Well, here I am in beautiful San Diego in about the most unbeautiful place you can imagine, the San Diego Comic Con. At one time I thought that it’d be impossible to cram as many people into one place as they do at Tokyo Disneyland. I know better now.

It’s neat to be walking around and seeing random celebrities I’m interested in — I saw Craig McCracken and the other guy from Shaun of the Dead who’s not Simon Pegg (turns out his name is Nick Frost) and I’m sure a few others that I’m forgetting. Still, it’s just way too crowded to be enjoyable. I think the Wonder Con, as dismal as it tends to be, is more my scale.

One thing I’ve realized is that these things put out some kind of coolness suppression aura. I’m a nerdy guy, and I’ll be the first to admit. But I’m a high-functioning nerd; I generally do an acceptable job of appearing somewhat normal. As soon as I get at one of these conventions, though, I turn into Lisa Lubner from the original Saturday Night Live. I’ll be talking to someone, and my brain is screaming “look them in the eye, look them in the eye,” but I just physically can’t. I trip over things, I forget what I’m saying halfway into a sentence, I just basically lose all non-dork functionality.

So far, Comic Con is pretty much exactly how it’s always been described to me. Huge, and hot, and manic, and impossibly crowded and geeky. And it’s something that’s good to see once, but you really don’t need to make a return visit. As soon as we entered the exhibit floor, I thought, “It’s like a quieter E3.” I wish I’d learned my lesson from E3 earlier; I would’ve been happier if I’d stopped after one.

And if you happen to be at the Con, stop by the Telltale Games booth and say howdy.

On Monday (or was it last week?) I saw a friend I haven’t seen in a long time, and he asked how I was liking the new job. I’m so used to answering that question by launching into a string of complaints or highly-qualified compliments, that it surprised me I couldn’t come up with much more than “I like it a lot.” It really struck me how nice it feels to be working for a company that’s so completely not evil.

Now, I should point out that I don’t really think any of the companies I’ve worked for are actually evil. The closest was really more just arrogant. And the other two were more “chaotic good,” as I understand the term: there were plenty of good intentions, but the company had gotten so monstrously huge that it tended to steamroll things in its path on its quest to make wholesome family entertainment.

I’d forgotten how much I like working for a smaller company in general. When you add the hands-down best community-building and support people in the business (possibly in any business), and combine that with a mission statement that the company has actually succeeded in pulling off, that makes it that much more impressive. It helps that everybody just seems more concerned with making cool games than anything else — doubly remarkable when you consider how long most of the staff has been working in videogames, and should by all rights be hopelessly jaded.

(I should also point out that my love of the company doesn’t extend to myself. My fluid and ephemeral understanding of the concept of “schedules” tends to be a detriment in a place that makes episodic content.)

I was reminded of it again today after reading reactions to this story making the rounds in videogame-related blogs: the developers of Condemned 2 are reportedly “working closely with the ESRB” to avoid a repeat of the “defacto banning OMG!!!!” of the genital-mutilation game Manhunt 2. Bloggers and posters on message boards are, predictably, railing against the ratings board and fretting about the implications towards free speech. Just as it was with Manhunt 2, you hear a lot about the “chilling effect” of the “Adults Only” rating, which most major retailers refuse to sell, and the console manufacturers refuse to license.

What you hardly ever hear about, though, is the developers’ responsibility. You never hear that this story is actually a very good thing, because it means a developer is willfully complying with the industry’s own ratings board, exactly as the system was intended to work. With all the cries of censorship, you never hear anyone ask if videogame developers really need to show a guy’s head getting crushed by a vice in order to realize their true artistic vision. It’s just automatically assumed that they should be able to, never questioned whether they ought to.

Which is good for me because it lets me affect a sense of smug superiority, my favorite thing to do. I can point out that my company makes unrated games and sells them online. So in theory, we could show gory decapitations and a guy’s head getting crushed by a vice. Just like any other developer could — as long as they were willing to use an alternate distribution model and forego the millions and millions of dollars you make selling big-ticket multi-platform games. We just choose not to.

And instead, have cartoony decapitations and make jokes about crushing a guy’s head in a vice.

The easiest way to tell that The Sopranos is a great show is that so far, the second season has been really good, and I’m disappointed by it. Everything that’s bugging me about it is a barely-perceptible nitpick, and each point is noticeable only because the first season set the bar so high.

