Okay. Let’s see:

Played the first Killquest match last night, but I’ll get to that. After two days of blessed respite, the sore throat is back, which frankly annoys the shit out of me. My latest Unemployment check hit late Wednesday night, allowing me to pay the phone bill online today. Yesterday, I called up Demolition Comics and had them ship about $65 worth of comics out here, so that should get here sometime next week. Paul got paid yesterday, and after a tough two day drought, also got a new delivery of horticultural supplies, so he’s nicely mellowed out once more. Paul’s buddy Scott drove me out to Wal-mart last night so I could pick up transparencies (with which to cover three out of the six map boards in KILLQUEST, to simulate dark conditions) and while there I picked up DVDs of Blow Out, a movie I’d remembered liking back in 1982 or thereabouts when we showed it on campus, as well as A Few Good Men, one of my favorite movies ever. And for more details on all these items, see below.

KILLQUEST: First Blood

Two teams entered the Kill Zone, warily. On one side, three men known only to each other by their code names, Mr. White, Mr. Pink, and Mr. Blonde, began circling through the strange, gloomy, occasionally pitch dark hallways, seeking their prey, Glock-9 automatic pistols held in front of them, ready to kill without mercy. Opposing them, Jay, Silent Bob, and Gary Coleman in a security guard’s uniform, also began their stealthy prowls. Only one team would survive! For the amusement of their alien handlers, these abducted Earthmen would seek each other out in this strange environment and relentlessly deal violent, bloody death to each other!

Early on, Mr. Pink, wandering alone without a flashlight through a darkened section of the Kill Zone, came upon the item they had all been told was a ticket to safety for any one individual: a Treasure Chest. Wasting no time, Mr. Pink snatched the chest up and quickly departed through a nearby exit, much as he had done in the movie Reservoir Dogs with a satchel of stolen diamonds. This left his teammates Mr. Blonde and Mr. White badly outnumbered, and yet, fate itself was to take a hand to readjust the odds shortly. A curious Gary Coleman probed the dark with his flashlight, only to recoil in horror, as a skeleton in the tattered remnants of some strange historical costume, bearing an archaic musket in its bony arms, lurched forward from the darkness and fired its ancient weapon! The elderly powder nonetheless firing, Coleman’s life expired as a centuries old musket ball tore his tiny but valiant heart into shreds.

Racing through the hallways towards each other, Jay, Silent Bob, and Mr. White all stepped around corners to confront each other in the same lethal hallway. Before Jay, sporting twin Uzi machine pistols, could so much as sneer the first ‘snuh’ from his senseless signature phrase ‘snootchie bootches’, three well aimed bullets from Mr. White’s pistol had blown fist sized gobs of Jay’s torso out through his back, sending the inveterate stoner’s vestigial soul screaming soundlessly to a richly deserved Hell. Silent Bob, being by far the more intelligent of the two, had wisely thrown himself flat as the dark suited, sunglasses wearing arch criminal had come around the corner shooting, but such was Mr. White’s amazing marksmanship that three more bullets slammed into Bob’s corpulent form even as he dove for the paving stones.

Yet here intelligence and foresight took a hand, for Silent Bob had chosen to purchase body armor, and that armor deflected enough of the three bullets’ impact to save his life. Acrobatically rolling back up to one knee, Bob returned fire, blazing away at Mr. White with a burst of autofire from his M-16. Four bullets struck the still firing Mr. White, cutting him down in a bloody hail of high velocity copper jacketed lead.

Badly wounded, Silent Bob then limped for the closest whirlpool spot, gambling on random fate to restore him to health before Mr. White’s sole surviving teammate could show up at a vengeful gallop. After several rounds of Silent Bob being stunned, having his weapons melted and fused into worthlessness, and having his fat, semi conscious corpus randomly teleported around the arena, Mr. Blonde finally shot his way through a locked door to find his hapless quarry diving frantically for cover around a corner. Six fast, well aimed bullets from Mr. Blonde’s Glock made Bob’s silence permanent and involuntary.

End result: $4,700 in total bounties and treasure for Team Tarantino, now comprised only of the crafty Mr. Pink and the belligerent Mr. Blonde. Along with the cash, Team Tarantino salvaged weapons and equipment including but not limited to, 2 Uzi machine pistols, 2 flashlights, a gadgeteer’s kit, Body Armor sized to fit Mr. Blonde, and an M-16.

In a post combat interview, Mr. Pink allowed “We’ll be recruiting some new guys for the group, but it ain’t easy. First, we need fuckin’ professionals. I’m tired of bein’ the only fuckin’ professional on the team. Second, we need guys who will maintain our sartorial style. And third, we’re looking for a certain moral and ethical flexibility in our boys… so ex-cons would be ideal.”

In other words, Team Tarantino will be looking for a few good men who dress in slouch hats, dark glasses, and dark suits, and who have done hard time. Hmmmm. Why do we get the feeling that Joliet Jake and his silent brother Elwood may soon be getting a call…?

