We’re now two and a half months into the End Times, and of course here I am, still writing “Living in a Righteous and Just Society” on my checks. As I’m sure you’re all aware, what’s brought about Imminent Rapture is the California Supreme Court ruling that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.

Of course, San Francisco made a big hoo-ha about it, trotting out their first married “couple” in an act of political showboating and promoting the gay agenda — nothing epitomizes the promiscuous homosexual lifestyle like two women in their late 80s.

But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of a ballot initiative that will allow California residents to vote on the legality of these so-called “marriages.” And I say November can’t come soon enough. It’s not that I’ve got anything personal against these “couples;” I just think that the Supreme Court overstepped their bounds. If we have judges taking it upon themselves to interpret laws, what’s next? People having sex on the streets with dogs and shoe trees, that’s what. Last I checked, we live in a democracy. And who better to make life-altering decisions about individual couples than thousands of strangers living hundreds of miles away?

As a concerned citizen, I’m doing my part to get ready for the November vote. I’ve already decided on a bunch of “marriages” I’m going to vote against:

1. First is the Coens, who live in the condo behind my building. Nice enough people, but you know, Jewish. Marriage is a religious institution, after all, and that means Christian ceremonies where we have enough sense not to waste a perfectly good glass by stepping on it.
2. Then there’s that couple who just moved in down the street. They’re Pakistani or Iraqi or Indian or something with some name I can’t pronounce, and of course you know what that means. “One Nation Under Allah?” I don’t think so.
3. The McAllisters are a tough call, since they’re a really nice couple. Unfortunately, one or the other of them is infertile — I never could find out which. Marriage is about procreation and raising children, and it has been for millennia. We can’t go changing the basic definitions of words just because a couple of people claim to be “in love.”
4. Jessica Alba and that dude she married, because we all know she can do better, am I right, guys?
5. Then there’s the Brown “family.” Peter, Sarah, and their daughter Julie, but there’s a problem: it’s their first marriage. And we all know it wasn’t “Adam and Eve,” it was “Adam and Lillith, then Eve.” I just feel sorry for the children.

And that’s just to start. It’s not going to be easy to make decisions for millions of people, but it’s our duty as Americans to decide these things. Not to leave it up to the couples themselves, and definitely not to put it in the hands of some “judges” who were “trained” to “interpret” the “law” on a “rational basis.”

Update: I’ve just been informed over e-mail that the November ballot initiative won’t let us vote against all marriages, just same-sex marriages. That doesn’t seem fair at all! How am I supposed to make decisions about the lives of people who don’t share all of my personal beliefs?

[Via John Scalzi's blog]

My degree is in computer science, which means I’m perfectly suited to buying comic books and geeking out over television series, but not so much for public speaking. So naturally, this weekend I haven’t done much of the former, but a ton of the latter.

Which is okay, since this was a business trip, not a vacation. I think I stopped caring sometime Friday afternoon, when I was doing an interview about a game I didn’t work on (it was Mark and Mike’s episode), by a half-naked woman in a Slave Leia costume. I realized that no matter what else happened this weekend, I couldn’t get any more awkward than that.

I’m not sure when it was, exactly, that “I’m never going to the San Diego Comic-Con again” turned into “Sure, sounds like fun! I’ll take a day off work!” But it didn’t take five minutes at the convention center for it all to come back like a sense memory… there are people who love this kind of thing, and I’m not one of them.

On Friday, my friends Polly and Kevin came by the booth and showed me a bunch of pictures around the show floor; it looked like they’d made it to all the big panels, and stopped at every character costume to pause for a photo op. It was a great reminder that these things are a blast for an awful lot of people who can just relax and get over their noise and personal space requirements, and just go with the flow.

There are still way, way, way too many people. Coming down, I’d marked off the stuff I wanted to see, optimistically thinking I could make it to a panel scheduled 30 minutes after an interview. It didn’t take long to realize that was a ridiculous idea.

The only ones I missed that I was really disappointed about were the “Venture Brothers” panel and the MST3K reunion. I didn’t even make it over to that side of the building until the Venture Brothers panel was about to start, so it was already packed with no chance of my getting in. And I’d figured all along that seeing the MST3K guys was important enough to me that I’d be willing to wait for 2 hours to get inside — I went there about an hour and 45 minutes before it was scheduled to start, and was told the reason there wasn’t a line was because the hall had long since filled up. I heard that for the “Heroes” panel, people had been camping out since the night before.

