The dirty secrets of a publicly viewed website

I was shown this link earlier today. It's only a paragraph, but just in case some of you folks are too lazy to check it out, I'll give you a summary. It seems (if the article is to be believed) the CIA is probing to discover the impact of Wikileaks. They're calling themselves the Wikileaks Task Force (WTF). An appropriate name, as "WTF"  is what I said to myself when I heard about this misappropriation of tax dollars.

I'm not saying I approve or disapprove of Wikileaks. I'd never really thought about the site at all before all this hubbub started up. Some people may take offense at my lack of a stand on this issue, but I figure that a few months after this all blows over, when most people don't even remember what Wikileaks is anymore, it won't matter what I think about it.

When you refuse to touch yourself, the terrorists win.

The guy who sent me the link followed it up by saying "Get ready for Operation LOLCAT next." That may sound like a joke, but I think there should be some serious probing done into these cats. They're up to some very suspicious behavior. For instance, why is Ceiling Cat watching me masturbate, and what government does he work for? How do we know he's not an Al Qaeda agent?

This seems like the kind of investigation that'd be right up Larry King's alley.Too bad he's retired. I mean, it's all about cats, so it's cute and cuddly, which King likes. Plus, since it's about cats, it's full of human interest, which really gets King rolling up those shirtsleeves.

There was one thing about the whole Wikileaks thing that I found amusing. I was watching a report on it on the local news. They were talking about how Paypal, Visa, et al were all refusing to send payments to the site. But I noticed that they neglected to mention the fact that every company that made such an announcement got shut down for several hours by hackers. I thought it was a strange oversight on their part, since the news loves slamming hackers almost as much as they love maligning video games and music that's not performed by corporate-controlled young white drug addicts. They really dropped the ball on that one.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Bad movies and fond memories

Back when I was a kid, there was a video rental chain (at least, I think it was a chain) called West Coast Video near my house. In one corner was a kid's section, which was partitioned off by faux castle walls and an arch that even at 10 years old I had to duck under (and I was a short kid). At the time, that seemed real cool, but looking back on it now, it seems very foolish. At the far corner from the kid's section was the Adult section, which was behind a doorway with a blind corner so you couldn't just look in. I remember being real curious about that, wondering what kind of movies were in there that I wasn't supposed to look at. I tried daring myself to go in there a couple times, but I never got up the nerve, except for standing in front of the doorway and trying to peer around. Eventually I decided it couldn't be too interesting, since my parents never went in there. Which I guess should tell me something about my parents.

Anyway, the kid's section was pretty much what you'd expect, cartoons and the like. I remember there was one movie that, like the Adult section, I kept trying to convince myself to rent, but I never did, because even as a kid I could tell that the movie would be garbage. At the time, I wasn't aware of the concept of "So Bad It's Good." Which is actually kind of funny, because there were a lot of movies I liked as a kid that could fit squarely into that trope, I was just too naive at the time to realize they were bad. I just knew they entertained me.

Some days, I kind of wish I had made myself rent that movie. In my older, more jaded years, I've come to have a greater appreciation for bad movies. MST3K played a big part in that. In fact, as I understand it, the movie was even on MST3K. I have a growing collection of films that I knew when I was buying them were going to be crap. Some of them I've even dared to watch by myself, without a gathering of friends to heckle the film with me. That's how depraved my fascination with low-budget direct-to-video genre movies has become.

Perhaps it's inaccurate to say I had no concept of So Bad It's Good. I remember that every time I went to West Coast Video, I would look at that movie and read the back cover, or sometimes just stare at the front and wonder "What were these people thinking?" Also, in some weird form of childish empathy, I felt sorry for the poor sods who made this movie, thinking it must have been a terrible embarrassment to have been in it. I even became embarrassed on their behalf even as I stared at the movie with a morbid fascination. I think my fear wasn't that the movie would be bad, because it obviously was, but that it was so bad I wouldn't be able to sit through it. Or that my mom would look at it and say "Are you crazy? We're not renting that," and I'd feel like an idiot.

It's funny, I no longer have any excuse not to watch the movie. There's nothing to stop me from finding a copy and downloading it (either the original or the MST3K version). I guess maybe now I'm just worried that there's no way it could live up to the badness I'm picturing in my head. Maybe I'll recommend it when and if I resurrect my old Beer And Bad Movie Nights.

For those of you wondering, the movie I'm talking about is Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

You may have noticed a couple new buttons at the top of this page. I've added an RSS feed to this blog, so that anyone interested can be notified of updates without having to come back to this site all the time.

If any of you folks have been wondering how to do this on your own blog, it's pretty simple. From the design page of your blog, go to the "page elements" tab (it should open to that one by default), and click on one of the "add a gadget" links in the sample display. A pop-up window will appear, offering a variety of tools you can add to your blog. The one you're looking for is at the bottom of the "basics" page, and is called "subscription links." Just click on the picture of the + sign, and that's it.

If you want more information on what RSS is, follow this link.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Hot talk about T&A

A few years back, I watched a movie called Absolon, a typical low budget direct-to-video Sci-Fi film starring Christopher Lambert. A couple weeks ago, I was on the site tvtropes.com and discovered that they didn't have a page for Absolon, so I decided to make one. The link above is to that page.

I had commented to a few people that with the exception of Highlander, every movie that Lambert has starred in -at least the ones I've seen- have been pretty crappy. I like watching those kinds of movies personally, I get some kind of perverse pleasure out of them. But I wonder what a man who's done a few big budget major motion pictures thinks when he's handed this kind of project. I imagine that the conversation with his agent must have gone something like this:

Agent: Chris, I've got a new movie here for you. It's called Absolon.
Lambert: Oh, yeah? What is it?
Agent: Well, uh, it's uh...
Lambert: Oh, man, don't tell me it's another direct-to-video movie.
Agent: Well, yes...
Lambert: It's probably a genre film, too.
Agent: Yeah, you could say that.
Lambert: Why do you keep getting me stuff like this?
Agent: Well, I think you'll like this one.
Lambert: Why's that?
Agent: You'll get to make out with Kelly Brook in it.
Lambert: <considering> Kelly Brook? The model?
Agent: Yes.
Lambert: The British girl with the...uh... <holds hands out about a foot from chest>
Agent: Yeah, that's her.
Lambert: I'll do it.

I was thinking about that motivation today, and I remembered something I'd heard somewhere. This study was done years ago were guys were made to look at pictures of people. A laser was set up that tracked where the eye fell on the picture, making a note of locations where the eye lingered. It was noted that when looking at someone, a person will look at one eye, then the other, then the mouth. And if a guy is looking at a woman, he will look at her breasts, as well. The man explaining this said "It turns out that men actually do like to look at a woman's breasts."

I'm sorry. This is news? Who was conducting this research? Aliens? Did someone really say "I wanna know if men like to look at breasts," and then get some grant money to perform an experiment, when he could have as easily asked his male friends? Or even his female friends? I somehow doubt women were unaware of this phenomenon. It's like conducting a study to see if humans would, given the choice, prefer to breathe air or poison. You'd think common sense and life experience would be enough to give you a definitive answer.

If anyone reading this is thinking about setting up an experiment to find out if men like looking at breasts, let me save you time and money right now. Yes, we do. I do, my friends do, my male family members do. Hell, I've met gay men who have expressed a fondness for women's breasts. There. Study complete. Now go cure cancer. Don't tell me you're a sociologist and wouldn't know where to start, just go cure cancer.

