Hi, folks. This weekend was, as usual, pretty quiet. Nothing spectacular, nothing fancy; I did get to play a little more City of Heroes in between sessions of Phoenix Wright. The first one. I’ll echo the young lawyer’s words: “von Karma, I think I hate you.” Evil bastard won’t let me say anything. And he has a crappy voice and his mother dresses him funny. I feel slightly better now.
There’s really nothing else of note to talk about right now. I can’t even find a halfway decent video on Youtube to put up as an excuse. Sorry, folks. Check back tomorrow; hopefully I’ll be ready to rant then.
Nothing too spectacular to report today, folks. Did some extra work this morning, then watched most of the Star Wars trilogy (the real one). Off to go grocery shopping now, and I’ll probably be jumping back into City of Heroes for a while later today.
In the absence of actual content, I bring you this:
I touched a bit on being verbally assaulted while playing XBLA Texas Hold ‘Em. However, I think it’s probably the best time to go into a little bit more detail about what happened simply because it exemplifies the worst (and best) elements of the Xbox Live model. Plus, well, I at least think the story’s funny.
First off, I should probably say that I’ve always been conscious of my accent. Of all of the people in my family, I managed to be the only one who has the strong Pittsburgh accent. For me, words like “yinz” and “The Stillers” have always been part of my vocabulary, and if you catch me on a bad day I tend to blur my long “I” phonemes into “ah”s with exceptional regularity. For me, humanity went through the Arn Age before they hit the Bronze Age. I shop at the Gian Iggle. That sort of thing. Pittsburgh has a pretty distinct regional accent but it’s largely unknown outside of the area, overshadowed by the more well-known Massachussetts and New York accents.
Still, regional accents only matter within a specific region. Within the Northeast US, I’m almost instantly pegged as being from the ‘Burgh. Take one step over the Atlantic, though, and all that people hear is “American”. Regardless of what I’m saying, I’m instantly blamed for every single thing wrong with this country. I would, of course, like to (totally non-sarcastically) apologize for not being able to vote in either of the two previous elections due to not knowing where the hell I was going to be at any given moment. If I had voted, of course, it would not have made a single bit of difference because no matter where I could have voted, I was always in a state that was decisively called with no uncertainty. Still, yes, I will accept full personal responsibility for a) Iraq, b) Enron, c) the Korean War, and d) Vietnam. Jerks.
Now I told you about that because of the three Scotsmen that I had the fortune to be matched up with. I was completely speechless as soon as I logged in because they did not shut up. Seriously. I had about forty seconds of stunned silence on my end while the constant stream of unintelligible gibberish flowed directly into my right ear. Now if they had not been speaking all at once, I might have been able to pick out the basic gist of their conversation. They were; and to be honest, the sound quality for the voice communication is not all that great, so even neutral language gets somewhat fuzzy. But this went beyond “fuzzy” and into the sublimely ridiculous.
The stereotype of the Scotsmen is that they manage to use the word f^%#* every other word in everyday conversation. If you’ve seen “Crank” or “The Transporter”, you get the idea (though “Crank” was one of the better films I’d seen last year). I have it on good authority that this is not necessarily the case in reality. But listening to these three, you couldn’t tell. Matter of fact, that particular word was one of the only things I could understand. That and “‘Ey, Fury, why you quiet?” I didn’t say anything until after about ten minutes of hearing them chase off everyone else.
They did eventually coax me to speak. “‘Ey, f%#$er, say something, f#$%ing $#@@%@.” So I said, in as calm a voice as I could muster, “Your conversation has rendered me speechless in admiration.” Wow, was that the wrong thing to say. Instantly, “‘Ey, f$%#ing American, ‘e’s a f%#$ing American, f%#$ off, America…” and so on. Yeah, that was probably telegraphed ten minutes ahead of time but at the same time I wasn’t going to quit just because they were morons. Actually, the fact that they were too busy yakking made it easier for me to win the majority of the hands.
So, when I managed to win a big hand, they kicked me from the table.
Now, that’s probably the worst part about Live-enabled games. That and people who think that the mike is their own personal karaoke machine; ran into a couple of those both in poker and in Rainbow Six. By and large, though, I’m very grateful for two elements added to the Live system since the last time I’d owned an Xbox. The first is the player feedback system. With all the copious not-playing-poker-time I’d had after being kicked, I could put all three of the drunken Scots on a “negative feedback” list, which basically means that I won’t be auto-matched with players like them again. Silent, anonymous, and easy. The other feature is the microphone mute feature, which I used to silence a couple other singers.
