I wish there were a plural word for that.

Reading:

• The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers. I enthusiastically supported Tim Powers before ever reading him; he writes historical fantasy, what more do you need to know? Then I read The Drawing of the Dark, which was… merely okay (even though a magical beer is the central plot device), and I wondered if perhaps he wasn’t all I’d hoped. Ah, but Dark was one of his first novels, and The Anubis Gates came after some years of refinement. It’s witty, it’s inventive, it’s entertaining. It has a gripping plot and is cover-to-cover full of weird and wild characters. It’s Dickens from hell.
• Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s futurism, or future history, that branch of hard scifi that tries to realistically imagine some part of the future - in this case the colonizing and terraforming of Mars. This book proves like none other (since Riverworld) that the exceptional scifi author must be a polymath; Robinson shows an impressive command of astronomy, geography, geology, engineering, history, sociology, psychology, languages, comparative religion, literature, space travel, genetics, biology, and many other fields. Robinson executes his usual trick of having exquisitely crafted characters in a plot that redefines “epic”.  No, not plot, quite; his books don’t have plots in the same way that history doesn’t have plots. It has stories. I was humbled by the power and majesty of this book - and it’s just the first in the trilogy.
• Road Dogs, by Elmore Leonard. First time reading Leonard. I looked forward to it. He’s known for his pacing; as he says, “I skip the boring parts.” I was surprised to find such a talky novel. Most of the novel is dialogue - great dialogue, with real rhythms and poetry to it, but little happening none the less. A fun novel, but not quite what I expected. It breezes through and is done with. An entertaining diversion - nothing humbling or majestic, but I wouldn’t be unhappy if I’d written it.
• The Bootleg Inn, by Jason Sauchuk. My buddy’s debut novel, about a haunted hotel in Nova Scotia. Not bad!

Watching:

• Planet Earth, BBC. As good as everyone says. I got goosebumps at the glorious thirty-second shot of the great white catching a seal.
• Inside the Medieval Mind, BBC4. It’s okay. I’ve learned a few new things, but it’s pretty clear that the cinematographer and director were bored as hell. Every shot is so edgy it makes my eyes bleed, and the soundtrack is rattling, disturbing, grating - that’d be fine if it were a slasher flick, but the guy’s just reading some monk’s letter from seven hundred years ago.

Playing:

• Dragon Age, Bioware. Great stuff. Game o’ the year.
• Final Fantasy XII, Square Enix. I made it to the endgame! … now I have to grind for ten more hours to beat the final boss.
• Wolverine: The Origin: The Movie: The Game about the Movie, Raven. Surprisingly great for a tie-in game. Crazy, silly violence. But it’s a good God of War-style combo-based brawler at heart. With RPG elements! Which everything should have. Breakfast cereals! Why shouldn’t I get better at eating them as I eat more? Shaving! I should be better at it, with all this experience.
• Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God, Telltale. My love for this company is so boundless that I actually pay for their games. It’s been a good year for Monkey Island fans. The final chapter is as good as the rest.

Listening:

• Stuff. Things. None of your business. Though the new Christmas song from Jens Rushing is pretty good.

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Nothing, I bet. But my life is full of robust activity, described by discretely consumable media!

Reading:

• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Well, at least it has a slightly less smug title than god is not great.
• Going Solo, by Roald Dahl. Just finished Boy, the first half of his autobiography, where he describes the hell of British boarding schools and his pastoral Norwegian summer vacations. (Coincidentally, the latest issue of National Geographic Traveler ranked the Norwegian fjords as the best place in the world, but I still can’t bring myself to believe that anyone can swim in the north Baltic. Just not possible. Too cold.) Anyway, Dahl goes to Africa to work the Shell company, then signs up to fly in WWII and protect Britain’s wrongfully seized overseas “possessions”. Adventure and ethnocentric domination ensues! Ha, ha, just kidding. Empire’s great. For King and Country! Seriously, though, Roald Dahl, freaking awesome, underrated because his finest works happen to appeal to children as well.
• Marco Polo, still.
• An exceedingly dry history of the Ancient Mediterranean. The basin of Western civilization and culture, the history of human life comes to us in - pot shards. Or potsherds, if you will. If you want to know about the Phoenicians, those first great seafaring kings, then you’ll want to know that they produced hand-marked pottery laquered sometimes in green and black! If you want to know about the great civilization of Carthage and its titanic struggles with the Romans, the conflict that engulfed the sea, then you’ll definitely want to know that they made exquisite ewers and amphorae much in the Hellenic style. Etc etc ad nauseum.
• Glory Road, by Robert Heinlein. A scifi approach to fantasy. A bit more plot-driven than his usual ideological meanderings, a bit more action-packed. It’s fun and only occasionally makes me feel like an inferior person for being poor and having once worn glasses like some kind of goddamn unAmerican sissy.
• Grant Morrison’s run on JLA. I was never a DC boy growing up (”The ‘d’ stands for ‘dumb’!” I once quipped), but I follow quality wherever it may go, and Morrison’s 125 issues of JLA are fantastic. Funny, great character moments, gripping, ROLLER-COASTER plots.

Playing:

• The original Suikoden. Yes, my laptop has four gigs of RAM and a 512 meg video card, and I’m using it to run PS1 emulation. But you know what? It’s a good game. The sprite animations are really well done, and the plot involves - get this - toppling an evil empire! I’m really interested in the unique and original plot.
• FFXII. STILL. Damn.

Watching:

• Season Two of Torchwood. The Doctor Who spinoff was stupid, trashy, and silly in its first season, but unintentionally so. It took itself deadly seriously, never accepting its fate as popcorn scifi. It wanted to be dark scifi, dark fantasy, a character-driven melodrama, Lovecraftian horror, and once, awfully, grindcore. It wanted to be sexy, and there was lots of sex, for sure, but employed in such an immature, licentious fashion as to actually be completely unsexy.
  Season Two, though, is already a marked improvement. The first episode had more fun than the entire first season put together, and James Marsters as a rival Time Captain gave it some much needed levity. The second episode I can’t remember. That’s not a great sign. Give me a minute. Oh, yeah. Sleeper alien terrorists. Pretty fun. Again, a bit too maudlin at points, never having a sense of its own stupidity, but fun at other times. Know your limits, Torchwood, and I will appreciate you for it. Realize that sword-arms and high tragedy do not mix.

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Reading:

• The Travels of Marco Polo, by… Marco Polo. Do you know who’s the greatest, most benevolent, richest ruler of all time? Kubilai Khan! Yes, perhaps 25 million Chinese perished under his rule, but, still, he’s a helluva guy! Haha. That said, the Khan, who built roads, established a courier system and some rudimentary forms of welfare, was probably a cut above the rest of thirteenth century rulers. He was the strongest in an age when nation-states went to the most psychopathic bullies in the playground. Though I am curious as to how conscientious he may or may not have been. Both Marco Polo and Robert Shea (in his Zinja books) give a very sympathetic portrayal of the Great Khan. And he inherited his empire, and the onus to keep it running (and the only way empires can continue to run is by - what, children? Anyone? Anyone? Further conquest! Correct!). But the fact remains that his final conquest of China killed 25 million people, more than all Hitler’s concentration camps combined. Hohum. The actual book itself is rather dry, often a plain recounting of exports and populations, but there are cultural notes that are invaluable, and occasional folk tales or legends that are fascinating.
• Nine Princes of Amber, by Roger Zelazny. I understand “Amber” fans are fanatics in the unabbreviated sense, but I don’t see why. The book is fine. It is unexceptional fantasy. Maybe it improves in later installments.
• god is not great, by Christopher Hitchens. Finished this one recently. Hitchens isn’t interested so much in the philosophical argument for atheism as in the historical argument against religion, for which he provides ample fodder. Interesting and enlightening.
• Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. Reading this with the wife right now. I always knew fast food was bad, but GODDAMN. Not this bad. I always thought, “Oh, it’s unhealthy, tastes like offal, and degrades your quality of life.” I had no idea it was so complicit in the crapification of America. I enjoy blaming George Bush for every ill of the nation, but it was mostly the happy, prosperous marriage of fast food and the automobile that fucked us up so badly.
• The Truth, by Terry Pratchett. I’m listening to this audiobook while I work out and wash the dishes. It’s like any other Pratchett book - that is, fun characters who are deep but not terribly broad, an engaging plot, beautiful witticisms and turns of phrase, lots of little pointless (but enjoyable) vignettes.
• Yes, I’m reading four books at once. How is this possible? My uncompromising experimentation with my own brain chemistry has yielded amazing results.