On the note of looking at visible parts of the female anatomy, I'd like to find the fashion designer who decided to print words on the back of ladies' pants and drop him or her down a cliff. The very first time I saw that, the first thought to enter my mind was "Oh, great. Something else for women to yell at me for looking at." Well, ok, the second thing. The first thing I thought was "What the hell is printed on that woman's ass?" I figure it's either a case of women moving forward in their plan to drive men completely insane, or distinct myopia. They go "Oh, how cute, there's something written on the seat of these pants!" and buy them, without considering the fact that this is going to draw the attention of people who see it.

And despite what some women seem to think, men they aren't attracted to are just as literate and curious as men they are attracted to. We're also not mind-readers. I've had conversations with women on topics like this, and the consensus seems to be that it's only Ok for a man to look at a woman if that woman finds the man attractive. Well, I don't know who does and doesn't find me attractive, so it's not like I have some kind of checklist I can carry around of which women's clothing it's safe to read.

And at any rate, if you're walking around with some pithy statement stretched across the front of your shirt, and you go "What are you looking at?" to an unacceptable male, you're not fooling anybody. Those words didn't appear there by magic. You knew full well that there's something written on your shirt, and that people's eyes are going to be naturally drawn there. Don't try and act like you're the innocent here.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault

Harry really needs to get himself a hat like that

I recently read Side Jobs, an anthology of short stories by Jim Butcher based on his series The Dresden Files. All but one of the stories have previously appeared elsewhere, and thus, they weren't all new to me. The stories cover the span of the books thus far (12 novels and counting), with the first story taking place before the first novel, and the last (the previously unpublished one) taking place about an hour after the most recent novel.

All of the books take place from the perspective of the eponymous character of the series, Harry Dresden. The Dresden Files are dark/urban fantasy. Harry Dresden is a wizard living in modern day Chicago (my hometown), working as a private investigator. As such, the series also has elements of crime novels, with a heavy noir influence. Think Phillip Marlowe with access to magic. Dresden generally makes his pay by finding lost objects and other trivial matters, but every now and then he gets pulled into something bigger and darker, which of course is what the novels are about.

Each of the stories in Side Jobs takes place in between two of the novels, which are broadly spaced a year apart each. Basically, they're tales of jobs Harry took that go above his normal "find my lost keys" job, but don't directly tie into the main plot arc of the series. Like the novels, the stories are written from Harry's perspective, except for "Backup," which follows Thomas Raith, another character from the novels, and "Aftermath," which follows Karin Murphy, a Chicago Police Officer and good friend of Harry's.

"Aftermath" is the afore mentioned final story in the anthology, and was the one I was most eager to read. It was both what I expected it to be and different. Changes ends on a major cliffhanger (or possibly not, depending on how it turns out when Ghost Story comes out), and while I knew the story wouldn't resolve anything, I hoped it would address the ending of the novel, show people's reactions to what happened. It did that, interwoven within a story that would have been compelling even without that hook. That was the part I hadn't expected. I had thought it would be contemplative character piece, which in some ways it was, as it lets the reader into the mind of Murphy, when previously we only had Dresden's point of view to consider. But within that inner conflict was an outer one just as interesting; both in its own right and because it gives the reader a glimpse into the reaction of the supernatural community to the events of Changes.

I had gotten into The Dresden Files a few years ago when a friend loaned me Storm Front, the first novel in the series. But I'd only gotten about as far as the fourth book, until two of my friends ordered advanced copies of The Dresden Files RPG. I'd had reservations about it, I'm generally wary of games based on books or movies. I never even picked up a copy of the Babylon 5 RPG, and that's based off what's probably my all-time favorite TV show.

But I have to say that Dresden Files makes for a nifty setting, and the rules system complements it well. It uses the FATE System, one of those rule systems that favors Roleplaying over Roll-Playing. Systems like that can be real hit-or-miss, especially if you've got a gaming group that wants everything neatly determined by the random chance of a 20-sider, but FATE handles it pretty well. Most RPGs stress that a character isn't just a set of stats on a piece of paper, and with FATE that's literally true. Your character doesn't have any attributes or the normal stuff, his or her capabilities are determined solely by skills and the like.

Ghost Story, the 13th book, comes out in April of 2011. I have to say I'm really itching to read it. Jim Butcher has really hones his craft with these books, you can see him mature as an author as you progress through the series. These are the kind of stories I want to tell. I don't mean urban fantasy, but the scope and the sheer "can't put it down" nature of these novels. Those following my other blog will know that I've been working on short stories and looking for places to submit them, but deep down I feel I am a novelist. It's my earnest hope that one day I'll have a series of books like The Dresden Files to point to in my old age and say "I was here." In the meantime, I can appreciate the fruits of others' labors.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Ace Attorney

I Object to the sky.

This year for Halloween I was Phoenix Wright, of the Ace Attorney series of Nintendo DS games produced by Capcom. There were about two people who recognized my costume without having prior knowledge of my costume, which is about what I'd expected. The Ace Attorney games have a pretty good following, but they're not exactly pop culture. I thought I'd discuss the games here, because I think they're awesome.

Currently, the series consists of five games: the first three starring Phoenix Wright, the fourth following Phoenix's protegee Apollo Justice, and the latest is about Phoenix's childhood friend and sometime antagonist Miles Edgeworth. This latest installment is notable in that it is the only one where Phoenix does not make a personal appearance, though he is alluded to several times in the game.

Phoenix Wright is a rookie defense attorney (at least, he is in the first game) who defends clients who for some reason are always alleged murderers. As you can imagine, these are not your classic run around killing people kind of games. Instead, they're very heavily story-based. Each case is roughly divided into two parts: Phoenix running around investigating the crime, and then cross-examining witnesses and presenting evidence in court. Even though the American translations of the games suggest that it's all taking place in America, it's plainly obvious to anyone paying attention that you're actually in Japan. I don't know how trials are run in Japan, but I'm going to guess that it's not like what's shown in these games.

To call the courthouse scenes chaotic would be an understatement. The games run very much on Rule of Funny, with ridiculous antics and quirky characters all around. Each manual for the game includes a disclaimer that these games are not an accurate representation of any court of law, and I don't doubt it. For instance, I doubt very much that any legal system would allow a prosecutor to carry around a whip, let alone stand idly by while she uses it to thrash witnesses, Phoenix, and the Judge. Miscarriage of justice is also a very common theme in these games. For instance, if Japan has such laws, I imagine the courts in this game would be filled to the brim with people up on perjury charges. If you were to bet someone every time a witness appeared on the stand that they were going to lie about something, you wouldn't win every bet, but I guarantee you'd come out well ahead.

Lay the legal smack-down on this guy.

The main weapon in Phoenix's arsenal during court scenes is the evidence he has acquired throughout the game. Each time a witness gives testimony, Phoenix is allowed to cross-examine, and the player has to carefully examine each part of the witnesses testimony and find a contradiction in that testimony (often a flat-out lie, but sometimes an honest mistake). Expect the Idiot Ball to get passed around a lot in these situations. When the player finds a contradiction in the testimony, he has to locate the piece of evidence that proves the contradiction, which is when the drama starts. When the player presents the right piece of evidence, the music stops, and Phoenix (or whoever else the player is controlling depending on the game) shouts his most memed line: OBJECTION! Then you get to sit back and smirk as you watch the witness sweats in the light of his exposed lie. Even when the contradiction is plain as day, it is very satisfying to see the accusatory finger of Phoenix extended triumphantly.

