Spiral Reverie - An Author's Musings

The Tears of Caga Tió

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 15:55:00 +0000


Holiday cheer meets confectionery defecation!

It is Christmas day now, isn't it? And as usual, I'm exceedingly sleep deprived after staying up all night working on various things. You'll never find a healthier chap.

At any rate, though I was tempted to do a Krampus story this year - there will be a Krampus story yet - this year, you get a bizarre little short for the Spanish crowd.

Just earlier this month, the surreal, brilliant Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations Christmas special introduced me to a certain Catalan mythological character and holiday tradition - none other than Tió de Nadal, otherwise known as Caga Tió. In a sense, Caga Tió is the anti-Krampus. Rather than punishing children for being children - all children are terrible, remember, you parents out there especially know this to be true - like Santa's monstrous Germanic pal, Caga Tió's sole holiday task is to inevitably poop candy. Ideally, turrón.

Should the Caga Tió fail in this task, the children beat it with sticks. Savagely. See? I was right about children all along.

Anyway, your annual Xmas short story. The whimsy. The weird. All that noise. Go!

The Tears of Caga Tió

Can you really blame anyone for hating the holiday season? All the avarice and unmitigated capitalism wrapped up in a veneer of insincere holly jolly nonsense. Everywhere you look, televisions and signs point guns at your head. "Think you love your family? You're buyin' them these gifts!" A low hiss. Always in a low hiss. That's the you-mean-business tone. A hateful tone to drown the holidays in. A good reason to drown your sorrows in egg nog. Spiked. 90% rum, ideally. You're drinking to forget. You've got to take that seriously.

Not all of us can drink away our sorrows. Or inject them away, or snort them away, and whatnot. This brings us to our poor, dear friend, Caga Tió, the Christmas whipping log.

Everybody loves Santa Claus. He shows up and tosses a bunch of gifts at people. Sometimes he fires them out of cannons. Rotund and jolly, but never diabetic. This whiskery holiday wizard whisks children's reasonable dreams from home to home across the globe, and only sometimes sics his understandably child-hating compadre Krampus on today's kids. He's gone all soft inside.

Caga Tió's holiday season consists entirely of things going in and out of his butt. If you can say that logs even technically have butts. And then he gets beaten mercilessly, because children know no mercy. Can you really blame him for needing therapy?

That's where Jana Holiday, licensed holiday therapist comes in. No, that's not her actual last name. Were you really expecting stressed out holiday characters to go and talk to someone named Schmidt? They expect the obvious. They expect cheese. Would you really expect anything else of individuals who exist solely by the sheer willpower contained within the collective human imagination? We've got this thing called the internet now. Imaginations were just how the primitive peoples passed the time waiting for funny cat videos to be invented.

It's the day after Christmas. Caga Tió's carried out his annual task. Always a dark day. The first year, he contemplated putting a gun in his mouth, only to realize that because he was a hollow log, it wouldn't do him any good. It's overcast, but it's only in the mid-fifties. Hardly snow weather. Hardly festive. As we join him, he totters up to the glass doors leading into the Holiday Holiday Counseling Service. He smacks into the doors sixteen times before anyone notices and lets him into the building. They have to press the buttons for him in the elevator, too. Caga Tió's stiff, awkward limbs aren't made for walking, let alone jumping, or any kind of interaction with the world around him.

Caga Tió waddles into Jana's office and, as usual, the Easter Bunny goes out of his way to trip him. As though that would take much effort in the first place. Caga Tió used to think that they could be friends, but apparently there's a huuuuuuuuuuuge difference between pooping candy and pooping candy concealed within colorful plastic eggs. Nuts to that guy, Caga Tió thinks as the secretary helps him right himself. On his back, Caga Tió's more helpless than a flipped turtle.

"Same old, same old," Caga Tió grumbles as Jana sets him upright on the patients' chair. "Why don't you kids just go buy a block of turrón already? I don't have to take all this abuse."

"No luck with that existence crisis, huh?" Jana sighs. "Look, Tió - if they just bought the candy themselves, you would no longer need to exist. You still understand this, right?"

"I get it. Nothing gets it more than me. With sticks. And bats. Every year. I mean, at least I have no actual capacity for physical sensation like you humans, so I don't feel anything when the turrón comes in and out, but it's the principle of the thing! I'm being violated!" Caga Tió flips over on his side, in one of the only visible expressions of emotion of which he's capable. "Can you blame me for sometimes wishing nobody had imagined me? I mean, come on, this is on you humans, too - a lot of you like the idea of beating up a log until it dumps out candy for you. I even have a face now!"

"We've discussed this before," Jana says, "but don't you think it's about time you took ownership of what you are? You can steer the course of your own identity if you try."

"Sure, maybe if you're Santa Claus you can get a lucrative soda deal and everything, but come on! I'm a hollowed-out log with little stilt-legs. Nothing is designed for us. Can you even imagine how many times a day I fall off counters?"

"Well, uh, I'd suggest masochism, but since you have no physical sensation whatsoever, I guess that's out. At least you don't feel any physical pain when the children beat you," Jana says.

"Only my pride," Caga Tió sighs. "Only my pride."

"I guess the whole filling yourself up with things you like and dislike on your own time idea fizzled, huh?" Jana twirled a pencil between her fingers.

"I don't even know what I like or dislike - nobody's imagined that for me, either. Maybe some of them think I'm supposed to be enjoying the beatings. Maybe the rest just don't care. I may be a log, but I'm a log with a face. You got to grow up, make friends, and go to college. I popped into existence longer than any of you have lived and my existence has been nothing but holiday songs, beatings, and candy pooping ever since! And it's not even really pooping! You guys just personified me that way - it's more like I'm evacuating my entire body cavity!" Caga Tió falls over onto his back, shaking his little stick-limbs furiously.

"For what it's worth, Tió, I think you're a pretty stand-up - what I mean to say is, you mean well. I understand that you're frustrated - you're living with an existential crisis that no human being can even begin to relate to," Jana attempts to console the log.

"I spend a couple of weeks every December hanging out in kids' houses so they can beat the candy out of me. I spend the rest of the year in my little house built for humans falling down stairs and trying to open jars. You understand nothing." Caga Tió would have sneered at Jana here, but he's incapable of changing his expression.

"By the way, I was wondering if I could follow you around in your home for a few weeks," Jana says. "You know, for a documentary. For the internet."

"Oh no! I know how this works! I've heard of that boxy thing with all the pictures." At this point, Caga Tió attempts to get up and storm out angrily, only to fall out of the chair onto his back.

"You mean well, Caga Tió," Jana says as she reaches down to help him up.

"I'm a candy-pooping holiday log. Why do I even pay you?"

"You can leave the turrón over there on your way out."

The Cruelest Holiday Season

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 23:50:00 +0000

Oh hey, it's already December. And not only December, but Christmas Eve. An exciting time of the year, if there ever was one. But arguably, all times in any and all years are both exciting and unexciting at once. Depends on where you are, who you're with, and countless other variables. Predicable opening paragraph, predictable opening paragraph filler. The opposite of exciting.

And I haven't even remarked yet about how I still need to write here on a more regular basis. Good thing I just got that out of the way. 2011 is a year I've spent mentally congested. Exceedingly so. This was my most inactive year yet writing here on Spiral Reverie. One of my 2012 goals is to change that. This inactivity on my part certainly hasn't been for a lack of trying. I have piles of blog posts sitting here unfinished - many things I wanted to say, or to finish saying, but then that mental congestion struck. Not that it's much of an excuse.

I'll be getting a few more of these things out of the way over the course of the remaining week of the year, at any rate. With any luck, perhaps I'll be a more exciting writer worth your following in 2012. Should I fail at that, in the least, there'll be more juicy little morsels entailing various strings of words that may or may not form thoughts that make some kind of sense for you to sink your mind-fangs into in the next year

All that yammering aside, I'll catch the few of you passing internet tumbleweeds up on all things interesting and uninteresting in a post I'll end the year with in another week or so, the salvaging of a post I intended to complete about four months ago. Funny, that. (And there will be a funnier Xmas story later tonight. I promise. I won't break this one.)

On to the purpose of this post. These prior paragraphs? An appetizer - probably some bread you've filled up on enough as so to lose interest in what lies ahead - before the mass of somber that follows as the substance of this post. You guys like somber, right? Statistically, a lot of you aren't feeling too wonderful at this purportedly festive time of year, after all. I've actually got some legitimate excuses for my latest bout of lethargy and malaise.

This one's for you, sad people. Relatively raw, just the way you like it. Always gluttons for punishment.

Those of you in any way familiar with the subject matter of my work have doubtlessly noticed my fixation on death. To call it an obsession would be fair. There are worse things to be obsessed with than mortality. Trivial things, for the broadest example. Death isn't trivial. The very cessation of being - of consciousness, of experience, of sensation, of memory - is something that haunts everybody at some point or another. And it's not even an exclusively human experience. Not all animals may necessarily experience or be capable of experiencing existential crises, and arguably, that's something to be envied. But many of them still grieve. There's nothing uniquely human about grief.

One day or another, our tenses all shift from present to past. He was. She was. They were. They are no longer. They are not.

I have a complex history with death, be it that of a relative, teacher, acquaintance, friend, or pet. Only one case of an individual's demise that I can recall can be said to have been taken poorly. That individual was not human. Whenever people I've known have died, I've always felt a little bit numb. Perhaps a little guilty that I didn't know them better, or didn't spend more time with them when I could have. That guilt doesn't go away, but you learn to push it down and ignore it. I feel like letting it go entirely would do a disservice to the deceased. Even though they're gone - it's not like they exist in any capacity by which they could care whether or not I felt guilty. And even if they did, they probably wouldn't want me to feel that way. The deceased I've known weren't a rotten bunch - not a single one of them.

No one escapes death's afterimages in this life. There isn't a single person who doesn't experience the departure of someone or some animal dear to them. And the weight of those deaths grows only heavier, the longer you live. You have to develop coping skills. We don't live in a world where time is allowed to stop - at least, not for long - when faced with mourning.

We all have different rituals. We grieve privately, and we grieve as communities - whether as large as a nation or as small as a family, perhaps only one or two people. We hold funerals. We bury our dead, and we burn them. We come together and cry. And we cry alone, pouring out the poisonous emotions within ourselves by whatever means we can. A matter of necessity. The restoration of homeostasis. Both as an individual, and as a community. You can't milk mourning forever - that's a disservice too.

I don't grieve like that. After the first death I took poorly, I had to develop stronger coping skills. The next death I faced - it was a relative's that time - I felt nothing. "Oh. I'll never see them again." That thought generally comes packaged with a particularly sharp sense of personal emptiness. It repeats. The repetition only makes it worse. We ache. I don't. The first time that hit me, I wasn't sure how to feel about myself as a person. I was only just getting into my teens back then, after all. How are you really supposed to feel, knowing that people are hurting over the loss of a dear relative, when you yourself don't really feel anything? And this was before some intensely negative formative experiences during my high school years that radically transformed my relationship with death and birthed my obsession with it - with endings.

From a constructive angle, I can really only hope that as a writer, this obsession will allow me to deliver unto you endings that really pack a punch. Endings that leave you thinking or feeling something - endings that haunt. Anything less would be another disappointment.

This year, my holiday season has been poisoned by death. I've found myself faced with two separate forms of grieving, each distinct. Every year, I've felt the so-called 'holiday spirit' less and less. Thanksgiving and Christmas creep up, and while I like the holidays for what they are, I've only felt increasingly numb, and as always, incredibly trapped - the end of each year brings a vivid reminder of how little of actual substance I've accomplished with my life. That I'm nowhere near where I want to be in terms of my writing career, in terms of life experience, and even in terms of geographic location. I am not where I want to be. I am not where I need to be. We had a very warm autumn this year, and winter has been off to a horribly warm start, too. We had the air conditioning on just yesterday, thanks to how uncomfortably hot my bedroom became by mid-morning. And I'm sick again, as I often seem to get at this time of the year. Every day, I see food - and tasty holiday confections - that I want to eat, but can't. At a point in my life where I'm occasionally sick for a month or longer, and find myself ill for an entire week surrounded by things I can't eat, it's impossible not to long for aspect of my youth where I was usually over any illness within a couple of days. And I'm stuck wondering just how much damage my stomach has incurred over the past decade, along with what that means for my future health.

The holiday season. Closing another year with a disheartening reminder of my own fragility and the inhibitions said fragility impresses onto my life and capacity to be who I want to be. There are few things I hate more than having to face this fragility, my distinct limitations as the human being I am - rather than the one I'd rather be - and watching as time continues to tick down as I head toward my thirties, feeling like a complete failure. I'm not the only one in this boat by a long shot - let alone within my own generation, considering how many of us have flat out failed to 'begin our lives' even now due to factors out of our control - but that knowledge isn't really a source of comfort.

As though that weren't enough - or horribly self-indulgent and self-centered enough for me - time came for death to cast its pall across my already pallid season. I'm writing a 'poor me' blog post when talking about the deaths of others. What a creep.

Just a few days before Thanksgiving last month, someone I knew in college was killed in a fatal hit and run. I didn't know Val well enough to call her a friend. She was among the first people I encountered, but never got to know back at the beginning of my freshman year in August of 2002. She was a member of the university's anime club, in which I largely found myself an unwanted silent presence, the whole club being the huge drama bomb that it was - routinely exploding. Most of the older club members flat-out ignored me when I tried to strike up conversation and make some new friends. Among the experiences that inevitably led to my spending much of college holed up in my dorm room as a hermit. Val wasn't one of those people.

She was later in a relationship with a good friend of mine whom I don't hear from too often these days. I hung out with the two of them and another of my good friends a few times before the small social circle I was a part of for much of college largely split apart as we all began to move in our own directions. I drifted, for reference. And that's where I am now, still - grasping at the direction I seek. For the time being, at least, it's out of reach.

My memories of Val at their most vivid were those few times the four of us hung out late at night. She always had a certain eccentric energy around her, and she lived true to herself, regardless of how others saw her. She was a strange one, but in an entirely positive way. That was the sense I got from the little time I spent in her company. I can't go as far as to say we were friends - we weren't even friends on Facebook, and as a result, I was one of the last people to learn of her sudden, tragic death. A week and a half later. We were friendly acquaintances, but she was a good friend to others I knew. I can only imagine their suffering. Mine inevitably pales in comparison - I simply went into a bit of shock upon learning what had become of her. "Oh. I'll never see her again." The usual numbness. And now my memories of college bear a distortion - the nights the four of us hung out, I can recall just how intensely into one another she and my friend were. My other friend and I would roll our eyes and comment that they should get a room already when they were pretty much all over each other in the main room of the apartment, when we hung out there. But I got a strong sense of how deeply the two of them cared for each other then. As someone who's never had a single romantic relationship that wasn't terrible, and who's the definition of a cynic as a result, you would think I would have rolled my eyes at their whole relationship. But I didn't - I was sincerely happy for them at the time, as much as I rolled my eyes at public displays of affection. I was glad they had what they did with each other. And that when they eventually broke up, they remained good friends. If nothing else, at least they seem to have found the woman responsible for Val's death.

I wish this were a more suitable tribute and a better obituary in general. But instead, this was mostly a selfish musing on my own thoughts and feelings - my own shock. But while Val's death made an impact on me, it's not even comparable to so many others, because I simply didn't know her all that well. From what little of her I knew, however, I know without a doubt that she was one of the good ones. My condolences and deepest sympathies go to the Miranda family and all of Val's friends. I really do wish I had more that I could say that didn't come off as entirely inadequate. She deserves better, but in the least, a bit of a tip of the hat here in my little blog is better than nothing, I like to hope.

A week after I learned of Val's tragic death, we had to put my dog down.

Other dogs will tell tales of your glory.

Bastian was fifteen. A Scottish Terrier. We had him for fourteen of those years and probably close to another couple of months, roughly. The above photo was taken when he was ten, before he got sick. Before the numerous health problems he had in the end began to pile up. By the end, he was essentially living in canine hospice care in our house. He was on effective painkilling medication to live his final weeks and months as comfortably as possible. Before that, he cried out in pain on a number of occasions. Every one of those cries cut right through you. We had to keep him wrapped up in little padded dog wraps to deal with his incontinence as well. There were stains, and there was blood. He drifted in an out of a mental fog at times, having gone a little senile. But when he wasn't in that fog, he was still his same old self. And over recent years, he'd given us more than a few scares - every time we thought he was going to die on us, he pulled through and recovered. He even recovered from going deaf for a little while, and what we believe was a stroke. He lived longer than most Scotties ever do. And when it came time for him to go - when it was the humane thing to do, as much as none of us wanted to say goodbye - he went out himself.

He never lost his mischievous, fun-loving personality. He never stopped being protective. Despite his somewhat-senility, he was never unrecognizable as himself. When he passed away, he wasn't defeated by death - rather, death was his conduit away from his pain. I was one of the only two of us in my family who stayed in the room with him, petting him as he passed away. I watched as he slumped over as though he were comfortably napping one last time in the end. As he received his injections and the life left his expression. I continued to pet him as his heart stopped beating. And for the first time, I witnessed death firsthand - it's not the same as finding your fish floating upside down in their tank, or coming home to finding a hamster or gerbil curled up in their cage, gone.

Death hangs over everything in much of my writing. And it's practically a lead character in my upcoming second novel, Project Princess - which I'm hoping to finish in its entirety in 2012. I'd already written about what it was like for the protagonist to not just witness death firsthand, but to witness the transformation someone you've killed undergoes the moment you kill them. My experience of being there with Bastian as he died under my gaze and affection mirrored what I'd already written with eerie exactitude. The moment someone dies in front of you, they transform. They're gone. What you're left with is a shell. A husk. You're no longer with them, and they're no longer with you. You're there with someone who looks just like them - Bastian's fur was just as soft, and he was still warm as I pet him even after his passing. But they're no longer who they were. They're just a body.

As established, I'm generally numb to death. Despite my coping skills, if they can be called that in their twisted nature, watching and feeling my beloved pet die that day, roughly around - a little before or after - 5:30 PM on December 7th, hit me the hardest anything has in years. I came home from the vet's office to fitful sleep, remembering clearly what his fur felt like on my hands for the very last time. Roughly two and a half weeks later now, I can still conjure the sensation of his fur to mind with such vividness that I can nearly feel like I'm petting him again. I can still recall coming home to his half-empty bowl, full of kibble he'd never finish. The frayed nerves everyone had then. My mother throwing out his bed the next morning. He'd already torn it up and gotten more use out of it in the near-year he had it than many dogs did out of beds they had for much of their lives. And now my younger brother is home for the holidays, and his little dog is here with him as usual. She's using Bastian's old food and water bowls. The whole world feels askew.

The most intense listlessness I've felt in years fell over me like a net, and I didn't really feel like doing much of anything for the first week or so after his death. But little-by-little, things are returning to normal. 'Normal,' in this case, meaning that I'm successfully adapting to life without him, after facing just how much of my daily life and thought processes used to revolve around that dog. He was basically my fuzzy younger brother, after all. We had him for more than half of my life. It was my job to look after him at night. Whenever I'd leave my room at night, I'd look out for him to make sure I wouldn't accidentally bump into him. My mornings would pretty much begin with my removing his wrap and taking him outside for a stroll around the yard. I'd take him on walks in the evenings on days when I was awake then. I keep odd hours. Inconsistent in a way that frustrates me. There's still a little tuft of his fur in the corner of my room that I don't really feel inclined to clean up. A reminder that he was here. And since I finally picked up a Nintendo 3DS a little over a month before his death, I'm carrying him with me in both figurative and literal senses, as I managed to get one good low-resolution 3D photo of him with the system before he passed, as well as his face in the built-in Face Raiders game. So he's with me in both my memories and my video game system. Even my memorials are nerdy.

Bastian really was my furry brother, a closer friend than any human being, never a companion more loyal. And to me, he stands as a symbol for over half my life - most of my adolescence up to my late twenties. Bastian was there with me for both the lowest lows and the few high points my life had over those years. He'd met the girl who damaged me tremendously in a way that ultimately became formative in my teen years, largely destroying my ability to love or get too close to anybody. And he'd also met the last girl I loved some years back when I last saw her, before a great distance suffocated all hope I ever had with her. Bastian was an era of my life. And with his death, something vital inside myself has been severed. More than mourning. He was in many ways my strongest tie to this place in North Carolina - I always felt that whenever I finally escaped from here, seeing him again would always be a chief reason to come back and visit - not to diminish the rest of my family, of course. That reason no longer exists, and I feel far, far less tied to Raleigh and North Carolina in general. Part of me really just wants to leave this state and not look back, but the not looking back part's pretty much a no-go as long as I still have family here. Still, with his death, so goes a major era of my life. And I feel as though in order to properly move on and do justice to Bastian in everything that was amazing about him, I need to escape from this place and move forward with my life. I need to succeed as a writer, if only in part as a personal, internal tribute to the dog. You can't spend forever mired in the stagnant era of someone you've lost forever. You just have to keep their memory inside and move forward. And I'm probably doing that for deceased dogs more than any human being I've ever known who's passed away. Apparently that's the kind of person I am, for whatever it means.

We knew he was going to pass away sooner or later, and had many months to prepare ourselves as we looked after him with all of his mounting health problems. But no amount of time was ever going to be enough. And now I have all of these dumb old nicknames and absurd little songs that I used to sing to him, and nothing to do with them. There'll be another dog in time, but they won't be another Bastian. They won't get his songs or his nicknames, but when the time is right, I look forward to meeting them, even though I'll never be as close. I hope to be living another era of my life elsewhere by then. If I can't manage that much, I can't even forgive myself. At least we've got Bastian's ashes with us, so he's with us in a sense, at least for the holidays.

If you can take anything away from the angle of this post, it's that I'm one self-centered bastard. I'd like to hope most writers are that way, but I can't speak for everyone else. I embody too many of the negative stereotypes about writers already, and the funny thing is, that doesn't even really bother me. Stereotypical or not, at least it's authentic. And the fact is, over the past month or so, the world lost a person and a dog whose losses have made the world a worse place. So long, Val. A shame we never got to talk more. So long, Bastian. Looks like I've got no other recourse now but to set the whole world on fire with my words.

The House That Murder Built

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:41:00 +0000

Oh, right. Halloween.

Once again, I disappeared for over a month and a half. More blog posts are coming, but things are clogged up, and for reasons that are surprisingly reasonable for once. This time, anyway.

But hey, I tossed something horribly spooky at you last year, so this year, you're getting a goofier, weirder Halloween short story again. And not very long, unfortunately. But then, short fiction is short fiction. In the least, though my short story output has been much slower this year, it hasn't halted entirely.

With how infrequently I update these days - frustrating as that is - feel free to think of this blog as a ghost. Ghost blog. You lose, Ghost Dad.

The House That Murder Built

Few things have annoyed the everycity nasties quite like Haunted Hill. Kids've called it that for generations because of its unusually large collection of menacing dead trees. They tend to continue to call it that even when they grow up to be all normal-size and partially covered in fur and all that nonsense. The problem is, there's nothing haunted about Haunted Hill. It's just a hill with a bunch of trees. Sometimes the grass gets overgrown, but Mr. Sanderson pops by about four times a year to take care of that.

You see, the everycity nasties never bothered to actually haunt Haunted Hill because it seemed too obvious. Everyone's going to expect ghosts and junk all over someplace specifically named for that. That's why you don't haunt there. You don't want to compartmentalize how you haunt and terrorize - that's a pretty good way to not scare anybody. They'll just avoid the place. Spooky is only spooky when it's unexpected.

"Oh look, there's a dancing skeleton with a hatchet or whatever." This is not the reaction you want. "Gee, I hope he doesn't dismember us or anything, what with his zero muscles and no gender. What's going on, technically an it?" Stop that!

The point of all this is, the everycity nasties are pretty annoyed. None of them really want to have anything to do with Haunted Hill, but this crap's getting out of hand. To resolve this point of annoyance, a gaggle of assorted ghosts, ghouls, mega-insects, and other miscellaneous creepy and disconcerting buggers have congregated on Haunted Hill to build a haunted house. Also, it's more of a mild incline than a hill. And roughly half of the trees that got it its name were cut down nearly a century ago during an unusually harsh winter. It's hard for anything lumpy to make much of an impression terrain-wise when you're haunting a piedmont region, I mean, why even bother? Scary things are all about angles askew. These monsters hardly amash can only really disappoint themselves and they know it.

Things are going okay, if you consider the fact that none of the creatures had an architectural degree or any handy boards with nails in them to be 'going okay.' But then, oh no! Not him! He shows up to get everybody off task! This is totally going to ruin what was probably going to go nowhere and lead to a lot of collective discomfort by replacing it with a slight variation on that very same discomfort!

None other than that accursed Greg, the socially awkward aspiring serial killer who has no human friends. The monsters let him hang out with them because they honestly just feel bad for him. He's shown up in a hockey mask. Come on, man.

"Oh look, here comes Greg," Creepula intones.

"Sorry I'm late, guys!" Greg huffs. "The community game ran long tonight." He pulls his hockey mask up, which still appears to be fresh out of the plastic. Not a trace of blood.

"Look, man," says Sledge, "you've gotta get better about these things. I mean, Brett over there drove all the way from his subterranean lair beneath Wall Street for this meeting. The least you can do is be on time."

Greg grins sheepishly. "I guess time just got away from me. Like it was a ghost. Or something."

"That's not an excuse," Gnarly-Tooth sneers. "Did you at least kill anybody on the way here?"

"I let an old lady cut in front of me in line for snacks. I mean, she kind of threatened me, but in a sense, I almost killed her with kindness. Responding to threats is totally a kind thing to do."

"Come on, Greg," Ghostly sighs. "We were just talking about this before you got here. I mean, you're a nice guy and all, and we get that it's not that easy making friends - hey, I used to be alive. But you're really screwing up the vibe we're trying to go for here."

"I'm trying really hard," Greg protests. "I'll kill somebody one of these days. Lots of people! I've just got the murderer version of that thing writers get - writer's block! I have a murder block. You guys totally get what I mean."

"None of us have ever had that. Ever." Creepula rolls her numerous eyes.

"I'll bring candy next time. That stuff's getting a big discount tomorrow. Surely some sugary treats will help you look past my transgressions," Greg offers.

"This is exactly what I mean," Ghostly groans. "Destroying humans is kind of our thing. Scaring them to death, scarring them for life, making them mysteriously disappear forever - you get the picture. We just don't feel that comfortable hanging out with a human who hasn't even committed to the whole murder thing. What I'm trying to say is, even we have our limits, Greg."

Greg shuffles his feet, putting on his best puppy-dog face.

"We gonna even start this haunted house thing or what?" Brett grunts.

"I've got a staple gun," Greg offers.

"Fine," Ghostly concedes. "Go get your staple gun. That candy next time had better be great."

A Funny Story About 9 and 11

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:50:00 +0000


Hey! This is a no smoking city!

Happy Terror Day, everybody! Now that we've hit the ten-year mark, I'd say it's about time we started commercializing this bad boy. Wouldn't you agree? This is America, there's MONEY TO BE MADE! We can turn this tragedy into treasure - and failing that, cold hard cash - or my name isn't Otis Bunkport Jr.! Which it isn't, mind you. But it might be someday, depending on the degree of violence with which people react to my completely tasteful picture caption over there.

You see it? Are you laughing? You're not laughing. Why aren't you laughing?

Let's be honest. It's the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Many people are going to be sentimental and weepy. Others are going to be distasteful and balance that out with some appropriately inappropriate jokes. And others yet are going to make everybody uncomfortable by being angry. Very angry. Blindingly, seethingly, I-spit-fire-and-you-will-be-incinerated angry. And no, not necessarily at nebulous foreign forces perceived to be eternal enemies of 'our freedom,' or 'threats from within,' entailing non-white, non-Christian, non-conservative persons within the United States. 'Are Country' nonsense. Rage that will set your house on fire and possibly neuter your dog. ~~Painlessly, mind you. You should have had that done already, anyway. What are you? Some kind of irresponsible dog owner?~~

Guess what kind of content is in this post below! ~~You've been warned.~~

September 11th, 2001. The day a lot of terrible things began. People love to say it was the day we 'lost our innocence,' as though we hadn't done that plenty of times before. As the proud, hubristic world power, we've gotten very good at turning a blind eye to the realities of our actions and relations with the rest of the world over the decades. Of course, now we're no longer the world power, and as a world power, we're only slipping lower, having been surpassed by much of the rest of the first world in most manners that matter - standards of living being one of the big ones - in recent decades. And with China rising, we continue to sink.

Following the terrorist attacks in 2001, we responded to unconscionable, savage butchery with butchery in kind. At the receiving end of our reprisals have been countless victims who far outnumber those who attacked us. Decades of US foreign policy played a role in influencing and even outright training those few who declared a more complicated form of war on the United States. But as those involves - and those victimized - live on the other side of the world, we Americans are blissfully out of step and out of tune with the realities of our much-celebrated military ventures. Our 'heroics' abroad. And in that willful, comfortable ignorance, none of our hands are clean. None of us are innocents.

Whatever moral high ground we could once claim, we sprinted to demolish. We became what we fought in the name of defeating. With more money and better organization. Not that that stopped us from slaughtering an incredible number of civilians and laboring to cover up as many cases of that as we could, as WikiLeaks has helped to reveal.

War is horrible and ugly, and here in America, we love to whitewash and romanticize it. Ever since our celebrated heroics in World War II - glossing over all the atrocities we also committed, because hey, fuck the inhuman monsters in Dresden and the Japanese 'civilians' we firebombed and dropped atom bombs on, am I right? - we've been hungry to prove our own perceived glory to the rest of the world time and time again through unnecessary war after unnecessary war. Even now, there are people proudly ignorant to what we were doing in Vietnam and insist that we 'could have won,' as though slaughtering even more farmers really would have meant something. Our hands as a nation are not merely stained, but despite our always having a staunch anti-war movement, there are many more who possess an outright thirst for blood. Whether fueled by our horrific war profiteering machine, or an unhealthy sense of nationalism whereby one feels compelled to prove America's 'superiority' through the conquest and destruction of 'enemies.' The kind of dangerous thinking that should not exist in a civilized society.

We're so bizarrely detached from the reality of what we're doing and the atrocities we commit that we even can't get enough of video games largely about distortions of our current, seemingly endless military ventures in the Middle East. People just pop onto Xbox Live to play some Call of Duty and shoot at each other and further dehumanized caricatures of the 'evil brown people who don't look like us or speak our language' that we've come to regard our 'enemies' as. And sometimes you'll even have the good fortune of running into small children, whose parents have done such a fine job as to have them yelling "Faggot!" at strangers online while trying to murder them. And it's well known at this point that these games are even very popular among our soldiers as a way to pass the time and have fun when off-duty during their deployments.

If that isn't disturbingly meta enough for you, an official US military first-person shooter, America's Army, exists completely for free online as an intended recruitment tool. Because if you love running around in pretend uniform and shooting guns in a game on the internet, you'll love getting trained not to think so much for yourself, getting deployed, and possibly ending up in the shit and scarred for life so you can come back home and enjoy the crushing poverty with the rest of us. Don't worry, you're totally a hero!

Domestically, we've been witnessing a swing to the extreme political right here in the US for decades now. By today's inflammatory rhetoric, you'd think there was some kind of 'radical' left threatening to shiv Uncle Sam, burn the patriots, and fuck the apple pie. That our two-party political system functioned as some sort of pendulum on a clock, swinging back and forth between extremes of left and right, and that the left was somehow threatening to break the whole clockwork. In reality, there is no representation for the left or the center in the US anymore. No actual, quantifiable political power. No ability to call for real moderation, no ability to affect change, no ability to make the kinds of changes necessary for us to reckon with the challenges of the future. We're trapped between the extreme right party - which moves further to the right by the year, today even making the Bush administration look moderate by comparison - and a center right party being inexorably pulled further to the extreme right by the other party.

The spineless Democrats, and the authoritarian Republicans. The former occasionally concerned with the interests of the people, and the latter shameless about their lies, detachment from reality, and sole loyalties to the wealthy and corporations, putting them routinely at odds with the interests of the American people. Many Americans continue to regard themselves and vote as though they were no more than lapsed billionaires. Over the past several decades, concepts like welfare have been successfully made into dirty words. And the rest of us are just too apathetic to stand up and take a real stand against the rising tide of right-wing extremism threatening to engulf and strangle us. The 2010 election was evidence of that. The people as a whole stayed home, while those who proudly stand for enabling our nation's worst and most dangerous - the so-called 'Tea Party,' worthy of no moniker more respectful than Teabaggers - came out to vote in numbers enough to break our already dangerously gridlocked congress further.

