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Television: A Loathe-Like Relationship

02 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Cable, Entertainment, Free Time, Friends, Lost, Myboys, Supernatural, Television, TV

My old cable company (back when I used to live in Flagstaff, AZ) sucked all kinds of rot-water. I lost track of the number of times I would come home on a Friday night to find my service had been cut off for no reason, or the connection just didn’t work, and because the cable company was closed for the weekend, I could not get things fixed until Monday, just before heading back out to the Navajo Nation for the week. Pay-per-view never worked, and of course there is the usual problem of umpteen channels of nothing worth watching.

Hated it!

I also remember watching about the 5th or 6th episode of MTV’s Real World in a row one night, and mumbling to myself; “What could possibly be more stupid than this show?”

I was alone, of course, but a little voice in the back of my head spoke loud and clear; “You watching it.”

One day, I moved across town, and at a certain point I realized this little mini-migration, along the fees for changing various services over to the new location, was going to cost a little more than I could afford on my next paycheck. So, I asked my cable company if I could delay one payment for two-weeks. I could have started with any number of other companies, but for some reason I called these guys first. They said, ‘yes’, and that was enough to solve my problem.

…or at least it would have been, had the person who actually said ‘yes’ to my request been authorized to do so, or even if that had been possible under their actual policies. Apparently, this was not the case. My service was cut off. Nobody cared that I had been told explicitly that I could do this, but they were happy to take my payment along with a couple extra fees and schedule a time to reconnect me.

I told them ‘nevermind.’

My initial plan was to save up and get a satellite dish. I figured it would take about a month to save up the money. What I didn’t plan on was kicking the television habit altogether. By the end of that month, I no longer needed, or wanted television. I had somehow just gotten used to life without it. I watched plenty of movies, and the internet enabled me to catch many great scenes without submitting myself to a whole show (or a whole series), but I no longer wanted continuous access to television.

That was that!

***

Letting go of television was one of the best decisions I ever in made in my life. I listened to a lot of great music, and I watched some great movies, and I dabbled at writing some things myself, to no avail of course, but I did find the experience a lot more satisfying than your average television show.

When asked about my seemingly freakish existence without functioning connection to a television service, I used to tell people it wasn’t that I wouldn’t want to watch TV, but rather, that I would sometimes watch it all day whether there was anything on it worth watching or not. (That Real-world-binge late on a Friday night comes to mind!) Ever since I was a kid, I recall, getting into a certain kind of mood, one that just made sitting in front of the idiot box seem like the perfect way to spend an hour, or a whole weekend. If that mood hit, I was watching something, even if that something disgusted me. Saying ‘no’ to television service was a way of saying ;no’ to that mood and the wasted time that went with it.

People usually responded to this explanation by telling me how to set up an antenna or steal my cable service.

Seriously, it’s almost as though some folks just can’t imagine a life without television. Life without TV must be an unfortunate existence, they seem to suppose, and so they respond to clear statements of preference for life without it as if it is a clear cry for help in getting television after all.

Ah well!

***

Things I noticed during my time without service: Some things about television got more interesting when I didn’t watch it regularly, and some got less interesting, a lot less interesting. I mostly remember the latter.

Laugh Tracks: They annoy the hell out of me now. I’m not used to them anymore, and when I hear one I feel personally insulted. All to often, a show runs with a joke that isn’t even remotely funny and uses the laugh track to try and convince us that it’s worth laughing anyway. This didn’t bother me when I was younger, but it sure does now. Those of us who grew up watching television have been trained to go along with this. My laugh-track training now has a glitch and so a laugh track is often enough to take me right out of a show altogether.

I hate them so much!

Made-for-Television Documentaries: the average television documentary crams about 5 minutes of information into a half-hour show. How they manage it, I will never know. The information these shows reveal is consistently lame, because just like so much television fiction, their stories are shaped by people who don’t trust an audience to handle anything but common television tropes. Add to that, the necessity of re-introducing the audience to the whole story at the end of every commercial break, and you have a whole bunch of fluff. If you are watching one of these documentaries for 8 minutes or so, half of that is reiteration of whatcame before and half is telling you something that won’t introduce anything new into the world of your present understanding. It really isn’t worth the time it takes to watch it

Or even to fast forward through it.

There are some amazing documentaries out there. They are not made for television.

News: I never noticed this pattern until I left off of television for awhile, but once I went without for a few years, it jumped out at me plain as day. If you were to measure the amount of time most news programs tease a story over the course of a day and then measure the amount of time they spend on the actual story, you would find that the former often dwarfs the latter.

All day, some of these stations just keep telling you about what’s coming up on a certain news segment that evening. The show starts, and they remind you about the story t the beginning and the end of the first segment. They do a commercial break and then they tell you the story is coming up soon, then remind you its coming after covering something else. This happens again, because they saved the big story for last. Finally, the story comes up and in the 5 or so minutes that follow, they add 1 or 2 new pieces of information to the stuff you already knew and the story is over before you even begin to get into it.

If these guys spent half as much time covering a story as they do selling it, they might be worth watching, but that’s a damned big if.