Of course, no courtroom drama would be complete without a slimeball lawyer. In a lot of movies and books, it's the defense attorney who takes this mantle, as they're often shown to be money-grubbing liars who are more interested in an acquittal than the truth. Since that wouldn't work in a game were you are the defense attorney, the dirtbag job goes to the prosecutor. Most prosecutors in the games have a very cut-and-dry view of the law. Namely, their job is to get the defendant declared guilty. Is it possible he's innocent? Who cares? All that matters to these guys is a conviction. The actual guilt or innocence of the defendant is someone else's problem.

These games are proof that video games don't have to be about blood and body counts to be a hell of a lot of fun. With all the wacky characterizations, convoluted cases, and mixture of humor and high drama, they're more than enough to keep you entertained for hours. And they're now out for the Wii, so even people who don't own a DS can try them out.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

I am very excited to present you with this new and improved blog!

Many years ago, I worked a Dominick's, a large chain of supermarkets here in Illinois. While I was there, we got bought out by Safeway, which I had never heard of but apparently is a dominant force in groceries across most of the rest of the country.You can see they're keeping their hand in the pot, too. Take a look at the two pages I linked up there, and you'll notice a number of similarities. As part of the buyout, all us employees were required to attend a meeting in the second floor stock room of a different Dominick's. I don't know why we had to go to a different Dominick's, as everyone there was from my store. For that matter, I don't know why their stock room was on the second floor.

The meeting, as anyone with any familiarity at all with corporate America can guess, was basically a big old bluster-fest designed to tell us how things were going to be run now that Safeway was in charge. I'm pretty sure I signed a non-disclosure agreement or something, so I can't really say much more, except that the buzzword for this program was "superior customer service." That and it was basically four hours of us being told how to comport ourselves in public, something every one of us presumably had learned how to do at the age of about 6. It involved watching a lot of stupid videos that I think were made by the same yahoos who made the videos I had to sit through in Grade School. They certainly weren't treating me as if I were any older or more sophisticated. That and every one of the videos said pretty much the exact same thing as all the others.

As a side-note, one of the women from my store had a minor emotional breakdown about halfway through the meeting. She had to be led away, and I recall her saying between the tears "It's too much to remember!" While it would please me greatly to say that the woman had simply rebelled against the doldrums of corporate drone-hood, I have to be honest and say she just wasn't a stable person. She was generally on the verge of tears even at the best of times.

The thing I remember clearest about this meeting was that, among the suits from Safeway deigning to breathe the same air-conditioning and dust as us (seriously, why is it always dusty in stock rooms? There's damn near constant motion in those things), was our store manager at the time. He informed us that earlier that week, he'd attended a meeting much like this one (though I imagine in cheerier surroundings), being told about the new policies and whatnot we would be working under. He told us that he "walked away from that meeting feeling very excited."

It was the first time I'd heard that particular word in a business setting, but it sure as hell wasn't the last. I think the main reason I remember it was that it sounded so alien coming from this guy. While he wasn't exactly the Boss From Hell, I just couldn't see him being excited about anything. He was the kind of guy whose emotional scale, if you'll forgive the musical pun, was barely an octave. I'd seen him mildly upset, vaguely disappointed, putting on a fake smile for the customers, acting warm and friendly in a rather distant manner with the employees, and sternly disciplinarian. In all but the faux happiness, his facial expression was generally of one suffering from mild but uncomfortable constipation. No matter how I stretched my imagination, I couldn't see him getting excited over anything, save a laxative.

Fast forward several years, to my office job at SecurityLink from Ameritech. I had gone from pushing carts to pushing buttons. I was pleased with the change, and it should tell you something about working as a bagger at a grocery store that I considered the move to cubicles, grey-on-drab color schemes, and its ilk an improvement.

I had been working there for not quite a year when a bunch of changes took place. From what water cooler gossip told me, Ameritech, which was in the process of being bought out by SBC, had to get rid of its security company (that being the part I worked for) because of some anti-trust law or something. So we get bought out by this mom-and-pop security company called Cambridge. That lasted about a week, before Cambridge got bought out by ADT. I've always had the sneaking suspicion that Cambridge bought SecurityLink to sweeten the deal with ADT. Especially as from what I could tell, Cambridge spent pretty much all the money they had in buying us. At least, that was the excuse they gave when raise time rolled around and we all got royally screwed. I'm not kidding, either. My boss explained to me that the average raise that year was $.08 an hour. I explained to him that it would have been less insulting to get no raise.

So after working for Ameritech for almost a year, then SBC for almost a week, I worked for Cambridge Security for about a month before the merger with ADT was complete. And soon after that, ADT got bought out by Tyco. For those keeping score at home, in the course of a month, I worked for five different companies, while keeping the same actual job. Maybe that's pretty normal for corporations in a world of constant mergers, buy-outs, bankruptcies, and other uncertainties, but it was all new to me, and it all happened pre-9/11, when our economy was supposed to be going strong.

One thing with all the paperwork I was getting welcoming me to the new company of the week: I became very familiar with corporate buzzwords. I could have hosted party games where someone had to drink every time some permutation of the word "excited" appeared in a memo, but I didn't want anyone dying of alcohol poisoning.

People like to throw around the word "soulless," but I hesitate to apply it here. It seems to me that it's more like blind dogged follow-the-leader antics. If that's the same thing to you as soulless, so be it. What seems to happen is, some guy makes millions (or billions, if millions are no longer the gold standard) climbing the corporate ladder, and then he publishes a book chronicling his achievements. Others in similar positions (or who want to get there) read the book, and decide that rather than it being that one guy's personal success story, it's some kind of alchemical formula that, if followed exactly and perfectly, will lead to the exact same success in everyone else who attempts it. So you've got hundreds or thousands of corporate drones fly fishing in the Andes while only wearing boxer-briefs because that's what the CEO of Megacorp does.

The ironic thing is, you've got all these people aping the actions of a man who made himself famous for not doing what everyone else around him was doing. All they're really accomplishing is setting up a staircase for the next outside-the-box thinker in the right place at the right time to ascend. In a way, it's Social Darwinism at it's very finest. And you have to wonder how much of that guy's personal fortune are due to royalties from the book on how he became a success?

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Musings on Music

Bad jokes aside, I never understood people who, when asked what kind of music they enjoy, respond "I listen to everything." I guess it's a good throwaway answer if you're just having small talk, but there are circumstances when I actually want to know what they listen to. The worst part is that most people who say that seem to actually believe it to be true. At least, until they hear the kind of stuff I listen to.

I think a lot of the blame falls on most people having a very narrow definition of what constitutes "everything." At least half of what they hear is music made in this country, and even then only in genres popular in whatever area they live in. It reminds me of that joke from The Blues Brothers. Elwood asks a woman at a bar they're about play at "What kind of music do you usually have here?" She responds "Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western." It's funny cuz it's true.

I've got a few different genres of music I listen to regularly. On my phone, I've got groups such as Metallica, David Bowie, Michael Tolcher, Iron Maiden, Phil Collins, Beck, and The Scorpions. There's even a two-disk compilation of Trance music on there. A bit eclectic, perhaps, but I note that almost all of it falls under Rock or Metal. And that's hardly everything.

I don't know, maybe I'm being pedantic. But it just bugs me sometimes, this "I listen to everything" stuff. Perhaps if we actually did give "everything" a shot, we'd broaden our horizons. Or perhaps not. No matter how much we deny it, we're comfortable with what's familiar, and we don't like change. Even the most left-leaning open-minded person will balk at anything that goes against what he or she is used to. It's just how we are. I'm probably no different, even though I'd like to think I am. Does that make me a hypocrite? I hope not.

