Those fuckers.

Those EVIL fuckers. Those BRILLIANT evil fuckers.

Let you have a free comment feature for long enough to get used to it, pile up a bunch of back comments... and then suspend your service, including your connection to all your archived comments, if you don't subscribe to the premium service.

Well, I subscribed, so, hopefully, these idiots will fix my comment threads sometime soon.

I hate them. But I admire them. Now fix my comments, you pricks.

Saturn’s Day, August 2, 2003, around 9:30 p.m.

CONFUSING TIME DILATION STUFF

For those who care… well, actually, for everyone reading this, whether they care or not… the above time notations are made when I sit down to start one of these things. Doing the average entry here takes me about two hours, so it will be around midnight when I finish and get this posted, making the date stamp probably obsolete, or nearly so, as well.

Yes, I know, you don’t care, really, you don’t. But I’ve always found it interesting to muse on how time flows by, and how much our perceptions seem to shape entropic flow. By the time I sign on and post this it will be several hours into my as yet unmapped future, and by the time you read this, it will doubtless be even further on than that. Who knows? I’m not planning to leave the house tonight so I doubt I’ll die or find true love, but I could win the Lotto… or you could, if there’s a Saturday drawing in your state and you bought a ticket. Things could be very different when you read this, than they are as I’m typing it. I find that interesting. But then, as many have noted, I’m deeply weird.

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MORE LOW BUDGET BLUES

The very first NFL game of the 2003 system. Very first one. Exhibition, I grant you. In Tokyo, at 5 a.m. in the morning, I further concede. Nonetheless, the very FIRST goddam football game of the hugely anticipated 2003 season, featuring the World Champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers… and you can’t watch the fucking thing unless you have cable.

This is insane and stupid.

Tonight’s six o’clock news tells me the Bucs won, which they’d goddam well better have, and that King and Simms both played very well, but Jesus H. Christ, we poverty stricken Bux fans would still kind of like to WATCH, you know? Hey, assholes! TV IS SUPPOSED TO BE FREE!!

I know, none of it really matters until we play Philadelphia, but still, I’d kind of like to watch the back up quarterbacks play. At least next Friday’s game is on Channel 8.

And, yes, yes, yes, I should stop bitching; at least the ENDLESS and entirely excruciating wait is over and football season is once more here again. I swear to GOD I don’t know why we can’t have football year round. Have two different leagues, or something. I mean, they play BASEBALL year round. They play BASKETBALL year round. Those games SUCK. Making us wait six goddam months between football seasons should be unConstitutional, or something.

Okay, yes, I am aware that they really don’t play baseball and basketball year round, but it sure as shit SEEMS that way, doesn’t it? And don’t even get me started on goddam hockey…

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A TIME OF DARKNESS IS UPON THE GALAXY

See, Krell Marader was a smuggler, and a not very nice woman at all, when she ran into this old Jedi knight, and he wound up sacrificing his life to save her life. With his dying breath he laid this major guilt trip on her about all the evil left to fight in the universe, and how the Force was very strong in Krell, and he could feel she had a great destiny for good or for evil. So, being somewhat honorable even if she was kind of a mean bitch, Krell sighed and set about trying to honor the dead bastard’s obvious last wish, and from there on in, she became a better person… in behavior, anyway.

See, underneath, Krell was always annoyed. But every time she had an opportunity to either do something good or bad… some poor old man was being hassled by bounty hunters, or kids were beating up some poor defenseless alien… she’d see that prick of a Jedi Knight in her head, like some annoying Lucasfilms version of Jiminy Cricket, and hear him talking about all the evil in the universe that he would no longer be able to battle… and she’d give an exasperated little grunt and then do the RIGHT thing… all because of guilt over Dead Jedi Dude haunting her head.

But then you get to the big reveal, 2/3s of the way through the plot of Knights of the Old Republic, and yes, I’m about to ruin the game so if you’re planning to play it, don’t read any more of this… and it turns out that Krell (or whoever the main character being played in any particular game may be) is actually… the former Sith Lord Revan, a major villain assumed dead since before the start of the game (the game mentions this character quite often, though, so you know who he/she – gender of Revan depends on the gender of the protagonist character you play, of course). Revan was captured by the Jedi and they removed his memories and reprogrammed him to be a soldier under their command, for various reasons too tedious to go into.

