Oh yeah: I’ve heard that writing is just like anything else, you have to practice at it before you get better. (Hence this weblog). So I’ve been spending the day limbering up, coming up with lines that I’ll never use.

• The MUNI bus seat was so vile and disgusting that even Rosa Parks would’ve refused to take it.
• A pack of bar-hoppers walking down Fulton Street in afterthoughts of Halloween costumes, including the guy dressed as he does every night except for the pink bunny ears, which he’s hoping will be just enough to show that he’s in touch with his wacky side and get him laid.
• The night is as cold as a a check made out to an orphanage and left unsigned.
• My Volkswagen has been recalled more times than a summer spent at the cabin by the lake.
• I didn’t just have a bowel movement, I had the whole symphony.
• And I don’t care what anybody says; I still like the pun about being a playa-hater.

Okay, so there’s going to be a lot of editing to do once November is over.

There was a story in The Sandman about a guy who was cursed with too many ideas — something about his muse getting pissed off, so she gave him infinite inspiration, too many ideas to be able to do anything with any of them. If I remember correctly, he ended the story insane or killing himself. But as he declined, there was panel after panel of him mumbling all his ideas for short stories and novels and plays. And if I remember correctly, most of them were pretty good, actually better than a lot of the stuff Neil Gaiman has done “for real.” More than anything else in that series, that was the story that convinced me that Gaiman was a genius.

Sometimes I feel like that (the too-many-ideas part, not the genius part). Except that the ideas, in retrospect, aren’t all that great when it’s not 3am and I’m trying to get to sleep and convinced that I’m brilliant. And it’s not that I’ve got too many to do anything with, it’s that I’m lazy. And most of them turn out to be episodes of “Tales from the Darkside” or “Friday the 13th: The Television Series” or “Buck Rogers” or some other television show or comic book I read and have already forgotten about. But apart from that, I’m exactly like that story.

I’m sitting in my darkened apartment, hiding from trick-or-treaters, thinking about my great novel-writing adventure which is due to start in just a couple of hours. And for you, the loyal readers of my website, I’m going to give an extra-special bonus and give away the ending:

I’m not going to be able to finish it.

Eh, I don’t know. I’ll still give it a go of course, and see how long I last. But my hopes and attention span have dwindled already, and I haven’t even started yet. Plus all the other distractions — the work which I can’t seem to finish, the fact that I’ve got to spend the entire next week in LA for work, and so many other things that it seems like I’m just looking for something to distract me.

Part of the reason I’m so disillusioned is because I just read Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore. Reading the NaNoWriMo site gives you the feeling of a bunch of excited people on a skydiving plane, getting themselves and each other psyched up about jumping out the door and feeling the exhiliration of making something creative. Reading Bloodsucking Fiends gave me the feeling of seeing the guy in front of me give everybody else a high five then make a battle cry and throw himself out of the plane, having his parachute fail to open, getting chopped up in the blades of a passing helicopter, bounce off a high-rise building, then land in a garbage truck.

It’s not the worst novel I’ve ever read — I’ve got about 15 Star Wars novels, remember. It’s not even the worst vampire novel I’ve ever read. But it’s one of the most depressing. It’s got this smarmy residue over the whole thing, a gross combination of the respective smarminess of Los Angeles and San Francisco that are bad enough on their own but even worse when combined. And you can tell the guy has been told by friends and agents all his life that he’s funny, and he’s writing the whole thing thinking how witty and clever he is and how his characters are lovable misfits and his situations novel and inventive and his dialogue just sparkles. And that in the end maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn a little something about ourselves.

But the characters are annoying, the wacky and subversive things they do are all contrived (they bowl with frozen turkeys in a Safeway after hours! how crazy is that?!?), the characters are stereotypes, and a lot of it is just downright offensive. He’s got plenty of the stock stereotypes, like the guys in Chinatown who talk with ls instead of rs, or the noble AIDS victims who are ciphers except for their disease. But also the American Beauty-style stereotypes: where you take a totally trite and insipid character, put one predictable spin on it, and act like you’ve suddenly created life from clay. I’d heard lots of positive reviews about it, and I’m sure that they liked it just because it made a half-step of effort past the most obvious cliches into slightly less obvious ones. And they probably like it because it’s so “refreshingly free of political correctness,” which means that it’s misogynistic and racist. Plus, he name-drops Anne Rice and Queen of the Damned as if they were good.

The whole book just feels like having an over-long conversation with someone who has above-average intelligence and a reasonable imagination, but is horribly, cripplingly shallow, and just doesn’t have the talent to reach his aspirations. And that’s about the least inspiring thing to read when you’re supposed to start writing. Reading something transparently bad just gives you the reassurance that no matter how talentless you are, at least you’re better than that. And reading something really good, of course, gives you something to aspire to. Reading this was just unsettling and depressing — it’s possible to be an uninspired C-list hack doomed to mediocrity, and still get published and praise and positive reviews and never realize how much you suck.

