Second Coming
(with apologies to William Butler Yeats)

The dough-faced anti-Christ
is oozing crocodile tears,
building an army of the lowest of the low.

They wave their grease-stained placards
scrawled with badly misspelt fears,
a new religion with a one-word creed:
just, “No.”

Now the best lack all conviction, while the worst
are shouting fictions on T.V.

And what rough beast slouches across the screen?

But until then, I’d like to once again share this story about Christmas in my house. Here’s hoping your holidays are every bit as wonderful as they can be.

I grew up in a very large family: I’m the youngest of ten kids. Yeah, you read that right. I have five older sisters and four older brothers — an even 5/5 split. To make things even more surreal, there was an eight-year gap between my youngest sister and my youngest brother, so most of my siblings are at least ten years older than me, with the difference in age between me and my oldest brother clocking in at ten days short of an even twenty years. So even in my earliest memories, my siblings had significant others, and very shortly thereafter, kids. (I now have a niece and two nephews who are married. But I’m not a great-uncle, yet.)

In addition to that, my dad’s biological mother died shortly after he was born, and his father got remarried, which made for five separate and distinct branches of the family tree just two generations back, counting the families of my maternal grandmother and grandfather, paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, and paternal step-grandmother. And many of them came from big families. (We’re talking about turn-of-the-century reproduction statistics here, mostly for recent immigrants to the country; this was not at all abnormal.)

Anyway, to sum up: we’re a big family. So the holidays were always a fairly substantial production.

While Thanksgiving and Christmas Day were reserved mainly for our immediate family (that is, the twelve of us plus, later, spouses and kids — I think we were up to forty-two attendees at the last count, including my late parents), there was one event each year that brought out the entire enormous clan: Wigilia.

Wigilia (pronounced vuh-GEE-lee-uh) is a Polish Christmas Eve celebration (Wigilia shares its root with “vigil,” as in waiting for the birth of Christ) that, in its traditional form, is celebrated with very specific foods and forms of preparation. Some of the observances include sprinkling straw under the tablecloths to signify the odd cradle choice at the Nativity, and setting an extra place at the table, to signify hospitality to travelers (I presume to make up for a certain Bethlehem innkeeper’s legendary faux pas), especially travelers of a divine nature. Some of the foods include pierogi (a type of savory stuffed pasta, similar to ravioli but much, much bigger and much, much more filling), baked apples, and probably some type of vile fermented cabbage that your parents force you to eat even though it quite literally makes you gag, and you tell them so but they think you’re just trying to get out of eating something you don’t like but someday you really will end up throwing up all over the table and then they’ll be sorry!

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes: Wigilia. We didn’t observe all the traditional foods or ceremonies. In our house (or, more specifically, in the sprawling, cavernous basement of our funeral home), Wigilia was about getting every damn distant relation we could find together for a night of entirely too much food, quite a bit of alcohol, Christmas carols, visits from Santa, games, moderately priced gifts, and oplatki.

(A word about oplatki. This is another Polish tradition in which a wafer — or in our case a truckload of wafers — having been blessed in a special Catholic ceremony, is distributed among all the attendees of Wigilia. Each person takes a wafer or wafer piece, and wanders around the room. When they encounter another person, they each break off a piece of the other’s oplatki and exchange a familial greeting appropriate to their relationship. This continues until every person at the gathering has either a.) exchanged oplatki with every other person at the gathering, or b.) run out of oplatki. Do the math on my family and you might assume that the length of this operation could be measured in hours. You would be correct.)

So: A huge space packed with probably a couple hundred relations, all making merry in age-appropriate fashion and stuffing themselves. It was great. As a child, I found this massive influx of people I barely knew just short of miraculous, a feeling only intensified when inevitably, in the middle of the evening, the sound of sleigh bells would herald the approach of Santa, who would take us young ones on his lap, ask if we’d been good, then reach into that giant garbage bag and pull out one — just one — small gift for each child, more than enough to tide us over until the next morning. He’d stay for one more Christmas carol and then ho! ho! ho! his way back up the basement stairs.

Somehow my dad always missed Santa coming by.

Now, Wigilia was a wonderful event in itself, but even more wonderful was the fact that on his way back up the chimney Santa would leave the rest of our gifts under the Christmas tree in the living room, two floors above.

(A word about the Christmas tree: It was magic. You see, every year my parents would put the Christmas tree stand on the floor and fill it with water, whereupon my youngest brother and I would drop in one of the magic Christmas tree seeds my mother kept in the kitchen, at the back of the top shelf to the right of the sink. The next morning, we’d wake to find a full-sized Christmas tree in our living room. It wasn’t until much later we noticed that the magic Christmas tree seeds bore a striking resemblance to whole peppercorns, and that the back steps always seemed to be freshly vacuumed the morning after a planting.)

