Government Identification is his Plaything

This is something I have laughed at, very hard, many times. My friend Ryan has a habit of taking ridiculous photos for his driver's license, enough so that he has worked out a system. Apparently, if you make too strange a face when having your picture taken, the DMV employee, whose soul has undoubtedly been eroded to a dull husk even God would look askance at, will grumpily tell you to stop fucking around (in so many words) and take a real picture. Ryan's solution? You simply have to hold whatever face you want to use from the very moment you enter the DMV. He has numerous, harrowing accounts of employees and other customers watching him and pointing at him the whole time. And still the man perseveres, and thank God he does, because the images below never fail to make me crack up. Also, notice the use of makeup in the final image; our young virtuouso is honing his craft, developing an ever-more intriquite ritual that will, one day, culminate in a DMV photo that will literally melt the face of anyone who beholds it. I look forward to that day...except for the face melting part of it.

Ryan is the proud papa of More Rants than Raves. Check it out for similar hilarity.

Bioshock: thanks for making little girls creepy again

I've been meaning to review Bioshock for some time now. At first I was hesitant because I hadn't finished the game entirely, but only days after I did, Halo 3 hit stores and my decision making faculties were arrested by the desire to pop online and have children and frat boys brutalize my digital avatar and, once they decide they cannot pronounce my gamertag correctly, call me a fag. Kudos to you, guys; you'll be running the country in a few years, God help us all.

I'm unsure if this is exactly the foot I want to start my reflections on, but nevertheless, allow me to say that Bioshock is one of those games that approaches the category of 'art,' enough so that one should second guess Roger Ebert's comparison of a satisfying game to a satisfying crap: both a true pleasure, but neither art (a metaphor which a number of avante garde artists--think Piss Christ--would undoubtedly take umbridge with). Let me see what I can do about disabusing what poor, overweight, aged Mr. Ebert has to say about a medium I suspect he knows little to nothing about.

Now, while I'm hesitant to unreservedly call the game 'art,' (less because of the game itself as the ephemeral nature of the term; I'm always more suspicious of someone who is certain they know whatever art is than those wary of blindly spaming the term) allow me to say that it is an extremely well crafted product that foregrounds a compelling story and visceral atmosphere without sacrificing gameplay in any significant way. To not give too much away, the game is set in a city called Rapture, built underneath the ocean by a renegade industrialist named Andrew Ryan who felt that governmental and religious constraints were hampering the lives and potential of humanity's greatest. As is so often the case in such utopic visions, however, things went awry, and the scientific freedom (in particular) that drew so many great minds to Rapture inevitably led to its downfall. By the time your plane crashes in the ocean and you find a way down there, the city has become a distopic hell where a few survivors hide and try to eeke out a life while genetically manipulated "splicers" roam the halls, quite insane, looking for their next fix of "Adam."

I realize that a few portions of those final sentences may have made no sense whatsoever. That's fine by me, because when you play the game yourself (and you should), you'll figure it all out quickly enough. Bare bones of the story aside, what most impressed me was the atmosphere of the game. The city was supposedly built in the late 1940's, and you arrive in 1960. The walls are covered in classic 50's advertisements, songs like "Beyond the Sea" play eerily in the background, and everywhere you hear Leave it to Beaver-esque jingles and messages advocating narcissism, child experimentation, and a happy acceptance of a rapidly deteriorating and increasingly dangerous society. As you travel around, you pick up radio logs left by important personages of the city, and piece by piece you start recognizing a picture of the city's former political, social, and scientific undercurrents, and why it all went so horribly wrong. There are clear villains in the game, but each one is a man or woman who simply followed too hard a line to fulfill what could, in another situation, have been an admirable philosophical ideal. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that this game was birthed at the time in American history that it was.

If you have the hardware, be it console or PC, to play the game, I highly recommend it. It is, at least in a game mechanics sense, a First Person Shooter, and thus won't clock in at much more than 15 - 20 hours of gameplay, but the pleasure of being immersed in that vividly and superbly crafted world is well worth the time and money. Enjoy Rapture.

No one likes it when you call it Frisco

Last weekend I made the slog north to San Francisco to meet up with a few friends for my buddy Jim's birthday. It began with a rather inauspicious start, as one of the chief organizers came down with some sort of stomache flu that entailed him making embarassing sounds on porcelain, or should he stray too far from that tiled room, in his pants. There was more too it than that, I'm sure, but frankly, isn't that enough to keep you from hopping on a plane?