Ultimately, I’m complaining for nothing. Yeah.
*: For those of you just joining the blog, I don’t use “The F-Word” out of a belief that it’s overused.
Last night I had a rather interesting conversation with a polite woman involved in the video game industry. Her role in the industry was as a market analyst; she goes to stores, talks with gamers and the clerks, and tries to ensure that the most popular games remain consistently in stock. She was asking pretty much everyone about the games, and she seemed very interested in talking to me after I mentioned my work with NetJak. However, while we were talking, a couple of people came up and looked at the Xbox 360 in the display case. I swear to high heaven, this was the first sentence out of this person’s mouth: “You can lay it on its side? Really? No way!” I am sure that the fact that the writing on the disc tray is upright only when the machine is on its side, in addition to the fact that there are little rubber feet on both one side and one end of the machine, were just little oversights that this “ubr gamr” just happened to miss. It’s cool. Happens to everyone. I just don’t want to be behind this jerk when he overlooks a stop sign.
I have stories to tell about XBLA Texas Hold ‘Em voice chat fun (”fun” in this case meaning “being berated by three obviously drunken Scots simply because a) I didn’t speak and b) when I did speak, I was American– at least, I think they were berating me, because quite frankly I couldn’t understand a damn word they were saying”), but perhaps another time.
I suppose, really, that at the core of the geek and nerd philosophy, underneath all of the layers of complexity and complication that we seem to adore, geeks have a deep-rooted appreciation of simplicity. The concept of something being elegant, functional, and simple is the greatest goal for any engineer, technical person, or electronics enthusiast. But within the simplicity, there can be myriad layers of complexity and complications. When complexity and confusion is distilled into a simple, elegant solution, that is often considered the ‘best’ solution.
The concept behind the anthology follows a young girl, Kino, who wanders the world with her (quite vocal) motorcycle Hermes. Why Hermes is intelligent and can speak isn’t explained, and really doesn’t need much of an explanation. Why Kino herself is wandering isn’t explained, but the reason she set out in the first place is given. (On a tangent, the stories in this volume were sorted into a chronological order for the English translation, but in the original the tales were shuffled. I’d actually rather that the original order have been preserved, and so I read them in a random order, but it might be easier to follow as it stands.)
Looking over the stories in the first volume of the anthology, Kino’s Journey is easily one of the most elegant tales I’ve ever read. The prose is very muted, and the stories told aren’t ostentatious or overwrought. There’s no core tension, no overarching villain, no one versus one rivalry and no central goal to Kino’s wanderings. The stories are tales of exploration and inquisition, stories which level a critical eye at various viewpoints.
What I find most fascinating about Kino’s character, actually, is that she and Hermes seem to be the only moderates on the face of the planet. Everyone in the world seems to have latched onto an idea and taken it to an unreasonable extreme. I’m well aware that the purpose of taking such positions is really only to pick apart a philosophy, and that if everyone was moderate in their beliefs before they screwed up their concept, it wouldn’t quite make for a very good story. Still, it could be seen as being a little preachy in places.
The series is being marketed as a young-adult set, which meshes almost with the Japanese “light novel” description. I’m not exactly sure that it’s the right classification, but it is very hard to argue with the way that comparisons to “The Little Prince” just seem to be apt. I would probably say it should be more for teens on the order of 16 to 18 as opposed to the more-traditional “13 and up”. If this got brought into a high-school English class, I’d be pretty happy about it– actually, if my old English teacher was still in the trenches, I’d have already sent her a copy. Come to think of it, I think maybe I ought to do that anyway.
There’s still quite a bit more to say about Kino’s Journey, but to say anything really would spoil so much of it. Tomorrow, I’ll give a quick little overview of my few hours with the 360 in general and Rainbow Six: Vegas in particular.
Inconsequential Update: I’m past 70,000 words and 126 pages now, with about 25 scenes left to write. I’ve got a lot of inspiration built up for this; three days ago I wanted to cut out a meaty sub-plot, but thanks to some discussion on the forums (by people who had no idea they were actually helping me), I’ve chosen to keep it. Assuming I don’t get suckered into more counter-terrorism fun tonight, I’ll be adding even more to the main plot (yes, there actually has congealed a main plot out of this whole mess).
I’ve got quite a bit to say about Kino’s Journey, but unfortunately there’s a lot going on. I haven’t forgotten my promise to have a post every day, but for right now let’s just put this aside. I’ll probably have the writeup done this afternoon, or at lunch.
I’m thinking that maybe whoever decided that this wasn’t exactly a good use of American military money has never actually played Halo or Half-Life. Because quite frankly, as everyone knows, you can be the nerdiest 90-pound weakling with multiple degrees from MIT and Berkeley, but once you put on a spiffy suit with a cryptic Greek letter on the front, you are the ultimate bad-ass. Hell, put me in one of these things and I’ll go to Iraq myself. Incidentally, there’s a note on the box: “Crowbar not included.”
I am so freakin’ bitter that The Mole got cancelled before I could get on, but crap like Armed and Famous gets produced. I like the idea of giving people an idea of what it’s like to go through police training, but it cheeses me off that they did this with celebrities who have no intention of continuing the job afterwards. Why not just take twelve real people through the training and follow them as they become cops, permanently? Ah well.
I would have quite a bit more to say about Kino’s Journey, but I have yet to finish the last two stories in this volume. (Plus, well, it’s Wednesday.) This backlog didn’t prevent me from picking up Train Man Monday afternoon, or from somehow (read: miraculously) winning an Xbox 360 after my dentist’s appointment yesterday. Suffice to say that I’ll have quite a bit to write about tomorrow.
Writers have a pretty peculiar thing with certain characters. I think every writer has one of their characters sitting somewhere in the back of their minds, commenting every once in a while, asking questions and wondering what’s taking the writer so long to write their story. Sometimes the character offers constructive criticism, while for other folks their inner muse is a vicious, unfeeling creature forged from pure hatred. It’s not without a certain amount of amusement that I think about this, especially given some of the stuff that I’ve read. On occasion, some of what I read makes me think that the author is genuinely schizophrenic. Usually when I look back at my archive of unfinished stories.
Thinking about this, I’ve recently had occasion to be reminded of a story that I was following for a while, by a occasional webcomic artist Ewen Cluney. It started life under the title “Haunted House”, but glancing through his site and DeviantArt profile, he seems to have re-titled it after the main character, Evangeline. Unless he’s decided to drop the entire storyline and just keep the character (which I can hardly blame him for, as I’m not completely innocent of that), I still remain interested. Heck, even if all he chose to do was keep the name and character design, I’d still want to take a look. When it’s finished, of course.
With regards to my own long-running project, Inconsequential, I’ve actually had a nice little breakthrough. The tale is outlined and plotted out to the finale, and depending on how long I run with it, that’s about sixty-five more pages or so. That is one of the most surreal things for me to look at: the page count reading well over a hundred and twenty right now, and all of it garbage that I wrote. Seriously. When it’s over, there will be close to two hundred single-spaced pages of pure drivel that is all my fault.
You cannot imagine how absolutely thrilled that makes me to even contemplate.
I came across my file of old stories, and I think that if there was something I wanted to try after this, it would be short stories. Don’t get me wrong, I like writing longer pieces, and eventually I want to tackle a second novel. But most of the ideas I’ve had of late really lend themselves to shorter spots. Also, I would love the challenge of establishing a story and getting it done under a certain number of words. Now that I’m finally back in the writing groove, I feel like I really ought to be writing more. I look back at 2006 and I see that I accomplished just about nothing. But now, it does me no good to get depressed over that year. Stuff Happened and it’s past now.
I’ll have stuff to relate about Kino’s Journey tomorrow.
Update: Oh yeah, Phoenix Wright: Justice For All ships today. I was under the odd impression that it would be in stores today, but I forgot about the holiday. Anyway, the only reason I bring this up is because I actually miss the “damn-that’s-creepy” automated alert system that EB/Gamestop uses to remind customers to pick up their games. The name for this system is, I kid you not, Aeris.
At 8:09pm, I cleared the final stage of Elite Beat Agents on the DS at a difficulty level of “Cruisin’” (two stars of four; the maximum difficulty available on a fresh copy of the game). This is the first game cleared in 2007. This is the first game cleared of three needed to break my moratorium on purchasing new games. The next game that is closest to completion is Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, followed by Final Fantasy XII.
One of the most irritating things about television is the advertisements. They’re a necessary evil, of course; the alternative is all-pay television, which actually wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t the problem of getting everyone to pay for it. But some advertisements go too far. Case in point, a particular advertisement for a cut-rate car insurance company known for having a stupid jingle. The most recent set of ads for this company are positively fixated on this jingle. This would not have attracted my attention except that I happened to notice the name plate on the desk of the presenter. It read “Bill Lumbergh”.
Immediately afterwards, a second commercial came on with the familiar (to me, anyway) sight of snow coming at a windshield. The familiar strains of the Star Trek theme began playing, sans Shatnerlogue. The camera zoomed back to show the inside of a Hummer.