Deus Ex

There's a sort of unofficial slogan for the game Deus Ex: When it's mentioned, someone will reinstall it. It was created by Ion Storm, a division of Eidos noted for games that became cult classics. It was released in 2000, followed by a watered down version for the PS 2 a couple years later. Your average gamer has either never heard of it, or considers it one of the finest games ever made. There's very little middle ground. It's one of those games that people like to pick up and replay every couple years. So what is it that has made it such an enduring game?

Deus Ex is a first-person shooter with role-playing overtones (it was described when it came out as "the first person RPG"). takes place sometime in the 2050s. The exact date is never really pinned down in the game. The world is your classic Twenty Minutes Into The Future cyberpunk dystopia; urban decay, eroded values, a populace made shiftless with ennui, mega-corporations, and corrupt governments. On top of that, a mysterious plague known as the Gray Death is threatening to wipe out humanity, especially the poor. Domestic terrorism has reached new heights, with its main goal being the confiscation of Ambrosia, the only known cure for the Gray Death.

In Deus Ex, the player takes control of JC Denton, a raw recruit in UNATCO (United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition). JC is a recipient of nano-augmentation, a radical new technology being tested as a replacement for disfiguring and soul-destroying cybernetics. He is only the second person to have received nano-augmentation, the other being his older brother Paul Denton.

The game starts with JC being transported to Liberty Island in New York (regardless of what New Jersey has to say about it), where UNATCO headquarters  is located. On the dock, he's approached by Paul, who briefs him on a situation developing. It seems that terrorists have stolen a shipment of Ambrosia and are currently holed up in the Statue of Liberty. Or rather, what's left of it. A terrorist attack on the Statue years earlier resulted in the head and arm being blown off, and much like the site of real life terrorist attack, nobody's done much with it since. To the right is a screen shot I took (with an added caption).

Paul advises you that you've been ordered to go and locate the Ambrosia so that UNATCO can reclaim it. Since you only just showed up and aren't carrying anything except some stuff you found lying around on the dock, Paul gives you a choice of three weapons to take with you: a hand crossbow with tranqulizer darts, a sniper rifle, or a rocket launcher.

And right there is one of the neat things about the game. The world is very open-ended, and it allows you to customize your character to your style of play. You can't carry every single item you find in the game, so you've got to choose what you carry with you based on what you consider the most important. If that sounds annoying, don't get too upset. They made it even worse in the sequel. The game has a large variety of weapons to choose from, in all shapes, sizes, and categories, so whether you like sneaking up on a guy and tazing him, shooting him from 300' away, or blowing him to holy hell, there's something in the game for you.

Nano-augmentation also forms a large part of the game's customization. When the game starts, JC only has a couple augmentations: nightvision, and a computer in his brain that allows him to store data, as well as working as a video phone that only he can see and hear. Throughout the game, you find augmentation canisters, each linked to a different part of JC's body. These can be used to gain new abilities. Each canister will give JC a choice of two new abilities: which one you choose depends on your style of play. For instance, the first canister you find will augment JC's musculature. One choice lets JC inflict more damage in melee combat, the other lets him lift heavier objects. Folks who like getting up close and personal in fights will prefer the damage bonus, while those who like exploring the game world will find the lifting bonus more useful.

Also, when building your character, you are given a number of points which you can use to buy and upgrade skills for your character. There's a number of skills, which do a variety of things like determine how well you can pick locks, how accurate you are with different variety of guns, or more esoteric things like how long you can survive breathing toxins. Some guides will probably tell you things like "ignore this skill, it's useless," or "you should really get some points in this," but really, it's all up to you and your style of play. If you feel that having more time to disarm a mine is more important than being able to fire a handgun more accurately, then do it that way.

As I said before, Deus Ex is a very open-ended game. There's no one right way to complete an objective. As a simplistic example, take a situation like the one presented in the screenshot on the right. Regular handguns and rifles are useless against a massive armored robot like the one in the picture. But, there's still a number of options for getting past it. If you have a rocket launcher (and you might not, as they take up a lot of inventory space), you could simply blow it to Kingdom Come. Also, the game has a number of grenades, which can all be mounted on walls and turned into proximity mines. Robots in the game all move in perimeters, so planting one in it's path shouldn't be a problem. Or, if you don't have anything to attack it with, or don't think you'll be coming back that way again, you can just sneak past it. The game even has ways of facilitating that, including an augmentation that turns you invisible, another that makes your footsteps silent (and some NPCs in the game can hear you tiptoeing across shag carpet from the next room), and other items to help you sneak around.

That's one of the things that gives the game the its replay value. The world is so sprawling, and there's so many ways to accomplish your goals, that even if you're careful to explore as much as you can, you probably won't see everything in the game your first time around. Another big thing is that the way you play the game affects the game itself. Nothing huge, the overall plot doesn't change, but people's attitudes toward you, and other small but sometimes significant things, can change depending on something as simple as whether you run into a room guns blazing or sneak in and tranq everyone inside. The main reason I'm replaying the game now is that I had done (or rather, hadn't done) one big thing that I thought was impossible to do, and now I want to see what the game's like having done it different this time. I won't say what it is for folks who haven't played, as it's a pretty big spoiler, but I will drop a hint for those who have played it. What I'm talking about involves Paul in the 'Ton Hotel before you go to Hong Kong.

If the game has any drawbacks, it's that the graphics aren't all that impressive, even for the time it came out. But they're not horrible or distracting, so I see that more as an aesthetic issue than a gameplay issue. Plus, these guys have been working on a patch to improve the graphics of the game. It's not complete (and considering the last update was in 2006, I wouldn't hold my breath on it), but there is a demo version you can download which touches up some stuff here and there. Also, if you pick up a copy of the game, make sure to get the latest patch for it. It was pretty buggy when it first came out. It's actually fairly notorious for its bugs, I've seen pages dedicated to documenting weird bugs in the game. Nothing fatal, I think the worst I ever encountered was a door in one area that kept opening and closing on its own. It was a bit spooky, but that's it. I also found an exploit in the same area where repeating one action kept giving me skill points, but if I did it too much, the game crashed. It's probably been fixed since then, anyhow.

I can see where the saying mentioned in the beginning comes from. I'm having fond memories of the game just talking about it, and I'm playing it at the moment. So, if you play games on your PC, and you like first-person shooters, then Deus Ex is a game you really ought to check out. And if you do, don't be surprised if you find yourself throwing it back on your PC a year or so later. Have fun.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

The Lost Fleet

I picked up a new series of books the other day, The Lost Fleet by John Campbell. I have the first three volumes, which I grabbed off Amazon.com since they were cheaper as a set. I was worried at first that I'd bought three books in a set that I might not like, but so far the investment has been sound.

The Lost Fleet is military Sci-Fi, a sub-genre I haven't read much of, with the exception of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers. There's very little comparison between the two, however. Starship Troopers is as much a political treatise as it is a novel. Thematically, The Lost Fleet is very different.

The back story is this. In some indeterminate point in the future, Commander John Geary is in charge of a small squadron of ships which is ambushed by the Syndicated Worlds. They are greatly outnumbered, and Geary's ship is damaged enough that it can't escape. So he stays behind and orders the rest of his ships to retreat while he holds the Syndics off in a last stand. Just before his ship is destroyed, he gets in his escape pod and puts himself in suspended animation. Unfortunately, his escape pod's distress beacon is damaged, and he floats in space for a century.

He's awoken by a fleet passing through the system and brought on board the flagship. He discovers to his horror that the war that started with the ambush on his ship is still ongoing, and that he was presumed dead and elevated to mythic status. He was given a posthumous promotion, and to every citizen of the Alliance, Captain "Black Jack" Geary is an infallible hero.

