Your Pixellated Quizo Update

Let’s talk a little bit about video games in a midly-serious, intellectualized way.

I am an avid player of video games and have been since the halcyon years of the eighth grade when my father told me I could get a Sega Genesis if I saved up the money to pay for half of it, thus teaching me both the value of fiscal responsibility and the value of splitting the cost of expensive shit with other people. I would not necessarily consider myself a “gamer,” though, since in my estimation most people who self-identify as “gamers” should also self-identify is “gigantic douchebags.” There is a mindset among a large percentage of the gaming population that the only purpose of playing a game is to win as decisively as possible. Suffice it to say that between going to a snooty prep school and growing up watching LaSalle basketball the burning need to win at all costs is not something that has been imprinted onto my psyche.

This is not to say that I am not the competitive type – I am, just not when it comes to video games. Back when I used to regularly play in good Quizos – we’re talking Johnny Goodtimes, the old Callahan’s in Mayfair, and, where I started out lo these many years ago, back at the New Deck – I was an absolutely unbearable teammate. I would flip out over missing a single question and argue answers for hours after the game had ended. Now that the only Quizos I play in, and only occasionally at that, are known as “the moron Quizo” and “the milkshake Quizo,” well, I’ve mellowed out somewhat on that score. At the exceedingly-rare serious Quizo game, though, I get very unpleasant. And, beyond Quizo, I’ve said before that the ultimate goal of my theatre company is the Sith-like subjugation of the entirety of Philadelphia theatre (complete with stormtroopers). So I still have a nasty and dangerous competitive streak in me, but it doesn’t extend to video games.

This is largely because I only get competitive about things that I actually have a shot at winning, and I realized a couple years ago that for however much I love playing video games the fact is that I’m not very good at them. In point of fact I am pretty terrible. I have the requisite hand-eye coordination to be able to play games with a greater degree of skill than, say, a lemur, but not much more than that. This, however, is okay.

It’s okay because I have long viewed video games as more of a narrative medium than a competitive one. At the end of the day video games are just a vehicle for telling stories, and my brain has been hard-wired since infancy to seek out and hoover up as much story as I possibly can. My parents are directly responsible for this; I regard the banning of sugary cereals and their constant insistence that books are great as the twin triumphs of their child-raising efforts. Thanks to them I’ve grown into a perfectly sane adult who is obsessed with Star Wars and gets nauseous at the thought of Lucky Charms.

It’s because of these things, though, that my video game tastes are strangely fractured (and that my favorite cereal is, seriously, Cheerios). When you lack the coordinative ability to frag at will first-person shooters are depressingly unamusing, so it is hardly surprising that the only ones I enjoy are those with a really strong narrative behind them like Half-Life (which has a great story I could not explain to you or even myself if I tried for a thousand years) and Medal of Honor (singlehandedly winning World War II = the most awesome story of all), both of which can be played extensively without getting your skull caved in by a 12-year old. (Someone is going to suggest “what about Halo” here, to which I suggest, “no, seriously, shut the fuck up.” Comparing the single-player in Halo to these games. Take the goddamn Bowie knife out of your skull and get back to me.)

I don’t go much for so-called action games with the noted exception of The Force Unleashed, which is currently at the top of my playlist. I’ve said before that The Force Unleashed is a great Star Wars movie (better than at least 50% of all extant Star Wars movies, at any rate) trapped inside a terrible game. That sentiment has lessened somewhat as I’ve gotten further into the game since once you get a full set of powers the game becomes stupidly amusing – never underestimate how joy-inducing it is to kill eight stormtroopers with a single button push – but the fact of the matter is that the story is SO good I don’t especially care that the game is bad because I’m not in it for the game. Twitchy cameras and sluggish targeting might matter to someone whose sole purpose for playing TFU is to jack up their gamerscore by another thousand points, but to me it’s just something that slows me down as I plow through to the ending (not the END, the ENDING), which I am starting to suspect is not going to be that happy.