Meanwhile, the alien handler for the Kevin Smith Gang is rumored to be looking towards younger recruits for his next team. One expects the refrain, “Dude, I can’t believe they killed Kenny!” will soon be echoing from the hallways of the Kill Zone… In other KILLQUEST news, alpha play brought its first dividends, as a suggestion to allow an option to lean around a corner and fire, and then duck back, has led to the addition of a new Combat Move: "Shoot and Cover", whereby, if a corner is handy, a character may choose to lean out, shoot, and duck back behind cover. If doing so, that character will add 2d6 to his own Target Rating, as well as the Target Rating of whoever he is shooting at. Obviously, if two people are doing this from opposite ends of the hall, they will add 4 d6 total to each other's target ratings, which will probably result (as it does in movies and TV shows) in a standoff, until something happens to break it up.

A Few Good Special Features

I picked up a cheap Special Edition of A Few Good Men on DVD because it’s long been one of my favorite films and I wanted to own it in widescreen format. However, included on the disc are a few interesting special features… one just your typical ‘behind the scenes’ thing with interviews about the making of the movie, featuring several cast members, as well as writer Aaron Sorkin and director Rob Reiner. Another featured interviews with Sorkin and Reiner tracing the conversion of the project from its original stage play status to a big screen film.

I’m fascinated with creative and technical process, so I found both these features interesting. (One I still haven’t watched is Rob Reiner’s commentary track during the movie iteself, but I’ll get to that.) While there aren’t any really stunning behind the scenes revelations, everyone interviewed opines that making the film was their favorite Hollywood experience ever, and they all also mention that Jack Nicholson being cast as Col. Nathan Jessup really forced everyone else in the film to bring their absolute A game to the acting process, which is why so many people agree that virtually every star in that film gives possibly their best performance ever in it.

Beyond that there’s not much to say that isn’t completely obvious; I love this movie, but most people who have watched it love it also, so there isn’t a great deal for me to add there. I think this is one of those nearly flawless movies that you can watch over and over again. A guy I knew in college once claimed that every time he watched Casablanca, he picked yet another character and just watched that character all the way through the film, because each part was so well acted and written and developed that they were all entirely three dimensional and shed new light on the film by watching it from their particular point of view. I myself am not particularly sure Casablanca merits that kind of attention, since my childhood obsession with the movie has long since passed away enough for me to realize that there is really only one admirable character in the movie, and he’s the one most people think is really boring (Victor Lazlo). The rest of the characters, and especially Captain Louis Renard, are pretty much stinkers, and if Rick Blaine is indeed going to strike up a beautiful friendship with Renard the serial rapist, torturer, and murderer at the end of the movie, then someone should probably just shoot both of them in the head and be done with it. And exactly what does “It’s not the parasite I mind so much as the cut rate one that bothers me” mean, anyway? I mean, that line sounds great, but I have never been able to make any sense out of it.

However, I do think you can closely scrutinize each character study in A Few Good Men and have that attention rewarded, as each character is beautifully nuanced, and all of them interact with each other at various interesting emotional and intellectual levels.

Something in the water

According to something he says in an interview, Aaron Sorkin graduated from the Drama Department of Syracuse University in 1983. This profoundly astounds me. It’s not just that I might very well have shared a playwrighting class or two with him (I took two while I was at S.U., and for a brief while toyed with the idea of switching my major to Drama), although if I did I don’t remember him at all. It’s just that, well, this brings the total score of Famous Folks Who Went To Syracuse University in the Early 1980s up to… well, four, if you count award winning comics professionals Kurt Busiek and Scott MacLeod (McCloud), and Vanessa Williams, the Miss America who had to give up her crown when a nude pictorial of her appeared in Penthouse.

I still hope to bring that score up by one myself, some day, although I have to admit, as Paul Newman might note, I sure am getting off to a slow start.

There may well be other Famous S.U. Alumni From The Early 1980s I’m currently not aware of, but just these four kind of freak me out.

Do not enter

When Scott drove me up to Wal-mart last night, we parked down at one end of the lot and I walked up to the large entrance where we all usually go in (Scott stayed in the car). To my annoyed puzzlement, the doors wouldn’t open, and looking in, I could see the entrance had orange traffic cones in front of it and some kind of banner arranged across it. So, I slogged all the way down a good half city block to the next entrance, and upon walking in and seeing some little old man in a Wal-mart’s vest with a deranged grin on his face, I said “What the hell is wrong with the other doors?”

His reply was a masterpiece of a non sequiter: “Oh, we’re gonna be open down here now, for the smokers.”

Yeah, I stood there for a few seconds trying to make sense of that, too, before I just decided to shake it off and play through it. Obviously, this addled denizen of the Land of Elderly Dementia was not someone who would respond either lucidly or cogently to further questioning, so I just moved on.

However, it strikes me as the utmost madness to shut down a large entrance to a large store simply because of Florida new ‘no smoking in public places’ law, which, I gather, vaguely, is at the heart of this silliness.

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.