Watching Wheatley

British director Ben Wheatley may be one of my new favorite directors, but it's hard to pin down why. So far, he's got four features under his belt: Down Terrace (2009), Kill List (2011), Sightseers (2012), and A Field in England (2013). I consumed the Kill List immediately after finishing Down Terrace. After two months, I took a trip to A Field in England after obsessively watching the trailer on YouTube for nearly a half a year, and the following day I found that Sightseers had been added to Netflix. You can guess what happened next. After seeing all four of them so close together, I'm still don't know what draws me to him.

In the beginning, there was Down Terrace, as it and Kill List were available on Netflix and still are as of this post. The two couldn't be more radically different in tone. I can best describe Down Terrace as a dark comedy, whereas Kill List is simply dark. And it could be argued both are family dramas. But the former is about freshly-released bumbling paranoid criminals seeing out their betrayer while the latter is about a hitman with a wife and kid who gets increasingly violent and paranoid. Down Terrace still has its share of violence but they are mostly quick cut. Man is killed with hammer. On to the next scene. Kill List, however, seems to linger on those moments. Man is killed with hammer. Killer keeps swinging.

Of the two, Down Terrace is the easier to recommend because it's lighter. It deals with heavy subject matter, sure, but it doesn't sit with you quite like Kill List does because it provides you plenty of humor to keep the tone light and amusing. These aren't the hardened professional criminals they want folks to believe they are; they're too clumsy for that. Kill List, on the other hand, is unrelenting. That made me feel like I watched Straw Dogs for the first time. A claustrophobic conclusion that is one of the more disturbing endings to a movie I can think of.

And yet, I wanted more. Not more of the unrelenting cold of Kill List, but more of Wheatley's work. What else could he do? A period piece? Surely, you jest. But he did one, and it doesn't feel much like a period piece at all. Yes, everybody's costumed up in 17th-century garb, and there's a certain way some characters speak that reminds you this takes place more than a few years ago, but there seems to be more going on than in another period piece like, say, this year's Great Expectations. Maybe it's the mushrooms most of the characters are force-fed that gives it that different feel. And an esoteric ending that I'm still working out.

Sightseers is more straightforward: a couple go RV-ing across England. But the man is a serial killer and the woman starts to open her mind to her partner's criminal tendencies. It's a funny movie, more so than the rest of Wheatley's work, including Down Terrace. But like the rest, it's dark. People die, and they don't go in funny ways. One does, but it's funny from a point of irony but little more.

It's impossible to ignore the body count in each one of Wheatley's movies. The highest is Kill List's (go figure), but in each of the movies there are at least four deaths. It's not surprising given that each of the films focus on criminals. Ben Wheatley could also be obsessed with death or it's an easy way to commit dramatic action to film or print, but either way the body count is as consistent as his casting of Michael Smiley in each movie:

Structurally, each of the films are divided into distinctive chapters. It's most explicit in Down Terrace and Kill List, as each is split up by days of the week and people on a kill list, respectively. But the dismantling remains in Sightseers and A Field in England as well. Each location that the couple visits in Sightseers is established with a shot of the RV pulling onto a road towards a museum or campground, almost as if the signage on the road are the titles introducing the next sequence. A Field in England's approach is perhaps the most peculiar in that there are a few moments when the cast are frozen as if posing for a painting. Some of them are frozen in an action, while others are posed unnaturally. Each time this happens seems to introduce a significant scene. It's different, and it's easily one of my favorite things about that film.

It could be that criminal element that drives me to watch Ben Wheatley's movies. After all, criminals are fun to watch. But what impresses me most about his body of work is that, despite the shared elements, each of these movies could not differ more. I look forward to whatever he's got next just to see where he goes. And to keep count of the deaths.

A Case for Arrogance

Last month marked the the fifth anniversary of me knowing about National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo” as the cool kids call it, and my second failed attempt at it. Every few days I received updates from the official NaNoWriMo website, subject line reading “Your NaNo Updates.” The truth of the matter was they weren't my updates. They weren’t about anything I was writing or anything my two NaNoWriMo buddies were working on. Most of it was “Pep Talk” from famous writers that, while probably helpful, never got my attention.

I don’t mean to say that I’m above it. While half of my brain harbors that arrogance that all writers have--otherwise they wouldn’t be writing--the other half asks myself what the hell I think I’m doing. Unfortunately, for the last few years now, that second voice has been most vocal.

There was a dry spell of writing for me after the end of my last semester of undergrad. I had the upper-level fiction class left to take and I was forced to take it with a professor who was notorious for harsh criticism in both literature and writing classes. I was never clear on his credentials for teaching a creative writing class. All I could read on him was his anti-genre elitism and vaguely sexist attitude. That class ended with me getting a B--my only B of all of my creative writing courses--and losing confidence in my writing. Maybe he was right: maybe I was a hack (my words, not his). I’ll never know why I got a B in the class and why some others got As, but I’m not about to ask him. At least some of my arrogance still sits in me.

It took a class in grad school taught by (Warning: NAME DROP) Roxane Gay to rekindle that spirit in me. Her criticism was blunt but not hurtful. For a time, I felt like I could ride that bicycle of writing all over again. I did for that semester and it felt good. But then the rest of grad school happened and ate up what time I could spend to think about writing. and then finally the thesis came which became composition priority Number One.

So here I am now, long after the hustle and bustle of graduate school, master’s degree in hand and I find I’m not writing anything except this blog. NaNoWriMo looked as good an opportunity as any to get back to it. I had all sorts of fiction ideas swimming through my head. A few days before NaNoWriMo started I even got to work on one of them. Did I fire off too soon?

As November progressed, I saw updates from old classmates on Facebook updating us with their progress in NaNoWriMo. They put up a better fight than I ever did. One had been sick and took a break from it. I wish I had that excuse.

NaNoWriMo is a lovely idea, truly. It gets those who aren’t writing otherwise to start thinking about it and doing it. If it gets people just thinking about it that aren’t otherwise, I’d say NaNoWriMo fulfilled some portion of its purpose. But then I think of the temporal boundaries of the month. Never have they claimed that they only want folks writing in the month of November. But there is a finality about November 30. Did you get those 50,000 words written? No? Well, you tried. Halfway through the month I realized I hadn’t written a single word for it yet and decided, “Screw it,” because what’s the point of trying to reach 50,000 words when I didn’t have 25,000 halfway through.

It’s a terrible attitude. Truly god awful. It’s especially ridiculous to pin it on an organization which has no goal other than getting folks to write. But this is the attitude you get when you need an audience, when you go from thinking you’re hot shit to knowing you’re just shit. I feel like Samson with a crewcut.

Without some sort of support network, I’ve found that writing, both during and outside of NaNoWriMo, is difficult. There are those who write for themselves, but I’m not one of them. I’ve always thrived in the workshop setting. Being an interstate immigrant to Arkansas, I’ve lost that ability to physically gather folks to a writing workshop. There is the prospect of a virtual one via Facebook with some grad schoolmates. Maybe they can stoke the fire of my arrogance.

Sexy Sexy Movie Sex

We’ve been running Blue is the Warmest Colo[u]r since Friday, and I’ve been keeping track of the number of people who walk out of it before the end. I put up a tally on my Facebook frequently and as of this post, we’ll have seven people who have walked out. It may not seem like much, but given the amount of people who’ve come to see the movie, it’s more than you might reckon.

Most of our clientele are older, retired types. They’ve comprised about half of the makeup of those who have seen the movie. The other half? Hip twentysomethings keen on seeing a foreign flick with some provocative imagery. None of the younger folks have walked out. All of our walkouts have been from the older crowd, which isn’t totally surprising. Those walkouts who chose to comment on their way out zeroed in on the racy bits, one man even offering up, “That is some of the most graphic sex I’ve seen in a movie.” And it may be, assuming the man has never viewed pornography.