Like the character of Tony’s sister Janice. She stands out as a stereotype in a series full of stereotypes — they start out laying the West Coast hippie drop-out schtick on really thick, and so far anyway, they haven’t really let up. It really shows what a remarkable thing they’ve done with the rest of the characters: they’re all stereotypes who can be easily summed up in a brief character description, but they seem real. Like real people who just tend to revert back into their predictable roles, either because it’s easier, or because they just don’t know any better.

It’s kind of the same thing with the character of Christopher, who’s transforming from a screw-up into just a frustrating screw-up. It could just be because the actor seems too smart to be doing the things his character does (his allegiance to Toshiba and HD-DVD notwithstanding). They cast a lot of young street thugs on the show, and they work because they do stupid things and they just look stupid. But Christopher just seems like he’s doing idiotic stuff because the script’s telling him to. And for all I know, that’s exactly where they’re going with the character; maybe I’m supposed to be frustrated.

And my last nitpick at the moment is a particularly unfair one, because it’s about a great scene. (Big spoilers for seasons 1 & 2 coming…) There’s a scene where Dr. Melfi has a guilt-induced nightmare about Tony Soprano having a blackout and wrecking his car. It’s perfectly paced and edited into the episode, it’s perfectly shot, and the choice of music (from The Wizard of Oz) is perfect. It’s really a creepy scene. But I knew within seconds that it was a dream, and that it was Dr. Melfi’s dream.

And that’s only a “problem” because the next-to-last episode of season 1 had the most brilliant fake-out I’ve ever seen on a TV show. It’s basically an hour-long con that I fell for completely. Every time I was supposed to believe I was one step ahead of the writers, I did; they played me like a cheap fiddle. By the final reveal, I couldn’t say anything other than “holy shit I can’t believe they just did that.”

But of course, that only works once, and every dream sequence afterwards is suspect. I’m still intrigued with the show, and I’m definitely still watching — I’ve been blown away so far, and the big surprising moments that have already been spoiled for me, haven’t even happened yet. Still, I can’t help feeling like I hit a peak, and I’m coasting downhill from here on out. More updates as the situation and my Netflix queue progresses.

And speaking of being spoiled for The Sopranos, David Chase gets +100 coolness points for this quote about the series finale at a recent awards show:

I really wasn’t going to go into it, but I’ll just say this…when I was going to Stanford University’s graduate film school and was 23 [years old], I went to see Planet of the Apes with my wife. When it was over, I said, ‘Wow … so they had a Statue of Liberty, too.’

Reading stuff like that in the context of the Sopranos is almost unnerving; you get the impression of someone who’s in total control of his art, who’s making exactly what he wants to make, with no guesswork.

And one last shallow observation: watching the series has made me see a common thread among the shows I like. At least for dramas, a show only gets me hooked if there’s some element of the supernatural, or at least the “unreal.” Battlestar Galactica has been (rightly) praised for its realism, but it never really grabbed me until they started with all of the prophecies and Lords of Kobol. Lost had me from the start, then lost me the further they got away from smoke monsters and Walt’s powers. Alias always had Rambaldi, The X-Files was The X-Files and Buffy was always Buffy. I probably would’ve started with The Sopranos sooner if I’d known it wasn’t just a New Jersey mobster seeing a psychiatrist, but was filled with dreams and omens and delusions and a bunch of consummate storytellers who have absolutely no qualms about messing with their audience’s head.

must be really important to a lot of people, if the parking lot of the Borders in Marin County is any indication! I had figured that since I was working late anyway, I could drop by at midnight tonight and gawk at all the kids.

When I drove by at around 11:30, the parking lot was full, with cars double-parked all up and down the entrances and the aisles of the overflow lot. And there was a line of cars waiting to turn in, coming from both directions. Crazy! You’d never think there’d be all that fuss over something as silly as a book; you’d think it was something important like a new cell phone.

I just hope that they don’t run out of copies before I can get one tomorrow lol!! But seriously, I’m kind of disappointed to miss out on the last big-event release that’s going to actually incorporate excited children instead of the excited man-children of gadgets and videogame consoles. Disappointed sitting here in the comfort of home, anyway — my hesitation and disappointment were completely non-existent when I was driving past the store; I hit the pedal so fast you’d think I was making a run for the snitch.

