Considering how memorable the stories are, it’s obvious Stephen King and the fearmeisters responsible for The Car were tapping into something primal and universal with the idea of an evil car.

I just think that by having the car totally flip out and kill people, they missed out on a prime opportunity for dread and true horror. A murderous demon car jumping through windows to run over girlfriends? That’s just a quick, cheap cat-jumping-out-of-the-cupboard scare. How come nobody’s captured the true long-term dread and despair? The kind you only get from owning a no-less evil, but passive-aggressive car?

Like, for instance, a POS Jetta that’s so boring and practical it latches onto your soul like a deer tick, slowly sucking the life out of you over eight long years. And lets every convenience feature break in the first year or two, but refuses to die. And goes dead in the middle of 70mph freeway traffic. And then its alternator goes out and kills the battery, stranding you in a ditch on the side of 101 north where you have to get towed to pay over 800 bucks for a repair on a car you don’t even want anymore.

It’s not just soul-draining and money-draining, but it does weird things to you, psychologically: I’m so fed up with it now that I’m ready to take a Bullitt. I’ve never seen the movie, and I’ve never been into muscle cars, but damn that’s a nice-looking car.

At this point, I’m ready to just get a big, stupid, impractical and irresponsible car. So what if the planet’s running out of oil? Haven’t I offset my carbon footprint enough over the past eight years, driving a car that gets 28 mpg? What’s the harm in going back into debt to get an overpriced car that’s bad for the environment? Or a convertible that’s completely impractical for the San Francisco bay area?

From what I read on the internet and hear from my family’s Amazon wish lists, it’s close to Christmas time. It’s hard to get really in the spirit of the Most Wonderful Time of the Year when I never really know what time or even day it is.

See, the problem is that I get a cold every year around late November/mid-December, but this year’s different. My immune system’s apparently decided that it’s tired of getting kicked around every year, and this time, it’s going to fight back. The problem is that my immune system is, like its owner, a fairly meek and mild-mannered white guy who doesn’t exercise much. By resolving to take on the young punks who are encroaching on his neighborhood, he’s just proving himself to be pathetically impotent.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I’ve been headachey and unable to breathe through my nose for what feels like a month now. The antihistamines and decongestants I’ve been taking are labeled “non-drowsy,” which is technically accurate: I vacillate between hyper-awake, where it’s physically impossible to close my eyes and I feel like I can see through walls, Matrix-style; and comatose. Neither of those is, technically, “drowsy.”

I’ve been getting no longer than 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep at a stretch, and it happens at completely unpredictable times. Last night I got home from work at about 8:30 or so, sat down on the couch to sort through whatever mail the cat hadn’t already eaten, and pulled out the laptop to get some writing done. The next thing I knew, it was 2 AM and I was bolting out of bed, because I had to warn Molly Shannon that the guy she was about to give a big investment check to was actually a grifter, and he hadn’t actually developed a way to regrow limbs, but had an identical twin who’d lost an arm in a mountain-climbing accident. (Did I mention the weird fever dreams I keep having?)

So for the more lucid of you: I hope you’re all enjoying the oncoming Christmas-and-I-suppose-other-holidays-but-really-we-all-know-what’s-the-most-important-one season! To get in the spirit, here’s the first of three YouTube clips of David Sedaris reading his story, “Six to Eight Black Men:”

I spent most of actual Thanksgiving digesting and being thankful for the traditional stuff — the health of my family and friends, having pretty much exactly the job I’ve wanted for over a decade and as far as I’m aware I’m keeping it despite the wishes of several people on the internets, and the fact that the world hasn’t completely blown up yet.

The day after Thanksgiving is reserved for being thankful for gross consumer excess and frivolous entertainment. Considering I’m always bitching about stuff on here, including the stuff I like a lot since I can’t seem to stop criticizing, it should be a nice change of pace.

The iPhone
I think I’ve mentioned once or twice that I paid a bit more than was necessary for this thing. But once you get past that — especially now, since it’s been reduced to “really expensive” instead of “holy crap you’ve got to be kidding me” — it’s pretty neat.

Especially for plane flights. I’m not having to fly as much as I was last year (another thing for which I’m extremely thankful), but plane flights back to Georgia are still 4 hours long, and there’s only so much time even I can spend sitting staring at nothing. On the way out here, I watched three episodes of “Battlestar Galactica” on the thing, and the picture is startlingly clear, and the sound is even better than watching from home. (Trucks are constantly passing in front of my apartment, and the Edward James Olmos, he tends to mutter). The picture’s at least as good as the Sony PSP’s, if not better, and it just makes more sense to lug the phone around than a videogame player that has only two good games for it. Plus, even if the phone didn’t have a longer battery life than my laptop, it’s a lot easier to deal with than a computer and DVDs. The seats on economy flights are so cramped these days, I can’t even unfold the laptop all the way.

