Category Archives: TV

The box in the living room you point your furniture at. Shows, commentary, recommendations and reviews.

Miss Ill Aynie Us

Hum a Little Tune

Today is weird. I’m not sure why but everything feels surreal, like I’m having a very vivid dream about a regular day only everything is just a little bit off. For example, I ordered a meal from Arby’s this morning—a meal I’ve ordered dozens of times from this exact same restaurant—and the price was about a dollar higher than usual. When I actually collected the food I noted that they had given me the extra large drink and a huge box of fries, without me ordering any differently than I usually do.

Also, I was sitting at a stoplight this morning on the way to work with a dozen or so other cars on a fairly busy cross street. I was about three cars back from the line. It changed from red to green to yellow to red again in the time it took me to get about eight feet. The car in front of me didn’t even make it through. The second car in line practically had to run a red light. I looked around after the strangeness at the other drivers and we were all exchanging glances like, “Uh, what?”

Finally, I was sitting at my desk when I realized I had to go to the bathroom really bad. Really bad. So I got up, walked (quickly) to the bathroom and stepped up to the urinal. Suddenly, I didn’t have to go at all. Not even a little bit. I kind of stood there, confused, for several moments before eventually shrugging and sauntering back to my desk. The feeling never really returned, not even after drinking that huge soda I didn’t order.

Since today is sort of random, I figured some random links were in order.

Top Ten Grossest Candies. I’m not sure what’s weirder, the gross candy or the fact that there is a website called CandyAddict.com.
My RSS primer didn’t exactly inspire a deluge of grateful email for opening people’s eyes to the wonder of Syndication. Still, I think it’s cool so I thought I’d pass along this link that Ryan sent me for converting any RSS feed into an email newsletter. I guess it’s kinda like the FeedBlitz feature I have only it just requires an RSS feed and not some involvement on the site maintainer’s part.
I know a lot of people bash on high profile blogs and I don’t mean to be one of those bitter little webwriters who are so envious of others’ success that I can only sleep at night after thoroughly convincing myself that I’m only obscure because I’m elite and the mainstream is lowest-common-denominator drivel worthy of nothing but scorn. Still, as much as I usually like and respect big gaming blogs like Kotaku, posts like this really annoy me. Sure the guy has a right to his opinion and he should certainly be able to post it but c’mon. Griping that New Super Mario Bros. is lame because it doesn’t surpass what some people consider to be the best side-scrolling platformer of all time? Incommensurate expectations much?
Just in case you were wondering and couldn’t figure it out from the links, the Current Coolness is Seattle-style Hot Dogs which are hot dogs with a generous helping of cream cheese and maybe some grilled onions. It sounds strange at first but trust me, it’s 100% fantastic. They make them at little street vendors all over the place in Seattle but they work just as well made at home. I recommend the Grillmaster Ballpark Franks and a substantial bun, toasted if possible. Grilling the dogs is always better as well. And don’t let the picture I have fool you, mustard is definitely not needed or desired in this case (it was just the only picture of a Seattle-style I could rustle up). Take that to heart too, dear reader, since you are in the presence of a mighty mustard fan here. As for the cream cheese, usually a fairly generous spread on one half of the bun is sufficient although you might want to either heat it up some or use the “soft” or whipped variety if you aren’t going to go with the toasted buns since it has a tendency to tear up regular buns in it’s usual cold, dense state. Plus it tastes a little better when it’s warm in this case.
Best summer TV show: Psych. It’s clever. Clever is good.

Star Drek

1 Reply

Slashdot is carrying a story about the new JJ Abrams-directed Star Trek movie casting Matt Damon as a young Captian James T. Kirk.

Now, I’m not a huge Trekkie. I do like Star Trek—as a card-carrying geek it’s part of the bylaws—but I don’t obsess on it the way some folks do. Still, I like the original series (campy old SF TV gets the thumbs up) and The Next Generation was often very good and occasionally awesome. Deep Space Nine was intriguing but I sort of drifted away from it during the initial run and I haven’t made time to go back and watch it on DVD yet. Voyager and Enterprise somehow inspired no interest from me and I haven’t see a movie since Generations, probably because it wasn’t very good and didn’t bode well for the direction they were taking the series. Honestly if you think about it most of what Rick Berman has done to the series has made me like it a lot less than I might have otherwise. Roddenberry knew what he was doing. Berman’s a hack. And that ain’t opinion, baby.

Anyway the point is that JJ Abrams directing a Star Trek movie is intriguing although I fear that Abrams is becoming the new go-to pseudo geek that people tap because of his success with Lost to do stuff that is really wild but popular. The thing is I don’t know that he’s really that guy because what he has done is come up with two very interesting shows with some memorable characters. He’s a start-up guy: He has the good high-concept ideas that get other people’s creative juices flowing. That’s a good thing, entertainment needs people like that.

But what he hasn’t shown any indication of is that he can take existing properties or ideas (including his own) and come up with some way to move them forward past the initial idea point. Alias, anyone? Mission Impossibe 3 (which I haven’t seen but was a huge disappointment in the box office)? I’m not sure that handing the reins to him and saying, “Save our franchise, Mr. Abrams!” is really the correct path to take here.

Especially since they’re talking about doing the flashback thing.

