When I was a senior in high school, I took Mrs. Eichhorn’s classical literature class. Mrs. Eichhorn was a tough old lady (we jokingly called her “The Third Eich,” not because she was mean, but just because she graded hard and we were high school kids and it was funny) who might as well have gotten to teach the seniors at my high school just because she won the passion contest in the teachers’ lounge. Don’t get me wrong — I had some really talented teachers in high school (I make a living writing now, so they must have been pretty good), but Mrs. Eich really loved this stuff. She made us all read Heinlein and Dickens and Faulkner and Hemingway. She made us read Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, promising us that it was the greatest novel ever written. I didn’t agree with her then, but that was, again, because I was a high school student. After having read through the book as an older man, I’ve since come around to her point of view.

Anyway, Eichhorn took some of her students on a trip to Europe every year — it was a very famous experience at my high school, and unless you were a big sports star or happened to already have a college-level affinity for math (neither of which were true about me), Eichhorn’s trip basically served as the highlight of your high school career, both as the experience of traveling through Europe with a garrulous and opinionated teacher who’d been there for many, many years in a row, and as the experience of being thousands of miles away from anyone you grew up with, with just your peers for hotel room company.

At the exact time that this trip was offered to me, I was forehead deep in the drama department. I had started out in high school along the football star path, but then quickly discovered, after a few health-threatening days of practice in full pads and a 101-degree St. Louis summer, that it wasn’t for me. So I’d turned to drama, and specifically the tech side. I rigged lights, I cut boards to build sets, I painted backgrounds and I set up speakers and screwed wheels on things. I was fascinated with the theater and the way it worked, and well on my way to a college degree where I’d eventually invest in the art of combining technology and imagination. On the very week that Eichhorn was scheduled to take us on her trip, the drama department was set to open up a high school production of Kiss Me Kate, and mere days before I had to fill out the final paperwork (all of the various consent forms and parental approvals required to follow a teacher around another continent), I was asked by my high school drama teacher to be a full tech director for the play.

Tech director was quite an honor: My drama teacher, Mrs. Rothermich (who I actually dedicated The Shape of Teeth to) was always listed in the programs as the “director” of our plays (except for the yearly one-acts show, where students got to direct), and this was basically her asking me if I wanted to share the marquee. Of course I did. But the show itself, which I definitely wouldn’t be able to miss, was supposed to open the exact same day I would have arrived in Europe.

I felt my life split into two different paths. In one, I went with Eich to Europe — I studied classical art, I learned all about the masters, I became an international traveler as a teenager (and, let’s be honest, I probably made out with some of the other girls on the trip). In the other, I stayed home — I tech directed, I went on to study technology and how to combine it with great art and storytelling, and I made out with some of the girls in the theater.

In the end, as you probably have guessed, I took the second option. I decided that while Europe would always be there, I would never get to tech direct my senior high school play again, and so I stayed home. I worked like crazy on Kiss Me Kate — I designed and built a three-part stage that actually split up and rotated around for the scenes in front of and behind the play-inside-a-play, and the whole show was a huge success. I have all of my old programs still, including the one listing me as tech director alongside my teacher (and signed by all of my friends, including plenty of cute high school girls telling me what a great job I’d done). I of course went on to a great and spectacular career, one that’s still continuing to break new ground to this day, making me the hero of millions all over the world. Happy ending for everyone, really.

Except that now I’m nearly 32. I’ve done a lot of what I set out to do — I do have a career doing what I love, I’ve made a lot of great friends in many different places, and just a few years ago, I finally moved out here to the west coast — I see palm trees and sunshine outside my windows, and I can walk down to the beach whenever I want.

And yet I’ve never been to Europe. In fact, though my parents are huge travelers (not only have they driven us around to every state, and up into Canada and down into Mexico), I’ve never even been off of this continent. Up until a few months ago, I never even had a passport. Never needed one. The last time I had the option to go overseas was back in high school, on that trip with the Third Eich, and for reasons listed above, I turned it down.

So last October, driving home through the streets of Los Angeles, I decided it was probably time. For a while, I’d been waiting on a trip overseas, waiting for the right vacation group, or for even the right relationship, to have someone to bring along with me. But there’s no reason to just sit here and wait for that, I decided. I’ve waited long enough. I said to myself, way back in high school, when I decided on the play instead of the trip, that I’d always have the chance to go to Europe again. And last October — I can specifically remember the exact moment — I decided it was time to take it.

I jumped through the hoops of grabbing a passport last November, getting my birth certificate out of the safe deposit box, and paying the fees as requested (including the expedited fees, just in case) to a surly, jaded postal worker who regarded me warily, as if she couldn’t believe that someone had actually gotten all of the paperwork together in exactly the right order for her. Last December, I went online, and bought a ticket to London.

The ticket was kind of a concern: How long should I go for, and where? I am both unlucky to be a freelancer, in that no one’s actually hired me for a full-time, benefits-enabled job just yet, and lucky to be a freelancer, in that I have a pretty flexible schedule, and work on the Internet from wherever I please. So I have a little bit of extra space and wiggle room in my job — I don’t actually have to be in an office anywhere, as long as I log in and deliver what I need to when it’s needed. And I didn’t want to make the trip too short; this is a big deal for me, and I want it to feel like it is, like it’s meaningful progress in my life.

So I decided to be both gratuitous and careful. I did buy a round-trip ticket (as opposed to an open-ended one), and I will leave and come out of London, England. I will leave Los Angeles on April 1st (April Fool’s Day, yes, but I am serious), on a Monday afternoon, and I will arrive back at LAX on May 1st, 2012. In between that time, I am planning to tour the continent — my four main destinations are going to be London, Paris, Berlin, and then Amsterdam, but I also want to make sure that I arrive with only a skeleton of a schedule. If I want to flesh it out with an unplanned trip to Rome, or a few day jaunt over to Prague, I want to be able to do that.

And, as you can tell from this already-too-long introduction, I am going to be writing about it. I am going to write every single day while I’m on the trip, and even quite a bit before it (and maybe a little bit after it). I have said a lot about why I’m taking this trip in this initial essay, but I have more to say about what I’m doing and why, and I’m sure I’ll have endless reactions to all of the new and wild and incredible I encounter while over there on my journey. I am fortunate enough (especially as a writer) to be the kind of person for whom almost everything can be fascinating, and I’m sure I’ll have no shortage of fascination overseas.

Anyway, that’s enough to start. In the coming days and weeks, I’ll tell you about the schedule I’m putting together, and if you have suggestions for what I should see or do while over there, please email (mike@mikeschramm.com) or tweet them to me and let me know. I will also tell you about how I plan to pack for the trip — so far, it’s the smartest packing scheme I’ve ever come up with (helped out by the fine folks at Tom Bihn, who kindly have sent me some luggage to try). And I aim to tell you about my relative lack of plans for lodging. Of all of the ideas I have in my head about going to Europe, the places I’ll get to lay my head number fewest among them, so I am very open for recommendations and insight on that front as well. In fact, if you are a European person and have a place for me to stay, I will very likely take you up on it.

Man, am I excited. All of my writing will show up here on the site, but depending on what people think of it and how it comes out, I may try to publish it elsewhere, in a book or on another blog. Stay tuned, also, for photos and videos, and lots of other fun documentation of my trip and where I am and what I’m doing. Obviously, that probably won’t start in earnest until April 1, but there will be some things up here before I leave for sure.

I don’t know where Eichhorn is right now — I assume, given that she was older when I was in high school twenty years ago, that she’s not still teaching, and even if so, she’s definitely not taking a pack of high school kids on a trip around Europe. But I do fondly remember her class, and her passion for brilliant literature, and her constant offer, to high school seniors, to take them overseas and show them what real history, and real art, and real sculpture and architecture, and what real real is like. And I hope that this trip, crazy as it will probably be, lives up to what I had to turn down all of those years ago. I can’t wait.

This is something I’ve been seeing happen for a while, but it’s still pretty astounding to me. Back when I was a kid, a great fantasy or sci-fi story was something that your friend told you about, or (if you were really lucky) something that you found on your own, on a shelf in a library. I found my favorite book, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by myself in my elementary school’s library, and I think it’s one of the many reasons I love that story so much. And when I was a kid, this is basically how I found all of my favorite fantasy and sci-fi stories: I read Lord of the Rings’ three books as a kid, CS Lewis’ Narnia tales, and all of Ray Bradbury’s and Asimov’s great sci-fi work. Later in life, I found a lot of things on my own, from graphic novels to sci-fi epics, and plunged through those as well: Grand stories with larger-than-life heroes, great death scenes, and hugely epic settings.

And lately, however, I’ve seen a lot of those tales brought to life in movies and television. Lord of the Rings obviously became a popular and epic movie series, Watchmen and V for Vendetta were both recreated in sparkling movie form, and over in television, things have gotten even geekier. The Walking Dead, which used to be a little graphic novel about a zombie apocalypse, is now a huge show on AMC, the same network that makes Mad Men. And I’m just now watching through the first season of Game of Thrones, which is not only an awesome HBO show, but a quality adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s really terrific novels.

Back when Lord of the Rings first came out in theaters, I remember walking past a group of young girls at a mall or just on the street somewhere, and as I passed, I was surprised to find that they weren’t talking about boys or clothes or makeup — all things that most of the girls I went to school with usually talked about. Nope — they were talking about how incredibly cool Gandalf is, and just what the limits of his power might be. One of them had even heard that he wasn’t even a human; he might even be a god of some kind!

That made me laugh out loud. I don’t mean that in a condescending way — I mean it in a joyful way. It amazes me that the stuff I once found on bookshelves by myself, hiding out during lunch because I didn’t want to sit alone in the cafeteria, was being discussed and joked about by the same kinds of kids I was hiding from. I love that people are shocked and excited when someone important dies on The Walking Dead, and “cool kids” in living rooms everywhere come away from their televisions with their imaginations racing. I just a few minutes ago watched the scene in Game of Thrones of Viserys being “crowned.” I remember how great and satisfying that scene was in the book (because, come on, he was a punk the whole entire time), and it makes me smile to think that a whole other world of people is getting to experience and respond to that story.

I just tweeted about this, because it’s fascinating to me, and I also wonder: What’s next? Just a few years ago, I figured these stories were geeky distractions, things I loved but could never really share with the world at large. But now that everyone is getting to know these characters, and being charmed, and annoyed, and thrilled by them. What else will see see go “mainstream”?

Here’s what I hope:

Bone, by Jeff Smith. This is such a terrific story with such well-built and worthwhile characters, and it really takes that epic feeling and makes it both very humorous and human. It’ll take a special director to make a movie out of this one, because so much of this work is really built for a comic book page, for the art of sequential art (not to mention the special effects involved in a world with Bone and friends, not to mention the rat creatures and their masters). But there are so many great moments and characters in here that I’d love to see the rest of the world meet them on a big screen.

Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons. To my mind, this and the next two books are as good as sci-fi gets. The images in Hyperion, especially, are just astounding, mind-blowing, insert adjective here stuff. This is another hard sell, probably, because it is so complex and literary, and there are so many characters and so much going on that it would be tough to make this really translate to a wider audience. But seeing the Shrike and the Treeships on screen, and having the average person on the street know just how crazy that stuff is? It would be so great.

Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Hyperion is the most intelligent sci-fi out there, but Snow Crash is the freakin’ coolest. You could almost argue that we’ve already seen this stuff on the big screen: Snow Crash was one of the books that defined cyberpunk, and movies like The Matrix have already carried out that idea on film pretty far. I reread the Diamond Age about a year ago, and I was astounded to find that I already owned one of the interactive, talking, connected books that it describes: It’s my iPad 2. But still, the characters and settings in these books would be fantastic to see portrayed, and I’d love to see Hiro Protagonist and Nell acknowledged as the cultural heroes they should be.

Concrete by Paul Chadwick. I cannot tell you here, in this small space, just how good Concrete is. It’s the kind of book that makes me believe, if everyone in the world was able to read and understand it (and yes I know how sadly impossible that is), that the world really would be a better place. It’s such a thoughtful and smart and real piece about the human condition that it should probably be a crime more people haven’t read it, or even know about it. Even at comic book stores, some clerks these days won’t know what this book is, and that’s a shame. I would love for someone like Frank Darabont to come along and do for Concrete what he did for the Walking Dead: Take an obscure, very medium and genre specific story, and adapt it wonderfully and faithfully for a larger audience. If ever there’s a story that the world could use, this is probably it.

Jennifer Government by Max Barry. This choice is just me being selfish, basically. I love this book, I think it’s one of the most deftly cinematic things I’ve ever read, and while it probably won’t change anyone’s mind the way a Concrete TV show would, I would love to see Jennifer Government and her world brought to life somehow. I am in love with the girl with the barcode under her eye, and Hack and the Johns Nike, and Buy Matsui, and Billy NRA, and all of the other wacky characters in this story. Of these stories, I think this one is probably the closest to ever actually come to film, and I hope it finally gets there, because it seems like it would be so much fun.

I’ve seen this question in a few places recently (including in the Joystiq tipline), and I just had a reader send it directly to me via my inbox. Over the last few days, a few people have asked me and other game journalists and sites something akin to the following: “The Entertainment Software Association supports the horrible and ignorant SOPA/PIPA legislation. The ESA also runs the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, convention every year in LA. So will you, Mike, as a guy who writes about games and technology, decline to cover E3 this year, in order to show your opposition to SOPA?”

Most of the times I’ve seen this question this week, it’s actually been about Joystiq, not me personally. And before I actually talk about this, I should say that I’m not in enough of a position of leadership at Joystiq where I even have the ability to choose whether we as a site cover a show or not. I have covered E3 for Joystiq for the past few years, and if I’m asked to go again, I definitely will, but plans haven’t been made yet and I don’t know what my plans are. So all of what I’m about to say about this is completely my own opinion — I can only speak for myself in this case, which is why this is here and not on Joystiq itself. I am pretty sure, knowing most of my talented colleagues on Joystiq and elsewhere, that a lot of games writers will agree with me, but of course their opinions are their own.

At any rate, here’s the answer: No, I will not decline to cover the ESA or E3. Yes, if I’m lucky enough to be asked to cover the convention, I will. And no, of course I’m not in favor of SOPA or PIPA, or any other legislation that puts the interests of a few selfish idiots over the benefits of so many.

But Mike, you say, the ESA supports this stupid legislation openly! Why not send a message to them by refusing to cover their convention?

Well, for a few reasons. First of all, and most obviously, E3 is the biggest game event (in the United States, at least) of the year. Many of the biggest game reveals and interviews (both in my career and in the industry overall) happen at E3, and any journalist who stays away from it for a political reason is simply not doing his or her job. My first duty is to my readers, and my readers want to know about E3, and I have a duty to tell them about it. Not to mention that doing my job makes me money I need to live. So there’s that.

Now, you might suggest that if all of the journalists decide to heroically pull out of E3, maybe the ESA will get a message, or maybe they’ll even cancel it. But honestly, I don’t think that will happen. Because here’s the real thing about E3: It’s not really about the journalists anyway.

I’ve gone to E3 for three or four years now, and guess how much I’ve ever paid to the ESA? Zero dollars. I’ve gone in with a big shiny press badge around my neck, I’ve had the lunches they offer to the press every day, I’ve sipped their coffee and eaten their free cookies, I’ve sat down on their couches and hiked all over the giant convention center that they rent out every year. I’ve cost them way more money than they’ve ever seen from me. If you really want me to stick it to the ESA financially, you should suggest I go to E3, and take up as much space in their convention center as I can. The E3 show isn’t for me — I benefit from it in terms of doing my job, but the ESA isn’t at all dependent on whether I show up or not.

Nope — the ESA is most dependent not on games journalists, but on exhibitors. It’s dependent on the games companies there showing off new titles, on the various accessory manufacturers who pay to rent all those rooms in the convention center, and on the public relations firms that build all of those booths and schedule all of my appointments there. The ESA doesn’t financially benefit from me being there at all. Instead, it’s the companies I cover at E3 that hold the real power. They’re why I’m there too, after all — if the ESA held E3 and none of those game companies showed up, I’d probably stay home and play games.

Now, of course, my press can help sell (or not sell) those companies’ games, and so yes, they’re there spending all of that money on the ESA because they’re trying to get covered by me and the rest of the press. And yes, the ESA does care that I come, but not because it loves me or cares about my opinion. The ESA only cares that I and other journalists show up so that it can sell booth space, and sell memberships to the association, and maintain its status as an influential industry organization. But I don’t affect any of those things directly — again, I work for my readers, and nobody else.

So here’s the deal. Instead of asking me and other journalists to betray both our livelihoods and the readers we serve, you should go to the people that the ESA really cares about: The exhibitors. Already, one studio has decided to not exhibit at E3, and asking other game studios and publishers to do the same would affect the ESA’s bottom line much more, and hopefully convince the organization that its position on SOPA is wrong. I’ll still cover studios, even if they aren’t at E3 — I just saw Red5 at CES, and am really looking forward to Firefall, and will happily write about it whether I see it at E3 or not.

Plus, talking directly to studios and publishers mean you have the power: If they refuse you, you can boycott them or their games until they make a move on the ESA’s stance. Yes, you can boycott my site if you really disagree with my position, but the ESA doesn’t even advertise on my sites, as far as I know. Even if a boycott of Joystiq is super successful, you’re just hurting me and my parent company, not anyone having to do with the ESA.

I’m heartily against SOPA — I’ve called my congresspeople, I’ve talked to my friends and family about how wrong it is, and I support any effort to defeat it. But when you ask me to support SOPA by not doing my job at E3, you’re asking the wrong thing for both of us. The ESA takes its money and power from the game companies that are its members, and if you really want the ESA to pull a turnaround, you should instead be talking to them. Good luck to you — I look forward to seeing (or writing) a post on Joystiq saying that the ESA, due to pressure from its members in the industry, has decided to change its position on this heinous legislation.

Update: And there you go. I will say this about the whole SOPA deal — obviously it took some pretty heinous legislation to bring down the Internet’s fury, but God bless the American legislative system on this one. People talked, power listened.

Unfortunately, while 2011 was an interesting year for me for a lot of reasons (did I mention that I have published my book? Please buy it!), it wasn’t necessarily because I kept up with my usual music, movies, and video games. I was pretty lazy about picking up new media this past year. I did pick up some, and I will go ahead and choose my favorites of the year, just because it’s tradition. But aside from video games (which is basically my work these days), I only really can list the music (and books) and movies (and TV) that I liked in 2011, not any definitive list of the best of the year. Maybe that defeats the purpose, but I’ll go ahead and list a few of them out anyway.

Music

Radiohead’s The King of Limbs was probably the first new album that I got into this year — I didn’t like it nearly as much as their past work (I liked In Rainbows much better), but it was still a solid offering. Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues was great, I really liked Jay Z and Kanye’s Watch the Throne collaboration, and M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming was another really great album.

Honorable mentions go to Cake’s Showroom of Compassion (a little disappointing, but any Cake album is great in my book), The Decemberists’ The King is Dead, and Childish Gambino’s Camp, which I think is great, but a little overrated, just because of how awesome Community and Donald Glover are even outside of the rhymes.

Books

Oh man — this is really embarrassing, because I didn’t read nearly as much as I was supposed to this year. All I really have for actual 2011 books are the ones I want to read: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, Lev Grossman’s Magician novels, and Ready Player One by the great Ernie Cline. I read Dance of Dragons and thought it was all right. But my favorite books this year, as I’ve said a few times already, are two Warhammer 40k omnibuses by Dan Abnett: Eisenhorn and then Ravenor. The Warhammer 40k setting is so awesome, you guys, and Abnett really knows exactly how to portray it in the most interesting way. Hopefully once I finish with my Warhammer 40k obsession I can get back into some more literary reading.

Movies (and TV)

There are so many great movies I haven’t seen yet this year (Drive, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Shame, The King’s Speech, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), so I probably haven’t even seen the top five movies from 2011 that I liked most. But I did like The Muppets, Source Code, Captain America, Super 8 (probably the best of the year so far for me), and X-men: First Class.

On TV, I did really enjoy The Walking Dead, though not as much as most people, I think. The BBC sitcom Pulling was probably the best thing I saw (it’s on Netflix — I’m not sure when it came out in Britain), but I also liked Community, Parks and Recreation, Damages, Sons of Anarchy, Archer, and Happy Endings.

Video Games

I’ll refer you to Joystiq on this one — my “Best of the Rest” picks will be up in a little bit, and I’ll link it right here when it’s out. [Update: And here it is!]

But in the meantime, here are my top five of the year:

1. Skyrim: I’ve told this story already, but I wasn’t a fan of Oblivion or Morrowind. In those games, the graphics and the bugs got in the way of true immersion in those varied worlds — I never stuck around in them long enough to really enjoy myself. But Skyrim’s revamped engine and interface smoothes over almost all of my issues with it, and what’s left, then, is a really fantastic, filled out fantasy world, one that’s living and breathing and gorgeous, in which I am the hero. When you bent Oblivion or Morrowind to your will, they usually broke, and usually in a way that ruined your immersion. But when you bend Skyrim, it bends beautifully, and meets you with XP and loot on the other side. Just a brilliant game, brilliantly done.

1.25. Batman: Arkham City: It’s almost too bad Skyrim did come out this year, because otherwise my GotY would be Batman, no question at all. I love Batman, as you might already know, and Arkham City is a great sequel to Arkham Asylum (which was my GotY the year it came out, even with Bioshock and Portal in the running). The way that Rocksteady took the closed-in, perfectly designed environments of Arkham Asylum and placed them outside in an open world is just plain genius, and the controls and setting are fascinating enough to me that I’m only about 20 Riddler trophies away from collecting all 400 to 100% the game yet again.

3. Portal 2: In the first game, GlaDOS’ character really made the whole show work. Yes, it was a great first-person puzzle game, and yes, the story and setting were well-done. But the first Portal was really about GlaDOS, a fully-formed, complete character that interacted with the player in a really meaningful and amazing way. How awesome is it, then, that Valve replicated that feat not once, not even twice, but three different times in the sequel. Not only did we get GlaDOS’ character redefined by placing her in a brand new spud of a setting, but we have the eminently quotable and likable Cave Johnson, and Wheatley, who is one of my favorite video game characters of all time. Stephen Merchant’s performance basically sets the bar for voicework in video games, as far as I’m concerned — every line is just delivered perfectly, and his work makes the story and the game a constant pleasure to play through time and time again.

4. Warhammer 40k: Space Marine: This was one of my favorite “video game” experiences of the year, and as I say in my Joystiq post, this was my favorite shooter of the year, even beating out bigger contenders like Modern Warfare 3 and Gears of War 3. As you can tell from my reading habits, I have fully fallen in love with the Warhammer 40k universe — I love the fantasy conventions translated over to sci-fi, and I love the scale of it: everything really is times 40,000, from the army size to the dreadnoughts and all of the various Space Marine powers and technologies. And of course Relic Entertainment loves this universe as well, and that’s evident in this game — everything from the architecture to the various Space Marine models and skins in multiplayer has been poured over and intelligently designed and laid out. From the over-the-top introduction of the dashing Captain Titus to the incredible climax of the story, this game is just terrific, and I hope it sets up lots of other, just as awesome Space Marine and Warhammer video games to come.

5. Jetpack Joyride: So many great iOS games this year, but this one takes the cake — it’s simple and fun, and yet also deep and rewarding. Halfbrick’s polish is astounding, from the amazing music to the various little animation touches (breaking the glass on the floor! High-fiving scientists for missions! And all of the various jetpacks and costumes are great too) and all of the missions and their various inventions and innovations. The game’s only one button (and there’s not even a button on the screen for it), but there’s so much addictive depth in the meta system that I’m still playing this one, and will continue to do so for a long time to come.

Whew. There you go. If I missed something (and I’m sure I did), let me know.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you (just in time for my goal of releasing it in 2011) my ebook, The Shape of Teeth:

What is this, you may ask? Why, it’s an ebook, in EPUB format, of 14 of my best and favorite short stories and essays that I’ve written over the years. I’ve been writing little bits and gags for quite a while, and this book collects all of the best ones, and then some. There’s a foreword by my good friend Mark Turpin, art by a few other good friends, lots of little interstitial quotes and fun stuff that I’ve written and put together over the last few months, and lots of full color pictures for you to marvel at and enjoy. You can read some previews and excerpts of the stories right over here.

And now, you can own this ebook for yourself: It’s available for $7 right now.

To buy THE SHAPE OF TEETH, click here, go over to a site called TinyPay.me (they’re very trustworthy and easy to use), and then use a Paypal account or a credit card to purchase and download the book.

BUT WAIT! Instead of buying through that link above, you could buy THE DELUXE EDITION of THE SHAPE OF TEETH, which includes not only the core book itself (so don’t buy both!), but also two more exclusive stories to read, a brand new and never-before-seen introduction for those stories, as well as a 36-minute audio podcast featuring me both talking about and reading three stories from the core book. Those three stories are “It Came From the Black Lagoon, and Was Vaguely Unsatisfied,” “The Incident in the Town By the Sea,” and “Godzilla in Love.” Trust me — the book is great, but the Deluxe Edition is the one you really want and it’s available for only three dollars more, or $10.

To buy THE SHAPE OF TEETH DELUXE EDITION, click here, and go through to TinyPay.me, which will let you buy the book (which comes in a zip file with the extra stories and the mp3 audio recording included, all DRM free) with Paypal or a credit card.

If you have any questions about this book, have trouble with the files or the file formats, or anything else, I can be reached at mike@mikeschramm.com.

I am so thrilled that you’re here to read about this book, and thrilled to FINALLY be able to offer it up to you. I hope you all like it — I’ve spent quite a while working on it (it was written over a matter of years, though the actual editing took a few months of my free time and weekends), and boy am I glad that it’s finally out and being sold.

And stay tuned — my next project will probably finally be getting that iPhone app up off the ground, so if you like buying and/or downloading things that I’ve worked on, you’re in luck, because there’s more where this came from. Thanks again!

Hey folks! Here’s a quick excerpt from one of the stories in my ebook short story collection, The Shape of Teeth, available for sale right here on mikeschramm.com this coming Friday, December 30th!

A minute or two passes. The bus doesn’t come. The man in the gray suit takes out a handkerchief, wipes his forehead, and puts the handkerchief away.

The second man steps back on the curb and sits down. Another moment passes.

What’s that? You want another excerpt from another story? Here you go!

“I fully respect the opinions and findings of the research team,” said Commander Me’reth into the microphone. She was careful to keep her face calm and her tone strong, despite knowing that her exact image in quantum duplicate was being broadcast across light years to the committee’s various homeworlds and stations. “It’s true, there is something important about Earth that surely the chronometer activity has shown. But I entreat you to find another way — there is too much beauty and power in this world to simply destroy it.”

