I am so sorry, dear readers, but I am in San Francisco once again, this time for the Game Developers’ Conference, and I don’t have time this evening to write up a Warcraft Wednesday. My apologies.

In the meantime, please do listen to the Incredible Podcast if you haven’t already. You will, as I have previously stated, enjoy it.

Oh my ladies and gents, the Internet is a wonderful place for comics. All sorts of amazing artists who I never would have found on comic store shelves are working day and night to deliver week after week of strips (sometimes three a week! sometimes five!) that are touching and hilarious and extremely well done. I feel as though I should do something, anything to honor the hard work of these individuals, so I will do what I do best: blog about them.

This list does not include Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton or The Abominable Charles Christopher by Karl Kerschl, not because they don’t belong here (they very much do), but because I’ve already interviewed them on this site before, Kate on the podcast, and Karl over here. Like all of the other comics on this list, please read them.

In no particular order:

-Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: XKCD if Randall could draw more than stick figures. Gags, often scientific in nature, often geeky, and very funny. The SMBC Theater live action shorts are also extremely well done for a site of this stature, and extremely funny as well. It’s amazing that this site isn’t bigger than Collegehumor or that ilk — it’s certainly more creative and funnier.

-Dead Winter: Zombies, bad guys, and cute chicks. And that art style! It’s amazing how far he’s come, both in terms of storytelling and design, but then again, that’s what happens when you really commit to a webcomic like this. It’s amazing that this shows up for free in my RSS reader every few days.

-Questionable Content: What’s amazing about this comic is that the content is never questionable — despite the fact that it updates so often (five days a week, without fail), the comic is always super true to these characters, to their lives, and often funny anyway (though the humor always comes from who these guys are, not some contrived punchline). Great comic — more touching and true than most TV shows I watch.

-Sailor Twain or, The Mermaid in the Hudson: This one’s pretty new to me but the style is terrific. Moody and Victorian and dark and beautiful.

-Overcompensating: Ok, so sometimes I do like the silly non sequiturs. This one’s got them, along with some weird art, but I like it. And it makes me laugh, even though I often have no idea why.

-Dinosaur Comics: This is on the list? Actually, it shouldn’t be — I did interview Ryan North as well a little while back. But it’s recently come to my attention that some people I know aren’t reading their Dinosaur Comics every day, and so hopefully including this here will rectify that situation. This is the most useful and entertaining clip art in the entire history of the universe ever.

-Gunshow: I think I’m late on this but oh man, Gunshow. It’s the best. Sometimes it makes no sense, but then you think about it for a bit later that day and it both makes sense and is very funny. I am a pro at explaining things, and this one leaves me trying to figure out a way to explain why it’s so good. Read this arc and maybe you’ll see why.

-Dresden Codak: Weird. Beautiful. It doesn’t update as often as some of these others, but it doesn’t have to. Each one of these is a gem, and as you look at it, it’s as if you’re seeing the light hit an idea in various ways and reflections.

-The Non-adventures of Wonderella: I’ve been reading this one almost since the very beginning. Like The Venture Brothers, it both skewers the genre it’s parodying, and yet still offers up a surprisingly solid mythos and backstory. Plus, Jokerella is the most adorably incompetent supervillian ever. She tries so hard!

-Nedroid Picture Diary: Reginald and Beartato have such wacky adventures. Like this one. “You just don’t understand cats.”

-NPC Comic: Considering my audience, you probably already know about Mary Varn’s comic, since I’ve talked it up in a few places already. But even if you’re not a gamer or a geek, it’s a great read, and it’s been really fun to see the comic and the site come into its own.

-Lucy Knisley’s Artjournal: So honest, so beautiful, so perfect. Lucy doesn’t update that often, either (I think she’s spending most of her time doing actual work, which is as it should be), but when she does, it’s always amazing. I wish I could express myself and my thoughts with my words with as much vibrance and honesty as she does with her pictures.

I think that’s more than ten, but calling it eleven webcomics would mess up the title, and I wanted to mention them all. Enjoy.

So baseball and I have a weird history (as I’ve mentioned before). I used to be much more of a fan, in the way that every kid is — when you’re young, you need heroes and role models, and usually sports is a pretty good place to get those. My brother and I were big fans of Ozzie Smith and Brett Hull, not so much because we were good at baseball or because we knew how to play, but just because we knew who they were and had posters (that we’d gotten free from school or from my Dad’s work) with them on our walls. We liked them, sure — we knew Ozzie’s flips and we watched Hull and Oates skate on the ice at the St. Louis Arena — but we followed them because we were told to, not because we knew anything about them. When you’re a kid, that’s probably the best way to do it.

When you grow up, however, the foggy heroes of legend start to come into focus, and then you realize they’re just people, people with jobs and performance reviews and tempers and problems and so on. Not that they’re not great (nobody would argue that Hull and Ozzie weren’t greats), but they’re real, in a way you don’t realize when you’re a kid. I think the baseball strike was when I really started giving up on sports. I was still only 14, so I didn’t really understand the whole thing (and I still don’t, except that I can guess why any given strike tends to happen), but that was definitely the point that I remembered thinking sports weren’t that fun anymore. Coincidentally, that’s about when I started high school, where I joined the drama department, and figured out I wanted to work in broadcasting. So who knows — if baseball had never gone on strike, maybe I’d be a crazy jock dude instead of a guy who writes about tech and video games.

No, on second thought, I’d probably still be into the video games.

But this recent fascination with baseball for me is coming at a completely different angle. I’ve already explained (follow the link above) how I came to be a Cubs fan, despite living in St. Louis for so much of my life. But even then, I wasn’t sure if my “year with the Cubs” would be an ongoing thing, or just an in-the-moment experience. Watching all of those games last year could have just been a fad for me — I just happened to be living near Wrigley, I just happened to go to bars full of people discussing the games, and all of the team’s games just happened to be on my television. When baseball started up again (which is what’s happening this week in Arizona), would I still care? Or would I move on to follow something else?

If this week is any indication, I’ll still care. I’m surprised with myself — I’m pouring over news and rumors of who’s coming back with the team and what the lineup will be like, I’m following the old familiar faces on Twitter again, and I think I’m going to make the most serious investment in my baseball fandom yet: $100 to subscribe to the league’s Internet video service, which will offer me up video of all of this year’s baseball games in streaming HD whenever I want them. (I would kind of rather watch them on TV, but I think I’m going to hook my MacBook up to my TV with HDMI anyway, so hopefully I will get to watch the good Len and Bob broadcast in HD that way.) I’ve thrilled to the earliest news of the Cubs’ spring training games (we’ve won both so far — not that it matters, but I am excited anyway), and the thing I’m perhaps most excited about is that there’s every indication that my favorite player, Kosuke Fukudome (who I hear has been earning a great nickname around the clubhouse), is going to have a great year. He should, too — the Cubs could use it.

In other words, I’m in. I’m surprising even myself — I’m not a sports guy, and I don’t usually have the stamina to keep up with a whole season, much less start in on another one (my few attempts to join fantasy leagues usually have me forgetting to check the stats a week or two in). But for some reason, this is clicking with me now, and I’m really excited to be a fan again this year.

Why? It’s not the same as when I was a kid. Back then, I used to listen to Jack Buck with a reverence, and marvel at Ozzie and all of the other guys like they were larger than life. Nowadays, I feel much more equal. I know how a business works, and I know how the team works, and that they need to win X games to match a record, or X hits for a bonus. I know what the broadcast guys have been through during a long road trip, and I can hear what it’s like in their voices when they’re running on far too little sleep (because I’ve done the same thing myself). And sometimes I even feel more experienced than these guys, not in a bad way, but in a way that makes me realize what I’ve learned from my own life. Some of them are even younger than I am, and so when Zambrano throws a fit during a bad game, I think of the same kinds of frustrations I’ve dealt with in my life, and what might be the right way to deal with them.

The kid that was me didn’t think any of that stuff — he didn’t even realize, I think, that Hull was getting paid, or that he had a life outside of the rink (yes, like you were surprised when you saw your teacher at the grocery store). But the fact that I’ve learned so much about people, and that these young guys playing sports are real people, kind of makes me appreciate the whole circus more.

And to be honest, I have finally landed on one of the great truths of sports fanmanship — you feel good when your team wins. Sure, you feel bad when they lose (and c’mon, I chose the Cubs, I know what that feels like), but you could be having a terrible day when suddenly the bats start to light up, and your team wins by three. You step outside after that, and even though it’s raining and you’re in a hurry, you smile anyway. Because no matter what else happens, the Cubs won today.

Hey hey, Wednesday means it’s time for me to look at what interested me most in the World of Warcraft this past week. In case you missed it, here’s my episode of Polygamerous, and here’s The Incredible Podcast, a relatively new podcast that I’m doing with the T. It’s good, go listen.

• I like this Hearthstone pillow a lot. I bought a black leather couch just recently, and it seems a little plain without some Warcraft-related pillows on it. I don’t know when I’ll have the time or inclination to actually pick any up, but my birthday is coming up in early May. Also, I would have liked to see that mana strudel in a closeup. I wonder what mana actually tastes like.
• I actually wrote about World of Warcraft on Joystiq this week — Activision not only went nuts on Infinity Ward, but released their annual financial report, and WoW was mentioned quite a bit in there. It’s probably no surprise that Blizzard’s WoW subscriptions, and therefore revenue, are dropping pretty quickly. As I’ve said here before, Cataclysm is the key — if they can bring back that original swell of players by promising a return to the old glory days, they can probably get another few solid years out of this game, at least until Diablo III comes out. But if Cataclysm doesn’t attract enough attention or get players intrigued enough to come back (and bring their friends with them), then I think we’re looking at the long, slow end of the World of Warcraft. Not that it’s bad for Blizzard — this game is already legendary, obviously, and they’ve got StarCraft II and Diablo and plenty of other irons in the fire that haven’t even been announced yet. But if Cataclysm doesn’t explode for them, I don’t see the game growing any more, especially with threats like The Old Republic and all of the other games stealing free time in 2010.
• This is a pretty interesting discussion that’s been running through the blogs (you can follow all of Matticus’ links to see what people are saying there). I would say that if you get /gkicked from your guild for something that you blog about, then you probably shouldn’t be in that guild anyway. Remember, it’s a game — if something makes you angry enough to really rail on someone on your blog, then it’s probably not worth the effort. And if someone goes to the trouble of /gkicking you just because of something they read, again, it’s not worth the effort to stay with them. Of course, me and my guild almost never see each other these days — I tend to sign on late at night and tend to be one of the only players on — so you probably shouldn’t take my advice anyway. But I wouldn’t worry too much if you get /gkicked for something you write. Either you shouldn’t be there anyway, or it’s not your fault, it’s theirs.
• Facebook is still waiting for their Mario, Halo, or Sonic. This didn’t get reported on any of the WoW sites (that I know of — if you saw a WoW site that mentioned it, let me know, so I can start following them), but I think it’s intrinsic to what WoW was and is. Farmville, for all of its silliness and simplicity, is an extremely popular game, and in many ways, it’s the next World of Warcraft. It’s a game that’s pulling in people who aren’t game players, and that’s exactly why Warcraft got so big in the first place. For Facebook to say that they haven’t yet had their flagship game yet is kind of a big deal. When that game does come along, my guess is that it will dwarf what Blizzard has done with this game. Don’t believe me? How many players did World of Warcraft have at its peak? 12 million? Gee, that’s cute.
• There’s some whining going on about the “dumbing down” of stats in Cataclysm. Again, I don’t think that’s bad — Blizzard is going back to basics. The game has become complicated by necessity — to keep theorycrafters interested and keep the game mechanics solid, you naturally have to add a little complexity into the mix. But Cataclysm is the big return to the old days that Blizzard is trying to pull off. I’m looking forward to seeing if they can do it. I will say that they sound like they can, and the stat changes I’ve seen seem focused on making gear more straightforward, which makes it easier for everybody. But my big worry is if they’ll keep enough of the old world to remind people what early Warcraft was like — is it possible to create nostalgia by changing everything?
• Some cool desktop calendars to help you keep up on dates during March.
• It still surprises me that people wait so long to do instances. Seriously, they’re the best part of the game. Go do them!
• I saw this community team picture as well, and had the same thoughts (though you’ll have to go find it somewhere yourself. For a game with an audience that is so diverse and varied, I was a little surprised that the community team was still a bunch of dudes who look like they love to play CounterStrike. Not that there is anything wrong with dudes like that, but even on WoW Insider, we aimed to pick up writers that represented the community.
• Finally, I don’t have much to add to this, but I think it’s an interesting idea. Maybe the Facebook Mario game will do exactly that.

That is it! Happy raiding everybody — hope you’re enjoying all of your adventures, in and out of Warcraft.

I didn’t write anything yesterday because I spent the evening with the guys at the Polygamerous podcast. I will link up the mp3 here when they post is so you can listen if you want, but I’ll warn you now that it’s mostly about video games, and thus probably only interesting to somewhere around half of you, if my extremely informal demographic knowledge about readers of this blog is correct. But it does have lots of me talking, so if that’s the thing you like to listen to, you might even enjoy it.

And in the meantime, there’s also lots of me talking on the Incredible Podcast. Go listen to that and review/rate/subscribe the thing in iTunes if you haven’t yet as well. Please. I beg of you.

I ran my third 5k last Sunday, my first here in LA, over in Chinatown. I did pretty well, I think, but was probably a little overenthusiastic. Probably.

To: Michael Schramm
1523 XXXXXXXXXXX Ave.
West Los Angeles, CA 90025

From: Johnny Liu
Los Angeles Chinatown City Council
Los Angeles, CA 90313

Dear Mr. Schramm,

We are extremely pleased that you were able to attend our 32nd annual Firecracker 5/10k Run/Walk event this past Sunday. You certainly ran a respectable time, finishing the 3.1 mile course in just over half an hour, constantly running despite the multiple climbs we placed on the path from Chinatown up to Dodgers Stadium. We hope the event was fulfilling for you, and that you enjoyed your time in our historic and heritage-rich part of this great city.

However, we did want to bring up a few concerns with you in regard to your behavior at the race. While we make it a priority to make sure that everyone at our city’s events is able to enjoy themselves, we’re afraid that you seemed to do so to the detriment of our other guests’ experience.

For example, when you first showed up on Sunday morning, it was probably less than prudent for you to yell out, “All right I’m ready, let’s run this [expletive],” as you did upon arriving at the starting line. We spent a lot of time planning out a short opening ceremony, and both State Senator Carol Liu and special guest star James Hong were probably extremely disappointed when you suggested that they should “stuff this noise” because you were ready to “beat feet.” They were both too polite to say anything, but we could see it on their faces.

Likewise, once the race actually started, it was probably not appropriate that you proceeded to push not only women but also children out of your way in order to keep up your running pace. We are proud that you were able to hold such a solid pace (one of your personal best, we believe), but given that our event is clearly labeled as a “run/walk,” we don’t feel it’s right that you were so competitive. Mrs. Nancy Hodgson of Pasadena also shared with us that you asked her to “move it, Grandma” as you ran by, and we also agreed with her that it was considerably rude to do so.

We do admit that not all of your competitive spirit was directed at other participants of our race, but considering that there were in fact children on our run, we were troubled to hear that as you ran up the aforementioned course hills, you constantly berated our city’s geographic features. Telling our hills that you were “rocking” them “silly,” and that you were making them your “[expletive],” while admittedly true, was not the thing to do with young ears around. Likewise, asking our hills “what ya’ll think of that, [expletive]! That’s right!” after you’d crested the summit was not at all appropriate.

Finally, your behavior after the race was, in a word, shocking. If your interpretation of the Thriller dance after crossing the finish line had been slightly more accurate, we might have let it pass, but in its current state, we regret being there to see it. While your physical prowess is certainly significant, the women in attendance were made overly uncomfortable by your clumsy flexing and posing, and the table full of post-race smoothies that you overturned during your impromptu celebration had been set up by a group of volunteers who were very distraught to see their contribution destroyed in a short albeit spectacular flash.

In short, Mr. Schramm, while we do hope you are able to visit our city again, and we do hope to see you at the Firecracker run next year, you would do well to leave the competitiveness at home. We agree that you do indeed rock, but we sadly inform you that our Master of Ceremonies did not appreciate you grabbing his mic and saying so in front of the gathered crowd at the finish line.

Thank you,

Johnny Liu
Los Angeles Chinatown City Council
3/2/2010

I’ve been meaning to buy a slow cooker (a.k.a. a crockpot, although I think that’s a brand name) for a while now. It’s actually a long story as to how I got to this place, but suffice it to say that I feel like I’m advancing up the cooking tree limb by limb, and even with a few falls on the way, I think I’m doing pretty well.

The branch structure I’ve decided to explore (because man, you could spend your whole life learning how to cook, and maybe I will) is what you might call “quality easy” — lately, I’ve been trying to come up with some easier ways to make food that’s usually tougher to do. For example, instead of deep frying things like fries or buffalo wings, I’ve been working on baking them. I’ve been buying premade ingredients, and cooking and mixing them together in new ways. And I’ve been slowly incorporating and getting myself familiar with more actual chef’s tool: For a while there, I was on a stir fry kick — just a wok-style pan and some oil — but then I realized I had an oven in my kitchen, and started using that. I had lasagna tonight, and I’ve baked chicken, baked potatoes, cooked veggies, made some bacon wraps, and so on. I still don’t think I’ve fully explored the oven and all of the things it can do, but I think I’m ready to move on to another appliance.

