Sunday, March 6, 2005 – early afternoon

I NEED A BIG LOAN

With the mournful, accordion-laced strains of the Counting Crows’ “Raining in Baltimore” wailing plaintively from my X-Box in the background, I may as well work on a blog page. Although I suspect this one will be really boring.

The weekly Hispanic Hootenannie has begun, and I can hear the throbbing of the base from the usual weekend driveway party my Central American neighbors generally throw for all their Central American friends through my bedroom wall. It’s an odd event; from the white t-shirts with cigarettes rolled up in one sleeve, the car parts scattered all over the driveway, the lifted hoods, and the various muscular men leaning into the engine cavity or crawling around on the ground under various old vehicles with tools, you’d think the 50s had been re-born, slightly Mexican. But only if you were deaf, since otherwise the weird thumping heavy metal hip-hop they listen to would instantly clue you otherwise.

Shrieking kids running around at sugar-fueled hyperspeed, and various latina moms you’d swear couldn’t be out of high school yet screaming after said kids in Spanish, add their own perceptual contributions to the sensory mosaic.

Mind you, I’d rather have quieter neighbors, but I’m trying hard not to get into an ugly mood before it’s absolutely necessary… i.e., when I go back to work on Wednesday. Before then, I’d really like to just mellow out. Of course, that would be a great deal more possible if I had neighbors considerate enough to moderate the volume of their music…

Still, if my thoughts turn to wishing I had a little flash-gun that sends out portable EMPs, forgive me. Some people just shouldn’t be entrusted with electricity…

As mentioned in the comment threads on my last blog page, I got my copy of Knights of the Old Republic for the X-box yesterday. I played about five hours of it last night. I’d forgotten how much several factors in KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC annoyed me, like how irritating most of the character's voices are (I think the programmers got four or five of their roleplayer buddies together who could do bad accents and had them do all the dialogue), and especially, how awful one of the main supporting character’s dialogue is (Carth Onasi, someone you’re stuck with from the start of the adventure through to the very end, and if you run a female protagonist, who is programmed to be her love interest, too).

Carth is truly, truly aggravating, as he’s a whiney 80s type Sensitive Guy who is also supposed to be a legendary warrior and star pilot… kind of like “What If Han Solo were played by Richard Gere At the End of Pretty Woman”. I would personally love to get into the code of this game and substantially rewrite all of Carth’s dialogue. I’d also like to chop out the voices and just read the dialogue, but you can’t do that, although the game does have a feature that allows the opposite (you can get rid of the subtitles and just listen to the voices, for a ‘more cinematic experience’).

Of course, I’d also love to get into the code of this game and program in a whole lot of sexually explicit imagery, which is something I remember wanting to do when I played it the first time, too. If you could actually bring up an alternate action/dialogue menu with things on it like ‘Proposition T’wilek dancing girl’ or ‘ask Bastilla for a blowjob’, and you had a chance to use your Jedi Mind Control powers to effect the outcome, it would liven this game right up… especially if you could do similar things to some of the total cartoon babes who join the party later on.

(As a side note, I have to think this is a universal impulse for nearly all male gamers playing computer games of this type; fight games like Soul Calibre and the various vs. games, which always feature several gorgeously animated hotties in very skimpy clothing, would be even more popular than they are already if there was a feature allowing a player to get rid of the clothes altogether, and to make different characters of your choice interact sexually, instead of violently. Can you imagine the enthusiasm with which gamers around the world would study their controls, seeking out the combination of button and trigger pressing that causes Ivy and Chung’Li to 69? The quest to unlock the 16” studded mystic strap ons could take up a whole secret level all its own…)

Back to reality of a sort… Right now I’m very early on Knights. Carth is the only member of my party and I have to take him with me everywhere I go, and every once in a while the computer will prompt me to prompt him to snivel some more, by pausing the action and saying {Carth seems to have something on his mind.} You can ignore those prompts, but it’s dangerous, because this indicates the computer has some necessary expository information to give you, and until you get it, and the computer notes it in your electronic gaming journal, certain key events will not occur.

So, you have to listen to Carth snivel a lot. And it’s REALLY aggravating.

The game has no programming that allows one party member to die and be replaced; there are eight other party members I need to collect at various points in the adventure, and you need to fulfill certain prerequisites before you can find and recruit them. There are four more I can pick up on this first planet – a wookie fighter, a young female T’wilek thief type, a powerful female Jedi goodie-goodie named Bastila who is a real fox and who I’d love to be able to run through that hypothetical sex menu I mentioned before, and a very very useful R2-D2 type droid unit.

