| deadline monkey's sarcasm overdose |
[Jul. 2nd, 2010|01:52 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | unslept | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Atmosphere, "Shrapnel" | ] |
HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS
I'M PLAYING SINGULARITY AND IT HAS HEALTH PACKS
IF I TAKE DAMAGE THE DAMAGE JUST KIND OF STAYS THERE UNTIL I HEAL IT
WHAT IS THIS STRANGE AND FRIGHTENING NEW WORLD IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF |
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| the oppressive existence of deadline monkey |
[Jun. 25th, 2010|02:40 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | speculative | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | J. Ralph, "Kansas City Shuffle" | ] |
One of the things about nerd culture that has always mystified me is the generally conservative atmosphere. As a general rule, the silent majority of science fiction fans seem to want more of what they already have: familiar characters, new takes on old scenarios, etc. For these people, nerd media - even with its heavy focus on fantasy, possibility and wonder - doesn't function to challenge, inspire, or innovate; instead, it's something like a warm bath in a familiar room.
I suppose that's fine as far as it goes; it's a big, weird world, and whatever gets you through it sane is probably a good thing.
What's frustrating is that the silent majority is where the money comes from, and they tend to recoil, hissing, from anything they don't already know. (That is, unless they're hit with a multimillion-dollar, multimedia ad campaign, on the level where it's less a marketing initiative and more the PR equivalent of the Visigoths sacking Rome.) You see a lot of this just about everywhere; the examples that come readily to my mind are "Firefly," Beyond Good & Evil, and the recent Sarah Polley movie Splice.
( and now we talk about comic books ) |
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| sportscenter |
[Jun. 17th, 2010|10:54 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | oddly anticipatory | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Bloody Tears" | ] |
It turns out that when my life depends on the outcome of the game, basketball's actually pretty exciting.
The Lakers won tonight and Los Angeles feels like it's under siege. The street outside my hotel smells like expended gunpowder and police cars are moving in tight groups of six. If the Lakers had lost - and they were getting shellacked right up until the third quarter - I'm not sure I'd have made it back from dinner.
This is kind of fun, really. |
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| deadline monkey and the infinite sadness |
[Jun. 16th, 2010|08:24 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | too damn early argh | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Jackalope, "Creeper" | ] |
So yeah, I have a certain degree of earned cynicism about Sony at this point, so maybe I'm not the guy to ask this question, but if you watched their press conference yesterday, did it seem really fucking weird to anyone else?
I don't mean Kevin Butler up there on stage worshipping a golden calf or whatever the fuck it was that he thought he was doing. I don't mean that sassy black kid that's going to be the new face of the PSP brand, although that was somewhere between amusing and cringe-worthy.
Mostly I'm wondering about how they packed the room. The audience response seemed far out of proportion to the actual value of what was said, pretty much at all times, even when someone on stage was saying patently ridiculous things. I cannot take a man seriously when he claims his company is an industry leader and font of boundless innovation when he's got a fucking blue-balled Wiimote in his hand. |
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| what man can kill me |
[Jun. 15th, 2010|12:01 am] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Los Angeles | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | exasperated | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Clutch, "Electric Worry" | ] |
Well, I've just been in my first earthquake.
I really don't know why I keep coming back here. |
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| a ridiculous apocalypse |
[May. 20th, 2010|02:43 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | bleakly fascinated | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Method Man, "Judgment Day" | ] |
I get up, raring to face the day, and then I read about the BP oil spill and trainwreck syndrome kicks in.
This is perhaps the dumbest possible ecological disaster and I cannot look away. |
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| i am the rocket messiah |
[May. 8th, 2010|09:02 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | scatterbrained | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | the Don Johnson Big Band, "Road" | ] |
- I have a job interview on Monday that, knock on wood, would put me in a position I have always wanted to be in, doing a job I have always wanted to do. I am somewhere between trying not to get my hopes too far up, lest disappointment destroy me, and carefully extrapolating a future career path that begins here, and ends in my triumphant ascension to god-emperor of the known universe.
- I really wish I could put my finger on what it is about Left 4 Dead 2 that isn't quite as satisfying as the original. I think some of it may be the fact that joining a "quick match" at any time of the day or night is like hopping an express train to abject failure. "The Passing" is a pretty nifty scenario all told, but I have yet to see a group of random players who can handle the finale in any way. Usually, they forget what game they're playing and scatter in three directions. I didn't think anything about L4D could be more irritating than the cockmongers who played the first one like it was Counterstrike, but I do believe that's been trumped.
