Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, May 31, 2004 The Pitch: It's like More Photos!  I'm hoping that the greenery comes off as well in the "shrink-to-blog" version as it does in the original. This was taken a block or so from Tim's place. My big regret is that I didn't get over there while it was raining: the darker the skies and the wetter the tracks, the more dramatic the contrast. 
posted by Jeff |
11:01 PM |
The Pitch: It's like Gross meets Consumerism!  The Portland swag pile, more or less. Not pictured is the beautiful new McSweeney's which I presented to Tim and the PS2 game Dynasty Warriors 3 which I bought the day I left. This buying spree was one of the ways I dealt with my time in Portland. The other way was to pop pictures whenever I could. Consumer and tourist--that was me in Portland.
posted by Jeff |
7:08 PM |
The Pitch: It's like Tempting Fate meets Bragging Outright! I'm happy to report it all came together. E. & I went and worked out, and then got our manicure/pedicures, the highlight of which were the little spa tubs we soaked our feet in while the massage chairs worked over our backs. My buttock massage wasn't working but I sure as hell wasn't going to say anything: the nail place was packed--six workers, ten customers--and I was the only guy there. The woman who did my nails kept giving me amused looks and then approving once-overs of Edi. It was a pretty uninterprable combo of looks, but I finally decided it was something like, "I'd never date a man who'd come here, but I admire how thoroughly the woman has broken your spirit." Of course, I was pretty self-conscious, so I may not have inferred correctly.Now we're home and getting ready to grill up some tuna steaks and break out the corn on the cob. I know I'm all but asking the gods to come down and destroy me, but life, dammit, is good. posted by Jeff | 6:54 PM | The Pitch: It's like Companeros meets Zardoz! Okay, so I've started the invasion of the photographs to the blog, god help you all. My ally in this venture is the bloggerbot, a tool offered through hello.com in hopes, I'm sure, of sharing in all that google/blogger cash.It's almost 3:00 on Memorial Day and things are pretty quiet. I've been meaning to write about Portland, however briefly, but may instead do the lazy man's way to photo blog posts, at least for today. I just watched Companeros (very good latter period Spaghetti Western) and may next watch Zardoz, both of which were part of my scary Portland shopping spree. I'm listening to a copy of Surfer Rosa, a side-effect of reading every music critic's slobbery review of Coachella over the past few weeks. Edi and I have tentative plans to get a manicure/pedicure later today--I should check on her and see if she's still game. posted by Jeff | 2:45 PM | The Pitch: It's like Photos from Portland, Part I  It's a scientific fact that in 95% of all photos with Tim in it, he will either be driving, smoking or giving the photographer the finger. I'm happy to finally have a picture containing all three elements.
posted by Jeff |
2:42 PM |
Tuesday, May 25, 2004 The Pitch: It's like North meets West! Yeah, we're here in Portland, the city with the block-long bookstore, and all is keen. It's incredibly warm and humid, something like seventy degrees out and there's going to be some rain soon, you can just tell.We're at the Mark Spencer, just a block away from Powell's, which is the above-mentioned bookstore. Not only does the store take up a full block, it also sells condoms in the men's rooms. I was simultaneously amused and horrified by the resulting mental image of couples fornicating freely among the stacks, errant pubic hairs pressed into remaindered copies of Rick Moody books, powerfully scented emulsions left on stacks of Carson McCullers paperbacks. I didn't buy condoms, although they had a pretty good deal on a Michael Chabon short story collection I might pick up later. The trip here was smooth, and I got a million dollar photo of Edi scowling at me on the plane that is now among my most treasured photographs ever. (I'll try to upload it when I get back.) In fact, I'm happy to say my decision to travel as a techno-dipshit has paid off handsomely: Not only did I get that great photo of Edi with the new camera, but photos of her family, and I'm writing this from the hotel bed because I brought the laptop and the wireless card and paid an extra six bucks to use the hotel's wi-fi network. All I need to do is get a bit of time in writing on the PDA and keyboard, and listen to a tune or two on my digital music player and I'll no longer be needlessly pretentious, I will be needfully pretentious. Amusingly enough, I was the only person out of the five at dinner tonight who didn't have a cell phone. I think that's the only thing that's keeping me from reaching gadget critical mass, and collapsing into a rechargeable battery singularity. posted by Jeff | 10:49 PM | Monday, May 24, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Airplane meets Top Secret! So....we're flying tomorrow.Is anything still illegal to bring to the airport? I was just arranging my travelling cutlery collection and, y'know, I was just wondering... The last