Anyway, since everyone knows Santa won’t leave gifts if he’s observed, it was strictly forbidden for us to leave the basement under any circumstances during the course of Wigilia. In fact, we’d often leave for midnight mass at St. Josephat’s directly from the basement, thereby prolonging the revelation of the gift count that much longer. And trust me, even the most hyperactive child would struggle to maintain interest in anything other than sleep after a two-hour Christmas production in which everything is said twice: once in English and once in Polish.

But time passed, like it does, and us kids started getting older, like kids do, and one year — I was maybe eight or nine years old, I’d say — I worked up the courage to boldly disobey the prime directive of Wigilia and sneak up to the living room. After Santa had left, I let a reasonable time pass and then padded up the business stairs from the lesser-occupied new section of the basement, inched open the door marked “private” in the main parlor, and crept up the back stairs into the house. Even before I turned the corner I could see the soft, reddish glow coming from down the hall. With my heart climbing higher and higher in my throat, I tiptoed the last few steps into the living room. What I saw there I have not to this day forgotten, and I doubt I ever will.

Let’s go back to the math for a moment: There were twelve people in my immediate family at that point, plus spouses in a number I would have to have been paying better attention to remember. But since I was approaching double digits in age, that meant that many of my older brothers and sisters had already gotten out of college and started out on their own. That meant less mouths my parents had to feed, and less school tuitions they had to pay. And furthermore, the family business was continuing to improve thanks to the passion and caring of my dad and his employees. (Plus, you know what they say about funeral homes: people are just dying to get in. Ah, ha. Ah, ha, hah, ha. Ahem. Sorry.) So understand that this was an unusually good year in the Rybicki household.

Now, our living room was pretty huge. I’d estimate it was maybe fifteen feet deep by maybe forty feet wide. Big enough for our whole family to squeeze in, if that gives you any indication. Even factoring in a generously sized Christmas tree and a couple couches, there was a pretty good amount of free space in this huge room.

But not this night. The room was lit solely by the lights from the Christmas tree, two or three candles on the mantle, and a dying fire in the fireplace. That soft light glinted off of the wrapping paper of presents stacked carefully upon every available patch of floor. There were presents behind the TV. There were presents on top of the five-foot-long record player console thingy (there was a time when both TVs and stereos were furniture). There were presents on the coffee table, behind the couch, and damned if I don’t remember there being presents under my dad’s chair. There were presents leaning against the walls all the way around the room, I swear. It was ridiculous. It was magical. It was the manifestation of childhood holiday fantasies, the Platonic ideal of Christmasness encountered at just the right age for it to make an indelible impression.

And as I stood there, with the hi-fi murmuring carols softly in the corner, the golden light reflecting a thousand thousand times off of glitter and tinsel and ribbons, I wanted to cry. Sure, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing, I wanted to laugh, I wanted to tear open presents and roll around in a pile of wrapping paper. Certainly. But I think most of all I wanted to cry. To this day I don’t know why; I would have thought I would have been too young to be overcome by complex emotion. But I wonder if some part of me knew that it wouldn’t be long before I outgrew some of that magic, before the simple wonder of the holiday started to wilt under the withering glare of crass commercialism.

I didn’t do any of the things I wanted to do at that moment. Instead I tiptoed back downstairs, closed the private door behind me, padded back into the basement and jumped into a game of statues with my cousins. Later, we went cross-town to midnight mass. And when we got home, I went to bed. Through all this, though, I was only half-present. A significant portion of my brain was still up in that glowing room, buzzing with anticipation, drugged by holiday atmosphere. From the moment I came back down those stairs, it was all I could do to sit still. I never slept easily as a child, but it must have taken literally hours for me to finally drift off that night.

And what did I get out of that enormous haul the next morning? What did Santa bring to reward my having been good all year (or at least all week)? What early-eighties toy craving was satisfied that day?

I haven’t the faintest idea. Can’t remember for the life of me. And honestly, I think it’s probably better that way. Because in the end, what’s under that wrapping paper doesn’t matter one tiny bit. The magic is what matters, and that will always be there, whether there’s a hundred presents under the tree or none at all.

So: from me to you, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas. Also: Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, and Happy Winter Solstice. Here’s hoping your winter holidays are every bit as magical as they should be. May they be filled with laughter, good food, good music, fine people, cherished memories, and all the pierogi you can shove in your face. Na zdrowie!

See, I love music games. I mean, I really love them. This is in part because I love music in an embarrassingly wide variety of genres, and in part because I’m a musician myself (I sing and play bass, guitar, and drums, in case you didn’t know). So these games sort of hit me right in the sweet spot.

Anyway, I’ve been spending the last few months putting this site together. This is a solo project; I’m doing all the writing, design, coding, PR, administration… Suddenly I’m very tired. Where was I? Oh yes: This site is all me. But I’m also hoping it’ll be useful to other fans of music games, who can keep up with the latest news and releases, and find lots of new music in The Vault.

So there it is, my Big Secret Project: Plastic Axe — Music games for music fans. Go have yourself a look around, and let me know what you think in the comments (over there rather than here, please).