I understand his subtext. He meant, “in a mainstream movie.” And I’m sure it’s true. It probably is the most graphic sex he’s seen in a movie. I didn’t have heart to tell him about Lars von Trier’s next effort, Nymphomaniac. But what about the rest of Blue?

The walkouts seem to occur about halfway through the movie. I confess, I’ve only seen snippets from when I peek through the glass from the projection booth. One sequence I can see giving cause for alarm occurs around this time, and it’s understandable that folks would become upset by it. In the realm of non-X-rated material, the scene in question is borderline outrageous. The positioning of the two female leads looks like something pulled from a scene in lesbian porn. Not porn for lesbians, per se, but porn involving lesbians. There’s already a running dialogue about the depiction of girl-on-girl relations on this film to which I have little to add. But what I hope to get to is why so many people would come to a movie just to walk out halfway through.

I’ll grant you the fact that the movie is 180 minutes. A couple older patrons have told us that they might have to walk out halfway through simply because they’re not sure if they can sit through 180 minutes of film, regardless of how engaging or revolting it might be. They stuck through it. But of the walkouts we’ve had, none suggest a weak constitution in the customer.

I’ll always remember my first: our first walkout looked noticeably disturbed. I was thrown off by the quick exit--there was still another 90 minutes to go of the movie. But out walks an older gentleman, wide-eyed and determined to increase the distance between him and the theater. I called out, “Have a good day,” to which he made no discernable vocal response, just a bewildered look in my direction. I turned to a coworker, bemused.

I don’t mean to mock the man. He did not have the Internet in his youth to prepare him for the horrors of the modern era. But look on his face suggested he saw something far worse than the passions of two young French women. It could have been the blue hair of one of the actresses. Or it could’ve been the unrelenting display of reverse cowgirl scissoring.

The man could’ve come in with prejudices towards homosexuality in general. Maybe not to the degree of blaming the destruction of Washington, IL, on the legalization of gay marriage in that state, but perhaps to that of viewing the gays as icky. I will not begrudge him his opinion. But what drew him to the film in the first place? It couldn’t have been the talk of sex. Sex is in all sorts of movies. The synopsis itself sounds bland: “Adele's life is changed when she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair, who will allow her to discover desire, to assert herself as a woman and as an adult. In front of others, Adele grows, seeks herself, loses herself, finds herself.”

Critics love it, though. The film earned the coveted Palme d’Or of the Cannes Film Festival. It may be as great as critics would have you believe, though I can’t weigh in since what little I’ve seen of the movie might as well have been a clip on a porn streaming site. Critical acclaim and coverage in such periodicals as The New York Times is going to get a movie a lot of attention. Are these people putting in so much stock into the opinions of the critics that they’ll subject themselves to that which they may not be ready for? Possibly. Though surely the reviews these people read did not gloss over the dirty bits. Reviewers have a responsibility to their readers to let people know why this film may or may not be for them. There may be the few that make their decisions based solely on the arbitrary numbers--5/5, 90%--but I’d like to believe it’s a tiny few.

But then there’s that powerful force called morbid curiosity. Entire websites are built on morbid curiosity. For some, there is a will to be shocked to the point of desensitization. If you want to see how effective a drone strike is, you can easily Google it and bear witness to scenes of destruction and slaughter. Not all who seek such imagery are sociopaths (though there must be plenty), but they all have to share that kernel of morbid curiosity to push them forward, to expend that bit of effort to see something that will disgust them.

Only one walkout looked truly disgusted: the first. Another stifled back his shock and sat in our lobby reading the paper while his wife watched the remainder of the movie. Two older couples made their exit while expressing how flabbergasted they were at how far the film dared to go. Interestingly enough, the most vocal or noticeably frazzled walkouts have been male. Could they be disturbed that two women didn’t have men in their romantic lives? God, I hope not.

I myself have never walked out of a movie. I don’t know if that’s a badge of pride or a mark of stubbornness. Given the motherlode of information on the Internet about every film that comes out, it’s easy for me to gauge whether I want to see it. Even when a movie has completely lost me, I’ll remain seated until the credits roll because I’ve paid the same amount of money to sit in a dark room with strangers for a couple hours that I could spend for a decent meal at a fast-casual restaurant. Of course, that could change if I saw something that was so horrifying that my best course of action would be to make a quick getaway. But I’ve never been blindsided by anything of the sort in a movie.

But not all of the older people who saw the film were walkouts. As I mentioned earlier, one elderly woman whose arthritis could’ve prevented her from sticking out all 180 minutes of the film stuck it out. She may have been disgusted, or she could’ve enjoyed the film, but either way she made it. Another older woman told her friend in the lobby that the film was “very good.” In fact, it was the older viewers who more more vocal about the film. The young’uns emerged from the theater in silence, unfazed by what they saw.

Nothing they hadn’t seen before.

Silencing the Call of Duty

I've kept up with the Call of Duty franchise since the first one came out. The first was one of those games in the early '00's that was foregoing the industry standard of allowing the player to carry as many weapons as the game had available and moving towards a more realistic approach. You could carry only as many guns as humanly possible (not Duke Nukemly possible), so when your MP44 and M1 Garand both run out of bullets you better find yourself some replacements. It also moved towards the more cinematic with scenes evoking various World War II films and adding a "shellshock" effect that made the visuals go dizzy when things went boom. Even though my PC had trouble running it, I dug it. Call of Duty 2 was the second game I got for my Xbox 360 and became a permanent fixture for splitscreen multiplayer at the summer camp I worked at. Despite it not being an Infinity Ward effort, I still found pleasure in 3 when it came to running down my online enemies in a shoddily-handled truck.

There was a delay, but I finally got into Modern Warfare and liked it enough to grab Modern Warfare 2, though I waved my hand at World at War because I wanted no part of its return to WW2, regardless of its zombies minigame. The Modern Warfare games had shiny new guns. I could have an TAR-21! I could accessorize it! But then there came the drama at Infinity Ward and the ousting of its leadership and subsequent gutting of its staff, all the while Treyarch was quietly putting out Black Ops which I warmed up to and played the hell out of. Though the story was meh it was only marginally so as I gave Treyarch props for injecting an unconventional narrative into the Call of Duty franchise. It didn't quite feel like a cannibalized Tom Clancy novel despite the presence of Pinko Commie Scum. The protagonist was a broken individual, not the silent professional that MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN THE SAME DAMN GUY IN EVERY GAME. He was voiced by Hollywood favorite Sam Worthington who has since gone missing (if someone sees him, let me know).

Shortly after, the franchise was stale for me. I knew already that Activision was pulling off this ludicrous trick of putting out a new game every year between two studios, all in the same franchise. The games haven't been outright terrible--they're polished and they've got that AAA budget behind them that makes hella dough back. It wasn't that I saw behind the curtain and saw Bobby Kotick's elfin face rubbing his palms. It just fizzled out for me.

So now we have Call of Duty: Ghosts upon us. And nobody's excited. People seem satisfied...mostly. Metacritic ratings show nothing above a 78. Self-profess CoD fan Jim Sterling expressed his disappointment in a somewhat melancholy review, giving the game a 5/10. Chris Carter confirms the franchise's staleness, but credits developer Treyarch with "innovat[ing] the franchise" and blames "complacency" for Ghosts' loss of love. But the sin is greater than complacency.

For years, we've been getting a yearly helping of mediocre techno-thriller served as a side to the bullet ballet of death that is the CoD multiplayer. We're getting the dish served by two different cooks: Infinity Ward and Treyarch. But now it's more complicated. While there are two different names serving out the food, there are different hands chopping up the carrots and browning the beef of the stew. Treyarch's got the same hands but they're learning and sort of innovating. Infinity Ward's got different hands but they've got the name, so now they're left to just mimic what the old guard did.

