::snort::

Via the Grinder krewe at Grinding.be - thanks, Xutraa.

Lo, there be Spoilers here
After watching these characters’ lives be shredded, built up, re-shredded and eventually ground into a gaseous mist of blood, there was no other way to end Battlestar Galactica . These characters have gone through the fucking wringer for our amusement and we needed to pay tribute to the characters - the actors, the writers, and production team. And I didn’t mind giving them that moment, after all the “Oh Shit” moments they’ve given me.

A Child’s Odyssey… and Adult’s
From the very beginning, Ronald D. Moore’s BSG set off on a parallel path of the 70s show, and if you look at the two shows, I see one as the children’s version of BSG and the other the accurate one, comparing children’s nativity plays to the sick fucking Passion-of-the-Christ blood and gore. Even down to the Angelic version of characters in this intergalatic odyssey, there’s a kid’s version and the “warts and all” truth version.

BSG was ripe for it’s time: in moment of panic, America was about to declare war on the world to ensure tyrants never force others to obey them. There’s a kernel of painful truth in that last sentence. BSG similarly blockaded the characters into a metal box against a deadly environment. The metaphor wasn’t just spot-on, but obvious.

So, what does this mean to television?
I don’t know. I do believe that episodic TV that has no goal is mind is reaching an end. Personally, while I can’t stand 5 minute episodes like The Guild or Red vs. Blue - funny as they are, the story is never deep enough for me. And excellently written TV is now more rare, especially with the CSI/Numbers/Bones feces-infested shows that insult everyone who participates in them these days. Real science is hard. Real life is hard. Why don’t we EVER see the villain get away and the cold case grow cold, die, and be an bitter pill.

BSG gaves us plenty of bitter pills, from romances that should’ve and shouldn’t to betrayals to the worst suicide ever depicted on tv (Dualla’s). Depressing and horrific. But it made for a compelling story. End to end, BSG left it’s mark on television.

The Cautionary
The cautionary tale of BSG truly is what is the next phase of life. Where do we go from here? My opinion is we go forward. We build the robots. We make the AI. We do it early. We do it often. We do it prolifically. And we make a strong effort to not obliterate ourselves in the process. We do these things like the way we climb mountains: because we can, because it’s there. Moore’s cautionary also comes with the nature of man, questioning the religious effort of people. Having heard him speak a couple times, he’s as brazen as most people get about this.

But still we have billions of people working to perpetrate the myth machines. However, Moore has as well. Making Kara Thrace an angel - or a construct that fulfilled it’s mission and self-deleted, and implying that Caprica 6 and Baltar could see constructs/angels, means there’s a design in the chaos. It’s very ham-handed, deus ex machina, and my rational-minded viewpoint, disappointing. I believe he backed down from the wall of “your religions are lies” - spoon feeding myth-lovers a last minute backdoor so that “everything” end ok because a deity is looking out for these characters.

If there’s a theme I’ve experienced with television and pop culture, ever since I was a kid, it’s the “I wish I hadn’t missed that phenomenon. I missed Highlander in the theatres because I never heard of it. Later, I missed the shows Nowhere Man and Threshhold, both of which I blame network tv. And yes, I’m one of those geeks that thought SportsNight was the best thing on TV.

Recently I hunted down the Warren Ellis’ Global Frequency pilot - don’t ask me how because then RIAA would have to sue me, effectively a dead-on-arrival TV show due to [insert favorite Hollywood rumor here]. What amazes me is that someone could watch the show and not carry it through, especially after spending the money and time to get something like this off the ground. The show is based on Ellis’ Global Frequncy comics - which is something I never got into.

For those that are not going to see it ever, the story is simple: It’s the end of the world [or humongous terrorist attack or very large natural disaster - you get the picture] and Michelle Forbes gets to play the cold hard bitch that going to save it, including recruiting you. Strike one: how can you deny Michelle Forbes a role she’s born for? Hollywood hates strong women, and has been particularly rude to Forbes, in my opinion.

You have the very cool Warren Ellis twist on it, in this case a psychic quantum bomb, but that’s not the important thing: the Global Frequency is potentially everyone - smart, skilled, or simply the best available person at the moment.

As big as Ellis’ internet ego-footprint is (here and here), I picked out an underlying idea that’s common with a lot of Ellis’ work: we’re all on this planet together and it’s a good thing. This is something we’ve seen on his run of the Authority. Strike two: Ellis’ viewpoint is perfectly represented on the show.

The characters include a hot repressed librarian er, physicist who has yet to let her hair down - her first exposure to the audience is effectively a very common character reaction to a corpse: the humorous barfing scene. It’s a great exposure to the character and humanizing moment.

Add to it Aimee Garcia’s sonorous voice (and body) as Aleph, the comptroller of the group. She humanizes much of the story and characterization bringing the three different characters together - a role that would’ve allowed Garcia to have some of the best lines in the show.

The end of the show forces an excellent character choice that would’ve killed most shows in the 80s and 90s, but is perfect for Post 9-11 television.

Plus - San Francisco! What better place to put a freaky storyline?

