I Don’t

Ha! Boom! Suck on that witty post title, “Lost!”

Looks like the show has finally hit me with the one-two punch: a mediocre episode followed by a long break to completely ween me of any sense of involvement in the series. It’s their own fault; they’ve been hyping this thing since even before the season started, saying that we were going to discover all kinds of stuff and it was going to change our perception of the series forever.

It didn’t do either. It set up a cliffhanger that has enough maybe enough weight to it to ratchet up the tension for about a week. Not two months. And they didn’t answer anything. Unless you count “which guy will Kate choose?” but really, who the hell cares? It’s an ensemble cast with smoke monsters and polar bears and electromagnetic machines and mysterious codes; don’t we have more significant things to think about?

I’m still going to be watching come February; I’d be lying to say I won’t. But this was just a huge triple-A Anti-Climax.

Nightmare on I-5

Sitting in a hotel overlooking the Hollywood Hills writing a blog entry while watching “Dancing With the Stars.” It doesn’t get any better than this.

Ever. Since I’ve apparently been condemned to Hell. I guess what the preachers kept saying about self-abuse being a carnal sin was true.

There’s an orc-like woman who lurks in the rental car office at the Burbank airport. For all I know, she’s a charming woman when not in between me and a set of car keys, but I haven’t seen any evidence of it. She’s not openly hostile, and she doesn’t hit or throw things, but still she manages to be just thoroughly unpleasant to be around. She just makes everything that much more difficult, and she seems to cherish the opportunity to do so.

In reality, it only ends up taking a few minutes to deal with her and be on my way, but it’s like the prolonged hyper-time of a car crash. By the end of it, I just take whatever car she’s giving out — minivan, Pontiac Vibe, pogo stick, whatever — just to get away and get “Ramble On” out of my head. (In particular: “then Gollum and the evil one came up and swept away with her…”)

The thing about Burbank is that it’s just awful. It’s mile after mile of relentless suburb. As you fly in, you’re blinded by the glint from all the identical swimming pools in the back of every identical house, crammed in among all the identical strip malls.

As you walk around, if you’re in the right light and you look closely enough at yourself, you can see wispy tendrils of dull gray smoke escaping from your every exposed orifice. It’s not cigarette smoke, and it’s not smog. It’s the soul being slowly squeezed out of your body, leaving nothing more than a dessicated Ann Coulteresque husk.

The thing about frequent flying into Burbank is that it turns awful into a routine. Burbank is oppressively mundane, but there’s always the chance you turn a corner and see the WB studios or the Hollywood Bowl or something else you recognize from years of excessive TV watching. So it was the exotic kind of mundane. At this point, though, it’s all just familiar. There’s not even the lesser thrill of knowing that I could get lost at any second, since without thinking, I still manage to get where I’m going through sheer muscle memory. Maybe it’s Purgatory, not hell.

Hey, speaking of excessive TV-watching, lost, and purgatory, guess what’s on! Gotta go.

Democracy Inaction

See also: fruits, nutsToday I exercised the right of every American citizen to have an uninformed voice in the course of action of our government.

I’m always left feeling guilty and ignorant every voting period, because of my policy of spending 30 minutes reading the for & against arguments about the propositions, then going to the poll and voting straight Democrat. I’ve done more research into buying mouthwash than I usually do for voting. (And yeah, I do use mouthwash. Shut the hell up.) And at the moment, I’m more up to speed with the politics of Damalsca and the Archadean Empire than of the state I live in. In my defense, water supply improvement bonds and Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Hummer aren’t 1% as cool as nethicite deposits and big-ass airships.

