Richard Dansky's Blog, page 5
February 12, 2014
On Driving In Snow...
In unrelated news, I hope the lady in the Lexus over on Aviation Blvd. who nearly took out six of us while fishtailing all over the place made it home safely and without clobbering anyone else.
January 24, 2014
The Kermit Test: A Game Writer's Friend
And before you ask, yes, that is Kermit the Frog's head photoshopped onto Sam Fisher's body. It's pertinent. I swear.
The Kermit Test: A Game Writers' Friend
And before you ask, yes, that is Kermit the Frog's head photoshopped onto Sam Fisher's body. It's pertinent. I swear.
January 23, 2014
Snow and the South
Yes, an inch of snow is enough to send the whole region screeching to a halt, which is pretty funny until you’re living in it. Because, yes, it’s just an inch. But the difference between no snow and an inch of snow in an area that isn’t used to it is a hell of a lot bigger than the difference between nine inches and ten in an area that is. An inch of snow on the ground in an area that doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot of snow removal equipment (because how often does it get used) means that the inch of snow is going to be sitting there a while in some parts of the region, which means it’s going to get crunched into a half inch of ice. And let’s not forget the folks who didn’t grow up driving with snow, who don’t have an instinctive feel for it, trying to get home or get their kids at school or whatever in that.
Now, I freely confess there is absolutely no excuse for the grocery store panic that grips the region every time the word “snow” gets uttered. Why the possibility of accumulation makes everyone pelt to the nearest Food Lion to grab all the milk, bread, eggs, batteries and condoms they can is beyond me - it’s not like the snow generally sticks around long enough for the milk to even think about going yogurt. And the folks who stubbornly insist that since they have SUVs, they don’t need to learn the difference between black ice and dry road, well, you need to get your heads out of your asses, toot suite, because the rest of us don’t appreciate getting held up by a blocked intersection after you pirouette through a stop light and into a four-car pileup. That stuff, frankly, deserves to get made fun of, or would if it weren’t so bloody dangerous.
But yeah, it all boils down to an inch of snow is a rare and exotic thing down here, and it gets handled as well as a rare and exotic thing - like, say, a hurricane slamming the Jersey shore - gets handled anywhere else. So if we could all dial back on the reflexive contempt for stuff that seems goofy only outside of context, we all might be a little happier.
And a little warmer, too.
January 14, 2014
On Virtual Love Interests: Vaporware and Her
In Spike Jonze’s new movie Her, a schlubby writer, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls for his operating system. You can’t really blame him. For one thing, the OS is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. For another, she’s programmed to be compatible with him. To match his wants and his needs. To make his life easier and his interactions with her uncomplicated and undemanding. And this is particularly alluring because relationships with real people are messy. They have jagged edges and they require work and you don’t always get everything you want as soon as you want it. Even in the most loving, equal partnership, there are points of contention and hidden land mines, moments of disagreement that can render you frustrated or angry or irritated. Hollywood may package up romance as seamless and zipless, but the person you wake up next to in the morning is a person, with their own wants and needs and dislikes. Theirs will never align precisely with yours; just as importantly, yours will never align with theirs. And so if you’re raised by movies to expect that once you find the love of your life, or even the love of the next six hours, it’s all slo-mo montages and near-psychic agreement, you’re going to get a rude surprise the second you discover that your partner’s wants and needs are just as valid as your own, and that you’re going to have to put in honest effort to support and sustain what you have.
That, in large part, was what I was trying to get at in VAPORWARE. The protagonist, Ryan, has relationships with multiple people in his life, and they’re hard. They take effort, to give the person in the relationship what they require or expect. Whether that’s the love and attention he needs to give his partner or the professional and personal respect he needs to give his ex or the friendship he needs to show his best buddy, all of them demand that he make an effort on someone else’s behalf or give up something he wants. What it is he actually wants is unimportant; what matters is that in dealing with the people who are theoretically important to him, he can’t have everything and he can’t have it right away, or he’s going to lose them as parts of his life.
And that’s where Blue Lightning comes from. The game asks him to give up nothing that he wants. There are no compromises, no learning curves or missteps or forgotten anniversaries or moments when he needs to subjugate his desires to Blue Lightning’s. All he needs to surrender is time, and who could possibly begrudge time spent at work? That’s doing something important.It’s the easiest thing to keep doing that, especially if your relationships outside of work are more demanding than the ones on the inside.