- Since there are some people wondering about this in the corners of the Internet, I do still occasionally pull out and poke at the Resident Evil Plot Analysis, but it's a cursed project; it kills email accounts (my game-over.net account has been inactive for a while due to sheer weight of accumulated spam), destroys fan communities, and was actually trapped on a dead laptop for a significant span of time. I'm sort of thinking if I post an update, Mt. Fuji will erupt.
- It's always a surreal moment when you're mentioned by name on TV Tropes. Which one of you did that?
- In a weird confluence of events, the parts of the comics-fan blogging world that I pay attention to, like the new Scans Daily and Chris Bird's blog (I find myself in the weird position of being able to say, re: Bird, that I "knew him when"), have all been reading DC the riot act over the last couple of days.
Bird talks about and links to a decent essay about DC's weird relationship with its own fanbase, which is a point well worth making, and s_d was the first place I saw people discussing the weird racist subtext in Brightest Day and in DC as a whole.
I don't have a lot of useful things to say about the discussion, really. I read Brightest Day #1, and as I say on the s_d thread, the violence of the book struck me before the racial content of it did. Geoff Johns has always struck me as a really fucking strange writer, because on the one hand, he's a continuity-embracing Silver Age fetishist, but on the other, he mows down random bystanders like wheat. I remember opening a TPB of his Flash run and reading a plot that involved a cult knife-murdering everyone Wally had ever saved, including a female police officer who got stabbed in the back while trying to protect her infant son. Blackest Night had an innocent-bystander body count in the thousands that no one at DC seems interested in discussing. Now, Brightest Day starts off with a hearty dose of white slavery and random stabbing.
You can't have it both ways, you know? Blackest Night tries to have an ending that involves the absolute victory of good over evil, and life over death, and Hal Jordan as Not Jesus Really, but I can't get over the sheer amount of bloodshed that led up to that point. I don't care how big the win is, but half the nonpowered DC Universe is lying dead in the street.
I'll also admit that I get a little fanboy grin when I see people comparing DC to Marvel right now. I'm not a huge fan of everything Marvel does, and "Brand New Day" left a bad taste in my mouth that has yet to quite go away, but I guess you have to dance with the one who brought you. It feels like my sports team is winning, somehow, as stupid as that is.
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| claw marks on the wall |
[May. 1st, 2010|01:13 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | bruised | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Don Johnson Big Band, "No MC No Delay" | ] |
I found myself with time to kill a couple of days ago at the Palms in Las Vegas, so I decided to check out the new A Nightmare on Elm Street. My inner thirteen-year-old demanded it.
It's getting kicked up and down the block by film critics right now (15% on Rotten Tomatoes), but that's more or less par for the course. I'm not sure something like this was ever going to be a critical darling, particularly when you consider that it's a remarkably faithful remake. It pulls the same protagonist bait-and-switch that the original did, for example.
The important thing, though, is that it keeps the scares relatively grounded. While I dug the hell out of them as a kid, the later Nightmares all rapidly devolved into special effects sequences, starring Freddy as a sort of homicidal Ray Harryhausen with an infinite budget. Sometimes they were effective despite that, like parts of Dream Warriors, but something was lost.
The remake is fairly sedate by comparison. The nightmares have a familiar dream logic to them, where one place is abruptly another and all places are always Freddy's boiler-room hell, and Freddy himself is given a slightly more complex personality and motivation. It's a largely better-written movie than the original was, and it's an overall more watchable film, especially given how poorly the original movie has aged.
There is one thing I'm a bit irritated by, though, and that's going to require some spoilers to discuss. ( So I'll go ahead and cut it here. ) |
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| today's scheduled distraction |
[Mar. 22nd, 2010|07:13 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | trainwreck syndrome | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Jakalope, "Creeper" | ] |
I do actually have things to do today. Rather a lot, in fact. Out of nowhere a bunch of irons caught fire simultaneously last week and now, by my math, I need to beat a game every six hours until Friday.
What's going to make that tricky is my desire to patrol the Internet looking for new, exciting protestations of socialism concerning last night's health care extravaganza.
Whether it's elderly seniors protesting that nobody else should get anything vaguely like Medicare, or would-be military veterans promising armed insurrection over the fact that somebody else may get Tricare someday, it turns out that watching ill-informed people cry can be remarkably entertaining.
It almost makes me want to turn on Rush Limbaugh. Almost. |
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| sigh |
[Mar. 15th, 2010|02:42 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | vaguely dissatisfied | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Ramona Falls, "I Say Fever" | ] |
If absolutely nothing else, Neal Stephenson's Anathem is worth reading for the concept of Diax's Rake.
It seems like something that should have been invented a long time ago. |
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stolisomancer's journal