**Warning: Minor Spoilers Ahead**

The main theme of the novels, especially in the first book, is the deconstruction of our views of heroes from our past. Nearly everyone Geary meets practically worships the ground he walks on, and are convinced he can do no wrong. The Alliance is a society of ancestor worshipers, compounding Geary's problems. Because he knows he's not infallible, the adoration he receives from others terrifies and sickens him, and he lives in fear of what will happen when the people around him discover he's just as human as the rest of them.

There's also a healthy dose of culture clash, as in the hundred years of war, much has changed, especially in the military. Ships on both sides fight more like savages than an organized unit. The fleet is extremely reluctant to move away from it's bloodthirsty attacks which kill as many of themselves as they do the enemy, and it's an uphill battle to get the fleet to learn to fight again as a cohesive force, even after such tactics prove to be devestatingly effective against an enemy unable to cope with it.

One thing that I found odd: there's no prologue, or flashback, or anything of the like, describing Geary being anbushed and stuck in stasis for a century. It's brought up here and there throughout the books, but that's it. At first, I had worried that I'd accidentally started reading the second or so book in the series, but Dauntless is indeed the first book in the series. I guess the author decided to throw the reader right into the action, rather than go into something anyone would know after reading the first chapter or glancing at the back of the book.

I'm on the third book right now, and they're rather good. The science is pretty hard, with the exception of things like FTL travel and shields, which people have grown to expect in all but the very hardest of Sci-Fi. Much is made in books about the speed of light, and how conducting operations in space can be difficult when it takes minutes or even hours for someone to see what someone else in another part of a star system is doing. To get an idea of what that entails, think about when you watch a reporter on the news interview someone in another part of the world. The reporter asks a question, and there's a noticeable delay of a second or two before the other person responds. That's because even at the speed of light, it takes a second or two to for the signal to get shot into space, bounce off a satellite, and reach the person on the other side. Then, it has to do that all over again to send the reply back to the reporter. By the same token, the sun is about eight light-minutes from Earth. That means, when you look at the sun, you're actually seeing where it was eight minutes ago. Now multiply that by distance by several factors, and you can see how it gets difficult to predict the actions of a ship sitting on the other side of the system from you.

There's six books in the series so far, and after I'm done with the one I'm on, I plan on getting the rest. It's got a good blend of intrigue, action, human interaction, and food-for-thought. The space battles are spiffy, and Campbell manages to make each encounter and situation unique. The series doesn't take itself too seriously, but neither does it make a farce out of itself. The characters, especially John Geary, are complex and very human. He manages to execute what Jayne Cobb called "thrilling heroics" without turning the heroes into a bunch of swashbuckling Mary Sues. They're real, they're flawed, they're sympathetic. You groan when they make a mistake, and you cheer when they're victorious. It's a good read, and it's got me thinking I should look more into the sub-genre of Military Sci-Fi.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

New Blog

I have established a new blog, dedicated to tracking my writing career. It is called The Joy Of Writing and can be found at emaxfieldmoen.blogspot.com.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

In Defense of Rifts

As I stated in a previous entry, I am a gamer geek. I've been playing tabletop Role-Playing Games for nearly half my life now, and been part of the same gaming group for 6 years now. Some of the faces may change, but two original members and myself have been there pretty much consistently, and we've been playing at the same place for over 5 of those years. I cut my teeth on Palladium Books titles, such as Heroes Unlimited.

Palladium is pretty much unheard of outside of gamer circles, and even many in the loop haven't heard of the company. They've had some modest successes, such as owning the licenses for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (though that series is now out of print) and Robotech/Macross RPGs. Their flagship title, however, and the one that really got me into RPGs, is Rifts. Rifts is an RPG built on a truly epic scale. The basic setting is a Post-Apocalyptic Earth, though many books include settings on other planets, and even a space opera setting in a far-flung universe. It contains elements of Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Cyberpunk, just about any setting you can think of.

And really, that's what attracted me to the game. As I often tell people, in Rifts you can make just about anything. You can be a cybernetic ninja, fighting alongside a wizard firing bolts from a magic gun, a medieval knight on a robotic horse, and an alien psychic riding a dinosaur. It may sound like the product of an overactive child's imagination, but that's one of the things I really like about the game. It lets me cut loose with my imagination in ways that I can't with any other game.I can throw in something that would be absolutely ridiculous in any other setting, but as long as I can make it work and the players dig it, it's cool.

It's a sad fact, however, that a lot of my fellow gamers are stigmatized against Rifts. The game has a reputation, probably not entirely unearned, for being a haven for hack and slash power gaming and Munchkinism. There's a number of reasons for this.

First, and probably most important, is Mega-Damage (M.D.). Basically, M.D. is a game rule used in Rifts and a couple other games (like Robotech) to account for damage far in excess of what would be possible in a normal game, without having to deal with large unwieldy numbers. All Palladium games have what's called S.D.C. (Structural Damage Capacity), which is equivalent to Hit Points in other games. Lets say Joe Average on the street has 20 SDC. One point of M.D. is equal to 100 SDC, meaning that even one point of M.D. would completely obliterate poor Joe.

What a lot of people will tell you Rifts is all about

In Rifts, pretty much all the armor and weaponry in the game (including natural armor and weapons of supernatural creatures) is calculated in M.D. So, this means that even a first-level character makes a modern-day Main Battle Tank look like a pea-shooter made of tissue paper by comparison. Obviously, to hack-and-slashers and Munchkins, this is a wet dream. This aspect of the game was even parodied in an April Fools article, by the creator of the game himself, where the fictional Giga-Damage was unveiled, along with new weapons with stats like "Range: The circumference of the Earth, minus 10 feet, so you don't shoot yourself in the back."

Also, there's the matter of game balance. Kevin Siembieda, the creator of Rifts, has gone on record as stating, in his opinion, "balanced" does not mean that every character operates on the same power level. He feels game balance is more an issue of equality of opportunity; that is, in a well-constructed game, every player has a chance to shine and use his character's particular talents. So a character can go out right from the start and get the biggest, most powerful gun and strongest armor he can lay his hands on.

And, there's the issue of Power Creep. It's the one facet of Rifts that's probably gotten as much, if not more, coverage than M.D. In my opinion, at least, the problem isn't as big as people claim. I still make characters using classes and equipment from the first book, and haven't found myself overwhelmed or underpowered. Hell, the Glitter Boy, which is cited as being the single most overpowered item in the game, comes from the first book.

As I said, all the above claims about Rifts are true, if exaggerated. You can play a Rifts game as a strictly hack-and-slash kill-em-all bloodfest. And if that's the kind of game you wanna play, knock yourself out. But you don't have to, and in all my years playing Rifts, I've never run or played a straight-out "shoot everything that moves and blow up everything that doesn't" game. I don't have anything against them, that's just not my style. There's just as much room for role-playing in Rifts as in any other RPG. I think what happens is that the ones who talk about Rifts the loudest are the gun bunny hardware lovers, who go on and on about all the ways to kill someone available in Rifts. And like in any group, it's the loudmouths you hear. And so it's assumed that anyone and everyone playing Rifts must be like that.

