|
| Hey all, I prolly should have posted here a while back. I have moved to LJ, and I've posted there at least as much as I ever posted here-- with more frequency, too, I think. So point your browser to http://balrogthane.livejournal.com and check it out! This site will no longer be updated. -(---- | | |
| One of the things I enjoy doing is play Kingdom of Loathing. This is a game that, if you're not familiar with it, essentially makes great fun of 'serious' MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft. The graphics never get beyond the occasional animated .GIF, and that only for extra-special items. The entire game is rife with obscure and not-so-obscure cultural references, from The Matrix to the lyrics from songs by bands like "They Might Be Giants." Rather than some form of money, the game's economy depends on 'meat.' A la other RPGs, the player can equip various weapons, but in Kingdom of Loathing these are similarly absurd (a 'can of maces' is essentially a can filled with tiny maces that can be fired at enemies for ranged damage).
One of the classes of 'items' a KoLer can find to make his/her tenure as an Adventurer is the familiars. These are usually -- well, sometimes -- animals that will follow the player around and help him/her in combat, by healing the player, attacking the enemy, getting extra items/meat, etc. Available familiars include the ultra-violent Clockwork Grapefruit, the multitasking Cocoabo (small chocolate bird), and the demonic Evil Teddy Bear. As a familiar gains experience, they become heavier; a 20-lb. familiar is far better than a 5-lb. one.
Anyway, the main point of this entire post was to explain what I am about to put here: a list of the familiars I have collected in the Kingdom. I am absurdly proud of my Familiar Terrarium, as I got to the point where it was hard to think of new names...
 | Concord, the 20-pound Baby Gravy Fairy |  | Dingo, the 20-pound Cheshire Bat |  | Sir Robin's Minstrel, the 20-pound Cocoabo |  | Dennis, the 20-pound Ninja Snowflake |  | Herbert, the 20-pound Hovering Sombrero |  | Patsy, the 20-pound Leprechaun |  | The Old Man from Scene 24, the 20-pound MagiMechTech MicroMechaMech |  | Sir Robin, the 20-pound Mosquito |  | Brother Maynard, the 20-pound Fuzzy Dice |  | The Repressed Peasant, the 20-pound Spooky Pirate Skeleton |  | Not Quite Dead, the 20-pound Blood-Faced Volleyball |  | Zoot, the 20-pound Ghost Pickle on a Stick |  | The Witch!!!, the 20-pound Star Starfish |  | Tim the Enchanter, the 20-pound Levitating Potato |  | The Trojan Rabbit, the 20-pound Howling Balloon Monkey |  | The Black Knight, the 20-pound Angry Goat |  | Frank, the 20-pound Clockwork Grapefruit |  | Ze French Taunter, the 20-pound Grue |  | The Rehabilitated Newt, the 20-pound Sabre-Toothed Lime |  | The Killer Bunny, the 20-pound Stab Bat |  | The Knight Who Says 'Ni', the 20-pound Killer Bee |  | The Black Beast of Aaarghhh, the 20-pound Barrrnacle |  | Sir Not Appearing in this Film, the 20-pound Ghuol Whelp |  | The Green Knight, the 13-pound Origami Towel Crane |  | The Three-Headed Giant, the 1-pound Scary Death Orb |
-(----
| | |
| This is my review of a book that I just read, a book named A Fistful of Matter, by [Ugluk]. If you are a TORCer and have not read this book, get it. Now.
The first thing that struck me about the book was sheer size. Having written some paltry and pathetic things in my time, I know a little about how much work it takes to produce 700 pages, and how long; that he was able to finish it is a strong point in his favor, even if not in the book's. Fortunately, the book is actually pretty good.
Some of the length of the book could have been cut down; Ugluk, as you probably know already, is fairly partial to hearing himself talk, and this is obvious in the book, especially in the beginning. But overall, it's not a major shortcoming, it just makes parts here and there a little tedious. Another sticky point is that, for a book that relies on intricate plots as much as it does, there are a couple of things that don't really work. As long as I'm throwing hypocritical stones, let me mention the editing. For being done by just a couple people, who don't do it as their professional job and have lots of things to do otherwise, it's great... but you can't help noticing the places where grammar stumbles a bit, or the punctuation doesn't really make sense.
Now that I've finished my pretentious criticism (pretentious because I've never finished more than 60 pages of anything, and it was really really bad), let me say what's good about the book. The plot is interesting, albeit a little haphazard in places, and there are several good twists. There are some good characters, not least among them, Elvis Presley. The names can be interesting, but more often they're somewhat annoying because you can't help but notice how they're just something else backwards. OK... sorry that I let more criticism get in here...