two days, instead of packing, I've been thinking about packing. And thinking of packing pretty much consists of trying to remember that Airport Security guy's line from Fight Club: "Nine times out of ten, it's an electric razor. But every once in a while...it's a dildo. Of course, it's company policy never to imply ownership in the event of a dildo--we always use the indefinite article, 'a dildo.' Never 'your dildo.'" I love that movie. More obsessive digital camera shopping/video game buying. Best Buy had Superman: Shadow of Apokolips for ninety-nine cents. On the one hand, I heard it was a crappy game. On the other--ninety-nine cents. Not like I have any taste in video games anyway. I pick up Playstation Magazine every month because I'm a complete and utter idiot (I could subscribe for the cost of, like, three issues, but I refuse to do it because each month I swear is my last issue) and out of a demo disc of dumb games, what do I end up playing over and over? That's right. The Transformers game. The Transformers are pretty much after my time--the whole robots-that-turn-into-trucks is just utterly absurd to me--but I heard okay things about the demo looking good. And yeah, the demo looks good. But I'll be god-damned if I don't play it three times a day just so I can turn my giant robot into a cool sports car and drive through the Amazon jungle. If you do it right, you can build up enough speed, launch, turn back into a robot in mid-air and kung-fu some evil robot in the head. I feel simultaneously elated (because of how cool it is) and ashamed (because of what an idiot man-child I am to enjoy it) every time I do it. In fact, in my short history of living with Edi, I have to say The Transformers is the only game I've been embarrassed to play in front of her. The other day, she was hanging out on the couch reading an essay by David Foster Wallace, and I was playing this demo and I was unbelievably humiliated when the command screens would come on because of the dumb-assedness of the pseudo-scientific speak: "Keep your optical sensors open for mini-cons wherever you can find them! But beware of evil decepticlones who will try their best to deplete your energons!" "Okay, okay," I started mashing buttons in the hope of skipping past the screen. "Jesus, shut up." I literally blushed with shame. To her credit, Edi either acted like she didn't notice, or else didn't notice. One more reason why I've been in the luckiest guy evar nominees for the past two and a half years. Will I blog from Portland? Place your bets! posted by Jeff | 10:31 PM | Saturday, May 22, 2004 The Pitch: These are the paragraphs I cut from the previous entry.... I include them here because I took the time to do so many frickin' linky-links:All I've been doing for the last hour or so is slowly chasing my tail on the Internet and researching our upcoming trip to Portland. I managed to hunt up the arcade (although my beloved nickel city, or nickel palace, or whatever the damn thing was called, appears to be gone), checked out the playlist and menu for the Bagdad Theater & Pub (looks like it's gonna be Hellboy, at least until Friday), and found a list of Wi-Fi spots. I have no idea if Tim's gonna be working on the days I'm there; how or where to see my friend Amber; or even what books I should be looking for if I end up with the chance to spend half the day in Powells. But mainly, I'm gonna spend most of my time in Portland just super-fuggin' glad to see my brother and almost-as-fuggin' glad to be away from work. If I can take some time off and come back to the workplace without feeling bugged and resentful and worried, it'll be great. posted by Jeff | 7:41 PM | The Pitch: It's like The Shining meets The Incredible Mr. Limpet! In one hour, I will be free from work for approx. two weeks (I've got to work on the CE website, but I'm not even worrying about that until after Memorial Day) and I cannot fuckin' wait. Work has been relatively mellow today, but that's not gonna stop me from whining and bitching about like I've been having bamboo shoots stuffed under my fingernails. (I've always wondered if that was 'bamboo shoots' or 'bamboo chutes' but I don't really care enough at the moment to Google it.)It may be the anniversary. Last Saturday was my nine year anniversary at this place. That's longer than my time in college and high school put together. And it's as long, now that I think about it, as my time at Jacoby Creek Elementary where I did K-8 in one straight shot. I'd like to say I was anxious to leave JCE, tugging at the leash of childhood, but honestly, as bad as eighth grade was (and it, along with seventh grade, was pretty bad), high school seemed infinitely worse: all the dickheads who'd disappeared, a class at a time, would all be there, waiting, to say nothing of all the dickheads at all the other schools--tributaries of cruelty emptying into a single swelling basin. And the first two years of high school were all that and more, I'm happy to report. But anyway, I think I've digressed from my main point. Or perhaps I haven't. Work here has been like an endless Senior year of high school for several years now (since at least late 2001): it's kind of