Once there, though, the four of us who could make it did settle in nicely. We've all known each other since high school, and despite the years that have passed, it never ceases to amaze me how quickly and comfortably we realign into our old group dynamics. I don't mean this in any sort of caste system sense: we don't have any fixed designated 'leader,' 'bitchboy,' 'gimp/sex-slave,' or 'backup vocals' slots. Rather, it's simply how much we can be and are ourselves with each other, despite the spatial divides between meetings or temporal ones between conversations.

Per the birfday boy's wishes, the first night entailed going to bars in the Marina. It was my first public outing with the wedding band but sans wife. Apart from the more traditional reading of such a ring as your devoted commitment to another human being, I'm already starting to read it also as a green light for being a jackass to women who talk to me in bars. For instance, later on in the night, when asked if I was really sharing a beer with Nick (I was--he hadn't wanted one that round, then changed his mind), I flashed my ring and told her not to worry, because I was married and Nick was my husband. At that precise moment, my wife smiled to herself somewhere, not knowing why. Then she thought about it, rolled her eyes, and knew it had something to do with me.

The following night we hit a German restaurant Jim has been raving about for months, this time with Kate in tow. Kate is a girl we went to highschool with who I literally hadn't seen in a decade. And why was this? Because I never really talked to her outside of class, let alone in any kind of social context. She's absolutely great, and a blast to go out drinking with, but these weren't things I would have been able to glean during high school. Back then, I drew a fairly clear line in the sand between my friends who knew what to do with a twenty-sided die and those that didn't. And that line was between those people I hung out with. The rest of the school we hid that side of ourselves from, because despite the acts we like to play, you only want to be so much of a pariah in high school. We may as well have been spending our weekend sodomizing livestock, the secrecy we employed amidst the mainstream kids. And Kate was one of those.

But as I said, she's a great girl, and we had a blast with her on Saturday night. So I've gotten over this whole "us and them" mentality, right? Grown up, realized I should take my fellow man and woman for the special embodiments of God's love and Creation that they are, and enjoy the many exciting conversations that will result, right? Fuck no. I will readily admit that there are many people from my past and present who I probably have written off too quickly or simply haven't been able to get to know well enough, and that I regret. I'm working on that. But when, for example, Kate asked (already knowing the answer) whether we'd be going to our high school reunion in a few weeks, well, I don't know language emphatic enough to express the negative response. I mean, the RSVP actually asked, amongst other things, who we had a secret crush on in high school. Really? That's how they're going to try to entice 500 young professionals to return to their hometown and stand awkwardly in a gymnasium for three hours? I would rather hump a burlap sack of broken glass that was only sleeping with me to get even with its ex-lover. Twice.

Below are a few pictures of the guilty parties involved. Names and captions are used to underscore the guilt of those depicted and, hopefully, instill a deep feeling of shame.

Jim the Birfday boy and Kate. I realize his hand looks disporportionately large on her shoulder, considering the size of the rest of him, but don't let that take away from the 2 litres of beer--the real star of the picture.

Nick, our humble iPhone photographer, is the one in the middle, desperately praying that he is not the roast beef in a sweaty manwich.

Because sometimes, eating a Pizza Bite with sleeves on just isn't gay enough.

Colonel Gentleman and the Don. I'm the white guy wearing a blue tshirt.

Wary of change....and bears

So over a few marathon sessions, I have graduated from having seen absolutely no episodes of Battlestar Galactica to having seen all those available to me on DVD, from the miniseries to the cliffhanger end (aren't they all?) of season 2.5. As it's a show firmly rooted in the science fiction genre, I assume they felt obligated to use decimals in their season notation. Who am I, lowly student of the Humanities that I am, to question their overly precise, mathematical wisdom?

First, be warned this is less a review of the show's quality as it is a rumination on my own hesitance to fully embrace it. The curious thing to me is that this show couldn't be much more tailored to the sorts of things I enjoy watching. It's well written, and while they did dip into the same well from time to time for a plot gimmick, the core elements of the series maintain senses of tension and suspicion that keep the viewer (well, me at least) entirely enthralled without going over the top and leaving the viewer feeling used or manipulated (which is often the case in this sort of endeavor). I feel affection for a number of the characters, and an equally positive sign, distaste for others--it's the apathy you don't want. When certain characters have been killed--and kill them this show does--I have felt disappointed about the loss. But as I loan it out to friends now, I do so not because of a compulsion of my own to share it but more of a sense of fair play, that the "buzz" is that this is a good sci-fi series, and thus if I have it in my possession I may as well share it with friends that I believe appreciate the genre.