Ahem, sorry. Anyway, the reason I called you here today is to let you know that Mac|Life has posted a how-to I put together many months ago, which aims to provide tips for home recording with GarageBand. You Mac owners may enjoy it — and for anyone on Windows machines, I tried to make these tips as general as possible, so many of them can be applied to any recording situation.

So I hope you enjoy them.

Steve Taylor writes to ask: “What PS2 or PS3 game would you recommend for those of us who LOVE Ratchet & Clank? I don’t know of anything like it.”

Well, let’s assume you own all the Insomniac-developed Ratchet games. (No? Here are Amazon links to Ratchet 1, 2, 3, Deadlocked, and Ratchet Future 1 and 2.) My next recommendation would be the Jak and Daxter series. The first is my favorite by far, followed by the third, then the second. There’s also a pretty solid racing game.

Also within the same basic genre (and most certainly within the same level of quality) is the Sly Cooper Series.

Beyond these, the Big Three of PlayStation platformers, you may enjoy Psychonauts and Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil. Aaaand that’s where my recommendation engine stalls out, because I honestly can’t think of any other really good games that are remotely similar.

Anyone else have any suggestions?

This is just to say that Green Pixels recently put up a couple more reviews of mine, for Guitar Hero Smash Hits and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 (the Wii version, with the fancy-schmancy new Wii MotionPlus pack-in). They’re both good! Go find out why.

Thou shalt post pictures of thy cats.

Clearly this is a profoundly impactful omission, which must be rectified immediately. And so, I give you: Fiona.

Now don’t we all feel better? Oh, fine, here’s one more to ensure that balance in the universe is maintained.

You’re welcome.

OK, I’ll give you a hint: It has something to do with plastic. And that’s all you’re getting.

Anyway, please bear with the lack of updates here for a little while longer, OK?

[Update: Fixed link to reflect where the stories are actually posting. Come leave a comment!]

So head on over to Liliputing for early impressions of my brand-spankin’-new Acer Aspire One D250. And I should have a full review up sometime the week after E3.

So please forgive me if this place goes dark for a bit. I expect to be back in the regular swing of things by mid-June.

Well, as regular as it gets around here.

One: The “random facts” interview theme is something I’d been wanting to pitch to some outlet for awhile but hadn’t gotten around to yet, and now it’d look like I’m ganking their idea. Jerks.

And two: Jaffe relates this little vignette that would make such an awesome premise for a story that it makes me angry I didn’t think of it:

I once called my childhood phone number — about five years ago — just to see what would happen. The phone picked up — no one said hello — and on the other end I heard two little kids playing and calling each other Philip (my brother’s name) and David (me, duh). Did I call the past? I still wonder. And no, you can’t take the idea and use it for a movie or book. It’s mine! Mine I tell you!

Isn’t that great? Check out the whole article, it’s a fun read.

People often ask me for recommendations for things like games and books and music and other things we humans need to survive. So a couple weeks back, I spent an afternoon putting together a huge collection of lists of my favorite games, music, movies, books, and even food…and then promptly forgot to mention it here on the main page.

So, hey, lookie there in the left-hand sidebar! It’s a Favorites page! It has all sorts of recommendations of stuff I happen to enjoy a whole lot. I hope you’ll find them useful. If not, feel free to leave a comment on that page. As long as you’re okay with me telling you how wrong you are.

[Photo by Jane Coleman. Used with permission only retroactively, because I'm a dumbass.]

And so it begins, this year’s health scare, and already it’s looking to beat out SARS for the quickest spread of misinformation. It’s on every news site and front page: SWINE FLU! SWINE FLU DISCOVERED IN THE U.S.! SWINE FLU DISCOVERD IN OHIO!

Hmm, I wonder why. Perhaps it’s because, like during any other fad, the people who create “report” the news are making decisions based on what will generate the most readership, thereby converting into ad sales, which converts into money in the pockets of the people who make descisions about what news to report.

No, I see no problem with that process, why do you ask?

By way of perspective, some numbers: In Mexico, where this outbreak is thought to have originated, there have been about 1600 reported cases thought to be swine flu as of this writing. Of those, about 100 people have died. I do not make light of those deaths. These are people with families and loved ones, and these are genuine tragedies, especially when you start wondering if those deaths could have been prevented with adequate medical care. But that’s a topic for another time.

No, I do not make light of those deaths, and 1 in 16 truly is a frighteningly high mortality rate for a flu. But remember two things: Mexico has more than one hundred million people. So while the chances of dying from swine flu once you’ve caught it seem to be rather high, the chances of the average person dying from it are at this point literally one in a million.

And two, this is in Mexico, where much of the country is rural and/or poor — which means less likely to visit a doctor for what feels like (and for most people, apparently is) little more than a common flu. So the number of people who’ve actually caught it — and fought it, and didn’t even think to contact a pricey or hard-to-reach doctor about it –  is likely to be much, much higher than 1600.

