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I recognize that I’m several years late to this party, but I’m finally watching Heroes and what the hell? In season one Peter is a sweet, peacenik nurse, and by season three every time he wants to save the world or be a hero he’s picking up a gun? This is lazy writing.
Also, I think the writers should be more aware that one of the powers Claire has as an invulnerable healer is the ability to totally gross-out her opponents by being all wounded at them until she heals. Like hello, have you never seen a zombie film? Walking people with wrong-angled parts are the scariest people.
Sigh. I’m sorry about this. I recognize that the modern pop culture life span being what it is, talking about Heroes is pretty much the same as if I were to go to New York right now and shout at the incoming ships to tell me whether or not Little Nell survives. Luckily, you don’t come here looking for current references. (Actually, most of you come here looking for pictures of Jared Leto, so pop-culturally speaking I think I’m ahead of the curve.)
Michele and I exchanged a few emails this morning (as we do most mornings), because she’d just discovered that Tatum Channing Tatum’s* abs (and, I guess, the rest of him) will be playing a stripper in an upcoming film. All I had to offer was my discovery that my neighborhood theater is showing To Kill a Mockingbird tomorrow night, but I felt this was almost as exciting, because Gregory Peck!
Except, “why did Gregory Peck never play a stripper opposite Tatum Channing Tatum?” I wrote. “With the magic of CG, shouldn’t this be not only possible but constantly happening?”
“I dunno,” Michele wrote back.** “I mean I think I like Gregory Peck most because he is dignified and I like Tatum Channing Tatum most for his little mockery smile and no shirt. I don’t think I would like either of them as much if they crossed into the other’s bailiwick.”
If I ever forget why I love Michele — I never do forget, but let’s say for argument’s sake that I got amnesia like in that other Tatum Channing Tatum movie — I only have to look at this email to remember. Who else would use the world “bailiwick” in an email about naked TCT? I might print this out and frame it.
*I can never remember if his name is Tatum Channing or Channing Tatum, so I try to cover all my bases.
**Capital letters have been added to Michele’s contributions because you’re on Carthage, where things get Capitalized. If you want to be all e.e. cummings, head over to Michele’s world.
I was thinking yesterday about family dinners. I grew up sitting down to dinner every night with my parents: no TV, no books, just conversation. This sometimes led to screaming matches and slammed doors (me), but more often led to shared jokes and silly voices and making fun of the dog (also me). We always ate in the kitchen, crammed into the breakfast nook. I wonder how much those dinners shaped me: as an adult, I am happiest when crammed into a space with just room enough to sit (as anyone who saw our last apartment in the later years will attest to), performing in a silly voice to a select handful of people I love. I am the clown who is happiest staying in the clown car with just one or two important clown friends.
But in this house, the dining room contains our only eating surface, which means my future kid will grow up eating nightly family dinners in a vast, silvery cavern. What will my kid grow up to be in that echoing undersea landscape? Best case scenario, a mermaid. But in reality, I might wind up raising some kind of tuna. I guess I could just plan a breakfast nook into our kitchen redesign, but part of me feels it might actually be an advantage to raise a tuna-child, so that we can ride her to safety in the inevitable earthquake and tsunami.
There should be mashups for books, I think. I’m not talking about this ridiculous(ly lucrative) new trend of taking a classic book and shoehorning in some new elements, a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I’m talking about a true mashup: taking two existing pieces of art and shoving them together to make something new. With music, you take two songs and alternate bits from them and layer them together and make a new song. With books, you would take the text from two books and alternate them and run the sentences together to make a new book.
For example: “There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” From The Voyage of the Old Man in the Sea (a mashup of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Old Man in the Sea).
If you’re very, very bored and habitually come to my blog to steal my ideas, here are a few you could use to get started:
– The Unbearable Lightness of Being Earnest
– The Bleak House at Pooh Corner (which I guess would be Eeyore’s house)
– Gone With the Wind in the Willows
– Franny and Zooey and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
– A Wrinkle in the Time Traveler’s Wife (yikes)
– The Phantom of the Tollbooth Operator
– The Railway Children of the Corn
– Howard’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe
– The Lion, the Witch and the Warden (The Warden is a very short book by Trollope, in case you are not up on your 19th century novellas, and why would you be?)
After eating a bag of “melts in your mouth, not in your hand” M&M’s, I looked indignantly at my candy-coated palm and asked my mother if we could sue the company for false advertising.
“We’ve been having kind of a streak of bad luck lately,” I said to Gene. “Have you noticed?”
“Bad luck?”
“You know, the fence falls down, you lose your wallet, neither of us is working now…”
“You’re right,” he said.
