Archive for October, 2010

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Dark Crystal, Finally

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

Although I grew up loving fantasy movies and loving Muppets, I’ve never seen The Dark Crystal. That doesn’t seem right, does it? Well, I decided to remedy this hole in my education.

It takes seven minutes for anything to happen. Well, there’s a bunch of ponderous narration, but I usually ignore that stuff. It’s always covered in the actual narrative anyway. It never takes too long before the young protagonist is telling people who killed his parents, and is being told in return that he has to go find the crystal shard etc. etc.

After the narration, the movie itself starts. And it feels weird, because it’s trying to be a Serious Fantasy with ominous overtones and all that, but it’s clearly Muppets. And from time to time, a character will have a voice that reminds you of Fozzie Bear. I understand that Jim Henson was trying to prove that he could make a movie for adults, but I don’t think it works. When you’re watching something for kids, or something that’s a comedy, you’ll accept a certain amount of cartooniness. But these things don’t work for me. All the voices are hard to understand, because they’re trying too hard to be scratchy and “alien”.

So I didn’t like it. I like movies with regular Muppets, but this one just felt like puppets flailing around in a lame plot. I’m glad I finally got it out of the way, though. Now I’m wondering if I ever saw Black Cauldron. I don’t remember it, but surely I must have, right?

Posted in Movie | 3 Comments »

The Festival of Rock Band the Third

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

My workplace has an interesting approach to holidays. Everyone gets a basic set of holidays off, most of which line up with things like Thanksgiving or “Winter Holiday,” if you know what I mean. And then everyone gets a handful of “Personal Days,” which I think are because people of different religions have different days on which they would like to do things.

Me, I do not belong to any religion. I used to be a Subgenius, but July 5, 1998 had fewer flying saucers than had been prophesied. So I use my days basically as celebrations of my right not to go into work when I don’t want to. Or when there’s something I specifically want to spend my day doing. Which is how we arrive at today, in which I stay home from work and play Rock Band 3. Whee!

So far, I’ve mostly been playing on the new keyboard thing. The game claims I’m in the top 7% of keyboard players worldwide, which I suspect is mostly a result of most people not rushing out to buy the game and then spend most of a day playing it. Although I really am pretty good; I’m playing on Expert and I’ve five-starred songs I’d never heard before. And I’ve gotten a “five gold star” and a 100% already. Not on the same song, though. Protip: the INXS song “Need You Tonight” is super-easy to get 100% on Expert.

Unfortunately, I have not managed to get the hang of Pro Keyboards yet. That’s a lot of keys! And to play it right, you’re basically sightreading the actual keyboard part, which turns out to be difficult. I’m working on it, but it’s not as much fun as instantly rocking out. Apparently, to learn to play keyboards properly, you have to practice? And work at it? Phooey.

Posted in Gaming | 2 Comments »

Book Review: The Great American Band-Wagon

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

I have a tendency to anthropomorphize things, which means that a library book sale is a dangerous place for me. Because sometimes I’ll pick up a book, flip through it, and see something like this:

IMG_0557

I give you The Great American Band-Wagon, by Charles Merz. This is a book that has been in the library system since there were handwritten cards in them. It’s presumably been there since just after it was written in 1928. And it’s never been checked out. I am incapable of not feeling bad for this poor, abandoned book. And it was only a dollar, so obviously I purchased it, took it home, and read it.

And it’s really fun! It’s basically a book about This Crazy Modern Age, in which the author is alternately amazed at the march of progress and faintly appalled at how things have changed. But it’s from 1928, which means that everything is incredibly dated. You know how in Back to the Future, everyone in 1955 seems to be constantly acting as 1955-y as they can, just to remind you that you’re in the past? It’s like that, except sincere.

There are chapters about the wonders of the Filling Station and Radio, both of which were relatively new. And there’s about a page of talk about the marvel that is the Electric Switchboard. It made breathless reporting on murder trials much easier!