Drives me nuts!

Good: What I like: There are certain things I enjoy more once you stay away from television for awhile. I just can’t find many patterns to them. I do think it’s mostly in the area of humor. Because I am not constantly exposed to some clichés, they seem less cliché to me. So, a show that is actually just recycling that one great inspiration from the first season may get a bigger laugh out of me than they would if I had been watching it all along. Others in the room may wonder why I am laughing at all, but for me, the joke is new. Their delivery is polished, and it’s perfect. I’m laughing my ass off at a joke everyone else already finds tiresome.

Random Television Sets: The first thing most people do when they walk into a hotel room is turn on the television set. I still did this for years after letting go of TV in my own home. Somewhere along the line I stopped doing that. Nowadays, I will stay for several days in a hotel room without even looking for the remote, much less hitting the ‘on’ button. It’s the same when I visit other people’s homes. If television viewing is the activity of the day, I used to plop down and enjoy it with them. Nowadays, if someone is doing something else in another part of the house, I am a little more likely to seek them out than to sit down with the television viewers.

***

My significant other, Moni, has very different ideas about television.

She likes it!

After some pretty serious battles over the matter, I finally surrendered, and we ended up with cable service connections after all. It’s a big house, I can usually escape the television if I want to. I do find that a couple of decades without the box have left me much better prepared to just walk away fro the television set than my younger self could manage. I can look at a television without feeling the overwhelming urge to sacrifice my day to its mind-altering effects.

This is a relief.

When that cable guy first showed up, I had visions of a hours spent grumbling in front of reality television or some such atrocity. I felt like an addict teased with my former drug of choice.

Happily the temptation has proven less than tempting.

For the most part.

***

One of the unexpected benefits of life with my own personal ambassador for television is that she has introduced me to a number of shows I missed during my years away from the box. The experience is hit or miss for me, but the hits have been worth the time.

Arrested Development: This was truly a brilliant show. I am sorry I missed it the first time around, and ever so grateful to have been introduced to it after the fact. I could watch the whole thing again, to be honest, and some day I probably will.

I gushes because it’s good.

Becker: Amusing, but not enough to keep me watching.

Gilmore Girls: This is also amusing, but somehow, I doubt that I’m in the target audience for this show.

Friends: I remember really enjoying this show when it first came out (back when i still had television service). I particularly enjoyed a lot of the Chandler humor, specifically, the way his tone of voice often failed to match the content of his words. He could concede a point with all the conviction of a man declaring absolute victory. (That still makes me laugh.) And of course, the girls were crush-worthy. None of that mattered by the end of the first season though. The show was already old, and frankly the Ross character was so far under my skin that the very thought of watching another episode made me a little queasy. I mean, well done to David Shwimmer! A lesser actor could not have made me hate his character so much, but I do think I was supposed to like him. I just don’t.

Moni watches friends all the time now. I have several episodes memorized, just from chance moments passing through the living room while it plays for the umpteenth time. …Grumble! I still laugh at some of the jokes, and I still cringe at others. Ross still makes me want to gouge my eyes and ears out with a broken ink pen.

Monk: This was really clever. The cleverness got old though. I enjoyed a season or so, and that was enough.

Myboys: One of my old college buddies plays “Kenny” in this show. I knew it was a good run for him, and I was happy to see him have it, but I had no idea how cool the show was. When Moni met Mike at a New Year’s Party, I finally got some notion of just how great that gig must have been for him. (She totally freaked!) Moni made me watch the entire series of course, and I enjoyed every episode of it.

Now if only Superstore would make more use of Mike!

Lost: We watched a season or two of lost, and I just wasn’t down to keep at it. I get tired of story lines that keep pulling the rug out from under reality, and this was clearly a worst offender. (I had heard complaints about this feature of the show before, and I must say, I was surprised to see just how bad it was.) Why invest yourself in plot point if the writers feel free to take it away in the next episode and just tell you the whole thing was an illusion, only to rip up the new reality once again at the start of the next season.

The Mindi Project: This is fun.

Community: I had no idea Chevy Chase was on television back when this was showing, and I can’t believe I missed it. Also, I think I was 2 or 3 seasons in before I realized Donald Glover was Childish Gambino. Moni was playing the America video, and I think my response went something like this;

“Hey Donald Glover is doing a parody of the America video, but why would he make fun of that… You know, he’s sticking pretty close to the original here, he.. oh!”

Ah well, I’m old and I’m white. I’m really not supposed to know about rappers anyway, am I? Anyway, “Community” was fantastic. The paint-ball episodes are especially brilliant. Hell, they are absolute genius. I don’t mean ‘genius’ for television. I mean genius! I would watch the whole series all over again, just to see one of them one more time.

Walking Dead: I tried binge-watching this. The zombie scenes get old when you watch them back to back. My internal monologue usually goes something like this; “Hit him in the head! No, now, hit that one in the head! Be careful, somebody is going to slip or something and one will almost get you, then someone will fix it (usually), and then you guys can just hit the rest of them in the head….” Suffice to say, there wasn’t enough good stuff happening outside that theme to sustain my interest. I quit a few seasons in.