Which means, ultimately, that Her and Vaporware are circling the same problem from two very different directions. Her is a marshmallow apocalypse, people sinking into effortless comfort and away from one another. Vaporware is about the cost of people falling into that sort of relationship, particularly the cost to people who are not themselves falling.
You may of course, be asking why I’m choosing now to write about Vaporware. After all, it’s been out for a while. I have new projects. Surely there’s something else to talk about. But sometimes things fall together a certain way. Her came out. Adam Shaftoe wrote a very sharp review of the book that nailed all the points I had been trying to make. And everything came together.
So. Is Vaporware like Her? No. But they’re different aspects of the same issue, different fictional takes on the latest iteration of that age-old question “How are we going to talk to each other?” Read the book, see the movie. Maybe you’ll figure it out. I certainly haven’t.
January 7, 2014
When Jerkfaces Ruin the Woo
But.
One of the reasons I watch Finding Bigfoot is that, at it’s core, it’s a positive show. Yes, Matt Moneymaker pulls new “documented” sasquatch behaviors out of his butt at a moment’s notice, and yes Bobo appears to be baked in half the episodes, and yes, their techniques occasionally appear designed to warn any potential sasquatches that it’s time to get the hell out of Dodge because the circus is in town, but still. They’re out there looking and exploring and genuinely hoping to add something to the human experience, and they generally do it cheerfully and politely and with occasional vague nods to things like “science”.
That, in a nutshell, is why I find it bearable week to week, even when they’re looking at footage of what is clearly someone who is engaging in Wookie cosplay and declaring it genuine. They’re not vicious and they’re not mean (except Matt on occasion*, but with hair like that, who can blame him) and, gosh darn it, they’re even plucky.
And then you get to crap like Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed, and everything changes. Because they’re not there to find anything new. Oh, no. Those guys have already found everything they’re looking for, whether it’s the incontrovertible fact that the Pyramids at Giza were actual a Tron-like power station that was also a death ray or that Vikings definitely colonized Oklahoma. Anyone who disagrees with them is not only wrong, they’re also actively evil - part of a conspiracy to cover up The Truth And Keep It From You. (The idea of a conspiracy of archaeologists, who generally can’t agree on where to have lunch, sitting in a star chamber and deciding what knowledge to allow is one of the more hysterical ones conjured by the show). The folks on those shows are Noble Crusaders For Truth, and anyone who disagrees with them - even if it’s just a guy espousing a different goofball conspiracy theory - is tainted with evil.
And then there’s what is at best anti-human racism, and at worst something really unpleasant bubbling underneath. The core premise of both Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed is that “the people who lived in place X back in the day couldn’t possibly have been advanced enough to create Y”. In Ancient Aliens' case, they credit the assist to what appear to be extras from Babylon 5; with America Unearthed it’s generally Europeans or Egyptians. In either case, the one hypothesis that gets dismissed immediately is that the folks who lived there at the time made the stuff using, I don’t know, hard work and gumption and smartness and stuff like that. It is, in a word, disturbing, especially since there’s plenty of evidence that in every case the locals were perfectly capable of - and should get credit for - doing the deed.
I understand the appeal of the woo. It’s great fun to imagine undiscovered mysteries and brave explorers and stories still untold. And, in a perfect world where a guy who looks like Londo Molari’s unsuccessful kid brother would not have a television series that ran for multiple seasons, potentially anomalous artifacts and structures would get explored in the spirit of wonder and the pursuit of knowledge that characterizes the best of scientific pursuits. I’d love to have a show where there’s a serious look at the possible history of Vinland, and actual analysis of weird rocks and structures. I’d love to see a show that genuinely explored Cahokia. Hell, I’d love a show that took a serious look at Mystery Hill and then presented its conclusions based on the facts, as opposed to stomping in convinced that it was a mixed Celtic-Phoenecian clambake in the hills of New Hampshire because of misunderstood archaeoastronomy with a side of sweet potato fries.
Instead, we get petty-minded bullying and weasel language and a mix of entitled persecution complexes and oblivious wishcasting. And while I’m sure those on the inside are cheering on their jut-jawed paranoid heroes for sticking it to The Man at 2 AM on basic cable (The Man, incidentally, has apparently infiltrated the Smithsonian, where He has masterminded a plan to mysteriously lose all the rocks proving that Oklahoma was colonized by alien vikings) and enjoying being along for the ride, I’m just saddened.