On paper, Activision had a killer business plan. But they should have known that the franchise would get diluted. And it happened much sooner than people are led to believe. The big argument for World at War was its "innovation" with the zombie mode: shooting Nazi zombies = pinnacle of fun. But it lacks depth and, despite it being initially only an unlockable mode after completing the campaign, that was the big selling point for the game. Treyarch's main multiplayer offering was CoD 4's reskinned for World War 2. Again, fun, but was hardly innovative. Hardly innovative but still successful.

Now we've got Infinity Ward version 2.0 copying Treyarch's recipe for success, using that secret zombie ingredient--but replacing it with aliens. Treyarch lucked out when they were riding the wave of zombie craze and have been able to continuously ride for a while. Aliens, unfortunately, haven't seen the resurgence that zombies had. Yeah, you've got a show like Falling Skies that shows there's some interest in little green men, but it's got nothing on the momentum behind The Walking Dead and every other god-awful zombie-centric creation. Sterling argues the alien mode lacks the camp of Treyarch's Zombies, instead manifesting as "a fairly bland slice of chaos, in which fairly uninteresting aliens are mowed through across blasted cities littered with quivering pustules." But of the two sister developers, Infinity Ward has always appeared the more severe and prudish one while Treyarch presented itself as the one who might buy you a beer if you take her out.

Perhaps the franchise has gone long in the tooth, and the weakness of Ghosts is just symptomatic of that. Judging from the gameplay footage, Titanfall might be the very cure that Call of Duty needs. The ease of controls that Call of Duty has always been praised for appears to have been "borrowed" by the former Infinity Ward devs that makeup Sledgehammer Games. But they didn't just add big-ass robots. They added another dimension to the gameplay altogether. Titanfall might be the Call of Duty game that is long overdue.

Running Into Walls

This coming weekend, I'm participating in the Little Rock Color Run. It's an untimed 5K run with "no winners or prizes, but runners are showered with colored powder at stations along the run." People pay money to run in their local to look like a box of melted crayons. Just one of the many reasons why the terrorists hate us for our western decadence.

But in all seriousness, it should be an experience. Whether or not I survive it will determine if it's a good one. The event itself would likely be more appealing if I ran with the same regularity that I eat breakfast (though in the past week that ratio's been 1:1).

I've never been a runner. My best mile time was 9:30 in high school and, while I prided myself on the fact that I was one of the few people in the "recreational" PE class to run the entirety of the mile, I knew the only reason why I did it wasn't strictly for my health. I thought the running would make me more attractive to the ladies in spite of everything I did in high school to impede my chances with them. Then apathy with a dash of reality set in and I stopped giving a damn about running the mile. Or kept giving just enough of a damn to not earn a zero one week when we ran the mile.

We went running yesterday around our neighborhood which, except for a select stretch of the main road that goes through it, would make for a stupendous topographical map. Divert from that main road and you're either tumbling down a hill or struggling up another. So we stayed along the main road. Sam says I kept a good pace, and I think she was right--it felt like a good pace. And then my body selectively remembered that I hadn't done this in a while and thought it would take it easy after four blocks. Or three. A few of those blocks are occupied by a big park so it's hard to really gauge distance in so vague a term as a "block."

My body had already ached from work the day before. It was my first time running the projectors and closing, and the former required a lot of movement on my part since the only other employee was a guy that had just started that previous Wednesday. All in all, he's got concessions down, but we had a rough start which required me to help both with concessions and take care of the projectors. Kneeling, standing, running up stairs, fetching cold beers, and kicking a plastic desk chair took a lot out of me. I slept well that night, though.

We ran a mile, I think: one-half to and from a certain point. And I think I ran most of it, or at least half of it. Sam was patient with me, more than I deserved because I get irritable from physical exertion. That, or I was irritable because I hadn't eaten yet that day. So Saturday, we run and cake ourselves in clouds of color. Surely it's nontoxic color, right?

Demystifying the Realistic Female Character

As a writer, I struggle with writing realistic female characters. I've never received explicit criticism for writing an unrealistic female character, but as soon as I write a character with ladyparts, I am immediately self-conscious. Is she promoting a stereotype I failed to recognize or didn't even know about? One of the oldest rules in writing is "Write what you know," and I don't know the female experience.

But I also I don' t know what that authentic female experience is supposed to be. It's comforting to know that many of the big writers don't, either. Steven Moffat, the current showrunner for Doctor Who and creator of the new Sherlock, has been largely criticized for his female characters. The popular episode "Blink" in which countless viewers can never look at weeping angel statues the same way again (or look away for that matter) is frequently lauded for its low-budget (even by Doctor Who standards) attempt at horror through simplicity and tricky editing. But the main character--not the Doctor or his companion--catches flak for zero development. Nivair H. Gabriel describes the character as "Moffat's embarrassingly flat narrator . . . whose lack of complexity has earned her a place of honor in the annals of Mary Sue." The author then points out another symptom of Moffat's writing broadly across other Who episodes, "It's the way women are written as if they have absolutely no control over what happens in their life at all--and they're fine with that." I don't mean to place Doctor Who on a pedestal of high quality writing, though there are some strong episodes for sure, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Moffat is a consummate misogynist. He remains a successful and popular writer, regardless. But the shortcomings of male authors don't stop there.

A fantasy novel I just began called Gardens of the Moon, part of the Malazan Book of the Fallen Series by Steven Erikson, has its share of criticism for female believability. In a review for Fantasy & Science Fiction, Charles de Lint gives credit where credit is due: "Mind you, there are a lot of characters, each with a fascinating history and story, and it takes some time getting to know them all and keeping them straight." The series is no Martin-esque feat of character birthing, but approaches the sheer volume of speaking bodies without sacrificing characterization. But then de Lint calls Erikson out on "the lack of any believable female characters." Indeed, the book is rife with female "stoic warriors, assassins, and mages . . . , courtesans, or in one case, a young girl possessed by gods and turned into a killing machine." While I've only made it about 150 pages in, I've encountered only a handful of female characters, including the one female character de Lint does praise: "Except for one strong female lead, the mage Tattersail, there's no distinct female perspective to set the female characters apart from their male counterparts." And I agree, Tattersail does outshine the other female characters. But I find it difficult to describe her perspective as distinctly female. She is female and her perspective is distinct, but I wonder if that's all the author meant or if he desired a perspective unique to the female experience.

George R. R. Martin, the man behind HBO's Game of Thrones and the books that inspired them, has been complimented from several sources for his ability to write realistic female characters. In an interview with The Telegraph, Jessica Salter argues that "the secret to his appeal" is that the book series A Song of Ice and Fire--on which Game of Thrones is based-- "has an army of female fans clamouring for his next installment." Salter writes, "Martin's women are more three dimensional," and offers up five distinct female characters who are strongly characterized in the books. He admits that he's "never been an eight year old girl," but nor has he "been an exiled princess, or a dwarf or bastard." Tapping into his own humanity is what makes his characters believable: "I just write human characters."

But is that sound enough advice? I want to believe it, but I'm still leery about my ability to write a female character. Truthfully, I've only written two as protagonists. The first was in a short story that could use plenty of TLC, but the latter was in a screenplay I penned as part of an independent study. Originally, the protagonist had started out as a male character, "Murphy." But at one point, I asked myself, "Why is Murphy male?" I then proceeded to change the character to female because I had no compelling argument to support Murphy's maleness. I had about 30 pages of a post-apocalyptic road movie written up and then went in to perform a sex change on Murphy. I changed pronouns. I described her as having long hair. Her named remained Murphy. I even toyed with her first name being "Charlotte" but that she was called "Charlie" by those who knew her, but then I remembered Eddie Murphy's brother's name is Charlie. I think I did okay. She was a hard-ass and I did nothing to sexualize her. My instructor for the independent study course made no critique of Murphy being unrealistic, but I still worried that Murphy was little more than a man in women's clothing. I worried that Murphy was not distinctly female. I still worry.

