Let’s show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown

As I mentioned a few days back, I borrowed Ghostbusters on DVD from the guy who lives next door (Jeff) and I just finished watching it again, a little here, a little there, over the past day or so. It’s still one of my favorite movies, and along with An American Werewolf in London, one of the few really successful attempts to fuse genuine comedy with genuine horror. Most of the movie, of course, is hilarious, but there are also some authentically scary moments as well (like Dana’s initial possession by Zul), and I think the movie is a real accomplishment, especially given the fact that Ivan Reitman generally isn’t someone I think of as being a particularly accomplished or skilled director.

In addition to how well the funny works with the scary in this film, I especially enjoy the subtle underscoring at the end of the film of Clarke’s Law, i.e., “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. While Gozer, ancient Sumerian deity, was clearly using what a pre-Roman culture would have simply labeled ‘magic’ and given up on, Egon and the Ghostbusters had enough of a scientific background to recognize the kind of energies that this ‘moldy Babylonian god’ was actually manipulating, and to develop a high tech counter to it from the tools they had at hand. Where a lot of similar movies would simply shrug and call it ‘magic’ and leave it at that, Ghostbusters stated quite clearly that while Gozer might have been powerful, he/she/it wasn’t doing anything beyond the capacity of a 20th century tech-geek to understand. “Back off, man, I’m a scientist”, indeed.

That’s one big Twinkie

The new hit game around these parts is something called RAW II, which Pat and Paul rented from Blockbuster Tuesday night. It’s a wrestling game, so my initial interest was minimal, but Paul was raving about the fact that it has a system for generating characters, which got me interested, since the fact that no such system exists in Soul Calibre II or DOA 3 is one of the things that very much annoys me about those games, especially since I came to them from Knights of the Old Republic, which has a very sophisticated character creation system… and trust me, if either of the above mentioned fighting games had a system for creating your own characters, I’d just play them all damn day and night.

Anyway, I set up a character… a purple skinned female named Tamara, after something from my long running fantasy RPG. Part of setting up the character is you get to set up a WWF style introduction for her, with a video that plays on the giant screen TVs and pyrotechnics going off and your own music and you can select from a variety of moves and control the lighting effects and a lot of other stuff.

Tamara’s intro is excellent; and it’s not just me saying that; Paul, Pat, and Scott all agree. I chose Suite’s “Fox On The Run” as her intro theme music and it works really well with the way she moves as she struts towards the stage, and it also works well in conjunction with the repeating video footage I created of her for the giant screen TV.

The game also has little roleplaying things you can do in between matches; the choices are limited (there’s no dialogue, probably because there was no way to program a lot of different voices for people to choose from) but fun… you can do anything from show up and encourage a fellow wrestler (attempting to make friends) to do things like set a trap for a fellow wrestler (something falls from a door and hits them, maybe) or even sneak attack them in the dressing room (which turns into a free for all and you may get your ass kicked). You can call out another wrestler and challenge them to a grudge match, or attempt to interfere in a scheduled bout (although more often than not, the security guys won’t let you). Once you program your activities for each match that you’re not actually fighting in, the computer will animate what actually happens.

One thing watching this game has taught me is that there are a LOT of babes in wrestling! Stacy Keibler, especially, seems very stareworthy, at least, her computer animated incarnation is. I’m tempted to watch Smackdown tonight (although yes, I KNOW how absolutely idiotic it is) just to check some of these foxes out.

What I don’t like about the game at all, though, is the moves and the fighting system. There are no hitpoints and half the buttons on the controller do nothing, and none of the buttons do anything by themselves. It’s all combinations, and you don’t beat someone down and then knock them out; you have to wrestle and bludgeon someone until they become extremely weak, and then pin them, or put them in a hold and force them to submit. It is, as Paul notes, a game of fine control, and I say fuck that; when I hit a button I want my guy to pummel the shit out of someone. So after running Tamara in one match and losing ignominiously, I just watch the other guys play. But that’s pretty fun, and if I owned a copy of the game (and an X-Box) I would happily create characters and intros for hours.

So far, to date, Paul has created two characters… a pretty good looking Hulk (he’s green and has purple pants and looks rather like the Lou Ferrigno TV Hulk), and another weird original character who wears purple called Mr. Blank. Pat created an indescribable midget with monstrously disproportional legs called Little Man Spade in an outfit Austin Powers wouldn’t be caught dead in, and Scott has come up with (after recently watching an old tape of mine with several episodes of The Tick cartoon on it), a pretty decent looking version of Die Fleidermaus, who is actually doing very well as a wrestler (the Hulk keeps getting his ass whipped, and Mr. Blank is not only getting his ass whipped a lot, but he keeps doing dumb stuff that makes everyone hate him).