A recent example of the sort of people we've elected in this swing to the right? Since the further consolidation of Republican power after their retaking the House of Representatives last year, we've seen the likes of the power-hungry Eric Cantor holding disaster victims hostage in the wake of Hurricane Irene, insisting that we couldn't provide relief in the wake of the damage done - catastrophic in places - unless we cut spending even further. Repeating the Republican party and Teabaggers' present ongoing mantra that we can somehow use spending cuts to get back to financial and economic prosperity, but should never, ever even consider the sane, progressive taxation of the wealthy. Let alone actual regulation, after years of deregulation devastated us. Also, we should apparently more or less consider the likes of multibillionaire Warren Buffett a commie traitor for arguing that we need to start taxing the wealthy again. We have so much to be proud of.

And in watching the current Republican candidates fight it out for their party's nomination to run against Obama next year, we've had the pleasure of seeing them proudly reject science - especially climate science, as catastrophe looms much nearer than we realize on the horizon - boast of the size of their families, reject the entire social safety net as no more than a 'Ponzi scheme,' and take bold stances including hating cancer. Obama's ratings are terrible at the moment, and his administration's efforts to serve the people have been hobbled pretty much since day one as the Republicans joined in lockstep to block their efforts to accomplish anything, even if it meant standing against the people's best interests on a routine basis. Should one of the usual field of incompetents get the nomination and somehow manage to oust Obama - despite the Republicans being at the very center of Obama's disappointments, in addition to Obama's eagerness to compromise with and appease a party set on destroying him, and his administration's general conservative leanings - let alone the dangerous Rick Perry, it's not really hyperbolic at this point to say that we're pretty well finished as a nation. We haven't even begun to recover from the damage inflicted by the Bush administration, and the Republican party has largely become an entrenched cancer on the nation. One that we cannot hope to recover from unless we excise the tumor before it's too late. Much of the Bush administration damage - particularly to our economy and job market - is increasingly appearing to be irreversible. And unless we - and not just America, but the whole world - begin to react more dramatically to climate change very soon, we're simply going to bring about our own preventable extinction. We're already heading well into past-the-point-of-no-return territory. We aren't even able to acknowledge the problem as a whole.

I have seen insisted frequently on the local editorials page - and in online comments as well - that Obama is supposed to take ownership of everything the Bush administration and Republicans brought down upon this nation. Specifically, that because Obama couldn't fix all of these problems in no time - especially facing the constant resistance he has since his election - everything Bush and the Republicans caused is now his fault, and we're not to look back at the root cause of these problems, let alone the now-entrenched fatal flaws in our political system that prevent us from finding actual solutions.

We also now know that after all our bold, heroic support of the Libyan rebels, we spent considerably more time, money, and effort backing up Muammar Gaddafi, and even tortured a man who went on to become one of the rebel leaders in charge when they finally drove Gaddafi out of Tripoli and removed him out of power. The overwhelming response to that story on the Yahoo News comments when I first read about this? Declarations that if we tortured (or 'renditioned') him, that he must have been a terrorist all along! This is America. We have so very much to be proud of.

The trend of a swing toward right-wing politics in response to growing Islamophobia in recent years is only becoming increasingly evident in many parts of Europe as well. The actions of an extreme few have largely led to political gains for those who should not be empowered in response. And even in Canada, poor Canada, they've been dealing with Stephen Harper for years now, and only just lost Jack Layton mere days ago.

It shouldn't have to be said, but it's okay for us to not be paranoid about terrorism, and cool to not hate Muslims. Crazy as it may sound? They're just as sick of this as we are, and they're just human beings like the rest of us. We'd all benefit as a society - and as individuals - if we'd stop trying to make others of each other and actually take the time to realize that people are far more alike than you know. The less alien you make other people in your head - regardless of language, religion, appearance, and so on - the more you'll realize the less you actually have to fear.

When we use fear as an excuse to oppress ourselves and each other, as they say, the terrorists have won. If we can't be courageous enough to stand up to the worse elements in our society that have reared their ugly heads and taken power time and time again in the past decade and only continue to consolidate it, we have no future. When we allow ourselves to be ruled by the wealthy, and to be dehumanized and diminished at every turn by corporations focused solely on lining executives' pockets while our standards of living collapse, we have failed. We don't get second chances. There are no do-overs.

If nothing else, this past decade has convinced me that we're a failure as a species. We have so much potential, it's criminal how much we've failed ourselves and each other. On the upside, at least we'll all be dead much sooner than we know. Someday, this poor planet can have a functioning ecosystem again as it consumes our ruin.

I'd say that we've succumbed to our worse nature, but that would imply that we have a better nature. Taking the long view of our species, it's probably more honest to say that greed and destructive, obsessive self-interest are our nature. That inner wretchedness with which we continuously struggle in an endless battle against what it is that we actually are and loathe to acknowledge. We try to be better, but there's too many of us who are too set on the idea that we're all players in a vicious game of winner-take-all, or we're simply too apathetic to care about any of the things that matter. That as individuals, we're powerless - and if we can't come together as a collective of individuals to change things for the better, we are. It's a losing battle.

If this blog drew enough readers to actually have a readerbase to speak of - here's a shout-out to the ghostly few who do pop by and all you lovely people who come here via Google searches and leave immediately - somebody would probably come along and tell me to shut up. To never forget - that 9/11 changed everything, so our continued violence isn't just okay. It's heroic and patriotic. This sentiment drips from so many corners of this country. And it's an illness that afflicts all of us - those of us wearing ourselves down fighting it the most acutely.

In the end, it appears that above all else, we're too selfish, too hateful, too apathetic, too proudly ignorant to survive.

That said, my condolences to all those who lost family and friends a decade ago today, and to everyone whose lives we ended or otherwise wrongly ruined in response. And even more sympathy to the first responders, whom we've failed to even properly look after as their health began to fail following their sincerely heroic work in the wake of the attacks. Most people don't have it in them to do what they did, or to make the sacrifices they now have for it. Human beings who've defied their nature and should continue to serve as a reminder to us all that we can be better. That we could.

This post? Total reader magnet. Also, I guess it's me inviting crazy people to put me on lists. The bad kind. Then again, isn't anything?

Osama Bin Laden's dead. But we didn't defeat him. And at the rate we're going, we may not. We aren't learning.

It's kind of funny how much more misanthropic I've become since my only other 9/11 post, from four years ago, back when this blog was just beginning. I had about as many readers back then as I do now.

Lower Your Eyes to Die with the Sun

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:42:00 +0000

Spent too much coming up with things to say in my next few blog posts - hence the delay. A comedy post, the big, horribly-belated-as-so-to-be-irrelevant Nintendo E3 blog post, and a post on the Operation Rainfall campaign for several great-looking Wii games are coming soon.

That said, just popping in briefly to post this.

The first teaser for M83's new album. This will be another amazing album of music I can write to, no question. Amazing Before the Dawn Heals Us vibes.

E3 2011 Day One: A Wilting Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 03:38:00 +0000

Oh god, not this shit again.

Oh hey, it's Electronics Entertainment Expo time again. Is the industry any healthier this year than it was last year? Not at all. Can you skip over this first post on the continually declining relevance of Sony and Microsoft? Probably. Everybody's known for years that the Playstation's years as the "hot brand" in gaming are over, and the XBox line never was. Still, here I am blabbing at you. Why do I do this? Compulsion, maybe. I'm so sorry.

At any rate, I'm going to try to keep my E3 posts a little saner this year than the ones from last year, just to get the post done and ultimately move on. Better for my own time and sanity. First up, just some quick thoughts on Sony and Microsoft's showings. To say the least, I wasn't impressed.

Microsoft and Sony have already held their conferences, of course. Microsoft pimped Kinect, Sony pimped Move, and neither peripheral is the Wii, let alone disrupting the Wii. Once again, literally flailing at relevance again this year. The rest of their lineups was nothing all that notable either - nothing that would surprise you if you were familiar with either, since at this point, a good 5-6 years into this generation, they're relying on redundant game releases and over-sequeling to the point at which their conferences were just a combination of boring and embarrassing.

Microsoft's facing internal calls for the ouster of Steve Ballmer after the company was passed not only by Apple, but now by IBM too. As of this fall, they will have been in console video gaming for 10 years with the XBox line, and despite the persistent media popularity and the brand's vocal online following, they've only taken a net loss in billions of dollars, never having been able to turn gaming hardware into a profitable front, and they've suffered catastrophic losses due to all kinds of hardware issues this generation. Kinect has done nothing to dig them out of that pit. Their E3 conference this year showed nothing game-changing and nothing that would inspire confidence that they're going to dig their way out of their financial hole. Their more 'traditional' games aren't moving hardware and are turning into a string of unremarkable sequels that the press squeals over, but then, the press has a history of squealing over virtually every major or hyped XBox 360 and PS3 game this generation, rendering gaming "media" hype ultimately worthless, given that virtually all of it has been known for years to be paid shilling. At this point, it's hard not to think that the XBox line won't be going the way of the Zune sooner than we think. If Microsoft has any competent businesspeople left, it will be.

In Sony's case, the PS3 has been an even bigger catastrophe overall, with ridiculous development costs like the XBox 360's that have ensured that in many cases, games can sell over a million copies and still fail to break even, let alone actually turn a profit. And most games on both those consoles have failed to sell anywhere near the million mark - most games on the platforms have ultimately taken painful losses, and the third parties, remaining foolhardily loyal to Sony and Microsoft despite their poor financial standings this generation, are running incredibly ragged right now. Third party lineups this E3 have been the weakest I've ever seen them. I'd feel bad for the industry if the situation wasn't self-inflicted. Sony's response? Introducing the Playstation Vita - formerly the NGP - essentially the PSP2, which boasts of graphics and hardware power (And ultimately development costs) comparable to the PS3, and Sony's trying to be competitive by selling it at such a loss that it's guaranteed to lead to billions in losses and further incredible instability in the company, all the while, its lineup at unveiling was nothing less than pathetic. Especially when compared to the incredible lineup and set of games Nintendo had ready to show for the 3DS at its unveiling at E3 last year. Third parties bet on the 3DS over Sony's PSP, which failed outside of Japan and largely sold as a multimedia device in Japan, with only a select few franchises turning a profit on it. (And most games suffering horribly due to an incredible piracy problem.) After trying to join with Sony and Microsoft to push customers away from the Wii bled third parties as badly as they did, betting heavily on the 3DS was the first smart third party call in quite a few years.

Sony's stock has been heading toward circling-the-drain territory since a series of major hacks dating back to mid-April took the Playstation Network down, and over the following weeks, every PSN user's private data stored on the servers was stolen. And then all of Sony's other online services were hacked, and their users' private data was stolen from those as well. As it turns out, Sony wasn't very interested in protecting their users' information - credit card numbers and more! - and was storing a tremendous amount of very, very sensitive user information in plain text, without any kind of encryption. In the weeks since, Sony has been scrambling to do as much public image control as it can, while doing as little as they can possibly get away with to make it up to their customers or actually secure their information. The very amusing hacktivist group Lulz Security - otherwise known as LulzSec for short - has been making headlines with their hacks in recent weeks, and not a week has gone by in which they haven't hit Sony at least a few times. Sony hasn't begun working on their security, and apparently breaching them is child's play - going on LulzSec's online testimonials. Ultimately, Sony's made it clear that they don't take safeguarding their customers' sensitive information remotely seriously, and think they can placate all those compromised by these regular hacks by the least they could possibly offer up in giveaways that they wouldn't take a real loss on by giving away.

As such, Sony's stock has been trending downward daily for over a month now, and their E3 showings this year don't stand to change that course. The Vita doesn't stand for anything the company or the industry needs to move forward in a new, healthier direction. And the near-daily to outright daily hacks are going to continue to undermine consumer confidence on every front, as they well should. By failing to make any effort to secure customers' sensitive data, Sony has demonstrated a disgustingly cavalier attitude toward their customers, and reminded further why their brand has been crumbling across the board in recent years. A lot of people are never going to buy Sony products again after this - I'd be among them if they hadn't shown me their character even sooner than this and convinced me that they were a corporation in no way worth my continued patronage - and this isn't a new trend overall. They've fallen behind all over the place in recent years, having developed a reputation for overpriced electronics that can easily be found both cheaper and better quality from the competition. They made no friends with their CD rootkit fiasco as well, having intentionally planted malicious malware in their customers' computers with CDs. Sony's future in gaming looks no rosier than Microsoft's. They can't sustain the incredible losses they've been taking for years, the Vita will do nothing to change that, and LulzSec's hacks will only continue to wound them more deeply. Looking back, I'm increasingly convinced that the smash successes of the Playstation and PS2 were flukes easily allowed by Nintendo and Sega's failures at the time, and that Sony really doesn't understand the video game industry, video game hardware, or the average gamer customer - who isn't the type to spend all their time foaming at the mouth on online forums over the latest shooter. All the successes of the first two Playstation consoles did was imbue them with a sense of entitled callousness toward their customers that makes them completely deserve the mess they've gotten themselves into.

In the end, Sony's PS3 games were built largely around trying to push their failed Wii Remote rip-off peripheral, "Move," just as Microsoft spent most of their conference trying to push Kinect, while most of the industry isn't getting behind it all that much, and most Kinect games haven't sold all that well. Sony and Microsoft simply continued last year's trend of thinking they could make the customer think their systems were "better Wiis." This tactic hasn't worked for either company, and is largely revelatory of the truth of their increasingly dire situation in the industry. The Vita won't do anything for Sony but lose a tremendous amount of money, given that they have to be eating a significant amount of money per unit sold at the announced $250 pricetag, with an incredibly weak lineup so far, set to launch this holiday season, by which point the 3DS is going to have a killer game lineup on shelves and be the better deal hands down - as it stands with even its current library, the 3DS already is. As things stand, a sense of desperation has hung over this year's E3 so far as two of the three big companies have struggled toward relevance and profit, their platforms having yielded the most dramatic financial losses the video game industry has ever seen. Nintendo successfully disrupted Sony with the Wii and 3DS, while Microsoft has clearly never understood what they were getting into with the XBox in the first place. The industry tried to reject Nintendo despite these successes, and now the third parties are running ragged, profit margins the thinnest they've ever been and more games than ever leading to huge losses. The industry's trying to contract inward and only becoming more conservative in response to change it rejected, and that is visibly destroying it.

Whether or not this will lead up to a second great industry crash after the one following the era of Atari and Colecovision remains to be seen. If it happens, it will be one that the industry chose to inflict upon itself in attempting to reject Nintendo's return to the top in the industry, their widening of gaming's audiences again with the Wii and DS, and the addition of features vital to the evolution of the video game experience: motion controls in particular. Sony and Microsoft are a long ways down their self-destructive paths - neither company seems to have learned a thing, and both have suffered enough financially from their respective catastrophic consoles this generation that either of them turning things around is entirely unlikely. Big conservative corporations like Sony and Microsoft aren't good at being forward thinking or adapting to change - when product lines fail (Microsoft isn't likely to keep the XBox line going too much longer now that they're coming up on a decade-plus of billions in losses to show for their video game console venture.), they're cut off like the gangrenous limbs they become. Microsoft did just that to the Zune not long ago, and financially, despite the investment made, there really isn't a good argument for continuing to push the XBox line forward in light of its continued incredible losses. There's no reason anyone should be confident that will change. Sony has simply allowed their own hubris and utter disregard for their customers to destroy them this generation - they've made it abundantly clear that they've learned nothing from their mistakes, and the companies that continue to swear a pointless fealty to them will sink with them. The Uncharted series is not the magic bullet they think it is. The proof is in the franchise's sales, and its proven inability to move hardware. Most people aren't looking for linear 3D Pitfall meets shameless Indiana Jones ripoff, more interested in looking and feeling like a movie than being a good game.

At any rate, Nintendo's big conference is the only one remaining in just over 12 hours now. There, we'll see whatever they have to show for the Wii and DS as they enter their final days, more secrets, surprises, and big new games for the newly launched 3DS - which I have yet to get my hands on, but am definitely jonesing for after playing Pilotwings Resort on a demo unit, knowing what's going to be coming out in the coming months - along with a more solid release schedule for all their games for the rest of the year. On top of that, they're going to unveil Project Cafe, the only relatively recently confirmed successor to the Wii, which may be launching a little over a year from now, assuming there's any truth to the word so far. Motion controls will be sticking around and evolving further, but from the sounds of things, there's going to be an interesting touchscreen controller of some sort too - where Sony and Microsoft demonstrated thoroughly this year just how low they've sunk and how low they've taken the industry's third party game developers by now, Nintendo stands poised to dominate E3 yet again, as they have a history of ever since the DS and Wii reveals midway into the past decade. Where Sony and Microsoft are ailing, Nintendo is at their financial best yet, and have rediscovered the importance of appealing to wider audiences - as well as returning to the fundamentals of older style gaming, the loss of which has damaged the industry as a whole, with things like the 2D New Super Mario Bros. games, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Wii Sports - and fresh off a strong 3DS launch, they're in a good position to become the only major player in the console and portable sides of the industry sooner than most realize. This, of course, is ignoring Apple, but their role isn't quite the same in the gaming scene either - more complementary than directly competitive, but still a company to keep an eye on nonetheless.

After a depressing first day for E3 2011, tomorrow is where things get interesting.

Back from the Rapture!

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:01:00 +0000

This is NOT what it looks like.

Hey guys! Long time no see! You won't believe where I've been the past few weeks! For once, I actually have a legitimate excuse for not updating.

I know this is going to sound crazy, but the Rapture actually happened, guys! Back on May 21st, just like that Harold Camping guy predicted! I'm not sure what that 'family' radio stuff is all about, but I've totally been to that heaven everyone's always talking about.

And I've gotta tell you, totally overrated.

Sure, you'd think, "Man, it's heaven! Clouds and stuff everywhere! This is totally friggin' sweet!" But you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. So dead wrong that you don't even have to die to go there, or even come back here - but I'll get to my unrapturing later.

I guess the first thing you're probably dying to hear is what heaven's like. It's okay, I guess, but only if you like the stuff that's there. If you don't, well - have you ever listened to someone talking about their latest golf game, but you don't care about golf and start to feel that if you hear them make one more 'birdie' joke, you're going to break their kneecaps and fashion them into stylish elbow pads as a warning to your enemies? It's basically like that constantly. And I'm not just talking about the droning noise the big guy makes whenever he starts talking - he almost makes the adults on the old Charlie Brown cartoons seem comprehensible - you have to really take the entirety of the concept of annoyance to this degree and stretch that and apply it to every aspect of existence imaginable. If you can do that, you can imagine what heaven is like. Not so cool now, is it? Unless you like golf stories, in which case, get out.

Anyway, there's clouds everywhere. Just like you'd expect. And there's solid ground, too - not on the clouds, though. There's guard rails and warning signs everywhere because if you step out onto the clouds, you're just going to fall through them to your death. I'm not sure what exactly is down there to fall to, but the clouds are made of cotton candy, and I'm pretty sure Earth's clouds aren't - science and all that - so maybe it's another planet. A stupider planet. Sure, cotton candy clouds sound pretty fun on the surface, but do you really want the sky to be full of spun sugar? That just makes everything uncomfortably sticky. Also, there's no dentists in heaven but your teeth still decay. There's no toothbrushes, toothpaste, or even running water. What the hell is up with that?

You're probably wondering, too, "How the hell did you get into heaven?" Man, I can't even tell you. Literally, I can't. I don't know. I'm not sure what the criteria are, but I can tell you for a fact that it's not something you want to do. Just meeting whatever requirements there are to be hurled heavenward made me want to completely change the way I live my life as so to ensure that whatever those requirements are, I can be certain that I will never meet them again. I was one of maybe three or four people who got picked up this time, anyway, so obviously not very many people qualified for this Rapture. There were some other people there too, but they couldn't have numbered more than sixteen or seventeen. I'm honestly surprised there were even that many - there's no upside to dealing with everything there.

I mean, sure, the big guy built a game room at some point, but even that pretty much sucked. They had a foosball table and a pinball table from the '70s, but only one of the flippers still worked. Also, someone apparently lost the air hockey table's puck a few years ago so it was worthless. I mean, if you're not even going to replace the puck, what's the point? There's nothing to do. Except maybe collect hair. The big guy doesn't like to shave, and his son isn't much better. Those dicks just shed all over everything, and apparently neither of them have heard of a fricking push broom. That's just unsanitary.

I had to get out of there - I wouldn't be here typing this if I hadn't succeeded either, obviously. But yeah, I basically just shoved the others around until the big guy threw me back to earth. Some people here have told me I was hit by a car.

~~Twenty cars.~~

~~All the cars.~~

I guess the real lesson here is that that Harold Camping Guy was both more right and wrong than he knows. Also, in case you're at risk of Rapture, maybe try carrying around a spare air hockey puck in your pocket, just to be considerate.

Then again, those guys are jerks. Keep my foolproof unrapturing method in mind. Unless you don't have arms.

The Restaurant at the End of Remembrance

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Wed, 11 May 2011 09:58:00 +0000

Everything I write about lately is death related. These brief thoughts won't be any different. One of these days, I still need to write about JD Salinger's passing, and we lost him nearly a year and a half ago now. At any rate, moving on -

10 years ago today, Douglas Adams passed away. We lost a brilliant, hilarious author, a humanist, activist, an atheist who didn't make the rest of us look bad, and a truly wonderful human being whose life's work only bettered the world. We lost him at the tragically young age of 49 to, of all things, exercise - the stress of something intended to only improve our health and extend our lives can, at times, have the opposite effect. I imagine he would have appreciated the irony.

Cheesy a thought as this is to end on - So long, and thanks for all the laughs. Also, a pity that we'll never know what was going on with the rhino in The Salmon of Doubt.

Process Talk: Shoegaze Fantasy

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Fri, 06 May 2011 22:45:00 +0000

In recent posts, I've shared some of the music and imagery that inspires me just for a bit of a glimpse into my process - what gets the old neurons firing - when I'm writing. In fact, some of you may be sick of that by now. And if that's the case, you'll just have to hang on for another post - this is one that's been bubbling in the back of my head since back in early October last year. Again, my thinking is that if I continue to find things to post - and go back to and finish posts intended to be finished and posted months ago - I will eventually finish clearing out the remaining mental cobwebs.

The big twist, of course, is that behind the cobwebs lies nothing.

At any rate, let's get on with it. Music. More of that. A subject I've wanted to write more about from my perspective for some time now - not so much in the cheesy, banal music-journalism sense as to explore the places that music can take you, what exactly sound can inspire. By my understanding, it's pretty common for writers to listen to music while plugging away on their current projects, and I'm certainly no different. Music can be vital to setting a tone, creating a mood. When I find a new band that I like, the phrase, 'music I can write to' reverberates through my head quite a bit. I like to create soundtracks to my novels, and there's no question that I'm not the only one doing that. I like the idea of someday being able to create original scores or pieces of music to accompany my work as well - whether or not I'll ever manage that at some point in the future is impossible to say at this point, though.

My current and ongoing second novel project, Project Princess, is arguably a work of fantasy. Yes, that's an appropriately pretentious, clunky way to begin this paragraph. I say 'arguably' because my focus is on the writing of distinctly literary fiction, which is itself a nebulous, complex, and often horribly pretentious concept. Once you establish yourself as trying to write literary fiction as opposed to mainstream commercial or genre fiction, you're pretty much slapping the 'You think you're better than me!?' crosshairs on your forehead, and can come off as if just by your focus and process, you're insulting all the commercial and genre fiction authors out there. To backpedal a bit, that isn't exactly my intent, but it's more of a matter of that literary fiction writers are focused on something different from commercial and genre fiction authors. Yes, we would like to make money on what we're doing, but we don't expect to make much - to generally make much less than commercial and genre fiction writers.

As the linked Wikipedia article details, as subjective as the definition of 'literature' is, what separates literary fiction from commercial and genre fiction is in its focus on style, psychological depth, and character over narrative and plot. The mainstream commercial fiction reader might find literary fiction to be meandering or frustrating, because it takes a lot longer to get where it's going, and more than the journey or destination, the story is really about the complex characters presented. Personally, I like to liken literary fiction to the written word equivalent of cinema's art house, and poetry to abstract short film. In literature, we have the likes of J.D. Salinger and Haruki Murakami alongside the likes of film's Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, as opposed to mainstream commercial fiction's Tom Clancy and Stephenie Meyer to Hollywood's Michael Bay and James Cameron. The narrow versus the broad - the niche versus the mainstream.

To get back to what I was saying before, Project Princess is arguably a work of fantasy, and technically speaking, my first novel - Project 27 Days - could be considered at least partially fantasy as well. Both of these novels are written in the setting I've sought to define myself by as I've developed as a writer - 'somewhere both familiar and unfamiliar.' Project 27 Days follows confused, muddled, and deeply conflicted people from the world as we know it through a near-month in a bizarre, surreal setting and set of circumstances. And the book itself is written in a very slice-of-life manner, each chapter following a day from its beginning to its end, with plenty of variation, twists, and turns as the story calls for it. It's a slow-paced, entirely character-driven story that those not into that sort of writing would find meandering and frustrating. Most of the action takes the form of conversations revealing of the characters, sometimes in a straightforward manner, and sometimes with calculated subtlety. It's unquestionably a very direct effort at an odd piece of literary fiction targeting a particular audience that enjoys that sort of writing. The book was even written with the idea that readers might spend a near-month reading it themselves, pacing their experience with the book to a chapter a day, to really drink in and savor the plot and moody setting, and go through the story with the characters on a more real-time level. Of course, readers could probably inhale the entire book in a day or two if they really tried, too - and I certainly wouldn't complain if anyone enjoyed it that much. That said, character is the center of my writing, far above plot.

Project Princess has significantly more of a concrete plot for the characters to follow than Project 27 Days, where the characters alone are the plot. Still, in its scope and ambition, the characters are still the center of Project Princess, too - it's just that they have more of a directed plot to follow, a literal path laid out, enemies to defeat both within and outside in the external world, and unlike Project 27 Days, there's extremely little sitting around. As opposed to Project 27 Days' gauzy, surreal setting, Project Princess's is a literal frozen apocalypse wherein those who stop moving for too long face the risk of dying before too long. The world of Project Princess, unlike Project 27 Days, is not our Earth - the characters are human, and many of the initially available themes and icons in the narrative are comfortably recognizable from the lexicon of the fantasy genre. If you've enjoyed the works of Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, or George R.R. Martin - I'm going on what I've seen of Game of Thrones so far, based on the latter's A Song of Ice and Fire series - you'll feel right at home with easing into the world of Project Princess. There's kingdoms with complex histories and political relationships, princes and princesses, castles and common rabble, swords and sorcery, trials and tribulations, monsters and more. The chief difference here is that the world is fanciful in different ways from the aforementioned works - or rather, it was, as the novel takes place in a world that has largely become a frigid husk of its former self. Extinction is an inescapable image.

In such a dreary world, you would expect a despondent tone on every front. But that's not quite the case in terms of the music that's inspired me. Heavy metal music has been associated with fantasy for decades, and so the concept of 'metal fantasy,' in all its associated violence, is hardly an unfamiliar one. In the past, metal has even come under fire for its lyrical themes labeled from merely juvenile to misogynistic and otherwise at times too occult-heavy for more conservative parents of the 1980s. While on one hand, I can certainly see the appeal of metal, I feel neither pride nor shame in saying that it's not particularly music that suits my tastes. Rather, where metal has been the music of choice for many a headbanging teenager for decades, my tastes and musical influences are a little bit less mainstream. Rather than 'metal fantasy,' what I seek to explore with the world and tone of Project Princess is something I like to think of as 'shoegaze fantasy,' drawing on my favorite subgenre of alternative rock - shoegaze.

Where metal fantasy is dark, gritty, and violent, 'shoegaze fantasy' is surreal, emotional, and dreamy, with a focus on profound melancholy avoiding melodrama. Where metal fantasy is a well-explored concept with a cult following, fantasy associated in particular with other musical tones in its inspiration is much less so. And in general, shoegaze tends to have a much smaller following than metal, which is comparatively mainstream. Metal has never 'died,' while shoegaze is a subgenre that is considered to have died and been at least partially reborn in more recent years, and even the genre name itself wasn't exactly conceived to be complimentary.

Where metal is intense, aggressive, and very, very extroverted, shoegaze is deeply introverted - it's music for the cerebral daydreamers, with a certain sort of sultry, heady sex appeal in many cases as well, entirely lacking the violence and energy of metal. Shoegaze is, at heart, a special brand of rock for navel-gazing introverts - speaking as one of those myself, they're certainly a big part of the inevitably intended audience for my work, just as a natural product of my own mental processes. In a world where there is metal fantasy, but little thought considered for fantasy influenced by and tied with other genres of rock, my intention is to find out if there's an audience for shoegaze fantasy. And the intended end result is, rather than something gritty and violent, a work of literary fiction set entirely within a constructed fantasy world: a story where there can be considerable violence, but the worst of it is emotional, rather than visceral.

With that, I'm going to take you on a brief walkthrough of the musical evolution of Project Princess. Where we begin, funnily enough, is not actually shoegaze. Rather, when I first began the initial - and eventually abandoned for rebooting - draft of the novel as I began to lay out Project Princess' skeletal structure back in March of 2006, I was listening to British indie electronic pop artist Imogen Heap's latest album, Speak for Yourself. Its opening track, 'Headlock,' sounded to me like the ideal opening tune for a complex work of alternative fantasy, the lyrics conveying a mixture of thoughts and emotions that put my mind to work on trying to establish exactly what the novel's central characters' relationships were and how exactly they were going to play out over the course of the story - in particular, the protagonist and heroine, as so far, a young man and woman are usually the core of my novels.

Following the inspiration I drew from the fantasy qualities in Imogen Heap's sound, I fell in love with New Yorkers Blonde Redhead. They aren't 100% shoegaze either, but the shoegaze sound - the gauze, the ethereal - is certainly a notable element in many of their songs. When I heard them perform the title track from their 2007 album, 23, on Late Night with Conan O'Brien shortly after I moved home from college for the last time that May - reflecting on how many years have passed since then and that I'm still living at home now, it's hard not to have mixed feelings - they were a band that immediately struck me as 'music I can write to.' And between that album and their latest - their 2010 release, Penny Sparkle - they've only further cemented themselves as the band driving Project Princess and defining it with their sound, while Project 27 Days was a mix of Feist, various classic rock songs, and Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton. Stars and M83 have both had strong influences on both of my novels so far as well, but where Emily Haines' Knives Don't Have Your Back is the definitive album of Project 27 Days, Blonde Redhead's 23 is the definitive album of Project Princess.

23. The age of the lead characters in Project Princess. Desolate, dreamy music that defines perfectly the tone I want the novel to breathe - the quiet aching, the hopelessness, the inescapable destruction, the flickering final dreams. The definitive song of the novel. As the wall of sound consumes you, so to do I seek to consume my readers with the endless frozen melancholy of the novel.

Dr. Strangeluv. Pure yearning. A song of journey, something to accompany the damaged protagonist as he seeks out the lost princess. A song of solitude and isolation, of deep-seated loneliness. A song of someone with no one. The protagonist. Can he save anyone?

Silently. A lighter-toned song. Subtext. The protagonist and the heroine. Persistent past tense. The lightest song associated with this novel. The feeling of letting go.

SW. The journey continues. The reflections continue. The crushing melody gradually wears you down, as signs of hope continue to fade away into the endlessly gray horizon. Everything is unclear. There are no certain answers. Spiraling.

Here Sometimes. From last year's Penny Sparkle album. A detached existence, a detached mind, a life lived in dreams. A tone that sounds very suitable for fantasy to me, like the rest of the songs shared.

Everything is Wrong. Another Penny Sparkle song. Continued spiraling. The world losing and the world lost. Resignation.

Not Getting There. A final song from Penny Sparkle. After 23, perhaps the song that in its simplicity, next captures the tone and feel of the novel. Near-definitive.

Also worth noting is that Blonde Redhead scored the 2008 Dungeons & Dragons documentary, The Dungeon Masters. That right there only further confirms that I'm not the only one who gets a very particular 'fantasy' vibe from the band, but that it's even intentional on their part.

