Was this piece from Cracked.com. I was literally in tears during lunch today.
It’s funny how when I was growing up, Cracked was the lame, wanna-be Mad Magazine. But now it’s successfully reinvented itself as an irreverent online humor site on par with The Onion.
Sorry about the varying font sizes here. This appears to be the default font for this template. Some past entries appear larger because I composed them in Word first and pasted them over.
To get everything looking the same, I think I’d have to go into each post individually and reformat the text. Frankly, that’s too much hassle. I would, however, like to settle on a standard font and text size. Anybody have any preferences?
So much for my plan to post something every day in 2009. Two weeks ago, Harlan came down with something nasty that caused him to miss nearly a full week of school. Relieving Tala from sick parent duty became rather more pressing than refreshing the blog. Of course, once Harlan got better, I came down with the same thing. The bug has been gestating in my chest all week. I worked from home on Wednesday and would have taken a sick day on Thursday, but I figured yesterday wasn’t a good day to not show up at the office. And today my bug blew up into something pretty nasty. Hopefully regular programming will return soon.
We watched Jurassic Park the other night. If you remember, they thought the dinosaurs were all female but because they had used frog DNA to fill in the gaps in the dino DNA, the dinos developed the ability to switch sex and reproduce.
Harlan: “Dad, if I had a dinosaur I would name him Bob. But if he suddenly started laying eggs, I would call it Alissa.”
Harlan’s friend Matthew came over the other day.
Harlan: “Let’s pretend we’re half man, half wolf!”
Matthew: “Yeah! And half monkey!”
Burger King went to places like Romania and Thailand to find people who have never eaten a hamburger before. Despite being sponsored by Burger King, it’s a surprisingly moving piece of promotional material. You will love the people they find.
I was touched by the innocence and generosity of the locals. I’m prone to being overly emotional about random things, and as I watched it in my office, tears welled up and I was just praying nobody would come in for me.
Harlan and I were joking around yesterday, trying to think of horrible traps for the other one to escape from, or perish in. Here was one of Harlan’s best efforts:
“Dad, I throw you in a giant pool of lava. And in the lava there are alligators. Lava-proof alligators. Oh, and sharks.”
I escaped by using my pocket transmogrifier to turn the lava into chicken soup, and the gators and sharks were just noodles and bits of chicken.
The Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web Today noted this funny headline:
“Christ Runs for 232 Yards in Catholic Victory”.
The WSJ commented only: “On any given Sunday…” but to my mind it was more of a “life imitates The Onion” item. Does anyone else remember this classic Onion piece?
“Christ Returns to NBA”
After a two-year hiatus, Jesus Christ returned to the NBA last night, taking the court with his former team, the Atlanta Hawks. Christ, who quit the sport in May 1994 to focus on spreading His message of universal love and compassion, made His triumphant return last night against the Bulls, just in time for Easter Sunday.
The return of Christ, who averaged 18.2 points and 7.3 assists per game during his 10-year NBA career, has excited success-hungry Hawks fans, who are calling Him the team’s “Savior.”
Classic. And to think now he’s rushing for 200+ yards a game in college football.
Man, I have this huge backlog of stuff I’ve wanted to blog about. Nearly every day for the past two weeks, I’ve told myself that I’ll come home after work and at least bang out something. And each night, I get tied up in housework, schoolwork, and uh, playing video games.
Here’s a quick story of some weird stuff that went down late last night. At about 2:30 a.m., we were woken up by a nearby police siren going off sporadically. There would be a “Bwooop! Bwoooooooop!”, silence for about a minute, then another pair of bwoops.
Finally, Tala gets up to check. She’s back in a flash, saying, “The police are out front.” So I roll out of bed and, sure enough, there are several cop cars parked out front, including one blocking our driveway and one in the neighbor’s driveway with his lights flashing.