Downton Abby: This was interesting. It was also irritating. I may try to explain both feelings in a post some day.

Supernatural: This is the best and worst of television for me. There are times when this show reminds me of those days sitting in front of the television because that’s what I wanted to do at that moment and the story line just wasn’t quite bad enough to change my mind. Seriously, the endless plot twists with angels and demons and various powerful entities grow tiresome. A bit like all the warp-drive talk on Star Trek, the world-building narratives in this show just get old for me. That said, I am actually amazed that they somehow landed on a final story-line in which the heroes of the show actively plot to kill God himself.

..and the fan base is right behind them.

(Chuck is such a dick!)

And seriously, that is brilliant! Getting to this point has occasionally been a little tedious, but the shear audacity of this final plot line is just amazing.

When Supernatural is at its best though, it is when they are doing one of their parody episodes. Supernatural has done some absolutely amazing stories commenting on aspects of popular culture, or satirizing various television tropes. The trickster episodes are good for this. Whenever Sam and Dean find themselves in a completely different kind of of show, or suddenly deprived of their role as protagonists in the series, I know damned well I am going to enjoy what follows. Those episodes are right on par with the paintball episodes in Community.

****

Ah well! I’m not entirely sure what all this adds up to. I haven’t even talked about what television meant to me as a kid. Like so many children, that box was my main baby-sitter, and it had an awful lot of time to influence my ways of looking at the world. That said, this post has already gone on for far too long.

I am mostly talking about a medium that is rapidly evolving into new things. Many of the patterns I grumble about here have already changed. Others are changing now. Whether that is for the better or for the worse, I do not know. One thing that strikes me as I look up at the post above is just how much I have to say about television for somebody who has actively tried to avoid it for much of my life.I still say ‘no’ to television a lot, but as the rambling words above demonstrate, it is still a large part of my life.

Television is a big part of modern life.

Big enough to reach even its nay-sayers.

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Of Ringers and Runts: An Experimental Exercise in Geeketry!

01 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by danielwalldammit in Gaming, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Entertainment, Games, Narrative, Role Playing Games, RPGs, Story-Telling, Storytelling

Nerds only now! The rest of you guys just run along…

img450fd49cc8adeI think most of us who play RPGs have had this experience, the one where the game master (GM) brings in a ringer. It may be a non-player character (NPC), or it may be the GM’s own personal player character (PC, which was much more common back in 1st edition, …yes, I’m that old). Either way, the ringer towers over the player characters. He kicks ass while they struggle to make a difference.

One thing that strikes me about this is just how often the players will initially greet the ringer with joy. He or she typically shows up just when the player characters face some challenge they thought surely would prove too much. Suddenly they have a chance after all. With the appearance of a ringer, you can’t help but feel that hope is alive and well again. At least you can feel that way until somewhere during the course of that epic battle when the three orcs your ranger has killed don’t seem all that significant in comparison to the 6 giants, four ogres, and thirteen trolls the ringer has offed while you were struggling with a random goblin. The ringer is always a mixed blessing. He can win the day, but he can also make winning feel an awful lot like losing.

If the ringer is still in the group six games later, then I for one reckon it’s time to leave.

Should a ringer stick around for several sessions, the players begin to feel they are just along for the ride. The ringer can reduce player characters, and with them the players themselves to the role of an audience rather than a participant. It can take the fun out of the story, and it can make you reconsider how you want to spend your Saturday nights.

I think most gamers would say that it’s bad GMing to let a major character overshadow the player characters like that. It’s the job of the GM to challenge the players, not take center stage and enjoy their applause every time he wins the day. This is why so many frown on GM player characters. Game Masters shouldn’t run characters of their own, so the wisdom goes. That’s just asking for abuse. But in my experience, the taboo against GM player characters just contributes to the problem rather than helping to solve it. Almost every ringer that I’ve seen began as an NPC, just another character in the cast. This is what frees the GM to set them up with extra power. Often, the GM doesn’t even plan to keep the ringer around that long. he’s just another character in the overall plot-line, so it’s not big deal if he has a little extra power. The trouble is that GMs do become attached to interesting NPCs, so much so that they look forward to playing them, leveling them up, and watching the kick ass. A GM can feel this way about an NPC just as easily as he (or one of his players) can feel about a player character. In effect, some GMs have player characters, and they don’t even know it.

img452cb6a3c0f00Back in the days of first edition, a GM’s player character was most often rolled up according to the same rules as those of the players. This provided a bit of a check on the whole ringer problem. Abuse could still happen, but there was a bit more of a sense that the GM’s character was supposed to be part of an ensemble. When they come in over-powered to begin with, they inevitably become the star of the show, and the notion that a given character isn’t really a player character can very well serve as the excuse for a GM to field one who simply dwarfs anything the other players can produce.

***

Anyway, ringers are a problem, right? “Don’t do them!” That’s usually a pretty good rule of thumb. So, here is a thought experiment. What if we toss that rule aside? Is it possible to put a ringer in a campaign without ruining everything?

