June « 2010 « Spectre Collie

Sunday June 27 2010 Personal

Thirty-Nine

One more year until I have to grow up.

There are worse places to be on your birthday than Disneyland. I had to be in LA around this weekend, so I figured that a trip to the parks made perfect sense — I could wear a big “It’s My Birthday” button around San Francisco, but I doubt it’d have the same impact.

I have yet to see the new World of Color thing that all the kids are talking about. I haven’t seen all that much yet, actually, since I got in too late for Fastpasses and I didn’t have enough patience to wait for stuff. But that’s turned out to be a good thing so far, because I’ve seen a lot of the great live entertainment.

At any point, without warning or provocation, I’ll tell you about the differences between Walt Disney World and Disneyland. One of them is that Disneyland feels a lot more “full,” as if there’s always something going on everywhere you look. I’ve only been here half a day and I’ve already seen all manner of parades and other shows break out all around me, plus other stuff I’d never seen before or hadn’t seen in years.

One of the “new” things is the “Captain EO Tribute,” which I’d only seen once before (right before it shut down, if I remember correctly), and which was a billion times better this time. In the line, they have scenes from some kind of making-of documentary showing George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppolla and about a billion dancers who look like they just got finished filming the video to “Warrior” by Scandal featuring Patty Smythe. As for the movie itself: I can’t honestly say that it’s aged well, but it really is just an amazing thing; it’s hard to believe that it even exists. I can’t remember where I saw it the first time (maybe Orlando?) because I definitely didn’t remember all the thumping in the seats and the early 80s 3D that hurts your eyes to even look at it. The funny thing is that I distinctly remember thinking, at several points throughout the 80s, that we were living through a cultural wasteland, and dreading the point at which people got nostalgic for the 80s. But here we are, and I can’t help but love it.

Not long after I saw the College All Star Marching Band playing in front of the train station, and they were terrific. Keeping up the Michael Jackson theme, they did a tribute medley, right down to performing the zombie dance with drum kits, tubas, and saxophones. That was followed by an Earth, Wind and Fire medley that was almost as good.

Over at California Adventure, they’ve got some kind of “Glow Fest” going on that turns the Hollywood Studios section of the park into a big street party/rave. I came into the park while a bunch of dancers were doing faux-Bollywood routines in front of the sun fountain, to several tracks including some from Slumdog Millionaire. And they never stopped, is the weird part — I had to go off and ride something because I was getting winded just watching them. When I came back, they had stands set up all down the street, and each one had one of the dancers still going at it, and a Disneyfied version of Bootsy Collins acting as DJ on the top of a dayglo colored Volkswagen Bus. I could imagine cynics or purists scoffing at it, but I loved every single bit of it. And the crowd did, too — the street was packed with people going nuts, taking the whole “dance like nobody’s watching” thing to heart. (Plus I was totally crushing on one of the dancers, which is completely inappropriate for somebody my age).

So yeah, the inexorable decline towards 40 doesn’t seem so bad, as long as I can keep getting away with not acting my age.

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Monday June 21 2010 Movies

The Trilogy That Wasn’t

Toy Story 3 is a perfect demonstration of everything that Pixar gets right. Hint: It has noting to do with rendering or marketing.

So yeah, Toy Story 3 is universally loved by critics and made over 100 million dollars over its first weekend of release (I’m going to see it a second time tomorrow night). You can read any of dozens of reviews that are all basically going to tell you the same thing; I think Sara Benincasa’s video review sums it up pretty well:

She’s not really exaggerating all that much, either: this movie will make you cry. If you’re not in tears at the end of it, then sorry, but you’re a replicant. I stopped even making a token attempt at hiding the fact I was crying, because the movie earned it. It actually started to make me concerned for the folks at Pixar having to work on these movies: is the company giving them enough water, making sure they’re properly hydrated while spending years working on things designed to make people cry?

Toy Story 3 isn’t my favorite Pixar movie (Up), and it isn’t even my favorite Toy Story movie (Toy Story 2). But it’s the first that doesn’t hit a single false note. Seriously, there’s just nothing wrong with it, no scene or even a single line of dialogue that feels out of place or unnecessary. All the plot developments are perfectly foreshadowed, and everything just makes sense. (If I had to struggle to find one complaint, it’d be that it veers a little too close to being a direct parody of Cool Hand Luke, but that’s a huge stretch and I’m not even sure if that would qualify as a “complaint.”) And what’s more, it’s structured and paced so well without feeling forced or over-calculated.