And now, to wrap, two more tracks by bands that have also made a significant impact on Project Princess and my writing in general.

Danish shoegaze-influenced self-proclaimed "pretentious art rockers" Mew's White Lips Kissed, from the album, 'And the Glass Handed Kites.' They make some of the most wintry music I've ever heard, and this particular song got a lot of play time when I was working on Project 27 Days - it's getting quite a bit with Project Princess too. Both novels are set in completely snowbound settings, after all. (The third novel will not be - to break the trend.) Like many songs I love, you'll notice that this is a song that can absolutely consume the listener. Its lyrics connect a bit more with Project 27 Days than Project Princess, though both novels share some thematic commonalities, and some fairly dark themes will be recurring in my novels - hopefully not redundantly.

And lastly, while I can't embed this particular upload, the music video for UK electronic pop group Ladytron's Destroy Everything You Touch is a huge source of influence on Project Princess, the song itself effectively being a sort of co-definitive musical theme alongside Blonde Redhead's 23, and the snowbound fantasy music video being a source of inspiration in my writing of the novel's setting. Double whammy. For all my talk of metal fantasy and proposed shoegaze fantasy here? A music video representation of New Wave electronic pop fantasy.

In a world where a western can have a rocking Neil Young soundtrack, there has to be room for a new kind of fantasy. There always has to be.

More Like Osama Bin Awkward Joke About Somebody Dying

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Mon, 02 May 2011 20:34:00 +0000

So, as you've all heard by now, Osama Bin Laden has kicked the proverbial bucket, bitten the proverbial dust, and tripped over the only-halfway-metaphorical toad. Not at all shockingly, theories that he had died years ago were proven untrue. Not quite ten years after the September 11th attacks, the big bad al-Qaeda head honcho we've devoted so much time, so many resources, and so many lives - not only our own, but the countless civilian lives lost in our not-wars-but-great-ways-for-contractors-to-make-money in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should we take to the streets and start singing 'War is Over,' as out of season as that would be? Break out the giant foam hands and wave them while chanting that America is number one until our voices give out and we tire of the redundancy?

I'd suggest a third option, but we as a people are not overly inclined to take that. I certainly don't find Bin Laden's death objectionable myself, there's no question of that - it was no different when Saddam Hussein was executed years back. But it's really just that - I'm feeling exactly the same way now that I did back then. When Hussein was killed, we had hyped up the Iraq war cause so absurdly that we practically expected the sky to open, and for Jesus Christ himself to descend on an escalator and personally give George W. Bush the greatest high-five in recorded history, leading the whole world to shed tears of joy and bow down before their true savior and the GREATEST PRESIDENT THERE EVER WAS as they stood together in that monumental moment. Because as we've learned all throughout history, pop culture, and more, all the bad things in life can be eliminated and greater good can be achieved the world over through wanton violence. Get to the end of that final level, defeat the final boss, and BA-BA-POW!!! a new high score and the world is saved. At least until that next bad guy gets his hands on the next MacGuffin that we forgot about until then - then it'll be time to go kill him too.

At the center of all this is just what there was when Hussein was hung. A man died that day. Another man died yesterday when Osama Bin Laden was killed. Neither of them were good men, and while on some humane level, I'd prefer they spent the rest of their lives suffering in prison, I don't find myself feeling horrible because they're dead. As someone who doesn't believe in any afterlife, part of me is inclined to feel that death let these men off easy. Bin Laden in particular spent his life sowing human suffering. His demise is no loss for the world, and more a relief than anything else, as his demise means that further suffering he would have caused firsthand has been prevented. But at the same time, I look around and see people cheering on a killing, and I can't help but think that despite all our pretenses of being civilized, postmodern twenty-first century people, there's still something savagely barbaric about us. And the killing of major villains around the world brings that out in us on a primal level.

While I have no particular empathy for Bin Laden, as I did not for Hussein, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of cheering on somebody's death, no matter who they are. Misanthropic as I am, my hatred doesn't extend in a direction where I would laugh at and find pleasure in somebody's death - there's a difference between that and not finding an individual's demise unwelcome. And since Bin Laden has died, there's talk of this being the 'end' of an era - amid, of course, every effort by the Republican party to diminish any credit to Obama or the current Democratic leadership while cheering on George W. Bush, as though he'd hunted down Bin Laden himself - after ten years of the 'War on Terror.'
Is the 'War on Terror' over? Not by a long shot. We're not just in it for the long haul - we're still seeking something cruelly undefined and open-ended. The chaos and tragedy of war and needless death are far from over. For all the initial sense of finality there was in Saddam Hussein's execution and is much the same in Bin Laden's long-anticipated killing, things haven't changed. We're still bankrupting ourselves on three wars now, while allowing our biggest criminals on Wall Street to get off scot-free while we attempt to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and middle classes, funneling their remaining money into the pockets of the nation's wealthiest. In America, livable work is hard to come by. People can still go bankrupt with ease when they try to see their doctor, and die from an easily preventable illness. In America, improving our standards of living incites foaming at the mouth and words of 'class warfare,' while we casually brush aside the slow crushing the upper classes have put the lower classes in America through for decades now. In America, unionization is treated as though you're affiliating with Josef Stalin himself. In America, teachers are 'lazy,' 'overpaid' when they don't make a living wage, routinely accused of indoctrinating children with 'liberal propaganda' for attempting to educate instead of teaching conservative propaganda, and we insist that they 'get summers off.' America's wealthy? Heroes who clawed their way to the top and are rightly living the American dream - why punish them with progressive taxation? Also, ignore that most wealth is inherited.

To our credit, fucking nobody went to see that Atlas Shrugged movie. We love Michael Bay, but oh, we draw the damn line at Ayn Rand. It's one thing to tell a 'story' with explosions - it's something else to make us sit through a hundred-page speech akin to "Fuck you, got mine."

Killing Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden doesn't change things, in the end. We are the ones who have to change - not merely through impassioned rhetoric like what led to Obama's election followed by years of nationally-destructive obstructionism by the GOP, ensuring that we won't just fail to achieve change, but that we'll backslide further if we keep electing them and head into dangerous territory - we have to demand an end to endless war. To call for the rebirth of a nation where 'welfare' is no longer a dirty word, and where the people stop treating each other like rivals in some bitter, desperate scramble for the invisible millions of dollars just waiting to be claimed by the next brave American willing to pursue their dreams. In a nation where the 'American Dream' has become a winner-take-all game of, "I'm gonna be rich, you're gonna die in a ditch," we cannot hope to build any kind of future if we cannot get past our increasingly feudalistic inclinations. The greatest crime of the human race is that we're capable so much better than this.

To quote the ending to Kurt Vonnegut's Dead-Eye Dick, "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven't ended yet."

The Limits of Control

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sun, 01 May 2011 20:56:00 +0000

You're overdue for some movie talk. I need a subject to blog about today. Two and two - let's go.

This time, we're taking a look at a fantastic film that most critics and viewers have hated. That alone should tell you outright that I enjoyed it because my tastes are better - and not in the "Hey, Marmaduke wasn't made for critics!" sense - and by establishing this, I am officially firing a shot off the bow of the critical giant that is Roger Ebert.

Oh god, what have I done?

I've been a fan of Jim Jarmusch's films for over half a decade now, having first experienced his work through 2005's Broken Flowers, having taken an interest in it as a result of my following Bill Murray's career turn to art house film over the past fourteen or so years. I enjoyed Broken Flowers, but it was different than any other art house film I'd seen before - and I was pretty well-versed in the more comparatively 'mainstream' art house filmmakers by that point, having plunged into the art house world in the earlier 2000s with Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Richard Kelly, and Terry Zwigoff's works - and intriguing in a way that I struggled to articulate.

In the years that followed, I added Coffee and Cigarettes, Dead Man, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to my collection. They each appealed in their own way. Coffee and Cigarettes spans decades with its quirky, enjoyable vignettes. Dead Man became one of my all-time favorite films, a zen-like black and white art house western with a strange sense of humor and a killer original score by Neil Young. Made four years later, Ghost Dog was a perfect follow-up to Dead Man. I caught about twenty minutes of Night on Earth on Showtime at the end of a free preview weekend - the preview ended just as I was getting hooked - just a few weeks ago. And Jarmusch himself even guest-starred on an episode of Bored to Death back in the first season, making fun of himself. All this and my experience with The Limits of Control have successfully convinced me that Jim Jarmusch is one of America's greatest filmmakers, inevitably unappreciated as he is in the mainstream. You can be an amazing filmmaker, and you can be a popular filmmaker - the two rarely overlap. Just ask Christopher Nolan. (His Batman movies and Inception are horribly overrated and frankly not very good.)

On the surface, The Limits of Control is a crime thriller. Three suspicious men meet in an airport. None of them have given names - nor does a single character in the entire film. The ensemble is led by Isaach De Bankolé, who plays a mysterious character simply listed as 'lone man.' He doesn't speak Spanish, but he's been given a job to do in Spain. Exactly who he is, what he does, what his job is, and why it has to be done are not established. And only one of these questions has a straightforward answer - the rest are left floating adrift in a sea of mystery. Feeling frustrated? Use your imagination. That challenge to the audience is central to The Limits of Control.

Starting in Madrid, the lone man follows his cryptic instructions - to visit a cafe near his accommodations and watch for a violin. These instructions lead to a long journey that takes the lone man across Spain, meeting with various mysterious strangers and exchanging color-coded matchboxes containing messages. There's a neurotic violinist (Luis Tosar), a nude woman who constantly tempts the lone man with sex and drapes herself over him at every opportunity (Paz de la Huerta), a blonde woman obsessed with old art house movies (Tilda Swinton), a woman obsessed with molecules (Youki Kudoh), a man with a guitar (John Hurt), a Mexican who discusses dream-like states and peyote (Gael Garcia Bernal), and matchboxes are exchanged with each of them. Between encounters, the lone man wanders the streets, visits art museums, and listens to music.

The script is minimal, built around monologues and exchanges between the mysterious strangers that the lone man - a mysterious stranger himself - and more than telling a concrete story, focuses on the suggestion of plot through repeated cryptic statements and thoughts, subtly expressing the film's themes beneath a gauzy veneer. The lone man himself is nearly silent over the course of the film, and when he speaks at all, it's rarely more than a mere single-syllable word. The other characters have much more to say, speaking in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Japanese. Even if the lone man couldn't understand their words, he could still use his imagination. De Bankolé is the definition of calm, detached, expressionless stoicism in his portrayal of the lone man - one of the coolest film characters ever created. A stoicism to which I can only aspire, but never hope to reach.

At times, The Limits of Control possesses a certain quality that I'd be inclined to call Tarantino-esque, but really, the film embodies the very sort of mood and spirit that Quentin Tarantino has spent much of his career paying self-aware homage to, without ever plunging in headfirst and abandoning all irony. Of course, with characters like Tilda Swinton's, even The Limits of Control is not without its intentionally meta, intensely self-aware moments of absurd humor. It also lacks the reliance on violence that Tarantino's films possess. The film breathes mood, aided only by the visually arresting cinematography of the always-brilliant Christopher Doyle. (Who was also the cinematographer for one of my all-time favorite films that I've written about before, my love of which will stay with me until the day I die.) You could take a still frame from just about any point in films Doyle has done the cinematography on, hang them on the wall in a museum or art gallery, and it would make sense. The film's intensely moody score - peppered with tracks by the Japanese band Boris - also recalls Dead Man and Ghost Dog, imbuing the film with a similarly otherworldly mood.

Beneath the surface, The Limits of Control is no mere crime thriller. It's something else entirely - an experiment in minimalism, a challenge to the audience, pretentious art house masturbation, or a parody of just that, depending on who you ask. Any way you look at it, it's a film for the patient, rewarding only those who give themselves over to the moody world of the film and fully immerse themselves in its seductively mysterious narrative.

As previously mentioned, most critics and viewers have absolutely hated this movie. It's not hard to understand why. Minimalistic films aren't for everyone - taste is subjective - and not every mininalist film is going to work for everybody, let alone something as experimental as The Limits of Control. The structure of the film is a mysterious stranger meeting other mysterious strangers, engaging in a little cryptic dialogue full of odd riddles, and passing coded communiques through matchboxes before parting ways and moving on. All of this is involved in something stranger and greater than a mere criminal plot - something mysterious and existential beyond the boundaries of reality, but they don't quite let the audience in on what it is that everything is building up to: just that something big is coming. A vague and intentionally unclear plot like this is naturally unsatisfying for most.

Still, these sources of dissatisfaction are not necessarily matters of objective flaws, so much as something to be understood subjectively, as the film even touches on in its script. It's not about a story, or even so much its characters - you would expect to fail on those grounds alone, and it still might for many viewers even if they understand what the film is getting at the entire time. But rather, the point of the film is to be drawn into its surreal, dreamlike atmosphere - to leave our world behind for the slick and stylish unreality of The Limits of Control - the definition of cool. It would be hard to make a film cooler.

As they say, la vida no valle nada.

Even If You're Never Awake

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:12:00 +0000

This post is pretty much a reconfiguration of something I've been meaning to post since late last September. As I keep up with the regular posts, I've been planning on expanding into more music and video posts, and I wanted to share this particularly inspiring piece of amazing, ambient drone music by Stars of the Lid.

Originally, it was going to be with this fantastic video of the snowy environment and nature captured on film up in a wintry Canada. Unfortunately, in the months since, that video was removed due to copyright claim. Curse you, legal system. That video wasn't harming anyone. This video just has a single still - but appropriately chilly - image of some icy mountains. An image that will be appearing in Project Princess as well.

I had also intended to post this during the winter, when a cold, snowy, deeply wintry bit of atmospheric music like this would be entirely appropriate. With May mere hours away, we're bound for the latter half of spring at this point. What I'm trying to get at here is that I deserve a medal for my punctuality.

Evocative, atmospheric, deeply moody music like this serves as yet another source of inspiration while I work on my second novel. I probably wouldn't be half the author I am - take that as you will - if not for the music I listen to while I write. If I ever manage to expand into music in the future as I would love to, it would be a tremendous fortune and privilege to create anything even slightly near the universe of this song's quality. (Though obviously, seeking out that fortune and privilege in the literary world is my first goal before I fire any shots off the bows of other creative media.) This song is nothing less than pure emotion - and exactly why I enjoy ambient drone music and you should too.

The Places We Leave Behind

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 22:08:00 +0000

My current novel, Project Princess, begins in ruins. Not the ruins of some ancient civilization - 遺跡【いせき】, iseki, or 'historic ruins/remains/relics' - but 廃虚【はいきょ】, haikyo. The ruins of an abandoned building, or something more recent. In the case of my novel, the ruined building in question had been functional and inhabited mere weeks to months prior to where we join the protagonist, at a time in which the passage of time has not only become unclear, but relatively meaningless. Ruins have spent quite a bit of time on my mind in the past year.

The 'Stairway to Hell' within Hashima Island/Gunkanjima.

Images and thoughts of decay, atrophy, and ruin have been commonplace in my mind for as long as I can remember. Weren't old, run down, rusted, rotten places that you weren't supposed to go fascinating as a child? Nightmares where the world is literally falling apart. The quiet poetry of places where people once lived, learned, loved, experienced, and died. Ruins are the haunting corpses left behind by civilization neglected, abandoned, and forgotten.

Where decay and atrophy are ugly shadows clinging to the backs of the living, the urban decay that turns buildings into ghosts and towns into ghost towns is more transformative. That which never lived cannot die in a literal sense, but it can instead become a captivating reminder of the transitory nature of not only our existence, but that of our very civilization. Too often in our hubris do we assume that we are the ultimate form of life on Earth, that our civilization will be the one to rise to the stars and become more than any other species on our world has ever dreamed of. It is that very hubris that undermines any possibility of our achieving such lofty ambitions, as we shackle ourselves with short-sighted selfishness and comfortable ignorance.

My fascination was only ignited again further through discovering 6 Differences several years ago on Kongregate, which features a good bit of focus on urban decay through its manipulated long exposure photography. There's many things I want to do in my life - skills I want to develop, talents I want to explore, risks that I want to take - and among them is to learn how to do long exposure photography myself. If I can eventually move to a major urban center, as is my goal - New York City being at the top of that list in the long term - I want to have the experience of spending a night roaming the city taking photographs of this particular type. If I can manage that, it'll be one less regret in the long run. I consider this style of photography - especially when coupled with surrealist visual manipulation - to be the still visual equivalent of the mood I wish to set in most of my writing. And mood is very, very important to me.

This fixation only grew further last year when - just over a year and a week ago now - I received Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon for the Wii for my 26th birthday. Focused on its isolated, deeply lonely mood, central to the game was the exploration of haikyo - the ruins of Tokyo and surrounding areas many, many years after an apocalyptic event that largely erased humanity from the face of the Earth. I played the game fairly obsessively for a couple of weeks until I finally finished it, and found myself wishing that it had been even longer when it was over - a rare experience. Games that I feel that way about tend to have one thing in common: a world I don't want to leave, a setting that I feel I can connect to completely. Those are few and extremely far between in video games, and I consider Fragile Dreams to be one of the extreme few games that legitimately succeeds as a work of art, for all the overblown talk we here these days trying to elevate the respect video games get without actually understanding what the pursuit of art means, as nebulous a concept as that is to define. Nearly a year after finishing the game, its main theme still sticks with me. While it's not a game designed for 'fun,' in breaking with the primary function of video games, it works as something only an interactive medium like video games can do that no passive medium can quite achieve - an exploration of intense loneliness that the individual embarks upon and completes themselves, rather than passively experiencing it through another.

Thankfully, I can honestly say I'm not the only person to hold this morbid fascination with decay. Urban exploration and photography have only developed more of a following in recent decades, and for obvious reasons when you see the photos. There are some absolutely incredible, breathtaking images of decay out there simply waiting to be captured. One could certainly argue that it's a bit of a bourgeois pastime, considering how many people in the world have no choice but to live within decay, but I don't personally feel that diminishes the value of urban exploration and photography, as dangerous as it can potentially be. Though I'm not exactly much of an 'outdoors person,' a pinnacle of unnaturalness in the unnatural existence human beings frequently lead, I'd like to do some urban exploration and see something devastating and breathtaking in ruins myself while I'm not yet a ghost myself.

The ruins in Project Princess aren't quite the familiar ones of our modern world, but more those of a developing medieval society suddenly wiped out. I can guarantee, though, that I will write an even more urban decay and ruin-focused novel sometime in the future. With any luck, perhaps I'll finally be a mature enough writer by then to someday take all of you somewhere enchanting and break your hearts repeatedly. Somewhere ruined, with scattered works of Banksy-esque graffiti, and an eerie stillness. Hold that image in your mind and keep your fingers crossed. I've still got a long way to go, and in a world we ourselves are ruining, what could be more relevant than ruins?

A Few Words: Blathering Anew

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:14:00 +0000

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

That's too many waits. Still, in usual form, I know what you, my phantom-like readers are thinking. You may be sick of the shtick, but as you know, we aren't all born clairvoyant - it'd be a shame to waste this talent. Especially considering how many seconds of your valuable time I've already wasted with my inane prattling. For every second of your life I steal, I only become stronger.

Obviously, my brain has been far too congested this year for my own good, let alone the good of any of you. Thus, this is me continuing to turn over that new writing leaf with as many harpoons and pitchforks as it takes.

The facts are these: I finished the initial full draft of my first novel, Project 27 Days, two years ago as of last month. I will have finished the final draft two years ago as of early October. Project Princess is continuing in full swing - not just in the figurative sense but also in the sense that in the narrative, things are sometimes swung and in many of these cases, lives are lost. My goal is to have the full draft of the book finished before I hit three years after completing Project Princess next year. Whether or not it'll have a real shot at being published by then remains to be seen, but failing that, I may take the plunge and risk self-publishing through Amazon, going by the reasoning that the fantasy genre has thrived in the self-publishing scene, and Project Princess does technically take place in a fantasy setting. There's no sexy troglodytes, though - the next big thing, you realize - and that may cost me dearly.

Aside from that, if I'm going to get out of here this year - and the prospects of that are looking as dim as ever - I need to find some freelance work that I can actually juggle with everything else to finally start making some money. I'm also going to be focusing on the iPhone game I'm involved with more now too, as we're beginning to enter the writing phase with that project - the game itself is a ways from nailing down a release date, but as that project begins to surface more visibly on the internet, I'll devote more time to talking about it.

The Spiral Reverie redesign the other day was part of an effort to jar myself out of my severe posting lull as of far this year. Aside from the former visual design, another problem with this blog has been its over-reliance on ridiculously long - and often image-free - posts that few have the courage or patience to brave. And over the years, I've started numerous post categories/topics, but haven't spent enough time fleshing many of these out. The neglected include: Ben Doesn't Know Anything About Sports, Movie Talk, Internet Spelunking, Publishing Chronicles, Film For Lovers, Science Babble, Sincere Personal Nonsense, Let's Get Morbid, You Call This Comedy?, This Guy Isn't a Great Short Story Writer, Actual Writing-Related Content, Apparently I Listen to Music Too, Porcupine Corner, Baby Pictures: Future Asshole or Furniture Mogul?, and That's Probably a Goiter. Subjects sorely missed by all, I know. It's tragic, if you think about it - and even more tragic if you don't.

This was supposed to be a much shorter post than it's shaping up to be. Unfortunately, I'm too good at introducing things, it seems. Yet another character flaw to lament. Let's move on to, at last, the first installment of the now regular feature this post is intended to introduce: A Few Words. Yes, short-form content on a more regular basis. Exactly what you were dying for. And also what I should actually be capable of producing more consistently - possibly the sort of thing more people might read.

My brief thoughts this time are horribly America-centric, but they are, I feel, a legitimate lamentation. Though this past winter was largely disappointingly brief and mild here in the southeast United States, massive snow and ice storms swept across the country and continent for much of later 2010 and the earlier months of 2011. We saw record and unusual snowfalls across a significant part of the country, along with plenty of power outages, some times when it was necessary for drivers to abandon their cars in treacherous conditions, and even a few deaths.

On the extreme-right, we saw a very predictable response to these weather conditions: smug, self-satisfied proclamations of "How 'bout that global warming?"

Now, just over a month into spring, we've seen dangerous storm systems crossing the country in recent weeks, bringing heavy rainfall, hail, and even some devastating tornadoes, including ones that killed over 250 people just the other day. This kind of extreme weather - much like the extreme conditions we saw across much of the country this past winter - is by no means normal, and the damage done and lives lost are certainly no laughing matter.

That said, I've noticed a distinct lack of commentary on the role climate change has likely played in these extremely unusual weather conditions over nearly the past six months now. We don't tend to see this much extreme weather clustered together, but few seem to be commenting on what we're seeing here. Much of the nation is either uninformed or completely misinformed about the nature of the catastrophic climate change our planet is going through, in large part thanks to the Republican party's ongoing war on science and the corporate-owned media trying to create 'debates' out of things that are not being debated - like the fact that industrialization is contributing to our planet's excessive carbon problem and dramatically affecting the climate. When the right writes off climate change - as in the aforementioned response to extreme winter weather - they tend to casually shrug off 'global warming' as the pleasant thought that someday our whole planet might be one big tropical paradise.

The reality, of course, is that as global temperatures rise, so too rises the temperature of our oceans, accelerating the already rapid rate at which the polar ice caps are melting. This will put large parts of countries, major cities, and even entire island nations underwater in mere years. And as the planet warms, weather patterns grow more extreme - we see harsher winters with more blizzards and ice, more frequent and powerful hurricanes, and more powerful storms. What we're seeing now is really only the beginning of a situation that isn't going to get better by shuffling our feet and making excuses for not reducing our carbon emissions. And as more extreme weather tests us - as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005, the harsher winters have begun to in recent years, and the waves of powerful storms and tornadoes we've seen in recent weeks - the more we're seeing how unprepared we really are for the much more dangerous weather patterns that we bear some responsibility for.

As a nation, our infrastructure is falling into increasing disrepair. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, George W. Bush flew in for a photo op and we largely turned a blind eye to the city and its suffering people. The powerful blizzards of this past winter and the devastating storms of recent weeks have served as reminders of how fragile and fallible our ways of life are - all it takes is a certain amount of ice and we're trapped in our homes. All it takes is some strong enough wind or a tornado, and our lives are easily destroyed or even lost entirely. At every turn, we continue to seek excuses for continuing our addiction to fossil fuels, while setting hesitant carbon emissions reduction goals for the far off future, by which point, it will be far too late. And it's becoming increasingly apparent now that in many capacities, we may already be a ways into 'too late' territory and well on our way into turning this world into our coffin.

When seeing this kind of unpreparedness and suffering at every turn in the face of especially unusual extreme weather patterns in recent months, it's hard not to get the sense that we're already in completely over our heads.

As you'll notice, a 2011 trend here is to post depressing, soul-wounding things. Because now is not the time for optimism. Arson, perhaps - but that's a little debatable.

At the end of this post, one thing can be said for certain: this was not a few words. The next one will be shorter.

The Change You Hoped For

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:32:00 +0000

Whoa, hey. What is all this?

I don't like change.

I know that's what you're all thinking right now. Also, "Why the hell haven't you caught up on replying to comments lately?" I'd give you an excuse for that, but it was recently run over a bus. Several buses. Multitudes of buses. You understand how that is.

At any rate, most posts are coming soon. I went from being merely old to even more of an oldmin recently, and I'm obliged to prattle about that yearly. Also, it's been kind of a weird, stressful ~~month~~ year so far. Still working on getting rid of the mental congestion that's been hindering my writing here as of late.

Obviously, things have changed here. We all miss the bland gray - the nothing-but-gray. You're not alone in that. Unfortunately, technically relatively unique though that look for the blog may have been - particularly in the sense that most people have better aesthetic sense than I do as so to know not to just slap a bunch of grays together and call it a website - I suspect that many potential readers probably took one look at the blog's visual design and stomped off to forget about the site a full three and a half seconds later. As such, here I am, ever the boring conformist, with a massive new Spiral Reverie overhaul that no longer looks terrible.

Sure, it isn't unique, and I have to ascribe 100% of the credit for the layout, colors, and background image to the resources provided by the new template designer that Blogger added last year, which really removed all excuses for a terrible-looking blog. I resisted the temptation for a while, but in the end, I succumbed - I'm so sorry, ghostly readers. I've failed you all.

In the spirit of failure and the celebration of a new version of the blog, I hereby retire the Spiral Reverie 1.0 subtitle, which has served it well since its initial inception back in January of 2007. No longer will this site be 'Spiral Reverie: 'round and 'round the sickle spiral, dreaming of what's lost,' as appropriately gloomy as that was. Today, I present to you the birth of 'Spiral Reverie: tomorrow's robots, ineffectual today.' Think of it like the little superlatives they change in the opening of the Colbert Report every so often - just far less often in my case.

Someday, I will have an entirely unique looking, far better blog than I do today. A Spiral Reverie - the title of which, I'm sure you've all wondered about the meaning of for no less than years - that in no way resembles the Spiral Reverie today. A Spiral Reverie with a thousand times the regular content - and I'm going to try to post more routine short-form thoughts starting very soon - with better, original visual design, and a haunting atmosphere. Everything you look for in a struggling author's blog. Except maybe jetpacks - those things'll take your legs off. I would know.

Someday.

Hope Estranged

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 23:29:00 +0000

Oh hey, I do have a blog, don't I?

I've been much quieter than usual this year. I keep promising more content 'soon,' but then not delivering. It's surprising that all two and one-sixteenth of you checking this blog with any kind of regularity have yet to gang up on me in a very small mob and threaten me with a crowbar. Still, there's a reason for my near-silence since early last November. There's a lot to be less than happy about these days - frustration with ongoing publishing efforts, struggles to get a paid writing job, the end of a very disappointing winter, fading hope of escaping the south this year already, my dog's declining health, the shocking earthquakes and tsunami that just hit Japan hours ago, and the state of both the country and the world. All of these things are weighing heavily on me at the moment, but the last one in particular has essentially clogged my resolve in recent months. I've had all these thoughts - intensely negative ones on the whole - stuck in my head for months now, interfering with my sleep, souring the enjoyment of my hobbies, disrupting my daily life, and keeping my stress levels high. I need to wake up earlier. I need badly to get out of this house. And I need to clear this blockage - this post is months coming, but hopefully it'll help.

This post is intended to be something cathartic. It is rambling and unpleasant, but if you feel like proceeding, go ahead and click the title to proceed. You've been warned. I have to admit, though, in finishing this post, I feel it's one of the better things I've written in a while - hopefully a testament to why maybe, just maybe, I should someday be able to make a living on my writing - and I'm sacrificing sleep for it, of course. Maybe I'll sleep better with all this off my chest. I hope to.

Where to begin?

Election Day, last November, I suppose. That's where the bitterness blockage - and its effects on this blog - seem to originate. Back then, I made my reasonable, rational plea to America not to sit back and let terrible ideas flood back into power. I was so much younger then, those four months ago. Once again, less than half of the country's registered voters turned out. Those who did were largely galvanized by the propagandizing of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and many sponsored by the Koch brothers, among others from America's ruling class. Rather than being energized to respond to the dangerous rhetoric of the corporatist Tea Party - the purpose of which runs wholly counter to that of the original Boston Tea Party - rational-thinking Americans stayed home and after two years of Democratic government often foiled by Republican obstructionism, America took another step backward.

Today, we're watching protests and revolutions take place across the Middle East as the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, and others have stood up against their oppressors - some in Iran and Saudi Arabia have again tried in vain. Here in America? Our 'revolution;' our 'retaking' of America? Angry protest against the best interests of the people - against the workers, for the corporate CEOs and Wall Street bankers; calling for smaller government, but demanding legislation that restricts our most vital personal freedoms and greatly affects our personal lives; rhetoric driven by greed, bigotry, and xenophobia, wrapped up in the American flag.

In the November 2010 midterm election, the voices of those who voted rang out and called for us to continue our decline: to truly become a nation ruled, not governed.

In the past twenty-four hours, revolting things have happened. In congress, New York Republican representative Peter King held flat-out bigoted hearings targeting America's Muslim population. You'd think we haven't bullied our pitiable Muslim minority enough since 9/11, considering the relentless attempts to tie their entire religion and all associated ethnicities to terrorism and common calls for genocide smeared across the ugliest parts of the internet, but apparently not. It's hard not to wonder if we'll ever grow up enough as a nation to start treating these people like the actual human beings they are. Experts and statistics have already invalidated King's baseless arguments that American Muslims "aren't doing enough" to foil domestic terrorist plots within the American Muslim community and that they're being radicalized. That didn't stop him from not inviting any experts to actually testify at the hearing, of course. Facts have no place in a GOP discussion. Like the fact, as Reza Aslan mentioned on last night's Colbert Report, that there have been more non-Muslim domestic terrorist threats in America than Muslim ones in the past decade as well. It's also worth noting that Peter King is a passionate supporter of Ireland's IRA political terrorist group, which he doesn't consider a terrorist group because they haven't attacked America. When people like this are elected, something has gone deeply, horribly wrong in your country.

In addition to that, after weeks of protest and polls showing that the public has turned sharply against him, the Wisconsin state senate and governor Scott Walker found a legislative loophole by which to successfully strip the public workers' union of nearly all of their collective bargaining rights. This after the 14 Democratic state senators stood by the people by fleeing to Illinois to prevent the Republicans from holding a quorum. In the end, the GOP senators separated their union-busting power grab from the budget - on which the Democrats and unions had already given up all ground outside of the collective bargaining rights issue. In sneering at and shrugging off weeks of protest and the people of Wisconsin turning against them, both governor Scott Walker and these GOP state senators made it abundantly clear that the term "public servant" is a contradiction in their cases. Textbook examples of the sorts of people who should not be in any form of public service, let alone actually elected. The silver lining in this is that recall elections are looking very likely for many of these state senators and possibly Walker himself.

