Sunday, November 28, 2004

Rashen fashen fricken fracken

It’s Sunday, right?

I’m moved to ask, because the idiot podiatrist who has an office directly across the street from me doesn’t seem to understand that. Day of rest, everybody’s day off, time of quiet repose… a day to recharge against Black Monday, when we all (well, nearly all of us) trudge back into the work week again.

Instead, across the street, we’ve got a crew of three repaving the parking lot. They’ve been repaving the parking lot for the past three days. Yesterday I dared to hope they might work normal hours and take the weekend off, but nooooooo, there they were, waking me up at 8:30 with their big honkin’ diesel engines, making me curse and flail around on my bedside stand for my earplugs.

This morning, I dared to hope again, and was, once more, horribly disappointed, as, you know, AGAIN with the big honkin’ diesel engines and their annoying beep-beep-beep backing up warning noises at 8:15 a.m.

FUCKERS.

So I found the earplugs and put them back in and went back to sleep until around noon, and had nightmares about vampires. I never have nightmares about vampires unless things are going straight to hell in my life, and I’m not sure exactly what could be going straight to hell in my life right now, but there they were, so chances are, I’ll get fired when I head back to work on Tuesday.

In the meantime, the Bucs lost a truly aggravating game to the hated and loathed Panthers, mostly due to their own moronic mistakes and the excellent play of the even more hated and loathed Julius Peppers. And just to make watching it even more fun for me, I had big honkin’ diesel engines and beep-beep-beep-beep from fifteen yards away all afternoon long, too.

So I’m in a foul mood. I am. Be advised.

I really could get fired on Tuesday, I suppose. We had very few emails at work, and I didn’t do a whole lot all night long. Normally that doesn’t seem to draw much ire from on high when our volume is so low, but, well, vampire nightmares never bode well, and the Bucs losing may not be ALL the bad luck that’s coming. And there’s a weird feeling in the air at work… smells like doom, or something similar.

I guess we’ll have wait and see. In the meantime, I think I’ll try to stick close to the house.

I have an enormous amount of Thanksgiving leftovers, which is cool… one thing I enjoy is piling up a tin plate with comfort food when I get home from work at midnight, sticking it into the oven to warm up for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then noshing my way through it while I check out something on video or DVD… and geez, this is shaping up to be the world’s most boring blog entry, isn’t it?

Friday was a pain in the ass at work. Everybody was grumpy. Since my boss’ excuse for not giving me the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving off when I asked for it was that everyone else already had it, I really expected that, at the very least, I'd be the only one on night crew and would have the place to myself for the night. There’s a peacefulness in solitude I find very rewarding, especially at work. But nooooo… every single member of the night crew was there, on Black Friday, with 30 emails in queue and none coming in all night long, either. We wound up getting caught up by 7:30 and having to take calls for the rest of the night… and nobody where I work who has managed to get off the phones likes to put that headset back on again. Miserable, miserable night.

Okay, enough of that. Let’s see. On HeroClix:

I’ve been giving it some thought. According to the new rules insert, the new Battlefield Condition cards are very nearly useless, assuming you’re playing with anyone who doesn’t like surprises. See, at the start of each game, each player can pick one of their BC cards, and then every player reveals those cards simultaneously. Some effects can accrue, but others cancel each other out. One card that cancels all other cards out is Ordinary Day, and I strongly suspect that every single HeroClix player you don’t enjoy playing against anyway will always bring one along to every game, just to make sure you can’t short circuit his Medics with a War Zone card, or screw up his long range attacks with a Darkness, or ground his flyers with a Crosswinds. It annoys me no end.

What HeroClix needs is a few unpredictable surprises… the one way in which it’s generally inferior to games like Magic is that it’s very predictable. Once you see an opposing player’s clix, you know everything he can do, and in most situations, his response is going to be predictable. It’s a lot like chess that way, which is one reason I find chess very boring. Oh, superior players can come up with original tactics… once… but you only get to play that sort of thing once, and then everybody is expecting it (and if it was effective, stealing it for their own teams).

I think players should be able to keep, say, 3 Battlefield Condition cards face down in front of them. At the start of their turn, a player should be able to roll a d6, and on a 5-6, say, he should be able to put a Battlefield Condition card into play. Maybe it could cost him one of his actions for that turn, so it’s not a completely free move. This means that the game could suddenly change in a totally unpredictable way, without any warning… suddenly all your flyers could get knocked out of the sky by a Crosswinds, or your Medics could suddenly suck because they find themselves in a War Zone. And those Battlefield Conditions would obtain until some other player rolled what they needed and put an Ordinary Day card into play, so you’d at least get the benefit of the BC for the rest of your turn, and maybe longer.

I think that would be much more fun, and add some much needed unpredictability to the game. I’m aware that it’s going to be very frustrating when suddenly someone screws up my grand strategy by whipping a Darkness into play, but, well, I’ll live with it, for the chance to throw a sudden monkey wrench into someone’s else’s plans.

I think I’ll stick that into my house rules, in fact… not that it matters, since it appears I will never play a game of HeroClix again in this lifetime…

When I went into work on Friday, one of my co-workers… the guy who picked up the booster packs for me on Wednesday, in fact… was sitting there at his desk reading something. Like Colin Campbell, checking out what other people are reading is a form of nosiness I’ve never been able to break myself of, so naturally I scanned his paperback’s cover as I went by… and did a double take.

