97 cm of Dutch courage
Well, despite my earlier feelings of competence, Star Wars: Jedi Academy has quickly turned into a morass of Sith v. Jedi combat, and I’m just not a skilled enough gamer to actually win battles through any sort of ability. It’s essentially a process of quicksaving at each Sith outpost and then screaming, collapsing, and quickloading repeatedly until I get a lucky torso hit. Because my computer has enough lag and because I can’t seem to master the combos, every lightsaber battle is less choreagraphed than it is accidental. None of which makes for inspiring or compelling gameplay.
So, I may need to put this back on the shelf until I can afford to acquire a faster computer, or a least a processing accelerator. The main argument for the former is te impending release of the LEGO Star Wars: Original Trilogy game, which will doubtless fail to run on my machine by the time that Aspyr gets around to re-engineering it for the Mac. And a new machine with the dual-boot Intel capability would allow me to not have to wait for Aspyr anyway.
However, while I may need to hang up my lightsaber, I will get to wield a sabre from long, long ago and far, far away: an 18th century Dutch rapier is currently shipping my way from the Netherlands (pictured on the right). While some parents might have thought that an updated computer would be a good practical gift for a recent Masters graduate, mine went for the gloriously useless antique sword option that I’d cavalierly added to my gift list in order to fill it out somewhat. As a deeply impractical person, myself, I am enamored both of the gift and the people who got it for me. Zombies beware! This is the kind of Dutch courage that I prefer: almost a meter of two hundred year old steel. That’ll get me through the long dark night of the soulless.
Gradumacated
Unsurprisingly, it’s particularly hard to find keychains, hats, et al. at the Simmons bookstore that read “Alumnus”.
While the commencement address was given by the eloquent and honest Eve Ensler, I was particularly interested to see what President Daniel Sargeant Cheever, Jr. was like before he retired and I wouldn’t have the chance. The Boston Globe had just written up a rather glowing profile of his tenure at Simmons and the transformations he had spearheaded, and it made me wish I’d been more involved in the community he’d helped reinvigorate.
Does Whatever A Spider Can
I should be strong, but the culture of self-actualization says otherwise. Be true to yourself, it says, be at peace with who you are. Old world thinking instead claims that through will power we shape our existence. Instead of making peace, we used to struggle. “All progress is made by unreasonable men,” quoth Bernard Shaw. That sort of thing. But, instead, I am soft and the product of my culture (see! that in and of itself is a self-actualizing statement), and find it difficult to rail against the dying of the… something. Pride, perhaps.
What is all this musing in aid of? Arachnophobia. I have found myself, as time passes, being increasingly okay with my squeamishness towards chitinous scrabbly things. I am no longer embarrassed about it. I don’t need to display a show of strength and fortitude, I don’t need to be macho. Instead I can shriek and cringe and shudder at the thought or presence of something with far too many legs and an alien physiology. And I can lash out in revulsion at their fear-inducing structure and squash the hell out of them with impunity, despite the fact that the collapse of their exoskeleton and the subsequent liquidation of their organs does little to make the revulsion go away.
However, this acceptance has also allowed the fears and feelings associated with coming into contact with such arthropods to magnify. By allowing them to occur, by not repressing them, they now hold full sway. Which becomes a problem when, as happened to me last week, one is in the middle of a long stretch of highway and suddenly notices a spider walking merrily across the inside on the windshield. Such a situation causes instant fear-based tension, revealing itself in symptoms that would look to any of my fellow highway travelers like a particularly rigid case of white-knuckled white line fever. Because, I needed to do three things simultaneously: 1) Not be overcome with a violent case of twitches and shudders, all of which would require me releasing my hands from the steering wheel, 2) finding an exit, quickly, and 3) following the movement of the spider so that when I finally pulled off the highway I could kill it with extreme prejudice. It’s difficult to focus on a small, dark creature on the inside surface of a transparent object you’re also supposed to be looking through, and so number two was difficult, but not nearly as difficult as number one, because the more I focused on the spider, the mode massive shudders kept coursing with pounding tides up my spinal column.