easy, I totally know my way around, most of my relationships have steadied, and nobody tends to give me any shit because I'm either liked or practically invisible because I've been around so long and people have problems of their own. And just like Senior year, when you get restless, you get really restless. I have this new digital camera, and my co-worker just went on break for almost two hours. And I was struck with this almost physically crippling desire to go around this floor and take high definition digital photos of the interior every unlocked desk drawer I could find. I don't doubt if I was caught, I'd be canned for taking those photos. It didn't matter that I was just doing it as some sort of lark, or a possible art project about individuality in homogenized surroundings, or writerly research, or whatever explanation I gave. And there are files a million times more interesting or disturbing or potentially troublesome right in front of me, b ut that's million times less likely to get me fired than the drawer/photo thing. And that may be why it's tempting--all that other stuff about art or research is all crap. Just like the senior peeling out in the parking lot in the name of rebellion is bullshitting everybody. He just wants to go--he wants to be someplace new. But he's too afraid of the actual future to just leave, so he tries to be stupid enough to shake things up, have his ass (and his future) handed to him that much sooner. I really do hope my two weeks away dilutes that stupidity. Unlike high school, I'm here because I want to be. But, at least at this point, I feel like even hours freely spent in a cage are still hours spent in a cage. posted by Jeff | 10:38 AM | Thursday, May 20, 2004 So I wrote the new comix section today, in between napping and Red Dead Revolver and what seemed like 13,000 snacks which have reduced my stomach into a state somewhere between a huffy gassy bellows and a sloshing poisoned punchbowl. Now all I have to do, in between mournful visits to the commode, is write the Fanboy Ramapge. I got about 200 words in before I realized I had no idea where I was going with it, and no idea what to write next. This panicked me into doing the dishes and, again, visiting the bathroom and praying for a cartoon anvil to drop on my head. While doing so, an idea came to me, and then another. I now have structure for the Fanboy and a few jokes to hang along that structure. Now all I need is the time and the space (I keep coming up with routines set in dialogue form, which gobbles up the space) to write it, and I'm set. On a perhaps not-unrelated note, when looking at myself in bathroom mirror, I noticed a new area of thinning on the right of the already dwindling colony that is the hair on my forehead. It's really more like the hair on my head that can almost reach my forehead, and now it's thinning even more than that. Man, I hope the rest of me quickly comes to resemble Patrick Stewart by the time I'm forty, because my hairline is probably going to be just like his right around then. Dammit. posted by Jeff | 11:05 PM | Wednesday, May 19, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Godzilla meets The Blob! A quick update, just because I ate so much sushi I think I may have ruptured something...It's newsletter time and I'm going to have to totally get off the stick. The last night of Godzilla is tomorrow, and I very much want to see it on the big screen. Really, really, really want to see it. If that's really true, though, why didn't I do more work on the newsletter today? I have some very good excuses, but the bad excuse is more Red Dead Revolver. I had to go back to it because I really like the duels, and I wanted to see what came next, and I'm a sucker. A whining, snivelling Pavlov's dog of a sucker. It gets better as you go on, a little. It's hard not to like a game where you get to shoot homicidal circus midgets, and I got to the introduction of the fish-out-of-water trick shooter (a beloved staple of the spaghetti western). But it's still not particularly good--which didn't stop me from eating up my spare time playing it. In fact, even now I'm bargaining with myself: Well, if I play it tonight, I'll get it out of my system and be less tempted to play it tomorrow. Yeah. Sure. Also there were some other things I wanted to post about, but rapidly approaching blood sugar coma presents me doing so in any great detail, or even remembering fully what they were. One was feeling kinda antsy about this whole Quentin Tarantino/Sophia Coppola dating thing. I saw a picture of them arm in arm at Cannes and it creeped me out. If I can get a better grasp on why, I'll let you know. It may only be the potential for truly frightening kids. Speaking of potential, here's a dollop of the wasted stuff. To publicize their Nick Hornby Songbook, McSweeneys had the good idea to invite people to write in short essays about their favorite songs, Hornsby-style. The results, from the few I've sampled, are pretty awful. Or at least two of my favorite songs ("Allison" and "Aching to Be") are written about in a very cringe-worthy way. Could I write a short essay about one of my favorite songs and not bone it up as badly? And