“Are you suggesting, commander,” asked Grauthor in a gravelly voice with the slightest hint of a sneer on his face, “that we should place this tiny, insignificant blue pinprick up above the soverignty of our Lord Emperor and his realm?” Me’reth didn’t flinch. “You claim the chronometers are not to be doubted, but if that’s true, this drop of filthy, backwoods water may someday present a threat to our families, our children, our very way of life! Pardon me, commander, but I would have it recorded that such a claim, if indeed you are saying so, borders on treason and even heresy itself!”

Oh man, I would pay A BILLION DOLLARS to be able to read both of those stories in full along with the 12 or so other stories in the collection! And the foreword by Mark “Turpster” Turpin! And the full glossary, and all sorts of little bits and pieces and addons! A billion dollars!

Well you don’t have to, because The Shape of Teeth epub is only seven dollars. That’s right, when it comes out on Friday, you’ll be able to buy it for only $7.

And as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a Deluxe Edition available for $3 more, or just ten dollars. Ten dollars is cheaper than going to a movie theater in Los Angeles, and if you live in a place where going to see a movie is cheaper than ten dollars, then you should probably go see a movie. But then skip your dinner that night, because seriously, ten dollars isn’t much at all.

And what do you get with this Deluxe Edition? Why, two more stories, which you will probably love (or loathe, who knows), AND an mp3 of me, Mike Schramm, reading three of the stories from the book. What’s that? You want an excerpt of that mp3? Why, here you go friends!

What an incredible deal! What a purchase you can make to end your year! Please come back here to mikeschramm.com on Friday, and buy your copy, standard or Deluxe, of The Shape of Teeth! I will really appreciate it. Thank you very much!

Here we go, everybody!

Yes, the ebook you’ve been waiting for is finally, FINALLY (almost) here. The Shape of Teeth is an ebook collection of short stories, essays, and various other things I’ve written, both old and new. Some of them have been published before (some on this very site), but I’ve proofread and updated them specifically for this book. Some other things have been published on other sites, but they’ve since disappeared from the Internet. And some of the things in this book are completely new. Here’s what you’ll find if you buy it:

• A foreword by the very funny and inimitable Mark “Turpster” Turpin. Yes, it’s rare to find this man writing and not talking or doing videos, but he’s written a very excellent and fun little piece to start this book off. I appreciate it very much currently, and you will too when you read it.
• Art by the very talented gentlemen listed on the cover. They all did terrific work, and they did it out of the generosity of their hearts, only so my words could be broken up by some of their very fascinating images. You’ll love these pictures, I’m sure — some of them are in color, some in black and white, all are fascinating.
• 14 (give or take a few) stories and essays written by yours truly, ranging from the scary to the silly, from the fun to the ephemeral. Some of these are just fun little jokes or pop culture bits, some of them are more in-depth and serious, and some of them are just plain weird and will make you wonder what I was thinking. There’s something for everyone — some of them you’ll love, some of them you’ll just like, and some of them will have you shaking your head.
• A full glossary of defined terms for the uninformed (or apathetic).
• A brand new three-part story that no one, even the early readers of this book, has ever actually read before.
• Plenty of gorgeous, full color pictures like that one on the cover, all taken by someone who doesn’t exist.
• Inspirational quotes to guide your way!
• DRM-free! Not actually medically evaluated by an independent panel of doctors, but it’s probably not too dangerous for you.
• And the book is available in a very convenient and easy-to-carry EPUB format, which means you can load it up on your e-reader of choice (or just use a free app like this one to read it on your computer).

This initial release will only be available as an EPUB download, but the book will eventually be on both the iBooks and Kindle stores, pending demand. The EPUB format is very versatile, though — if you have an iPad or a Kindle, it’ll be very easy to send it to yourself and open it up.

And what will this book and all of its wisdom and charm cost you, you ask? All of this can be yours for the low, low price of Seven American Dollars. ($7). That’s right — on December 30th, 2011, you’ll be able to come right back to this page, pay $7 via credit card or other available forms of payment TBD, and this ebook file is yours to do with as you please.

BUT WAIT! That’s not all!

That book sounds incredible, you say. How could it get any better?! Well let me tell you friend: it can. Because you could spend $7 on the book itself. OR, you could buy the Deluxe Edition of the ebook for just $3 more, which will land you at a nice round price of $10. And what does the Deluxe Edition get you?

• An exclusive written story, never before published, which didn’t get included in the ebook itself. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of this one, but I’m often a very bad judge of what’s good and what isn’t, so with the Deluxe Edition, you can get this one and read it for yourself! Maybe you’ll like it.
• Also, an exclusive essay, which is about Lindsay Lohan. It’s one of the first things I wrote that went viral, and it is pretty funny, if a little dated.
• AND you’ll get the real prize here, which is a special MP3 audiobook version of three of the stories from The Shape of Teeth. You can hear me, Mike Schramm, reading these stories in my very own voice, with all of the inflections, pronunciations, and tones that I intended while writing them. If you like my podcasts, this will be fun — it’s like podcasting, only I’ve written all of the words I’ll be saying.
• Plus, I will appreciate you as a good friend. And, you’ll get first dibs on anything else I put out ever (which, according to plans, will probably be iPhone apps, or more books, or who knows what).

Boy, when you put it that way, who wouldn’t want to just go ahead and spend the $10, right? That’s cheaper than most meals these days — skip lunch and read a book! All of this will be available to the public on December 30th, 2011, so stay tuned and get your wallets ready until then. Thanks for your patience! It’s finally coming out!

Hey folks. So I decided I wanted to watch a movie tonight, and rather than just choosing something for myself, I came up with an interesting experiment to try. I started up a poll via Twitter so you folks on the Internet could choose a movie for me, and then I promised that whatever the outcome of that poll, I’d sit down and write out my thoughts on the movie as I watch it. Here’s the poll — note that you can like or dislike options, or add your own if you have a better suggestion.

Right now, it seems like the haters are ruling things over there, as only a couple of movie choices have positive votes on them. I figured that even before the liveblog starts, I would give you my opinion of a few of the choices so you can have some context.

Currently, the first season of the Walking Dead is winning. I probably won’t watch the whole first season, and I’m actually currently watching that series on my own — I think I’m up to episode 3. So I’d probably just do two episodes of that if that wins. I’ve seen both Tron Legacy and Scott Pilgrim, but those might be fun to watch because I actually went on the junkets of both of those, interviewing the actor and directors about the movies. So I might actually have something interesting to say about those if they win. I own the DVD for Princess Mononoke, so I’ve obviously seen it a few times, and I do have things to say about anime. I also own the DVD of Super Troopers, and I actually met those guys once back at Ithaca College. I’ve seen Kick-Ass once, and I haven’t seen any of the other movies on the list at the moment — some of them look good, some of them not so much.

So there’s a little context. I’m heading out for a couple of hours now, so there’s plenty of time to put some votes and suggestions in over there. If The Walking Dead wins and someone else wants to suggest an episode for me to watch and commentate on, then I’ll choose the most highly rated one, otherwise I’ll just pick one myself. Good luck voting! Thanks for all your involvement so far — this is already fun for me. I’ll be back in this post later on this evening to type up the winner as I watch it live.

0:00 All right — the winner is The Walking Dead, season 1. As I said, I don’t have time to do the whole thing, and I’m in two episodes already, so I’m going to do episodes three and four. I’ll recap them and give you my opinions on the episode as I watch it live here. The whole thing should take 1:30 (two episodes, 45 minutes each), so that’s what the clock is.

I will say to begin that I think The Walking Dead show is pretty good. It’s well shot and well produced, but I haven’t yet been blown away by the writing or the characters (remember, I’m two episodes in). I’ve heard multiple people say that the series never lived up to the potential of the pilot, and I generally agree with that sentiment so far. It makes sense: You really have to be special if you want to use zombies and get something new done, and while The Walking Dead is a strong setting and has strong characters, we all kind of know zombies already. I am a huge fan of the comic books, I should say, too: I think there, the timing and even the scares can be pulled off a little bit better from panel to panel. But we’ll see — maybe I’ll see something in these two episodes that really sells me on the series.

0:01 This episode is called Tell it to the Frogs. I remember in the books that Sheriff Rick (that’s his name, right?) does eventually make it to the camp at some point, so I presume that will happen fairly soon here. There is no “Last time on The Walking Dead” on Netflix, but last I remember (spoilers!), the racist dude was left on top of the department store, and the Sheriff was exiting Atlanta with a van full of minorities and a really happy guy in a sports car.

And hey, we start this episode with Mr. Racist right again. I kind of thought his was a one-shot story, but I guess they did drop some tools out on the roof last episode, so I guess there’s more of him to tell about.

Aw, he’s delirious, and his wrists are all cut up. Are we supposed to feel sorry for Mr. Racist? Because I don’t. He’s racist, remember? Is it possible that there’s a racist with a heart of gold? “Hey guys, I really hate black people and mexicans, but boy … sometimes I just really need a friend, you know?”

2:08: Racist guy finally remember he’s at the top of an apartment building full of zombies chained to a pipe. He’s crying for Jesus. Would it be more poetic if these zombies didn’t used to be white people? “I deserve it,” he says. Man, they’re really trying to make you feel bad for the poor racist. I … still don’t?

4:01 What is he yelling? “I ain’t gonna start begging now,” I guess. “Don’t you worry about me begging ever.” How self sufficient. And here are the title credits. I really like the credits, actually — I saw that one shot of the empty highway even before the show was done shooting, and I was like, yup, that looks about right. I wonder why the title words show up the way they do. Maybe it’s like a zombie, shambling towards you? Left, then right, then left. The … Dead… Walking.

Now’s as good a time as any to tell you what I think about zombies. There are two things about zombies that really interest me in telling stories and entertainment. One is that they’re pretty much the perfect horror mechanic — they’re the living (ok, unliving) embodiment of all kinds of human fears. The main one is death, and that’s a fear that’s universal no matter who you are or where you’re from. No matter who you happen to be, death is coming for you, it’s inevitable, and when zombies start showing up, death isn’t just a quiet moan outside that people try and avoid talking about, it’s also trying to kick in the door and get to every last one of you. Zombie movies are also very much not just about your own death, but about the death of loved ones — every “oh no, he’s been bitten!” moment in a zombie movie is really about dealing with losing those closest to you. The premiere of Walking Dead, that story about the guy and his son trying to get over the wife/mother’s death, is about moving on and letting go of the people you love when bad things happen to them, which we’ll all have to deal with at some point and of course which we’re all anxious about. And then of course there are the other fears, like biological threats, creepy crawling hands, and all of that other stuff.

The other interesting thing about zombies is something I first heard someone (I don’t remember who, sorry) say about zombies in video games. Zombies are a human analog, in that they’re a way to show a lot of fun and exciting gory stuff, without actually doing anything bad to humans. The sheriff in WD can, for example, walking down the street, shoot five people right in the head, stuff an axe in the neck and forehead of five more, and then rip the head off of a woman and run away into a building. If he does that to real people, he’s a mass murderer and a maniac, but if he does that to zombies, he’s a real hero who’s just barely survived some major danger. Zombies let you do stuff like cut heads off and blow out brains, and even people who’s normally be sickened out by stuff like that if they saw it in a Human Centipede or Saw movie, think it’s awesome.

Oh hey, they just showed the racist’s name in the credits, and it’s Michael Rooker! I totally forgot — I saw Michael Rooker last year at Treyarch when they were doing promotion for the Black Ops zombie map that he stars in, and he was quite a character. He was supposed to be playing the map, but he wasn’t interested in actually playing Call of Duty — instead, he was drinking the free booze like crazy, and telling crude stories about women to the Activision PR guys. Unfortunately, I don’t remember any of the stories, but I do remember that Rooker was not kidding around about all of the various things he’d done to and then said about women. Lots of cursing. I thought about interviewing him for Joystiq, then decided against it and just talked to the devs for a bit.

4:44 One of the guys in the van says “Nobody’s going to be sad he didn’t come back” (about Rooker — now that he has a name, I kind of do care about him) ” … except maybe Darryl, his brother.” How convenient. He’s got a brother that we’re going to meet when they get back to the camp. I’m still not down with this — the guy was an unredeemable racist last episode, and the only reason he’s still there is because the fat dude dropped the key. That’s basically luck. And while I wouldn’t really put the guy to death, karma says he deserved it, and I ain’t fighting with karma.

5:33 Here’s the Sheriff’s wife and kid, hanging out with their would-be dad. “If you think this is bad,” says fake dad, “Wait until you start shaving!” Oh, that’s cute, he’s trying to be a father figure. I would love for this kid to not buy it at all, but of course he does. I don’t like this guy, I don’t like this kid, and honestly, don’t really like this lady.

I like the Sheriff, though!

7:12 The car is heading into the camp, still ringing with that alarm. I don’t buy that — don’t alarms shut off, especially when the car is turned on? It’d be funny if that alarm never, ever shuts off — five years later these people are still living out in the woods, all deaf, with a car alarm going off.

Also, the alarm was originally used as a lure for the zombies, if I recall correctly. Wouldn’t the people at the camp be angry that it’s still going? I guess they are yelling to turn it off, but it would have already attracted everything walking from miles around, no?

Oh — old soldier guy agrees with me. Him I like, too.

8:33 Should I be a little wary about the fact that the first camp the Sheriff runs into happens to be the exact one with his wife and kid in it? That’s what happens in the books, and I guess you could explain it away and say that there’s only one camp near Atlanta and so of course that’s the one that he’d end up at, but Atlanta’s a big city.

I should probably be more sentimental about this. This is a big scene, I guess. I like how it takes the lady (I can’t remember her name, but I think the actor’s name is Robin — she was in Prison Break) only like 30 seconds to get to “oh crap, I left a coma patient in the hospital and then shacked up with his buddy.” She’s so overcome with emotion — except when she has to remember to foreshadow exactly what happened.

I probably shouldn’t be so hard on the writers — the father stuff was just shorthand to show new viewers that this dude has moved into this family’s life a little too soon, I guess. But it doesn’t really endear me to the show.

11:40 See, this is why I like the sheriff — he’s smart. He understands, he’s honest, he’s our hero. When bad stuff happens at this camp (and trust me, I know it will, and not just because I’ve read the books), it won’t be because the sheriff did something dumb. It’ll be because these petty people with their stupid problems will cause all kinds of trouble. Look at Robin, all shifty. Leave the drama behind, woman!

Also, the soldier won’t mess anything up, either.

And here we go — one of the rednecks is a little too cold, wants the fire hotter. Shane apparently figures he hasn’t dealt with enough trouble (what with his surrogate wife and kid being retaken by a dude in a coma), and decides to pick a fight. Me? It’s late, we’ve had a rough day — I’d let the redneck light his fire and just let him get eaten when the zombies show up. But nope, Shane’s in a fussy mood because he can’t go hunting for frogs with the kid.

13:47 Pragmatic soldier brings Darryl up. Everybody claims they should tell the truth, soldier guy says no. Uh oh — I don’t agree with soldier guy on this; why lie? If Darryl gets angry, well, there are plenty of rooftops and pipes left in Atlanta, right?

The fat guy says that racist is probably still alive since he chained the door to the roof, and “that’s on us.” Actually, dude — it’s probably on the guy who dropped the key, right? That’s you, right? I wouldn’t start bringing “us” into this situation. “That’s on me,” is what you should say there.

And he’s racist.

15:44 Sheriff loves his kid. Don’t see how — what’s that kid done?

Then he jumps in bed with Robin. Did they even wash the sheets before Shane headed out? Because that’s funky.

“I want to take it all back,” she says. “The anger, and the bad times, and the mistakes.” Sheriff ain’t havin it. Also, it’s a little shameless and obvious to use “cocky” as an innuendo. Come on now, writers.

There’s Shane. I knew we’d get to him sleeping out in the rain. What’s he want? Go with another man’s lady, get burned, brother. I’d tell him to go talk to the sisters, but both of them are pretty annoying.

21:59 Sheriff can’t stop thinking about the racist, but before he gets the ok to play hero, we get a zombie sighting. I wonder if the writers have a time limit on how long they can go on this show without showing zombies. If I was in charge, I would. You’re one of the only shows on TV where you can show zombies nonstop? Do it! I’d care a lot more about the “cocky” scene if they were also getting attacked by zombies at the same time. Just saying.

They beat the zombie down — and then keep beating it. Guys, guys, guys! Chill out! It’s twice dead now. This is one reason why I liked Shawn of the Dead so much — in that one, they figured out that you just have to hit the brain, and then you’re good to go. I don’t know exactly how long it’s been in Walking Dead since this all started, but you think they’d be more efficient at killing zombies by now than just having five guys with blunt objects stand around and beat on it, no?

Like, for example, use a crossbow like this guy who just walked out of the woods. This guy’s loud, disrespectful, sweaty and dirty, and violent. Must be Darryl? I guess he actually does know about the brains, but I also like how they say he can’t cut the deer meat off, but then he pulls a bloody arrow out of the zombie’s head and just carries it off. I guess he’s not going to lick it clean or anything, but wouldn’t that be just as infected?

Also, speaking of questions, are they worried about the zombie deer at all? Maybe the deer was dead from arrows before the zombie bit it. But I’m still not clear on what exactly happened in this world — maybe they should stand around and beat the deer to death too, just to be sure. And then maybe-Darryl can shoot it through the eye, too.

25:32 Oh, he’s calling for the racist. It is Darryl.

Also, the sheriff’s name is Rick Grimes. Darryl fights about as well as his brother, which means the Sheriff counters and beats him down.

27:23 I forgot they call zombies “geeks” in this show. Not really a fan of that — I don’t think anyone in this universe so far, not even the asian guy who loves his sports car, has ever shown any awareness that they’re actually in a zombie apocalypse. Don’t you kind of have to do that now?

I guess Walking Dead is getting away with it, and yes, I guess it might make things meta if the characters have foreknowledge of zombies and their behaviors and weaknesses, but is it weird that zombies show up in a universe where there’s apparently no cultural references to the zombie mythos? In Walking Dead’s universe, that means there was no Night of the Living Dead, no 28 Days, and no I am Legend (originally written, by the way, in 1954). Zombies are also based on voodoo mythology — is there no voodoo in the American South of this universe?

If this is all true, and you subscribe to the idea of multiple universes with infinite possibilities, this might mean that if our own world ever actually gets to its apocalypse, it just might be some thing we’ve never actually imagined before. That would kind of suck, because whatever disaster awaited us would likely have no actual cultural meaning attached to it. As I said before, zombies come preloaded with all sorts of human anxieties and fears, but if you’d never heard of zombies and they suddenly showed up, you might not understand what they were all about.

Perhaps I’m getting too heady. Back to the show.

28:00 “The hell with all ya’ll,” says a teary Darryl. “I’ll go get him.” The sheriff is going back too. I agree that this point that it’s the right thing for the sheriff to do as a hero, but are we al forgetting that the racist is a racist?

Huh, Shane remembers. Good for him. “We left him like an animal caught in a trap,” says the sheriff. Do we all buy that the sheriff really wants to save him now, but didn’t back when they were actually leaving him there? I guess it makes sense in terms of moving the show’s plot forward, but if he really feels this way now, I don’t really see him leaving the city in the first place. As soon as they said “Oh right we left the racist on the roof,” that would probably have been the time for him to talk about how nobody should die that way, right?

30:48 The wife and kid don’t want him to go. What are they going to do? Just live the rest of their lives in the woods?

I guess the show is doing a good job trying to create a tangled issue here — at the very least, the writers are trying to create a little drama, and then putting characters squarely on one side or the other. That’s commendable, and it works. The characters are doing a nice job of trying to lay out each side clearly. But I’m not down with the premise; I thought the racist guy’s story was done, and I don’t want him back anyway. What are they going to do when they find him, bring him back to the camp? He was violent, stupid, angry, completely belligerent, and that was before he got left on top of a roof with a bunch of zombies.

32:56 Pragmatic soldier guy is pragmatic. I guess the van is being set up for the next episode’s central conflict.

34:24 “Four men, four rounds. Let’s just hope that four is your lucky number.” Shane’s being a real douchebag. And yes, that’s what I meant to say. He’s not wrong about leaving the racist behind, but dude, you don’t have to be so cocky about it.

35:24 Wait! The kid shows signs of intelligence! “Think about it, Mom. Everything that’s happened to him so far, nothing’s killed him yet.” Now that’s some solid thinking, kid. Glad to see you got past the “I don’t want you to go” nonsense from before.

They park on railroad tracks (sure, that’s convenient) and decide to walk into the city. Come on now. There was a construction site that was zombie free last time! I think maybe they blew the gates open on that, but there wasn’t anyone living in there — wouldn’t it still be clean?

I do like the music, though. The best part of this series is the subtlety. It’s very Japanese in its horror: Western horror movies go for big reveals and big scares, but Eastern horror movies (which have leaked over into a lot of Hollywood movies lately) show you the danger and let you discover it for yourself. Like The Ring — Eastern horror movies will open up a closet door, and hold a shot there for ten or fifteen seconds, and it takes you about that long to realize that THERE’S A KID WITH GLOWING EYES IN THERE STARING AT YOU. Western horror movies would just show the protagonist opening the closet and freaking out. Walking Dead isn’t quite as subtle as supernatural horror, but it is careful and slow with the way it reveals and scares, and I do like that.

36:25 Shane took the kid to catch frogs!!! Unbelievable. “Listen kid, I know your dad who you thought was dead just rolled back into your life after I hooked up with your mom, and yes, I understand that your father went into the city to fight zombies and save a racist even against your wishes, and you might never see him again. But hey, how about that frog catching?” Stupid.

I hope Shane gets eaten. I don’t remember what happens to him in the comics — I think I remember the sheriff being responsible somehow.

37:44 Haha, practical black lady is questioning “the division of labor here.” Us too, lady. Us too.

Oh man and just when I start to like her, they give the girls a sassy girl talk chat. The annoying girl misses her vibrator, and “me too,” the scandalous old lady says before they all start cackling like a bunch of hens. Come on. I hope they all get eaten.

Fortunately, the redneck breaks it up. He is exactly right — they are definitely not in a comedy club. They are washing clothes in a dirt pond. There isn’t a cocktail waitress or a goofy poster in sight. Right on, redneck.

40:04 Robin has major issues with Shane. Apparently she completely hates him all of a sudden, but I’m not sure why that would be. Guilt, I guess? Oh, apparently he told her that the sheriff died. Poor Shane. He’s totally getting eaten, before or after somebody kills him.

Darryl pulls another blood-covered arrow from a zombie’s head as they go through the department store. I wonder if it’s the same arrow that he used on the other zombie.

41:45 Uh oh, annoying blonde #1 is picking a fight with redneck. Haha his job “sure ain’t listening to some smart-mouth uppity bitch.” Oh, redneck. Saying that stuff right in the middle of an abandoned quarry with five girls who were just talking about how much they miss their vibrators? Nice move, buddy!

It’s all or nothing with these writers — either you’re completely and totally lovable and vulnerable in a world full of soul-crushing threats, or you’re a big talkin’ moron who doesn’t know when to shut up. The only guy in the middle ground is the asian dude, but at least he got to drive the car around on the empty freeway for a while.

42:33 It’s sexual revolution all up in this quarry! Yes, at this point, redneck has hit his lady and bought his way right into evil territory, but that’s fine — time for Shane to redeem himself and do something at least a little heroic. Shane takes out a little frustration, and beats the redneck like a deer-chewing zombie.

43:49 Show’s almost over, let’s get ourselves to a cliffhanger! The Lucky Four army finally makes its way to the roof, and … The racist is gone. Well, most of him is gone.

You might says he’s been disarmed. Looks like that hacksaw came in handy. That pipe sure lost its grip on him. Hope he got his severance pay! I’m just kidding — what a performance by Michael Rooker. Let’s give him a nice hand, everybody!

That’s all I got. And credits — let’s start episode 4.

0:00 The annoying sisters somehow found a canoe and decided to take a little fishing trip in the canyon. They’re arguing about what their dad knows about fishing, but guys — THIS TALK IS NOT REALLY ABOUT FISHING. It’s about the differences between these two despite the fact that they’re sisters. See how that works? If you ever have to write a scene, just keep that in mind — make your characters use words about whatever they’re doing, but have them actually talk about what they mean to each other! It’s like magic.

“Because he knew we were so different. He knew that you needed to catch the fish, and I needed to throw them back,” says the younger sister. See how this works? Also, this whole episode (called “Vatos”) is going to be about how characters either need to keep what they’ve got or throw it away for the future. Trust me. We’re only two minutes in, but I’m a writer. I know.

The girl who wants to throw things away got a bite. Which means by the end of this episode, we’re probably going to be throwing a lot of things away.

3:49: Yup, the weird guy who’s with pragmatic soldier guy is digging a grave while dramatic music plays, and then we jump to the credits. I knew he was going to play a part in this episode — he was a little too excited about rubber hoses last time around. Nobody gets that excited about rubber hoses, and doesn’t have a lot more to say about them.

Then we jump to a little crossbow/bullet mexican standoff on the racist’s rooftop. Not sure why Darryl is so bummed. Maybe he thinks they ate every part of the racist but the hand.

We do know that they cut the door open when they entered, and there weren’t any other zombies around, so the racist must have headed off the roof. They follow the blood and — fire escape? Oh no — another door. Wait a minute, if they only went back because they were sure the racist was alive, and the black guy was sure the racist was alive because he chained the door up, what about the other door? Wouldn’t he have remembered “Well, I chained one door, but the other’s completely open — he’s probably dead, no need to go back.” I think he would have.

7:06 “Jim” is the pragmatic soldier’s friend’s name. Always the pragmatist, PS tells him to drink some water, at least. Look, PS, he’s just really frustrated about that rubber hose. What if the van doesn’t come back, and you have to take the RV somewhere? That hose fit perfectly!

Racist apparently escaped into a room where there JUST HAPPENS to be a portrait of a bunch of rich white guys on the wall. Whew! Nice catch for him, huh? He must have felt right at home walking into there. “Hello, good sir, welcome to the boardroom! Have a seat here and let me just shake your — oh.”

8:37 The annoying ladies caught a bunch of fish, apparently. If only they’d caught a vibrator, too — then everybody would be really happy.

9:51 This is a big department store building. Apparently the racist cauterized his hand on a stove, and then jumped out down a fire escape. I knew it!

It’s probably worth noting that I don’t remember any of this racist stuff from the comics — as far as I remember, they went straight out to the camp, and then things went crazy out there. I guess this all works in the show’s universe, but I still don’t like that premise that they left him and then came back. I wonder if the first two episodes were written together, shopped around as the pilot, and then these episodes came later. That would definitely add to what I said in the very beginning (man, this is long, right?) that the show doesn’t really live up to its initial bang.