But then, should that be my goal? Should I go for the distinct female? Or should I go for the distinctly female? Or should I divorce myself from gender at the basic level and go for the human? Writers, what are your experiences? My fellow male writers, do you struggle? Or do you think you have it?

An Exercise in Futility: Dwarf Fortress

There's a possibility you've heard of the game Dwarf Fortress. If so, then you probably know how impossible and unforgiving the game is. If you don't, let me lay down a beat for you. As you figured out, you're tasked with building a dwarf fortress. Except it's not you building it, it's a pack of rough-n-tumblin' dwarves. You don't so much control them as suggest places to dig and build, but they're usually agreeable unless they're injured, sick, or dead. Those qualities occur more frequently than not. You've got goblins, wildlife, the elements, and starvation to contend with. But it's okay because they're a bunch of dwarves. Right?

Numerous websites are dedicated to sharing stories about players' DF experiences like recording the epic tales of lost civilizations. There is no endgame. You play until the civilization falls. Or you get frustrated because you keep confusing a dwarf for a tree or vice versa. Did I mention the game looks like this?

That's not the Matrix; that's Dwarf Fortress. And in Dwarf Fortress, losing is fun. Let me repeat that: losing is fun.

I have decided for the eighth time that I'm going to attempt to learn and play Dwarf Fortress until my dwarves cave themselves in and are devoured by demons. The first time I even tried to play the game I had no clue what was going on, only saw little characters strolling around the wagon, waiting for my command. I don't think I ever issued a command because I didn't understand how they worked. But I have a better idea now, after having attempted several different tutorials, I think I'm ready to lose all over again.

Eweanenu, "The Enchanted Planets," Year 87 of the Age of Myth

The band embarked in the Courteous Field on the continent of the Sacks. My party of seven arrived from the Mountainhomes, ready to strike the earth and establish a new home called Asdugtun. Though tired from the long journey, they knew it was important to get to work quickly before the the world sought to consume them.

[It was by this point the writer had commanded his two woodworkers, Shorast Kolimik and Stukos Delersakrith, to chop down trees to start building furniture. The game remained paused until the writer finally saw that pressing the space bar resumed the action of the game so his dwarves could proceed with their job. He also shifted the camera view in such a way that he lost sight of his dwarves and had to perform a Google search in order to figure out how to center the camera view back on his dwarves. -Ed.]

Miner Sibrek Endokmafol was tasked with carving a home into the earth for his companions.

[The writer struggled with commanding the dwarf to dig downward, continually trying to set a zone for him to mine. The writer realized that mining does not occur on a vertical axis but rather a horizontal one, so he had to pick the Channel function in order to dig downard. -Ed.]

Sibrek chipped away through rock and dirt to create a long hallway that they could soon channel off into offices, private rooms, workshops, meeting halls--

[The writer decided that he had accomplished much by this point so he saved his game and went to find food. -Ed.]

TO BE CONTINUED

#rashtags

Last night on a Late Night rerun, Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake performed a sketch in which they essentially spoke Twitter-speak, ending everything they say with the word "hashtag," crossing both index and middle fingers over each other to replicate a #, and following it up with a quip. Amusing, but might also dig into something we're still struggling to understand.

A hashtag, according to Wikipedia, "is a form of metadata tag" used to categorize different messages with a common tagging. While we most closely associate the hashtag with Twitter, it has its origins in IRC networks to perform a similar function. Open Web Advocate Chris Messina is responsible for bringing the hashtag to Twitter, and ever since the practice has flooded over to other social networking sites like Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, and even Linkedin.

Across the board, hashtags been used for anything from internet memes to product promotion. Given their ease of use, it's no surprise that hashtags spread like a rash throughout cyberspace. Even before the practice was technically supported on Facebook, users were using them, presumably because of their own Twitter experience. Just this morning a friend of mine issued a couple hashtags himself: "#8yearoldSaxMan" and "#thereisstillhopeforfuturegenerations." Though the latter is a bit lengthy, I can see it being a hashtag used by others as it's a common sentiment. The former, however, seems unique to the user's situation. It also sets a previous meme on its head, that of the "The Sexy Sax Man," the video in which a shirtless man with a long ponytail plays saxophone with provocative dancing.

But how many situations or descriptions would warrant the hashtag "#8yearoldSaxMan"? The hashtag has evolved from something beyond a mere categorization system to a rhetorical device that serves an unusual purpose. If my friend had simply said "like an 8 year old Sax Man" or "8 year old Sax Man," it would say the same thing. But it wouldn't have the same impact.

There's a certain finality that is imbued in a hashtagged phrase, and not simply because a hashtag usually comes at the end. The hashtag has become an alternative and extended punctuation, a way for the writer to get their last word in. If a Twitter post were an essay, the hashtag would be the pithy concluding paragraph. The fact that the phrase is usually hyperlinked and bereft of spaces gives it an aesthetic uniqueness that draws viewers attentions immediately to the point where it almost inadvertently serves a similar purpose to "tl;dr" ("too long; didn't read").

Are hashtags used to insert an idea into a culture and spread it? Or are they just a fun way to state an idea?" #youtellme #audi5000 #paymeforthis

Review: Teleglitch Die More Edition

You've been running for a while now. Your legs want to give out but you know you can't stop because to stop is to die. The chattering of the abominations hot on your heels change fight or flight to an act of both. You count three, no, six of them barreling down the hallway. You backpedal, pull out the shotgun slung over your shoulder and fire three successive blasts. Each shot cuts down one, but those that remain continue on to pursue. You could throw the canned meat, that usually slows them down. But you haven't eaten in some time. Or there's the cangun you improvised only moments ago. Rain a hail of hot nails upon your pursuers. But you might just kill yourself in the process.

I shouldn't have eaten that canned meat.

Teleglitch follows a long line of rogue-like games with an attitude that says, "If you die, that's it." It doesn't do anything as drastic as uninstall itself from your computer, but if you die in Teleglitch you just have to restart the game. Its expanded version, subtitled "Die More Edition" emphasizes the brutality of the charmingly simple game and, while mathematically speaking you may die more often in this new edition, you'd still die plenty in the original.

There is a story to the game that reveals itself through various computer terminals and a brief opening interlude. Get this: you're at a space colony and things go south fast. Dark matter swallows hallways and mutants and zombies of all sorts scour the corridors seeking flesh. They've got two items on the menu: canned meat and you.

The game's visuals are a pixelated simple feast. Character models differ just enough that you can tell the difference between you and them, but that's the only distinction you have to worry about. Some enemies are a bit bigger, so you can guess it's going to take a few extra shots (or stabs if you're out of ammo) to bring down. The camera hovers over the landscape like a voyeuristic drone watching a lone survivor narrowly avoid being a main course for a mutant social gathering. It zooms in and rotates depending on how big of a room you enter, which can get dizzying but is able to be turned off in the options. Your map is activated by hitting Tab and the camera zooming all the way out, revealing everything you've explored thus far and obscuring the unknown in a blanket of black. Everything outside the randomized corridors and rooms is that same absolute black, reinforcing a fear of the unknown. While traversing the facility, you might come across a hallway that ends in darkness with a strange colorful ripple on its surface. "Anomalies," they call them. I'll let you guess what happens when you walk into them.

For the average PC shooter fan, the controls are a walk in the park. WASD moves your character swiftly through the claustrophobic environments. Your mouse wheel picks a different item in your inventory like a shotgun or a medkit. Right mouse button aims. Left mouse button shoots. The way the Good Lord intended.

Then there's the C key. By default, this is the "Combine" key that allows you to combine different items in your inventory to make new tools or weapons. Combine a can of meat with some RDX_250 explosive and make the sophisticated "meattrap." Box of nails and some more RDX_250? Nailbomb. It doesn't have the engineering depth of a game like Minecraft, but it does add some survivalist flavor to a game where your second objective to hopping teleportation pads is to survive.

It's no Game of the Year contender, but it's a challenging and simple odyssey that proves it's well worth its cost. You can pick it up on Steam for $3.25, where it normally retails for $12.99.