Listening:

• There is nothing new under the sun. At this very moment, it’s Vashti Bunyan’s Lookaftering, a gorgeous album that somehow did not change the world. I got the Dodos’ newest, but it has not captured my heart.

Watching:

• The Prisoner. You may know this one. From the 60s. A guy resigns his job for private reasons, and he’s kidnapped and brought to the mysterious “Village” until he explains why he quit. Ensues numerous mind games between the prisoner and the Village. It’s an Orwellian study of free will versus conformity, and it’s also good scifi/spy fiction, or “spy-fi”, if you must. It influenced Lost, but this show has more originality and meaning in a single episode than that latter-day leviathan has in a whole season.
  The most thrilling aspect (to me) is that this bold, bizarre, unique work of art was the product of one man’s mind: Patrick McGoohan, writer, producer, director, star. A brilliant actor, a savvy storyteller. (The AV Club’s obituary for him opens with: “Patrick McGoohan was a son of a bitch.” I don’t doubt it. He was a badass.) The fact that he could bring his unique vision to life so vividly gives me an intensely fulfilling sense of accomplishment by proxy. I am proud of our modern era, proud that someone took the chance on this insane-seeming project with this insane-seeming creator. In Simmons’s Ilium/Olympos, a character dying of radiation poisoning reflects on how grateful he is that he could be of the same species as Shakespeare. That is how I feel for the producers of The Prisoner. This is bold, uncompromised art, produced with a lot of someone else’s money, for popular consumption. It is refreshing in this age of Heroes, season 4.
  That said, it probably couldn’t be produced these days. No one would take a chance on something so bizarre. AMC’s upcoming remake promises to be quite tamed. … but I’ll watch it anyway.

Playing:

• The World Ends with You, developed by Jupiter. I’ve tried to get into this critical darling three times now, and have finally succeeded. At first I thought the combat sloppy and frantic. Now I see the method to the madness. The story has gripped me. The J-Pop soundtrack and the beautiful character art always appealed to me. Now I understand the opinion that this is a modern classic, a work of unvarnished, unmatched originality in a traditionally stale genre. Too bad no one bought it, and they’ll never make a sequel, or anything remotely like it, again.
• Gun, developed by Neversoft. The guys behind Tony Hawk made a Western game! How weird. But it was quite good, especially for 2005. Video games are so technology-dependent that only the exceptional age well, and while the graphics are often hideous, the hit detection spotty, etc., the gameplay itself is still solid. It’s got a small open world, where Dodge City, Kansas, and Empire, New Mexico are less than a mile apart, and where you can trample passers-by to death with your horse and then scalp them, if you want, though the game never explains why you might want to. But it tells a good story (if a bit over-the-top), and the shooting is fun throughout the game’s short span. Recommended, if you see it in the bargain bin.
• Final Fantasy XII, STILL. It’s good. I get most of my gaming done at work, and the PS2 resides at home, so progress is slow.The story makes no sense, so I know it’s Final Fantasy. I read a plot description on wikipedia, and I still don’t know what the hell’s going on. The combat has grown on me. It makes transparent the repetitive nature of JRPG combat, and it may spoil all JRPGs for me in the future.
• God of War, at times. Brutal, fun, bloody, hard as hell at times. I switch to this to blow off steam when FFXII gets boring.
• Can’t wait for Dragon Age. I’ve been following this one for three years now. I play - nay, devour - everything Bioware releases, and this looks amazing. November 3rd! Or 4th! Something. The first Assassin’s Creed alternately bored and amazed me. A sequel is greeted with cautious optimism. I would love to play Brutal Legend, but Tim Schafer has turned his back on ME, the loyal fan who bought Psychonauts (for $35, on sale), by not releasing it for PC. I would’ve totally bought it legitimately, too. Sigh.