At the center of the attack on unions lies a much, much bigger issue that has been gestating within America for decades, and hasn't been improving. This attack on American workers was orchestrated in the name of so-called 'fiscal responsibility' - a popular Republican banner flown today in the name of attacking any and all programs and rights that benefit the American people and American workers. "Wisconsin is broke," said Scott Walker. Similarly, GOP leaders in congress like house majority and senate minority leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have echoed that sentiment on a national level. The truth of the matter is, that's a lie: the GOP's modus operandi. Wisconsin was in fine shape financially until they passed a bunch of corporate tax cuts and ceased to properly, progressively tax the wealthy. We've witnessed the same problem on a national scale. While claiming to be the 'party of fiscal responsibility,' the GOP ignores their eight years of frequently unchecked reckless spending under George W. Bush that turned a massive surplus into an incredible deficit. They attack president Obama by saying that he's spent even more, but even that's a lie - they continue to cite the Bush administration's fraudulent financial records in which they chose to conveniently omit the insane costs of our violent ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. A major part of the explosion of Obama's spending comes from the fact that his administration has not continued the Bush administration's deceptive bookkeeping practices.

Where the Tea Party-backed Wisconsin GOP leaders seized on the budgetary crisis caused by irresponsible taxation of corporations and the wealthy to attack the unions, we're watching a similar crisis unfold on a national level as congress attempts to avoid a government shutdown by the GOP. This week, both Democrat and Republican budgets were defeated in each of the houses of congress. Neither of them were good, but the Democrats' was the lesser of two evils. The GOP's budget continued their usual strategy of staking out an extremist position and watching as the Democrats and so-called "socialist" Obama capitulate and give them close to everything - if not outright everything - they demand, much to the detriment of the nation and people. In the GOP's budget - and I'm sure we'll see them continue to press the attack - were efforts to completely defund Planned Parenthood, PBS, and NPR, among other programs and services vital in both our dangerously corporate public media and to the general public. And NPR is likely most at risk thanks to another Andrew Breitbart backed and distributed 'sting' video by professional scam artist and privileged conservative white kid James O'Keefe, both of whom have discredited themselves repeatedly and shown themselves to be among the slimiest of the crooks lowering the political discourse in the country year after year. NPR didn't stand up for themselves, and even sadder, the NPR executive on tape wasn't wrong in his statements on the Tea Party - when recognizing the objective fact that racism and ignorance are driving factors in that increasingly thug-like corporatist group is enough to wreck your career or lose your job, we're witnessing the rise of a legitimately dangerous mob. Apparently we learned nothing from what Breitbart and O'Keefe did to Shirley Sherrod last year.

America's biggest problem is by no means the deficit - that can be resolved quite comfortably, but we have no one in power willing to act like responsible adults, let alone responsible leaders, and begin closing corporate tax loopholes and raising taxes on the wealthy as necessary. And of course, that's not to forget the vitally important reduction of our incredibly bloated defense budget, much of which goes into feeding the toxic military-industrial complex. Our biggest problem as a nation is the continued spread of poverty, and since John Edwards withdrew from the public eye in personal disgrace (While the just-as-personally-slimy Newt Gingrich is planning on running for president now and recently tried to credit his 'passion for America' for his cheating on his wife while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer. What.), we almost never hear any politicians speak of poverty anymore. That would, after all, entail actually regarding the impoverished as human beings instead of sneering at them and blaming them for their own hopeless situation.

Whenever the proper progressive taxation of corporations and the wealthy is brought up, the GOP begins rattling their sabers about "class warfare" and "wealth redistribution," while the Tea Party crowd feels they're being clever by saying they've been "Taxed Enough Already," despite our unsustainable obscenely low tax rates today. You cannot have a functioning, thriving 20th - let alone 21st - century society without a functioning central government working to serve the people and a populace mature enough to understand the importance of a strong progressive system of taxation. We take everything the government provides for granted and like self-entitled children, we demand it all for free, while also thumbing our noses a government and telling ourselves we're "fighting the man," when we're instead further enabling the corporate interests that have all but snuffed out democracy in America.

Just days ago, in a fantastic speech in Madison, Michael Moore brought up the issue of wealth redistribution that the GOP loves to attack American's working and shriveling middle classes over - the very fact that the income disparity in this nation is the largest it's ever been, and that 400 people have the total wealth of half of the rest of the country combined. We've had the "socialism" the GOP sneers at for decades since we began a program of corporate/privileged appeasement and welfare back during the Reagan years that began a dramatic redistribution of America's wealth from the many to the few, undoing decades of hard-fought workers' rights and the very basis of our middle class. Class warfare has been waged from the top to the bottom for decades in America - those of us in the middle have fallen hard, and whenever we even observe what's happened and suggest fighting back, the right-wing-owned media noise machine quickly shouts that down in an effort to keep it from public consciousness. Limp as ever, the Democrats continue to allow the GOP to frame every debate, allowing America's working public - and teachers especially as of late - to be vilified while upholding the horrifyingly wealthy corporate leaders and Wall Street bankers who fill Republican campaign coffers and successfully got our conservative-bent Supreme Court to sell out democracy in the Citizens United case ruling in January 2010. Not one person on Wall Street has gone to jail in the wake of the economic collapse their reckless gambling has caused.

As the American people continue to sink into destitution, the Republicans in congress are set on balancing the budget on the backs of the working class and dying middle class. They nearly shut down congressional procedure at the end of 2010 to essentially blackmail their way into an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%, even holding up health care for 9/11 first responders. This is the heart of their party's professed 'morality.' Morality that dictates that, as Gloria Steinem put it beautifully on last week's Real Time with Bill Maher, "life begins at conception and ends at birth." They speak of the need for "everyone" to "sacrifice." But what they really mean is something more in the vein of, "If you aren't obscenely wealthy, you can go fuck yourself." If you're rich enough, you "win," apparently - I'll get on to another "winning" disgraceful figure who's gotten far too much media attention in just a bit - and get to be exempt from making the same "sacrifices" as the rest of us. The policies the GOP continues to push forward will cut hundreds of thousands - if not ultimately millions - of additional jobs. They focused heavily on job creation during the 2010 campaign season, then changed their tune immediately, refocusing on cutting jobs as they did during the Bush years with a callous lack of caring reflective of their increasingly cartoon-level sociopathic agenda.

Throughout the protests in Wisconsin, you couldn't swing a dead cat on a major news outlet's comments section without hitting a seething comment about "union thugs" and how "hard-working" America's wealthy are. All this of course ignoring that only 7% of our workforce is now unionized, and many states are outright union-free - even the GOP's beloved Ronald Reagan called the death of unions the death of freedom a good 31 years ago now - and that's just another part of our dramatic wage stagnation since the 1980s. Of course Reagan would be a key link in the chain of leaders that began putting down the American union and taking away workers' rights. In this, we've even seen the right-wing phenomenon of support for union-busting from impoverished individuals envious of union workers. Instead of finding inspiration and seeking to fight back for union rights - a long, hard battle America has to fight a second time because we got complacent and let our rights be stripped away - they'd rather see union workers as miserable as they are. The fact that this is commonplace speaks again of a great illness that's infected the American character quite visibly in recent decades.

While we face all of these things, the GOP continues to encourage the country's woes to only worsen so that they can blame Obama and the Democrats for the state of things as they attempt to retake the White House in November next year. Thankfully, they have nobody electable to run. But still, president Obama does the American people no favors by continuing to capitulate to the GOP at every turn. We're still in Iraq and Afghanistan. The virtually criminal Bush tax cuts weren't allowed to expire. And Obama just gave up on closing Guantanamo Bay this week and joined George W. Bush in tossing the rule of law away to side with continuing the indefinite detention of suspected terrorist detainees that we cannot convict due to a lack of evidence. And these are only a few of the things he's capitulated on. It's a wonder we got Don't Ask, Don't Tell overturned just before the end of last year. And while it's also appreciable that the White House will no longer defend the similarly bigoted Defense of Marriage Act, the Republicans have their true colors on display as usual in their announced plans to defend it themselves.

In the end, we attack teachers and public workers in general; we attack any and all efforts to begin working on fixing America's infrastructure, which would create tons of jobs; we demonize the idea of improving American transportation by joining the rest of the modern world with high-speed rail; on top of all that, we desperately suck up to corporations and engage in welfare for them, while deriding welfare for actual human beings. And of course, after getting depressingly watered down health care reform the other year, the GOP is now set on trying to repeal it entirely and continue to prop up our broken system that's still more focused on profits than providing actual health care. They won't succeed - at least, not as things are now. But what we got in 2010 was more for the insurance companies than the people - being able to receive treatment or go to the doctor for a check-up is increasingly becoming a privilege in America. Our grave national illness is not merely a matter of metaphor.

As all of this goes on, we the people busy ourselves with irrelevant matters while learning nothing. We complain about the fluctuation in gas prices over Middle East unrest instead of investing in green energy technology. Even China's well on the way to leaving us in the dust on that front now. Fox News keeps busy by telling us that Middle Eastern revolutions will lead to more enemies for America - ignoring our long history of violence and propping up oppressive dictators there, earning our hatred - while arguing that we also need to increase our fossil fuel addiction and dependency even further. Continuing our focus on what's on television, we distract ourselves from any real news by laughing at the crazy antics of a drug-addicted actor with a history of abusing women that we love to shrug off with an, "Eh, they're just whores." Something symptomatic of our longstanding misogyny problem.

In January, Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head at a public meeting with constituents in Arizona, which is increasingly turning into a portrait of the end of America. The shooter was very mentally ill and obsessed with anti-government conspiracy theories, but neither a clear "leftist" or "right-winger." We spent weeks slinging mud, each side trying to pin this individual, Jared Loughner, on the other. The argument was eventually made that the heated, increasingly violent political rhetoric - primarily from the Republicans, but not exclusively - could have contributed to his snapping and going on his rampage, in which even children were killed. This led to a facetious play at civility and feigned bipartisanship in congress, with the Democrats and Republicans even sitting together for once - and our lone real socialist, Vermont's Bernie Sanders, one of our only senators actually working for the people - while president Obama gave a rather weak State of the Union address in February. It's enough to make you wish our politicians were more honest about how disinterested they are in actually serving the public - to make you wish these individuals were as politically unviable as they should be. A silver lining, at least, is that Gabby Giffords is making an impressive recovery. And a much rustier and more corrosive lining is that every time we have a public rampage like this - every few years - instead of having the gun rights discussion America sorely needs, the far right scrambles to deregulate guns even further. The obsession the American public has with firearms is not something healthier nations have in common with us.

Ultimately, that's the theme of what I've needed to get off my chest today. That America has been infected with an incredible cancer for decades now, and as we continue to undo decades of progress, dismantle the "American Dream," and turn increasingly into a nation of the deluded destitute, it's hard not to feel hopeless. The state of things today is exactly why I'm a misanthrope. We're not learning. And most of us don't even vote. We're witnessing the result of the failure of democracy in America, a system which itself fails when you don't have an engaged, informed populace. We have neither, and haven't had either for decades now. I've been losing sleep over this for months. I've had these thoughts and feelings rattling around inside, and they've impeded my forward momentum in this blog. Maybe that will change now that I've written this. I hope it will. But I can't promise an outpouring of optimism.

There was no Film For Lovers series in Feburary this year primarily due to a lack of material. I might have covered Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I plan on blogging about at some point anyway, even if it's already been done to death. It's a brilliant film - and one of Jim Carrey's legitimately good ones - deserving of unceasing love. I haven't seen much focused on love in months (I'm not sure if I'd spotlight Scott Pilgrim vs. The World in a feature like that or not - love plays a big role, but it's more fun and nerdy than anything else. If anything, it's a work of love for its source material by everyone involved.), though, and my own film collection's growth has slowed to a relative crawl as of late. To toss some recommendations out there from what I've watched the past few months, The Social Network, The Kids are All Right, The People Speak, Monsters, Temple Grandin, Micmacs, and Cyrus are all worth your time. I'll try to do some more film themed blog posts again soon - I'm hoping to start writing a bit more about music this year too. I've been meaning to contribute my own thoughts, and I have a few videos I'll be posting on here as short posts (Like last year's Trains Through Tokyo), for a little more content. Music journalism as a whole is pretty terrible, but I like the idea of sharing a bit of what kinds of music I like, and what inspires me. Plus, M83 has a new album coming out sometime this year, which I can't wait for - I need to pick up Asobi Seksu's new album still, too. Basically, I'm a Shoegaze nerd. Prepare your ears for walls of harmonious sound. For the hell of it, my current state of mind, through M83. One of my very favorite albums and album cover images.

I don't write about writing or the craft nearly as often as I probably should, and since my older brother - in encouraging me to 'get with the times' and get into self-publishing - sent me a link to this blog post the other day, I've felt a good diatribe against self-publishing and the deeply sleazy, anti-literary vibe I'm getting from all this coming on. My views all make me sound like an incredibly pretentious, narcissistic asshole (And really, what that I write doesn't?), but I have some very strong feelings on that while self-publishing can be beneficial and valuable for some, it's ultimately damaging to literature. As a writer devoted to cultivating his literary writing craft, I take tremendous offense to the commodification of books to the point of dumbing them down to treating a novel like a cheap 99 cent iPhone app. If the internet self-publishing eBook revolution is going to kill literature, then I'm going to go down with the ship and die in the gutter. The revulsion I felt in reading that, if anything, really helps me define even more of my identity as an author (And not just the aforementioned pretentious narcissist), and further establish my absolute need to find an agent and through them an editor and publisher. I will not settle for sinking into a sea of professional-contact-free low-effort dirt-cheap digital pulp - my desire, my need is to produce works of far more substance and authenticity than that. I'll leave it at that, because I can elaborate much more in the inevitable self-publishing rant post that I'll probably end up doing within the next few days.

Also, I'm probably going to finally cave and rework this blog's appearance soon with a Blogger template even as much as I dislike the idea of it not looking entirely unique. Spiral Reverie needs more readers - this thing needs to look more appealing if it's going to draw them. In addition to more content. I'm not good at selling or marketing myself in general. My approach, ultimately, is more in the vein of "If you build it, they will come." That often doesn't work on the internet, of course. You're supposed to track down other authors and communities of fellow aspiring authors and start networking if you want to get attention - I can't really do that. Extreme introversion extends to the internet, too. I don't even like posting on message boards - I'm a lurker at heart, creepy as internet lingo makes that sound. I'm well aware of the fact that while I like Spiral Reverie's "shades of gray" visual theme that I put together myself, it's ugly. As fun as it is to revel in writing massive, near-unreadably long posts of tremendous substance that almost nobody will ever stumble across and read like this - as fun as it is to be underground, which isn't hard to be on the internet - a writer needs readers. And even if it means temporarily sacrificing some of the blog's uniqueness, a visual look that won't drive off visitors is more important right now. I'm no web designer myself - I know what I like when I see it and have a lot of vague ideas, but I'm not good at articulating, let alone expressing, my aesthetic sense - and so I'm probably going to have to wait and see if a day ever comes that I can afford to spend thousands of dollars hiring a web designer to make my presence on the internet as cool as, say, Haruki Murakami's. His western website is the epitome of cool author websites. Maybe someday I'll have a publisher that loves me enough to foot the bill to make my internet presence that cool. It's nice to have dreams.

At any rate, the 3DS launch is 16 days away now. I'm really looking forward to that, but also stressed out at the same time. Money is a big problem. I'd ideally like to be able to snag one by late spring or early summer, but the system's going to quickly get as rare as the Wii was for years, and they're launching at the same $250 price point the Wii did. The system's hardware power, fantastic array of built-in features and games, and incredible announced lineup of games coming in the future more than make it worth the cost of entry - that thing's going to be beautiful and revolutionary. (Some people get extremely excited about new Apple releases - Nintendo's my drug.) But getting hold of one won't be easy, and while I've been working on getting a freelance writing job to start making money, it's tough to balance that with work on Project Princess - which is coming along again, and in the least, will be less weird and more marketable than project 27 Days, though just as literary in its ambition - regular query letters, and at least the occasional post here. If I can find some decent-paying freelance work and actually get the job - I've had some stumbles and been ignored before, much like with the query letter process, which I've at least started hearing more responses to here and there though nothing elaborate - I can quickly see all of my early money disappearing into a 3DS and some early games for that, though.

Considering that the last time I went to a game store was over 5 months ago now, as helpful as games are in my stress management, I don't seem to be able to sponge off loaned money from my father to sustain my hobbies for much longer. And that's something to deal with in trying to gain difficult financial independence - losing the ability to buy games, books, music, movies, and more tends to raise my stress levels tremendously, as much of a privileged first world problem that I really shouldn't even be complaining about as that is - and similarly, my hopes of escaping the south and moving to San Francisco this year have already more or less sunk. The friend I was going to move in with forgot about our plans and moved in with another friend out there, so the costs of moving and living out there just went from potentially affordable to unlivable, as they are for someone as literally broke as I am in any major city - and as a writer and someone needing to actually experience more of life at my embarrassing age of coming-up-on-27 (See ya, mid-twenties. Hello, near-thirties.), anywhere less than a major city would be profoundly dissatisfying. When I find concrete numbers for paying freelance writing work on the ads I've been checking out in working hard on finding work in these first months of the year, what I get out of them is that I'd have to focus more on freelance work than creative work and absolutely scramble to make so much as $1000 a month. And even that would barely cover rent in a decent single apartment in San Francisco - it wouldn't be remotely enough for the overall costs of living, let alone furniture, hobbies, and responsibly saving so I can actually build up the kind of financial reserve everyone needs. In short, like in my less than cheery New Year's post over two months ago, life is still kicking my ass. But hey, all the authors worth anything who've made any kind of meaningful mark no the world and produced authentic, substantive works of literature that could touch people's lives all had to face tremendous hardship - even if mine pales horribly in comparison - before achieving even a modicum of success, right? Right? Of course, a lot of them died miserable and destitute and never really make much of a mark or achieved any kind of following until after they were dead. This is why - for all my ranting - people write for the money, not to produce meaningful art.

All this, and at the end of this horribly self-indulgent blog post, I've still barely mentioned the incredible crisis that Japan is going through as we speak. Compared to that, my existential, creative, professional, and personal sources of anguish are minimal. My hopeful thoughts? Right now, I've reserved those for the survivors. In the least, the world is pulling together to offer what assistance and relief we can - the more, the better. Just last week, I watched the season premiere of No Reservations and was devastated by the state Haiti's still in, even after what the world contributed. Years before that, Anthony Bourdain did a show in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, reminding that in the wake of disaster, we often don't even take care of our own here in America. Considering its vital place in the world, I'm convinced we can all do better with Japan, but at the same time, we shouldn't forget New Orleans or Haiti. One of the most heartbreakingly common human traits is our capacity to turn a blind eye to profound human suffering. I'm afraid that even by the substance of this blog post on its own, I've provided ample evidence that I'm no better.

Pocket Warfare: 2011's New Generation of Portables

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:04:00 +0000

Oh, hello there, internet! I almost didn't notice you there after spending too much staring at screens caused my eyes to atrophy and fall out. You know that thing they say about all your other senses strengthening in response to the loss of any individual one? Apparently that's not always true.

Anyway, half-hearted fabricated blog post openings aside, I'm sure you're all thinking the same thing: "Hey, what the hell man? You said you were going to start posting more often and now January's almost over and you've only got one post up. What's up with that?" But more importantly, you're also thinking, "WHY ISN'T HE GUSHING ABOUT VIDEO GAMES YET THIS YEAR?! THERE'S MORE NEWS OUT AND I WANT IT HERE AND ONLY HERE." Okay, I get it, my blog is the singularly greatest blog that has ever existed on the face of the internet. Calm down - breathe into this paper bag. I'm here. You should really consider getting some counseling - this half-baked blog hasn't even gotten a single decent redesign since it awkwardly gray conception over four years ago now. It's like the internet equivalent of a frozen dinner you left in the back of your freezer and only remember to poke at every now and then - it's not like you're ever going to eat it, or like it's even still edible.

Now what we've established in the introduction to the second post of 2011 that Spiral Reverie has severe freezer burn, it's time for you to hit the title link jump below the cut to the meat and potatoes of this post - a discussion of the new portable war to ensue on the market this year between Nintendo's 3DS and Sony's newly unveiled "PSP2," currently codenamed the NGP. (And for those not interested, more non-video-game content is coming very soon! Sit tight.)
Now on to the main event, the bare knuckle battle and other appropriately violent hyperbole filled market conflict coming this year between Nintendo's 3DS and Sony's "PSP2," which was unveiled in the past 24 hours as the NGP, or "New Generation Portable."

We've known about the 3DS since roughly last March when the handheld's existence was first leaked by a Japanese newspaper and word spread across the internet like wildfire. Nintendo unveiled the 3DS at E3 last June to incredible fanfare, with its glasses-free parallax 3D visual effects, hardware horsepower falling somewhere between the Gamecube and Wii, additional graphical shader capabilities that even the Wii lacked (Allowing some games, like Capcom's upcoming Resident Evil games, to look nearly like the output on Sony and Microsoft's high-definition consoles, but on a significantly lower budget.), numerous new features, and some of the strongest third party support a Nintendo system has seen yet.

A Japanese release date and price point were set alongside some additional game announcements at an event in Tokyo at the end of September, a special Nintendo World event was held early in the new year, and westerners got a similar treatment back on the 19th in New York and Amsterdam. The system hits Japan on February 27th, Europe on March 25th, and North America on March 27th, going for $250 here.

The PSP2/NGP was unveiled in the past 24 hours with much less to be excited about, much to slap one's forehead in reaction to, and the typical internet responses. I'll get to all of the above in a bit, but first, let's break down the elements of each of these platforms.

Graphics
Discussing these is pretty unavoidable these days, as much as they're used to push hardware these days, and as much as they inflate game development costs for developers and prices for customers alike. Both systems feature vastly improved screens over their previous iterations, though on a technical level, as you'd expect, the PSP2's is superior to the 3DS's and an overall more impressive piece of technology.

In Nintendo's case, the 3DS still has two screens like the original DS - a larger upper screen, where the gameplay will largely be taking place on the system, and smaller lower screen, which is the same size as the original DS screens and still serves as the system's single touchscreen. The upper screen is also the only 3D one - there's a 3D slider on the side of the system that allows you to make adjustments to the 3D display, allowing you to find your own customizable settings depending on your face's distance from the screen and your own personal level of comfort with 3D, which can be troublesome for some people. And for those people, the 3D can also be turned off entirely. Speaking personally, the 3D effects are the least exciting aspect of the 3DS to me, not having gotten into the 3D movie craze or had any interest in ever owning a pair of those specialized 3D glasses. As far as I'm concerned, while the effect is neat, it's about as meaningful in the grand scheme of entertainment as the introduction of high-definition televisions and visuals, which is to say, not particularly notable, as the content isn't all in technical visual improvements. As the visuals go, I'm just happy to see the power the system has - one of the smallest gaps between a current generation console and portable system yet, between the Wii and 3DS - and that it's being represented on the platform in a broad range from Dreamcast-level visuals to graphics that at times look to match the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 without the insane pricetag attached to development.

As for the PSP2, Sony's made a number of changes. They've stuck to a single screen, but as I'll continue to elaborate upon, they've made a considerable effort to do with the PSP2 what they've always done - shamelessly copy Nintendo, then shamelessly try to pass what they do off as new and innovative. After spending an entire generation attacking every new feature Nintendo introduced as "gimmicks," then proceeding to shamelessly release a knock-off of Nintendo's main motion control setup for the Wii as a largely underused and overpriced PS3 peripheral last year - which didn't even receive the reception that Microsoft's insanely heavily marketed Eyetoy knockoff did - they copied their touchscreen, making the PSP's screen a touchscreen. As an aside, they added a touchpad to the back of the system itself as well, but it's hard to say what real functionality that'll bring to the system. It's hard to see it being comfortable using a touchpad that doesn't display anything and that you don't actually look at on the back of the system while playing a game. Some fingers do need to be devoted to actually gripping a handheld system when using it, after all. Other than that, the PSP2's main screen is an HD one - banking on the appeal (And much higher budget) of high definition graphics on a small screen. Of course, this is also coming nearly half a decade into the current console generation, in which both Sony and Microsoft banked heavily on the notion that HD television and movies were about to explode years back and that gaming would naturally join them - history has since shown as the customers voted with their wallets that most people don't care if a game's graphics are HD or not, so long as they look appealing. And the trend in focusing on "photorealistic" gaming has led to some of the blandest, ugliest, and altogether most visually unimaginative and unappealing games the industry has ever seen.

The PSP fell somewhere in between the PSX and PS2 - roughly a Dreamcast overall. The PSP2 looks to essentially be a portable PS3, Sony's console presently in dead last this generation, which has lost the company billions of dollars and on which development costs are so high that most games - like on the 360 - do not break even, let alone sell well enough to turn any kind of notable profit, with relatively few exceptions. Even Sony's first party games are never guaranteed to make money (As we've also seen with Microsoft, looking at how Alan Wake completely bombed last year after years of hype.), after multiple first party releases flopped on the PS3 this generation. After the PSP failed to achieve mainstream success - tanking everywhere but Japan, and largely only finding the success it did in the Japan on the backs of the Monster Hunter and Phantasy Star Portable franchises, both of which are likely to see 3DS releases this coming portable generation - as an overpriced mess by design with minimal compelling software, Sony seems to have apparently come to the conclusion that they didn't go far enough with the PSP, in now producing a portable version of their over-powered, incredibly expensive console that took them from first to dead last in gaming. There's a very special kind of hubris visible here, trying to repeat what has already failed horribly and led to billions in losses for both Sony and third parties that blindly supported the Playstation brandname this generation with the PSP2. A direct indication that even when their platforms have undeniably faced failure and resulted in staggering financial losses, they've learned nothing from it, as they've continued to publicly call their failures successes and push forward with an entirely self-destructive strategy in the video game industry, devoid of any kind of vision beyond graphics and stealing from Nintendo. Corporate thought at its worst and most utterly embarrassing. The last thing an entertainment medium needs more of.

Software Library
Of course, as we've seen with the HD consoles and every console that's had a significant graphical advantage over its competitors, it's never the graphics that make a market leader or vastly successful system - HD, 3D, or otherwise. It's all about the games, and on this front, there's no comparison. Nintendo has a massive variety of games coming to the 3DS, with some incredible third party support right out the door.

A major focus of this generation on their part is continuing to bring the third parties back after they largely fled from Nintendo's consoles when they fell from their former position of market leadership with the N64. Nintendo tried to get their support back with the Wii, designing it to be significantly easier and more affordable to develop for than its competitors, the Xbox 360 and PS3 requiring massive, multimillion dollar budgets to develop for and typically requiring over a million copies sold for games to break even or turn a profit - costs that have led to notably incredible financial losses for most of the video game industry this generation. Instead of taking advantage of these improved costs, third parties continued for the most part to display the disdain for Nintendo they had grown accustomed to over the decade or so of Sony's control of the industry with the first two Playstation consoles, putting out extremely low-budget, often intentionally half-hearted efforts on the Wii, then refusing to market their games at all, then acting surprised and trashing the system when their intentionally insulting releases on the platform didn't sell - reflecting their lack of effort - even in cases when they actually turned a profit. Funnily enough, you never hear a peep out of the third parties when third PS3 and 360 games routinely fail to turn a profit. There's been no lack of complaints over the Wii's graphical hardware horsepower too, compared to the HD consoles, when it's very visible that the same extremely high-end graphics they demanded on the HD systems are wrecking these companies - when you're focused on graphics so expensive to make that you have very little chance of making money on the game afterward, your gaming company's executives should probably be fired for some of the poorest leadership imaginable in this industry. And funnily enough, a major first party Nintendo release coming this year, The Last Story, handily demonstrates how little most third parties ever tried on the Wii, demonstrating outright that the Wii can compete with the HD consoles visually when developers actually try. Imagine that.

At this rate, despite a few stand-out third party efforts on the Wii that deservingly did well and made good money - Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and Monster Hunter 3 Tri were high-effort Capcom titles that beat expectations and made money, last November's GoldenEye 007 revival did quite well as you'd expect, as did the excellent Epic Mickey, which Disney made the most heavily marketed Wii third party game (And the only Wii third party game that saw a serious commercial campaign in at least three years.) - Nintendo's unlikely to see the third parties come back to them on the Wii with their tails tucked between their legs this generation. On the 3DS, on the other hand, we're seeing just that - the portable market has become much, much larger than the console market in recent generations (The original DS being the most successful dedicated gaming system in the industry's history.) - as third parties can't exactly deny how vital strong 3DS support is to their future, especially now that they're hurting as much as they are after routinely taking hefty losses on overpriced PS3/Xbox 360 development. Much as Sony and Microsoft did with the design and development with their veritable Hindenburgs of gaming consoles, Nintendo involved third parties with the 3DS's design to ensure that they got the higher end graphics they wanted on the system - just without the attached suicidal pricetag. Likewise, the system was region locked - though seemingly only in the software, allowing companies to potentially release games that could be played on other regions' systems if they chose to, the region lock system has a lot of people confused at the moment - in order to increase profitability by region after the original DS and Gameboy Advance had been region-free, and both Nintendo and third parties have boasted of a very strong anti-piracy protection setup on the system to make it less likely than the internet's shameless thieves will be able to wage war on the industry's profit margins anytime soon. The original DS developed something of a piracy problem over time, though it wasn't quite as bad as the PSP's, which suffered from being cracked within days of the system's release, leading to its notoriety as the pirate's platform of choice in this past handheld generation.

As a result of Nintendo's efforts, third parties have one of the most varied and appealing lineups in a long time coming to the 3DS, even stronger than the original DS's - and the original DS's was excellent, just a bit oversaturated with many of the same genres repeated, and many third parties never utilized much of the DS's hardware power, leading to a lot of more advanced Gameboy Advance style 2D games and a relative minimum in 3D open world releases compared to the Playstation and N64 consoles the original DS was closest to in terms of overall hardware power. After a good decade of fan campaigning, Capcom's even reviving the long-dormant Mega Man Legends 3D action-RPG/adventure take on the popular Mega Man series with the 3rd game being developed exclusively for the 3DS as a special project with lots of online fan input. Nintendo's reviving Kid Icarus for the first time in 20 years with Kid Icarus: Uprising, as well as Pilotwings, which hadn't seen a new game in about 15 years. Already turning into a platform that's made the seemingly impossible appear possible, many are wondering if we won't see more long forgotten and left behind cult game series such as Sega's Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, and Seaman, among others, get new installments as well. And in addition to their excellent third party support, Nintendo has a portable Virtual Console - like the Wii's - coming, that will start by releasing classic Gameboy and Gameboy Color games for download, and in time, hopefully Game Gear and Neo Geo Pocket Color titles as well. The DSi line's DSiWare online downloads will also be available on the 3DS's online eShop - which now takes currency instead of converting your money into 'points,' and will include customer ratings between 1-5 stars, full details on games, downloadable game demos, and movies to look at gameplay footage so you'll have plenty of options before you guy games - as will new 3DSWare downloadable titles that you'll be able to run directly off an SD card, and Nintendo's including a 2-gigabyte one of those with every 3DS.

In the PSP2's case? Third parties have pledged support, but unveiled zero original games at this point. We saw a similar surge in support announcements for the original PSP, but most third parties that backed the system heavily came away very disappointed, with waves of support often followed by extended droughts as a result of the companies' losses on games developed for it. Sony had virtually no original software to show for the PSP2 at their unveiling today. Just a bunch of direct PS3 ports that were supposed to wow us with that they were successfully pulled off, except these are ultimately all games that have been out for years now, can be found for $30 or less (The HD consoles' games tend to drop in price very quickly due to how hard it is to move $60 games to begin with and how poorly most games sell on those systems, even the biggest ones largely selling the bulk of what they're going to within days of release, sales slowing to a crawl after that.), and they're undoubtedly going to be sold at a much higher price again on Sony's portable. An armload of PS3 ports to a smaller screen make no argument for why you should buy the PSP2. They just leave you asking why you should buy one at all. Hardware horsepower has never, and still does not drive the video game industry, and Sony is still apparently deadset on focusing on that above all else, much to both their detriment and the detriment of third party developers still convinced that they should be focusing on Sony's platforms as they continue to sink the company. The lack of actual third party unveilings or any original software so far is very telling of the hesitation many third parties likely have at this point in supporting the PSP2, the PSP having failed to take off in most of the world, and the PSP2 essentially being a portable version of Sony's biggest console failure, debilitating development costs and all. There's no reason for third parties to get behind the PSP2, knowing full well how unlikely most games are to make money on it, just as it's incredibly hard to justify continuing to support the PS3 now after all the losses the industry has taken on that - conversely, it's similarly difficult for them to justify continuing to dump on the Wii. Only with Nintendo does the industry look for excuses to say that it "doesn't count" when their consoles are the market-leading mainstream ones. And that attitude is nothing less than suicidal on an industry scale.

