I honestly can’t tell if “Heroes” has gotten significantly better since I first saw it (and mercilessly ragged on it), or if I’m just starting to come down off my high horse and admit that my tastes aren’t as highbrow as I like to think.

I’ve still got problems with it. Biggest is that the whole thing reeks of Major Network Television. There are the stupid catch-phrases, and the big event gimmicks (”One of the heroes will DIE!”), and the soap-opera casting. Is it just me, or does anybody else think the actress playing the congressman’s wife just looks weird and unnatural?

Plus, it still feels like a bunch of people who are late to the whole comic book party. “We’ve got a superhero who can borrow other superheroes’ powers. Does that not just blow your mind?!?” Well, no, because we’ve seen Rogue do it in X-Men comics for decades, plus there were these movies that came out a while back you might have heard of. The creator of the show has been quick to point that out in interviews — he’s said he’ll come up with ideas and then hear from a friend that there’s already a well-established character that does the same thing. Still, it’s fun to make fun of him for it.

Especially when they try to build drama around it. Their big climax for the first half season was what goes down at Homecoming, and it was all relatively cool. But is there anybody in the audience who didn’t know what was going to happen as soon as the episode started? The character who borrows other heroes’ powers is going to sacrifice everything to save the girl who can survive falls from great height. But oh no! We see a horrible painting of the future showing him fall from a great height!

Fifteen minutes into the episode, my mother, who’s not exactly steeped in comic book lore, said, “After he absorbs the cheerleader’s healing ability, is he going to get the bad guy’s power too?” And she wasn’t having a heroin-induced vision of the future, as far as I could tell.

Still, the show’s engaging, it always delivers some kind of pay-off (I’m not mad at you, “Lost,” just very, very disappointed), and I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but it seems like the dialogue has gotten less corny and the acting has been bumped up a notch to B-list.

And as cocky as I am, there’s stuff that I’ve been too dense to comprehend. One of my big problems with the show was figuring out what they were going to do with the Niki character. Multiple personality disorder isn’t a super power. It was only while I was reading a message board, trying to find out which hero is going to DIE next week?!? that some fan pointed out what I never picked up on: she’s the Hulk.

I don’t know if that counts as “subtle,” considering that there’s already a She-Hulk. And I’ve heard that a version of the real Hulk’s backstory says that he was created not from gamma radiation but MPD as a result of child abuse. Short of having her screaming “Hulk SMASH!” instead of using long-range rifles, I don’t know how they could’ve made it any clearer.

No doubt this story about a woman fined for hanging a peace-sign wreath is going to be making the rounds a lot, but really, it’s just astounding.

I’m not sure what’s most alarming about it:

• That the neighbors didn’t recognize it as a peace sign. But then, I have to remember that not everybody lives as close to Berkeley as I do, and they don’t see them as frequently. Maybe we should just be glad they didn’t think it was the Mercedes logo.
• That some neighbors used “we have children serving in Iraq” as grounds for their complaint. No, you dipshits, just no. “But my children are serving in Iraq” is supposed to be your knee-jerk response to people protesting the war in Iraq to try and guilt them into shutting up. It’s not for when somebody wishes for an end to war so that your children can come home and pass your damaged moron genes onto their kids.
• That the homeowners association president is such a tool. The AP version of the story starts with the guy, Bob Kearns, taking the school principal approach, describing it as if he’d been stuck in a bad situation and was just being fair to all the residents. But towards the end of the story, you see the truth:
  

  Kearns ordered the committee to require Jensen to remove the wreath, but members refused after concluding that it was merely a seasonal symbol that didn’t say anything. Kearns fired all five committee members.

  In other words: Kearns is not just your typical idiot who thinks himself a Patriot, but a coward who will enforce his opinion and then hide behind the rules.

• That there are still homeowners associations. Yeah, I rent. The whole concept is bizarre to me.

At the risk of getting too earnest here: what the hell, people?

For a couple of years, I’ve been trying to keep up the role of “left-leaning moderate” I’ve assigned myself. Even though I’ll make comments about how the invasion of Iraq was completely unjustified, how Bush is an idiot and Cheney is the harbinger of Hell’s dominion over Earth, and how Fox News and other gross Republican propaganda is twisting and corrupting America into a nation of evil, my heart hasn’t been completely in it. There’s always the voice in the back of my head that’s saying, “Remain objective. Be skeptical of everything. Make sure that you’re not just spouting out mindless left-wing propaganda. There are still intelligent, well-meaning, but misguided people who don’t share your opinions.”