So I said it last year, I’ll say it again this year, and I’ll probably say it yet again next year: this thing has just gotten way too big, and the one in San Francisco is about as much as I can tolerate. I’m not sure how they can solve it; splitting it up into separate cons for comics, movies/TV, and games seems like a natural move, but would lose the whole “multimedia” thing that’s half of the appeal. Maybe the only solution is to schedule a bully convention across the street to thin out the ranks a little bit.

One thing definitely in San Diego’s favor: apart from a few predictable examples, everybody was extremely friendly. You’d inevitably get jostled and bumped into and stepped on, and almost without fail, people were saying “excuse me” and “are you okay?” and just being surprisingly polite.

My convention in numbers:

• Panels seen: 0 (unless Telltale’s counts)
• Comic books bought: 3 (all recent B.P.R.D. issues that you could buy anywhere)
• Famous and near-famous people seen from a great distance: 10 (Judd Apatow, Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank), Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Jackson Publick, Nathan Fillion’s back, Felicia Day (of Dr. Horrible), Richard Hatch, about five different guys I’d swear were Seth Rogen, that guy on “Reno: 911″ that I went to college with whose name I forget, and Jon and the Lasagna Cat)
• Meals eaten: 3
• Meals eaten at non-pizza places: 0
• Interviews given: 7? Maybe?
• Interviews I can remember making a single coherent sentence: 0
• Items bought: 2 (a MST3k anniversary T-shirt from the Shout! Factory booth, and a sketchbook from Mike Mignola).

For the first day of Comic-Con wonder and and excitement, I’ve been enjoying the sights and sounds of beautiful San… Francisco.

I got about three hours of sleep last night (one hour less than normal for the past few weeks), and hauled ass down to the airport at record speed. I got there with only about 1/3 of my face properly shaved but with plenty of time to make the flight. I checked in at one of their little automatic kiosks, and learned that my flight at 8:45 had been cancelled, but I could be confirmed on a flight for 9:20. No problem! I went through security, made my way down to the ass-end of the airport to the chosen gate, and was surprised to see no line, no mention of San Diego, or any sign at all that the flight was more than imaginary.

After about a 20-minute wait at the customer service desk, I got to speak to a human being, who started looking through standbys and alternate routes, all the time shaking her head and talking about how it didn’t look good. She told me I was still confirmed on the 9:20 flight, which surprised me, since it was already 9:05. She pointed out that that was 9:20 PM, not AM.

What sucks about that is that it completely defused all the righteous indignation I’d built up. I get so few opportunities to be genuinely entitled to be pissed about something, and I went and wasted it by confusing AM with PM. So when she told me that I was way far down on the standby list, and all the flights were booked solid, and they either wouldn’t or couldn’t give me an alternate route, and my only options were to wait in the airport for 12 hours or come back later tonight, and they couldn’t even reimburse my airport parking, I’d been completely beaten down. Those of us who don’t have planes are completely at the mercy of the people who do.

What really sucks is that this was supposed to be my ease-into-the-horrors-of-Comic-Con day, and I used up a vacation day to do it. Because I really didn’t want to be getting there late at night and having to deal with checking in and all that nonsense, then getting little sleep before getting slammed with a full day of sensory overload. Which is pretty much exactly what’s going to happen.

It also sucks that I missed the panel on episodic gaming with Hothead and TTG, and also Steve’s panel. And those are just the two things I know about without ever having looked at the official schedule.

Ah well, at least I got a nap out of it. Maybe someday I’ll be able to get out of San Francisco and get something resembling time off.

Also: Telltale announced the third game series today, and it’s Wallace & Gromit.

TomorrowThursday I’m headed down to the San Diego Comic Con for what is likely to be another four days of me wandering around completely bewildered.

In case I’ve managed to accumulate any stalkers, I’m going to be at a panel with some other Telltale folks (and Steve Purcell!) on Saturday morning talking about Sam & Max, Strong Bad, and the mysterious unannounced Third License of Mystery:

11:30-12:30 Sam & Max, Strong Bad, and the Secrets Behind Turning Comics into Games— Sam & Max may have their roots in indy comics, but the crime-fighting duo is right at home starring in a successful series of episodic games. The cast of the popular Homestarrunner.com web cartoons are following suit this summer in Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. Why do comics make for such great games? Telltale designers Mark Darin, Chuck Jordan, and Mike Stemmle, artist Mai Nguyen, and Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell will tell you all about the fun (and work) of bringing comics to life. Plus, get a first look at a third, completely new episodic game series! Room 4

(Which means I’ve got to miss the Hellboy panel, dammit!)