Online Support/Social Functionality
As we've moved forward each generation, online play has become increasingly important in both console and portable gaming. Sega first brought it into home platforms with the Dreamcast - years after it had begun to become commonplace in PC gaming, of course - with a few games with online play (Including the revolutionary Phantasy Star Online, which while fun, still didn't exactly live up to the original Phantasy Star series.), and neat little things like being able to download a Christmas tree for the city hub area of the game in Sonic Adventure. Now, a good decade-plus later, tens of millions of people are playing social games on Facebook every day and strong online support is an expected standard feature on dedicated gaming devices.

As one of their notable weaknesses, Nintendo's always been overly conservative with online play and features in their systems. On the Gamecube, we only got a couple Phantasy Star Online games that could be played by hooking your Gamecube up to a network. Online launched a good 8-10 months after launch for both the DS and Wii - the Wii at least starting out with online shop, News, and Forecast Channel access. While online play on Nintendo systems has always been fun, it's been undeniably cumbersome and inconvenient, having to deal with 12-digit Friend Codes for every single game, and even an individual one for the Wii system's address book, which only really allows you to exchange Mii avatars, Wiimail, and photos online.

Thankfully, with the 3DS, Nintendo's taking a significant leap forward in giving us a single dedicated Friend Code for each individual system, for starters. In addition to that, we're also getting a single dedicated friend list that can contain up to 100 people, and an indicator light system on the DS to alert us when friends are online. From what's been revealed so far, we'll be able to see a little orange light on the system to let us know when friends are playing online - while the system itself generally attempts to connect to any WiFi online network in the area to keep you constantly online, and otherwise to connect to any nearby 3DSes when the wireless connection switch is on - as well as what they're playing, and to see a Facebook-like status message of some kind. Some kind of instant messaging system has been confirmed as in the works as well, and we'll be able to easily check our friend lists when playing a game, thanks to the Home menu suspend feature. We'll also be able to directly exchange friend codes through local connections with other nearby players - using a friend request system of some sort, apparently - and be able to exchange codes directly online in some games, without always needing to directly input the 12-digit code manually anymore. A huge step up in convenience.

Beyond this significant leap in core functionality, however, the system still lacks any announced online bells and whistles, which are now expected as a standard in online play. Microsoft has had Xbox Live since the original Xbox launched with Halo, and that set something of a standard on the Xbox 360 with dedicated online profiles and social networking tied to your online username, letting you collect your stats, achievements, and so forth on a single profile and share that with friends, as well as display "gamer cards" with a basic overview of your stats on outside websites. Sony adopted their own version of this on their Playstation Network (PSN) with the PS3 this generation, creating a similar profile system to display their own achievement system, trophies. Free online Flash-based game websites like Kongregate and Newgrounds have their own achievement and stat-tracking systems for their games, tied into player profiles on the sites. And even Apple just recently launched their own system like this on the iPhone and iPad, Game Center, where you can track many games' achievements, leaderboard positions, and more. And of course, even digital online game store and social hub Steam gives each registered user their own dedicated profile to track high scores, achievements, and more on to share and compare with friends.

Nintendo is literally the only major presence in gaming these days that lacks a system like this, and recently Nintendo of America translator Bill Trinen made comments on such systems that demonstrated the company's increasing openness to such systems - despite lead designer and video game legend Shigeru Miyamoto's (Father of Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda, and essentially modern video gaming) distaste for them - but also suggested that it's not likely that we'll see one on the 3DS anytime soon. That said, while the core functionality of the 3DS's new online system is robust and great - going on strong third party testimony and the fact that it's finally centralized with a single friend code - people aren't going to be happy if Nintendo doesn't get on bringing about their own version of these bells and whistles. And as is, Nintendo has some excellent bells and whistles on the 3DS - which I'll be getting into momentarily - but they aren't online ones.

Social online gaming is huge these days, considering the massive popularity of games like Farmville and Cityville on Facebook, and thanks to the cumbersome multi-Friend-Code system on the Wii and DS, while they've had great online games, online has been vastly underutilized. And Nintendo themselves have been startlingly unambitious when it comes to their own online feature ventures. It's understandable and praiseworthy that Nintendo's wanted to keep a strong focus on local multiplayer, as online gaming definitely can't replicate the experience of sitting around in a room with friends, but they've needed sorely to focus on keeping up with and outdoing the competition in online and what little has been revealed about the 3DS's centralized online functions so far is still pretty bare-bones - the kind of experience you could get in PC games online over 10 years ago. It's very functional, but it doesn't live up to today's online standards in terms of social networking - a dedicated profile, centralized stat tracking to share stats and achievements with friends, perhaps Facebook and/or Twitter connectivity, and so on - people are going to complain, as it goes against the expected standard. People want to be able to connect with their friends on more levels than just instant messaging or seeing what they're playing at the moment - they want to be able to see everything they've played and share what they've played, what they've accomplished, their high scores, and more, perhaps even passively affecting the content in each other's single-player experiences by connecting online. This is the core of modern social gaming, and Nintendo's only partially gotten on board with this, when they should be at the forefront.

At the January 19th event in New York, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime repeatedly emphasized the importance of the new focus on "building communities" on the 3DS, but the still relatively bare-bones online features we've seen so far on the 3DS aren't enough to satisfy that desire online. They've introduced a brilliant, innovative social feature in StreetPass, the system's feature in which it scans for any and all nearby 3DSes when you're out in public and you've got it in sleep mode in your pocket, connects with them, and exchanges some information. When you go to the StreetPass Mii Plaza on the system, you'll visit a pleasant little virtual park where your Mii avatar meets the Miis of all the people you interacted with and collects their Miis and very basic little exchanged profile cards with things like their name, the number of times you've connected with them, where they're from, and the last piece of software or game they played. Also, if you've played any games in common, you'll exchange certain data in those. For example, if you've both played Nintendogs + Cats, when out walking your dog or cat in your virtual neighborhood, you'll pass the Miis of people you've StreetPass connected with walking one of their pets every so often, adding more life to your little virtual world. In Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition, you'll fight passive battles against other game owners with action figures that you collect when fighting these passive battles, so you need to connect with all the people you can on StreetPass to collect as many figurines as you can. Samurai Warriors Chronicles seems to have some kind of passive local warfare waged between 3DS owners upon connecting with other game owners. And Dead or Alive: Dimensions, The Sims 3, and others have confirmed their own StreetPass functions. Fantastic social concepts with one drawback - the whole feature is geared toward gamers in Japan, where it's much easier to find and passively connect with other video gamers on the street. People are much more spread out in America, and odds of connecting with someone outside of a specialist store, gaming event, or the streets of a major city are very slim.

As it stands, there's been no online alternative to StreetPass announced yet, when something like that is a definite must in order for western gamers to get the most out of those social features - some manner of exchanging that StreetPass data with friends online, perhaps with some daily limitations as so to make sure you couldn't abuse it and collect all the Super Street Fighter IV figurines in a single day. Similarly, it's kind of absurd to talk about "community building" in the sense of a very fun, fresh feature like this, exchanging data with local friends and strangers, but then giving us a very bare-bones core online setup where we can only see when and if our friends are online, what they're playing at the time, a status message, and IM them. It's a great core for functional online play, but a very lackluster one for the aforementioned "community building" in an online setting.

In the past, when the system was first revealed and Nintendo talked about the system having a much more robust, centralized online system, things like trading ghost data, high scores, achievements, and all sorts of day-to-day new data with friends were bandied about. So far, what we've seen of their new online system is not that - it's hard to say if we'll see any ghost data exchange until Mario Kart 3DS comes out (Either this fall or next year, there's no set release locked in yet), there's in-game achievement systems in some games like Super Street Fighter IV, and no real content trading in online multiplayer confirmed yet for any game - but simply an extremely bare-bones centralized friend list. Again, as I've emphasized, functional and nothing to complain about in itself, but beyond that, with what little we know, the online experience looks like it'll still be lacking outside of individual games. Super Street Fighter IV 3DS and Dead or Alive have robust online options, as all 3DS fighters should, and Samurai Warriors Chronicles has cooperative online battles to join into with friends for rewards, but no online features have been confirmed in any first party Nintendo games yet (Though they've been hinted at for Kid Icarus: Uprising), and outside of the friend list, eShop, web browser, and constant connection when a wireless internet connection's available, we haven't seen any other significant online features suggesting the serious investment in a fuller centralized online system that they've been implying for over half a year now.

All that said, we still don't know the full functionality of the 3DS online yet, or what may come in the future. Bill Trinen himself has shown that he's not 100% in the know about all of the 3DS's features, present or future, having had some confusion over whether or not we'd have access to the eShop at launch - it's looking that it won't be preloaded on the system at launch, but there will be a firmware update on launch day to download it immediately then and gain access to the Virtual Console, DSiWare, and 3DSWare games available then. And technically speaking, functionality like downloadable content and patching have been confirmed for the 3DS, so it's fully possible that Nintendo could launch a new, fuller online social network in the vein of Xbox Live, PSN, Steam, and Game Center later this year, patching compatibility with it into all previous games - which would be feasible within the platform's first year of life - with a full stat-tracking and achievement system. As is, the 3DS contains an Activity Log feature, which tracks all of your daily footsteps with the system in-pocket using its pedometer feature, and there's a software log section in that which tracks every game and application you've run on your 3DS and ranks them by total time and total number of play sessions, tracking every use, total time, longest and shortest sessions, average session length, and so on, in an expansion of the Wii's Nintendo Channel's simple time and use number stat-tracking. It seems a little silly to only track these things, though, when with a simple update to the software on the internet and included standard in future hardware shipments, they could add additional functionality to the channel, letting you view pages of actual game-related content with your in-game stats, high scores, achievements, and so forth viewable directly within the system.

Likewise, to match the aforementioned social services on the other platforms, rather than connecting it solely with each system's online shop, Nintendo could expand their online Club Nintendo service - on which users already have registered usernames and accounts that Nintendo could dramatically expand the functionality of - to connect with the system as a whole and develop a new social networking site akin to Microsoft's Live and Sony's PSN with their own approach and unique Nintendo flavor. They've flirted with online social elements before, with the now sadly long dead NintendoWiFi.com from the launch of the DS's online games back in 2005, which allowed you to view which games you'd played online and various stats about online play, and for a while, they had an online gamer card system for Metroid Prime Hunters on the DS, which let you publicly display your stats for the game online. There's nothing like that available for any of their online games or features now, and the only online display features we have at all are photo upload to Facebook on the DSi (Which will presumably come to the 3DS too) and plans for some kind of QR code online display for the 3DS, which would allow you to share out Mii designs online by posting the image of the QR code for people to photograph with the 3DS and generate the Mii from the data encoded in the image. That itself is a really cool function, but definitely not enough to satisfy people. Expanding the Activity Log to track-in game content, trophies and challenges in Mario Kart, medals in Star Fox, progress and treasure collection in Zelda, and other assorted milestones from game to game to share with friends on an expanded Club Nintendo social network viewable through a web browser or directly on the 3DS would be a massive leap forward and would make people happy, getting them hooked on the addictive social metagames that achievement and stat tracking and comparisons have become. And considering that everyone has them now - even Apple, Nintendo's cited chief rival, which doesn't even put out dedicated gaming platforms, has such a system - and Nintendo's begun to open up to the idea, it's hardly a matter of if, but when they finally choose to implement systems like this. And frankly, the sooner they bring a system like this to the 3DS with a firmware update and get to patching compatibility into games released prior to that, the better - they'll only stand to benefit in the long run.

Basically, the 3DS's core online functionality so far is excellent, but missing the bells and whistles today's gamer demands and literally every competitor already has. Nintendo needs to get cracking on implementing their own take on these features, but ideally finding a way to do them one better with their own trademark warm, pleasant Nintendo style. Perhaps some kind of virtual space Mii world to explore and build with friends while showing off achievements, continuing to use Miis as the primary user avatar on Nintendo systems (As it's clear that we will be setting our personal Mii as the system's owner for a variety of functions in the 3DS.), akin to the warm world seen in Wii Sports Resort's Wuhu Island, the Mii neighborhood and city with its changing seasons in Personal Trainer: Walking on the DS, and the pleasant, cozy virtual life-esque apartment in the Wii's Wii no Ma channel that sadly has yet to make it across the pond for western Wii owners. The possibilities are limitless, and I'm sure Nintendo could find a way to completely outdo the others' online social systems, getting into them last, but doing them best - and completely free, where Microsoft charges monthly fees and Sony's openly moving toward that - it's just a matter of Nintendo finally stepping things up more fully after all their talk and giving us an ambitious means of doing all that aforementioned "community building" online. It's only a matter of time, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we'll see a huge leap forward into that from them sooner than later - far as I'm concerned, that's pretty much all they're lacking now. I'm fine with using dedicated friend codes for each individual game system so long as we could link them to our Club Nintendo profile for achievements, stat tracking, and social networking, and have at least some kind of recurring username in that, each system basically having its own individual phone number.

Finally getting to the Sony front, the PSP2's online details aren't all confirmed either. It will connect to users' PSN accounts and use the same trophy system, that much is confirmed. 3G support for online has also been confirmed but this may entail regular fees to go online with the system too, and it hasn't been confirmed if it'll have any free online play, or if they'll be going fully pay online like Xbox Live, considering that they've been gradually reducing the free online content and focus on the PS3 to try to push users toward paid PSN Plus accounts. It's hard to say if the PSP2's online will be better than the 3DS's overall from what we know about both platforms at this point, but in the least, it has a dedicated profile to connect to and an achievement system, and the 3DS doesn't have those yet, at least, giving it a potential slight advantage on that front.

Additional Features

Whew. Time for some shorter-form talk. I doubt most of you made it through those previous rambles.

Let's start with the 3DS's additional features. The 3DS gained an analog slider - these days called the 'circle pad' - above the dpad for improved control over movement in 3D games, which is said to be a lot better than the original PSP's problem-prone analog nub. It also has a motion sensor and gyroscopic motion sensor inside, allowing for the use of motion controls in some games, like the augmented reality games, full motion periscope control in Nintendo's new Steel Diver submarine game, bow aiming in Zelda, and more. Where the DSi systems contained a fairly simple digital camera for photography and some basic camera-based games, the 3DS contains two outer and one inner 3D camera for 3D photography, hinted future 3D film recording, augmented reality games that impose game content onto the image of the real world with special cards included (The AR Games themselves come preinstalled on the system.), photo-based Mii generation, and other assorted camera-based gaming and non-gaming functions. The new 3DS stylus is telescoping, so you can adjust its length to your personal comfort. A charging cradle is included to improve the ease of recharging the system further, and it apparently also boosts the wireless signal for faster online content downloads when connected to the internet in SpotPass mode. And then there's the built-in software - you'll be able to suspend to the Home menu when playing games to do a little multitasking, specifically allowing you to use the web browser, the built in gaming notebook, check your received data notifications from StreetPass and SpotPass, and check your friend list and do instant messaging. You'll be able to do all of those normally otherwise, too. Then there's the aforementioned preinstalled Augmented Reality games using the cards that come with the system - only a cool target shooting game has been shown so far, the others are secret as of yet - a fun Face Raiders augmented reality arcade shooter also preinstalled on the system; which generates enemies to shoot at based on your face and images captured of the faces of others around you while you play; the Mii Maker (Which can store up to 100 Miis in its plaza like the Wii and features a bunch of new Mii design features the original Wii Mii Channel lacked.); the aforementioned StreetPass Mii Plaza for local social data viewing; the aforementioned Activity Log; the aforementioned eShop; Nintendo 3DS Sound, which lets you play mp3s and aac files as well as create and share your own audio files and songs and share them with friends (There's some kind of ranking system too, but a lot of these things have yet to be detailed.); the ability to transfer DSiWare from DSis to your 3DS in the future; and there's going to be some kind of 3D video feature in the future, allowing you to view movies on the 3DS as well. All the details of that have yet to be hammered out.

In short, as I said earlier, while the 3DS's additional online features - bells and whistles and so on - need some serious fleshing out for community building and deeper socializing, the 3DS is in no way lacking in the bells and whistles department otherwise. The camera and preinstalled augmented reality games alone will hook a lot of people, no doubt.

On the PSP2, they created their own blatant tag mode knockoff of the 3DS's StreetPass mode (Undoubtedly designed after it was unveiled for the 3DS last June) with no actual integration into anything shown yet (Just as most of the new PSP2 features - most stolen directly from Nintendo - have yet to be demonstrated as actually being used ina nything.). They also took the motion sensing features in addition to the touchscreen, though they haven't been demonstrated yet either. It's using a simple menu system like the 3DS's, but by design the PSP2's user interface looks much more amateurish and far less appealing overall. Sony's always struggled with their user interfaces. The PSP2 also has a built-in GPS (Undoubtedly to compete with iPhone GPS features. I have a hard time seeing this being meaningfully used on the PSP2, though - just being yet another thing inflating the price.); aforementioned 3G, which will likely lead to regular fees for that, jacking the price up even higher; a second analog stick, but this time both analog sticks are full sticks, not nubs, hampering portability; an electronic compass (Not sure how useful this will end up being.); and lastly, they added a microphone, which the DS introduced to portables and the 3DS also has included standard. No actual use for that has been demonstrated yet either. And considering Sony's struggles to demonstrate any grasp of meaningful use of motion control on the PS3 with the Six-Axis controller or Move peripheral, I have to say I'm skeptical that they'll make even half the kind of use Nintendo platforms do of the numerous features they shamelessly copied directly from Nintendo for the PSP2. And it's just kind of embarrassing that they dumped all these additional features like the GPS in there, when most people aren't going to buy or use a PSP2 for that - it's awkward flailing at competition with Apple, which already has the market for this sort of thing down anyway.

Brand/History
It's not hard to figure out what's going to happen in this newly dawning generation of portable hardware, going by the most recent portable and console generations. The original DS was launched to widespread skepticism and insistence that it would be the end of Nintendo in portable gaming after always having dominated it, as the PSP was basically a disc-based Sony attempt at their own Gameboy. Everybody raved about the PSP's graphics and concluded that graphics would determine the generation's victor - as they never have (Note: Gaming 'analysts' and 'journalists' are generally nothing more than paid shills cheerleading for their side of choice. Not people with any kind of perspective on the industry or its history or any real connection to gamers outside of the violently polarized and fanboyism embarrassing subculture that video games have. If I can impart any wisdom to anyone out there interested in video games, it's that you should stay far, far away from the subculture and stick to having fun with your friends.) - and then when the PSP came out, it turned out to have some serious design flaws. Sony responded to criticism of these flaws with, in short, "Shut up, they're features, not flaws. You can't criticize us." After all the skepticism, as major titles - the flood beginning with Nintendogs - began hitting the DS and its online games launched, the system went from doing well, but not blowing the world away to knocking socks off left and right and expanding the market in before unthought of ways with new types of software, creating incredible millions of new gamers. The PSP ultimately went on to fail to gain a meaningful userbase or market presence in the west, most games on the system going ignored or getting pirated to death. Only in Japan - as previously mentioned - did the system find a successful base thanks pretty much entirely to Capcom and Sega's popular cult Monster Hunter and Phantasy Star Portable games, which dont' have as much of a following in the west. The DS, on the other hand, went against all expectations and became the most successful gaming platform of all time.

The Wii was met with similar expectations, since it wasn't a massive graphical powerhouse like the HD consoles Sony and Microsoft put out, and instead banked on lower budgets, broader appeal software - going for both traditional gamers and new gamers with everything from ultra-violent action games to epic adventures and easy pick up and play sports and party games - and general innovation. And like the DS, it was a disruptor, and went on to infuriate Sony and Microsoft's bases by quickly demolishing their consoles in sales and pulling in the mass market that they thought their platforms were entitled to with their primary focus on dark, gritty shooters you mostly play online on clumsier older style controllers less than ideal for even that kind of gameplay.

Over the course of the past console and portable generations, we've watched Nintendo's second meteoric rise, going from merely having a cult following in consoles and dominating the portable market to rising back up in consoles and knocking Sony from first to third place as Sony let their romanticization of their own brandname go to their heads and commit brand suicide with the PSP and PS3, the DS overcoming doubts and ultimately being a disruptive game changer in portables - taking down their fiercest portable competition yet, comparatively - and the Wii going from being a laughingstock in the online subculture to leaving that same crowd in tears as it similarly disrupted traditional console gaming and completely changed the name of the game. Now Sony is desperately flailing at relevance, copying Nintendo in an effort to improve the value of their hardware, and both Sony and Microsoft have put out motion peripherals in the past few months in an attempt to recapture some kind of relevance. Sony's failed and hasn't given their cynical Wii Remote knockoff peripheral much backing. And in the case of Microsoft's Kinect, they've seen some strong opening sales in pumping more money into marketing their Eyetoy knockoff alone than any other advertising anyone has done this generation. That said, they didn't produce something that's going to bring in the mass market - it didn't even disrupt the Wii, it just helped boost Xbox 360 holiday sales, though the Wii still beat it with the help of some strong holiday games in Epic Mickey, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and GoldenEye 007 - and when people refer to it, it's never the Kinect games they're talking about. It's purely about the peripheral's novelty, and like the Eyetoy, its gameplay functionality and long-term novelty are limited - you can only do so much with dancing around in front of a camera, and notably, very, very few of the few games out for Kinect have actually sold well, and few are actually coming in the future.

When you get down to it, Sony committed rather violent brand suicide after the PS2. They largely showed that they didn't get what portable gaming was about with the PSP, and made some indefensibly poor decisions - like pushing the PSPGo in an attempt to get their users off physical media entirely so they could control all the prices directly on their digital online store, kill physical ownership rights entirely, and cut retailers out as well, screwing both the customer and retailer royally, as Sony has a history of openly espousing belief that "download-only" is the future of gaming - and the PS3 is a staggering trainwreck of a system that, like the Xbox 360, has simply been a mammoth financial failure. Sony went from number one to dead last, losing billions of dollars - and all their PS2 and PSP profits - with the PS3, which sent the whole company into a rather unstable place after they pretty much bet the farm on the assumption that their customers would pay anything and that it was the guaranteed market leader. Their followup solution this generation? To make a portable PS3 - basically, trying to put out a fire by using more fire. As for Microsoft, they've never turned a net profit on their Xbox line - their ventures in video game hardware have been nothing but a huge failure from every angle, and they're having a hard time justifying keeping the Xbox line going. The PSP2 shows no sign of Sony getting where they've gone horribly wrong, only that they're desperately trying to cling to Nintendo's coattails in the hopes of remaining relevant. The 3DS, with all of its new features, is similarly disruptive like the Wii and original DS were - Nintendo's continued portable dominance is pretty clearly in the bag already, as Sony's PSP2 revelation's made clear, and I'd bet that the Wii's successor will handily beat whatever the competition serves up, if Sony and Microsoft can even get away with putting out future Playstations and Xboxes after what a disaster this generation has been for them. Neither company has a clue how to reach the mass market, and looking back, Sony's decade of success was in large part a fluke - not something they earned by being an incredible, visionary company in gaming hardware. That's the last thing they've ever been - they were never more than a faceless corporation looking to make money, as they even pretty much outright flaunt with their embarrassingly smug "Kevin Butler" PS3 ads where they try to convince us to buy their systems with an incredibly grating corporate executive character. I'm not so sure their marketing department gets 'funny.' With the third parties flocking to the 3DS, I suspect the Wii's successor will be betting a lot more respect as well.

Portability
Let's face it - one of the most important factors of any portable is its actual portability. This'll be an even shorter discussion.

The 3DS retained its predecessors' simple, elegant, and very functional clamshell design, making it easy for you to close the system in your pocket, keeping it in sleep mode to drastically reduce power consumption, which will help a lot when the wireless switch is on to hunt for other 3DSes to connect with when out in public. Designed as the culmination of all of the original DS and DSi's revisions, it's small and comfortably designed, and with the built-in pedometer function - through which you can earn "Play Coins" to unlock content in games, another very unique Nintendo-innovated feature, designed with the pedometer to get players out and about with their 3DS to look for people to connect with in StreetPass - you've got good reason to enjoy its portability and carry it everywhere. The battery life raised some eyebrows when it was first announced, based on Nintendo's always very conservative battery life estimates for their new portables in recent years, but those have since been cleared up. If you have the 3D effect on its highest setting - which is the most likely to potentially risk eye strain if you use it for more than 30 minutes (Though it goes without saying that you should be taking regular breaks when gaming anyway.) - with the brightness on its highest setting and the wireless search on, you'll get 3-5 hours out of the 3DS's battery before it needs to be recharged. However, by turning the brightness down - to its numerous but still very visible other light settings - using the power-save mode you can turn on, turning down the 3D effect or turning it off, and turning off the wireless if you're traveling and in no position to make use of StreetPass or SpotPass anyway, you should be able to get at least 8 hours if not more out of the system, so the 3DS's very comfortable portability has been ensured by design.

The PSP2, on the other hand, reverted to the design of the original PSP - not a good sign. It's essentially an awkward brick in your hand, now plus the back touchpad and additional analog stick. The original PSP's screen was notoriously easy to damage and break - pretty much by design - and while the PSP2's is undoubtedly sturdier as an OLED touchscreen, the fact that you don't have a clamshell setup like with the 3DS still means that the screen will constantly be rubbing up against the inside of your pants (As will the touchpad), which could potentially cause some long term wear, I'd imagine. Not to mention, the fact that they went for full-on analog sticks instead of the original PSP's nub with the PSP2 also means the sticks will awkwardly jut out in your pocket and make it much, much less comfortable to carry. And it's hard to see anybody making use of the PSP2's StreetPass tag mode knockoff feature - which they haven't detailed much yet anyway - if it's not even comfortable to carry around in your pocket. And considering the insane sheer power of the PSP2 as an essential portable PS3, odds of the battery life being anything less than dire are nil. Like with the original PSP, Sony's demonstrated with the PSP2 that they still have yet to grasp the basic concept of portability - neither battery life, nor the idea of making something you can comfortably carry around in your pocket. I've spent a lot of years poking fun at Sony for their increasing incompetence, but honestly, they're like cartoon characters now - if they can get something wrong, they do these days.

Hardware/Software Price
And now it's time for the clincher, the dealmaker or dealbreaker.

The 3DS is launching at the end of March with a very strong launch window lineup of around 30 games - many of them very good looking - hitting between the launch and E3 in early June. The system itself will retail here in North America for $250 - the same price the Wii went for, and it easily justifies that price with all of its excellent features, built-in content, future promise, and the amazing announced software lineup. The software prices haven't been officially announced yet, but Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has stated they'll be in line with the original DS game's prices, and the confirmed Japan prices already reflect that. So in short, we should be seeing average prices from $30 to $40 and probably not much more. I could see some third parties experimenting with the $50ish mark, but like others who've tried going to $40-50 in the past, like it happened on the PSP, I doubt it would last - the market isn't willing to pay console game prices for portable games. And with the development prices skyrocketing to match the PS3's on the 3DS, I have a feeling we're going to see a mass exodus of smaller name developers in Japan from the PSP to the 3DS in this coming new generation. Here's to hoping I get a shot at an English release of a 3DS Kenka Bancho, or something similar, perhaps a Yakuza from Sega - it's about time they branched out with that franchise, considering that it's not likely making money on the PS3 with those sub-million total sales numbers.

As for the PSP2, there's no prices for anything yet. It's not hard to speculate, however. Sony's made it clear that they've learned absolutely nothing from the incredible trouncing the PSP got from the DS and how insanely poorly the PS3 has done this generation, in trying to counter the 3DS with a portable PS3. I can't imagine what thinking led them to conclude that the console that lost them billions of dollars would suddenly make a hit portable. The lack of critical thought and self-awareness going on at Sony these days is simply staggering - they're like a cartoon version of a bad corporation. That said, with all the features announced for the 3DS on top of its hardware power - and PS3s going for $300-400 these days - the cheapest I can see the PSP2 launching for when it supposedly hits for the holidays later this year (Not much time to prepare new games, considering the massive development cycles PS3 games require for years on end, while the 3DS has a phenomenal library coming in its first year alone that'll be very well established by PSP2 launch.) is around $350. But considering so many of the other features, I could see it more likely being in the $400-500 range. And considering their continued behavior this generation, there's no doubt in my mind that Sony would seriously consider - if not outright go for - that price point. And considering that PS3 games are $60 as a standard, I could see them setting PSP2 games at that too. Considering how incredibly unprofitable the PS3 has been and how much has been lost on it, given everything Sony revealed in these past 24 hours, there's pretty much no way the PSP2 or "NGP" has any shot at making money. I'm just astonished by how far Sony has fallen and how irresponsibly, how insanely poorly the company is run these days. How do people like this get control over this much money? I will never know.

Lastly, let's take a look at some Gamer Reactions.

As usual, you've got the crowd that hates Nintendo on one hand,. They've spent the past 6 months trolling every blog and message board insisting that the 3DS has to be terrible and that the PSP2 - based on a magical image they'd built up of it in their heads - would come along and make their fantasies of the original PSP crushing the DS years ago come true. When the much more underwhelming - to flat-out embarrassingly terrible - reality of the PSP2 was revealed today, they're still sticking with it and insisting at every turn that it'll somehow be a serious competitor when Sony just shrunk down their massively failing current console. Literally the worst thing they could have done. But Sony's mistakes and even outright insults to its audience don't shake their most devoted fanboys, who'd buy anything Sony told them to. But of course, this crowd controls a tremendous part of the gaming media, and thus, we get no lack of very visible scorn for Nintendo at every turn over their well-earned current dominance of both the console and portable sides of the game industry, and this has led to some third parties listening to this crowd and the biased - and typically flat-out paid off for positive buzz - media, getting a very different message from what's actually happening, ignoring their actual customers to focus on angry, Nintendo-hating people online who don't actually buy as many games to begin with, let alone as many types. So we get this constant message that it "doesn't count" that the DS crushed the PSP and that the Wii's a universe ahead of its competition, while Sony and Microsoft both visibly flail at relevance with peripherals like Move and Kinect and Sony shows that they have literally no ideas of their own with the PSP2.

Listening to this crowd has been toxic for the industry, which has spent years trying to ignore the elephant in the room - the fact that development costs ballooned to an unsustainable level on the PS3 and 360 - and now will on the PSP2 - requiring million-plus sales just to break even or turn a profit. A tiny sliver of any gaming console's library pulls that off, while the majority do less, and in the past - and present on Nintendo platforms - still made good money at sub-million sales. There was a healthy market for niche and cult games that Sony and Microsoft have forced off of their platforms as a result of the exploding development costs and increasingly long development cycles, so we find ourselves waiting much longer for games to come out, we get less games overall, and hype dies down after you've seen the same game being talked up at the same game show for multiple years in a row. The PS3 and 360 have been undeniably toxic presences in the industry, but too proud to change courses and refocus on the only profitable platforms being put out and backed anymore - by daring to actually make big effort Wii games and marketing them - the industry's been choosing to continue to poison itself, many companies repeatedly losing millions of dollars on PS3/360 releases, then trashing the Wii instead when a low-effort and marketing-free game still made money, just not millions of sales. They turn and attack Nintendo, and they attack the Wii's audience - and you don't get much worse as a company than flat out attacking the very audience on which their survival is dependent, dumping on the actual mass market that has always driven video games. You don't tell the customer they're wrong - third parties need to accept their own error and shift platforms. But in the least so far, they're obviously showing interest in partially doing that by focusing on the 3DS aggressively, while they're all coming off as very standoffish on the PSP2, and rightly so - the original PSP itself wasn't even particularly good for most developers.