Crap like this just shows that The Dark Side is winning. Until now, every time I’ve seen one of those “Support Our Troops” stickers on the back of a car (okay, an enormous SUV) (and I’ve been to malls in the Atlanta area, so I’ve seen thousands of them), I’ve assumed that the driver of the vehicle and I had roughly the same sentiment, but were looking at it from slightly different sides of the political spectrum. They were saying “Soldiers are risking their lives out of a sense of duty to their country, and we should support them until they get the job done.” I was saying, “Although the war is unjustified, the soldiers’ sense of duty is completely justified, and we should support them and do all we can to bring them home safely.”

Now, I’m saying the same thing, but they’re saying, “Love it or leave it, you Godless pinko San Francisco faggot-hippie.” And the map of the US in my head no longer looks like the simple red state/blue state job we’ve had rammed into our collective subconscious, complete with the well-intentioned-but-simple-minded midwesterners that people like to believe still exist. Instead, it looks like those old propaganda films that show the Red Menace spreading out from Russia and enveloping Europe and Asia. Now it’s a black cloud emanating from Washington and wherever Fox News broadcasts from, twisting people’s minds so completely that they believe peace on earth is something to be frowned upon.

The residents who supposedly complained because their children are serving in Iraq — what the hell are their children serving for, anyway? Is it not so that they can return to the US and watch idiotic television and get fat off too much food and play overly-violent videogames and enjoy all the mind-numbing excess that should come from peace? Or so the people of Iraq can go about their lives in peace without being afraid they’ll be murdered and thrown into a mass grave by their own countrymen? Or so that the Left and the Right can go back to arguing about economic policy and civil rights and marriages and abortions instead of arguing about whether it’s a good thing to go to a politically unstable area and kill people and set off civil wars?

I can understand how the Bush Administration benefits from having an ongoing war with no end in sight; it’s a relatively cheap way to whip up your supporters into patriotic frenzy and keep them too afraid to vote you out of office. But how does your average American benefit from wanting an end to peace?

That’s Pearl Forrester’s turkey recipe from Mystery Science Theater 3000. A post on Rain’s blog reminded me how I used to gather round the VCR on Thanksgiving day, watching or recording as much of the MST3K marathon as I could manage. I had moved on from that profound sense of loss, so thanks to Rain for bringing it back up again.

Even though we can’t watch new episodes anymore, we can try RiffTrax, Mike Nelson’s attempt to exploit his past success re-awaken the magic of MST for us all.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like a good enough idea… AT FIRST. The bad: it’s only one or two guys instead of the whole cast (Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy make guest appearances), no host segments, and you have to sync up everything by hand. The good: the gang gets to cover modern movies, and Mike at long last gets to do Roadhouse.

Makes a great gift for the person in your life who doesn’t have real-life funny friends to watch movies with.

First off, unrelated to everything else but I want to mention it: everybody check out the Child’s Play Charity. They’ve done a good job with it, they’ve added a bunch of recipients for this round, and it couldn’t be easier to donate. (Since it’s through Amazon, it’s actually kind of fun to donate, because you see what you’re getting and it feels like you’re shopping). Anybody who’s reading this and is the type of person who would be getting me a Christmas gift, make a donation to the Oakland Children’s Hospital instead. And everybody else, consider making a donation anyway.

Now: It’s a good thing I’m not superstitious, or the last 24 hours would be creeping me out. Last night, I had a dream that scared the hell out of me. It’s pretty embarrassing, because I know exactly what caused it — falling asleep right after watching “Heroes.” I’m hooked on the series, I’ll admit, but it’s still just not a good enough show to be working its way into my subconscious.

The dream started with me outside my apartment. I get picked up by a taxi. The driver takes off with tires squealing and he’s cracking jokes, so I’m thinking it was going to be a wacky adventure dream. Then I notice that all the lights on the street are out. The cab stops and picks up the political brother guy, who sits in the front and starts cracking jokes with the driver. I point out that the car’s headlights are off, but they ignore me and the car takes off again.

