Words of wisdom (or so I think) from Peter O’Donnell, through the mouth of his finest creation, Modesty Blaise.

In amidst the rush of car tires and the intermittent rumbling of heavier truck engines going by on nearby 6th Street, I have nothing much to do. It’s my second actual day without work (I used to work Wednesday through Saturday) and I’m putting off the inevitable re-immersion into Knights of the Old Republic II by working on a new blog page.

I played the first Knights of the Old Republic while I was living with my brother Paul last year. I had forgotten a lot of things about the nature of the game. One of them was that this is a one player game only. That doesn’t matter to me here, since I’m living alone and nobody ever drops over. But it just seemed strange to me, because I thought I clearly remembered playing it with Paul and a few of his friends. I’d imagine, though, that that’s just me inserting memories of various multiplayer games I did share with them.

Now that I’m re-acquainted with Knights, I can remember that Paul and I nearly came to blows a few times over which one of us was going to play at any given time. He had saved games with his character, and I had saved games with mine, and until we got on opposite work schedules, there were often some angry words from one of us directed at the other one, after the other one had been hogging the X-Box for four or five hours straight, with no intentions of giving it up any time soon.

That’s the odd thing about these games. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found my attention span for most things, especially reading, has grown shorter and shorter. That bothers me, as I love to read and it still seems to me that the book is by far the best entertainment medium yet invented, since it requires the reader to utilize their own imagination, instead of simply opening their perceptual channels to preprogrammed stimuli designed and controlled by someone else.

Yet, nonetheless, nowadays I am apparently so overstimulated by brighter, louder, more distracting entertainments that I can barely read for 20 minutes at a time without putting the book down and doing something else… walking to the door and looking out at the rain for a few minutes (it’s been raining constantly in my part of Florida for the last week; it’s like living on Ray Bradbury’s Venus), picking up a HeroClix figure or two and checking out their dials, pulling out a videotape or a DVD and watching it, switching the X-Box over to the jukebox feature so I can listen to music, or, most sadly often, getting myself something to eat.

I realize, of course, that what’s happening is that I have indeed become overstimulated. Reading is a very quiet activity, and the images we conjure up in our imaginations, regardless of what Harlan Ellison may insist otherwise, are pallid things compared to what we can see and hear through our TV screens simply by inserting a shiny little frisbee into one of our wondrous projection machines. Reading may directly stimulate certain lobes of the brain, but it seems to do it in a manner that we find, ultimately, unsatisfying, as compared to the massive fixes of sensory input we can get much more quickly by watching some dreadful Roland Emmerich sci-fi spectacle on the tube.

Knights of the Old Republic II is not a game for anyone who can’t stand being jerked around. Its predecessor was like this, too, to an extent, but II has taken the whole “you will do what you are told and you will do it NOW” thing to an extreme undreamed of by its programmers in its previous stage. While playing yesterday on one of the planets (Nar Shadaa, I think; the Smuggler’s Moon), I wandered around for hours blindly doing anything that was put in front of me to do, and eventually seemed to exhaust all the opportunities in the local area without triggering whatever it was that was necessary to get me to the essential stage there (a certain crime boss had to be wiped out so that various quests could be fulfilled, and no matter what I tried, I just couldn’t wangle a meet with the guy so I could bifurcate his head with my lightsabre).

Then I finally decided to go back and do one stupid thing I’d blown off prior to this (involving having one of the female NPCs in my party agree to go dance in front of a Hutt crimelord) and suddenly everything cascaded at once… and I found myself thrown into a three hour sequence in which my Jedi was quickly captured, and I was forced to play one different character in the supporting party after another in the ongoing attempt at rescuing him. I had to be my droid long enough to infiltrate a warehouse and steal some docking codes; I had to be the Han Solo type in the party long enough to fight off some bounty hunters and get some necessary information from them; and then I had to choose two other party members to infiltrate the big crime boss’ orbital pleasure yacht and rescue myself.

Stuff like this is kind of exasperating, if you allow yourself to think “I paid for this goddam game, I should be allowed to PLAY THE DAMNED CHARACTER I WANT!” But, as a guy named Bigelow once noted, “It’s all part of the show”.

One thing I did remember accurately from the first time around is that I can play this game for hours at a time without getting bored. Unfortunately, what does happen is that after a while my eyes start to blur and I get the faint traces of an incipient headache… no actual pain, but a definite feeling of pressure in my temples. That, and a very vague feeling of unease in my stomach… not nausea, actually, but something that feels like it could turn into it if I don’t take a break. I don’t remember these symptoms back when I was playing at Paul’s, but again, due to having to share time on the X-Box with him, I don’t think I played for as long at a stretch then, either.

And saying that I can play for hours without getting bored isn’t quite true. There are long stretches in this game where all you are doing is running around from one area to another… you get a certain vital piece of information from the alien who runs the Ithorian Compound, which triggers certain programmed subroutines in the game, and you have to hotfoot it back over to the local security station, where the guy in charge there will now provide you with something else you need, since you will now be allowed to feed him a different piece of dialogue to open up whole new avenues of action. And there are worse times when you feel like you’ve done everything you can and nothing new is happening and you still haven’t accomplished your main mission. That can be both boring and frustrating.

The rule for games like this, which I am re-learning now, is that you have to do pretty much EVERYthing they put in front of you. Ignoring the most minor thing (or the most tedious) can completely stall the plot’s development.

For lecherous potential players like me, I should warn you that unlike the first Knights, this one makes you wait a very very long time before you get anything fun to look at in the party. For that reason, male players who long for cartoon beauty may well want to set up a female character, just so they have something to rest their eyes on through the first 15 to 20 hours of the game. It isn’t until the very end of the Telos sequence that the Handmaiden enters the scenario and here’s a hint: once she joins the party, don’t let her wear anything. Of course, prudishness requires that even set at ‘nothing’, all characters are wearing SOMEthing, but the Handmaiden’s bare minimum ‘SOMEthing’ is indeed a bare minimum, and looks really good on her. You can always pause the game and toggle some armor onto her before you go into combat, although she turns out to be an amazing unarmed combatant and in most cases does reasonably well in her bra and panty set.

You then have to go to Nar Shadaa to pick up Mira, who is this totally hot redhead bounty hunter. She doesn’t strip down as well as the Handmaiden (shorts and a tank top), but if you do the thing where you have one of your female NPCs dance for Vogga the Hutt, you get provided with the same kind of slave-girl costume that Princess Lea is wearing in RETURN OF THE JEDI. Only Mira or the Handmaiden can wear it, and if you ever have a party configuration in which no one is wearing it, the computer takes it away from you again, and the Handmaiden, as I’ve said, already has a sexy outfit to wear, so put it on Mira and leave it there. She’s a treat to look at in it. The costume provides +2 to all Persuade roll offs, so it’s not simply an aesthetic joy. I keep Mira in the back with a missile weapon nowadays, though, since she doesn’t have any armor.

Somewhere around there, another female character who is fairly aesthetically pleasing named Visas will show up. She starts out as a villain and you have to defeat her in combat to get her into your party, which isn’t anywhere near as easy as you’d want it to be – I got my ass kicked by her over and over again until I finally managed to get lucky and defeat her. Confronting her one on one in combat is a bad idea; at the point where she shows up, you are nowhere near good enough to handle her (for one thing, she has a lightsabre and you haven’t acquired one yet). I had to retreat to a spot where she had to approach me through a narrow hallway and hit her with every grenade I had, while the droid in the party engaged her from the other side to keep her from moving up on me. Then I blasted her from a distance with an Arkanian blaster rifle until she finally dropped.

Visas also shows one of the annoying double standards the game has. When you defeat her, you ‘break her lightsabre’, which is aggravating, because otherwise, you could take it away from her and use it yourself. And once Visas joins the group, she suddenly becomes much less effective in combat than she was when she was attacking you. But that last point is typical of this whole game; your player character in this is some legendary former Jedi Knight who was, apparently, at one time nearly all powerful, but who has had his Force powers stripped away and has to re-connect with the Force and re-learn his abilities.