The Lucky Four are convinced by Darryl to head out into Atlanta and find racist Merle. I gotta say — I don’t know where or how they’re going to find him. That’s a real stumper.

11:53 “Why you diggin, Jim? You headin to China?” Shane asks a creepy Jim. What did Robin ever see in this guy that she jumps in bed with him right after her husband supposedly dies?

Jim just wants to dig some graves, people. Man. Just leave him alone! Can’t a guy dig a bunch of graves and scare a couple of kids in peace? Let him dig!

Then Jim brings up the whole deal with Shane beating up the redneck, and says he’s wrong for getting involved in someone else’s marriage. Shane? Involved in someone else’s marriage? NO WAY. Robin should speak up here — Shane would never ever insert himself into someone else’s marr– oh. Oh. Never mind then.

13:34 Shane attacks Jim. And handcuffs him?!? Holy crap, people! Just let the guy dig some graves so he can deal with the death of his family! Why’s everybody so concerned about Jim hurting some dirt?

14:34 Asian guy is suggesting that he and Darryl can deal with the guns better than the Lucky Four all together. I agree — I should learn Asian guy’s name, because I think he’s beating out the sheriff as my favorite character.

Although, we just learned that he delivered pizzas before the apocalypse, which means we’re learning something lovable and endearing about him right before he’s about to undertake a dangerous mission. That … is probably bad.

16:08 The Asian (sorry — Korean) guy wakes up a zombie who was just sleeping in a car.

I’ll repeat that: A zombie was just sitting there sleeping in a car.

“Muuurrhmmmm… brainnnsss… hey, guys — I’m just, I’m getting a little crampy here. I’ve been shambling around for a few days now, and boy are my dogs barking. Does anybody — does anybody just mind if I just sit in this car for a second? Just gonna take a load off here, just for a little bit. That’s cool, right?”

“Boy, this carseat is kinda comfy. I know we don’t need to sleep any more guys, brains and all that, but I just — Look, I’m just going to close my eyes for a second here, guys. Well at least one of them — my eyelid got ripped off on the other one. Man, I’m really tired. I’m just … I’m just gonna…. lay my head… zzzz… brains…..”

“Oh hey! Was that an asian guy running past me?! Or was he Korean?”

16:48 Spanish-speaking kid shows up out of nowhere, his gangster buddies are right behind him. And Korean guy gets kidnapped. I knew it!

I like that the sheriff gets his hat back. Listen guys, I’ve never been in a zombie apocalypse myself, but I do know that if one goes down, there’s nothing you could really use more than a really solid hat. It protects your eyes and skin from the sun, keeps the sweat off your brow, and it makes you look darn stylish while you’re burying an axe in some dead girl’s head. Yup, there’s nothing better to have during a zombie plague than a hat. Oh, and maybe a big bag of guns. That helps, too.

18:34 JIM’S BEEN TIED TO A TREE! Listen, there are a lot of things you can do in a zombie apocalypse — you can steal cars and planes, you can kill zombies all you want, and according to Shane, you can even beat up rednecks and tell women that their husbands are dead to sleep with them.

But you hear me now people: Don’t you ever, EVER, dig a bunch of graves. Not on Shane’s watch. No siree — nobody’s digging graves at this camp! Take that, Jim, you grave digger.

18:54 “How long are you going to keep me like this,” asks Jim.

“Well, I don’t think you’re a danger to yourself or others,” says Shane. “But you better stay away from that dirt out there. It doesn’t appreciate being moved all around with a shovel for the purpose of burying dead people. YOU GOT THAT!”

Seriously, Shane. Digging graves. Leave him alone.

20:08 Jim thinks the sheriff is tough as nails? Didn’t Darryl think his racist brother was tough as nails too? Nails must be extra tough in this universe.

21:21 Darryl just called the mexican gang “this little turd and his douchebag friends.” Hey now — did you really mean to call him a douchebag? Oh, you did? Oh, never mind then.

Turd’s feisty, but he freaks out when he sees what Merle the racist left behind. He fell down on the floor there, sheriff — why don’t you give him a hand up? Turd’s in a gang though — he’s his own man, not interested in handouts.

I got more, you guys. Don’t worry, they’re coming.

22:27 The Unlucky Three head over to the gang’s HQ and get told about Guillermo, who’s apparently the leader of the gang. I kind of think it would be great if it was the Guillermo from Weeds leading the gang, but nope. Guillermo looks like one of the kids from The Wire, though he’s not as great an actor.

Uh oh, my writer’s intuition is kicking in. We haven’t heard from the racist in a while, which means he’ll probably show up at some point here, just as things are getting to a boil point with the gang. We’ll see. Along those lines, the writers aren’t really nailing the whole “keep things or throw them away” angle, but we’ve got Jim hanging on to his family and their deaths, and the Unlucky Three catching Turd, and trying to decide whether to hang on to him or the guns. Nobody’s had to make a real choice yet, but I guess that’s where we’re headed.

25:12 Turd’s name is Miguel, but I’ll keep calling him Turd. Asian guy’s name is Glen, so I’ll call him Glen.

And again, writers do a nice job here of putting the sheriff in a tough position, and using the black guy and Darryl to really hash out the two sides of the issue. That’s something I don’t always do in my writing enough — characters who have to make a choice should really get both sides of the issue explored for them or buy them, and that always makes the eventual decision that much more of a payoff.

28:57 I wonder what this Mexican gang’s story of the zombie apocalypse is like. What did they do when they first found out zombies were everywhere? What have they had to eat all this time? They’re in some completely outfitted auto shop, and the folks in the camp outside the city had to strip that muscle car for parts? And I thought the city was completely abandoned anyway?!?

Also, if I was a head writer/producer on this show, and I did have a rule about how long the show can go before zombies show up to fight, this episode would have already broken it. At least we have some gangster’s abuela to resolve this tough situation.

30:09 Haha, Guillermo completely folds when his grandma shows up! Unbelievable. He was going to really kill three/four men for a bunch of guns, but his grandma can tell him to back down? I don’t know, guys — I know you like this show, but that’s pretty goofy.

Oh but at least we get to see some of their story. They’ve been gardening in the backyard, apparently — they’re gardening gangstas! And there’s a nursing home! And one of the gangstas is a doctor!

Oh man, and Guillermo was in on it all along! He was joking about the dogs! But he still would have killed the sheriff! “Wouldn’t be the first time we had to.” Really? REALLY?

I don’t know guys — I think the gangsta nursing home might have just ended this show for me. It’s too goofy. “These people — the oldies? Staff took off, just left them here to die.” THE OLDIES! Come on now. Guillermo is a custodian! I guess that explains why he’s such a terrible actor.

Not buying this at all. Guillermo is explaining how mexican gangsters are willing to stay in a city crowded with zombies to protect a bunch of “oldies” in a nursing home (possibly even having to kill armed cops who come by) just because they care. No really. That’s what he’s explaining.

Maybe I take that stuff about how he’s such a terrible actor back. He literally just had to tell this show’s most unbelievable story all by himself. And this is a show where the sheriff found his family in the first camp, and a bunch of guys went back into a zombie infested city to save a racist who they accidentally left on a rooftop.

I dunno, guys. I dunno.

34:30 At least the Lucky Four are back together. About time for the racist to reappear?

Yup. “Dude, where’s our van?” “I left it right here, dude.” “Dude, where’s our van?” Oh no! Now Jim won’t ever get his rubber hose!

35:46 “I built up the rocks so the flames can be higher? See?” Yup, thanks buddy. That is clearly the argument that was tearing this camp apart. Now that the flames are higher, everybody’s going to be fine.

Notice that as Shane comes down to talk to him, he’s hanging out with the sheriff’s kid again. Sure, Robin did just say about twenty minutes ago that he should stay away from her kid and her family, but that was before JIM STARTED DIGGING GRAVES. The world really has changed, people.

“I hope you understand the need for this time out.” I had no idea Shane had a psychology degree. Need some help getting over the horrible deaths of your family? Ask Dr. Shane, MD to help you out: he’ll punch you in the face, handcuff you, tie you to a tree, and you’ll feel better in no time!

36:38 The redneck is really smashed up, and as if we needed any more reasons to dislike him, he even intones a little sexual abuse to his kid. That I obviously can’t stand for — I liked him when he was breaking up the cackling ladies who clearly WERE NOT at a comedy club, and I understood him when he just wanted to keep a hold on his family, but he’s pretty clearly due for a zombie buffet at this point.

Also, the Lucky Four apparently have to run back to camp without that van. Seriously: Jim needs that rubber hose. I hope that van gets back in one piece.

37:24 Uh oh, pragmatic soldier winds his watch every day. Get the rope, Shane! Maybe it’s not just digging graves — maybe any repetitive motion isn’t allowed here at all.

Also, hey now, pragmatic soldier, with that “I give you a mausoleum watch to remember time” joke around the campfire. This ain’t no comedy club.

39:08 Just a few minutes left! Time for a cliffhanger. Yup, little annoying sister has to pee, and clearly nothing bad can happen now.

ZOMBIES! Guys, did you forget that this show was actually about zombies? Because I almost did. The last zombie we saw was the one waking up when Glen ran past, and … that’s been about it for this whole episode! Oh, and the ones Darryl killed with his arrows.

Oh redneck Earl, we barely knew ye. All we knew about you was that you hated women and abused your family. Surely there was more to know! Maybe we can see you in another life — an undead life.

Little annoying sister gets bitten too, which means the sisters are probably about to get even more annoying. Shane gets bitten, and none too soon. Luckily, the Lucky Four reappear to save the day. Oops — guess I was wrong; little sister isn’t going to be annoying for too much longer. Big sister will have to be doubly annoying for the both of them from now on. I guess they really are different — looks like giving up the things you catch is the wrong way to go.

But man, all those zombies really came out of nowhere, right? No zombies at that camp for weeks, and then they all just start suddenly stumbling in out of the forest? It’s weird — it’s almost like something changed, like something that wasn’t there before pulled them in. Something like the fire being larger, and … OH CRAP. Thanks for nothing, fire fixer.

Also, Jim is apparently psychic. THE END.

—-

Whew! I hope you guys enjoyed that — I can’t imagine anyone is still reading this, but there you go, one and half hours of commentary. I would like to hear from you if you enjoyed this, and I especially would like to hear what you think if you happen to watch these episodes while you read this. I don’t know if this was completely successful, but I may try this again at some point — maybe I’ll make an audio commentary instead. Thanks for reading! Lates ya’ll!

I’m going to go and dig some graves.

This week I’m in Denver, CO, where the 360iDev conference is currently going on — it’s a gathering of iPhone developers that I’m covering for TUAW (you can see most of my coverage right over here, with more to come). All week long, I’ve been chatting with developers, listening in on conversations and talks, and just generally learning about what iPhone and iPad app developers are dealing with and learning about.

Every time this conference meets, they do something called a “game jam,” in which all of the developers park themselves in a room with soda and snacks, and just jump into Xcode and work overnight on a brand new, original products. Some developers do it just for fun, some do it just to mess around with a new framework or check out a new feature of the language, and some of these developers have actually prototyped or even just coded games that later were actually released out for sale on the App Store. I’ve been to one of these before, but as you may have read, I recently started messing around with game development, and recently have been playing with iPhone dev as well, so I’m going to actually sit in on the game jam tonight, and try to get a working iPhone game made before I go to bed this evening.

I have no idea how it’s going to work, so I promise nothing. The theme, announced today at lunch, is “opposite,” and since I heard that theme (I tried not to come up with any ideas before they announced it, so I’m starting completely from scratch), I have narrowed down a pretty solid idea that I think I can pull off with the Cocos2D framework. It’s inspired by a few different things I’ve seen this week: It’s simple (because I’m not a very good or experienced coder — I need simple), it’s based on an old arcade game (because I went to a bar last night with old school arcade games, and really enjoyed the reminder of how pure and enjoyable old school arcade games can be), and it’s a pretty standard game with a crazy little twist (because Mike Lee said yesterday that the best ideas are 80% boring, with a nice 20% crazy frosting on top).

I’ll be liveblogging the whole process right here as I do it this evening — the game jam starts up at 8pm mountain time here in Denver, so come back here then if you want updates. I’ll be posting pictures, videos, and maybe even streaming, depending how the network connection here at the conference hotel holds up (spoiler: it probably won’t). I do want to document this, though (because I want to really test myself in terms of development, and really try to learn from it), so there will be plenty here to see if you come back later. In other words, stay tuned. This will, hopefully, be a lot of fun.

6:39pm: I’m about to head out to dinner, and then off to the game jam proper, but before I go, here’s a quick sketch I drew together in Sketches for iPhone with my original idea. As you can see, I am not an artist.

Instead of just battling with one ball, though, I had the idea that my black and white pong paddles will fight with a bunch of different balls. There will be a dynamically moving line separating the two (I’ve been meaning to mess around with the particle system in cocos2d, so hopefully I can make some black and white particles fly around and make the line sort of a “leaky vortex” kind of thing as it moves), and every time the ball passes over that line, I imagine it splitting into one of each color, as well as pushing the line a little bit to one side or the other. So the goal of the game won’t just be to keep balls from falling off the screen, but to bounce them back at the line, trying to push it back away towards the other player.

I have a few other ideas, much more murky. As you can see, some of the balls are bigger than the others — I have this idea that maybe the balls pick up steam and grow as they cross the line, which means keeping a ball bouncing for longer makes it more powerful with each bounce. Unfortunately, that would also make it more easy to keep in the air, so I can foresee some balance issues there.

I’m not sure if the opposing paddle (the white one) will be AI-driven, or an actual mirror of the black paddle, maybe requiring the player to move both his paddle and the opposite at the same time, but only trying to bounce the balls with the black one. And the other idea I have is that the line will move across the screen — it’ll start out as a relatively tame and quiet game with a black paddle and one ball on the white screen, but eventually that black vortex-y line will crawl leftward (maybe I can even do a dark humming sound effect that grows louder as the game goes on), and as it moves towards the black paddle, the player will be left with less and less room to maneuver as more and more action takes over the screen. That works with the theme too — you’ll be getting frightened by your opposite color crawling ever closer to you (even though that threatening color is the one your paddle happens to be as well).

Anyway, that’s my basic idea — we’ll have to see how that all plays out in with my very, very rudimentary coding and artistic skills. I have a feeling it’ll change a lot once I get things moving in the game; I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep it interesting and playable as just a basic Pong game, especially one that’s meant for one player rather than two (I know I could do two players on the same iPhone touch screen, but I’d rather make a single-player experience). But I think there’s enough to start with — I’ll go grab some dinner, and will update when I’ve actually sat down to start coding. If you’re around and watching, let me know what you think on Twitter, please!

8:22pm: Here we go. Xcode up and running, cocos2d Hello World built. First thing I’m going to do is create a new scene in cocos2d, and then a front and back layer. If this game works out, I will probably have a few different scenes, and I think it’ll be worth it to break from the template right now.

I’ll try to remember to update this often — from what I know about these things, it’s easy to get involved in the work and forget to document it. So I’ll try to make a note here every 20 minutes or so. Will set my iPhone timer if I forget.

9:07pm: Ran into my first issue — had to set the background color of the first layer to white. Got some good help from developer friend Markus (@markusn on Twitter) who I’m sure I’ll be bothering quite a bit this evening.

9:32pm: Had an issue trying to instantiate my first paddle, because I was trying to call a method called “paddleWithTexture” by using the selector “initWithTexture.” I messed around with it for a good five minutes, then asked Markus to come over and check it for me — with him looking over my shoulder, I ran to check the name of the method right away, and ended up looking stupid. I told him I was dumb and sorry for wasting his time, and he shook his head at me and said that kind of thing happened all the time — “you could spend two hours on stuff like that.” Coding is tough for everybody, apparently.

11:06pm: Speaking of spending two hours on something, after way too long I’ve finally got a ball and a paddle moving on the iPhone:

Had an issue with the ball not getting put in my ball array (apparently you have to allocate the memory for an object before you use it — go figure!), and I still have a problem of the paddle going off screen when it reaches the edges (not sure what the deal is there — maybe a float/int problem). But at least the ball and paddle are in there and working, collision works as well.

Next up, I’m going to try to build that line that goes across the screen — on one side, it’ll be black, and on the other it’ll be white. Then I have to figure out a way for the ball to interact with it when it crosses over (so you don’t see a black ball on a black backgound). We’ll see.

12:34am: I have been forgetting to update, obviously. I have the line going across the screen, and it’s easy enough to have the ball interact with it, but now I have a problem. Changing an image on a sprite is a pretty easy task — if you use a spritesheet, which I’ve never actually done. The other devs are telling me it’s a tough topic to learn at a game jam, and they say I should do a more brute force approach, but I’m torn. I should learn spritesheets at some point, right? Still working on it.

3:00am: Still working. This is a slog — I’m getting dragged down into stuff that’s a little bit over my head. I’m juggling a few different problems, but I am getting worn out. The game looks about like I want it to look, but the gameplay’s not quite close enough yet to start balancing it — I can’t seem to get the ball textures to switch color, and if I can’t get a white ball on a black background and vice versa, it’s not really playable. I’ll give it a little while longer yet.

4:29am: Ok, I’m going to call it. I’m not anywhere near done, though the game actually looks and plays somewhat all right:

What I did:
-I got sprites on a screen, and got them to move. The black paddle is moved by touch, and the white paddle currently just follows the black paddle, though I’m not sure if I’m going to leave it that way or not. But all of that was my own programming. The black section that crosses over the view is also all my own programming, which I was pretty impressed that I pulled off without any help.
-The ball does change color when it crosses the line, which was a big win for me. Huge thanks to both Markus Nigrin and Ray Wenderlich for helping out with that one — Ray’s site is great if you ever want to learn iPhone programming or cocos2d.
-I got collision working, which wasn’t so much me (though I did spend a good hour or so on it) as it was a developer named Max, who actually makes the great Soundrop app. He’s working on some really interesting stuff, and he (with just a little bit of input from me) really knocked the collision on this one out of the park.
-And I learned a heck of a lot, both by working on my own game and by watching and talking to the other devs here. I definitely feel like I’ve done quite a bit tonight, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot this week in general about how people deal with this stuff.

What I have to do yet:
-I never did get other balls to spawn, but it seems easy enough — with another hour or so of development, I’m sure I could get that going. That would really make the game more interesting and really bring the thing together.
-And the final piece of gameplay would be making all of those balls actually move the divide back and forth. That seems fairly easy too – I probably will implement it at some point in the future.
-I didn’t get to do any particle work — I really thought I’d get a chance to do that tonight. Oh well — I’ll take a look at it when I get home. All the devs here told me it would only be a few lines of code, once I actually figured it out.
-And I didn’t get to make a title screen, which was probably hoping for a little much anyway. I got all dragged down in the collision stuff, when I thought I’d already solved those problems in code. My biggest issue with the collision turned out to be that my paddle code was written for a horizontal paddle, so when I moved to a vertical paddle, it introduced a whole bunch of issues. And then when I mirrored the paddle on the other side, that broke a lot of stuff too. If I’d had better collision code in the first place, I could have gotten a lot more done.

Oh well. Definitely not a failure, but I thought I’d have more to show. Oh well. Stay tuned — I do see myself working on this one in the future, and maybe it’ll even turn into an app that people can play. I don’t have a developer account, otherwise I’d just release it for free, but if I pick up a dev account in the future and this gets into a form where people can play it, I’ll let you guys check it out. Have a good night! I’m off to pass out (and then wake up in three hours for another day of conferencing and then a long flight home to LA. Gooooood times.

Update: After a few more tweaks, here’s the game in action:

It’s not done yet, but it is actually playable. I may still mess around on it a bit, and if I ever get those last few things done, I may even try to release it out as a free game (if I end up spending the $99 to be a real app developer). I don’t know how fun it actually is, so I’d have to do some game balancing, but at the very least, if I added touch controls to that opposing paddle, it might be a pretty interesting two player game. We’ll see.

Update: It’s eight months later, and the game is now out! There’s more info about this game’s development right over here, too. Go buy it!

So a little while ago, I basically figured out how easy it was to progress toward your dreams. Not necessarily accomplish them — that is hard, and usually takes a lot of time and effort. But just moving towards your dreams is pretty easy. All you have to do is figure out what they are, and then put some actual work in going to get them accomplished. Pretty simple.

The first dream I had was publishing a book, and I can tell you that The Shape of Teeth (as I’m calling it — see last post) is coming along quite well. It’s been delayed again (sorry!), but I’ve got a few really talented and really nice artists putting together some art for me, and once that’s all set, I’ll assemble it and it will be ready for your reading enjoyment and pleasure in the ebook reader of your choice.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to follow another dream of mine, which is to actually develop some games. I still love writing, and I still plan to be a writer for the rest of my life. But just like some people build things out of wood or paint for fun on the weekends, I want to really try my hand at making some solid video games. This is one that I’ve struggled with for a while — to make really solid games, you not only have to be really good at math, and really understand computers, but you have to be good at art, and know how to have fun, and a whole bunch of other talents, some of which I don’t actually have.

Still, I’m driven to do this, so after a few unsuccessful starts with coding in various languages (did I mention that you have to be really good at math? I’m generally not), I decided to get all the way back to basics. When I was a kid, I used to literally code in BASIC, which is the old “20 GOTO 10″ language that we all probably learned in school. And I wasn’t bad at that one — I programmed an address book, and some text adventures, and even a maze game in Extended Color BASIC on my Tandy computer. But since then, programming has all moved from messing around with variables in a pretty linear manner, to object-oriented programming. Now, you don’t get a $STRING and output it, you build an object that will input or output a string object whenever certain conditions are met. At least that’s how I think it works — I can’t seem to wrap my head around the structure and thinking behind object oriented stuff. It’s too complex for me.

So I decided to shoot low — I poked around for ways to build games without actually programming them, and I eventually landed on the bottom rung of the ladder, with a system called Scratch. Scratch was developed at MIT as an educational tool for kids — it’s as basic as programming gets. Instead of coding scripts, you just drag and drop certain visual rules together, and then those rules move images around, and if you put it all together in the right way, you can make a game. So I decided to sit down and play with this a little while back, and after about an hour or so, I had made my first game, simply called Cat Jumps Over The Dog. And here, in fact, it is:

Just press the spacebar to jump over the dog, as many times as you can. The record is somewhere around 130, I think.

Simple? Yes, but that was kind of the point — it was simply an experiment to see if I could build a real, working game, no matter how easy or how dumb it actually was. And I tweeted that out, and a few people actually played it. I even got beta-style feedback — players told me that seeing “You Lose,” even when they had really tried, was disappointing. And I got some good feedback on the flags in the background (which were the only part of the game that I actually drew myself — everything else in there was clipart from the Scratch app). It was at this point that I realized, holy crap, that I had made a game that people had then gone on to play. Dream, here I come!

I decided to ramp things up with Scratch a little bit then — the system is really simple, but I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to push the limits a little harder. I’ve always had an idea for a 2D game where you see a car driving from above, and you can pick up ammo and fire weapons at enemy cars — sort of like Spy Hunter, but without all of the instant reflexes required, and all of the crashing and danger. I worked for about a week and a half with Scratch, and even drew some of my own graphics for the game (which are terrible — I have never in my life had an aptitude for art or design, unfortunately). I used Scratch’s in-app music system to create some sounds for the game, and I implemented a few tough things to do in Scratch (you’d be surprised at how hard it is to determine collisions between objects sometimes, or make a van that spawns mines stop spawning them whenever it’s dead). The result of that work was my second game, Race Attack! (The title of which, my friends later informed me, had some unintended overtones of racial violence. Totally unintended! It’s just a game about racing and attacking.) You can use the arrow keys to steer your car, and then the spacebar to fire missles (when you have ammo).

You’ll notice that in that one, the end of the game always says “Game Over” — except (hint hint) when you actually win. I programmed an actual ending to the game, unlike Cat Jumps Over The Dog, because people asked for one — just score 50 points to see it in action. And I couldn’t really resist throwing a fun nod in from one of my favorite games, Metroid.

Man, I had a heck of a good time making both of those games. Sure, you could argue that they’re boring and terrible, and that the art sucks. But I was overjoyed to make an actual game with an actual set of rules that people could actually play, and even get better at, and even succeed with. Even though Scratch is completely visual (and meant for children), I found parts of my brain that I hadn’t used in years lighting up and sparking like crazy: a problem would arise without a clear and convenient solution, and I’d turn it over in my head, even when I was away from the computer, and mess around with the code and try different things, until I finally would land on something that worked. And then I’d work on that thing, and make it better, and eventually I’d come up with a solution that wasn’t just clear and convenient, but actually quite elegant. In other words, I was coding, you guys! I was really doing it!

My success with Scratch has inspired me to go even further — I decided to move up the chain just a little bit to Gamesalad, which is another visual development system, though one that’s a little closer to code than Scratch’s Playschool-style development. Yes, I’m not really coding still, but I have found that Gamesalad’s system of actors is actually closer to object-oriented programming than I’ve ever come before, not to mention that I actually understand what I’m doing. Plus, it has the benefit of what’s supposed to be a pretty easy port over to iOS and even the Mac App Store, so while everything I’ve done over there has only been in HTML 5 so far, presumably I could eventually take a game to an actual commercial enterprise without a lot of trouble.

My first game on Gamesalad is going to be an inside joke from The Incredible Podcast of Amazing Awesomeness — a while ago, a listener asked what kind of game we’d make if we ever made one, and we came up with the idea for Cat Wars 3: Feline Frenzy, which is a dual-stick “barker,” in which a dog takes on a whole army of cats (we figured that the best games in trilogies are always the last ones, so we’re starting with Cat Wars 3 rather than the two nonexistent earlier games in the series). I actually have a working version of the game running, and lots of ideas to put in it for later builds, but since my temporary art is so terrible, my Tipoaa co-host Turpster (who is actually an animation student and thus has a proclivity towards art) is revamping the art completely. I haven’t seen anything he’s done yet, but I’m sure it’ll look better than the junk I drew.

After he’s done with that (and we’re done with a few other things I want to put in the game), we’ll be actually releasing Cat Wars 3 as a free to play HTML5 game — my first real, actual game release. After that, there’s a chance we’ll take it to the iOS App Store, actually implementing the iPhone’s touch screen for the controls, and putting in a few more extras that would only be available on the App Store version. I don’t have a playable version of Cat Wars to share yet, but it’s coming soon — we’re aiming to have it out by the end of October at the latest, hopefully before then.

And then, guys, I have even more. I’m already working on another prototype in Gamesalad, and I really do want to learn to actually code, so I’ve been looking at Cocos2D and a few other “helpers” for developing my programming skills. Unfortunately, Cocos2D is an iPhone-only thing, and that requires an Apple Developer account, which I haven’t actually grabbed yet. If anyone knows of a similarly free and relatively simple system for making games on either Windows or Mac that would help me figure out this object oriented stuff, I’m all ears.