We’re headed up a hill, where there’s a road construction sign and a ramp for cars to jump over the construction if they’re in a hurry. I start yelling at the driver to turn on his lights, and he says they don’t work, none of the lights in the city work. I say that it must be because of an electro-magnetic pulse, but then why is the car still working? Right then the car’s engine goes dead at the top of the hill, and we sit there for a second. I’m about to turn around to look behind me, but suddenly there’s an orange light bright as daylight covering everything. I realize that somebody’s dropped a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the hill behind City Hall. Everything is still silent as we wait for the blast to hit us. Then I hear a sound like an oncoming train, I feel the fillings melting out of my back teeth, and I sit straight up in bed, wide awake, all TV-movie style.

I had jumped out of bed, gotten fully dressed, put on my shoes, and was standing in the living room before I was even fully awake. It’s your typical nuclear apocalypse unease dream, common to anybody around my age who grew up during the Reagan Administration and the airing of The Day After. I wouldn’t even have thought much of it, if it hadn’t been for the bird this afternoon.

A bird got in the house and started flying around the living room. We eventually chased it out a window, but still it was just creepy. It would have been a lot creepier if the bird hadn’t shit on me in mid-flight; that just made it annoying. I don’t know what the folklore is around having a bird fly in the house and take a dump on you, other than “you will be in the bathroom cussing and re-washing your hair within the hour.”

The past couple of weeks have been crazy ridiculous busy, but it feels like being finally over the hump and able to see the horizon. Or something metaphorical like that.

Of course, it took more than a few nights with four or five hours of sleep, and being locked in my apartment the whole time so I could go three or four days in a stretch without speaking to another human, but that builds character. Or something metaphorical like that.

This website fell victim to my lack-of-sleep-and-desperation-fueled dementia, as I inadvertently wiped out a lot of stuff last night. My backups are back on the Left Coast, so this’ll have to do for a week.

Now I’m going to kick back and enjoy Thanksgiving week in the land of gravy. God Bless America, and don’t cook your stuffing inside the bird!

Everybody knows that when you’re faced with an overwhelming amount of work, not because of outside pressure as much as because you’ve been slow to get things done, the best course of action is to procrastinate some more. The past couple of nights I’ve been hard-core with the procrastination; I did something I can’t remember doing in a long time: I just sat in front of the TV and flipped through the channels, watching whatever was on.

When you start channel-surfing after years of having a reliance on the TiVo, it really makes you stop and think. I just couldn’t shake the thought of how much research and effort and science and technology went into my TV setup.

Go back hundreds if not thousands of years, to when man first discovered sequential images. Then the discovery of persistence of vision, and the foresight to put those images together to create animation. Elsewhere, the principles of color theory that lead to the pointillist movement in art, and the ingenious discovery that the human brain can make up a complete image from discrete points of color.

Then there’s all of the genius that went into the discovery and use of radio waves and the idea of broadcasted transmissions. Research into sound and acoustics, so that a signal can be recorded, transmitted, and reproduced on a remote speaker. The study of phosphors, which can generate light when hit with electricity. The idea of representing information digitally, so that a single coherent image can be broken up into discrete pixels and then reproduced on a display device. The evolution of the cathode ray tube, which generates a complete two-dimensional image several times a second using a single beam of electricity that moves faster than we can easily conceive. Then the development of plasma and liquid crystal displays, which create images and animation on a flat surface. Not to mention all the technology that went into the construction of flat, high-resolution screens and tiny speakers and circuit boards.

On top of all that, there’s the study of propulsion and rocket science. And the evolution of that from the obvious applications like space exploration and blowing up people, to the ingenious idea of launching a piece of machinery into geosynchronous orbit with the earth so that you can transmit these digital images to far distant points on the planet almost instantaneously.

And all those centuries of research and toil and brilliant discoveries from the most genius minds of the human race all work together to bring us “Deal or No Deal.”

While we’re all contemplating the significance of that, I have to go use a bunch of miniaturized transistors that perform millions of calculations in a second, and ultra-thin liquid crystal displays and tiny radio transmitters that communicate with an extensive cellular radio network to provide instantaneous communication with points halfway across the world, so I can vote for Mario Lopez to win “Dancing with the Stars.” Slater’s got the moves, yo.