Obligatory side rant: how fucking sad is it that the writing and acting in a video game are like TEN HUNDRED BILLION times better than the last three movies? Case in point if you aren’t aware of the game: the main character (Darth Vader’s Sith apprentice) communicates with people via a droid that turns itself into a holographic projection of whoever is on the other end of the line. After one time when he’s talking to Vader, after the call ends the droid collapses in a heap and says “I hate being him.” And the main character looks at the droid, and is suddenly very sad, and says, “I think he does too.” Those two lines have more real emotion behind them than every second of the first three movies put together. Congratulations, George. You spent 10 years, $400 million, and used a thousand people to make three movies that aren’t as good as one game that 30 people made in eighteen months. EPIC FAIL.

Anyway.

Mostly my gaming taste tends towards RPGs and sports games, and sports games are really just narrative vehicles anyway. Playing NHL or FIFA or whatever isn’t “can I somehow defeat my computer opponent/jerkoff guy on the internet?” It’s a story, and you’re waiting to see how it ends. Can Kansas win back-to-back BCS championships? (Yes.) Will Chelsea stretch out their six-game winning streak? (Yes.) Can Tiger break his own record at Pebble Beach? (Yes.) Will the Devils ever lose by fewer than 5 goals on Martin Brodeur’s day off? (No.) Despite the national media’s constant attempts to make them so I don’t believe that ACTUAL sports are a narrative event, but firing up NCAA Football on 360 is creating a story as much as sitting down to write the screenplay to Rudy.

And, as those of us of the gaming sort know, RPGs are basically just 40-80 hour movies with occasional gameplay bits in between scenes. The story rules still apply – I will grit my teeth and ignore reams and reams of terrible gameplay if the script is good enough (and I have). There are people, serious RPG-players, who complain that they hate Final Fantasy VIII (one of my all-time top five favorite games ever*) because “the gameplay is broken.” To that point, I remind them that A) it’s a freaking RPG, the gameplay (while in this case definitely broken) is irrelevant, and B) you KNOW the gameplay is irrelevant, and you actually hate it because it’s a love story and you’re an immature jackass. Admit it. ADMIT IT. YOU HATE IT BECAUSE IT’S A LOVE STORY. ADMIT THAT YOU ARE AN IMMATURE JACKASS. ADMIT IT!

I’m sorry, I still get a bit worked up about that one.

Also, there was something about baseball this week, but I was too busy trying to destroy the Emperor. I’ll have more on the World Series shenanigans tonight.

JLK







* In no particular order: Final Fantasy VIII, Half-Life, NFL 2K5, Final Fantasy Tactics, StarCraft

Your Olympic Spirit Quizo Update

When I got home from my last day at the Death Star factory on Friday, I was a little bummed until I remembered that, hey! It's the first day of the Olympics!

I am a stupidly big fan of the Olympics. They say that the Olympics are sports for people who don't really watch sports, but I say, "screw that noise." I love the Olympics. It very nicely fits in with the gorging, hoovering way in which I consume entertainment. You really cannot underestimate the awesomeness of being able to essentially do nothing but watch sports for 16 days straight, and now with my days suddenly, shall we say, much more wide-open and NBC's multi-channel 24/7 coverage I can do precisely that.

Plus you get to discover all kinds of neat things in the process. Watching the US Women's National Team at the Olympics was what originally got me interested in soccer - thanks for that, ladies - and this weekend I discovered "team handball." If you haven't seen it, team handball is best described as either "soccer with hands" or "lacrosse without sticks." When you first start watching it you think it's kinda stupid, but then the more you watch you realize it's actually pretty damned cool.

There is, however, a downside to these weeks of decadent sports consumption.

