Ain't this the Life! No. 2

Ain't this the Life! No. 1

Men without hats

I was thinking the other day that if they gave an award for the Least Interesting Person in America, you could really only win it once.

So what's the time limit on how long you say hello to someone in the corridors at work? I keep being made to feel like I'm a weirdo because I'll give at least a head nod to someone I've met before. It's like, two weeks of not directly working with the person or talking with them and you're a ghost. Really, how do you do that?

It's not like I'm easy to miss or anything, they see me coming, but they pass by staring straight ahead or giving the old "I wonder what my phone looks like" thing. Nobody's calling you, man; you're not fooling anyone!

It doesn't make me angry, really it's kind of amusing that someone has decided to willfully ignore me because it's too much trouble to acknowledge my existence for even two seconds. It makes me wonder at what point they decided to take this action. Is it even a conscious decision? Maybe these people have little timers in their head which, once a certain period has elapsed, resets itself, tossing out the old and making ready to accept the new.

You know and I can't even call it rude because it happens everywhere I work. That's what makes me think I'm the odd man out in this apparently acceptable social situation. I can't just ignore someone outright like that; sometimes, if I'm feeling particularly non-antisocial, I'll even say "Good morning" to people I don't even know. I figure, hey, we're all here in the same place working on basically the same stuff, why not?

I notice it's usually older people who are cool with saying "Good morning" to people they don't know. Most people look a bit put off if I look like I'm about to initiate a greeting. If it's someone around my age, I usually don't even bother anymore, unless I think they're in sales, because they say "Good morning" like there's a chance you'll buy something. That's pretty cool.

Seriously, if you're having a bad day, go hang around the people in sales or marketing. You'll either feel better because of their inane feel-good smalltalk or, at the very least, you'll feel like a better person by simple comparison. Not to trash those people or anything, because I know they work hard and, Jesus, I could never do that job. It's a level of inner and outer deception that should have its own chapter in the DSM IV.

I can't tell if the time-based ignore is a new thing or a natural human reaction. Maybe it's a way to naturally weed out people who aren't going to become part of your social circle, slowly pushing them out so as not to appear aggressive. Sounds like a plausible caveman-ish thing to do. And I don't mean that negatively, just it sounds like one of those early human social norms. Keep the peace and protect the tribe, all that stuff which may or may not have actually been the case.

What's the answer you ask? Well, I think if we all wore more professional-looking hats we'd be more polite. I don't think many people could resist the whole hat-doffing thing. Plus, you get to say "How do you do?" which is fun, but just sounds creepy if you aren't wearing a hat. Yep, that would really get things moving in the right direction.

But, sadly, I am not a hat person, which means I'm doomed to the two-week revolving door of acknowledgment for as long as I walk the halls.

Gratuitous violence just doesn't make me laugh like it used to

So I went and saw Pineapple Express today and, while overall I enjoyed it, I was surprised by the number of times I thought to myself, "Well, that was unnecessarily violent." How could this be that I no longer found excessive, mindless violence in the name of comedy to be, well, funny?

If you haven't seen the film, oh there's no reason not to check it out. I mean, it's a not particularly a "have to see it in the theater" experience, but it's worth watching. It starts out strong, slows down some, gets kinda mindless and out of hand and then, at the final scene, it's back to being very well done.

If I were a thinking man, I'd say it's some kind of metaphor or somethin'.

If you don't know what it's about, imagine a Cheech and Chong film with action and a mostly thought-out plot. And, in between all the weed smoking, there's a good amount of sometimes oddly graphic violence.

*SPOILER ALERT*

I can't keep talking about the film without mentioning what actually happens. So if you don't care if parts get ruined, keep reading. If you do, visit the old site for a while (link in upper right of page).

It's not all the violence in the film I think is gratuitous, far from it, but there are a few scenes where I wondered, "Why even add that in? It's not funny, it doesn't advance the plot, and were it not there the scene could have been even tighter."

1. The police car chase - When Saul stops the car and the policewoman starts firing at him, one of the bullets, we're shown by way of a cut, hits a bystander. Okay, now what? We already knew she was a bad cop, it's not like that's some kind of turning point for her character.

And it didn't even hit a ha-ha bystander like a mime or, since the movie's produced by Judd Apatow's company, a humorous minority, it was just some white dude.