Adding insult to injury on many fronts, the very first party member you run into is this annoying and ugly old hag who constantly lectures you on the perils of do-gooding and how inadequate you are with the Force. Later on, when the hotties all join the party, she starts bitching at you that you need to stay focused and not spend so much time leering at them. I swear that it’s like she’s going to turn out to be your Jedi’s mother, or something… except, having typed that, I’ve just realized that in point of fact, she must actually be the Handmaiden’s mother, which is probably why she spends so much time trying to keep you from balling her daughter. Hmmmm.

All right. This entry should get few or no comments, and that’s fine. I have to go get something to eat.

CHEESE AND CRACKERS GOT ALL MUDDY

An intelligent, clearly very competent and just generally remarkable woman in Atlanta is taken hostage by a violent, desperate, extremely dangerous man who has just gone on a homicidal rampage at a nearby courthouse and who is still armed with the weapon he took off a deputy and used to kill three other people. Somehow or other, over the course of the next 20 hours or so, this astonishing woman manages to talk this guy into letting her leave her apartment without injury or molestation, and into surrendering peacefully to the authorities when they show up there looking for him after she calls them.

What do I find sad about this? Well… apparently, we’re once more going to give all the credit for this incredible human accomplishment to someone who may never have actually lived, and, if he did, well, he’s been dead for just under 2,000 years.

Honestly, this sickens and appalls me. When Kurt Warner led the Rams to a title game back in, I believe it was, 2001, the first thing he did upon having a microphone thrust into his face was give all the credit for his remarkable performance to Jesus.

As a human being myself, I have to say that when I see this sort of thing, it offends me. If Jesus is going to get the credit for every unusual or remarkable human accomplishment, it seems to me he should also be notated as a complicit party whenever a human being anywhere does anything wrong. When a drunk driver mows down two kids at a crosswalk, we should give the credit to Jesus. When some poor desperate fuck somewhere can’t take it any more and kills seven of his co-workers before putting the gun in his mouth and blowing his own brains out, well, God was his co-pilot, too. Let’s all of us admit that if Jesus was guiding Ashley Smith's brilliantly placating words and actions, or Kurt Warner’s perfectly trained throwing arm and his innate brilliance and hard-earned mastery of complex tactics and strategies, then it’s only reasonable to assume that Sonagod was standing right beside John Wilkes Booth and had his spiritual finger on the trigger that sent a bullet into the brain of Abraham Lincoln.

Ah, the fundamentalists will tell us, but that’s not true. God inspires all the good stuff. But it’s God’s enemy, Satan, who is the source of every evil impulse in the world.

To which I say, God created Satan, he let Satan off the leash, and you can put the blame on the Devil all you want, but down here on Earth, if you raise your Rottweiler to kill everything that moves and then let it run loose in the neighborhood, we put the blame on you every time that mad beast guts someone’s cat or mauls some poor kid.

In Ms. Smith’s case, while I wouldn’t doubt her sincerity (nor, for that matter, do I doubt Kurt Warner’s), well, I just find it really sad. Here we have these two remarkably gifted individuals, whose training and beliefs preclude them from taking any sort of pride in their own outstanding accomplishments. The press was obliging enough to dig up Ms. Smith’s “questionable” background, revealing one shoplifting arrest when she was 16, two counts of underage possession of alcohol when she was 18, a probation violation in her early 20s, and one count of assault against her stepfather, with no details given except charges were dropped, when she was 25 (last year, in other words).

Such is our society that, while Ms. Smith’s remarkable achievement in getting Brian Nichols to let her go unharmed, and surrender peacefully to authorities he’d just shot his way through a day before, is all laid at the feet of Jesus, her previous transgressions… well, I guess those are all her fault.

You have to wonder if, eventually, Jesus… or his self appointed representatives on Earth… will start suing people like Ms. Smith, and Kurt Warner, for a percentage of the money they make off the various amazing things that they do, which they immediately turn around and credit to God.