And the one that I’ve landed on is the slow cooker. I’m kind of excited about it — I work from home but usually have my attention focused on work, so my plan is to wake up and add ingredients on the various times I take breaks throughout the day. I’m not quite sure what you cook in a slow cooker besides chili (which is what I’ll do first), but I’m sure I can come up with some things. Meatballs, right? Some kind of roast, I know that (though traditionally, I’m not that into roasts, but I’m open to ideas). Oh, and there’s probably some kind of awesome BBQ I can put together, no?

Clearly I’m taking my sweet time with this. I’m sure, just re-reading that last paragraph, that some of your are already pasting your favorite recipes into your email, thinking I’m crazy for not knowing 50 things I can make in a slow cooker. How can I be a meat eater and not know the paradise of slow-cooked BBQ pork, you’re thinking. And if you do send me recipes, I’ll appreciate it, and when I have a chance, I will try to cook what you send.

But really, I’m not too bothered. Cooking, for me, has become much less about the mastery and more about the experience. When I was younger, I would try to make cookies, and I would make a mistake somewhere in the mix, and when the batch was ruined, I would get discouraged and never make the same thing again. But lately, it’s much more about the iteration — I enjoy thinking about the recipe beforehand, and even as I do it, I think what else I could do with it. “This recipe is good, but next time I’ll try some oregano.” Half of my thoughts are on what I’ll do next, so when the final product comes out less than exactly perfect, it’s ok — I’m already thinking about what I’ll do differently the next time. And by the third or fourth try, I’m finding I can make stuff that’s really good. The iteration is the thing, not the instant mastery. Which is the way it should be, I think.

So that’s my plan with the slow cooker — take it easy, experiment a lot, and hopefully through some trial and error, come up with something I like that’s reasonably good for me. And then make that a few more times just for fun.

I’m no chef, obviously. But lately, I cook like the guy painting the sunset at the park with a canvas paints — the painting may not be very original or good, but I’m happy just to be out there watching the sun go down anyway.

• Hey hey, patch 3.3.5! Called it! So the Black Dragonflight is invading the Ruby Sanctum, and that’s the kickoff for Cataclysm. I’m down for sure — I said last week that I wasn’t sure whether or not Cataclysm held as much signficance for players as the Arthas story did, but one way Blizzard can make that happen is by bringing in the old lore early and often, and it looks like they’re going to do exactly that with this patch. Sounds good to me. There are a few other spoilers released so far, and they do make things interesting, I’ll say that. But I won’t reveal here what they are.
• One of the things about Warcraft I was actually most excited about this week wasn’t in Warcraft at all: it was the Starcraft II beta. I finally joined up a few days ago, and I have to say, not only am I impressed by the game, but I’m very impressed by the social connections made with the new Battle.net. Finding friends is super easy, and while you can tell the party matching system is definitely still in beta (I’m not even sure their netcode has been optimized yet), I like all the options available: You can leave notes for and about your friends, you can share replays with each other (and I’d imagine that there’ll be a web interface for doing just that eventually), and it looks like you’ll even be able to create and share maps. Very social, and very much the influence of Blizzard’s time spent on World of Warcraft. I’m interested to see what they come up with for Diablo 3 as well — I can’t wait to see new ways to share your character, or keep track of friends as they’re playing.
• Felicia Day at Farpoint last Saturday. With some good insight about creating media, and a funny story about Vork. Although how much of a WoW nerd is he really if he’s bragging about being 78? Hit 80 already, man!
• I guess there are going to be “overcloaks” added to the game in the future. I guess that’s cool — it’s actually a step away from the idea of “gear as identification.” We always used to talk about why you couldn’t customize your gear, or just change the look of your gear to, say, your favorite tier while keeping your stats the same: it’s because Blizzard wants your gear to be an identifier not only of who you are, but of what you are: which race, which faction, which spec, and so on. I guess covering up the cloak doesn’t change things too much (I can only ID one cloak by look, and then only because it’s “white and longer than your average cape”), and it does provide a little more graphical flair on the character.
• Is it possible that people are tired of the Dungeon Finder system already? I guess if you ran the thing day and night when it first came out, you might be a little burned out on it, but let’s not forget that we had five years, five years of “LFG Gundrak plzzzz need healer and tank” before this. Wait times have been a little longer, I’ll grant, but I think that’s just the state of the game at this point — we’re between patches and between expansions, and you have to admit, 2010 has had some terrific games so far. I would laugh if people are going after the Dungeon Finder already, though. We just got it — if you’re already tired of it, you’ve played too much. And speaking of the Dungeon Finder, this is a great move as well.
• Finally, this isn’t about WoW, but wow. I played Global Agenda at E3 last year and I liked it a lot. But it’s fine to have a differnet opinion of the game — assuming you’ve actually played it long enough to know.

That’s it — a little short this week, but in my defense, I cleared out the feed complete. There isn’t much going on, though I did let a few good drama stories slip by. If only there was a place where someone was collecting and posting those…

I’ve been thinking this week about the strange case of Craig Barth. Craig Barth is (was?) the CEO of a company named Devil Mountain Software that supposedly made benchmarking software for Windows programs and computers — when companies want to know how much time it should take their employees to work with certain programs, they’d run Barth’s program and find out. Barth was used as a source often by the bloggers and writers at a site called InfoWorld (as well as other outlets, including Fox News, and even Gizmodo at one point), usually claiming that Windows Vista was bloated and slow, and that anyone who used it was probably a fool.

There’s only one problem (and no, it’s not that Vista isn’t bloated and slow). Craig Barth doesn’t actually exist. Turns out he was an alias of one Randall C. Kennedy, a pretty well-known guy who also works for InfoWorld as a commentator and columnist (usually also, probably not coincidentally, spouting off various controversial opinions about operating systems). Kennedy actually does own a company called Devil Mountain Software, and he claims that he started the alias simply to separate his blogging and his working personas. Which in and of itself might not have been a problem, except that he was blogging and working on the same things. Using a pen name is one thing, but actually hiding your identity while posing as a source for the exact same publication you’re writing for is really another. He never directly quoted “Barth” for his own stories, but he apparently did talk about the company in third-person without revealing the tie, and he was more than happy to be quoted elsewhere, including on the very site he worked for, under a fake name.

There is some confusion here — Kennedy actually claims that his editors and the writer who sourced him knew all about the dual identity, while they claim that they had no idea (and the publication has subsequently fired him). He also says that it was totally fine for him to use two identities — when he started up the company, “Craig Barth” was an alias that he came up with to keep his public and company personas separate, and it’s only when “Craig Barth” started getting quoted that trouble arose.

Whatever the truth (and Kennedy doesn’t actually seem to care anyway — he claims the whole identity reveal is an attack on him by Microsoft, and that he’s living out the rest of his days on the beach), this whole episode has me thinking about fake identities online. They’re so easy to create — signing up for a Gmail address, a domain with hosting, and a Paypal account is almost enough to make a company out of whole HTML these days — and they seem so easy to keep anonymous that when a situation presents itself where you might want to keep one reputation separate from another, why not be “Craig Barth” instead of Randall Kennedy?

But that’s the key here — your identity is your reputation, and while a fake identity may allow you to escape some of your own actions or words some of the time, I’d like to think that even on the Internet, you’ll eventually be held responsible. I can think of quite a few manufactured online identities — this kid who created an airline, Fake Steve, Ferrarro the WoW paladin, EA spouse, Belle du Jour, and so on — and in every single case, we eventually found out who was who. Sometimes, the revealed party was punished, sometimes rewarded with a book deal, but even online, the person hiding eventually had to face the light.

When I tweeted something to that effect yesterday, my colleague Eliah Hecht pointed out that we just haven’t heard about the ones who are still keeping their secrets, which is definitely true. But on a long enough scale, and especially when the identity really is used to circumvent ethical or legal constraints, I believe most major secrets come to light. We eventually found out who Deep Throat was — if a guy who can bring down the President anonymously can eventually be revealed, Joe Blogger who pretends to be as Jane Blogger doesn’t have a chance in the larger scheme of things.

That won’t stop guys like Randall Kennedy from thinking they can still get away with it. Your identity, even in this virtual age, is your reputation, and your reputation is everything. Can you keep your word? Can you be who you say that you are? Can you represent yourself in a worthwhile way, and do and post things online in a way that you’d want to be proud of, rather than hiding behind a secret identity and hoping no one finds out?

I know I’m moralizing here, and I know this could come back around in my face. Maybe someday in the future, I’ll be put in just such a situation where I think it’s easier to hide behind a fake name rather than live up to what I say and do, and I’ll eventually get caught, and someone will come back to this post and call me a hypocrite. I’d deserve it.

And so, while I hope that doesn’t ever happen, I will agree that sometimes, you need a fake identity. To use my examples from before, Fake Steve made his fortune with his, and EA Spouse and Belle du Jour probably would have never written what they’d written if not for anonymity. Brooke Magnanti, a.k.a. Belle, said that the anonymity she used “will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on.” I can’t argue with that — there are exceptions to every rule, and certainly there are times when names have to be left out if it, if not changed completely.

But I do think it’s best to try and avoid that situation if possible. Even Magnanti admits that once she came clean, it felt much better “not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about.” That’s what should keep guys like Kennedy from doing what they do — not the fear of being caught or the punishment of revelation, but the gnawing feeling that you’re failing your job as a writer to tell the truth whenever you put words down. Even the people who have to hide behind a fake name shouldn’t want to. And if you’re using a fake name to hide something you’re simply not proud of (or that you can get in trouble for doing or saying), you’ve got no excuse at all.

So Mike Schramm is my name, and hopefully everything I do and say, even online, will appear under it in the future. I’ve got enough trouble keeping this reputation going — hopefully the time won’t ever arise when I need to start up a whole new one.

Before I start writing this, I just want to thank everybody for stopping by the Incredible Podcast recording the other day — we had over 100 people show up to listen, which is more than I ever expected for the first show. Just fantastic — thanks so much for your support. We’re now over in iTunes, and we’re blazing up the charts, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do. Even if you don’t plan to listen, it helps us out getting noticed and building up an audience (and we need all the help we can get, considering that this is as DIY an operation as it gets so far). Thanks!

On to today’s post:

Five Lessons Learned from Final Fantasy Tactics

Yes, one of the things I meant to talk about on the Incredible Podcast last weekend was the fact that I recently bought Final Fantasy Tactics to play on my Playstation 3. I’ve been jonesing, at various times, for a good old-school Final Fantasy game, a complicated strategy game, and a solid RPG, and FFT is supposed to be all three of those at once, so I figured I’d go back and give it a playthrough. There was only one problem: I am really, really bad at strategy games.

I don’t know what it is (and I don’t think it’s that I’m dumb, though you may disagree), but whenever video game choices get really hard and/or complicated, I stop paying attention. I do love me some Civ, and the factor with that seems to be that even though there’s a lot of things happening in that game, you’re really only making one choice at a time — you’re just moving a unit, adjusting a city, or setting a production queue. And there’s no time limit, obviously, so you can make choices as slow or as quick as you want. Real-time strategy games, however, have nothing but time limits — I just got into the Starcraft II beta tonight, and sure enough, I’m bad at it. Pressured to fight against an opponent, I can’t keep track of units and queues and tiers and all of the other things you need to keep an eye on when you’re playing that game.

But FFT (as well as the tactics genre in general) has elements of both — it’s basically turn-based, like Civ, but you are managing multiple units and queues at any given time. You need to control up to five characters on a tiled board, and you need to move them around in turns to variously attack enemies, heal themselves, or line up buff spells or other items or abilities. In short, I figured it was hard, but it was manageable. I would buy Final Fantasy Tactics, and learn how to strategize, even if it killed me.

And it turns out that I survived — after a weekend of playing the game, I think I have a pretty good grasp on how things work. It took me a lot of lost battles, and a lot of resetting the game, but at this point, I can survive almost anything. I’m still not great at the game — I can’t walk into a new battle and rock it unless I get really lucky — but even if things go wrong during one of the battles, I can make the right moves, use the right items and abilities, and make it out alive.

So I figured, since I spent last weekend learning as much about myself as I did about this game, that I would share some of the wisdom I gained with you. Here’s five things I learned from Final Fantasy Tactics.

1. Attacking is not always the right thing to do. Most of the winning conditions in this game are to “kill all the enemies,” so you’d think that diving in and taking them all out would be the way to go. But not at all — there are lots and lots of times in the game when it’s much wiser to make a move that doesn’t hurt the enemy. That was one of the things I learned right away — while I would see a wounded enemy and think that all I had to do to win was walk up and attack, that attack would miss, the enemy would return fire, and all of a sudden I’d be the one in danger. Once I wrapped my head around the idea that it was always better to consider my options before jumping into the fray, I got a lot better right away. Sure, it sounds obvious now, but lots of my early losses were because I went on the offensive way before I should have.

2. Let them come to you. This is a corollary to the first lesson. On some of the levels, you can see that there are actually waves of enemies — there are multiple groups of powerful, slow enemies that you’re meant to take on one group at a time, because as you’re fighting the first group, the other group will slowly be making its way toward you. If you attacked both at the same time, you’d be overwhelmed, but being patient and using the extra movement time can get you the win. Even on levels where there’s just one group, it’s almost always better to wait and buff up as the enemy comes to you rather than rush out there yourself. Allowing the enemy to try and move in first tends to put you in a much better position to react and return fire.

3. Heal up when you can. This was the other big thing I learned right away — healing makes the difference in a tactics game, because very often, your enemies don’t heal at all. So any time you can take a breather and heal up, you should probably take it. In all of the battles I’ve fought so far, there is no time limit, so taking an extra turn to finish the fight isn’t a problem (I’m sure there will be limits in the future, but first things first). Even if a character is only down a few points, those points could make the difference the next time they get attacked, so use the heal spell first, and then go in for the kill.

4. Strengths on strengths. This is actually something I learned before FFT (in other games, actually), but it’s especially applicable to a game like this: stacking strengths is often better than spreading yourself around. Especially in the case of a game where you have multiple characters with various roles, it’s better to buff up a knight’s strength with his armor and give him the sword that does extra damage (and maybe even throw a strength buff in there, too). Weaknesses are something to keep an eye on, but you can usually take care of weaknesses with other character’s strengths, so stacking in one direction as much as possible is usually more helpful.

5. Read the manual. For most of my life, I wasn’t a guy that reads manuals — whenever I got a new device or a new game, I just flipped it on and poked around until I found what I wanted. But for really complicated systems and games, I’ve learned that it pays to start at the beginning and read to the end. It takes much less time and effort to read the manual than to figure it out yourself or fix a mistake you’d otherwise make. Again, that sounds obvious to you, dear reader, because you’re smart. But it wasn’t until more recently that I figured out that’s the right thing to do, and going through the whole FFT manual and tutorial helped out a lot.

I’ve probably lost most of you by now — “Seriously Mike, you had that much trouble just playing a game?” And it’s not that I had trouble — until this weekend, I’d pick up a tactics game, play it for a few minutes, realize it was way more complicated than I wanted to deal with, and move on. But last weekend I sat down to conquer this complicated genre, and I really feel like I did. I’m about halfway done with the game now, and I already have my eye on Disgaea 3. I’m starting to see patterns in the gameplay, and as you’ve probably already figured out from this post, parallels in my life. By conquering this game, I feel like I’ve built up some new pathways in thinking, some new talents that weren’t developed before. By figuring out FFT, I’ve figured out another part of my life, and I feel like I’ve already been rewarded for it.

All that for $10 on PSN. Good deal.

I don’t do too much self promotion on this site — I figure that if you’re here, you already know me and what I do. But the reason I haven’t posted here much this week and last is because I’ve been pretty busy working on the other sites I work on, and there have been a lot of cool things I’ve done you may not have seen. So just in case you missed something, here’s some great posts I’ve done on Joystiq and TUAW lately:

• I did a lot of fun stuff at Macworld last week — I played with the Parrot AR.Drone in this video (for the post that got my first front-page placement on Digg of the week), and wrote a hands-on here.
• I also did a lot of great interviews at Macworld: I talked to the great Telltale Games both in text and on video, Dr. Ge Wang of Smule, and Andrew Gregory of Autotune the News (you may remember my first conversation with him and his brothers on the first episode of The Modern World).
• I also talked to Heroes star Greg Grunberg on the red carpet at an EA event this week. He showed me his favorite iPhone games, good guy.
• I shot this video of an iPad mockup at Macworld, and as I was shooting it, I guaranteed to my co-workers that it would get on the front page of Digg, and sure enough, it did.
• And this little post about conservatives bringing in a younger audience with video games also got Dugg. That’s three Diggs in one week, not too shabby.
• Finally, this post about Noby Noby Boy on the iPhone wasn’t super popular or anything, but I really liked writing it.

Pretty good week’s worth of work, if you ask me. I’ve also been working on a brand new podcast with my friend Mark “Turpster” Turpin, and you can find the site we set up this week (well, he set it up, I only did some of the background things) over at IncrediblePodcast.com. If you are a fan of our work on the WoW Insider Show, you will want to listen for sure, and even if you don’t play WoW but want to hear me talk about things with a really funny guy, you should tune in and check it out. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

I’m making the mistake yet again of apologizing for not posting on my blog, but I apologize for not posting on my blog. After a week’s worth of work like this, I end up out of ideas at the end of the day, and neither of us have any fun if I sit in front of a blank screen for an hour before closing it angrily and going to bed. I will try to think original thoughts over the weekend, and write them down for you all next week. Thanks for reading.

This Sunday, 1pm. Be there, and by there, I mean here — I’ll have a link to our Ustream page by then.

Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve found interesting in the World of Warcraft this past week (actually two, since I was at Macworld and busy last week):

• Sex advice from World of Warcraft players. This is silly, but what it showed me more than anything is that “Warcraft players” is a huge group of people. Giving them advice about anything, from spec builds to sex positions, is a tough thing to do, just because there are so many different kinds of people in the group that they’re tough to box up.
• Blizzard announced today that they’ve given $1.1 million to the Make-a-Wish foundation thanks to the sales of the Pandaren in-game pets, and my friend at the OC (don’t call it that) Register was on the scene. Apparently Samwise was drawing characters for one of the MaW kids (awesome!) and they had a big check and everything. Plus, though I could have only told you about Ezra, Blizzard has actually hosted eight different Make-a-Wish kids. Good for them. The cynical side of me wonders what they could have done if they had donated all of the earnings from the Pandaren to charity (instead of just the half), but that’s just the cynical side. Also, boggle at the fact that over 220,000 players bought the Pandaren, one of only two pets to show up on the store that day. Just think what they’ll do with these. Blizzard has yet another money printing press, and it doesn’t even require them to develop a game.
• Pike is the latest WoW blogger to let the account lapse. I still have my account (though I’ve been too busy to play over the past week or so), and I’m not going anywhere, but we are definitely moving into the hibernation period of the game, with all of the Wrath content out and competitors like Star Trek Online (and even Starcraft II, which opened up a private beta today) knocking at the door. I’m too good at hedging my bets to call it quits, but I will say that Cataclysm represents a big challenge for WoW. Their goal will be to get WoW players who’ve quit once or twice already interested in the game yet again, and the fact that most of their new content will be revamped versions of old content will be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, maybe people who actually miss the Barrens will find new things to do there again. But on the other hand, who actually misses the Barrens?
• Turns out Blizzard is splitting up with Upper Deck. Lots of people are saying that this has something to do with the Yu-Gi-Oh thing, but really, I’m sure it has more to do with sales and interest — even at GenCon last year, interest in the WoW TCG was way down, and they were even canceling events at the end of 2009. I don’t think Blizzard will start it all up again with a new vendor, though — I think, from the rumors I’ve heard for a while, that they’ll start it up in a completely new way. Probably not one involving a separate company, or those pesky actual paper cards…
• Larisa wrote a post about Blizzard’s guild program, and her guesses are true: the whole thing is super shady. There’s way more interaction between developers and the top guilds in the game than most people realize. The developers have multiple tools to watch and see what’s going on in the game’s dungeons, and so when they see anything strange or interesting, odds are that they’re either there in an invisible (or even visible) form, or looking through the many logs that Blizzard keeps about what’s happening on the servers. I’ve heard stories from the developers about how on the night after a patch release, all they do is follow guilds through the content, taking notes on what they’re doing and what should be fixed. On a 25-man raid the night after a given release, it’s very likely that you’ve got 5-10 folks on Blizzard campus right there in the raid following along with you. The other reason it’s shady is that communication goes both ways — I won’t say these high level guilds are cheating on the live servers (at least not any more — there was a time when Blizzard would provide server transfers and character re-customization to free to some high level guilds, even before the public could do that for pay), but on the test servers, anything goes. And Blizzard is running any number of test or mirror or special event servers at any given time, not just the ones we see when we log into the test realms.
• These are great.
• You’ve all seen this, right? The lyrics are iffy, but I love the camera work and the voices. Very well done.

And that’s all I got for now — there are about 500 more posts sitting in my RSS reader about Warcraft, but I don’t have time to sift through two weeks of stuff at the moment. Stay tuned on Sunday though — we will discuss WoW and lots of other things. If you have something you want to us to answer, discuss, or make fun of, please do email me about it!

I know, I know, I am neglecting my duties here. I have a few different bits of pressure on me lately, some of which I can’t go into, but I will say that I got a little cold, along with a lot of experience, during my trip to San Francisco last week, so I don’t have all the energy to put into writing something good. Or even something, really — you readers know I don’t always even shoot for “good” on this site anyway.

I guess the most momentous thing that has happened to me lately is that I won my bowling league. Well I didn’t win — we did. Two other nice folks and I (who had never met before — we got teamed up together at the start of the league about three months ago) somehow picked up the most points in the league overall, and so earlier this week we were awarded the biggest trophies they had, along with a little magnet that says “USBC league champion.” We did this mostly by having a great handicap — I’m not sure how exactly a handicap makes the game fair, but the way it works is that you’re awarded a number of extra points per week depending on your average, so that lower scoring players are evened out with those who have more experience. My math is terrible, but I guess we were the lowest scoring players of all, so we won.

No, I’m joking, we did pretty well. But most of our victories were simply victories against our average, not actually victories against the other teams. On the last week, we had to win only one point, and on the last of three games that night, I just happened to score 30 points above my average, securing us the victory. It was fun to win, but my biggest worry was actually not celebrating all that much — the other team bowled really well, and we only beat them because of our handicaps.

But just as I didn’t want to be a poor sport by celebrating too much, I also didn’t want to be a poor sport by refusing a victory, so I took the trophy home. It’s quite an accomplishment for me — as I twittered last week, I don’t think I’ve ever actually won at anything even remotely athletic. I’ve competed and accomplished things requiring physical prowess before (and now that I think about it, I guess I’ve contributed to team victories). But winning? Not usually my thing.

And apparently it didn’t appeal to me too much — after much deliberation, I finally told our league organizer and my teammates this past week that I wouldn’t be back during the next bowling league season. I joke about retiring as all-time champion (and certainly it’s probably more fun, if not very sporting, to go out on a win), but really I just want to try something else. Sure, I joined the bowling league to meet people, and I did meet a lot of nice people, but really I just joined a bowling league because I’d never joined a bowling league before. And now, I have — next season wouldn’t be quite as original.

I’d rather do something else — I’m thinking that I’ll take a class of some kind, either an improv or acting class, or a cooking class. I’ve been meaning to learn about wines for a while, maybe I’ll do that.

Maybe I’ll even win a trophy.

Hey folks. Sorry I didn’t get a video up this weekend — my Saturday consisted of me running errands, and my Sunday consisted of making some food and watching the Super Bowl with my family, so I didn’t really do anything that you’d want to watch.

I’m really looking forward to this week: tonight is the last night of my bowling league, and the way I see it, we only have to win one game out of three tonight to win the whole thing. So hopefully we’ll be able to pull that off. After that, I’m racing home and packing up for my first trip ever to San Francisco. I’ve never been up there before, and I’m driving up the tomorrow morning.

I’m going up there to cover Macworld for TUAW. I’m not sure what to expect at all. I’ve been to many conferences before, and I’ve covered almost as many as I’ve been to, but I’ve never been to a Macworld before, and I’ve never worked with the TUAW team. This one should be interesting — it’s a weird year for Macworld (Apple isn’t actually there, long story), but TUAW is going all out. We’ll be livestreaming video and posting coverage nonstop on our official Macworld page, so keep an eye there this week if you’re interested in Apple computers and iPhones, and you’ll probably see me doing some interviews and demos.

Other than that, it’s always fun to meet new people at a convention (and to hit up all of the PR parties in the evenings). Posting here may be slim, but I’ll try to keep you in mind, dear mikeschramm.com readers, and maybe get a picture or a little text your way when I can. I’ll be back to full steam here next week.

Thanks as always for reading. Hope your week is as good as I think mine will be!

I took a break from reading A General Theory of Love to read World War Z, but now I’m back on the emotional psychology, and it’s just as interesting as it was earlier. The part of the book I’m reading is talking all about memory, and the role it plays in emotions, and the point that they make is that there is no emotion without memory. We only have feelings for others because we remember them, and it’s that memory, that continuity of feelings and senses and thoughts, that makes up our emotions and relationships.

Pretty interesting stuff. In one sense, it’s awfully freeing — we are constantly creating memories, and constantly taking in what we see and comparing it to what we’ve seen before. The book talks about how we actually remember things, and says that we’re not only explicitly learning things (“1+1=2,” and all of the other things you remember from school), but that we’re constantly and unconsciously implicitly learning how the world works around us. Whether it’s a brand new video game that you’re deciphering the rules to, or a new person that you’ve met multiple times, we’re constantly unconsciously picking up cues and storing them away. You learn that if Mario eats that flower, he can throw fire, or that the person you just met also used to be really into Tori Amos, and millions of other little ideas and facts and even wordless emotions that we’re storing away for a future time.

That’s pretty impressive — we’re all doing that, all the time. When you think of just how incredible and powerful our minds all are, and that we’re feeding each other information and emotional feedback in concert all the time, you start to get a big picture view of just why humanity is so strange and so wild and so amazing.

But memory is also a chain. As much as it tells us, both about ourselves and the world around us, it also ties us down into what we’ve known before. If every time you touch a hot stove, you get hurt, you’ll remember not to touch the stove again. But what if it’s a coincidence that the few times you touched the stove, it was hot? What if the cues you get, and the things you learn, are wrong? We’d never know — everything we know and feel comes from our own memories, and even in the face of absolute clear reason, our memories are what dictate our actions and emotions.

The book doesn’t talk much about this yet (and maybe it will — I haven’t finished it), but I had a memory float up from the murk today that came unbidden, that just rose up in my head unrequested, spawned by something random that I saw or happened to come across. And once it was there, I couldn’t get it out.

My life has changed a lot lately. But then I again I guess that’s what happens when you live long enough — I also read today that as you get older, time means less because you’ve lived through more of it. Nevertheless, I thought maybe that I was a completely different person, that the now was what mattered, and that the before didn’t affect me, wasn’t really a part of me any more.

But of course it was. One memory, and it was all back — the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same emotions and oft-traveled mental ground. Our memories can help us learn all kinds of new things, and they serve (well) as our compiled realms of knowledge, vast libraries of storage about all we’ve seen and all we know so far. But man, they are powerful in the other direction, too. One thought, hidden away for years, can set us right back into old thinking and patterns.

• There’s a rumor going around that BlizzCon is being held in Anaheim later this year, which is probably true, but as I’ve always said, there is no BlizzCon until Blizzard says so. Everything I’ve seen of that event is that Blizzard does it both as a favor and an afterthought for the community — they lose money on it, they don’t waste time planning anything for it until a few weeks ahead of time, and when the time actually comes to host it, it’s completely barebones. They pay to outsource most of the work, and/or they use call center employees as volunteers for most of the staff members. If there is another BlizzCon, I’ll be there — they’re a great time, and it’s awesome to see all of the community people in person. But all of this worrying over whether there will be another one or not, or where it will be, is much ado over nothing. There is no BlizzCon until Blizzard decides so.
• On the other hand, Blizzard did reveal this week that they’re planning on integrating the Auction House into the Armory (in both its online and mobile incarnations) in a “premium” way. Now that is fascinating — obviously we’ve wanted to have an iPhone app that accesses mail or the AH for a long time, but the fact that they’re going “premium” (which is a code word for they’re charging) is new. I wonder how much they’ll charge — I can’t imagine it would be more than 99 cents or so, maybe up to a maximum of $5 if they’re offering some serious functionality, meaning something like access to the inventory, ways to schedule auctions, and so on. I would never buy any virtual goods with real cash, but I would spend some real money on real functionality, and creating a market for mobile apps under the Blizzard banner could be a cottage industry. A mobile Battle.net chat client would probably sell, as would an online minigame for Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 that affected the main game in some way. And while free apps would have to justify their existence (to take away from development time, and so on), paid apps fund themselves. Very interesting. We’ll have to see what Blizzard offers.
• Oh, and the Lich King is dead, but I don’t care. I’m not sure why — Arthas was a pretty epic storyline. But the ending, spoiled by that cinematic that leaked out, feels cheap somehow. It’s funny — at this point, Blizzard must realize that there’s a flip side to including epic cinematics in their games. On the one hand, they want to have epic events feel epic, and putting together a cinematic is a good way to do that. Obviously, they’ve invested a lot in a team that will help them do that often. On the other hand, cinematics are very easily extracted and leaked out on to YouTube, which means that the most epic events in the expansion were seen by everyone even before the patch finished installing for most of us. I wonder if they’re trying to think of another way to keep epic lore epic (seen by only those who’ve unlocked the moments in-game), or if they’re already programming cinematics in expecting that they’ll be seen by everyone when the patch drops.
• Now that Arthas is dead, of course, we can probably expect the usual post-expansion valley of interest, at least until Cataclysm fever really takes off in a few months. Don’t forget my prediction, though: I still think we’ll have a full content patch (rep, daily quests, instances) worth of world event material to bring on the Cataclysm with. I don’t think Blizzard will let us sit around for long before some serious Cataclysm happenings start up in the actual game.
• In game, I’m still mostly just doing random pickup groups, and I’ve found, like Gevlon and Rohan, that groups are extraordinarily patient. I’ve tried to start some group kicks, and I haven’t been kicked myself (yet), but I’ve found that it’s very hard to get anyone kicked for underperforming or even being a pain. That’s probably a good thing — I know I’m often underperforming, and I’m probably a pain as well — but it’s interesting. For all of their reputation about WoW players being jerks to each other, when it comes to random in-game groups, people are actually pretty forgiving. Either that, or they just don’t want to wait for another tank to come through the system and get ready and buffed.
• Some excellent Warcraft wallpapers over here.
• Zath (whoever that is) is running a competition for some WoW gear, and I think all I have to do is mention the contest on my blog. So there you go. If I win, I’ll give the prize away here.
• This is a good question — Blizzard doesn’t always (well, hasn’t ever, actually) made it clear what symbols and flashes and spell sounds are which. Of course, there is a graphic and/or a sound for every single spell, and if you play WoW a lot (which, if you play WoW, is probably how you play it), you can just listen to a raid and hear the rogue hitting their cooldowns, the mage casting their fireballs, and the shaman spitting out Chain Heal. But for players who don’t play (or raid) as often, I wonder if there’s any way to make that a little easier. It might be interesting to see a wiki or something (or a part of WoWWiki) that matches up spell animations and sounds with the spells themselves, sort of a quick reference guide for what kinds of casting are going on.
• Finally, here are some Healthstone soaps. They look like they smell terrific. If you know what I mean.

That’s it! Until next week, happy Warcraft-ing!

Sorry, I’ve been busy this evening — I watched Groundhog Day to celebrate, and then I saw the Lost premiere (which I’d like to write about, but which I don’t want to spoil for anyone, so I’ll wait). And now, it’s late already, and I’m too tired to write anything.

Instead, enjoy this rap about the movie Aliens.

The Grammys were last night, and there are lots and lots of food trucks in LA that I’ve been meaning to try. Can you tell which is which?

1. Vesuvio

2. Hot N Cold

3. Let’s Be Frank

4. Marked 5

5. Ego

6. Twang

7. Nom Nom

8. Pretty Wings

9. Umami

10. White Horse

Food trucks: 1, 2, 4, 7, 9
Grammy winners: 2, 5, 6, 8, 10

I started this jokey series a ways back, and I don’t think it actually ever made anyone but me laugh, but really, that’s all I need.

It is 1901, and a new century brings with it many marvels of technology and wonder! Throughout the Earth, certain individuals are making vast steps both forwards and backwards in time, both unlocking the secrets of the past and slowly unraveling even the most mysterious mysteries of the future! First among these is one PROFESSOR INTELLIGENT, who with his assistant TIMMY, is currently researching the secrets of ancient Egypt, finding items one would never expect among long-buried treasures and tombs of yore!

But we’ll return to the current adventures of our dangerous duo in just one moment. First, we set our scene in darkness. But only relative darkness, as, slowly, a torch of yellow light emerges in the background. We are in a cavernous hallway, one surrounded by what is clearly manmade stone, yet covered in dust and dirt that only years of inactivity can place. Two men appear in the darkness, one holding a torch — they appear to be Turkish in origin, and they speak a strange language, one of many from around the ancient Mediterranean rim.

Still, their gestures and intonations reveal their intentions: they are planning an ambush! One signals behind a statue on one side of the chamber, and the other signals farther back down the hallway. As the two strange men from the Near East move to their appointed hiding places, a worry may cross your mind. Who are these two Turks planning to ambush? Could it be our own Professor Impossible and his trusty entourage? And if so, what could our intrepid hero do?

But worry not, young reader — our man has many talents, and among them is certainly the ability to see trouble coming! Worry not one bit, for we shall see what lies ahead for the good Professor.

And on that note, look! Near the far end of the ceiling of the hallway, there is suddenly a movement, a shuffling of rock and stone! Suddenly, light from above pushes through, and then, a shape falls to the ground below.

“Auggh,” says PROFESSOR INTELLIGENT as he falls into a heap on the floor, and then stops moving.

Another person jumps down from above, and lands deftly, and then another person arrives in the now torchlit chamber. It is, of course TIMMY! And our friend INSPECTOR MILLIBANK from Scotland Yard in London!

“I’m sure glad you decided to come along with us from London, Inspector!” says Timmy. “You never know when or where we might find ne’er-do-wells, even in an ancient tomb of an old pharaoh!”

“Think not of it,” answers the Inspector. “The professor has answered my call many a time, it was only prudent that I answer his! Speaking of, is he alright? He hasn’t moved since he got down here.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s just examining something closely on the floor.” Timmy says, kneeling down to pat the face-down Professor on his back. “What is it, Professor? What did you find?”

“Euggh,” says the Professor, who rolls over on his side. “What the gell just happened?”

“I’m sorry,” says the Inspector, “did he just say gell?”

“Oh no,” Timmy exclaims, “it must be a curse! A curse from the ancient tomb!”

“No, you idio-uggggh,” answers the Professor. “My head is killing me, I can’t see straight. I think I’ve got a conduss — a concussion. I landed on my head after falling through the floor up there.”

“Fight it, professor!” Timmy exclaims. “We’ve got to keep moving ahead! We’re almost to the tomb!”