On another hand, we get the video gaming forum's equivalent of the "both sides are equally wrong - the truth always lies in the middle" political school of thought. In other words: "You guys are passionate about one side or the other and I don't care to familiarize myself with the facts or follow any trends, so I'm just going to assume you're both wrong and everything's fine." This particular gamer is often seen these days insisting that Sony is 'fine' - when they visibly are not these days - that the PSP was 'equally successful' as the DS, that its library was 'just as good,' that piracy did 'equal' harm to the PSP and DS, that no matter how many millions to billions of dollars Sony and Microsoft lose on their hardware and third parties lose on games on their systems, 'they're fine,' and never ever in financial trouble (You have to ignore all the open signs of companies sinking deeper and deeper into the red this generation, the issue of many companies propping themselves up by merging together to try to support their continually poor business decisions while reinforcing their utter disconnect from where the gaming mass market is these days - the market they desperately need to stay in business.), and that whatever troubles companies have faced, Sony and Microsoft would never lie to us about how they've been doing, nor would third parties ever intentionally opt not to comment on their HD failures while going out of their way to rail on Wii games that even succeeded. They attempt to rationalize and even intellectualize - in what embarrassing ways gaming can be 'intellectualized' - irrational behavior on the industry's part, particularly in regard toward bias against Nintendo and toward Sony, when no facts or objectivity can back such behavior any longer. This type of gamer tends to be seen defending Sony's forum and blog zealots - like the aforementioned lot - who insist that Sony is always the 'rightful king,' and as the company continues to boast that they're "still number one" in dead last place after losing billions of dollars, believe in what they say, while they try to rationalize how it "doesn't count" that Nintendo has changed gaming again as it has, and how vital to the industry and its future it is that Nintendo return to the top, as the only hardware manufacturer with any real vision for the medium. No matter what, all companies have bottomless pockets, Sony and Microsoft are 'fine,' and all complaints about Nintendo are 'justified,' but all criticism of Sony or Microsoft is ill-founded and uncalled for - those media outlets could certainly never be paid off to shield them! - and that no matter what, Nintendo's always on the verge of falling down, while Sony and Microsoft are always reportedly in the middle of a new meteoric rise to the top that simply isn't happening.

In the shortest of the short - the gaming industry is a very stupid place these days, and the gaming subculture is just as awful and stupid. The PSP2 is looking to be an incredible trainwreck of a system, more in line with the PS3 than the PSP (Which was at least a moderate success with some worthy games, though it had nothing on the DS and a lot of serious problems.), and the 3DS is looking to be something pretty incredible, though Nintendo seriously needs to get more ambitious with their online focus. Also, to say it again - if anyone who's ever remotely interested in gaming checks this post out from the outside, heed my advice and stay far, far away from gaming's subculture. Proud "gamers" are some of the most embarrassing and insufferable people you could ever meet - this also tends to be the case for most subcultures.

Years Like Avalanches

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 19:16:00 +0000

New Year's Day, 2011. The day that in a silent clamor, new words fell across the untrodden internet gravel of Spiral Reverie. For the first time in almost but not quite two months.

Excuses were offered, manly tears left unshed. Minds like fuses were blown, their boxes unplugged and shipped first-class to deep space. The nebulae were unappreciative, as they usually are. And then the aforementioned excuses were packed up into additional crates and fired off into the future - to be included in an incoming jumble of overdue blog posts delayed for various reasons over the time period not quite known and not quite named "The Missing Months."

So yeah, none of the usual holiday season or new year's fanfare here. "A curious silence," you guys undoubtedly thought - when I say "you guys," I mean the theoretical three or four of you who might accidentally stumble across this blog on Google at some indeterminate point in the past and/or future. This past holiday season was probably the first in which you could say I wasn't "feeling it." However much time I spent trying to get into the "holiday spirit," "cheer," and whatnot, I didn't feel like any of it. The whole season felt like a very sudden and rushed week - a busy and somewhat stressful time, pleasant though it otherwise was. A brief little typhoon, but for the most part, I felt like an outside observer, even inside my own body. And now, just like that, the year's over.

It doesn't really feel like a year's passed. I still feel like I just got over being ill in the late spring/early summer a mere few days ago, though it's January. A January starting with a 62-degree high, following lightning striking thrice in December, in snow falling here several times when it usually never does in December. And this year, it even fell on Xmas night, for the first time in over 60 years. Ups and downs. Pleasant, surreal, and at the moment, a warmer day than I'm fond of seeing in January lies ahead. Looking back, it's the aforementioned illness and its aftermath that defined 2010 for me - not exactly the sort of thing you want defining a year. It's as though a car of some kind just plowed through me when I fell ill back in May last year. I struggled with eating comfortably afterward, and I still feel like I'm not eating entirely normally or comfortably like before now either. I began to starve in the earlier half of summer for how I was feeling, and that's not a problem now, and I've grappled on and off with issues of discomfort with leaving the house and traveling in moving vehicles. At least some of this is probably due to ongoing problems with allergies that I'm to blame for anyway, with a lot of cleaning and dusting to do that's needed doing for months. Congestion can be a real killer. But still, I've felt "off" for over half a year now, and that uncomfortable feeling has yet to cease. It's definitely brought out the hypochondriac in me, and it's hardly a positive - the stress brought on from constantly thinking a million different things could be wrong with you.

These feelings acted as a continual source of distraction for me over the latter half of 2010. They distracted me from keeping focused on my writing - which amounted to attempting to juggle a dozen things at once, from writing contest entries to query letters to writing job applications to regular blogging to novel work; when you chase two hares, you will catch neither - and led me to often seek distraction in my hobbies or the internet. Anything to take my mind off my feeling stressed out, off-kilter, and as though there was something wrong with me in terms of health that I couldn't quite pinpoint, which it could very well just be a mere matter of months of crushing congestion taking a heavy toll. Unfortunately, my talent for adapting to discomfort has its limits.

I have other excuses for not posting here recently, but as alluded to in previous paragraphs, you'll see those excuses in the openings to upcoming posts as I work on catching up on my blogging backlog. I still owe you guys several months' monthly stories and half-cogent babbling on some other topics. (How do you feel about sustainable agriculture?) What better time for this blog to resume a somewhat more reliable update schedule than the new year?

Yes, it's horribly contrived - we begin every new year with the empty tradition of pretending we're going to resolve to accomplish something or some things that year. The older we get, the more mockingly we treat the idea as we realize how self-defeating it is - people rarely change, and even more rarely achieve their ambitions. We'd all be internet superstars if it happened for just anybody, and the very notion of drawing notice would lose all its appeal. We'd have to go counter-culture again, rebelling against the accepted and lauded norms before eventually coming full circle and having to find a new way to reject everything we'd achieved and stood for. Kind of like that recent controversial Patton Oswalt article about nerd culture needing to die in Wired that's prompted a collective temper tantrum from the internet's dominant nerd populace.

Still, as much as I dislike the tradition of "New Year's Resolutions," knowing as much as any other adult that they're wishful thinking that I'm no more likely to achieve than anyone else, I feel that same cringingly unoriginal urge to look forward to the new year ahead and think wishfully of the coming days. Let's organize these thoughts into bullet points - everyone loves bullet points!

- Publishing. Over the course of 2010, I only ended up sending out 8 queries total, falling far short of the number I wanted to send out. Out of those 8, only 2 got replies - both of which were rejection. In perspective, getting responses, even just for rejections, from a quarter of the agents queried isn't bad at all. But I'm still nowhere near the aspiring writer norm yet - I haven't hit the double or triple digits in queries sent, and I'll definitely hit the former this year, though it's hard to say in regard to the latter. You haven't really had the full aspiring writer experience until you've been literally buried if not flat out drowned in rejection letters. You have to be so accustomed to "No! GO AWAY!" that a positive response is nothing short of paralyzing.

I'm planning on finally getting another batch of letters out this month, and more in the spring - the real challenge is narrowing down just whom to query. Agent research continues, at any rate. I just need to find some more agents whose interests include the sort of strange literary fiction I produce.

- Finances. I'm only just over four and a half months from entering my late twenties, those last few years spent teetering on the terrifying brink of one's thirties. A time spent trying not to fall into an abyss constructed by a culture terrified of aging gracefully - or aging at all. You've gotta enjoy those shining years of your youth, 'seishun,' as they say in Japan. After all, once you get into your late twenties, early thirties, and beyond, that's when you get caught in the "real world" bear trap.

Get up, go to work, come home, relax briefly, go to sleep, repeat. Make money, spend money, pay rent and utilities, pay for things you don't have the time to enjoy anymore but are fun to think about. Find someone just as stressed out in their trapped, structured existence, bond, blow off some steam by sleeping together, do that a few more times, then make some mistakes like getting married and having kids. Grow older, realize you were never really in love with anything more than the concept, and that you were both afraid of being alone. Get a divorce, try to live vicariously through your kids, watch as the retirement age is raised every so often in the name of punishing the average person for the mistakes of the wealthy and corrupt. Eventually retire, stress out over reduced medical benefits and the inability to afford to enjoy retired life, get cancer, look back on a life spent working just to get by, die full of regrets.

This structure, when laid out and described in this manner, fits millions - if not billions - of lives across the globe. The magnificent insignificance and quietly tragic mundanity of our existence. So many lead this life or some slight variation of it - I'm ridiculous in that I want to avoid much of it. There's no satisfaction in a traditional life for me, just suffocation in an iron house lined with sleepers; some peaceful, some fretful.

I have yet to make a cent on my writing, though I'm staggering toward hopefully securing some freelance work I'd be suited to. Enough in time, ideally, to be able to make enough of a living to get by on my own. Nearly went with a job I was probably a bit overqualified for last autumn, but as the site's launch neared, I got the sense that it would be better to back out. So far, it's looking like I made the correct choice. I won't name said site, however - considering that this could be seen as a bit of a jab - out of both an interest in professionalism and personal respect for those involved with the site. I just need to keep looking for some kind of freelance writing work I'd be well-suited to while I continue to work on getting my first novel published. It would probably be ideal to find a steady paying writing gig for a longer period in the future too, if even possible, considering how hard it is to make a living on published novels - and writing in general - these days. Print and publishing have been dying for years now - it kind of only figures that my skill set is dependent on these fields. On people actually being willing to pay for my writing, and to pay to read it.

- Relocation. Moving didn't happen last year, but it's definitely on the table for this year. I need to get out on my own and 'begin' my life at last. San Francisco's still the primary destination I'm looking at, but things've only gotten more complicated. I need to work on arranging a trip out there for probably a week or so sometime this year - and to arrange it months in advance to minimize costs, as travel's hardly cheap - to get a feel for the place. One of my best friends and I were planning on splitting rent on an apartment when I moved there sometime later this year - he's kind of pushed that aside without warning now in lieu of now planning to get a place with a friend from his grad school instead, so I'm getting more into high-and-dry territory here, with costs of living now significantly increasing again. Lovely. This aspect of my plans for the year just got a lot more complicated, so it'll be interesting to see just what happens.

- Redesign. Still need to work on redesigning Spiral Reverie. Meant to last year, but never got much work done on that front. I still like the shades of gray-themed visual color scheme the blog's always had, but I know that it can be altered to work better overall. And frankly, the blog could stand to be more visually appealing - I'm sure its current look has driven off plenty of potential readers. I'm still just not sure where to begin - I'm disinclined to use the new Blogger template designer, since that's entirely geared toward using others' template designs, color schemes, photography, and other visual elements. Rather than looking like any other number of blogs out there, I want Spiral Reverie to be unique. The problem is, I lack the skill and visual design talent it would take to remake this blog into something more ideal. Still as much of a problem this year as it was last year.

- Novel Numero Dos. I didn't make nearly as much progress on Project Princess as I would have liked last year. I need to find the time to pick up the pace again this year and ideally get most of it finished within the year while balancing more regular blogging again.

- Those Crazy Electronic Thingamajigs. On a leisure note, Nintendo's launching their new 3DS portable in North America in March. A deluge of new information and game media will be coming out starting just a few days from now up through the Japanese launch next month and into the near-spring as the North American launch date nears. It has one of the most exciting game lineups - if not the most exciting - a new platform has ever had announced before launch. So as a video game nerd, it's a damn exciting year for the hobby, considering how the platform practically makes a good case for console obsolescence with all of its features and technical strengths. This is the first new platform launch since Spiral Reverie's birth on the internet four years ago today, so I'll undoubtedly be writing up some more nerdy commentary on it in the comings weeks and months. Look forward to that! (Or beware, depending on your interests as a reader of my blog.)

As of this coming June, it will have been four years since I moved home after finishing college. These years are passing far too quickly, and far too much of my youth seems to be quietly evaporating before my eyes, forming regret-condensation on my windows as the months wheel by and my precious cold months inevitably return to the heat that consumes more of each passing year. I have a lot that I need to get done this year. I've got to get better at juggling - I've got to stop feeling off-kilter and feel healthier again. I've got to get my life on track, my writing out there, before it stalls any further or worse yet derails. With each passing year, I carry only more pressure on my shoulders, only more stress, but there are things I need to do, that I need to accomplish like anyone else. Assuming it isn't a complete disaster, 2011 will be a big year. And I suspect that like the last, it too may tumble by like an avalanche.

Until everything ends, the future is always oncoming. It's hazy and often imperceptible, and never guaranteed to be bright and shiny - neither for individuals nor nations. All anyone can do is grit their teeth and continue marching forward. We have to try not to trip.

Conan First Show Liveblog - Team Coco on TBS!

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 10:26:00 +0000

It's finally here, Team Coco fans, the day we've all been waiting for! After Late Night with Conan O'Brien's strong 16-year run from 1993 to 2009, NBC - now rightly less one Jeff Zucker - pretty much threw Conan under a bus with the tonight show to keep Jay Leno around. Conan's Tonight Show tenure having abruptly concluded back in later January, he only got to host the show for a little over 7 and a half months. Highway robbery.

Of course, they also pushed Conan and his staff to effectively tone down their trademark strangeness that made their Late Night years so amazing. The Jay Leno show poisoned the ratings of everything that followed it - the Tonight Show included - as Leno's audience flat-out refused to accept Conan and many of Conan's fans were undoubtedly less than happy with how much more vanilla the show was than Late Night. Of course, once the controversial second "Late Night War" of sorts began, the Tonight Show writing kicked into high gear without any concern for appeasing the disinterested oldsters and the ratings exploded again as the Team Coco phenomenon was born on the internet. Now Leno's ratings are worse than Conan's were - the base that stopped watching the Tonight Show after Conan took over only held brief interest in the show again after Leno's return before they stopped watching again. Just desserts.

Since the show ended, Conan gave an exasperated interview and went on his Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television tour with Andy Richter and Reggie Watts over the later spring and into the summer. On the tour, classic sketches and characters were rebranded and could potentially all appear on the new show. The Masturbating Bear returned as the Self-Pleasuring Panda and the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever became the Chuck Norris Rural Policeman Handle. And of course, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog showed up too - as he also did on Night of Too Many Stars last month - and since he looks to be owned by Robert Smigel, not NBC, he should be back in true form on Conan. I'd be surprised if he didn't make at least one appearance in this first month, if not possibly this first week.

Over the summer and fall, Team Coco provided some more comedy content for the internet on their site, eventually putting up video promos starring Conan and videos of Conan answering a question a week from fans. All this led up to the Live Coco Cam two and a half weeks ago, 24 hours of Team Coco comedy run by Aaron Bleyaert, interns, and other assorted staff, with appearances by Conan, Andy Richter, LaBamba, Pierre Bernard, and others from the show, along with some cameos including George Lopez and Dog the Bounty Hunter. A week ago tonight, they posted the special 5-minute Show Zero online as well - Conan doing an entire show from a conference room in five minutes, humor all in top form, still with the beard he's often been seen with this year, previously seen as his protest during the 2007-2008 WGA strike (Which I covered quite a bit on this blog back then), the eponymous strikebeard.

We lost Joel Godard in the move from New York to L.A. for The Tonight Show, and now we're losing Max Weinberg, who led both The Max Weinberg 7 during the Late Night years and The Tonight Show Band on the Tonight Show. The band - save for Max - went on tour with Conan as the Legally Prohibited Band, and now they are officially The Basic Cable Band! As expected, they're being led by Jimmy Vivino, who always led the band when Max went on tour with Bruce Springsteen, and James Wormworth - who always filled in for Max when he was on tour - has fully replaced him as the drummer after moving to L.A. and joining the Tonight Show band, only having been a guest member in New York with the Max Weinberg 7. The rest of the band - Jerry Vivino, Richie "LaBamba" Rosenberg, Mark Pender, Scott Healy, and Mike Merritt - are still around, so musically, we'll have more of the same fantastic sound from the house band so vital to both Conan's Late Night and Tonight Show years. And knowing Conan and the writers, after they didn't get much screen time on the Tonight Show, I'm betting we're going to see the band participating in a lot more comedy sketches again like they used to on Late Night.

Over these recent turbulent years for Conan and fans, we've watched Conan now go from living one dream to the next. He'd always aspired to host the Tonight Show, and the terrible leadership at NBC unfortunately cut his time living the dream short. But as mentioned before, there's an upside - he'd always dreamed of his own show, which he completely owns and controls. And now on TBS, he has just that - a spiritual return to what made the Late Night years so amazing. A potential game-changer for TBS and cable TV in general as the era of TiVO/DVRs and TV on the internet has begun to change the television landscape and reduce the power and influence the networks once held. Now, not quite 9 and a half months since the end of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, in roughly 18 hours from my writing this, Conan finally premieres on TBS!

From here on, I'll be liveblogging the big premiere tonight as it happens, starting at 11 PM EST. Til then, enjoy the breakout star of Live Coco Cam, the Dancing Taco!

11 PM - let's go!

(11:00) Last season, on Conan - opening Godfather spoof with NBC getting rid of him, and oh, hey, there's Jon Hamm, in character from Mad Men as Conan looks for a new job and works a variety.

(11:02) Conan working fast food; as a creepy clown; and now Larry King saving him, It's A Wonderful Life style. Two words: "Basic cable." TBS's terms? "Much less." More Tommy Gun death.

(11:03) New opening. Andy announcing! Seth Rogen, Lea Michele, and Jack White. Guest contest winner. And of course, Andy and Jimmy Vivino and the Basic Cable Band. The episode? Baaa Baaa Blackmail. Actual show names. Interesting.

(11:05) The crow goes wild, and - the string dance! Back at last! "I know what you're all thinking - 'Hey, it's the guy from Twitter!'" "Kanye West?"

(11:06) "I named the show 'Conan,' so I'd be harder to replace." "I have dreamed about being a talk show host on basic cable since I was 46." Number one in TBS's main demographic, "People who can't afford HBO." "It's not easy being a talk show host on a network without a lot of money on a channel viewers have a lot of trouble finding. So that's why I left NBC."

(11:08) Conan noting that he went through this big ordeal to avoid going on at midnight, then after Daylight Savings Time ended, now he's basically on at midnight.

(11:09) Conan summing up everything that went on while he was off the air in a single joke - that's a lot of references in one joke. And now there's no barrier between Conan and the audience anymore.

(11:10) The question of whether Conan can use his old characters from his NBC years. A clip of NBC using one of Conan's old characters - a Mega Millions drawing with, THE MASTURBATING BEAR! Though not mentioned by name. And Andy's still bantering with

(11:11) Guest announcements at the end of the monologue. Seth Rogen's promoting The Green Hornet, which hits theaters in January. Then Lea Michele from Glee. And lastly, musical guest Jack White. Plus, the winner of the rigged first guest contest! A strong opening show lineup.

(11:12) And now Conan biting the hand that feeds him, making fun of the internet for saving him. Fantastic, haha. Throwing to the band, and the first commercial break at 11:13!

(11:17) Back with Andy on the couch again, fully Conan's sidekick again as he was largely becoming later into the Tonight Show, and the first of their new bumpers. Tomorrow? Tom Hanks, Jack McBrayer from 30 Rock, and musical guest Soundgarden.

(11:18) Then a look around the new set, the first talk show with a view of the ocean. Conan using a remote control to play with the moving moon over the ocean in the background, including attacking Andy with ti. Amazing. Andy noticed its incredible "lunar wobble." "Just like the real thing!"

(11:19) Conan addressing his highest highs and lowest lows this year. His lowest? The Conan Halloween mask. As Andy put it, "It's kind of an Asian Val Kilmer." They couldn't legally call it a Conan mask, so what is it? An "Ex-Talk Show Host" mask. "What the hell? Why don't you just put a cigarette out in my eye?" "What are you?" "I'm an Ex-Talk Show Host." "Who are you supposed to be?" "Who cares?" As Andy put it - "It's very authentic inside - inside it smells like tears." Andy's jokes are definitely getting dirtier tonight already, too. Nice.

(11:21) A well-wishing video from Ricky Garvais, wishing Conan luck with his new TBS show, uncomfortably. And now additional messages, expressing lament over what happened at TBS - then on to the Food Network, Good Morning Dayton, and satellite radio, which no one has. "He'll be better on radio. He's got the looks."

(11:22) And that's all the opening bits for this first show. Commercial break time again, next up, Seth Rogen!

(11:25) I love how Microsoft goes after people desperately attached to their phones in their commercials, then tries to sell them their Windows phone. (Ow.)

(11:26) Back from commercial! Jimmy Vivino and the Basic Cable Band! And now the fake first guest contest results. The deliberately rigged results are in, and the first guest? Arlene Wagner, the Nutcracker Museum curator, who gave Conan a nutcracker and walked off. "Off into the mountains," as Andy put it.

(11:28) Second guest, time for Seth Rogen, promoting The Green Hornet! "Thank you for having me! I'm so glad everyone more famous is busy now."

(11:29) Noting that since Conan last saw him, Rogen's now engaged to be married, and now Rogen's musing on how much he doesn't care about the wedding preparations - how his girlfriend's always wanted to get married but he never thought about it at all until he asked her. And in no time, the first bleeped cursing of the show, breaking the rules already. Though of course, they can get away with more on TBS than NBC. Seth now comparing getting the engagement ring to someone giving him a truckload of heroin. Then as soon as he got it, he proposed to her in an awkward state of undress in the closet, not every little girl's image of how they want to be proposed to.

(11:32) Now discussing the failure of Prop 19 in California - which would have legalized pot. Seth pointed out that virtually anyone can get a medical marijuana card there, though, and how even he has one. His very specific ailment? "I ain't got no weed on me right now." The lady there? "We actually have just the thing for that!" Then worries that the weed doctor would actually find something wrong with him.

(11:33) The Green Hornet talk. It hits theaters January 14th, 2011. Talking about how Seth Rogen is not really someone you think of when you think of people out there kicking ass. "If Matthew McConaughey looked like this - he'd murder himself. He'd literally kill himself. But for me it's pretty awesome." And Michel Gondry directed! Weird and eccentric. "You kind of think he's a French genius and you think he's gonna take things like this and make art out of it, and instead he puts them on his crotch and pretends it's a penis." My time to note how awesome Michel Gondry is as an aside. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is amazing, and The Science of Sleep is a lot of fun too.

(11:35) Next commercial break. Next up, Lea Michele. Not a two-part interview like many of Conan's Tonight Show ones were.

(11:39) Back from commercial! Lea Michele from Glee now. A good choice to round out the first show lineup. Immediately into talk about the moving moon. She noted that his hair's reaching new heights.

(11:40) From there, into talk about Glee and the fact that Lea's parents didn't know she could sing for a really long time, though Conan had assumed she'd grown up a prodigy after seeing her performing on Glee. She hadn't seriously until her first Broadway audition.

(11:41) Now discussing a recent cast photoshoot in GQ that drew some controversy, the shoot deemed 'too sexy' by some. Conan's come up with a way to make the photos less sexy - inserting a photo of him from high school into each of them. Lea's shocked by how pale he is.

(11:43) The first awkward moment of the show with an odd background noise. "Basic cable." They had a lot of odd technical moments like that on NBC too. Then, another Lea Michele magazine cover story in the past - the October issue of Glamour she'd appeared on poured out all over the highway in L.A. when a truck carrying them got into a wreck and turned over, spilling out magazines everywhere. And this after she'd been drilled repeatedly not to show the cover to anybody.

(11:45) Commercial break. Up next, Jack White!

(11:49) Back from commercial again. The bumpers are all fun - different from the NBC days, more kinetic. Conan now introducing Jack White. He hung out with him in Nashville this past summer and they recorded an album this summer - they're performing a song from it together now. The Basic Cable Band's all in the background supporting them. Ah, it's great to see the gang all back together on TV again. Max Weinberg's loss is even less felt than Joel Godard's since he barely got to do anything in comedy bits on the Tonight Show. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with the rest of the band in sketches. The song itself? Catchy stuff. This is possibly the most elaborate musical performance Conan's ever done on air, too. Fantastic way to end the first show.

(11:52) Last commercial break!

(11:56) And back again! The band's back over at their stands, and now Conan's back at the desk with Jack White. Talking about when they first met, shooting a remote for Late Night at a bowling alley in Detroit in 1999, back before Jack White and The White Stripes were exactly all that well known. And of course, they've worked together a lot since. He produced this album with Conan and the band, and a spoken word album, with a depressed Conan image on its cover.

(11:58) The show's over now. Conan thanked everybody. Ricky Gervais'll be on in January and he has a new special airing December 18th. I wonder if it'll be an HBO one - I'd assume so. His standup's great stuff. End credits, new Conaco logo, Conan getting shot up by Tommy Guns a second time. On to Lopez Tonight, Conan over.

All-in-all, a strong first show. Looking forward to the rest of the week. It's damn nice to have Conan back on TV again. Also really glad to have DVR access now so I can record the Daily Show and Colbert Report and watch those afterward. Whew. Gotta support Team Coco. Great job, everybody!

Midterm Madness: Pragmatic Progress versus Regressive Racket

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:21:00 +0000

Yet another blog post from me. Either I'm on fire or there's been a lot worth actually blogging about - even with shorter posts - within a limited time frame as of late. At any rate, it's Election Day today! Always a worthwhile subject, especially in light of the tense, polarized state of political discourse in this nation pretty much ever since Barack Obama was elected president. After being rejected by the voters for two major elections, the lesson the GOP took from it was not that they were too extreme in their politics - after they'd wreaked havoc on the nation for six years with the Bush administration, and the Democratic Congress for Bush's final two years still didn't check his administration's power and abuses nearly enough - but that they weren't extreme enough.

We made history by electing our first black president back in 2008 - his technically being racially mixed doesn't diminish the momentousness of this achievement, considering the incredible barrier broken: our first president who isn't just another white man. And of course, race has been the big topic ever since his election - not so much the achievement itself as the explosion to new levels of Republicans insisting that American white people are somehow being victimized. Ever since his rise as a presidential candidate in 2008, the discourse has flooded with all kinds of popular fiction about who he is and what he stands for - myths about his ethnic background, religion, and politics like no president has seen before. It's not all racism, but it's not just racism either - ignorance, xenophobia, and the usual overzealousness seen from those living in an alternate reality of their own construction whenever the Republicans aren't completely dominating every branch of government have pervaded and twisted the narrative at every turn for years now.

(Post continued when you hit the title to jump in)

What has all this gotten us? A media as slanted to the right as ever in fear of being accused of "liberalism," all sorts of irrational campaigning based on political issues with no real roots in the current state of things, and a crop of some of the worst and most unqualified candidates ever to grace a ballot here, thanks to the "Tea Party," full of confused and angry old white people being successfully manipulated by the interests of plutocrats. There's quite a few differences between an authentic grassroots movement and a corporate bankrolled one - the far right supports one and opposes the other (Hey there, "Free Speech Zones!"); the media will report on one and ignore the other (What's going on, heavy coverage for even small Tea Party gatherings while ignoring massive progressive rallies and protests?); one is typically in the best interests of the people as a whole while the other's much to the contrary.

Divided as ever at this vital midterm election, the state of our political discourse is weak. The Republicans have spent the past year and nine and a half months sitting in Congress getting paid to obstruct instead of actually legislating or attempting to lead the country in a positive direction. We voted them out of power due to the incredibly poor way they handled the nation, and their response has been to cross their arms and sneer (See: Every Republican reaction shots in every televised presidential address before Congress.), announce that they wanted Obama to fail (As we heard plenty after he took office.), and ultimately played every role they could in furthering that interest. Their concerns have openly not been with serving the American people, but standing in Obama and the Democrats' way in their efforts to govern and begin the daunting cleanup process following the long trainwreck that was the George W. Bush presidency, during which the Republicans essentially ran this country into the ground. (Like most things Bush touched in his life, interestingly.) Even now, they've made talking points of saying that they wouldn't change a thing from what they'd done before - they want to get back into power on a return to the very policies that made a mess of everything in the first place. The fear-mongering has been turned up to 11, but rationally speaking, the biggest threat this country faces right now is a Republican return to power. It'll be a long time before we can handle weathering another Republican regime, considering our current national instability.

But, as Jon Stewart rightly pointed out at Saturday's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, despite what some of the more religiously off-the-rails on the far right seem to hope at times, "these are hard times - not end times." Constantly fighting each other and fighting against our own best interests does none of us anything more than disservice. I'm as guilty as many on the legitimate left (Not the center-right frequently demonized as though they were radical Socialists or Communists calling for a complete restructuring of American society - today's Democratic party.) of moments of vitriolic hyperbole toward the far right that spent eight years asphyxiating this nation and has had more success in continuing to do so than they should have under current leadership so far. I'm writing this post from as rational an angle as I can in the spirit of Stewart and Colbert's rally - to do you, the readers, a service - but being on the left also doesn't mean being spineless and refusing to call out the far right for what they've done to this country; for what they've continued to do to it and propose to do if allowed back in power. Nor am I an advocate for cooperating with those seeking to overturn women's rights, oppress minorities, deny long-fought-for rights to the GBLT community, dismantle government programs that elevate the people's standard of living and improve civil society, and increasingly funnel the American people's tax dollars into the pockets of an extreme wealthy few as we continue to become more destitute as a nation.

In the past not-quite-two-years, we've only just begun to take a few paces forward from where we were before. The change Obama campaigned on was not something he'd ever claimed would - or even could - happen all at once. He even stated that we'd have to make him make the changes we want - that we need to stay politically involved. Many have tried to do so and succeeded, but even more have ultimately failed, simply because they're too busy living their lives to dedicate all their time to activism. And it helps us make no progress when our newsmedia is nearly entirely corporate-owned and slanted sharply to the right as a result. All the while, we see constant calls for the defunding of any government programs accused of a "left-wing bias." (See: Any and all reporting or action outside of the Republicans' far-right echo chamber.) A recent story, of course, being immediate calls for the defunding of NPR after conservative contributor Juan Williams was fired after he made comments on Bill O'Reilly's terrible Fox News show about how he got nervous around Muslims - particularly singling them out as those dressed in traditional Muslim garb and identifying themselves primarily as Muslim. (Naturally prefaced by the usual "Now I'm not a racist..." statement of sorts that people always make before they say something they know is bigoted.) Basically, Williams casually pandered to Fox News' audience - on the network where there's something wrong with you if you don't hate Muslims and equate them all to terrorists, apparently - and made a casually racist statement. (Also naturally ignoring the fact that none of the terrorists we've seen dressed in traditional garb or in any way went out of their way to draw attention to their religion - they made an effort to completely assimilate and come across as inconspicuous, as you'd expect given their intents.) Firing him was the right thing to do, just as it was right for CNN to fire Rick Sanchez after his radio outburst against the Jewish people and the media - but where Juan Williams was just appealing to an audience already full of people comfortable with casual bigotry toward Muslims (The kind of bigotry that isn't healthy and shouldn't be normative in any country), even Sanchez actually had a legitimate point to make in his breakdown, in noting the severe lack of representation of minorities in our newsmedia. Both CNN and NPR made the right choices in firing Williams and Sanchez, there shouldn't be an issue with what happened to either - considering how little integrity we see left in today's journalistic outlets, it's actually kind of impressive that NPR had it in them to drop Williams after that. But of course, as soon as he was fired, Williams signed a lucrative new contract to join the dishonest echo chamber on Fox News, where Rick Sanchez had it in him to acknowledge his error and apologize, as well as to immediately dismiss Fox. Between the two, one came out looking better, and the grandstanding we see on Fox News against one of our only media institutions with any integrity left to speak of over this kind of indefensible casual bigotry speaks volumes.

Obama's been hammering a bit of a clumsy, but nevertheless apt metaphor for months now about this election. That when the Republicans had the keys to the car, they drove it into the ditch. Voters spent the past two major elections returning the Democrats to power - though we've seen no lack of abuse of Congressional rules by the Republicans to wield far more power than they frankly should have at this point - and since we've only just begun to get out of that ditch again, returning the metaphorical keys to the Republicans would be a grave error for the people to make. Especially in a fit of short-sighted, right-wing-manipulated rage that things didn't get better overnight. When Obama said that the Republicans have to "ride in the back" just days ago, Fox News seized on the opportunity to insist Obama was making a racist remark, connecting it back to the Jim Crow Laws, ignoring that it was all a car metaphor that had nothing to do with buses and obviously all about a clear metaphor. Also ignoring the fact that their own RNC chair Michael Steele had enthusiastically announced back at the beginning of August that the Democrats were going "to the back of the bus!" They were perfectly fine with that. The cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy are, frankly, depressingly expected.