We've had power gamers in our group. We've had Muchkins. We've had min-maxers. And ironically (or perhaps not), they were usually the least effective members of our group. Why? Several reasons. One, they were each and to a man focused on making his character as physically powerful as he could. They'd buy the most powerful weapons, get whatever equipment they thought would make them more potent combatants (for an example, see the "I want two arms" story in my post "Space the Rodian"). They focused totally on being hellions in battle, while ignoring the fact that there was way more to the game than encounters. Plus, like any munchkin, if they couldn't kill an enemy in a single blow (one-shotting, we called it), or if they took any damage whatsoever, they'd get huffy and lose any and all battle effectiveness they had. I can't understand why a guy who spent months of game and real time building and designing his character so that he had M.D. numbering in the thousands would then raise a fit over taking 5 points of damage. Wasn't that the whole point, so that you wouldn't have to worry about a few measly points?

Most of all, they fell into a very common trap. They looked only at the numbers when it came to their equipment. Take the afore-mentioned Glitter Boy for example. A Glitter Boy is a suit of Power Armor (sort of a halfway step between an exoskeleton like Iron Man and Mecha like found in Robotech or Battletech) designed to be the most powerful single-person assault vehicle on Earth. It gets its name from its laser-resistant armor, which is highly-polished and glitters in the sun. As far as stats go, it has more armor and its rail gun can do more damage than any other piece of equipment in the game usable by a single character. It was built using late 21st Century technology (from right before the Great Cataclysm that transformed the Earth into the game's Post-Apocalyptic setting), and is so durable and powerful that some of those original suits, handed down from parent to child, are still being used 300 years later.

If a battle in Rifts were nothing more than two groups standing in front of each other and firing away like some Revolutionary War battle, the Glitter Boy would win, hands down. If it were just a matter of rolling dice and writing down the results, the battle would be over before it was started. Some Rifts groups have stated that they won't even allow Glitter Boys in their party for that reason. Other groups state that no one in their group will play a Glitter Boy because they're useless. How can both these statements be true? It all depends on how you're playing the game.

Along with it's strengths, Glitter Boys have a lot of weaknesses. Compared to other suits of power armor, they're ponderously slow. While their rail gun (called a Boom Gun) is massively powerful, it's also the only weapon the suit has. If it gets destroyed, the Glitter Boy pilot has no other way to fight than hand-to-hand combat, which the Glitter Boy is not suited for at all. Plus, the Boom Gun gets it's name because the shells it fires are electromagnetically accelerated to such a rate that they surpass MACH 2 before leaving the barrel. The resultant sonic boom is so loud that anyone within 150' (including the Glitter Boy's companions) is deafened for several minutes afterward. And worst of all, the gun has such a massive kick that the suit has to drive pylons 10' into the ground and fire recoil-suppressing thrusters every time it fires to keep the suit (and pilot) from being thrown to the ground. This means that while firing, the suit is completely immobile, a big fat target. And since the suit is so notorious, both in game and out, it's likely to be the prime target of the opposing side. That's not even to mention the fact that there's only a few places on Rifts Earth that can reload or repair a Glitter Boy.

From my copy of the Limited Gold Edition of the main book

There's a lot more I could go into, but basically it all boils down to this. Rifts doesn't have to be about who's got the biggest gun or who can soak up the most damage. Like any role-playing game, it can have just as much battle, intrigue, storyline, etc. that you want it to have. So, if you get a chance to play Rifts, don't turn it down out of hand because you "don't like power gaming." Give it a try. You might find you like it.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

A Week in Boston

Back in July, I went on vacation to Boston. And it's been about this long since I've been able to think about the trip without cringing. Not that anything bad happened during the trip, aside from me losing my DS in O'Hare.

That was a real bummer, but it was nothing compared to what happened upon my return. We had literally just walked in the door from our return flight to find the basement of our house, where I live, flooding. We've had floods before, and normally it amounted to little more than puddles and me spending a couple hours mopping up. Thism however, was a deluge. By the next morning, my basement had over three feet of water in it. Fortunately, I lost very few of my personal possessions, as previous floods had taught me to leave nothing on the floor, but it was still a loss. I slept on the floor of my sister's part of the house for almost two months.

But that's another story, and a sad one that I don't wish to go into presently. I intend to focus on the positive; namely, the fun time I had in Boston. We went there to visit my cousin Tami and her husband Denny,* as well as my young first cousins once removed Noah and Lilah. Noah will be turning three soon, and his sister Lilah was about 8 months old at the time we visited. While there, we did some sight-seeing, normal tourist stuff.

Here's one thing that I can't explain about myself. I am terrified of heights. If I'm any higher than two or three stories in a building, I won't go within five feet of a window. But I love flying. Put me in a plane, and I will spend the entire trip staring out the nearest window like a blind man who has just been granted the gift of sight. The only explanation I can come up with is that I feel safer sitting in a plane than standing by a window in a building.

Noah and myself

Noah was a lot of fun, if a bit too much at times. One thing that amused me to no end was that he had trouble remembering who I am. He's only seen me a couple times, and the last time was last Christmas, which is a long time ago for someone who isn't even three years old yet. For the first couple days, he confused me for my cousin and as a result would refer to me as "Uncle Jim." An understandable mistake from his perspective: Jim and I are barely six months apart in age, are of similar builds, and while we don't look alike, I imagine we must have a family resemblance. Noah understood that I was a male family member who wasn't one of his grandparents, so I must be Uncle Jim. Q.E.D. I corrected him each time, which seemed to cause even more confusion. A pattern soon established, as follows:

"Uncle Jim!"
"I'm not Uncle Jim. I'm your cousin Eric."
<beat> "Where's Uncle Jim?"
"He's in Chicago."

I think the last bit is what really threw him for a loop. He was born and lived the first year or so of his life in Switzerland, and probably only vaguely remembers that. By comparison, he was in Chicago to see us maybe twice, and only one of those times was he old enough to walk and talk. He probably had no idea what I was talking about when I said "Chicago," which my mom confirmed when she told me that I should just say "He's at his house."

My sister Jessi and Lilah

Lilah, on the other hand, being less than a year old, wasn't bothered by such trivialities as who the hell we all were. At that age, I imagine everyone is lumped into one of a few very specific categories: Mommy and Daddy, other people feeding me, other people playing with me, and random people standing within my line of sight. There's some overlap of course, but when you're too young to form long-term memories, it's pretty much a moment-by-moment thing.

As I stated before, as well as visiting my newly-minted relatives, we also did the tourist thing. Boston is a lovely town, and full of history. Being that I've lived my whole life in Chicago, it was both amazing and humbling to stand in front of buildings with signs authenticating the fact that they are in fact older than this country. There's a wide variety of beautiful architecture, especially the churches. I wanted to go see the Red Church, the oldest church in America, but alas, even a week wasn't long enough to see everything I wanted to experience.

But we did get to see a lot. We visited M.I.T. and Harvard. M.I.T. was strange. It wasn't built like a college. If I hadn't been told we were strolling through a college campus, I would have insisted we were walking around in some downtown area. It looked more like a busy financial district, with buildings of varying age and architecture, than one of the most prestigious colleges in America. Not that I'm speaking ill of M.I.T. Everything was well built and pleasing to the eye, it just wasn't at all what I expected.

Hahvahd

Harvard, on the other hand, was exactly what I picture a renowned University looking like. Sprawling acres of tended lawns, with trees spaced sporadically here and there with plenty of lounging students (especially considering this was July), buildings of red brick practically dripping with age and history. Also, I found it highly amusing that the tour guides I saw were wearing T-shirts that said "Hahvahd."