That’s another thing: the Day & Night short turns out to be the perfect choice to present with Toy Story 3, because it’s the most old-school capital-A Animation short Pixar’s done in years. And TS3 is the culmination of the studio’s first attempt at feature-length animation, and it shows. They’ve proven over and over again that they can basically do whatever they want at this point, but the movies still don’t feel as if they’re family films that happen to be animated; there’s a real sense of the love of animation for its own sake.

There’s a kind of density of imagination that’s unique to animation — every object on screen and every second of screen time is valuable, so scenes are meticulously planned out and packed full of as much stuff as possible. In Toy Story 3, it’s most evident in the various escape sequences. The people behind the scenes are familiar not only with every object in the room, but every square centimeter of every object, and all the possibilities of it. Scenes are expertly choreographed so that every fraction of a second plays out exactly as it should. There’s an element of that in any animated movie, even the most insipid cash-grab franchise movies. But the Toy Story series celebrates it, with all of its scenes of toys working together to pull off some complicated scheme, each toy revealing some hidden part at just the right moment. There’s a real sense of play, where the people behind the scenes aren’t thinking “what happens next?” but “what could happen next?”

And that idea of a “Toy Story series” was a surprise to me throughout the movie, even though I’d bought the ticket and saw the big number 3 on the marquee. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was the last movie in a long-running series, so it was jarring to be reminded that time had passed for all of these characters, and that Pixar was going to be finishing their story. You can tell that they really love the characters and the world that they created, and they wanted to give them a satisfying conclusion — it’s not milking another movie out of a franchise, or even joining in another adventure of a bunch of well-loved characters. It’s an arc. And for the people making these movies, it’s the end of a story that started almost 20 years ago, one that they’re more closely tied to than even the most devoted fan.

It’s not that I hadn’t gotten attached to the characters, it’s more that I’d always just assumed they’d always been there and would continue to always be there. We’ve gotten accustomed to ongoing franchises and disposable blockbusters, but Toy Story had become a classic while I wasn’t noticing. I guess I’d always just assumed that, like toys, the characters and the movies would keep going on, unchanged, in perpetuity. And the major theme of the movie is that time goes on, and even those of us most locked in a state of arrested development are going to have to grow up sometime.

Which is ultimately why Pixar can accomplish things that no other studio has quite been able to manage. The technical artistry in Toy Story 3 is predictably flawless, but of course Pixar movies have never been about technology — other studios have caught up with Pixar with rendering tech, but you can’t just put anything through a rendering engine and end up with a classic. But it’s not just about “story,” either: you can’t just take any sitcom, or “family-friendly” feature script about the importance of being true to yourself, and expect that to be anything more than disposable entertainment product.

Where Pixar’s different, I think, is that there’s a sense of harmony between the movie and the process of making the movie. Stuff isn’t animated because animation sells, but because they love animation. Only animate when it makes sense to (which is I imagine why they’re branching out into live action). And the movies don’t feel like calculated family-friendly hits, but movies that end up being family-friendly because they’re genuine and honest stories about childhood, parenthood, identity, and discovery. That’s the main reason I don’t see any merit in the common complaint that Pixar movies haven’t had female lead characters — Pixar doesn’t need to be making movies to order or to fill some sort of quota; they need to keep making movies that feel honest.

No doubt there were all kinds of high-level meetings and marketing mandates for a third Toy Story movie. But watching Toy Story 3, you don’t get the sense that that’s why the movie was made. It feels like a movie they wanted to make to conclude the story of characters they loved. (Now watch them announce a Toy Story 4 and waste all the time I spent writing this thing). It never registered as the third in a series with me because I never really thought of it as a “series;” it was just something that’s always existed with no beginning or ending, and we’d peek in every five years or so to see what was going on this time. You can’t choreograph or plan to have that kind of a classic; it’s something that happens as a result of being honest.

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Wednesday June 16 2010 Technology

Spontaneous Obsolescence

Dozens of over-privileged gadget hounds have suddenly found themselves with outdated electronic equipment. Won’t you please help?

As an electronic gadget obsessive with more disposable income than common sense, I’m well aware with the trials of being an “early adopter.” (That’s a euphemism for the older term, “impatient doof.”) We buy overpriced things, we watch them go down in price and up in specs and features, we sell them or donate them once they’re four or five years old, we buy a new one. It’s all part of the Great Circle of Life.