The same echo chamber media has spent these past near-two-years parading pundits in front of the camera one after the next who insist that the Obama administration has accomplished "nothing." In reality, the Obama administration has had the most productive first couple of years of any presidential administration since Lyndon B. Johnson, as author Jonathan Alter pointed out on the Daily Show just the other night. They reformed healthcare - not in the most ideal way possible, but close, giving us some absolutely vital improvements. Any attempts to fight that reform or still drop people by the insurance industry only further fuels political efforts and arguments to take those last steps to finally get a nationalized healthcare system going in eventually fully acknowledging that a for-profit healthcare system just doesn't serve the people's best interests. Likewise, we've seen valuable financial sector reform passed, we've been paid back for many - if not nearly all - of the bailouts by now with interest, open progress toward repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, two good choices for new Supreme Court justices (If only we could rid ourselves of the Supreme Court breaking bunch - Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas - who've turned the court dangerously conservative overall.), the founding of a new consumer advocacy agency, and the aversion of a second Great Depression! Economic stimulus has also worked, the economy has begun to grow, and the higher end of things has effectively recovered - the real challenge we face now is job creation, and that's going to only be a major ongoing priority. Not an easy thing to accomplish when so much of corporate America is slated against that these days. Nor has it helped that many of the administration's efforts to get the word out on how much they really have accomplished - even many of the things they've done having been previously proposed by Republicans who now opposed these measures out of pure obstructionist principle and nothing more as that party continues to slide dangerously ever further into the extreme (Anybody who suggests there's "second amendment solutions" to their failure to regain power should not be politically viable. And Nevada's Sharron Angle is only one of those who've hinted at a violent uprising being an acceptable outcome - I can understand not liking Harry Reid, there's a lot about him that disappoints, but Angle makes him look amazing.) - have been muffled by our corporate echo chamber media. It's downright pathetic when we have Democrats openly running on having opposed real progress in this country. And it's no less pathetic that so many have reduced Obama, Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi to boogeymen in their minds. These are not indications of a healthy democracy or an honest, rational discourse - they're symptoms of a much bigger illness that far too many Americans have been infected with.

I could bring in some more examples, but by now, I've made my point.

All of you reading this, get out and vote. Don't allow those co-opted by the increasingly cartoon villainlike Republicans incensed with rage against the "liberals" (Who're the last people responsible for the current messes we face as a nation) hijack the election and turn the clock back even further. Many of the problems we face right now in this nation do not stem from the political left, but from a complete lack of its representation - the current administration is staunchly center-right with a very pragmatic approach to everything. By no means "Socialists," but a good representation of what a more respectable Republican party would look like. The political center these days is well to the left of the Democrats and extremely far to the left of the Republicans - an ideal two-party system would have forward-thinkers and pragmatists from the center left and center right working together and making compromises when necessary to lead the nation as a whole toward a better tomorrow. We have nothing resembling that today, and our deceitful media does everything it can to suppress meaningful, honest debate. Get out and vote for sanity and progress, not a return to the politics that dragged us all down over most of the past decade! Despite the media and Republicans constantly harping on landline phone polls predicting a Tea Party-led GOP landslide, their research methodology is flawed and there's no lack of signs of America's more sane population - the majority, despite the picture painted by most of our media - is going to step up today and do their part to counter fear, anger, and insanity (Which motivates the opposition to get out and vote, just in showing us the unqualified and dangerous individuals the irrational have made politically viable) with a calmer tone.

It may be a long time yet before we can drag the nation back from the edge of the abyss far to the right, but again, as Jon Stewart said, these are, in fact, not "end times." Rather than fighting against one another and voting for those backed by corporations and the interests of America's most wealthy, we should be channeling our dissatisfaction together into something more constructive - into our own best interests, through a rational dialogue. Sooner than we know it, it is possible to get America back to a time when "tea" doesn't mean gatherings of middle aged white people stomping their feet about the black president actually working for them, and on once more to a time when tea is simply nothing more than a relaxing beverage of all varieties for people to sit down together and enjoy. Considering the anger and tension we see from the Tea Party crowd - by no means a new movement in US history, and by no means a positive one - you'd think they could really stand to sit down and actually drink some of that tea instead of just tossing bags into a pot, as many apparently do. You can't have a real discussion when you're angry, and now more than ever, America is sorely due an honest, rational political discourse. Mexicans aren't stealing our jobs, Muslims aren't terrorists, and nobody is living the high life as a "welfare queen." If you want to be angry about government spending, the first places you should direct your dissatisfaction and anger are the Department of Defense and Military-Industrial Complex. Most of what's going on there isn't making us any safer - let alone the troops we so often make a point of showboating about valuing.

What We Pretend to Be

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 18:46:00 +0000

Halloween afternoon. I was going to have two stories up for you today, but I keep trying to push myself to get more up here than I reasonably can in a single twenty-four hour period. I'm delaying the late-September story into early November, after the election - yes, yikes, but it has to be done.

Anyway, defying the norm, here's your October story, in October! Just in time for Halloween. The story's theme, no less! Could it possibly be more of a coincidence? (Yes.)

Hit that jump. It's short, but not quite as goofy as the previous three years' awkward Halloween stories.

What We Pretend to Be

As each October draws to a close, everybody looks forward to the one day each year on which it's considered socially acceptable to strap even more masks to our faces than we usually do. Human beings typically find it too difficult to endure prolonged exposure to the world without the aid of numerous filters to protect themselves, much in the same way that no astronaut's likely to survive a spacewalk without their helmet.

Why is it that we're so afraid to be ourselves around each other? What is it that we fear that sends our honesty packing for the hills? That if we didn't protect ourselves, we'd soon find ourselves at the mercy of others' teeth and claws? Or that we might see ourselves reflected in a similarly unflattering light? We do pride ourselves on thinking that we're higher creatures, but even our pettiest of day-to-day interpersonal conflicts seems to contradict our idealized self-image.

We get up in the morning and force ourselves into our clothes when we'd rather stay in bed - the sheets always feel their softest when leaving them is the last thing you want to do, but you have no choice. We groan into the mirror as we brush our teeth and relish in that no one at work sees us in such a state, unkempt and disassembled. We go about our routines to make ourselves presentable to each other, as so to avoid triggering anybody's predatory instincts, and we form unspoken strategic alliances - there's only so many rungs on the ladder that any of us will climb, so let's at least make sure that guy doesn't get anywhere, if nothing else.

We don't divulge any information that we judge to be too personal. What we dream about at night, what we'd rather be doing with our lives, when we lost our virginity, whether we've been the victim of a crime, whether we've ever contemplated suicide, whether we've ever been angry enough to consider killing another person, whether there's really anything wrong with any of us. Put the mirrors away, keep eye contact fleeting. Never a moment of vulnerability, surround the rawest nerves with a mile of plating, and keep the surveillance camera lenses from getting too dusty.

When Halloween comes, it's time to dress up and tell the world who we are. The cool-headed gunslinger from some fantasy of the old west; the ferocious dinosaur; the flesh-eating zombie; the spooky skeleton; the faceless ghost; the killer robot; the sexy any-occupation-imaginable; the lazy pop culture reference; the dog-lobster; the internet meme; the cute animal of choice - or anything else, really. Nothing is off-limits and everything makes some sort of statement.

The way we want the world to see us is projected through the costumes we choose to wear, just as we attempt to manipulate and construct others' impressions of us through the way we behave around them. We're adaptable, if not outright inconsistent, each and every one of us. We're a hundred different people each day depending on whom we're speaking to or whether we're alone. And we fear the day these constructs disappear and we're all revealed nakedly to one another for who we truly are. Some of us may accept one other, but others would tear into one another without a second thought. If there's such a thing as a biblical apocalypse, I imagine that would be it - the cute squirrel wouldn't be safe from the tyrannosaurus rex, no matter how endearing their mannerisms; the tough cowboy might not even be able to comprehend the audacious dog-lobster; and the sexy everything would have to watch out for nearly every other male with functioning genitalia. Every vulnerability is to be exploited, after all. It's only human nature.

Some have fun putting together haunted houses and making a few bucks scaring the bejeezus out of attendees looking to be spooked. Others transform the outside of their homes to both draw and terrify trick-or-treaters. I'm not that interesting. Sometimes I stay home and watch television. Other times I hit a friend's party and get buzzed. Either way, decorating is too much effort, and I'd rather not see the kids, so I just leave a bowl of candy out on the front porch. You never know who the little angels, devils, goblins, and princesses will grow up to be. The worst thing for them would be to grow up and be me.

Me? I'm that one guy injecting cyanide into the occasional peppermint patty - the one you've always heard rumors about.

You're welcome.

The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear Liveblog

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 16:11:00 +0000

About a month or so again - perhaps a month and a half - Jon Stewart began teasing an upcoming announcement on the Daily Show. Stephen Colbert, after noting demand for a "Restoring Truthiness" rally in response to terrible Fox News pundit Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally (Which was mostly about a fuck-you to the separation of church and state and general GOP pandering, warning people of those scary "others" coming to get Jesus-loving white people who always vote Republican.), began teasing his own counter-announcement, insisting that his announcement would make Jon's seem like nothing.

Eventually, this escalated to the announcement of dueling rallies - Jon's Rally to Restore Sanity and Stephen's March to Keep Fear Alive. They spent weeks hyping them up after setting the October 30th date, just in time for Halloween. Jon got a lot of public notice and media attention, including endorsements from Oprah, buses courtesy of Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post, and even mention by president Barack Obama, who appeared on the Daily Show this past Wednesday during their week of shows in Washington, DC.

He held his own as well, when Jon asked some tough questions, and touted his and the current Democratic congress's strong track record of actually getting things done, including vital healthcare reform, financial reform, and effectively stopping a second Great Depression from happening. All true, and all things the right seeks to constantly discredit Obama and the Democrats for accomplishing. (And when I say "the right," I'm generally just focusing on the GOP here - the Democrats are to the left of them, but they're still very much center-right and corporatist. Problematic unto themselves, but more of a problem to be dealt with if we can shift away from the brink as a nation, considering the insanity we regularly hear espoused by the GOP these days.) We've gotten not quite two years to clean up an eight-year mess that will take decades for this nation to likely ever recover from as fully as possible - and some things, like the numbers of lives lost due to reckless decisions by the previous administration, cannot be recovered - and that isn't nearly enough time to undo that kind of damage.

What we have done these past near-two-years, however, amounts to getting a strong, pragmatic start, taking America's recovery one step at a time. Obama's even committed to bipartisanship in ways both conceptually admirable and unwise in application. Still, the fact that he's been so adamant about that speaks volumes about his belief in the political system - in compromise; in actually working together to get things done instead of stonewalling like the Republicans have been since he took office - regardless of how broken its processes currently are. The Democrats - save for those who've lacked the guts to stand by their record these past twenty-ish months - deserve reelection. The Republicans have spent these months crossing their arms and sitting in congress shaking their heads to everything, even policy ideas they had proposed years ago in the first place! No one right of mind should even consider voting for them on Tuesday - not for what they've spent these years representing. I'll get into that more on Tuesday before I turn into a complete broken record, though - I've got an election post coming up then.

Anyway, after all the attention Jon Stewart got - even getting a rally permit for the National Mall, and tying the rally in to a charity to restore and care for the area - Stephen Colbert went mostly ignored, only really getting an endorsement from Rick Sanchez. (Who had a bad day, snapped, and said some terrible, hateful things - lashing out at Jon among others, not having taken being made fun of routinely for all these years so well - and actually had a point in his rant about how underrepresented minorities are in the newsmedia in the next week, losing his job in public disgrace. Unlike Juan Williams, who just lost his job at NPR the other week for his casual anti-Muslim bigotry, Sanchez had the wisdom not to jump to Fox News and went on to demonstrate that despite the things he said, he recognized how wrong they were and at least showed the world that he's not a completely terrible person at heart.) In the end, he came on the Daily Show and signed onto Jon's rally permit, combining the Rally to Restore Sanity and March to Keep Fear Alive into a single event - the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

All this? A last minute liveblog that I haphazardly decided to do, since the only other one I can think of that I'll be doing in the future will be the upcoming Conan premiere in a little over another week. Worthwhile content. I was going to be asleep before noon - that was the plan - but instead, once the rally started, I just had to stay up and watch it. So here it all is, my liveblog in its entirety - and now, nearing 4 PM, I'm going to take some time to finish up my severely overdue late-September short story before I crash. And tonight, I'm writing a Halloween-themed short story for you guys just in time for the holiday itself for the October monthly short story. This is how backed up I've been on my blog work here - and this is also my dedication to all of you, the silent millions secretly hanging on my every word and dying for the day I finally get an agent and get novels on shelves for you to buy and gleefully hug to your chests in literary anticipation. (PRETEND.)

For those of you following this - if any - as a point of reference, the rally's also streaming live on Comedy Central's website.

Let's get sane. (All times EST)

(12:00) The Roots! Not sure what song they're performing to open with. I'm going to try to get the names of all the songs performed. The National Mall looks pretty packed - a veritable sea of sanity. Wonder if we'll see a total turnout bigger than Beck's insulting Lincoln Memorial "Honor" rally months back. And hey, where there's signs, they're actually spelled correctly. Fancy that!

(12:10) John Legend joins them! Now performing a song with them. One of the songs performed was a cover of Monsters of Folk's "Dear God." Mellow, relaxing way to kick things off. Befitting of the theme.

(12:15) A second song by John Legend and The Roots, "Hard Times."

(12:19) A third song by Legend and The Roots. I believe that was "Little Ghetto Boy" by Donny Hathaway.

(12:25) A fourth song, written back in 1973 by Bill Withers. Legend recalling the circumstances of when it was written, in the midst of the Vietnam War. And now we're still at war. "I Can't Write Left-Handed" is the song. Legend was also the first to get away with an unedited "fuck" on-air, not quite half an hour in. Ah, live television. Gotta love it.

(12:32) Fantastic extended jam as the song moves toward its close.

(12:34) Another song. Really energetic rap this time - "The Seed (2.0)." Not a cover this time, but an original by The Roots.

(12:39) And now, the Mythbusters! Adam Save and Jamie Hyneman. Time for them to do some experiments, starting with The Wave. That crowd is ridiculously massive. Cheers for sanity.

(12:43) Adam suggested that the crowd is about 150,000 large. I can see that - this is an incredible turnout. You can't even see where the crowd ends on the horizon.

(12:48) Now they're doing some sound experiments after all the various Waves they had the crowd do.

(12:52) Now they're going to get the whole crowd to jump to create a groundswell. They brought some seismologists and a seismometer to measure the effects of the jump.

(12:54) The results? Not much seismic activity, but still 100 times more powerful than a minor car crash with their second jump.

(12:55) And now the Mythbusters are going. Fun segment.

(12:56) The official opening and Jon Stewart at last makes his appearance as the host of the part of the rally dedicated to sanity! Starting with the crowd standing for a singing of the national anthem performed by four troops. Those ladies and gents can sing.

(12:59) Jon returns! "ARE YOU READY TO RESTORE SANITY!?"

(1:00) Important things first. No littering - the National Mall is a treasure and presently in disrepair. "Let's leave this place cleaner than we found it!" Asking any landscapers in attendance to help out, get some topiaries up. The most important things for a rally? Jokingly, 'Color and size.' "Over ten million people" in attendance - lampooning Fox News's exaggeration of attendance at Glenn Beck's rally. A perfect demographic sample of the American people? Definitely. If you have too many white people at a rally, it must be racist. If you have too many colored people, they must be asking for basic equal rights - something we are not ready to give.

(1:02) With the help of Aasif Mandvi and Samantha Bee in the crowd, they're counting off the exact size of the crowd so no one can doubt the numbers in attendance.

(1:03) Samantha Bee and Aasif Mandvi interviewing crowd members, counting them off and having them identify themselves demographically. And the young ladies can't get enough of Jon Stewart. (STEW-BEEF!)

(1:04) "Jon! Help!" The voice of Stephen Colbert! Trapped in his fear bunker! Comm link on Jumbotron time. Stephen in a very dark place. His fear bunker was 2000 feet below the stage, encased in solid bedrock. Stephen was shirtless in a cave, mostly afraid that no one showed up to their rally. The crowd cheered to let him know they were there. "Are the men handsome? Are the women beautiful? And do they respond to obvious pandering?"

(1:06) He's coming up! An alarm rings and Stephen Colbert emerges to the Colbert Report theme in a Chilean miner pod emergence spoof - clad in an Eviel Knievel style outfit, the always-classy caped jumpsuit. "Chi! Chi! Le! Le!"

(1:08) "Hello America! Hello multitude on the Washington Mall! Oh! Oh, this feels right!" And, of course, "KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!" "They're reasonable for now, Jon. But soon they'll be a mindless panicked mob once I release the bees!" "RELEASE THE BEES!" Bees coated with peanut butter. Deliberately fabricating fears that don't exist. Raising awareness of potential dangers and then allowing an informed public decide whether to cower in terror or die bravely. Our media, all right.

(1:10) Whispers instead of cheers in favor of restoring sanity. That's a quiet cheer. And a massive chorus of ghostly "WOOOOO!"s to keep fear alive. Stephen declared himself the winner, the rally over, and thanked The Roots.

(1:12) For a more traditional start - not a book burning! - Father Guido Sarducci, here to deliver the rally's benediction. He was on the Colbert Report a few months back, as I recall. Still around, still funny. Cheers from the crowd for each religion. Observation about Judaism and Islam - "You know, they don't eat the same meat, and yet they don't get along. You'd think they could build on that."

(1:17) Shot of the crowd as Sarducci talked religion. Someone dressed up as Beaker from The Muppet Show with a pro-science sign. Fantastic.

(1:19) The benediction wrapped. When Sarducci thanked god for dogs especially, they cut to someone in the audience dressed as Clifford the Big Red Dog, too.

(1:20) And now Stephen Colbert's inaugurating things with "an poem," now dressed in a leather jacket and American flag pants. To read it? Law & Order's Sam Waterston, infamous Law & Order sound effect in tow. "Are You Sure?" by the Reverend Sir Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA.

(1:23) The poem concluded. Lots of memes from our half decade of Colbert Report fun. Jon felt that music could express some emotions difficult for us to express with words. Formerly Cat Stevens, Yusuf Islam, performing "Peace Train!"

(1:26) Stephen Colbert interrupted, much to audience protest. Jon had to step in and apologize. Stephen refuses to get on the Peace Train. He has a better train instead, he says, and the conductor has an important announcement to make. Ozzy Osbourne! "Crazy Train," I believe.

(1:29) Jon interrupted Ozzy, refusing to get on that train - it was going off the rails, after all. Back to Yusuf Islam continuing his song! Not even a full minute before Stephen interrupted and threw back to Ozzy. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups sponsor message banner across the screen - I also endorse this candy. Jon interrupted seconds later, and now both are trying to play their respective songs simultaneously.

(1:31) Now things are ruined! They've got no train! Except! Wait! The Love Train! Thus, a performance they could agree on by The OJs. Rally halfway point passed. Wonderful so far.

(1:36) Performance finished. Jon appeared and announced all these fantastic musical guests again. "Sanity does not mean never having unreasonable moments." And now a look at true stories of unreasonable moments people have had in the public eye in montage. Steven Slater, that flight attendant who had a famous meltdown, and Teresa Giudice of - I believe - that Real Housewives of New Jersey reality show.

(1:39) Now discussing the most important thing about a rally - how it's reported on. Either it was a tremendous success or a horrendous failure staged by a fringe movement. Wyatt Cenac and Jason Jones now covering the rally from both perspectives within the crowd. Wyatt's the optimist, and Jones is the pessimist. Talking to crowd members too. Much shakier camera for Jones. Overhead shots for Cenac to show the huge crowd, while Jones tried to present them as being few in number, nothing more than a disorganized fringe mob. Jones kept trying to rile up a guy in the crowd, and it didn't work.

(1:41) And now giving out medals to individuals who demonstrated rationality and sanity in the face of difficult circumstances. The Medals of Reasonableness all had owls on them.

(1:42) The first medal goes to Venezuelan baseball player Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers, who didn't flip out at an umpire who made a bad call. He accepted the medal and spoke well of the umpire via a taped statement.

(1:44) Stephen interrupts with his own medal: the Stephen Colbert Fear Award. His medals depicted a naked man running with scissors. He awarded it to all the news organizations that barred their reporters from attending Jon and Stephen's rally out of fear that they'd be accused of a liberal bias for covering it. Those organizations? ABC, CBS, the AP, The New York Times, and NPR! With no one in attendance to present the award to, he decided to present it to someone with more courage: a seven-year-old girl. Stephen asked if she was scared to be there, and she said it was fun. Stephen warned her about a cooties epidemic you won't hear about on NPR.

(1:46) The next two performers? Here from Chicago, which means they must have been cursed out by Rahm Emanuel. Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy, performing "You Are Not Alone."

(1:50) Performance complete. Second Medal for Reasonableness time! This one went to Velma Hart for respectfully asking Obama some very tough questions at a CNBC town hall meeting. She came out to accept her medal live. "He gave me his answer, and he's been giving us our answer every day since!" A sane, reasonable, respectful lady. Another good call.

(1:52) Time for the second Feary! (Fearie?) Given to Anderson Cooper's tight black t-shirt, for being with Cooper while he covered a number of scary things over the years.

(1:54) Nobody knows what's next on their program - then it's PK Winsome. An important message from a friend, played by none other than Tim Meadows, of course. Presenting PK Winsome's Commemorative Merchandise Mart, as opposed to his usual deadly pharmaceuticals in his Colbert Report segments. Complete with surplus souvenir mousepads for the movie Antz, as well as "Mice Mice Baby" Vanilla Ice mousepads. He's really desperate to get rid of those mousepads.

(1:57) And now Jon's in an American flag windbreaker. He thanked the crowd for attending and Stephen came out in the same pullover fleece zip-up, as Jon elaborated. Stephen announced that Jon was desecrating it since it matched Stephen's pants. Stephen demanded he take it off. Arguing over who could wear American flag sweaters.

(1:59) And now Stephen and Jon singing about why they love America, dueling over that love with their pullovers. Very awkward start for Stephen as he struggled to find the right pitch. Jon stumbled when he started too - not exactly as rehearsed as their duet on A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All! Of course, that also benefited from not being live. You can only get these awkward moments live. Jabs in there at Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez, too. Wonderful and well-deserved. The chorus is about the country being "the greatest, strongest, country in the world." And even a shoutout to straight men who like Glee. Technically in that demographic myself.

(2:03) Toward the end of their song, they're holding up mics to audience members and getting them to sing where they're from to alter the lyrics in "From ____, to _____" form, eventually crescendoing back to the chorus, deeming no one more American than we. Jeff Tweedy backed them with the acoustic guitar.

(2:05) Jon apologized for our having to hear him sing and said we wouldn't have to again - it worked in rehearsal. Then it was time for the third Medal of Reasonableness. Going to wrestler Mick Foley, who seems like a pretty decent guy too, despite what one might think of pro-wrestlers. For exemplifying reasonableness in everything but his day job, he was given the medal. Foley came out to accept the medal live. "Civility is cool" indeed.

(2:07) And the final fear award went to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who naturally wasn't there to accept it, valuing his privacy more than he does yours. (They've sold a lot of private user data over the years.) Facebook has opened up new forms of fear, too, as Stephen pointed out, since now you could see if your ex found someone cuter - everybody's greatest fear, of course. Stephen accepted the award since Zuckerburg wasn't there and told him to friend him - he was going to post a photo of him wearing the medal on his own Facebook wall. All reminds me that I still need to see The Social Network since that looks legitimately very good. (Plus, these really well-constructed trailers - a rare case of TV spots actually getting my attention for a movie - introduced me to Sigur Ros's Jonsi's music. Wonderful stuff.)

(2:08) Jon gave out one last award, refusing to end their awards with fear. To the "Dude, you have no Koran!" guy from one of the planned controversial Koran burnings back in September- Jacob Isom. Stephen yanked it away and announced "Dude, you have no medal!" Then Isom got his medal and tossed it out into the crowd, walking away wordlessly. I praised that guy on Twitter back in September, and he's still the man. Respect.

(2:10) Another musical guest, performing with Sheryl Crow, Kid Rock. They performed a new song, "Care." T.I. taped a green screen thing for the, since he couldn't be there. He was one of the collaborators behind the song performed. Not the cheeriest song, seemingly about not being able to change the world - the opposite of the message we need to believe in now.

(2:16) And now another song. I'm going to assume this is another new one they're performing here - I can't find a name anywhere. I'm not a fan of either of them, so I'm kind of looking forward to this part being over - I actually like all of the previous musical guests, though I haven't made a habit of listening to any of them with regularity.

(2:21) Done. Whew. And now an important announcement from Stephen Colbert. Our keynote speaker for the afternoon: Jon Stewart.

(2:23) Stephen interrupted Jon's keynote, noting that every point must have a counterpoint. FORMIDABLE OPPONENT! Stephen needed to be empodiumed - though it's not a word - in now challenging Jon to a debate. First Formidable Opponent segment where Stephen's not just debating himself - they never do this segment enough on the Report. Jon's arguing for reason, while Stephen's arguing on the behalf of fear. Where Jon turned to history, Stephen turned to the bible. Jon invoked FDR's infamous quotation, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." As Stephen pointed out, Nixon said, "People respond to fear, not love." That's why Stephen proposed to his wife by hiding the ring inside a rabid badger.

(2:26) Jon called out media fearmongers, while Stephen wanted to know what the new, latest thing to be afraid of was - Jon turned to korbamite (Corbamite?) from the first season of the original Star Trek, all the way down to citing the specific episode referenced.

(2:28) And now Jon's calling out fearmongering against Muslims. Excellent! Truth. Oh, hey, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar! There to represent Muslims - "No matter our religious positions, we're all on the same team." Yes indeed.

(2:31) And in calling out Stephen's bigotry toward robots, an appearance by the one and only R2-D2, "one of the good ones." They even invoked the infamous R2-scream when Jon mentioned that there was a blender backstage with its eye on him.

(2:32) Jon's reasonableness is poisoning Stephen's fear, so he's summoning... FEARZILLA! A big papier-mache Stephen Colbert, throwing to a montage of mainstream media fearmongering. They like to ask "Could it be in your neighborhood?" a lot.

(2:34) Stephen declared himself the winner and high-fived his papier-mache self, but Jon insisted that most of the fears in the montage were overblown and would never come true. Then Stephen threw to media and political hyperbole with violent shots back and forth between the right and left - the right's worse and gets much, much, much more coverage and focus, being allowed to push the narrative as they do, but we've had some embarrassing moments on the left well worth calling out too. (Though compared to the rest of the globe, our "left-wing" and "liberals" here are pretty much sane centrists.) Another montage that demonstrated well - like the one prior - how horribly broken the media and our political discussion are.

(2:36) Stephen declared himself the winner again. Jon admitted the montages were pretty dispiriting. Jon brought out his hotel remote to point out that it's a weapon against the media - something we can use to turn off the TV or change the channel to escape the media. Stephen threw to an Early Show segment (And other morning news show clips) on the dirtiest things in hotel rooms where the horribly disgusting things found on hotel TV remotes were discussed. Stephen declared the Daily Show over and said Jon would be missed, declaring Jon killed.

(2:38) John Oliver is here! In forest green tights as Peter Pan, no less, calling Jon completely dead, telling him to stop talking. And since Jon died and needed the crowd's help, Peter-John appealed to them and told them to clap for Jon. Jon insisted that he appreciated but really didn't need their help since he wasn't dead. John tried to get people to do the Hambone, or the Arsenio - a little jig. Next up was chanting - chanting, "Will this help?!" And the chanting started killing Stephen Colbert, the American joining together to chant as one, burning and melting Stephen and his powerful fear - My preciousssss - sending him to the ground along with his puppet, officially dead. John dragged Stephen off-stage and stagehands took the puppet away.

(2:41) Now Jon was alone on stage. He addressed the incredible musical performances they'd had, and some technical comedy too. And now a moment - however brief - for sincerity, possibly violating that comedian-pundit line. He discussed how we could've looked at today's gathering, and discussed how they wanted to put on the best show possible - our time was valuable, so they didn't want to waste it, and were honored to perform for all of us in that beautiful space, on the National Mall.

(2:44) "What exactly was this?" He can't control what people think it was, he can only state his intentions. It wasn't a rally to ridicule people of faith, activism, the heartland, people of passionate argument, or to belittle the difficult times we live in. "But we live now in hard times, not end times! And we can have animus and not be enemies! But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke." Addressing the broken 24-hour newsmedia, and that while they didn't cause our problems, its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold a magnifying glass up to our problems and illuminate otherwise unseen issues, or they can use it to light ants on fire - they do the latter. "If we amplify everything, we hear nothing." "There are terrorists, racists, Stalinists, and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned!" He went on about our tendency to thoughtlessly throw these labels about, doing a great disservice to the actual horrible people in the world - "just as our inability to distinguish between terrorists and Muslims makes us less safe, not more."

(2:47) "The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we get sicker! And perhaps eczema." "That being said, I feel good. Strangely, calmly good." Because the image of Americans reflected by our media and political processes is a false one - it's essentially a fun house mirror, distorting everything. Every day we hear about how we can't work together to get things done and how we're on the brink of collapse, but it's untrue - "we work together to get things done every damn day!" "The only place we don't is here or on cable TV! But Americans don't live here or on cable TV. Where we live, our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done. Most don't live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals, or conservatives. Americans live their lives as people just a little late for something they have to do - often something they don't want to do, but they do it. Impossible things every day that are only made possible by the little reasonable compromises we all make."

(2:51) Jon looked at images of cars in traffic on camera and described the kinds of people out there in them, all the little things that make us different and all the things that unite us. Every car is filled with "individuals of strong belief and principles they hold dear," often in sharp conflict with one another, but they still have to funnel into little off-turns and navigate the roads together, each compromising constantly and taking their turns as we drive where we need to get to go. And occasionally we see selfish jerks who rush ahead and cut other people off, but those people are rare, scorned, and not hired as an analyst. "Because we know instinctively as a people, that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we always have to work together. And there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn't the promised land - it's just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together."

(2:53) Jon said that our presence was what he wanted at the rally - that was all he'd wanted. "Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. To see you here and the kind of people you are today has restored mine." Uproarious applause and cheering.

(2:54) Tony Bennett is out to sing "America the Beautiful." Fantastic closing.

(2:56) Jon thanked everyone for coming today and thanked Stephen, who came out then too. They thanked everyone on their shows, and all the musicians who came out to share their time with us.

(2:57) And now all the musical artists are out for one final song, along with all the other guests and award winners, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, R2-D2, the seven-year-old girl, and all the correspondents. The musicians then joined together in their final song. Not sure what the song is. I'll try to get that next - "I'll Take You There," I believe. End credits rolled.

(3:00) Over. I'll finish polishing bits of extra info in this liveblog, then it's done and I need to finish a short story here before I sleep. Crazy.

Final thoughts: the right-wing laden media (Which they even called out in many mainstream outlets being afraid to cover the rally and risk being labeled "liberal," pathetic as that witch hunt has always been) will try to label this as a failure to fire up the left to vote on Tuesday and stop the teabaggers from wrecking the nation. And we'll undoubtedly see as much negative slant against Jon, Stephen, and everyone involved here as possible. It probably will fire up a lot of America's youth, especially, though - and I'd bet that most if not all of the people in the crowd and viewers on TV will vote, and the majority of them probably won't be voting Republican. It was all more mellow entertainment mixed with a call for reason and rationality than it was any leftist manifesto, and as great political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow observed on Twitter, a lot of it sounded like a college freshman stoner session. And he's not wrong - the themes were pretty typical to that sort of stereotypical thought. But in their simplicity and appeal, they're not wrong or any less beautiful.

I doubt we're going to be seeing any kind of a return to sanity in the end for all this - things are going to take a horrible turn if the right gets the massive gains they're expecting next week, and if we manage to stop them and keep the country focused in a better direction, the discourse is only going to get shriller and nastier - but for what it all is, and for the sentiment expressed, it was still a good way to spend three hours. Three hours in which we could all sit back, listen to some good music, laugh at some awkward comedy, and join together in just wanting to feel like the world hadn't lost its mind for a little while. And these days more than ever, as stressful and trying as the times are, we need to be able to feel that way. To separate ourselves from the consuming madness; to look about us; to look at each other, even; to clear our heads; and to say to ourselves, "I haven't lost to all this yet."