“Afraid not, gents,” says one of the Turkish men in a rough accent, stepping out from behind the shadows. “This is the end of your line.”

“We’ve got orders,” says the other, appearing at the end of the corridor from his own hiding place brandishing a pistol in his hand. “Hands in the air!”

Inspector Millibank appears to survey the situation, looking for an advantage to fight from, and then resigns and raises his hands in the air. Timmy does the same, but the professor remains on the floor, rubbing his head and looking a little woozy.

“Did you hear what we said?” says one of the Turks. “Get up! Hands in the air!” To prove his mettle, he fires the pistol at the ground near our professor, and the gunshot echoes throughout the underground cavern. The Inspector and Timmy cover their ears in pain momentarily and then put their hands back up in the air as quickly as possible.

“Jesus!” says the professor. “We didn’t even know you guys were down here. I’ve got to go to hospital, anyway, I think.” he says, stumbling a little as he tries to stand. He touches his head and then checks his hand. “Is that blood? Damnit!”

“No one going anywhere,” says one of the Turks as he checks Millibank for weapons and pulls a second pistol from within Millibank’s coat. “Not until boss arrives.”

“Boss?” says Timmy. “But you don’t mean that it’s… ” Timmy trails off in fear.

“He surely does, Timmy,” says the Inspector with a growl. “Only one villian is dastardly enough to solve the riddle and arrive in the tomb before the great Professor Intelligent. Their boss must be…” he says, with a final pause before dramatic effect.

“Look, I think I’m really bleeding here,” says Professor Intelligent. “It’s starting to get on my coat. Oh god, and who knows what kind of fungus is growing down here? This can’t be safe.”

“Dr. Vile!” say both Timmy and the Inspector in a fright.

“The one and only,” says the evil Dr. Vile, emerging from the end of the chamber with a twirl of his mustache and a grin to match his name.

“All right,” says the Professor. “That’s it, then. Look, I don’t know what’s going on — last I remember, I was drinking in some bar, and the next thing I know the kid and the cop are dragging me around some dark temple place. I just want to go and get some medical care and hopefully some painkillers. I know you always have some plan going on, and really, that’s fine by me, let’s just –”

“ENOUGH!” shouts the terrible Dr. Vile, and motions to his two minions to grab some nearby rope and tie up our three adventurers. “You’ve tangled with me for the last time, Professor Intelligent! I knew that if you were in Cairo, you wouldn’t be able to avoid the mystery of the Tomb of Imhotep!”

“You mean you solved the Riddle of the Sphinx too?” exclaims Timmy, now tied up with the Professor and Inspector Millibank. “You found the golden feline and replaced it in the Emperor’s harem before dawn on the day of reckoning!”

“Look,” says the professor, “I don’t know where he gets this stuff, seriously. I think he just makes it up. We can go, it’s fine.”

“I did!” shouts Dr. Vile, twirling his mustache even more menacingly. “I made plans to arrive here even before you did, and ambush you myself! And now you’ll be able to see my final triumph!”

“No!” shouts Timmy. “Professor, he’s found the Ancient Chalice of Imhotep!”

“Seriously?” asks the professor with exasperation. “Is that a real thing? Where are you getting this stuff? Millibank, do you have any idea what’s going on here?”

“No, sir,” says Inspector Millibank faithfully, “but then again you’re usually the one who solves all of the mysteries.”

“See, Vile?” sighs the professor. “This is what I’m dealing with. I don’t care what you do or what you have wired to explode or whatever. Just let us go.”

“Silence!” retorts Vile. “I… actually do have this whole place wired to explode. I’m surprised you saw through that part of my plan!” The two Turks exchange looks of slight alarm.

“Are you kidding?” asks the professor. “You always have something you want to blow up or — look, seriously, I don’t care. I’m bleeding here. Just let us go.”

“Never! Now that my plan is almost complete, I can tell you: I’m going to drink from the chalice! And then I’m going to blow this whole tomb sky high!”

“But, you’ll kill us all!” cries Millibank.

“All of us, Inspector,” says Timmy. “But not him — he’s got the chalice!”

“Exactly right, Timmy,” replies the evil doctor, and pulls a golden chalice from beneath his scientist’s coat. “I will drink from the chalice, and earn eternal life! You’ll all be blown to bits, but I will survive!”

“No!” cries Timmy. “Professor! We’ve got to stop him.”

“Ah, you stop him, you little snot. I think — I think I’m losing consciousness,” the professor replies, his eyes slowly closing into what must surely be deep thought about their current predicament.

“Now,” Dr. Vile speaks, “I will drink, and live forever! Turks, light the explosives!”

The Turks look at each other, and then at Dr. Vile. One of them speaks: “We do not think so, effendi.”

Dr. Vile is incredulous. “What!? Do as I say! Obey your master.”

“We will help you find your treasure,” says one of the Turks. “But drinking from the chalice must not be done.” They advance on the doctor.

“Professor, wake up!” whispers Timmy. “I think something is happening!”

The Doctor makes a desperate move to sip from the chalice, but one of the Turks is on him like a flash, knocking the cup from his hand and spilling its liquid on the tomb’s floor. The other moves quicker than lightning across the desert sky, and soon the Doctor is vanquished, unconscious on the rough stone.

“Professor, you did it!” says Timmy, and Millibank seems to move to protest but then shrugs. The professor says nothing, lost in thought, a little drool falling from his mouth and blood from his head wound slowly coloring his coat-collar.

“The doctor reached too far,” says one of the Turks to Timmy. “We will let you go, if only we get your word that you will stay away from the Ancient Chalice.”

“Of course!” says Timmy. “The professor seeks only knowledge, not eternal life! We’ll leave you and your tomb alone!”

“Then we will let you go,” says one of the Turks. “And we will return you safely to Cairo. But first, we best seek medical attention for your friend.”

“Uggghhhh,” says the professor as he is untied. And the great genius does not speak again until back in the haze of morphine in a Cairo hospital.

So once again the great professor has defeated the villian and saved the day! But what will become of the evil Dr. Vile? And who are the two helpful Near Easterners who assisted our hero?

Stay tuned for more of Professor Intelligent’s Thrilling Tales of Thrills!

• I actually, finally, after about two years of fishing those stupid pools on and off, got Mr. Pinchy this week. I’m surprised at myself — I didn’t accidentally click away from the loot (I did that once on the old fishing tournament), I got it within a few casts on the day I tried, and on the very first wish, I got what I wanted: the noncombat pet. Pretty amazing. That was my last big goal in WoW, so now I’m not sure what I want to do. I guess my Pally (which I haven’t been playing lately) could stand to get his epic copter and his motorcycle, so that’ll probably be what I go after next.
• Speaking of things I posted about on Twitter, it is coming. Stay tuned.
• This was an interesting question bouncing around the blogosphere: do addons make the game too easy? And if so, is that ok? When I posted that Mr. Pinchy screenshot, someone on Twitter replied back to me to point out that I’m not using any bag addons, and when I wondered why, I figured it was because I liked organizing my stuff the way the developers wanted me to, rather than having some addon do it for me. Sure, it’s a little harder, and sometimes things get lost in my bags, but in that case, I’d rather use the game’s UI. That doesn’t mean I don’t use Pally Power and Recount — in those instances, I’d rather that the game be “easier,” or at least not use up my mental awareness on the little things. But yes — those complaining that the game is too easy could probably stand to look in their addons folder and see just which parts of the game they’re bypassing with automation.
• Here’s an awesome Felhunter plush as well. I’ve been looking for some more lamps/lights for my apartment, and I’d love to find something Warcraft-related, but I haven’t see anything yet. If you do, let me know.
• I’m bummed that Ghostcrawler doesn’t seem keen on letting us use different types of ammo in different situations. I agree that if you do it the traditional way, it can make for some full bags and a lot of micromanaging. But shamans have their own UI — maybe hunters should get another set of spells or a dropdown menu somewhere to choose which “ammo” they’re using. If ammo really is going away, why not just put it in the UI? He says that there aren’t many situations where you’d need to use different ammo and that it’s too much for hunters to worry about, but I have faith that a) developers will come up with ammo different enough that there’s reason to make a choice and b) surely a dropdown menu where the ammo slot is right now wouldn’t be too much to worry about. If you’re losing ammo anyway, make it that easy, and turn up the costs for repairs on the weapons.
• There’s obviously nothing to this, but I thought it was cool that she responded.
• Finally, convention season is starting up again, and I found out this week that I’m going to get to go to GDC 2010 in March. It’ll be my first GDC, and I’m really looking forward to it. Though I’m not covering Blizzard specifically (unless they want to announce any upcoming apps for the newly-announced iPad, ahem), I’ll definitely stop by the booth and say hi, and if they happen to be showing off Cataclysm, I’ll let you know how it looks. Should be fun!

Thanks for reading, ya’ll! Hope all is well with you in the World of Warcraft. As always, if you see something cool you think I might like, feel free to email me and I’ll be happy to check it out.

Mass Effect 2 came out today, and I’m looking forward to it, but I’m still playing Dragon Age. And I think I’ve figured out why.

Jonash: Hello! Welcome to the thriving city of Denerim! What can I do for you?

• What’s here in Denerim?
• Who are you?
• Where can I find Brother Genetivi?
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: What’s here in Denerim?

Jonash: Oh, lots of things! The shops are mostly in the main square, but you can find different places to go all over the city. Just be sure to stay out of the Elven Alienage — that place is a mess. Anything else I can help you with?

• What’s here in Denerim?
• Who are you?
• Where can I find Brother Genetivi?
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: Who are you exactly?

Jonash: Oh my name is Jonash, I’m the blacksmith here in this part of town. My son used to help me, but, well, it’s just me lately…

• Oh no! What happened?
• Where’s your son? Can I help in some way?
• Haven’t you hired another assistant?
• I hope that doesn’t mean I have to wait.

Chumley: Oh no! What happened to your son?

Jonash: Oh, he’s been rebelling against me for a while — he left about a week ago and hasn’t been back since. I would be more worried, but he’s been gone before, and at least it’s one less mouth to food. I would like to have him back, but only for the work. I don’t have enough money to hire anyone else.

• Can I help in some way?
• Haven’t you hired another assistant?
• I hope that doesn’t mean I have to wait.

Chumley: Can I help in some way?

Jonash: No, not really. Unless you find him somewhere around the city. I don’t know if he’d want to come back at all, but if you do find him, I guess you could tell him that the irons need heating again.

• Haven’t you hired another assistant?
• I hope that doesn’t mean I have to wait.

Chumley: Haven’t you hired another assistant?

Jonash: Wait, didn’t you hear me? I already said I didn’t have enough money to hire anyone else. Are you even listening to these answers?

• Tell me again about Denerim.
• Where can I find Brother Genetivi?
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: What’s here in Denerim?

Jonash: Seriously? Didn’t you already ask that question? Are you just clicking all of the choices so you can make sure to hear everything? I told you — Denerim is the market and a lot of other places. It’s all on your map, just go look.

• Tell me again about Denerim.
• Where can I find Brother Genetivi?
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: Where can I find Brother Genetivi?

Jonash: Brother Genetivi? Never heard of him. But I believe he usually hangs out near the Chantry — which you probably would have known if you’d actually paid attention to your quest log instead of stopping by every single NPC to ask them every single question you could because video games have conditioned you to talk to everyone. No wonder this game is taking you so long. Can I help you with anything else?

• What’s here in Denerim?
• Who are you?
• Tell me again about Brother Genetivi.
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: Tell me again about Brother Genetivi.

Jonash: Sigh. I already told you everything I know, and you didn’t even have to ask me about that. Seriously, I don’t know why Bioware even bothered to record all of this dialogue — it’s completely meaningless to both of us.

• What’s here in Denerim?
• Who are you?
• Tell me again about Brother Genetivi.
• Do you have anything for sale?

Chumley: Do you have anything for sale?

Jonash: Sure, here you go. Feel free to spend five minutes sorting through all of the junk you picked up in the last dungeon, because you’re playing this game like Diablo and think that you need to save everything for vendor trash. I’m sure you’ll do the same thing at the next vendor, even though we pretty much have all the same stuff anyway. Man, you’re bad at playing this game.

I’m here. My internet is occasionally dropping out, but that’s not why I didn’t post a video this weekend. Frankly, I don’t just feel that motivated to post much at all. Sometimes, your life feels like it has meaning — a few projects you’re working on are taking off, the weather is particularly nice lately, and everything seems to be humming along, driven by some ethereal engine that you don’t particularly control, but that seems to be pushing you and your life forward.

And sometimes that engine stalls, and your life feels pretty aimless, and nothing much changes or seems like it’ll change in the future. This second feeling is the one I’m having lately. It’s unfortunate, but in my experience these things pass, and the first feeling, the one with an engine behind it, will eventually return. I usually just have to wait it out.

Please don’t worry or anything — this past Friday night I was feeling a little bummed, and I tweeted exactly that, and I saw a friend on Saturday who expressed concern about it. But I told him not to worry, and I made a mental note to try and keep that stuff off the Internet. On the Internet, no one knows what you really mean, and people may worry that you’re in real trouble when you casually mention that a night didn’t really go your way. But in reality, it’s just life. Everyone deals with it.

I’m breaking that rule already by saying that I don’t really feel inclined to post lately, but don’t worry about it. Because every time things go down, there is a resulting up that comes along eventually. I’ll just sit here, and quietly wait for exactly that to happen.

It’s been raining here in LA, and my internet seems to be suffering. It’s a really disappointing thing, especially for someone like me who spends so much time online, to be working on the internet and then just have it die in the middle of something important. It’s like getting into a really interesting blog post, and then s

• Blizzard did another developer chat, and it seemed to me to be much better than the first for one reason: Ghostcrawler. That guy is not only smart (I know, he and I have chatted about Warcraft over beers), but he’s really excellent at being insightful about the game without dropping megatons about the developers’ plans. He knows the game inside and out, and when players come up to him with an issue (in the dev chat or at BlizzCon), he knows how to break it down in a way that’s meaningful to them and talk about the mechanics behind it without making Blizzard look bad. If there’s a problem with Ghostcrawler, I’d say that he’s too interested in an ongoing balance — he’s not interested in finding a good place where everyone’s even, he’s more interested in keeping things up in the air and interesting. But that’s better for the game, anyway.
• There were also a bunch of resilience changes, but honestly, I don’t care. PvPers will probably cheer, and then they’ll cry again when the damage done by players gets buffed back in line, and so on. This is what I was saying about Ghostcrawler: it’s a constant juggling act, rather than trying to actually reach an equilibrium. But the juggling act is what keeps subscriptions happening and what keeps players interested, so he’ll keep at it as long as he can.
• This is a great question: will we have another Olympic event? I expect so. Looking forward to that.
• On February 5th, there’ll be a pet show over on the Horde side of Wyrmrest Accord. Some ingame events are boring, but I imagine this one will be pretty fascinating — hopefully there’ll be some pretty rare pets in attendance.
• My good friend Brigwyn did a great interview with Arxkanite, who wrote the much-maligned but widely used Gearscore addon. Definitely give it a listen.
• Blessing of Kings has one of the first really good arguments I’ve seen against crowd control. Basically, he says that if you really want cc that’s worth something, you’ll have to created a limited number of dependencies between mobs per pull. Which means that we’d just go back to a bunch of cookie-cutter pulls. I still disagree with him — I love crowd control, and how it brings another level of strategy into a 5-man group, and I think the devs could come up with a solid and interesting set of dependencies like BoK talks about — but it’s an interesting point.
• Matticus, who wrote for WoW: The Magazine, so check that out, wants to know why people cared about the drama in Guildwatch. I can think of a few reasons: despite what most people suspected, the whole point of the drama section in GW was actually to act as a warning sign. As in, “here goes your guild but for the grace of Ghostcrawler.” Here’s how bad things get, so you can know not to go here with your guild. Second, it’s just funny — it’s predictable, and it’s amusing to see that no matter what someone is pissed about, the core issue is usually that they think they’re better or deserve more than someone else. Plus, it’s fun to make fun of people who mess up (and the correct response to something like Guildwatch drama is to laugh at yourself — some people did that, most didn’t). Matt says he might start a drama blog, but trust me, I’m way ahead of him. I didn’t think Guildwatch was coming back at all (and I think “The Classifieds” is an interesting idea — Lisa always does a great job), but yes, I am planning on starting up some type of blog that examines MMO drama. If someone else out there wants to try it, feel free, but I’ll tell you two other things: 1) Matt’s right, it’s a lot of work, and 2) this may sound egotistical, but I think another thing that people liked about GW was my voice behind it. Maybe I’ll prove myself wrong.
• Finally, Blizzard added both a model viewer and character RSS feeds to the Armory last week. Re: the model viewer, I tweeted that I didn’t really get it — we can already see our characters by logging into the game, and while the “pose” thing is cute, it doesn’t serve much of a purpose that I can see. The RSS feeds are more interesting — Larisa was one of a few bloggers that wondered about the privacy of the whole thing. Does it matter if someone knows what you did in World of Warcraft last night? Your boss could follow your feed and see when you’re dinging while you should be working, or an ex under restraining order might be able to tell when you’re home. I don’t know how Blizzard could make it optional or not (seems to me that if you could see the information behind one feed, you could eventually figure out how to reach them all), but making it optional certainly seems like the best way to do it. I haven’t seen a lot about this, but it’s a pretty big issue. I doubt this is the last we’ll hear about it.

That’s it! Pretty full column this week, I’ll have to see if there’s a better way to format it all next time. Enjoy!

I couldn’t think of what to write this evening, despite some excellent suggestions from folks on Twitter. Then I realized I hadn’t tried writing any limericks (or poetry at all, hmmm) in a while, so here’s a few of those.