While I love the Olympics, I hate - hate hate motherfucking HATE - human interest stories (possibly because, as a number of my exes have suggested, I may not be human). And that's under normal, non-Olympic conditions. During the Olympics the prevalence of these mind-numbing tales soars to unthinkable levels and I feel a distinct urge to murder something every time an Olympic announcer starts talking about the heartwarming (occasionally heartbreaking) story of Steve Grabowski's rise to OH SWEET MERCIFUL CHRIST I'M GOING TO THROW A ROCK THROUGH MY GODDAMN TELEVISION. This shit is not what I came to watch. I came to watch people throw javelins and swim really fast and crap like that. I don't care how they got there. I DON'T FUCKING CARE. Worse still, I don't know anyone who does. Have you ever been watching the Olympics (or in fact any sporting event) with people, and when the stirring music (which used to be, I am not making this up, the theme song from The Adventures of Brisco County Jr) someone says, "hey, shut up man, I wanna hear this guy's life story?" No. Of course not. No one ever has. This is what causes the "sports for people who don't watch sports" criticism, and whoever thought "this is how we should cover the Olympics" should be shot, then drawn and quartered, then tarred and feathered, then shot again for good measure.

I have really grown to hate these bits of "the athlete's story" during the coverage. I mean, seriously, the worst hack writer in Hollywood couldn't churn out melodrama like this if their life depended on it. If the sports media, and especially NBC, is to be believed every single athlete at the Games has had to endure senses-shattering hardship to reach their shot at Olympic glory:

"Johann Jones' road to the triathlon was a rocky one. Born without arms, legs, or a sense of smell, he spent his first fourteen years in a specially-designed propulsion pod that allowed him to move around and feed himself through a complex series of eyelid-operated mechanical arms. On his fourteenth birthday he began the perilous trek up Mount Everest to meet the mystic who, it was claimed, could teach him an ancient Eastern method of limb regeneration, but because the Nepalese government refused him a permit, he had to climb the mountain without the use of his pod. So Johann spent a grueling 9 weeks ascending the tallest mountain in the world, pulling himself six inches a time with his tongue. When he reached the top the mystic taught him how to grow new arms and legs, but the limbs were weak and flimsy and the bones in them would break in a stiff breeze, so he spent the next four years of his life learning how to walk and eat and turn pages of books inside a special wind-free warehouse outside Area 51 where the only human contact he could have was via webcam with his fiancee, a heroin-addicted ex-prostitute he met at a bus terminal who gave up her life of sin after taking a shine to a poor disabled boy... with dreams of Olympic gold."

Then, as if that weren't enough to drive a normal person to depths of insanity that would make Hannibal Lecter sit back and say, "hmm, interesting," comes the buildup just before the event itself, which only becomes bearable when the story completely breaks down as the athletes in question fall flat on their faces.

"Can this young man, who has already broken his own world records three times in this event, fulfill his Olympic dream today, his birthday? If he wins the moon will be renamed in his honor, the European Union will disband and make him the leader of a new Holy Roman Empire, and after his coronation he will be treated to wild sex orgies with the Russian Women's Tennis team twice a day, and... oh... er... guess he'll have to settle for the bronze, there, Bob."

The weight of expectation is a terrible thing, folks.

And it wouldn't be so bad, I suppose, if these stories which populate every possible interstitial second of, you know, ACTUAL FUCKING SPORTS weren't an obvious anomaly. Especially when the reality is that most Olympic athletes' stories are more along the lines of:

"Cloned from the cells of Bruce Jenner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Sven lived in an Olympic Athlete Training and Body Perfection Compound until he was thirteen, where he trained in every possible endeavor of human physicality in a strength and endurance regimen that kills nine-tenths of those who begin it - fifty percent of whom perish before they are six years old. By the age of fourteen he was a perfect physical specimen who repeatedly defeated both Batman AND Captain America in virtual-reality scenarios designed to push the human body to punishing limits and beyond. After graduating the compound he was handed over to Darth Bane who would teach him the finer points of the hammer throw, the event he was genetically-engineered to destroy every existing world record in, while training Sven to become a Dark Lord of the Sith. His limbs and organs were replaced with bionic devices that allow him to bench press 1400 pounds and run a 90-second mile, and his blood has been replaced with a substance we are told is not unlike motor oil, which both provides critical cooling to his mechanical parts but also keeps his new gel-circuitry techno-brain, capable of processing over 14 quadrillion calculations per second, well-lubricated. Suffice it to say, Bob, this should be an easy event for Sven when you consider that he can not only use his barely-human body and telekinesis to add dozens of meters to his throws, but also has the ability to cripple his opponents with Force lightning."