Now the remaining questions are, what happened to Stephen's "Ghost of Jon" song and the winners of the sanity sign and fear costume contests they were going to show?

TV Season 2010-2011: The Remote is My Only Friend

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:51:00 +0000

Autumn 2010. Vibrant colors explode through the leaves in profusion as the northern hemisphere begins its annual descent into the grave. But what's really important here is that there's new things to watch on that crazy static-laden moving picture box that humans can't get enough of.

Sure, some of us set foot in that strange place some call 'the great outdoors' - or, 'the wilderness' for short - every once in a while. Most of us don't stray from the asphalt. But even now, we have little pocket screens so we can watch our TVs everywhere we go. We're no longer alone anywhere, anytime.

TV is always there for us.

Always.

Anyway, it's time for my annual post where I ramble about what's in the new season and what's coming up in the midseason that I personally deem worth noting or watching. Valuable advice that you all undoubtedly take to heart. Because without TV, what heart have you? Lives are terrifying things.

NBC
Chuck - Mondays @ 8 PM - It's hard to believe it, but we're already up to the fourth season of Chuck. Season one was disrupted back in fall '07 by the WGA strike that I blogged about so much back then. (It all seems very far away now. This blog's turning into a webcodger. Try not to think about that too hard.) We got a second full season following that from fall '08 through spring '09, and after lots of fan campaigning to save the show from cancellation - and more in-show Subway advertisements - a thirteen-episode third season was picked up for the midseason and aired beginning back in January this year, eventually getting an additional six-episode extension. We're somewhere between seasons two and three in terms of what we got for season four - NBC made the right call in dropping Heroes (Which was technically watchable in its fourth season, probably the best season since the first, but still had no plot and didn't deserve to stick around.) and hanging onto Chuck, but they only picked up a thirteen-episode fourth season. Unless it gets an extension similar to season three, this season will be over as soon as early to mid December. And we don't know if this will be the last season or not - it's something Chuck fans have had to ask themselves with every season so far, its future perpetually up in the air due to a consistent lack of impressive ratings. Chuck's a rare case of a quality show that barely anyone's watching actually hanging in there thanks to a devoted cult following. I'm not sure if they have enough plot to keep the show going for a sixth or seventh season - and I doubt it'll make it that far - but if a fifth season happens, I could see that perhaps being the place to wrap up. After thwarting The Ring, facing personal loss, and triumphing at last in love in season three, Chuck's now facing all kinds of relationship issues while searching for his mother - whose abandonment of Chuck and his sister in their childhood just so happened to be due to her being a spy as well, like increasingly most of the show's cast - and confronting the menace of the international arms dealer, Volkoff.

Community - Thursdays @ 8 PM - I have to open by saying that Community was my favorite new show of last season. Sorry, Gleeks - singing teens may be fun, but Community's far better. In many ways, I think of Community as being sort of the spiritual successor to Scrubs in taking over its old time slot and possessing the same kind of energy and predilection for joyfully absurd, smartly written humor that revels in its self-aware silliness. Everybody should be watching this show. Unfortunately, it's currently suffering the old Thursday night NBC "Must See TV" curse where the lead-in opening show on the block gets the least viewers. Scrubs suffered the same thing for a number of years but still managed to hang in there, but even now Community's on the bubble too. Here's hoping they can pull through and get at least a third season - I can't recommend Community enough. It's still as much of a goofy comedy about a community college study group as ever, but it's hard to describe the show in terms that really capture what makes it brilliant - it's a show that has to be experienced. The characters, the cast, the odd and brilliant plots from episode to episode, and the meta humor all make it very unlike any other sitcom on TV right now. The ensemble cast, outside of the more visible Chevy Chase and Ken Jeong, has some of the best comic actors most people probably haven't heard of working today in it.

The Office - Thursdays @ 9 PM - Season seven, Steve Carell's final season. And yes, they are planning on continuing the show without him. Considering the story arcs this season so far and comments by Paul Lieberstein, it looks like Ed Helms's character, Andy Bernard, is going to be shifted further into the spotlight as the effective replacement for Michael Scott as the series' lead. Hard to say whether this means he'll get the managerial job in Scranton or if they'll bring in a new boss character and make the boss less of the show's central focus. Either way, like every other sitcom that's lost its lead, I don't really expect the show to last beyond its eighth season into 2012. This season really should be the final season by all good writing sense, but I suspect it was an NBC decision to keep going without Carell. In the least, an eighth season should be more watchable than most shows' awkward final seasons with the original lead gone, considering that they'll still have Lieberstein, Mindy Kaling, and B.J. Novak around, and they still put out good episodes. So far, season seven's off to a solid start, too. We may be long past the shows' peak in seasons two and three, but it's still very funny and well worth watching. Changes made in the past season, including the Dunder-Mifflin buyout by Saber (Headed by Kathy Bates), the addition of Ellie Kemper to the main cast as the new receptionist, Erin, and bringing Daryl (Craig Robinson) up into the main office from the warehouse have been welcome, as well. There's still freshness left to enjoy, even if some of the older storylines - like Jim and Pam - have pretty much run their course and have nowhere left to go.

Parks and Recreation - Thursdays in January - It's not back on the air yet, obviously. I suspect it'll go back to its previous 8:30 time slot when it returns, bumping 30 Rock back up to the 9:30 slot currently occupied by Outsourced. On Outsourced: I've seen the original movie the show's based on, and it was a pretty cute little indie film that did a good job jabbing at American struggles to adapt to other cultures, while also getting a few lighthearted laughs out of how strange Indian culture can seem to Americans. It's a pretty minor feelgood film that's worth a viewing, but this new sitcom based on it doesn't really live up to what the film accomplished. The writing often feels stunted, like too much or too little from the film is jammed into each episode, while ultimately trying to come off as sort of a much less clever Indian-based take on a The Office-like series. (Yes, it's also appropriate to wince at how nearly half the cast in the opening is white. And the show isn't filmed in India either, naturally.) There is some legitimate talent in the cast - many of the actors in the Indian cast show plenty of good comic timing and a knack for delivery, but you have to feel sorry for them because the material just isn't particularly strong or consistently funny, and all of it is a little too rooted in stereotypes without the balance in character development that made the show work. It's pretty much a doomed venture from the start: white America won't watch a show where most of the cast is Indian, most Americans won't watch a show about outsourcing (While oddly we don't see enough rage at the private sector over outsourcing compared to the irrational anger we constantly see thrown at the government for trying to fix the Bush administration's mess, when if anything, the Obama administration's biggest error is in trying too hard to appease and work with the Republicans.) considering the current job market climate, and most of the time the jokes aren't much more than: "Oh those crazy Indians!" The cast can do better, and hopefully most of them will in time. Anyway, back to Parks and Rec - that'll be back in January after Outsourced inevitably gets the axe, and considering how excellent the second season was, I'm anticipating the third being just as fun. Hopefully it'll do well enough in the ratings to keep off the bubble.

FOX
Glee - Tuesdays @ 8 PM - New day, new time slot. The first half of the first season was a little inconsistent but still largely sharp and entertaining. The second half of the season was fairly so-so, in many ways turning into the very sort of show the first half of the season had been satirizing without a shred of irony. The sharper humor's back, thankfully, in season two so far. But it's not as fresh or good as the first half of season one, and the writing and characters are still as inconsistent as ever. It's already been renewed for a third season - that was picked up with the second - but it's hard to say if Glee will remain worth watching for its entire run. For what it is, it always had promise and it's still pretty entertaining overall, but it doesn't quite live up to the kind of hype it gets and its inconsistency is a definite weakness. Inconsistency and lack of real direction was more or less what killed Heroes - it didn't have much of a core, and while Glee hasn't sunk quite that low, it has some of the same sorts of flaws.

That's just about it for Fox shows for me this season. I'm pretty much done with Seth MacFarlane's shows, and I haven't really been able to bring myself to care about them anymore. Family Guy really started losing the last of what made it funny to me before this past season, and from what I've caught of the current season, I don't feel bad about moving on. American Dad seems to have similarly peaked, and The Cleveland Show felt kind of unnecessary and redundant after everything else. A lot of what they do feels recycled to me now.

Bob's Burgers - Sundays midseason - The one other Fox show I will be checking out this season. Following the brilliant Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, hilarious Home Movies, and the short-lived Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil, Loren Bouchard's finally back with a new show, which is intended to in part replace the now-absent King of the Hill. Soup2Nuts isn't involved, so there won't be a return to the "squigglevision" animation style of his earlier two shows, sadly, but the animation style still looks closer to that overall than Lucy, which was a little jarring in its awkward CGI. I had a difficult time getting into that one, personally. At any rate, it's got an excellent voice cast, including the always-present H. Jon Benjamin - you haven't have a Loren Bouchard show without him - Flight of the Conchords and the Daily Show's Kristen Schaal, and Delocated and fellow Flight of the Conchords cast member Eugene Mirman. Lots of great talent is coming together, which can only mean one thing: the show will get one season and then get axed because it's not another Seth MacFarlane show. Sad. Hopefully it'll live up to the quality of Bouchard's earlier shows - the sort of improvised conversational style of dialogue on those shows made for something truly unique and very funny.

Fringe - Thursdays @ 9 PM - Edited this one into the post late. Completely forgot to mention it before. Started watching the show with family on DVD at the beginning of the year. In the latter half of season 2 now, and at this rate, we'll be caught up to where the show is in season 3 now by sometime in perhaps January. Strong J.J. Abrams show, very much the sort of postmodern successor to The X-Files. Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson are strong leads, and John Noble pretty much steals the show as the mad doctor Walter Bishop. Good supporting cast, too. Show's currently on the bubble ratings-wise, apparently, but hopefully they'll at least manage a fourth season too. After the first season and a half had largely been a fairly self-contained episodic sci-fi crime scene procedural series - which spent a lot of time building up to something very different - the show's now getting into a huge, focused central story arc, moving away from its older narrative approach. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.

FX
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - Thursdays @ 10 PM - Sunny's kinda hurt so far this season. The season opener two-parter had some great ideas, but many of them fizzled and the episodes weren't nearly as funny as they could have been. Nowhere near what you'd expect of the show. Different writers and directors than usual, too, apparently. Third episode was better though it still felt a little phoned in. Fourth was my favorite of the season so far. Fifth wasn't quite as good, but was still enjoyable overall. Last week's sixth was solid. Charlie's creepy Uncle Jack - who really hadn't gotten much dialogue before - and Mac's indestructible ancient childhood dog, Poppins, have had some of the best comedy moments of the season so far, too. Overall, I'm getting the sense that this sixth season is pretty much where Sunny enters its decline, sadly. It's been nowhere near as funny or consistent as previous seasons. It's still funny, and it's still enjoyable, but markedly less than what it used to be. Seasons four and five were mixed but still stronger than this - season three may have been the peak, in retrospect, and while the show's still enjoyable, it still hurts that six feels like as much of a drop off as it does. I'm still going to stick with it, though - it'd have to get far worse than this (And basically stop being funny altogether) to get me to stop watching.

Archer - Thursdays Midseason (I believe) - Caught the first season of Archer on Netflix streaming on my Wii over the summer after a friend had recommended it to me. I caught the original "secret" pilot premiere last fall after an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and was amused, but its time slot conflicted with other shows I watched when the first season fully began back in January. The show's very dark, but it's a riotously funny parody of spy shows and movies - sort of like Chuck, but with less missions and more sort of office and family dysfunctionality-based humor. It's often very dark, but it's one of the funniest shows on TV right now too - currently airing reruns late at night - and season two begins in January. Now that I've got DVR access, I'll be able to catch that as it airs. Stellar voice cast, too, led by the likes of H. Jon Benjamin, Aisha Tyler, Chris Parnell, and Judy Greer.

Louie - Tuesdays Midseason - Watched the first season over the summer. One of the biggest downer sketch comedy shows ever, but Louis C.K.'s edgy as ever in the show. I'm honestly surprised it got picked up for another season, but I'm really glad it did. I'll definitely be watching it when it returns in April 2011, and I recommend checking out late night reruns. FX has it in a block with Archer and - terribly - Two and a Half Men. (Token jab at Charlie Sheen for being worthless. And also at CBS sitcoms in general. All of them.)

HBO
Bored to Death - Sundays - We switched over to a new cable and internet service over the summer, which - as previously mentioned - entailed some fantastically convenient DVR access, and we ultimately ended up becoming HBO subscribers, too. We're not letting our first real premium cable channel subscription go to waste, and over the late summer I caught up on reruns of the first season of Bored to Death. And I have to say, Jonathan Ames's show starring Jason Schwartzman as a struggling novelist turned amateur Craigslist detective named after himself sounds like something I'd come up with. (Though maybe with a slightly different form of humorous narcissism than naming the protagonist after myself.) And between Schwartzman, an amusingly low-key Zach Galifianakis (Who I'm glad to see has really blown up in recent years - now Maria Bamford's genius just needs to get proper recognition for all four of the Comedians of Comedy to finally be comparatively mainstream, Patton Oswalt and Brian Posehn having been well known for some time now.), and a nonchalantly hedonistic Ted Danson, you get a very smart, literate, neurotic comedy series that I can't help but love. Lots of great people in the supporting cast, too, with Juno's Olivia Thirlby, Oliver Platt, Patton Oswalt, and John Hodgman as at least semi-reoccurring faces. Season two's a little over half over now and still going strong. This is a series I'll definitely be adding to my DVD collection.

Eastbound & Down - Sundays - Observe & Report director Jody Hill regularly collaborates with Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green for this, probably HBO's crudest, darkest comedy. I caught up on the first season over the summer, and season two has followed protagonist white trash disgraced former baseball star Kenny fuckin' Powers (Danny McBride) into Mexico after he fled Wilmington, North Carolina (Where the first season took place, and where the show was in fact shot on location, as a friend from there has confirmed.) following learning that a planned comeback in the major leagues had been a lie. Of all the rest of the season one cast, only true gangsta Stevie Janowski has followed him down there, the others now replaced by a new cast of unfortunate people whose lives Kenny naturally does his part to ruin. There's a constant, fantastically dark undercurrent of constant failure and underlying depression in every bit of the humor as usual as Kenny's massive ego wreaks havoc on everyone's lives. Napoleon Dynamite's Efren Ramirez is in the cast this season too, as Kenny's neighbor and friend Catuey. It's nice to see him still getting work in something worth watching, though apparently there's a Napoleon Dynamite animated series - with the original movie's main cast returning to voice their characters - planned for 2011 now. It'll be interesting to see whether or not that ends up being a good idea. At any rate, there's only one episode left of season two, which will air on Halloween. Another definite recommendation.

Boardwalk Empire - Sundays - I haven't watched any of this yet, but I've heard great things. All the episodes so far are sitting on the DVR just waiting for me to set a little time aside for them. Think The Sopranos in prohibition era Atlantic City, with Steve Buscemi as the ultimate gangster. Good premise, lots of acclaim.

Real Time with Bill Maher - Fridays - I've gotten hooked on this as a solid weekly complement to The Daily Show and Colbert Report since its latest season began a few weeks back. People's mileage tends to vary in how well they can stand Maher's personality and mannerisms - there's a bit of a smugness to him, admittedly, that I can understand people having trouble with - but he brings a strong sense of humor to discussions of the latest news stories that's less silly than Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's. At times, he can be an even stronger and tougher interviewer than Jon Stewart too - as Stewart these days has at times attempted to depressingly try to appeal a bit more to the right by making some "See? They do it too!" false equivalencies about the left these days that don't quite work, and at other times he lets some fairly crazy guests get away with more than he should - in being completely unafraid to call out any extreme-right guests in his discussion panel when they're wrong. Worthwhile, intelligent television, and you can generally count on Maher to be rational and right on pretty much every issue - like you generally can Stewart and Colbert.

In Reruns? I caught up on the third season of True Blood not all that long ago. The writing on that show's increasingly cheesy soap opera/near-Heroes-level bad, but I'll probably still stick with it for a while yet. It still does have some entertainment value, and I am among the few who stuck with Heroes to the bitter end. I caught up on Hung season two not too long ago as well - the show sort of reminds me of Showtime's Weeds (Gotta wait for the season of that which is currently airing to hit DVD next spring), but less funny, more depressing, and focused on male prostitution instead of pot. (Though granted, Weeds kind of shifted away from pot to Mexican gangsters in more recent seasons without losing the flow or humor that made previous seasons wonderful.) It's a hard to describe its overall appeal, as I wasn't even completely into it at first, but it's a show that's definitely grown on me. Thomas Jane's a compelling lead (And his cameo in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was wonderful), Jane Adams is so pitiful that you can't help but feel sorry for her, and I've developed a lot of sympathy for Anne Heche's character in the most recent season, too. That's probably the root of my growing enjoyment of it - everyone's in such a pitiful state so much of the time, you can't help but want to see them pull through and get their lives together. It's not for everybody, but I'm looking forward to a third season. If it ends there, I could see three seasons being enough. Otherwise, I'm interested in checking out Summer Heights High, as I've heard interesting things about that short Australian series, as well as The Ricky Gervais Show whenever they start rerunning it, since Ricky Gervais is always hilarious. Flight of the Conchords reruns are always recommended, and we're DVRing the new season of In Treatment now, so I may give that a shot.

Sci-Fi (SyFy)
Caprica - Tuesdays @ 10 PM - Moved from the old Battlestar Galactica Friday at 10 PM timeslot to a comparatively more competitive one. Still, the ratings aren't strong and there's a lot of talk that it might not get a second season. That makes me very sad, and I'm really hoping Sci-Fi will give it a real shot and fans can get the numbers up. It's an excellent, fresh prequel to Ronald Moore and David Eick's BSG reimagining, with a strong cast and consistently intriguing, compelling writing. It has the same kind of magic that BSG did, and made the gutsy move of being a rare science fiction TV series set on its planets' surfaces rather than being another of the usual space operas with battles with aliens and so forth. The story that's here is very well conceived and executed - in many ways even sharper than BSG was at times in its later seasons - but people just aren't watching. And there's already talk and rumors of a separate BSG series - which may not involve Moore, Eick, or their reimagined timeline - following William Adama's time as a fighter pilot in the first Cylon war. That's even more discouraging to hear - they could easily tell that story in a third or fourth season of Caprica, considering that Caprica is essentially the story of the Graystone family - responsible for Cylon development - their tumultuous history with the Adamas, and the development of the Cylon humanoid robot from its earliest prototype to their eventually gaining full awareness and turning on humanity. Caprica is exactly how this prequel story should be told - the last thing we need is to lose this and see a third Galactica continuity created after Moore and Eick did such a stellar job with BSG and Caprica. The show still has my favorite opening of any show on TV right now, too. This is the kind of science fiction television people should be watching.

Adult Swim (Cartoon Network)
Robot Chicken - Sundays - The fifth season premieres on Halloween. I'm not sure how this gets Emmy nominations and The Boondocks somehow doesn't (It's pretty much criminal that South Park won as many as it did and The Boondocks has yet to pick up one.), but it's still a guilty pleasure for me. Pure goofy nerd humor with stop motion action figures. I've been watching since day one back in 2005, and half a decade later, it still amuses me, though I'm not a big fan of the lazy extreme violence jokes here and there. The '70s and '80s nostalgia is appealing and you never know what you're going to get in each episode's grab-bag of sketches. (You can't hate last season's The Dark Crystal embarrassing modern rap parody, Batman/Two-Face hot chocolate sketch, and the nerd's trip to Oz, where he joined up with Liono, Optimus Prime, and The Crow.) A new Star Wars special is coming in December, too.

Delocated - Sundays - Former Late Night with Conan O'Brien writer and performer Jon Glaser was great in the first season of this, his first original TV series. He's been hitting season two out of the park, though. The season'll be over already in about a week and a half or so, sadly, but it's well worth watching. This high concept absurdist witness protection program reality TV parody comedy is one of Adult Swim's best shows, and tons of very funny people are on it basically all the time. One of Adult Swim's few live action shows.

The Venture Bros. - Sundays - The show's a legend unto itself. Basically a sort of adult comedy based in a world like that of the old Jonny Quest cartoons and similar '60s and '70s Hanna-Barbera adventure shows - the creators even call it an homage to Jonny Quest at heart. That right there says why you should be watching. And like Eastbound & Down, the central theme of the writing and humor is failure. Nonstop failure. At all times. One of the best comedy themes. Fantastic voice cast, too. Watch it.

In Reruns? As mentioned before, The Boondocks. Season three aired over the summer and it was the show's strongest, funniest season yet, opening with a satire on Obama's election and inauguration and public reaction, and closing with a parody of 24.

Comedy Central
Ugly Americans - Wednesdays @ 10:30 PM - The latter half of the first season, which premiered back in the spring, is airing now. I still need to catch up on the DVR. Comedy Central's best animated series since Drawn Together, which was an all-around guilty pleasure. South Park hasn't been funny in a very, very long time. Or had anything worth saying to say, either. It's got a strong voice cast and former Simpsons talent behind its conception. A unique, sort of retro comic book feel to its animation style too, worked on by Augenblick Studios, which also works on Adult Swim's Superjail! and animated the "Lying Rhino" segement in The State's The Ten.

TBS
Conan - Mondays-Thursdays @ 11 PM - In less than two weeks, Conan returns! After spending over 13 hours on the 24 hour Live Coco Cam (#LiveCocoCam forever! Token nods to the interns, PAs, writers, LaBamba, Bley, and other assorted staff who made the livecam so fun and addictive to watch.), I'm ready for some Conan goodness. Both Conan and Andy appeared on last week's Night of Too Many Stars autism education benefit on Comedy Central, and Conan auctioned off an opportunity for someone to be the Masturbating Bear, which makes me wonder if he managed to wrest the character from NBC's grasp to bring with him to TBS. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog showed up, too, and I have a feeling that Robert Smigel holds any copyright over NBC, so we'll likely see Triumph back on TBS too. Notably, Joel Godard did the opening announcing for the Night of Too Many Stars benefit, too. While I don't mind Andy announcing, being a longtime Andy Richter fan, I do have to admit I miss Joel and the great, creepy comedy bits they always did with him. Losing both him and Max is a shame, though hopefully we'll see more of the band in sketches to make up for that now.

During the Live Coco Cam, the first week's guests were announced, as well through a pair of puppets during a live puppet show. (Highlights from the Live Coco Cam are up on YouTube.)

Monday 11/8 - Poll Winner, Seth Rogen (The Green Hornet), musical guest Jack White
Tuesday - Tom Hanks (First guest on the second Tonight Show as well, and the originator of Conan's "Coco" nickname), Jack McBrayer (30 Rock), Soundgarden
Wednesday - Jon Hamm (Mad Men), Charlyne Yi, Fistful of Mercy
Thursday - Michael Cera (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World DVD hits that week), Julie Bowen (Modern Family), Canadian comedian Jon Dore

Not a bad lineup at all. There won't be any more Friday shows, so Conan's show schedule will be like Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's - he's up against both of them directly at 11 PM now - as TBS gets gangbusters ratings for their Friday night dinner and a movie feature. So altogether, one less Conan per week, directly up against Jon and Stephen, on basic cable, minus Max now too, but a return to classic style Late Night comedy with Andy in tow and so much more freedom with lots of great people working hard on the new show. I can't wait.

ABC
No Ordinary Family - I've heard promising things about this one and it's been sitting on the DVR, but I haven't watched any of it. Take my recommendation with a grain of salt since I can't say firsthand whether I'm into it or not yet.

Travel Channel
Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations - Mondays @ 10 PM and various other times - Tony Bourdain's adventures are always fun to watch. This year's season's already over, but there's always reruns!

IFC
The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret - Fridays - I haven't started this yet, but I've been DVRing it. Downer comedy starring David Cross in the UK - sort of a 6-episode British-style sitcom format - and also featuring Will Arnett. (This looks better than Arnett's Running Wilde.) Going to give it a shot soon, as the season's already over half over now too, I believe. David Cross usually isn't someone you can go wrong with.

That's pretty much that. Lots of TV shows worth watching and further rotting or otherwise entertaining your lumps of gray matter with. All things considered, everyone needs an escape these days, and the entertainment biz is certainly producing no lack of legitimately worthwhile programming. I'm such a pop culture nerd, I should probably be much more deeply ashamed than I am.

Getting Back the Respect We had When We Were 7

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:51:00 +0000

Oh hey, when I did that Derrick Comedy post back in May, I did say I was looking forward to doing a review post on Mystery Team soon, didn't I? The movie did hit DVD nearly five months ago, after all.

Well, not everything in life works out as planned, and I only just now finally saw the film through Netflix. I've read enough mixed reactions to it online to say that it isn't a film for everyone, but that said, if you're a fan of Derrick Comedy or Upright Citizens Brigade, you need to watch it. Failure to do so would be most regrettable.

Hit the jump for the review.

Growing up in small town Oakdale, Michigan, the Mystery Team - Jason, the master of disguise (Donald Glover); Duncan, boy genius (D.C. Pierson); and Charlie, strongest kid in town (Dominic Dierkes) - made a name for themselves as Encyclopedia Brown-style detectives, solving peewee crime cases for the local kids. Eleven years later, the boys are about to graduate from high school and everyone else has grown up but them.

Realizing how far they'd fallen from their days as respected seven-year-old sleuths, the Mystery Team sees the opportunity to make a name for themselves again when a little girl comes to them with something little out of their league - the mystery of her parents' double homicide. Going on the victims' connection to an ongoing lumber union case and a missing heirloom ring, the boys tumble down the rabbit hole into Oakdale's seedy underbelly where they cross paths with strippers with C-section scars, a heroin-addicted hobo, a violent drug dealer, and more. Their client's older sister, Kelly (Parks and Recreation's always-lovable Aubrey Plaza), is eventually drawn into the shady caper as the mystery begins to unravel, and ends up being the first girl to awaken Jason's stunted affections.

The mystery itself is nothing particularly spectacular, with some fairly predictable cookiecutter twists and turns, but it all works - the film isn't so much about the mystery as the comedy that plays out through these simple characters as they continue their investigation. The film finds its heart both in the Mystery Team's near-single-minded determination to solve the mystery for their client and the emerging theme late in the film of the boys' need to finally grow up and start acting their age - from losing some of their innocence about sex to learning the sheer joy of using the word fuck - with college not far off.

Mystery Team's comedy is almost entirely rooted in the central trio's arrested development, as they react to every situation - however dangerous - with complete naiveté, all the way down to making childish exclamations and remarks where most people their age would instead curse. Their childish innocence continues into any sexual situation, from Charlie awkwardly articulating his attraction to Jason's mother, Jason's parents casually lamenting that their eighteen-year-old son still thought girls were gross, their inability to understand sexual hand gestures, and an amusing brief boner gag following an uncomfortable lapdance scene in a seedy strip club. (Which they infiltrated dressed as high class gentlemen in with top hats and monocles.) Throughout the film, Jason struggles to understand his attraction to Kelly, and only finally gets up the courage to sort-of confess to her at the end after talking to a guy at an office party he infiltrated in disguise (Played by UCB founding member Matt Walsh), whom Jason found to be really sad as a person. And early in the film, the boys rely heavily on accusing their old arch-nemesis - the now-bedridden Old Man McGinty - of guilt in all their cases, to the point of breaking into his house and yelling at him while he lay on his deathbed.

The rest of the supporting cast is rounded out by previous Derrick Comedy collaborators. Current SNL cast member Bobby Moynihan (Who was in "Bro Rape.") plays a local grocery store employee who's obviously horribly depressed, has no friends outside of the Mystery Team, and no real reason to live. His sad state - having worked at that grocery store since he was fifteen and lost pretty much everything else in his life over the years - is key in Jason's character development later in the film. (What little character development there is, anyway - everyone is really two-dimensional at best, but in a way that works well for comedy.) The Office's adorable Ellie Kemper (Previously best known for "Blowjob Girl" with Derrick.) appears throughout the film as Jamie, another teenager caught in arrested development whose sole purpose is to show up and tip off the Mystery Team about possible cases brewing through yelled one liners. ("There's something fishy going on down at the sardine factory! I think it's fish!") There's a particular short cutaway gag with her that ended up being one of the best moments in the film. And comedian Tom Shillue shows up briefly early on as well, though in a straight man role. Derrick Comedy's other two members only make very brief cameos in the film - their producer, Meggie McFadden shows up as a wheelchair bound high school classmate, and director Dan Eckman appears briefly as a guy fucking the bread in the grocery store before running away. (And as an aside, congrats to McFadden and Eckman on their engagement - it was mentioned in the "Who is Wally Cummings?" extra feature comedy sketch on the DVD.)

Mystery Team's plot is basically a simple skeletal framework to layer jokes on, and the jokes in this movie are fairly constant. A few of them fall flat, but most of them at least got a grin out of me, and quite a few actually managed to make me laugh out loud. And it's very rare these days when a film manages to catch me off guard and actually make me laugh, which to me speaks highly of the humor content - the most important part.

Donald Glover, otherwise known as Childish Gambino when producing his own hip-hop, scored the entire film, giving it a sort of childhood high adventure feel, suiting the characters in contrast with the very dark situations they get themselves into throughout the film. Glover's usual hip-hop beats only make a few appearances, standing out most when punctuating the beginning of the end credits. Dan Eckman's direction is competent throughout. The film's flow feels a little bit disjointed at first but smooths out within the first half hour, though the film never loses the feeling that it's basically one big stretched-out comedy sketch. And at heart, that's what it is. Your enjoyment of the film is pretty much determined by whether or not you've liked any of Derrick Comedy's sketches - and if you're into any UCB humor in general, you'll probably enjoy them.

Personally, I got into Derrick Comedy back when I was still in college. It was pretty exciting to me to see comedians my age pulling off good sketch comedy, and for their debut feature film - obvious shoestring budget and all - Mystery Team is a hilarious start. I've enjoyed the group's contributions - and occasional member cameos - on Community, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else they do in the future. Between their work and that of some other sketch groups and young comedians I've seen, I feel I can confidently say that my generation's bringing good things to the comedy world. It's inspiring to me. All the more tempting to try my hand in a comedy screenplay contest in L.A. that has its deadline approaching in about two and a half weeks. I could try putting something shorter together, though I have been kicking around a concept - also characters and dialogue - for an eccentric feature-length comedy movie for a few years now. I'd have to drop a lot of other stuff for the time being to focus primarily on that - and scriptwriting is new to me, so I'd have to take a little time to make sure I got the format and style down - but if I committed myself to it fully, it's possible that I could turn out a feature-length script within a few weeks. I'm confident that the concept is actually funny - I tend to be pretty aware when my work sucks.

(Almost) Conaw Time! (Almost) Time for Conaw!

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 17:24:00 +0000

This is it, fellow Team Coco members. One month from tonight, Conan's new TBS series will debut at long last. (At 11 PM EST, going up against the Daily Show and Colbert Report.)

The other month, Conan finally released a video revealing the new show's name.

And there you have it! Conaw. Er, Conan. Simple and straight to the point.

Andy Richter will be sticking around as Conan's sidekick and presumably still his announcer since they left Joel Godard behind when they left New York.

The long-suspected Max Weinberg 7/Tonight Show Band shakeup has finally been confirmed, too. Max Weinberg has moved on and is working with a new group of musicians now - he didn't replace Kevin Eubanks on Leno (Who's rightfully facing poor ratings now) as many had suspected earlier in the summer. It looks like Jimmy Vivino's going to be the new bandleader with James "Worm" Wormworth fully replacing Max as the drummer. Basically, the usual lineup whenever Max toured with Bruce Springsteen in the past. Having toured with Conan this summer as The Legally Prohibited Band, the band's new name hasn't been announced yet. With any luck, we'll see them used more prominently in comedy sketches again, though, after they barely got to do any comedy during their short Tonight Show run.

Andy Richter confirmed in an interview a few months back that Conan will be returning in spirit to the Late Night days' style of comedy. Back to the surreality and general weirdness that made Late Night with Conan O'Brien a hit, which NBC had made them sharply tone down on the Tonight Show in hopes of drawing the older, more conservative Leno crowd that was never going to watch Conan to begin with. And of course, now that they're going to be on cable, they'll have even less limitations in terms of what they can get away with in their comedy than they did on NBC at 12:35. With just another month to wait, we've got a lot to look forward to.