How Critical are Critics?

A recent post on Reddit pointed to a 0% rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes for Fox's new sitcom, Dads. The Tomatometer offers this consensus: "A near-total disaster, Dads makes the fatal mistake of believing its racist gags can lend an edge to its aggressively predictable writing and unlikable characters." I've seen bits and pieces of the show, mainly to kill time until its superior comes on, Brooklyn Nine Nine. What I've seen doesn't make me want to see any more than bits and pieces. In fact, I'd do better to see less.

The premise of Dads, according to Rotten Tomatoes, is simple enough to the point of dull and uninspired: "Two successful video-game developers take in their hard-to-live-with fathers in this sitcom." A part of me wonders if the premise in itself was sales-pitch to ride the coattails of Chuck Lorre-spearheaded sitcom juggernaut The Big Bang Theory in terms of nerd pandering, but what little I saw didn't lead me to believe there was much to draw me in. Yes, the two stars Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi play video-game developers (though I don't recall much development being done), but I don't remember much developing. Maybe an in-joke that I'd be in on had I watched from the first second, but I'm not so sure. Oh look, a hot Asian assistant. Literally the first time I saw her, she was dressed as a schoolgirl. There was a joke in there too, but I missed it.

But I'm not the only one missing the jokes. It's clear from Metacritic that the critics abhor it. Philadelphia Daily News' Ellen Gray lays it out bluntly: "Dads just isn't very funny." She goes as far to say that the cast is above the material they utter. Entertainment Weekly's Melissa Maerz expresses the consensus of the show's racist humor, unsure if it's the "clueless dads...who might be racist, or maybe it's just the show." What little I saw of it didn't toss any racist humor my way, or if it did it was so unfunny that it didn't even land. I have to agree with Gray's sentiment about the cast being above the show...for the most part. Giovanni Ribisi's done some sitcom work in the past--I recently saw him in a rerun of Friends--and Seth Green's got a solid TV comedy resume. But the dads might be our weakest links.

Comedy giant Martin Mull and Animal House lead Peter Riegert star as the eponymous dads. The creators of the show may have been seeking some hidden comedy energies that lie latent in the two aging funnymen, though they didn't appear to tap into that ley line. Choosing Mull made some sense to me--he's a comedy veteran who showed he still had chops as recently as Arrested Development, though arguably AD is not so recent. But Riegert's presence feels anomalous. He was a part of one of the biggest comedy films of the 20th Century, but is that enough to reel him into this mess? Was he even a first choice?

To put out some fires, Fox strategically put out a commercial that essentially says, "f--- the critics." In a bold maneuver, the network owns up to the lack of love from critics, but argues, that it's the fans who matters. Not these elitist buttholes who review TV shows for a living. And Fox might have a point--CBS's Big Bang Theory is still on after six years and the critics haven't shown it the warmest of receptions. But they haven't straight-up panned it either like they did with Dads. Regardless, a 7.9 score from users is a higher rating than the "57 out of a 100" Metascore.

There is something curious about this divide, however. Purely comparing numbers, 57 is higher than 7.9. The Metascore puts itself out of 100 points whereas the User Score is only out of 10. Metacritic privileges the professional critics by seemingly weighing their scores over that of users. What purpose does this serve? Does Metacritic believe that user reviews are not as valid as critic reviews? If so, why?

I admit that I take more stock in critic reviews than I do those of users. I privilege the professionalism over layman's critiques. I'm not so sure it's a good thing. But a service like Metacritic appears to promote this critical elitism over public opinion. And I fear I'm only promoting it further by using it.

Fixin' for Netflixin': Room 23

Recently, we sat down for Room 237, a documentary from Rodney Ascher about the impressive amount of outrageous theories surrounding Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Some theories covered include the film being a critique of the American government's systematic war on Native Americans to a confession by Kubrick for having taken part in the staging of the moon landing. Some of what's presented is not entirely far-fetched, but the way some presenters explain their interpretations feels disjointed and ultimately subverts the credence of their work.

Full disclosure: I still haven't seen all of The Shining in one sitting. Like many movies on TV, I've seen it piecemeal as I flip to it halfway through or ten minutes from the end. Never did I see the beginning of the movie on TV. I believe it was on Netflix for a while but that dead lady that Jack macks on still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

In the same way that The Shining is an unconventional horror movie, Ascher's documentary feels unorthodox. The film simultaneously is and isn't a talking head documentary: on the whole, its a series of disembodied voices. Occasionally, we get a credit at the bottom of the screen when a new voice takes over but beyond that we don't know who these people are. They all sound like they're film critics or literary critics, but for all we know they're just die-hard fans of Kubrick. They appear educated enough and credible enough, but due to Ascher's choice of footage, they're just voices leaking from the ether.

Most of the footage is pulled from not only The Shining, but some of Kubrick's other work like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange, and Eyes Wide Shut. There are other clips of teenagers in a movie theater that appears like it's from some 1980's flick, but its source is unclear. I'm not sure why clips from other Kubrick films were chosen as most of them are just incidental. There are times when non-Shining clips are brought in for comparative analysis, and those illustrate the elements that make a film distinctly Kubrick. But others leave you scratching your head, like a clip of Tom Cruise's character walking past a movie theater. It's purpose just apparently mimics an anecdote from one the speakers.

In a way, however, it fully immerses us into Kubrick's universe. We're not given a chance to surface from the flood of his work, so it forces us to see through that lens. It might be so you can make the connections easier. Or it could be to give a sense of cohesion where so many theories take away such a sense.

Given that so many of the theories are visually based, it's logical that the director chose to eschew standard talking head footage for clips from the movie. It's one thing to see a bearded man with glasses tell the audience about the significance of the Calumet baking powder can, but it's quite another to see all of the can's appearances while the significance is explained. That being said, it was hard to separate theories from their parents, and at times I wasn't sure if multiple interpretations were coming from the same authors. But in the end, the focus isn't on those who interpret but the interpretations themselves. They are the cast of this movie.

Why Assassin's Creed is Dumb (Spoilers if You Actually Care About That Sort of Thing)

What's with the Jolly--ooo I see what they did.

I'll fess up now: I've only played the first Assassin's Creed game in its entirety, the one where you're the American-sounding Arabian assassin with a baller hood and parkour moves to boot. It was okay. It took me a while, but only because I got bored with it. It's not a terrible game, and indeed the gameplay was good enough that they recycled it with a little bit extra for four more games with a fifth one coming soon. I just found the story dull, the gameplay repetitive, and HOLY GOD IS ALTAIR A TERRIBLE PROTAGONIST.

As is his descendant, who you also play as in all of the games. I dreaded the intervals where you're cooped up in a sterile-looking penthouse between pseudo-time-traveling. You have two things you can do: move your character and press a button. Any button. They'll all do the same thing, assuming you've encountered something you can interact with like strange writings or a person. Most of those intermissions are spent conversing with that lady from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and all of those sequences are boring. Yes, they serve to further the plot. But never mind is the plot silly and convoluted for the sake of being convoluted.

In these games, you either play as Desmond, just some modern day dude who gets caught up in a secret war between the Assassins and the Templars. Oddly enough, the Assassins are the "good" guys, but that's just because between them and the Temples Templars, they're the less dickish. The Temptations Templars want to rule the world because that's a convenient motive for bad dudes. But you don't just play as Desmond, you also play as one of his several ancestors who--get this--were all Assassins. Crazy, no? And the way the game explains is that you're tapping into Desmond's genetic memories to, uh, learn stuff. I guess. It was to find a relic in the first game, I think it's to learn how to become an Assassin in the third game. Don't ask me about the rest. The third one wasn't too clear either.

Of the games I've played, Desmond seems to be progressively groomed to be the savior of humanity from the Temps and their diabolical designs. The second game's intro gives Desmond a little bit more to do, like beat up some innocent security guards hired on by the Evil Templar Organization because somebody wants a little taste of freedom. Desmond gets to do more than just talk to Sarah Marshall; he gets to punch some guys.