“Butbutbut,” you say, “the WHO called swine flu a ‘a public health emergency of international concern’!” Oooh, sounds scary. Until you look at the WHO website:

A public health emergency of international concern refers to an extraordinary public health event which is determined, under specific procedures:

• to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease; and

• to potentially require a coordinated international response.

Hmm, not so scary.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. It’s important to take reasonable precautions when dealing with a situation like this; y’know, wash your hands and don’t go out if you’re sick, that sorta thing. But it’s also important to keep perspective, and to remember that in our modern, cable-news-driven society, things like this almost always seem much worse than they are.

We’ll be seeing swine flu news everywhere for weeks to come, no doubt. But remember that for awhile we saw Paris Hilton news everywhere, too. The media follows the money, and the money follows the fad, and the fad follows psychology — not reality, at least not necessarily.

So let’s all calm the hell down, OK?

[Thanks to xkcd for inspiring this rant.]

Update: I never thought I’d say this, but thank you, CNN, for providing a bit of perspective. (And thanks to Mike for the link.)

First, a definition: In the article, Arrington says, “Let’s put the law aside for a moment – this post is about doing the right thing.” OK, so the question Arrington is actually asking is, “Is stealing music ethically wrong?” That’s helpful, because it makes the answer particularly easy:

Of course it’s wrong, you fucking idiot.

But Arrington — an erstwhile corporate attorney — disagrees. He spends the whole article setting up a lot of really awesome hoops and jumping through them all to arrive at the conclusion that it isn’t. Here are some of my favorite gems from the article:

“People who are older than say 30 think that downloading music is ethically wrong [because] they remember that music is something that you pay for. … But if you’ve discovered and come to love music in the last decade, I don’t see how you can be expected to know when listening to recorded music is ok, and when it’s wrong.”

Oh, I see: If you can’t figure out if stealing something is wrong, that means it’s OK to steal it.

“Just a couple of years ago anyone listening to free streaming music anywhere on the Internet was violating copyright and subject to being labeled unethical. Today, its no problem.”

Oh, I see: If something is easy to take, that means it’s OK to take it.

“If you live in China, you can download music legally from Google for free.”

Oh, I see: If something is legal in China, that means it’s ethical. Let’s celebrate this revelation: Lead sundaes for everyone!

“Over the last few years the line has blurred to the point where there really isn’t any line any more. We can listen to free, on demand streaming music at MySpace Music and lots of other sites. It’s ok to do it at MySpace, but it’s wrong to do it at Project Playlist, just because the right contracts aren’t in place?”

Um. Yes. Just like it’s OK for my friend to borrow my car when I tell him he can, but not to take it without my permission. Is this concept really so hard to grasp?

Look, you really need to read the whole article. Arrington dances around the issue with lots of insinuations about the recording industry and record labels and all the Big Bad Boring Wolves of the music industry, including one particularly awesome segment where he claims that the labels should be paying him for his stealing of their music. But nowhere in this article — not once — does he mention the people who make the fucking music he’s stealing. There’s a very good reason for that: Once you introduce musicians into the equation, all his carefully balanced hoops fall like festive dominos.

Because musicians are the people who are trying to make a living by creating and selling music. Sure, there are other revenue streams open to musicians: touring, merchandise sales, royalties, etc. But without ownership of their own music, all these things fall apart. If stealing music is OK, why should radio stations have to pay when they play it? Why should ad agencies have to pay to license it? Why should record labels have to pay the artist for the right to put it on a disc and sell it, for fuck’s sake?

Perhaps this shockingly ignorant argument can be better illustrated with a different profession. Let’s say you’re, oh, I dunno, the editor of an awkwardly named technology website. And let’s say one day you decided you wanted to collect all your editorials into a slick e-book, complete with commissioned illustrations and bonus material. Now let’s say you wanted to let people read the material of the entire book for free on your site, but you wanted to charge a buck or two for the deluxe edition, for those who wanted to download it to their Kindles and whatonot.

You’re saying it’s ethically fine for me to pirate a copy of Internet Ramblings of a Fucking Idiot just because some of the material is available for free on your website? And not only that, but you should actually be paying me for the privilege?

No? Because you should have the right to earn a living from your talent, hard work, and clear intelligence? Hmm. I wonder how that’s different from musicians.

Oh, that’s right — it’s not.

Update: OH GOD THE IRONY!

“Rapture porn.”

I’m glad I’m not alone in thinking this way; Ty Burr at the Boston Globe positively nails it. Though his score of 1.5 stars is, I believe, too generous.

I am often disappointed by movies, but I am rarely disgusted, and almost never actually offended. Knowing pulled off a hat trick with its impressively bad writing, acting, and heavy-handed allegory. After that it’s hard to care how technologically impressive a film may be.

Avoid at all costs.

