Foiled Again

I love NASA. I think that space exploration is one of the human race's better endeavors, and I support it with the energy and fervor I usually reserve for being misanthropic or eating cake. But I can sort of see where some of the criticisms of them being time wasters and money-eaters come from. A few days ago, the Phoenix lander safely arrived on Mars to do some soil testing. Bravo, well done. Now NASA has to send the space shuttle up to the ISS (International Space Station) on an emergency mission to fix the toilet.

The humor in the situation is obvious (and as such I'm going to try and get through this without a poop joke), and it isn't like toilets are these Herculean machines made of frozen strong that take cleaning chemicals and dirty water and products of the less family-friendly human orifices by the ton every day but they stay on track no matter what, God damn it. Point is, the things break. And apparently, even space toilets on space stations in space break.

It does make me wonder why nobody thought to pack supplies to fix it on board the station itself. I mean, it has people on it. People make some nasty by-products. And launching the space shuttle is expensive; taxpayer money too. Yes, you, me, and every other red-blooded American is sending a small part of our dollars to send a space shuttle to fix a space potty. In space. I know that when the power dies at my house a small part of me panics thinking, "Where is it all going to go?" But those guys are on a motherfucking space station. Popping outside for a quick wee is not exactly an option.

Critics of NASA have long said that they use too much time and money on useless endeavors, and while I'll argue that sending a man to Mars is a pretty useless endeavor (unless it's Ewe Boll minus one spacesuit) sending an entire space shuttle to fix the pot may not be useless, but it sure is wasteful. And I can't imagine the poor guys up there, thinking, "Oh Christ, it's everywhere!"

...

shit piss wee urine pee-pee turds chocolate logs land mines droppings defecation urination whiz dump spoor stool giant PILES OF CRRAAAPPPPP!

God damn it.

The American legal system did something right. It gets a cookie.

I've been told that the number one way to get fired nowadays is to blog on the job. Well, ha! Take this corporate America. Yeah.

So Jack Thompson's trial wrapped up recently. I really hate to talk about this guy because he is the kind of media whore who gets off on attention, and bolsters his reputation on attention. It doesn't matter what kind of attention, and with the absolutely pathetic state of the Internet and its users, getting good attention is almost impossible nowadays - not that it matters anyway. You'd have to prove your ancestry to Jesus and build skis out of the True Cross and make a cape out of the shroud of Turin and win the Olympic ski slope for the USA, crushing the Chinese, cover the world in solar panels mocked up to look like the stars and stripes, and then go and feed a bunch of babies in The People's Republic of the Congo all while humming "Amazing Grace" and the national anthem out of each side of your mouth and winning on American Idol to get any kind of good attention on the webs, and you'd still be hated and mocked just for doing so damn well for yourself you bloody overachiever.

::breathes::

Anyhow, Game Politics probably has the best coverage, and I mean that as a flat-out compliment despite my altercations with them. He is guilty of almost 31 counts of misusing, misrepresenting, or flat out breaking Florida Bar Association laws, which all falls under the title of Professional Misdemeanor, mostly in non-video game related matters. This makes it all the more sweeter because it proves that aside from an insane right-wing weirdo who touted the "fact" that pretend violence is much worse than real violence, the guy is a flat out incompetent lawyer even when, to put it one way, out of his element.

This also is not the first time Thompson has been slapped in the balls by the courts. In 2005, his pro hac vice licence (Latin for "for this event," meaning a lawyer can sit in or consult on a case with which they are otherwise unaffiliated) was revoked during the trial of Devin Moore. Moore shot two police officers and a dispatcher supposedly because Grand Theft Auto told him it was okay. Thompson, naturally, jumped all over this in the same manner a squirrel would jump on the last acorn on Earth, which resulted in Judge Moore revoking the licence and stating, "Mr. Thompson's actions before this Court suggest that he is unable to conduct himself in a manner befitting practice in this state [Alabama]."

My favorite charge he was found guilty of is, taken from Escapist Magazine, "Using means that have no other purpose than to embarrass, delay or burden a third person." I think that describes the man to a capital T.

But we have to remember that this is America, and as such it is pretty difficult to get a news camera pointed at you (You Tube notwithstanding.) It is even more difficult when you are the kind of genetic freak who does not speak in five second sound bytes and actually has something deep, meaningful, challenging, in insightful to say. Thompson is the same model of person as Madonna or Oscar Wilde, not to say that he is a talented singer or a wonderful writer, but he has a knack for attracting the media. Television and particularly the Internet do not provide any kind of quality control with the information the beam into your forehead. Thompson has been around for a while now, ever since Columbine made it cool to scapegoat pop culture and popular media for the sake of terrible parenting and to avoid making upper-middle class white folks look bad. He is only one man representing what has come to be a rather accepted point of view: games, music, and movies turn your pink-skinned virgin-eared bright-eyed Christian children into baby eaters.

