From the category archives:
Photo-radar van driver shot to death; dies slowly and painfully.
Somehow I can’t help but feel that some of you are missing the point.
Edit: The gunman proves to be an excellent shot, hitting both van and driver at speeds well over the posted limit. In fact, the van has a photo of him and his license plate to prove it.
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I’ve been accused of trying to be hip and topical with my recent focus on DRM and copy protection, in some attempt to drum up controversy, dust off my soapbox and get some good old righteous indignation back in my rhetoric, but actually there’s nothing quite so manipulative to it. I’m not trying to whip up scandal by voicing pro-hacker sentiment, it’s just that the last month or so has really been a nightmare when it comes to gaming.
I’ll try to explain. This is what’s happened basically every time I’ve tried to play a game I installed in the last couple of years, but never got around to playing because of work:
1) Spoony gets bored/pissed off/stressed and decides to play a game.
2) Tries to get past the solo of “Cult of Personality,” fails, and snarls something incoherent and vile as he finds ice for his wrist.
3) Looks through his PC game list and realizes to his sorrow that most of his games suck, and that he intentionally purchases sucky games to amuse you. This reminds him of work, which he should be doing, and angers him even further. He ponders taking up hardcore drinking.
4) Finds an installed game he never got around to playing.
5) The game demands to see the actual disc because of copy protection measures.
6) Spends the next six hours tearing the place apart looking for a disc because it invariably arrived in a fucking paper goddamn sleeve.
7) If I ever find it, I’m too tired by this point and decide to go to sleep.
Anyway, that’s pretty much been the story whenever I’ve tried to find a way to unwind in the last couple of months. My own lack of organization has really made things harder than they needed to be. After losing my copies of both Civilization IV and Neverwinter Nights 2 (and trust me, I went through every disc and even lifted every piece of furniture in the room– NWN2 is gone, man.)
And if I hear one goddamn word about a CD wallet or one of those flippy CD books, I will have you flayed.
I lost a whole day as I resolved to simply clean the damn room and print up jewel case labels for every paper-sleeved disc in my possession. My hands are now damn near crippled, but I’m happy at last. They all have lovely, wonderful end-labels. It’s beautiful.
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You might consider it somewhat unprofessional for a guy to review something before he’s finished it, but seeing as how Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem is well over a zillion pages long, I’ll only be able to finish it if modern science triples the human lifespan. Seriously, at 940 pages, you could bludgeon seals to death with this sombitch.
So far, I remain unimpressed. They say madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, and after agonizing through a thousand pages of The Baroque Cycle, I don’t know why I’m surprised. Let me put it this way: does any story take a thousand pages to tell? Maybe the Lord of the Rings saga (and that’s counting the Silmarillion: a book you would still find boring even if Morgan Freeman were the guy reading it to you). But c’mon. There are whole anthologies of books that don’t rack up a thousand pages, and they tell complete, entertaining stories.
I don’t know when Neal Stephenson lost all sense of editorial restraint, but god damn, man, get to the fucking point. I’d call him “long-winded” but the chapter with Tom Bambodil was a little long-winded. It was a little extraneous. Neal Stephenson needs to shut the fuck up. I want to be entertained, not lectured. A thousand pages, Neal? This is getting into Wheel of Time levels of rambling, do-nothing bullshit. But hell, at least in the Wheel of Time there was some interesting stuff going on. Sieges, wizards, prophecies, sword-fighting, revenge, chases, escapes, true love, miracles. What happened in Quicksilver? A guy sailed on a fucking boat to issue a dissertation on who invented calculus.
You mean to tell me that Neal looked at Anathem, a book so dense I can actually see small particles of matter breaking off my sandwich and orbiting the dust jacket, and decided there wasn’t a single thing he’d cut to make the story flow better. Not the chapter where two monks wander around a city, doing nothing but talking about how bored they are? We couldn’t cut the endless dictionary entries? Oh yes, nothing screams effective plotting like interrupting every three pages with a dry list of definitions from an imaginary dictionary.
And that leads me to my major complaint against Anathem: the future-speak. I don’t think I’ve ever been as annoyed at frelling made-up future-words as I am here. No, I’m not talking about curse words like “frak” and “smeg,” instead, Stephenson chooses to set his book on an Earth-like world called Arbre, and since it’s like Earth, but not quite, everyone uses different words for stuff. Only problem is, he basically redefines half of the nouns in the English language by calling them something else. So a “movie” is now a “speely,” a “camera” is now a “speelycaptor,” monasteries are “mynsters,” monks are “fraas” and “suurs,” saints are “saunts.” There are Burgers (that aren’t made of beef), Tetrarchs, vlors, slashberries, Deolaters and slines.