Which meant, in the terms of my particular characterization, that Dead Jedi Dude in Krell Marader’s head had never existed. He was just something the Jedi had come up with to manipulate Krell’s behavior.

Mind you, Dead Jedi Dude is something I made up, so I could get a handle on Krell’s behavior… I wanted to play a classic story of redemption, so I made up a major moral turning point for my character that occurred before the game started. I wanted her to be someone with a shady past and no natural inclination towards good, who was struggling to do the right thing. Since KOTOL is an RPG must concerned with moral decisions (how you play gives you either Light Side or Dark Side points, which has various impacts on game play and how the scenario ultimately turns out). So I made up Dead Jedi Dude to give me a handle on Krell’s characterization and help me choose what her actions and dialogue choices would be.

Anyway, Krell’s behavior had been admirable up until that point and she was pretty high up on the Light Side scale, but when she found out the truth… that Dead Jedi Dude wasn’t real and it was all a trick… she went seriously Dark Side. After struggling through many of the game’s further trials and ordeals (including spending four hours last night dying over and over again as I tried to kill the game’s major villain, Lord Malek, to reclaim my former title as the Lord of the Sith), I finally emerged triumphant, and saw the ending of the game you get when you go over to the Dark Side and win through… basically, a victory parade with your character being hailed by triumphant Sith storm troopers as your unstoppable armada spreads out to crush the galaxy beneath your iron heel. Very Hitleresque, actually, although with the usual Star Wars nominal SF trappings.

I saw the ‘heroic’ ending when Paul first finished the game; it’s pretty much the end of the very first STAR WARS movie replayed… your character and his buddies get a big medal pinned on them in front of a cheering crowd, and the eternal gratitude of the Republic and the Jedi Order.

Let me tell you, however, the game designers make you pay for the fun of conquering the universe. In this game (I don’t know if this happens in other games like this, this is the first one I’ve played) you end up getting 9 other characters to join your party along the way, and they fight alongside you and, since it’s an RPG, there is nominal (pre-programmed) personality interplay and supposedly you bond with them. It’s pretty obvious to me as a writer that if you play heroically, then everything is fine; you get through to the end and all your people are okay. There are a few Dark Side types (two, actually) in your group, but that’s okay; Dark Side types are simply unscrupulous, there is no reason an evil person can’t behave heroically if they fall in with the ‘right’ crowd.

However, since Krell chose to re-embrace her original identity and went seriously Dark Side, when we got towards the end and the rest of my group realized I’d gone evil and was now planning to conquer the universe, all the goodie goodies tried to stop me. One of the worst goodie goodies had already gone Dark Side by that point, so I had her on my side, and of course the two evil characters in the party swore loyalty immediately, and the little droid unit didn’t much care. However, that left Carth, the Republic soldier, Juhani, a cat-woman Jedi whom I had previously redeemed from the Dark Side and who kind of worshipped me as a god because of it, Jolee Bindo, this crotchety old Jedi I found in the forests on the Wookie world, Mission, a 14 year old Twi’llek girl, and Zaanthar, her faithful Wookie companion, who absolutely refused to join up with my evil plan.

Of that group, I never much liked Jolee (he was obviously meant to be ‘crusty but lovable’, and not written very well, and I just found him annoying) and I hated Carth from the minute he first spoke a line of dialogue to me. If you run a male character, then the female Jedi in the party, Bastila, ends up being (kind of) your love interest, but if you run a female character, Carth is meant to be your romantic lead (this is a very homophobic game; of course it’s for kids so any kind of mention of sex is pretty much verboten, but, nonetheless, the game’s built in assumptions are that all the characters are straight and all romantic relationships are heterosexual, which, since I was running a babe surrounded by babes, struck me as kind of narrow minded and limiting).

Carth, as I say, aggravated the hell out of me. He was obviously meant to be very heroic. He had a tragic background (the Sith, and in fact, my former identity, had wiped out his home planet, along with his wife and, he thought, his son, when his Republic fleet was just hours too late getting back to stop them), he moped around a lot, he was deeply sensitive and kind and gave these long deep mournful meaningful emotional speeches, and honestly I just wanted to hit him with a brick. If the game had allowed it, I’d have tossed him out an airlock first chance I got. But you can’t even get the characters you really hate in your group killed because if any one member of your party survives a fight, all the ‘killed’ ones get back up, too. (If you all die, well, you either start a new game or go back to your previously saved one and try again… but once these folks join up with you, you CANNOT get rid of them. No matter how aggravating they are.)

