Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Today's Word: Office

A soul-deadening location that pulls you away from your life's pursuits and loved ones. On the other hand, it is a fierce engine for daydreams and escape plans.

Class last night went well. A lot of good feedback on the synopsis revision, as well as a thumb's up from my teacher about revising the first chapter/contest submission. The postmark deadline is Feb. 22, but Monday is a holiday here in the states and that means the post office will be closed on Monday. So, it looks like I'll have to get it into the post office on Saturday to be sure it's in the mail. Backtracking further, that means I have to get everything ready to go late Friday which means (deep breath) synopsis revision tonight and chapter editing Thursday night with one final going over Friday night before The Great Big Print Out and All-Important Filling Out the Contest Entry Form. I have this vision that I'll be pounding a lot of caffeine into my system until I revert to the 100-cups-of-coffee Fry from the sorely missed "Futurama." After that 100th cup, the world around Fry slowed to a Matrixesque "bullet time" where Fry could move at near sonic speeds. I figure I'll be operating at that rate for the next few days, concentrated on textual perfection, so blogging might be lighter than usual.

Bring Your Own Towel

Alright. I'm breaking through my normal chrysalis of passive bemusement and into my officially shamelessly giddy clown tuxedo. The new trailer for the upcoming "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" film is up at Amazon, of all places. I'll write more about Douglas Adams, author of the sci-fi/comedy novels on which the movie is based, closer to the film's opening, but nearly everything about this movie makes me smile. The adventures of the hapless Arthur Dent was a bright spot in an otherwise rocky childhood, and Adams' quirky humor gave nerdy kids like me a secret language to use on each other, leaving the more popular cliques in the dark. His books were smart yet accessible, densely packed but textually light. Everything about Adams' prose suggested a friendliness, a laughter in the face of danger. The universe might be enormous and aliens threatening, but at least they were neurotic and clumsy as you were. The film (at least the trailer) suggests the same, and from what I've read about the test screenings, it's mostly true to the book. I imagine some purists will be steamed at any tampering (just as some were fuming with how the Lord of the Rings film trilogy swerved widely from the source material), but Adams had a hand in writing this script, so some of his spirit will be in there somewhere. Adams always altered his "Hitchhiker" stories, even to the point of having versions contradict each other when "Hitchhiker's" came out as a book, radio show, TV miniseries and (soon) movie. With Adams' untimely passing in 2001, we'll never know the answer, but I imagine he must have had a grin at rewriting the same jokes over again and still getting smiles and applause from the audience.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

She's Otherwise Occupied

Adding a link to the always readable Riverbend, the nom de plume behind the blog Baghdad Burning. She's an Iraqi woman living in Iraq, posting when there's electricity to do so. It's a street-level view of the American occupation of her country, refreshing and harrowing at once. A stark break from neo-con pundits and vapid talking heads on American TV pointing out how wonderful things are in ol' Mesopotamia.

Today's Word hasn't been updated, the bums.

Tinkered with the contest submission last night. Up until now, the structure has been: Narrative, flashback part 1, narrative, flashback part 2, narrative, flashback part 3, narrative. Last night, I swapped things around so it was all one big linear motion. The one drawback is the action-filled opening I posted a few days ago has been moved to page 4, but it now sets up the general exterior opening, giving a view of Seattle as a whole as Rayelle runs for her life. I'm leaning to the new set-up because the flashbacks seem to lose their tension after while. You know Rayelle survives the danger in the flashback because you see her on the street. I make the comparison to the opening sequence of any Bond movie: You know Bond is going to escape because there's another two hours of film. My wife, who reads books in the way whales dine on plankton (and who is a professional editor), doesn't mind the flashback. She says the technique establishes what kind of person Rayelle is, and I can see that. I need to make the decision soon, since I need to get the submission in the mail by the weekend.

My wife, last night, sprung my Valentine's gift on me. Apparently, I've been a very good boy because Cupid Claus got me an iPod Shuffle.

Well, it's on order. Should be here in a couple weeks.

Monday, February 14, 2005

You got game?

Some gaming news that I have to report on

First and foremost, it looks like the gnomes at Blizzard are gearing up to do a lot of hiring. No word on what the title might be, but there are a ton of clues if you know where to look. I'm betting it's the latest in the drug addiction that is the "Diablo" series.

Blizzard is best known for creating the real-time strategies "Starcraft" and "Warcraft" as well as the aforementioned RPG "Diablo." One ad seeks a Lead Game Designer with experience making RPGs to lead the team that designed the first two Diablo games. A few years ago, Blizzard had a lot of defections from its organization, casting doubt on the future of the "Diablo" series. When Blizzard announced a couple years it was going to break with tradition by developing a game for a game consoles and not the PC, it sent gamers into a tizzy, wondering what was happening with the company.

But Blizzard is nothing but methodical. They develop titles for their licenses usually in order. Which makes me think a Diablo title is under development. After all, Blizzard last year put out the online RPG version of its human-versus-orc Warcraft license, "World of Warcraft." Currently, it's working on that tender piece of space-faring vaporware for the game consoles,"Starcraft: Ghost." That leaves only Diablo left out. Piece that together with the text of the ads and it stands to reason in that casual letter-to-Santa-please-please way that Blizzard is about to come up with something sword and sorcery.

Two things that trouble me, however (outside of the fact I could be dead wrong)
1) Diablo II and its expansion pack came out for the Mac at the same time as the PC. I don't know if Blizzard will make that happen again. I live in dread of a PC-only release of Diablo 3.
2) Blizzard is notorious for taking ice ages to develop its games. If they were looking for staffers now, Diablo 3 probably won't hit for a few years. Example: "Starcraft:Ghost" has been in development for years, and had been pushed back numerous times. It's now rumored "Ghost" won't show up until the next generation of consoles roll out late 2005/mid-2006.