Already, it's a step up from the first game's modern day interludes, but it's still not great. Desmond is still uninteresting and clueless (granted, it picks up right at the end of the first game), and despite being voiced by everybody's favorite voice actor Nolan North, he has the charisma of a fake potted plant. The long-ass introduction with Desmond from the beginning of Assassin's Creed III doesn't help things, although given my ignorance of the end of AC II and the everything of AC Brotherhood and AC Revelations, I missed where the weird got turned up.

Yup. Weirder than genetic memory.

But in the process, they also picked up a new cast member, everybody's favorite interdimensional godlike manchild from Star Trek: The Next Generation, John De Lancie.

Q, now with 100% more goatee.

But he doesn't have his mystical Q powers in this as far as I can tell, and he's only there to be the hard-to-impress dad to Desmond's angst-ridden son. Again, I missed some things so maybe the father-son dynamic is more worthy of my emotional investment than I'm giving it credit. But then again, this game is from the same makers as Assassin's Creed with Most Boring Video Game Protagonist of 2007, Altair. 

So good of an Assassin he doesn't have a face.

So we have a fourth game coming up, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (pictured at the top). As you can probably tell, it's about pirates, which sounds promising. But so did III with its Revolutionary War backdrop, until it killed the entire series for me. As I mentioned before, you play as at least two different characters in these games, Desmond, and some random descendant. Desmond's plotline serves as a pointless frame in which, honestly, if ditched could improve the games ten fold. An argument could be made that the cuts to modern day from the first Assassin's Creed were to help the pacing and give players respite from the action. Except there isn't much action. The parkour movement gets stale after you realize that all you're doing is holding a button down with an additional button if you want to move faster. The missions are identical: kill this bad dude and escape the guards. The extras are all scavenger hunts that aren't remotely interesting because, get this, to do find stuff you have to hold a button down for an extended amount of time. It's a boring sandwich with slightly less boring meat (or vegetables if you're awful). 

In III, you again play as Desmond and, get this, some rad English Assassin named Haytham who's gotta take some targets out in the Colonies. And he's pretty alright. It might be the accent, but he's already a load better than Altair and an improvement over the rich boy Assassin of AC II. He's interesting. He's got a three-corner hat. He hooks up with a Native American lady. He turns out to be a Templar. Damn, didn't see that one coming. And I don't mean that in the good way. If there's anything I learned from my college creative writing classes (except that I don't like a lot of creative writing students), it's that you can't be coy with your readers, and Ubisoft, the first few hours of your game is a hot mess of coy sauce. It's at that point that you start playing as his European-Mohawk offspring, Connor. And it's at that point I stopped.

Nothing against playing as that character (except that he's a kid and one of your training missions is a game of hide and seek), but it's then when everything takes a dive. One of the characters you associated with as Haytham is a premium buttpipe, but only after you encounter him as Connor. Maybe the last few years corrupted him, but it's still a stark contrast to what we saw of him pre-Connor. 

I felt burned. Duped. Like I'd been played with a plot line sleight of hand that had picked my precious time from my back pocket. The game's dull framing narrative was bad enough, but then they took away a protagonist I actually enjoyed playing as. Maybe Connor would grow on me if I kept playing, but I don't have it in me to give the game another chance. Assassin's Creed IV comes out near the end of October. It's got pirates, and from what I've read Desmond is dead at the end of III so that's a vast improvement. 

I'm looking forward to not finishing it.

Couch Crawl

After deciding that the game would be acceptable, I rented Diablo III for Xbox 360 to play with Sam. In the demo we tried beforehand, I had started a barbarian character with the name "Hogar," the default suggestion. Sam went with a wizard named "demena," a name of her own design. It took no time for her to get acquainted with the game's controls as, when you start out, you have the control stick to move your character, the A button to perform your basic attack, and the Left Bumper to quaff a healing potion. We started out right away smashing up zombies with my axe and her magic shooty spells.

The only concern she raised was her character's starting garb, which was very little. I joked that part of the game was finding more clothes as you loot for more and better armor, but it still bothered her. When you're not a 14-year-old boy anymore, the fantasy trope of scantily-clad warrior women loses its sex appeal and feels more like sexless nerd pandering. It bothered her for different reasons, ones I could understand but not fully given my male experience. I wondered about Sam's choice of character name: "demena," nearly a homonym of "demeaning" depending on how you pronounced it. Was it intentional?

We played the demo for a significant amount of time, longer than she's been able to sit through Bioshock Infinite due to motion sickness. It helps that Diablo III fixed camera perspective doesn't pan or spin quickly to induce dizziness. We played long enough to level up to level 6, her at a slightly faster rate than me. I'm not sure if it was some piece of equipment giving her an experience point boost, but her character would shout an epiphany to signal leveling up sooner than my dim-witted barbarian would. I discovered that, unlike the PC version, the 360 version did not alert you to new abilities when you gained a level. Instead, a new button-mapping would appear at the bottom of the screen, not informing you what abilities were attached to which buttons. On one hand, I like the idea of having to experiment with different buttons to see what mystic explosions emanate from the wizard's wand. [There has to be a better way to say that. -Ed.] But for a newbie like my girlfriend, it doesn't help when they only window that pops up with instruction is at the beginning of the game, telling you, "Push A to hit shit."

When I told Sam about this, the dynamic of the game slowly began to shift. We started to wordlessly strategize. She'd keep her wizard a decent distance away from the action, blasting with arcane energy or icing baddies with a freeze ray. My barbarian would stay in the thick of it, cracking skulls and stunning my enemies with hearty ground pound. This strategy mostly worked until we got further into the game when the minions seemed to multiply ten fold.

Demena died a few more times than Hogar did, but given that this is a video game death has no permanence. I'm not positive what the consequences of death are in the Xbox 360 version of Diablo III. I had thought it was an experience point penalty, but if that's the case Sam must've been raking in hella experience while I bashed frozen zombies. Demena's mortality was no fault of Sam's, however. She being a wiz guarantees some degree of character squishiness, to borrow a term from the pencil and paper side of role-playing. 

We made it a great deal further than I had in my first outing into Sanctuary on the PC with my monk Severian. We met a scoundrel whom Demena talked to a great deal more than any other character (except for the cowardly mayor who wouldn't move his cart out of our way). We fought goatmen in the Festering Woods. We saved a burning town from witch-worshiping zealots. We turned criminal brigands into charred skeletons. And all from the comfort of an aged futon.

Coping With Ya'll

"Ya'll" was always a cowboy thing to me. We had our good-ol'-boys in Central Illinois, those who embraced the redneck stereotype while waving their rebel flags and drove trucks that would break all sound-related city ordinances if my hometown had any. Their accents always danced the line of southern without jumping the Mason-Dixon line. Never full Texas, but distinctly rural. And nobody said "ya'll."

My first exposure to "ya'll," that is to say, the first time I heard the contraction without a television speaker as a mediator, was when a girl starting going to my middle school after she moved with her family from Texas. She didn't have the accent--in fact, she sounded more like us than some of us did. But she said, "ya'll." Everything else had that Midwestern lack of twang, and then she'd hit that address to a group of people. "How ya'll doing?" You'll notice that the g remains at the end of doing, not contracted by any means. It seemed to emphasize the anomalous presence of the word, like speaking Spanish but dropping a German word in. I wasn't around her much (a year younger than me) so I never got used to the word's use.

My mom bought me a t-shirt when she took a trip to visit her friend who now lived in Texas after spending most of her life in Northwest Indiana. On it was the Texas flag with its lone star and the phrase, "It's a Texas thing, ya'll wouldn't understand it." I wore it but never thought much of it until the new girl saw my shirt and told me that she was from Texas. She didn't sound like it until she read the shirt out loud and hit that hard ya'll.