Here’s something funny about SF: It really needs to go forward, as in, toward the future. It sounds strange since most SF is futuristic anyway, but there is more than just this one example of SF universes that have a hard time moving past their own initially fabricated realities. Pushing foward and making up new things to happen to a cast of characters is something that should be obvious in SF but frustratingly often isn’t. Star Wars prequels anyone? The problem lies in the fact that once you start flashing back and doing prequel-type stories you run into the problem of the anticlimax: Since we started with these characters (or this universe or whatever) at some point in the future, some of the dramatic license is sucked out of the stories from the relative past because to a certain extent, we know how it ends.

I once had an English/writing teacher tell me that flashbacks are only useful as tools which shed new light on events happening in the current setting. If they exist solely to flesh out a story that can otherwise be alluded to, better the allusion than the full on exposition in flashback form. What happens with all these Episode Ones and Temple of Dooms and Animatrixes is that things we don’t need to be told in gritty detail are fully fleshed out to the point where we physically can’t form a sense of suspense because we know how it ends. How can you fear for Indiana Jones’ life if you know he lived to experience the events in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Did anyone really need to know for sure that Anakin Skywalker lost most of his limbs and was put into the Darth Vader suit because of lava burning off his limbs? We could have lived our whole lives and never needed to know that particular tidbit, but it was supposed to be the ultimate climax of six hours worth of films.

In the end I don’t care if they cast Matt Damon or Tommy Lee Jones as a young James Kirk: I don’t want them to have to cast a young James Kirk at all. Move on, people. Let’s get on with the story: There are plenty to tell that don’t involve re-visiting characters that have practically been cast as 24/7 reality show stars as much screen time as they’ve had. Isn’t it maybe time for a new group of characters? Why can’t we have the next Next Generation?

Focus on Fear

7 Replies

I am not a brave person. Although at the time I didn’t particularly see myself as such, I reflect on my childhood as being full of jittery, frightened moments. I was a small and rather timid child, slight in stature and composition and also courage. I didn’t particularly care for most creepy crawly things that boys are often associated with and while I had a pretty big mouth (good for getting oneself into frightening situations) I had no spine to back it up with and spent a lot of time fleeing moments that looked like they may come out badly.

The first moment I recall experiencing genuine fear was as a small child in the first home I remember: A little three bedroom number in San Leandro right underneath the BART tracks. It had a detached garage that sat near the back of the property so we had a fairly long driveway that was open to the neighbor’s identical driveway. I don’t recall my parents spending a lot of time talking to the neighbors… my memory pegs them as vaguely white trash in disposition, but they had a young son whom I remember playing with on occasion in our practically shared driveways.

I can’t say how old he was at the time, I must have been four or five so I’m guessing he was maybe ten. He was older and I dimly recall thinking of him as a friend for some time although later I would think of him only in terms of what a ruthlessly cruel tormentor he became. He decided one day to scare me by donning a mask and poking his head over his back fence (which looked out over the driveways where we had been playing). The mask wasn’t particularly scary, but he just stood there, staring at me. At first I was nonplussed but unconcerned, and I implored him to quit clowning and get back to the game. But he remained still, coldly watching and making phony but eerily muffled growling noises. After a few moments of this he disappeared behind the fence once again.

It took me a few minutes to puzzle out that it was possible that the creature over the fence wasn’t my neighbor (Shannon) at all, but in fact someone or something else entirely. I fled into my backyard through the open fence gate and all the way to the other side of the house where I crouched in the side yard for a few minutes, peeking out just enough to see past our gate and to the neighbor’s fence. Eventually the monster reappeared, this time looking around. For me.

I waited it out for a while until the monster disappeared and I heard Shannon emerge from his house again. I ran back out to see what was up. He acted like he had no clue what I was talking about. I tried to convince him for a while and eventually he said he’d go see what was up. He went back into the house and a few moments later the monster appeared over the fence. At this time I was no longer sure it was some person in a goofy Halloween mask, it was clearly some malevolent being who had some sort of interest in me personally. Clearly this interest could lead to no good, so I did what any other mostly chicken five year old would do when presented with this new and frightening development: I ran inside to tell mommy.

Eventually I wandered, timidly, back outside and found Shannon there, wondering where I was. I asked him what had happened and he made up some story about scaring off some other kid by hitting him in the head with a rock. I accepted the story for the most part, but I kept a close eye on that fence from then until really the day we moved.

After that time there were at least two other incidents where someone—undoubtedly Shannon—would wait until I was outside and then don some sort of mask or another and poke his head through the window or push aside the curtains to frighten me.

And it worked. I specifically remember being shocked by a skeletal mask at one point and storming into the house in tears telling my parents that I wanted to move. Their response was typical of an adult who is weary of dealing with a skittish kid who has nothing better to be frightened of than a stupid rubber mask: Shut up and stop being a baby.

We moved out of that house when I was nine years old. In the time between the mask incident with Shannon and our move, two other events conspired to make sleep a difficult task: For one, I saw Cloak and Dagger in the movie theater (strangely I recall this being a double feature with The Jungle Book). The movie isn’t scary, so don’t misunderstand. It’s not like my parents took me to see Poltergeist or anything: Cloak and Dagger was kind of like WarGames or Tron only with spies and detectives instead of crazy computers or living video games. But what got me was that near the beginning a man is pushed to his death over a stairwell. He falls and naturally dies. There is some complication shortly thereafter where the body is not found or the man who supposedly dies is seen walking back up the stairs—it was too much for my young mind to comprehend. But I do recall the plummet of that man to his death as being the most intensely frightening thing I could think of.

Another thing I saw was a few short seconds of the television miniseries V. Of course the part I saw included one of the lizard-like aliens with half his human disguise ripped off in long ribbons of pseudo flesh with the green scaly true face poking out from beneath. I wasn’t allowed to watch the show but a mis-timed request for water or a poorly thought out sense of curiosity had lasting impressions.