If you’ve been playing along with the OPM home game (that is, our staggeringly awesome podcast — tune in at radiopm.1up.com today! [Edit: :( ]), you know that a few of us here have been bitten by the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion bug. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why this game is so compelling. I mean, sure, it’s enormous, and sure, it’s real purty, but we’ve seen other big, beautiful games that haven’t captivated our interest (and that of millions of other players) like Oblivion has. But I think I figured out what that special something is that keeps people talking about the game: freedom.

Now, “freedom” is a buzzword that’s been thrown around since GTA3 made “sandbox” games the Hip New Thing. But consider what that means in the context of GTA: You can be a bad guy…or you can be a really bad guy. I mean, you can follow along the main story and steal cars and carry out hits and whatnot, or you can do all that plus run down pedestrians and beat grandmothers over the heads with baseball bats. What you can’t do is be a hero. (Well, you can be a goody-goody, law-abiding citizen, but that pretty much entails walking down the sidewalk and looking at architecture. Not exactly the most entertaining experience.)

Of course, that is freedom compared to what you normally find in games, where you’re either a hero or an anti-hero, following a narrow path with few significant choices. But Oblivion offers real freedom: Completing the main story does involve being basically a “good guy,” but if that doesn’t float your boat you can play as a thief or an assassin—and get a game’s worth of play time out of either of those choices. You can be a paragon of virtue of the incarnation of pure evil; the game supports both choices, and everything in between.

Of course, choosing to go down either path has legitimate, logical consequences within the game world. If you decide to play as a villain you will be treated like a villain, forced to tread lightly where honest, law-abiding citizens are concerned.

Morality within a game world is something that’s been tried before; the old Ultima RPGs incorporated the idea heavily, for example. But it’s not something you see too much of these days, and that is, to my mind, a damn shame. As we approach the point of diminishing returns with regard to graphics and size and realism, it’s time for game designers to start turning all that technological prowess toward designing games that have real depth to them, depth that can only be achieved by giving the player legitimate choices within the game world.

When it’s done right, the result is a game that offers a different experience to just about anyone playing. It generates lots of discussion, fierce dedication, and a fervent desire for more games that treat players like adults capable of making significant decisions. This is the final frontier of gaming, the real next generation. Designers, are you up to the challenge?

Four hours later I’m angry, my forehead is red from all the slapping, and I’m completely disgusted. (Also, probably, hungry.) Because either this simple, obvious tool does not exist, or I — with all my intertube experience and Google-fu — cannot find it.

Here’s the latest example: I do a lot of writing for websites, right? But I’m a freelancer, not on staff, which means that most of my writing gets sent to an editor rather than inserted directly into the site’s content management system, or CMS. That means that I have to send over a document file of some type, a document file created in some sort of word-processing apparatus.

And here’s the problem: Every word-processing apparatus I’ve tried is positively horrendous at generating HTML, the code-level backbone of internet writing. Every single one, when you attempt to save a simply formatted text file as HTML, inserts all kinds of crazy formatting information that would be an absolute horror for any editor to have to remove on a regular basis.

This is bad for business.

So I started searching for a very simple tool: A word processor that allows the writer to mark up his or her document with basic formatting — bold, italic, underline, and links — and then allows the document to be saved (or God, at the very least, viewed) in HTML that includes nothing but paragraph breaks; markers for bold, ital, and underline; and links.

I want to be able to type, just as I am doing now with my blogging software’s online content management system, using the near-universal commands of Ctrl-U, Ctrl-I, Ctrl-B, and Ctrl-K — or at the very least buttons on a toolbar — and have those turn out <u>, <i>, <b>, and <a href=”"> tags, and nothing else. And when I add a new paragraph I want to see a </p><p>, dammit!

Can I enter these tags by hand? Sure. But here’s the problem: Right now I’m doing a weekly music-game column for Green Pixels that is almost entirely links. And like most sensible sites, when GP links to a page on another website, they instruct your browser to open a new window. That means that each link needs to say <a href=”http://URL” target=”_blank”>Link Text</a>. You try typing that about fifty times and see if you don’t start looking for a better way.

This is the solution I’m working with right now: I type the big lists of song releases into Microsoft Word, because I like to keep them alphabetical and Word is good at stuff like that. Then I copy the list and paste it without formatting — a key distinction! — into Google Docs. I use Google Docs to turn all those lists into links, one for each artist and one for each song, because Docs includes a simple key-mapping for that and also allows you to automatically add that “target=_blank” attribute to each one. Docs also allows you to view the file in HTML, so I do that, copy it, and paste it back into Word. Because Docs also inserts a bunch of unnecessary crap like titles and ID tags (for some unfathomable reason) on each link, and also uses double line breaks in place of paragraph breaks (for an even less fathomable reason). So I have to do a find-and-replace to remove all that extraneous gibberish that drives editors crazy, and Docs’ find-and-replace is garbage.

I know I’ve probably lost most of you already, but the point is this: My needs are simple, but I have yet to find a tool that meets them. I’ve tried word processors…I’ve tried notepads…I’ve tried desktop-based blogging software…I’ve tried online options. None of them seem to solve a problem that I have got to imagine has been bugging web writers for a decade now.