And three hours of video fit on the thing, even the 4GB version, in addition to over 700 songs. For the seven-hours-including-layover flight back to SF, I’m loading the phone up with Minority Report, which I’ve ever seen, plus more episodes of “Battlestar” and “Flight of the Conchords.”

The iPhone SDK
This is still tentative, but the optimistic part of me is already thankful for it. Since all the stuff the device does works this well, I’m looking forward to seeing the stuff the device can do. And Apple finally did what they should’ve done months ago, and announce that they are indeed planning on releasing an SDK for the phone.

It can all still go horribly awry, of course, when we learn that you’re kept from accessing any of the data or private storage of the phone, or you have to pay some obscene developer’s fee to develop for it, or you can only release stuff through the iTunes store or some nonsense. But there’s still a chance they’ll do things right. And it’s still a lot better than having them lie to us with nonsense about bringing down the cell network, or telling us how sweet it is to make web apps for a device with a slow internet connection.

30 Rock
Alec Baldwin’s performance a few weeks ago is probably the best 2 minutes of television this year. And even the MSNBC caption scrawls from the Edie Falco episode (”Mysterious Visitor from Future Wins Lottery Yet Again”) are funnier than 90% of the other stuff on television. Points go to their Lifetime movie parody, as well, if only for the title: “A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me a Better Face So I Could Change the World: The Celeste Cunningham Story”. Loss of “30 Rock” is about the only genuine reason people should be upset about the writers’ strike, and reason enough for the networks to capitulate.

Lobster Johnson
This is a new series based on a character that’s been in backup stories in the Hellboy and BPRD comics. And it takes all the potential that’s been bouncing around all the other comics and finally realizes it: a pulp adventure about supernatural evil that’s got some of the humor of The Amazing Screw-On Head, the epic feeling of Hellboy, and the Shadow-inspired team stuff of BPRD.

Plus, Jason Armstrong’s art is outstanding. He doesn’t slavishly mimic Mike Mignola’s style, but it still feels very much like a Hellboy comic that’s been put into a blender with the whole of comic book art history. Even better, he uses a style exactly when it’s needed — you’ll see characters with Mignola-style hands and Jack Kirby-inspired faces, plus I’m sure several other artists I can recognize but can’t pinpoint exactly what’s the influence. The end result is that you get the mood of a Hellboy comic, but you can actually follow what’s going on.

Teen Titans Volume 2
The DC Showcase series is a great idea that turns out to be disappointing in practice — for those of us who are more readers than collectors, it’s the chance to see all this comic book history that we missed, with all of the stories compiled in one affordable place. But as it turns out, the stories were never all that deep in the first place. And you’re not actually missing out on all that much by reading a synopsis online.

Except for Teen Titans, and that’s almost entirely due to Bob Haney. The man just knew how to make a shamelessly pandering, goofy comic book story and make it more awesome than it had any right to be. Volume 2 is lighter on his stuff than Volume 1 was, and as the comic moved into the late 60s and early 70s, it lost some of that goofy innocence of the early 60s. Still, I doubt you’re going to find anything that’s as just plain fun to read as these Teen Titans collections.

The Outstanding Videogame Glut of 2007
I can’t remember the last time so many great games were released in the same year. At least not since the Dreamcast’s golden year. Game of the Year for me is still Team Fortress 2 and The Orange Box in general, but Bioshock and Super Mario Galaxy were both outstanding enough that if they’d been the only good thing out this year, it would’ve been a banner year.

And I haven’t even gotten around to playing much of Final Fantasy Tactics or Jeanne d’Arc for the PSP, or The Phantom Hourglass for the DS, or the Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword expansion on the PC. Then there’s the list of games that I keep hearing are great, but for the first time I can remember, I’m not buying any more games until I actually have time to play them. I’m even still spending time with the latest Sims 2 expansion, and that game’s at the point in its life cycle where it’s supposed to suck.

The best aspect to it all is that the success of The Orange Box and Bioshock have invalidated all my long-winded worrying about the death of storytelling in games. Stories aren’t getting squeezed out of games, they’re just getting started.

For this vacation, the family’s been indulging me in a bunch of nostalgia trips. The other day was The Georgia Aquarium, which is tough to be nostalgic for seeing as how it only opened a few years ago, but it was my first time back in downtown Atlanta in a long time.

