The Penny Arcade Expo is this weekend, and I’m flying up tomorrow for another three days of being awkward and confused while surrounded by nerdcrowds. I’m actually looking forward to this one, unlike the Comic Con, because I keep hearing how PAX is the right way to do a convention. I’d actually forgotten it was a videogame convention until a friend reminded me — I’ve been to so many comic cons and Macworlds recently that I started to conflate them all. Oh yeah, videogames! I remember liking those!

Plus, I think I like Seattle, at least the three or so hours I saw of it when I went up to the Microsoft campus a few years ago. I distinctly remember being startled at how clean the air was.

I’m going to be on two panels: Writing for Video Games from 6:00PM to 7:00PM on Friday, and then Make a Scene, the Strong Bad Edition from 7:30PM to 8:30PM. I hear that the Make a Scene panel at last year’s was a lot of fun; we get audience members to record lines for the characters and then put them together in our game engine for a cutscene at the end of the panel.

So if you’re going to be in Seattle, check me out! (No seriously, check me out!) And if you’re in San Francisco, please don’t steal my stuff.

Friday night I imitated a normal person and left work before dark. I just sat at home and watched movies on AMC, so I guess I imitated a depressingly boring normal person, but still, it beats working.

Apparently, AMC runs horror movies on Friday nights, and this week we got: Puppet Master (a reminder of how horrible the 80s were), Magic (not as bad as I’d heard it was, but still not really good), and The Beast Must Die (quite possibly the greatest movie ever made in the history of cinema).

I’m only partly exaggerating about The Beast Must Die; I’m actually a little embarrassed that I’d never heard of it before. It’s everything a late-70s horror movie should be, and then some. It’s like a cross between a Castle horror movie, Enter the Dragon, and a blaxploitation flick, right down to the chicka-chicka-wow-wow on the soundtrack. Best of all is the “Werewolf Break” that’s promised at the beginning of the movie and then delivered 15 minutes before the end — everything stops for 30 seconds to give the audience a chance to piece together the clues and figure out who’s the werewolf. Plus, it’s got Peter Cushing and Michael Gambon, each of whom has this completely inexplicable ability to make a movie seem classier, even though their careers absolutely don’t warrant it.

None of the movies are actually scary, of course; the only disturbing thing about my evening completely and gloriously wasted was the number of commercials. I don’t know if it’s always been like this, and it’s just been too long since I’ve watched TV “live;” or if AMC saves up all their questionable content for Friday nights, but these ads were a non-stop Parade of Sexual Dysfunction. They had male enhancement products in forms I didn’t know (and was happier not knowing) existed — herbal supplements, powders, pills, drinks, and even a delicious shake. (Which kind of make sense, if my own results after a delicious shake are any indication).

All at varying levels of FDA approval, but with one thing in common: the ads are hosted by the smarmiest sons of bitches you’d ever want to see. And the women are all either rolling their eyes and grinning talking about “that certain part of the male anatomy” — I think they’re talkin’ about the penis — or there’s the one that takes the opposite tack and has the moderately-but-not-quite-attractive woman trying to shame guys into calling. “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?” she demands, and I have to reply, “I’m waiting for you to calm the hell down and see about getting those moles removed, lady.”

And that was before they started bringing out the vibrators and pumps. The vibrator commercial is bad enough, because it’s got women giggling over a magazine ad, unable to come (ha!) right out and say what the heck it is they’re even selling. Then the middle aged woman who’s been listening in the whole time pipes up and tells them where she buys hers. While you’re still desperately trying to get that image out of your head, they start with the ads for the Medicare-and-most-insurance-approved pumps for gentlemen. Those ads are all guys no younger than 50, most of them looking like they just walked off the set of “Hee Haw,” talking about how the vacuum action changed their lives and “if you got a brain in your head, you’ll call right now!”

And it’s moments like those when you think, “Yep, it’s been a good run, but I think it’s time for the human race to just die out now.” But they just won’t let it!

I know I’ve been whining about it pretty much incessantly for the last five years or so, but dammit, it bugs me how my beard decided to skip “salt and pepper” altogether and proceed directly to “whiskey-soaked derelict.” It’s almost enough to make me convert to Buddhism in the hopes that I can re-roll for some more color-safe genes. Either that, or start pushing a shopping cart around the city, with a boombox playing “Purple Rain” on infinite loop and yelling at invisible people.

One thing it has taught me, though, is about tact, and how I don’t have it. A while ago I ran into someone I hadn’t seen in years, and her first comment as, “Wow! You look so distinguished!” Of course, my brain instantly translated distinguished to old, but I was impressed at how someone could so effortlessly come up with the right way to comment on the ravages of time, without skipping a beat.

I’ve never been able to do that. It’s not even that I’m thinking “Holy crap, you got old/fat/weird-looking and I can’t stop staring,” I really am a nicer person in my head than I seem to be on the outside. And I think that’s the problem; I hardly ever even notice stuff like that, so my brain is struggling to come up with something to comment on. It sounds like I’m struggling to think of something polite to say, when in fact I’m struggling to think of anything to say.

I’ve seen a lot of links to this article about introverts being passed around, and while it seems a little — I’m not sure what the word is, maybe “twee?” — it does convey pretty well the idea of social interaction being exhausting. But I’ve gotten old distinguished enough that I’m no longer envious of the “life of the party types.” Now I just want to be the kind of person who can make the kind of synaptic leaps to be able to see a person and think of something polite to say in less than a second with nary an “Uhhh….”

Ever since production started on SBCG4AP, Nick and Jake have been working on a video series documenting the development process. The first part was released today:

When I first heard about Tropic Thunder, I thought it was going to be just another two hours of Ben Stiller and Jack Black hamming it up, or at best one of Stiller’s MTV Movie Awards parodies stretched out to feature length. Turns out it’s got plenty of both, but it manages to be surprisingly good. Those movie parodies were always funny, after all — apparently all you have to do to get a whole movie out of them is to add a few hundred million to the budget, throw in a few more celebrities, and most importantly: get Robert Downey, Jr. involved.

He’s kind of awesome in this movie. There’s one line — I can’t remember the gag, it was pretty forgettable — but his delivery is so perfect it’s almost scary funny. After the scene ended, a few people in the audience actually clapped. I’d never seen that in a movie before, people applauding the delivery of a line.

Everybody else manages to do the kind of thing they do best, they rein in the goofy camera-hogging but still manage to make it over the top, and the gags are all over the place. Most of the scenes have slapstick, puns, fart jokes, and satire all going on at the same time. Whenever Hollywood types make a satire about Hollywood, it generally makes me uncomfortable — I wonder if they’re in on the irony of making a movie to make fun of yourself for being self-absorbed. Here, they got the balance just about right.

And, probably not all that surprising, the parody trailers are perfect. I can’t remember a movie where the opening worked so well. It set the perfect tone for a movie that’s going to go balls-out goofy for the next two hours. The movie does kind of run out of power towards the end, but it’s got so much momentum from the beginning, the coasting speed is still pretty damn funny.

My favorite TV show of the moment is called “Nounai Este I.Q. Supplement” [that link is in Japanese], a game show where a panel of celebrities answers Brain Age-type puzzles. It’s not subtitled, so I understand 0.01% of what’s going on, but for me, that’s a large part of the appeal. When I am able to solve the occasional “spot the difference” puzzle, I feel smart, and when I can solve a kana puzzle, I feel like a genius.

The episode that aired here last week was themed to GeGeGe no Kitaro a manga series by Shigeru Mizuki. (Presumably because one of the frequent guests on the show starred in last year’s live action adaptation). The characters kept popping up in the show, effects were superimposed on the celebrities, and the whole thing seemed like a ton of fun.

I was aware of Mizuki’s work, mostly from SH Morgan’s excellent Obakemono Project website and a mention on the Drawn! blog. His artwork directly inspired the parade scene in one of my favorite movies, Pom Poko, and just about anything that deals with yokai (Japanese goblins and spirits) is drawn directly from his interpretation. Plus, there’s a museum and a road lined with statues of Mizuki’s characters in his hometown. But I’ve got to admit that I’d dismissed it as a cultural blip, like Rat Fink.