One thing I forgot to mention: Flushed Away is a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it to anybody who likes Wallace & Gromit.

It’s pretty dire for the first ten minutes or so; the whole thing has the taint of DreamWorks about it, and you’re likely to believe that the whole thing’s been Shrek-ified. But about the first time you see a slug, the Aardman effect kicks in, and it’s all great from there on. All the voices are great (especially Bill Nighy as the albino rat and Jean Reno as Le Frog), the story’s even more solid than a “kids movie” needs to be, the character animation is perfect, and they even put plasticine textures on the model to distract you from the fact you’re watching CGI.

The Wallace & Gromit movies are more about being clever and inventive; this is all about being funny. And it’s surprising how well it works; jokes as corny as these (again, see “Jean Reno as Le Frog”) really shouldn’t work as well as they do. But it’s all in the timing and their willingness to go at it full-barrel. If you’re going to do a getting-racked-in-the-nuts joke, go all the way with it. And then do it again.

I can’t think of a thing I didn’t like about this movie, and I hope it’s a hit.

I’m really not good at videogames. This seems hard for people to process, sometimes — considering how long I’ve worked in games and how much I go on about them, I guess it’s easy to assume that I’ve got some acceptable level of skill at actually playing them.

More than a few times, people have asked to play a videogame with me. For my part, I always point out that I’m not good at them. I guess they assume that I’m being modest, or underestimating how bad I am, or even trying to hustle them. Even after we’ve started playing, their expression changes not to one of understanding, but of disbelief. I can understand not being great at games, but how can anyone be this inept? For that matter, how can he walk without constantly running into walls, or operate fine motor control such as required by writing without stabbing himself in the eye?

Which is another point towards saying that Gears of War is a pretty cool game. I’m astoundingly awful at it, and I still manage to like it.

The fact that I die every two minutes and have to restart is just one of the many reasons I should hate it. It seems like they took a list of things I hate about games and tried to fulfill every entry.

• It’s by Epic.
• In particular, by Cliff “Hey look at me I’m a videogame rock star and what? Videogame rock stars aren’t cool anymore? Guys? Guys, come back!” Bleszinski.
• It’s been hyped to all hell, for what seems like a year now.
• Including commercials that for no discernible reason use a cover of the song “Mad World.”
• It’s a shooter.
• In particular, a console shooter, requiring you to aim with a joystick.
• You play as a tough-as-nails thick-necked military veteran who’s been wrongfully imprisoned.
• You’re joined by a squad of other thick-necked army guys, some of whom don’t appreciate your lone wolf attitude.
• The back story and world-building for the entire game, as near as I can make out, is simply that there’s a war against a bunch of ugly aliens.
• The world has gear-themed art throughout, which doesn’t make sense, and they didn’t even attempt to provide context for it like Valve did with the lambda symbol in Half-Life.
• The name doesn’t make sense (at least yet), as a game called Gears of War that doesn’t involve battle mechs is just wrong.
• It’s by Epic. I really hate them.

But still, it’s just a solid game. If you’re following the “are videogames art?” debate, this is a point in favor of the “good gameplay is an art in itself, and games don’t need to be judged by the same criteria as movies” camp.

The whole game is based on the idea of finding cover during firefights, and everything works towards that. Pretty much all of your movement controls are designed to make your stupid character duck-and-run, press against walls or under bunkers, and jump or tumble to the next barrier. When executed well, it works perfectly. When executed like I play, it ends up with a lot of tripping over couches, running directly into the line of fire, or crouching right next to an enemy soldier and getting a chainsaw to the head.

It looks great, too. All the reviews talk about the visuals as being “stunning” and “better than a videogame has a right to look,” and you’d take it as hyperbole until you actually see it in action. They did a really outstanding job, and even better, it’s all in service of the game, instead of grandstanding visuals for their own sake. The character design is pretty stupid — impossibly thick barrel-shaped guys with soul patches and do-rags and earrings just like a bunch of suburban videogame makers imagining what “cool tough guys” would look like — but it’s consistent throughout and works well for what they’re trying to do.

It’s taken my attention away from Final Fantasy XII for the moment, which is impressive considering that that’s not only a more epic game, but it’s more my type of game in just about every way. And since I’m so bad at these things, it takes me at least twice as long as it would take a competent person to finish one. That’s gameplay value.