I asked folks on Twitter for recommendations, and the results were almost comically diverse. Most people seem to either be entering all the formatting tags by hand, or relying on their editors to make traditional word-processing documents web-ready. No two people used the same software.

Clearly there is a need here. But you tell me: Am I asking too much? Or am I just missing that one awesome bit of software that everybody knows about but no one’s bothered to hip me to? I’m getting desperate here, people. Please help me out with your suggestions before I’m forced to teach myself a modern programming language and write my own damn software.

Here’s something I found interesting. The article says, in reference to the market recovering:

Other investors may look to obscure indicators such as the Baltic Dry Index, which tracks the cost of shipping iron ore, grain and other materials. Rising rates can indicate demand for raw materials is increasing, which suggests a strengthening economy.

And here’s what the Baltic Dry Index looks like for the past 12 months:

I’m no economist, but it looks like there’s a pretty noticeable trend over the past couple months. I’m just saying.

If I were to estimate the amount of time I spent in that building…well, let’s do it now. I went to work there every day for almost four years. Call it 7500 normal working hours. Now add an extra 40 to 60 hours a month to account for deadlines, for around 44 months. Yeah, that’s about what I expected: ten thousand hours is a pretty fair estimate. To do that all at once you’d have to work for about 14 months straight. Without stopping to sleep.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining. Some of my fondest memories happened in and around that building. I made some dear friends. I learned some important lessons. I met my wife during this time. I laughed a lot. I ate some really spectacular take-out.

But you stay in any place long enough, you’re gonna get a little crazy.

WELCOME TO THE FUTURE
Last time I implied that the Lombard shenanigans didn’t stop with the move over to Oakbrook, and to a certain extent that’s true. But it’s also true that lots of things changed for the better. For example, I got a new computer. When I started at Ziff I was working on a Macintosh IIsi (OK, technically I was sharing a IIsi with Nelson Taruc), a machine that had already been discontinued for three years when I started using it. It had a blazing twenty-megahertz processor and a staggering one megabyte of RAM.

What it did not have was a CD drive. Or an Ethernet connection. Hey, I’m lucky it did color. So the new machine I got, which if memory serves was a PowerMac 6200, was a pretty big step up.

It was also right around that time — this is late 1998, remember — that we were allowed to use the Internet. This was a big plus because for the last year or so we had only inter-office e-mail — no Internet access whatsoever. And for my first year and a half or so we didn’t even have that. If you had something you needed to disseminate through the group you would print out a memo, walk around the office, and hand-deliver it to everybody.

Remember that this is the company that published PC Magazine, Computer Shopper, and about a bajillion other technology-focused magazines. Have we all meditated on the irony? Good.

Other things improved, too. The new office, having been custom-fitted for our use, boasted a few pretty sweet features. One was a full-time demo room, complete with 50-something-inch TV, surround sound, and tiered seating. Before this, game companies would demo games at whoever’s desk was available.

We got a tricked-out lunch room, with actual tables and chairs, and a refrigerated vending machine that I bought way too many Lunchables and microwave chicken sandwiches from. It had a solarium which led to a brick patio with picnic benches, where Gary Steinman and I would play chess and the smokers would congregate on warm summer deadline evenings.

We got a suite of arcade machines, from a new hybrid Blitz/Showtime machine to a pair of linked Hydro Thunder sit-down cabinets. (I believe I still had the high score on Ship Graveyard when we left that place.) We got a network, so we no longer had to tote SyQuest disks around the office on deadline. And we got swanky new cubes that, probably not coincidentally, could not be moved or otherwise resized.

And then we got an electric skateboard.

ZERO TO DISFIGURED IN HALF A SECOND
This was not the first wheeled transport we’d employed within the building. Earlier, as part of some questionable game tie-in, some company had sent over a bunch of Razor scooters. Since the office sprawled across a single level, these were actually legitimately useful as quick transportation; you could scoot over to the print area to grab proofs and then scoot back to your desk in record time. And if we occasionally built ramps to jump over people lying prone on the ground, or gathered up half a dozen scooter pilots to race laps around the building, well, who could blame us? What else did you expect us to do on deadline? Make magazines or something?

Anyway, at some point before the launch of the original Xbox, the guys at EGM went up to Microsoft to look at the system. The way I heard it told, someone in the Xbox division, someone fairly high up, if memory serves, used an electric skateboard to get around the Microsoft campus. And I guess the EGM guys were so obviously taken with this concept that as a gesture of appreciation Microsoft sent one over.

Now, understand that this was not a toy. This was a fairly massive device, probably about four feet long and heavy as all get-out — maybe 30 pounds or so. It was controlled by a handheld trigger device similar to those used to pilot high-end remote-controlled cars; stand on the board, squeeze the trigger, and the thing moves. Wait, let me change the emphasis there: Squeeze the trigger and the thing moves. It only did maybe 10 to 15 MPH or so — you could ride your bike faster — but it wasn’t about the speed, it was about the acceleration. See, this surprisingly heavy machine could hit top speed in about a fifth of a second.