To my parents credit they were pretty patient with me. As a six or seven year old with nightmares, sleep was not high on my priority list and they tried their best to console me and be understanding when possible. I recall that it finally got out of hand, keeping my father up or waking him up probably for the 20th time in the same night and I recall him clearly warning me that it was all fine and I was safe and nothing was going to happen to me but if I woke him up again he would not come to my “rescue”, my only recourse was to try and be brave. I was hurt by this but it finally sunk in that my fear was something that should not be shared with anyone. Since bravery was not my strong suit, my actual recourse was unpleasant sleeplessness for many, many nights.

I bring all this up because of a thread over on Fark discussing early childhood terrors (specifically due to movies or TV shows) that would be silly when watched now. I want to point out how strange it was that some of the things that seem to be quite commonly disturbing to children, such as The Wizard of Oz (the flying monkeys seem to do it for most people) or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, really bothered me that much. The tunnel scene in Wonka was a bit grotesque but not frightening by any stretch and I don’t remember having much of a problem with Oz at all except maybe staying awake through the whole thing.

But you also have to understand that my timidness as a child was so pervasive that my parents had to strictly monitor what I could watch on TV. Anything that smacked of monsters or creep-outs was a big no-no (due I’m sure to my previous penchant for keeping them awake all night anytime I got the slightest bit spooked) and since they weren’t particularly interested in scary movies, I didn’t watch a lot of these movies as a kid.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t find other stuff to be afraid of. One of my favorite cartoons as a kid was G.I. Joe. Despite the fact that it was a military cartoon and everyone carried around guns all the time, no one really ever got hurt (how’s that for teaching the “fun” of war to little kids?). For the most part it was fine, but there was one two-part episode that originally aired in 1985 called There’s No Place Like Springfield that was this surreal, Twilight Zone-style mind trip (for an 11 year old, at least). I remember it being not exactly scary but more unnerving.

At one point I came in halfway through Something Wicked This Way Comes and witnessed little more than the film’s antagonist, Mr. Dark, opening his palm to reveal a demonic symbol etched/tattooed into it (perhaps a pentagram… I can’t truly recall). It scared me quite a bit and I can recall several nightmares springing forth from that image which included an identical or very similar scene where a sinister man’s palm revealed his true nature. I have honestly never actually seen the full movie of Something Wicked to this day.

I remember watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries one night. The show was pretty creepy in general but this was a bit later, around late Junior High I believe, so I was more or less over the standard ghost stories and alien abduction tales as sources for real nighttime fear. But this episode featured a re-enactment of a satanic cult meeting where they were sacrificing dogs and killing babies or something along those lines. It totally weirded me out to the point where I spent most of another night somewhere between sleepless and plunged into nightmare.

The point of all this is that I spent quite a large chunk of childhood being afraid of the dark, trying to cope with vivid nightmares and having a lot of sharply unpleasant experiences with fear. Strange then that I decided to start reading Stephen King novels.

Actually it started before then. In about sixth grade I picked up a book by John Bellairs called The House With a Clock in Its Walls which I’ve since gone back and read and found to be rather… mundane. But at the time it was seriously creepy and atmospheric and left me crowding myself under the covers for several weeks.

I’m not sure why I kept reading, why I continued to put myself into a state of trembling paranoia with these stories. Gallons of ink have been spilled trying to decipher the human tendency to seek out certain types of fear, to embrace it in some ways. Not everyone is like this, mind. Nikki steadfastly refuses to read or watch or play part in activities that lead to terror. But perhaps it isn’t so completely out of character for me. After all, I’m the kid who practically broke down in tears as a little squirt because I was too short to go on the scariest, twistiest ride in the amusement park near our house. And from the moment I was finally able to just push up on my tiptoes enough to cross a few straggling, cowlicked hair strands above the cursed line marking who could and could not ride, I felt the exhilarating rush of the steep drop into the double loops and the whizzing turns that led to the heart-stopping corkscrew and I loved every second of it.

In spite of my general timidness, there was always something about me that made me hate the fear, made me want to face it instead of running and hiding. Some twenty-five years later, I’m more or less over the mask-over-the-fence incident, but for a long while I looked back on my flight and cowardice as hideously shameful acts, taunting in their remembered humiliation. I had been tricked by a cruel neighbor kid and had not been able to shake that fear for many, many years.

Perhaps in a way I started reading scary stories and watching scary movies as a way of facing that kid in the mask via proxy. If I could watch the horror show and sleep soundly that night, maybe it would mean that Shannon wasn’t still haunting me with his pale, hollow mask and uncreative grunting growls. If I made it through The Shining, it might mean I wasn’t a sissy after all. In doing so, in facing the fear, I found something strange. It was fun, kind of like a roller coaster. If you let yourself believe just a little bit and you stretched your imagination some, you could get those nervous chills and the heart-jumping frights but as soon as the book cover closed or the house lights came up, it seemed silly and unimportant. Like stepping off a ride. Fear was replaced with calm reason and a tiny bit of regret. It was over, maybe a little too soon.