You can’t really appreciate what a huge impact GeGeGe no Kitaro has in Japan — and is slowly, gradually getting outside Japan — until you see a bunch of people who grew up with the comics and cartoons and are really getting into it. And really, how could you not get into it? It’s early 60s cool combined with Japanese folklore, and I think it’s time we in the US admit that Japanese ghosts and monsters beat ours by several orders of magnitude. I’m guessing the closest equivalent we have in the US would be if The Munsters had been based not on a bunch of movies, but on centuries-old folk tales. Or if Charlie Brown had magic powers and lived in a graveyard with the eyeball of his father and was charged with keeping peace between the human and goblin worlds.

And had a really catchy theme song. Here’s the opening to three of the manga’s animated incarnations on TV. The late 60s (unquestionably the coolest):

The mid 80s:

And last year:

Now I’ve got to make a pilgrimage to Sakaiminato to see the yokai up-close and in person.

And here’s a clip of “I.Q. Supplement” in case anyone’s wondering what that’s all about. If it helps anybody figure out what’s going on: the only one I could get was around 0:50,because a Japanese word for “squirrel” is risu.

Somehow I’d gotten the idea that the new X-Files movie was about werewolves. I think maybe I mis-heard “Wendigo” when someone was saying, “When did it go horribly wrong?” So if you go see the movie expecting werewolves or yeti, you’re going to be disappointed.

Of course, if you go see the movie at all, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s really not very good. But at least it’s educational. I learned:

• Much of West Virginia is covered by icy tundra and snowdrifts several feet high.
• Except for the skyscraper-filled cities.
• You don’t have to be any kind of specialist to perform neurosurgery, you just have to know how to google for “stem cell research.”
• Experimental stem cell procedures are surprisingly easy to get green-lit in a Catholic hospital.
• And the stem cell samples are so easy to get, you can be on the operating table the same day you come up with the idea.
• Same-sex marriage inevitably leads to mad science.
• When performing transplant surgery, it’s important to get the correct blood type, so the patient doesn’t reject the donor head.
• People with rare blood types wear MedicAlert bracelets to advertise that fact, even when their blood type is the universal receiver.
• In West Virginia, public pools are segregated by blood type.
• You can shave off a thick beard without trimming it first, as long as you avoid the spirit gum.
• People’s arms can give off psychic vibrations even after their head has been severed.
• Dana Scully is steamin’ mad at pedophiles, and she’s also amazingly good at reading mailbox addresses at night during one of West Virginia’s frequent blizzards.
• “Reaper” must be filmed in Canada, since one of the guys from that show has a small part in the movie. I already knew Leoben as our gay Russian villain was Canadian, and I was expecting the Kids in the Hall and Alanis Morisette to show up any minute.
• “The X-Files” only worked when it didn’t take itself seriously.

Considering how the movie completely falls apart if you think about it for even a second, it’s surprising that the biggest complaint isn’t that it’s ludicrous, but that it’s so dull. But that’s really how “The X-Files” always worked — the production values and performances were always high enough to make you believe it was smarter than it really was. And Mark Snow’s ever-present keyboard would lull you into a false sense of significance.

That, combined with the brilliance of the occasional Darin Morgan episode, would distract you from the fact that an awful lot of the series was just Mulder and Scully standing around having exasperatingly pointless conversations that are meant to sound meaningful. But at least back then, there was genuine appeal to the characters; in I Want to Believe, they’ve had all the charisma drained out of them as if they’d been exsanguinated.

As an added bonus, here’s what I learned from the trailers:

• Rain’s theory is correct; Jason Statham is the Jean-Claude Van Damme of the next generation. I predict he’ll become a twin of himself any moment now.
• Michelle Yeoh hates me, because she keeps making me go see horrible movies just by being in them.
• Joan Allen has just stopped caring.