My main goals were to vote against Leland Yee and to vote No on Proposition 86. Turns out Yee wasn’t on my ballot, so his anti-videogame political grandstanding will have to continue unchecked until I move to a different district. And it’s no surprise that I voted against 86 (it’s the one that would introduce an additional $2.60 tax on each pack of cigarettes sold in CA) — I wanted to ask if they had a blacker pen so I could vote more against it — but it may be surprising that I’m against it for more than just the obvious altruistic reasons. It offends me as exactly the kind of intrusive, moralizing legislation that turns people to the dark side of Republicanism or even worse, libertarianism. I want to find the people who came up with the proposition and just breathe on them.

And when you vote in San Francisco, you’re constantly reminded that you’re voting in San Francisco. There’s the good way — the ballot’s in three languages and the names you’re voting for are of the widest multicultural demographic you’re going to see outside of Sesame Street. And then the bad way — last year, the Stupid City Proposition was something along the lines of “Should it be the policy of the city of San Francisco to call for an end to the Iraq War?” This year, it’s “Should it be City policy to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney?”

Which is one of those can’t-win questions like “How long have you been beating your wife?” It’s all in the wording. Should Bush & Cheney be impeached? Boy howdy. If the politics of Washington are such that getting blown by an intern is grounds for impeachment, then manipulating a terrorist attack and deceiving your constituency about it are most definitely grounds. But should it be City policy to call for the impeachment? No. It should be City policy to figure out why the water coming from my tap has the color and consistency of Goldschlager, or why it takes an hour and a half or $20 to get from any one part of the city to any other, or why the city has almost as many homeless people as it does iPods. So how are you supposed to distill all that down to “yes” or “no?”

Live with Regis & Vaan

Character design by Yoshitaka Amano and Mark FoleyFinal Fantasy XII is a great game. It took me about eight hours to come to that conclusion, because I didn’t like it much at first, and it takes a long time to get going.

I wasn’t jumping up and down to get into another long RPG, but I ran into my friend Frank on the flight down to Burbank, and he recommended it. I had some time to kill before my flight left, so I went by and picked up a copy. And sitting inside with a videogame seemed to be the best way to guard myself against party-goers and trick-or-treaters on Halloween night.

There’s a lot going against it to start. It’s got the beautiful but interminable cut-scenes that are a Final Fantasy standard by this point, and you begin with just about the driest exposition possible of countries at war. After at least an hour of cut-scenes and training, you’re given your main character, Kelly Ripa (pictured). For some reason, they’ve given her a male voice. The battle system is different, and most of the familiar elements like scene transitions and end-battle victory music are missing, so you can’t get nostalgic. And the biggest insult of all: you start out fighting rats.

Gradually they trickle out additional characters, and familiar things like crystals and the power of the earth and giant dark conspiracies with androgynous leaders and it starts to feel like a Final Fantasy game is about to happen. But with it they introduce the new “gambit” battle system, which means they’ve finally removed that last pesky bit of interactivity from FFX and have finally released a game that can play itself.

But gradually, over the next few hours, it all starts to pull together. When it finally coalesces into sky pirates on hover bikes being shot at by giant airships during a daring escape from a palace culminating in a boss fight against a giant horse made of flame and you win just at the last minute and you finally see the camera pan across your party and get the familiar victory music, that’s when you sit back and think, “Okay, this is pretty bad-ass.”

It’s a really impressive production. Even more than the usual standard for the series; these things take years to produce and have budgets on the scale of small countries. But usually the result is visually stunning but overwhelmingly Japanese — technically unparalleled but completely foreign and indecipherable, with hundreds of neat things that get drowned in all the visual overload. This one, once you get past the overly complicated political intrigue, is an accessible and compelling story.

There’s a definite Star Wars influence. Other games in the series have made reference to the movies, but this is more direct, what with its story about a sky pirate and an orphan going onto a giant ship to rescue a princess who’s leader of a rebellion against an evil empire. But even though it’s the most blatant, it’s so well told — the art is phenomenal, the world-building is perfectly done, the voice performances are solid, and the characters are genuinely interesting — that it never feels like a rip-off. And the familiar Final Fantasy elements, when they appear, are so well-done that they don’t get overwhelmed by all the other stuff going on (the bombs just look cool).