I’m still not brave. I have yet to overcome my biggest fear (a completely irrational one I’ve discussed before which can’t be combated in the same way as regular chills because there is no “reality” to step back into when it’s over… the reality is there when the fear is triggered) which is not a surge of adrenaline but a direct evokation of the fight or flight response. But these days the scary movies and creep-out books and survival horror video games are some of my favorites. Excepting the dreams where I’m underwater, I actually enjoy the rare nightmare I have to a certain degree. The imaginative ones, like where zombies are chasing me through my apartment complex which suddenly becomes a particular street corner in San Francisco and the crazy guy who hides behind a broken tree branch outside of Joe’s Crab Shack and scares passerby walks up to me and offers a fistful of thumbtacks as my only defense against the crushing hordes of the undead: Those I like. They’re fun in a “I’m starring in a movie in my head” kind of way. Once you wake up, of course.

These days there isn’t much that really scares me when it comes to entertainment. Modern horror movies go more for the gross out than the real scare. The Sixth Sense was good because it was actually a nerve-wracking experience. More movies should be like that. I like watching old black and white horror movies now more than the modern ones: They aren’t really scary to me either but at least they have a sense of fun about them. Few books I’ve read lately have had much impact. Maybe I’m getting so old that I’m just over the idea of monsters in the closet. For as much as my formative years were spent being afraid of the dark, I needed only step into a bit and realize it was not so bad. It could, in fact, be kind of fun.

Update: The text of this article has changed from the original to better reflect the facts of my childhood nightmares. See the comments section for a complete explanation.

So what about you? What scared you as a kid? Did you get over it? Leave a comment or drop me a note.

Though One Day My Fears May Overrun

A Brief Meta Comment

If you stopped by the site sometime after about 11:00 pm PDT until around 9:00 am PDT you may have seen the site lookin’ all busted. I think I’ve fixed the Netflix feeds so they won’t break the site when they don’t work now but if you see the site acting goofy like that I wouldn’t mind a quick email letting me know. I suppose that goes for general site weirdness evident since the server switch.

Giggiddy Game Weekend

Tomorrow we head out for Kublacon. I had grand intentions of getting a bunch of my painting projects done but instead I fell into a spiral of video game resurgence, Netflix queue burning, lazy TV watching and irregular work hours. As such, my wonderful armies will not see the honor of battle this con. It’s really not a huge deal since there will be a slew of other stuff to do and more than enough games to play. I am still going to run a short Shadowrun 4th Edition adventure tomorrow night so at least I don’t feel like I did nothing to prepare for this anticipated event, but I had grand schemes of Warmaster battles that will have to wait for some arbitrary weekend in the future.

The only bad thing about the con is that in order to get a decent room and have a chance to get settled in and play a few pick up games before the festivities kick into full gear I need to get off work earlier than usual which naturally means getting to work earlier than usual. I’m still not exactly sure how that’s even going to work but considering that Friday nights at a con are historically rather sleep deprived, that strongly suggests that tomorrow may be in the running for Longest Day Ever.

Enjoy your lengthy weekend, Internet.

It is to Chuckle

Two quick things that made me laugh recently. One was during the abyssmal Alias finale when one of the characters said in typical overly dramatic fashion regarding the whereabouts of the wily villains:

It gets worse. We tracked their location to… Mongolia.

Nik turned to me and said, “‘It gets worse’? Why, do they not have enough frequent flier miles to cover the trip?”

I LOL’d.

Also, the most brilliant one-word website ever.

Known By Another Name

False Though it May Be, One Can’t Hear ‘You’re a Genius’ Too Often

Weekend Bulletin:

I went ahead and put in a pre-order for my DS Lite. I don’t care what you say, that thing is smooth and I mean, c’mon: New Super Mario Brothers and new Secret of Mana game? You just don’t know.
As a matter of fact, for a system I once derided as something I didn’t really see the point of there are just so many games I want to play for it, I’m not sure where to begin. Aside from the above mentioned Mario Bros. and Children of Mana, there’s also the new 3D-ized Final Fantasy III (no, not FFVI, the real III); some sort of Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest, whatever) where you play as a blue slime (I know, right?); the non-optional Mario Kart DS; Metroid Prime: Hunters; Age of Empires (turn-based!); Advance Wars: Dual Strike (more turn-based strategy joy!); Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow… that’s not even talking about my weird desire to check out the girl-targeted Princess Peach platformer nor the Resident Evil remake and oh hey, did I forget to mention the puzzle games? Yeah, Tetris DS, Meteos, Puyo Pop Fever and Bust-a-Move DS. Considering how hard it has been to come up with games I want to play for the systems I have at the moment (recall that I went back and played an old game over again because pickin’s have been so slim) a wealth of options is a blessing.
The Sharks won last night and for some weird reason they play again tonight for game two. I also caught some of the Ducks/Avalanche game yesterday afternoon and I have to say that Bryzgalov isn’t some lucky Duck. I mean, he’s pretty impressive. The side-to-side glove ~~stop~~ robbery on Alex Tanguay’s open net gambit was flat out brilliant. But the Ducks in general made the Avs look silly. In fact, considering how much the Sharks owned the Oilers in the second period, making them look pretty silly for not even coming up with a shot on goal for over ten minutes, I’m just about set to see a Ducks/Sharks Western Conferenece Finals.
Also? They play Pennywise at the Pond when the Ducks score a goal. That’s just cool. I mean, I don’t like the Ducks (I’m not allowed, see… I’m a Sharks fan), but I’m only saying they impressed me and I want to see the Sharks beat them to make it to the Cup series.
First things first, the Sharks need to finish off Edmonton. I liked that Marleau’s line was still cookin’ and the top line played well, but I need to see Cheechoo beat some of these chump goalies. I mean, Roloson? Seriously? Seriously?
Gin and HB picked up RAZRs over the weekend and after stuffing ourselves with barbequed ribs and chicken while cheering the Sharks to victory yesterday evening I showed them how to transfer files from their iMac to their phones via bluetooth. They expressed that I might be a genius which is patently and provably false but I had to forgive them because the beauty of bluetooth has been known to spawn uncontrollable fits of hyperbole in the past.
I caught an episode of a show I’ve been meaning to watch for weeks now called Deadliest Catch about Alaskan Crab fishermen. It’s pretty much as good as I had hoped and if you have a chance you might want to check it out. Those dudes are pretty hardcore. What else are you going to watch? Desperate Housewives?
What I wonder is whether the camera crews have to be as crazy as the fishermen to stand out there on those boats filming while they haul in those big crab traps. I guess it isn’t as bad as having to do the work but I still don’t think I’d be too cool with waiting for a wall of freezing Alaskan water to hit me in the face so I can get a shot of freezing Alaskan water hitting someone else, just in case the footage might make it in the show.
My iPod is starting to go south on me. The headphone jack is dirty and has poor connections now so it hisses, gets quiet and crackles when the jack gets twisted around or even nuged the wrong way. Plus it resets itself probably once every two or three hours of use and holds about half the battery charge it once did. Granted I’ve used and abused the heck out of the thing for two years so I’m not making any quality comments here, I’m just saying it may be time to start saving up for a new one.
So we’re going shopping tonight before the game to look for a new couch and possibly some sort of book storage unit. Our old couch was one of the first things we bought when we got married six and a half years ago and it was a cool couch back then: Two reclining seats, leather, pull-down center console with built-in heat and massage features plus cup holders and flip-up armrests with remote control storage. Fast forward to the present. As a state-of-the-art sofa it fails. As a comfrotable place to sit, it fails. As an attractive centerpiece to our living room, it fails on about sixteen levels. So it’s gotta go. I’d rather be spending the money on, say, an HD TV set, but even I can see the logic that having a super sweet TV wouldn’t matter if you didn’t want to sit in front of it.
The bookcase situation has gotten pretty dire, itself. Nik and I are both readers and, perhaps more pointedly, avid book collectors. We have about six bookshelves already stacked and stuffed with hundreds of books plus there are about six or seven other places around the house where books sit piled on top of each other. I originally thought I could just put some cinder blocks and plywood together but then I remembered that our apartment floor is not level and slanted surfaces and cinder blocks on the second floor… I mean, what could go wrong? Also, I remembered that I’m married and not living in a fraternity house so, you know, yeah, right.

Rebarbative Rally

I’m lazy today but I want to update. This sounds like a job for…

Bullet Points

I attended a corporate meeting in San Francisco today. It was an hour bus trip (one-way) with some company provided snacks of dubious quality as an incentive. Unlike the Microsoft company rallies you see in famous internet clips, this was less of a pep rally as a sort of drab, state-of-the-company report. Turns out, the state of our company is “pretty okay, probably.” Inspiring!
I’ll count it as acceptable that the Sharks managed to draw a tie from the opening road games in their series. That basically puts them in a best-of-five with home ice advanatge. What I don’t find acceptable is the officiating so far in the series. It’s not that they call too many penalties (although I’d prefer a lot fewer, thanks) it’s more that they are so mind-numbingly inconsistent with them. Both ways. Each team has alternated in the young series from penalty box parade to getting away with murder. The series is tied but I’d basically give both games to the refs had the Predators managed to make the game yesterday even remotely interesting. As it is I’d say the Sharks were robbed of any legitimate chance to win on Friday and the Preds had the wind sucked out of their sails by a bunch of really random calls on Sunday. Going forward with the series I really hope these refs can get out of the way and let the teams decide who wins.
I caught Silent Hill on Saturday with HB since both of us are pretty big fans of the game(s). The movie wasn’t preview screened for critics (bad sign) and got a lot of bad reviews from those who made the effort to give it a rating. I don’t necessarily disagree with some of the criticisms (bad dialogue, some questionable acting, too much/not enough exposition) but I think considering the source material games are basically incomprehensible as well and horror movies aren’t exactly the place to go to see fine Academy Award-worthy performances that it did what it was trying to do pretty admirably. At the very least I was entertained for a couple of hours. I can’t exactly recommend it, but I wasn’t sorry to have seen it. What I was sorry about was spending $4.00 for a small diet soda that tasted like regular soda that had been sitting in melted ice for about eight hours.
I went over to HB’s place on Friday to catch the game and while I was there I tried to do a bit more work on the network I messed up. I was able to determine that their net connection was fine by plugging the ethernet cable right into my laptop so with no other troubleshooting steps revealing any useful information I diagnosed the AirPort Express as having some sort of issue; possibly a faulty ethernet connector. After we caught the movie we headed over to the nearest Apple store for our appointment at the Genius Bar to have it looked at. The Genius plugged it in and it worked fine for him which left us back at square one. I had to take Nik out to Whimsy‘s place for some tea party/Mary Kay pusher meeting so I couldn’t follow through with the new info, but HB called and said that he got home and just unplugged everything and plugged it all back in and stuff started working again so the final diagnosis is: Who knows? Man I love computers.
We caught the end of The Next Food Network Star last night and Guy won, which is what I was hoping. The funny thing is, I don’t know that I’d actually watch his show or not because I get kind of tired of generic in-studio cooking shows, but at least that unpleasantly-shaped, uncomfortably effeminate goofball Reggie didn’t win. Seriously, dude, dry up the waterworks. Even the chicks weren’t as weepy as you.
I picked up Indigo Prophecy for the XBox over the weekend as well. It’s a very curious game that I knew only from a comment made by a friend and the description on the back of the box so I had very few preconceptions going in. It works like an adventure game, mostly, where you wander around and try to figure out what to do. Usually it isn’t too hard to determine and the story is cinematic and intriguing enough to keep you pushing along, trying not to get stuck up in the game so the story can fight its way out. The strange thing is that all the “gameplay” elements are very abstracted from the action on the screen, such that action sequences are handled via a series of rythym game-style follow-the-leader joystick movements. In this way it’s kind of like Dragon’s Lair, which is sort of unfortunate because it kinda pulls you out of the action and forces you to think about something other than what your avatar is actually doing. It works in certain cases like when playing a guitar (the rythym element makes logical sense there) but when fleeing from a horde of mutated insects or kickboxing a punching bag it feels divorced from what the character is actually doing. Also failing in certain tasks merely ends the game forcing a restart which, for a game that is trying really hard to be an interactive movie, feels forced and simply reminds the player that—despite the sheen of freedom—they really are still on a rail. What’s almost the most frustrating is that I’m really interested in the story but I feel like I’m being needlessly thrust into interaction where it doesn’t add to the enjoyment. I’d almost rather be watching Indigo Prophecy: The Movie than guiding these characters through their morning shower routines and whatever.
Nik and I stopped by the mall for a bit yesterday so I could look for a plain black zip-up sweatshirt now that the weather is finally threatening to get nicer. My agitation at being shut down in this endeavour has led me to a brilliant business idea: Normal Clothes. I’d sell plain T-shirts without any Socially Inexcusable If Spoken Aloud and Largely Offensive Statements Played For Laughs Because They Appear On a T-Shirt; clothing that doesn’t force one to become a walking billboard; jeans that don’t cost enough to dent the National Deficit and seasonal clothing available year-round because weather doesn’t really care about our human calendars. Okay so maybe as a business it isn’t brilliant, but if such an establishment existed, I’d be their #1 customer.
I did find a pair of sunglasses that were relatively cheap. Of course, they were broken and I had to take them back.
Whomever said that shopping was therapeutic does not own a dictionary and clearly mistook “therapeutic” to mean “capable of inducing suicide.”