My favorite part was the chapter on golf. Apparently, golf used to be considered a game for girls and the infirm, but around the mid-1920s became inexplicably popular among businessmen. So “lawyers playing golf” was a crazy thing to see. And observe what the author has to say about golf clothes (which I’ll remind you were very much the argyle Plus Fours back then):

It is not bad fun to wear clothes that are made for the open road, in a world dressed up in office clothes and collars. This is no game for office clothes. It is no game for lady-like white flannels and shoes that stain with grass. It is a game for hob-nailed boots, plus fours, and woollen stockings.

It is easy enough to say of plus fours that they hang like sand-bags on the average human frame, but this is not the important fact about them. The important fact is that they have brought the modern world a substitute for leather chaps.

It is easy enough to say of woollen stockings done in emeralds, purples, heliotropes, and carmines, laid out in checkers, diamonds, and hexagonals, that they do not add an inch to the distance a golf ball can be driven from a tee. But this is to miss the whole point of the costume. In a drab age these bright legs are the war-paint of the nation.

I love that stuff. How often do you see the word “heliotrope” these days? Let alone in plural! And the argument that argyle socks and golf shoes are tough woollen stockings and hob-nailed boots? Awesome. I like a writer who’s willing to take a crazy stand like that. The war-paint of a nation? Nice work. And that sort of talk is applied to things like soda fountains and rotogravure sections. Rotogravure, if you’re curious, is the amazingly modernistic method used to put photographs in newspapers in 1928.

This whole book was a lot of fun. If you see it at a library sale, I highly recommend it.

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Metropolis: Awesome

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Last weekend, I saw Metropolis, and I’m going to try to explain why it was so awesome.

First of all, it was the first Science Fiction Epic. Until Metropolis, science fiction was so disreputable that no one thought a movie with a robot could be made, let alone be a classic. It’s hard to imagine at this point, what with the massive robot-based blockbusters and all, but even after Metropolis, back in the 1930s, science fiction fanzines were full of plans for petitions for studios to make movies. Those plans were usually created by Forrest J. Ackerman,

Second, it was a practically complete version on the movie, which is something I didn’t think would ever happen. See, Fritz Lang created a movie that was 153 minutes long. That version showed in Berlin a few times, but the distributors felt it was too long for general use. So it was cut down to 90 minutes and most of the original plot was rendered incoherent. And that’s the version the world has known for the last 80 years or so. In 2001, there was a version cut together that used some production stills and the screenplay to kind of give the impression of what the original version of Metropolis might have been like if all the cinematography was replaced by still photos. They got it up to 124 minutes of real footage by scouring museums around the world.

In 2008, a new print surfaced in Buenos Aires. Apparently, right after the movie was made, a copy was sent to Argentina at the request of an Argentinian distributor. Then it made the rounds of those theaters until a film critic added it to his personal collection. In the 1960s, it was sold to Argentina’s National Art Fund, although at this point, no one knew that it was probably the last print of the complete version. It ended up in a Museum of Cinema in Buenos Aires, although it had been transferred from nitrate stock to 16mm somewhere along the line. If you’ve seen Inglourious Basterds, you’ll know why that was a good idea.

That’s where things stood. A few years ago, someone mentioned to the ex-husband of the Museo del Cine that a screening of Metropolis seemed to have taken a lot longer than an hour and a half. Then the print had to be flown to Germany so the Metropolis experts could take a look at it. Their skepticism was presumably replaced with elation, because the newly discovered scenes were unmistakably legitimate.

Then, the world had to wait for two years while Metropolisgot restored to within an inch of its life. This was the frustrating part.

So anyway, it finally got finished. They showed it in Berlin, then took it on tour. I saw it with live musical accompaniment from The Alloy Orchestra, who already had a great score worked out for the parts of Metropolis that already existed.

And that’s what I got to see on Saturday. It was awesome.

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Every Game is a Role-Playing Game

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

I used to say that I like games more when I can turn them into role-playing games. But it has since occurred to me that I actually just play every game like a role-playing game, which you’ll have to admit saves me a lot of time. When I play Risk, I set aside the little plastic pieces that represent units that did a particularly valiant job in defending my territory.

Even Monopoly. “Thank you for staying at Giant Shoe Real Estate. We hope to see you again soon. Please pay no attention to the news reports of our CEO being thrown in jail for the third time this year.” And so on. Playing it like this points up my favorite thing about Monopoly, which is the assumption that if you’re in the real estate business, you’ll occasionally go to jail. They don’t even specify a crime!

Chess, now. Chess is different. I’ve tried treating it like a war game, but it’s just too abstract. And the castles move more than real castle do. So instead I have a tendency to just adopt a character while I play. Maybe my opponent is a supervillain. Or I could be playing Death! Naturally, I do that sort of thing inside my head, unless I think it would be to my advantage to unsettle my opponent.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this wouldn’t work with games that are completely abstract. Like Scrabble. And, well, that’s true. My premise is basically a lie. Although I do tend to try to come up with a storyline that combines all the words on the board.

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Waiting for Rock Band 3

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

My first rhythm game was Parappa the Rapper, back in 1997. The player adopted the role of a small white dog who rapped about things like driving, making soup, and waiting in line for the bathroom. You triggered phrases by pushing “up” on the Playstation controller. But it wasn’t just “up”! Sometimes it was “down”. Or even “right” or “left,” once you reached the advanced levels. Good times.

A couple of years later, UmLammer Jammy came out. It starred a guitar-playing lamb, and it also used the directional pad as the cue for controlling the characters. That’s why they were called “rhythm games”; because all you really needed to do was have good rhythm. And have a tolerance for exceedingly crazy nonsense in the plot department.

When Guitar Hero came out in 2005, it rode the two innovations of real songs and customized guitar-like controllers. There were a few drum-based games before then, but their licensed songs tended to the public domain. Playing the Ramones or Joan Jett was super-fun.

Now we’re several generations past that and I’m waiting for Rock Band 3 to come out next week. The game has evolved to the point where we’ll be able to use actual guitars, drums, and keyboards. It remains to be seen if the accuracy takes the fun out of the game.

One thing I like about Rock Band (and, I guess, Guitar Hero and other games like that) is that it’s really several games in one. I can be playing a guitar simulator while Rhias is playing the karaoke game. If guitar gets boring, I can switch to drums. The game experience is wildly variable depending on what instrument you’re playing.

I do have one objection to these games. The top level of the songs is always songs I can’t stand. I get that these songs like “Painkiller” and “Battery” are really fast and complex, but I don’t like listening to them. And it’s not like “technical complexity” is the same thing as “artistic merit” in the first place. As a result, when I’m going through the Career Mode (which I like a lot, because the more like a role-playing game something is, the more I like it), I reach a Fun Peak about two-thirds of the way through, when the technical challenge is high and I’m playing songs I like. Then it’s all downhill as the songs get really hard to play and hard to listen to. And it doesn’t help that they’re songs I don’t know, which means that I don’t even know what they’re supposed to sound like.

I can tell you this: I’m going to get me one of those new keyboard controllers. I think there’s a chance I’m good enough on real keyboards to be really good at fake keyboards!

Posted in Gaming | 1 Comment »

The Event (so far)

Monday, October 18th, 2010

As you may already be aware, I recap THE EVƎNT for Television Without Pity. That means that I pay a lot of attention to each episode, since it’s my job to both describe the, um, evənts, and to make fun of them. In an ideal show, that would mean that I’m seeing lots of little details that become important later on. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced this is an ideal show, so the closer I look, the dopier it seems.

Right now, I’ve seen the first four episodes, so I’m going to take a moment to cover what I think are the basic flaws in this show. I don’t really get to do this in the recap format unless I just go for a straight-up page-long digression. And when I do those, I prefer to talk about something other than the show itself. Why digress unless you’re going to go completely nuts, right?