What surprised and impressed me most is that “gambit” system, where you don’t control all of your characters directly but instead set up their AI to perform actions during combat. It was pretty ballsy of them to include it, because it sounds like a horrible idea; it takes away the last bit of control from the player and plays itself. In practice, though, it’s just what these games need. There’s nothing compelling about choosing “Attack” over and over again from a menu. The only interesting part of most console RPG combat is when you could figure out a great tactical combination and pull it off.

The system in FF XII automates all the tedium while still giving you the level of control that’s interesting. And even more surprising is that both the boss fights and all the easy level-grinding fights up to that point are made more exciting as a result. The only thing that would’ve made the gambits system better is if they’d included pre-generated versions for different character classes, like healers and black mages.

Overall, I get the feeling that this is finally the successor to Final Fantasy Tactics (which, I remind everybody, is the best videogame ever made). Even though it uses a different battle system, and it’s set in the same world only in name, it feels even more like the original game than FF Tactics Advance did. It borrows the best elements from Advance (the hunt side-quests, the new character races, the judges), ditches the stuff that sucked (the cards and rule system, the lack of focus, the cheesy child-sucked-from-the-real-world storyline), and keeps the best from the original (the general setting and European feel, the epic scope, the variety of character creation, and the odd-ball combinations like Lancer-ninjas and Calculator-green-mages).

And of course, the writing and translation are the best yet for the series, and there’s a level of polish in everything from the transportation system to the bestiary (which is, for the first time ever in one of these games, interesting on its own). I do wish there were more variety in the main characters — so far I miss the black mages, and the weird specialized characters like moogles and Red XIII, but you can’t have everything.

So far, I’m loving it. Now I just need five or six extra hours each day to get everything done and have time to play a videogame.

Subtropical Homesick Blues

Bob Dylan via YouTubeOh boy! My blog’s first post-by-request. Granted, it’s about “Lost,” so I would’ve ended up talking about it anyway, but still.

It looks like the “Lost” backlash is in full effect on the internets, to the point that even the complaints have gotten stale. For my part, just over the last four or five weeks I’ve gone from being excited enough to stage an ill-fated “Lost”-watching party at my apartment, to being disappointed, to even forgetting that it was on last night until I was reminded. Still, I think the episodes this season have steadily been getting better.

I’m not the gushing fanboy that I used to be, but I kept thinking last night that there was some really cool stuff going on, stuff that reminded me of a show I used to like an awful lot. I didn’t really care about the big developments last night, and/or I saw them coming from a mile away even without the internet spoilers, but I still thought it was a very well-done episode.

The episode could just as well have been called “The Cost of Success,” because at this point, the show is clearly a victim of its own hype. The production quality and the performances haven’t gone down, and the series still has one of the highest cool-stuff-per-episode ratios on TV, but they’re just not delivering on everything they promised, and it’s wearing down viewers’ patience. I kept being reminded of the series “Heroes.” It’s really not a good show. It’s got enormous plot holes, terrible terrible dialogue, mediocre performances, and is full to bursting with tired cliches, stereotypes, and gimmicks. “Lost” is better in just about every conceivable way — so how come I’m more interested in what’s going on with the former than I am with the latter?

Now, the “Lost” guys have painted themselves into a corner, and they’ve got an obscene amount riding on the next episode. It’s going to be the last for a long while, so they stand to lose a lot of viewers. As if that weren’t enough, they’ve been hyping it even since before the season started, saying that it’s going to be the most stunning thing we’ve ever seen on television. If it doesn’t deliver on a lot of the mysteries left dangling since the pilot episode, then there are going to be a lot of pissed off viewers, and those of us who are still watching the show are going to have to hear about it incessantly for the next four months.