2. Red shooting off Matheson's foot - First he drives over the guy, which is fine, but why show him blowing off his dead foot? It was like Robocop minus the veiled anti-facsism message. Any laughs it generated were more from shock than anything else.

3. Ted's body after the bomb blast - Did they really need to hire Rick Baker for just the one scene? Seriously, comedy bomb blast victim = not moving + sooty face + singed hair. That's it. Done. Don't need the bubbly 4th degree burn look on the trunk of the body or whatever they were going for.

4. Killing off Bill Hader right at the beginning - Come on, his five minutes were better than the middle thirty of the movie. Again, his offscreen death was one of those shock laughs and really, I think, it traded off for giggles a character that could have been used later on.

Now, I'm no big-time comedy writer or anything, but I've seen enough dumb-ass movies to know that there's nothing funnier than revealing a guy, late into a movie, who everyone thought had died years ago.

You mean to tell me it wouldn't have been a bigger laugh for to him wander out in the middle of the big fight scene, after years of hiding and subsisting on pot? He could have even popped up from behind the wall Gary Cole knocks a hole in with his realistically charred midsection.

I don't know, that's just four things I thought of off the top of my head that bothered me. Yet, I know if I had seen this movie at 18 or 19 I would have laughed my head off and not blinked twice at any of it.

I wonder if it's because I've already seen it so many times that a shock laugh just isn't funny anymore, or if I feel like overworking a joke with violence is lazy and therefore a waste of my time. I really don't know. Maybe I think I know better than the writers, and I can see where they're pandering and taking the easy joke over really trying.

Because, certainly, there's a place for over-the-top violence. I'm not trying to come off like some anti-movie violence crusader or anything, but in the context of this film I just didn't see the point in many cases, why the writers and director took the extra-realistic and brutal step for what, essentially, is a comedy buddy picture.

But, oh well, not my movie. Though, and I'll say, if I were the editor, I'd take the first twenty-five minutes, paste on the last ten minutes, and you've got yourself a great short film.

Yes, but wouldn't it better with parmesan?

Is it a new thing for chain restaurants to take perfectly normal food, which otherwise would have little or no need for additional toppings, and just throw parmesan on them?

I noticed this a few weeks ago while at a work lunch over at the Red Robin. They have regular fries, which are perfectly fine, but then they also have parmesan-garlic fries. Would you like to know the main difference between the two? The ones with parmesan taste way saltier and leave your hands all sticky.

Salty, sticky hands may be fine for prom night, but they're completely unnecessary when it comes to fries. And it's not a sweet-sticky either, like you get from eating brownies or soaking your fists in a giant tub of smoothie. No, it's that oily-sticky where, were it possible, you'd wake up with your hands covered in acne.

And then again I saw it at The Baker's Crust this past Sunday. I'm not lying, every menu item's description ended with the phrase "and lightly dusted with parmesan." Even the mozzarella sticks. Even the "Piatto di parmigiano" which is just an empty plate, dusted with parmesan.

I know there's some well-meaning marketing guy working at Baker's Crustcorp (the parent company) whose job is on the line if he can't come up with a new way to sell onion rings, but this just has all the earmarks of laziness. I swear he's sitting around with his buddies somewhere, drinking some parmesan dusted imported brews, bragging about it.

"What next Todd, how can even top yourself?"
"Oh Tad, you silly boy, you know I've always got an ace up my sleeve. An ace in the hole. An ace for all seasons, an ace-"
"Spill it."
"Fried parsley garnish."
*audible gasps*
"Fried flat-leaf parsley garnish."
*slow clap*

And as Todd rides off into the sunset on the shoulders of his equally drunken, facile compatriots, he can be secure in yet another year of repetitive menus featuring fad toppings that people will chug down simply because they're there.

All I'm saying is, if you look at a menu item, and I mean anywhere, I don't care if it's a chain or local, and your first thought is "Why the f*ck would anyone even want to do that?", don't order it.

Beer-battered shrimp? "Oh okay I can see that." Deep fried hot dog taco-panini? "Huh, that doesn't even register with my imagination as being physically possible. Maybe I should skip it." Problem solved.

Tonsorial Sisyphus

I need a haircut. Actually it's not so much that I need a haircut right now but rather I'll need one if I don't get it cut soon. I imagine this is the case for most people.