It gets to the point where it’s like the book is written in code, where every word means something else, and all I can wonder is why Stephenson didn’t just write the book in English instead of making it a mental chore to decipher his book. I understand that in any fantasy world you’re going to have to make up some new terms, but this is ridiculous. You’re talking about common, ordinary things. It’s not interesting to write a book where you insist on calling a banana a “jaunezippiefruit” just because it’s a different world and they don’t have bananas, just banana-like things. And yet, clocks are still clocks, a portcullis is still a portcullis.
I suspect he’s trying to illustrate some kind of syntactic disconnect between the isolated monastic community and the world outside their cloisters, but it just doesn’t work. The monks are speaking Ye Olde Dumblish, and the people outside are speaking New Dumblish. Nobody’s speaking English, so there’s no middle ground. Congratulations, Neal, you’ve duplicated the monks’ sense of alienation, in that I’m completely alienated, frustrated, and I don’t want to read your retarded book full of pidgin sci-fi words. Eat my mivonks with Jovian boogle-hoops, smeghead. Grok that?
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A while back I started reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, the first in a long (I repeat, long) series of books known as the Baroque Cycle.
I couldn’t get past the first hundred pages.
At first I chalked it up to the tedium of my job, a general sense of ennui, low energy, and disinterest in reading anything “heavy.” But after giving it another chance, and suffering through the first book, I simply can’t stand it anymore. Quicksilver is, to be blunt, abusively dull. And despite what you might think, I’m not the kind of guy who demands ninjas, action heroes, and pulp adventure in a novel to fill the Awesome Quota. But I do demand that something fucking happen. This book should be right up my alley; I love speculative fiction. This alternate history shit is fascinating to me. But my god, it’s just unbearable. Nothing happens. I kept waiting for 500 pages for Stephenson to reach some kind of goddamn point, raise some kind of dramatic tension, or even set up the beginnings of some kind of conflict, and nothing of that sort happens.
I feel really guilty about it, too. I love this fucking guy. Snow Crash and Zodiac are works of sheer genius, and the Baroque Cycle was supposed to be his masterpiece. You can tell the guy spent years, if not decades researching this crap, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t use every fucking note he took in this endless, rambling pile of garbage.
Sorry Neal. I gave you about 400 more pages’ worth of my attention than I’d give anyone else to get me interested. I don’t know how anyone can write three books of over 3,000 pages and forget to tell a story, but you pulled it off. You shouldn’t have called if Quicksilver, you should have called it Filibuster.
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AUGH. I can’t– I just…My god. This is…
This is the cinematic equivalent of an asteroid about to hit the fucking Earth, people. It’s huge, it’s ugly, it’s horrible, and if you have any sense at all you should run shrieking away from it as quickly as you can. And like any apocalyptic abomination that’s about to destroy culture and the last vestiges of what make humanity worth preserving, there are some mad, frothing maniacs who embrace the rapture and worship the coming doom. We’ve been fortunate enough so far to avoid a real Twilight fan invasion, because I’ve been on other message boards and you’ve not seen such a pack of rabid, snarling jagoffs so willing to engage in bitter, pointless flamewars over this.
It’s a perfect storm of co-mingling fan-worship, too. You’ve got the teenage girl demographic, infatuated with this…fucking vapid, vacant pasty-faced asshole, with that face you just want to ram into a men’s room doorknob until his teeth litter the ground like bloody chiclets. It’s not that he’s a pretty boy– we hate John Cena enough for that, I guess– it’s that garbage vampire-chic aura, that godawful brooding intensity, that mysterious “I’m the biggest, sexiest mistake you’d ever make, ladies, because I’m fucking dangerous” scowl that makes all the women drool.
It’s got all those goth-heads hooked, too. Some people just never get tired of it. I promised myself I wouldn’t use the term “emo” unless it was absolutely necessary, but what else do you call an entire genre based around a pale, dreary bore who always drones on about his own existential angst, his eternal torment, his alienation from human society, and the constant struggle to contain the beast of his infinite rage forever crawling in his skin, lest it surface and harm those he loves? Come to think of it, what is with all of this vampire worship, anyway? Vampire stories are lame, and they were lame even when Anne Rice shat her oversexualized Mary Sue fiction all over bookstores. After that, we had to endure fucking Anita Blake, and now this?
It boggles my mind to even imagine that, as bad as the Anita Blake stories are, Twilight is far, far worse. And all I did was read a sample chapter online. It’s so bad, that even hearing summaries of the plot can evoke snorts of derision. My mom used to watch daytime soaps that had less ham-handed melodrama and less-disturbing sexual liaisons. This madness has to stop, and if you don’t believe me, just keep watching. The Twilight movies are coming, and people, you are going to see some sad, depraved motherfuckers buying enough tickets to keep it at #1 in the box office for months.