Rarely, though, is this delicate ecosystem hit with such a wide-spread cataclysm like the one we’ve seen this week. In just a few short days, I went from being blessed with pristine examples of consumerism at its finest, to being burdened with obsolete relics. It disgusts me even to look at them.

What’s worst is that all of the new models fix the one most annoying thing about each. For instance:

We all knew that The iPhone 4 was coming out, so it wasn’t a surprise. (Well, it wasn’t a surprise to most of us — apparently Apple and AT&T didn’t get the memo). This version has a faster processor and a much improved camera, which were my biggest complaints about the old version: now I don’t feel compelled to take a point-and-shoot everywhere. So I set aside some money — that I would’ve wasted on charity or something frivolous like that — and was prepared to make an informed purchase.

But then E3 happened! A new Xbox 360! Styled after the PS3, with special dust-collecting coating and barely-sensitive touch-activated not-buttons! And it, theoretically, fixes the two biggest problems with the old Xbox 360: catastrophic system failure from poor ventilation, and the fact that turning on the console is like having a leaf blower pressed against your head while standing on a runway at LAX.

And then: A Nintendo 3DS! Which fixes the biggest problem with the older Nintendo DS: that, err, it didn’t have 3D. Okay, that one is kind of weak, but I still want one after hearing everybody on the Twitter going nuts over it.

But then out of nowhere: A new Mac Mini! I’ve spent the past couple of years trying to piece together a decent home theater PC using the enormous, Brezhnev-era Mac Mini; an external drive; a USB TV tuner; an assortment of remote control apps; a Microsoft IR receiver; various DVI-to-HDMI adapters; and snot. Now Apple has said, “Oh right! HDMI has existed for several years now!” and upped the hard drive size and built an HDMI port right into the back, making it an HTPC right out of the box. (And by the sound of it, fixing the problem Mac has with overscan/underscan on my TV). It’s still overpriced to use as just a home theater PC, but it’s the best version of the mini that Apple has made yet.

And of course, the Microsoft Kinect business, which solves the problem of “I don’t look stupid enough while playing videogames.”

Now looking on ebay at all the listings of used Mac minis and Xbox 360s is positively heartbreaking; you can almost hear Sarah McLachlan wailing in the background as you scroll past one “0 bids” after the other. And now I actually feel kind of gross for writing all this, so I’ll start browsing elsewhere.

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Saturday June 12 2010 Apple

Reeder for iPad

The Reeder app is finally available for the iPad, and the iPad finally feels useful

I’ve got a pretty nasty RSS feed-reading habit. I’m currently subscribed to 116 feeds (down from around 200 at my peak), and I start to feel anxious and disconnected if I go too long without sucking from the webtap. I blame NetNewsWire by Brent Simmons, which set the standard for how a desktop RSS feed reader should be written. It’s so extensible and so efficient, it practically makes fun of you if you’re not keeping track of thousands of posts in hundreds of feeds.

One of the most important things I was looking for in the iPad was a way to make the whole feed-reading ritual more enjoyable and less like work. Instead of getting up in the morning and immediately sitting in front of the computer to pore over news articles like a less effective Winston Smith, I could lean back on the couch like they show in the Apple ads, and develop some kind of “morning paper”-esque ritual that would make me feel more like a bonafide grown-up.

The iPad version of NetNewsWire was released at launch (or maybe soon after), and I’ve been using it since then. It’s fast and efficient, but it just didn’t flow as well as it does on the desktop. It understandably stays very close to Apple’s established UI for iPad apps, which is part of the problem: I don’t like the standards Apple’s put into place. They claim that “it doesn’t matter” how you hold the iPad, but their own system of pop-ups and full page views ends up giving every app two modes: an orientation that’s efficient (usually landscape), and one that’s enjoyable to use (usually portrait). With NetNewsWire, it meant a lot of flipping the device around — landscape to get through lots of posts quickly, portrait to read in depth — and forwarding the ones I wanted to read in greater detail to Marco Arment’s outstanding Instapaper app.

There’s a separate app called Early Edition that compiles newspaper-style page views from your available RSS feeds, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted, either. It was kind of the opposite extreme to NetNewsWire: nice-looking, but not as efficient. What I really wanted was something that would split the difference: good for reading single posts in detail, efficient for scanning through blogs that could have hundreds of entries, and a seamless way to switch between the two modes.