if so, which song? And how to avoid the sucking? posted by Jeff | 10:13 PM | Tuesday, May 18, 2004 The Pitch: It's Refreshingly Pitch-Free! Nothing too exciting around here, but I thought I'd post anyway since I'm trying to be Quantity Lad on the blog front.I rented, finally, Red Dead Revolver for the PS2 and I'm glad I didn't dash out and buy it. RDR is a Western shoot-'em-up, and while the gameplay is moderately deep, the story is excruciatingly shallow. It's something along the lines of: Well, you get thirty seconds of dialogue, then a bunch of people shoot at you. Then, after ou've shot them, more people show up to shoot at you, but you're not quite sure where they are. Then, when you're through shooting them, more people show up to shoot you, then the boss shoots up, there's a bit of dialogue, then you shoot the guys and the boss. Then the boss turns out to be the underboss and the real boss shows you up, and then you shoot him, and shoot him, and shoot him, and shoot him. And when he's dead, you're rewarded with thirty more seconds of dialogue. And the faux Morricone soundtrack is okay, but it's not the huge glorious Morricone rip-off that Outlaws is (although Outlaws just didn't have enough tracks--I shiver to think what they could have done with access to a DVD instead of two CDs). I've got the game until Sunday (of course, this is the week the newsletter is due) so I'll tinker with it, but I'm surprised at how little I really want to after 45 minutes of play. It beats wandering around lost looking for a submarine to hijack (the current excitement that is XIII) but, despite the cool Dueling option, the Spidey sense for shootouts, the ability to hide behind cover and shoot, I'm not just feeling it. I'll let you know if the situation changes but: Sorry Red Dead Revolver. Your name was cool. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I am love, love, loving the new camera. I missed being able to take a picture and then post it as my desktop, or post it on a website or whatever. That is my segueway to showing you the photo so, of course, for some reason I can't post it to my blog. Grrr! Dammit! So now I have to send you here to see it. Yeah, that desktop makes me happy every time I see it, all right. I'm only a hundred and fifty pages from finishing the re-read and it's gonna be kinda hard not to turn around and start reading it again. Hibbs has lent me the first Wild Cards book, and has been (im)patiently asking me every week for over a month: "Finished with Gravity's Reading Rainbow yet?" So I have books on deck. Nonetheless, Gravity's Rainbow sexily pouts in front of me, kind of a "hey, sailor, where you running off to?" kind of vibe. "Don't you want restart me with a clean yellow legal pad at your side and jot down each occurrence and context of the words 'chess,' 'dog,' 'mandala,' 'gravity,' 'lowland,' 'qlippoth,' 'pig,' 'shit,' the initials 'K. K.,' (it ain't just coincidence that the Kenosha Kid and King Kong got 'em in common, Jackson) and oh so many more? W-well, dontcha?" Hmmm. Maybe I shouldn't keep my desktop this way for too long. I could end up in trouble... posted by Jeff | 9:22 PM | Monday, May 17, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Wings of Desire meets The Andromeda Strain! If I remember correctly (and I may not) the word Tim uses to describe my palm and foldout keyboard writing arrangement is "fruity." And perhaps this is why, as a rule, the only people who get very excited by seeing me write in cafes or at outdoor tables are the Japanese, Germans, a few Dutch guys, people who were the fastest touch-typists in their high school, and an African-American of the "white people are crazy" school who couldn't believe I was actually typing. "Oh, I thought you were just goofing on people," he said after noticing there were actually words on the screen and everything. "You were just kind of looking around and, you know--" he flapped his hands up and down. I suspected what he wanted to say, but he didn't actually say it."You look like Stevie Wonder," Edi had already told me. "You kind of roll your head around to the music, your fingers bouncing up and down on the keys." "No, I don't!" "Oh, yes. Yes, you do." So this morning--excited German guy. From the opposite end of the cafe, I saw him talking to a friend while looking at me and flapping his hands up and down. I smiled at him and took off my headphones. "That would be my music of choice," he yelled over to me. "The sound of typing!" I smiled and nodded at him. On the one hand, I would completely agree with him. On the other, agreeing with him might force me to explain why I put on headphones and listened to music. No paradoxes for me, thanks. He started to ask another question as I was putting on my headphones, so I took them off again. "What?" In the end, he came over for much excited ooh'ing and ahhh'ing (well, the German version of ooh'ing and ahh'ing, which meant that he pointed and lectured about my device to me and occasionally would go "Hmmm!" in a very pleased way), and we bitched amiably about impactless keyboards, thumbpads, and the like. He of course asked about Bluetooth and lifted up a corner of his coat to show his