Once on the side of the road, I discovered that due to the sloped glass of the windshield, I had difficulty squashing the little bugger, and so tried to transport him from the car so that I could jump up on down on him once he was on the large, flat expanse on non-sloped pavement my car was pulled over next to. But in removing him from the car, there was a moment when I lost track of him. He was no longer on the windshield, and not longer on the object with which I was removing him from the car, which meant he was either safely outside or somewhere on the floor of the car, or someplace generally hidden away. I squished another passing spider that had nothing to do with the proceeding, simply out of frustrated retribution. But this has not prevented me from interpreting every stray brush of hair, fabric, or whatever inside my car as, “AAAAAHHH! AAAAHHH!! THE SPIDER”S BACK! AND IT’S ON ME!!!” My own little pathetic personal version of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In attempting to allay this syndrome, I was listening to Phil Jupitus’ excellent stand-up bit on spiders from his Quadrophobia album, but all his talk of spiders and wriggling legs and the like just made the onset of the Phantom Arachnid (Not Insect) Contact attacks more frequent and more vivid. I think it’s time to go back to steely resolve, and none of this twenty-first century “be true to your pansy instincts” nonsense.
Camera Lucidity
The picture to the left is that of the Sony Mavica camera. I’m in love with this camera the way I never have been with a digital camera. And why? Because it’s not especially good. It’s got little in the way of features, and the best pictures it takes are of a 0.8 megapixel resolution. And it’s the size of a late-nineties digital videocamera, the first ones that you’d see parents at weddings and graduations holding away from their bodies as they squinted at the tiny viewscreen. There was an odd zombified quality to their perambulation as they wandered about, holding the camera with stiff arms away from them and trying to frame whatever it was they were trying to capture without jiggling the whole device. One loses the fine motor control of stability when one is relying on that many muscle groups.
However, this camera takes pictures and saves them immediately to a floppy diskette. What a great idea! The school library at which I’m currently interning has two of the little buggers in their A/V closet, and my mind is blown with the possibilities! No more messing with cords or adapters or mini-USBs or flash cards… pop the disk into the computer and post the images on the web or paste them into your word processing document. Boom. Done. What a great thing to give middle schoolers who are writing a class newspaper. It may run about $150, but it doesn’t feel like a big deal because you can’t get great pictures from it! It’s so hard for me to take pictures because I’m precious about features and settings and composition and light and shutter speed and blah, blah, blah. But with a camera like this, a camera that saves images to something as cheap and as notoriously unreliable as a floppy, well, taking pictures with a camera like that is easy, because one can’t take it seriously.
My advisor loves visuals in the portfolio reports that come out of the practicum/intern process, so I dutifully took a couple of snaps of a lecture aid I created and a poster for National Drop Everything And Read Day that I whipped up. Bang, they were on the floppy disk and ready to be exported for presentation. I dropped the diskette in my pocket…
…and it wasn’t until three hours later when I got home that I remembered that I own a Mac, and I haven’t had a floppy disk drive since 1999. So while I’m still in love with the Sony Mavica, it’s doubtful that I’ll be picking one up any time soon.
Taking the ‘Art’ out of ‘Cathartic’
Driving home from work yesterday I was listening to All Things Considered, and I stumbled upon a story that was steering wheel-poundingly fearsome and hilarious simultaneously. A man named Hamilton Banks has, after years and years of being a lifelong opera fan, finally combined his love of music with his adoration of the principles of the Power of Positive Thinking as espoused by Norman Vincent Peale, to found an opera company where he will systematically edit all the great tragedies so that they have uplifting endings.
That’s right, at the end of Don Giovanni, the fear of Hell and its torments will so move Don Giovanni that he will be born again in the love of Christ and marry the girl. So as not to spoil the opera, new lyrics will be written to some of Mozart’s cheerier music featured in the earlier portions of the work, including the “Peasants’ Wedding Song”.