In any event, at this point my hair looks as good as it is going to for this cutting cycle. I don't know about you, but right as my hair starts to get longer it really falls into place. Maybe the new hair is just starting to relax and fit in with all the other hairs up there, who can say. Perhaps they're about to start up a rec volleyball team.

The thing is, some people I've found look best right at the moment their haircut is over. The stylist has, well, styled it properly; it's all sitting up or waved or permed or gelled or whatever and you know that it's all downhill from there.

There's no way that person is going to keep that going for a whole six weeks or however long they wait between appointments. By the end of the first week they've decided they "don't really like that style anymore" and want something new next time. The following Wednesday they've decided a nice hat is all the cranial style they need.

Some people's hair never seems to grow at all until right when they need a haircut. I don't know how this happens. It's usually with short-haired people.

My hair, though, looks okay after the cut, but steadily increases in power week by week. Right now I'm at week 6, with an appointment a few days from now, and I don't even comb it anymore. I mean, I never actually use a comb or anything, but now I just step out of the shower, dry it, shake it a little and it just looks perfect.

I wish I could explain it, but I can't. The saddest part is that I get so little time with the perfection. Just as it's reaching some mathematical eventuality for rightness, chop. Like a ripe tomato, which is plucked from the vine in its sublime, succulent, magnificent vegetable prime, then sliced, and put on a cheese sandwich.

In this case the cheese sandwich is the salon floor.

What I'm saying is it's a cruel life for me and my what's-on-top. This weekend is all I have to enjoy it; to have a fleeting glimpse of what might have been. Well, of what is, I suppose, for a short time. But the time might have been longer!

Still I say, don't cry for me, more than is necessary. It'll grow back.

Monster in a (Dev) Box

For the past 9 months I've been working on creating an online game. No, not a souped-up 3D world full of paladins, wizards and thinly-veiled xenophobic metaphors, but a text-based kingdom builder built on statistics. No I know, why am I not already being hounded by Apple to create a version for the iPhone? I wonder that myself.

Well, two reasons. One, it sounds exceptionally boring. And two, it's nowhere near complete. Turns out it takes a lot work to build even the most basic of complicated games. The funny part is it's not even the complicated stuff that takes time. I wrote the equations for running and balancing a stock market in about three hours.

No, it's the little crap. The little crap that people like me hate to do. Without going into too many specifics, I'll just say error handling. If you don't know what that is, it's what you have to write when you don't have confidence in your abilities as a developer. (I'm not talking about server-side error handling where there could be an actual issue, I'm talking about JavaScript and such)

Try? Catch? No thanks. I prefer to live on the edge.

But anyways, back to the non-technical stuff. Here's the logo:

Yes, it's called "One Eye Filled with night", after a line from a Leonard Cohen song. Maybe that's cheesy, but I think it works alright.

The idea of the game is that here you are with this kingdom to run and, to start out, you have one city and one military unit. You run the show and lead everything. Eventually though you'll want to get governors and generals and more units, more cities, all that good stuff.

Keep in mind this is all displayed in a straightforward, non-mappy way. List of cities with stats, list of units with stats, all that. I mean, it looks pretty enough, I didn't totally slack-ass it, but it is not what you might call "graphics-laden".

Though I am particularly proud of the image I worked up for an inbox message:

Ahhh yeah, would you take a look at that? You can almost see yourself opening it and going, "My what a tiny yet well-rendered message this is."

So once you have your little kingdom up and running you can start interacting with other users: buying and selling items on a stock exchange, exchanging messages, and conducting war. This is the part of the game I really want to get to, but I can't until I do the little crap. And that's what slows me down.

One week I'll put in maybe 15 hours or so on it, the next (ie, this current one) I won't do anything. It's hard to want to sometimes because you see all these other totally rockin' games out there and think, "Well what's the point? Who's going to play this? Even if I did finish it, where would it even go?"

Obviously people still play Trukz, but that game doesn't really require much of a time investment. I'm trying to build that into my game, where you can just come on for a few minutes, re-arrange some stuff, and get on with your day. I think my approach so far kinda does that, which is good.

I don't know, we'll see where it goes. I really just wanted to post this to start myself off on writing about it, to keep track of progress along the way. If anything changes, oh in the next week or so, I'm sure there'll be an update.