Unfortunately, another of the annoying things about this game (besides Carth, and the hysterically bad mock-British accents all the Sith have) is that at certain points in the story line you have to do stuff you may not want to do, because it’s the only way to get past a specific event bottleneck. For example, to rescue Bastila I will first have to win a series of ‘swoop’ races, which involves successfully racing a rocket powered missile through a course and requires a type of hand-eye coordination I’m really bad at. Last time I had Paul do it for me, but this time I guess I’ll have to do it myself, unless I can discover some alternative method to get to her.

Also, as I vaguely recall, In order to get the little droid into my party, I first have to become either the swoop champion of this planet, or I have to fight my way to the top in a series of arena duels. I’d prefer to skip both, but the other thing about this game is, once you move on from a planet to another sector of the game, the Sith tend to come along and blow up the planet you were just on. So if I don’t get all four new party members at this point, I will never get them. And without them, well, I probably can’t finish the game, as they are all very useful (even Carth is an excellent pilot, when he’s not whimpering about something).

The game should have about eight other back up characters in it, though, that you can find in various places if members of your primary party die. I suspect the reason it doesn’t is that early playtesting showed a lot of people would happily run Carth right into the closest batch of heavily armed Sith wearing nothing but his underwear and equipped only with a paperback book if they did, just to get rid of the whiney fucker.

Ah, well. Maybe KOTOR II will show some improvements.

Along with KOTOR, I also got three Modesty Blaise books yesterday… Sabre-Tooth, The Impossible Virgin, and The Silver Mistress. These are apparently part of a new series of softcover editions being published by Souvenir Press, and they look good, although they’re an odd size, larger than a conventional paperback and smaller than a hard cover, making them a clumsy fit on my shelves. Still, it’s nice to have access to these again. I’ve only read each of these once (I got them out of various different libraries over the course of the past fifteen years; no one library branch I’ve ever been in has had more than one or two Modesty Blaise books, and lately, they’ve been out of print so long you can’t find them anywhere at all).

The small author’s bio on the back answers a few questions for me. The Modesty Blaise newspaper strip stopped being published back in 2001. And apparently Peter O’Donnell is still alive, although, as he was 81 in 2001, he’s getting on.

This means I am only missing, at this point, A Taste For Death (but I really want that one, it introduces a very important secondary character and has great villains), and the two anthologies of Modesty short stories, Pieces of Modesty and a newer one I hadn’t heard of until I ordered it online, Cobra Trap, which supposedly contains the last Modesty Blaise story ever to be told, in which a middle aged Modesty (reportedly, she is in her 50s) comes out of retirement for one last caper.

The first and the last I have on order. The middle one (Pieces, for those of you having trouble keeping track, and the way I write, who can blame you?) there does not seem to be a cheap copy of available yet, and I don’t quite want to pay $60 for it. And, of course, this is just the prose stuff; there are 38 years worth of Modesty Blaise newspaper strips to collect, all of which are well worth reading (especially the early decade or so, featuring artwork by the matchless Jim Holdaway).

I went up to Wal-mart last night after work to pick up some groceries, and while I was there, I also gave into temptation and grabbed the first season of Deadwood. So, when I need a break from a Western in space, I can switch to a Western on Earth for a while.

Steve Tice just sent me an email telling me he’s put a big box of comics in the mail for me, so we’ll see what’s in there when I get it. A lot of Geoff Johns material, I imagine.

And, as probably a final note, has anybody else recently gotten a new deluge of these bank account information phishing emails? Last year I’d thought they were finally dying off, but lately I’ve been besieged with them. Everybody in Africa wants to give me 2.5 millions dollars, it seems. I want to assume everyone knows these things are scams, and yet, would whoever is sending them be making such a concerted effort if they weren’t getting some kind of return?

And is it really so goddam hard to track down who’s sending these things? If we can invade Iraq over nothing at all, can’t we invade wherever these things are originating from and blow up THEIR electrical grid?

Addendum, 6:42 a.m. Monday morning -

Macbeth hath murdered sleep, or at least, my mom has.

See, latish last night… I’m going to guess around 8:15, as I was skipping back and forth between KOTOR and Channel 13 (heading back to KOTOR when commercials came on, natch), my mom called and said she and my stepdad were in town and wanted to take me to breakfast at 11 this morning.

Well, you can’t turn your mom down, and only rarely can you turn free breakfast down, at least, if you’re me, so I said okay. But here’s the thing:

Breakfast at 11 means I have to get up at 10 am sharp. You wouldn’t think that would be a problem, as she called fairly early in the evening. Just head off to bed by, oh, 2 am, and I’m good to go. And given that I normally get up at 10 am on a work day anyway, honestly, big D, what’s the huhu?