In any case, it is still a victory. It is a victory not so much for the fact that this psycho can no longer practice law, but that it peels back the veil of righteousness and authority that the Jesus loving, gay bashing, protect whitey crowd wears just a little more. It shows that one of the leading voices in the angry-mob-pitchfork-and-torches march on games and music is nothing more than a slimy immature lying son of a bitch that even Florida will not defend.

Canon? Try Fanon.

Fanfiction is the kind of thing I wave a dismissive hand at and assume it is reserved for awkward unwashed teenagers who watch far too much bad Japanese cartoons and prance around in capes yelling, "i'm a riter!" And I will readily admit I've gotten in it my head to try my hand at it, but after a few pages of bad ideas and notably terrible writing, I deleted the Word document. Then took a shower. Then cried a little.

But even I cannot deny that there is a lot of the stuff out there, so much so that it has been getting serious attention as a serious form of writing. The website FanFiction dot com is the sewer grate that collects a good deal of it as it flows through the tubes of the Internet. And I am not going to go so far as to say that all "fanfics" are bad writing. I'll use one that my very own younger sibling wrote as an example of what I'm taking about (yeah, sorry sis, going to stick your head on a fence post. You can have it back when I'm done.) Most of the complaints I have about fan fiction are because it is fan fiction.

My sister's piece, Kage Matsuri, and I use italics because it is over 30,000 words so it might as well be treated like a long-form work, is based on the comic slash cartoon slash live action movie slash line of home appliances Death Note. Now, to someone who is very familiar with the world of Death Note, I'm sure the characters make perfect sense. To someone like me, who has only seen about five episodes of the cartoon before starting to suffer cognitive dissonance, it seems to take place in a Paper Mario 2D world where the good guys have the depth of a 1960s-era Superman, everyone else is a gargantuan idiot, and the word "whammy" is taken grossly out of cultural context.

As I said before, there isn't much I can complain about in the way of actual writing. There is some genuinely gritty action and witty dialog, but once again, that assumes I know the "canon" - what goes on in the actual base story the fiction is based on. You have to know the "canon" to get the "fanon," is another way of putting it. Thus anything written using the canon of whatever story is the basis of the fan fiction is meaningless unless you know it.

This is my first big complaint about fan fiction as a whole. Writers, at least the good ones, write for everyone. Even books like historical fictions or sci-fi, again, the good ones, go to great lengths to explain themselves so the reader isn't completely lost. Jurassic Park wouldn't have the popularity it did if it assumed that the reader already understood all there was to know about the finer points of replicating dinosaurs from preserved DNA. In fact, almost half of the book revolves around explaining stuff, but that doesn't detract from it being a suspenseful, exciting read. It seems to me that fan fiction wants to channel that detail in the literary world while not having to use up a hundred and fifty pages explaining it all, so it just takes place in a nice pre-made world with pre-made characters. Plus, it is virtually impossible to give an honest critique of fan fiction because of this. Chances are, if you already like Death Note, you'll enjoy its fan fictions, if indeed you are the type who reads them. Since things like plot, setting, and aspects of character such as motivation and personality are already taken care of, it is impossible for a given critic to appraise them unless, again, they know the canon.

And just to drive the point home, the "Reviews" on FanFiction-decimal point-com, if they could be called that, are not exactly the most helpful things in the world. For example, the "Half-Life Full-Life Consequences" thing, made more famous on YouTube by a funny-as-hell Garry's Mod video (click here to see what I mean), is a Half-Life 2 fiction about the sci-fi series hero Gordon Freeman's brother. According to the authors information, he is a nine-year-old boy who has some serious trouble grasping the English language, even for a 3rd grader. Reviews quote-un-quote ranged from, "Eat shit and die you sack of pig sick." to "OMG!!!!!!!!!! I want 2 hav ur BABYS!" Maybe it's just me, but something tells me that neither of those are going to land in the NY Times book review section. Reviews are supposed to analyze the subject and give some at least somewhat informed opinions on them, not just express hatred of a writer who is probably some thirty year old guy living in a basement reading them, saying between mouthfuls of cake, "Dance, puppets, dance!"

