Literary Walk of Shame

It's getting close to the end of classes and that means that I'll have more time for reading my own books instead of trying to figure out how much of an article I can skip over and still be able to have a conversation about it (a fine skill to have if you're in school, I must say). In anticipation or procrastination or what-have-you I've done up a list of all the books I've had piling up these past few months to hopefully both encourage me and shame me into reading more and watching British comedies less (oh Black Adder, you always know just the right sarcastic retort).

Books I've Started and Plan to Finish
Notes from Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
On Writing - Stephen King
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat - Oliver Sacks
The Proud Highway - Hunter S. Thompson
The Secret Sharer - Joseph Conrad
At Swim Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien

(though honestly those last 3 are starting to look like they'll have a perpetual bookmark hanging out of the middle.)



Books Yet to Read But I'm Totally Gonna
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Coraline - Neil Gaiman
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman
The Golden Apples of the Sun - Ray Bradbury
Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Mark Richardson
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and other Jazz Age Stories - F. Scott Fitzgerald
What the Dog Saw - Malcolm Gladwell
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
The English Patient - Michael Ondaateje
The Rum Diary - Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in America - Hunter S. Thompson
Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philip K. Dick
The Stand - Stephen King
How We Decide - Jonah Lehrer
The Walking Dead - Robert Kirkman et al.
Looking for Jake - China Mieville
The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse - Robert Rankin

Apparently my sister has an infinite supply of Terry Pratchett and Marian Zimmer Bradley as well. Something tells me I won't be delving into that supply any time soon.

Torchlight

In a moment of weakness or boredom or whatever you want to call it I logged into Steam today and within 10 minutes had purchased Torchlight. No I have never fully played Diablo or Diablo II and can only really play games that I have to sit down in front of a TV to play or can make work on a laptop. So knowing full well that I was going to have a hell of a time even playing this new dungeon crawl from some of the guys who worked on the game that has sent many a PC gamer into premature carpal tunnel territory, I found myself clicking "purchase".

Well, nothing to do about that now. It's mine and I have so far enjoyed, as much as one can with a trackpad, the first couple of missions the game has to offer. The art style is nice to look at and the world has a great exaggerated, cartoon style that gives games so much more longevity than those that try for realism. The only problem now is the same I had in Borderlands. I feel like I'm just throwing stats and skill points around with no real plan. Regardless, I still like when enemies blow up and having a dog run around with me kicking goblin ass and when I find rare items that I can pop on and see a change in my character.

I think I'm going to need a mouse and a good playing surface if I'm going to get through this though. I'm already feeling some pain in my wrist and I want to play more. Not a good combination.

Where the Wild Things Are Review

Where the Wild Things Are is a movie that took me quite a bit by surprise. For a film that I thought was going to be a pretty standard tale of unbridled childhood imagination I found an unexpectedly subtle and thoughtful look at themes of loneliness, desire for understanding and fear of change. Unfortunately these successes make this film feel very adult in it's focus. It is frequently lonely, has no good guys or bad guys and is sometimes frightening to a degree that makes one wonder whether this is really a movie for kids.

The movie follows most of the premise of the children's book where a young boy, Max, is sent to his room for misbehaving during dinner and escapes into a world of wild monsters who appreciate and make him their king. Max eventually becomes homesick and returns to a loving family. The movie takes the liberty of the medium to send Max to an island instead of his room and expand on the personalities of the characters. It develops a whole cast of people and monsters who are struggling for some validation and understanding from those around them. From Max's mom who is struggling with work and trying move on after a divorce from Max's dad to the goat faced monster who is afraid of dangerous games but goes along because everyone ignores his fears. Spike Jonze does a remarkable job of bringing these themes to the front using a minimum of dialog preferring to let the silence and the muppety-CGI facial expressions show what the characters don't have the understanding or vocabulary to do themselves. Max's first meeting with these monsters is as joyous as it is in the book but is almost immediately brought down by the fears and insecurities of the islands inhabitants. It soon becomes clear that each of the monsters represents a different element of Max's own fears and by interacting with them all individually he learns about his own expectations from his family.

If this is sounding particularly deep it's because the movie expects you to figure a lot of it out for yourself. The problem with this is that if you strip out the implied psychoanalysis you are left with a movie that is alternately lonely, frightening and seemingly without resolution. Psychotherapists may be able to fully explain this movie but if you miss that Max is learning about his own life through the troubles of the monsters there is really nothing left. For a movie that is so centred on the imagination and issues of children I wouldn't recommend this movie to kids unless there's someone available to have a long facts of life discussion with afterwards.

The disconnect between the image of this movie and the content aside, I really enjoyed Where the Wild Things Are. It gave a surprisingly deep and mature look at issues that we all face at some point or another and told it in a manner that depended on reading unsaid emotions that not even the characters really understood when they were feeling them. With all this backed up by real costumed actors, and helped with some subtle CG, Where the Wild Things Are is a satisfying experience for anyone who enjoys movies that blend incredible imagination with a mature understanding of itself.

Persona 4

In a marketplace that is so oversaturated with video games of every genre, level of difficulty, aesthetic style and platform these days the I've found it increasingly hard to find games that I can genuinely enjoy. Reviewers try to put quality ratings on games and to tease out the elements that are notably good or bad but I've rarely found any one or even a group of review sources that can accurately predict my enjoyment of a game. Case in point: Persona 4.

My Background

I've had a sort of spotty history with games. I've moved through a number of formative phases as I've changed personally and built up my repertoire of games that have made a significant impression on me. During one of these phases I played Japanese Role Playing Games. I think perhaps I was lucky that I got into them when I did. I started with Final Fantasy 3 (EN), moved onto Chrono Trigger, played FF7 and Earthbound... some of the most highly regarded games of the genre. But maybe that set the bar too high. As I moved onto FF8 and 9, Lufia 2 and Xenogears and the like I found them continually more frustrating. Wrote plots, extended sequences of non-gameplay, all of it just seemed like I was investing my time in inferior versions of old stories dressed up in new art styles and combat systems that stopped being fun. So I stopped playing them (and most other games for similar reasons).

Nearly ten years later I've had my own personal return to gaming but as to what I should be playing, I had no real sources outside of what games received the most hype. These were usually FPS's, casual games, action games and rhythm games. I had remembered that I was once into JRPG's but most of the conversation around them reinforced the idea that they were still exactly what I had left behind.

Traditional RPGs

With the RPG's of old you could write most of the plot on a postage stamp. A group of adventures come across an evil organization (usually a kingdom or empire) and lead a rebellion against them. Usually the empire is replaced with some demonic baddy around the halfway point and you repeat the process of resistance again. You move from dungeon to dungeon fighting bosses who activate cut scenes and generally mash the "next dialog" button until you get pointed in another another direction then you go from there. Eventually you have explored the entire planet and you run around doing side quests until you get bored then never beat the game and it sits on your shelf with a 99% clear file on your memory card. That last part might not be typical but it's not a unique way of playing RPGs as far as I've heard. By opening up the world to the player they remove any sense of urgency to resolve the plot. It is generally the time the player uses to clue up all the side quests to get the best weapons and spells and level grind to the point where the last dungeon is easy. Xenogears was probably the worst for this in my experience. The first half of the game set itself up pretty well but the latter half became a total mess of impenetrable story, battles that made any levelling you had done pointless and zero player control between boss fights. Once they let you back out of the stupid room with the story and the chair there's literally nothing to do but side quests and a battle arena. I'd admit to having more fun than I should have with the battle arena but every time I would try to approach the final dungeon I would think how much I didn't give a damn what the ending of the story was and left it.

Other games would try to rely on the strength or variety of their characters. Final Fantasy 3 holds a special place in my heart because I believe it was the first time I experienced these character memes but further games would fail to do anything interesting with them. The characters were static and developed at the whim of the story rather than in response to any of the inconsequential dialog choices the player was responsible for. On the other side of this are the games that gave you characters that had no other reason for being there other than whatever coloured bauble you happened to have in your pocket. Chrono Cross was the worst for this with a seemingly endless number of characters with perhaps 2 that had any significant development. For a system of storytelling that is based around the strength of the characters you interact with, it's eternally frustrating when you become attached to a character that has no connection to the main plot.

There's something to be said for respecting conventions that are part of the identity of a series. I'm not try to say that these systems are inherently bad, merely that there are diminishing returns as to how much enjoyment these games have given me over the years. As with any musician or artist there's a balance between innovation and satisfying your fans that must be struck and I have not remained a fan.

The Game

Persona 4 does exactly what I've been wanting from RPG's for some time now. It has taken the elements that I came to these games for in the first place and fuses them with more intimate narrative and character development while increasing the players control over how rich the world around them is. You play a pretty average shell character that you name and get to remote control around between cut scenes. One think I like about him though is that he's not completely personality-less. There are times when he will react to things that go on in the world outside of any input and other times where you'll have a number of similar sounding options. Furthermore, there is a personality system that puts gates on certain dialog choices. If you have not developed enough bravery you may not be able to ask a girl for her phone number. If you don't have a high enough understanding you may not be able to negotiate certain delicate conversations. I like how this essentially puts you at the controls of this character but not at full control.

The story in Persona 4 is thankfully reduced in scope by several magnitudes from the "save the world" progression of most JPRG's. You never actually leave the city you start off in and your central quest is to solve a mystery that is contained in that town. You do not get airships. You do not get teleported to the moon or get caught on the wrong side of a rockslide and have to make your way to your next objective via a hovercraft. You do enter a television. The TV is your all-purpose dungeon hub. Once dungeons have been unlocked you enter the TV then wander up a tower till you find a boss. It's a pretty simple system but I can't see any reason why getting into random battles on your way from a town to a cave is any better so I enjoy the compartmentalization of dungeon crawling that the TV ends up being. The rest of the world is for you to develop your relationship with the other characters in the game.

This leads into the next thing I really enjoyed about Persona 4, the social linking system. I've written here about the player/character gap that is apparent when you play socializing like a min/max game but you really do get more control over that process than any other game I've played. There are a number of people in the world who you may become friends with. Some of these have multiple outcomes from intimate relationships to becoming estranged from (apparently. I never experienced this myself). These social links are generally optional but the efficiency of your character in battle suffers. It kind of misses the point to ignore them though. If you're not social linking in between dungeons you have options but no really interesting ones. Furthermore the depth of character you discover through the social linking process is amazingly deep. You really feel like you get to know these characters and have some influence over helping them figuring out their problems. And they're real problems too. Not like the the NPC who wants you get a red herring from an enemy (though they're there too) but real issues of personal identity in a world that has expectations of gender identity, family, and self-worth. It is simply phenomenal in a world where a 10 second soft-core bump and grind session is held up as an example of immorality in video games that this game is able to bring up some serious issues of personality and societal pressure in such a mature way.

Finally, Persona is a game that has a real, measurable momentum that forces the player to be mindful of time as a crucial factor in how they play. There are many elements of the plot and the social links that are available in windows of time. If you squander your time you may miss the opportunity to progress the plot and result in a game over. Because of this you are never really given the opportunity to reach a dead end or get sidetracked by secondary or tertiary quests (most if not all, of which are banal fetch quests anyway).

It's immensely satisfying after so many games failing to properly keep momentum near the end of the quest to be treated to a fascinating, mature and somewhat relatable plotline that is populated by interesting characters and solid gameplay mechanics.


Post Script

I've left a few elements out of the main body of this article due to length and my desire to complete this in one sitting. First of all the combat is fairly standard attack/magic/item affair with an interesting twist that has you look for the right spell to best incapacitate the enemy. It's less attrition based and more Rock/Paper/Scissors. Next, the game has a huge amount of voice acting which I guess isn't all that obscure these days. I did find myself genuinely liking the characters more when I had a face and a voice to relate to them. Finally the game does not even try to hide how Japanese it is. Aside from a vaguely western design for all the characters (a la most anime) you are in a town in Japan and you hang out in ramen shops and use honourifics when referring to anyone you speak to. There's no impression of the entire world being based on feudal Japan or whatever. Inaba's actually a town name in Japan. I'll probably never know how similar the two places are but the Inaba of Persona 4 feels just small enough for you to become intimately familiar with all the locations before too long.

Ooo rah. First real paper of the term and I'm done the night before. What a student I am. Learning all kinds of stuff about stuff and putting it down on paper for people to tear apart. This is what it means to be alive.

Not that I'd really know. The idea of a lust for life has been kind of absent from my days only to be replaced by bittersweet music. I've had lyrics from the grunge era and songs about the unfairness of the world in my head all night and it's made me surly but thankfully not despondent to the point where I'll bury my head in a pile of unwashed clothing and try to evict the demons of doubt and self-deprication from my head. Nope. Just sarcastic and occasionally riled up by the odd party anthem (because sometimes it should smell like teen spirit).

It's also feeling like I went a little too far into my interests to keep my mind off things lately. I have about 10 different gaming blogs being collected through google reader and I still check Giant Bomb a few times a day. Honestly, it's better than the time I've been flushing away on Facebook but I realized not long ago that constantly worrying about the actions and inane internet activity of so many people was actually making me more stressed out than I had any right being. I don't know whether it's just right now or whether I've been becoming slowly dependant on that stream of text to pacify my need to live vicariously through other people. Probably the latter these days. Anyway I've started a weening process from Facebook in particular. Staying active on Twitter but the few people I know who do use it do so as a news stream anyway.

Here's to a month of turmoil. May it be over soon. Now where's my Scotch...

Video Game Protagonists are Psychopaths

Last night I put Half-Life 2 back in the Xbox to relive what is if not one the best game of the last few years, certainly the most well received one. My experience with the Half-Life series has certainly not been against this opinion but I noticed something strange when I was playing it that stood out after just having put 100 hours into a JPRG:

Most video game protagonists are psychopaths.

I won't admit to coming up with this idea myself. Indeed the idea of Gordon Freeman as some kind of twisted vehicle for impassioned murder was brought to my attention about a year ago. I was thinking about it when I was replaying HL2 however and once I realized that I was playing the game like I had ADHD and the supporting characters still treated me like the messiah I began to wonder if this whole experience wasn't supposed to be Gordon's warped point of view where he is essentially put in a very long corridor and continues down that path with people patting him on the back every so often and giving him a bigger gun with which to shoot the next thing that doesn't give him positive reenforcement. It doesn't help either that I constantly find myself exploring nooks and crannies and playing around with the game physics when people are trying to relay important information about the gravity of what is happening in the world. I know it's a stretch to expect the players moment to moment actions to fit in with the narrative you are traveling through but when your only real abilities are to jump and shoot it becomes hard to think of Gordon as anything but this high powered weapon with a quick-save button. Furthermore if we see the Gman and the resistance NPCs as elements that just point Gordon in a certain direction and pull the trigger then why shouldn't we, as the players who are literally pulling that trigger, be equally responsible for Gordon's actions?

Obviously because giving the player that level of agency in this setting isn't fun and if you could potentially stop your progress by not interacting with the NPCs in the right way it would be infuriating.

Gordon isn't the only protagonist who suffers from his avatar status. I recently finished Persona 4 and had a similar issue with the motivations of your character. You get to name him and select his dialog choices and in what particular sequence he interacts with the other characters in that world. One of the major mechanics is a socializing system where you nurture your relationship with other people in the world through having conversations and spending time with them. It never really feels, however, like you're really bonding with them. The rewards for spending time with the other characters are highly valuable, perhaps even necessary for fighting effectively. I found myself on more than a few occasions just thumbing through dialogs I wasn't particularly interested in because I knew that I would get better spells if I did so. Instead of legitimately responding to the characters in a way that I would have I ended up just trying to guess what the game wanted me to say to them so I could move on to the next step more quickly. Maybe there's some implicit message in all of that about me or video games or people in general but it sure made me think that my character was looking at the people around him as puzzles that he could solve rather than people he had any real emotional investment in.

I guess the point here is that when you are trying to make a story with believable interactions between your characters the way most video games do it, where you are controlling a person like you would a remote controlled car, leads to some dissonance between what the game wants you to think you are doing and what you are really doing. It's good we have games like Burnout Paradise where you act like a lunatic because that's what you're supposed to be doing.

Version... 4.0 (ish?)

It's good to be back in school. Hell it's good to be doing anything again. Good to be learning, good to be making connections, good to be able to take a walk when I want good to be able to see more than 4 half walls a day. I'm not saying never again to that life but that type of job? No. I've got too much ambition to try to suffer that again.

In the mean time it's back to school. Back to absorbing news straight into my blood. Back to wasting time becoming an expert in pointless trivia. Really just back to figuring it all out again. School feels good. I may not be doing anything significant right now but learning how to be a student again instead of treating knowledge as a hobby is a bit of a transition. You're on someone else's clock instead of your own and learning for the purpose of proving to another that you can figure it all out. Once again, however, I find that I've been slacking about keeping up a regular output outside of linking to articles on Facebook. So here I am again trying to start this blog and figure out some way of contributing to it on a regular basis.

These first few articles I think will be more musings on the state of my interests and opinions with a clear thread coming out later as I get more used to it.

Just a quote I took to after reading it in HST's "Saga of a Desperate Southern Outlaw"

To be nobody but yourself- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
E.E. Cummings

Up

I've been reappreciating the way that movies are such a perfect little moment of escape from the real world. When I watch television serials they tend to have to separate the episodic narrative and the overarching series or season narrative. The last few minutes of a show are usually part of a whole different story that you put together over in bits and pieces. Movies always strike me as being more focused and allow you to get a whole story in a digestible amount of time.

Tonight I saw Up, latest entry in the Pixar catalog. I love the work that Pixar does. They find some way of making stories that are beautiful in their simplicity and their appeal to emotion. They are stylistically designed for a younger audience, but still manage to have a level that adults can appreciate as well. I quite liked Up but I felt that it was a little thin on this level. I think that Ratatouille and The Incredible both seemed to have themes that were much more resonant with the issues that I come across in my life. Up had some of these trans-generational issues for sure but I didn't really feel like the way they did it was as special as I've come to expect from the Pixar guys. Perhaps I'll come back to this idea later.

The past few weeks have run some havoc on my ability to produce anything creative. I couldn't even do cover letters. It would appear that I'm still not at where I would like to be but I suppose every journey needs a first step.

Moebius & Fat

Not much happening to put the wind in my sails these days but I've watched two good documentaries so I'll let that be my point of departure.

I used to be a big fan of comic books. I'm sure most people can say the same for some period in their childhood when they poured with awe over the latest heroics of Spider-Man or Batman or whoever happened to catch your younger self at just the right time and in just the right way to spark that magic flame of imagination. My history after that initial rush was somewhat inconsistent but I was fortunate enough to be turned on to some of the more sophisticated, or at least different, works of artists outside of the Marvel/DC style of comic via the phenomenon of the movie Heavy Metal when I was still in my early teenage years. The amount of detail and fantasy in the stories that made it into Heavy Metal, let alone the highly visible gore and sexuality, was quite a turn from the very sterilized or specific way these subjects were brought up in most other media. It defied almost every convention that I expected from exposure to traditional media and wrapped it all up in a visually striking art style.