“But overall, I feel like we’re still having a really good life,” I said, “weirdly. I mean, when I think back through my days in the last few months, all my memories are of happy things. We’re doing really well in spite of this unlucky streak.”
“I agree,” he said.
“Of course, the bad things are mostly happening to you,” I mused. “You had to fix the fence; it was your wallet. But we are partners, so in a way anything that happens to you happens to me.”
“That’s right,” said Gene.
“Although also, in another and much more real way, it doesn’t happen to me at all.”
Michele has alerted me to the fact that the SF Library is having one of their ninja spring sales this weekend. Every year they have the giant book sale in September, but every few years they randomly have an equally giant sale in the spring and it sneaks up on you like a ninja. This is one such year.
I already own all the books but I will be there on Sunday just to see if anything new has been written since September. The sale is at Fort Mason and on Sunday everything is $1 or less, so if you like things that are good, slightly battered, or being fought over by a pack of rabid bibliophiles, come on down.
An image search for “rabid book lovers” gets you this. The puppy is sad that you don’t own all the books yet. Why don’t you own more books? Do you hate the puppy?
“You know, I can’t even remember which knee your scar is on,” I say to Gene.
“My right knee,” he says. “I think.”
“You don’t know?”
“Well, let’s see.” He pulls up his pant leg and we look at his knee. “Yep, there it is.”
I blink. “That’s tiny. I guess I’m thinking of the scar on your shin.”
“My shin?” He pulls up his other pant leg and we look at his scar-free shin.
“What the hell?” I say. “I distinctly remember you having a great big whopping pink scar on one of your legs.”
“Nope.”
We sit silently for a moment, me frowning, Gene contemplating his own kneecaps with interest.
“Maybe someone has changed reality in the style of The Matrix, or some kind of time-travel scenario,” I suggest, “and I am the only one who remembers things the way they used to be. Everyone else is like…sheep…and I’m like…the thing that stands out in a flock of sheep.” Gene’s only response is to continue to eyeball his own legs. “This can’t be good,” I say. “The one who remembers is always the one who has to be brutally dealt with by the robot overlords or scrappy time-traveling adventurers. In fact, you know what? I officially do not remember your scar. This new reality is just fine with me.”
“Okay,” says Gene to his knees.
“And if you’re the one who changed reality, well…please don’t kill me in my sleep.”
I’ve been playing Stacking, the new game from Tim Schafer and Double Fine. If you are unfamiliar with the superstars of geekdom who dot my personal firmament, Schafer was a designer on almost all the best adventure games: the first two Monkey Island games, The Day of the Tentacle, Psychonauts, and the very best game ever made, Grim Fandango. He helped invent things like, say, the dialogue tree,* where your character has multiple response options which sometimes dictate the direction of conversations. (In games before that, all you could do was click on a character and watch a pre-scripted conversation. So much more fun to have the option to ask different questions or hurl insults. You’re a failure as a pirate, Wally!)
This is actually from Monkey Island 3. Not a Schafer game, but the dialogue tree tradition was by now well-established.
I had already played Costume Quest, Schafer’s follow-up to his massively awesome Psychonauts, and had found it sort of…limited? Fun and cute, filled with Schafer’s trademark amusing dialogue, but kind of repetitive.
Screenshot from Costume Quest: “Don’t hold your candy pail like that. It looks desperate.” Pretty good, although the best line is from one of the villains just before he attacks you: “You remind me of my parents…from whom I am bitterly estranged!”
Still, I was excited about Stacking because the premise looked so out-of-control awesome: you play a tiny Russian doll named Charlie who moves through a world filled with other stacking Russian dolls. To solve puzzles, you “stack” into dolls of larger and larger sizes, each of whom has a special ability which may help you solve challenges or side quests. Also, the graphics and soundtrack looked really beautiful.
Now I’ve played a few hours of the game. And the graphics and soundtrack are really beautiful, and the concept is as neat as it sounded, but the game itself is just…boring and hard.
For one thing, Stacking is set in an Industrial Revolution-era world full of amusing child labor and robber-baron-types, which is pleasingly dark in tone, but unfortunately also dark in color. I keep finding myself in rooms where the mood lighting is so dim that it’s almost impossible to see what’s going on. Also, the game was originally created for Playstation, so the PC controls are kind of difficult to use. (I don’t know if I can really blame Double Fine for my unwillingness to buy a Playstation, but I am happy to try.) And I sort of hate first-person games anyway. I get a little nauseated if I play them for too long. (This was a problem I had with Psychonauts, too.) I miss side-scrolling adventures, you know? Just show me everything in the room on one screen, don’t make me waggle the character’s head around.