The weird thing is, we don’t see any movement. There are no cops milling about or talking to either of our neighbors. Nobody has knocked on our door, either. After 5-10 minutes, the cop in front of our driveway drives off and parks at the end of the street. Another 5-10 minutes later, the cop next door switches off his lights and drives away.
This morning, I told a friend with several cop buddies and he said it sounded like they had set up a perimeter to try to snare somebody on foot. They typically park or cruise a street with lights flashing and making some noise in hopes of turning the guy back and into cops pressing from the other side.
Later in the morning, I called the sheriff’s office and they confirmed there had been a burglary in the vicinity and there had been a search for the perp.
Eventually, Tala talked to our neighbors and it turns out that someone found an unlatched ground floor window, crawled through, turned on the kitchen light, then exited out the back door. These neighbors have an alarm system but the volume was set so low they didn’t realize right away what was happening.
Now, here’s the twist that makes you go, “Hmmmmm.” Earlier in the evening, our row of houses was visited by a guy selling home security systems. This same guy had been by a couple months ago when all of us first moved in, and he was checking back to push us yet again. Our neighbors said they mentioned that to the police and wondered outright if the salesman had set the whole thing up. The cops actually agreed that that was a distinct possibility. The recommended everyone get an alarm, but not from that guy.
The problem is that according to my friend’s cop buddies, the home-monitoring style of security systems are worthless because it takes police 30 minutes to two hours to respond. What is useful is the audible alarm part of those setups because they scare the burglar away. By the time the cops get around to checking things out, he’s long gone.
Unfortunately, most modern alarms are actually service plans and more resemble cellphones or cable TV than household appliances. Why sell someone a set of low-margin hardware once when you can sell them discounted hardware and lock them into a $50/month subscription? The difference is that with cellphones and cable TV, the service portion is actually the most useful: without a network connection or programs piped through, a cellphone or cable box is useless. But with alarms, it’s the initial 60 seconds of 90-decible wailing that provides 99 percent of the value.
As if that’s not enough of a scam, we have to suspect that unscrupulous salesmen are arranging break-ins to spur demand.
Seahawks linebacker Lofa Tatupu:
And Gears of War hero Marcus Fenix:
The Seahawks could definitely use a COG or two based on yesterday’s embarrassment.
Just over two months ago, I wrote that I was taking a job with Microsoft’s Xbox division. The ensuing 5 weeks ended up being one of the busiest periods of my life. In fact, I think we must have set some sort of record for doing a complete interstate move.
My last day with Reuters was June 20. By June 26, me, my wife and 6-year-old son had packed up and hit the road on the 900-mile drive to Seattle.
I received my Microsoft badge on June 30, just two weeks before the E3 expo in Los Angeles that is the video game industry’s most important show of the year (and which, incidentally, we won hands-down).
We closed on a new house on July 31 and were fully moved in by the evening of August 2.
It really was one of those moves in which everything comes together, A-Team-like. It was about time, since we’d had enough practice. Here is a brief history of our wanderings since the mid-90s:
That’s five major moves in less than 10 years. I guess all that practice paid off since pretty much everything went off without a hitch this time.
In a corporate move like this, there are so many moving parts: moving company (and a separate company to move one of our cars), corporate HR for both Reuters and Microsoft, the temp housing company, the real estate agent, the mortgage lender, the home seller, etc. In every case, each party totally went to bat for us to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible. It was amazing.
I don’t have much to report right now. Scratch that, I have tons to report, but I’m not going to do it right at this moment. This is sort of the re-launching of Command-K, and I just needed to log in and get the ball rolling again.
In the coming weeks I’ll be writing about the new job, my evolving perspective on the games industry from the inside and other random thoughts.