There's been a lot of time between then and now but I still have fond memories of the vistas and the design of the characters. Imagine my surprise then when I find myself talking about documentaries at a post earth hour party with my landlord and having him hand me a documentary called "Moebius: Redux" he produced on the life and influence of Jean Giraud AKA Moebius, artist behind the original incarnation of Heavy Metal and apparently designer of the art in some of my favourite films. The film puts together interviews from Moebius himself and some individuals he worked closest with in his career including fellow french artist Phillipe Druillet and famed director Alejandro Jorodowski. Mostly I found it fascinating because, probably due to the language barrier, I never knew about the totally surreal and philosophical stories these artists were telling. Even flipping through panels today I'm amazed by how much these guys seemed to pack in to each frame. There was a quote in the movie about how the characters looked like they had a full history written all over their face from the very first panel and I would have to agree.

The next part was about how Moebius moved to movies which highlighted some interesting contributions to movies that I've appreciated the art style of for a while. The major ones were Ridley Scott's Alien, The Fifth Element and Blade Runner, although the documentary kind of implies that Scott cribbed the design from the world of Blade Runner from a story that Moebius did with the screen-writer for Alien. All interesting trivia and made me appreciate what all these artists have done.

The other documentary I watched was way less interesting but I had some time to kill tonight so I loaded up one of the free documentaries on CBC On Demand. Tonight's pick was "Morbidly Obese" on fat people who get gastronomic bypass surgery. There were some interesting aspects to it but everyone gets the surgery and has an awesome life after they lose their fat so I didn't really feel like there was much of a message aside from "when fat people get thin they are happier" and some prying the curtain back on the challenges these people face doing things the rest of us take for granted. Lots of bedsores and naked fat people and warm happy music when the fat people are less fat. Not really much there otherwise.

From gratuitous gore and breasts to bedsores.... the things I learn.... oi...

I had a terrifying flash of "old man syndrome" the other day when I was thinking about making a mix-cd. I remember the argument that High Fidelity brought up that the mix tape was an art and how hesitant people seemed to be about the concept of mix-cds once that medium was popular. But CDs are going bye bye in the face of flash media, ubiquitious internet access and wi-fi, so what's left for the personal mix of songs that you make for people?

I suppose the only functional option left is the podcast, but that strips out the package that you get when you deliver the mix. There's little room for art, it gets lost in some corner of your hard-drive you'll visit every few months...

I suppose that we've got a few years left until the CD is an anachronism but it's going to be a sad day when someone tells you they don't have any way to play your mix.

 

I've been seeing this favourite album meme crawling through facebook lately and it struck me that the art on most of these albums is really high quality. So I decided to do a collage of some of my favourite album covers from my collection regardless of the quality of the album. Some are tied to the album content, some are just esoteric.

While I'm Waiting for the Water to Boil...

I've had a number of issues on my mind since I last wrote that I could easily write several pages on but instead I'm going to start by saying that waking up with a hangover on a Wednesday and being unable to take a shower before work because your pipes have frozen is something no one should have to go through. Why was I hungover on a Wednesday? Well, as if St. Patrick's day wasn't enough of a reason we were also celebrating a friends birthday with green food colouring, Irish Whisky and hole-in-the wall bars filled with talented makers of Irish music. The morning was a sharp reminder that sometimes you have to borrow against your future comfort for the good of the moment.

That seems to be the theme of the past few days. After a weekend in which I fell into a feedback loop of boredom, I was lucky enough on Monday to leave the house with intentions of getting a coffee and working on a paper and ended up going for dinner with someone I really haven't had much more than a peripheral relationship with and very much enjoying the company and conversation. Unfortunately this was all at the cost of the time I needed to do my assignment so when all was said and done I had missed out on all but three hours of sleep. Tuesday, as mentioned, involved birthday cheer and St. Patrick's Day foolishness and spending all day cursing St. Patrick and his penchant for alcohol. Not to mention the realization that I have a week to write a research paper.

But before any of that I have ice to defeat and a spot between to blankets that needs me to lie in it for a while.

It's also become pretty clear that I get some pretty foolish ideas into my mind when it comes to the opposite sex. I'm still trying to figure out whether this is a bad thing that I should stop with the sobering brick of reality.

Trekkies (Trekkers?)

For the past few weeks I've been craving knowledge. Part of is is because I'm back in school and being forced to read and write about topics at someone else's behest; part of it is because a full time job has left the time in between work and sleep a wasteland of poorly spent time. Having recognized that my life has become significantly more bland and sedentary I've been trying to try to do something meaningful whenever possible.