holstered Bluetooth cell phone, and he started talking about voltage--the five volt threshold, I think he referred to it--which is the voltage that flows through a USB line and some other thing I can't remember. Like any good techie, in his two minutes with me, he managed to bitch about how "they" make you pay for all these different power sources when, if you can just figure how to power your device on 5 volts, you can do just about anything for free. After a few minutes of actually pushing his fingers on the keyboard to see if the texture and give was agreeable (it was!), he thanked me, made his way back to his table, and then left three minutes later. I actually was pretty fond of him, and became convinced three minutes in that I was talking to Wim Wenders--there was something about the steely blue eyes behind the handsomely featureless face, the colorless hair with the generic cut. It was the face of countless architects, scientists, modern painters, writers on books concerning chess prodigies and number theory--the face I always associate with Wim Wenders and his emotionally formalist epics. As he walked away, I wanted to say, "Wait, who are you?" Who was he, if not Wim Wenders? He left the cafe three minutes later, pulled out (of course) a pipe, and got behind the wheel a car of indeterminate type the color of dirty pool water. Because I've been wandering the last month or so in the wilderness of plotless, characterless writing, the essential characterness of Wim Wenders asserted a magnetic pull on me. Let me see those functional glass tables of your home, Wim! Let me see the broken-spined hardcovers analyzing the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit guttered with pipe ash! I promise to make no noise at all as you put on a Bach concerto (nothing at all like the sound of typing) and hike out over uncut grass to refill the bird feeder! And if you can somehow find it in your heart to commit adultery, or become unheathily obsessed with your neighbor, or use USB cables to power your reading lamps, I swear to you I'll be your friend for life! posted by Jeff | 8:05 AM | Sunday, May 16, 2004 Google: It's like Rear Window meets The Bad News Bears! After a very long time without, I have a digital camera again. We have a digital camera, actually, as Edi purchased it to use for work reasons, can write it off for tax purposes, and I'm the monkey guy who gets to run around with it snapping blurry photos with my thumb. I've missed it so.It's a 4 megapixel camera which means, um, that they're huge. I guess that makes sense, right? Well, downloading the pictures from the camera was a breeze but emailing just a select few to Edi took a a while. And the photos of her look great, but I look like a cock-eyed sunburned Frankenstein. Sadly, this is no fault of the camera--it's how I look that's the problem. I don't need a 4 megapixel camera--I need a .2 megapixel camera, one that makes my eyes look less squinty and changes my forehead's sweaty patina into a gentle glow. I may request that Edi takes all pictures of me in Angel mode. Yes, our camera really has an Angel mode which according to the instruction book "is intended for shots of children and women, since it gives particularly beautiful skin tones and also gives priority to the shutter response so that you can capture fleeting laughter or smiles." (Reading that really drove home that we had bought a Japanese camera.) The camera also takes movies and records sound for those of us who also hate the sound of our own voices and may still cling to the foolish belief that we look better in motion than we do standing still. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if another ten years we have cameras that can capture our auras so people like me can shake our heads in silent horror at how befouled is the actuality of the personal nimbus. Sigh. Okay, that's a nice and depressing take on what was actually a really lovely little moment: Edi and I taking pictures of each other and laughing and marveling at how well the stuffed bunny on the computer looked. Unsurprisingly, he's a natural in front of a camera and doesn't seem bothered by how he comes off in photos at all. posted by Jeff | 7:51 PM | Saturday, May 15, 2004 I just spilled Diet Coke on myself. Now I only have three hours until my flesh falls off. posted by Jeff | 7:02 PM | Friday, May 14, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Omega Man meets The Dreamers! We had tickets last night for a free screener of Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes. We were reasonably excited about them when I got them from work on Friday.But the closer we got to Thursday, the less we wanted to go. And by Thursday morning, it was decided in one of those weird, unspoken, coupley things that sometimes happens: we weren't going to go, and neither of us were into it. Now, we both like Jim Jarmusch, and we both like free. And after a day spent doing all sorts of back-patting accomplishments (haircut, laundry, egg-boiling, shopping, working out), you think we'd both enjoy a relaxing flick filled with understated humor and delicious celebrity cameos. Instead, if I may use the patois of Northern Island