Problem One: The Flashback Gimmick

Starting in the first episode, there was a lot of FIVE DAYS EARLIER nonsense, which is something that I think is exceedingly overused in television these days. Aside from my favorite episode of Firefly (“Out of Gas,” natch), it’s hardly ever used for actual narrative purposes. And this show is no different. By this time, we’re only getting a couple of token flashbacks per episode, and they’re apparently designed to convey vital information like “Sean and his fiancee went to Thanksgiving dinner at her parents’ house this one time.” It’s not like in LOST where the flashbacks paralleled each episode’s main plot and told us something about the characters. It just feels like they decided they’d be “a show with flashbacks.”

Problem Two: The Locations

In one episode, the president was in Florida, Arizona, and Washington, DC. In the last episode, two characters drove from Yuma to Lubbock between scenes. Another character was apparently moved from Florida to Texas in a storage container. One enterprising fellow presumably dove off a cruise ship anchored off the coast of South America and showed up in Los Angeles five days later. We never see flashbacks that cover the implausible stuff.

Problem Three: The Detainees

So there are these 97 people (well, 96 now) that have been kept in a secret facility in Alaska for the last 66 years. Their DNA is 1% different from human beings, and they were involved in a plane crash in 1944, since when they haven’t aged. And some of them escaped from the plane crash and have been sneaking around America (and presumably other countries). And that’s all we know. That’s acceptably vague. But the show hasn’t bothered to tell us what the detainees’ cover story is. Presumably they’ve said something to the effect of “Oh, us? No, we’re totally human beings from this planet. Not from the future or anything, promise. The only reason we don’t age is that, um, we eat a lot of yogurt.” We see President Martinez stomping around in high dudgeon (you can get pretty high dudgeon when you’re a president) that the detainees have been lying, but we never get to hear the lie! It’s not satisfying.

Problem Four: They’re All Boring Jerks

Should I be rooting for Sean? Sophia? The president? Honestly, hardly any of them have a clearly defined goal, so I have trouble caring who achieves what.

Anyway, episode five is going to start in a couple of hours. It’s possible that all these objections will be dealt with and dismissed. But I doubt it.

Posted in Television | 2 Comments »

Slant That Rhyme

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

A “slant rhyme” is something that’s almost, but not quite, a perfect rhyme. Like “splat” is a rhyme for “flat” and a slant rhyme for “clap.”

The trick to a slant rhyme is that the vowel sounds normally stay the same, while consonants can be replaced with similar noises. An unvoiced lingual stop at the end of a rod (like “T”) can be replaced with, say, a labial stop (“P”) and the actual sound is going to be a lot like a rhyme, even if it doesn’t meet all the requirements. There’s even a Slant Rhyme Dictionary!

Slant rhymes are often used in rhymes that are intended for performance, both because they make it easier to find rhymes and because they combine the “words sound alike” aspect of rhymes with the “every word doesn’t sound exactly the same” aspect of things that aren’t totally boring.

Now I shall provide something that may appear to be irrelevant. I shall ask you to be patient while I introduce this seeming non sequitur, because I promise that I shall concluding with a thrilling synthesis of my two themes.

I was recently alerted via Facebook to Eminem’s claim that he can rhyme “orange.” Here’s what Mr. Inem has to say:

“People say that the word ‘orange’ doesn’t rhyme with anything, and that kind of pisses me off, because I can think of a lot of things that rhyme with orange [...] If you enunciate it and make it more than one syllable — or-ange — you could say, like, ‘I put my or-ange four-inch door hinge in stor-age and ate por-ridge with Ge-orge.’”

At this point, you might think that I’m going to defend those as being slant-rhymes. I am not; I’m actually going to explain why those are actual, legitimate rhymes.

See, the concept of “rhyming” is based on what words actually sound like, not what they’re supposed to sound like. Depending on one’s accent, “pen” and “tin” might rhyme, or might not. Consider this couplet from the “Fat Albert” theme song:

You’ll have some fun now with me and all the gang,
Learnin’ from each other while we do our thing

That doesn’t rhyme. Clearly. However, what if “thing” were pronounced “thang”? And don’t say “But that’s not how that word’s pronounced,” because the fact is that lots of people do pronounce it like that. Then it’s a perfect rhyme! I have to admit that the actual theme song does not use that pronunciation, but I’m pretty sure it was supposed to.