In my college town, there was a restaurant that was never open since I started as a freshman. From what I understand, the owner refused to relinquish ownership but had no immediate plans to reopen the restaurant. I heard they served food you'd see at a Popeye's or Long John Silver's. The outside was colorful, sharing the same color scheme as a Long John Silver's with blue siding and yellow trim. The parking lot was overgrown, populated by weeds infiltrating the cracks in the pavement and bereft of cars carrying hungry people. Above the front of the restaurant in straight-lined stylized lettering was the phrase, "How Ya'll Doin?" No apostrophe at the end of Doin, but a question mark as if to suggest they owners were genuinely interested how passersby were. Or maybe everybody. "Ya'll" is inclusive.

A trip to North Carolina immersed me further into "ya'll" culture. It was a similar sensation as when the girl from Texas greeted me or anyone else, except everyone around me was doing it. It wasn't until then that I came to that epiphany that nearly everyone we talked to lacked anything resembling an accent and sounded like the Nebraskans they tell newscasters to mimic, except for "ya'll." I never thought the word would induce a feeling of cognitive dissonance in me.

And then I moved down here. Everybody says "ya'll," regardless of accent. Everybody. I'm not used to it. Neither is Sam. I hear it in restaurants, grocery stores, antique stores. It's weird. I'm not offended, of course, but I'm still not used to it. Maybe I won't be. But I probably should get used to it.

Sojourning Skyrim Again, or a Confession

Skyrim is nearly two years old, and the fun returns on the game have diminished little. After my Hard Drive Crisis of '13, I lost some of my save games--specifically my original character--but thanks to the Steam Cloud service, I retained the rest, specifically a female dark elf named Elaris. Burning stuff her thing. Burning it with * M A G I C *

I put about six hours into her game long before I got a new hard drive. By that point, I had returned to my original character, the defaultly named Prisoner whose Redguard background in one-handed weapons fueled his bloodlust. I had started Skyrim's expansion Dawnguard and joined a band of zealous vampire slayers to, uh, quite literally guard the dawn. My interests shifted back to The Witcher 2, so it was a long while before I traversed the cold mountain and Skyrim, home to Nords and giants alike.

I reinstalled Skyrim last week and saw only Elaris--no Prisoner--remained. I did not click on her save, instead I hopped into a new game. the long familiar intro of my character wheeled up to a small village in a prison wagon was still the same chore to sit through, but finally I was called up for execution, which meant I was called up for character creation. It's a curious thing that one's character should be birthed only a moment before they rest their neck on a chopping block. Leave it to those clever bastards at Bethesda.

Skyrim is a game of sandboxy freedom, and character creation is an extension of that. Want to be human? You've got four choices. Elf? Choose from a few different pointy-eared dudes. Cat-man? Sure. Lizard-lady? Fine. Dwarf? Go screw yourself.

Skyrim is part of a long series of games with an established lore that while they threw fifty different variations of fantasy tropes en masse towards your face, they wrote out the single best demi-human race the genre has even known: dwarves. Sure, dwarves are referred to and you can explore their steampunk ruins. But they're not Tolkien's brand of bearded badass. Oh no, they're just an extinct society of elves. There's a reason why The Hobbit focuses on a band of dwarves and not elves. Because elves suck.

And I don't mean this from an "elves are gay" position, because that's just an insult to the LGBT community. When it comes down to it, I cannot separate the word "elf" from its Christmas connotations. I've been immersed in fantasy long enough that I know full well that Tolkien was not referring to Santa's Little Helpers. I don't have this same issue with dwarves and Snow White because they mostly perform the same function. When they belt out "Hi-ho, it's off to work we go," you better believe they got some mining to do for gems and ore and stuff. Sure, we don't see them tear it up with ale and battle axes, but that's because Disney's a family company and they can't show that Sleepy's just in a perpetual drunken stupor.

So what do I go with in Skyrim? Khajiit, or anthropomorphic gypsy cat. Why? Because they're naturally stealthy, got claws they can use as weapons, and I DON'T LIKE ELVES

The Madness in Adaptation

Recently, I saw a production of the musical Wicked. I'm not a huge musical person, but Sam was really excited about seeing it so I figured, sure, why not. The extent of my knowledge of the musical came from my high school's show choir taking a trip and seeing a production of it, as well as performing the song "Popular" for their routine. I also knew it was based on a book that two of my classmates in high school were obsessed with. Both musical and novel deal with the life of the Wicked Witch of the West before, during, and after the events of the film The Wizard of Oz. I enjoyed what I saw, but this isn't a review of the production. This is an exploration of adaptation and intertextuality and why I find it so difficult to reconcile adaptations with their source works.

The original novel by Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, is a parallel novel of the classic Judy Garland picture The Wizard of Oz and the book on which it was based, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. We see the events of The Wizard of Oz play out from a different perspective. In this case, our point-of-view is centered on the film's antagonist, the Wicked Witch of the West. The film does not name her, unlike the Maguire novel which gives her not only a name but a voice, at least one beyond threatening young girls' dogs. To my understanding, Maguire's work focuses on elements mainly from the film but employs some elements from Baum's series as well. It's likely, however, that Maguire's audience would be comprised of those who have seen the 1939 film and might not have known it was an adaptation. Indeed, the film is such an iconic American work that it overshadows the literary foundation on which it was built. But I digress.

I haven't read Maguire's novel, nor Baum's work, but I've seen the film and it seemed enough to keep me afloat during the musical adaptation of the novel. I knew the characters and was able to make connections to the film, and it was fascinating to see happy-go-lucky meditation on morality put to music. But then it got me thinking, do we read this as an alternative universe or the same place and events from a different vantage point? In-jokes are spread throughout the musical that would only be caught if the audience had prior knowledge of the film. At one point, the witch utters, "There's no place like home," the memorable line opined by the film's protagonist. Do we take this as coincidence that the Witch says this? Or in this retelling of the story, is it the Witch who solely says this?

Without the film, the musical may work, but for an ideal experience it appears that one must know the film to read and appreciate the musical's intertextuality. A viewer unversed in the movie would not know that the dog's name is Toto, not Dodo as a character mistakenly refers to it. That same viewer would not know the significance of house that fell out of the twister or who the hell this girl is that stole a pair of shoes. So much of the musical demands a prerequisite knowledge of an early 20th century children's movie.

This is a time for adaptations and "re-imaginings." The media is awash with content that for every new piece of content there are three reworkings of old content. This is not necessarily bad--adaptation has long been in practice. Some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were borrowed from Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron and so on and so forth. There are successful re-imaginings. 2003's Battlestar Galactica comes to mind, arguably usurping its predecessor in terms of character depth and cultural relevance. Even the recent Spider-man adaptation was a hit with critics even though the previous Spider-man franchise came out only five years before. But ours is a remix culture, trimming usable elements and combining them with others.

A re-imagining that I enjoy but still struggle with is BBC's Sherlock, created by Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat. The drama presents itself as a modern day retelling of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective stories centered around detective Sherlock Holmes and his partner-in-crimefighting Dr. John Watson. Characters and events are updated to suit the current time period; Watson served during the War on Terror in Afghanistan, and Sherlock's work is proudly advertised through an online blog. The show's first season earned an 85 on Metacritic, proving that the modernization of a classic film and literary character makes for good television. And I have to agree, it makes for damn entertaining TV. But this is where I struggle: are we in an alternative timeline where Sherlock Holmes exists only in the present as a real human being?

In discussing the program with a friend, I was informed that there was a clue that Sherlock's world and the world of Doyle's work were one in the same due to a literal tip of the iconic hat most associated with the deducing detective. But was it a nod to the audience who presumably knows the significance of that hat in particular? Is Moffat's Sherlock a world in which there was a Sherlock in the Victorian age who existed in flesh and blood or ink and paper? Everything else about the new Sherlock appears to be our world its share of issues, except for these two characters whose very names displace them in time.