And a little disgusted.
And not watching any more.
*Moneymaker’s legendary “THERE’S NOWHERE FOR THE OWL TO SIT!” rants have been toned back and the discussions of the “evidence” have moved largely to conditionals. Not perfect, but it’s a start.
December 22, 2013
Scenes From a Vacation In the Uwharries
And then Bob was telling us about the cider and the wine cake, and we bought some of that too, and then piled back into the car. We were losing daylight, and the cabin we’d rented was - as we had been told - up seven miles of dirt road, and we were making the journey in stages: Home to Devil’s Tramping Ground, Devil’s Tramping Ground to the orchard, orchard to Troy, the gateway town for the Uwharries I’d visited in the summer, and Troy to the cabin.
It never did occur to any of us to ask why he’d asked us about Bigfoot.
###
Devil’s Tramping Ground is a legend. A circular patch of ground south of Siler City where nothing’s grown for centuries, where Ol’ Nick himself supposedly walks around at night thinking up literal deviltry, where objects left in the circle overnight are supposedly flung out by a mysterious force.
We had directions there printed out from a web site.
Pull over, they said, at the parking area on your left. The Tramping Ground is down a path 150 or so feet into the woods. Be respectful - it’s on private property. Bring a trash bag and maybe clean up a bit if you see anything.
We pulled over. We pulled out. We walked up the path into a clearing, where someone had set up a campfire the night before. Burned cans of paint sat in the ashes, evidence of huffing. Beer cans and soda bottles were everywhere, and various paths led off in various directions. There was nothing visible that looked remotely tramped, or devilish.
So we headed off down one path, lured by what looked like a clearing up ahead. That turned out to be an optical illusion, so we went down another path, and another one (which led us back to the first one) and another one, and by this time we were all getting a little nervous about whether we’d pulled in at the wrong place or some such, when I did the painful, obvious thing.
I went to the web site where we’d gotten the directions, my phone somehow miraculously pulling bars. I called up the page of pictures of the Tramping Ground.
And I saw it was the sandy clearing with the campfire and the huffed paint cans in it.
We went back. We posed for pictures. We cleaned up some bottles and cans, as it seemed like the right thing to do. Lynne found a small stone circle someone had obviously set up with great care for a smaller fire - and by “small” I mean maybe 2 feet across. And that was that, the mystery I’d been telling myself I’d go see for nearly fifteen years.
###
"Go on ahead and see if there’s anything interesting," Melinda said. We were up a hillside along a path, looking vaguely for a map feature called "Nifty Rocks", and she and Lynne were sitting on a fallen log. Up ahead the trail supposedly made a small loop.
"Like a gazelle," I said, and went on. Jeff came with me, and we hit the loop trail almost instantly. Left, we decided, for no good reason, and started walking. According to the map, the trail went along the edge of the lake; what we found instead was that it went along the top of bluffs by the edge of the lake, but maybe twenty feet back from the edge and screened by trees. Not as scenic as one would hope, so we pressed on looking for something more interesting.
Meanwhile. it turned out that more than five minutes had passed. Lynne and Melinda got a little worried about their vanished husbands. They followed us along the path, but didn’t catch up. THey tried calling us, but we’d sensibly turned off our cell phones to save battery life. And they tried sasquatch calls, figuring we’d hear those and respond.
We did not hear them. Neither, apparently, did any local sasquatches.
So they turned back. And we trundled on, oblivious to the time. Eventually, we hit a landmark sign that said, simple, “Big Rock”. And it was, a boulder formation jutting out of the top of the hill. We gravitated to it, of course. Took some pictures. Looked around. And then realized we’d completely lost the path.
Now, we knew we were inside a loop. We knew we’d hit the path sooner or later. We had a decent idea of which way we’d come from, and there was plenty of light left. But still, cutting through the forest on a best guess, two horror writers against a tiny patch of wilderness passing ravines and landmarks that most assuredly were not on our map…
And then, suddenly, we found the path, and we heard noises.
Sasquatch calls. From our wives. Who were not pleased with us at all.
And who insisted in immediately going back on the path, but taking the part of the loop we hadn’t.