The activist and writer Susan Estrich penned a column about Grand Theft Auto 4. Let’s take a look at what she thinks:
“I write for a living and still have difficulty finding the words to describe it. Awful doesn’t begin…
“Imagine gratuitous violence. Then imagine people with more imagination than you or I making it more graphic and awful than we could ever dream…
“It’s the genius that is being distorted into creating more and worse violence. There’s no question that great minds are behind these games, in terms of creative and technological skill. But think of what else they could be doing. And aren’t…
“It’s a shame and a waste, and it portends a generation going down the tubes. “Rockstar” my you-know-what. Shame on you. You owe the kids who worship you — and line your coffers — better than this garbage.”
It’s hard to imagine someone of Estrich’s sophistication writing something like this about Martin Scorsese or David Chase. Right away she falls into the trap of pigeonholing all games as designed only for kids.
I’ve played about 7 hours of Grand Theft Auto 4’s story so far and I can tell you the violence isn’t nearly as graphic as recent horror movies like Saw, or even The Passion of the Christ. Probably by an order of magnitude.
What disturbs Estrich and many other critics is the aspect of agency in video games. You are an active participant, tasked with carrying out these horrific actions. Watching a movie at least gives you some detachment or distance from the on-screen action, but in GTA you pull the trigger yourself.
But look at any thoughtful review of GTA4. The choices, often between two equally bad evils, are creating lots of discomfited gamers. Watching movies like Good Fellas or Colors, we’ve all probably thought about what we would if placed in those situations. Well, GTA4 gives you that opportunity. I’m just really surprised that Estrich, who has watched enough of the game to see key turning points that provide context for these choices, hasn’t picked up on this.
There are two half-points, however, on which I sort of agree with her.
“But think of what else they could be doing. And aren’t…”
Let me pre-emptively say that I realize a huge part of the attraction for GTA is that it lets you try out the criminal lifestyle with no real-world consequence. Rockstar thrives on pushing the bounds of taste. It’s a key part of what has made the series so popular. So what follows is just some brainstorming, and is not in any way meant to say, “GTA would have been better if…”
But anyway, a few days ago I was wondering if there would have been any way to make GTA more socially acceptable. Or something that would retain the edginess without casting you, the player, as an actual criminal. What if the game cast you as a police officer caught between trying to clean up both the city and your own department? That could allow for equally gritty and disturbing scenarios: go take down such and such drug dealer, only to find that one of your superior officers is in on the deal. Go undercover and be forced to choose between proving your loyalty to the mafia by killing a fellow cop, or following your conscience. It could still retain the total freedom to beat up passers-by and pick up hookers, only this time you’d be a Harvey Keitel-style Bad Lieutenant.
The other half-point for Estrich is that she at least refrains from calling for legislation to ban games like GTA. She has the common-sense attitude that personal responsibility matters. Despite her reservations, she lets her son play because she knows he’s a good kid with a low risk of picking up any bad behavior that could be potentially imparted by the game.
While I happen to disagree with Estrich’s main points, I can accept her column as reasonable criticism of the game’s themes, or of Rockstar’s objectives in general. Just because Rockstar has the right to make any game they want doesn’t mean they can’t be called out for doing so. I can understand the argument that even though something is allowed to happen doesn’t mean it should happen. We employ that reasoning every day in hundreds of little choices. I could smoke, but I don’t. A friend of mine could eat meat but she doesn’t. Those kind of choices are the way a free society is supposed to work.
Oh, I do have one last bone to pick with Estrich. Rockstar doesn’t just make GTA games. They have also made the biting school satire Bully, Western adventure Red Dead Revolver and the Midnight Run street racing games. Oh, and Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis, known far and wide as the most realistic ping-pong simulator ever created. So there.
I’ve been taking my first vacation of the year and my folks are in town, so posting has been light lately.
Yesterday we did a 4-mile hike through Muir Woods and then followed it up with some refreshing surf and sun at Muir Beach. Today we went to Haight-Ashbury. Did the dirty hippie thing. Went to Amoeba Music, which is so edgy, even the clerk who took my money was complaining about the weird stuff piped over their music system. Bought a CD.