So what was the problem? I don’t know. The conspiracy theorist in me says the ideal is dangerously democratic. The cinematic fan tells me it was shot far too dark, whcih could’ve been my recording. Wikipedia has it’s own theory. Either way, while I’m a bit of a Warren Ellis freak, I regret finding good things out that have already been cancelled. Feels like I keep missing the important calls - the good news is that I’m planning on getting copies of the trade paperback today.

There’s games and then there’s games. Valve’s Left4Dead has basically opened up and polished up a genre of games, and has done so in a way that other co-op, post-apocalyptic, four-on-four person teams will never be the same. Yep, the genre is “COPAFOFP w/ Zombies.” Ok, I kid.

This game was hard for me to write about not because everyone else has given it a great review, but because it is so. damned. good. Plus, I really wanted to say something important about it’s game play.

Reviewer credentials - never review a game you haven’t played extensively. Yes, I’m whining at YOU, Yatzee!
According to my Steam account, I’ve got:
34 hours of playtime
37 of 51 achievements
My biggest Hunter pounce was 10 points (out of a potential 25)
and I’ve yet to make it through any campaign on Expert.

But I keep trying. So why’s it taken me so long to write about this game? Hell, it’s been out for weeks - what’s defective with me? It’s because I’ve read and watched a ton of reviews and all of them have raved. Simply raved about this game, except the standard Yatzee Croshaw wingeing and nit-picking, telling me he phoned this one in.

I’m going to talk tangentially about this game: it’s a fucking masterpiece like most Valve games, and it’s got the polish that EA would’ve simply ignored to put into it. So raving more about it isn’t going to help.

A core of the L4D gameplay is cooperation, and helping each other. Everyone knows that the clock is ticking - you have to make it through the map. You have to kill zombies. Everyone, except the very newbie, knows that this game is bent on killing your character and simply will not allow a “respawn” - it’s do or die. In versus mode, it’s even more pronounced.

What is important is that I’ve added more Steam community “friends” in the last 2 weeks than I have since I’ve installed Steam. You can immediately tell good players from bad after one game of L4D… scratch that… not good players, but good PEOPLE. Bad people - like jerks and whiners - are almost completely cut out of the game play because… well, they’re jerks. Either through voting or a tit-for-tat Dawkins’ like grudging (from Dawkins’ Selfish Gene), where you help someone, but they don’t help you - no one else helps them either.

The good people work together as a team, who have low tolerance for whiners, who have a willingness to both teach and learn new strategies and tactics. Team Fortress, Halo and all the rest of the group vs. group games wish they had this level of excellent game play. And yes, there are some guilds that develop impenetrable cooperation, but it does congeal as part of the game play itself. It doesn’t evolve from the game play. We will get back to that evolution point in a bit.

The strategies used on the first week of game play have completely transformed in less than two weeks. As players get familiar with other players and maps, they enact different strategies - usually variations of fast/slow for survivors and bottleneck/harrying for infected (that’s zombies). The players have developed standards - one or two people end up becoming tactical leads and the others simply support them.

Also, players develop different tactics based on the situation - as we (the collective players) learned of weaknesses, we’ve also learned of strengths - in the characters of the infected or the maps, or the ability to teamwork. As the strategy is consensus based, all it takes is one ass-tard… sorry, player… who wants to Rambo the game and the entire game play is changed. And one person who whines about the speed of his computer simply gets booted because there’s a low tolerance - the game play is too fast and communication too important to tolerate whiners.

So, not only does L4D have evolving strategies, tactics, but culture as well. If communication is a precious commodity, tolerance for someone whining “Fuck fuck fuck they’re cheating that’s bullshit you fuckers” on a webmic will immediately get the boot. Thus, a meta game exists enforcing good standards of team play.

And this is where we’re seeing an incredible change in player behavior. If you act like a jerk, your three partners “darwin” you out of the gene pool. As a human being who wants to have a good time, you learn either because it’s in your nature, or because you’re force to cooperate. You learn to play - not “nice” but “good”.

In a world that celebrates evil-wins-out behavior prominently displayed in reality shows Left4Dead is a really “good” thing.

–
P.S. It would be neat if, when playing solo, the bots need a command console such as “Protect [character]”, “Defend HERE” - just a few simple commands would help a lot. Plus, I hate it when the bots set off the car alarm… but.. ok, I can live with it. Stupid bots. Also, should be able to play solo as infected to learn the tactics.

“With, without.
And who will deny its what the fightings all about?”
-Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, Us and Them

So Bill Maher’s Religulous put me in the tailspin that I expected it would. We have roughly 1.5 to 2 billion people fighting over the existence of 14 million. One side believes they need to die, the other believes they need to overcome… and then there’s confusion with the temple of the mount and wailing wall. Frankly, I don’t get it, but I do understand history, and George Santayana - “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

One of the core tenants about Religulous isn’t about the stupidity of religious people (yes, I call it stupidity), but the need to confront these people, like a psychiatrist guides a patient to confront their issues. I wonder how many psychologists and councilors go home after a long day’s work and think, “What a bunch of stupid fucking ‘tards?”