comrades, we couldn't be arsed. Do you know the original Japanese cut of Godzilla is halfway through its two-week run at the Castro and I haven't seen it once? We still haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I haven't been to the Naz8 in months. All of this has built up to the sort of frenzy that would normally drive me into the theaters for a week, an ongoing frenzy of diurnal dark-dwelling and compulsive cinema watching. I even want to see The Punisher now, for Christ's sakes! And yet, whenever I think of actually going to the theater I get restless and uncomfortable and kind of twitchy. I actually think shit like "Why should I go to the movies? All I'm doing is wasting two to three hours of my life?" As I do with everything nowadays, I blame Van Helsing. ("Honey! Van Helsing clogged the toilet again!!") Van Helsing wasn't the worst movie I've seen--at the time, the action seemed okay, the set design was nice, I even laughed at a line or two. But it's as if the movie, like a slow-acting toxin, has thoroughly poisoned Edi and I on the idea of going to films. Even when seen for free, the relentless vapidity and repetitiveness of Van Helsing (a movie which, in a more honest world, should have been called "Everyone Swings on a Rope!") causes such existential distress, it is capable of blighting one's soul. Perhaps it was precisely that Van Helsing wasn't the worst film ever is why it has destroyed my kidneys and begun atrophying my optic nerves--all the noise and the color and the movement of the cameras was able to keep me distracted the entire time, almost pleasantly, and now I fear the movie-going experience because I am filled to my very core with anguished self-doubt. If I can't tell the difference between soul rape and a decent movie, how can I protect myself? What's to keep me from sneaking into a showing of The Day After Tomorrow and then finding myself, months later, a man-whore in Bogota with no idea how I got there or even whether Jake Gyllenhaal is a decent actor? My hope is it's just a passing phase, an aftertaste that will fade from one's mouth as the cells are replaced, generation by generation. But I worry, in an distractable and irritable way. What if Van Helsing is, to steal a metaphor from another film, the cinematic equivalent of the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique? I felt okay when it happened, but now I wonder if, five steps after I left the theater, my love for movie-going tumbled lifeless at my feet, while I staggered on unaware. posted by Jeff | 8:12 AM | Wednesday, May 12, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Three Days of the Condor meets Speed Racer! I'd read Ubisoft's XIII looked great but wasn't particularly good. But on Sunday I also read that it was ten bucks at Circuit City. So I went and picked it up.Well, it's not particularly good but that hasn't stopped me from playing it anyway. A first person shooter with a combination of graphic novel design and cel-shaded animation, XIII has lots of nice little touches and a few bad ones. Here's a game where you can see the sound effects, and can gauge when to jump around a corner and ambush your enemy based on whether the "TAP TAP TAP" of his footsteps are getting larger or smaller. (And I don't know what they've got lined up for later levels, but in a game where the dialogue is spoken and also appears in word balloons over people's heads, how great would it be for you to develop telepathy and be able to read people's thought balloons?) The score is jazzy--literally jazzy, with a great peppy drumming making the action scenes punchy and fast--and overall the whole thing reminds me of Lucasart's Outlaws, which I always liked and had a similar approach of a first-person shooter welded to a genre movie. The problem is, XIII kinda sucks. And not just in a "nothing says high-quality voice acting like David Duchovny, Adam West and the rapper Eve!" way (or a "we've established the comic book speech ballons but we're still going to have character's mouths move, making them look like convulsing sex dolls trying to chew gum" way.) It sucks in a "in five minutes, you're going to be trying really hard not to throw this controller across the room" way. If you've got a first person shooter, it's all about the controls. Particularly in a console game, where we consumers know we're playing with less-than-bleeding-edge graphics and smaller levels and an inability to map the controls to a keyboard and mouse combo of our choosing, etc. You just have to have good controls, otherwise the game is less like fun and more like a chore. And XIII is particularly grating, making you switch between weapons and non-weapons in a goofy way, making you reliant on a dumb-ass grappling gun all too eager to leaving you swinging around in circles while enemies strafe at you with machine guns. (XIII also has what I consider the bane of new millennium first-person-shooters: escort missions. For me, there's nothing worse than a computer NPC yelling "cover me!" and running like an ass-hatted moron into a rain of bullets while you're still trying to find that extra medkit.) If there's anything XIII has going for it, it's an abundance of sniper