Having my parents in town means, of course, that we get free babysitting for the duration. We’ve finally saw a couple movies we’ve been dying to see: There Will Be Blood and Juno. Both were excellent. Blood was a lot more subtle than I’d expected. I was figuring on an in-your-face, over-the-top, Bill the Butcher-style role, but there were a lot of interesting and even admirable aspects to Daniel Plainview’s character. I may write more about it later.
Wisdom from a 6-year-old:
“Dad, if you want to know goo, you’ve got to taste goo.”
Sorry the posting’s been light this week. We’ve had a slew of Japanese friends packing up and going home, which has made for some busy evenings and teary farewells.
On the upside, my bronchitis is gone thanks to the miracle of antibiotics. Yup, I sure do love me some azithromycin.
Keep that headline in mind. I have a tale of DMV woe to relate first, but it will circle back around to make a gaming related point.
I finally resolved to get Tala her learner’s permit. The first step in that process is to take the written test. I had today off (Good Friday as a work holiday is about the best thing $1,000 in annual union dues buys me) and told her I would take her to the DMV and set her up with the test. Should be easy, right?
We got to the DMV around 10:30 and the wait wasn’t that bad. We were called to the counter in about 20 minutes. In the meantime we had filled out the application. The only thing that had me a little worried was that they needed her Social Security number, which I didn’t have. Oh well, I figured that if they needed that, at worst Tala could start taking the test and I would drive back home and get it. Silly me.
They need the number right then and there to even register you for the test. Okay, it’s still not really a big deal as we live less than 10 minutes away. I drive home and pull the number off our tax returns. I don’t think she ever had an actual Social Security card, or if she did, we lost it right away.
I was back within 20 minutes and it was another 20 minute wait or so to get back to the counter. Same clerk. Give him the number, and he goes off to validate it. Five minutes later he comes back and says the number doesn’t match her name. Turns out her SocSec number is under her maiden name while her green card, the ID we used to fill out the form, is under her married name. Never mind that we are waving both her green card and her Chinese passport, which has her maiden name, under the nose of the clerk. The rules say the names have to match, and the only way to do that is to go to the SocSec office and change the name.
At least they have directions to the nearest SocSec office, which is about 6 miles away. So we tool on up there.
“Well,” Tala said, “at least this should be easy. We’ll show my ID and get it changed, and go back to the DMV.”
To which I replied: “Don’t underestimate the government’s ability to complicate even the simplest tasks.”
After another 20-minute wait, we get up to the counter. I tell the pleasant young woman on the other side that my wife’s Social number is registered under her maiden name and she wants to change it to her married name. I give her the number, the green card and her passport. She scans everything for a moment, then looks up and says:
“And where’s your marriage certificate?”
Marriage certificate?
“Yes, we need the marriage certificate to confirm you are married.”
Well, the green card proves we are married because in order to get the green card — issued under her married name — we had to prove to Immigration and Naturalization Service that we did indeed get married. That proof entailed showing them our marriage certificate.
But of course the INS database doesn’t talk to the SSA database, or at least what you do in one realm doesn’t matter to the other. So, our next task is to come up with the marriage certificate. I am reasonably sure I have a copy in our home files, but if not, we’ll have to contact the records office of King County, Washington, 900 miles away, and get a copy sent to us.
And anyway, I don’t have any time off from work to go through this rigamarole for another two weeks, when I take some vacation during Harlan’s Spring Break. Apart from the massive inconvenience, there’s something that just chafes at the revolutionary American character to have to provide a federal identification number in order to just take the first step of obtaining a state driver’s license. Sigh.
Back to the title of this post. Chances are, if you’re a fan of role-playing games you already know where this is going. The comparison is high in my mind because I’ve finally been working through Mass Effect, the sci-fi RPG for the Xbox 360 that came out late last year to much critical acclaim.