Okay, I know you can do it for a game or two, but what if the ringer was there for the balance of the campaign. Is it possible to do this without ruining the players’ fun?

In essence, this is a question of re-protagonization. In gaming, we often talk about deprotagonization, the process by which a character is made irrelevant to the story-line in a campaign, but what can be done to provide genuine significance to a character living in the shadow of a ringer? That is the question posed by the prospect of gaming (deliberately) with a ringer. It’s a thought experiment of sorts, but hopefully an amusing one.

How to go about it?

***

img450fd04546e89I can think of a few angles. Whether or not they would actually add up to a fun campaign, well that’s an open question! Anyway, here are the guidelines I would use to set up the campaign.

One: Much of the ringer’s activities take place offstage, leaving the player characters free to resolve their own challenges without the help of the big guy. For example, the ringer is a spell caster, and she is performing a complex task inside a building. The players must protect the building themselves. If they fail, her spell is ruined, and the overall plot takes a turn for the worse. What I really like about this example is the characters can fail without this resulting in a total party kill. If they blow it, then the enemy reaches the ringer, and the ringer then enters the fight. This way the PCs will probably live through their failure, but everyone will know the development is bad in the long run, because that spell was important. How? Well that’s a question for a larger plot-line…

Okay, this might be cheating a bit, because a ringer off-stage isn’t all that different from any other background piece of a campaign plot. Arguably, such things are happening just offstage in many campaigns. It’s just not that unusual. The full challenge of making a ringer work would be one of making it work when the ringer is standing right there beside the players, doing things along with them, and providing tangible assistance during the course of events. It could provide an interesting twist for a game or two to let the players cope with the sudden absence of their MVP, but if that’s the campaign, then your campaign doesn’t really have a ringer. That’s ducking the challenge here rather than facing it.

Two: Give the healer an inherently supportive role. What is she good at? She can heal like no-one’s business, or she is really great at support magic. She can make the other characters run faster, hit harder, and otherwise kick ass. If only they were a little better to begin with! (This works particularly well if you combine it with a definite plan for PC growth.)

What I like about this approach is it filters the impact of the ringer through the actions of the PCs. The ringer remains a ringer She can do amazing things, but the PCs will still have to kill the bad guys; they will still have to scale the cliffs, and they will still have to break open the door to the enemy castle. They may get a boost from the ringer, but it’s up to them to make that boost matter. In effect, the ringer becomes their own asset. It is up to them to make her matter.

What doesn’t work about this approach is that it soft-peddles the ringer to the point that she may not seem like a ringer. Fantasy movies and books are full of wise wizards with far more power than the warrior-protagonists which remain the focal point of such stories. Simply put, we care who wields the sword more than we care who keeps him healthy. That’s one of life’s little perversions, but I reckon it’s a common enough feature to storytelling, it doesn’t make much sense to deny it. A real ringer is a ringer than leaves carnage in his wake, not one that brings you back from the dead and gives you an energy drink. Maybe that shouldn’t be the case, but it is.

img4547cd6d641b0Three: Let a player run the ringer. I’ve done this countless times. My old first edition D&D campaign ran for over 20 years. Since we started a new plot-line every year or so, we would often roll one or of the old characters into the new campaign. This often meant that a single player would have a 9th level character or two while everyone else was starting at 1st. It could be fun. We let different players run the ringers in different campaigns, and with multiple characters on the board, no-one got bored. There was always plenty for the other characters to do.

This approach at least takes some of the sting out of the GM bias, but that may be all it accomplishes, and a PC-ringer poses problems of its own. If the ringer-rolling player isn’t present for a game session, then either someone else must run their character (something I don’t like doing), or your ringer is gone. How to explain the absence of the ringer or the player’s how to cope with his absence is sometimes a tricky question. Also, letting a player run the ringer makes it harder to control the relationship between the ringer and the other players. If that player is selfish, then she will deprotagonize the other players, and you can’t do anything about it without taking the player’s ability to run her own character. That’s no fun. It can all workout, but suffice to say that I don’t think this really solves the problems posed by putting a ringer in a campaign.

Four: Make the ringer its own challenge. It doesn’t have to be obvious that the ringer will help with tasks the players have set out to accomplish. Maybe she doesn’t really want to help at all and the players will have to talk her into it. Better still, if they must actively work to keep her on track over the course of the campaign! Is the ringer a drunkard? The players must keep her sober for the big fights. Is she really forgetful or otherwise aloof to the point of becoming utterly unreliable? If the player characters have to make decisions for her, or even role-play the process of guiding her actions, the ringer becomes an extension of the player’s own efforts. What she does is what they get her to do. It may still be her fireball, but at least it will be the players who told her where to place it.

On a side note: it could be interesting to give players powers enabling them to redirect the actions of the ringer. In effect, she becomes a power source, but at least some of her actions are determined by the players.