If anybody’s down there and wants to hang out, let me know. The convention gets overwhelming quickly.

WordPress released their new free iPhone client today, and I’m trying it out with a photo of my desk.

Initial observation: writing HTML on a cell phone is not fun. (But I’m pretty sure that’s not the point of the thing.)

According to the box office numbers, there’s a good chance that everyone reading this has already seen The Dark Knight. But just in case, I’ll include a spoiler warning: it’s pretty damn good.

The movie mentions several times how the Joker and Batman are both “freaks” and outsiders, and how lonely it is to be different from everyone else. Now this, I can relate to somewhat, based on my lukewarm-at-best reaction to Batman Begins, and being in packed rooms at conventions where everyone else is practically wetting himself at the notion of a sequel. I’d have to smile nervously and clap and give a half-hearted “whoo!” and then go home wondering if maybe the problem is with me, and then cry myself to sleep under my X-Men 2 poster. I just didn’t get the attraction.

But The Dark Knight is an excellent movie. When you consider the performances — not a bad one in the entire cast, and Heath Ledger really is as outstanding as people have been saying; the production values; the dialogue; the unabashedly and unapologetically mature tone; the music and phenomenal sound design, it’s probably the best comic book movie ever made. But it’s still not my favorite, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what it is that doesn’t work for me.

I can’t accuse it of being too dry, because there are loads of genuinely clever moments. Or of being self-important Oscar-bait, because there’s an action scene involving a truck, a motorcycle, and some cable that may be the first objectively bad-ass scene in action movie history. (Which is to say: it’s not a matter of opinion; it would be impossible for a human being to watch that scene and not say, “Now that was bad-ass.”)

I can’t really even fault the two-and-a-half-hour length, since it did a remarkable job of keeping up the pacing. Even late into the movie, when you hear that weird “Joker noise” come up on the soundtrack, you can’t help but get every bit as tense as you were during the first scenes. It was only in the last half hour when I started to get “adaptation fatigue,” when I thought, “Wait, you’re going to try and squeeze The Killing Joke in here too? Really?” It felt like they were afraid they weren’t going to be allowed to make another Batman movie, so they had to squeeze every “serious” Batman story they could into one movie.

What it comes down to is that these movies are for the people who’ve been wanting a real Batman movie ever since the 70s. Back when people were desperate to “take back” the character from the campy 60s version and get back to his sinister and tragic roots. When I first got into comics, I was already in college, so I felt like I had to make up for lost time by getting big stacks of them and reading through several issues of Batman at a time. And I always ended up with the same feeling as I did watching Batman Begins: sure the story is competently told, but it’s going to end up ridiculous if you put any amount of thought into it, so why bother? Comics continue to swing back and forth between “joyless” and “ridiculous,” and Batman is the poster child for that.

Several times during The Dark Knight, I was struck by how it’s so much better, by several orders of magnitude, than any interpretation of Batman done so far. The Tim Burton movies seem even more embarrassingly silly now than they did when they were released, and it’s unsettling to think that at the time, they were supposed to be a counter to the “silly” version of Batman. When you consider all the indignities the character’s been made to suffer over the past 50 years, it’s perfectly understandable that people would want to see a version that does the character justice.

Especially when the movie is as good as this one. But still…

The Dark Knight is a much better movie than Hellboy 2, but the latter had earth elementals and fairies and giant clockwork monsters and the Angel of Death and ectoplasm in a diving suit, all memorable images that stand out in my mind and make me want to see it again. The Dark Knight is more realistic and less corny than X-Men 2, but there wasn’t really any moment I was inclined to stand up and cheer as when Nightcrawler bamfs out of a plane to save Rogue.

As good as The Dark Knight is, it still feels like it’s targeted at the people who want to be able to pinpoint Gotham City on a map. The people who insist that comics can too tell meaningful stories. Personally, I don’t feel that defensive about the term “comic book movie,” and don’t think they have anything to prove. I’ll take a Miyazaki-inspired 40’s art deco nightmare over Chicago any day, and a dark cave with a giant penny over a big Matrix-y room with concrete floors and fluorescent lights.

I’ve got 2 Venture Brothers-related confessions to make: first is that before he showed up in the series, I’d never heard of Klaus Nomi. Second is that until last week’s episode (”What Goes Down Must Come Up”), I’ve thought this season was clever but not hilariously funny.