So again, most of the complaints I have about fan fiction are mainly because it is fan fiction. Now Tim, you Herculean Exemplar, you say, that isn't fair, you can't criticize something for what it is. Well, yes, you can. You can criticize Nazis for being Nazis. Getting back to my sister's writing, I really wanted to give her monster story offshoot an honest read, but because I don't know too much about Death Note, I had no idea what was going on. And honestly, if you are going to write a story for a specific person, you might as well just write them a god damn letter.

::hands head back:: All done.

About damn time.

In the spirit of buying a game and letting it sit for two years before I beat it, I finished Fatal Frame 2 last night. The entire thing was a bit of a let-down, given how much I loved the original Fatal Frame. If you don't know, the series (and it's always a series) is a line of games where you play an absolutely adorable Japanese girl who is supposed to be 12 but could easily pass for 18, and you have a magic camera that can banish ghosts if you take their picture. In the original, you played a student who goes looking for her beloved teacher in a haunted Japanese mansion and becomes entangled in a whole mess with ghosts and antiquated sacrifice rituals. In Number 2, you play as Mio, a typical Japanese girl who has a thing for abandoning her sister, and occasionally as her twin Mayo, who get lost in the woods and land in a haunted Japanese village, which really just consists of four haunted Japanese houses, and the twins need escape before they become the subjects of another antiquated sacrifice ritual.

My main complaint about FF2 is the fact that it is, well, Japanese. It is Japanese to the point of being noticeably Japanese, as if a Japanese man was standing behind you right now with a baseball bat carved from a Japanese cherry tree and was about to beat you silly with it but don't turn around and look because that will really piss him off! For example, the storyline does not make sense to us Westerners unless you understand that a popular myth in Japan is that certain deaths, generally suicides, are doomed to repeat their deaths for all eternity as ghosts. That is never explained in FF2, even though it is the driving force and central idea behind the plot. Mio and Hellman's, I mean Mayo, are caught in the village's last day before an evil spirit was released and went Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the place. The game's Japanese-ness also shows through in the completely linear storyline. Not that FF1 wasn't linear, but there are these sequences when the twins become separated, where you play as Mayo, and you basically have to run her from one end of a hallway to another. During one I tried to go into another room and there was an invisible wall. I wonder why the developers even let you control her if there is only one possible thing to do? The game is so chock-full of pre-rendered sequences anyway, another two or three couldn't hurt. When the twins are together, it seems as though Mayo is possessed by the spirits and the will speak through her, but Mio doesn't seem to notice. You'll be running around with your sister behind you and she'll say, "The ritual... we were born for this purpose..." and there is no reaction from Mio whatsoever, as if Mayo just does this all the time, the freak. I could go on bashing the game for being so ethnic but there's plenty of other bad design areas at which to whack.

The movement is painfully slow. I don't want to jump to conclusions but it looks like the game drives home the stereotype of Japanese girls being small and mousy. Mio runs from bloodthirsty, disfigured angry spirits the same way one would casually prance through a field of daffodils. Which doesn't hurt combat much since, for as fucking slow as Mio is, the spirits are slower. The controls are workable, though switching between 3rd-person running around view and 1st-person take pictures of shit view takes some getting used to. It would have been better if the keys were customizable since in 3rd-person the cancel button is the same as the take a picture button in 1st-person. The camera angles seem designed to give the most atmospheric shots of the village and houses, which works beautifully if ignore the fact that a player is controlling a character. I do have to give the game that it's atmospheric, but it lacks the same claustrophobic, trapped feeling that the first one had. Why the twins couldn't leave the village is never explained except for the fact that there is another one of those invisible walls made of concentrated stupid at the exit. And while I'm on the topic if things the game forces you to do, there are these retarded sequences where certain doors will not open unless you capture the right spirit. It took me an hour to find one of said spirits because there is no indication of where the damn thing might have been hiding. Sorry, Japan. Sorry for not know where to look for something that's fucking invisible.

My final big complaint, game play wise, is the difficulty. The enemy spirits range from pathetic (ghosts in houses) to mildly annoying (ghosts of farmers) to totally fucking impossible. Standard ghosts have a predictable attack pattern of wander on up to you at 2 feet per hour then strike. The only break from this are the female ghosts who channel Ringu far too much in looks (black hair isn't scary anymore guys) and charge at you from across the room, or the farmer ghosts who hit you with sticks. Or, the ghosts of sticks? But at one point I was in basement when a priest ghost attacked. Not only did he randomly teleport every time I hit him, he shot flying skulls out of his staff and moved like one of the normal spirits hopped up on some spirit amphetamines. Of course, it wasn't that hard of a fight considering you trip over powerful ammo (film) and healing items, and even the crappy herbal medicine restores a minimum half of your health bar. There was an attempt to compensate for how easy it is to dispatch the spirits, by first making them all have tons of hit points so it takes ten shots to kill them, and also by making you fight the same ghosts two or three times in a row. Making enemies hard to kill based on their life bars is not good game design.