Speaking of the stereotypical Southie accent, during our last day in Boston we went on a tour of various locations in Boston where movies and TV shows have been shot (or at least used for second-unit photography). The tour guide had a so-called "neutral" American accent; i.e. a Midwestern accent pretty close to my own. He said this was because he went to college in Virginia, and had been made fun of for his Massachusetts non-rhotic manner of speaking, causing him to teach himself to learn a new accent. However, at point during the tour, we stopped at a bar where a scene from Good Will Hunting had been filmed. While in there, one of the barflies looked over at me, and we had the following conversation, pretty much verbatim.

Barfly: Ah you paht of the touah?
Me: Yeah, I'm with the movie tour.
Barfly: Have you seen The Depahted?
Me: (trying not to laugh) It's been mentioned a lot during the tour.
Barfly: It was filmed heah too, you know.

I mean, come on. Out of all the movies filmed in Boston he could have mentioned, he had to ask me about the one that has a name that showcases his accent?

Going back to Harvard, when we were entering, my sister asked us what the name of the school's founder was. I couldn't remember, and my mom said "John Harvard." That sounded familiar to me, so I said I thought that was it. About ten minutes later, we came upon a statue which, according to rumor, is not of John Harvard, even though the plaque has his name on it. My mom saw it and started laughing, stating that she had been making the name up earlier. For the rest of the day, just saying "John Harvard" was enough to get us all laughing.

The movie tour was a lot of fun, too, even though I had only been vaguely interested in it. I was much more interested in seeing historic sites in Boston, but as my sister had already done that when she'd been there a couple months earlier, I decided it could wait for another time. During the tour, our guide had a running contest going, where he would hand over coupons every time one of us answered a question correctly. There were points given out for other things, such as pointing out whenever we passed a Dunkin Donuts (which it turns out got it's start in Boston), but most of them were for answering questions. I thought I had it in the bag, but there was another guy there who gave me a real run for my money. I was thoroughly unsurprised when I noticed he was wearing a T-shirt with a quote from The Usual Suspects on it. This guy obviously knew his movies. Perhaps appropriately, we ended up pretty much in a tie, so we both got to go home with a little plastic trophy proclaiming us to be "Movie Buffs." I'll have to figure out what the hell I did with mine.

Denny, my cousin Tami's husband, was in Switzerland on a job interview our first day there, but he was back by the second day. Denny is good people in my opinion. He's got the most awesome German accent I've ever heard, and he's rather soft-spoken most of the time, a sharp contrast to my family, stereotypical loud obnoxious Americans all. I don't mean soft spoken in that he doesn't voice his opinion, he does, especially if you get him going. I mean it literally, his normal speaking voice is a good 10-20 decibels lower than most people I know. I had a good time sitting out on the back porch with him drinking beer and chatting about whatever.

One thing that was weird for me was the change of schedule. Boston is only one hour off Chicago, so there was no jet-lag. But I'm a night person. I think nothing of staying up till the wee hours of the morning and waking up well after noon. But on that trip, I found myself going to bed by 10 (and thinking about how it was only 9 back home), and waking up about 5 or 6 am.

"Waking up" might sound innocuous. It's one thing having an alarm go off, or having someone poke their head in to tell you it's time to get up. It's quite another to be jarred awake by a naked toddler leaping onto your unconscious form and demanding to be thrown around the room like a rag doll. This was a daily occurrence, as I was sleeping on a futon in Noah's play room, and like most young children he has absolutely no sense of propriety. It didn't even occur to him that I might not be ready upon the instant of waking to roughhouse with him.

Here's one thing I noticed while I was visiting. If there's one trait that all members of the Kasperek family have in common, it's that we all have the same eye color. I've noticed that every one of the blood relatives on my mom's side of the family has the same blue eyes I do, which is impressive considering pretty much all of my relatives by marriage have brown eyes. You'd figure the brown allele would have caught on somewhere, but our eye color seems to be indomitable.

But of course, it was eventually time to go home. It was raining when we got to the airport, and that rain seemed to follow us as it was coming down in buckets when we landed in O'Hare. And as I already stated, that rain had some very unfortunate implications for me. But I still don't want to revisit that, so it is at this point that I will bid you all adieu.

More pictures of my trip can be viewed here.

* In case you're wondering, that actually is them in those links.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

One for all the hoopy froods out there

The second coming?

A couple days ago, I finished And Another Thing, Book Six of the Hitchhiker's Trilogy. For those who don't know, the first five books of the Trilogy (it's something of an in-joke to call it that) were penned by the late, lamented Douglas Adams, who went on to his final reward in May of 2001. Before his death, Adams had commented that he would like to write another Hitchhiker's book, as Book Five, Mostly Harmless, ended the series on a rather bleak note.

Several years after his death, Adams' widow gave permission for a sixth book to Eoin Colfer, author of -among other things- the Artemis Fowl series of novels. Mr. Colfer was an interesting choice, in my opinion. Hailing from Ireland, a mere stone's throw from Adams' native England, he was well-equipped to give the novel the same idiosyncratic British flavor Adams had injected into the series.

However, and this is an interesting point, up until now, all of Colfer's books had been written for the juvenile/young adult audience. I am a fan of the Artemis Fowl series, and while they're a load of fun and there's many chuckles to be had, They don't have that same gut-busting humor that Adams was so famous for. Adams had a way of describing things (such as the immortal "they hung in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't") that I can only liken to one other author, Terry Pratchett. It might help that both authors are British.

However, I was heartened by his choice of title. It works on a number of levels. All five of the original books drew their title from the first book. "And another thing..." comes from the fourth book, but it still follows the same theme on drawing a title from a previous work. And having the title come from a different book than all the others helps to set it apart right from the onset. The quote in question the title comes from reads:

"The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying 'And another thing…' twenty minutes after admitting he's lost the argument."

Reading the book, it seems that Colfer took greatly to the idea that he was writing this book for adults. He seems to revel in his sudden ability to swear and discuss other adult themes. Not that the book is excessively dirty, but compared to his Artemis Fowl books, which contain no cursing save for an untranslated swear from a non-human language, it's a noticeable change. And, to my American eye, it's even more noticeable due to the fact that the curses are all clearly British/Irish in origin: i.e. "arse," "shite," and "fecking."

The typical American, apparently.

Speaking of which, I noticed that the only character in the novel who's explicitly stated as being American comes from Texas. I realize Texas is a large place, and that the stereotypical Texan (six-shooter, mustachioed, choleric temper) is probably the easiest to recognize of any American culture, but to go by British authors, you'd think they make up 3/4 of our population. It seems any time a British author wants to insert an American character, going as far back as Bram Stoker.

But back to the book. It is certainly written in the spirit of Adams' original novels. The theoretical sciences involved seem to incorporate Adams' Rule of Funny science with Colfer's own Rule of Cool science. For instance (minor spoiler warning, late in the novel it's mentioned that Dark Matter works to enhance a person's emotions. No explanation for why this should be is given, nor, as this is a Hitchhiker's book, is one expected. The series has always involved a large amount of Willing Suspension of Disbelief, and the newest installment is no exception. You're reading these books to have a good time, not to discover the cutting edge of science.

And the book is a good time. It's a hoot, it's a blast. Considering the material he's working with, and the fanbase he has to appease, it can't have been an easy task to write this novel. As a new author covering old, familiar territory, Colfer of course has his own interpretations on the characters he's working with. Sometimes, one person can see a character in a far different light than others do. But Colfer manages to keep the original feel of both the narrative and the characterizations, while still managing to inject his own personality seamlessly into the work.

I've spoken to people who refuse to read the book on account of the fact that Adams didn't write it. In my opinion, they're missing out. Reading it is like being reunited with old friends, friends you were so close to that there's none of that awkward "So, uh...how've you been?" rigmarole. And Another Thing... throws you right into the action, and doesn't give up for a moment. If you're a fan of the series, and you're not a curmudgeon about it, you won't be disappointed by this latest installment in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Space the Rodian

Go on, try it.