Oh, fuck you.
I’m tired of this shit. I’m all about retro-gaming. I’m nostalgic. I love going back and remembering old stuff and how great it was. I even bought Mega Man 9 and was hopelessly charmed by the memories. But this has got to stop.
All I remember hearing when the Wii was coming out was “Twilight Princess is gonna be awesome!” and the only game for the Gamecube anyone ever mentioned was fucking Wind Waker. Game of the Year awards all around. People raved about the graphics, the cel-shading, the controls, the story, you name it. Zelda’s always been huge, and it’s only gotten bigger.
And I fucking hate it.
Oh, I’m not going to sit here and tell you they’re not good games. They are. All of them. They’re very good. They’re part of the foundation of gaming itself. I’m not denying their place in history. Twilight Princess was a terrific game…when it was called Majora’s Mask…or Ocarina of Time. There has never been any appreciable evolution in the Zelda games. Every game is almost literally a carbon copy of every other Zelda game with slightly different maps and puzzles. The plots have never even attempted to tie together to form a coherent canonical plotline, and attempting to make sense of them is an exercise in futility. They’re all basically parallel-universe stories, all of which involve a mute elf brat in a green hat saving a blonde from a fat goblin.
“But Spoony!” you whine, “AC/DC still rocks, and they haven’t changed in 35 years! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?”
Yes, AC/DC does still rock your mother, but the difference is that AC/DC didn’t just keep releasing the same album over and over again with slight variations on the core melodies. They wrote new stuff but managed to maintain their unique, kickass style. The only real change you could count on with the Legend of Zelda series was a graphical facelift whenever a new console hit the store shelves.
I hate fucking Zelda fans, and all the people who used to write me asking if I picked up Twilight Princess, or the Minish Cap, or any one of the dozens of other indistinguishable games out there. Reality check: there’s no story, there’s no innovation, there’s no evolution. You’ve been playing the same goddamn game for twenty-five years. Zelda 2 for the fucking NES was the most unique game of the bunch.
And that’s truth.
Zombie films used to be on the fringe– edgy, trashy, nearly plotless cinema that people pretended was cool. That’s not the case anymore; zombie flicks are springing up all over the place, because any idiot with a load of Karo syrup and torn clothes can make one, and they’re all basically about the same thing. I participated in an independent film festival, with zombie short films in vogue. They fit in nicely with most young filmmakers’ sense of rebellion, being bleak, nihilistic, cheap, and it’s a genre where broad and hideous acting is not only forgivable, it’s desirable.
Zombie media is everywhere, and not just because the YouTube generation is armed with cheap DV cameras. Comics, literature, and games have latched onto the zombie meme like the undead’s jaws on your ankle. The fad has been ridden into the ground, piledriven six feet under, dug up, fucked, decapitated, had its neck stump fucked, and re-buried under a load of fanboy spooge. The “Marvel Zombies” have risen at least three times with no end in sight, the “Walking Dead” comic is serviceable, but should have ended two years ago, and there are more comics arising all the time. Dead Rising kicked off the mall-survival fantasies of gamers everywhere, and even now, all the people at your local Gamestop will talk about are the upcoming zombie games.
There’s nothing more annoying than zombie fans. Honest to god, I’ve rarely seen such pretentiousness over such fucking awful movies in my life. They’ll act like you just don’t get it, like Romero is some kind of a fucking genius for jackhammering metaphors into his films about the stupidity of humanity, the horrors of mass conformity, and man’s inhumanity to man. Sure, I’ll grant you that Romero represents the best the zombie genre has to offer, and is probably the most intellectual of the bunch, but there’s only so far you can ride that shambling corpse. Romero’s last two films were absolutely abysmal, and yet all I could hear about how deep and penetrating Romero’s insight into humanity is.
Let’s get this straight, okay? Zombie films suck. They’ve always sucked, and they’re meant to suck. They’ve been mined for every conceivable metaphor. The tabula rasa that is the zombie’s blank, expressionless stare has been thoroughly shat upon and smeared on every media. It’s done. The only real innovation to come to the genre was Danny Boyle’s “speed zombie,” and of course, I know a ton of zombie fan dickheads who will be quick to point out that the 28 Days Later creatures were “infected” and not “zombies.” It makes me want to jam those quotation marks right up their smug asses.
Look, I don’t care if you enjoy zombie flicks. More power to you. But let’s not pretend it’s because you admire the subtext. You like violence, you get a chuckle out of dismemberment, and if there are titties in the movie, that’s bonus points. It’s garbage cinema. Drive-in fluff. Completely brainless. The genre is completely played out.
It’s over.
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