On the other hand, I’m still wanting to do NaNoWriMo out of spite. Spite for Alma Hromic, a humorless, bitter, self-important woman who would be bad enough just for writing “I was born with ink in my veins, in a town on the banks of an ancient river, in a country which no longer exists.” But she secured her place as a hero to the creative process with this screed against NaNoWriMo which shows how much she completely misses the point. (Unfortunately, it also demonstrates how much people put their self-worth into their own writing ability, but I guess that’s a topic for another therapy session).

So this book, if it ever gets finished, will be dedicated to you, Ms. Hromic!

I’ve looked at the news for the new World of Warcraft expansion, and my reaction is pretty much “meh.” Of course, I’m still going to buy and play the hell out of it, but I can’t get all that excited about it. Partly because it seems like it’s most appealing to people who are either at level 60 and have run out of stuff to do (I’m not), and/or people who have played all the Warcraft games and see some recognizable back-story there (I don’t). Plus I’m just tired of Blizzard and have realized two things about the company:

1. Blizzard has dicked over enough of my friends now that they have officially become “the bad guys.”
2. You’ll only get my World of Warcraft game away from me when you pry it from my cold, dead, Wizard’s Ring of the Monkey (+10 Agility, Soulbound, required level 33)-wearing fingers.

So it’s kind of a love-hate relationship.

And that’s why articles like this one piss me off. It’s kind of old news: WoW has a program that runs when the game is running, monitoring other apps on your machine to make sure you’re not running some cheat software. One of the things it does is check the title bars of your other open applications, a commonly-used and publically-available Windows API call for years, to look for known cheat programs.

What pisses me off is that now, like with New Orleans vs. the Bush Administration, I’m finding myself siding with the bad guys (Blizzard) over the good guys (the Electronic Frontier Foundation). Now, I support the EFF (in spirit, not financially) and think it’s good to have them around. But they’ve taken what is at heart a great concept that everyone can agree with, and gone too extremist with it, much like Greenpeace, PETA, the ACLU, and NAMBLA.

From the article:

Digital rights group The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) branded The Warden “spyware” and said its use constituted “a massive invasion of privacy”.

The EFF said that it was not acceptable simply to take Blizzard’s word that it did nothing with the information it gathered. It added that the Blizzard could get away with using The Warden because information about it was buried in licence agreements that few people read.

A “massive invasion of privacy?” Please. And getting upset about what Blizzard might do with the information is what gets branded you an alarmist and conspiracy theorist. The last part is the worst, though. Anyone who’s alarmed and upset and blaming Blizzard should maybe, oh I don’t know, read the license agreements that they agreed to.

One quote from a different player of the game, who has a surprising amount of common sense for a Blizzard fan:

“If someone is afraid of the program reading sensitive information from their programs, one possible solution is simply to not run any additional programs while playing World of Warcraft,” he said, “which is certainly advisable from a performance standpoint to begin with.”

What a novel concept. If you don’t like Blizzard knowing that you’re looking at porn sites or on an AOL chat with DarkNEO2731, then just close those windows before you play the game.

Here’s the bit about the Brainiac who “discovered” the “massive invasion of privacy” by “dissasembling the code” of the program to watch in action (read: he ran a copy of WinSpy):

Writing in his blog about what he found Mr Hoglund said: “I watched The Warden sniff down the e-mail addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs.”

Mr Hoglund noted that the text strings in title bars could easily contain credit card details or social security numbers.

Okay, complain about Blizzard all you want on your blog, yeah whatever. But let me give you some helpful advice: if you’re dealing with a bank or company that puts your credit card details in the title bar of its site, it’s time for you to stop complaining to a videogame company and start finding yourself a real bank. Sheesh.

Having to read all these tech news websites, especially where privacy rights online are concerned, just makes me realize what a bunch of whiny, paranoid bitches computer people are.

Man, I thought I’d learned everything about procrastination from college and then working at EA, but that was strictly amateur class. Now that I’m working from home, I’ve gone professional in my time-wasting.

Before, it was The Sims 2, where I’d do stupid stuff like see an interesting house in the city and then go into the game to try and build that and then put a family in it and then try to get them hooked up with one of my other Sims or have a baby and then before I knew it three or four hours had passed.