Hey, speaking of Harry Potter and working late: ever since my familiar has become a latchkey cat, he’s gotten to be a real fat-ass. I never thought they really meant it when they said pets take after their owners, but he’s got enough of a gut to make me suspect that he’s been dipping into my Coke stash. I’m sure it’s more likely that he just spends the whole day with nobody to play with, so he just lounges around watching the window onto the street, or “Cat TV.” And since I haven’t been around, I’ve been guilt-feeding him. Since it’s looking more likely that I won’t make my resolution to lose weight this year, maybe I can put the cat on a diet instead.

And yeah, I’m aware that it’s weird an inappropriate for a 36-year-old man to be blogging about Harry Potter and his cat. I can’t be sitting around having fun when I’m still 2 chapters away from finishing my steamy Hermione/Steve Jobs fan fiction!

My Transformers experience wasn’t a total wash, though, because before the movie they ran the trailer for a new “Untitled J.J. Abrams Project”. According to the IMDB, it’s got a writing credit by Drew Goddard, who was heavily involved in “Lost”, “Alias”, and “Angel”.

There are rumors and speculation up on ain’t it cool news, which I’m avoiding partly to go into it as unspoiled as possible, and mostly because I don’t like to linger on that website.

The trailer’s up on Apple’s trailer site. It’s not nearly as cool seeing it on a computer as it is in a theater, but it’s still pretty intriguing. Based on the people involved and the potential of that trailer, I’m tempted to start standing in line now.

Qatar is in the Middle East! I learned that from the Transformers movie. Each of the dozen or so times the movie cut over to the action in Qatar (Middle East), there would be a shot of the desert and some army guys and a building with mosaic-lined archways and guys in turbans, and there’d be a subtitle that said “QATAR - THE MIDDLE EAST”. So you can’t say the movie doesn’t teach you anything.

The most valuable thing to be learned from Transformers, though, is exactly how not to make a movie about the Transformers. It’s really just awful. Don’t think that the caption thing is my biggest complaint about the movie — far, far from it. I only bring it up to demonstrate how the movie manages to use every single possible channel of communication available to cinema in its two-and-a-half-hour-long assault on the audience’s intelligence.

I’ve seen several positive reviews of the movie that include disclaimers as defense against the cultural elite who are supposedly going to be stumbling into Transformers and ending up baffled and outraged: you read a lot of reminders that it’s a big, loud action movie; and you see it’s supposed to be campy; and you’re bound to be disappointed if you try to judge it as high art instead of summer blockbuster spectacle.

Yeah, thanks, guys, but I think we get it. It’s 2007; we’re already over a decade and a half through the ironic generation. I think we all knew what to expect when we paid ten bucks to see a Michael Bay movie based on an 80s cartoon based on a toy about cars that turn into giant robots. Hasbro gets second billing, for crying out loud. The problem isn’t just that it fails to deliver as a real movie, it fails deliver as a campy marketing-driven giant robot action movie.

Action? I’ve read reviews that say the filmmakers knew what the crowd wanted, so they made sure to let you see the Transformers from the first scene of the movie. But that’s not true. It starts with the biggest of cliches, the character-building army guys discussing “what are you gonna do back home” sequence, which would be annoying enough even if the characters involved had anything to do with the rest of the movie. By the time you’re ready to see all of them dead, our first Decepticon lands and starts demolishing the base.

At least I think that’s what happened. The Transformers of the title are all so badly designed it’s impossible to tell them apart when they’re not in their General Motors® form, and it’s near impossible to tell what they’re doing. And in the movie, everything’s filmed with shaky cams and covered in smoke and explosions and lasers to make you feel like you’re really there. So the end result is a bunch of gray metal forms moving around incomprehensibly while people run around screaming, punctuating with the occasional cool shockwave effect and a car flying over something. Repeat that formula about a dozen times, and you’ve got all the action sequences.

Story? The “plot” is something about a giant cube that landed on Earth and the Decepticons are going to get it and the Autobots want to destroy it and the key is in Shia LeBeouf’s great-grandfather’s glasses. And you know really, whatever. A movie about cars that turn into robots doesn’t have to be better than that. But by about two hours in, when they started introducing another group of characters (this one led by John Turturro, which just made me very sad), I’d thought of at least a dozen better ways to tell the same story.