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Reading: Not actually “reading” anything, what with Lasik recovery. I have, however, listened to a few audio books. Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book was - - - very, very good. Hugo? I don’t know. I need to read Anathem before I can decide whether to validate or reject the votes of thousands of fans. But it was very good. There was little Gaimanness… Gaimanity… that weird combination of sentimentality and vagary that often annoys me about his tales, and crippled American Gods. The characters were good, it was short on cliche, and heartwarming without being cloying. Well done! And, the book was read by the author, whose reading was so good, so versatile, that I got more out of the audio book than I might have from a paper book.

Then I “read” Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky, which was originally serialized in “Boy’s Life” in the 50s. There’s a lot of talk about how great the Boy Scouts are, which I managed to ignore, and a lot of proselytizing about how great it is to be self-sufficient and never depend on the government for a handout, you goddamn welfare liberals. How… deeply ironic this is in light of the massive bailouts of the past year, all for the sake of right-wing industrialists. However, the depiction of a fledgling colony is quite interesting, and at the end there is an extremely profound segment about the nature of overpopulation that redeemed the political passages.

Playing: Just finished “Darkest of Days,” an FPS for PC. It was execrable. But my review was quite funny; it’s easier to review awful games than good ones. It’ll be up in a few days. Soon: Scribblenauts, just as soon as my eyes recover sufficiently that I can spend hours staring at two tiny squares of flashing light, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (PS2 version), and - the big one for me - the PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum. If you don’t know, this was penned by Paul Dini, who wrote the best episodes of the 90s animated series, and voiced by many of the talents of that series. It’s in the Guinness Book as the “best reviewed superhero game of all time”. Take that as you will. I’m also eager to play the PC version of the new Red Faction. Fall is always a tsunami of titles, against which one must struggle to stay afloat.

Watching: season one of The Sopranos. It justifies its reputation. I was wondering today at the quality of British TV, after watching an episode of Simon Pegg’s bizarre “Spaced”. Any government-sponsored enterprise in America gravitates to bland mediocrity, yet the BBC can produce gems like “Spaced,” a weird little show, often weird for weirdness’s sake, quite hilarious, but always unique, always being itself. The network shows of quality seem like bizarre flukes that happen when no one’s watching, like the Office, Simpsons, Veronica Mars, etc. Most quality shows are on cable, though, where they’re less worried about advertisers - HBO and Showtime especially. But in the UK, it’s government-sponsored, and it’s often daring and innovative. I could never imagine Monty Python’s Flying Circus being produced in America (never mind the inherent Britishness of it). Nothing that wildly original could survive in our market (here we all point to Arrested Development and lament).

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How are we to define our lives and our identities in a world that strives so ardently to destroy meaning? Since the era of Socrates and his colleagues, we have sought a better understanding of who we are, why we are here, and what to do with ourselves in the short time allotted us. Sometimes we find fulfillment in ascetic lifestyles, artistic creation, or charitable works. Sometimes we watch “Dancing with the Stars”.