Here’s the deal – I can get up at 10 a.m. because I know I could actually sleep until 12. The knowledge that I could sleep until noon, if I wanted to (my shift at work starts at 1 p.m.) allows me to get to sleep the night before if I go to bed around 2 or 3 a.m.

If I know I absolutely have to be up the next day by a certain time… I can’t sleep.

I tried. I went to bed around 9 and slept until midnight. Couldn’t sleep any more, so I got up and watched the first ep of Deadwood and ate something and went back to bed around 2:30. And absolutely could not sleep, so here I am, wide awake, and pretty much planning to stay that way until sometime this afternoon, after brunch, and I pay the water bill, and maybe see if the lousy town I live in has any job openings in its City Clerk department while I’m over there. (I’m guessing the answer is ‘no’; this place is a ‘city’ by courtesy and in wild flights of fancy only; I doubt that City Clerk itself is a full time job here. But I’ll be over in City Hall, such as it is, paying the water bill anyway, so I may as well check.)

I’m already feeling the aches and pains that sleep deprived, middle aged flesh is heir to, so I’ll be pretty wiggly by the time brunch is over, and will most likely crash like one of the dead once I get back home again. If I could just go to bed right now, without a goddam ten o’clock deadline hanging over my head like the Sword of frickin’ Damocles, I could sleep until noon or 1 p.m., get up, and feel fine. But nooooooooo…

Over on Mike Norton’s blog, he’s been keeping track of this insanely selfish and utterly immoral funding drive that Trekkies have organized, with the stated purpose of raising $30 million dollars to directly fund a new season of Star Trek: Enterprise. And, while I happen to think the Star Trek franchise is, in and of itself, a misshapen blot on the escutcheon of science fiction in general, and that Enterprise in specific is now and always has been utter horseshit (don’t get me started on that godawful Brian Adams theme song), that’s really not what my extremely irate and infuriated opinion regarding this misplaced fundraising effort is about.

It’s simply about these: these priorities are utterly warped. To the point of actual emotional and psychological sickness.

Thirty million dollars. Thirty million dollars. Stop and think about that for a moment. Roll that figure around in your mind for a couple of seconds. Thirty. MILLION. Dollars.

Now, it’s the 21st Century and thirty million clams just doesn’t go as far as it used to, but still. Thirty million portraits of George Washington all piled up in one place at one time… that’s some oomph, buddy. That’s a mountain of influence. That’s some Let’s Get Things Done money.

That’s a lot of free hot lunches for kids living in poverty, who otherwise may get a PB & J and a juicebox when they get home, if they’re lucky. A lot of dosses and hot meals at homeless shelters. A lot of sanctuaries for battered women and battered kids. It’s probably at least two dozen life saving operations and/or cancer treatments for the uninsured. It is the salvation of art and music lessons at, I have to guess, at least a hundred public schools. And I could go on and on. Thirty million dollars is a heapin’ helpin’ o’ tender lovin’ care. In a vastly overpopulated world full of amazingly, heartbreakingly worthwhile and needy causes, where our government has told us for the last decade and a half that it is now our responsibility to take care of the less fortunate among us, because it’s too busy bailing out failed S&L’s and breaking other people’s countries to be bothered with the poor, anyone who manages to put thirty million dollars altogether into one place is someone with a great deal of power… for good, or for ill.

We geeks… and that includes all you whiney crybaby Trekkies who may be reading this and getting ready to piss and moan in the comment threads about how you can spend your money any way you like and saving the world isn’t YOUR responsibility, oh no… we geeks have a saying. Some of you may have heard of it. It goes like this:

With great power comes great responsibility.

I am just going to say this once, and say it flatly, and I do not believe this is a subjective viewpoint, I believe it is as objectively factual as gravity:

If you put thirty million dollars in one place and then spend it on a new season of Enterprise, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Not to mention committed.

The only ethical, socially responsible way to do this is to raise sixty million dollars. Contribute thirty million of it to the Red Cross, or the Peace Corps, or Catholic Charities, or pick out a string of homeless shelters and make all their days. Then you can spend the other thirty on anything you want.

Do I do this? When I spend $80 on something like Deadwood, or drop $250 on a case of HeroClix, do I contribute a like amount to some worthwhile service organization?

No, I don’t.

But I’m not spending thirty million dollars on my own petty entertainment joneses, either.

Hell, you don’t even have to match it one for one. If Trek United wants to announce that for every dollar they raise towards this massively self indulgent and utterly unnecessary goal, they’ll contribute a dime to… something, UNICEF, the World Food Bank, some fucking thing that isn’t about good looking actors in tight, quasi-militaristic fetish gear providing another 22 episodes of stroke material for people who badly need to move out of their parents’ basements… I’ll back off of this.