I think this approach is promising insofar as it gives the player characters some sense of control over the campaign. Still, convincing the hero to do the right thing isn’t quite as much fun as being the one who does it yourself. a fireball rolled up by another character will never be as fun as one you roll up yourself, even if you did talk the other person into casting it. Giving the PCs a care and feeding role to play in managing the ringer helps a bit, but this alone won’t provide a satisfactory solution to the problem.

img4577093b04e3cFive: You can give the player characters independent tasks and even long-term goals that diverge slightly from those of the ringer. Perhaps, the ringer is happy to demolish all the orcs in the northern wastelands, but she isn’t all that concerned about the elven princess the characters want to keep alive. Their challenge thus requires tasks that the ringer won’t help with and their sense of accomplishment will then rest (at least partially) on terms that don’t involve the ringer.

I think this is critical to resolving the problems posed by a ringer. Whatever problems the ringer can be relied upon to help the players solve, the players must face some problems they have to resolve on their own. If these problems can be put in play at the same time, in the same scenario, then so much the better. The ringer is in play on the table, and the player characters must do something for which her help will not be provided. Not only does this go a long way toward resolving the problems posed by a ringer; it can also spice up game combat in general. A battle with a subplot is more interesting than a straight-up fight, and if that sub-plot skews the significance of the characters present, so much the better.

Six: Let the characters progress to a level comparable to that of the ringer. This really is the big one, as far as this challenge is concerned, because it makes the ringer into a challenge that must itself be resolved over the course of the campaign. In effect, this turns the problem posed by a ringer into a source of meaning in itself. To make this work, though, you must risk letting the characters feel the weight of the ringer initially. Let them struggle to matter for challenge or two, then let them solve a problem or three, and finally give them a moment when they see the ringer as an equal rather than a superior.

For an extra twist, let the ringer become an enemy in this final moment, and let the battle with that ringer be the final test of progress. You know you’ve made it when your mentor lies defeated before you! …extra fun if some cryptic prophesy alludes to this early in the campaign.

Extra twist, or not, I think letting the players overcome the difference is the key to making a ringer into a positive force in the campaign. It’s an experience, I recall from my early days in gaming. I spent most of my gaming days playing first edition D&D. It was a consistent expectation back in those days that your character would start as a grunt and grow into power over the course of a campaign. Most importantly, first edition was a definite sense of diminishing returns. You could bring a 1st level character into an 8th level campaign, and by the time the other characters had made 10th, your own character was probably only one or two levels behind them. You weren’t quite even with the others yet, but at that point, you were one of the group, a force to be reckoned with. Watching your significance grow in comparison to the established characters in such a campaign could be a lot of fun. In effect, the over-powered characters provide a base-line from which you gauge your characters progress, effectively making it all that much more obvious than it would be in a campaign where the characters (and their enemies) are both relatively evenly matched.

The sense of character progress is something I missed in 3rd edition. The balance of power in that game didn’t shift much over the course of a game. If one character was 5th level and another 1st, ten games later, then 5th level character was till significantly more powerful than the 1st. You just couldn’t overcome the difference like you could in first edition. It’s one of the things that made the presence of a ringer that much more toxic in 3rd edition, I think. Under normal circumstances, the differences could not be overcome. I miss it. Maybe that’s what has me thinking about ringers.

No, I haven’t played 4th or 5th edition.

SixB: As a further twist on progress, give the ringer an active role in helping the PCs develop and grow. It’s easy enough to role-pay a mentor apprentice relationship, but it’s a little more fun to provide some significance to this in the game-mechanics. IN my home-brew system, I allow characters to share experience points, and I make this more effective under selected conditions, as in cases where the advanced character has specific teaching abilities, or if the characters have entered an established relationship of some kind). I let the players choose these things, of course, but I give these choices weight in character development. This can help to accelerate player character growth relative to the ringer even as it slows the ringer down. Such mechanics can help to facilitate the change in balance for an overall campaign. It’s particularly interesting when the players themselves have a ringer. Letting them decide how to deal with the differences in power-level provides another layer of meaning to the plot, and of course I try to ensure that the rewards for sharing experience and helping younger characters grow will outweigh any costs.

…of course, none of which is going to help any of the poor bastards when it’s time to meet the dragon!

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Quote-Mining Makes Baby Jesus Cry

31 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Aphorisms, Entertainment, Humor, Quotations, Sarcasm, Wit

Mean to da Kitty!

…and I’m a bad man.

…Okay, I really do hate quote mining, at least when it masquerades as serious scholarship. But the collection of quotes on my Facebook page is not serious scholarship, or at least that’s not what I had I mind when I collected them. I just thought they were cool. So presenting (for your entertainment) a few of my favorite things:

***

“It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously.”
– Alan Greenspan

***

“The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”
— Will Rogers

***

“Tables, chairs, and open chests would have suited Jesus best. He’d have caused nobody harm. No-one alive.”
– Judas (Jesus Christ Superstar)

***

“You’re a Eurotrash colon lying down.”

Open Letter to Umlaut

***

“If wishes were horses, we’d all be eatin’ steak.”
– Jane (from Firefly)

***

(Kitty's Revenge!)

Kitty’s revenge!