For the record: the Aquarium has a big, friendly staff, and you could tell a ton of money had been put into it, but the whole thing struck me as overly Disney. But in a bad way. I didn’t think it would be possible for me to say this about anything, but it was too theme-park-like. Right down to the 3D movie with CG fish and a turtle that sings like Aretha Franklin — it was all slick, but empty. Which I realize are two good qualities for fish in general, but I wanted something meatier. On the plus side, there’s a pretty cool mural by Shag outside the theater. And we skipped the new World of Coke museum entirely.

I’ve eaten at The Varsity twice, Chick-fil-a once (so far), drove by the restaurant we always called the blue hamburger (which used to be the most distinctive building in the Atlanta skyline, but is all but invisible now), and got caught in the traffic that’s now choking my hometown to death. All that’s left is The Big Chicken and Stone Mountain, which I guess I’ll have to re-visit on another trip.

Today we went up to Athens, my home for four years, which I haven’t seen in at least twelve. Like most fits of nostalgia, it was an eerie combination of being surprised at how much has changed, and simultaneously surprised at how much was exactly the same.

There’s now an enormous Starbucks across from the campus, of course, but I can’t claim to be that upset since I can’t remember what used to be there. My favorite concert venue, the Georgia Theatre, is still there; so is my favorite bar, the Globe, across the street; and my favorite record store, Wuxtry. Guthries, which had phenomenally good chicken fingers, has been replaced by some slick new place that we didn’t try. Also gone is Lowry’s, the most irresponsible thing possible for a college town: a bar that had nickel nights every Thursday, with stands giving out free cigarettes at every table. And you could smoke indoors back then! You just had to go outside to vomit. It was just like Pleasure Island without the turning into donkeys.

Today I made the exact same circuit I always made, from the campus to my favorite spots downtown, and it was all just familiar enough to be pleasant, but not enough to make me think I actually missed it. At the time I was there, I didn’t have any great love for the place, so it would be phoney for me to suddenly claim some great attachment to it. Still, it was nice to go back.

One semi-interesting story: back when I was at UGA, I was just getting into the LucasArts SCUMM games, and was a fan of the Sam & Max comics in the back of the Adventurer magazine that came with every game. I hadn’t realized they were a real comic until I started going to Bizarro Wuxtry, a great comic shop in downtown Athens. They had all kinds of Sam & Max stuff that turned out to be pretty rare: one of the first T-shirts, a couple of the comics, the color collection, and Steve Purcell’s Toybox comic.

Right after I moved out to California, I somehow lost that Toybox comic. I’d gotten Steve to sign it, and had safely packed it away in geek storage, but I must’ve loaned it to someone and never gotten it back. It’s one of my favorite comics, and going without it all these years has been like adjusting to a phantom limb. Today I went back to the same store, and right there, probably in the exact same place I’d bought it 14 years ago, was another copy of the comic book.

I snatched it up and was telling that same story to the guy who was working the counter, and he offered to track down some more Sam & Max-related stuff, but it turned out I already had most of it. He was nice enough to warn me not to pay the 300 or so bucks that people are charging for Surfin’ the Highway, because some company is about to reprint it. I was having warm feelings of fond memories and the realization that I’m doing exactly what I’ve wanted to be doing for a long time, and then he told me he hadn’t played the games because they’re Windows only.

What’s the cut-off date for post-Comic-Con recap blog posts, anyway? 12 hours? A day? Can I get an extension for having to spend a whole day driving back from San Diego, then the next day flying back to Georgia, then the next day sleeping? Plus another extension for having nothing particularly interesting to say except complaints?

The Hotel del Coronado
is pretty… pretty lousy! Boom! But really, it’s a neat-looking place, but the service is a drag. It took about 30 minutes to check in and be told that our reservation for two beds got us a room with one bed, so I got to spend several hundred dollars to sleep on an AeroBed. I was having a hard enough time convincing myself it was okay to spend way way out of my price range for the once-in-a-lifetime historic-hotel thing, but with the waits and prices they just kept making it worse.

On the plus side, though: I got to walk out on the beach every night and feel the tide dragging the sand out from under my feet, something I haven’t done since I was little and spent summer vacations at Myrtle Beach. I’d recommend visitors to San Diego check the place out, but not actually stay there, even if you can afford it. And if you’re going for Comic-Con, book your hotel well in advance! By the time we booked in April, the del Coronado was actually one of the cheapest places we could find!