This is my dilemma. The standbys of the genre, mine at least, have lost some of their glitter for me over the years (though I suspect this is the natural result when you place a trophy on a shelf and smile at it affectionately from a distance as it slowly collects dust) but still I cling to them. I still love Star Wars, but I'm not going to pretend that Lucas didn't do some damage to its mythology, at least in my eyes, with the prequels. Moments of those films were like watching a father beat his child, and not in the way you wish some would do in grocery stores, airports, and Chuck-E-Cheese. After I had seen Firefly and Serenity, I made a conscious effort to spread that aborted series and film through my network of closest friends. But with BSG, I feel no such compulsion. And this brings me to my point. It seems as if I have reached some critical mass where I appreciate new entertainments but cannot embrace them with the fervor I once did.

And it's not all about BSG. God help me if I degenerate into such musings over one show. But it's the same across the board: the music I listen to, the subjects I study, the games I like--I haven't significantly deviated in any of these for over a decade. How bleak a statement is that? But whatever handicap I might have in the academic and entertainment portions of my life, the good news is that I've found a happy medium with the more important part of that same life: my relationships. I still maintain a stubborn loyalty to the best people from my past, but I thankfully seem to show no hesitance to embrace new ones, even here in the land God forgot. Unlike this television series, I have no reservations about telling everyone about my new friends, forcing them to meet my old friends when they visit, to make them team up together with me when gaming online to have our collective asses stomped by children literally too young to even understand the remedial classes we teach.

So what the hell is the point? Not much, really, save perhaps a warning not to let those murky green waters stagnate too much. And if you're interested, give Battlestar Galactica a try. Of course for me, those are one and the same thing.

A Gentle Reminder

This may be coming a little late in the season, what with summer drawing to an end and people returning to school. Then again, perhaps this is timed right: if long, unattended hours at home for little Billy were the perfect opportunity to experiment with empty toilet paper tubes and a belt sander, the inconvenient intrusion of learnin' once more into his daily routine will necessarily put a dent in his stats. Perhaps, then, he can ride this decline all the way to a complete cessation of self abuse. Unless, of course, he hates kittens:

Of course, he might. It is not unheard of for people to dislike kittens, what with their surly attitudes and complete inability to articulate complex ideas. This is why Santa Clause, a venerable saint of the Catholic Church (albeit a Lycian one) has also decided to become proactive and address an open letter to you:

Ho, Ho, Ho! I Saw You Masturbating!

"And it wasn't just once either, my wee friend! Oh, what a naughty, prolific rascal you've been! Ho, ho, ho!"

Now if a chronically obese bearded man, drunk off eggnog and possessing the magical power of breaking into your house once a year isn't enough to scare kids straight (well, flaccid, I suppose), then I don't know what will. Kitten-haters.

A Beautiful, Bouncing, Baby Zombie Boy

So I finally caved and made myself a blog. I should have known that this was inevitable, that someone whose profession essentially amounts to reading and writing all the time wouldn't be able to resist the free publication of his random thoughts. I suppose I was hoping that my egotism would be overpowered by my fear of appearing egotistical (ironically), but to quote Val Kilmer, "it appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds."

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not condemning the idea of a blog. Indeed, I'm rather enamored with it, and I try to regularly read those of my friends. But for whatever reason, I just cringe at the thought of a blog of my own. A scene from Dawn of the Dead (2004) comes to mind, which is rather funny to write, since I had to look up the damn title on IMDB just to make the reference. Already I lay bare my mechanism, it seems. But I digress. As anyone reading this blog will already know by heart, the bite of the zombie essentially begins a transformation that cannot be retarded or reversed; it's only a matter of time until you too will crave the succulent moisture of brain between your incisors as you shamble down the streets of your hometown looking for a wandering innocent to devour--preferably one without a camera crew behind him/her, because those ones tend to be the stars of major motion pictures, and that typically means they're well armed with heavy weapons and horribly written dialogue. And if you happen to turn a corner and see Bruce Campbell, you run the other way, because that man will end your zombie ass pronto.

Anyway, amidst the survivors who make it to a mall in the first third of Dawn of the Dead is a young couple, but surprise, the young pregnant wife has been contaminated by a zombie bite. The husband, because chivalry never picks an opportune time to charge a windmill, decides he can't kill her but instead ties her down to a bed, hidden from the others, even after she fully becomes a zombie. Long story short, she eventually gives birth to a zombie baby, and the husband (by this time completely insane) is holding the kid up like he just pulled the Christ child from the manger. This is what I worry my blog will be: a hideous, flesh-eating infant that only its maniacal father believes is at all worthy of love or even existence.

Be that as it may, it has allowed me to pepper my first ever blog post with some of my favorite things: unnecessarily big words, zombies, overindulgent metaphors, zombie babies, the semicolon, and parenthetical aside. So it can't be all that bad, right?