These rainstorms today here in LA
Have caused chaos and lots of disarray
But that’s not quite the worst:
Though the levees may burst,
I just had my car washed yesterday.

Jack Bauer’s back on the airwaves
And I’m thrilled yet again by his close shaves
And here’s this season’s twist
Jack’s not the most pissed
It’s Renee who decorum and law waives!

Folks were bummed that the Navi are not real
And in China they watch with too much zeal
But the craziest thing
About Cameron’s fling
Is an age 60 Ripley! That’s unreal!

NBC is adjusting their clocks
And Jay Leno is taking his knocks
The most probable ending
Of the Tonight Show’s “lending”?
It’s that Conan is headed to Fox.

A new episode! And so soon!

• One frame of fame per person in this music video.
• “Feet on the ground from far away” looks at some of the interesting ways we’re using Google Street View. One of those is this photographer’s survey of some of the interesting art Google’s automated cameras have shot.
• Oil drops can apparently navigate mazes. Wait until you hear my feeble attempt to explain how.
• People complaining of a tower that’s causing sickness in South Africa get a surprise during a public meeting. Honestly, I don’t think I did a great job of talking about this one, but it is a good story.
• In what order do you show the Star Wars movies to someone who’s never seen them? I’m sticking with 4,5,6,1,2,3.
• Finally, a cruise ship makes a stop in Haiti despite all that’s happening there, and I talk about the bigger picture of the virtual proximity that we seem to be cultivating online. I didn’t actually mention how you can help out Haitians, since I presume that you’ve either already heard how to do so or you’ve already done so, but just in case, go give some money to the Red Cross.

Thanks for listening! Enjoy the show!

 

 The Modern World, episode 15: Play Now | Play in Popup

NASA recently found cocaine in one of their hangars. What other embarrassments might be in store for the space program?

Glowsticks found the morning after in Mission Control

Interns subjected to ten-shot “countdown” at yearly office party

Strange smell from math department turns out to be originating from hookah sitting in front of whiteboard full of groundbreaking trajectory calculations

New orbital navigation system designated MJ-420

Engineering has been designing microvacuum pump that turns out to be really great at doing whippets

New budget includes $100 million for astronauts’ “special K” supply aboard ISS

‘Shrooms have been grown on the moon since Apollo 12

Space shuttle launch pad turns out to be huge bong

David Bowman didn’t trip through time at the end of 2001 — he was just on LSD in zero gravity

• It’s still all Dungeon Finder for me lately — my guild doesn’t seem to have enough people to go raiding, so I just log in, get in a random group (finally running Heroics with my pally), and run a few instances. Lately, I’ve been thinking of going back to the hunter. I originally switched to my Pally so that I could do some tanking and/or healing, but I tried to do both of those in random groups and to be honest, I didn’t find them that fun as a hybrid. I think I’m going to stick with straight DPS, though maybe I’ll go back and level a priest for Cataclysm.
• Can you believe that this woman plays World of Warcraft? Or used to, anyway. Man she is pretty, and pretty nerdy!
• The WoW TCG is completely revamping the way they’re doing business in 2010. Not necessarily surprising, given that there are more sets out now than anyone can count, and they’ve needed a refresh to try and pull in new players. I don’t think they’re due for a demise — I think they’re so far into the community at this point that Blizzard won’t bother with starting up any other licensing deals. But I do think things will change over there pretty drastically, which is probably usually what happens when TCG games get that old.
• I have to agree with Boubouille here — the Cataclysm alpha may be starting up soon, but it really doesn’t mean much to us at all. Friends and family alpha means it’s not open to the public (as Mania says, that means you and me), and I think given their experience with Wrath, Blizzard is going to be really careful about releasing information early. Eventually, there will be a PTR and/or an open beta, and we’ll have lots of time to pick all of the many many changes over then. Until then, I would say let them do their thing and wait for the sure-to-be-exciting pre-release world event. Remember, my thinking is that we’ll have basically a content patch worth of quests and reputation and items to look over for the world event.
• Bornakk says no changes to the Battered Hilt drop rate… which means we’ll probably see a change soon. Ha! I kid. I still haven’t seen mine yet. Or my Mr. Pinchy. Or my Perky Pug (though I’m closer than ever).
• I do this all… the… time. Malygos: “Pledge fealty to me, and perhaps I won’t slaughter you for your insolence!” Me: “Ok, ok! We pledge! Guys, let’s go, he seems pretty angry.”
• Finally, here are some fun games to play while running Heroics with the dungeon finder. I’m probably too chicken to play them on my still undergeared paladin, though I may try some of the DPS ideas on my hunter this week.

That’s it for this week! Oh, one more thing: have you seen this site yet? It’s probably NSFW and you probably won’t like it, but I thought it was funny.

I was trying to think of something to write tonight, and I thought, “With everybody talking about the Jay Leno/NBC/Conan thing, is there really anything else interesting or original that I can say about it?” Probably incorrectly, I decided yes.

Our hero, Conan O’Brien, storms into the NBC executive offices, demanding to speak with the network execs. He manages to fight his way into the executive boardroom, only to find a panel of three network heads, two men and one woman, calmly sitting at a table facing the door he enters from.

Conan: All right, you idiots! I’ve had enough of this rumormongering and back and forth about you and me and Jay Leno and what’s happening with these late night shows. I’m here to finish this! I’m here for the truth!

Executive #1: Conan, what’s wrong?

Executive #2: Yes, what in Gliese 581 are you talking about?

Conan: Wow, that’s a weird expression for you to use. I wonder if that will come back up later. Never mind for now, though — You know what I’m talking about! The news is saying you want to put Jay Leno back in the Tonight Show’s timeslot, and move me and the Tonight Show back to 12:05am! That’s sacrilege! That would mean that the Tonight Show would actually be on TV tomorrow!

Executive #3: Yes, yes Conan, that’s all true. But what’s your problem? Why are you barging in here?

Conan: Barging in here? How dare you murder tradition and take my hard-earned dream from me just because Jay Leno’s show failed!? Why are you asking me to pay for your failures?!

Executive #1: Failures? What does he mean?

Executive #2: I think I see the problem here. Conan thinks the Jay Leno Show was a failure.

Conan: Thinks? Of course it was a failure! His ratings were terrible, and his “comedy” is even worse! Just look at the fervor on the Internet. The show, and your whole experiment to replace prime time drama with a variety hour, was a gigantic failure!

Executive #2: Oh no, Conan. You’re looking at things the wrong way. The Jay Leno Show was making us plenty of money from advertisers. In fact, even though it’s losing in ratings to all the other networks, we’re making way more money than we ever would buying sets and scripts and actors and assistant directors for all those prime time dramas. Advertisers love his family-friendly, bland content, and his show costs us relatively nothing to produce at all.

Conan: Wait, so you don’t care about the ratings at all?

Executive #3: Why would you think we do, Conan? We’ve never said otherwise. Our chairman said earlier this year that the show was not just great, it was “exceeding our expectations and those of our advertisers”! Think about it — DVR is a huge issue with us. Heroes gets time-shifted, and our advertisers complain. The Office gets time-shifted, and our advertisers complain — plus, some of their material is considered “controversial,” though we’re working hard to convince them it’s “water cooler friendly.” But the Jay Leno Show is perfect for us — the format lets us do product mentions whenever we want, the timeliness makes it DVR-proof, and the advertisers love Jay. I just had a Coke guy bring his daughter in to see the show, they got a real kick out of the headlines!

Executive #1: Ha! I love those!

Conan: Wait, you’re saying you like the Jay Leno Show better than The Office?

Executive #1: Of course Conan — the Jay Leno Show makes us more money. Why wouldn’t we like it? We like what our advertisers like, and even if we have to charge less because ratings are low, we were still making way more money than we ever spent on ER. That show was a real anchor on the network, let me tell you!

Executive #2: Just the catering on ER was more than we pay the crappy writers on Leno! Thank goodness that thing ended.

Conan: But if you don’t care about the comedy or ratings, then — wait, so you really thought the Jay Leno Show was a success? What about the affiliates? What about the reaction on the Internet?

Executive #2: Well of course it was a success, did you see all that money we made? I’ve got a huge pile of it right here! (Pulls pile of money from under the desk)

Executive #3: The affiliates thing was a problem for a little while, yes, Conan, but they got over it. They affiliates use our content to make their money, and while they might whine about our lead-ins, in the end, they’ll always come crawling back home.

Executive #2: And the Internet — Conan, my daughter is on the Internet all the time, and her favorite show is Jersey Shore. Do you think the Internet has any taste in television?

Executive #1: (looks at pile of money and starts drooling a little bit)

Conan: Did you just start drooling over that money? Again, that seems strange. But wait, ok, I get why you didn’t care what people thought about the Jay Leno Show — it was making you money because of low costs and high advertiser interest, and I get why you don’t care about the Internet. So why are you deciding to change things back now?

Executive #2: Unfortunately, the tide turned — public opinion had it that the show was a failure, and advertisers didn’t want to be associated with a failure. We would have let Jay go for years, even if his ratings had never improved. But once the advertisers started reading in those lame newspapers — we’ll shut them down yet — that Jay Leno was a mistake, then they started believing it. That’s ok, though — we’ll still have him at 11:30, just like the advertisers want it. What they say goes. It’s not like viewers are paying us any money.

Conan: But didn’t you read my statement today? What about the history of the Tonight Show? That’s an NBC classic! NBC has a long tradition of quality programming — doesn’t that mean anything to you? Why would you break up tradition and your own brand just to make more money?

Executive #3: Sigh. Earth traditions.

Conan: Wait, did you just say “Earth traditions”?

(The three executives look at each other.)

Executive #1: Ok, Conan. I think it’s time we told you anyway. The truth is, we’re actually aliens from a faraway planet.

(They all pull off their human masks to reveal insectoid heads.)

Conan: No! The seemingly innocuous mention of a distant planet earlier in the script has suddenly turned out to be a hint at a larger truth!

Executive #2: Yes, Conan, it’s hamfisted melodrama. And as it turns out, we care nothing about your Earth traditions like the storied “Tonight Show,” your human dreams, or even the strange conceit you earthlings call “comedy.” Truthfully, we just don’t get it.

Executive #3: Coincidentally, none of our main demographics understand “irony” or “wit,” either, but as far as we can tell, they’re all still human. Just really, really dumb.

Executive #2: Indeed. But the point is, Conan, we don’t really care about ratings or art or respect or integrity at all. We only care about one thing. And that’s our main food source, Moylent Green.

Executive #1: (reaches to grab part of the pile of money, eying it hungrily)

Conan: Moylent Green? But I don’t understand. What’s Moylent Green?

Executive #2: In a strange twist of fate, Conan, it turns out that the one thing we love to eat is actually little green pieces of paper with currency values printed on them. And your planet happens to be full of it.

Conan: No! You don’t mean…

Executive #1: Yes, Conan. (Gobbles down the pile of money in a ravenous gulp)

Conan: Soy — I mean Moylent Green is money!

Executive #2: Yes, Conan. And that’s why we don’t care about anything you have to say — all we care about is making money, and then eating it to support our disgusting and lecherous insectoid lifestyle. And there’s nothing you can do about it, Conan! You’ll take the 12:05 slot and like it!

Conan: No! You monsters! Nooo!! I’ll tell everyone! I’ll tell the world!

Executive #3: You’ll tell who, Conan? Matt Lauer? Katie Couric? Brian Williams?

Executive #1: Why do you think we pay them so much? Couric can eat a bankroll like you wouldn’t believe! Hahahaha!

(All the executives laugh with their alien laughter. Conan runs out the door and down the hall screaming.)

Executive #3: Hahaha! Oh, that was fun. Which reminds me — we’ve got to call the ABC hive and have them cancel Modern Family. It’s far too good to make the kind of green we’ll need for this year’s hibernation sweeps. Let’s have them put something a little more advertiser friendly in there — maybe another Dancing with the Stars.

Executive #1: Dancing II: Electric Boogaloo! Perfect! And since we’ve just had a meeting and we’ve got a plate of money here, let’s make it lunch and eat!

(They smile and laugh as only insects can, and gobble up the pile of advertiser money on the table.)

I figured that it had been a while since I last did an open Q&A, so I announced on Twitter today that I would answer some questions, and here you go. Not that you guys necessarily care what I have to say, but a) you’re coming to a site named after me, so I figure you must care at least a little bit, and b) I like taking random prompts wherever I want to go with them, so I’m doing it! Begin the gauntlet!

@carlosfrevert asks: Are you going to play Star Trek Online?

Probably not. I used to play EVE Online and World of Warcraft (and D&D Online, and a couple of other MMOs) back when I worked on Massively.com, but I found out pretty quickly that I never ended up playing either one enough to justify two subscriptions. And I’m not really that much of a Star Trek fan — I am much more of a Star Wars guy. I like the rough and tumble better than the diplomatic teleporting. If STO gets amazing reviews, I may do a free trial, but no, I don’t have any plans to pick up another MMO very soon.

I am planning on playing The Old Republic for a while, only because I suspect it’ll be very different from your usual MMO (and I’m a big Bioware fan). But even then, it’ll be a tough sell to get me away from WoW, and I don’t plan to hold more than one major subscription for any length of time.

What will pull me away from WoW? I’ve heard rumors poking around the Internet lately that have mirrored what I’ve heard offline and off the record for a few months now in whispered conversations with friends of friends of Blizzard employees. Blizzard is a titan of the MMO scene, and whatever they’re planning next will undoubtedly be rad.

@deepholes wants to know: “Mike, should I go to law school?”

If you want to be a lawyer, then I would say yes, you should go to law school, as I believe that’s pretty much the only way it’s done. That’s what I saw when I googled this question, and I agree: law school is tough and expensive and probably not very much fun. The only reason you’d want to go through it is if you really do want to be a lawyer. So the question should probably be not if you should go to law school, but why.

If you should go because your Dad wants you to, or because it’s what you always expected to do, or because you just want to make a lot of money, then no, you probably shouldn’t go (trust me, there are much easier ways to make lots of money). But if you want to be a lawyer, look forward to reading over complicated legal texts, and enjoy dealing with tough issues, probably without any clear answers, then please do go.

My brother went to law school and he’s now an environmental lawyer. Unfortunately, I’m writing this too late to actually call him for his advice (he’s in DC on the East Coast, and I’m in LA), but if I know him well, and I do, he’d probably agree with me: if you’re going to invest that much time and frustration and money in something like that, you better want it. Good luck!

@Lorangriel and @Septictank27: “Why did you quit wow.com?”

That’s not quite a fair question. I wouldn’t say that I “quit” WoW.com.

@spocket1 replies: “Why did you leave WoW Insider?”

Unfortunately, I’ve said all I can say publicly about my leaving the site. If I could tell you more, I would, and I do plan to be at BlizzCon this year, so if you want to know the whole story, come up and ask and I’ll tell you. I’ll just say that there were differences, and I’ll have to leave it at that. There’s no crazy story or anything, but needless to say, as you may already know, I’m still working for the parent company. So you can do the math and probably see why that’s all I got for you. Sorry. The fact of the matter is that, even though of course I miss the community, I’ve moved on and so have they. So that’s that.

Fortunately, I’m still playing WoW, and I’m writing about it every Wednesday here at mikeschramm.com in what I call Warcraft Wednesday. So everybody wins!

And I am talking with Turpster about another podcast. It won’t be another WoW Insider Show, but if we can set up a worthwhile plan and get it moving, I will promise that it will be fun and that you will enjoy it.

@fredgallup asks: “How do you REALLY feel about TotalBiscuit?”

Who?

@AngerFork wonders: “If you could be sent any distance into the future without worry of losing your life, how far would you go? What would you see?”

I thought for a while about this one since it was asked this afternoon. I thought about going to the end of my life just to see what happens, but then I figured that wouldn’t be any good. What if it turns out that I died peacefully and that I was just old and lying in bed when I appeared? When I came back, I’d have to wonder if I did anything different with that knowledge, and if I did whether I’d get hit by a bus or not, and I’d just spend my time looking for that bedroom and wondering when my younger self would show up or if I would have made my future different at all. So no, I don’t think I’d want to come back within my lifetime to meet myself.

I thought about coming back, say, a few hundred years into the future to see what things were like from a technological standpoint, but my guess is that I’d be disappointed — either we’d have blown ourselves up by then, a new Ice Age would have wiped most of us out, or we’d all have been turned into morons like in Idiocracy. And honestly, future technology doesn’t interest me too much — either I’ll be disappointed that we haven’t gone farther than I thought, or I’ll be so bummed that we can’t use their flying cars and cool gadgets in the current era.

So I basically decided I’d like to go to the end. Of everything. The entire universe. That seems most enlightening — I’m guessing by then there wouldn’t be any traces of humanity left to bum me out, and I’d get to see what this actually all is, if it all just ends or if it repeats or if there is some outer being or if we’re just someone else’s whimsical imagination. I wouldn’t really be able to do anything when I came back, but I’m guessing just knowing for sure what this all is would probably make my life better.

So that’s when I would go without worry of losing my life — the absolute end of the universe, to see just what happens when the existence of everything we know comes to a close. Plus, I hear the steaks are excellent and the show is good there.

Finally, @TJMadd asks: “What made you move away from Chicago to the West Coast?”

Opportunity, mostly. There’s more chances out here for me to write about video games, movies, music and television, which is what I want to do. There’s more companies looking for community managers, which is something I can do well. There’s more events to cover and more opportunities for interviews and in-person meetings. And there’s more wackiness out here and more strange stories to hear and experience and write down later on. I’ve been wanting to move out to LA for a while, so it’s kind of the culmination of a dream for me.