That was nothing compared to Civilization IV. That game is pure evil. I always made fun of the people who claimed they had an “internet addiction” or were addicted to games like Everquest and World of Warcraft, and I still do, because they deserve it. The idea of being addicted to a videogame is absurd. But this game is just weird. When I picked it up on Thursday, I was resigned to waste a whole day on it, and that’s exactly what happened. I got it home around 4pm, and the next thing I knew it was 2am and dark outside and I just felt gross. Really stupid, but I saw it coming so whatever.

But it’s worse than that. Yesterday I was reading a review of the game that mentioned this opening sequence (narrated by Leonard Nimoy) that I didn’t remember seeing. So I started up a game just to check that out. And the next thing I knew, it was 4 hours later. Not even my usual “I know I shouldn’t be doing this now, but I’ll make up for it later” thinking; I genuinely didn’t realize that much time had passed. So, I’ve decided to put that game aside until after I finished my work. Seeing as how I’m not a damn twelve-year-old.

So that’s left all the other stuff to creep in and take over my attention. Like how I became convinced that I wanted to add my AudioScrobbler recently-played tracks to my website like all the cool kids do. Even though I don’t listen to iTunes all that much, and nobody who reads this thing is all that interested in my music — that’s not the point. The point is that it could all track this data that nobody’s interested in, automatically. That’s Web 2.0! The future of the internets! And what’s more, I got it working perfectly, writing the code to get the data and parse it out and put it in a nice little list on the sidebar, rationalizing that I was learning about web programming as I went. But for whatever reason, it doesn’t work from my webserver, and AudioScrobbler’s service is only up intermittently. So scratch that.

But hey, check this out! Some guy made a bunch of Flickr Toys to make calendars, mosaics, Magic cards, magazine covers, and such from your Flickr photos. And what impresses me is that Flickr has complete documentation for their API, so you can write your own toys and galleries and stuff using your photo collections. That means I’ve got to write a new gallery for all my travel photos, right?

Maybe later. After I get past the outline stage and writer’s block I’ve been having with work.

For now, there’s another SFist column up. I’m only supposed to do one a week, but again: it lets me get distracted from what I’m supposed to be doing.

And finally: Happy birthday, Mac! Welcome to your 30s. It’s not as horrifying as I make it out to be.

It’s way past my bedtime, but I wanted to get a post in about Shadows of the Colossus before tomorrow, when Civilization IV supposedly comes out and takes up all my attention.

I’m only two battles in, and the reviews are saying that it gets better as you go along. My initial take on it is that it’s a tremendous achievement for videogames, but it’s still not quite as good as ICO. You’ve got to compare the two, not just because the same people were behind both games, but because they’ve got the same sensibility. You’re dropped into an unfamiliar fantasy world, given some unconventional tools and shown how to use them, and then you push a story along to its conclusion.

That sounds like it could describe just about any game, but what’s remarkable about these two is that hundreds of games try to do that, but only a few actually succeed. When I started working in videogames, I was assuming and hoping that as games matured, they’d get better at telling stories. Ten years later, there’s billions of dollars in the business, but still not that level of artistic achievement. There are definitely standouts, but the hit-to-miss ratio is still even worse than comic books, much less movies. Either the story is so heavy that the game is over-simplified or reduced to something mundane and predictable, or the game mechanic is solid but it ends up being irrelevant because you’re a space marine or a dark elf.

ICO and Colossus are both original, they’re both unconventional, they both have beautiful settings and great art and sound design, and they both have a story and game mechanic that work together to further each other. Colossus, though, is just a little too gamey — it feels a little too much like a string of boss battles, instead of a story that I’m involved in.

The boss battles are really cool, though. I’d read descriptions of the fights — you climb up the body of a giant as it’s moving, trying to find its weak point — and had even seen it played at E3, but actually playing it is different. Because the interface is so simplified and what you’re doing is so weird, it doesn’t feel like a series of jumping puzzles like every other game, but that you’re actually climbing up on a big monster to kill it.

But at least so far, that’s all you do. There’s a little bit of horse-riding (which is a neat interface on its own) and using your sword to focus light to tell you where to go next (also neat), but it’s really a series of giant, moving puzzles. I used to describe ICO as “like Myst, if it ran in real-time and you actually cared what was happening.” Colossus is more impressive in a lot of ways, but it loses some of the relevance; even with its interminably long opening cutscene, I don’t really care what’s happening. I’m just waiting to see the next little bit of spectacle.

And I haven’t finished it, so this isn’t a spoiler, but I’ll bet a million bucks that the giants turn out to be good.

Another SFist post is up, which mentions zombies in passing.

That’s because today is a special day: at last, my little obsession over the past few months is over, and I’m caught up with “Alias.” TNT finally ran the zombie episode. I’d been expecting a whole zombie storyline, but they didn’t show up until the season finale. And they weren’t really zombies. But still, it was pretty damn impressive as a TV show season finale. On par with the best season, season 2. I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence, but what they both have in common is Lena Olin as Sydney’s mom. Kinda sucks when you make a show with one great, stand-out character that your staff really knows how to write for and makes for the best storylines, and you can only have her make guest appearances.