rifle missions. I've played through 4 or 5 levels now, and two of them were all about sneaking up with a harpoon gun and using an 8x scope to kill people from afar. Even now, as I curse the designers for having me try to snipe from the roof of a dangling cable car (because, of course, instead of running from side to side, my character keeps going up and down the ladder), I'm like "Cool, I've got a sniper rifle!" Critics have complained about the sluggish AI on XIII but it helps ease the pain of the shitty control scheme, and it gives me plenty of time to sneak about, picking off one patrolman after another with perfectly placed head shots. Should you heed the advice of somebody who apparently would be happy playing a modern-day version of "Duck Hunt?" Probably not. But should you spend ten bucks to pick up XIII? Unless you're obsessed with building your games library (guilty) or trading in used games later, the Duck Hunter says, Probably not. posted by Jeff | 10:41 AM | Tuesday, May 11, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Freddy Vs. Jason meets Ecks Vs. Sever! I'm sure it's been said 75 million times already, but damn is this user upgrade to blogger ug-lee!I have, with some regret, uninstalled Avant Browser. Although I loved a lot of features Avant Browser had (yay! No pop-ups), a good number of them actually came from having the google toolbar built in. Although AB still had it once the Google toolbar was removed, I found it to be a bit of a system hog and I couldn't turn off its predilection for checking on boot for a new version of AB. To top it off, the guy who created AvantBrowser (Anderson, uh, Che?, I think) upgrades the thing every friggin' week. Finally, the prospect of having a "blog this!" button that worked was just too tempting. I really appreciated being able to one-click stuff for review later, and missed t a lot in the last couple weeks (now I can go through some of the links I had emailed to myself and dig up the info). My only concern with all of this is I'm now totally Google's whore. I search on Google, I blog through Google. I've got the fuggin' Google toolbar. Plus, I have one of those beta googlemail accounts which I've been using to handle all my mailing list emails for the last week. This is after I stopped using dictionary sites because I found out you can just type "define:[word you know but can never really remember what it means, exactly, like 'vituperative']" and Google will give you a list of definitions. And there was this helpful article in the S.F. Chronicle that shows you how to look up phone numbers, use reverse phone numbers, calculate functions, and check flight info on Google. I give it two years before I can type tax:[SSN] and it will do my taxes for me. And yet, as is the way with lovely, lovely capitalism, although it waits on me hand and foot, Google is not my whore. I am now its whore. It knows where I search. It knows who I email and what I email them about. It knows what interests me enough to put on my blogs, and it will take all this information to sell my ass like a two-dollar whore to slavering advertisers. Will it be such a bad world when I am able to open my browser and see discreet pastel ad boxes offering to sell me old Jack Kirby comics and Sonny Chiba DVDs? Well, "bad" isn't really the right word, so I guess my answer is no. It will be, however, a more compromised world, a less diverse world, a more pleasant, well-run, quietly fascist world. How does that John Cale quote go from the end of Watchmen? "It will be a stronger, loving world for us to die in"? (And yes, in case you're wondering, I searched in Google to try and find the quote--God help me!) posted by Jeff | 10:23 PM | Saturday, May 08, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Dawn of the Dead meets Dawn of the Dead! So the other day, I rented the original Dawn of the Dead. Again. This means I've seen it twice in the last two months. Which compares favorably with my current record for the remake of the Dawn of the Dead which I've also seen twice in the last two months. In fact, originally, I saw the remake in the theaters, rented the original, then saw the remake again in the space of two weeks. And after seeing the remake for the second time, I really wanted to immediately re-rent the orignal: only a strong fear that I would be creating an unstoppable memetic reverb that would have me dashing from the theater to the VCR again and again stopped from doing so. After waiting a month or so, I realized I still wanted to re-see the original, so I did. I think it's wise to wait as I no longer want to rush right out and re-see the remake. No, no. I am more than willing to wait until the expanded version comes out on DVD and then buy it.This would be the point of the blog where I dig right in as to what's so great about each version of DoD, apply my typically slapdash standards of critical comment, etc. No dice. I'm so brain-addled it took me ten minutes to make the para above sound at all rational. Plus, work has now come down the pike and I'm the only one who seems to understand what's to be done with it. posted by Jeff | 3:46 PM | |
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