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.

My parents, who, as I’ve said before, are traveling around the country in an RV and blogging about it over here, are in Los Angeles for the holidays to both visit me and see some sights. I promised them I’d take them to a TV show while they were here, and I faintly remember my mom enjoying Wheel of Fortune daily when my siblings and I were kids, so we traveled over to Sony Pictures Studios in beautiful Culver City (just a mile or so from where I now live in West LA) to see Pat Sajak and Vanna White do the same thing they’ve been doing since the early 80s.

I don’t know how much you know about television shows, but I’ve actually been to a few — I was out here in LA for a few months during college while I was studying broadcasting, and all of my friends basically interned at TV studios, so almost every week we’d go check out a TV taping. I’ve seen tapings of Price is Right (that entire staff is basically Ithaca College alumni, so if you watch the show, Ithaca college students appear as contestants with surprisingly frequency), the old Dennis Miller Show (with guest George Carlin), Tonight Show (Jay Leno era, with Laurence Fishburne as a guest), The Weakest Link, The Man Show, and a few other regularly shot shows out here (all game and talk shows — I haven’t yet been out here while the sitcoms are shooting, not to mention that most of the ones I like aren’t shot in front of an audience anyway). So I’m pretty used to the fact that, when you walk into a TV studio, everything is much smaller than you’d expect it to be.

Of course, maybe you can’t tell that from my pictures. These were all snapped surreptitiously with an iPhone, which was supposed to be turned off at the time. I thought about shooting video of the show, but then thought better of it, so instead, you get these blurry iPhone shots. We actually saw them tape three shows, all of which will be on in March 2010 (during some special “Taste of Europe”-themed week, I guess), and the most fascinating thing about the whole setup (as with most TV shows that have been running for years and years) is just how routine it all is. They move the audience in while prepping the contestants on stage (we couldn’t hear what they were saying, but some production assistant was standing with them, and making motions while she spoke, trying to tell them to be really excited and move as quickly through the game as they could — give a letter, spin the wheel, applaud, give another letter, spin again, so on), and then bring the hosts out, count down, the show’s on as you see it on TV with just a few voiceovers missing, and then they only take commercial breaks of a minute or two. At the end of the show, they sweep the set around for the final puzzle, all of the hosts and contestants know where to stand, and all of the shots are set up ahead of time and put on tape for a few seconds, and then before you can even realize what’s happening, it’s on to the next show, back to prepping contestants and then Pat and Vanna come out again dressed in different clothes for the next day, and so on.

They also made the point a few times to the audience that they couldn’t have them yelling out answers — apparently that’s an issue, especially on the last puzzle with all of the prize money on the line. If anyone in-house yells an answer out, they supposedly trash the puzzle and have to re-tape the segment. But while I did hear a few letters whispered around me, no one yelled anything out, so we didn’t have any delays or problems. I read somewhere before we went that Pat and Vanna are apparently really, really excellent at solving the puzzles, because they’ve been doing it for so long, but I couldn’t see exactly how much information they were fed or guessed themselves. I think Vanna was pretty good — a few times, she’d start walking before things lit up for her, which made me think she’d solved them (though maybe she has a light or display somewhere that I couldn’t see). Sajak usually had to look at something hidden from our view before he said, “Yes, there are two Bs,” so I’m guessing he has a display offstage that tells him how many of each guessed letters there are. A few times, though, he didn’t have to look, so he probably does figure out some of the puzzles before they’re all lit up.

My dad, who is a smart guy, had trouble following just what all was happening, but that’s because the show isn’t for the audience in the theater, it’s for the audience at home that watches the thing every day. There’s no in-depth explanation of the game or long strategy sessions, just lots of buzzes and dings and flashing lights like a casino. I was amazed at just how “background” the show was — Sajak’s dialogue was bland and forgettable, the contestants were chosen to be endearing but tame, and of course Vanna White, who’s over 50 but still had a creepy audience guy in front of us asking if she gave hugs out as prizes, is the definition of surface — stand there, flip letters, smile and clap. We clapped a lot, too — the crew held up applause signs whenever someone spun the wheel, and they told us that whenever Vanna is clapping, we should be, too, “just like at home.”