I also saw Notch coding in Java for his Ludum Dare project, and man, that really looked amazing, though he’s obviously a talented and very experienced programmer, two things that I am not yet. But I definitely have no end of game ideas, and the prototype I’m working on in Gamesalad is a game that I’ve wanted to play for a long time, though no one (as far as I know) has ever made it yet. I’d love to tell you more, but I don’t want to promise something I can’t do, so we’ll have to wait and see on that one.

In truth, I’m worried that the idea is a little too complex — that despite all of my success so far, I’ll end up bumping into a problem that just requires too much math (or, you know, an actual computer science degree, of which I don’t have course one) for me to ever actually understand and figure out. But for now, it’s still a lot of fun, and all of the issues I’ve come across have eventually been solved. After all, it turns out it’s not all that hard to actually follow your dream: Just go out and chase it down, one step at a time.

I’ve already told you about my plans for the Secret Schramm Project, and I also am pretty sure I told you I wanted to have it done by July. Obviously, that didn’t work out, given everything else I’ve done (I got on an improv team! I went to Comic-Con! I got my brother all married! I spent a week away from the Internet in Wisconsin!), but work continues nevertheless. I’m proud to say that after a lot of editing and tweaking and re-typing, I have finally gotten all of the stories I’ll be including in the book into an actual epub file using an actual epub editor (I’m using Sigil), so the content is more or less locked at this point. That’s a pretty big deal — if I wanted to sell the book, with no bells or whistles on it, I could do it today.

But let’s be honest, bells and whistles are the fun part. So now my goal is to add all of that stuff I told you about — some art to go in between the chapters, some extra pieces by people who aren’t named Mike Schramm, and some other fun things I love about books and have always wanted to create for one of mine.

Art is the first concern; I had a talk with an actual, for-real artist who didn’t know me well enough to be offended the other week, and asked about just how much money she expected to make for a commissioned drawing. Unfortunately, the figure she quoted me was way higher than I expected, and given that I was planning to ask some artists that I really admire to make work for me for much cheaper (and don’t want to offend them), the bottom line is that I just can’t afford to commission all of the artwork I’d need. So my new plan is to find some art that fits my pieces, and then ask nicely if I can use it for the book. The issue, of course, is that this is a book for sale, so obviously I don’t want to just Google some work and stick it in without compensation. But hopefully I will find some things that fit, and then maybe ask an artist I know well (very nicely) to do an original cover for me, and then hopefully the book will be a little more than just text.

I’m going to ask a few people to write things, and those should be pretty easy to slot in. I have a few ideas, as I said before, for more “book-y” things to include, so I will work on those and they should be pretty fun.

And of course I have settled on a title: “The Shape of Teeth.” Originally I was aiming to use a title of one of the stories (so I could do the traditional “… And Other Stories by Mike Schramm,” which I really like), but as I was going through them and editing them, I found this phrase which I not only liked the sound of, but which I think really fits the wacky theme that threads through all of this work. I like the idea of not teeth themselves (which would mean real danger), but the shape of teeth — something that hints at actual physical danger, but might end up being all in your mind anyway. Noone but me will probably ever get all of that out of the title, even after reading through the whole book, but just like everything else in this project, I put it in there just for me anyway.

I hope this all sounds interesting enough to you all that you’re excited to buy the book when it comes out. At this point, I’m probably aiming for mid to late September, but if it bleeds into October, that’s fine anyway. Fall is my favorite time of year, and it seems like a great time for magic, for stories, for huddling around a campfire in the dark woods and sharing some crazy, funny, or touching things you’ve heard lately. That’s what I hope this ends up being — I’d love to have been able to make a real book, something I could sell in a leather-bound edition that smells like creamy paper, with a built-in ribbon bookmark and an embossed title page. But instead, I’m crafting this ebook file for you, and my goal is to make it the most hand-crafted and pored-over digital document you’ve ever had the pleasure of paying a few bucks for. So stay tuned; more news soon.

So as you may or may not have heard from my many anxious tweets last weekend, I have basically reached the end of my improv training. I’ve been studying improvisation for the better part of the year now, originally just for the heck of it, but later on for two major reasons: a) it fascinates me — I like chasing both the form of improvised theater as a currently evolving art, and that mindset that you get in while performing well, a wacky little state of awareness and communication with everyone around you, including the audience and your fellow performers. And b) because it seems to make me a better person, not necessarily in a therapy/discovering myself way (though if I’m honest, I guess there’s some of that in there), but in an intelligent, well-studied, well-rounded individual kind of way. There are a lot of things that would meet this second criteria, I think, but in this case, improv just happens to be one of them. (I also spent last night doing some intermediate-to-advanced hardware repair on my Mac mini, and before that, I ran about seven miles for fun and exercise. So there’s your well-rounded for you.)

Anyway, I’m finishing level 7 at Los Angeles’ IO West theater, which is the graduation level, so in a few weeks I will have finished my training, and generally learned what improv is. But that’s only the beginning — I also auditioned last weekend to join one of the official teams at the theater, and after the previously mentioned anxiety, I was accepted. So I’ve joined a team, with a bunch of other folks, and we’re going to be performing some improv there in LA. I also occasionally perform with a group of friends called Motel TV, and I’ll probably join at least one more team or show before this is all done — I’d like to try some really down-to-Earth two-person improv at some point.

In other words, I have a lot of shows lately. I’m not sure of the best way to share them with you all (or if you even care — I know most people reading this probably don’t live in Los Angeles anyway). But I do feel the need to market them somehow, and so even if this isn’t the right place, I’m going to try to put my shows up here, so that interested parties can have some idea when I’ll be on stage.

Tonight is actually the first of many shows I’m in this month — my level 7 class is performing this evening at 7pm in IO West’s Del Close Theater. All of these shows, unless otherwise stated, are in that theater, which is right behind IO West over on Hollywood and Cahuenga Blvd. Valet parking is a cheap $5 right across the street, or you can usually find some meters over on Wilcox if you’re parking after 7pm in the evening.

This Thursday, Motel TV will be on stage with the Prism Box theater at 9pm. I believe that show is at the Elephant, 6322 Santa Monica Boulevard, but I may be wrong about that. I’ll update this when I know for sure.

Then on Friday, my brand new (still nameless) team will perform in the Del Close Theater. We go on at 9pm or thereabouts, and I recommend you make an evening out of it — there are a lot of solid teams performing in the DCT lately.

Next Sunday, we have another level 7 show, also at 7pm in the DCT. The level 7 class team, whose name is Wiffle Waffle, is also performing next Thursday and the Thursday after (the 14th and the 21st), both of those shows at 8pm, and on the main stage of the theater. That’s a big deal — each of those shows are $10, but if you want in, let me know ahead of time, and I can probably get you a comp.

Finally, on Tuesday the 19th, my unnamed team will be performing at 11pm out on the Mainstage. That whole night on the mainstage will be terrific, with great teams like Waterloo, Bandit, and Local 132 all performing. Buying one ticket at IO gets you in all night, so come early, grab a set, and then just enjoy a full night of improv finishing with me.

Hope some of you can come out! My challenge still hasn’t been accepted, so if anyone shows up before a show and says hi to me, I will throw in a World of Warcraft reference sometime during the show (or any reference you happen to want, as long as it’s not super obscene). Please come out if you can! Thanks!

Oh, and I do want you to come, but because I know you will all ask if there will be any videotape of these, I will tell you that there probably will be. Stay tuned for that. But please don’t let that stop you from coming to see us live — one of the many reasons I like improv so much is that it is still very much a live form. Works much better when you’re part of all of that communication going around.

Hey everybody! I haven’t written here in a little while, and unfortunately things have been so busy lately that I wasn’t able to do my usual E3 post, in which I round up all of the crazy stuff I saw and wrote about at E3 this year. You can basically see all of the stuff I wrote about for Joystiq in my posts over there, but I’ll specifically point you to these: Skulls of the Shogun, Payday: The Heist (the best title I wrote during the show, in my humble opinion), Torchlight 2, and Mass Effect 3. All amazing games.

I also finally got to play Star Wars: The Old Republic during the show. It’s been at E3 and other events I’ve been at before, but for various reasons, I’ve never had the time or been assigned to actually sit down and play it. I still wasn’t assigned at E3 to see it (the folks at Massively covered it very well already), but I did want to check it out to see if it was worth the fuss, and so I did. Huge thanks to the game director James Ohlen for putting up with my various jabs and jokes at his game’s expense while he kindly walked me through a couple of missions. I didn’t quite realize how close he was to the game’s development until it was too late, but hopefully he wasn’t too offended.

So what’s the verdict? In short, I loved it. I won’t call it a WoW killer because as far as I’m concerned, you can’t kill a game that’s already immortal, but Bioware has borrowed a lot of the things that made WoW such a great game, and added on some extra icing that will make SWTOR a must-see MMO experience. The much-discussed dialog scenes are completely awesome, in my estimation — while they are a little more wooden than your standard Mass Effect conversation, they still bring a heck of a lot to actually building and defining your character as you play.

There’s a lot of smart moves with the quests as well — Bioware has pretty much separated quest and story, and while some players might not dig that, I liked it a lot. You don’t get that many “kill 10 boars” quests, as far as I saw — instead, you’re told to go to a certain place for a story reason, and once there, you can get an optional quest to kill 10 boars or save 10 hostages, automatically granted when you kill your first boar or save your first hostage. That’s a small change but it makes a big difference, I think; if you’re presented with an unpleasant bit of grinding, you can choose to just skip it and still continue the story anyway. Of course, you can’t skip too many of those optional quests, or you won’t get the XP you need, but I think there’ll be a nice balance between grinding on enemies you like and skipping the grinds you find boring.

I did find a few hiccups, and these are what I joked about to the game director. You can have a mount in the game in the form of a landspeeder bike, which is awesome. But that bike will also jump in place when you press the spacebar, which I thought was silly — an out-of-place holdover from WoW’s animal mounts. The game also doesn’t take advantage of some improvements Blizzard has since given to WoW: I like WoW’s relatively new quest guides on the in-game map and the on-screen minimap. If you need to find a quest target in WoW, the game quickly and easily directs you to it. But SWTOR isn’t that helpful, and there were a few times I outright got lost, missing the help I am used to getting while questing in WoW.

No, the combat isn’t that different from other MMOs — while Bioware seems to be pushing it forward with mechanics like a cover system for one class and a few other various tweaks and additions, it still just felt to me like an MMO, where you stand there and use abilities, hoping that the enemy’s life bar runs out before yours does. I do like the addition of companions — not only do they add to the story and build the game’s surprisingly deep morality system, but they’re basically like party members who never leave, allowing you to do group-style content even if you’re solo or only with one other friend.

In short, the game seemed like a lot of fun, and after going back and forth on it for a little while, I’m very hopeful about how it will turn out. I think there’s a lot of polishing left to do in development, but I think we’ll see a big, solid launch from this one, and I think a few Bioware and Mass Effect fanboys who haven’t yet been convinced to jump in on an MMO will give this one a shot.

This post is long already, but I did want to mention one other thing I’m thinking about lately: Free-to-play games. It’s interesting — I’ve been following the free-to-play market for a few years now, and a couple of years ago, all of the best free-to-play games were coming out of Asia, specifically Korea and China. Developers wanted a bigger free-to-play market here in the US (and some Facebook-based companies like Zynga had it), but they couldn’t quite figure out how to get hardcore Western gamers to submit to a free-to-play model. Back then, microtransactions was a bad word — buying in-game items was akin to cheating.

Nowadays, of course, things are different — Riot Games is making big bucks with its League of Legends title, iOS games are selling in-app purchases like hotcakes, and just this week, both Valve and Blizzard have moved their games towards a free-to-play system, with Team Fortress 2 going completely free-to-play, and WoW becoming free-to-play up to level 20. What the heck happened?

I tweeted this yesterday, but I think what actually happened is this: For a long time, developers were trying to figure out how to convince Western audiences that free-to-play was OK, that these Korean games that required you to buy potions to win were actually fun. But in the end, they couldn’t do that — even big Nexon titles just aren’t taking off in the West the way they have overseas. So instead of changing the audience, developers instead changed the games. They simply took games people were already playing, and turned those free-to-play instead. And that’s a much easier transition: Team Fortress 2 had already been free for a short period, and a trial account for WoW was already easy to find (heck, I’ve got three referral keys sitting in my email right now), so why not push those out to a free audience?

I still think we won’t see big budget titles get released as free-to-play, unless they’re already supported by a serious microtransaction system like League of Legends (I don’t think, for example, that we’ll hear about Bioshock Infinite going free-to-play any time soon). But free-to-play is emerging as a way to make big audiences even bigger, so what I think we’ll see more of is established titles bringing out a free-to-play component. That will be things like a free-to-play Call of Duty game, free games from companies like Popcap, and things like CCP’s Dust 514, which is set to bring a larger and more varied audience to the already popular and profitable EVE Online.

Free-to-play is a fascinating model, and you don’t have to be a genius to see that it’s growing at a rapid pace. But I do find it interesting how it’s grown — developers tried to take the Western audience and bring it to the free-to-play games, and that didn’t work. So now we’re seeing developers take the games that people are already interested in, and bring those to a free-to-play audience. And that’s working, with a surprising amount of success.

This has really riled me up, and rather than doing what I’ve whined about in the past and sending a bunch of tweets about it, I just decided to throw a blog post together. This is pre-E3 week, and I’m technically too busy to write anything other than what I’m already supposed to be working on, but I’m pretty angry about this, so I’m putting this together quickly.

Here’s the deal: For a long time, Blizzard (who makes World of Warcraft, though if you don’t know that, none of this post will probably make any sense to you) has promised to include friends in the Dungeon Finder system. Right now, you can play with people from other realms, but they’re all random people, and while you can chat with your Real ID friends, you can’t actually meet up with them in the game if you happen to be on other realms. Fortunately, today, Blizzard has announced that it’s very close to releasing that functionality, finally allowing me to play with all of my Real ID friends across realms. Unfortunately, Blizzard wants to charge a premium fee for that service.

Here’s the thing: World of Warcraft already charges a premium fee. I’ve been paying $15 a month since I started playing the game, which is more money than I actually want to admit I’ve given them. Sure, I’ve gotten a lot of game out of that, but the world has changed since that original agreement started. Back then, $15 a month was worth it to play an online game, because there weren’t that many around that worked well. These days, there are tons of terrific online games around, many of which are much cheaper (my Xbox Live gold membership has been a bargain compared to WoW), and some of which are completely free.

It’s not that those games don’t charge — they do charge for customization or other services, and those charges are very reasonable and in large part allow those games to be very profitable. But WoW is already a premium game — it’s already the biggest drain on my gaming spending. If Blizzard wants to charge for optional services like realm transfers, character re-customization, mobile access, or even, yes, the idiotic Sparkle Pony, then fine. I can definitely stay away from using those services, because they’re all extra and optional.

But playing with my friends? That’s a pretty core part of an MMO, and it’s outright greedy of Blizzard to suggest that I, as one of their premium subscribers, need to pay another premium fee to enjoy their game with my friends in that way. You may argue that I’m being overly entitled, and sure, why not. I can play with my friends in League of Legends, and Portal 2, and Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption, and Crysis 2, and all of the other multiplayer games I play, without a premium charge. So yes, I do feel entitled to this kind of gameplay, especially when I’m already still paying $15 a month.

In the end, Blizzard can charge whatever it wants, but if they stick with a “premium charge” for this service, I won’t use it. They say that only the people inviting their friends have to pay the cost, and I feel that’s a little shady — I’m half tempted to ignore any invites from the service, just because I don’t want people paying for me when I’m clearly so vehemently against a system like this. Blizzard’s holding me and my friends hostage, keeping us apart until one of us cracks and ponies up the cash.

But most importantly, aside from any personal issue I have with the charges, I find it really sad that Blizzard, a company that’s always been about letting players play their games as they like, is so out of touch with what the real multiplayer game market is like. MMOs, at this point, are a free-to-play endeavor. For a few years now, the only MMO that’s really been able to get away with a subscription on a mass market level is World of Warcraft, and that’s because it’s worth it. If WoW were free already, I’d happily pony up a few bucks for the ability to play with my friends.

But it’s not, of course. And to ask your players to play extra for such a core feature, especially when they’re the players who’ve stuck around and continued to pay when lots of other players have moved on to free titles, shows a real disrespect for your player base and a real misunderstanding about what is happening in this market.

So this is one of the weirdest things to happen to me on Twitter: last night I had a tweet that went viral. Around 10pm last night, I happened to be deleting an app from my iPhone, and something funny about the way the icons looked occurred to me. I tweeted that thought:

And as you can see, it blew up soon after. Note that those 800 retweets are recent — as far as I can tell, that tweet has been retweeted over a few thousand times. And those are just the retweets using Twitter’s official retweet button; lots of people just retweeted it as their own. In fact, these two accounts straight up stole it, and those each got retweeted over a couple dozen times, according to Twitter’s search site. In other words, this tweet really really hit people in the right place. I’m a little worried that despite all of the other work I’ve done, it’s the most popular thing I’ve written so far.

So what the heck happened?

First, and probably most interesting about all of this, I will tell you that nothing happened on my end. I did nothing to promote this tweet any more than any of the other crazy thoughts I put out on Twitter, and in fact in my work as a blogger, I’ve tried to promote other tweets with much less success. But I have been watching how this has all worked very closely, and I find it fascinating how this thing has spread. I once read an article that suggested that “memes” like this were the real sentient creatures, with humans serving as the mere microbial gel that memes grow in, and while I think that’s a little kooky to be true, it’s certainly what could have happened here. This idea came unbidden to me, I wrote that tweet more or less whole, and then it propagated out by itself. It was just the kind of thing that people a) thought was funny, and b) just had to share.

It all started in a matter of minutes, actually — I happened to check the retweets on my posts just a few minutes after I put that up, and within just ten minutes or so of posting it, I’d already hit a couple of hundred retweets, so it had already reached enough of an audience to go exponentially viral. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t do a great job of tracking exactly who retweets things and when, but I do know that two big retweeters early on were @majicdave and @phillryu, both excellent and popular iPhone developers that I’ve worked with in the past. As far as I can tell, a few influencers like those guys retweeted my tweet in just the first few minutes, and in that time, enough of a crowd had gathered to spread it around.

About an hour after all of that happened, I got a tweet from someone telling me that the original post had hit Twitter’s front page. Twitter’s front page has changed for me, but I know it used to have a scrolling field of “hot” tweets going by, and I presume my tweet made it there, wherever that is now. I don’t know if that’s editorially run or features tweets chosen by an algorithm, but I’m guessing it’s both — my tweet got enough retweets to get flagged in Twitter’s popularity system, and then an editor somewhere read it, figured it was funny and original (which, ahem, it was) and then sent it to the front page. At that point, the audience changed — instead of just my usual gaming and Apple audience, I started getting replies and retweets from all sorts of people, mostly social media-savvy folks who probably use and read Twitter a lot. A lot of cute girls, actually.

These are the people who were finding me for the first time, and I started seeing “following you on Twitter” emails show up in my inbox. Since the tweet got big last night, I’ve probably had 400 new people following me on Twitter. Some of them are tech people or gamers (my usual crowd, thanks to my blog work), but a lot of them are just social media-ites, looking for the next big thing). I put a cute tweet up last night welcoming them, but I have no idea if they’ll stay and become my fans, or see all of my usual emo tweeting and move on. We’ll see.

Despite my two examples above, I am kind of surprised at how much I’m actually cited as the author of that tweet. Like I said, most people just used the retweet button, which automatically cites me, but a surprising amount of people gave me a via or used the old “RT @mikeschramm” format. In fact, that’s had some interesting effects — I’ve gotten quite a few replies back that are simple “LOL” or “That’s funny” (and they’re still coming in as I write this — thanks!), and at least one Twitter trending service told me that for a short time yesterday, my name was actually a top trending term in the United States (because so many people were RT’ing @mikeschramm). I never saw it trending on Twitter’s actual page, but I find it funny anyway.

I should probably note, too, that I didn’t get paid at all for that little piece of writing. Someone suggested I turn it into a t-shirt, though it didn’t seem worth the trouble (and c’mon, it’s not that great — it’s not like I want to be the “screaming icons” guy for the rest of my life). Maybe if I can turn my new followers into fans, I may get something out of this, but for now, Twitter remains free entertainment that I’m giving away. Fine by me.

I’m glad people liked it — like I said, I didn’t really think that tweet was any different from any of the other crazy things I get from my brain. If I had to nail down why I think it’s been so popular (and I warn you, this is me killing the joke by explaining it), I would say it was just a new, emotional way of looking at something a lot of people recognized. Also, it incorporated something else I’ve noticed in comedy, which is that people often laugh at danger when it’s revealed to be safe — we think it’s funny that those icons are screaming, because we know they can’t really do that. I know, that’s killing the joke, but this is analysis, and analysis doesn’t have a sense of humor.

And I’m analyzing this because I have tried to get trending tweets before, not on my own account, but often on the accounts of the sites I’ve worked for. I’m fascinated by the whole process — it’s a weird mix of tech and humanity that’s tough to wrangle and almost impossible to control. The only tweets I’ve ever seen hit regularly are big news announcements that fit in just a few words, information that people want to share quickly with the various audiences that follow them. And if nothing else, this little episode shows that people will either be into something or not — I doubt it’d be possible to get a tweet trending that’s any more than ten or fifteen minutes old. Either people are in on it and it’s something they have to share, or all they’ll do is see it, give it a chuckle, and then move on.

Yes, the past few weeks I’ve been twittering about working on something called the #secretschrammproject. In reality I’ve been working on it for even longer than that, and there has been a lot of times where I worked on it but didn’t actually tell anyone about it. It’s a long story, longer than I can tell here, and most of it would bore you anyway. But here’s what I’d like you to know right now:

I’m working on a book.

That’s not really news — I’ve been working on a book for a while now, actually on a couple of books with various amounts of seriousness. Originally I wanted to write a novel, and I still plan to write a novel, but this book isn’t that novel. I’ve been writing for a long time, and I’ve probably written about two novels over the years (three if you count one that’s really terrible), but I don’t think I really have anything that’s novel-length that’s really that good. And when I finally set out a goal to publish something this year, I decided that I still wasn’t really good enough to hammer out one story and really make it fly as my first chance out of the gate. I’d like to think I could, but honestly, I don’t think I can.

So what I’ve decided to do is publish an ebook myself instead. Personally, I’ve been using ebooks more and more — reading them on my iPhone and checking them out on the Kindle and the iPad, and I think there’s a lot of value to a book in “e-form,” if you will. I’ll be selling this ebook on a few different marketplaces (iBooks and the Kindle Store, and here on the website as a PDF and an ePub file or whatever you need it as), so anyone with any kind of reader will be able to download it and check it out. And because I’m doing it myself, I won’t have to worry about selling it to an agent or a publisher before I sell it to you readers — I’ll just be able to put it up and if you want to, you can come grab and enjoy it.

So what will it be? That’s the fun part. I have a ton of writing that I’ve done in various places in the past — not on TUAW or WoW Insider or Joystiq, but just little fiction pieces and essays and other short things, that have appeared both here on my own website and on other various places around the net. This will basically be a collection of those — not all of them, but a nice tidy collection of some of my best short pieces. I’ll re-work and republish some of my favorite pieces in the past (that you may not have seen before, as they’re hidden in the archives or have disappeared from the ‘net already), I’ll put in some pieces that never actually saw print but were written a while ago, and I’m working on some new pieces that no one has ever seen before, too. All told, I’m aiming for about ten to twenty of these little essays — every one of them makes me laugh, so hopefully you’ll like them as well. It’ll kind of be a greatest hits collection, except that you’ll never have seen most of the pieces before.

I’m also planning to put in a bunch of extras — I am hoping to commission some art to include in among the stories (because I loved reading the old Sherlock Holmes books with the old Sidney Paget drawings and mysterious captions beneath them, not to mention that there are a lot of artists on the Internet whose work I really admire), and I am planning to invite some guests to help me out with some text as well. Because I’m publishing this all myself, I hope to make it something really interesting and special — it’ll still be an actual ebook in that it’s a file you can download, but I love books as much as anyone and I’m really excited about the chance to be able to make my own. I get to set up an ISBN! I may put together a glossary and/or footnotes. If you like reading, you’ll probably love this book.

Anyway, it’s still a ways out — I don’t have an actual title to share with you yet (“A Werewolf Orientation Manual and Other Stories” is the best I’ve got so far, but I don’t think that will be it), and quite a few of the stories are still being worked on. I haven’t started putting the file together yet at all, which I expect to take a little while in terms of design and technical tweaking. If you want a date, I’m aiming for sometime in July, though it could be later than that. Definitely before the summer ends.

I haven’t landed on a price yet either, but it won’t be any more than ten dollars, probably not even that. I would give it away for free, but I want an iPad, people. Daddy needs gadget money. And hopefully the product will be enjoyable enough that it’ll be worth it. I’ll do my best.

So anyway, that’s the plan. Stay tuned — I’ll eventually be sharing some excerpts here, of course, and I will definitely let you know everywhere when it’s available.

In fact, if you want to get regular email updates about the book, send me a note at mike AT mikeschramm.com with the subject line of “secretschrammproject” and I’ll include you on a makeshift email list, which I promise never to sell or spam you with. And heck, I just thought of this now, but if you join that list, I’ll probably give you a special offer or a discount on the whole thing when it’s out anyway. How exciting is that!

If you’re reading this, it means you are interested in what I’m doing, and for that I am so incredibly grateful that I can’t really put it all into simple words. Thank you. Thanks very much, and stay tuned for more on this thing going forward.

Hey, ask me some questions on Twitter, and I’ll answer them here live right now before you very eyes!

Q: @oturista: Have you read The Name of the Wind and the sequel The Wise Man’s Fear?

A: No I haven’t, but it’s next on my list to read. I’m still trying to get through Gardens of the Moon, which was recommended to me on Twitter, and is a long slog through the first 200 pages. I’m about 400 pages in and it’s picked up a bit though. As soon as I’m done with it, unless I’m really sold on the series, I’ll read Name of the Wind.

Q: @joshdjx: When did you lose your virginity? :)

A: High school. I was 17. It was awkward. Just like most of my relationships since. :(

Q: @linenboy: if Mike Schramm was a brand, what product would it be for?

A: Mike Schramm (TM) is a brand! It’s how I make all the money, yo.

But if it was a fictional brand, I would put my name on Mike Schramm brand industrial crackers. Yes, when normal crackers won’t cut it, Mike Schramm brand industrial crackers will lift all of your condiments and then some. Cheese, meat, cream cheese, dip, whatever you need. Mike Schramm brand industrial crackers will get the job done. They’re tasty, and good for you!