Plus, the weather is great and the women are beautiful. It’s not all a dream — the traffic is terrible, I still haven’t found a worthwhile pizza place (the food in general here is much less impressive than in Chicago), everything here is pricey and spread out all over the place, and moving to a city where I didn’t really know anyone well was much tougher than I imagined it would be.

But of course it wasn’t anything I couldn’t survive. In general, I’m happy I made the move. It’s been a heck of an experience, it’s paid off quite a bit already, and I really feel like I’m putting together a pretty solid life for myself out here. Can’t really ask for more than that.

Thanks for all your questions, everybody!

I think this worked. AudioBoo was trouble for me tonight. Had to record it twice, and I think it crashed on upload. Hopefully you can hear it — I’m not doing it again!

Oh, it’s been far too long since we’ve seen this wonderful feature. Previously on a Real Life Scientist: Questions about Christmas, Questions about Space.

Q: Dear Real Life Scientist, a little while ago, my family and I went and saw the movie 2012. In the movie, they say that the world will end in 2012 because of an old calendar, and lots of bad things happen. In school, I learned that 2012 is only two years away — will what happen in that movie ever happen in the real world?
-Jonathan R., Sandusky, OH

Dr. Richard R. Williams III, Ph.D., Astronomy and History at Stanford University: Hey Jonathan, thanks for writing in. Yes, the movie 2012 has caused kids just like you to ask all sorts of questions about the Mayan calendar and what might happen when it ends in two years. But I can tell you that the producers of that movie have tricked you with a little movie magic: while there is a calendar used by the ancient Mayan people that does in fact end in 2012, all indications are that it’s only a coincidence. Humanity has used all sorts of calendars throughout history, based on everything from the movements of the stars to the changing of the seasons, and the truth is that they start and end all the time without any major changes to the world at all. No, it’s much more likely that the Mayans just didn’t understand or feel the need to mark a date as far in the future as 2012, and that’s why their calendar ended then.

The real end of the world won’t be marked on anyone’s calendar — it’s much more likely that the cataclysmic destruction of the earth will come without any warning at all. If history is any indication, 2012 is just a movie; when the real end of the world comes, you and your family will never see it coming.

Q: Dear Real Life Scientist, in school we learned about meteors, which are big flaming rocks that fly through space. Our teacher even said that some of them had hit Earth, and one maybe even killed all the dinosaurs! I asked what would happen if one ever hit us, and my teacher told us that we have telescopes and we can use math to know where they’ll hit long before they do. Is this true?
-Sally C., Portland, OR

Dr. Williams III: Hello Sally. It’s true, there are all kinds of formations and collections of minerals and materials flying through the sky (though more of them are frozen rather than flaming, at least until they hit Earth’s atmosphere). And yes, some of them have hit Earth before. In fact, lots of tiny meteors and meteorites hit our planet every day, usually burning up in the atmosphere above you. Only very rarely does a large piece of rock break through, but it has happened — there are very large craters in the western United States that many scientists believe were created by meteors. We don’t really know what would happen if a very large meteor hit Earth today, but depending on where it landed, it would possibly be extremely destructive.

We do have lots and lots of telescopes and radar dishes watching the sky, and I’d like to tell you, Sally, that we’ll definitely see a potential impact a long time in advance. But I can’t. Just over 10 years ago, a meteor 500 meters across — a major impact if it had hit us — was detected close to the Earth only a few days previous. In March 2004, a much smaller asteroid that passed extremely close to our planet was only detected a few days before impact. And in October of 2008, an asteroid that did eventually land in Sudan was detected only 20 hours before it reached Earth. We’ve been extremely lucky that we haven’t been hit so far, and the fact, Sally, is that if we are on a crash course with a major impact, we won’t know about it until it’s far too late.

Q: Dear Real Life Scientist: My mom says that we don’t need to worry about the end of the world because God loves us and when the end comes, he’ll appear to take us up to Heaven. That sounds good, but I’m not sure. What do you think?
-Jeffrey H., Gary, IN

Dr. Williams III: Jeffrey, I can tell you with conviction that there is no scientific evidence at all, ever collected, that tells us that hypothesis or anything remotely like it is even slightly true. Everything we’ve ever seen says that when you die, your consciousness ceases to exist and what’s left of your body breaks down and rots away. There is no scientific evidence to suggest otherwise.

And let me tell you, some of the faith-based evidence is pretty circumstantial as well.

• I haven’t been playing much lately — I got a PS3 last week and most of my gaming time has gone to that. But I have been running the occasional instance on my pally, and my guild is apparently moving through Ulduar quickly. I didn’t get to raid with them on New Year’s Day, but hopefully I’ll get in with them this week.
• Hide and Seek in Stormwind has been done before, but never quite like this: someone dressed up in full Stormwind guard gear and hid in plain sight. I love that lowbies actually ran up and tried to click on him.
• Oculus, as you’ve heard, has new rewards in it. I think it’s great — I’ve never liked the instance, and I can’t wait to get my hands on one of those drakes. But I do think it’s an interesting precedent for Blizzard to set: if people don’t like your content, just make it more rewarding. That can be a tough line to walk. If Arena is less popular, should they beef up the rewards you get from it? Obviously Oculus is an outlier — we’re at the end of an expansion, epics are already being given away like candy, and this is an instance that has fundamental issues; they can’t simply fix it without completely redoing it. In essence, Blizzard is saying, “we surrender, have some more stuff.” When Cataclysm comes around, I don’t expect to see them solving things in the same way. Then again, Exanna says it’s still not enough.
• I’m not saying this guy made the wrong choice, but if the Orc was an actual replica of the statue outside the Blizzard offices, I might have given it a lot of thought. I guess if it’s the girl or the Orc, you go with the girl, but look at it! That thing is awesome! Can’t we keep it in a closet or something, baby?
• Note that players can now send whispers to other players on different realms while in the same party. Big change, small notice about it.
• Did you know that Furbolgs are actually based on the Irish legend of Fir Bolgs? You did? Well I had no idea. Obviously Blizzard constantly borrows from mythology (Loken = Loki, Thorim = Thor, and so on), but it’s surprising that even some of the things you think are original about Azeroth turn out to not be so original after all.
• Finally, this is old, but I just heard about it this week. Bummed that your gearscore addon isn’t finding you quality people to partner with ingame? Try the new standard, Namescore, which is an addon that uses what I can only imagine is a high-quality algorithm to determine what the person you’re looking at is like in terms of playstyle, talent, and attitude, and then give you a number to rate them with. I don’t know about you all, but I’m not grouping with anyone below a namescore of 100 ever again! Sorry, Ðæthkíllá, no group for you!

Have a tip for Warcraft Wednesday? Email it along, I’d love to check it out.

I’m currently looking for a place to write about film. If you know of a site that could use someone like me in LA to go see movies and write reviews just like this one or whatever about them, please email and let me know!

I’m as big a fan of Sherlock Holmes as they come — when I was a kid, it was Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys, and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for me. I read everything I could get my hands on, and more often than not, that happened to be detective stories. I loved the Victorian tales of the man who lived at 221B Baker Street — the prim and proper era contrasted with the dark alleys and shifty behavior of would-be do-badders who themselves ended up caught in the eccentric master of deduction’s traps.

And so when I heard that Guy Ritchie was making a Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, I was interested in seeing it. Sherlock Holmes, for all of its fame, is a very British, specifically London, bit of mythology, and Guy Ritchie, in his own way, is a very British, specifically London, director, so I figured it could work. Downey, Jr. has been getting ever more brilliant lately, in between Iron Man and his both hilarious and genius turn in Tropic Thunder, and while Jude Law doesn’t exactly have the portly frame that you’d usually associate with Watson, I figured he’s a good enough actor to pull it off. Turns out I was right on all of those counts — while the Sherlock Holmes movie doesn’t exactly capture what I love best about the series by Arthur Conan Doyle, those three filmmakers play their parts well, and it’s a respectable action flick.

Note I said action, not detective. While this Sherlock Holmes is called a master detective and does indeed have the powers of observation and deduction the character is known for, he’s not so much a crime solver as an dysfunctional action star. There are some excellent scenes and setpieces in the movie (from a drydock complete with ship being constructed to the framework of the London Bridge), and the whole thing looks terrific — a dirty, mysterious Victorian London. The writing keeps things moving along well, and lets these actors put their new shines on these classic characters. But in the end, this is an action movie, so much so that it even sets up the predictable franchise sequel by the end.

Which is kind of a shame. The movie does play around with the tradition — most visions of Holmes have him as more of an arrogant professor type, always correcting Watson and two steps ahead of the game (which is, of course, afoot). But Downey’s (and Ritchie’s, I presume) Holmes is more a victim of his powers of observation and deduction rather than in control of them. They’re put to some new uses (it turns out Holmes is an excellent fighter, because he is extremely good at deducing what will happen when he breaks his opponent’s leg — that was mentioned in the stories but never explained or portrayed in the way the movie does it), but more than anything, Holmes seems befuddled by all the things he’s seeing around him. His powers are an obsession themselves, and have wrecked his life, his relationships, and made him grossly dependent on Watson, rather than the way the books have portrayed it, as often the other way around. Despite the new take on the old character, Downey is entertaining as always, and despite putting on a British accent, can deliver a line (like the trailer’s “Beneath this pillow lies the key to my release”) with just the right amount of flair.

Rachel McAdams is also in the film as Irene Adler, someone whom Holmes always describes in the books as “the woman,” the only female to ever beat him at his own game. In the books they were never lovers (Holmes wouldn’t have time for such “inscrutable” games), but in the movie, it’s heavily implied that this is so, and having her around gives another fun angle to Holmes’ and Watson’s dependent bromance, and even pushes the plot along a few times.

But for all of the interesting twists on the mythology, the movie itself fails at the detective side of things — the mystery surrounds a cultish, possibly magical threat, and when the solution finally does come, we’re not even given a chance to guess at it ourselves. The pleasure of a detective story is being given the clues all along (mixed in, of course, with a nice bunch of red herrings and the occasional twist), and trying to figure it out yourself. In the movie, we’re never given half of the information Holmes is, and when he finally does figure it out, it all falls into a good vs. bad action movie plot, with everyone racing to save and/or destroy the day, depending on which side they’re on.

That’s the real problem with making a Sherlock Holmes movie: the reason the books were such a blast to read is because Holmes was always reaching conclusions long before anyone else did. Those powers of deduction had him beating everyone to the punch (including the reader), and the last few pages were Holmes simply explaining what we’d missed all along. I’d even go back into the stories, only to find, sure enough, that the answer had been right there on the page. We saw one thing, he saw another completely, and he’s the genius who figures it all out, every time. There’s none of that here. Holmes drifts off into a blur of a montage, and emerges from the other end with an answer that doesn’t make much sense and requires another stunt scene.

Not to say that it’s a bad flick. It’s fun, well-acted, a little long in the middle, but speeds to a relatively satisfactory conclusion. But the things I loved about Holmes in the old stories aren’t here. There are new qualities in their place, and they’re very clever, but when I want a good detective yarn, I’ve got to go back to The Speckled Band, the Red-Headed League, and all of the other classic tales.

Holy cow, the podcast about this weird modern world that we live in is back! And you thought it wouldn’t ever appear again. On the show today:

• The perfect way to slice a pizza: Cutting through the center makes it simple. Cutting an even number of cuts isn’t too complicated. But when you cut an odd number of cuts not through the center, that’s when the mathematicians start scratching their heads.
• Sales of the physics book that Tiger Woods was reading when he crashed his car jumped way up.
• Matt Haughey writes in defense of Twittering during a tragedy. I’ve never really been through anything like that, but I can’t say I wouldn’t want to post a tweet about it if I was.
• The BBC says there’s been no decrease in illegal downloading. Just want to make that clear since I said on the last show that DVRs actually helped live ratings.
• What are the chances that the best chess (or basketball, or Halo) player in the world has never actually played the game they’re the best at?
• Finally, the joking computer sometimes gets it wrong. Here are all of the (bad) jokes shared online.

Thanks for listening. If you are still listening, please do send in some feedback and let me know what you like and don’t about the show. Thanks!

 

 The Modern World, episode 14: Play Now | Play in Popup

My parents and I went to the Rose Parade yesterday, and I made this video. Most complicated video I’ve tried so far. Not sure how well it works, but baby steps.

So it’s been about a week and a half since I stopped posting daily on WoW.com, and I definitely miss covering the community. I’m still playing Warcraft and reading all about it, and there are still lots of ideas and things about Azeroth bouncing around in my head that definitely don’t fit on a bigger game blog like Joystiq (and definitely not on TUAW, though those are the two places I’m writing these days, in case you hadn’t heard that), but seem like they deserve to be said or highlighted somewhere.

I thought about starting a WoW blog of my own, but honestly, I don’t have the time to do it — I’m busy as it is. But I do have this site that I am writing on every day, so I figured this would be a good compromise: one day a week where I can cover what I want to cover about World of Warcraft. Some of you might be interested to read it because you are players, and that’s great, though I’ll warn you that this will basically be a grab-bag of stuff I’m thinking about or seeing, not an actual news roundup (in other words, I’m not here to compete with anybody). And if you’re not a WoW player and don’t care, well, you’ll have to skip over the post each week. Though maybe you’ll see something that interests you and you’ll become a player.

Just because you all will ask: I have been talking with Turpster about working on another podcast, though we haven’t yet figured out what form it’ll take, whether it’ll be a WoW podcast or just a games podcast or what. I think he also has his own plans, and of course he’s still doing Movielicious and all of the other things he’s doing. But yes, I really enjoyed chatting with him every week, and hopefully we’ll come up with a good, worthwhile way to do it again soon. Ideas welcome.

On to the first edition of Warcraft Wednesday:

• I have been running the Dungeon Finder nonstop on my Pally lately, and I was surprised to get a lot of the new Frozen Halls instances and the ToC 5-man, even when I just chose a random dungeon. But then I realized that most people want to run those — I probably was just getting in on runs of people who’d chosen an actual instance. Thought that was interesting — I thought most players would just go random, but I guess those are obviously the best instances to run, especially for 5-man gear. Works great for me because I’m trying to gear my Pally up to hopefully do some Heroic tanking. Haven’t seen the Battered Hilt drop at all yet, though.
• The WoW Magazine preview finally went online the other day. I flicked through it, and it looks great, though I’m surprised they stuck mostly with covering the community (there’s an interview with Breanni of WarcraftPets.com, and a few columns from folks who write for PC Gamer and at least one player — the name didn’t sound familiar, but I assume he’s probably freelanced for Future before) rather than doing what they should do best, which is show the behind-the-scenes at Blizzard. They do have a column by Neth, but she’s one of the folks we’re already reading on the forums — how about some insight into a level designer’s day to day or a look at how the team put Icecrown Citadel together from start to finish? Maybe they’re saving that for the actual magazine, but in my mind, that’s what the official WoW mag should do: offer a look into Blizzard that no one else can offer. They have to completely approve it anyway — although maybe that’s why they didn’t actually show much behind the scenes.
• Speaking of Breanni, I saw this post on Twitter, and couldn’t agree more. I think a nice little lava elemental for blacksmiths, maybe a gnome nurse pet for First Aid, and… gee, I dunno what for leatherworkers. A crocodile? A vulture (y’know, because they swoop in and skin for leather)? But yes, I think more pets should be given out for maxing professions, not sold in the Blizzard Store.
• Finally, Larisa of Pink Pigtail Inn has started releasing the results of her lists of 2009, and the outcomes are as interesting as promised. The first set of results showed that everyone loved Ulduar (not surprising — what other raid did people love) and hated Eye of Eternity. I recently beat Eye of Eternity for the first time, and other than the drakes, I liked it. But yes, I guess the drakes are the issue. Here’s the second set of results — apparently the mammoths are the worst gold sink (agreed! they’re just ground mounts!), dual spec was the most important new feature (though Dungeon Finder rightfully got runner-up), Quel’Delar best quest, Wyrmrest Accord worst tabard (agreed), and Onyxia whelping favorite non-combat pet. I would disagree on that last one — the Perky Pug is the cutest pet in the game, and it’s a nice fair reward; not too easy, not too hard. But so went the survey, apparently. Can’t wait to see more.

And that’s it. Painless, no? Let me know what you think, and if there’s something you think I absolutely have to see about Warcraft, feel free to send it along. But I’m using RSS full steam now, after many years of avoiding it, so I’ll warn you: I see all!

As has become the annual tradition here on the site, here’s my year-end roundup of the best music, movies, and games that I heard, played, and saw this year. Note that these are my personal picks — I’m not an expert in all of these categories, and especially in the category of movies, I really didn’t see a bunch of movies I wanted to see (it’s been a very busy year for me). But what the heck, here’s the top five in each that spring to mind.

Top five albums of 2009

Assorted songs by Pomplamoose
This is my favorite new band of 2009, and I don’t even have a full album from them, just a series of downloads and YouTube videos to listen to. The first I heard of theirs was this Single Ladies cover (which got itself stuck in my head more than any other song this year), but since then I’ve fallen in love with Nataly Dawn, and I guess her boyfriend and co-artist Jack Conte is pretty cool, too. I won’t link all the songs (ok, I will link September), but just go head over to YouTube and get lost in all the great inventive mixes and tweaks these guys put in their beautiful music together.

The Blueprint 3 by Jay Z
Hip hop is a young man’s game… unless you’re Jay Z, apparently. He’s still making great music that earns him respect in a tough scene and also happens to sell very well, which isn’t easy for anyone, much less a guy who just hit 40. “Empire State of Mind” is unfortunately overplayed at this point, but if you could listen to it with new ears again, you’d hear a classic hip hop anthem with a chorus that soars above the busy streets just like New York’s own skyscrapers.