Panels
The show was so incomprehensibly crowded, and the lines so long, and me so lazy, that I only managed to see one: the Futurama panel, with the entire cast and the executive producers. They did a dramatic reading of the free comic book given out at the panel, which was basically an extended joke about Planet Express’ cancellation by the “Box Network” and being saved by the “Carton Network.” (Get it?!?) But it was worth it for Maurice LaMarche’s reading everything as Calculon. Which then turned into an extended (and really funny) voice-off competition between LaMarche, Billy West, and John DiMaggio.

Celebrity Sightings
As I already mentioned, I passed by Craig McCracken and Nick Frost, and caught a glimpse of Kristen Bell signing photos at some booth. (She’s really tiny, and from what I could see, just as astoundingly beautiful in person as she is on the TV box).

Edited to mention: Rain got to go to a panel with the women of Battlestar Galactica, and Ron Moore, so she wins. Front row, too.

Failed Social Interactions With Artists
I saw Shawn McManus in the autograph area, and I intended to tell him I’ve been a big fan of his stuff since his Dr. Fate series with J.M. DeMatteis, one of my favorite-ever comic series. But I didn’t have anything for him to sign, and it’s kind of awkward just to go up and say “I’m a big fan.” (I know that from experience). I headed out to the ATM to get some cash to buy one of his prints, but by the time I got back he’d already closed up the booth.

I did bring my hardbound Art of Hellboy book to get signed by Mike Mignola, and then failed to do it. The only signing opportunity was a big, crowded event at the Dark Horse booth (at least when I passed by). Instead I got another of his small convention prints, like I did at the last Wonder Con. I predict I’ll eventually have enough of them to wallpaper my house, or at least roll around in.

Also in the failure category: my copy of DC: New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke remains unsigned. The DC booth was nuts. Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham of Fables were there for a signing, but of course I forgot to bring my copies of those books.

Failed Booth Appearances
I was tentatively scheduled to be at the Telltale booth to sign copies of the Sam & Max games (and I suppose Curse of Monkey Island, if anyone had brought their copy), but completely failed to make it. The scary part is that I can’t even remember why — I was either still dealing with traffic and parking, or finding something to eat, or wandering naked and confused through the exhibition hall. The entire weekend was a confused blur, so by about 5pm on Friday I was just passively asking people around me what to do next. I’ll try to make it up to my legions of fans at the next Wonder Con.

Successful Purchasing Experiences
I felt like kind of a douche for badgering Steve Purcell to sell me one of his few remaining Sam & Max prints, but dammit, I’ve wanted one for a long time. There’s one hanging in the Telltale offices that I’ve contemplated stealing ever since the first time I visited, a couple of years ago.

Apart from that, I got a copy of Flight Volume 4, an always-beautiful compilation of indie comic artists’ stories with a common theme. They had a great system set up where they’d pass the book along to all the artists at the booth and it would eventually work its way back. So even though I didn’t actually talk to any of the artists, I still got a personalized copy. I’m a fan of Vera Brosgol’s work on her website and the previous Flight volumes, so I was glad to see she’s got a story in this collection. And I didn’t realize until later that my friend Graham has a story in it, although he wasn’t there; I’ll have to see if he can sign it at APE or something.

And I got two copies of the Tek Jansen comic, signed by the artist. I just hadn’t realized he was the artist when I was paying for them, and was a little surprised and felt somewhat foolish when he took a pen and wrote his name on the cover of each. “What the heck are you do– oh.” Whoops.

Congratulations
to Steve Purcell for winning the Eisner award for Best Digital Comic, for the Sam & Max story on Telltale’s site. (You can see a recreation of the award ceremony from the Pope on Telltale’s blog).

It’s reassuring to see that the internet is still working, and you’ll see embittered complaints about a funny, hand-painted original comic presented for free, complete with anonymous criticisms and allegations of ignorance on the part of the judges. Call me biased (or, since this is the internet, I guess call me bias) but I say any comic with a panel about Sam’s hideous junk deserves to win every award the show offers.

Interstate 5
I’ve heard rumors off and on that they’re planning to build a bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I would welcome such a creation. If it proves unfeasible, I suggest they spend the money on an alternate technology: a Spy Hunter style button that I can press to take the minivan driving at 55 mph in front of me and send it careening into the median with a fiery explosion.

What in the hell is so hard to understand, people? You drive on the right, you pass on the left. If you’re not actively engaged in the pursuit of overtaking another vehicle, by which I mean you’ll pass it within the next 10 minutes, you get the hell over in the right lane. There’s no excuse to be driving 60 mph in the fast lane of a highway with a 70 mph speed limit. Has the world gone mad?

I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to another Comic Con. Good to see once, but I’m perfectly happy with the more awkward but also more earnest Wonder Con from now on. But if I do ever have to go south of San Jose again, I’m flying.

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.

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.