Reeder for iPad by Silvio Rizzi is exactly that. I’d already been a fan of the iPhone version of Reeder, but reading lots of text on a cell phone is never going to be ideal. The iPad version, though, gets just about everything right. I started gushing about it as soon as I tried it, but it’s really not an exaggeration to say that it’s turned the iPad from an overpriced novelty to a genuinely useful computer.

Here’s why I like it, with pictures. I really do believe that the interface is worth studying; anybody who’s considering making an iPad app should look at how Reeder does things and why they’re usually a good idea.

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Tuesday June 8 2010 Apple

Stress Test

Some days it ain’t easy to be a fan of Apple

Here’s a fun game as long as you have a very loose definition of “fun” and “game:” see how long you can watch the iPhone 4 “Design Video” before all the hyperbole and breathless exclamations of wonder make you have to turn it off. I lasted until the head of iPhone OS Software said he was blown away by a video conference call.

(And yeah, I’m going to avoid calling it “iOS” for as long as I can because I think that’s a dumb name).

Maybe it’s just because I assumed video conferencing was something that all other non-iPhones could already do, but Apple exceeded my tolerance for marketing with this whole push. To hear them tell it, they make it sound like the polio vaccine and the discovery of fire were baby steps on the way to a backside illumination sensor. (Great for both a band name and a sex act).

Sure, all the Apple reps talked about the iPad as if at any moment they were about to put a hand up over the camera and ask for a moment to recompose themselves. But that’s understandable — the iPad is kind of a tough sell. Unlike the iPad, everybody knows what an iPhone does, and this is a better one.

And I think that’s ultimately what my issue is: the new version is basically a no-brainer of an upgrade. Based on Engadget.com’s recap and hands-on, it’s got just about every single thing that’s been missing from my current 3G model: the iPad’s processor, a better display, a better camera, a forward-facing camera, video recording, thinner form factor, less plastic-feeling build, Wireless N.

I usually go through my ritual of denial-acceptance-preorder-purchase-guilt whenever Apple releases a new iThingToBuy, but there’s none of that here. I’m going to get one, it’s going to replace both my phone and my point-and-shoot camera, and I’m going to get a lot of use out of it. It would’ve been a completely stress- and guilt-free first world purchasing experience, but then they had to trot out the video. And that just makes me understand why so many people roll their eyes at the sight of an Apple logo and accuse people who like their products of being “cultish.”

I said “just about every thing,” because it’s still missing compact flash storage, and it’s still tied to AT&T. I understand why they don’t do the compact flash — so the price difference between the 16GB and 32GB models will go to Apple instead of SanDisk.

But I’d sort of hoped that after years of profiting from flash memory markup on the iPhones and iPods, Apple had collected enough money to buy its way out of AT&T exclusivity. Like just about everyone else with an iPhone in San Francisco, I’d love to drop AT&T, and their reneging on the unlimited data plans just makes me want to even more. But Apple may have saved them once again, by putting out a phone that’s appealing enough to make up for being lousy as an actual phone.

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Friday June 4 2010 Personal

Something Different

Turn and face the strange

One of the problems with having a blog (apart from being pegged as a narcissist who’s easily swayed by internet trends) is that I’ve gotten completely dependent on it. I genuinely need this thing in order to remember when stuff happened. Pretty much everything that occurred between 1971 and last week is a big jumble of barely-connected memories that I’m assuming were spaced out fairly evenly, but as far as I’m concerned might just as well have all happened in 2002.

And because my journal is splayed out on the internet, it makes it seem like everything is an announcement, even when it’s really not. More of a “reminder” or a “notation” or maybe a “fun fact” for the world’s most boring “what happened on this date?” calendar. Today’s entry: my last day at Telltale Games.

Not my last day ever working with those guys, I’m hoping, just my last day as a regular full-timer. I’m extremely proud of the games we made while I was there, and the teams continue to exceed my expectations. And I think Telltale is regularly doing stuff that games desperately need to have — storytelling moments, and concentrated chunks of originality and imagination (and just plain weirdness) — and doing them at a level than no other studio is matching. Even those with multi-million dollar budgets.

It’s absolutely no exaggeration to say that I’ve wanted to work on a Sam & Max game since I was a sophomore in college. First from reading the comics in the back of The Adventurer that came with my Star Wars games, then playing Hit the Road and being amazed that a game like that could even exist. (It always felt kind of like sacrilege to say so, especially when I was working on Monkey 3, but I was always a bigger fan of Sam & Max than anything from Monkey Island or the other LucasArts games). I don’t know if I wanted to work on thirteen Sam & Max games, but maybe that was just a case of getting enough chances to get it right. So thanks to Dave Grossman and Kevin Bruner at Telltale for giving me the chance to work on a Sam & Max game that was actually released. (And to Brendan Ferguson for being an excellent puzzle designer and a pretty tireless lead).