He was reading Kenneth “Lester Dent” Robeson’s immortal The Man Of Bronze, the classic October 1964 Bantam paperback edition, featuring the cool curving, high velocity, blood red DOC SAVAGE logo and the amazing James Bama cover painting showing Doc (actually, a slightly reworked, nearly photographic rendering of model and one-time Flash Gordon actor Steve Holland) in what was to become Doc’s archetypical pose… grim facial expression, taut, rippling musculature revealed by an artfully ripped shirt that I would spend much of my childhood and adolescence trying to figure out how to duplicate with pencil and/or pen, without notable success.

Talk about a blast from the past.

I first met Doc Savage at the house of one of an endless parade of temporary babysitters my mom left me and my younger brothers with during the day when school was out in my childhood. I can’t even remember who this particular babysitter was, but she had a son who was a few years older than I was, and he was a slob, and he had comic books and cheap paperbacks scattered all over his room. The comic books were horrid things… he was one of those disgusting freaks of nature who actually prefers, and seeks out, titles like Little Dot and Richie Rich and Hot Stuff and Casper The Friendly Ghost and all that crap, you know, the sort of geek that we superhero comics geeks throw screaming out of our treehouses whenever we get the chance, preferably onto sharpened stakes. I mean, this kind of ‘comics fan’ is one step down from even the generally despised Archie collectors.

Most of the paperbacks were pretty cruddy, too… Mack Bolan, The Destroyer, and some endless pseudo-SF series about Captain Somebody or Other whose name I can’t remember right now, but which was always pretty badly written, judging from the couple I once tried to read. Mixed in with the piles, though, were a few volumes that caught my eye, mostly due to the cool tapering logo and the dramatic cover paintings I’ve already mentioned. They were Doc Savage books. I picked one up… I’m pretty sure it was The Thousand Headed Man, but it might have been The Black Spot… and I was lost to the world. My mom eventually showed up, and found me surrounded by a pile of Doc Savage paperbacks I’d winnowed out of the stacks in that disheveled bedroom. Whoever the woman who was babysitting me was, told my mom as they stood there in the doorway that if I wanted that trashy stuff, I was welcome to it… my heart leapt up… but my mom said “No, he’s got enough crap like that already”.

And we never went back there.

I managed to score a few other Doc Savage novels, always the seemingly ubiquitous Bantam paperback editions, over the course of my childhood, but it’s only now, as an adult, that I’m really learning that there are nearly 200 of the things, and, alas, most of them profoundly suck. It’s always sad, when you discover something you loved as a child doesn’t hold up well to adult scrutiny.

Still, the few Doc Savage novels I managed to grab up over the years never stuck permanently in my library, for some reason… either I kept loaning them out and not getting them back, or, more likely, people in houses where I lived kept lifting them and not returning them, I don’t know. I can’t even really remember which ones I’ve read now, and which ones I haven’t. I’m pretty sure I’ve read The Thousand Headed Man and The Black Spot. I actually own The Metal Master because I bought a beat up copy (Bantam paperback edition once again) at a library thrift shop a couple of years ago (it’s really terrible, too).

My buddy loaned me his copy of The Man of Bronze when he saw how interested I was (he still has my Marvel Masterworks edition of Fantastic Four #s 1-10, so he was amenable to some mild arm twisting), and I’ve been reading it over the past few days. It’s really appallingly badly written, and horribly pulpy, but… I can see what I enjoyed so much about the series when I was 11 or so. For all the melodramatic excesses, Doc is a genuinely heroic protagonist, who goes around the world battling evil and helping the oppressed for no other reason except that it’s, you know, the right thing to do.

Modern day second guessers and deconstructionists have made much of Doc’s penchant for turning his criminal adversaries into productive members of society by performing operations on their brains (a latter day DC Doc Savage comic series, written by Doug Moench, depicted an elderly Monk and Ham admitting that these operations were more generally known as ‘lobotomies’), but I’m not going to join the legions of nay-sayers over that. Lobotomizing a sociopath strikes me as being a far more moral method of rehabilitation than locking him up in one of the rape & torture facilities we smilingly call a prison here in the United States… and, anyway, Moench is probably wrong. The operations Doc performed may well not be lobotomies at all. Doc is a genius, after all (he’s got a brain, a super-brain, that never fails)… he could very well have come up with an operation that removes mental illness leading to violent criminal acts and allows a former offender to live a useful and unimpaired life. If anyone could do it, it would be Doc… although it’s doubtful anyone else would have the skill to perform such a delicate surgery.

Doc is also perhaps the very first of the pulp adventurers (well, the ones that emerged in the 1930s, anyway) who used his intellectual capacities as much as his indomitable physique to battle crime. (Sherlock Holmes, obviously, was the prototype of the scholarly adventurer who outwitted evil, but by the time the 30s rolled around, most pulp hero types used combinations of pugilism, unearthly hypnotic powers, and a hail of gunfire to foil their nefarious foes. Doc had no unearthly powers; he used deduction and applied science to track down and defeat his foes, and although he and his men always went armed, they only shot their enemies with tranquilizing mercy bullets of Doc’s own invention… a kindly innovation that someone like the Shadow would have haughtily sneered at.)

It would, I suppose, be somewhat cool to try and collect as many of the Bantam paperbacks as I can… I’m sure I could find them online, probably quite cheaply… but, well, they are really badly written, and there are so many of them I’d spend much of the rest of my life plowing through them, only to discover that, yes, they really ARE as badly written as you'd figure they'd have to be.

Still, just seeing this particular volume is a pleasant little hit of nostalgia, and that can’t be a bad thing.

Hey, Simpsons in fifteen. Time to post this and go sprawl in the recliner for a while.

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.