I was chatting with a good friend about why other terrorists don’t get on planes, land in the US and start blowing themselves up. I believe its because once you get to the US, it’s a completely different Earth than the rest of the world. Yeah, we’re imperialistic assholes that have a penchant for bombing brown people.

NPR’s All in the Media today ran a piece on how cable news is fracturing the need to be unbiased. We’ve known for a long time that Fox is an unbiased source, but the reason why people watch it is because it wont challenge their “views” - it’s never going to show a soldier crying as his face gets shot off. We listen to the music we like most. We watch the shows we like the most. We subscribe to the earthly world view that makes us comfortable.

The difference between faith and rationalism is that faith requires you to lie to yourself and hope for the best. Rationalism forces you to prepare, and sometimes causes nihilism which is an emotional land of hopelessness. JMS has an important saying here, but there’s something I use to address hope in a life of reason.

Human’s evolved on this planet for 200,000 years and have roughly 50,000 years of culture. While atheism has been around on and off for thousands of years, it’s rarely been a political movement, and when it’s been included as a tenant of politics, well, how do YOU summarize Soviet Russia and Soviet China? Not the most enlightend of societies.

And slowly, atheists are fighting to gain hold of people’s hearts and minds, but… I wonder if it’s worth it? Once you reject your dominant culture, you’re very likely to not want to join groups again without a healthy skepticism. So, not only do we have to move extreme believers to less irrational, but we also have to move the less irrational to the skeptic, and the skeptics to the active atheistic culture.

The Bright movement is one way for “conciousness awareness” - and it’s doing a very good job at it, but it’s not going to be enough. There’s literally billions of monotheists out there which can’t, won’t or are not allowed to go to the-Brights.net, let’s alone access to the internet.

Plus, there’s the last issue: no one likes being told that their big, invisible buddy is a myth. When you do, you risk death, anger, and other stupid responses. Very few atheists I know have the missionary spirit in them: “Sir, have you heard the good word about Darwin?” seems that it just wont work, does it?

(To be continued)

So, Avatar finally was able to get it’s bowels moving enough to drop the final issue of Black Summer (#7).

Frankly, I am not a fan of multiple cover, print every other month and charge three bucks for a comic business, but the sad thing is that Avatar is the only publisher that’s pushing any sort of boundaries right now, except for publishers that don’t touch superheroes at all - and unless you live in San Fran, New York or LA, you simply can’t get hold of non-superhero comics on a reasonable basis. Recently I was getting down on Warren Ellis’ because his books were tending to start strong and slowly wash out over time.

But I was harshing too heavy, primarily because I was jonesing for more decent reads. Black Summer ends like all good scifi is supposed to: a harsh reality with a grim mirror. The first six issues can be read as an us-against-the-world because one of “us” went off on the deep end. Similar to Blade Runner, the end of the Black Summer re-cast the entire tale into something else entirely. Superheroes constantly break laws: they crush buildings, illegal search and seizure, and kill people in the name of JUSTICE.

Black Summer is a serialization of two stories: why would people want to step outside the law to fix the world, and how far would they go? For each character in the book, there’s an origin of sorts - not a “how I got my powers” but “why do I want to be a superhero” origin - a telling of socio-political theory each character has to step in and create justice. Everything between “I want to save the world” to “because it’s there” reasoning is applied to each character. And the ever-unsatisfactory plot of “who watches the watchmen” (in a non-Alan Moore way) is also embodied in a character, slightly ham-handed, but a decent mustache twirling villain none-the-less.

But there’s justice and there’s the law and while the superhero power fantasy is important for young people to feel empowered by their passion and abilities, the law is there for a reason. Black Summer reminds us of why the law exists and why power fantasies should remain fantasies.

*Oh, yeah, in a shameless marketing move, Avatar created Black Summer Zombies cover shown above. **Sigh**

Art shows are always entertaining. Especially the Phoenix Artwalk, which is to say, the digging for semi-precious gems in mountain of used shit-stained underwear. Sturgeon’s law is a total underachiever when it comes to the first friday artwalk. But I wouldn’t be mentioning this if I didn’t stumble on to Alexander Scott Hughes‘ Put a Tiger in Your Tank, which I’ll get to presently.

Honestly, I’m almost ready to shell out some money for some of these works. His work is emotional and he’s got some images that makes him stand out. And a lot of it smells of great potential.

He loves the scary ookie pop culture stuff (Nightmare Before Christmas, Invader Zim) which seems to be real popular with the crowd - it’s probably his bread and butter as an artist. And his work of young boys with bare chests are excellently rendered to my uneducated eyes - and if that phrase sorta creeps you out, I’d say he does a good job of keeping the innocence without making it creepy which is pretty cool actually.

But the gem in my [heathen] eyes is Put a Tiger in Your Tank, depicting the Exxon logo and 50’s slogan Tiger leaping with an Imperial Stormtrooper in the foreground. As I write this, it’s about 10 feet away and it’s got some fun energy with a bizarre pop-culture invade-the-world overtone to it.

Very enjoyable.