A main feature of RPGs is the quest system. The player has a goal, but to achieve that goal and push the story forward, there are a number of hoops the game makes the player jump through.
For instance, in Mass Effect, my character recently arrived at a spaceport on a remote planet that services a system of privately run research labs. I was on the trail of a person who has crucial information needed to make sense of the larger mystery I’m ensnared in. But my status as an elite intelligence agent gives me little authority in this private facility and I have to seek a way to leave the spaceport and gain access to the lab where my quarry is holed up.
I learn from an official who greets me off my starship that I need a permit to leave. She suggests I seek out an administrator. I track him down and he gives me the brush-off. Fortunately, on my way out his assistant drops hints about a couple alternative avenues.
I opt to talk to a merchant who asks me to smuggle something. It requires a trip back to my ship to retrieve the item, which I then carry back to the station administrator. He thanks me by granting me a pass to leave the spaceport.
So here are two thoughts. It actually helped me a little to think of this DMV goose-chase as just another quest in a real-life role-playing game. I was just going through the 2008 California-resident version of trying to leave the spaceport.
That thought was immediately followed by one wondering if Mass Effectis at its core just a series of mundane, frustruating tasks when stripped of its 720p graphics, biotic implants, vast universe of worlds and detailed character development. When I plant my butt on the couch for an hour trying to figure out how to leave the spaceport, am I not really just trying to take the driver’s test?
What accounts for the difference between the two? Is it just in the graphics, story and rich background of Mass Effect? That’s exciting to me, but for my character who is living in that future, wouldn’t this just be the kind of craptastic bureaucracy that frustruates us today? Are Mass Effectand other RPGs just bureaucracy simulators? Or does this sort of thing become more interesting when you know it’s part of saving the galaxy and not just trying to satisfy a very basic part of living in modern society?
Man, this has been one of the worst colds I’ve suffered through in a while. I stayed home yesterday, today, and it looks like I will quite possibly stay home tomorrow.
Moreover, this bug seems to be impervious against extra-strength Tylenol, offering little prospect of relief. I don’t have a serious cough, but at night it’s frequent enough so that neither I nor Tala get a good rest.
Meanwhile, everyone else is enjoying some of the finest weather we’ve had this year, with bright blue skies and balmy temperatures. I enviously eyed all the joggers I saw in my brief forays out of doors today.
The only good thing about staying home is that I’ve been able to get some good reading in. I finished Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen, and started an advance copy of an upcoming book on video games. I plan on writing a feature on it when it comes in about a month, so more on that later.
I’ve also finally had a chance to sit down and play a couple hours of Mass Effect. I’ve only logged about 6.5 hours in it so far, but I think the story is finally sucking me in. I don’t know why I’ve had trouble getting into the game but it just hadn’t grabbed me in the same way Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or Oblivion did.
One last mope: I’m bummed because I finally found a place selling Mama Lil’s hot peppers, which are fantastic on nachos. I instantly bought a jar, but realized tonight that we are out of tortilla chips. We are never out of tortilla chips. And it’s too late, and I’m too sick, to do anything about it now.
I wish I were talking about the Zep song, but no, I’m actually sick. For the third time this year. Actually the second, because I think this is just a flare-up of something I’ve had for a couple weeks now.
Back in February I came down with a typical cold for a couple days, and it has persisted as a low-level cough for nearly three weeks now. I haven’t felt sick at all — I’ve been able to run, go to the gym, go to work, etc. But I’ve lived with this mild, annoying cough.
Last night the bug asserted itself again and promoted itself into my sinuses. Now I have a phlegmy cough and a runny nose, and I actually feel sick. Not fun. I’ve now been sick more in the first 2-1/2 months of this year than I was in all of 2007.
As I said, not fun.
This may be the single best story I’ve ever read on the Reuters wire. I mean, it’s about Chuck Norris, so right there it’s pretty much ahead of 99 percent of everything else.