Hey the site looks even more plain!

So here's the new design. Yes, it's pretty plain for now, but I'll work on that some. I'm not a huge fan of complicated-looking designs to begin with, but I'm sure there'll be some changes to this look. The nice part about it is that it's a lot easier to maintain than the previous site. Without getting into boring talk about HTML/CSS and FTP uploads and so on, I can update anything about the site having only to touch a couple of files.

Mostly that's because I'm using Blogger now to handle all of the articles. On the previous site I used them for the blog only, but the page template didn't exactly match the rest of the site and upkeep for that template was therefore kind of annoying. Even worse, adding new pages was a pain and prone to human error. Now both halves of the site and everything that describes the page style are in their own singular places. Basically I just maintain the home page and the rest is done for me. Much more to my way of thinking.

On the home page, you'll notice there is a "Featured Article" section, which will highlight one of either the Blog or Incredible Things articles. At the start it probably won't make much sense, as the Featured Article will be available in a couple of places. But as time goes on I figure it'll link to previous articles for the day, or for special sites/pages created as I go. Who knows? THE WORLD IS MY OYSTER.

I should also say the previous site content is still available; just click the "View old site" link in the upper right-hand corner and there you'll be. Aside from the obvious differences, I also stripped down the navigation between the old site and this one. After the first year or so I realized 99% of the articles went into the "Other" section, and the other bits were more blog-like so it became natural to have just two main sections, as there now are.

Battle for Wesnoth

So I started up with a new game this past weekend, the somewhat cheesily titled Battle for Wesnoth, which is much better than its name implies. The gameplay is based on these two Sega games I'm not familiar with, Master of Monsters and Warsong, but it heavily reminds me of the Sega CD game Dark Wizard, which I suppose is probably also based on those two previous games.

In any event, it's like this: you have a main character you control who must raise an army and fight battles. That's basically it. You start out with nothing and slowly build up your army over the course of a campaign, gaining experience and advancing both your soldiers and the plot by completing each scenario.

The site claims each scenario can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours and, with maybe 10 scenarios per campaign, you could easily spend the better part of a day on just one campaign. So far I've only completed the tutorial, and that took about an hour and a half or so. It was a grand affair of elves versus orcs & wolf-riders and I, eventually, came out on top: my awesome elven archers ripping them all to shreds. Fun stuff.

The graphics are good, as is the music, though I'm probably the worst person to ask about either of those. I'll admit I am completely out of touch when it comes to gaming. The most recently purchased console in the house is a Super Nintendo we got from a thrift store about seven years ago.

To me, Donkey Kong Country is the pinnacle of video game artistry, aside from the few times I played Grand Theft Auto III on a friend's PS2 6 years ago. No, I did try out Mario and Sonic: Olympic Games on a DS Lite at Wal*Mart while waiting for a prescription two months ago. That was my last and most recent modern console gaming experience. And, oh yes, I won the gold.

That kinda made me feel like I hadn't missed much, you know? If I can step out of playing the new generation of console games and then jump right in and totally rock one of them, have I really missed anything? Now, admittedly, Mario and Sonic isn't quite the same level of difficulty as your average Metal Gear Solid but, even then, those types of third-person action/adventure games are so similar that once you've played one, you can transfer those skills to the rest.

Or maybe not, I never play them. I'm just going by the reviews I read of games which I have no intention of buying. It seems to me to be a total crapshoot, though, which makes me glad I don't drop money on them. As far as I can tell, the only guaranteed good games are from the Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear series'. And Star Control, that seems to be popular as well.

I'll tell you, the only game I'm looking forward to these days is Spore, for the PC. I'm a bit more up on PC games than those for consoles, but still my knowledge is limited to those that don't require me to purchase a new graphics card. I mean, I'm by no means a gamer, but I'm not a non-gamer either. I would like to play more games, but usually when I start playing I think "Boy, I sure am spending too much time on this. I could be doing something creative. Life is short! Your 31st birthday is Sunday; you'll be dead soon!"

It just kinda spirals out of control like that. Which leads me back to Battle for Wesnoth, which, with a set of nicely delineated scenarios within each campaign, you can slowly work your way through a storyline without the whole process turning into some sort of soul-wrenching digital hourglass spilling out the pixel grains of your own mortality. That's right, I said "pixel grains".