So Jolee I didn’t much like, and I loathed Carth with every fiber of my being, and Bastila, the goodie goodie female Honan, really got on my last nerve, too. The two other evil characters in the party were a Mandalorian mercenary named Candorus that I never much cared for (when he found out I was Revan, though, he practically kissed my feet) and a psychotic droid named HK-47 that liked to blow stuff up and who had a deeply obnoxious personality. Besides them, there was Mission, the 14 year old sneak thief I mentioned, and her Wookie buddy Zaanthar, a little R2D2 like droid who didn’t talk at all, and Juhali, the cat-woman Jedi. Out of the entire party, the three I liked most were Mission, Zaanthar, and Juhali.

So, naturally, when I went evil, those were the three I had to kill. And, trust me, it SUCKED.

I know, I know, they’re just fictional characters. But I really hated having to kill Juhali, and then later on, I hated having to kill Mission, a LOT. And just to make it worse, where I would have really enjoyed carving Carth into stew, the game let him run away!

Bastila went over to the Dark Side, which made her much more pleasant to deal with… on the Light Side, she’d been very sanctimonious and judgemental. On the Dark Side, on the other hand, she was pretty cool.

Anyway, I rule the universe, so tremble and obey.

I have to give mad props to Paul. All the way through the game I’d paid little attention to the idea of making my character into someone who could beat the evil Lord Malek at the end, and as I mentioned above, I just kept dying in the final climactic fight scene against him. Over and over again, for four solid hours, no matter what I did, he kept killing me. I could not outfight him with a light saber, and my Force powers would not work on him because he had better powers than I did (he’d taken Force Resistance, which I hadn’t, because I wanted to wear armor and all the really effective Force powers, Light and Dark, don’t work if you wear any armor at all).

Finally, Paul took the controls for a second and went through ALL my equipment (which, by the time you get to the end of the game, adds up to a LOT). Then he suggested that, instead of fighting Malek with Jedi weapons, I throw an adhesive grenade at him to make him hold still at a distance from me, and then lob other grenades at him (I had a ton, all kinds, including thermal detonators, which make a nice BIG bang) when he couldn’t move. So I did that, and finally, that worked… not a very Jedi (or Sith) like way to reclaim my title as Dark Lord of the Galaxy, but I didn’t much care.

Of course, realistically, if people existed with powers like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker demonstrated in the STAR WARS movies, you couldn’t beat them with grenaded, and you’d be stupid to try. In fact, simply walking into the presence of a strong Jedi with grenades on your person would be idiotic, since I have to assume that someone who can summon their lightsaber from across the room would have little difficulty tossing you backwards through an open doorway with sheer telekinetic force and then mentally triggering all your grenades at once. I mean… ka-BOOM!

But it worked in the game, and I rule the universe. Grovel before me.

This was my first real experience with a computerized ‘roleplaying game’, and since this is my blog, I’m going to vent all over the place now about how truly exasperating these things are, or at least, this one is.

I’ve already mentioned annoying party members and how you can’t get rid of them. Another of the more minor annoying aspects of the game is that while at critical junctures your character gets a choice of dialogue, whoever wrote the dialogue for this game sucked at it, and of course, since they don’t want you doing anything really all that intelligent and derailing the plot early, a lot of times the choices you have are much too limited. But honestly, the dialogue in this game just bites, licks and chews. There’s not much sense of humor in anything your character gets a chance to say; if you’re really heroic, everything you say is Dudley Do-Right boring, and if you’re playing it totally evil, you sound like a bad B movie villain twirling his mustachios.

In fact, other than having to kill Juhani and Mission (which SUCKED) the worst part about going over to the Dark Side was having to spew dialogue like “I am Revan, Dark Lord of the Sith returned! Bow before me or DIE!” And that’s pretty much ALL Revan ever said, once you got the fucker to that point.