None of them involved dicking around for an hour and a half, and then suddenly bringing every character in the movie together in the same place to reveal that the main villain and the super-powerful object the villain wants to get have been sitting right next to each other for the past 80 years. Seriously, guys, that’s just lazy.

Comedy? You’ll hear that the movie is just smart enough to know that it’s campy, and inserts humor to make fun of itself. Don’t believe it! The height of the comedy is Turturro in comically ludicrous underwear getting peed on by one of the Autobots, while another makes a joke about lube. The same joke that they’d already made not five minutes earlier, when a chihuahua in a comically oversized foot cast pees on one of the Autobots during the sequence where they’re all hiding out around the main character’s house while his parents make belabored jokes about masturbation.

If I’m an expert on anything, it’s on the subject of overly-labored and stale jokes. And I could write a thesis on Transformers. There’s no joke so stale (e.g. President Bush stand-in asking for ding dongs) that the movie won’t make it at least twice. In a movie called Transformers that has only about eight or nine transformers, there are two, repeat two wisecrackin’ black grandmas.

Some of the “humor” was so unrecognizable as such, that the music guy was confused. Apparently Bay or somebody involved in the movie had just seen The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, and decided he wanted to try that new semi-improv comedy thing that was all the rage. There’s a bit with an overzealous cop accusing Shia LeBeouf’s character of being on drugs that I’m guessing was supposed to be hilarious, but had string-filled orchestral tension music playing throughout.

Performances? You’ll hear a lot about Shia LeBeouf, and sure, he’s just fine in the movie. Most of the cast is, actually. And you’ve got to give them credit; everybody seems to get that it’s a comedy, so you don’t have some people trying to play it straight while everything around them is goofy. But none of them have anything to work with.

Sound Design? The sound design rocked. Seriously. In fact, it was the only single thing in the movie that I thought was well done. The sound of the transformations, the alien broadcast signals, the sound of Starscream turning into a jet and taking off, all excellent.

Except I just remembered: as part of the astoundingly cheesy product placement throughout the movie, one dude’s Xbox 360 comes to life and grows arms it uses to attack him with. And it makes the Xbox 360 startup sound when it comes to life. Which makes me sad. Because it showed that somebody involved was detail-oriented enough to put that in, but was too oblivious to realize that he was working on a movie that was completely without soul or conscience and ultimately stands as an example of everything that’s wrong in 2007 American society. So there’s that.

Oh yeah I forgot! I failed to mention one of the things that bugged me the most. One of the Decepticons disguises himself as a police car. I’d read in other reviews that they replaced the “To Serve and Protect” motto on the car with “To Punish and Enslave.” And when I read that, I thought, that’s approaching a clever little joke there, maybe the movie’s not all that bad. But in the actual movie, there’s a big close-up of the back of the car during an action sequence, to make sure you see the joke. And then there’s a slow-motion drive by with the camera on the back-bumper to make absolutely sure you get it. And then, I’m not kidding, they added a CG effect where the words light up.

I’m assuming that Bay wanted to put a big flashing arrow pointing to the joke, but he’d already used up the budget getting a robot to pee on John Turturro.

Needmore!
I’d forgotten the degree to which having an office job cuts into your free time. Spend eight or nine hours in an office doing nothing but writing what passes for “humor,” and the last thing you want to do when you get home is write stuff on a weblog.

And somehow, I’m getting even less accomplished than when I was working from home with more distractions. I’m sure I just need to get back in the routine of going to work, but it’s been a month already and it still feels all weird.

Social Circle!
Whatever the WordPress people did to their blog editor, they messed it up something fierce. It makes it a real pain to write anything on here and give the good people the crucial updates on my rock and roll life. If this keeps up, I’ll have to actually talk to people in person. And that means they can talk back and interrupt me to contradict me or to talk about themselves, all things I don’t have to bother with on a blog.

Plus, all the blog editing programs I can find either suck or are currently broken. I’ve started writing one for OS X, but that goes back to the no free time problem.

Rome!
I was so surprised by how “The Sopranos” lived up to the hype around it, that I decided to check out some other HBO series. I’d seen “Deadwood” in hotels before, and it just doesn’t do anything for me at all. Last night I decided to try out “Rome,” because as with anything about ancient Rome, it has obvious appeal: fight scenes and nudity.