To round it all out, Fatal Frame 2 has some of the worst storytelling I've ever seen. Most of it is told in flashback, going between what once happened in the village to the history of the two sisters. Along the way you learn that the village has this ritual where one twin girl kills her sister in order to appease the gods, otherwise the gates to hell open. One of the sisters in the original village, Yae, runs off with the son of a scientist (anthropologist? reporter? It's never explained who this guy is but he's in the village studying it.) and as a result the ritual fails. Another point in where the Japanese-ness of the game shows is the heavy reliance of reincarnation as a plot point, which is also something that is not widely understood in Western mythos. Sisters Mio and Miracle Whip (sorry, last time, I promise) have the same soul as sisters Yae and Sae, therefore they are expected to complete the ritual. Nothing else keeps the two in the village besides sheer idiocy. There are characters who are introduced and never go anywhere, such as a white haired boy locked in a shed who occasionally gives advice and Dr. Aso, who made the magical camera that somehow just ended up in the village. In Fatal Frame 1, most of the story revolves around the camera, and in this, it is just there, pending explanation like every other god damn thing.

I'd say this game is reserved only for three kinds people: ones who like Japanese horror movies a little too much, golfers, and hardcore Fatal Frame fans. I do give FF2 that it is atmospheric and genuinely creepy, but too much time was put into the extras and not into the game itself. When you beat it on normal mode you get hard more, which is exactly the same as normal except you get some new lenses for your camera and the ghosts with too many hit points get more hit points. There's also a mission mode, which I have no intention of trying. If the game isn't fun to begin with, what makes you think it'll be fun otherwise? There are also the trademark extra costumes, which hammer the proverbial Japanese nail in the proverbial Japanese coffin of the proverbial fucking Japanese-ality of this game. Mio's costumes include a schoolgirls uniform, a maid outfit, and some skimpy bondage gear. She's twelve for fuck's sake! Add people with Japanese schoolgirl fetishes to the list of those who'd like this game.

One redeeming factor is that in the books that talk about the ritual, they replace certain words with "*" or "**". The writing quality for the game was pretty bad, so I just substituted some suggestive language for the "*"s.

The gate to hell is called the balls.
Gaze not upon the balls.
Eyes that glimpse the balls will be blinded by the balls.
Speak not of the balls.
The mouth which utters balls will be made speechless by the balls.
Listen not to the balls.
Those who heed the balls are turned heartless by the balls.

Yeah, I'm 5.

Summah-Time

And it's fucking forty degrees out. Awesome.

Anyhow, another semester is over and for as weird as it is for me to say, I actually miss it. Summers for us college freaks host this strange lull where you aren't writing papers every week or staying up all night doing research and stuff like that. Well, I suppose that applies to us college freaks who pay attention, not the lazy shits and business majors. But I digress. (Or do I? Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha!)

What?

One thing I am looking forward to this summer, now a mere 12 days away is the new Indiana Jones film. I generally avoid IMDB due to the fact that 50 percent of it's users are idiots and the other 50 percent, as the case with the alleged Silent Hill 2 script proved, lying assholes. But since the info about the film released is modest anyway it's safe to look up who is going to be in it and who isn't and disregard any other information as complete and utter bull. Kate Blanchett and that annoying kid from Saved by the Be -- I'm sorry Transformers -- are making appearances, which worries me. Blanchett is totally hit or miss and has never really impressed me and if Temple of Doom was any lesson to Speilberg whatsoever, he should know younger, fast-talking sidekicks DO NOT WORK.

One thing that gives me hope is that, again allegedly, from an interview with the man himself, very little of the movie will be done with computers. I have nothing against graphics, but so far the best examples of films that have done it right are Lord of the Rings and Brotherhood of the Wolf, where the graphics were simply streamlined into the film, such as the Orc costumes in LOTR being made in meticulous detail, then simply enhanced. Speilberg and Lucas each rely way too heavily on graphics, but at least Lucas does it right. I cite Minority Report as not only an incompetent movie but one that simply vomits acidic light all over its viewers because someone in the tech department thought that bloom makes everything better.

In spite of myself, and my whining, I'm looking forward to the movie anyway. Its a throwback to the kinds of things that inspired dozens of really shitty adventures stories I wrote at age 9, and don't ask because they have all been destroyed for the betterment of humanity.

Kickin' it old school!