Q: @ayemcshane: epic fight. If you could have your way with One historic figure who Would it it be and what is your weapon of Choice?

A: As I write this, I’m watching Ip Man, which is apparently the story of a legendary martial arts master that trained Bruce Lee. I would not want to fight him — from what I’m seeing in this movie, he would wipe the floor with me.

I guess if I wanted to win the fight, I’d choose some geeky dude from the history of science, like James Watson, one of the guys who discovered DNA. You know he’d be easy to take in a fight. And again, if I really wanted to win, I’d choose a weapon like a gun — although if we both get guns, that might be trouble. I would say James Watson with a samurai sword. Do I win?

Q: @randilj: Where do you see yourself progressing in the next 5 years?

A: My current goal is to buy a house, so I’d like to do that within the next five years. After that I don’t know — I am supposed to be working on a book and publishing that, so ideally I’ll be writing books before long. But that’s just an ideal — I have no idea what I’ll be doing in five years. I guess I’ll say I’ll still be in LA, though I don’t think I’ll be living where I currently live now.

As for a job, I have no idea — I love what I’m doing now, so I could still be doing that. But then again, it could dry up tomorrow. Who knows?

Q: @siujrh I love TUAW but u dont seem as happy as on wowinsider

A: That’s not a question!

I like writing, and specifically blogging. I really enjoyed working on WoW Insider, and I really like working on Joystiq and TUAW. I’m extremely lucky to have been able to do everything I’ve done since I went full-time freelance a few years ago.

Q: @ayemcshane: Victory @mikeschramm

A: Take that, James Watson!

Q: @markusn: dinner with two people of your choice, incl historic persons. Who and why?

A: I would like to have dinner with a former President, because I’m pretty sure once you enter office, you’re told some pretty crazy stuff. Roosevelt seems like he would be an interesting person to sit down and eat with.

Other than that, I’d like to chat with someone who stood by their convictions no matter what, and ask them how they put up with such a crazy world even while they were chasing after something that seemed impossible. Gandhi comes to mind, but I’m sure there’s quite a few people in history that would match that description. Not that I’m chasing anything really impossible, but this world is really nuts sometimes. I’d be interested to know how someone like that dealt with it.

Q: @dblueguy: What would you do for a Klondike bar?

A: I was going to say “ask someone for a Klondike bar” as a joke, but honestly, if I saw someone on the street with two Klondike bars, I probably wouldn’t just walk up to them and ask them for the second one, just in case they weren’t eating it.

Ip Man has gotten pretty good, so I’m going to tune in and watch that. Thanks for all the questions, people!

I just looked up the price online for a pack of Klondike bars, and I found out that Klondike bars are often sold for $4 in packs of six. So I guess I would pay 66 cents for a Klondike bar. Anything more than that, and you can just keep it, I’m good, thanks.

Turns out this movie Ip Man is pretty good. Think I’m done here — I’m going to tune in and watch this for a bit. THanks for all your questions!

A few weeks ago at GDC, I got to meet up with the guys from Remedy Entertainment, who were showing me their new iOS game Death Rally. It’s based on an old game they did back in the 90s, where you drive a little car around a track that’s equipped with machine guns, blowing up your fellow racers and fighting for first place. I wrote about it for TUAW, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, as I said there.

While I was doing that demo, Remedy also told me that they were running a contest with all of the press members at GDC — they were going to have everyone who saw the game race around one specific level in one specific car, and the best time among all the journalists there would win an actual cameo in the game. Their face, in other words, would be seen alongside the other cameos, including one Duke Nukem, John Gore from the iOS game Minigore, and a character from Remedy’s console title, Alan Wake. My first attempts at the game weren’t that great — the joystick controlling the car works well, but takes a little getting used to, and at the end of the demo, when I finally got handed the controls and told this was going to be my one chance at fame, I didn’t have too many expectations.

But when I grabbed that virtual joystick and started the race, something in me kicked in. Some primal competitive juices flowed through my brain, and I drove that little car around the track as if my life depended on it. I quickly abandoned the AI players, caught every turn perfectly, hit every shortcut dead-on, and raced ahead at full speed along the stretches. I didn’t see any of the AI cars the rest of that race — I was too far ahead of them, and I almost even lapped them at one point. As I finished, my time came up on screen, and the Remedy developer read it off, startled: fifty-two seconds. Both he and the PR person in the room were shocked — the actual producer of the game had raced earlier that day, and hadn’t come up with any better than a minute. There were still a few journalists left to race, but my time was by far the best they’d seen.

And sure enough, a few weeks later, I got the email to send in a picture for them to use in the game. You can download the game right now (it’s on sale at launch for $4.99, but it’s a universal app, so it’ll work on iPhone and iPad), and you can race against and attack me whenever I randomly come up as a member of the competition. There are a few other gaming journalists hidden in there as well — Brian Crecente from Kotaku is one of the racers (as “Brian C.”), and there’s a “G. Keighley,” who I haven’t seen, but I assume is the G4 host himself. Here’s me in the game, about to race myself (“toucansamurai” is my Game Center name):

Remedy did also ask me for some audio clips — some of the bosses in the game will throw off little catchphrases as they start a race and as they finish. And I did send them some that I thought were pretty clever (“How’s it going, everybody in the Death Rally?” and “How’s my driving? It’s TUAW-riffic!”, for example), but I didn’t hear them come up as I played the game last night, so I assume they didn’t get used. Still, it’s pretty awesome seeing myself in the game, and thanks to Remedy for actually using my whole name — I would be a little bummed if I was in there as just “Mike S.”

So there’s the story — if you saw my name in the game and did a Google search to see just who I was, there you go. If not, you really should buy it — of course I’m biased (though I didn’t get paid at all for my appearance), but it’s a solid little action racer, with a nice upgrade path and very fluid controls. I’ll see you out there on the laps!

Update: Ha, apparently there’s an achievement for beating me, too, the title of which is hilarious. Thanks to @poggn on Twitter for the picture!

This is awesome — apparently the latest episode of Batman: Brave and the Bold (seen on YouTube here for as long as it stays up) is chock full of classic Silver Age Batman and Superman references, including old covers, nods to old costumes and storylines, and old character cameos. It’s just amazing — there’s more love for old comic books in that one half hour cartoon than there’s been on TV and in movies for the past ten years.

There’s even some straightforward references to old Bats/Supes battles, including the classic knockdown brawl in The Dark Knight Returns (where Batman proves, as far as I’m concerned, that given enough time, he could beat up anyone ever). This isn’t just a neat animator’s in-joke, this is a full-on homage to one of the most classic periods in superhero comics.

I’ve already gushed about how great DC and Warner Brothers have been doing with those straight-to-DVD movies lately (Crisis on Two Earths is my recent favorite, if you haven’t seen any of them), but this is just incredible: a seriously entertaining animated superhero show written and created by people who clearly know and love the old comics they’re based on.

Related: You should totally watch the Music Meister episode of Batman: BatB if you haven’t yet, featuring Neil Patrick Harris leading a musical story of Batman. And this scene from another episode, with the Birds of Prey girls singing to an evil Bruce Wayne about various DC superhero gossip, is just about the funniest comic-related thing around.

Just putting this here, mostly for my own reference:

Bayonetta
Fable 3
WoW: Cataclysm
Limbo
Deathspank
Super Meat Boy
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

And that’s all just from last year. Haven’t even picked up Dead Space 2 or Bulletstorm yet. Clearly I need more free time.

I don’t know if I’ve actually mentioned it here, but if you follow me on any of the various social networks I frequent, you may have heard that I’ve been taking improv classes. Originally, it was just a lark — I joined a bowling league when I first came to LA, and then planned to try an improv class (and then maybe take a cooking class or learn to brew some beer) — but thanks to some combination of amusement and apparent skill I’ve decided to stick with it. I’ve conquered four levels, am about to sign up for a fifth, and have joined up with a team that’s rehearsing and performing with some regularity.

I usually say that I’m not a performer, and I don’t really consider myself to be one. I like being in the spotlight, but I think it’s my Midwestern roots that taught me never to seek it out. “Shy” is also not a label that I usually ascribe to myself, but it’s true that I don’t like talking to people I don’t know. In a room of people I’ve never met, I usually stick to the wall, maybe have a drink, and eventually leave just to escape being so awkward. Around friends, I can joke and laugh, and when put on the spot to perform or speak, I can usually deliver (and enjoy doing so). But I think I lean more introverted than anything else, just because it’s less trouble, for me and others.

I’ve actually learned a lot about this kind of thing because I started doing improv. When you’re put on a stage and asked to play any number of characters or speak from any of many various points of view, you learn which points of view you can more easily espouse and which are more foreign. Playing a nerd feels simple and easy to make entertaining because it’s territory that I have traveled already (and I’m not complaining — I credit my nerdery with my livelhood). But playing someone confident and outgoing is not quite as easy for me — the choices that character would make are so different from the ones I make every day that I’m surprised how hard it is to make them.

That reads obvious when I type it out — of course acting is hard, and acting like someone very different from you is harder. But among the things I do admit I do well is observe, and the best characters I’ve played in my short career are imitations of people and character types that I’ve seen many times and know well. Surely I’ve seen confident and characters before — I can list off friends and acquaintances that I’d call confident and outgoing. It surprised me, I guess, that it was so hard to simply say what they would say and do what they would do.

And part of being in a performing group, I’ve discovered, is the constant pursuit of cohesion and improvement. To be a good improviser, especially one on a team trying to be good, is to be comfortable and ready with a quick line in any situation, and so I’ve found that being part of an improv group requires you to constantly push yourself (and your fellow members) out into very uncomfortable situations, only to make sure you’re right behind them and supporting when you do. One thing we’ve done as a group, though not in a really formal way, is to critique each other on our characters and choices. And since, as I said, there’s a real correlation between character choices and personal values, those critiques have expanded beyond just talking with each other about our improvisation, and moved on into talking to each other about ourselves.

In short, I’ve been told that I’m not confident enough. It’s not the first time I’ve been told this — when I was a kid, an older friend, somewhat of a mentor, came to me and confessed he was worried about my self esteem. I’m fine, I answered him. In fact, some of the kids at school had called me “arrogant” before — if anything, I said, I’m overconfident. My friend nodded doubtfully and left it at that.

But he was probably right, just as my group probably is now. For whatever reason, I often am my own worst critic, kicking myself for small mistakes even when I succeed in the big picture. When I’m at those gatherings hanging on the wall, or more likely walking home afterwards, I’m usually racking my brain trying to figure out what my deal is, why other people find conversation so simple and easy when I’ve got nothing to talk about and no one I want to talk about it with. When I’m given compliments, I try to take them with a thanks, but I still sneak in qualifications, to my own chagrin. Sure, I say, I did land that three-pointer pretty well, but it’s mostly the shoes. I just threw the ball and hoped. But thanks for the compliment. I appreciate it.

I’m sure it’s probably fixable, though the answers are probably the old platitudes of believing in yourself or valuing your strengths, neither of which I’m really bothered to do (and I could write a whole other post on how this thing supports itself — I do well but push myself to do better, which makes me do more well, which pushes me to push myself again, which makes me do better, and so on). And I didn’t join improv for the therapy — I joined it to imagine some fun things and make some jokes, both of which I’ve done (and do), with varying success. I don’t expect improv to fix my issues — in fact, though this is probably controversial to say, I do expect that most personal flaws don’t ever really get fixed anyway, so embedded they are in our own minds and experiences. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try, or that I don’t, but everything I’ve read about the way the mind works tells me it’s a snowball thing anyway. Reinforcement is a hell of a drug.

But I do find it interesting that improv has revealed this specific personal flaw. I still don’t consider myself a performer, even as I’m regularly performing. But I am surprised that I’ve learned so much about myself just from pretending to be other people.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about my digital identity. A long time ago, I never wanted to share anything online — I never used my real name, I never really registered for any online accounts, and I generally just watched from the outside, content to enjoy the, um, content rather than contribute. As my Internet-based career has picked up, though, that’s obviously not really a choice any more, and more recently I’ve just decided my life is more or less an open book. There are still plenty of things I don’t willingly share, but basically I’m upfront about who I am online, and I stand by whatever I post, whether it’s on one of the sites I work on or just some random blog or message board.

I think that’s the right choice, actually — so many things that result in online embarrassment (like, as just a random recent example, this little mini-scandal with the Jets coach) usually just stem from people thinking they were posting anonymously or privately when they really weren’t. If you just figure all of the time that everyone you know (work, friends, family) can read and see everything you post online, then there’s not a lot to worry about. Your parents may see a curse word here and there, and your boss may read that you’re partying on a Friday night, but generally you realize you need to behave yourself.

But my worry lately has been more personal. I’m thinking about writing more for myself — one of my goals for a long time has been to publish a book, and since I’ve just finished a big goal in my life (more on that soon), I think it’s time to start cracking on the publishing thing. I’m looking back at my writing, and have realized that the less I write, the better it tends to be. Some of my favorite things were written back when I was working retail during the day — my only outlet for creativity came after a full day of mindless labor. Nowadays, I pay my checks with writing, and tweet my thoughts all day long, and I’m finding in some cases that at the end of the day, I’ve already said everything I’ve wanted to.

So I’m thinking about how I act online, and what the right thing to do really is. To help correlate some of that thinking, I made up a little survey last night. I wanted to see what people expected of me on Twitter and Facebook, and what my friends and followers wanted out of me. I could probably guess these things (and indeed, in most cases, I did), but surveys and stats are fun, and why not. You may think it’s weird to create a survey just for your Twitter followers, and I wouldn’t disagree, but I thought it was interesting.

So here are the results.

I sent out the link to my Twitter page twice — once last night and once earlier today. My Twitter feed (where I have 3800 followers, give or take a few hundred spambots) goes both here on this site (where almost nobody reads it) and to Facebook, where presumably 400 friends read it, but it’s probably only more like a couple dozen. As of this writing, 73 people responded to the survey. Ostensibly, that’s only a return rate of 1.8%, but what the heck, we’ll just presume these numbers are representative. These people are all self-selected anyway, and they took the time to answer this for me — it’s not like I gave away a fake free iPod or anything.

Actually, I’ll pause for one second here to say that looking at these results, I’d bet that these numbers are representative not just for me, but for most users on Twitter and Facebook. A recent analysis said that most Tweets are actually ignored, and that doesn’t surprise me at all. The things that people want (and don’t want) to see in my Twitter feed probably apply to most people who aren’t me, too. Though I’m just guessing on that.

Anyway, back to the survey. The first question was how much I should tweet. I’ve been pretty sensitive on spam tweeting — I’ve mostly unfollowed all of the people (even friends) who fill up my Twitter list with a series of ten or even twenty tweets in a row. I don’t appreciate spamming or chain tweeting and I try not to do it on my own feeds. Last week, since it was so slow, I actually experimented (though I’m not sure if anyone noticed) with just tweeting once per day, just to see what it was like. Usually, I try to tweet no more often than once per hour. Nobody wants to overdose on Schramm.

55% of respondents said that I should tweet “as much as you do now.” I expected this — people are pretty good at filtering out things they don’t care about, not to mention that this is all being asked of people who are currently following me anyway, so anyone unhappy with the frequency of my tweeting (too much or too little), probably wouldn’t be taking the survey. But what did surprise me is the 39% of people (these percentages are rounded, in case they don’t add up to 100) who said I should tweet more often. I don’t know if I will, but I thought “more” and “less” would be generally split up. Instead, only 4% said to tweet less.

The next two questions were the ones I really wanted to ask — I’ve gotten lots of feedback from singular people on various things I should or shouldn’t tweet about, but I wanted to see some more generic feedback. Of the things that people liked seeing in my tweets, “Random stuff about games” and “Random stuff about WoW” (World of Warcraft, for the uninitiated) battled it out for the top spot with 78%. In the end, games won, and again, not that surprising — games and WoW are most of my work experience so far, and they’re where most of my Twitter followers come from. “Links to interesting stories” are also well liked at 73%, and that’s what I think Twitter is really about for me — sharing things I see online and am interested in.

On the dislike side, I’m not surprised that “Random stuff about my feelings” won with 36% of the vote. That’s what I’ve gotten the most feedback on the past (“Mike, you’re bumming me out!”), and I agree, that’s the least exciting stuff to read on Twitter. But sometimes you have to share that stuff. And a lot of people told me that they were disappointed that the dislike question required an answer (something I did intentionally) — they said they didn’t really dislike anything coming out of my Twitter feed. I appreciate that.

The biggest surprise in this section was the “Really random stuff” answer. I like using Twitter in weird ways — I’ve wanted for a while to try Tweeting as a character for a few days, or Tweet in another language for a bit, or just post something crazy. In the past I’ve tweeted song lyrics that I like, and people usually reply with a “Say wut?” kind of answer. I like using Twitter in random ways, though hopefully never in an annoying fashion. At any rate, you guys probably don’t — “Really random stuff” got the least like votes, and the second most dislike votes. That’s interesting to hear. It probably won’t stop me from being random every once in a while, but I think that’s just a matter of people expecting a certain thing from my feed, and getting something they don’t understand or don’t want. That makes sense, I guess.

Speaking of random, I’m glad to see that 55% of respondents chose pie over cake. I’ve gone back and forth on this important issue, but I’m glad to see that I agree with the current majority.

The essay question answers were as funny as I’d hoped they would be. Here’s a few good ones:

“Fear is butts.”

“Ha ha! Internet.”

Yes, Ha ha! Internet indeed.

And it turns out that everyone, 100%, every single person who took the survey does indeed love me back. Thanks!

How have I never seen this before?

Congrats to Mass Effect 2 on a well-deserved win of Joystiq’s game of the year!

For the fourth year in a row, here’s my annual wrapup of what I liked in music, movies, and video games this year.

Top five albums of 2010

“Weathervanes” – Freelance Whales
This was recommended to me by my friend Jaime and apparently she knows my taste in music — quirky, poppy, lots of rhythms, and a weird echo of loneliness. This album unfortunately falls off a bit near the end, but the first six songs or so are some of the best I’ve heard all year.

“Release Me” – The Like
This was the first band I really “found” at a concert here in LA — they’re three pretty girls whose fathers are music producers, but they also happen to be really good musicians in their own right. If you listen to their earlier stuff, it’s a little more dreamy (and not bad), but for this album they grew the group out and teamed up with producer Mark Ronson to really turn towards vintage rock and roll. Yes, it’s ironic, and hipstery. But I really love Z’s growly, knowing voice and Tennessee’s perfect drums. They’re like a postmodern, alternate universe Beatles.

“My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” – Kanye West
Even after all of the hype, I didn’t really think I’d like it — I don’t really like Kanye and his ego, and while I do listen to his other albums, I’ve never really been impressed by him. When I put this one on the iPod, I didn’t really expect to be impressed. But I was anyway — ‘Ye’s as dark as he was on “808s and Heartbreak” (if not darker), but he’s got his musicianship down. And though he lets his ego talk (too) loudly when he’s not making music, in the studio he apparently knows when to shut up and let talents like Bon Iver and Nicki Minaj shine. I was really impressed by this one, in spite of my expectations — all the way through, it’s an amazing album, both for him and for music in general.

“Sigh No More” – Mumford and Sons
The Decemberists borrow folk music in the English tradition and sometimes it feels hollow, as if Colin and company are making fun of the old ballads they’re aping. But this one borrows from the same tradition and yet feels raw-nerve real. Plus, I have to give them kudos for creating a rock radio hit with a major banjo part in “Little Lion Man.” That’s hard to do nowadays.

“Treats” – Sleigh Bells
I was late to the party on this one — I really only gave this album a good listen as real sleigh bells were starting to be heard later on this year. But when I did actually digest it, I was really impressed. I have no idea what they’re doing on this record; it literally is noise. I don’t really hear instruments or a mix in there, and I couldn’t really tell you any of the lyrics. But it’s really fun to listen to anyway.

Honorable mentions: “Sir Lucious Left Foot the Son of Chico Dusty” – Big Boi, “B.o.B Presents: The Adventure of Bobby Ray” – B.o.B., “The Five Ghosts” – Stars, “High Violet” – The National, “Volume Two” – She & Him, “Broken Bells” – Broken Bells, “The Lady Killer” – Cee-lo Green.

Update: I honestly forgot that Peter Gabriel’s great “Scratch my Back” cover album came out this year — it would have definitely been included in my top five had I remembered.

Top five movies of 2010 (that I saw*)

*Yeah, once again I’ve been slacking on my movie watching. You’d think moving out to LA would actually get me out to the movie theater more, but alas it’s not true. I’ve missed out on a lot of movies people are saying might be the year’s best, including The King’s Speech, Catfish, Black Swan, 127 Hours, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Jackass 3D, and so on. I’ll list these anyway — these are the best movies I saw this year.

Inception
Even with the disclaimer above, I feel pretty sure in saying I did see the best movie that came out this year, and it was Inception. I loved it — I loved how the movie lived by its own internal logic, and while I’m not a huge fan of Leonardo DiCaprio, I was very impressed by both Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page. Plus, the visuals were just so impressive. We’re at a point now with film, I think (and video games, to kind of a lesser extent), where there’s no technological limit on what we can actually show on screen. The only limit is in the director’s imagination, and Christopher Nolan definitely has an active one of those.

The Fighter
On Christmas Day, I went with my friends to see three movies in a row in the theater: Tron, this one, and True Grit. And while I really enjoyed them all (I’m not sure whether I’m going to put True Grit on this list yet or not), I was surprised that The Fighter stuck out for me as the best one. I don’t usually like films based on real people, and Mark Wahlberg doesn’t really make me think “actor.” But he played his part well in this movie, and was surrounded on all sides by people who can act — the impressive Melissa Leo, my actress crush Amy Adams, and Christian Bale (who’s rivaling Gary Oldman for range lately). Even O’Keefe (who is actually played by the real O’Keefe, it turns out) won me over in the end, and what I kind of thought would be an overwrought, predictable sports movie turned out to have way more heart and depth than I expected. I’m glad I saw this early — anyone waiting to see it until after it wins all kinds of awards probably won’t be as impressed as I was with it.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Unfortunately, I fall just slightly over the target age group for this one — the generation that really identifies with Canadian rocker and romance-seeker Scott Pilgrim is actually a few years younger than me, I think. So the actual movie didn’t play with me quite as well as it would have had I been young and hip enough to been a fan of Sex Bob-omb and Ramona Flowers before I graduated college. Still, I liked it a lot, and it earns a place on this list for the circumstances I saw it in: at a Comic-Con screening, a few weeks before it actually came out. I was there with an audience full of Comic-Con attending Scott Pilgrim fans, all of whom had gotten in the theater for free after waiting in line for over and hour, and all of whom knew that the film’s stars and creators were sitting right there in the audience with them. I’ve never seen a room so electrified for a movie — people laughed at every joke, cheered every reference, and loved every character. It was probably the most wild two hours I’ve ever had in a movie theater, and of course it made the movie that much better.

Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths
Not actually being on TV hasn’t stopped Bruce Timm and Warner Brothers’s DC animation unit from making some amazing animated films about the DC Universe, and while this is the best of the year, the other two DC animated movies that came out this year weren’t bad either. This one is based on the old Earth 2 storyline (as well as a few other alternate universe storylines that Batman, Superman, and the rest of the JLA have had to face throughout the years, and it’s just plain awesome. You’ve got Superman doing his big blue boy scout thing, heroes who aren’t what they seem, and as usual in the Justice League, by the end it’s up to grumpy old Batman to save the multiverse (spoiler: from another grumpy old Batman). I loved this movie — it’s the best superhero movie I’ve seen in a long time, and I just love how geeky Bruce Timm and his teams are getting with these direct-to-videos, calling out old DC heroes and storylines that would never make it in the mainstream movies coming out lately.

Alice in Wonderland
Anything Tim Burton makes just charms me over. I don’t even know if this was that great a movie (I have seen the original Disney Alice once, and even read the book once, but didn’t remember all of the particulars), but I really enjoy how, even as he’s moved more and more towards the mainstream, Burton’s been able to keep that weird counterculture edge that he’s always played with. In every single one of his films, he’s been able to play with the idea of what a traditional “hero” should be, and give the weird loser a chance to enjoy the spotlight for a while.

Honorable Mentions: Toy Story 3, Iron Man 2, Batman: Under the Red Hood, Kick-Ass, True Grit.

Top five video games of the year

Mass Effect 2
I think this was the best overall game of the year (and I think it’ll be suitably honored in places that keep track of such things). Yes, Bioware cut a lot of the boring RPG points stuff out of it, but if that allowed them to spend more time on that story, then it paid off. I loved just bringing my old character in seamlessly from the first game, and I really loved running across all of the old storylines sprinkled liberally around the world — even if I didn’t remember them exactly, these characters and I literally had a past in common, and that improved dialogue system made it even easier to share that with them. For the first time in any Bioware game I can remember, I actually hunted down all of the special quests for each character and maxed out everything I could before the finale, trying as hard as I could to keep my crew alive and with me. And even then, by making certain choices in the midst of battle (yes, I probably could have looked up the “right” answers, but where’s the fun in that), some of my best friends died to save the universe, and those are choices I’ll have to live with in the trilogy’s finale next year. Bioware is a brilliant company, making their own sci-fi universe in Mass Effect was a brilliant movie, and polishing that game to an exceptional shine in the sequel made for the best game this year.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
I’m not sure if I should actually include this year, as I haven’t even actually bought the expansion yet. But I’ve already had so much fun enjoying the free content added in to the game that I can definitely include this update in my top 5. I’ll admit, I didn’t think Blizzard could bring me (or the rest of their huge audience) back to World of Warcraft — haven’t we done it all in this game already? But playing through the updated Eastern Plaguelands was a revelation — Blizzard has learned so much in this game’s five years about how to tell a story with these mechanics and how to streamline the player’s experience perfect that I was amazed by how right they’d gotten it. Then I moved to Burning Steppes, and I loved that zone. Then I played through Swamp of Sorrows of all places, and it was the same thing. Then, I went to Outland … and, well, the content there is a little old. But still, even before I’ve actually put my $40 down (I hear Archaeology is worth the price of admission alone), Cataclysm has brought so much to this game and given so much entertainment that I have no problem honoring it here.

Enslaved
I called this one back at E3 — I was impressed back then at both how literary and cinematic it was, and the full game fulfilled that promise. In a year without an Uncharted sequel, you won’t find a more cinematic game to play through. The characters of Trip and Monkey are my favorite pair this year, and everything in this game, from the gorgeous level art to the solid core gameplay, is targeted at defining those two and what their place is in this weird post-apocalyptic world. The game suffers a bit later on from signs of too small a budget (the story kind of fizzles out with a quick wrapup, and later levels and gameplay aren’t quite as varied or well-defined as the expansive early experiences), but even with those concerns, Enslaved is definitely one of the year’s best. I don’t know what a sequel would do with a story, but I’d love to see Ninja Theory get the chance to put another game like this together with a little stronger budget.