Tonight I watched the documentary "Trekkies". Hopefully those of you reading have not immediately jumped to a conclusion about the quality of the film based on the title. I must admit first off that Star Trek was an important part of my childhood. Almost every night my dad would sit down to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and we would all join him. We would lose ourselves in the adventures of Picard and Riker and Data and all the rest. I still remember when how strange it was when we knew the next episode would be the last. After so many years it instilled in me a real sense of loss when the final credits rolled and we were left asking "what now?" Deep Space Nine lost be before the peak of the show and Voyager did not even come close to repeating what I loved about TNG so I drifted away from Star Trek and sci-fi in general. Perhaps it was the family bond that TNG represented in our household that no other incarnation of the Star Trek franchise was able to latch onto or perhaps it was just a young boy looking for something more solid to believe in than spaceships and aliens. Whatever the reason Star Trek moved on and I did not.

Coming into the world of Trekkies for me was like returning to a childhood haunt and finding that it has been turned into a church or a circus. Star Trek fanatics have always gotten a hard time from popular opinion. Even Rocky Horror fans seem like they have less baggage then a person walking down the street in a Klingon outfit. At least the person dressed as Dr. Frank N. Futer has a sense of humor about their outfit. The same cannot be said of all Trek fans. It is this bias that Trekkies probes with astounding results. Even from the introduction we know Trekkies are not fans like any would could imagine. The director, Roger Nygard, delves deeply into the impact, both positive and negative, that Star Trek has had on people around the world. Some of the first fans we see are those that we would "expect" including a trio dressed as an ambassador party of blue aliens and a man dressed in a Trek uniform with bright red lipstick (we learn later that he is dressed as the unseen wife of a minor character from a single episode). We are then introduced to the interviewer, Denise Corsby, whom fans may recognize as Tasha Yar from the early TNG episodes. It is at this point when it becomes obvious that there is more to the fans then our first impressions would allow.

The balanced presentation of even the most ridiculous characters in the film is a testament to the quality of the documentarian. A often returned to character in the movie is a dentist and his family of Star Trek fans. He has designed his dental office around a Star Trek theme. His family, a wife and two kids, are always portrayed with their uniforms on whether it is at home, at the grocery store or at work. Regardless, his staff seems to be accepting of their Federation work uniforms and his clients seem to be OK with his Star Trek office. We are shown a kid who is a second generation fan after his father who at first comes off as a goof and a nerd but who, at the age of 14, has already produced impressively detailed 3D models of scenes from a Star Trek movie he and his friends are producing. We hear stories from the cast of the various Trek shows that range from laughable to disturbing to tear jerking. One of these stories is from James Doohan, AKA Scotty. He tells us of a girl who sent us a letter. A suicide letter. Fearing for the girl, he invited her to a convention he was speaking at and to subsequent conventions where he talked to her. Years later she contacted him again to tell him that she had just received a masters degree in electronic engineering.

It is these details that Trekkies shines. Few of the characters have been consumed by their obsession and even those that seem the most removed from reality have jobs and kids and lives outside Star Trek. It is hard to look down on a woman with hundreds of photos of Brent Spiner when I can recall the names and works of hundreds of different musicians and actors. I used to follow every single, every side project every charity that Pearl Jam was connected with. I still have vinyls of their albums that have never touched a record player. Star Trek holds a much stronger claim to combatting social issues the Pearl Jam ever did and through their stories they introduced generations of children to important social issues from racism to poverty to dealing with the loss of loved ones. Maybe most of us did not go past tuning in every week but the lessons being taught were universal and the importance of children being involved in a show that teaches such universal lessons should not be understated.

"For the hour you are on I forget the body that I am in." This is what a woman, so paralyzed she needed an interpreter to decipher the frail mumblings from her lips, told John de Lancie (Q). Star Trek fans, like the fans of anything else range from the obsessive stalkers to those who take their love for the show on a personal level. Anyone who was a fan of Star Trek during their childhood should check out Trekkies if not for nostalgia, because it is an exceptionally well done documentary. There is a lot to laugh at, marvel at and be embarrassed for but all of it is thought provoking.

House of Leaves & Space

I haven't been living up to my promise to write something new every day. Most days I haven't had much of an excuse. Lazyness mostly. Other than writing an essay this time last week I have been focusing my attention on deciphering the various puzzles in my life right now. Some personal, some superficial. Street Fighter 4 is a superficial time sink that has recently imposed itself on my life but I think after tonight I'll be spreading my time out a little more evenly amongst the things that are keeping me busy these days. It's really quite amazing just how much has happened in the past week, though it would probably be more accurate to say that I'm looking around with a greater appreciation of things I usually take for granted, if not ignore completely.

But that's a discussion for another day. Tonight I want to go over a few aspects of House of Leaves. I am still reading it, however infrequently I actually turn a few pages. Going into the book I was afraid that it would be needlessly complicated. I guess I was half right. It's complicated but obvious enough about explaining it's own complexity as you attempt to navigate it. The thing I have been really enjoying about it is that there's a fairly obvious parallel between the themes of the book and the way it presents them to you, that is, the paths it opens up that the reader can travel on. During this writing I'll be using a lot of the language of movement. If you've read the book you can probably see why. It has a lot to do with space and paths, both physical and mental. Before I go any further I should note that I'm still fairly early in the page count of the book, but this doesn't mean that I'm not well into the story. The book looks big, but in reality, the space it occupies is not what it seems. Many pages contain less than a paragraph. Others are packed with dense overlapped piles of words that are essentially dead ends.