I still have faith they can pull off something good, even though there’s no way it’s going to be everything people want from it. I thought last week’s episode was pretty cool if forgettable, and last night’s showed they can still hand out the reveals when they need to. But for that I need spoilers, so don’t read the rest of this post if you haven’t seen the last two episodes.
Continue reading “Subtropical Homesick Blues”

Lack of variation on a theme

Before I give anybody the wrong impression: I still like theme parks. In general. I can see myself going to them, and enjoying them.

But sometimes on a Monday night, you just want to go out for dinner. Without walking through clouds of fog and past giant globes and guys doing the robot to an 80’s funk cover of REM’s “Superman” and giant signs of the Hulk and King Kong to get theme park food. It takes the edge off the magic.

I suspect that too much exposure to theme park environments gives you a warped sense of reality. Even moreso than normal.

Is LA always like this, or do I just have a seriously skewed impression of it on account of the theme restaurants and roller coasters?

More fun with dream analysis

from the Wikipedia entry on Cheetos, useful for its scintillating 'in recipes' sectionThe neighbors’ Halloween party last night had an extended jam session on the bongos that lasted from about midnight to 2 or 3 AM. (The time change and my intense desire to go to sleep made it difficult to gauge). Once it was all over and replaced with the sounds of people in their early twenties right outside my window shouting about how drunk they were and how they had to get a cab, I was finally able to get to sleep and have some of the weirdest dreams.

The best part about my dreams is that they’re just weird enough to be marginally entertaining, and so obvious it’s easy to figure out what they’re telling me. Here are two of last night’s:

I have to do a project pitch of some sort for a company in China, but I don’t have any ideas. I realize I’ve been putting it off for too long and it’s time I have to turn in something. I spend a couple of days writing whatever comes to mind, then turn it in. The next day, the Emperor of China calls me into his palace and starts chewing me out. He says my ideas are totally lame and half-assed, and then, “With all your going-on about how great you are, I expected something really spectacular. But this is sub-standard work, mediocre at best.”

I stand there for a minute, thinking it’s not appropriate to argue with the Emperor of China, then finally speak up. I say that I never go on about how great I am, and he isn’t being fair. He says, “whatever,” and sends me away.

Then I’m at a mall, with a friend of mine from high school and another woman who I can’t picture or identify, but I know I have a huge crush on her. I split off from them to go to a Johnny Rockets-style restaurant in the mall, except it’s owned by Frito-Lay and all the dishes are Cheetos-themed. While I’m standing in line at a counter to place my order, I notice they have this weird lighting effect on everyone in line. It affects just your skin — not your hair or clothing — and makes it look like you’re made of Cheetos. I keep passing my hand in and out of the light beam, staring at other customers’ faces, and wondering how they did it.

I turn around and see that my friend and the other woman are standing behind me. My friend is really interested in the effect, but the other woman (who I still can’t see or identify) just mutters that it’s lame. She says she can understand why the Emperor of China thought it was a bad idea.

Incidentally, if you like reading other people’s dreams, the site Slow Wave by artist Jesse Reklaw has comic strips based on reader-submitted dreams.

The Supremely Satisfying Tittybong

I realize you’re supposed to finish a book before you write a book report on it, but 1) I’m really enjoying this one, and 2) I’m bored and want to virtual-talk to somebody, and c) who knows, I could die tomorrow, and everyone would be at the wake lamenting, “If only there’d been more time. Now we’ll never get the chance to ask Chuck if he enjoyed In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson.” (In case I drop dead while blogging: the answer is yes, I’m enjoying it a lot).

When I was reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, I said that I was really impressed with Bryson’s writing but was frustrated with how he handled the material. While a historian and magazine columnist writing about science didn’t work well for me, a humorist writing travel memoirs works great.

For starters, it’s about Australia. Who doesn’t love Australia? Satanists, that’s who. And possibly New Zealanders, which is just about the same thing. The impression you get from In a Sunburned Country is that the country has the most bizarre and inhospitable environment on the planet, with the friendliest people in the world trying to counter-balance that.