Ocean Eyes by Owl City
This is the point at which the Pitchfork hipsters stop reading this list, close the browser window in disgust, and go listen to Bitte Orca for the four hundredth time this year. Yes, Owl City is a pop record, and yes, it’s overplayed as well, and yes, it’s completely and totally ripping off The Postal Service. But Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello haven’t made an album together in years, so if I can’t have more of them, I’ll take the next best thing. Sure, I wince at some of the puns, and yes, though I like Fireflies, I’ve heard it enough to last me for years. But Adam Young is making the sumptuous, catchy electronic pop that the Postal Service stopped making after their first album, and I can’t get enough. If Ben and Jimmy want to come reclaim their territory, great. But until then, I’ll be listening to this album yet again.

Safe by Dan Bull
This was another YouTube find — I heard Generation Gaming by him, and had to hear more. I found Safe, a sort of concept album that shows this British rapper’s flair for mixing up songwriting and hip hop in ways they aren’t usually combined. The Streets is probably the easiest comparison (they do both have that accent, and they are both rapping), but Mike Skinner is much harsher, both in beats and rhymes, than this guy. Bull’s songs go down much smoother.

Fantasies by Metric
Another pop record — my tastes have gotten pretty boring as I get older. But this album was definitely one of my most listened-to records this year, and I think it’s Metric’s best. They let Emily Haines get on the mic and just do the rocking to back her up. All these songs, from the building hum of Blindness to the over-the-top bestial clash of Stadium Love, are catchy and loud and great.

Top five movies (I’ve seen) of 2009

I’ll warn you again: I’ve been shockingly neglectful in my moviewatching habits this year. I haven’t yet seen Inglorious Basterds, District 9, Bruno, Julie and Julia, Extract, Zombieland, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Precious, Bad Lieutenant, The Hurt Locker, or any number of other movies that should probably otherwise be on this list. But these are the best five I saw.

Up
The opening sequence of this one is the best piece of film Pixar has ever made in their entire legendary career. There’s more feeling in the first 20 minutes of this movie than in all of the animated CG movies Dreamworks has ever made, and in most of the animated films ever assembled. By the end of the movie, things got a little silly (the dogs? really?), but man, that story of the poor old man and his adventure-bound wife cuts you right to the core right away.

Watchmen
I’ve got my issues with it (mostly the ending), but as far as I’m concerned, Zach Snyder put the unfilmable comic on film. He did just enough borrowing and just enough of his own work to make a stunning movie experience that still doesn’t take away from the original graphic novel reading. Alan Moore’s Watchmen book is still incredible, because it does things visually that you can only do in a comic book. But Snyder’s movie pulls off enough of those little tricks to keep the movie faithful, and puts a few movie and CG tricks in as well. Rorshach is still creepy but right, Manhattan is still naked, and all of the characters and stories are still there: super heroes and villians who have to deal with the dirty, ugly, shocking way the real world works.

Up in the Air
This is the one Oscar contender I was able to catch this year, and while I haven’t been a big fan of Jason Reitman in the past (I thought Thank You for Smoking was lame, and Juno was cloying), this one sold me: these are some of the strongest, most real characters I’ve seen on the screen in a while. The story takes some weird moves through this weird world that we all seem to live in these days, but these characters never, ever hit a false note, and even the most traveled of sentiments (how many times have you heard the meaningless phrase “in this economy” this year?) can still be powerful and striking when you’ve got real stories backing them up. Part of this is luck — apparently Reitman wrote this years ago, and delays in making it made the release this year much more timely — but I’ll admit it: Reitman can make some real characters and he can get talented actors to make you believe them.

Star Trek
I’m not a trekkie, so maybe my opinion doesn’t count here, but here’s another movie where I walked out saying that “they did it.” Chris Pine is the best Kirk I’ve ever seen — rowdy, witty, and ready to jump into a fight he probably can’t win. Spock was suitably annoying in the way logic can be, and with Nimoy, they had the perfect minimal nod to the old series. Plus, the whole time travel premise was the best possible Star Trek-style way to show that while this is a reboot, this isn’t necessarily the characters you already know.

Taken
See, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for number 5 here! I need to see more movies! But yes, as I twittered right after I saw this one, this was the best paternal revenge story since The Limey. I really enjoyed it. Not a big movie, but nice, taut action around a solid, interesting premise. Not all action movies have to be about crazy giant robots or weird looking aliens shooting laser guns. Some of them can just be good.

Top five games of 2009

Batman: Arkham Asylum
This is my game of the year. I didn’t expect much until I actually played it for the first time back at E3, and then I realized what Rocksteady had actually done, which was what we’ve all wanted someone to do for a long time: actually give you the experience of being Batman. When you fight in this game, you’re not just fighting, you’re choosing who you want knocked out, because Batman is that good. When you sneak around, you’re not worried about whether they’ll see you or not (nobody ever sees Batman coming), you’re just thinking about how scared you’re making the bad guys. And the fact that they got the Batman: TAS voices and writers to put a great story in a Super Metroid-style Bioshock-quality environment is icing on the GotY cake.

Borderlands
A lot of companies and people have tried to recreate the addictive loot-hunting gameplay of Diablo, but nobody I’ve tried has succeeded — until Gearbox’s first person shooter came along. The story is lame (and the ending is lame as a result), but even after my friend and I beat the game, we’ve gone back multiple times to clean up all the quests we could find and keep on hunting for that better gun, that bigger shield. There are a few quibbles with the controls (holding X down accidentally will replace the gun you’re holding with whatever you pick up, sometime causing you to drop an amazing weapon, and sometimes you’re stuck running just to find a fast travel station where it’s not immediately clear which one you want to go to), but the pacing is a thing of beauty, and when you’re in the world of Pandora with a few friends, there hasn’t been a better co-op experience this year. Here’s hoping the sequel comes soon, and we get many, many more levels and guns to gain with this gameplay.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade
I don’t usually go in for the more obviously Japanese fare — it’s usually very well done, but a little too strange for me to really appreciate it (see Metal Gear Solid and the recent Final Fantasy games — good games, but I don’t get most of them). But this one spoke to me — the graphics are unspeakably beautiful, the gameplay combines solid 2D arcade action with a terrific, grindy RPG weapon hunt (gotta catch all the swords!) and some wild boss battles. Excellent game — almost made it worth having the Wii around this year.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Yes, I’m drinking the kool-aid, but wait: I never bought Call of Duty 4. I rented it over a weekend — beat the singleplayer in a few hours and played a few multiplayer games with some friends. I decided to get in on the ground floor with this one, and it’s been worth the ride: the single-player experience, short as it is, consists of a series of action movie highs. The spec ops mode is a terrific way to play co-op. And the multiplayer mode is the most exciting FPS shootout I’ve played in a while — despite the racist voice chat (I mute them all), the exploits (I played something else the weekend the Javelin bug was out there), and the crazy good clans ruining the experience for everyone else, it’s super fun to knife somebody in the back and hear that level up sound.

Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes
I had high hopes for a few Puzzle Quest-style followups to take the throne this year, from Square Enix’s Gyromancer to Puzzle Quest’s own Galactrix sci-fi sequel. But in the end, this new contender made by my new favorite developer, Capy, was the one that captured the genie in an entirely new bottle. It’s still a puzzle RPG, but the puzzling is gem-matching done in a completely new way (you can match vertically for offense or horizontally for defense, and there’s a “charging” element that not only has you strategizing where to make your matches, but when), and the RPG is much more story than quest based, with multiple main characters and multiple units controlled by each, each with their own stats and leveling schedules. Add in Capy’s excellent retro pixelated designs (never have zombies and demons been so cute, and you can even match bears!), and this is my favorite handheld game of the year.

There you go. You’ll notice I didn’t do honorable mentions this year, and there’s a few reasons why, but mostly it was just because I was pretty picky this year. Next year, I may also have to do TV shows — Mad Men and 24 would have been on that list, along with Big Bang Theory. If you have your own list, be sure to email or tweet it to me, I’d like to see it.

So I’ve finally caught up on Heroes — for the longest time, I had about seven episodes just sitting on my DVR waiting for me to watch through all of them, and I finally did. I’ll warn you right away: this post is only for people who’ve seen Heroes all the way up until the eleventh episode of the fourth season. Spoiler alert. As of this writing, the show is on holiday break, and will be back with a few new episodes next week. There are a few reasons for this post: one is that I’m thinking about trying to become a television writer, and so I want to see if I can be a little creative with a show that I follow. And the second reason is that frankly, Heroes sucks. I thought the original pilot was bad, but I was told to keep watching by friends, and I think my interest (and probably everyone else’s) in the show peaked back in episode five, when Future Hiro appeared to Peter on the train and the series actually promised us an interesting future. Unfortunately, other than Five Years Gone, which is probably my favorite episode, the show has completely floundered, and at this point, it’ll take basically a complete reboot to get back to a place where it’s relevant or interesting.

Thus, here are five things that the show should do to revitalize itself:

1) Move forward. This is the biggest problem of Heroes in general — it’s more or less an extended origin story, which is fine. I like the premise of the show, which is to put superhuman abilities in the hands of real people in an interesting way. Duck the capes and aliases completely and put a new spin on comic books. That’s great. But at some point, you need to push on in the story, and either move your original Heroes forward, or move on to other origin stories. Creator Tim Kring originally wanted to have a rotating cast, and that’s one way to go. But with a guy like Peter Petrelli (who was really shaping up to be a great central boy scout figure in the developing universe), you can’t go back to having him lose his powers every season, or have yet another character have amnesia that puts them back at square one. Move on! Either find us new characters, or at least let the current ones start actually solving some of their problems instead of dealing with the same nonsense they’ve dealt with for three seasons.

That’s pretty vague, but to a certain extent, the rest of these are all extensions of that idea. This show has basically become the dramatic flagship for NBC, whose dramatic possibilities are so bad that they’ve got Jay Leno on every night at 10, and as a result, everybody is dipping their hands in to try and make sure the soup tastes good. The show’s been through about three different runners (including the great Bryan Fuller), and there’s been multiple shakeups in the writing staff. I would say Tim Kring should run it, but it sounds like he’s the source of some of the issues, so maybe they should just hand the whole thing off to someone who knows what they’re doing. And the first thing that person should do is:

2) Kill Sylar. Case in point for there being too many influences on the direction of the show that don’t belong: Zachary Quinto’s Sylar, who was probably supposed to be killed off at the end of season one (that would have been a suitable first season finale), and yet who has bounced around and since spent more boring time on the screen than any of the other characters. Why did this happen? Quinto’s a marquee star — NBC did the demographic research, and his was the face they decided to attach the show to. But that doesn’t make any sense — he was written in as a psychopath who will stop at nothing to keep killing, not to mention that more than a few characters have made it their goals to end his life. Seriously? Hiro, with all of his time-bending power, can’t finish off Sylar when he’s broken and bleeding? No, Quinto was in Star Trek, he’s a face, and NBC is going to tie him to the front of the boat until it goes down at sea. I actually like the guy — he seems like a pretty good actor, despite his character making no sense, and he was a great Spock. But NBC, really, let him go. Kill him off, solve some storylines, and find a new villian with a new plot. Even Samuel, who’s been a fairly respectable villian this past season, looks tired of having to deal with old storylines.

I should say that they came close at the end of the last episode — Nathan threw himself off of a building to supposedly finish off Sylar forever, and in my chair watching, I was almost convinced that they would actually do it. But no, Sylar slunk off the wrecked car smirking, and I had to put my head in my hands. Why can’t we just be rid of this lame guy and his lame story?

3) Stop worrying about the powers. I get the sense that the creators of the show are worried about limitless power “breaking” the show’s logic, because everyone who seems to have an awesome power seems to either lose it or get a case of amnesia every five minutes (or in Hiro’s case, some supposedly fatal disease that only keeps him from time traveling when it doesn’t fit the writers’ purposes). And it’s true that it’s a conundrum — if Hiro can travel to any time and place, why doesn’t he just travel to the exact time and place that Samuel kidnapped Charlie and get her back? If Peter is indestructable, can go invisible, travel through time, and change shape whenever he wants, how could you get him in enough danger to make it interesting? Obviously, we’ve got to break them back down, right? Otherwise the fans will burn us alive for forgetting a power that Peter should have picked up or missing a possibile step Hiro could have taken.

But here’s the thing: comic books have been dealing with this for years. It’s a story about people who can move things with their mind and fly through the air — it’s not like it makes sense anyway. Viewers are tuning in to see strong, consistent characters, not just nitpick over all the ways Hiro could have time traveled to save the day. Sure, some people will nitpick, but those people are called fans — you want that to happen. So writing staff, stop being lazy, create some characters with enough power for us to stay interested, and start getting creative with what you do to them. Superman has had vast, limitless power for years, and every single week he gets in another set of trouble or adventures. If you can’t get some conflict to envelop your characters because they’re just too darned strong, you need to think of a bigger conflict. And I don’t mean just inflate the budget with world-ending explosions every week, I mean get creative about the way you tell it.

4) In fact, go on a killing spree. You know who else they need to kill off? Angela Petrelli. What does she add to the show? Tracy Strauss could die, too — in fact, she did die as Niki Sanders, but apparently Ali Larter was too popular, so they had to bring her back as a completely different person. And then they completely ignored the most interesting part of her new story, which is that there was some scientist actually creating Ali Larters in a lab somewhere. Forget her aimless, boring wandering — why didn’t we hear more about that?

Other people that could stand to die: Suresh (who’s died like three times now, and hasn’t come back any more interesting either time), Matt Parkman (I like Greg Grunberg, but explain to me what’s interesting about his character? That episode with his father was pretty well done, but now that he’s supposedly back with his wife, what does he want? Why are we still following him?), and Denko. Oh wait, Denko did die, but his death was so boring, and his character was so wishy washy that I wouldn’t mind them bringing him back just so they could kill him again.

5) Where’s the ladies at? This is really my biggest personal issue with Heroes: all of my favorite women on the show end up getting killed off way before their time. Eden McCain was an awesome character — she could control people with her voice (she killed her stepmother by saying “I wish you’d die”), and one of the series’ first big reveals was that she was spying on Suresh for the Company. But no sooner had we gotten to know her true self than they had her shooting herself in the head to keep her away from Sylar. Really? She couldn’t just say, “put me down”?

Then I really liked Candice, the shape shifting girl, who not only looked great when she was shaped like Missy Peregrym, but also had an interesting back story: she was actually a really ugly high school girl who’d found she could use her power to look like whatever she wanted on the outside. That’s a really awesome and interesting backstory, and even in her few scenes in the show, there were some cool hints at the dichotomy there. What happened to her? Sylar killed her for the lamest of reasons. Why? There was a schedule conflict with the actress, and the writers couldn’t keep the character interesting after that. The schedule conflict was with a show on CW — NBC should have written Zachary Quinto’s check out to her and solved the problem right away.

Kristin Bell was Elle Bishop. Great actress, great character. Killed by Sylar.

Daphne Millbrook. Killed — well, not by Sylar, but for a stupid reason. Matt Parkman’s story with her was interesting, and it makes him even more lame that he seems to have forgotten all about it.

The cheerleader was killed by Sylar, but you can’t kill her anyway. But she has been much more annoying since — never has a character had such a cool ability and used it in such cheap and stupid ways. Has she ever actually used her power in a way that wasn’t just for showing it off to someone? I remember her running in the burning house and jumping out the window to escape — and that’s about it.

I like this other character they’ve got in the extended universe named Hana Gitelman — she’s shown up on the show a few times, but she’s a girl that can send and recieve communication with her body. I kind of hope they don’t give her a bigger part on the show, though. Because every cool girl with a great power ends up dying anyway, usually at the hands of that idiot Sylar, who (as previously stated) should have been killed off three seasons ago.

So yes, Heroes writers, there’s what you need to do. Let the powers go nuts, clean house by killing off some major cast members, and for Pete Petrelli’s sake, leave the ladies alone.

Video is late this week as usual.

Still practicing. This will probably all lead to something cool someday, but we’re not there yet. I think I might try a time-lapse video next, though I’ll be at the Rose Parade this week, so the video will probably be from there.

I could have been someone
Well, so could anyone
You took my dreams from me when I first found you

I kept them with me, babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone, I’ve built my dreams around you

I’ve been meaning to get back to movie writing lately, but I haven’t yet found a site that wants me writing for them. I figured I’d get some practice in anyway — whenever I go see a movie, I’ll get a review up for you here. If you know of a site looking for an LA-based writer that wouldn’t mind posting the occasional review, drop me an email at mike (at) mikeschramm dawt com.

When they first started showing off motion pictures to audiences (so the likely apocryphal story goes), they projected a film of a train coming down the tracks on the screen, and the earliest of moviegoers, uncertain of what they were seeing, dove out of their seats to get out of the way. Nowadays, we laugh at their antiquity — it was just a movie, obviously. It couldn’t hurt them. But the fact remains that we trust our senses, and James Cameron’s latest years-in-the-making, overbudget-and-yet-worth-it epic proves that we’re getting better than ever at fooling them.

Before I saw the movie (in 3D and IMAX of course — the only way to see a movie that has been constructed for exactly that experience, something that will become much more common if the previews they showed before have anything to say about it), I read it compared to Jurassic Park, and that’s as apt a comparison as I can think of. I saw Jurassic Park the very first day it came out back in 1990 (one of my schoolmates won a pair of tickets in our classroom, and I convinced him we were best buddies enough to take me), and that movie delivered on what it promised: you really, truly saw dinosaurs as you’d never seen them before. Since then, lots of the paleontological theories that fed Spielberg’s vision have actually been disproven (turns out T-rex did see more than just motion), but those images were so strong and so well-constructed that even though we knew those things were CGI, those of us who saw that movie on the big screen and hear the word “dinosaur” will keep that image. At least until someone else comes along and does it better.