We didn’t make it back to Big Rock. We never saw Nifty Rocks (or Kodak Rock, another landmark on the map). I’m not sure Lynne and Melinda believe Big Rock exists. But the next day, we all stayed together and we all stayed on the path.
###
The sign said there was a dam, one of those brown signs that generally indicates things in parks your supposed to go see. So we kept on down the road looking for it, hoping there’d be a nice view or a parking lot or something. And we didn’t see it, and we kept going down that dirt road, which got increasingly more rutted and rocky, and Melinda, who’d grown up driving those roads, became increasingly concerned about the fact that we were down a Park Service Road covered in rocks and gullies in a 2007 Camry Hybrid, which had most assuredly not been designed for such things. Sensibly, she made noises about turning around. Less sensibly, I pointed out we hadn’t seen the dam, so we should keep going. Sensibly, she made louder noises about turning around, which may or may not have culminated in a declaration of intent to seize the wheel, throw me out of the car, and head back to civilization with Jeff and Lynne.
I turned the car round. And there, through the trees, we saw the dam, and the waterfall spilling down its side. It was well off the road, which had been following roughly the edge of the Yadkin River, and there was nothing scening or hikeable or accessible about it.
But it was there, and we saw it. And then we headed back, looking for an easier path.
###
Seven miles of dirt road. That’s what the directions said. Turn onto the road into the park north of Troy on 109, and then the fun would begin. It was well after dark when we left Troy, the car crammed with groceries and us and our stuff. We had no idea where the turn was, and checking road signs at 45 miles an hour on a twisty country highway was not something our screenburned eyes were good at. Eventually we pulled over and looked at the map, and figured the turn was just over the Uwharrie River. So we kept an eye out for the river, and when we found it, kept an eye out for the turn, and when we made it, still nearly ended up in a ditch because it was goddamn dark and the road spun off at an angle.
Then, seven miles of dirt road. Dirt and rock, really. Sometimes one lane wide. Dark. Up and down hills. Watching for turns, jokingly watching for sasquatches. Seeing warnings for OTV trails and worrying that either offroaders or deer were going to lurch out of the darkness. And of course checking the odometer - has it been seven miles yet? How about now?
We missed the last turn, of course, largely because it looked like an ATV path and not a road. Beyond it was a trailhead and a parking lot; we turned around there and nearly took the belly off the Camry crossing a rain gully in the hard-packed dirt. Then back and down the turn - a look at that turn in daylight had us cringing that we’d tried it - and up a steeper hill with looser dirt than we’d seen before, with the Camry giving it all it had before we finally crested the top and found, there, the cabin.
And we pulled up, and we unloaded, and Melinda said, “Tomorrow, if you want, I can drive.”
December 15, 2013
12 Things About The Place I Live That Outsiders Just Don’t Understand
2-The place where I live has a particular regional delicacy or way of preparing a standard dish that other people don’t do. Because I live here, I’ve gotten used to it and I think it’s better than the way it’s done everywhere else.
3-We have a unique way of pronouncing a couple of common words that nobody else does. We take this as a mark of pride. Everyone else just calls it an accent, and thinks we’re weird when we correct them or get upset about it. Also, we make t-shirts highlighting the weird way we pronounce it, and sell them to tourists and short-timers.
4-We are very proud of one of our strange local festivals/customs, and will constantly be shocked and surprised when we discover that people who don’t live here have no idea what we’re talking about when we mention them. The fact that the local festival/custom generally involves spending lots of money at a few specialty stores that cater to it and wearing a weird hat has not yet breached our consciousness.
5-Our pizza is different from and better than your pizza. Just accept this.
6-There is something special and unique about the place where I live that only natives understand, never mind the fact that a significant portion of the people who live where I live are not actually from here. In fact, a huge chunk of the population is relative newcomers, who quickly embrace our weird local customs, foods, and pronunciation quirks in an effort to convince themselves that they are in fact locals.
7-We get very offended by people stereotyping people from around here. So offended that we periodically reinforce those regional stereotypes by posting lists of weird regional behaviors to social media sites.
8-There are no sports fans like our local sports fans. We like to paint ourselves team colors, tailgate in parking lots before games, and get wildly excited when our teams win. Occasionally, we set couches on fire.
9-We firmly believe that there is something wrong with anyone who hasn’t tried one of our local microbrewed beers, never mind that it doesn’t get distribution more than fifteen miles from the brewery. We can wax endlessly rhapsodic about that beer despite the fact that we do not ourselves drink it, largely because it’s slightly more expensive than the stuff we started drinking in college.