You know, now that I think about it, I wouldn't mind these stupid human-interest stories so much if they'd make lightsaber combat an Olympic sport.

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: The One Where The Masses Rise Up Against Me

My family had some fairly serious money troubles when I was a really young kid. My parents, god bless them, were spending basically every cent they had (and then some) educating my sister and I, and that didn't leave a whole lot of wiggle room for anything else. As I got older things started to loosen up a little but they didn't really get completely cleared up until... oh, I'd guess sometime when I was in college or thereabouts.

Around Christmas, when I was very young at least, my mother wouldn't say anything, she'd just look worried all the time. As I got older my mother had a familiar Christmas litany. I swear she would say the EXACT SAME WORDS every year: "it's going to be a lean Christmas." She would say that in an attempt to cushion the blow for when that year's present haul wasn't as impressive as the previous year.

I didn't notice at the time but I now realize that every time she said that when my father was in earshot he would just smile, basically to himself. Somehow my mother never realized that every year, without fail, my father would go out on Christmas Eve in an orgiastic frenzy of present buying and every year, without fail, no one would be disappointed.

One Christmas present, though, that my father did NOT buy came when I must have been 8. Amongst a sea of other presents were two videotapes: one had the first three Star Wars movies on it, and the other had the first three Star Trek movies. Apparently the A/V department at my father's school had gotten their hands on a tape-to-tape recorder, and my dad went and rented all those movies and put them onto single tapes for me. I'm assuming they were recorded in SLP or "picture quality, what's that?" mode, though admittedly the crispness of said images is not that big a deal when a) you are 8, and b) your TV is as big as an RV but only has a 19" screen, thus rendering the quality of the tape pretty much a non-issue.

So I had these tapes. My memory of them is remarkably vivid: the label on the Star Wars tape was written in my dad's giant all-capitals block-letter handwriting, and the label on the Star Trek tape must have been written by whoever it was at Girard who made it; the handwriting was considerably smaller and more elegant than my father's. I had these tapes and, in probably the first instance of the obsessive nature with which I would inhale entertainment for the rest of my life, watched them over and over and over and over AND OVER again. My parents didn't mind - it is worth noting that when I was that age they weren't much older than I am now, and they were both long-time gigantic nerds to boot - and my sister was 6 and, I dunno, I guess she was around or something.

I was already a big Star Wars fan, even at 8. Empire was the first movie I ever saw in a theatre. I had books and action figures and all that stuff. My course as a lifelong Star Wars nerd was locked in around my fourth birthday. (Thanks a fucking lot, Mom and Dad.)

I don't remember specifically liking Star Trek BEFORE I got that tape, but I sure as hell did afterward. I went the same way as I did with Star Wars, vacuuming up as much material as I possibly could; if you think adult collectors of things like this are sad you should see it at that age; when you're 8 or 9 paraphernalia is like crack, and with the associated addict behaviors to boot.

In the process of my multimedia hoovering I learned basically everything there was to know about Star Trek at the time. It is worth noting here that this was before the days of the net and Wikipedia and whatnot where over the course of a couple hours you can, Matrix-like, download every vital piece of information about an entertainment franchise directly into your brain and have the equivalent knowledge of having seen every episode/movie/whatever without ever watching a frame of film/reading a page/whatever. I learned everything about Star Trek the hard way.

So in 1987 when I saw a commercial for "Star Trek: The Next Generation," oh, man, it was like the derrick drill hitting that oil field for the first time.

Nerd.

EXPLOSION.

I was instantly hooked on TNG, even though I distinctly recall telling my mother at one point during the first season that though I loved it and it was my favorite thing on television it still wasn't as good as old Star Trek. Still, I watched it with an obsession that would be pretty frightening were I to witness it now in a 9-year-old. When I would get grounded and sentenced to "no TV" my parents would have to make an exception for TNG because I would go completely BERSERK if I didn't get to watch it. It was the first time I was ever completely hooked on a television show. I'm pretty sure that TNG is still the only show where I watched EVERY SINGLE EPISODE at their first-run airtime. In the years since I've gotten pretty compulsive about watching Lost or Galactica but I still DVR them from time to time. Back then, though, I'm almost positive I watched 7 years of TNG eps the very second they aired.

The first seeds of doubt started with little things. Tiny things. Why does a Frenchman have a British accent? I didn't hit that one until I was about 14. What's the point of having shields if there's like 900,000 ways around them? Wow the holodeck and transporters seem to malfunction a lot. Wow there seem to be an AWFUL lot of these anonymous crew members who die with regularity. What the hell does Worf DO, anyway? "Security Chief?" What the fuck is that? The ship has enough firepower to blow up a planet and there's a GUY whose job it is to keep the ship SAFE? From what, the Great Green Arkleseizure?

But these questions occupied the back of my mind, a dark, humid corner where another voice sat saying "if Luke kissed Leia in Empire and they were revealed as siblings in Jedi then these movies aren't planned out very well, but that means..." which we now recognize as the first steps on the road to madness.

I ignored that part of my brain - the part asking distressing questions about Star Trek, at least - for a lot of years. We still had Trek movies with delightful regularity (if not delightful or regular quality) and TNG was, by all accounts, on television in full-blown syndication something like 45 times a week. Somewhere in there, though, there was this, I dunno, gap between when TNG was on everywhere three times a day to when it started its abortive, ill-considered run on Spike, when there was very little Star Trek to be had.

(Side note: what genius decided that it was a great idea to make STAR TREK the flagship show of what is, essentially, the Frat Boy Channel? That is one person, folks, who does not fucking well understand "branding.")

When TNG came to Spike there was this giant promotional push (like you do) and I sat down to watch - seriously, intently WATCH - Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time in several years.

After a few weeks I came to a conclusion:

It's not that good.

I'm sorry, folks, it really isn't.

Part of the reason it's not that good is because of the one part of it that is truly amazing: Patrick Stewart. Even if he wasn't such a great actor - and not to take anything away from the rest of that cast, but he's so far past any of them it's not funny - if nothing else Picard was the only character on the show who was REMOTELY interesting. Every other crew member of the USS Enterprise-D (that's right, goddammit, it's the Enterprise-motherfucking-DEE) is a bland cipher at best or a one-note joke at worst. Dutiful Riker. Naïve Data. Worf the Warrior. And the rest, here on Gilligan's Isle. Seriously, Troi, WHAT THE FUCK IS SHE ON THAT SHIP FOR? She doesn't do ANYTHING.

The actors - all of whom are quite talented, except for maybe Dr. Crusher, whose character was construed so narrowly as to be practically two-dimensional and thus provide no insight into the actress - are all trying very hard, but you can see in the first couple years the show straining against Roddenberry's vision of a perfect 24th century human utopia (which, while philosophically interesting, makes for acutely bad drama) and then, after he left, TNG became stuck in the rut that strain created. By then boring anti-drama had become part of the show's DNA and every time they tried to break out of it things came across as strange and off-putting. The Klingon civil war arc is so out of character for TNG it seems like it's from some other show entirely (possibly the later, exponentially better DS9), the late-seasons "romance" (a term used here in surely its loosest sense) between Troi and Worf is as clunky as Russian poetry, and even Q got tiresome after far too many appearances down the years.