Sure, that weirded me out a bit (who applauds at game shows at home?), but in general, there was nothing wrong with it — they do it exactly right for what it is. I have seen the show on muted TV screens the past few weeks at the gym, just because it happens to be on when I’m there and I knew I’d be seeing it live in person. But when you sit down and see three shows in a row, and the amount of people and activity that goes into the thing, you’re kind of amazed at how much work goes into something that’s basically designed to be the soundtrack to you cooking dinner or working out.

That older guy is Charlie O’Donnell, who’s been working as announcer on the show longer than even the stars have. He’s had bigger careers as a voice than most people have had with their whole body, and he was entertaining but bored — this was their last taping before the Christmas break, and you could kind of tell that he, like most of the people working there, were ready to go off to Christmas parties or home to their families. The one time he really lit up was reminiscing for a moment about when the show started, and he talked about Dick Clark — he’s done announcing, he said, for everything “Dick” had ever done. The way he said “Dick” was a nice little hint of old Hollywood — speaking so informally about a guy who is really a legend. But then again, it made me realize, as well, that all of the legends end up just being people, too.

Yes, even those two.

The parents liked it, as did I. I have been meaning to see a Craig Ferguson show sometime here — that’ll probably be my next stop in a TV studio. Oh, and I won a T-shirt as a door prize — it was a “Wheel of Fortune at Sea World” shirt from a few years ago. I gave it to my dad. On the way off the lot, we walked in among all of the big soundstage buildings that Sony has set up, and one of them had a “Green Hornet” prop storage sign on it, which was pretty awesome (though Charlie O’Donnell had mentioned earlier that they’d finished shooting there a little while ago, and moved off to the Paramount lot).

I didn’t get a picture of it, unfortunately. A security dude walked by and gave me a look that made me think it wasn’t worth the trouble. My parents and I went on our way to Canter’s for lunch.

I am sorry to say that I had a busy day today, what may be an even busier day tomorrow, and so I don’t have time to write anything for you tonight. But I will go ahead and post this animation for you to view. I tweeted about it earlier this week, but it’s just so good. I can’t stop watching it. Enjoy.

This song has been bouncing around in my head whether I want it to or not, so I figured I’d write something about it today. And now it’s bouncing around in your head.

And yes, there is actually one of these near me in LA, and no I haven’t been there (I try to stay away from fast food as much as possible with the whole better eating thing, though I have broken down a few times, I’ll admit). And yes, I know that they probably just have Pizza Hut menu items and Taco Bell menu items. But what if they combined them? Hint: the correct reaction to these things is disgust, not drool. Think of the calories!

Menu items at the real Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell

Pasta bel Grande

1/2 pound Cheese and Potato Calzone

Chicken Gordita Lasagna

Meat Lover’s Soft Taco

Mexican P’zone

The Panormous Bean Burrito

Breadsticks Supreme

Double Decker Stuffed Crust Pepperoni Lover’s Volcano Taco

Grilled Stuft Italian Sausage

Cinnamon Sticks (they’re on the menu for both)

Pepsi

Since I moved out to LA, I’ve joined up with Time Warner as both an internet and cable provider. I’ve never really been happy with any of my service providers (phone, cable, Internet), but Time Warner seemed like the lesser evil of the ones I’m eligible for, and they haven’t been too bad — they’ve had fairly solid prices and the service hasn’t been terrible. Sure, there are dropouts, but I don’t expect any service to be up 100% of the time — if they were really bad, I’d switch.

And then, the other day, I got this email from them.

Basically, they’re saying that they face increasing contract prices when it comes time to renewing their content deals, and they’re telling me, their customer, that they may have to raise prices on my service if I want to keep getting the same programming that I’ve gotten before. In essence, they’re trying to say that it’s not their fault that prices will be going up — it’s those evil content providers who are fleecing the innocent Time Warner. And if they do raise prices, it’ll be my fault as a customer — I should have supported them when I wanted them to get tough.

What a complete crock.

Of course, I hit roll over. I’m Time Warner’s customer — I chose them, not the other way around. If they’re going to raise prices, I’m going to hold them accountable, not some network trying to break even on a show I like. There’s already way too much crappy TV on, if you ask me, from those nonsensical reality shows to pointless “news” programming twenty-four hours a day. If prices are going up, it’s not my fault — I pay my bills on time every month. If Time Warner is finding they’re paying too much for network content, then it’s time to stop buying network content.

Hitting “roll over” sends you to a page that basically says “sorry — the right answer was ‘get tough.’” Time Warner wants to show you that they’re the little guy. Of course, they’re not actually producing any of the content I like, or put on my DVR, or watch weekly — they’re just buying it in contracts. And the prices on those contracts are going up not just because quality content is more expensive than ever, or just because networks are fighting for advertisers in an increasingly competitive environment, though I’m sure both of those things is probably true. But let’s be honest, it’s because “going up” is what prices do. Just ask my landlord. If they’d sent an ad that said that, I wouldn’t have minded at all.

Time Warner is apparently going big with this campaign as well — it’s not just in my email, I saw it show up on TV, and I’d bet I’ll get it in snail mail soon. Whoever dreamed this up is an insidious genius (“Waitaminute, guys — what if we tried to convince the public that we were a scared little kitten, faultless for raising prices and making more money?”), and whoever believes that Time Warner isn’t at fault for raising prices on their customers, no matter what costs they have to deal with, is a moron.

That said, I am still a customer — sending out stupid emails isn’t enough to get me to drop your service. But raising prices while blaming customers is. If I get another email in a few months from them that says, “We told you we didn’t want to do it, but we have to raise prices because you didn’t tell us to get tough enough,” I’ll be looking for a new service provider. And if the time comes that the price of all the shows I watch in iTunes is lower than my monthly cable bill, I’ll be rolling on over there. That tough enough, Time Warner?

This week’s video is going to be my Rock Band 2 Endless Setlist run — 84 songs done on Expert mode, all in a row. I’ll probably have a tough time with the last few, but I figured if I’m going to do something, I might as well do it as well as I possibly can.

The stream is below. I looked into streaming the video directly, but it wasn’t in my budget for a quick stream like this. So instead you get video from my MacBook. I’ll try to look in on the chat, but obviously while playing, that will be tough. So you’re aware, I am going for the Platinum Artist achievement. I won’t be doing the Bladder of Steel achievement — that requires you to do all of the songs without stopping or failing, and I doubt I’ll be able to clear all of the songs without failing at least once. I’ll try, but I don’t think it’ll happen, and once I do fail, I will probably take a short break for food.

It’s a quality cause. If I can beat this 84 song monster on Expert, certainly you can give a few bucks and skip your next Starbucks run. Thanks!

I’ll also be posting updates here when I can. Wish me luck!

Update: Started around 11:30am. Now, at 2:22, I’m on song number 41, about halfway through all 84 songs. But on Offspring’s Come Out and Play, I accidentally hit start during the song, which means the Bladder of Steel achievement is gone. Oh well. At least that means I can take a break for dinner. But I’m pushing on for Platinum Artist. Also, we’re trying for donation goals now: $100 will get me to do a song on camera so you can see me playing this plastic guitar. $200 donations on the day will have me singing a song as I play it — definitely embarrassing. Please give if you haven’t yet!

Update 2: Now 5:30 or so and I’m stuck on Master Exploder. Didn’t feel like I was improving, so we took a break for dinner. I’m told we have raised over $200, so I will be singing Carry On My Wayward Son while I play (whenever I get there). I will do my best to push on — I don’t have anything to do until work tomorrow morning, so presumably I can go until then. After Tenacious D, I’ll probably be fine for the next five songs or so, and then after that, it will be rough going again for the last 12 songs.

The good news is that even if I don’t make it, we’ve raised a nice chunk of money for Child’s Play — they put video games in hospitals for sick kids. If you haven’t donated yet, please do!

Update 3: After almost two hours on just the one three-minute song, I finally beat Master Exploder. At 7:00, I’ve now made it to the last tier of songs, and after this, I have no idea what will happen. These are the toughest songs the game has to offer: crazy metal, weird time signatures, just torrents of notes, some of them in no relation to the others. I’ll see how it goes — if I spend more than two hours on any given song without beating it, I may be forced to call it quits. Thanks for all the support so far, everyone — AU tells me things are awesome. Onward I go.

Update 4: 7:50. Stuck on Megadeth — the notes don’t make any sense, and they’re coming too fast. I’m taking what I think will be my last break now — my vision is a little blurry, and my hand is starting to ache. I think this game might be beating me.

Update 5: It’s 8:30pm. After beating my head up against the same section on Megadeth (about 88% into the song), I think I’ve reached the limits of my what my fingers can do. My left hand hurts a bit, especially in the ring finger (not sure why that is). I have a headache, and my vision is doing that thing you get when you play Rock Band for a while — the middle of my field of vision keeps scrolling upward. So I’m calling it. I should have gone and done it on hard — apparently Syrana and Sideshow both also did it today, and they blew through it on hard with two people. But Expert has those extra points, and you get a special-er icon. I was so tempted, but I flew too high, I guess.

Anyway, made it through 75 of 84 songs. Only really got stuck on two of them, and only failed out on two or three more. I’m not the best RB player, but I can’t think that’s too bad.

I’ll be back, Rock Band. I probably will finish it off on hard eventually, maybe with someone else in the band. In the meantime, I’m told we made $375 for Child’s Play today and I have no problem at all with that. Rock on.

Update 6: Apparently Stompalina over at Azeroth United recorded me playing and singing Carry On My Wayward Son after the donations hit $200. I can’t recommend anyone actually listens to it. I was young and I needed the money. Donated.

Two warnings: One, I am not good at writing fiction, so don’t expect much. Two, this is weird stuff. Read at your own peril. Probably not fit for public consumption.

It all began with one of the farmers’ girls in the schoolyard.

Later, it was learned that it began even earlier, with dead chickens outside of coops, the shepherd’s family dog found beaten to death, a vagrant’s body in a ditch on the north side of town, deceased of a cause indiscernible by the county doctor. The carpenter’s sister claimed to know exactly when it began, which she claimed was proof that she was attuned to matters of the occult. But it was generally agreed, even after the incident, that good and honorable ladies and gentlemen didn’t believe in matters of the occult (hinting, of course, that the carpenter’s sister, who lived two counties over anyway, was excluded from such company), and mutilated poultry was just as likely to be caused by a hungry fox as by whatever mysterious superstition had sprung up around the incident at hand.

And so it began with the girl the schoolyard, who came in from the outdoors one day crying and running to the teacher about something that had happened outside. When the teacher, who was a lovely young lady betrothed to the banker’s handsome son, found the girl, she held her in her arms and asked gently what had happened. The young girl was almost inconsolable, and the teacher soon discovered a mark, a cut on her arm that was bleeding. The teacher went to get bandages and water while the girl sobbed and breathed, and eventually the farmer’s daughter calmed to quiet, even while she shivered, though it was still only early Fall.

The teacher cleaned the wound and it took a strange shape as the blood was wiped away. Two lines of cuts, in what seemed the shape of teeth. Were you bitten? the teacher asked. The girl nodded, finally sharing some notion of what had taken place, and the teacher bent down to embrace her, desperate to calm her panic. It was the boy, the girl whispered. The widow’s son. He’s bad, she said.

It was off to the schoolmistress then. The teacher sent the girl home with an aide, and as class had let out for the day, sent the rest of the children straight home. The widow’s son had not returned from recess, which didn’t surprise the teacher — he had probably fled home for fear of punishment. The teacher wasn’t sure what type of punishment would be enacted, but the schoolmistress would know.

Well that won’t do, said the schoolmistress when she’d heard what the girl had said. The widow’s family certainly hadn’t had the most blessed of times — the husband had died in the mines years ago, back when there was still ore worth finding in the town. But since then, the widow had lived on the hill, feeding herself and her son as best she could. She hadn’t been seen in the town for a while, but the townsfolk left her to herself — she’d been through enough.

Still, they couldn’t have the son causing problems at school. The teacher shared that the boy had been a problem since the summer — he’d never attacked anyone, of course, but he’s been quieter than usual, reserved and darker. He’d wandered in the woods nearly every day during recess, and had even come from there occasionally in the mornings, and returned there in the evenings. The teacher had meant to talk to him, but every time she’d approached him, some other issue had come up, or her attention had been distracted, and she found herself drawn away from the boy to the other students. But nothing like this had ever happened. She’d have known.

The schoolmistress agreed, and it was decided that the two of them would travel up to the widow’s house that afternoon, to speak to the woman, and see what could be done about the boy. The teacher cleaned her classroom, the schoolmistress finished her work, and the two set out into the autumn afternoon as the orange sun moved through the crisp colored leaves toward the horizon.

(more…)

To be completely honest, I had a long day today. Lots of work, didn’t sleep much last night, did what I could of an event in World of Warcraft, had to head out early to hit the gym and do as much of a workout as I could, and then went out to a bar to meet up with a guy I haven’t seen in a long time. So I don’t really have time to write anything tonight, and even if I did, I feel like I’m tired enough to pass out. I’ve been meaning to do some fiction again — tomorrow I promise I’ll try that.

In the meantime instead of reading a post here, go take a break, and go play Plants vs. Zombies free online. I did for the first time recently, and I can feel it pulling at the back of my brain. “Mike,” it’s saying, “play me. I can entertain you for staggering amounts of time with some simple clicking.” And it’s exactly right.

Sorry for the tacky mirror picture (and the goofy look), but I wanted to show off my new t-shirt. I picked it up during Woot.com’s Woot-off the other week — it’s the first shirt they ever sold on their t-shirt site, and they brought it back for a limited run, so I grabbed it. Obviously it’s got all kinds of video game controllers on it, and so since I now own and will be wearing the shirt, I figured I should know what they all are. Here’s the list of all the controllers on there, straight from the designer, with a little information added about my sordid history with games:

Atari 2600 #v
GCE Vectrex
NES #*^&!
NES Max #*
Magnavox Odyssey
Colecovision
Atari 7800
NES Advantage #
Mattel Intelivision
Atari 5200
Sega Master System@
NEC Turbografx-16@
Nintendo Super Family
Panasonic 3D0
Sony Playstation #*v
Nintendo 64 #*
Sega Genesis #*
Sega Genesis 6 Button #*%!
Nintendo Virtual Boy @
Sony Playstation Dual Analog #*^
Super NES #@
Atari Jaguar
Sega Saturn @
Sega Saturn 3D
XBOX Controller S #@
Wavebird #*^
Wii #*%
Sega Dreamcast #@&
XBOX “Duke” #@v$
XBOX 360 #*%^&
Wii Classic #*%
Gamecube #*

# = I recognized these controllers on the shirt before I saw this list.
* = I owned these controllers at one point in my life.
% = I still own these controllers today.
@ = I never actually owned these controllers, but I spent a large amount of time with them — either at a friend’s house, in a K-mart while waiting for my mom to finish shopping, or in a Gamestop.
^ = Controllers I particularly like.
v = Controllers I particularly dislike.
& = Controllers that I have actually thrown in frustration.
! = Controllers that make me extremely nostalgic, remembering nights as a kid, spent with a friend, enthralled at this new form of entertainment, and how it made you feel a certain incredible way with simple pixels and noises from a television set. Losses, victories, lives and deaths, enemies defeated, goals met, monsters vanquished, and princesses rescued, over and over again.
$ = Seriously, it’s gigantic. Who ever thought that was a good idea?

I’ve been bowling once a week lately — I joined a league here in LA for fun, and I’m having a really good time with it. I kind of want to learn the lingo, but there’s not actually that much of it. So I figured I’d make some up.

Actually, never mind, there’s plenty of it. Did you know you have to make sure your axis tilt is right, or you might end up in the back ends and miss your chance at picking up a baby split? But I’ll make some up anyway.

Greased: Three beers in, prime condition for throwing strikes. Example: “We’re only in the second game, and Mike is greased already.”

Utterball: A shot that rolls down the side of the lane and only hits one pin. Almost a gutterball.

Sly five: A high five (the premiere form of congratulation in our league, for a reason I can’t quite ascertain) in which neither participant is actually looking at the connection.

The turn: A move you perform when you let the ball go and just know, even before it reaches the first set of arrows on the lane, that it’s a bad throw. You turn away from the lane and walk back to your seat, dejected.

Empashrug: A shrugging/slight grinning gesture made when your teammate misses pins entirely. Vaguely says, “Oh well. Next time.”

Bump toss: Throwing the ball down the lane in such a way that it actually bounces off the surface as it goes. Not very graceful, but surprisingly effective.

Spaced invader: Someone who bowls in the wrong lane because they weren’t paying attention.

Dodging the Bird: Purposely missing some pins in the frame after two strikes, so you don’t get three strikes (also called a Turkey) and have to do the stupid turkey dance that some bowlers will make you do.