Every Sunday for the last six years, or near enough as makes no difference, I've been playing tabletop Role-Playing Games with the same group. We started off playing Rifts, and have flipped back and forth between several other games, such as the Star Wars RPG and Dungeons and Dragons 3.5. Six years is a long time, even if it is only one day out of the week, and we've amassed a collection of stories and shared experiences that is rather mind-boggling.

It's gotten so that people who've never even gamed with us are familiar with many of our stories. And for those of you who have never played an RPG, it's not all stories like "Have you heard about the time we trounced that 20th Level Black Dragon?" In fact, most of our favorite stories aren't about defeating huge monsters, unless something really amusing happened during the fight. A lot of them are the kind of stories most people tell, stories about when so-and-so did something very foolish or embarrassing. The kind of stories where repeating one certain phrase from it will send anyone who was there into gales of laughter. Like "Do we still have a problem?" or "Look, it moves you at a speed."

Sometimes, the right statement can enter the vernacular, and become almost idiomatic within a group. as is the case with slang within our own society. One in particular that exists within our group stands out in my mind. It goes as follows:

I want two arms, and I want two other arms.

It came about from an out-of-character conversation (meaning that we were speaking as a bunch of guys sitting around a table, not as though we were characters in the game). I was running that game, and one of the players, well known for his rampant munchkinism, was asking me if he could get an extra pair of arms for his character. However, he wasn't making himself understood very well.

"Hey, I want another some new arms for my character."
"So you want to replace your arms with bionic ones?"
"No, I want them under my real arms."
"So you want four arms?"
"No. Listen. I want two arms, and I want two other arms."

The reason the conversation came up was that while the rules allow you to have bionic arms, he wanted them to be detachable. I don't remember if he explained why, but my thinking was that to him, it'd be the best of both worlds. He'd have an extra pair of arms when he needed them, and the rest of the time he wouldn't have to worry about people giving him weird looks in the street. It was odd, as he wasn't the kind of player who normally cared about how strange he looked (the guy thought nothing of carrying five or six guns at all times, concealed behind a flowing cloak), but having only two arms in social situations must have been important to him, as when I told him he couldn't do it, he dropped the matter entirely.

Well, point is, we still use the phrase "I want two arms, and I want two other arms" today, usually to describe a situation where neither side has any idea what the other wants. Also in situations where someone is asking for two sets of things that are superficially similar (like arms), but fundamentally different (one pair is metal), and the person doing the asking hasn't specified the difference. And as you can imagine, we've built up quite a collection of such sayings in 6 years.

In case you're wondering about the title, it comes from a Star Wars game we were playing. I played a Rodian (see the picture above for an example of that race), and was playing him like a typical member of his race. That is, he was an aggressive arrogant jerk. As you can imagine, he really endeared himself to the rest of the party. They probably kept him around only because I'd built him into a crack-shot. Regardless, it became a running gag during that campaign that the solution to every situation involved "spacing the Rodian." As in shoving him in an airlock and jettisoning him into space. They never actually did it, but it was always brought up.

Forward the Complaints

I hate forwards to novels, I really do. They like the bad opening narrations to movies that the execs force of the production crew because they figure the viewers are too stupid to figure out the plot of the movie on their own. The analogy isn't perfect, since the motives aren't entirely the same. But the end results are: they completely suck the life out of a creative work before you've even had a chance to experience it.

There are two ways a forward makes an appearance in a book. The first is that the author himself had some bit of writing he couldn't figure out a way to insert in the novel, so he just puts it in the front. When done well, they're known as a prologue and can enhance the reading experience. In Fantasy novels they're practically a requirement, as it's a safe assumption that anyone reading such a work is not intimately familiar with the world the story takes place in. While there's something to be said for preserving the sense of mystery and wonder which is the point of escapist fiction, giving the reader a general idea right at the start may be wise to prevent readers from throwing the novel aside in frustration and shouting "I don't understand a damned thing going on here!"

Sometimes, however, it can be a form of exposition that not only has no logical place in the main body of the novel in question, but is also written in a different format/style from the rest of the work. But the author thinks it's such a clever bit of writing, or that it's absolutely essential that you know the back story behind Jack P. Protagonist's great-great-uncle Wally, that he puts it in regardless of the fact that it's jarring and extraneous.

However, that is not the kind of forward I'm talking about. The kind I'm referring to is the kind publishers awkwardly cram into new printings of novels. I guess the mentality is that someone is more likely to buy a copy of a book they already own if they see the words "With A New Forward By X!" on the front. Many times, X is the author, but not always.

The ones by people who aren't the author are the ones that really annoy me. They're usually written by a critic or a professor of literature or someone else who's supposed to have at least a technical understanding of the structure of a novel, and is asked to write a few pages on why this particular novel stands out among others. The problem is, the author of the forward seems to assume that, since he's already read the book, so has everyone else. This, if you're not careful, you'll have the entire plot of the novel spelled out for you, with plot twists and all the other real interesting parts, completely spoiled before you've reached page one. They must get the idea from movie trailers, another medium who seems to get off on blowing surprise twists for the audience.

I mean really, is it that hard to believe that I want to actually read the book I just bought? If I wanted a quick run-down of what happens in the book, I could just look up a synopsis. If I want some crackpot's interpretation of the book's symbols and themes, I'll head down to the local bar. It's getting so a beer costs less than a paperback in any case.

Of course, wannabe Devil's Advocates out there might be asking "Why not just skip over the forward?" Which is of course a valid counterpoint. And really, nine times out of ten, it's not an issue. However, there is a case where the forward becomes very hard to avoid. My job involves a lot of driving. On some days I may be in my car for several hours out of my shift. So one thing I've taken to doing is listening to audio books while I drive. And in that case, I can't just flip pages until I've gotten to the actual story. I've got to sit there and fast forward and rewind through the damn thing until it seems I've gotten to a spoiler-free point. And at that point, the experience becomes a jarring sequence of hearing bits of the first few pages of the book and hearing lines like "...and at the time, no reader could have imagined an author would actually kill his..." and "The pounding outside grew ever louder as..."

Also, it seems to be required to at least once in a forward to use a phrase to the effect of "...in a manner with which writers of lesser caliber cannot compete." Now, I admire your ability to write a sentence so that it doesn't end in a preposition, but can we please remove the phrase "writers of lesser caliber" or "writers of lesser talent" from the vernacular of critique? It's used so much that it would seem that every author who's ever lived is the supreme example of his craft. It's getting repeated so much it's starting to have about as much semantic content as when reporters say "startling new developments." All it tells you is that you're about to read/hear some stupid fluff piece and can stop paying attention.

Just as bad as forwards are the back covers of books (movies as well, but generally not as much). The blurb on your average back cover/dust jacket has an annoying tendency to give you the plot of the book to as far about about 3/4 of the way through. If you're foolish enough to actually read that, you might as well just open the book to the last chapter and start from there, because that's about the only part of the book that hasn't been spoon-fed to you already.

It might seem nit-picky, and that's because I'm a nit-picky guy. But really, it's like if the original trailers for Citizen Kane had said "Never before has so much to-do been made over a sled!" Then you walk into the theater, and you see this reporter trying to figure out why Charles Foster Kane's last word was "Rosebud," and you're like "Dude, it was his sled when he was a kid. Why did I pay good money to see this?" And yet it still happens all the time. Amazing.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights