Richard Dansky's Blog, page 30

It's Better For Everyone

Once upon a time, I got chased down Massachusetts Avenue in Harvard Square by an irate Jew for Jesus. She stampeded after me, trailing pamphlets like tire smoke, shouting profanity-filled attestations of God's love for me and suchlike, mainly because I'd told her that I preferred being a Jew for Moses.

In retrospect, enraged pursuit probably wasn't the best way for her to show off what she was, metaphorically speaking, selling, but that's neither here nor there. It was a long time ago, after all, and I haven't exactly given the incident a lot of thought since.

Yesterday, I got a package in the mail. It turned out to be a trade paperback edition of the New Testament with special "convince the Jew!" supporting material, courtesy of a Jews for Jesus group I'd never heard of. Now, I don't exactly make a secret of the fact that I am, as they say, a Red Sea Pedestrian. I don't particularly care if people try to proselytize me within certain limits if that's their religious duty because it's not going to work. I mean, heck, under certain circumstances, it's kind of sweet when friends care enough about you to try to save your soul from eternal hellfire.

But like I said, it ain't going to happen. I'm Jewish. I like being Jewish. After forty years, I think I've gotten reasonably good at it, and I'd hate to throw away all those years of practicing Judaism to start over with something else. And I'm not entirely thrilled that these folks dug up my contact information to send me something, even if it was done with the best of intentions.

So let's make a deal, folks. Please don't send me any more stuff, ever, 'cause we all win that way. You don't have to waste time and money shipping off something I will never read. I don't waste time seeing that it's something I'll never read and writing a meandering blog post about it. And maybe, just maybe, it'll save a tree somewhere.

Are we good? Thanks. And merry Christmas.

Tron Eve

OK, I understood why they wanted to resurrect Tron . It's shiny and it's unique looking and it's full of memorable images (see also: lightcycle), and it's managed to insert itself into the category of movie where those who've seen it consider themselves members of a fairly exclusive club. (For a similar experience with lit majors, mention "Withnail and I", which, to be fair, has the advantage of being a much, much better film.)

And I'm one of the nerds who actually saw it in the theater, and geeked out on all the Sark-y goodness even while I realized the plot was full of odd-shaped holes. I mean, seriously. The Grid Bugs. What were they there for? They weren't scary, they were barely on screen, it was just "Oh look, Grid Bugs", and a quick beauty shot. Then, bam, all gone. But hey, it looked like nothing else out there, and it had half the cast of Babylon 5 plus The Dude, and, yeah, I kind of dug it.

Years later, I bought it on VHS, and it was one of the tapes Melinda grabbed to take to the hospital when I was laid up a few years back. Now, one of the things that I'm absolutely awful at doing is sleeping, especially when I'm told I have to sleep. It's not that I don't want to, it's that my body actively rebels. Tell me I need to take a nap to win a million dollars, and I'll find my kidneys have snuck out to grab me a six-pack of Coke Zero and toothpicks to prop my eyelids open. You get the idea.

But the fact remains that, even with holes in me and tubes running out of them, and even with my brain fogged on half the Oxycontin in the US that Rush Limbaugh didn't manage to snaffle, I couldn't sleep. So Melinda suggested we watch a movie, and put in Tron .

Let me tell you, that's how you watch Tron . I'm fairly certain most of the movie I saw wasn't actually in the movie, but who the hell cares. I experienced Tron . I got Tron . I understood Tron , right down to its glowing electric bones. And then I fell asleep.

All of which is a roundabout way of sneaking up on the fact that I'm not particularly interested in seeing Tron: Even More Tron, despite the fact that I have been commanded to lest I lose my nerd cred. It looks gorgeous. I'm sure as a work of craft it is marvelous. But for good or ill, my mental image of Tron is fixed somewhere between the wide-eyed geekery of youth and the psychedelic lightshow of my later visit. The spandex-and-splodey spectacle that's being pitched at me, even if the film isn't actually like that, doesn't feel like it's related.

I'm sure it'll be spectacular. I might even go see it. But I suspect that no matter what, it won't feel like Tron .

Speaking of Being Part Of Something Cool...

Splinter Cell: Conviction took home Best Co-Op and Most Original Gameplay from IGN the other night. Congrats to everyone on the team!

So I went to the DMV....

The DMV's a punchline, right? Every trip there lasts nine years, all the employees are bizarre and surly and rude, and the whole thing is straight out of Beetlejuice, right?

Which, if you think about it, means that it's no fun to be a DMV employee. Even if you do your job spectacularly - even if you move folks through your office with incredible efficiency, make it a pleasant place to do a necessary function, and show customers courtesy and respect, you're still going to hear an endless stream of "Haw haw, DMV" jokes. And if you work in one of those hellhole DMVs that everyone talks about, well, that can't be any fun either.

(As a side note, I'm willing to wager most people's experiences at the DMV have consisted of nothing worse than boredom. Admittedly, that's a capital offense in these ADD days of miracles and smartphone wonders, but still. And the first person to say in the comments, "Well, I had a crappy time at a DMV once and that means all DMVs suck" gets a moldy cheese sandwich mailed to them. Book rate.)

With that in mind, I'd like to extend a thank-you to the folks at the Cary, NC DMV office. They were polite. They were professional. They were helpful and courteous, and gave me a (futile) shot to do something about my terminal hat hair for my picture. And, their office was clean and pleasant to be in.

Which, all things considered, deserves a thank-you, and not a dumb joke about how I spent a gazillion hours in the DMV.

Unexpected Coolness

Ages ago, I did an interview with Michal Thornton Wyman about game writing, for a book he was writing on game development. It was, as noted, a while ago - which, to be fair, means "more than a week ago" to my caffeine-addled brain - which meant that I'd looked at the questions, I'd fired the answers off, and I'd largely forgotten about the whole thing.

Until the other day, when, unexpectedly, the book showed up on my doorstep. And it's a beaut, and the interview actually makes me sound vaguely coherent. Which, as they say, is nice.

So, in conclusion, it's nice to find yourself unexpectedly part of something cool.

DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE

No, not anything in particular.

Just a thought.

When you get to the point when accomplishing something becomes, not something to feel good about, but rather, a way to stop feeling bad about the fact that you haven't finished it yet, and when you feel this way about everything you accomplish, then maybe it's time to re-examine a few things.

Most of the universe, by definition, is undone. You're never going to be done with /everything/, particularly not if you keep adding things to the to-do list to ensure you always have something to feel bad about not having accomplished.

So. It's OK to feel good about doing something. It's dumb to punish yourself for not doing everything. And it's really dumb to make it so that you feel like you can't ever do anything.

Enough Out Of You

Dear History Channel:

I know we have had words before, but this time I mean it. I'm done. You've gone too far. When you show programs that have nothing to do with history - like, say "people driving trucks weird places until someone dies" or "people steering boats into unpleasant places" or "people cutting down trees in places that used to be pleasant but now aren't any more" - that's one thing. When you make a nod and a wink to what the skeptical podcasts call "The Whoo" with vaguely scientific takes (still not historical, mind you), like "we send people into the woods for two days and have them take pictures of deer" or "we have a guy in a boonie hat wax rhapsodic about UFOs", that's another. But Ancient Aliens? As a series? Seriously. The day I need to be lectured by some fatuous dude with Londo Molari's old haircut about how the Egyptians used vibrational levitation to move blocks of stone without someone else following immediately to say "Centauri-looking dude is a fruitbat" is the day we part ways.

Look, I'm all for open-mindedness. I'm all for exploring all areas of human knowledge (except those involving the Spice Girls) and experience with an open mind. I'm all for people believing what they want to believe, as long as it doesn't involve trying to perform blood sacrifice with my cats or ritual temple prostitution in my driveway. (You want to do it in the bradford pears, go for it. And good luck.) But extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof, and giving someone credence and a platform as some kind of authority just because they've published a book just makes you look like cynical opportunists. I mean, for God's sake, I'VE published books. That doesn't mean anything I have to say about the laws of physics, Bronze Age tribal custom on Salisbury Plain, or the religious aspects of the Nazca Lines means a goddamn thing. And anyone who claims to be an authority on those matters and starts any argument they have with "I just know that..." is about as much of an expert as I am. Probably less.

Oh, and don't say you're letting them ramble because they make good television. They don't. They come across as eager, sweaty fanatics, true believers who could just as easily be discoursing on Spider-Man or WARP3 or Lee Harvey Oswald.