Now, here’s the thing. Eminem is not a poet; he’s a performer. His speech up there was written to be said out loud. And he’s perfectly capable of putting a little extra enunciating into “OR-inj” and then putting more voicing into the end of “Four-inch” so that the sounds line up perfectly. And that means they do rhyme.

Posted in Manifestos | 1 Comment »

I Wanna Be on Wikipedia

Sunday, October 10th, 2010

I have long wanted to be famous. Not paparazzi-famous, but famous enough that I can go specific places and there will be people who know who I am. And it’s occurred to me that Wikipedia provides a relatively accurate measurement of the level of fame I want. So that’s my new goal: I want a Wikipedia page.

Now, I don’t want to cheat the system. I don’t want one of those pages that gets deleted as soon as someone notices that it exists. I don’t even want a page that consists of a one-paragraph boilerplate and occasionally has to survive discussions about deletion. I want an actual, legitimate page.

Now, my name already appears in Wikipedia in a couple of spots. The page on The Sideboard (the tournament-Magic magazine I edited for a few years) lists me. And the Television Without Pity page lists me under the recappers (as “Montykins”). Although they don’t mention that I’m recapping The Event.

I could also arguably be listed in the entry for The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, in which I played an office worker. I had a name and a line of dialogue, so I think I could just barely count as “cast.” And there’s a case for listing me somewhere in the Magicthegathering.com entry, especially the part about Arcana, now that I have an actual byline on it.

Luckily, Wikipedia has a page specifically about the criteria for determining notability. So I’m going to look at a couple of them!

Biography: The person has received a well-known and significant award or honor, or has been nominated for one several times.

Well, I was nominated for a couple of Diarist.Net awards back when there were hardly any online journals. That probably doesn’t count, though. I’ll make a note that if I see an opportunity to win an Oscar, I should take it.

Biography: The person has created, or played a major role in co-creating, a significant or well-known work, or collective body of work, that has been the subject of an independent book or feature-length film, or of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews.

Not quite. I’ve made a minor contribution to Magic: The Gathering (mostly flavor text and some playtesting). I’ve made a huge contribution to magicthegathering.com, but I suspect the website isn’t significant enough.

So I think the easiest angle for me is to win a well-known and significant award or honor. If anyone knows what the easiest one to win is, please let me know.

Posted in Manifestos | 1 Comment »

Art vs. Artist

Friday, October 8th, 2010

I have long since come to terms with the fact that I don’t have to like an artist in order to enjoy their art. A lot of musicians are jerks, but that doesn’t fundamentally change what the song sounds like. Brilliant movies can be made by mean, controlling jerks, but I still like the occasional Hitchcock, you know? Even when someone starts to cross over from “jerk” into parts beyond, I can usually still enjoy the art. Woody Allen’s movies are not Woody Allen.

It gets harder when the artist becomes an actual criminal. Roman Polanski, say. Or Phil Spector. But to be honest, I was never that big a fan of any of Polanski’s movies to begin with, so I don’t have to deal with it there.

I bring that all up just so I can present the opposite side: there are cases where I like an artist a lot but hate their work. And that’s much harder for me, for some reason. The most common case is when it’s a friend, because then not only do I end up not liking something I’m trying really hard to appreciate, but I have to see them afterward and talk about it.

But there are people who I don’t know who I feel that way about. Like Eddie Izzard. I think he’s great. I strongly approve of Eddie Izzards. I’m always glad to see him in a movie or on a talk show. Except that I don’t like his comedy. I’ve tried. I’ve even seen him live, but it just doesn’t work for me at all. But I try again and again to like his work, since I like him.

There are other comics, artists, and musicians who I feel that way about. I think it’s odd that if I like someone’s work, them being a jerk on a talk show has no effect. But if I hate a band and they turn out to be cool people, I’m likely to try really hard to like the music. Even after I already know I don’t!

Posted in Pop Culture | 1 Comment »

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