One of the best things about the book, though, is the successful creation of alternate fiction. Ugluk has formed a universe that, while you wouldn't want to go there for many excellent reasons, is nevertheless fun to read about. It's believable, and when you finish the book, you wish there was more about the different characters. I look forward to the sequel(s).
Hint hint.
-(----
| | |
| This is the guest column I wrote for The Smoking Jacket, an eclectic blog.
I have been deeply impressed with the dedication of the good folks at The Smoking Jacket, and with their decidedly eclectic selection of subject material. So I was naturally honored when their editorial board approached me about writing a guest column reviewing movies. I appreciate their work and hope they continue it for years to come. After some thought, I realized that people don't generally want to read good reviews of movies they haven't seen. If you saw a movie and liked it, you might be happy to read a good review of it, but otherwise, you'd much rather read a review of a truly bad movie than of a masterpiece-- they're so much more interesting. For instance, Titanic, a movie we all know. It isn't nearly as fun to discuss the movie on the basis of its actual merits as it is to lampoon it. Today's movie-to-be-skewered is The Phantom: Slam Evil! Just the subtitle lets you know you're in for a real treat.
First off, let me admit that I am very much unfamiliar with the titular character; I know that he has a long and often impressive past in the pages of newspaper comics. This review is not about him, it is about the movie. Phantom begins when some random badguys show up on an island, looking for a fabled skull of power. Thanks to our hero being asleep on the job, they get it, but before they can make their escape the purple-tighted warrior is alerted to their presence. He rides out to head off the badguys, who are making their getaway in a large diesel truck, and catches up with them as they drive towards a rope bridge; of course, he fights it out with them on the truck. Through a series of unlikely events, our hero and a random island boy end up on the truck as it rolls onto the bridge. Then comes a lengthy sequence where the bridge slowly breaks, rope by rope, bringing them ever closer to their doom... until the Phantom manages to swing away from the truck, at which point the bridge promptly collapses. The truck falls 50 feet to the river below and, the moment it strikes the surface, explodes in a very cheap fireball. I should also mention that this movie has some of the absolute worst fight choreography I have ever seen. The rest of the movie actually goes downhill from there. The Phantom realizes that there's an evil corporate magnate who is trying to get his greedy hands on all three of these skulls of power, which obviously must not be allowed to happen, so he and some random babe race around the globe, trying to stop him. The whole movie begs the question, if these skulls are so bad, and if the natives who controlled them originally knew it, what demon of stupidity possessed them that they didn't destroy them in the first place? We might be tempted to assume that they could not do so, except that the movie ends in their destruction. At one point, the random babe is on a plane to the jungle to meet with the Phantom. Her plane is hijacked by a group of biplane pilots, all of whom are female and led by a young Catherine Zeta-Jones. In proper B-movie tradition, the pilots are all hot and apparently spend as much time as possible in their underwear-- when the Phantom goes to rescue the random babe from the pirate ship, all of the pilots have shed their suits and show no interest in putting anything else on (not that anyone seems to notice). The movie never even attempts to explain where the pirates came from or why they work with the Evil Magnate, although considering the rest of the plot this is not really a problem. There is also a shadowy organization that strikes from ANOTHER random tropical island. Like many evil organizations, their lair is in an 'extinct' volcano (although, since the peak is smoking when we first see it, we have to wonder just how dumb this organization is). This organization of pirates looks like they got their costumes by running through a museum and grabbing one article of clothing from each display, but we are probably supposed to think they look sinister and ancient. Their brilliant security measures consist of having a pair of 'sharks' in a moat; the producers apparently assumed no-one would be able to tell the difference between sharks and dolphins. The finale of the movie occurs here, where the bad fight choreography of the movie reaches its nadir. There is no way to describe the fighting that doesn't make it sound better than it is, so I won't discuss it further. A word really must be said about the Phantom himself. In comics, purple outfits are fine, especially if the guy underneath is well-muscled. But movies just can't do that. X-Men, to its credit, realized this: Hugh Jackman doesn't have to wear black-and-yellow spandex. But the Phantom missed that memo. He leaps about the screen in his trademark skintight purple suit, apparently blissfully unaware that he looks like the biggest dweeb in the history of cinema. To make a bad situation worse, his suit was tailored so badly that he looks like he has a weak chest and a generous gut (this is not actually the fault of the actor, since when he appears in his oh-so-clever alter ego disguise he looks fine). Finally, a good actor can make almost anything work; a purple suit is probably a bit much for anyone, but some actors can take what they are given and find ways to make it seem at least believable. This is not the case for the Phantom. He approaches his role with single-minded tenacity, finding every chance to make his character even dumber and exploiting them ruthlessly. His expression never changes, but unlike Schwarzeneger and his impassive ('wooden') features, the Phantom's face is permanently lit up by the kind of smile you associate with an IQ under 50. Many action movies have dumb dialogue, ridiculous plots, and flat characters, although not many of them have such a supremely uncool hero. But most action movies do at least get one thing right: action. The Phantom succeeds in muffing even this simple requirement. -(---- | | |