This episode had me dying, though. (Yeah, I’m watching it Wednesday night. I’ve been busy). The story was the best this season, Jefferson Twilight makes everything funny, and it was nice to get a little break from the Monarch and the Guild of Calamitous Intent stuff.

Plus, I just like it when I get a reference. And I love it when people just go balls-out on a joke, and have it end up working perfectly. When they first showed the sewer tunnel and played the little snippets of music, I thought, “Wait a second. They’re not actually doing what I think they’re doing.” And then they topped it with pretty much the best reference ever. I had to pause the recording I was laughing so hard.

I didn’t catch a single one of the references in the later scenes, but for a minute there, I felt hip.

My favorite line (paraphrased): “They’re members of the Rusty Venture fan club, which explains the survival skills they needed to live down there for 40 years.”

I really wanted to love Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and for the first 15 or 20 minutes, it looked like that was exactly what was going to happen. There’s a really clever flashback to Hellboy’s time growing up on an army base (previously only seen in a two-page gag story called “Pancakes”), and a fantastic sequence where the movie’s back-story is delivered via CG puppets. It’s just beautifully done, imaginative, with a distinctive style that still felt very much influenced by Mike Mignola’s style.

It’s followed by a neat title sequence, a cool scene introducing us to the story’s villain, and a creepy sequence at an auction house. It’s all great stuff, and with the monsters, sigils, antiquities scattered about, and sense of impending doom, it nails the tone of a live action version of a Hellboy story.

But then everything kind of starts to unravel as soon as Hellboy shows up. It never really falls apart, but it just kind of deflates. There’s a ton of brilliant stuff throughout, most of it so impressive that I’d recommend the movie to anybody who’s a fan of effects-heavy action movies. And it was much better than the first Hellboy movie. But it still felt uncomfortably “off.”

There’s so much that the movie gets exactly right. The story has the feel of an ancient legend pushed into the modern day, an apocalyptic cataclysm that can only be averted by lots of punching and shooting. There are self-important kings and lords, and untrustworthy guides who work according to rules that we just barely understand. And the sinister versions of elves, fairies, and other creatures, that I think only the team Guillermo del Toro has put together can do justice to. (Ideas and character designs that were hinted at in Pan’s Labyrinth are splayed out all over the screen here).

But the tone was just wrong. After seeing The Devil’s Backbone, I wondered if del Toro’s work kept getting violated by Hollywood. But he has screenwriting credit on Hellboy 2, and I kept feeling like the screenwriting was the weak link. The script understands that Hellboy is ultimately a comedy series, but doesn’t seem to get that it’s supposed to be dry humor. Long stretches of mood and foreboding, followed by a punchline about as un-subtle as you can get. (”Is that… a monkey?” “HE’S GOT A GUN!!!”)

But pretty much every time the movie attempted comedy, it just felt stretched too thin, dragged on too long, or just fell flat. And it kept falling back on the “get a load of this guy!” stuff, reminding us how wacky it is to be watching a movie where a huge tough-talking demon is the good guy. But anybody going into a movie called “Hellboy” has already heard that joke and gotten it; the movie needs to top that. And all the lame story points from the first movie are still shoe-horned into this one: there’s still the unnecessary romance between Hellboy and Liz Sherman, and the Tim Burton-esque theme of freaks who just want to fit in. Plus, there’s way too much Jimmy Kimmel, which is to say, there’s some.

Then again, the tone of Hellboy adaptations varies so much that I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’m the one who doesn’t “get” it. The novelizations and short stories seem to think he’s the demon form of Indiana Jones; the videogames seem to think he’s a Mortal Kombat character; and the movies seem to think he’s Lobo crossed with Edward Scissorhands. Maybe that’s the genius of the comics — there’s so little dialogue and so many silent side shots of watching statues or ravens murmuring portents of doom, you’re free to impose whatever character you want on Hellboy.

So as not to end on a down note, I want to point out a few of the things I like: The character of Johann Krauss — a German medium who was trapped in his ectoplasmic form during a seance and now has to live inside a containment suit — is kind of underused in the comics, a cool idea that kind of went nowhere. In the movie, he’s great, a cool suit that’s continually outgassing, and a memorable voice (by Seth McFarlane, surprisingly). The fight scenes were big, dumb, and hard to follow, exactly like they are in the comics. There’s a whole scene with Liz and a character I won’t name but he’s near the end and is like the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth — that whole scene is exactly like a Hellboy comic. And I really loved the brief image of Hellboy’s “true form.”