This is not to say there aren't moments where the show, through some fortuitous alchemy of script and acting and direction, didn't pop and sometimes even take flight. The episode where Q flings the ship into the Delta Quadrant and we meet the Borg for the first time is remarkably good television, and the Borg's return in The Best of Both Worlds is as satisfying as any season finale/premiere two-parter I can think of. This is true DESPITE the fact that every Borg appearance on the show after are such horrific cock-ups that retroactively poison every instance previous, and that it would take First Contact to truly "make" the Borg. The one with Jean Simmons as Admiral Satie, the witchhunt-y episode (The Drumhead? Maybe?) is, to my mind, the best hour of pure acting (and probably writing) in the entire series. And "Cause and Effect" is a fantastic, just a truly fantastically-executed hour of science fiction, though it occupies a black space in my heart because, in what is surely the greatest irony in the history of the universe, it is the single episode of TNG I have seen more than any other; for a period of - I am not making this up - almost 10 years it seemed like just about every time I turned on TNG "Cause and Effect" was on. And John De Lancie, overused though he was, is still always a joy to watch with Stewart.

But those, and a few others, are really only a couple high points in what is an overall run of surprisingly depressed quality. One almost gets the sense that after 20-some-odd years between Star Trek and The Next Generation the time spent on TNG was the creators learning how to make Star Trek, at least on television. The fact that Deep Space Nine is SO good - and even ten years after it went off the air when I catch it I am STARTLED by how good almost every single episode of DS9 is, and how remarkable the whole series became - is some pretty strong evidence in that direction. Of course, the dreck that was Voyager and the first two seasons of Enterprise undermines that argument somewhat, but shut the hell up.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying TNG is bad. It isn't. Especially if you compare it to some of it's contemporaries; it is more than probable that part of the reason we have such fond memories of Next Gen is because, for science fiction fans at least, the available alternatives were so unpleasant. It isn't bad. At times, even, it's pretty good, but on the whole it's just not nearly as good as we remember it.

And, of course, if I could just bring myself to not watch it when it's on, I wouldn't have to think about this so often.

JLK

Your Mister Subliminal Quizo Update

The thing I really hate about lapsing into smoking again - aside from, you know, the actual buying and smoking of cigarettes - is falling back into what I would call "smoker's thinking." This refers to things like waiting for your ride to show up and, realizing that your ride's car is a non-smoking flight, thinking "well, I'd better get a cigarette in before he gets here." I had almost that exact thought Friday night and I was immediately rather disgusted with myself and, after swearing vengeance against the world for turning in such a way that my choices to relieve the crushing stresses I labor under became a) start smoking again or b) start recreationally murdering prostitutes, I determined that once my show was over I would have to go back on the smoking wagon. This is, as I have said previous, not especially easy, but after going seriously smoke-free for a while I recognize that it's the way to go. It's unfortunate, really, since to once again quote the great Neal Stephenson, for something disgusting and lethal smoking is remarkably enjoyable. PAYING for cigarettes, now, that's a different story.

(Dealer's Choice, at the Dark Horse, opening September 18, $10, www.phillybinge.com)

Speaking of disgusting and lethal, I had the grave misfortune of watching the new Highlander movie this weekend. I am a big fan of Highlander, at least the first movie and the TV show. The hideous, misbegotten thing I watched Saturday night was the Darth Vader of Highlander - more machine now than man, twisted and evil. I had been told it was on TV only minutes before it aired, and I quickly called a friend of mine who I knew was also a fan, and we spent the entire film texting each other back and forth about how awful it was, and then immediately after it ended I had to give him a sincere apology for telling him it was on. I think he summed it up best when he wrote: "when I watch Highlander I want good sword fights, a little melodrama, and Scottish accents, and this garbage doesn't have ANY of those things." All things aside - and I mean ALL things - if you make a Highlander movie and you don't at least have one really cool-looking sword fight you have failed at life. But not only were they not good, they were actively BAD. Like, you watch it, and you realize that the director - a term used here, surely, in its loosest and basest sense - was trying to do something "new" and "interesting" and "cool" but along the way forgot that he's a fucking anencephalic colobus monkey who couldn't choreograph or shoot a good sword fight if he was possessed by the restless spirit of Douglas Fairbanks.

Put it this way: this movie makes the Star Wars prequels look like the crowning achievement of world cinema.

Put it another way: it's worse than Highlander 2.