But as long as this is just, straight up, “Hey, we need to come up with thirty million dollars or we might have to actually, you know, get a life next year”, I think it’s reprehensible, and foolish, and sick.

So there.

Moving along…

I’ve been musing a little bit on the default heterosexuality in Knights of the Old Republic.

See, you can’t say it’s just thoughtless. This is an artifact. Everything in it is created, and required thousands of hours of programming. The programmers had enough forethought to provide the option of making the central protagonist character either male or female, and they also programmed the storyline so that you get a different love interest depending on the choice you make. If you decide to make your central character male, you end up having the cute female Jedi Bastilla fall in love with you. Make your central character female and you’ve got whiney wank Carth wrapped around your neck like an albatross for the entire storyline. (If you’re playing a male character, you have the opportunity to corrupt Bastilla if you decide to go over to the dark side of the Force, and she ends up as your second in command. If you play a female character and decide to go dark, goodie goodie Carth eventually runs away… but unfortunately, not until the end of the story, and the game doesn’t give you a chance to kill him, either, which is very annoying.)

I don’t know. This just bothers me, on some level.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty much straight. I tend to think about as few people in the world are completely heterosexual as there are completely homosexual folks; most of us, I suspect, are an uneasy mixture, with a pronounced tendency towards one and perhaps minor inclinations we will probably never explore, given the nature of the society we live in, towards the other. And I’m also not completely emotionally comfortable with male homosexuality, and, like most males, I’m somewhat titillated by girl/girl stuff, although I find myself annoyed and alienated by exclusive female homosexuality, too (unless both chicks are woofers, in which case, have at it).

You see I’m being painfully honest here.

Nonetheless, for a programmed artifact of this sort, created in the glorious year of 2003, to have this kind of mainstream heterosexual default setting bugs me. I may not be fully comfortable with non-mainstream sexuality, and I certainly don’t think a game that a lot of teenagers are going to play should actually be decked out with the kind of explicit erotic imagery I wistfully wished for in my earlier entry.

But, at the same time, if a gay person wants to play this game, they should have the option of having a romantic interest they would actually be interested in. At the very least, you’d hope that in a universe that contains light sabres, faster than light technology, psionics, hundreds of different sentient nonhuman races, and artificial intelligence, they’d have gotten over homophobia.

Or, to put it another way, if heterosexuality were in the minority, and I could only have a girlfriend in this game by running a female character, because I did not have the option of electing to be a straight man, well, I doubt I’d play the game much. And if I did, I don’t think I’d enjoy it as much as I could. And I guarantee you, I would NEVER run a male central character, if that meant dating Carth. I mean, he’s bad enough when you’re a chick. If I were a guy and I had to listen to him tell me how much he loves me… ew. Not happening, sorry.

Now, I know. The conservative mindset would simply be horrified and enraged if someone marketed an adventure game, even one intended for adults only, that offered a ‘be gay!’ option. If the next version of Grand Theft Auto featured an option whereby players could pick up young male street hustlers, or transvestites, and get health points back by doing the nasty with them in the back seat, Congress would simply ban it. Vicarious car theft, cop killing, pedestrian manslaughter, armed robbery, ho chasing, and women beating we will tolerate. Conservatives will bitch about this stuff, and insist on putting ratings on the game that they know won’t work (if there’s a 15 year old male in America who hasn’t played GTA yet, he must be Amish), but still, they will stop short of actual censorship, because they know that’s a button that big business won’t tolerate, and GTA makes millions of dollars a year for someone.

Vicarious faggotry, on the other hand, would push it over the edge. “We don’t want our children exposed to that!” would ring like freedom from every mountain top. The same fatuous twaddle-head I overheard at work last week confiding in the break room about how she lets her kids watch slasher movies because she’s ‘pretty sure they won’t grow up to be psychoes’, would absolutely go ballistic at the idea of those same kids being exposed to a game that gave them the option of even a vaguely hinted at homosexual interaction with an entirely imaginary cluster of pixels.

I don’t know. Sexuality is sexuality, and people are people. Whether we like it or not, this is all part of the real world, and I have little doubt that there are many gay teenagers out there who play these games, and who would be a lot more comfortable if, at least in the privacy of their bedroom, while playing by themselves, they could stop pretending to be something they are not, if only in externalized interactive fantasy.

It seems sad to me, and more than that, tragic, that we live in a world where a natural state of existence, that nobody can actually control, is regarded as something “we don’t want to expose our children to”… especially when so many parents are willing to heedlessly expose their children to the worst sort of actually objectionable, highly anti-social stimulus, on the grounds that “well, I don’t think my kids will grow up to be psychoes”.

God forbid, though, that they grow up to be gay… or if they do, they can at least have the decency to feel really really rotten about it.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.