The book is also funny as hell. I was sold as soon as I read the passage where Bryson describes himself falling asleep in someone’s car:

Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside — tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air — decides to leak out. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling.

Reading that was the first time I’ve laughed out loud at a book since I first found Roy Blount Jr.’s stuff. And he’s consistent; the book is filled with genuinely funny passages; even when he goes for the corny or predictable joke, it’s hilarious.

The best surprise of the book for me is that it’s reminded me to drop the preconceived ideas I have about people. Not Australians, in particular — the country as described in the book matches pretty well with how I’ve always imagined it — but people in general. I was pretty dismissive of Bill Bryson’s books, figuring anything that popular can’t possibly be good. I assumed they were light, and easy to read (both of which are true, it turns out), and full of Country Home Companion-style heartwarming, wry humor. I imagined the target audience, like Bryson himself, were suburban mid-westerners in their 50s who had excess income and leisure time they wanted to fill with something mildly adventurous. In short, the CBS crowd.

That was dispelled the first couple of times he said “fuck” and described himself drawing a cartoon about salmon masturbating. It sounds as if all you have to do is cuss and make giggling jokes about sex to keep me entertained, and while that’s true, that’s not my point. In fact, my point is the opposite. We’ve gotten so used to the idea that comedy has to be “edgy” to be funny, that it’s become just as tired a stereotype as the opposite. I suspect that people are a lot less sheltered and tightly-wound than we imagine them to be, and when your whole schtick is built around shocking people, more often than not you’re just being boorish.

The real talent isn’t in taking it upon yourself to shock people out of their complacent Father Knows Best existence, it’s having the subtlety and nuance to recognize exactly when saying “fuck” makes the joke. I’m glad I was wrong to be so dismissive about Bryson; he’s a lot more talented than I’d assumed.

Taiko

It’s coming up on November again, which means another International Taiko Festival in Berkeley and another post where I tell people they should check it out. The tickets are more than a little pricey, but it’s usually a spectacular show. If anybody out there’s planning to go, let me know so’s I don’t have to sit there by myself.

Until then, I’ve got the first of my home movies from Tokyo up on the interweb. I’d been hoping to see a genuine taiko performance in Japan, but didn’t know where to look. On one of my days off, I was headed through Yoyogi Park on the way to the Meiji Shrine, followed the sound of far-off drumming, and wandered right into the middle of the Tokyo Sri Lanka Festival. There I caught the tail end of a taiko performance on stage. I don’t speak or read Japanese, so I don’t know the name of the group that was performing.

The videos suffer a little from the compression, and the fact that I can’t hold a camera steady on account of my condition, but the basic idea’s there. Here’s their final performance (about 7 minutes):

and its encore (about 2 and a half minutes):

Damn Wii Smokes Too Much

And it procrastinates.I’m way too old and disinterested to be getting into a “which console rocks hardest” battle, but I still read the videogame blogs and am bemused by the wackiness surrounding the Nintendo Wii.

Specifically, it has the power to turn people into hypocrites. First was this quote from one of Sony Australia’s managers saying that the Wii was “a bit pricey.” If you’re not laughing, it means that you haven’t been following the next gen console battles and aren’t aware that the Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost six hundred dollars in the US, and, according to the blog post, an even thousand of those funny Australian “dollars”. I heard something about the PS3’s price being reduced, where now in the US it will only cost you 500 bucks and a kidney.

Now, there’s this couple of quotes about the system. Somebody from San Rafael game developer Factor 5 called it the “GameCube 1.5” and criticized it for not distinguishing itself enough from the previous generation console. Factor 5, you may remember, is the company that built its reputation with Rogue Squadron VIII, also known as Shadows of the Empire 10.5.1, also known as What the Hell, Let’s Do the Death Star Trench Run and Hoth Battle One More Time Because God Knows You Lapped it Up Like Starving Dogs The First Dozen Times We Sold It To You.

It seems pretty clear to me that Nintendo is taking the same tack with the Wii that it did with the Nintendo DS. That is, release an incremental update to the hardware with a fundamental change in the way the games are played.

I was as big a nay-sayer as anybody else when the DS and Sony PSP were first released; the PSP clearly had better hardware (and it still does), a better screen, and was just a better machine overall. And I’ve seen how wrong I was about that. My PSP is now collecting dust, while I still pull out the DS at least once a month. Because Nintendo knows how to make games; there’s always at least one or two classic, must-have titles exclusive to the system. People remember how they played a game, not whether it had a higher resolution than its predecessor.

I’ve got a couple of friends who work for Sony, so I feel kind of bad for saying it, but: there’s no way in hell I’m getting a PS3 anytime soon. This isn’t like when I swore I’d never get an Xbox 360, either; that was just a case of my trying to talk myself out of buying it. My opinion of the PS3 started with my assumption that of course I’d have to buy one, then changed to lack of interest once I saw how capable the Xbox 360 is, then complete lack of interest once I found out how expensive the thing is going to be, and now active contempt.

The contempt comes from the arrogance Sony’s taken in releasing the thing, and their refusal to learn from past mistakes, like with the PSP. The PS3 just seems completely inessential. It’s just prettier versions of the exact same types of games that are already available on the 360 and the PS2. It’s got a DVD player in a format that no one needs yet, because there’s not enough content available for it. And charging that much for an inessential machine just strikes me as arrogant.

Combine that with all the other little criticisms: the batteries in the wireless controller can’t be replaced; the PS3 only works with its own remote and is incompatible with universal remotes because there’s no IR sensor; the online service sounds as if it’s going to be a big, decentralized mess similar to the one that failed on the PS2. I keep getting reminded of the Memory Stick and the UMD — the company’s shoving formats down our throats, trying to sell us what they want us to have, instead of what we actually want.

The whole videogame console business is seeming increasingly irrelevant to me, the less I become an employee and the more I become just a fan. The 360 does everything I want: it’s got a lot of fun games, it’s got an online system that’s so well-designed I still can’t believe it’s from Microsoft, and its DVD player is streamlined enough that I can finally get rid of my old standalone player. The Wii just looks like it’ll be a lot of fun. The PS3 has so little appeal to me that I figure I’m just not their target market. But with as much Sony crap as I’ve already bought and my tendency to spend all my discretionary income on overpriced gadgets, if I’m not the target market, then who the hell is?

Hellboy: Sword of Storms

Mr. BoyThe Cartoon Network is airing an animated Hellboy movie called “Hellboy: Sword of Storms” this Saturday at 6:30pm. I’d heard about the series at the local comic book convention last year, but it’d dropped off my radar until seeing it in a magazine this week.

Because it’s 2006, you can find an online production diary for the series in blog format. I haven’t read it yet, part of my stay-completely-unspoiled policy (which is cleverly disguised as having no free time at all).

My knee-jerk impression based on nothing other than the pictures on that blog: it looks like a more standard animation style than trying to do an exact duplicate of Mike Mignola’s style. That could be good or bad; The Amazing Screw-on Head was clearly made by people who were huge fans of the comic book and ended up being a slavish reproduction. It was neat to see my favorite comic book in motion on a major network, or even the Sci-Fi Channel, but at the same time it felt like there was nothing there I hadn’t already seen. And I haven’t seen or heard anything about the continuation of that series, so I’m assuming it didn’t make a huge impression.

Hellboy (apparently it’s intended to be a series) looks like it’s going for a more easily-animated style, and the synopsis of Sword of Storms sounds like it’s faithful to the comics while leaving plenty of room to be an ongoing action-heavy series. If you want to grab the anime market, start your story in Japan: good idea.

At this point, I’m expecting to have the same reaction as I did to the movie: good effort, nice to see the characters in motion, but on the whole basically forgettable. I’m open to being pleasantly surprised, though.