We even have the US adaptation of The Office. For the most part, the elements are the same--goofy boss, will-they-won't-they sexual tension between two coworkers, neurotic awkward nerd--and due to it being a sitcom, I didn't think much about them being in unified or separate universes. But then in Season 7, Ricky Gervais makes an appearance as his character from the UK version of The Office, David Brent. In a later episode, Brent appears again, seeking work and Dunder Mifflin. This could be just an random nod to the original series, but then it makes me wonder if the two shows are parallel to one another? Are Tim and Dawn still a thing across the pond as Jim and Pam are getting together here in the States? Has David Brent irritated the whole of UK to the point of being banished to the US?

It's things like this that keep me up at night.

A Tale of Two Diablo IIIs, or Prelude to Couch Crawl

June 2012 saw the release of the long awaited sequel to Blizzard's action RPG franchise, Diablo III. The months leading up to its release were filled with excitement and anxiety as rabid fans salivated over the return to Diablo's dark fantasy world of Sanctuary but also dreaded its lack of gothic darkness. When it finally came out, the game was a polished product for sure, but Diablo's mechanics felt gutted. Some found it difficult to call it an RPG as character customization had now been limited to what breastplate your character was wearing. To some it was a failure, but to most critics it was a decent release, garnering an 88 on Metacritic.

Since its release, the auction house has come and gone and many who missed the previous iterations' depth of character progression had left to try alternatives like Torchlight II and Path of Exile. But in September 2013, we saw the release of Diablo III again, but this time for consoles. PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 users could now enjoy the hack and slash loot farming from their couches as opposed to leaning into a computer screen. Reviews for the console versions strayed not far from their PC counterpart with both versions getting an 86 on Metacritic.

This is not Diablo's first foray into the living room. The original crawled its way to PlayStation in 1998, only a couple years after its PC release. Gamespot gave Diablo for PSX an 8.1, praising it as a mostly successful translation of Diablo's addicting hybrid gameplay with a few animation hiccups. All in all, a formula for success. So it's no surprise that Diablo III saw the LCD light of flat screen televisions.

I bought Diablo III shortly after its PC release in 2012 and played it for about a week. Leading up to it, I had been playing Torchlight, which borrows heavily from the first two Diablo games (no doubt because of Torchlight's development team containing Diablo developers) and adds some unique mechanics like a pet to send all of your extra loot back to town for selling. A worthy successor for sure. Yes, it was cartoony to the point of bordering on juvenile, but the mechanics were something to write home about.

Diablo III lasted about a week for me. The story was middling at best--though who plays Diablo for the story? And while the dark aesthetic was preferable to Torchlight's, environments began to feel stale and recycled. While the randomly generated level mechanic of the Diablo series had made a return, there was only so much variety to see. Multiplayer was an alright experience when you had someone to play with, but I too was feeling miffed that I had no say in what stats to increase every time I hit a level. Sure, the monk's fisticuffs looked like a dream in full three-dimensional rendering with Havoc physics to boot, but for Cain's sake, I thought I was playing an RPG.

That's not to say I didn't like the game. I find it fun in bursts. But playing the game by one's self feels more like a chore than outright fun. So, I figure let's give the Xbox 360 version's couch co-op a shot. Sam doesn't game but she's been such a loving girlfriend to feign interest and give it a shot with Bioshock Infinite (damn her motion sickness!), and she's agreed to jump into Sanctuary with me. We'll give the demo a shot before we invest any further into the game (hello nearby Redbox).

God help us.

Castle Doctrine

This morning I went to examine our balcony door to see about fixing it. The door is crooked and there's a space that looks like a possible entryway for little critters, and I wondered if it was as easy a solution as tightening the upper hinges. Opening the door, I discovered that we had squatters. Buzzing, stinging squatters.

We've found a couple of them around the apartment before. The first one I thought was a dead roach, but it turned out to just be a soon-to-be dead wasp. The second Sam thought was a spider in the corner of our bathroom. Upon close inspection, it turned out to be a dead wasp. I long wondered where they came from. Did they have their own doorway? Did they have an embassy we didn't know about? Whatever the case, I wanted to keep them--and any other unwanted guests--out.

The nest sat in the doorway just under the threshold in front of the door. Nothing flew out but I saw a couple of them crawling around. I slammed the door. My breathing went shallow. My heart rate tripled. I don't think I have a phobia--that's an irrational fear, right? I got stung by a yellow jacket when I was ten years old at my sister's wedding reception, and cried like a rivet went through my wrist. I went inside--the reception was in our backyard--and watched TV while I kept ice on the sting. My cousin Adam came in and made fun of me.

So I didn't want to get stung. It hurt like hell the first time, and I didn't want to see the sequel. I needed a solution quickly. YouTube served me well in the past in terms of instructing me on how to dice onions and make egg salad, so I figured I could find a recipe for serving up a main course of wasp annihilation.  One video showed using this incredible death foam on a large nest above a garage. The uploader suggested doing it at night so the wasps would be asleep and you could cut their throats in bed, but I didn't have that kind of time. It was going to hang over me forever, or at least until winter when I could pull the nest down by hand and punt the bastards into the snow. He also suggested wearing protective covering, but I don't have any jeans.

Then I considered a professional. Let them get stung to hell. They get paid for that. Orkin. Or a local guy. Then I saw something about a special for $50 off on a visit and figured they were well out of my budget.

My breathing was still heavy, and my heart hadn't slowed. I didn't even want to stay in the apartment. I left. I saw our neighbor Mark as I came down the stairs, likely on lunch. I just met him last night on our balcony. He asked me how it was going. I didn't know how to explain to him that we had home invaders and I was going to buy a big gun--maybe a .357, maybe, a 12-gauge shotgun--to cleanse my dominion of winged stinging filth. But I just told him, "Good."

I was seething with rage, in response to my own fear of things no bigger than my little toe and to the idea that there could be just a couple of the little shits or a well-connected network of miniature pain-bringers and I had no clue. Immediate threats first.

The Ace Hardware isn't far, so I ran by there. I wondered if I needed that industrial strength foam that may have been weaponized Barbasol. I then wondered if, should there be more, do I buy some sort of beekeeper outfit? Would they even have that at Ace?

Entering Ace, I was greeted by an employee. He walked with a slight limp and spoke with the southern drawl I'm still getting used to. He asked me what I was looking for, and I told him: "Wasp spray." I was headed in the right direction anyway but he escorted me there, suggested the Ace-brand stuff because that's what they used on "the farm" and it seemed to work good. Then he saw the price for Raid-brand was practically identical. I went with Raid out of some twisted brand loyalty.

I return home. No sign that they had breached. I debated waiting until later. It was a short debate. I grabbed a broom, the very broom I used to smack the roach-turned-wasp only weeks before. I readied it by the doorway. I grasped the can of Raid Wasp & Hornet that I had already removed the safety plastic piece outside. Opened the door. Two of them crawled about. Let off a burst, squeezing the trigger as I had learned to for the rifle shooting merit badge. Dead wasps fell lifeless. I slammed the door shut.

I spray a heavy dose on the cracks around the door like I'm laying down a barrier. None shall pass. I sat in a chair near the door and waited. Seconds passed as I expected some to break through like buzzing berzerkers. But none did pass. I opened the door again, doorknob slick with Raid Wasp & Hornet formula. I sprayed another volley, seeing no dead wasps fall. Was it empty?

Taking the broom, I gently prodded the small nest. Then I speared it like a Spartan. It came down easy enough, falling square in the center of the balcony. I shut the door, unsure if there would be retaliation. I thought back to things I'd heard about wasps returning to help fallen comrades because of some pheromone released in death. Thought back to me dropping their home so effortlessly and ungracefully. I needed to get rid of the nest. I batted it off the balcony into the woods using the broom. The wasps on the balcony remained still, no signs of life. Or further conflict.