But DwtS is so much more than a way to sedate ourselves until death. It is not a neutral pastime. It is a force of negativity, a sort of active stupidity that actually destroys meaning around it. With every episode that airs, a book disappears. Pliny’s Studiosus, Aristotle’s On Comedy - gone the way of the dodo.

DwtS is on my mind because I just learned that Tom Freaking DeLay, of all people, will appear on this season. I think the intersection of people who watch DwtS and people who know who Tom Delay is would be rather small, but the network execs think otherwise. I try to maintain a level of objectivity regarding the plight of the world; if you feel empathy for every, say, soldier suicide-bombed or every AIDS-baby born, you would quickly lose functionality as a human being. But this - this fills me with a deep sort of despair for the state of humanity. It is nothing, it is a trifle, it will soon be forgotten by the populace’s over-stimulated brains - but in the meantime they will watch the hell out of it.

In The Satanic Verses, there is a nightmare sequence wherein a character imagines hordes of young Muslims marching happily into a monstrous mullah’s chewing maw, a profoundly disturbing allegory for the way fundamentalism can consume lives, literally and figuratively. I will appropriate the image. The maw is ABC. The young mujaheddin are we, the viewers.

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We’ve been watching NBC’s “Chuck,” and while it occasionally suffers the symptoms of lowest-common-denominator television, it’s still pretty good. By the end of the first season, it’s managed to (finally) strike a balance between humor and gravity, and it no longer makes me wish I were watching “Alias” instead.

(What do I mean by lowest-common-denominator? Simple! Rather: simplicity. Shows like “The Wire” and “Deadwood” require you to use your brain while watching TV; “Lost,” “Heroes,” “Chuck” are aware that you are watching TV to escape your brain and the attendant existential hell that we call the human condition, so they work hard to make things easy for you. For example, characters have a tendency, not often found in the real world, to broadcast their emotions and intentions, so the viewer doesn’t have to guess; they also like to spell out twists for you. Let’s say a character whom we thought dead is in fact alive. The show will not only give you his name, but remind you that it’s shocking that he’s dead, with one polished line, something like this: “Bryce? What? You’re alive! No - you’re dead!”)

Unfortunately, the show’s portrayal of nerd culture is quite broad. It was created by Josh Schwartz, creator of “The OC” (I know, I know), and it’s pretty clear that, while he might have been within spitting distance of nerds at some point, he has, in fact, never been a nerd himself. I advise him to hire some kind of “nerd consultant,” or, failing that, some “Buffy” writers.

Accuracies:

• Nerds do in fact like Red Bull. Good guess.
• “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” is actually a game that nerds do play. However, they don’t refer to it by the full name every time it’s mentioned. “Hey, man, let’s play some ‘Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare”! Furthermore, you’ve mentioned this game four times in the first ten episodes; there’s more than one video game in this world. Find out what they are!
• Kudos for showing Halo 3 and Gears of War on screen, and using actual gameplay footage rather than prerecorded Mario or Tetris tapes. But you can do better than that, show! Halo and GoW are not actually restricted to nerds; in fact, you could call them “lowest common denominator games”. Why not show something like, I don’t know, an RPG, the nerd’s genre of choice? It’d blow my mind to see “Lost Odyssey” or “Tales of Whatever” on network TV.
• Nerds do drink Red Bull.
• The movie posters in Chuck’s room: Dune, Tron, and Oldboy. Good calls - it’d be even better if he compared Oldboy (negatively, of course) to the original manga.