The show has enough of those, but really not much else. It’s got super-high production values, obviously, but the writing and plotting are just kind of predictable. Not necessarily bad, just kind of “there.” I made it through the first two episodes and I’m not really compelled to keep watching it. Maybe it gets better?

Cumming!
snicker

Decatur!
Rain clued me into the fact that Roy Blount, Jr.’s new book, Long Time Leaving, is out now. (Blount grew up in Decatur, just like I did for several years!)

I don’t believe I’ve managed to convince anyone to be a fan of Blount’s, and if you’re not already, this book isn’t going to win you over. But I like it so far. I’m still impressed at his ability to make prose feel like poetry — he rambles and meanders around a topic for a few pages, throwing out seemingly unrelated bits of information, and it’s not until the end of it that the whole picture comes together, like a sudden jolt. Still, this one feels even more like a collection of disparate essays and magazine columns than his previous collections.

Bethlehem!
A new collection of the comic book Fables is out, this one containing the Christmas special. It’s not my favorite of the collections, but if you’ve been reading Fables, it’s a must-have. And if you haven’t been reading it, then there’s something wrong with you.

Cox!
The Bush Administration is having more fun with checks and balances this week. I can’t read much before my eyes glaze over with liberal rage, but from the picture and the headline it looks like something about GW ordering Senator Palpatine not to testify before the increasingly powerless Galactic Senate Congress. Dumb old Constitution!

Doraville!
This TV Funhouse ran quite a while ago (the Robert Blake references are your first clue), but it still cracks me up every time. It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen on SNL in the past couple of years. Don’t question it!

Zebulon!
I just like saying “Zebulon!” I hope when the aliens come, one of them is named Zebulon. And they land in Roswell.

I hope everybody had a great fourth of July! I did. It’s a great opportunity to blow stuff up in celebration of what is ostensibly a democracy!

“Ostensibly,” of course, because our president has apparently given up even trying to make it seem like there’s a functional system of checks and balances still in place. In case it’s not obvious, I’m talking about Bush’s using his get-out-of-jail-free card on Scooter Libby on Monday, commuting Libby’s sentence for perjury for his involvement in the Valerie Plame case.

I didn’t particularly feel like complaining about it on here at the time, since it just seemed superfluous and futile. The liberal outrage was pretty well covered on the internets, described by people much more eloquent and knowledgeable than I am. Plus, every time I think that there’s absolutely nothing that Bush could do that’s a more blatant “fuck you” to the American people, he surprises me by topping himself. So I was afraid to jinx it.

There’s been a tremendous furor over Bush’s move, from Congress, the press, and the people, so naturally the White House responded today in the best way it knows how: by pointing fingers at the Clintons. Bill Clinton summed up what a lot of people — excuse me, of course, I mean a lot of liberals — are saying: this is standard practice for the Bush administration, acting as if they answer to no one.

White House spokesman Tony Snow’s response? “You started it!”

That’s right. Instead of actually responding to the allegations or providing any logical and coherent attempt at making the decision sound valid, they brought up Whitewater. That’s not just bad politics, that’s bad humanity. It’s what cranks on message boards and comment threads do, whenever the Bush administration is asked to justify its actions — they go straight to mentioning cigars and BJs. If Mr. Snow gets asked about the issue again, I’d recommend the ever-useful “Nuh-uh!”, “Says you!”, and the indefeasible “I don’t make trash, I burn it!”

Again, this is entirely expected of the administration at this point. This is, after all, the president who defended his decision earlier by saying: “The consequences of [Libby's] felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting.” Which has got to be ample consolation for Plame, seeing as how her former life in the CIA suffered the consequences of a ridiculously brazen case of petty political payback. Maybe she can save Libby a place in the unemployment line.

But look, there’s only about a year and a half left in this administration. Could you guys please, for our sake, at least do us the courtesy of pretending that there’s a working government and effective political system in place? And could the congressional majority take some time away from their busy schedule of bending over, and make a show of restoring the balance of government, like they’d promised? And could I impose on Mr. Snow to put a little effort into political rhetoric that at least touches on the issue of hand, before he resorts to “yo mama” jokes?