NPR contributor Alice Furlaud is very fair with Mr. Banks and doesn’t mock his enterprise. She lays it out documentary style, and does an admirable job of not emphasizing the point that anyone in his right mind would listen to such a proposal and call him a delusional fool. She does eventually quote Ms. Linda Cabot Black of the Boston Lyric Opera Company who voices quite clearly what most of the listening audience was hopefully thinking: “Oh, yes, Hamilton Banks did approach Boston Lyric Opera and offered us a fortune to change the endings. Of course we turned him down, thought it was a silly idea. …How on Earth would Puccini and Wagner and the other great composers, what would they think about changing the endings? It would be just ludicrous.”
Mr. Banks, on the other hand, is quite convinced of the purity of his exercise. He honestly cannot conceive of an audience’s desire for catharsis, leading him to say in one breath that he loves the operas of the great masters, and then in the next that maybe “if the wonderful anti-depressant drugs we have today had been available, they’d never have written those depressing endings and maybe they’d never written the whole opera.” Great! That’s what the power of positive thinking can do! Deprive the world of Great Art! Well done, Mr. Banks for showing us the way: we need to medicate all artists out of existence!
However, if one were less inclined to be outraged and want to use the Power of Positive Thinking to find something worthwhile in this ridiculous news story, it is a marvelous example of the classic syndrome of Life Imitating Satire. Some of you may recall the episode of Jon Lovitz’s The Critic where a TV executive uses digital editing to create new happy endings for films like Casablanca. That was done as a joke, as the sort of idea of which only the most boneheaded and inartistic individual could conceive. But now we know that such an individual isn’t just the fanciful, fictional comedic extreme of someone’s imagination! America strikes again and proves that not only can someone this outrageous be real, but he can also be incredibly successful! USA! USA! Providing the world with self-deluded, charismatic, ignorant bizarro-humans for over two hundred years!
Chickens by the Car, Bizarre
I’m not one to delight in other people’s misery. Not ordinary people anyway. CEOs of corporations, politicians… for these people who have thrust themselves into the capitalist limelight, I have nothing but schadenfreude, and I am so hot right now for Tom DeLay to go to prison. But decent, ordinary folk get a variety of sufferings thrust upon them, and I wish it otherwise. Chris MacLaren’s blog entry about a neighbor’s burning house reminded me vividly of driving through Saratoga on my way to 9 Derby Drive and passing a house on fire. It was beautiful. The flames were spilling out of the front door and pouring along the roof of the porch. There the air currents caught them and pulled them back into the second story window, creating a swooping column of fire that curved and roared and pulsed like the most dangerous crazy straw imaginable. But even as I was awestruck by the spectacle, I knew that this was someone’s everything that was being destroyed, and I couldn’t, in good conscience, rubberneck just for the breathtaking physics and colors.
The other day, the house that is diagonally across the street from my window had emptied its contents out onto the lawn. I don’t know if the property was foreclosed or condemned or the tenants evicted… I can but speculate, but it didn’t look like the occupants were simply moving, and so it’s likely that the circumstances were unhappy.
However, as a result of the evacuation of this property, there is now a pair of vagabond chickens wandering the yard. And because they are feeling the liberty of suddenly being free range, they often leave the yard and explore the adjacent street and parking lot and the yards of the neighboring houses. I have long held the philosophy that any movie that has a shot of chickens running amok in a dusty road is going to be awesome, or at least that moment will make me more predisposed to ignore other glaring flaws. In any case, the occasional view of chickens nonchalantly meandering through traffic has increased the joy I feel while idly gazing out of my tiny kitchen. And while this probably doesn’t improve the circumstances of the previous owners of these chickens any, it feels good take some irrational, cackling cheerfulness out of the results of their misfortune. That probably makes me a terrible person.
(I have subsequently communed with and photographed these chickens, and I was hoping to have the photos developed and up for this post, but the likelihood of me actually getting this film to the pharmacy or even to SnapFish with any due speed is heartily unlikely. Don’t “stay tuned” or anything, but I will edit this post to include visual documentation at some point. EDIT: Which has, clearly, been done.)