However, without a doubt the most ANNOYING thing about these computerized RPGs is that they absolutely will not allow you to do anything that would change the plot in any really important way. Well, there is the choice of two different endings, good and bad, depending on how you play Revan. But, other than that, anytime a crucial juncture in the story comes along that the programmers don’t want you messing with, the game goes into ‘cinema mode’, and basically you’re just watching a movie for the next five or ten minutes, as vastly important decisions are made right in front of you without any real input or interaction from or by you, and pivotal events occur without you being given the slightest opportunity to influence them. You don’t, for example, get to decide whether or not you want to go to the Jedi Council’s planet and be trained as a Jedi. Bastila just programs the ship to take you there and you have no opportunity to try to persuade her otherwise, or reprogram the ship, or hold her at blaster point and make her take you somewhere else, or throw her skanky ass the hell off your cruiser, or just kill the bitch and go any place in the universe except the goddam boring Jedi planet. You also can’t refuse to be trained as a Jedi; the game doesn’t give you that dialogue option. (My character didn’t want to be trained as a Jedi; she was perfectly happy running around as a mercenary, especially once she stole this really nifty space ship.)

You can change the order of the four planets you have to go to in order to get clues to find the big plot device at the end, but no matter what order you go in, the same major events unfold… various planets get blown up once you’re done with them (which is annoying, since a lot of the little ‘missions’ you do on each planet are to help various people get out of different kinds of trouble, so having the whole planet get turned into a cinder by the Sith as soon as you take off makes for a real sense of futility), you get captured by the Sith and tortured, you run into Malek a few times but aren’t allowed to kill him (because that has to wait for the final battle) and, in the end, while you can change some of the details, and you can end up either good or evil, saving the Galaxy from crushing Sith tyranny or, well, crushing the Galaxy beneath your iron heel, the basic story cannot really be altered. And frankly, I find that GODDAM aggravating.

If you haven’t played one of these games, you really won’t understand. But, well, you go through it and you have all these choices and options, and then, suddenly, the screen narrows down into a letterbox format, and you see your characters from an omniscient viewpoint, as if watching them in a movie, and you realize “uh oh… something important is happening and they aren’t going to let me do anything about it…” Then for the next five or ten minutes, you just sit there through endless blathering dialogue, some of which you may have a choice about (but if the plot point is really important, nothing you say much matters; if you try to talk Bastila out of going to Dantoine, for example, she just gets stubborn and insists).

You can’t do anything while the game is in ‘cinema’ mode; you can’t even save your game in the middle of endless reams of expository dialogue, so if you die during an interstellar voyage, for example, you have to go back and reload and go through the entire endless cinematic transition all over again. It’s ANNOYING.

Another way the game is very annoying is that it does not allow you to choose who you get into fights with or not. There are a lot of minor characters you run into who get very snotty with you, but YOU CAN’T KILL THEM. On the other hand, there are some characters you’d really rather not fight, for various reasons (sometimes just because you like them) but the game, at that point, decrees you must have combat. On a very few occasions, if it’s programmed, the fight will stop and your opponent will try to surrender, and you can choose whether to let them or go on and kill them, but that’s rare (I think it happened to me twice).

And, goddamit, the game let CARTH run away and when I told Mission ‘run away, child, this isn’t your concern’, it MADE ME KILL HER!!!! AUGGGH! I HATE THAT!!!

Then Paul and I got into this aggravating discussion about how people prefer games like this to actual RPGs with human GMs (like mine) because in games like this, all the numbers and dice rolls are taken care of for you, and you’re presented with a range of preprogrammed options, and other than during the annoying Mensa-like tests and puzzles you have to figure out occasionally to open a door or get into a particular room, the game never requires you to think. Paul had started the argument by observing to me that when he GMed a roleplaying campaign, if the players seemed stuck, he’d throw out a hint or bring in a helpful NPC, whereas in my campaign, it was sink or swim… if the players couldn’t figure out anything sensible to do, well, they were probably going to either get killed or very frustrated.

I said something like ‘yeah, it sucks when the GM wants you to actually THINK about stuff, instead of spoon feeding you the answers’, and he got annoyed with me, because, well, I was right and he didn’t like that.

However, to an extent I understand his aggravation, because every time this damned game threw some logic puzzle at me, or some numerical sequence I had to figure out, it just exasperated me. I didn’t want to THINK about this shit, I just wanted to open doors, get cool stuff, and kill monsters. But then, regardless of what people say, it’s impossible to really have a computerized roleplaying game; you HAVE to have a sentient referee for real characterization and interaction. And in a computer game, no, I don’t really want to think or figure out puzzles. I just want to open doors, beat enemies, and get treasure.

Anyway. If you’re going to play Knights of the Old Republic, don’t go Dark Side. It absolutely SUCKS when you have to kill Mission.

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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:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(c) be a better writer than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

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:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

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.

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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.

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