There is no more damning assessment of any movie than that, but to make a HIGHLANDER movie worse than Highlander 2 is pretty astounding.

(Dealer's Choice, at the Dark Horse, opening September 18, $10, www.phillybinge.com)

It's sad, really, because I was hoping a new Highlander movie would lift me up out of the despair of Chelsea being robbed of a win on Saturday morning by an official who does not understand the fairly important part of the offside rule that one can not be offside if one is BEHIND THE BALL. I dread the possibility that Blackburn's play on Saturday - 8 men on the defense at all times, hardly a shot on goal to speak of, three defensive substitutions, and a general unwillingness to even consider trying to win - is what we're going to face all season. It's bad enough when your winning goal in the face of such cowardice is wrongly disallowed, but if I have to watch that kind of garbage football all season it's going to be a long year.

(Dealer's Choice, at the Dark Horse, opening September 18, $10, www.phillybinge.com)

Remember that we have special Monday Night Football Quizo tonight, meaning that we will be starting at 7:30. That is SEVEN-THIRTY-IN-THE-PM, folks, since I want to be done and dusted in time to get home for kickoff. You thought the 24 premiere night quizo was fast? Tonight I will be the goddamned Flash compared to that.

(Dealer's Choice, at the Dark Horse, opening September 18, $10, www.phillybinge.com)

You also may have heard that I am producing a show which is playing at our very own Dark Horse Pub. It's called "Dealer's Choice," and it's by Patrick Marber. It is out-fuck-standing. It opens tomorrow night and tickets are but ten dollars. It has poker, English accents, and beer. What else could you want from a play? All the information you need is at our website, www.phillybinge.com. Come see it. You will be glad you did. More accurately, I will make you very unhappy if you do not.

(Dealer's Choice, at the Dark Horse, opening September 18, $10, www.phillybinge.com)

7:30 tonight, then, see you there.

(Dealer's Choice, at the Dark Horse, opening September 18, $10, http://www.phillybinge.com)

JLK

Your Comfortable Shoes Quizo Update

This past weekend saw Wizard World Philadelphia - aka a comic book convention, aka "Nerdi Gras" (as one friend of mine calls such things) - and to I'm quite sure no one's surprise I attended.

Now for considerable percentages of those who go these events are an exercise in counter-social behavior ranging from quiet-yet-dignified protest against the oppressive regime of the Cool Kids (wearing a Green Lantern t-shirt) to out-and-out incitement of open rebellious warfare against our evil mainstream overlords (wearing a homemade Spider-Man costume). The latter, especially, can get very unfortunate as the vast majority of people wearing such outfits are, shall we say, shaped a lot more like yours truly than Spider-Man necessarily. Note that I would make an official exception for the folks dressed like stormtroopers, Darth Vader and the like, as since attending my first convention years ago I have learned that those folks are members of a group called the 501st Legion who a) make all that shit by hand - handmade movie-quality stormtrooper armor deserves no small amount of credit in the first place - and b) do tons of charity appearances for children's hospitals, museums, and the like. You want to snicker at the guy in the Thor outfit that's one thing, but never laugh at the stormtroopers.

The defining feature of events like this, however, is the fact that it means I essentially spend an entire weekend standing and walking around, which was a serious consideration even before I turned my lower spine and left leg into useless mush. As I said after my first convention years ago: the most important thing is to WEAR THE RIGHT SHOES.

Due to various ridiculous circumstances, this year of course I did not do that, and spent the rest of the weekend (and well into this morning) paying the price. A word of advice: when given a choice between doing something you KNOW is both stupid and will cause you considerable pain in the long run or getting to a three-day event ten minutes later than you planned on getting there, take the extra ten minutes and find your fucking sneakers.

My inability to walk led to the unlikely event of me watching the movie Rising Sun on television on Saturday night - primarily because going out would have meant that someone would have not only had to drive me wherever we were going but would have had to assist me, linebacker-with-a-sprained-ankle-style, from my front door to their car and no one seemed to be up for that. Rising Sun, aside from managing to be at once both quietly understated and hilariously overwrought, also has the distinction of being one of only two movies I can think of in which Sean Connery says the word "fuck," which is just really, really weird (the other being The Rock). For that alone it deserves commemoration.