10-Something about Point #6. I don’t remember what Point #6 was, but at this point the list is getting a little overstretched, so it’s time to reference something that’s already been said in hopes of padding things out a little longer.
11-We have a couple of unique words for common items that don’t get used outside of a 50 mile radius of where I’m standing. We like to make fun of people who don’t understand what we’re talking about when we use them when we’re here, and to get annoyed at people who don’t understand when we’re talking about when we use them somewhere else.
12-People from my area steadfastly believe that lists like this will educate people about our area, and refuse to believe that the only people reading it are locals looking for affirmation.
December 5, 2013
A night in a bar in the Marais
Tonight, I had dinner at Le Marche. It's something I do every time I come to Paris, for two reasons. One, their duck breast in spiced honey is otherworldly, but more importantly, when I came to Paris solo for the first time in 2004, Le Marche was the first restaurant I found and wandered into on my own. It's my first real memory of Paris as a solo traveler, and it carries the weight of ten years of memories.
That night back in 2004, I finished dinner, nervously - I hadn't gotten the hang of French restaurant manners yet - tipped exorbitantly, and wandered out into the night. Next door was a bar, a bar with English in the windows and on the sign, a bar that promised lots and lots of options for single malt scotches. It was called The Pure Malt, and I went in. The bartender took my order, shook his head disapprovingly, and thumped the scotch list on the counter in front of me. I tried something different and new, which turned into my favorite whisky, and ended up spending the evening chatting with my fellow bar patrons. One had been the hairdresser on the set of Eyes Wide Shut, while the other two were Australian lawyers on their honeymoon with extensive advice on how to get out of jail in Bali if you were caught for pot possession.
I have never been to Bali. I have never been arrested for possession. The closest I have ever come is when I tried to smuggle some primo German smoked meat back into the States on a flight from Bucharest and was told by a customs officer at JFK, "Sir, would you please show me your sausage". But it was a hell of a night.
Tonight, after eating at Le Marche, I went to the Pure Malt. It's still there, under new ownership. The bartender was a friendly sort, and we chatted about drinking and Halloween decorations and drinking and video games and drinking and, you get the idea. And then the couple at the table behind me got up to settle their tab. Lovely folks, very nice, and it turned out they were celebrating her birthday, which called for one more round, which I picked up because it was her birthday and strangers had been kind to me in this bar once upon a time, and then they started talking about Halloween and the makeup they'd done and how the gent of the couple hadn't played a video game since his fiancee had arrived in Paris and drinking and there were shots and another round of beers and then another round of shots to toast the ongoing birthday, which has rolled over the midnight mark but not yet elapsed in the young lady's former residence of Hawaii and...
And at a certain point I realized that it was still 2004 in that bar for me, that it would always be 2004 in that bar for me, only now I was the old-timer (of a sorts) raconteuring stories and damn if things hadn't come full circle.
I am older now. I am possibly wiser. I am certainly better at my craft, and possibly better at life, and happier with who I am. And a single night in a bar that ended without a fight, a collapse, an illness, a hookup, or a bill in the quadruple digits wouldn't seem to be a likely candidate for a touchstone. And yet, there I was, and there I was, and here I am.
Slainte.
December 4, 2013
New Sights in Paris
Like a left instead of a right when headed toward Place du Marche Sainte-Catherine, which takes you down a narrow street called Rue Necker. It dead ends a couple of blocks in, an enclosed alley with weathered stone scuplture and a bronze satyr's head - or is it a devil's - blocking the way. The head is clearly intended as a fountain, but he's run dry until spring, empty mouth gaping.
Or a walk around the Place des Vosges, where there's suddenly an open gate into the gardens of the Hotel de Sully, a place I'd walked past a hundred times and never seen open. Monday, under grey skies, they were open. A family posed for pictures in front of a mounted metal wheel against a stone wall; dead vines climbed against the upper reaches of the mansion. And on the right, as I headed for the street beyond, a gift shop.
Or the shantytown sprung up suddenly, crooked into the corner of an on-ramp on the highway leading from Charles de Gaulle. A year ago, it hadn't been there. Now, makeshift tents and clotheslines huddled against the railing, low enough not to be obvious, high enough to be seen.