Red Dead Redemption
This was so much more than Grand Theft Horse. It didn’t have to be — Rockstar knows how to make open world storyline games, and all they had to do, really, was create an open world western game. But they really went over and above what was expected with this one, both in terms of all of the various things you can do (I wish Grand Theft Auto had its own version of skinning to play with), and in the story, which both paid homage to classic Westerns and overtook them. It’s almost a shame there was so much to do in this game, because some people couldn’t finish it. And Red Dead Redemption had no question the best ending to a game of 2010, if not the past decade.

Rock Band 3
Joystiq’s Chris Grant and I were lucky enough to go to the unveiling of Rock Band 3 earlier this year before E3, and before the show we weren’t sure what to expect. Activision had just shown us what it was doing with Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, and the rumor was that Harmonix was working on a keyboard peripheral (though that rumor seemed almost too silly). But on the way home from the reveal (where I was one of the first five people outside of Harmonix to play this game in the entire world), Grant and I couldn’t stop talking about this game — how they’d streamlined the Rock Band experience perfectly, how Activision would have to give up on music games, and how Harmonix was going to change the world and teach anyone and everyone on the street how to shred on the guitar. And when I finally bought the game later on this year, none of it disappointed — what could have simply been a bigger library and an incremental release really turned out to be a revolution in music games, both how they work and how they’re played, both online and off. Sure, there’s a new keyboard, but the real genius of Rock Band 3 is how Harmonix has tackled and conquered problems I didn’t even realize their genre had.

Honorable Mentions: Nimble Strong, Bartender in Training, Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, Puzzle Quest 2, Pocket Frogs.

I’ve learned something about myself this past week. Give me a number to hit, and I don’t really care all that much. I’m not really much of an achievement hunter in games — I’ve chased down a few, and I’ve gone after 100% completion in just a couple of my favorite games (I’ve only 100% completed one title on Xbox Live, actually — I think it was the first Puzzle Quest). Arbitrary scores don’t mean much to me, though. I won’t really spend too much time going after random goals, in video games, or anywhere else.

Put a name on that number, though, and as I’ve learned this week, you’ve got me. I picked up Rock Band 3 on Saturday, finally, and of course it’s excellent as I knew it would be. But it’s one of the first games I’ve got that markedly advertises my friends’ scores to me. Whenever you beat a song while playing online, you get an update on whether or not you’ve beaten a friend’s score: “You’ve beaten GamerGuy’s score,” it will say, or “Get 1500 more points to beat GamerGirl’s score.” And for some reason, that has hit me like catnip — I will jump right back into a song I’ve just played, if only to earn my way back up to the top of the leaderboard.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, of course — I’ve topped a few leaderboards in Apple’s Game Center already, playing games obsessively just to conquer those numbers by my friends’ names. But Rock Band 3 made apparent to me just how much different actual competition with a friend makes. Play a song offline, and you’re only compared to your own past scores — you’re rewarded if you get a personal high score, but you’re not compared to actual friends. Playing online with others’ scores, however, awakens a weird competition in me that I didn’t know was there.

And if things get more social, then the obsession grows as well. I wrote about a free-to-play Back to the Future promo game on Joystiq the other day, and played a few rounds then just to see what it was like. I wasn’t super impressed, and decided to abandon it in favor of other, better, match-3 games. But this morning, I was challenged by a friend online, and instantly I found myself back in the game, pushing for a higher score despite my initial apathy towards the title. She beat me again, and again, despite having to do actual, paying work (which I did eventually get done, lest my boss read this and wonder), I jumped back in to top my high score yet again. For good, I hope — it hasn’t been beaten yet.

So yes, there’s something there — something in the social connections I have with friends, online and off, that pushes me towards competition with them more than anything else. It’s not a hatred thing — I really enjoy playing games with friends, and I’m never actually fighting them, even when I’m fighting to top their scores. I think it’s more of an empathic thing — I know these are real people, and I can imagine them scoring the numbers they’ve earned. They’re not a faceless enemy, somewhere in the world, perhaps using some illicit methods or secret strategies that I don’t know. They’re my friends, just normal people, and if they can do that well at the game, well heck. I can, too.

Game makers know this, of course — tomorrow, I’m probably going to pick up Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, and that game’s Autolog is a system built around creating and celebrating exactly this kind of competition. I already have friends planning to compete with me, and I’m recruiting other friends to buy the game and do the same. We haven’t seen the end of this kind of thing at all — games of all kinds are going to get much more social, and the easiest way for games to do so is with these kinds of leaderboards and asynchronous gameplay.

But it is interesting to me that such a thing works so well, especially on me, someone who’s not always inclined to fight for the top spot in any specific endeavor. It’s definitely something I’ll be thinking about — as I grind my way up above your name on the leaderboards.

I saw a speech last week where I was told not to make any more crap. “There is already too much crap in the world,” the speaker said. “Don’t make more crap.” And ever since I heard that, I’ve been worried that all I’m making is more crap.

I do a lot of creating — I’ve set my life up that way. I create things for myself, I create things for other people, I create some things for my own edification, and some I create for my friends, or just because I promised to. When I talked to Bruce Campbell as a DJ on my college radio station, I asked him why he’d acted in From Dusk Til Dawn 2. That movie was terrible, I told him, and you were only in it for the first three minutes before you died along with Tiffany Amber Theissen! I rented it specifically because you were in it, and I got ripped off! Campbell just laughed at me. The director, Scott Spiegel, was an old friend of his from back in the Evil Dead days, and he’d done the cameo as a favor. “Some parts you do for money,” said Bruce, “some you do for the art, and some you do for a friend.”

Does From Dusk Til Dawn 2 count as crap then?

In some respects, I feel like I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done. Some of the things I’m writing lately are not only more important personally to me than anything else I’ve written, but they’re also being seen by more people than ever before. Some of the things I’m writing because I feel they need to be said — I’m living and breathing those things, and I’m seeking out feedback after they’re published, trying to learn as much as I can from them. And some things I’m writing because they just need to be written, both because I’m paid to write them and because it’s just part of the day-to-day. I wouldn’t say I’m not putting effort into them — I am. I try to put some truth into everything I write, just because of all of the things I know about, that’s the one solid thing that everyone, from all walks of life, seems to be interested in. Even if I’m writing about a funny sticker or a little plushy toy, if I can get some truth in there, the thing works.

But at the same time, I also feel like I’m creating more than I ever have, and that means that some of it has to be better than the rest of it. I recently started taking an improv class, and it’s been fascinating, both in terms of learning how to fabricate coherent characters and story live on stage with a group mind, and just in terms of my own progression. I originally planned to just take a fun class, and now I’m three classes in, have joined an actual group, and am facing down the possibility of actually performing comedy on stage as much as every single week.

The problem is, I think it’s crap. Part of the issue is experience — I’ve been watching a lot of improv comedy (you’re mandated to by the classes anyway), and the stuff I’ve been watching is being performed by people who have done it for years and years, sometimes even with the same people the whole time. I’m three months in, and it’s probably ludicrous to compare what they can do to what I can do. I’ve barely ever been on stage (we’ll leave aside a few school plays and one extremely short run of attempts at standup comedy), and it’s silly for me to look at them and the hilarious and exquisite things they can create, and compare that to my lumpy, inadequate clod of an improv scene.

But of course I compare them anyway. And of course I come up lacking. And I worry that the very effort of creating these scenes is just pushing more crap into the world. Who am I to try and tackle anything outside my chosen profession of writing, anyway? If I want to write so much, why not just stick with that? Surely I should concentrate on what I think I can, maybe, one day, do beautifully, and leave the rest of the world to those better at it.

Of course I know that’s not true, either. No one spins gold on the first try. And even when Bruce Campbell was doing a part for money, or subbing in a cameo for his friend, he was still doing something that he really wanted to do anyway. If you want to create, then you have to, whether it’s crap, or brilliant, or otherwise.

The best you can hope, I guess, is that what you create doesn’t finish its life as crap. It can start that way — sometimes, when you need to create, you just do, and whatever happens, happens. But I guess as a creator, the best you can do is to go back and do it again, make it better, and hope that whatever you’ve made turns out, someday, to not be crap.

I’m joining this meme unasked. These are probably not in order, and possibly not even real (they’re memories, after all).

1. Waiting with my aunt and uncle for my mom to come home with my baby brother, worried that he was going to take up part of my room.

2. Eating dinner and watching for one of my parents’ cars to drive into the garage below our kitchen as they came home from work.

3. Playing with my dad while he used a heavy hole digger in the backyard to set up a piece of playground equipment, and accidentally doing something that caused it to hit my sister’s toe. I was yelled at, and felt terrible, both because I felt responsible, and because I felt I wasn’t showing enough remorse.

4. Playing on the playground at school, swinging upside down with my legs on the jungle gym, and then waking up to find a doctor putting stitches in the back of my head. I could feel the string going in!

5. Asking a teacher if I could hang out by myself in the hall during playtime so I could read quietly. She seemed very distraught that I didn’t want to stay in the same room as her and everyone else.

6. Changing clothes in the empty room of our second family house that would later become my bedroom (and then my brother’s).

7. Listening to Bill Cosby, Allen Sherman, and bible story records.

8. Charming the babysitter I had a kid crush on by showing her how I could create a BASIC program on our color computer to ask her name and repeat it back to her:

10 INPUT “WHAT IS YOUR NAME”, N$
20 PRINT “HELLO”; N$
30 PRINT “HOW ARE YOU TODAY”

She was amazed that I could do that, and let me stay up all the way until we saw my parents’ car lights enter the driveway, but I knew she had a boyfriend her own age and wasn’t really interested in me anyway.

9. Being told what happens in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie by a friend who’d seen it on day one. “And then, Raphael yelled because he lost his sai.”

10. Riding my bike down a hill way too fast, flipping the bike over, smashing my face up, and having to haul my injured self a few blocks home to my worried grandmother.

So this week, I finally went ahead and did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while: I cut my cable. I like television — I’m not overly obsessed with it (and a lot of really popular shows, like the American version of The Office and any reality shows, never click with me), but I enjoy making dinner and sitting down occasionally to watch quality programming like Mad Men, 30 Rock, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. I’m a big Mythbusters fan, and I had Futurama on the DVR, as well as Nip/Tuck, Lost (of course), and 24 when they were both still on. My family almost always had cable at home when I was a kid, and I appreciate a good night of television.

I’ve actually gone without before, too — when I first moved to Chicago, my roommate and I didn’t have any extra money, and he didn’t want any extra distractions (from going out and getting a job), so we willfully stuck with just broadcast television for a while. Five channels, three of them in foreign languages. But ever since I got my nice big HDTV a few years ago, I’ve had cable — I figured it would be a waste to watch anything less than HD with a TV like the one I have. I did used to have Netflix as well, but canceled it a few months before I left for Los Angeles last year — at the time, my Instant Queue never seemed to appear with great video quality, and I never found the time to watch any of the DVDs they sent.

So as of last week, I was paying Time Warner a not-insignificant amount of money for their crappy little DVR box (I might still have cable if I owned a Tivo, now that I think about it) and their television service. A couple of weeks ago, I found that something was wrong with my cable box — it was overheating and freezing up, and it required a restart occasionally, and missed a few shows I’d set to record. I called the company, they sent a dude out, and as I figured he’d do, he soon recommended that I just take a new box. Fine by me. But there was a problem:

Him: So I’ll just put a new box in here, if that’s ok with you.

Me: Sounds good. There wasn’t really anything on there that I needed to watch anyway. Although — wait, does this mean my recordings are gone?

Him: Yeah, those don’t transfer.

Me: But I mean the scheduling. All of the scheduling I did?

Him: Yeah, that’s all gone.

That gave me pause. The OS on that DVR box is one of the worst ever designed, and I found that I dreaded the thought of having to go back into that guide, find and/or search for all of the quirky shows that I liked, and re-enter them all into the system. I eventually agreed to it, but it shook me that I was so tied into Time Warner’s crappy system. I wanted the box to bring my shows to me, but I didn’t want to have to depend on telling that stupid box what to do. If that’s how little I actually cared about watching those shows, I thought, then why was I paying the bill in the first place?

And so, last Friday, I decided to make the cut. I called up Time Warner, canceled my cable service, and today returned the cable box. I don’t have live television coming to my house any more. That’s a solid $50 off my monthly bill.

What I do have is Netflix — I jumped on the website and re-subscribed last night. I only went with the $9/month one disc plan — it’s the cheapest that allows Instant Watch, and honestly, I don’t need any more discs lying around my house. Fortunately, my Internet connection is much better here than it was in Chicago, and last night I was watching Pushing Daisies and Archer in full, bright HD — hopefully that will all stay up. I also found that two things will probably make me like my Netflix subscription more than I did before: their catalog and recommendation system is much better than it was a year and a half or so ago when I last tried it (I love the “combination” recommendations they do), and being without a movie subscription service for a while has left me with a whole slew of new-ish titles that I’ve missed. There’s plenty to watch, both movies and TV shows.

Also, Netflix on iPhone is worth a mention as well — I tried it out last night, and it worked very impressively. I am looking forward to the next time I’m in a plane with wifi.

I also may go ahead and subscribe to Hulu Plus — I’m not 100% convinced yet, both because it has ads, and because I probably don’t need it, but I like the idea of using that for current shows that I miss. I’ll wait and see on that one just how many current shows I want to watch before taking the plunge. If it’s only a few, I will probably just use the free version (I was already doing that occasionally, when that stupid DVR missed out on something).

And if all else fails, there’s always Bittorrent. I don’t really like having to go into often very shady places on the ‘net, find torrents, and run downloads on each single episode of TV that I want, but I’m thinking that for some shows, I’ll just have to. I already get spoilers on Twitter since I moved to the West Coast (seriously, New Yorkers, do you have to tweet about what’s happening on Mad Men just seconds after you see it?), and I don’t think I can really settle for being seasons behind on my favorite shows just because there’s no legal way to do it besides cable.

I will miss sports and other live television — I have an MLB subscription (not that the Cubs have been worth watching this year lately), and I’m expecting to visit some bars to watch the Bears. I will also miss catching car chases here in LA; that was a guilty pleasure of mine, hearing about a car chase going down on Twitter and turning on the TV to see it unfold, trying to recognize just where in the city it was. I won’t be able to do that phone thing with friends, either, where you are both watching a movie on the same channel at the same time (although I’m interested to try out Netflix’s party viewing on Xbox — maybe we can have a Tipoaa viewing party at some point and give it a shot).

But otherwise, I think it’ll work fine, and at the very least, even if I don’t use any of it, I’m saving $50 a month (yes, I’m paying for Netflix, but I figured I’ll be saving that since I was also occasionally renting movies anyway). And I’m looking forward to learning if it works or not — streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have been threatening to take the throne of traditional cable companies like Time Warner, and I’ll be happy to be one of the early adopters figuring out if they can actually do it. I’m thinking of this as a DIY-style experiment — instead of overpaying for tons of shows I don’t watch, I’ll underpay and only choose the ones I want.

And lest you think I worry too much about my television supply, that I am simply some illiterate zombie that requires a FlashBox 9000 to entertain me and do my thinking for me day and night, I’ll also tell you that I’ve lately been reading and enjoying a dead tree copy of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. Great book. Not all of my entertainment plugs straight into the wall.

PS: I’ve been asked what I think of Apple TV and iTunes for this kind of thing. If I didn’t own an Xbox 360, a PS3 and a Wii, I would probably give the Apple TV some consideration. But with any one of those consoles (not to mention all three, which I probably wouldn’t have if I didn’t write about games for a living), I don’t think the Apple TV is worth it. And I’ve never purchased anything in iTunes — a subscription plan would probably change that, but I don’t like the idea of paying per episode or per movie any more, no matter how cheap.

I took a walk around Culver City earlier today, and posted some pictures I took with my brand new iPhone 4 to my Flickr account (which I haven’t done in a while). It was fun — I went and found a self-guided walking tour map on the city’s website, and then went down there (it’s about 10 minutes south of me here in LA), and hiked around the city, finding all of the little hidden art and reading all of the “Historic Landmark” plaques around town.

It occurred to me just as I was walking away from my car that what I was doing was probably really weird — what kind of crazy dude under 40 just goes on walking tours by himself? It’s like the kind of guy that always fills out the scorecard exactly right when he goes to baseball games (I don’t), or cans his own tomatoes even though he lives alone (I do — live alone, not can tomatoes). Going on an old walking tour by my lonesome probably wasn’t the coolest thing to do on my Labor Day Sunday afternoon.

But I shrugged it off — I enjoy exploring cities and finding all of the hidden spots that most people walk past. I especially enjoy following written directions to landmarks — it’s like a scavenger hunt. There’s a picture of a Laurel and Hardy mural in the Flickr set I posted — that wall was listed in the guide as one confusing line, and it took me about 30 minutes of hiking around a certain block to find it. I checked every darn wall in that square block, and the last one I looked at, hidden in the back of an alley behind an art gallery had that picture on it. Culver City, I learned, is on the land of an old ranch named La Ballona, and earned its name as the “Heart of Screenland” after the movie industry built studios and theaters all over the place. The Laurel and Hardy films (along with tons of classic old movies) were filmed in that same five square blocks, and this picture, sitting in a back alley between a stairwell and a parking garage, commemorates their history.

I enjoyed finding that on my own, combing a set of streets and buildings to soak in exactly what they’ve been up to the last hundred years or so. These pictures don’t show everything I found (I stopped by the first church in Culver City, St. Augustine, so named because it was started by a priest from my own Santa Monica, and St. Augustine was apparently St. Monica’s son), but I think they give a nice taste of what turned out to be a fine afternoon.

I’ve thought about this issue before — being that I’m a nerd and being that I like games, I’ve often wondered just what it is that makes me (and lots of nerds like me) obsess over the ins and outs of other universes and other realities. From chess to Mass Effect 2 (which I’m playing and enjoying lately) to Settlers of Catan to World of WarCraft, all games are really a set of rules. Some are more complicated than others (Civilization is obviously a very complicated game, while Bejeweled is not so much), but essentially they are an interactive set of rules — do something, and this consequence will arise.

That, I think, is both why I and other nerds enjoy games, where the rules are clearly documented, and especially computer games, where the rules are infallible (computers are notoriously stingy rulekeepers, as any programmer will tell you). Because in life, the rules dissolve into countless variants and shades of gray. Relationships are one Rubik’s Cube that I personally haven’t been able to crack. At least in a real Rubik’s Cube, when you turn the cube a certain way, the colors will always react the same. But in a real-life relationship, one word, one look, even one touch can mean many different things. There is no “exactly right” way to woo someone, because the rules are impossible to define and rarely enforced anyway. If there was an actual strategy to a successful relationship — if game theory really applied to human interaction — nerds would be the biggest “players” around.

That makes me sound like I’m a sociopath, and that I’d much rather deal with virtual worlds and characters than the real world and real people (which, to a certain extent, may be true, but I’m social enough, I get out out of the house when I can). But it is interesting to me that many of the things I appreciate about a good game are intrinsically different to what I encounter in the real world situations that I have trouble dealing with. Games create the structure of interactions with their rules and regulations, and without those rules in place, it’s hard for us nerdy folks to figure out what the “right” move actually is.

P.S. After I wrote this, I went to read the comments on that post, and the point was made that “Games have explicit rules and no real stakes. The ‘real’ social world has no rules and high stakes.” That’s an important point, and I humbly admit that it pretty much undoes my point above. For all of their rules and consequences, games have zero to no real world effect, and of course the real social world can make or break your relationships, your job, and your life. So if you get a choice of playing an inconsequential game that lets you experiment all you want, or a one-time-only practically random game that will affect your life forever, which would you choose to do? That kind of paints me as a coward, drawing away from the real world because I’m afraid of losing the more important social game, but so be it. It’s true.

I just want to put this somewhere, but not on Twitter because it is a HUGE SPOILER for the brilliant movie Inception that I saw a few weeks ago. Seriously, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t read this — you’re doing yourself a great disservice.

I’m serious — don’t think the movie is all hype and read this anyway. It really is that good, go see it.

Done? Okay. Here’s the real deal about Inception — I originally came up with this idea right after seeing the movie, but I haven’t seen it posted anywhere else yet, so I’m going to share it with you now.

Cobb’s “totem” isn’t the top. The top is his wife’s totem. Yes, he may have learned what the totem felt like somehow, and yes, he may have used it to incept his wife and make her believe that the world wasn’t real (and maybe it wasn’t — more on that in a second). But I don’t think he can just take her totem — because the totem is supposed to be something that only the dreamer can know about, it automatically wouldn’t work for him. She’d know just as much about it as he would.

I saw something online today that his wedding ring was his totem, and maybe that’s true — I haven’t done all of the research yet, but I don’t think it is his actual totem, just because that seems like Nolan would be hiding it a little too subtly. No, I think Nolan hid Cobb’s totem in plain sight.

So here’s my thought: Cobb’s totem … is his kids.

That’s why we don’t see their faces the whole time (because we can’t know what they look like), and that’s why they keep appearing in weird places, and that’s why he doesn’t want to look at them in the dream — if he looks at them and they’re not the same as his memory, that will tell him that he’s not where he belongs. And it’s why, at the end of the movie, he finally sees their faces, and recognizes them as his memories, and all is finally, finally right with the world.

Although I agree that it may not be — maybe, just as he stole his wife’s totem, she stole his. Either she realized that they were his totem, or just knew their children well enough to reproduce them. Either way, just because I do think the kids are his totem doesn’t mean I know for sure whether he’s dreaming at the end or not.

In fact, I’d probably argue that not even Nolan really “knows” if Cobb’s dreaming at the end or not according to the top. The whole time the movie was playing, I was worried that it would be all for nothing. The cliche twist ending of a movie about a dream within a dream within a dream is that even in the “real world,” they’re still dreaming. I could have told you that cliche even before the movie started. So the whole time they were running around the hotel and shooting people in the snow and running through the city, I kept thinking, “If this all turns out to be his dream, I’m going to be pissed. If Nolan does all of this, and it’s all just for a dream, what’s the point.”

And then, I got to the end, and the top spun around, and it shuttered and kept spinning, and ——

The screen went black, and with the rest of the theater, I gasped out loud. This cliche ending that I was suspecting the whole time had actually been turned on its head. The answer I thought I’d known all along had actually been taken away from me, and I imagined Nolan somewhere laughing manaically. “Oh, did you want to know the ending, Schramm? I thought it was all a cliche. I thought you didn’t care!”

So he got me with that one. But I think the ending is purposely ambivalent — the top does stutter at the end, so it’s possible that it will stop, and which means Cobb’s world is real, and he’ll live happily ever after, probably dreaming up wild cityscapes with Juno. But if the top doesn’t stop (and honestly, how would Nolan show that it doesn’t stop? If he wanted to show to the audience very clearly that the top keeps spinning, what would he do — have it sitting there for an hour before the screen went black?), then of course Cobb is still dreaming, and I’ve seen all kinds of weird theories about why that might be. Maybe he’s being incepted by someone else (which would explain why he’s spills his guts to Juno so easily, even when he can’t share his secrets with Joseph Gordon Levitt), maybe it’s a revenge thing by his wife, maybe he’s still in Limbo, etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, none of that really matters — the point of the movie is that it works, completely, whether or not that top level world is real. It works according to its own internal, weird logic (that the subconscious attacks the intruder, that a kick will wake you up but not being thrown around in a car, that you can share minds with some kind of drug and unexplained machine, and so on). As complicated and as labyrinthine as it gets — get it, mazes? — it all works.

Plus, that hotel fight scene was really awesome. And that Juno is really cute.

I am not dead! But I have probably worked harder in the last few weeks than I’ve ever worked during the same time period before. I attended both WWDC and E3 in the last two weeks (and it looks like I might get to go to Comic-Con next month, which will be another dream come true, and will leave the Toyko Game Show as the last big show on my list to attend), and here are some good posts from all of that:

• I got to interview Warren Spector, gaming developer legend behind Deus Ex and Thief, about his new game Epic Mickey. What a smart guy, and what a dream job he’s landed working on this game.
• I got to meet up with the folks from Riot Games again — they’re quickly moving up the list of my favorite game developers, and I’m really enjoying jumping into some League of Legends matches lately.
• I played Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood again a few times, and still enjoy it a lot.
• I got to play the great Scott Pilgrim game, which is my second-most anticipated downloadable title this year, the first being Puzzle Quest 2.
• And I got to play Rock Band 3. In fact, let the story be told: I was in the second band in the world outside of Harmonix to play the game. I wanted to be in the first band in the world, and so after the presentation to the E3 judges a couple of weeks back, I unashamedly ran up to the stage and grabbed the lead guitar and lead vocals. We were just about to choose a song, making me the first lead guitar player in the world outside of Harmonix to play the game, when I heard a song start from the second demo setup in the back of the room. So I missed it by just a few seconds. But oh well — the game is brilliant, and I expect to play it even more than I’ve played Rock Band 2, which is a whole heck of a lot.

So that’s E3. Actually, a lot more stuff happened (I took some of the Joystiq staff out to an amazing curry place near my house in LA, and took the two guys from Massively.com out to Pink’s Hot Dogs, the legendary hot dog stand out here. I didn’t get in on any In n Out runs, but I can do that anytime myself these days, so it’s not so big a deal), but there’s so much I don’t have time to share it with you now. I’ll probably portion out all of the stories in the future. There was a particularly good story (Burrito of Fate-level, I might say) told by Joystiq’s own Justin McElroy that you should look forward to.

WWDC was in San Fran the week before, and not only did I have the best Chinese food I’ve ever had in my life (at a restaurant called Fang) and another Beard Papa creme puff, but I also wrote about:

This very fun game called Chopper 2.
• This cool game company called Imangi, a husband and wife team of developers, and their latest title.
• Square, a company that’s made a credit card reader for the iPhone. These guys are going to be billionaires, and they’re doing it by being legitimately good, or at least as good as you can get in the credit business. They’ve had some technical issues, but I believe they’ll work them out.
• An app by Kyle Kinkade called Bartleby’s Book of Buttons. The app immediately reminded me of the book from The Diamond Age, and I told Kinkade so, but he’d never actually read it. I told him to buy it in iBooks immediately and read it on the plane home, and unless he’s been lying to me, he’s really enjoyed it.

And a bunch of other things that you can find in the usual places. What fun, eh? It’s been interesting to say the least — met tons of people, heard tons of stories, and done a lot of what I think is hopefully insightful interviewing and writing. This week, I’m back home for a while, and I’m looking forward to things being calmer, but it won’t be long, I’m sure, before I’m itching for the road again. I really love covering stuff like this, and after all of the back and forth about moving to LA and taking on a whole new environment, things seem to really be paying off so far.

Oh, and while most of my E3 writing has already appeared on Joystiq (so go there if you want to know what I thought of what I played), here’s the top five games I played at E3:

Game of the Show is Enslaved. Great game — feels great, looks great, very well written, and even though I’ve only played it for a few minutes, I’m already in love with the characters and their relationship. I’ll admit, last year I was big on Brutal Legend, and that game disappointed to a certain extent. But I was also big on Batman: Arkham Asylum, and that game turned out to be great. I think Enslaved will be one of the best original titles of the year.

Rock Band 3, of course.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light — there were quite a few great co-op experiences in the show (Portal 2, was great, I hear), but this one was my favorite of the one I played. Lots of puzzles, not so hard that they’re unsolvable, but just hard and “teasy” enough that they get inside your head and you want to experiment with them and figure out a solution.

Puzzle Quest 2. They had to drag me away from that one. I thought it was coming out tomorrow on XBLA, but apparently I have to wait another week.

Scott Pilgrim. It just brims with retro goodness — I couldn’t stop smiling while I played it, and I had to really pay attention to try and keep up with all of the little references to both the comic book and just great old NES games. I’m a little disappointed there’s no online co-op (there is supposedly four-player offline, and online seems like a must), but otherwise the game is just amazing. Will probably be a day one PS3 purchase.

You are perhaps wondering why I haven’t posted here lately? My other blog posts, let me show you them.

I’ve been busy doing lots and lots of hands-on and interview work for Joystiq lately — E3 is in a few weeks, and so last week, the very talented and impressive Chris Grant (my boss, basically) came out to Los Angeles as a Game Critics’ Association judge to preview all of the big games, and he kindly let me tag along with him. As a result, I’ve gotten to play most of the big titles of the coming year, only I can’t really tell you about them until around June 15th, when the show actually starts. But I can tell you that they were mostly awesome. Especially this one I saw — oh man, if I hadn’t signed a little piece of paper making me promise not to tell you about it until they let me, you’d think it was awesome.

The embargo for a few has already come up, and here, in fact, they are:

• Before the E3 Judges week, I visited Activision’s HQ in Santa Monica (just minutes from my apartment!) to play Blur, and I liked it. It’s coming out this week, but as I said on Twitter, I’m not quite sure if I want to give Activision sixty dollars. If I could give the money straight to Bizarre Creations, I’d do it, but Activision has made some choices lately that I’m not all that into supporting. But the game’s good!
• I went to a Skate 3 event at beautiful Venice Beach and interviewed the game’s developer.
• I talked to the Audio Director on the upcoming Crackdown 2. We bonded over my Audio Production major in college.
• And thus began the pre-E3 events. First, I saw a presentation by the Art Director on Deus Ex 3. Game looks great, and man they thought a lot about how it should look.
• I interviewed Patrick Curry from Wideload Games, who I actually knew from Chicago (since their studios were one floor up from the PR agency I used to work at). Guilty Party was actually a lot of fun — if I regularly had people over to play video games, it would be a good time for sure.
• I didn’t write these, but I am mentioned in the hands-on of the Lara Croft downloadable game, and I asked a few of the questions in the interview. One of my favorite games of the show so far, providing some amazing co-op gameplay. The fact that it’s a downloadable title is just icing on the cake.
• I played Toy Story 3: The Video Game, and while it wasn’t something I’d buy, I’m sure there are plenty of people who were interested in knowing how it was.
• I got to see Enslaved for the first time, and it was awesome. This one should be big — the story and the characters really stand out already, and if it’s done correctly, I could definitely see it being a contender for game of the year.
• And I played Puzzle Quest 2, and had a long and really enjoyable conversation about game design with the game’s creator. Maybe it’s just me being egotistical, but I think we both really enjoyed the chat — he’s a really smart guy, and I’m a big fan of his game, so I think he was really excited to get and digest some direct feedback from someone who’s poured hours into his game. And I was excited to pick his brain a little bit, and find out some of the reasons behind the rules in the game I’ve played with for so long. If you liked Puzzle Quest, you will love PQ2, and if you didn’t play Puzzle Quest, seriously, go do it.

That’s it for now, but there will be lots more in the next few weeks. As for posting here, I will do it when I can — I meant to write up a big thing about the finale of Lost, but everyone is talking about it now, so that’s kind of passe. I’m also meant to be putting some time in on an actual book, seeing as I set a personal goal to start working on it during May. But I just haven’t had any extra time to write lately, much less put something original up over here. If I get the chance to do so, I will.

Let’s do this! Do you guys care about reading this at all? I don’t know how much attention this little deal is getting any more, and obviously I’m a little busy lately. If people want to read it, I’ll keep doing it, but given that there’s not much to pull me in until Cataclysm (at least), I don’t know if I’ll keep it up or not. Anyway, I have a little bit of time tonight, so on with the show:

• This is an amazing post — all 52 bosses in Wrath, rated from easiest to hardest. Very nice (and thorough!) overview of the whole expansion from a raiding perspective.
• Here’s Saate’s latest Word Jumble, and he gave me a shout out for my shout out. Which means this post is a shout out for a shouted out shout out, I guess. Just go do the jumble, it’s fun, and I guess the answer is about me. And you can win a Spectral Tiger for commenting on that post, so do go over and do it.
• There are rumblings that BRK is headed back to World of Warcraft, and/or that he’s already playing in the F&F Alpha of Cataclysm. Far be it from me to speculation on what BRK is up to. It would be nice to have him around the game again, although given the reasons why he stepped away, I’m sure it’s not a decision made lightly. But if he is planning on writing about WoW again, more power to him. I haven’t emailed him yet, but of course he’s welcome to come on Tipoaa with us any time.
• Advanced classes looks brilliant — great way to provide some variety without having to build out a whole full-fledged class. Oh wait, that’s not WoW. Never mind.
• Blizzard asked Boubouille to take the Cataclysm stuff down, and he did. Man, I could tell you stories — but I can’t. Suffice it to say that it’s almost always better, especially with stuff obtained like that, to just go ahead and take it down. As I said the other week, we’ll see it all eventually anyway, and there’s nothing you can do with information like that. Sure, you can drool over it, and pretend it’s important, but we should have learned by now that the graphics and stats don’t make the game, the actual gameplay does. As Bou says, it’s stupid to make a stand. Picking your battles is smart, especially when you’re covering a company like Blizzard, and that’s not the right battle to pick.
• There was some new profession information released this week (See? This is exactly the kind of information that was leaking out anyway, only it wasn’t official — Blizzard has definitely learned some lessons for this expansion release, I can tell), and most of it is pretty boring. I assume professions will be the same as in the past, which means that you’ll have to level them all the way up to make anything actually useful, thereby making a bunch of non-useful items on the way. I like the little stats that add to your real character power, but of course they can’t make those too powerful. Oh well. I don’t think crafting can be improved too much further in World of Warcraft — some other MMO (or even just a game — MW2 actually has a “crafting” system in the form of weapon mods and the “Bling” perk) will have to try and do it better.
• Scott’s book is on its way to me — I can’t wait to see it. Scott was the most regular and dedicated columnist that ever worked with me at WoW.com (they were all good, but Scott stood out, as did many other folks in other ways), and he is a very smart and very clear writer. I’ve never lead a guild (and I don’t plan to), but I’m so glad he was able to work out that book deal. And I’m told my name is in it — it’s actually extremely selfish of me to be excited about that, but I am anyway. Congrats Scott! Everybody go buy his book.
• Finally, did I link to this last week? I can’t remember. Even if I did, go look at it if you didn’t — interesting survey results. I’m not sure how applicable they are to the game as a whole, but the summary is at least some interesting reading about the sample size.

And that’s it. Thanks for reading! Let me know if you did read it — if people care, maybe I’ll keep it up. Heck maybe I’ll even post it on Wednesday! Go figure!

EA came up with an idiotic idea to raise a little money for server costs on their sports games: they’re going to charge $10 for a “one-time pass” into the multiplayer portions of the titles. People who buy the games new will get a one-use code that lets them in, but anyone buying the game used will have to pay an extra $10 on top of that for online gameplay.

EA’s case for this sounds somewhat legit: online costs have gone up, they’re doing things like constant team updates and regular online events in addition to regular online multiplayer, and they need some way to keep that going. Additionally, given that these sports games are released yearly, there’s a huge amount of back catalog used sales that they’re not making any money on, and charging for this pass is designed to let them do that. Plus, let’s be honest, they need the money. EA isn’t the company it once was, and games are more expensive than ever.

So why is this a bad idea?

It hurts used game buyers. Bare minimum, there’s a $10 fee that anyone who buys a used game has to play if they want in on the multiplayer, a feature that they used to get for free. And it’s not just Gamestop — if I trade games with my friends or pick them up on Craigslist, I have to pay that fee as well. I follow games, so I already know this fee is coming, but imagine the customers who have no idea about this change, pick up Tiger Woods from their friends for the $30 they have to spend on a game that month, and come home only to find that they can’t play a tournament online because they have to pay another ten bucks. That’s a bad customer experience, and especially if EA is talking about standard online features that most games these days come with, it’s a ripoff.

It hurts new game buyers. Obviously used owners are the ones targeted by this fee, but if I buy a game new, it hurts me, too. The second I use the code I get with my new game, it’s worth at least $10 less than what it would have been. And if I happen to have two consoles in the house (maybe one for me and one for the girlfriend or my son), we have to pay an extra fee to go online with the same game. I was planning on buying Tiger Woods 2011 this year, to play it with my friend online. And now, I won’t: buying an EA game that requires this pass will cost me money later, and could cause headaches right now. What if my code doesn’t work? What if their servers go down? What am I getting for my money?

It’s desperate. EA needs to raise money? Fine, raise it on features that are new, not features that we’ve had for years. Come up with something worth charging for — Mass Effect 2 already did this (and it’s actually kept me from buying that game so far), and instead of marking it as a must-pay fee, they’ve turned it into a way to release new free content. Almost all of the DLC items so far have come out for free, making that $10 that I would pay with a used game actually worth something. But just charging $10 to play online, something that we’ve already had for years, is dumb.

And if EA needs to charge for money for the same thing because they’re not making enough on their yearly sports rehashes, maybe they should invest their money more wisely.

Does any of my complaining matter? Probably not — people who buy Madden new will still buy it new, and they’ll never see the $10 charge (they’ll just put in their pass and go). Sports is a weird genre in video games, too — for all I know, most of the people who buy used EA games never bother to play them online anyway, so maybe they won’t even bother paying the $10 fee even if they’re asked to. I’m sure there are guys who buy last year’s Madden who don’t ever bother to play it online, just want it for a few football parties with their friends at home.

In other words, this will probably work (and like Mass Effect 2, we’ll see it implemented on more EA titles, and even other companies’ games in the future). But as always, I’ll vote with my wallet — if you don’t think EA should pull stuff like this, you need to make the choice not to buy their games and not to give them money. Companies keep doing what sells, so if you’re angry about a decision made by a game company, you need to look at your library first and see how much of your money they’ve made. I’m not organizing a boycott or anything — you do what you want to do, and if this type of thing flies (ie, people pay the fees), it’ll keep showing up. But I pay money for games and deals I think are worth it, and this isn’t one of those.

I thought this was interesting — was organizing my music tonight, and took a look at my “Mike’s Top 200″ playlist in iTunes. I made it a while back — it takes the top 200 songs according to plays and puts them all in one playlist. Unfortunately, as far as I know, iTunes doesn’t register plays from a shared computer (which is actually how I listen to my music most of the time: I have the library saved on my Mac mini, and I use that as a kind of server, listening in via other iTunes installs around my house), but it does register plays on my iPhone and iPod, and that’s probably a good 60% of my listens anyway. So it’s a pretty good list of what I have been listening to. And I decided to sort the songs according to plays, and then list out the top 10 bands. Quite a few bands appear more than once, because I often just put albums on and listen to those all the way through, but I took the first 10 bands that showed up on the list in order. I got this:

1. The Shins
2. The Hush Sound
3. The National
4. Imogen Heap
5. The Mountain Goats
6. Vampire Weekend
7. Fountains of Wayne
8. Arcade Fire
9. Okkervil River
10. Rilo Kiley

Which is pretty darn trendy, if you ask me. It’s interesting, because when people ask me what my favorite music is, I usually tell them The Police, Cake, and Bad Religion — those are definitely the bands whose entire catalogs I enjoy and (at least I thought) that I most listen to. But this list is way different. In fact, while I do see three Cake songs in my top 200, I don’t see any Police or Bad Religion.

Timeframe is another factor — I wore out my old Bad Religion tapes, and I own Cake and The Police’s whole catalogs on CD, so this list is definitely an iTunes product. The earliest song I entered into my library on iTunes is back in September of ‘05, and I probably did do most of my listening of those other bands before then. Strangely, the latest song entered into my top 200 is Metric’s Gimme Sympathy, which I put in my library in April of 2009. And before that, I have to jump all the way back to December 2008 (when I put the Son Lux album in).

Of course, songs have to be in my library a while before I listen to them enough to make this top 200 list (in fact, I wonder what a top 500 list would look like … ). But it’s interesting to me that the actual stats about my listening are so different from what I expected them to be.

Here’s a rundown of what I’ve found interesting in the world of the World of Warcraft this week.

• Have I linked you to my interview on Rawrcast yet? We talk about WoW quite a bit on that one.
• Blizzard made the news today (Joystiq’s post is still upcoming) by talking about their RealID system and how it works with Facebook. This all seems like old news to me — I’ve seen this stuff in action in the StarCraft 2 beta, and it’s not that big a deal. It’s basically a Blizzard login that tracks what you’re doing in Blizzard’s games. EA’s done the same thing for years, and Steam has done it even before that, but of course this one will work across the realms of Warcraft, so that’s the biggest draw for people. I share concerns that a few others have voiced — obviously I won’t want everyone I know to know where I am all the time. But I trust, from my experience with StarCraft 2, that I’ll be able to turn it off whenever I want — if I don’t want to be disturbed for any reason, I don’t think I will.
• The Friends and Family alpha is officially underway, and even with the leaks (Deathwing’s model got leaked, and surprise, it looks exactly like what we saw in the trailer), I’m still not seeing anything super intriguing there. Blizzard is doing a little better job keeping things under wraps, so good for them, and they’re also sharing a little bit more with their Screenshots of the Day from Cataclysm, but none of that stuff really entrances me either. It looks like more WoW, which isn’t a bad thing — never a bad thing — but I’m far more excited about other titles this year than I am about Cataclysm so far. They’ve got plenty of time to build up the hype, and hopefully I will see something that really intrigues me, but so far, it looks like the same old game in a few new places.
• It’s probably no surprise, then, too, that I haven’t been playing much lately. But that’s not really because I’m disliking the game, it’s more of a factor of time. I still plan to slave away at Loremaster, and hopefully even get it on my Paladin before the expansion. We’ll see. I’m hoping to take some of the day off for my birthday tomorrow, and while my focus has been on FFXIII lately, WoW may get some playtime.
• Spinks has a good post about damage meters. I’ve never really been against damage meters — they do make things more fun as a DPS player, and even when I don’t top them (which is often), it’s helpful to see who is and look at their gear and rotations. But I guess they’re troublesome enough, with the bragging and comparing, that Blizzard doesn’t want to officially bring them into the game.
• Another Word Jumble. I think these things are great.
• Here’s something interesting: No more 10/25 man raid differences, basically. Raiding 25 will still give you more loot, but not any better, and no difference in respective difficulty. That is interesting, though I wonder why they’re even bothering with 25-man raids anyway — why not just go 10 normal or 10 heroic? Honestly, I don’t think this will change how the game is played much — people who have the 25-man groups will still raid 25-man, and they’ll just get the best items they can get. But I almost think this is Blizzard cutting back content — it takes a long time to design different items and different abilities and different difficulties. And if people aren’t using them (and you can get more money by selling virtual items, ahem), then why put the time in? I don’t see this change as driven by customers at all — rather, I think Blizzard is deciding to cut costs where they can, not because they’re losing money, but because they want to focus on other functions of the game.

Thanks for reading!

Update: And the floodgates, they open wide.

Hey there! You’re probably wondering why there haven’t been many posts here lately. I’ve been busy. In fact, let me show you:

• A few weeks ago, I went to a conference called 360iDev in San Jose. It was an iPhone developers’ conference, and among other things, I saw one of Apple’s engineers speak. I spent a lot of time there writing about that and the rest of the conference for TUAW.
• Last week, I went to a 3D Gaming Summit here in Los Angeles for Joystiq, and I even got to moderate a panel. Fun times.
• Last weekend, I flew out to Seattle, and visited the Voices that Matter iPhone deveopers’ conference for TUAW. Here’s a quick panel writeup that I did, and here’s a great story about a really smart kid who’s making amazing software.
• Earlier this week, I went to a game preview for Joystiq … that I can’t actually tell you about yet. I got to play an unreleased game, but the news is still under embargo, so we haven’t posted about it quite yet. But it was fun, and I got to take a quick trip down the coast here in California.
• And on Thursday, I visited the LA Games Summit at Hollywood’s beautiful Roosevelt Hotel (I’m told one of the rooms we were in was where the very first Academy Awards were held). I wrote about both Vivendi considering digital distribution for WoW (something I’ve thought about for a while), and a quick interview with Playdom’s CEO, along with a few other short tidbits from the industry summit.

So I’m glad to say that my plan, conceived all of those years ago, to come out to Los Angeles and hit the events scene is paying off big time. I’ve done a ton of event coverage already this year, and it’s only May. And it helps a lot that I really enjoy going out to events and doing interviews and meeting people — it’s a lot of work, but it’s also a very concentrated writing experience, and I love doing that.

I will definitely write here when I can, and when I’ve got something to say. But that’s why things have slowed down here again: just because, as is usually the case, I’m busy elsewhere.

Hey, you didn’t expect to see this podcast again, did you? I’m still doing it, when I have the time. This one’s rough, I think, but maybe you’ll find it interesting.

• When you listen to music, your brain is actually making a series of predictions. And when your predictions are wrong, then it gets interesting.
• Fiction is more persuasive than non-fiction, and we’re still guessing why.
• Easy = true. I didn’t do a great job of explaining this one, but just read the article. Fascinating stuff in there.
• Slime mold studied by researchers is developing in the exact same pattern as the Japanese rail system.
• Disney parks are fun, but what about the lines? Disney’s trying to come up with a new way to make you wait without making it feel like you’re waiting.

Hopefully something in there catches your fancy. Thanks for listening!

 

 The Modern World, episode 13 [40:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Yeah, it’s actually Thursday, but I’ve been super busy the past few weeks (and that’s not going to change, as I’m about to head out of town again this weekend). But just in case you want to know what I think of the World of Warcraft, I hate to disappoint you, so here’s a late Warcraft Wednesday for you.

• Warcraft Word Jumble, and it’s even interactive! I would not be opposed to seeing Warcraft-related versions of common party and newspaper games. It would even be wild to see them in the game — isn’t it about time Blizzard added a little bit more interactivity to quests and games rather than just the click-this-item, run here gameplay?
• Brigwyn has me a little worried with all of this finality — hopefully he’ll still keep up the site as always. But it was nice to be mentioned in such a flattering way. And you can listen in to their podcast to hear me rant and rave about the sparkle pony.
• Larisa, intelligently as always, puts into words what I’ve basically been saying for years. I don’t guess at what Blizzard is thinking any more, just because none of their actions as regards their community have made any sense for a long time. And I don’t give them free advice about how to deal with that community, either, though I’ve definitely got plenty sitting around my huge head. Anytime they want to call me up to consult for their community team, I’ll be here. Meanwhile, however, never in the history of selling products has one company accomplished so much by doing so little. It speaks to the power of their game design talent that even as they shut doors and ignore their biggest core fans, people still can’t donate enough attention and time (and let’s be honest, money) to their games.
• In-game, I’ve actually been playing quite a bit (on the few days I’ve had recently where I’m not working from when I wake up to when I go to sleep). All I’ve been doing is running quests with my Paladin — he finally built his epic flying mount, and next I’m planning to get to da choppah. I need money, which is coming pretty quickly from the quests, and I need to level my Engineering a few more points, which should come pretty easily with all of the various ore I’ve stockpiled while questing around. After that, I’m seriously considering going for Loremaster, but I figured that I’d start in Northrend — I haven’t even cleared Icecrown yet, so first things first. If I finish all the quests in one zone, I’ll move to another, and if I clear out Northrend, then I’ll start questing in the older expansions. You may argue that I should do the older realms first, since Cataclysm will replace all of those quests, but I’m not in a hurry — I’m willing to wait and see what happens there. If they do replace all of those quests, then at least I’ll be doing new ones.
• These are cute. I feel like I should probably get some art of my characters done sometime here — I don’t want something so cookie-cutter or space-taking as a FigurePrint, but it would be cool to have a custom drawing or even painting of a few of my favorite characters to put on the wall. Of course, if I ever end up marrying somebody, it’ll probably just sit in the closet, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to look at it for now.
• And finally, I don’t remember if I linked this here or not, but just in case you missed it, I was also on this Group Quest podcast the other week. I don’t rant about the sparkle pony, but I do hopefully provide some entertaining insight on the game at large and Cataclysm’s class changes specifically. Enjoy!

And that’s it for now. This site is one of my favorite sites to work on, but it’s also kind of the inverse of whatever I’m doing in real life — when things are slow out on the other blogs, I write a lot here, and when things are busy out there, I almost never have time to write here. So even if you don’t see posts from me here regularly, you can at least know that somewhere, I’m out there, writing like a madman.

Unfortunately, the Cubs season has been one long run of disappointment so far, and things don’t seem to be looking up at all. Fans of the Cubs at this point are basically just hoping it doesn’t hurt too much — we’re mostly putting our arms up and asking for it not to be right in the face if possible.

But I have gleamed something worthwhile from this baseball season so far, and that is a growing deeper appreciation for the game itself. Last year, I followed a bunch of Cubs tweeters, and while they gave me a lot of fun and good insight on my team, I didn’t get much news from the rest of the league. So this season I pulled up what I thought were a few good league-wide baseball blogs, and they’ve been extremely interesting reading even outside of the Cubs’ disappointing gameplay. I’ve learned fun things about numbers from all over the league, whether baseball is actually running out of records to break, Jackie Robinson day (call me dumb, but I didn’t know such a thing existed — how awesome), heard a great story from a Philly blogger about catching a foul ball for his kid, and gotten to watch a mascot fall off of a dugout overhead. Don’t worry, he wasn’t hurt at all.

Sports, to me, have always seemed pretty impenetrable — I never really had the time or interest to follow anything specifically, and the traditional sports talk (in which a bunch of dudes throw around names and numbers while subtly competing with each other about who knows the best or who can be the most dismissive) has never appealed to me much. But what I’m finding in exploring the bigger world of baseball this year, especially on these blogs, is not only a real sense of community (which is to be expected — what else is the Internet but a series of communications inside various communities), but a real intelligence and wit shining on through. Sports media tends towards the elite — even something like Sportscenter, shown at bars and gyms all over the country, has to keep the names and references coming to keep “real” sports fans hooked. But these blogs that I’m reading about baseball, especially the best of them, offer up no such walls or hurdles. Haven’t heard of the players they’re joking about? They link off their names, so you can go see them online, where they’ve been and what they’ve done. Don’t know what RISP or OBP are? They explain it, they link it, and they give a little insight along with the opinion.

For the most part (having followed Cubs bloggers and twitterers for over a year now, I do go a little deeper on the Cubs side, so there are a few bloggers I read who aren’t so accessible), the tone is jovial, and inclusive, and fun. And that’s really refreshing — even if my Cubs don’t win, I can jump into the baseball section of my RSS reader and hear a good baseball story or learn something interesting about a game that went down last night.

I like it. I don’t know if it’s just the way baseball is right now (it seems like as sports go, this one is pretty popular), or if the Internet really has made more of these connections and story-sharing circles possible, or, more likely, some combination of those two. But I’m surprisingly myself with how interested I’ve become not only in my own team, but the sport in general.

Not that it’s helped me — I downloaded the MLB 10 The Show demo the other day, and just got crushed (I’m looking around for a softball league or something like that — maybe I’ll do better in real life). But it has made a terrible Cubs season more fun so far.

Employee 1: Hey so I had an idea last night.

Employee 2: Oh yeah? What’s that?

E1: You know all of these little minipets we’ve got laying around from the card game?

E2: Oh sure. My friend in character design worked hard on one of those. He was angry when he found out it wouldn’t be used.

E1: Well I’ve been playing Farmville, and I had a thought. What if we just, you know, sold them?

E2: Sold them? What, you mean like for gold?

E1: No, I mean… like… for money.

E2: Wait, real money? Are you nuts?

E1: Not a lot of money! Just a little money. They’re just sitting on our art database, it’s not like they’re getting used any more since the TCG went bottoms up, right? We might as well liquidate them off.

E2: But that seems, like, wrong. It’s a game. You’re supposed to play and earn stuff, not just buy stuff.

E1: Well you won’t need to earn these, it’ll just be a fun thing. We’ll sell them for like ten bucks. They’re just pets — nobody will buy them anyway. We’ll probably get thanked for helping clean out inventory before the expansion.

E2: I guess we did just create that online store and the online identity thing — all we’d have to do is create a SKU and then mail them out in-game. But pets for real money, doesn’t that seem kind of… skeevy?

E1: Bah, no one will care. People who want real pets will still earn them, these will just be one of however many thousand we’ve got. A fun little thrill for just ten bucks.

E2: Five bucks?

E1: Ten bucks seems good to me.

E2: …

E1: Ten bucks, and on one we’ll give half the profits to charity.

E2: …

E1: Oh, come on! What’s the worst that could happen? We’ll make money for the company?

E2: Fine. But if the bosses find out, it’ll be your fault.

***

Boss 1 and boss 2 break in the door.

Boss 1: Who’s in charge here?

E1: (was sleeping) Huh? Wha?

E2: Holy crap! If anything went wrong, he did it.

E1: All right, fine. I’m in charge. What do you want?

B1: Why is all of this money being deposited into our online store account?

E1: Wait, which account is that?

E2: Is that…? Oh crap, I knew it. I told you! I told you this would screw us over!

E1: Ok, listen, I can explain. This is just a little thing we tried, I can turn it off.

B1: Listen. You two are just menial employees here, and this company has grown very big in the past few years — there are all kinds of people wandering the halls whose faces I don’t even bother to try and recognize any more. All I want to know is: One, what have you done to get all of this money in our account?

E1: It was just a –

B1: Two, is it legal?

E1: Look, we’ll fix —

B2: And three, how can we get more of it?

E2: Look, this is all just a misunderstanding. We had this little idea to get rid of some old designs we had that we weren’t going to use, and it just got out of hand. Wait, did you just ask how you can get more of it?