And in other gaming news, I ran my RPG for a couple of hours for Paul and Scott today… just long enough to get them more or less launched into their next scenario, in which they have to go to a nearby island and kill a vacationing Lord on behalf of his son, who is currently ruling the City Quarter his father normally presides over, and would like to keep the job permanently.

Yeah, okay, THAT was geeky enough.

It’s true. This man has no dick.

In real world news, Pat had mentioned Tuesday that he might be able to drive me over to Mill Plastics & Machines, a small factory at the other end of Zephyrhills where Paul’s buddy Chad now works. Chad had mentioned to me a while back that they’ll be hiring new people soon, and he makes $9 an hour, which is about the best pay you’re going to find in this burg, and hey, I’ll work in a factory for that much money, especially in a place where one bedroom apartments rent for $300 to $500 per month.

Pat had said he wouldn’t know until around 4, so, naturally, he called at 2 to tell me he could take me over right that moment if I wanted. For normal people this would be no problem, but I don’t work and Paul works either second or third shift, so lately we’ve both been staying up all night and going to bed around 5 or 6 in the morning, and as we both have insomnia, neither of us get to sleep until around 8 or 9, generally. That meant that when the phone jangled at 2 in the afternoon, we were both sound asleep, and as it happened, Pat caught me right in the middle of a dream cycle where some chick who looked exactly like Jennifer Aniston (but who wasn’t Jennifer Aniston in the internal context of the dream; I remember that much) was just about to tell me her name. The first ring woke me up, and it was one of those interesting situations where you wake up so suddenly and abruptly that you can’t move at all; it’s like your whole body is wrapped in wet linen or something. So I heard the phone ring twice more, and then I heard Paul blundering across the living room (our walls are paper thin), heard a crash and a thud and a howl of pain, then heard Paul answer the phone and start screaming at whoever was on the other end of it that he’d just stubbed his toe on the bookshelf.

I suppose an impartial observer would have found it pretty funny. But Paul was pissed at me for a while because, as he put it, “You always answer the phone”. It didn’t help that I replied, “well, we have a goddam answering machine, so there’s no reason for you to fling yourself as if from a catapult across the room if, for example, I’m still too damned sleepy to move at that moment”. To which he went, somewhat surlily, “well, yeah, but…”

Anyway, Pat drove me out to the place, and since Chad had said they’d want to interview me on the spot (I should know not to trust Paul’s friend Chad’s assurances any more; he’s a nice guy and he did fix the leak in our tub faucet, weeks after he promised he would, but half of everything he says is horseshit and the other half is just plain wrong) I wore nice pants, a nice shirt, and an actual tie. Then I got there, and there were two doors leading in to what was obviously the office area. One had a large sign on it saying ‘please use other door’, so I went to the other door, and it was locked, so I went back to the first door with the sign, and it was unlocked, so I went inside, and found the office, which was empty, which was probably why the office door was locked. I eventually found an old guy who didn’t seem to be too on the ball who took my resume and vouchsafed that “Doug handles all that, and, um, he must of went some where”. But at least he let me use a phone to call a cab, since I was at the other end of town and Pat, thinking I was going to have an interview, had just dropped me off and not stuck around.

So I left the application (which Chad had finally brought me, two weeks after he told me he would, following numerous reminders from me and Paul) and my resume on a desk I presume must have been Doug’s, and I’ll follow up tomorrow, although I have little hope. Still, you never know, right?… and eventually I have to get a break, yes?

In other real world news, in recently renewed email contact, Alli indicated she was a Red Sox fan, and although I honestly couldn’t care less if every professional baseball player in the world suddenly gains gravitic immunity and hurtles off the globe into space at several thousand miles per hour, I had to tell her that I’d had a vision in which the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. And now I see that the Marlins beat them, which, again, I really could not possibly care less about, baseball isn’t a sport, it’s a summer rec activity, but still, it’s interesting to see that God still takes pleasure in making me look like an idiot.

God also enjoys tormenting me in other ways, like, for example, consistently giving me ONE lousy matching number on my Lotto quick picks, something he did yet again in last night’s drawing. I know it’s stretching it to ask to WIN, but hey, four numbers and the resultant $70 or so would be very welcome here right now.

On her blog right now, Elayne Riggs is running down her extraordinarily long blogroll and really racking her wits to find nice things to say about every blogger on it, and most recently she said some very nice things about me and this blog, so, thanks, Elayne, even if I am aware that I annoy you inordinately rather often and don’t hang comments on your blog anywhere near as much as I should.

And in probably the most interesting news here, I got the following email yesterday: