September 2011

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Addiction!

by Jaybird on September 30, 2011

In the vein of things in which I have partaken, and continue to partake, without being able to recommend them, allow me to mention Dragon Age Legends on Facebook.

It’s actually a real facebook RPG. Free to play (though “premium” content will cost you… but you already knew that).

There is tactical turn-based combat (you can win or lose a fight depending on the choices you make). There are multiple player classes. There are multiple skill trees. There are all kinds of loot. There are all kinds of maps. There is castle-building. There is even clan-to-clan fighting.

The problem is that most of it feels like pushing a button to get a pellet. Oh, in three minutes, I’ll be able to do *THIS*. In five minutes, I’ll be able to do *THAT*. If I get in two more fights I’ll have enough gold to buy a furnace that will increase the productivity of my potion room by one potion.

Pellet. Pellet. Pellet.

That said, there are worse things than pellets. Especially free.

The fighting is fun and you have to think about how you want the fight to play out. The castle building is a positive delight and you’ll find yourself re-arranging and sorting your rooms to maximize potion/bomb/health kit output.

And, after a few months, you’ll forget about it.

I haven’t yet, of course… but, man. I can’t wait until I do.

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Unbound!

by Jaybird on September 29, 2011

This week’s Free Thursday will take us to Good Old Games (dot com!) where we will boggle at the following two titles being available for the low low price of FREE!

Beneath A Steel Sky (designed and illustrated by Watchmen’s Dave Gibbons) is a point and click adventure game (yay 90′s!) that is pretty much one of the swan songs of the genre before the danged first person shooters took over. It didn’t get half the attention it deserved.

Ultima 4 is also available. Holy cow! Ultima IV!!! If I recall correctly, this is the first game that didn’t let you pick your character from a list but instead gave you a personality test. A single-elimination tournament of 8 Virtues going head to head with each other… the virtue that won out was the one that was the bedrock of your character. I want to say that Spirituality was Rangers, Justice was Druids, Humility was Shepherds… anyway, the point of the game was *NOT* to kill everything. It was actually to become a good person. There were quests galore, dungeons to crawl, monsters to slay… but there were also beggars to whom you gave gold and shrines you visited in order to pray and meditate. There was nothing like this when this came out. I don’t know how playable it would be today but, at the time, it was as immersive as, oh, Grand Theft Auto III. Except you were supposed to be good.

Hey, they’re free. What could possibly go wrong?

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Wednesday!

by Jaybird on September 28, 2011

After the concert, I’m going through all of my shoegaze stuff and thinking “these guys are probably really loud in concert too.”

So… what are you listening to?

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Signaling

by Patrick Cahalan on September 27, 2011

The recent post poll results were unexpected.  It says something about the participants that the nearly universal suggestion was Plan 9 From Outer Space.  At some point, I’ll get into this more deeply (shortest: you guys are disturbed; less short: disturbed is okay – I am too – but you’re still disturbed).  That’s not where I’m going today, however.  For reasons difficult to explain, it made me think of this article by Patton Oswalt, which encouraged me to write this post to try and worm that out of my noggin.  Apologies for the resulting nature of the beast.  I’m all over the place here.

The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly. In the ’80s, you couldn’t get up to speed on an entire genre in a weekend. You had to wait, month to month, for the issues of Watchmen to come out. We couldn’t BitTorrent the latest John Woo film or digitally download an entire decade’s worth of grunge or hip hop. Hell, there were a few weeks during the spring of 1991 when we couldn’t tell whether Nirvana or Tad would be the next band to break big. Imagine the terror!

But then reflect on the advantages. Waiting for the next issue, movie, or album gave you time to reread, rewatch, reabsorb whatever you loved, so you brought your own idiosyncratic love of that thing to your thought-palace. People who were obsessed with Star Trek or the Ender’s Game books were all obsessed with the same object, but its light shone differently on each person. Everyone had to create in their mind unanswered questions or what-ifs. What if Leia, not Luke, had become a Jedi? What happens after Rorschach’s journal is found at the end of Watchmen? What the hell was The Prisoner about?

…

Now, with everyone more or less otaku and everything immediately awesome (or, if not, just as immediately rebooted or recut as a hilarious YouTube or Funny or Die spoof), the old inner longing for more or better that made our present pop culture so amazing is dwindling.

I have some issues with Patton’s piece, but I do think he is onto something.  The signaling devices are out of tune.  One cannot determine from the presence of a “Star Wars” t-shirt if the guy you just bumped into at a neighborhood gathering is a “weak otaku” or not.

But this doesn’t mean that all signaling is gone, which is where he goes south.

It just means that the noise is a bit more pervasive, and one must tune one’s instruments a tad… and really, Star Wars wasn’t a great signal to begin with, was it?  Comments like this one illustrate that there are still mighty otaku out there, and that there are in fact ways to spot them without huge difficulty.

This tied into the Plan 9 bit above when I thought of this:

Signals You Like Bad Movies

  • Worst sign: “I like Police Academy 4“
  • Bad sign: “I like The Rocky Horror Picture Show“
  • Good sign: “I like Plan 9 From Outer Space!”
  • Better sign: “I like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!”
  • Best sign: “I like Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle Of Death!”

Plan 9 From Outer Space is indeed a bad movie.  It’s a really bad movie.  If you’re a fan of bad movies, you’ve probably seen it, and you’ve probably enjoyed it.  The problem, however, is that everyone knows it’s the quintessential bad science fiction movie.  So if your “bad movie otaku” is weak, you’ve probably still seen Plan 9 From Outer Space, and you’ll probably still say you like it.  On the other hand, if someone tells me, “I loved Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, because it’s terrible and it has Karen Waldron in it and I loved her in The New Adventures of Beans Baxter.  Plus, Shannon Tweed!  Adrienne Barbeau!  ADRIENNE MOFREAKIN’ BARBEAU!”… well, that tells me the “bad movie otaku” is freaking strong with this one.

Of course, I immediately became enamored of this idea, and I came up with a few others.

Signals You Like Comic Books

  • Worst sign: “I like the Spider Man movies”
  • Bad sign: “I like X-men”
  • Good sign: “I like the Golden Age version of The Green Lantern the best”
  • Better sign: “I liked Suicide Squad”
  • Best sign: “I own the entire run of Grimjack”

Signals You Like Science Fiction, video

  • Worst sign: “I liked Avatar“
  • Bad sign: “I like Star Wars“
  • Good sign: “I like Star Trek“
  • Better sign: “My favorite Star Trek episode is (any one not “The Trouble with Tribbles”)… but (enumerated list <10) are all contenders”
  • Best sign: “I love Space:1999“

Signals You Like Science Fiction, literature

  • Worst sign: “I like I Am Legend“
  • Bad sign: “I like Ender’s Game“
  • Good sign: “I like the Miles Vorkosigan books”
  • Better sign: “I like The Foundation“
  • Best sign: “I love Howard Waldrop”

It’s not necessarily that any of the things in question are bad things, or even bad exemplars of the class of thing you’re talking about.  It’s because the signaling value is less than one would like it to be, if one was using it as a signaling device.  Offer your own otaku signaling ratings in the comments, would you?

(edited to add) Apologies to Brother Jaybird for double-posting on Tuesday.  I probably should have saved this for Thursday, it likely would have benefited from some polishing, too.  Sometimes you have to get something out of your head.  (/edited)

(edited again) I inverted otaku to okatu at least 50% of the time in the post and in the comments.  Clearly, I am not a real Japanophile. (/edited)

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Distortion!

by Jaybird on September 27, 2011

So I went to my first concert in quite a while last night. It was to see the band “Low“.

It’s the type of music that I really enjoy… hazy, overproduced, distorted… yet mellow and relaxing at the same time. They opened with a huge dissonant wall of sound that slowly resolved itself into gorgeous chords.

You may remember Low from their hit “Sunflower” off of the album Things We Lost In the Fire from a few years back.

They were very, very loud.

The odd thing, however, was that since most of the music involved much more bass than treble (the lead guitarist’s hand never seemed to go below the third fret excepting solos), you didn’t really hear the loud as much as you felt it. To take a deep breath was to feel different parts of your core vibrate to the chords they were playing.

They have recently released a new album, C’mon, and they were touring in support of that.

Well, the songs were absolutely gorgeous. Fuzzy guitars, fuzzy vocals, fuzzy harmonies… it’s a little like wine. When you have just a bit, it’s pleasant enough. With a bit more, it makes you feel fuzzy as well. More than that… and sitting quietly becomes a wonderful, wonderful idea in its own right.

This is off of their new album. It doesn’t do justice to how good the song is live. (Trigger warning: self-harmful behavior)

So that’s my recommendation for you this week.

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Poll!

by Patrick Cahalan on September 26, 2011

I live on the block that is the Halloween block.

It’s like the block that is the Christmas Decorations Block, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s that one block in town that goes ape over a holiday and everyone dresses the house to the nines to one-up everybody else.

I don’t know that I can compete in year one with the established players, as they’ve been building their collection of decorations for years and they have themes and in many cases have capital investments behind the decorations they’re gonna put up between now and Halloween.

So I’m cheating. I have a decent AV setup and I’m going to throw up the hi def projector and the screen and the speakers and show a movie. About 60% of the walking crowd is little kids, so Alien or Elm Street or the like is out. I’m torn between the original Dracula, the original Frankenstein, or Forbidden Planet.

Forbidden Planet appeals because “50s SF flicks” is a workable theme for building up additional decorations, as well. Plus, well… Forbidden Planet.

Thoughts? Crowd-sourcing ideas early to get momentum building…

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Identification!

by Jaybird on September 26, 2011

(In the psychodynamic sense, not the “passport” sense of the term.)

One of the benefits of a retcon is that you can change history to make it foreshadow the present. It’s not just the past, anymore… it’s prologue. Instead of wandering from point to point to get to here, a good edit can result in a straightforward narrative of history.

DC Comics, from around Crisis On Infinite Earths ran with this and explained, more or less, that Superman was the Superhero that established the pattern of what it meant to be a Hero. Protect the innocent. Deliver the guilty to the proper authorities. Do not kill. Superman is the Gold Standard. (We will, of course, ignore the books from the early days that had him kill bad guys, and we won’t count the times that he killed xenomorphs, or Doomsday, or General Zod (that was John Byrne)).

In that particular version of history, it was Superman first and then other heroes started showing up. Green Lantern. Wonder Woman. Flash. Martian Manhunter. The pattern was set for all of the heroes… which brings me to the new 52.

It looks like in this new continuity, Superman may or may not be the first hero. At the very least, he’s much more the vigilante than the Big Blue Boy Scout… and this makes me wonder what the DC Universe is going to do to explore a world of heroes without someone exemplary set down the rules of The Game.

They’re probably going to avoid it for reasons laid out in Cynicism!… but I find myself hoping that the heroes will stumble for a while before discovering that they have to be heroes that stand for something.

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Sunday!

by Jaybird on September 25, 2011

So… What are you reading and/or watching?

Maribou asked me to pick up Ultimate X-Men Vol. 16: Cable for her yesterday and I picked up a handful of 52 titles while I was there… Justice League and Action Comics are both “year one” titles, I’ve found out. So I’m totally going to start getting those every month.

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Saturday!

by Jaybird on September 24, 2011

So… what are you playing?

Now that the last DLC for Fallout New Vegas is out, I’m going to start that game over from the beginning and go though it one last time. I don’t know about you, but I always find it depressing to play the “evil” option of RPGs. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. To get all of the endings last time, I had to finish my last game as someone in Caesar’s Legions… and that was frustrating.

It will be good to play through again. With Mr. House.

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Wine!

by Jaybird on September 24, 2011

There is a little place downtown called Rasta Pasta.

It’s what it says on the tin.

You walk in and there is reggae music playing, the lights are red or green or yellow, there are pictures of Bob Marley everywhere, and you’ve got a 50/50 shot of having a waitperson who happens to have a card from a dispensary.

It’s one of our favorite places to eat downtown. Check out that menu! (I recommend the spaghetti with garlic and herb sauce… elegant in its simplicity. Maribou likes the Natural Mystic.)

The house wine there is Big House Red. It’s yet another spicy/fruity dark and viscous wine that stays on your tongue and makes you glad you stopped in. Surprisingly, it fits in perfectly with the music, the food, and the general ambiance. On top of that, it’s only eight bucks. So even if you’re enjoying it somewhere else entirely (I hope you still have food and music, though!), you’ll feel all sorts of reggae inside.

It goes perfectly with pastas, sandwiches, nachos, and pizza. It’s a lovely little Friday night wine.

Check it out.

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