A Chance to Shine

I don’t know if you recall, but I posted a long ol’ rant about why I wasn’t going to watch Alias anymore a while back. Since then, I haven’t, just like I said.

But you know what? When it starts up again next week in the final run toward the series finale, I actually am going to watch.

So what changed?

Honestly, nothing at all. As far as I know they still tried to let things go on too long, they still folded to stupid actor demands and they still have displayed no indication that they have a clue how to wrap this all up. Yet, I feel as though I must watch. Not because I care about Alias any more, but rather because seeing what they do with the endgame on that show will give me a good indication about where I need to set my expecations for Lost.

I look at it this way: The Alias crew (including Lost creator J.J. Abrams) has written itself into a monster hole. Getting out with any semblance of grace is going to require some very, very good writing. I see this going one of three ways:

The end is a massive letdown. In keeping with the direction the show has been going since season three, there is nothing redeeming about the series finale. In this scenario, I lower my expectations for Lost to the floor. As in, “I’ll enjoy it while it’s good but the moment it starts getting lame, I’m outro.” I have no interest in investing myself in shows that are just going to end up sucking eventually.
The end is a Matrix-like disappointment but not a complete failure. The Matrix could have ended any number of ways. The way I would have preferred it is not the direction they went, but I could at least see what they were trying to do and respect their choice. If Alias pulls something like this off I’ll remain cautiously optimistic about Lost and hope I never end up writing a bitter diatribe about it down the road.
The end is a bonafide blockbuster, shattering my expectations with its awesomeness. If Abrams et al manage to pull this steaming pile of poo out of the fire and craft something worthy of the early seasons from it, I will gladly retract every negative thing I ever said about them and put my trust fully back into their capable hands. I will fear no Lost development and all will be well.

I don’t know how likely that last one is, but I think a clever writer could do something to shake things up. But here’s the catch: Even my all-time favorite TV hero (Joss Whedon) didn’t exactly knock it out of the park with his Buffy and Angel series finales. I’d classify both of them as secret option #4 in which neither show actually ended because you never know when you might want to head back to the well and have some sort of reunion TV movie or whatever. Not exactly the kind of thing that would inspire confidence for Lost, I think something like that would fall into category 1 or at best 2, depending on how clever the execution was.

But either way, here’s my prediction: If Lost doesn’t end after season four, it’s going to totally suck. Someone on a message board suggested that the only acceptably cool conclusion to Lost would be for it not to end and the mysteries to never be revealed. As endlessly frustrating as that would be, I gotta say he had a point. I still say that the show can be done and completed in a satisfactory way if this season’s finale marks the mid-point of the entire run, but unfortunately no one bothers to ask me how stuff should work; so with history as my guide I only hope that this Alias experiment works enough to allow me to keep enjoying Lost as long as possible.

No pressure or anything, Mr. Abrams.

Rant/Review

The words emitting from my keyboard yesterday in regards to Lost were joyous. Enthusiastic. I really like that show and I look forward to it each week. I even get a little bummed out when the repeat-streak comes.

Let me quickly set about deflating any of that happy, positive vibe before it starts to spread. The only thing we like to spread around here is vitriol.

Oh, and jam. But that’s a whole other deal.