In Space, No One Can Hear Your Engine Cavitation
Went to go see the Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science yesterday. I’ve been in Star Wars mode of late, really enjoying my nostalgic connection with the films. I dug out my Star Wars Lego sets from a couple of years back and reassembled them, noticing again how well designed they were and how old school the design was. Much of Lego’s current output relies heavily on the large, structural pre-fab elements that remove any resonance from the traditional term “Lego brick”. They are vastly un-brick-like. Rumours persist that this is because Lego had to design new and different building elements once their copyright on the traditional nubby blocks expired, and so in order to prevent their kits from falling into commercial obsolescence they have engaged in a number of marketing and licensing deals, and have increasingly built kits using their non-rectangular “bricks”. Whether this is completely accurate, it is one of the seeming failings of the upcoming Batman line of Lego kits, which seem flimsy and chi-chi, without the solidity of the classic kits. Amusingly, to further justify the bitterness of the prequel-hatahs, the Star Wars original trilogy Lego kits are largely designed like the kits that would have been their contemporaries in the 1980s.
I had been to a Star Wars museum exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in 1998, and so I anticipated that this exhibit would be similarly enjoyable. However, except for the presence of an AT-ST, a jawa, an actual full-sized set-model of Luke’s Episode IV landspeeder, and some jedi outfits, there was little in this exhibit that I hadn’t seen before. Some artifacts and props were totally unfamiliar, and upon closer examination, I discovered that they were part of the world of design that underlay Episode III. How sad that I was so underwhelmed by the prequels that by the time it came to Revenge I wasn’t even paying attention to the world-building and prop and costume design that LucasArts has always done so well. Although, it must be said, the original trilogy was designed with the aim in mind that the used objects would have been well and truly used, that little would look clean or pristine. And the new films were designed at the apex of a civilization, with curves and opulence. And, frankly, I found it less interesting. The way in which an object wears and is distressed gives it a sense of history and tangibility. It makes it look less like a prop and more like a tool. And the little crater marks and dents on the Falcon and the landspeeder make them more interesting than any lovely Naboo creation.
One other thought on the exhibit: the gift shop had a number of t-shirts and hats and the like featuring the visage and color scheme of Darth Vader. Most of these were accompanied by various logos that spelled out “Vader” or “Sith” in gangland fonts reminiscent of tags and tattoos and tribal markings. And while this was relatively cool, I am totally bemused at the idea that The Empire, an ultimate expression of a monolithic Establishment, could be successfully sold as teen-friendly rebellious street-wear. S’all I’m sayin’.
And what has caused all of this fondness for the creative works of a man I had largely disavowed? Star Wars: Jedi Academy. I am now up to level three, and the difficulty level has progressed to the point where my ass is being handed to me by Sith on a regular basis. With the most recent upgrade to my powers, I had the option of sticking with one lightsaber and being able to wield it as strong levels, or to use two sabers simultaneously, or to use a Darth Maul-stylee dual-bladed weapon. Frankly, the hilt designs on the dual-saber were all terrible, but after fighting a bunch of Sith apprentices, I was keen on the idea of being able to see more than one color laser-blade while zooping about the maps. However, the fact that I can’t seem to defend myself with two blades, thus causing me to die shrieking every couple of minutes is causing me to seriously consider jumping back to a previous save point so that I can stick with one supah-strong blade.
But while working valiantly to get to my current stalemate, I was having a really good time. Despite the fact that I needed to consult the walkthrough about four out of every five missions at some seemingly impassible point — a mark of shame, as it clearly indicates that I could never buy a video game on its release date, as I would hit some intractable puzzle and have to wait a few weeks until someone else had taken the time to map everything out… how demoralizing — the gameplay and the action have been incredibly compelling. Wired magazine mirrored my opinions to a T recently when they pointed out that the best movies George Lucas has released lately have been Star Wars video games. The blend of sound effects and soundtrack, and the complex action sequences are exactly what I want out of a Star Wars film, and i have the ability to skip past the lame dialogue. These are the adventures I would have played in my backyard in 1980, with gun-shaped sticks and the occasional Mattel product. And that is a most satisfying nostalgia, far more fulfilling than trying to justify the failing vision of a once-inventive director.