I do think it’s kind of funny that throughout the entire series so far, the only times they’ve showed Jack Bristow kissing a woman, it was with someone he was angry at or repulsed by. C’mon, dude — you’re an actor! And it’s Lena Olin and Isabella Rosselini for gosh sakes! Can’t you just take one on the chin for ABC, and put some passion in it?

So all that’s left is the two missing episodes from the beginning of season 4, but I already know what happens in those from flashbacks and such. Then I have to pick a new hobby. I do have these “Lost” episodes on DVD sitting around…

My favorite review of DOOM is from Statler and Waldorf.

The Muppets have a new movie review show online at movies.com, and it’s about the best thing ever. The latest episode talks about DOOM, Elizabethtown, and has a hilarious bit with Animal and Dr. Teeth explaining Shopgirl. I hope they keep doing it; I wonder if they’re going to be allowed to be as brutal about Disney movies as they are with everyone else’s.

At the moment, at least, it’s the only movie-review site you need.

Man, I’m disappointed. Even with the reviews, I was still holding out hope that they got it right with DOOM. But they did everything wrong. It ended up being neither good, nor so bad it’s good; it’s just there. Boring and completely uninspired.

The reviews I’ve read still miss the point; they warn how it’s based on a videogame, and so it’s supposed to be big dumb mindless action. But that could make you think, “Well damn, I’m in the mood for some big dumb mindless action, so I’m going to lower my expectations and check that sumbitch out!” The problem is that it’s got big and dumb, but no action. It’s not a good horror movie, or a good action movie, or a good videogame movie, but it thinks it’s all three.

And remember how I said that from the trailer, it looked like they didn’t make the mistake of treating it like they were making a horror movie? I was wrong. For most of the movie, they either don’t show the monster at all (see, because that’s suspenseful), or they have a showdown with one of the monsters just decimating a space marine. DOOM the game isn’t about suspense; it’s about shooting a ton of monsters and finding keys that lead to more monsters. At the beginning of the movie, they say that there are six scientists involved. Six. I was wondering if maybe the movie’s CPU wasn’t powerful enough to show more monsters.

The Rock let me down, is the worst part. He was going on interviews and such saying how the movie gets it, that DOOM is a balls-out action movie for fans of the game. And the only thing sadder than somebody who just doesn’t get it, is someone who doesn’t get it but thinks that he does. His dialog was bad, but it wasn’t interesting bad, just dumb bad. And he didn’t do anything to knock it over the top. Plus, I suspect his involvement is what turned the finale into a wrestling match instead of a shoot-out.

Oh yeah, that’s right — the DOOM movie, the movie about the world’s best-known first person shooter, ends with a wrestling match. He fires the BFG once, he misses, and then starts camping against the Lord of the Rings guy until he jumps out and it turns into the WWF.

They should’ve ditched the zombies, first. Sounds like sacrilege, but DOOM is sad proof that zombies don’t automatically make everything better. No aliens either; they should’ve kept it a portal to Hell. If they didn’t want to have all the cheesy high school goth kid pentagrams and flaming skulls and such, they could’ve just called it a portal to “some mysterious other dimension.”

They should’ve ditched the space marines. I know it’s hard thinking up new ideas, especially when so many other movies use a team of space marines. But DOOM isn’t about a team; it’s about being one guy against a ton of monsters. Keep Eomer and The Rock, lose the rest. Keep Eomer’s sister as Doctor Exposition if you want, but don’t waste time trying to make her a character. Either give her a gun and a callsign, or leave her alone until it’s time for her to explain something.

They get points for including the first-person sequence at all, but there was a lot wrong with that. It was their big showpiece and you could tell, but after the build-up, it was a huge disappointment. I’m not even that good at shooters, and I’ve had sequences in DOOM the game that were much more exciting than DOOM the movie. What’s in the movie is more like a cheesy carnival haunted house, done up in CGI.

The heartbreaking thing is they were so close to getting it right with that. They had a guy in a control center who was watching all the video feeds from the different marines. They should’ve had the movie frequently switch to POV from the marines, showing their decreasing health and ammo counts on-screen. Not only would it have been true to the game, it would’ve been a better horror-suspense movie. None of the marines in DOOM the movie were killed in interesting ways, but if they’d just switched to their POV and showed them walking down a dark creepy hallway with dwindling health, that would’ve added something original to the whole mix.

Maybe they’ll learn how to get it right by the time of Daikatana: The Motion Picture.