Finally, my dad and I celebrated Father's Day by watching Oakmont Country Club win the US Open. As a golfer you don't really "win" the US Open so much as you just lose better than everyone else and pray the course does not literally swallow you whole and slowly digest you for a thousand years ( c.f. Boba Fett and the Sarlacc, Phil Mickelson and Winged Foot).

JLK

Your Life Is Awesome Quizo Update

Well, let's be honest, it is, isn't it? Not even the fact that I'm still sitting at a goddamned end table in someone else's office (and will be for the foreseeable future) can change that.

The weather is beautiful, the Phillies are finally at .500, Chelsea won the FA Cup, and thanks to the strange fiscal schedule here at the hospital I have 6 three-day weekends in a row starting this week. This week it's actually FOUR days! Suh-weet.

I also watched Pan's Labyrinth this weekend, which is an outstanding movie, even if it is somewhat deceptively advertised. Suffice it to say that we should all be glad that Guillermo Del Toro passed on directing the Narnia movie. I also watched that two weeks ago and great googly moogly did it suck. But that was the week BEFORE this past week; before everything came up awesome.

Everything is truly coming up awesome because yesterday I had this conversation with my friend Chris.

Chris: So, they made the announcement yesterday.

Me: And?

Chris: Well..

Me: TELL ME! TELL ME NOW!

Chris: It's official. It's Starcraft 2.

Me: I see. (trying to remain dignified) Well, that's certainly good news.

Chris: Uh huh.

It is at this point that both of us start jumping up and down, waving our hands in the air and screaming like those teenaged girls you see on recordings of the Beatles first show on Ed Sullivan, "OH MY GOD STARCRAFT 2 OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

If you are not someone who is necessarily into video games let me try and explain. The announcement (and, by necessity, impending release) of Starcraft 2 is, essentially, the biggest news in video game history. The original Starcraft came out in 1998 and is STILL played online something like half a million times EVERY DAY. Ten years on I still play Starcraft. I will wager decent money that at least a couple people reading this e-mail still play Starcraft. Starcraft is a professional sport in Korea. I am not making this up. They show it on television. The best players are millionaires with money they made playing Starcraft.

Put yourself back in time - let's say about 1998 - when the actual release of the first new Star Wars movie was announced and you hadn't seen them yet and didn't know they were going to be absolute garbage that would take all your precious childhood memories, stomp them to death, set their corpses on fire, and then have a rabid dog piss on the ashes. The days when all that mattered was that new Star Wars movies were coming and they were going to be amazing and blow your mind and life would never be the same.

Now go forward a little bit to May 19, 1999 (and I am vaguely ashamed to admit I actually know that date from memory) to the release of The Phantom Menace, and instead of being the dreck that it was and ushering in 6 years of slaughtered hopes and dreams, it was everything you hoped it would be and more.

THAT is what Starcraft 2 finally coming out means. It is the Star Wars prequels of video games, only it's not going to suck. It's going to do far more than not suck. It's going to make life worth living again. I thought life was pretty amazing before - now that I know Starcraft 2 is actually coming, well, I can die happy. After I've played the game, at least.

It occurs to me that if you're not the sort of person who gets at least a little excited about things like new Star Wars movies (back before we knew that was a bad thing, at least) and the announcement of highly anticipated video games then Quizo may not be the game for you.

If you want some pictures of recent awesomeness, on the Quizo page - http://quizo.blogspot.com - there is a link to my online photo gallery, which has many things that are - you guessed it - awesome.

Also note - this week the boisterous trivia nerds of Das Boot will be going for their third win in a row, so be prepared to stop them. As a wise man once said: "My friends, this is our final hour. Not all of us may survive the coming conflict. Yet death may be a blessing should we fail here."

See you tonight.

JLK