“Who died and made you suck?”
– The Vandals

***

“Supporting Israel doesn’t mean you’re pro-Jewish. It just means you want all the Jews a half a world away to fulfill our Biblical prophecy.”
– “Reverend” Jim Osborne (of the Landover Baptist Church)

***

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
– Author Unknown

***

“A great many things are dying very violently all the time. The best days for violent deaths are Tuesdays. They are the yellow paint days. Saturdays are second best, or worst. Saturdays are red paint days. The great death game is therefore a contest between red paint days and yellow paint days. So far yellow paint days are winning by 31 corpses to 29. Whatever the color, a violent death is always celebrated by a firework.”
– Smut, Drowning by Numbers

***

“America! You’re an unfriendly waitress with bad cappuccino.”
– The Foremen

***

“He said, that’d be the last thing I ever do is shoot mahself, …which it was.”
– Vernon Florida.

***

“I’d rather be damned if I don’t.”
– Robert McNamara

***

“right after daddy gets home from the bar
visits his bookie and steals a new car
he’ll drive to the strip club
and if daddy plays his cards right
he’ll bring home your new mommy tonight”
– Lullaby, Stephen Lynch

***

“We’re raising up our standard, so you can lower yours.
We’ll see ya slashed and slandered and abandoned on the shores.
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Bring on the media whores!”
– The Foremen

***

“When you get in bed with ultimate evil, my friend, it always takes the covers.”
– The Tick

***

“Neither party ever gains any insight or learns from these encounters. They never sit down and discuss their differences. Repeated defeats do not teach Bluto to honour Olive Oyl’s humanity, and repeated pummellings do not teach Popeye to swallow his spinach before the fight.”
– Walter Wink, Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence

***

“”Jesus… ah, son, let me tell you about Jesus. You see, son, Jesus is a man, but sometimes, he’s also an idea – kind of like Salvadore Dali painting. You ever see a Dali painting, son? You ever see that melting clock face picture? Jesus is like that. Like a bunch of clocks, melting against various wood finishes. Jesus is like… well, it’s kind of like this, son. Picture an apple covered in a layer of smooth butter, and lacquered with sweet syrup. Now picture this candied apple resting upon a melted clock – you know, like that one in the Dali painting. Now picture the melted clock spinning, and slowly turning, and in the background, the Moscow Red Army Choir is performing Ave Maria.

“You see, son, Jesus, well, Jesus is kind of like that. Now you go and reflect.”

– Mithie (from rpg.net)

***

“I’ll fold you into my wallet and spend you on a whore.”
– The Terror

***

“Every time a child gets health care, an angel loses its virginity in a rather inventive manner.”
– Mrs. Betty Bowers

***

“And if I want to eat your soul, I’ll just throw it on the griddle. Don’t need to make a deal. I don’t need to tell a riddle. And fuck Charlie Daniels! I don’t care if he can fiddle. I’m Satan.”
– Stephen Lynch

***

“There’s a mackerel of a cornflake for you.”
– Line cut from A Clockwork Orange

***

“The position that private action, however deplorable, is not a fit subject for government action puts libertarians in the position of repeating simultaneously all the things that are wrong with the world and their resolute determination to do nothing about them.”
– Andrew Sabl

***

“You could call us Aaron Burr from the way we’re dropping Hamiltons!”
– Lazy Sunday

***

“Every Time I see your face. Every tie my shoes.”

– The Butthole Surfers

***

“In the Beginning there was nothing, not even time. No planets, no stars, no hip-hop, no rhyme. Then there was a bang like the sound of my gat. The universe began and the shit was phat.”

– M.C. Hawking, A Brief History of Rhyme

***

“Start wearing purple for me now.”
– Gogol Bordello

***

“Shout-out to the girl who wanted the Japanese kanji for “luck” to represent her Irish heritage.”
– S.K. Williams (employee at a tattoo shop)

***

“A bit more violent than Brahms, but it’s pretty good.”
– Lemmy

***

“Vilmar, a traveling salesman, whose 10.4 year old Opel became stuck in a 3 meter deep snow bank during blizzard in rural Schleswig-Holstein. It took Vilmar several hours to trudge through the deep snow drifts to the nearest farm house with a light on. Frozen half to death, Vilmar finally reached the front door and knocked on it. When Berke, a grizzled old farmer, answered the door, Vilmar pleaded for a place to spend the night. “Sure, young man, I can give you a place to sleep,” said the hospitable old man. “But, I have no daughter for you to sleep with.”
– Dingfod from Freethought Forums

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The Grey – Movie Review (Yeah Spoilers)

14 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, Movies

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Alaska, Entertainment, Film, Liam Neeson, Movies, Prudhoe Bay, The Grey, Wolves

In The Grey, Liam Neeson along with a small cast of characters survive a plane crash in remote parts of Alaska. The crash is, well, …the first of their challenges.

I saw this movie in a theater in Anchorage. I had just come off a flight very much like the one portrayed in the film, and I was killing time during the layover before a second round of middle-seat torment, when someone suggested watching this movie. It sounded like a good way to kill some time.