Picture, if you will, standing perfectly still atop a fairly small device as it moves from a dead stop to 15 MPH forward in less than a second. It’s like having a rug yanked out from under you. By a motorcycle. Watching people try this thing out for the first time was like riding a candy cart down into a bottomless mine of amusement. Even if you were prepared for the controller’s sensitivity, it was very, very easy to squeeze the trigger hard enough to take your (or someone else’s) life into your hands. So for the first week or so that this thing was in the office, half the staff had bruised tailbones.

To everyone’s credit, up until this point we really had been doing a fine job of keeping the new office in good shape. I joked last time about whether a more professional environment makes people behave more professionally, but I do think it can. Working in that office, I think we all felt more like grownups and less like anarchic college students, and we were doing a pretty good job of keeping this place looking pretty nice.

But very quickly, marks and dents started showing up in walls. Tire marks started showing up in carpets. Cube walls near the open space in the EGM area — the space that was most often used to try out the skateboard — started to get a little wobbly from people running into them. We could have resisted, I suppose, but come on. It’s an electric skateboard. How do you not play with it?

Of course, I suppose we technically didn’t have to put Crispin in a football helmet and shoulderpads and ram him into the rows of metal chairs set up for a meeting. Maybe we didn’t really need to experiment with mounting chairs on the skateboard and tooling around the office in a recumbent position. I suppose it wasn’t strictly necessary to tow people around on wheeled office chairs. But, you know, you get a brilliant idea, you gotta try it out. If you don’t risk permanent disfigurement on an electric skateboard, you’ll never learn just how far your neck can bend without breaking, is what I always say.

Even so, one deadline evening things did get a little out of hand.

BLACKOUT IN THE RED ROOM
Toward the center of the office was a space we all called the Red Room. Picture the room in your office that has the copy machine and fax machine and office supplies, only lop off the walls at about six feet so the room opens to the industrial ceiling far above. Now stick it in the middle of a sea of beige cubicles and paint it blood red. I think someone thought it was stylish, but to me it always just seemed like an odd place to have to go to make copies.

Anyway, this room was one of the few places in our part of the office where The Suits could be relied upon to visit regularly. Normally they’d stick to Administrative Row and leave us to our videogames and scooter races, but everyone needs to make copies now and then. My point here is that there were places in the office where we could reasonably expect damage to go unnoticed by anyone who would care. This was not one of those places.

Which is why it caused such a stir when someone — someone who specifically requested I not name him here, so let’s call him Art — mounted the electric skateboard, yanked on the trigger, and fell on his ass while the metal beast smashed at pretty much full speed right into one of the corners of the Red Room.

In case I’ve not sufficiently related the power of this thing, I’ll describe the damage: horrific. The skateboard struck at just the right angle to tear the entire corner of the wall off like an overgenerous hunk of string cheese. The bottom three feet or so of the corner was demolished, down to the studs. You could peer into the interior of the wall. The skateboard had actually bent the metal in the stud.

Arty turned so pale I thought he might pass out. Here we were in this new-ish office, in a very central location, and he’d done some damage that contrasted very well with the bold colors of the walls. But then something interesting happened. Rather than abandoning poor Arty McArtguy to his likely fate of impending unemployment, the entire office (well, those of us who were there at that late hour) rallied around him. Plans were laid. Color samples were painstakingly assembled from the debris. A contingent was directed to head to Home Depot for a tub of spackle, some chicken wire, and paint.

Not long thereafter, we had assembled a work space around the blast zone. We molded chicken wire over the gaping hole. We slathered on spackle. We went and played Hydro Thunder for a couple hours while it dried. Then we painted.

It looked good. Not great, but good. The sharp edge of the corner had been restored, and it matched its mate on the other side of the wall. There was just one problem: We’d been in the office long enough that the walls had picked up a fairly significant and indelible coating of dust from the open ceilings. And here was this brand-new, blazing-red paint right on the corner everyone would walk by. It would be as obvious as a zit on prom night. So here’s what we did. I think this might have actually been my idea, and if so I’m pretty proud of myself: We took the remaining paint chips from the incident. We ground them up into a fairly fine powder. And then we blew the powder onto the wet paint. It instantly blended in with the older paint. Genius!

And how did we do? If you read the comments from my previous entry, you already know. Our receptionist Laura wrote, “I know about it…but never did find out where the repair was actually done.” Success!

LOOK NORTH, TURN LEFT
But all things must end. In June of 2002, I was getting ready to drive to Ohio for a week’s vacation with my girlfriend when I got an IM from my boss, John Davison. “I need you to be in the office on Tuesday,” he wrote. “For a meeting. It’s very important.” But he wouldn’t tell me why.