Inaccuracies:

• How about some books? Nerds are known to read a lot, yet Chuck’s house is totally bare of books. Nerds buy a lot of them and show them off, or at least have them easily accessible.
• Music? We don’t know much of Chuck’s personal taste, but the soundtrack seems to favor the Shins, Spoon, and other just-barely-still-indie fare that works equally well on pop radio. Nerds scorn this with white-hot intensity; even if they like the music, they must hate that other people like it, which means not playing it on the soundtrack. Chuck should listen to the pre-Capitol Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Tom Wait, Neutral Milk Hotel, or at least prog-rock, which is 1980s nerd shorthand.
• Nerds DO NOT drink Budweiser. Really, the thing that distinguishes nerds is their passion and discriminating tastes; whether or not their music or books or games are terrible, they care deeply about them and put a lot of thought into them. And anyone who puts a lot of thought into the beer he drinks does not drink Budweiser. Sorry.
• Attractive people. Chuck himself is TV-attractive, and his former friend Bryce is jeans-model hot. I can barely accept Chuck as a nerd, and certainly not Bryce. Bryce has the face of sneering ignorant superiority that nerds hate on sight; it is the face of the schoolyard bully who hates the nerds for being uglier, smarter, more socially awkward than himself. Chuck’s comic relief friend Morgan is merely short and bearded, but his TV-attractiveness shines through.
  However, don’t think I’m saying that nerds can’t be attractive; myself, Colin Meloy, China Mieville, Felicia Day, Joanna Newsom all disprove that misconception. Rather, I dislike the weird pop-culture approach to nerds in the context of this show - at first, they are considered unattractive, second-class citizens almost, merely because they use their imaginations and are interested in things in a world where it’s not cool to use your imagination or be interested in things. When Chuck flirts with the hot chick, at first there’s an element of novelty to it, as if he has no right to be approaching the hot chick. This is… 1980s campus-comedy thinking. Nerds have ruled the world for a decade now, for so long that “nerd” itself cannot be considered derogatory.
  So the weird dichotomy is this: we’re supposed to consider these guys unattractive because they’re nerds; yet the actors are attractive; yet many real-world nerds are quite attractive, and even date other attractive people. But the show doesn’t seem to understand how to deal with that. At the worst, this leads to two purely comic-relief characters entering a relationship that seems like a charade, which mocks not only the characters but also the demographics they’re targeting - fortunately, later, the writers pull it together and give this a little depth and humanity. I attribute this (and anything else good that the show does) to Phil Klemmer, former “Veronica Mars” writer.

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Watching: “Chuck,” Season One, recommended by nerds. It’s okay so far - sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it misfires, but there are enough good ideas here to keep me interested. Its portrayal of nerd culture is a little broad, but they’re trying, at least.

Reading: The Iron Council, by China Mieville. It’s grabbed me. His fantasy world is bizarre, vivid, and engrossing. More importantly, I can tell that he loves language and loves putting words together; he’s a writer who writes, rather than merely telling a story. He’s got style, and I’m not just saying that because he looks like a professional finger-breaker.

“I will break your fingers if you do not enjoy my use of language.”

Playing: Sam and Max, Season Two - just played the first (superlative!) episode of their Monkey Island, and it reminded me that I have a few episodes of this game to finish. Telltale is great at crafting puzzles that make you think, but are logical and not unfairly difficult; add smooth presentation and superb writing.

Wrist: Still sprained, still typing single-handedly.

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Reading: My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk. I got it because I love Umberto Eco, and this seemed the closest thing in the bookstore. Also, the recommendation of the Nobel Prize committee means a lot to me, even if their recommendation sells fewer books than Oprah’s. The book’s interesting so far. The author switches narrators every chapter, so you know it’s Literature.

Playing: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. I loved the first one, and the second improves on it in almost every way. I’ll be reviewing this one for ZTGamedomain, so it’s work, so I have to play it for hours a day.

Watching: Pushing Daisies. We watched the first seven stellar episodes of the second season, then quit when it went on hiatus; now we’re finishing up the remaining six. Last night’s episode, “Comfort Food,” was poignant, delightful, wonderful, weird, touching, hilarious - all the things that only this show can do. Dammit, people, why didn’t you watch this? Now it’s dead.

Loving: Firefox 3.5. Life gets better every day.

Two more weeks of school, and then we’re off to Japan!

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