It wasn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. Liam Neeson turned in a fine performance, as did the rest of the cast. Do I need to say that he was compelling? Do I have to tell you that he made the character come alive? Let’s just take that as a given, and add that the rest of the cast also turned in excellent performances. Really, I have no qualms about the acting.

The problem I have with this movie is the story itself. The damned plot reminded me of chalk boards at nearly every turn.

Chalk boards and fingernails that is.

We could start with its portrayal the sort of people who work in the oil fields of Alaska. Neeson’s character, John Ottway tells us early on that he is a hired killer of sorts, working in the oil fields of Alaska. He then goes on to describe the oil-field workers as a mindless, hard-drinking and violent lot, prone to criminal actions. There is little in the opening scenes to suggest that Ottway’s comments are intended as anything less than the truth, at least as this movie envisions it.

Having shared an airplane with workers from Prudhoe Bay several times, I couldn’t help but cringe. I kept thinking about a long discussion I had on one flight with mechanic headed home to Texas. He spoke with me about his faith in the Baha’i church and a range of experiences working in different parts of the world. Did this movie do him justice? Not by a long shot, nor I suspect did it do justice for the rest of the workers at these fields.

Mind you, I am happy to go with a bit of slanderous fiction if we can then get along with a plausible storyline. I could just accept the movie’s take as a given and put it behind me. I could.

But let’s just return to the, “hired killer” theme. Who or what does Ottway kill?

Wolves.

Yes, Ottway kills wolves for a living, as is established in an early scene when we see him bring a lone wolf down with one well-placed shot, just in the nick of time. This would be a lone wolf that moved from stalking to charging multiple oil workers. The movie offers no explanation for the conduct of this wolf, giving the impression that this sort of thing is par for the course.

The Grey does give us a moving little moment where Ottway lays his hand reassuringly on the wolf as it dies. (Yes, that’s right, he touched the dying wolf as it died. …cause that’s what you do with a wounded and dying wolf. …Yep.)

And I should add that this scene is one of the more realistic moments in the films lupine antics. To say that the wolves of this film do not much act like the real thing is putting it mildly, unless of course you mean the Dire Wolves from Dungeons and Dragons. These wolves are smarter, meaner, more persistent, and just generally more bad-ass than any wolves in the known world, …Tolkein novels and role-playing games aside, I mean. Yes, I do think this movie depicts the Dire Wolves of D&D quite accurately.

Which is of course the major basis for the plot. First the plane crashes, and then a pack of Dire Wolves hunts the survivors for the rest of the movie, picking them off one by one.

If you’ve read my blog, you probably think I rooted for the wolves throughout the movie.

I did.

The trouble is that for all their extraordinary powers, these magical wolves take an awful long time to finish off their human quarry. And just when I was getting to the point where I thought the last bunch off heroes might actually make it (or perish in one merciful slaughter), the movie finds a new tone of nails-on-chalkboard resonance to strike. You see, it wasn’t enough to hit me with condescending portrayals of oil workers pit up against magical uber-wolves from fantasy land. No, this movie had one more means of tormenting yours truly.

It found my true weakness.

With but three survivors left, one of them finally gives up. The character, John Diaz, a particularly rough and tumble fellow decides he simply cannot go on. Now this might seem plausible, because of course he is hungry, cold, and tired at this point (much as I was sitting in that theater in Anchorage), but that would be far too predictable an excuse to lay down and die. No, it turns out that Diaz, the problem child of survivor group, has finally seen the error of his. He realizes how beautiful the countryside is, and realizes that the rest of his miserable life has been wasted all along. So, Diaz tells the other two to go on. And Ottway? Ottway understands and accepts this decision. This really belongs in an Iron John book. They leave Diaz sitting by a rover waiting for the wolves to get him, but not before some very meaningful moments of male-bonding occur.

At this point of the movie, I think I was genuinely squirming in my seat. In fact I am squirming now, just thinking of it.

So, I will just take a moment to mention some of the more interesting features of the movie. Ottway has a number of flashbacks during the course of the movie, consistently returning to a past relationship with a beautiful woman. These moments do serve to set up an interesting aspect of the film narrative; it is the reason he now works in the oil fields, and it is the source of his outlook and (ironically) his leadership qualities. Sadly, this theme never develops into its full potential.

I should also say that there is a drowning scene in this movie that is quite well done, a bit reminiscent of an old Paul Newman film, Sometimes a Great Notion. What makes it so interesting. Well you will have to brave the wolves to find out, because I’m not going to give this one away.

Well that’s it. I could go on, but, …no, I can’t. The memory of this movie is too much for me. I really don’t feel well at all right now. I look outside my window at the beautiful Alaskan scenery, and I realize that I just cannot go back to this movie review. You my dear reader should go on without me. Maybe you can make safely it to the next blog on your own. Just click the link to the Bill Hess Blog and you’ll be safe.

I’ll just sit here and let the chalkboard-sounds and the wolves get me.

Go!

Just go!