Speaking of dates

What kind of world do we live in when Doom 3 will ship for the Macintosh (March) before it ships for the Xbox (April 4)?

Disposable heroes

Xbox.IGN.com has an article up about yet another game looking to dethrone the urban chaos experience that is the "Grand Theft Auto" license. Titled "Fear and Respect," the game is "a realistic take on life in South Central Los Angeles from collaborators Snoop Dogg and John Singleton."

In other words, it's a clone of "GTA: San Andreas." That, in and of itself, isn't a bad thing. The market works like that. You get a smash hit and everyone races to copy it to cash in on a splashback effect in sales.

What bothers me is this (from the article): "Fear & Respect is more about "A day in the life" and less about run and gun, kill everything in site with no consequences. In the real world, you don't run through LA, stealing cars and shooting whomever you want. Gunfights will be more true to life, you can't just stand in the open and start shooting, you'll need to take cover and be smart in gun combat. We are also creating "dramatic moments" to bring the character and the game to life."

What bothers me is this: Interurban life, and all peripheral violence, is becoming a game to be played by anyone. What is a tragedy every night in America's cities is stripped of its malevolence and brutality and turned into entertainment. What bothers me is that John Singleton, who directed the visceral "Boys in the Hood," has traded cpaturing the hard-hitting misery of life in south central Los Angeles for a vision into disposable violence. Get killed by a gang banger, just reload from the safe point and try again. It's the same with World War II games, giving players a faux-experience of the terror of war, where each step could be your last. I won't get into the further objectification of young inner city African American males as gun-toting killers, but it does make me wonder what the marketing of this title is going to be like, as well as the target market. Is it going to be "street cred" cool for white suburban kids who think they're hip-hoppers? Will inner city kids want to play something that's supposed to represent their lives? Are gang members the next World War II soldier: the prefered player class for committing violence for a good cause? Is gang violence supposed to be fun?

I know: It's just a game, but there are some serious questions here. It's one thing to shoot a Stormtrooper or a Covenant, both fictional creations who seek to kill you first. It's another when the pixels get a little too real, the locale just a little too familiar, and all the activity is plausible. When the screen resembles when you walk out the front door, you have to start wondering about how much realism is good for entertainment.
Today's Word: Erased

He went back and chopped out all the e-mails from his mistress, all the threads that acted as silent evidence pulling him out of this running life. One by one, all the love notes, desperate plans, half-hearted erotica vanished into the ether. And he would say one day that they never happened.

Oi, that's a cheerful sentiment on Valentine's Day. It's about 9 a.m. here in Seattle and I feel like I've been awake since the American Civil War. Very tired and spent the weekend on the couch resting in a body roughed over from two weeks of unrealized stress coming to a head. Wife and I on the couch with overfed cats perching on top of us. My snow-colored laptop humming away battery power at my feet. A parade of DVDs. Pre-emptive consumption of Valentine's Day junk food. I could use another decade on the snooze alarm.

I don't get ill that much. Most of my sickness are 12-hour minor gremlins residing in my throat or a sinus. By the next day, I'm better. Here, my muscles feel eroded and everything is on a three-second delay thanks to DayQuil. Interested in seeing what caffeine will do to my system. I'm just happy I haven't crashed out, a state I get in every once in a while where I get a brutal flu and my body is in open rebellion for a couple weeks. Everything comes out orange. It happens when I least suspect it, and lasts until I forget what it feels like to be healthy.

At least I rewrote the synopsis for contest. Got it down to three pages. Ha! My wife read the first chapter for the first time last night and was generally supportive. As an editor by trade, she'll go over it soon to weed out any stylistic varmints.

(an interlude, where some works gets done, a journey to the bathroom ensues, and our hero gets a Diet Pepsi)

Caffeine is now in my veins. The chemistry of DayQuil, breakfast, and Diet Pepsi is bringing my world into focus now. My brain is registering warm colors like red and yellow now. Thoughts and memories get their marching orders and, yes, we did go see "Woman in Black" on Saturday. Wife got scared at the proceedings, and I thought I would be terrified. I don't like going into a situation where I know I'm going to be deliberately terrified, and I had been dreading going to see the play (it's about a ghost with a revenge streak a mile wide). But in the seats, I was fine, more in agony over the plastic coffins of my new shoes.

Oh damn, I do feel a thousand percent better. It's such an amazing sensation to feel your body get better within minutes, to feel an iron shroud living from your muscles. I didn't want to spend Valentine's Day under the weather. I didn't want to just leave some cards and gifts in my wake as I tumbled off to an early bed, amorous pursuits left abandoned for vandals to wreck. I know there are cynics out there who frown on such a corporate-fueled holiday, but Valentine's Day is a sort of Thanksgiving for lovers. You take this day to give thanks for what you have in the love department, realizing all the complex calculus that it takes for two people to come together in this world, and you look around and thank whatever deity you trust that it's all working out. If you're smart, you don't just use this day to shower your beloved with flowers, candy, and a poem. You don't use this day as a mortgage to remember your lover. You're supposed to do that all year long. But today, ah, today is the day you celebrate love, and as far as holidays go, it's a decent one to celebrate. It's stripped of patriotism, nationalism, and overt religious flavoring. Valentine's Day is about love, ranging from the purity of hand-holding to the hedonism of body syrup and leather. It's for everyone. It's about the good things in life. I like it more than the corporate slaveholding that occupies Christmas, the saccharine overload guilt bomb of Mother's Day, and the violent overtones of Independence Day. Don't get me started on the Super Bowl.

So, happy Valentine's Day. And for the cynics, someone loves you, whether you like it or not.

P.S. It's snowing in Seattle!