Top Chef

Nik and I started watching a couple of dumb shows that came on around the same time. One is Top Chef and the other is The Next Food Network Star. Now, both shows are ostensibly about finding out which of a pool of candidates is best suited to have their culinary skills put on display. The execution of each is night and day.

I’m not even going to bother “reviewing” The Next Food Network Star. It’s a decent show that has a fairly likeable ensemble who seem to be cordial to each other even if they are technically in competition and it works as both a reality contest and a sort of backstage look at the staple Food Network shows. They don’t focus on forced interpersonal drama and the prize being offered is clearly one of obvious tangible value. I’ll keep watching it.

Top Chef, on the other hand, is an unmitigated disaster of a TV show that I’m almost inclined to carry on with it just to have the object lesson of how not to execute a reality show—or for that reason any style of TV show. It is only the fact that I have zero interest in ever actually creating a reality show that prevents me from persuing this particular lesson.

First of all, they focus almost entirely on the drama between the differing personalities of the chefs/contestants. In case you haven’t heard me say it before, I have no problem repeating myself: The absolute worst, most un-entertaining, deplorable part about “reality” TV is the constant bickering, arguing, intelligence-deprived raving we’re subjected to that is I guess supposed to approximate drama. Actually it’s like listening to cats fight: All sound and fury with no real purpose but to annoy the crap out of anyone in earshot. And this is 85% of the show.

A large part of this negativity comes from them having cast The World’s Most Unlikeable Contestants featuring six of the seven character traits most likely to cause spontaneous migranes followed by blackouts and vast chasms of lost time leading to bewildering arrests and insanity pleas. I mean, that Steven guy? That simply must be an act for the camera because I simply cannot believe in a world where someone that repulsive and supererogatorily smug finds a way to function in society. Anyone I ever met that took themselves so seriously as to suggest that they might be unfamiliar with a hot dog due to its base nature would, by definition, require ejection into the void of space. “I’m accustomed to four-star dining,” indeed.

But you know, I watch Survivor (against my better judgement, but that has yet to stop me for longer than one season) so I’m pretty familiar with the “repugnant fame-seekers” routine here. I may not like it, I may gripe about it incessantly, but I can cope with it. What I cannot abide by is the utterly asinine and completely farcical nature of this so-called competition.

To recap, the prize at stake here is $100,000, a full line of high-end kitchen applicances, a write-up in a respected culinary magazine and a job catering a high-profile event. For a budding chef, this is pretty huge I’d imagine. You would think, with so much riding on the line, that the producers of the show would make an effort to try and both cast people of roughly equal skill and then follow that up by creating fair and reasonable tasks for them to compete in which would allow the judges to fairly identify which was most deserving.

Apparently that never entered anyone’s mind in setting up these “challenges,” or even the premise of the show itself.

First of all, each show has two competitions, the “Quickfire” challenge which is a fairly short test of some kind where the winner is given immunity (using Survivor parlance) from the second elimination challenge in the second half of the show. The first flaw in the logic starts right there because while having immunity prevents a contestant from being booted, the person who is eliminated is the person who performs the worst in the challenge. So if the person who won the Quickfire challenge performs poorly in the elimination challenge, the eliminated contestant is the second worst person, which is a pretty massive injustice to begin with. But that ignores the fact that you have a negative contest, which in and of itself is a very poor game mechanic. Think about it this way: They give one player the title of “winner” from each elimination challenge. But it means nothing. Literally, nothing happens from winning. It is only the ultimate loser who suffers which means that the contest becomes (once you factor in the immunity granted from the Quickfire challenge) “be at least the third worst.”

Put another way, you are only ever—ever—competing to be better than just two other contestants.

But it gets even better. Assuming that was simply the case, you still might have a decent competition if the playing field remained level. But it doesn’t. For starters the contestants range from a twentysomething ex-model trying to start a new career who has practically negative real world chefing experience to competitors who have owned and operating their own restaurants for years. The above mentioned Steven isn’t even a chef, but rather a Sommelier. It turns out he does have at least a modicum of cooking skill but he could have easily spent the whole show just handing the judges various glasses of wine. Even if you assume that it would be more or less impossible to get a group of chefs who were of roughly equal skill and experience, you would have to at least assume that the challenges themselves were balanced, right?

Bzzzt.

Consider the most recent episode. The contestants were divided into teams of two. Now, right off the bat that’s a suspect condition because remember we’re trying to decide which individual chef is worthy of a massive reward and now we have them working with randomly drawn partners which, if improperly paired, might result in someone’s dismissal due to any number of non-cooking-skill related factors (managerial miscues, personality conflicts, poor performance by the teammate, etc). If that weren’t bad enough, the challenge was to create street food that fused two distinct culinary styles. The common thread was that all had “Latin cuisine” as one of the styles. In the interest of fairness I would assume the other style would be identical across the board. Nope. Instead there were as many different secondary styles as there were teams.

When you note that one of the styles was Japanese while another was Moroccan you realize that there is simply no way that the results of the contest could be fairly and accurately compared, much less quantified into some sort of heirarchal structure. On top of all this there is a different “celebrity” judge each week, usually a respected local chef from a restaurant in San Francisco where the show is filmed. But this too is another problem because these chefs are under (apparently) no direction to keep their opinions limited to the taste of the food; rather they judge contestants (in turn) by their attitudes, their execution of the specifics of the challenge, their personalities, their choice of ingredients or any other thing they might choose to use as criteria. In one case last episode the guest judge remarked a number of times that he absolutely loved a particular kind of pork, which one of the teams had just happened to use. A happy coincidence but one wonders if the team in question might have suffered if a different judge who did not care for the dish had been involved.

I realize that these types of shows are not exactly fair. Survivor isn’t fair. But the one thing about Survivor and its clones is that at least of the ones I’ve seen they manage to stay internally consistent. The biggest clue that Top Chef can’t even manage to work within its own context? Each contestant has, at one point or another, been among the lower tier of the players at elimination time and facing a potential punting from the show. Explain to me how you can award someone a title and a prize if at some point in your own competition designed to find the best, they (in theory at least) had performed poorly enough to warrant ejection from the game?

Flicks

I’ve caught a couple of movies this week. Among them are The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Derailed. Narnia is fantastic (it is difficult for me to pry my fond childhood memories of the Narnia stories when my dad read them aloud to my brother and I from that idealized context, but fortunately the movie doesn’t make me need to) and Nik actually bought me the two-disc extended collector’s edition. I’m pretty happy that worked out well.

Derailed, though, is a mess. I had zero expectations going in, even not knowing what genere it fell under. In spite of this handicap I had the movie’s plot, twist and outcome nailed within twenty minutes and was actively annoyed when the plot of the whole movie hinges on the lead character acting like a complete simpleton twice in the span of ten minutes. Do yourself a favor and miss this movie.

The Good, the Bad and the Awesome

Good

Okay, I know the Intel Macs have gotten some negative press for various technical issues but it sounds like Apple is busting their humps to get them cleaned up, so I won’t really get into that right now. Basically I pretty much suspected that the first versions of the processor swapping hardware needed to be categorized under “Early adopters only; buyers beware.” I mean, it’s a first rev of an Apple product. Duh.

But dude. I mean, have you seen this Boot Camp business? Homina.

Bad

I flipped on the TV last night to check out the Sharks game only to catch the fade to commercial at the end of the first period. When the ads were over they switched over to the Giants game.

For clarity’s sake I want to point out that I’m a Giants fan and generally speaking I want Fox Sports Net to broadcast local teams’ games. But let’s think about this for a minute: On one hand we have the Sharks, nine games from the end of the regular season, on a comeback year after the lockout, locked in a tense and exciting playoff race. On the other hand we have the Giants vs. the Padres in a stadium that got rained out yesterday, playing the effectively meaningless third game of the year. Which of these two events should get top billing on FSN?

What really hacks me is that they moved the Sharks game to Fox Sports Net Plus, which our wonderful local Comcast affiliate pulled a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah, I was pretty flamed about it. I ended up listening to the Internet broadcast (barely maintaining my sanity despite the onslaught of ear-wrecking audio artifacts, pops, hisses and dropouts—hooray for Windows Media Player) but it wasn’t the same. I would have even begrudgingly admitted defeat if the game was at home, but this was in Colorado. Colorado.

There is no justice.

Awesome

Are you watching Lost? Because if you aren’t, you’re totally missing out. Totally.

Potential minor spoilers follow. Read at your own peril.

I probably don’t need to be enumerating the wonders of this show since it doesn’t seem like it has a really tough time finding viewers, but after last night’s episode I saw more than a little negative feedback around the Internets from people who felt that the “It’s all in Hurley’s head” meme of “Dave” was a set up for an eventual cop-out.

Maybe it’s just me but I took this episode as a direct dismissal of that explanation (or any other “It’s all just a dream” hooey). Put it this way, I can’t see how the writers, producers and directors who have spent the last year and a half building an intricate, layered mystery would choose now to reveal essentially the entire secret. I mean, if this is all it is—Hurley or someone else’s (Walt comes up a lot in these discussions) dream—and they’re telling us now, who’s going to keep watching? Who’s going to care what the hatch is all about or what the map means or who the Others are or where the smoke comes from? The answer would have to be “What difference does it make, it’s all in Hurley’s mind anyway?”

Presenting this as a possibility at this stage in the game suggests to me that the island is anything but a dream. And I don’t even think it’s a red herring, it’s just a way of saying “We wouldn’t do that to you… but wouldn’t it have been wicked if we did?”

I’m not saying this show won’t disappoint in the long run. J.J. Abrams didn’t exactly inspire confidence with Alias in his ability to develop effective exit strategies for his shows. But I read more than a few posts from people on message boards that said based on “Dave” they were done with the show. To those people I say, “C’mon! If this is all it takes for you to lose faith in the writers maybe you didn’t really like the show that much to begin with.” Which would be sort of sad because for my money there hasn’t been anything on TV this engaging and this generally high quality since… well… I dunno. Buffy, maybe. Even then Buffy had its share of filler or outright bad episodes; my complaint with any episode of Lost has only ever been that they didn’t move forward enough and that’s probably just a testament to how deep my appetite for the story this show is telling goes.

I meant to update my “Box in the Living Room” series for the mid-season but I’ll be honest and say that I watch a fraction of the shows I made sure were on my TiVo back in September/October. I’m only still watching Surface, Supernatural and How I Met Your Mother from the fall’s new shows (even then, Surface is over and Supernatural isn’t necessarily what I’d call a can’t-miss in my book) and most of last year’s staples have drifted from my immediate consciousness leaving me with basically Lost, Scrubs and Veronica Mars as weekly appointments.

I was a bit hard on Lost back in October but it has occurred to me that the pacing of the show is actually pretty good this season and as long as I’m having fun, the revelations and new mysteries are coming at a decent pace to keep me intrigued. I’m not sure what else I could be asking for, you know?

ironSoap

A critically engaging exercise in pointless tedium.