| Is it worse to have a nightmare, or a really good dream? If you have a nightmare, you wake up and the first thing you think is “thank God that wasn’t real!” Your parents didn’t really die; you aren’t actually being torn limb from limb by monsters; you didn’t really fail that course. What was so brutally real five seconds ago retreats into memory, and a patchy memory at that-- your mind seems to be frantically cleaning up behind your dream, diligently sweeping it away. You sigh and lie back down, knowing that whatever is wrong with the world it isn’t actually as bad as you thought. On the other hand... you wake up and you feel your entire being suffused with joy: pure, simple joy, unspoiled by the defects of reality. But that joy immediately plunges into despair as you realize there is no cause for it. Now your diligent mind is your most implacable foe, snatching what few scraps you can recall from you even as you try your utmost to commit everything to long-term memory. You are left with a ghost of an emotion, the knowledge that you were happy, even if it wasn’t real. This dream definitely fit into the latter category. When I awoke, I was HAPPY. Deeply and completely happy. There was a person I had met who was almost perfect, a girl with a pure and beautiful character. There was nothing physical about her at all; I didn’t even remember what she looked like. It didn’t matter, of course, what she looked like, because she was such a good person. The dream itself was, as dreams are wont to be, rather random. It began at our church, where I met several people and a couple animals, none of whom were exactly like their real counterparts (again, par for the course in dreams). But then it shifted gears: I found myself at the annex, still on the church campus, where I do my secretary work. A family lived there (this is not quite as crazy as it sounds, as our pastor’s family did, in fact, live in the annex for a year or so). The family consisted of a father and mother and two kids, a boy and a girl. The father was an almost stereotypically strict and abusive father, convinced of his own superhuman righteousness and of his children’s worldliness. The mother was unremarkable. The son was friendly, although subdued because of his father. And the daughter... The daughter was the one who was so perfect. She was sweet, kind, friendly, and smart, although even more subdued than her brother. As I said, I don’t even remember what she looked like. Somehow, in the few minutes my dream took up, I got to know her very well and fell in love with her. It wasn’t viewed from outside, like when you dream about getting killed and can see your own body. I didn’t see myself falling in love-- I felt it. Again, there was nothing physical about this love: it was beautifully pure. Anyway, it was obvious that she needed to get away from her crazy dad, and her brother seemed ready to help. Somewhere in there the eldest son, a sergeant in the military, came home, and his parents went off to dote on him. I convinced her to go get in my car, gave her the keys, and then went to talk to her parents-- try to head them off. The dad seemed to suspect me, and went to get his shotgun, although I knew somehow that he didn’t want to use it on me: he wanted to use it on his daughter. So I ran outside and she had started the car; I leapt into the back seat just as he burst out the door, she floored it out of the parking lot, and we escaped. Then I woke up. The whole experience raises many questions, of course. Were my emotions less real because their object did not exist? Or, because my mind believed that object to exist, were those emotions like real emotions? Would it have been better to not have had that dream, so that I would not feel such a keen sense of loss? I discussed the dream with my roomie, after thinking about it all day. I didn’t expect to be understood; I half-expected to be teased. But he had had a similar dream once, when he was much younger, and knew exactly what I was talking about. I put forth my opinion that it might be better never to have had the dream. He thought about that for a moment, puffed on his cigar, then replied, “What about the saying, ‘Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all’?” And I was forced to agree. Oddly enough, I once had a dream very similar to this one, also many years ago. I remember nothing of this earlier dream except that there was a really nice girl, and she made me feel very, very funny inside. I distinctly recall having this dream while I was sleeping in an upstairs room by myself, and since I haven’t slept in that room since I was five years old I was very young indeed. In that case, too, there was no physical representation of the person, just a memory of her character-- her spirit, if you like. And this raises even more questions, especially in light of the experience my roomie had. One could suggest psychic explanations for the dreams. Maybe these people, who appeared as nothing but character in the dream, were the spirits of other people, living or dead; perhaps, in our dreams, our subconscious minds bump into one another in ways we could never understand or access when we are awake. Perhaps. Or maybe, inside everyone, there is an awareness of goodness-- a seed in every human heart, no matter how depraved, which is capable of recognizing what is good and pure in the world. And every now and then your mind, wandering through the forgotten underworld of the subconscious, stumbles across this inner template and uses it to build up an individual. Maybe, too, there is an idea of what love is, or should be-- I imagine the two would be closely linked-- and your mind, even when you are very young, tries to put this idea into human form, into a form that you can understand. Or maybe your subconscious likes to tease you. -(---- | | |
|