And that’s what Avatar does extremely well. Not create dinosaurs, but create things that never existed for us at all, in large and clustered bunches. Aliens, creatures, glowy plants, giant trees, huge canyons, floating islands, mech suits, double-bladed hovercopters, newfangled computer UIs and interfaces, theoretical engineering in action, humanoid products of genetic science, a virtual Zoe Saldana (actually, I have no idea how much of that last one was actually in the movie*, but if nothing else, she did a great voice acting job). The alien world of Pandora is full of things, and all of it is immensely believable and meticulously created in IMAX-sized, clear as day, perfectly produced 3D. For Jurassic Park, Spielberg went and talked to all of the top dino-related minds in the world to make sure his vision was completely and absolutely correct. For Avatar, Cameron is the top Pandora-related mind in the world, and he’s got Weta and Stan Winston and ILM to make sure it all works exactly right.

And that vision holds throughout. I saw a Tron poster here in LA while driving to the movie theater, and I thought of that teaser, and how we don’t really believe something on screen is real until we see it destroyed. When those Tron cycles are speeding around, they look like what you’d expect CGI Tron cycles to look like, which is basically what they looked like in the first movie. But at the end, when that bike flies up into the air and disintegrates into all of its mechanical and messy parts, you start to believe that cycle was actually real, and start to think about the mechanics behind it. Likewise, without spoiling anything, Cameron shows you the beautiful and amazing world of Pandora, and then proceeds to rip it apart, and it makes the whole thing even more believable. Sure, the Navi look cool. But just wait until you see them riding on the backs of alien horses and dodging missiles in bullet time with a crazy explosion in the background! You’ll believe an alien can fight a mech!

And that’s where Avatar’s only problem lies — it’s an incredible movie, an amazing spectacle, and definitely a masterwork by a filmmaker who’s racking up quite a few of them. But in the end, it’s still only a Cameron movie. This is the guy who made Terminator 2, and Aliens (Sigourney Weaver plays a nice role in this one, but it just reminds you that Cameron is still directing everything), and True Lies, and as incredibly real as Pandora is, it almost feels boxed in by the fact that it’s presented in a sci-fi action movie. The story is good, and the dialog serves its purpose, but you almost wish you could just explore the world without the epic battle for freedom getting in the way. Sure, it’s time for the hero to make a rousing speech, but could you maybe move the camera back behind that hill over there? The rest of this world is full of such amazing things, I’m sure there’s something incredible behind that bush!

If you showed this movie to one of those folks who’d never heard of movies before — you sat them down in the stadium seating inside the surround sound theater with the three story screen and put those little glasses on their head, despite their objections — the experience would do nothing less than change their life. “That was incredible,” they’d say afterwards. “I can’t believe such a place exists! We must go there, and meet the Navi, and study their planet! Such wonders there are! Such awesome life! Such a universe that we live in!”

And I think you’d be a little disappointed to have to look down at them and be forced to explain the obvious: “Those creatures were all generated by calculating machines. Those people aren’t real, they’re actors standing in front of green screens. And that place, full of the most fantastic and alien things ever shown on screen, doesn’t exist. It’s just a movie. Two hours’ entertainment over a holiday weekend. Leave your popcorn on the floor, and let’s go back out to the lobby.”

*The last part of this conversation between James Cameron and Peter Jackson says that Zoe Saldana was very much in the movie. That’s interesting to me — according to these two guys, actors very much have a place in a world full of computer-generated images.

A little while back, I wrote this little rant about Time Warner Cable trying to blame customers like me for an ongoing negotiation with networks over content prices. Apparently networks are trying to raise their prices for content, and TWC is trying to pass the buck on to us — if prices go up, they’ll claim it’s because we didn’t stand up for them, and if they don’t go up, TWC will raise prices anyway.

Watching The Simpsons this evening, I saw a quick ad for this website put together by the network, directly leading the charge the other way. Fox has all sorts of fun claims on this page, including what I said about cable prices going up above, claims that TWC charges for basic broadcast channels without actually paying for the content, TWC made $6 billion in operating profit in 2008, and Fox saying that cable channels are unfairly getting both ad and subscription fees, while broadcast networks are stuck with only advertising.

Apparently the deal has to be all wrapped up by January 1st — Fox even has a list of programming on the website that I might miss if it doesn’t work, including the 24 season premiere. I will be really angry if that’s not available on my cable subscription, and I really will start considering other providers, including DirecTV, Dish Network, or just picking up a digital antenna.

I don’t really have a horse in this race — I definitely don’t think TWC should raise my prices beyond reason, but I don’t know exactly what Fox is asking of them, or what a fair settlement really is between the two companies. That’s for them to figure out. But I do find the whole fight fascinating, and I do wonder why they ever decided to involve us anyway. The deal isn’t dependent on any legislation (and in fact, Fox says that Congress has chosen to stay out of it; the only action they recommend is to send your comments to Fox… so they can use them in the legal writeups, maybe?). TWC obviously thought that they could influence the networks by creating angry consumers, but a) I didn’t get angry at anyone but TWC, and b) obviously the networks aren’t actually influenced by TWC’s propaganda (insomuch as they’re creating their own).

As I said before, my decision stays the same: I want to watch content I like at a reasonable price. If TWC, Fox, or anyone else involved in all of this chaos can’t work that out, then I’ll go off and make a deal with someone who can.

Watch the audio, it’s a little loud.

Man in Tuxedo: Hey Mike.

Mike Schramm: Um, hi?

Man in Tuxedo: How’s it going?

MS: Umm, fine? How’s it going with you?

MIT: Just fine. What’s new?

MS: Oh, not much. Been an interesting week, but you know, can’t complain. Listen, don’t take this the wrong way. But who are you? And why are you here on the site?

MIT: You don’t remember me, do you?

MS: Erm. No, I don’t.

HH: My name’s Horace.

MS: Okay.

HH: Horace Higgenbotham.

MS: Wow. Horace? Higg — Higgenbother?

HH: HiggenbothAM. I’ve been here before.

MS: That name does sound kind of familiar, but I don’t remem — wait. I know you. You were here when we had that little party. You’re the announcer guy, from the 550th post!

HH: That’s me.

MS: Oh, wow, man! Long time no see! How’ve you been? Wow, you were here a long time ago — that was back when this blog was pretty much it! That was back before… Wow, that was back before any of it.

HH: I know.

MS: Wow, man. So what, you’ve just been hanging around here in your tuxedo?

HH: Oh no. You don’t remember? I’m a figment of your imagination. You gave me this name, just because you thought it sounded silly. I’ve been with you the whole time. And you already know that lately, I’ve been showing back up in your head again. You’re remembering back to the days when you were only writing here, for yourself, not for money or visitors, but just for the fun of it. Back then, you had a blog that nobody read, that wasn’t your job, that was just a way to relax, to untangle all of the strings in your head at the end of the day. I know — I was there.

MS: Well yeah, but man, things have changed since then. I wrote that post back in my dingy little mouse-infected room in Chicago. I’m in LA now! I always wanted this, and now I’ve got it! And visitors — man, I still don’t have any visitors on this site, but you should see some of the blogs I’ve worked on. Thousands, millions of visitors! It’s big stuff!

HH: Sounds like.

MS: Sometimes too big to really comprehend, actually. How do you comprehend what hundreds of thousands of people think individually about what you write, about what comes out of whatever’s bouncing around in your head? How can you expect what they’ll think about it, or even try to sort it all out when you get pages and pages of comments and feedback? It’s amazing how things have changed. Back then, I didn’t hear anything from anyone, and these days, I get more of it than I can keep up with. What a journey. I can’t believe you’ve been here the whole time!

HH: Well, sure you do. Remember, you made me up. You’re even writing this now. That’s what we said in the post before — everyone reading this knows that everything I say is what you’re really saying. When I speak, it’s you talking.

MS: I guess so. I mean, that doesn’t make much sense, but I guess it’s all true.

HH: That could probably be said about most of the things that you write.

MS: Nice. Glad to see you haven’t given up on undercutting me. But why are you here now?

HH: Last time I was here, we talked about public and private personas. You said that blogging was an act with a dichotomy at its core: it’s a set of private thoughts placed in a public place. Everyone who writes in a medium designed to be read by others (blogs included) can write about whatever they want, can be as private as they want to about what they’re writing, but it’s essentially a public act. You’re using me as an outside figure, but I’m saying what you’re thinking privately.

MS: Deep.

HH: You’ve been thinking about all of that stuff again lately, which is why I’m back here. Only now, it’s different, because your writing actually is public.

MS: It’s not that public. People may care about the things I’m writing about, but they don’t care that much about me.

HH: I think there are more people who care than you realize. And now you’ve started writing again here, and even though you’re diving back into that private stash of thoughts, that public persona has a much bigger part of the dichotomy than it did before.

MS: It’s true. The silly stuff I wrote here way back when was only for me, and I think that was part of the fun of it. As long as I amused myself, it didn’t matter. But it still doesn’t, right? This site is still mine. Am I suddenly more worried about how my writing will be received just because it actually is being received?

HH: I wish I could help. But I don’t have answers for you.

MS: Because I don’t have answers for myself.

HH: Pretty much. But I can tell you that it is different. Maybe that’s one thing you can do in your writing here day to day: figure out why.

MS: I guess. It’s good to see you, man. Brings me right back to the old days. What happened to that crowd that you had with you?

HH: Oh, they were just here for the anniversary thing. It was your 550th post, we were celebrating. Back then, your permalinks had post numbers in them, and every day, you’d be able to see how many posts you’d done on the site. You don’t even know how many posts you have here now, do you?

MS: No, I guess not. I changed the permalinks a while back. I stopped counting. Once I got past a certain number, I don’t know if it even really mattered to me any more. Back then, everything I’d written was here and numbered on this site. But now, I’ve written so many things in different places, there’s no way to number them all. Maybe that’s part of what’s different.

HH: Maybe.

MS: But hey listen, we can’t just have you sitting around here all the time. You should come out there with me. Maybe I can mention you in a tweet or something, use you in a blog post out there! I think people would really like it. That celebration thing was funny! We had some good patter, man.

HH: Thanks, but I don’t think so. It’s that public/private thing, remember? I think I’ll stick to the private side. And you probably wouldn’t say this yourself, but you like keeping some things out of the public arena. You share a lot, but there are some things you would rather not share with other people.

MS: All right. But hey, let’s not wait another five years, dude. Let’s do this again sometime. It’s great to see you, you know?

HH: I’ll be here whenever you think of me. Good night, everybody!

MS: Good night? Oh right, that’s how you — I mean I. How I finished the first one. I get it. Good night, everybody.

A friend of mine pointed out Nature Friend Magazine — this is a magazine about nature designed for children that doesn’t let silly science like evolution get in the way. They say their goal is to “stand on the truth of God’s Word and to present it as enjoyable fact while learning about the creatures God has created.” I was intrigued — as you might know, I’ve always been a fan of both nature and creationism. So I figured I’d write a little something for them from my own research. I sent it to them a while back, but haven’t heard any response yet.

It is night in the forest, and down below the stars, the trees, which were created fully formed into the universe and may show signs of adaptation in seed distribution that are only coincidence, are full of life. On the forest floor, mice scurry about among the underbrush, and again, the fact that these smaller plants feature larger root systems and smaller leaves is just smart thinking by our Creator, not actually because they have developed over time to take more of their nutrients from the ground rather than the rare sunlight that filters down to them. The mice themselves hunt for food on five-toed hands, and the fact that they share that many toes with not only humans and primates but also the bats that circle above them, is completely and totally happenstance.

But wait, what’s that flutter in the branches above? It’s an owl, out hunting for a midnight meal. The owl’s eyes face forward in its head, unlike most birds, which allows it to percieve depth better at night. But of course all owls have always had that adaptation, always, and the fact that their bone structure is closely related not only to all other birds but actually dinosaur fossils that have been found as well means nothing at all. One thing all owls don’t have, however, is a serrated edge on their flight feathers, that works to muffle the sound of their takeoff when pouncing on food. Which owls don’t have the sound-muting edges? Owls who hunt fish don’t have these feathers. But that’s probably not because owls who made noise and hunted things other than fish didn’t get to eat their prey — it’s probably just because God didn’t have time to serrate all of those feather edges.

This owl, because he hunts mammals rather than fish, has those serrated edges, and so you might think that the forest is nearly silent as he swoops from a branch to grab the unlucky mouse. You’d be wrong, though — the sounds of crickets chirping echoes all around. Crickets chirp by rubbing their wings together, and only male crickets chirp, either to attract a female or warn other males away. There’s one population of crickets that doesn’t chirp at all — on the island of Kauai in Hawaii, a parasitic fly started eating crickets that it could find via their chirping, and instead of normal crickets surviving and thriving, a strain of mutant crickets without large enough wings to chirp ended up becoming the dominant population.

But of course, that’s all — ummmm, I mean… God? The bible? Coincidence? Maybe? I give up.

I’m in a sad song mood for some reason tonight. I just found this song, which is probably why.

“Eleanor Rigby,” The Beatles. This is a boring choice, I know, but it’s my favorite Beatles song, and if you want to talk about lonely, forlorn folks, this song’s got ‘em.

“A Stone,” Okkervil River. Will Sheff’s voice is great for looping and spiralling lines of lyrics, but it’s also great at just simple pain and sorrow for a love lost long ago.

“Get Lonely,” Mountain Goats. John Darnielle’s got whole albums of sad songs, but this is probably the saddest, loneliest song of his that I can think of (“No Children” is a terrific song that’s sad in a “screw it all” way, but it’s not as down in the dumps as this one). I once read a review for this album in which the reviewer actually talked to Darnielle about this whole thing and that he didn’t really get how maudlin it all was. “You don’t understand it,” John said. “Do you have a girlfriend?” Yes, answered the reviewer. “Break up with her,” said John. “Then listen to the album again.”

“Exit Music (for a film),” Radiohead. Never mind that it was written for Romeo + Juliet, this is probably the most depressing, genius song on a depressing, genius album.

“Fred Jones, Part 2,” Ben Folds. This song probably isn’t as classic as the rest of these, but there’s something about it that gets me. And having Cake’s John McCrea doing background vocals doesn’t hurt (or should I say does hurt?).

Wow, that’s a depressing bunch of music. Sorry about that. But I will say that after listening to these, I feel a little better, actually. That’s what the best sad music does — no matter what your situation is or what’s happening with you, a great sad song can make you realize that there’s someone out there feeling exactly what you are. And maybe, if they can express it that exactly and beautifully, then maybe it’s ok to feel that way after all.

I’ve been trying to think of something to write about tonight (and I did come up with a few things — you’ll see them all here eventually, including my usual year-end top five lists of music, movies, and games of the year), but when this little happening today popped back into my head, it wouldn’t get out. So I’m going to do something that will probably be boring and tell you about something that happened to me today. Sorry if you think it’s lame. In other news, my mom has posted about our Wheel of Fortune trip on her blog, so if you want to read another perspective on my post from last Thursday, there you go.

So anyway, I was at the gym today, and I’m slowly learning the employees’ names there. Apparently they’re also learning mine — it started when one guy always said, “hey Mike” when I walked in, even though I never actually told him my name. I have a little barcode on my keychain that they scan when I head in, and I assume that shows them my name when I show up. So occasionally the folks there will call me by name or say hello, and it’s never a big deal. I haven’t really learned any of their names yet, but I guess that’s my problem.

I usually say goodbye as I head out, too, and today as I walked out, the girl at the desk stopped me and said, “Oh hey, I have something of yours.” She did?

“You do?” I asked.

“Yep, here you go,” she said, passing me a DVD. It was a copy of the Watchmen movie, the limited edition release. It was opened and looked a little used. And on the front, there was a post-it, on which was written what looked like, “Mike Schramin.”

I’ve never owned a copy of Watchmen (though I do want to watch that Black Freighter animation they put together at some point), and I don’t know anybody at the gym well enough for them to leave any DVDs at the counter for me to take home. I’ve never even talked about Watchmen with anyone in Los Angeles yet. It wasn’t my DVD. Not mine, I said. That’s my name, kind of — it’s spelled wrong. But that’s not my movie.

“Ok,” she said. “Weird.”

“Good movie, though,” I replied.

“Sure.” And I waved and walked out, forgetting for a while that the encounter had ever happened.

But then, a few hours later, I started thinking about how strange that happening really was. Why would there be a Watchmen DVD that I didn’t own with my name on it at the gym? Who was this Mike Schramin? Was it possible that there was another person, who happened to bring his Watchmen DVD to the gym, whose name was a misspelling of mine?

Then my imagination started up, and it was all over.

What if the girl was actually trying to pass me a DVD surreptitiously? What if I missed the cues — what if I was supposed to take the DVD anyway? What if someone, a spy, had snuck in the gym or otherwise placed a DVD there, somehow associating it with my name? What kind of secret messages had I passed up by not taking a DVD that was seemingly meant for me?

Would I have brought it home, only to start it up past the first menu and then see an image of a man sitting at a table talking directly to me, giving me a secret mission and telling me that the DVD would self destruct when the message was over? It could have been anything, and I just walked away.

Of course, I’m glad I didn’t take it — it wasn’t mine, and whoever’s it was will probably want it eventually. But listen, spies, the next time you want to covertly pass me some information without my foreknowledge, please spell my name right.