Here’s the intro, but it’s worth clicking the link above to read through to the end, which has a great kicker quote — no pun intended — from an Iraqi police trainer.
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) – Hollywood action star Chuck Norris, known for his martial arts prowess and tough-guy image, has become a cult figure among the U.S. military in Iraq and an unlikely hero for some in Iraq’s security forces.
A small cardboard shrine is dedicated to Norris at a U.S. military helicopter hub in Baghdad, and comments lauding the manliness and virility of the actor have been left on toilet walls across Iraq and even in neighboring Kuwait, soldiers say.
“The fastest way to a man’s heart is with Chuck Norris’s fist,” reads one message at the shrine, which consists of a signed photo of the actor surrounded by similar statements.
“Chuck Norris puts the laughter in manslaughter,” reads one and “Chuck Norris divides by zero,” reads another.
It’s a sad day for geeks everywhere: Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has died at age 69 of an abdominal aneurysm. As my friend Joetold me via IM: “I sensed a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of geeks in their parents’ basements cried out in mourning…” That strikes the perfect balance of respect and geeky homage this event calls for. It’s probably than joking about running out of hit points or failing a saving throw.
I certainly knew my way around a 20-sided diewhen I was a kid and remember clearly my first in-depth contact with the game. I remember sitting in on some dungeon-crawling sessions in early early grade school when the D&D phenomenon first broke in the mid-late ’70s. But it wasn’t until 6th grade that I rolled my first character, thanks to my social studies teacher Mr. Schuster (not his real name).
Thinking back on it, it was pretty edgy for him to start an extracurricular D&D club at a Catholic school where nuns still strolled the halls and the game was in the headlines for turning kids into devil-worshipping slackers. I distinctly remember rolling a pretty crappy character. I think his highest attribute was 13 or 14, and his lowest was 3 or 4. Mr. Schuster advised me to assign the low score to charisma, then made him a half-orc to explain how he got walloped with the business end of the ugly stick. To make me feel better about having an unattractive and weak character, Mr. Schuster made him an assassin and told me to keep that secret from the rest of the players. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to see my hatchet-faced killer in action because, a couple weeks later, Mr. Schuster was fired. It was nothing to do with D&D. The rumor was that he threw chalk at a student and cursed him with obscene language.
But I kept my fascination for D&D through grade school and part of high school. The weird thing is that I never actually played it that much. Few of my friends were into it, so I mostly just spent hours poring over the rules laid forth in The Dungeon Master’s Guide and The Player’s Handbook, dreaming up new characters, and absorbing the mythology of the Monster Manual andDieties and Demigods. Thanks to D&D, I had sterling instruction in fantasy taxonomy long before I read Tolkien. I learned the defining characteristics of elves, dwarves and halflings, and got schooled in the mundane nuisances of bugbears and hobgoblins. D&D introduced me to the more exotic menaces of ocre jellies, undead liches and floating, wide-eyed beholders, and taught me the names of powerful ancient evils like Asmodeus, Beelzebub, and Tiamat.
Eventually, cars, girls and stereos took over my spare time. Probably more than a decade passed before I encountered D&D again, in 1999, and this time it had been thoroughly updated for the computer age in the form of role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate IIthat featured epic 40-hour-long stories, rich characters and lush, cutting-edge graphics. Amazingly, Gygax’s 6-attribute character creation system, turn-based combat and byzantine system of bonuses and penalties affecting almost every action could be ported perfectly to computers. Given that I had been a kid who often had to play D&D — the ultimate geek social network of its day — by myself, this ability to play through a detailed campaign alone was instantly appealing.
It’s amazing the D&D still thrives today through dice, pencils and lead figurines despite the wild popularity of video games and how easy, compelling and accessible they made fantasy worlds. Gygax and his crew hit upon a magical formula that fired the imagination of generations of geeks and, along with Tolkien, is pretty much entirely responsible for the state of fantasy role-playing games today.
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