So, in conclusion: we're done. You're dead to me, at least until you start showing some actual history, and a lot fewer blurry pictures of hubcabs. And I say this as a guy with a shelf full of books on Bigfoot.

You've got The Whoo. And cooties. And I don't want either.

Are They Still Making Talkies?

So, Melinda and I didn't go to the movies Friday night. This is not unusual; we've barely gone to the movies at all this year. In previous years, we might have actually sallied forth to assay Warrior's Way (or whatever that cockamamie cowboy ninja think with Jeffrey Rush is) - I mean, hell, we were there for opening night of Snakes On a Plane - this year, not so much. The last movie we saw was Inception; the last one before that was Scott Pilgrim. Throw in Kick-Ass and Red Cliff, and that's pretty much the sum of our non-revival moviegoing this year. We saw more flicks at the Escapism film festival in one weekend than we have the rest of the year combined.

Part of it is that there are fewer and fewer movies that seem interesting, I suppose. Or more to the point, fewer and fewer films that seem like they're interesting enough to supercede, say, an evening chatting with friends in the social calendar. Some of that's the movies themselves - I mean, I can put a bucket on my head and hit it with a wooden spoon for two hours, and get most of the experience of Transformers 2 (incomprehensible fight scenes yes, Megan Fox's scanty outfits no). Mostly, though, it's the fact that movies are now spoon-fed to us so condescendingly that they're not fun any more. Trailers are shot-for-shot congruent, the lighting clues you in as to everything that's going to happen in the movie (If blue, then scary monsters, check), and everything explodes. There's no magic, no hint that seeing the movie will give me anything more than what's in the trailer except, well, more minute count of everything I've already seen. I don't feel attracted to the film, I feel like I've eaten a couple of Whoppers at high velocity, and I'm cinematically queasy as a result.

Maybe there's an audience out there that doesn't want to go see a movie if they don't know everything that happens in it. Me, I'd rather be surprised occasionally, and with that surprise, delighted. Maybe I'll get that from something coming up. Or maybe not. The sad thing is, I feel like I know what I'm missing.

Such things scare me

After much deliberation, I have decided that I have absolutely no interest in ever purchasing a car advertised by humanoid hamsters who are demonstrably cooler than I am.

I'll go with that. Thanks.

And This, Boys, Is Why I Married Her

So, after tonight's weekly helping of The Soup, I decided to decompress a little - it's been a interesting week - with some Rock Band 3. My love for the game is mighty, but I'll no doubt be writing about that some other time. Tonight, I just wanted to put together a playlist and play pretend bass, badly.

Melinda looked up, saw I was turning on the 360, and said, "Are you sure you want to do that? Thundarr's coming on."

Now, anyone who knows me knows I love my Thundarr the Barbarian. If I could have palled around with Ookla the Mok during middle school, my life would have been tons easier. And that's before we get into the cool inflatable-looking horse, or the Kirbytastic visuals, or the fact that in one episode Thundarr and friends fight a werewolf named Zevon.

Get it? Zevon. As in "Werewolves of London". Which is in Rock Band 3. Which is what I was talking about in the first place.

In any case, though I was sorely tempted by the possibility of demon dogs and lords of light, I decided to stick to my guns - or axe, or guitar - and play. I logged in, put together a short playlist, and, without disturbing Melinda at her knitting too much, proceeded to hammer away mostly pitifully at four songs. The last of these was Night Ranger's "Don't Tell Me You Love Me", which I'd downloaded for two reasons. One, nostalgia for the godawful video where the band jumps around on train tracks in front of some bad bluescreening, and two, because in my jaundiced opinion the thing Rock Band does best is let you flail around shamelessly while gnawing on FM-staple corporate rock. Boston, check. Journey, check. Styx, check. And Night Ranger, check.  

But this time, after I finish plowing through the last mangled bits of Jack Blades-y goodness, I notice something funny. Apparently, my birch beer-powered performance was good enough for 98th on the leaderboard. 98th! I mean, I may work in video games, but I'm not actually good at them. I've never been on a leaderboard for anythng.

I turn to my wife, and say, "Honey, guess what? I'm 98th on the leaderboard. Of, like, everybody." Melinda looks up. "So...not a lot of people buying Night Ranger downloadable content, then, are there?"

"No," I say, and grin, and go back to playing. Because that was the exact right thing to say.