This was irregular. But John was not the type to make bizarre requests lightly. So I drove back from Ohio on a Tuesday morning and walked into an all-hands-on-deck meeting, where it was revealed that pretty much the whole damn office was being relocated to San Francisco.

San Francisco, the place I’ve wanted to live since I first visited at the age of 13. Sometimes things just have a way of coming together, you know?

But we’d be losing a lot. Many of our friends and colleagues couldn’t or wouldn’t make the move due to positions being eliminated, family obligations, and/or a simple desire not to leave the Midwest. We’d also be leaving behind the sprawling megaplex of office, which meant no more scooter races or electric skateboards or cavernous lunch room with en suite arcade.

Never again would I hear Stratty McStrategyguy try to impress the temp receptionist by talking about his run-ins with UFOs and his wrestling of alligators. Never again would Clueless Editorial Director Guy try to convince us that losing half the staff of EGM was like losing an arm, but that’s OK because “we’ll just grow another arm” (or, for that matter, call me into his office and give me such an odd talking to that I was convinced I was being fired, when in actuality I was getting a 15-percent raise). Never again would signs be posted warning of caustic urine disintigrating the walls in the bathroom; no more Hydro Thunder challenges would be issued; no more cowboy hats would be burnt out on the patio.

This was the trademark headwear of my first boss. He was…not a great boss.

But a new office awaited, in a new city. So one August day, my girlfriend and I squeezed ourself into her VW hatchback with our three cats and a bunch of suitcases, hit I-80, and drove west and west and west. A lot of really wonderful stuff was in front of us. In the next few years, we’d get married, I’d get promoted, we’d take many spectacular drives around the Bay Area. A lot of new faces would come through Ziff’s doors. And a lot of faces would leave — including mine. There was a lot to look forward to.

But damn do I wish I’d taken pictures of that skateboard crash.

Next time: Gambling and gluttony on the high seas, the Greatest Commute Ever, and the rise and fall of RadiOPM.

Thing the First: My weekly column about music games is up over at Green Pixels. We did something a little different this time, reorganizing the column as a collection of links to let you dig into the catalogs of the different artists. I think you’ll find it more useful than previous columns.

And Thing the Second: Don’t worry, fans of office-related destruction, I’m still working on the Ziff-trospective, Part III — I had some things that needed tending to over this past week, but I’m planning to have it up over the weekend or early next week. Thanks for your patience.

I was doing a search for statistics on the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises for my weekly music-game column over at Green Pixels, and for some reason stumbled on this article about late-’80s/early-’90s punk band Pennywise. I was pleased (if a bit surprised) to learn that the band is still together and performing, but the part of the article that really amused me goes like this:

The band’s punk credibility was boosted by some Sex Pistols-like antics. During an appearance on the syndicated call-in radio show “Loveline,” [guitarist Fletcher] Dragge intentionally vomited on strait-laced co-host Dr. Drew. The interview took place at alternative rock station KROQ-FM in Los Angeles in 1995.

What the article does not tell you is that a day or two later the band played a show at Peabody’s Down Under in Cleveland, Ohio. I happened to be in Peabody’s legendary green room while they were telling the story to a friend of mine — it’s possible my band was actually opening that night, but I honestly don’t remember — and was as aghast as you probably were the first time you heard this story. But then Fletcher did something that in some ways is even worse.

Apparently, after the appearance on Loveline, he had been smoking a cigar. And apparently, he decided it would be a good idea to put the cigar out on the back of his own hand. (I cannot see Fight Club without thinking of this story.) And apparently, before going on that night, he decided it would be a good idea to pick the scab off the burn and draw the Pennywise logo on the wall of the room.

In his own blood.

And make it three feet high.

But this was just one contribution to the art on the wall, which included a nearly mural-sized bit of abstract art courtesy of Natalie Merchant, and another large drawing from Eddie Vedder. Lemme tell you, Peabody’s back in the ’90s was the shit. They had this spectacular booking agent who had an almost scary sense of when a band was about to get really big. Nirvana and Pearl Jam both played there right before grunge exploded. Jane’s Addiction played there when nobody had any idea who they were. The Offspring played there right as “Come Out and Play” was hitting the radio. It was uncanny. Maybe it was the size of the club — big but intimate, I think the capacity was around 450, which is just right if you ask me. Maybe it was the great sound system and sound guy. Maybe it was the location in the Flats, Cleveland’s longstanding (but now largely tame) neighborhood of debauchery. But this place was something special.

Technically there is still a place in Cleveland called Peabody’s, but it’s not remotely the same. (And a quick peek at their website indicates their days of booking interesting up-and-comers are pretty much over.) Luckily the memories aren’t going anywhere. I even have a nifty memento to mark my own experience with the club: On Ani Difranco’s live double-album Living In Clip, there’s a shot of her sitting on a battered couch in front of a wall with writing all over it. (I’ve tried to find a version online, but can’t seem to.) Above her head is the name of my band, and the bands of some of my good friends. That’s Peabody’s green room. It was legendary.

It’s gone now.