House of Leaves is able to create a sense of space in another way, which is the thing I really wanted to discuss. If you try to read straight through the main text of the book you will miss everything, and then when there is no clear way forward you will be lost. At the onset it is a formatted and familiar document. There are parts of personal narrative from one editor, clearly separated from other parts that appear to be an academic paper, complete with footnotes. For most people this is a known quantity and likewise the subject of these parts is of the normal life of a family who have bought a new house. As the story progresses it is revealed that something is not quite right about the house. It is larger on the inside than the outside. As the essay portion of House of Leaves delves into the mystery of the house the familiar format we have become used to starts to fall apart. Lengthy sections of personal anecdotes divert us from the main body of the essay which itself often goes down bizarre paths. As a reader our attention is constantly redirected towards footnotes, appendices, sections that had been eliminated completely then brought back until eventually we find ourselves in a labyrinth of footnotes, some relevant, some not. You may chase a note down several pages only to find that at the end it references another note that starts on the same page but is printed upside down and goes back the way you came. There are footnote pits that lead to nowhere and show you the mirror image of the words as you "climb back" to your original page. Sometimes it will tell you to read an appendix, or direct you to the wrong note. Navigating this section of the book disorients you and you find a way to mark your place so you know where to return to if you get lost amongst the words.

Ordinarily this would be a mess but just prior to this maze you can find in footnotes printed in red with a strikethrough (denoting a piece deleted then recovered) that the author was discussing the myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinth. The main text of the section also discusses a maze.

It's getting late so I'll have to cut this short, but the point I'm trying to make is that it is amazing that Danielewski has managed to make me think of his words as representing a physical space and that it actually works well. I can only hope that this idea is a fertile ground for other parallels in his writing mechanics and content.

Street Fightin' Man | Gamers With Jobs

Street Fightin' Man | Gamers With Jobs

My adoration for GWJ notwithstanding this piece speaks with far more precision why I'm holding out on buying Street Fighter IV. I lack the arcade heritage that most fans of the series have but I know people that were and even spending evenings at their place squaring off against whoever is in the room has shown me the appeal of the fighting game genre. Unfortunately my living room will not be a place of gathering for the "World Warriors". I am quite content with being the incoming challenger in someone elses game right now. Time will have to tell if I want to step up to being a host myself.

Going to try to do another quick one tonight. I've been thinking all day about ways that some novels have experimented with storytelling techniques. Specifically I've been thinking about House of Leaves and The Dictionary of The Khazars. Both of these try to tell a story in a way that is totally different then the standard linear novel. I began to think about other ways we absorb stories and I came around to how we usually read content on the internet. Many online publications, blogs especially, mix content. A page that contains an article may have key words that link to outside content to complete or supplement the readers knowledge of the issue being addressed in the original piece. I should probably do some more research before going any further but this seems like an extremely interesting medium through which one could tell a full story that was unique to the readers reading habits, being as rich and deep as they choose to go in it.

I'll have to come back to this but I've been tossing it around in my head all night and I think it's got potential.

There isn't much to say right about now but I haven't written in a while and I wanted to make an effort to churn out some positive work so I'm forcing myself here at 12:30 to throw down some words. To be fair this is my magic hour. I do some of my best work in this "I should be in bed" period and as much as I WOULD rather be trying to sleep I'm holding myself hostage to the keyboard so I won't look back and regret time wasted.

All in all it's been a mixed few days. I've been doing some reading about psychological health and dealing with the ending of a relationship. A few times I've had to set aside all my reservations and embrace the self-help style, new-age, ultra-positive lingo that makes up the majority of self-help sources. I will grant that I am in pretty bad need of some advice and I'm not going to begrudge it a style of writing I'm not a fan of. My reading has led me to some effective coping techniques (including writing, hence all the content lately) and taking a few steps off the normal social channels. At this point I've only been getting bad news from Facebook and whatever else shows me every minutiae about my social circle's internet activity so I've opted to check it once or twice a day for less then a minute unless replying to a message. I'm calmer now, generally, and while some info that drags me down sifts through I haven't been flat out mad for a while. I've even found that most people I actually care about hearing from are much easier to come by then I thought. Hell, Facebook is probably responsible for me not seeing them that much due to their every action being broadcast all the time. It's hard to need to catch up to someone whose life is out there on a webpage being updated in real time.