And huge thanks to Steve Purcell for letting me spend so much time messing around with his characters and trusting us enough not to ruin them. Getting to do season three brainstorming with Dave, Mike Stemmle, and Steve was one of the best things that I’ve gotten to do in my career so far. (And that’s saying a good bit, considering how lucky I’ve been at stumbling into great jobs).

But it’s been pretty clear for a while that I wasn’t going to be content unless I could get out and try to do my own thing. A while ago I wrote a bunch of over-long posts about storytelling in videogames, and the more I wrote, the more I came to the obvious conclusion: the people who are really making a statement about videogames aren’t making statements; they’re making games. I need to start trying out ideas and attempting to make something more experimental than even a smaller studio like Telltale could practically take on. Maybe nothing will come of it — it’s entirely possible that I’m ridiculously over-estimating my own abilities — but with all the tools and support for independent games right now, there’s no better time to try it and see.

Plus, I’ve never been one of those people who thrive on an accelerated schedule; I’m more the type of person who ruminates and meanders. Moseys, even. There’s an episode of Star Trek called “Wink of an Eye” about a race of aliens who’d become “hyper-accelerated” so that no one else could see or hear them. I’ve felt like that quite a bit over the past few years — especially driving over the Golden Gate in the morning and seeing all the sight-seers stopping to check out the bay, and finding myself wondering “Where do these people find the time?” It seems like a good time to slow things down a little so I can get productive again.

And in case anybody’s wondering about the rest of season three of Sam & Max, which is still in progress: don’t worry. I think the season has been some of the company’s finest work so far, and what I’ve seen of the rest of the episodes carries on at that level. My work on the final episode is pretty much done, and it couldn’t be in better hands to wrap everything up. I think people are going to be impressed, disgusted, and horrified.

I hope the people who wandered on here as a result of my work with Telltale will keep stopping by, and will check out whatever game I happen to come up with, assuming this whole scheme works. (And if you know of any game contracting gigs to help pay the bills, let me know).

But for now, I’m planning to get reacquainted with being bored; it feels like it’s been a long time since I have been. Enough time with that, and I’ll be even more motivated to get off my ass and try something different.

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Friday June 4 2010 Personal

Our Bastard Tongue

We don’t have a lot of snow where I live, so we’ve got hundreds of words for something else. Warning: contains profanity.

Last night I caught myself calling a cartoon character a douchebag, and it suddenly occurred to me I could be over-using the word. I’ve been using it an awful lot lately, and I don’t remember even hearing it before a few years ago. It got me a little worried I was slipping into another Internet meme: I might as well be one of those faux hipsters shouting “the cake is a lie” and “I like me some…”

But then I realized, “Oh hell to the no, this is just how I roll.” Douchebag is just a great word. It perfectly describes a certain type of person, and none of the other options quite come close:

Asshole is just too broad, and it doesn’t have the same sense of permanence. The guy who’s been making racist comments non-stop for the past ten years is an asshole, but so’s the guy who just cut me off in traffic.

Prick is too soft; a prick is just a minor irritant, not the prolongued obnoxiousness of a bonafide douche.

Asswipe and its variant, Shitstain, convey the same sense of uselessness as douchebag, but without the same sense of oblivious arrogance.

Dipshit and its TV-friendly Dukes of Hazzard-era version dipstick only cover the stupidity, but again, not the arrogance.

Assclown is pretty great, but it’s from Office Space. It’s always going to be from Office Space.

Asshat captures the incompetence, but none of the smarminess of a genuine douchebag.

Jack-off and the pathetically underpowered jag-off are just kind of vulgar and stupid. And even if they weren’t, they kind of capture the self-absorption of the true douchebag, but none of his unctiousness.

Twat is awfully close, but it’s a lot more vulgar, right on the edge of what’s too vulgar for me to be using in casual conversation. I don’t like typing it, much less making it bold and italic.

And all the fuck- variations — -wit, -wad, -head, -brain, -ing jackass — might as well just be less PG-13-friendly versions of asshole.

Clearly, douchebag is an immensely powerful and unique word. How else to describe Jeremy Piven and that guy from The Mentalist? It’s a word whose time has come.