B2: Son, I know you’re probably some kind of “video hypercoder” and that you didn’t go to business school, or probably any school at all, given the way you smell. But this building you’re in is a business, and the goal of a business is to make money. So either tell us what you did right now, or you won’t be making any money here ever again.

E1: Look, we sold a few pets. That’s all. We had them designed, they didn’t take any time, we just figured we’d put a store up and sell them. It wasn’t a big deal, and it’s over — we’re really sorry. We’ll refund the money and we’ll give the pet out to everyone in the game.

B1: Give the pet out? Why?

E2: People weren’t happy about it — they don’t want us selling pixels for real money. The game is about making your character better, not buying things with real money to make it better. People don’t like it, we’ll end it, we’re sorry.

B2: Wait, people aren’t happy because they didn’t get anything real? But they still paid?

E1: A lot of people paid, actually. Like, a whole lot of people.

B1: And they each paid $10? Do we have anything real to sell?

E2: Well we’ve got these plushies sitting around — we usually sell those during the big convention every year. I guess maybe we could put those on the site and include these with it.

B2: Do it. We’ll check back in after it goes live.

E1: Wait, you don’t want to fire us?

B1: Fire you? You just earned us more money in one day than we spent making the last content patch, and the online store is still going gangbusters. If we’d known we could do this three years ago, we could have given an expansion away for free!

E2: Wait, really? But it’s not fair. These pets aren’t worth $10 — they’re not even worth $5. We’ve been giving them away for years! At least when people buy an expansion, they’re buying actual content, an actual experience that they wouldn’t have otherwise. These are just pixels.

B2: Son, things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. I know these things are just pixels in your crazy video machines. But if people are willing to pay ten bucks to see pixels, then you take their money and smile when you say thank you.

E2: But that doesn’t seem —

B1: Look, do it. Put the pets up, add the plushies with it, and let’s see how those do.

E1: What should we sell them for? We sell the convention ones for $40, but that’s a special event, and there’s no pets with those.

B1: What do they cost to make?

E2: We got a bulk deal for next year — they’re each a couple bucks to make. They come out of China somewhere. The people who played them probably come home and spend the money we paid them on our games.

B1: Sell them with the pets for $20.

B2: $25.

Boss 1 and 2 look at each other. They both laugh.

B1 and 2: $24.99.

They laugh again as they walk out of the room together.

***

B1: Ok, we’re back. How did the pets with the plushies do?

E1: Umm…

B2: Spit it out, son!

E2: Look, they didn’t do quite as well as the other pets.

B1: What? But they were worth more! They were real items — I thought that’s what these people wanted.

E1: Well we thought that, too. But then we talked to some players, and they said that they didn’t really want a plushie sitting around their house. And they didn’t really want to give their address and wait for it to be mailed, and wonder if it would show up or not.

E2: And some of them said that they didn’t actually want the plushie anyway.

B1: Wait, they didn’t want the plushie? I thought they wanted something real.

E1: That’s what they said. But they don’t actually want the plushie specifically. Digital is just easier, they said.

E2: Don’t get us wrong, we sold plenty. Just not quite as many as the in-game pets by themselves.

B2: Do we have anything else to sell?

E2: What? No, it was just the plushies. We’ve got t-shirts and stuff, but we have other companies to sell those for us.

B2: Nothing? What about this art vault you got? Anything in there?

E2: Well yeah, we have another little pet in there — we were thinking about giving it away on a test realm or something.

B1: That’s good. That’ll do.

B2: Sure, that’s good, too. But do you have anything bigger?

E1: Bigger?

E2: We did make this one thing, but that’s not really…

B1: What is it?

E1: There’s this horse. It was supposed to drop from a boss on one of the instances, but he wasn’t the last boss of the expansion, and we figured we’d want to save the coolest mount until the last boss. So we just kind of put him away for a while — we were thinking of using the horse next expansion, maybe in another realm or something.

E2: Yeah, but we can’t use that horse. I mean — I wasn’t really comfortable with the pets, but the mount? That thing is a game changer — people won’t have to buy a mount ever again if they get one of those. Plus, this whole thing is wrong anyway — it’s all gotten out of hand. There are people that do this, companies that take money like this, but not us. We sell experiences, not designs. We make games, not virtual item stores.

B2: We make money, son. This mount — can you put it up on the store? Like by itself, without a plushie?

E1: Sure, wouldn’t be hard. The code’s all there.

B1: And people would want it? Like there’s not anything else like it in the game?

E1: Well, the model is in the game, but not the textures or anything. Yeah, I think people would want it. I mean, I wasn’t even really sure people would spend money on those pets, but they did, right?

B2: They certainly did. Do it. Put the mount up.

E1: What should we charge for it?

B1 and B2 smile.

B1: Same as the plushies. $24.99.

B2: Wait. $25. Take a penny, take a penny, right? (smiles)

E2: You can’t be serious, though! Just a cosmetic mount for twenty-five dollars? There are really incredible full games that cost less than that! You’re talking about a situation where people might actually give us thousands of dollars for this thing. I mean I don’t think it’ll go this high, but we might get a million dollars from people, just for this mount. $25 is two months worth of the subscription, if you go with a longer plan. If half of our user base buys this thing, we’ll earn more on the mount than on the actual game this month! I thought we were a game company here — I signed up to be a game designer.

B2: I told you, son. We’re a business. We make money. It’s tax day — they’re all getting their refunds, they can pay. Put the mount up.

E1: Will do.

B1: We’ll see what it does. If you’re right, and nobody buys it, lesson learned. We’ll go back to making our games, and we won’t ever bother with just selling pixels for many, many times over what they cost us to make. Like he said, something’s only worth what people are willing to pay for it. If this mount isn’t worth $25, then nobody will pay for it.

E2: But what if people do? I mean, I don’t think anyone’s crazy enough to spend $25 on a virtual item — it’s a cosmetic change in a five-year old game. And once we announce the new MMO in the next year, no one’s going to be interested in this game any more, anyway.

B2: The new MMO! I forgot! Oh man, I can’t wait to see what we can do selling items in that.

E2: Ugh, thank goodness I’m not on that team. But here’s what really scares me: what if this mount thing works? What if it sells? This company got huge because we worked really hard and made really great games — the only reason you can even pull off a scam like those pets is because of the hard work people did years ago, not just on this game, but on all of the great ones before it. Because of the solid, polished, impressive work that that small team of folks did years ago, our company is a behemoth today with thousands of employees globally, and we have an extremely dedicated userbase that dwarfs almost everyone else in the industry. And you’re going to use all of that good will and all of that love we’ve earned to charge people $25 for a bunch of pixels that look like a pony? That’s what really scares me. What if they pay?

B2: Son, if they pay, then we will have ourselves one very successful business. [Laughs]

B1: [Laughs]

They both exit the room and walk down the hall lined with posters of classic PC games, laughing all the way.

Sorry — I’ve been away covering a conference all this week, and I still have a stack of work to do from that, plus I took the wrong path and ended up driving about ten hours across Southern California today. It was pretty and all, but I’m exhausted. So while there’s lots of cool WoW stuff going on, I just don’t have the brain bandwidth to write about any of it today.

But I will post this oldie but goodie, one of my favorite Spiff videos. WW will be back next week.

I wrote this sonnet about Lost for a longer joke I was going to do about me selling some poetry to try and raise money for an iPad. But the joke wasn’t that good, and I really shouldn’t be begging for money here. I should probably stop whining about how much the iPad costs and just buy it.

But anyway, here is a sonnet in (somewhat — I think I missed a few places) iambic pentameter from the point-of-view of Sun on Lost:

As I, upon this wind-swept island wait
For him, my rough-classed strong Korean man,
I wonder if he’s reached some ill-sung fate,
Or gotten lost in time, just like that Dan.

I’ve lied and threatened, known my share of sin,
But I returned here, searching for my Jin.

For some reason I’ve been awfully busy lately, so I haven’t had much time to write here, much less play World of Warcraft (and unfortunately, this probably won’t change — next week I’ll be out of town for a conference, and then the week after I’m hosting a panel, and then in May I have another big project to work on). But I did want to do this week’s Warcraft Wednesday for you, so here it is. Probably smaller than usual, but maybe something’s better than nothing.

• I can confirm that the Cataclysm beta is about to start. I don’t know if I’ll get an invite (or if I even want one — I usually like to avoid PTR/beta realms and actually experience things on the live realms), but either way, I’d say we’re about four or five months out from the release. That puts Cataclysm out sometime in August/September, which seems about right. It’s possible that they could go a little earlier, as we already know that lots and lots of work has been done on the expansion, not to mention that Blizzard has gotten better and better, I think, at testing and releasing content. Plus, I was just thinking about this the other day: with the exception of a few people and a few Blizzard higher-ups, this is a very different team from the people that actually launched the game and even that first expansion. The workflow has probably changed quite a bit since the days of Burning Crusade and even Wrath. Still, we’re at least closer than ever, and from what I’ve seen, there will be zero NDA, so we’ll likely see a flood of screenshots and movies and information come right out of the beta as soon as it opens.
• I’ll tell you something else that’s probably close: An Armory iPad app. I’m a little surprised that there’s not one already, but then again, Blizzard would want to test the app before they release it, and they’re probably not grossing enough in the store for Apple to justify giving them a test unit early. But I’ll bet you money that there are plenty of iPads sitting around the Blizzard offices during the day, and that very soon, we’ll see a release from them in the store. An authenticator doesn’t really seem right — more likely it’ll be an updated Armory app.
• There’s a lot of class information dropping this week, but honestly, that doesn’t bring much more than a yawn from me. Not sure why — it could be because I haven’t seen Hunter changes yet, or maybe it’s because I’m most looking forward to content, not class changes. New class abilities won’t surprise me any more — I don’t care if Hunters can spawn copies of their pets or Shaman have a more steady mana output, yadda yadda yadda. What matters most to me is what Deathwing does to the Old World, and if Blizzard can make a five-year-old game feel new again. When they plan to release that information on the forums, let me know.
• Hey, happy birthday Warcraft Pets! Notable for being probably the most visible member of the community that’s actually acknowledged by Blizzard, so kudos for that (oh yeah, and for having a great site of course :) ). Slightly related to vanity pets: I am a little ashamed to say that I got taken in by El’s April Fool’s joke about the Aquarium for in-game fishing. At first, I was like, “Oh man Blizzard is going way too Farmville,” and then I was like, “Whoah, actually this is pretty cool,” and then (about 3/4ths of the way down the page) I realized it was April 1st and El was having a go. But still, I have to admit that I was kind of sold on it. Not into the microtransactions, mind you (never into the microtransactions), but the idea of a serious system behind vanity pets? That’s intriguing.
• Cool wallpaper. Cool icons.
• Great post by Larisa about BlizzCon. It is an excellent event — at this point, even if Blizzard wasn’t announcing games or showing off new titles, everyone would want to just get together anyway and have a good time for a weekend. Too bad Larisa can’t go, but yes, I agree, it is a pain to come all the way across the country (or in her case, the world), pay for hotel and food, and try to nab a ticket to get into a limited show. On the other hand, if it was easier or cheaper to come, I don’t think it’d be the same event. Same deal with PAX — the fact that it is such a targeted and focused group is kind of what makes it so special. A tightly knit virtual community brought to life.
• I twittered about this, but I’ll say it again: goodbye and thanks, Eyonix. For some reason, the CMs never seemed to like my corner of the community (actually, I think I know why, but it’s a misunderstanding that never got corrected), but I appreciate their work, both as a writer and a fan. Hope we get to see him somewhere else (and when we do, hope we realize that he’s Eyonix — kind of weird that CMs of his stature are still going by aliases).

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading!

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything witty to say tonight, but instead I’ll share Hunch’s Twitter predictor with you. Hunch is a site that I mentioned a while back on The Modern World (which I should really do a new episode of at some point…) that is designed to crowdsource decisional questions — answer things like “What should I eat for dinner?” by seeing what people before you in the same situation chose.

They’ve hooked their system up to Twitter, and if you type in your username (it’s safe, they won’t steal your account or anything), they’ll check out your followers (and maybe your tweet text, but I’m not sure about that I just saw on the bottom of their page that they don’t — it’s only follower information), and then they’ll try to predict how you’ll answer a series of questions. In other words, they’ll ask if you are good at computers, and if you have a lot of techies in your “circle,” it’ll guess that you are.

I ran through the quiz twice (once with my username, and once by putting in someone else’s twitter username — shh, don’t tell them), and it’s pretty interesting. While they make some pretty broad strokes (“Are you a liberal or conservative?”), there are some interesting questions in there (“Are you more extroverted or introverted?” and “Do you consider yourself traditional or original and inventive?”). And more often than not, Hunch did indeed guess correctly about me, though there was the occasional secret (how could they know that I secretly prefer chick lit over sci fi?) about me that they didn’t guess correctly.

And of course, as you answer, the survey updates itself, so that at this point, they’re hitting correct on most of their answers. It’s just a cute online test to most of us, but I’ll tell you who’d really be interested in this information: Advertisers. Twitter follower information is publicly available (at least it is for me — private accounts may not be), and if an advertiser plugged my information into a service like Hunch, they’d have a pretty good idea, even without getting my consent, about the kinds of things I like to spend money on and the kinds of things I am interested in. That’s the real secret of Hunch’s database: the more of this kind of stuff advertisers know about you, the more they can get you to agree with.

Is Hunch selling this information? I don’t think so, but there’s nothing to stop them, and in fact Twitter might even want to pick them up (and/or is probably running something like this already), since they’re rolling out their advertising plans soon. But in the meantime, it just shows you how much information about you is encoded into these social networks you join and frequent. There’s a whole library of information that can be learned about you and who you are simply by seeing who you’re connected to and how.

I used to actually be very into the whole April Fool’s thing. When I was a kid, I tried to convince my parents that our TV had been stolen. I woke up very early in the morning, unplugged our family television and all of its various wires from its stand in the family room, and carried it by myself (I’d like to think I was 8 or 9 when I did this, but it was probably closer to 13, which makes it more embarrassing) into the living room, where I hid it under a blanket. When my parents finally got up and I walked in to act all surprised and wonder very loudly why someone would steal our TV, they just shook their heads and wondered what was wrong with me. The joke didn’t go over very well (and, I can now see with my older and more comedically-experienced eyes, for good reason). I returned the TV quietly only a little while later, without incident.

I like the idea of April Fool’s — that anything can happen, and that something surprising and unexpected might be right around the corner. But over the years, and especially with the rise of the Internet, where it’s extremely easy to make things up and spread the word about them very quickly and without a lot of recourse, April Fool’s doesn’t always fall into that same sense of wonder and trickery. Sometimes, it’s just an outright and awkward lie — as all the game journalists I’m following on Twitter have said, this day can be hell for fact-checking, especially when you’re covering sites that aren’t good at being just subtle and witty enough to make it a joke rather than a fabrication or a trick. And this year, even the jokes have gotten a “meh” reaction from me. I think XKCD pulled off the only real April Fool’s Day prank that I liked this year, which was a fully-working command-line interface for the webcomic site. Even the one joke I tried this year, talking about Farmville rather than Warcraft yesterday, got a pretty “meh” reaction from me, and no reaction from anyone reading it.

I’m not sure if there’s something actually wrong here, or if this needs to be fixed at all. Ideally, we’ll get to a point where everyone is tired of the fabricating and the meh jokes, and sites on the Internet will only post really interesting and entertaining funny things on April 1st. That’s started to happen a little bit — it used to be that everybody switched places or went crazy on April 1, and compared to a few years ago, today’s events have been pretty sedate.

But I wouldn’t mind going the other direction — maybe it’s so easy to spread and share information nowadays, and the Internet is already such a silly place, that we don’t even need April 1st any more. Maybe it’s just not worth bothering with. Are we even getting anything out of it? Are there any pranks or jokes that were really worth reading or putting the time into today? ThinkGeek probably had some of the most worthwhile stuff, but that stuff is so smart that like many ThinkGeek April 1st gags in the past, they’ll probably have someone actually make it. And Bioware is actually selling DLC for April 1st. Yes the items are joke-y, but what’s really funny about that?

The best April Fool’s prank I ever pulled was also when I was a kid, and also on my parents (you can probably see why I admire them so much, considering how many annoying shenanigans I tortured them with). One April 1st, I woke early (again, most of my plans involved waking up early), and changed every clock in the house that I could to an hour forward. My dad usually woke up at 5:30, and I set his clock so that it would actually go off at 4:30 (when it was set to 5:30). I changed the kitchen clock that he always checked, and my brother and sister’s clocks as well. The only clock that I couldn’t change was the one in his car, and I figured that as soon as he got into the car and turned the key, the dashboard clock would light up and he’d know something was wrong.

And lo and behold, it worked. At 4:30 he rose and showered as he did every day, ate his cereal breakfast and read the paper while packing his lunch (my Mom also got up and chatted with him as he packed), and headed out to the car a full hour before he was supposed to be at work. I wandered out of my room innocently, and just as my Mom asked why I was up so early, my Dad came back in from the car. “What time do you have?” he asked. “I think there’s something wrong with the clocks. Why’s it still dark outside?”

I remember him being confused, and again, my parents getting that look on their faces as I explained my subterfuge like a minature, chubby supervillian. But in the end, my Dad got the joke, and even moreso, I think he appreciated that he didn’t have to be at work for another hour. He sat back down at the kitchen table with my mother and I, and we talked and laughed for another forty-five minutes, extra time I’d secretly earned us with my prank.

I guess, for reasons like that, we might as well keep trying to fool each other, even if most of the jokes don’t quite hit their target exactly. Maybe it’s worth it for the occasional one that does.

But if not, I’m fine with International Talk Like a Pirate Day taking over for the silly holiday every year. I think I like that one a little better anyway, matey.

And now it’s time once again for FarmVille Wednesday, in which I talk what’s interested me in the past week of my favoritest MMO ever, FARMVILLE. Omg I love clicking.

• Spring fever is underway! Everyone’s collecting eggs for their spring basket in hopes of picking up a chick or something else that’s cool from a Mystery Egg. I don’t have too many friends, so I’m still stuck at “Empty,” but I’m hoping to do a lot better on this run than I did on the St. Patrick’s Day event where you had to try and earn gold from everyone. I’m totally going for that Mystery Egg!
• But I’m not nearly as excited about Spring as I am about the three features it seems like they’ve been teasing forever on the login screen — pets, co-op farming, and the farmer’s marketplace. All three of those got a little more outlined in Monday’s official podcast. FarmVille is already kind of co-op in a way, but I think bringing in a little more meaningful interaction will really push the game up to the next level in terms of fun (which means, it’ll actually be a little fun). Especially when you look at what Ngmoco is doing with We Rule (players in that game can actually own businesses and sell orders off to their friends), FarmVille could use a little more direct interactivity to counterweigh all of the clicking.
• Personally, I’ve just restarted in terms of what I’m growing. For a long time, I figured that since I was always near a computer, I should go short term, big profit, and I planted a lot of strawberries and soybeans. But lately, I feel like it’s more worth it to go in on the long term, and decided to do some mass-planting of longer crops like artichokes (and even pineapples, just for the heck of it). After the last harvest, however, I think I’m going to remake the farm — I’ve got a sizeable pocket build up at this point, and I think I might redesign my farm. The original design focused a lot on personal choices (like spelling out crops in the shape of my name), but I think in the future, I might go a little more traditional, which should make it easier for me to go through and harvest quickly.
• You may have heard that a European councilman lost his job due to playing FarmVille too much during council meetings. I’ll take the same line I always have on this one: if playing FarmVille too much is costing you your job, it’s time to stop playing FarmVille. After all, how else will you make some real money which you can then pour back into the game as FarmVille bucks? It’s very, very important to keep your job going — even if you have to let those crops wither occasionally, a steady paycheck, which you can then directly turn over to Zynga, is extremely important. Family relationships on the other hand, not so much. Your Shamrock Sheep will always love you — can you say the same about your wife? Didn’t think so.
• I’ve seen some cool crafts lately, too: While this FarmVille kitty is probably a little too girly for me, I really like this black sheep and this pig sculpture (the second especially considering my pig-purchasing spree last week). But my favorite is this moo art — I’d like to hang that on my wall.

That’s it for this week. Stay tuned next week — hopefully by then my Horse Stable will be built, and I can tell you all about how I did it!

I’m about to sit down and watch one of my favorite TV shows, 24, which last week Fox confirmed was going to be done for at the end of this season.

I’m actually ok with the decision — I still love the show, but I think both the show and its main character (Jack Bauer, who will be up there with Batman as one of my favorite fictional characters of all time) have done pretty much all they can. For all of the political bluster and hype (the show made a few headlines for Jack’s tendency to torture terrorists for information, at a time when torturing terrorists became frighteningly close to, if not actually, legal), the core of the show is really a Greek tragedy, and I think that the story is about wrapped up anyway.

Perhaps I should explain.

If you’ve never seen the show, I highly recommend you at least watch season one. Fans of the show each have their own favorite seasons — season two is mostly singled out as the worst season (one of the characters went on the run against cougars in an infamously bad attempt to spice up the suspense), and I personally like season five a lot — but season one, pretty much everyone agrees, is the quintessential 24 story. Jack Bauer is working at CTU (Counter Terrorist Unit) when he and his family are taken off guard one evening, and he has 24 hours to fight terrorists and save the world.

The basic premise of the show is that Jack Bauer is the most awesome counter-terrorism agent of all time. Nothing kills him, nothing stops him, and even though again and again and again and again, he’s forced to do the impossible with no time and no tools at his disposal, he usually pulls it off. And the creators of 24 are very good (and to their credit, have been very good the whole time) at ratcheting up that suspense, sometimes in multiple stories. The show itself takes place in real-time — each episode is an hour of the story, and each season is 24 hours — and it’s that ticking clock that really ties everything together. Sometimes the premise pushes things into the silly, like when it takes Jack Bauer 10 minutes to drive across Los Angeles (I’ve lived here for almost eight months now, and sometimes it takes me 15 minutes to go across my street), or when characters continually get thrown into situations just to keep the plot moving. Another common joke among fans is what Jack Bauer must think by now, having gone through eight different days at different times of his life, all of them packed to the brim with much more than any actual living human being could handle. This is a guy who doesn’t even work for CTU any more, and yet gets tortured at six in the morning, finds the time to live through a nuclear blast at 5pm, and then wins a fistfight against an agency mole at midnight. He gets in shootouts hourly at this point — he’s a hero.

And yet he’s a flawed hero, because, without spoiling the story, his crazy life has cost him. Jack’s tried to quit his job multiple times, and yet each season, something finds a way to pull him back into the action. His family and his relationships have suffered — if the person he’s dating hasn’t turned out to be a mole or a plant, then their sibling or parents usually are, or their son gets into trouble with someone who is.

And it’s wearing on him — in the promo for this last season, he jokes with his granddaughter that “you’re supposed to call me Grandpa.” And indeed, as season eight has pushed on, signs keep appearing that Jack is past his prime. Oh, he’s still superhuman — he still takes down terrorists with ease, and he’s still always, always right about that suitcase being a bomb, or that person lying, or the terrorists playing two parties off against each other.

But while the early secondary characters in the series were usually incompetent or traitorous, they’re now starting to be right as well. Not in the always-right way that Jack is (like Batman, he never, ever goes the weak route or bothers to compromise), but in a way that they’re kind of right, too. Things in Jack’s world are changing, and the real tragedy of 24, the real finale, may be that for all of Jack’s hard work and suffering and sacrifice, he may not have changed the world at all.

Of course, I don’t know how the show will actually end. In a way, though I will be sad that there’s not a new 24 on every week during the seasons, I’m kind of glad to see them call it quits. Every story needs a worthwhile ending, and I expect a good one from 24. Jack needs to finally, once and for all, have saved the world. There’s a rumor that he’ll die, and there’s even a rumor that they’ll do a movie (though I actually hope that doesn’t happen — not only are they suggesting that they won’t do it in real-time, which seems blasphemous for 24, but don’t we all remember the mess that Serenity was? That show really needed to go on, and yet the movie was still a mistake. I did like the TV movie that 24 put together, but it was really just another episode, not what they’re talking about in terms of a movie).

But no matter what, Jack’s story deserves an ending. I have my doubts that it’ll be happy — this show never really ends on a good note for the characters involved, even if the 24 universe (which is actually a few years ahead of ours, thus explaining some of the surveillance technology that we don’t happen to have in general usage yet) is still intact and running. So end away, 24. And no matter how many more members of CTU turn out to be moles, or how many times Jack gets shot in the arm and lifts something an hour later without wincing, I’ll still be watching.

As with that, I’m off to watch the show. Forgive me for hurrying — we’re running out of time!

Update: Just saw this week’s show (and the promo at the end for next week) — they are already pushing the finale hard. I can’t wait. I’m not sure how much of the show has actually been shot so far (I seem to recall they shoot about six weeks ahead, which means the last four will have been done with the knowledge that the show is ending), but I reckon it’ll be a nice finale. Not quite as epic as Lost, but I’m looking forward to it.

Sorry guys — had a long day and I need to play some video games, so rather than writing something here, I’m off to play Final Fantasy XIII.

I’m about three hours in — I like it so far, but it is kind of a bummer how much they streamlined it. I haven’t gotten all of the different strategy parts (like paradigms) “unlocked” yet, so I’m not really feeling the whole depth of the game. Still, I like it — all of the naysayers are right about some of the things they’re saying, but they forget one thing: it’s Final Fantasy. I haven’t played a Final Fantasy game since X, so it’s been years since I saw that gloved hand in the menus and heard and seen a JRPG like this one.

In fact, the J may be the most important part of how this game is being received — it’s a very, very Japanese game, and it’s always been a pretty Japanese series. Back when Final Fantasy VII ruled the world, Japan was the center of video games — they were turning out the brightest and the best, Sony sold the most popular console around, and the most popular American developers were still making games for the PC. Nowadays, though — well, Nintendo actually sells the most popular console. But the most popular games are created and sold by American developers, and Japan is sort of playing catch-up behind some really interesting game ideas from American design schools and European game designers.

It’s weird to think of Final Fantasy as an underdog, but it kind of is — the JRPG is almost an extinct animal at this point, and clearly Square Enix feels they have to streamline to reach a mass audience. The irony, of course, is that they probably don’t. Video gaming might need to progress, with motion controllers and 3D and so on, to make more money, but JRPGs really don’t. People are more than happy to play the same old 100-hour ATB games that they’ve always played, given that they’re created with love and care. Sooner or later, I hope some upstart developer comes along and realizes that. I think the next big Final Fantasy-style game won’t even be called Final Fantasy.

And look, you got me to write something anyway. I’m off to play.

PS. Lightning is a badass. I wonder if she’s a mom, because, y’know, “moms are tough.” Also, this is great.