And then there are the puzzles themselves. Rather than putting in a lot of different kinds of fiendishly difficult item-based puzzles, a la classic adventure gaming, Schafer & co. have created fewer puzzles that each have three different solutions. And each solution requires figuring out which doll to use and then wandering around an enormous space full of dolls until you find the one you need; also, that’s the whole solution, because once you’re in the doll, you have the necessary power to solve the puzzle. This gets very, very boring. I think Double Fine knew it would, too, because when you try to leave a world before you’ve found all the solutions to each puzzle, you get a little pop-up message saying something like “Are you sure? A true adventurer wouldn’t leave so much undone!” It reeks of desperation, like a time-share salesman thrusting pamphlet after pamphlet at you as you head for the door.
Mind you, I am not blaming Double Fine. There’s a dearth of adventure games on the market these days, which leads me to believe there’s a dearth of old school players like me who just want to combine items into other items to solve puzzles. This impression is borne up by the reviews of Stacking which seem to be universally positive, as though reviewers are so grateful to be reviewing something that doesn’t involve shooting a disturbingly realistic humanoid figure that they will settle for anything. So yes, I do realize that I can’t expect a company to make games that no one but me wants to play. (Although the new Monkey Island game by Telltale is just wonderful in every way; to say nothing of their Sam & Max series. And Amanita Design’s Machinarium, which was made just a few years ago, is one of the best and prettiest adventure games I’ve ever played. So obviously some designers love me.)
Anyway, what do I know? I am getting more old-ladyish by the day. Games were better in my youth, and kids were more respectful, and Robin McKinley wrote readable books and Chris Cornell wrote good songs. And ozone! Call this an ozone layer, I don’t. Not a patch on the layer we used to have, let me tell you. So go ahead and play Stacking, youth of America. I’ll just be over in this corner with Manny Calavera, grumbling about better days.
R.I.P. awesome adventure games. Except Machinarium. And stuff from Telltale.
*It’s worth noting that my info on this comes from an in-game commentary by Schafer himself, where he and the other Monkey Island designers mention that they were the first ones to create a dialogue tree. So…grain of salt, I guess?
Since I cannot go to Paris at present, yesterday I decided to go to San Francisco and pretend I was somewhere else. (Excuse my photo effects, please. I’m experimenting with an Android app called Vignette and possibly going a little overboard with it. But it’s so fun!)
I got up early (for me) and took the exotic Bay Area transit system to Civic Center.
I went to the Asian Art Museum to see the Maharaja exhibit and wandered around looking at the sparkly stuff, and also this thing.
I like walking around a museum alone because I don’t feel pressure to read any of the info that doesn’t interest me or look at the stuff which doesn’t speak to me. Basically, if it wasn’t encrusted in rubies or decorated with peacock feathers, I gave it a miss. However, it got kind of lonely. I find I like having someone with me; I like to drag a friend to the next gem-filled glass case and show it off as if I’d just mined those stones myself. So before long I was off again.
This statue had a seagull on its head, which unfortunately could not be captured because a) I can’t figure out how to zoom in on stuff with my phone and b) I was too excited about making this photo look worse with my app to remember why I took it in the first place. But trust me, that bird is there. And it is super funny.
For my next trick, I took a train to the Mission, where I had planned to have lunch at Tartine (for fancy Parisian-type coffee and baked goods!) and then wander around a bunch of stores I’d never been to. But as soon as I got to the Mission, I realized my plan was doomed. What I love about being in a foreign city is its foreignness, and there is nothing foreign to me about SF. Even streets and buildings and murals I’ve never seen still resonate with San Franciscity; it’s a city that’s so thoroughly itself, you can’t make it stand in for anything else. (Also true for Paris, by the way. This plan was a bust from the start.)
I can hear someone speak anywhere in SF and know instantly that they are of my town. For example: “So when do I get that demo, dawg?” -One white guy to another.
The cuisine is immediately recognizable as SF-made. For example: “It’s an abomination, but it’s delicious.” -A dude I pass sums up the entirety of SF food, and if you disagree, I have three words: bacon ice cream.
Annnd the rule of threes suggests that I need another quote, but I’ve got nothing.
The worst thing was, while everything around me was utterly familiar, none of it feels like home anymore. So I hopped on a train and came back to Alameda, and as soon as I got here I felt like I was home again. But also I kept noticing, as I usually do here, all the little side streets and cafes and canals and stuff that I haven’t explored yet. You guys, I totally live in a foreign city! Well, okay, a foreign town. And it is pretty great here.
So, to sum up, European adventure: fail. But life choice FTW.
Truly, there is no place like home.
(Isn’t it great how I was able to encapsulate my experiences into a tidy life lesson? I am the Punky Brewster of Alameda. But if anyone wants to give me a free plane ticket to London or Paris or something, I would be happy to be the Punky Brewster of the foreign city of your choice as well, I’m just sayin’.)