Brothelversary
Just when I’ve finally gotten rid of the enormous bandwidth suck and lag time that was my January 1st book cover spectacular, I spring the following on you. Oh, well. Happy birthday anyway, Brothel. You’ve caused me to seriously injure eternity in a manner which none can calculate. May you continue not to set off firewalls with your title, and may you have more than nine members in the future. Many happy returns of the day.
Central Dogma
Many, many, manymany people have written about the recent New York ComicCon. They were, mostly, people who were in attendance, and therefore had something interesting to say. I wasn’t, so I’ve waited for the furor to die down somewhat before I felt it was safe to comment upon something that I really don’t have much experience in. That and, well, I had already blogged this week, and I find it hard to break the habit of storing up entires for those long, cold stretches when one really doesn’t have much to add to the global commentary.
Publisher’s Weekly does a — shock! — weekly newsletter about the comic book scene, and they covered a conference of librarians at the NYCC to discuss the issues surrounding coded and overt depiction of sexuality in manga. Manga is hot in bookstores these days, and so it’s also hot in libraries. And because it’s hot. many publishers have jumped on the bandwagon and purchased the U.S. reprint rights to all sorts of speed-lined, zip-a-tone garbage that is well and truly thought of as ephemeral if not disposable in its country of origin. And librarians, despite the fact that they claim to be experts in evaluating sources and resources, are apparently all higglety-pigglety about being able to distinguish which manga is actually worth reading, and which manga might cause the average parent to transform into a short, stumpy, superdeformed caricature of steaming wrath.
So, the article says, librarians would like ratings on manga. They acknowledge that some manga is rated already, but what they’d really prefer are the kind of ratings that the MPAA has been supplying recently — the kind where the reader is also provided with a laundry list of all the purile reasons why someone might want to go see this particular flick. (I’m being snide, of course, but mostly about the MPAA.) Certain librarians at this panel did feel like the ratings were insufficient in allowing them to anticipate content. And one interesting and accurate point was that even initial readings may not be an accurate gague of future content: “A manga series will start out clean and age-appropriate and later in the series will develop more mature themes.” Of course, due to the delay between domestic publication and U.S. publication, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see if a particular series has turned blue in Japan before volume one is printer over here.
But that’s not really the key point of why I bring up this whole sundry tale. Librarians aren’t supposed to want ratings. According to the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, “Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” This has, in fact, been specifically interpreted to indicate that it would be unethical for a librarian to not stock or to deny the circulation of Rated-R films to youth. “Policies that set minimum age limits for access to any nonprint materials or information technology, with or without parental permission, abridge library use for minors.” Whoops. Guess you weren’t supposed to ask for that. No wonder the PW article described her as “hesitant”. BURN THE HERETIC! BUUUURRRNNN HEEEERRRRR!!!
Of course, the real reason why this pinged my radar is because I think that particular proscription of the Library Bill of Rights is the best self-defeating statement since “All generalizations are false”. If the ALA make a dogmatic statement of doctrine stating that libraries aren’t allowed to follow dogma or doctrine, then they are obligated not to select or proscribe materials based upon the Library Bill of Rights. Whoops, again.
Free Pancakes on National Pancake Day!
Free Pancakes on National Pancake Day!
On February 28, 2006 from 7 AM to 2 PM IHOPs across the country will celebrate National Pancake Day (also known as Shrove Tuesday) by offering our guests a free short stack of pancakes*. This is going to be our biggest one day celebration in our history.
National Pancake Day has a rich history that stretches back centuries and has always been a time of celebration. National Pancake Day always falls on Fat Tuesday and this year it will be a celebration at IHOP.
* Limit one free short stack per guest. Valid for dine-in only, no to go orders. Not valid with any other offer, special, coupon, or discount. Valid at participating restaurants only, while supplies last.
Pancakes! FREE PANCAKES! I LOVE PAMCAKES!
However, a) I only just found out about this, and b) there are an insufficient number of local IHOPs in my vicinity.
So I cannot have IHOP pancakes, and shall have to make my own. Because since I leanred about this, I have to have pancakes for dinner. Which means that I have to do the dishes. Damncakes.
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