In a way, I almost hope so. The minute a public acknowledgement of Jesus starts costing people money, they’ll shut the hell up about it.

Let me spell this out slowly, since sometimes my irony is somewhat obscure: I don’t honestly believe we should give God the blame for human atrocity. I don’t think we should blame Satan, either. Or Allah, for that matter.

By the same token, I do not think it is right to give God, or any other extraterrestrial, insubstantial, mythical entity the credit for outstanding human achievements, either.

As individuals, and as a race, I think we should take the credit, and the blame, for the things that we do, ourselves. When one of us aspires to some truly astonishing accomplishment, we should all feel justifiable pride, because we are all, every one of us, human.

And when one of us does something dreadful, something horrible, something truly depraved and evil and wrong, well, we should all look down just a bit in shame. Because that’s part of being human, too.

We often try to excuse such things, however obliquely, by labeling such actions as ‘inhuman’, but that’s nothing but the baldest of face saving lies. No one who has paid the slightest attention to current events, much less human history, can possibly believe that any atrocity is ‘inhuman’, any more than successfully flying to the Moon, or providing food for a starving stranger, is ‘inhuman’.

It’s all part of what we are. We choose, every day, which aspects of our humanity to exhibit and act upon, and for that, we get either credit or blame.

But honestly, I just can’t see where God or Jesus (or Allah, or Buddha, or Bast, or anyone else) enters into the equation.

RENT OUT TEXAS, LIVE IN HELL

I thought I was done, but that was before I read today’s paper.

Congressional Republicans, exasperated with those tiresome Democrats employing the exact same tactics they learned from the Republican minority to forestall any meaningful legislation all those years when Democrats were in a majority and still didn’t manage to do anyone any real good, have managed to get a provision into the proposed Senate budget for the forthcoming year that will allow oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.

Such a procedural matter is not subject to a 2/3s majority, and therefore, cannot be filibustered. It opens the door for the Senate to basically fund drilling later on. A series of steps still have to be taken, but none of them require a 2/3s majority… which means, barring some kind of miracle (say, retroactively going back in time a year and somehow having a fraud free election anywhere in America), we’re going to see drilling machinery in ANWR setting up over the next two years.

Paul Wolfowitz has spent at least the last 25 years trying to talk various Presidents into adopting a foreign policy based around the notion of pre-emptive military strikes on countries we don’t like very much. Wolfowitz and his fellow neo-cons seemed to feel this was necessary, to restore respect for America in the eyes of the world.

Under our current unelected regime, Wolfowitz has actually been given the military toys he’s long sought to play with, and apparently discovered their limitations – namely, that we can only break one country at a time with them, or, well, two, tops, assuming one of them (Afghanistan, in this case) doesn’t really have a military infrastructure (or any other sort of infrastructure) in place at the time we invade them.

This has seemingly infuriated Wolfowitz, so in an act of admirable subtlety for a Republican neo-con warmonger who has never actually carried a weapon in a war zone in his life, dear Paul has pulled some strings to get himself appointed as the new head of the World Bank.

Now he’ll be able to mess with up to 184 different developing nations, and probably end up creating even more of a mess than the current debacle in Iraq.

El Jefe Bush calls Wolfowitz “a compassionate, decent man who will do a fine job at the World Bank”.

El Jefe has a remarkable sense of humor, as can be seen from the following joke he’s been telling at various conclaves regarding his new Social Security policy:

“To get to Livingston, you’ve got to go down the highway. And you go through the cattle guard. And you turn left. And go through another cattle guard.” (Brief but probably necessary digression to those of you who didn’t grow up on dairy farms: a cattle guard is a metal fence across a thoroughfare that keeps cows from wandering out of their fields.) “And a fellow comes back and says ‘Hey, what color uniforms do those cattle guards have on?’ “

Our Commander in Chief, folks. Let’s give him a big hand. He’s here all week. Enjoy the veal.

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.