So I've found some solace in that. My other source of distraction has been Battlestar Galactica. I simply didn't have enough time before to watch it and get everything else that needed to be done out of the way but I've got time aplenty now so I've been tearing through it. There are a lot of things I cringe whenever I see, especially since it comes so highly regarded, but then I'll catch a subtle bit imagery or they'll juxtapose the story or the characters in just the right way to open up a whole new facet that you didn't recognize before. All the same, the really interesting bits can be buried by random deus-ex machina or character motivations that fall out of the sky or waiting too long to add to narratives brought up episodes ago. Just nitpicks that occasionally inspire Lost-rage. It's been keeping me thinking and entertained and that is exactly what I need right now. I've even taken to exercising during the show.

Well now it's REALLY time to hit publish and turn in for the night. Maybe someday I'll have more discipline.

Edit: Also, this weekend is going to be a nightmare...

Spooky ass books

I was splitting my time between struggling to stay awake and studying a handbook for writing this afternoon and decided to heed a piece of advice I gleaned from a paragraph in the section on improving your writing skills. Specifically that you should attempt to write anything, no matter how pointless every day. So here it goes. I failed my resolve to head to the pool today so I might as well get this done.

Yesterday was a strange day all around. I worked all day, proceeded to head to the library to finish a project for my writing course. It wasn't exactly one of my most lucid pieces of prose but i got it done. One of the consequences of my 12 hour work marathon was that the idea of sitting in front of a video device made me feel an aneurysm coming on. The risk of bursting an artery in my brain seemed very real and frightening at the time so I went to my bookshelf and grabbed whatever was buried way in the back. It happened to be a book my sister left with me before she left for Japan, "House of Leaves".

The reputation of this book has not escaped me and I've seen people praise it's ability to truly inspire fear in readers and how the level of detail given to minutiae is unprecedented. Thinking about it now, it seems like it has something in common with the "alternate reality games" that Nine Inch Nails, Lost and AI have all come up with to appeal to the obsessive fact finders and internet detectives among the fanbase. Case in point: the hard cover version of House of Leaves contains a huge string of hexadecimal code on the inside covers. If you transcribe this code into a text document you get an AIFF file for clip of a song from Poe. NIN had a puzzle in the lead up to Year Zero that involved taking a piece of a leaked song and running a spectrum analysis of a certain part to reveal a phone number. I've always been fascinated with the design of these kind of "games" and it seems already from the little i've read that this was a collaborative process.

But yeah. All I wanted to say was that the book has hooked me so far but I'll be extremely depressed if it loses me with the hard stuff before I'm fully invested in it. It's already got this meta "story of a story of a story" structure set up and I worry that it's going to leave me frustrated when I see people quoting parts like:

"Forgive me please for including this. An old man's mind is just as likely to wander as a young man's, but where a young man will forgive the stray, and old man will cut it out. Youth always tries to fill the void, and old man learns to live with it. It took me twenty years to unlearn the fortunes found in a swerve. Perhaps this is no news to you but then I have killed many men and I have both legs and I don't think I ever quite equaled the bald gnome Error who comes from his cave with featherless ankles to feast on the mighty dead."

That's the problem with experimental art. You're never sure if it's more on the side of genius or pretentious.

Tech support circus

Fuck modems and routers and tech support...hell, fuck telecommunications in general.

So for a few weeks now I've been having issues with my internet connection. It's brought into striking clarity just how critical it is to have access to the internet at all times, even (especially) when trying to fix your internet.

I'm sore and cranky and want to bury all my electronics in the desert but ultimately I feel a sense of superiority against my ISP for thwarting their attempts to control my internet usage.

So here's the crux of the problem. My ISP is Bell/Aliant. I imagine this isn't an uncommon practice but when they send you the modem (Siemens Speedstream 4200) it's loaded with a gimped, safety-scissors version of the firmware. You can put in your password and that's pretty much it. No port forwarding or any of the things that you'll want to be messing with if you use any program or service outside of web-browsing. I've never attempted to connect to the router directly, always through the router and it's worked well. Then last month I had to troubleshoot some technical issue that required me to use the pinhole on the back to reset it to default settings.



This is apparently not as straightforward as it sounds. From what I can conclude from looking back on all of this it all comes back to when my 12 month internet subscription (you get a better rate if you buy the 12 month deal) expired. When my contract was up they switched me over to another channel which caused the modem to flake out and go into an error state. When I reset it it switched from "bridge mode" to "router mode", the difference being that bridge mode lets my other SMC router deal with all the port forwarding and PPPoE stuff. The difference between setting the modem to one of these or the other is the length of time you hold down the reset button.

This is so far out of what the average technical capabilities of any tech support person I've had to deal with is I am astounded that anyone ever gets their internet straightened out if this kind of a problem occurs. It really is ludicrous how far some ISPs go to keep their customers from having any control over the product they're selling.

Links:
Factory Firmware for Speedstream 4200
DSLReports thread that helped me solve my problem
I feel bad for this guy. Hope he figured it out on his own.