Which got me wondering: what prompted the douchebag explosion? I don’t remember using it at all before 2006, and since I’m usually late to catch on, that means it must’ve entered wide usage around 2000. Office Space came out in 1999, with Gary Cole’s pivotal role of Nordberg providing the personification of the modern douchebag. (I don’t mean to diminish young Robert Downey Jr.’s pioneering work in douchebaggery in the 80s, or the great work that Dennis Miller has done in the field consistently over the past 25 years, but it hadn’t yet become a phenomenon).

But surely douchebags existed before then. OR DID THEY?!

There are various studies done by actual, professional linguists on various isolated communities that suggest a correlation between a society’s understanding of certain concepts and whether that society has a word for that concept. This goes way deeper than that “1000 words for snow” business: this is freaky reality-bending stuff.

For instance: one society didn’t use specific numbers for counting, but more general terms like “none,” “a few,” “more than a few,” or “a lot.” When shown two different amounts of something — both within the “a few” cut-off — they simply didn’t recognize a distinction between the two amounts.

Another study took people who didn’t have separate words for different shades of a color — not just guys, who either can’t or refuse to acknowledge the distinction between “salmon” and “pink,” but more like societies who didn’t have a word for “purple.” As I understand it, even in tests where language was removed, the people couldn’t distinguish colors they didn’t have a word for.

So there’s the question: has there always been a constant supply of douchebags, and we’ve just gotten better at identifying and describing them? Or are we actually creating douchebags, summoning them from the ether like Bloody Mary or Beetlejuice? Maybe some kind of combination, where we’ve so effectively described the douchebag that the guys (not being sexist, just accurate: they’re always guys) who were formerly just vaguely described as “pretentious twits” or “smarmy pricks” or “Christian Bale” now had something concrete to aspire to.

So I guess what I’m saying is: words have power. And I like making fun of people who never really did me any harm.

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Thursday June 3 2010 Lost

Have You Tried Unplugging It and Plugging It Back In Again?

Hey, does anybody remember that TV show Lost?

Sawyer and Juliet at the vending machines
Pictures from ABC.com’s Lost site

Last Sunday night, ABC aired four and a half hours of commercials, with intermittent breaks for the final episode of Lost and a featurette with interviews with the cast and show runners. In the interview with Evangeline Lilly, she said something like “Kate’s strengths were her weaknesses.” Or maybe it was vice-versa. It was a long time ago, and all I really remember were the Target ads.

Whatever the case, that’s a pretty good summation of the whole series: what made Lost so great — and I still say it’s one of the top 5 best TV series ever made, even accounting for the tail end of the plane — is that it seemed to have an infinite supply of potential energy. They were calling up references left and right, from fringe science to pop culture to videogames, constantly tossing big new ideas into the mix. Hardly anything was out of bounds. You just don’t see that kind of fearlessness in network TV, especially not in a series that was so high-profile for a big network.

But then, you can’t really run for six years off of potential energy. (Even with the limitless magical properties of electromagnetism). People kept abandoning the show in frustration once they realized that the entire series was going to be all build-up but no pay-off — it even threatened to throw me off a few times, and I have an extraordinarily high patience for being blue-balled. By the last season, the show runners basically had to come out and admit that they weren’t going to answer every question raised, and a ton of them didn’t even get addressed.

But they said it would be “satisfying,” and I think it was, for the most part. They came up with a way to deliver a mediocre but acceptable “real” ending for the series, and then also a “let’s just throw whatever we can think of together for 18 episodes, and try to make it seem meaningful” ending. I can totally understand how people who were expecting some kind of big pay-off would be pissed; I didn’t mind as much, because I’ve always been more interested in the build-up.

Or to put it more poetically: Lost at its peak was a character from The Flintstones, forever trapped in pre-run, its legs an indistinct blur, the bongos forever playing their mad rhythm, a too-fleeting moment of beauty trapped in time before vanishing in a dash leading towards an uncertain and ultimately unsatisfying destination, like The Gruesomes’ house next door or a Stony Curtis autograph signing.

And for anybody who’s still disappointed that the show didn’t provide more answers, just do a Google search on “The Valenzetti Equation” and “The Lost Experience”. That is what happens when you try to explain too much about Lost. This kind of thing can never end well. So I guess it’s good that they left the obsessive fans to their own alternate-reality game and wikis, and kept the series proper kind of vague.

I do have plenty o’gripes, though.
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