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Special Sarcasm-Free Saturday: Three Indigenous Films (in Ascending Order of Coolness)

13 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aborigine, Atanarjuat, Entertainment, Ethnography, Film, Indigenous Peoples, Inuit, Massai, Movies, Ten Canoes, The Rain Warriors

Okay, I know it’s not actually Saturday, but I wanted the alliteration. I’ll try to stick to the Sarcasm-Free theme though, which should be easy enough, because I actually like today’s subject. Yes, I actually like some things. Honest! Case in point, here is a batch of my favorite movies. They are not documentaries. Each tells a fictional story, but each sets that story squarely in a distinctive “tribal” setting. Each is carried out in the native language of its setting, and each uses native actors. The authenticity of each depiction varies (and that is always a tricky question no matter how it’s handled). Suffice to say that in each of these cases, there seems enough to get my attention, and each tells an interesting story in its own right. We can begin this tour in Africa with a movie called The Rain Warriors (2005). The story follows a group of young Massai warriors as they embark on a quest to slay the incarnation of a deity. Yes, I said “deity,” but it’s worse than that, really. The deity has taken on the form of a lion, and killing this lion-deity is the price it will take to bring rain back to the region, thus saving their people from starvation. In the process, this young group of warriors will also have to prove that they are ready to become men. Given the role of Age-sets in Massai life, it is interesting enough to see a coming of age n this setting, but some reviewers have suggested the plot is a bit too romantic to be taken too seriously. It is difficult to say how much of this premise is genuinely rooted in Massai thought and how much is the projection of its French Director, Pascal Plisson, but the same could be said said about some serious scholarship on the very same subject. In the end, what I like most about this movie is the juxtaposition of the classic coming-of-age theme with the role of warriors. It is a simple paradox. The main characters face life and death challenges, the sort of challenges that separate the men from the boys, so to speak. …and yet, the main characters are boys, a fact which they demonstrate often enough during the course of the story, and sometimes with dire consequences. This feature of the movie isn’t just interesting story-telling. It a truth of actual warfare, that it is often carried out by youth. With so little to separate them from the activities of childhood, these characters must somehow find within themselves the courage and judgement to make adulthood possible. Watching this movie reminded me of the First chapter of Slaughterhouse Five and Vonnegut’s comparison of his own wartime experience to the Children’s Crusade. Add this touching theme to the unique flavor of the cultural setting, and we have a worthwhile sitting. But don’t try to eat dinner while you watch this movie. …unless, you speak Massai. It sucks to read subtitles in between bites of a taco. I’ve tried. Sailing a ways out to sea, we come to the movie, Ten Canoes (2006). This movie is set in the wetlands of Arnhem Land in Australia. With its two European Directors, this movie too has its non-native input, but the team makes a serious effort to produce an authentically indigenous story. (And this is an interesting story in itself, as made clear in the extras provided in the movie.) The most interesting thing about this film (to me anyway) is the double framing of the story. We begin with a humorous narrative by David Gulpilil whom you may recognize from Rabbit Proof Fence, Cocodile Dundee, or The Proposition (to name just a few of his credits). This story sets the stage for another one (depicted in black and white) about a group of men cutting canoes to go hunting birds in the wetlands. One of the men, Dayindi, is envious of his older brother’s wives, or at least one of them (if you get the drift). he also thinks it unfair that he should have no wives while older men in his community should have so many. Responding to his younger kin, his brother, Minygululu, tells Dayindi the story of an ancester similarly stressed by thoughts of his own brother’s wives. This latter story is depicted in full color. So, we have a story within a story within a story. If that doesn’t make your sense of awesome blossom, then you can go suck a carrot! Without giving too much away, the framing infuses the movie with a meaning well beyond each of the individual narratives. Gulpilil’s opening comments help to set in perspective the nature of life itself and the ties between people and their land in Aboriginal thought. The middle narrative sets up a moral dilemma which will generate not one but two separate plot-lines. The conclusion of Minygululu’s narrative then turns out to be an answer to Dayindi’s own dilemma. Its significance for the opening narrative is a little less clear, but that just leaves us with something to think about. And a reason to watch this movie yet again. And Finally we have Atanarjuat, or The Fast Runner (2001). This movie is set in Canada, or more properly Igloolik. It’s cast speaks Inuktitut throughout the film. To say that this is an Inuit production would be putting it mildly. The plot for the movie is derived from (and largely faithful to) an Inuit story. It’s directer, cast, and crew, are all Inuit. (Okay, maybe not everyone on the crew, but you get the idea.) And just to be clear about this, the intended audience appears to be Inuit as well. (To say that Inupiat seem to like this film too is putting it mildly.) True to the nature of native story-telling, the film wastes little time explaining the cultural landscape, or establishing the setting in which its characters live. The movie is made for those who know the setting and will recognize its central characters and themes. It gets right into the plot, relating the central challenge of Atanarjuat and his family, a powerful curse which is to haunt his family throughout the story. The curse which begins the story is placed on Atanarjuat’s father, leading the family to experience great hardship. In time Atanarjuat and his brother grow strong and prove themselves capable hunters. Atanarjuat himself vies with a rival, Oki, for the the affection of a beautiful young woman, Atuat. The twists are turns in this story are many and varied (I cannot do justice to them), leading eventually to the scene which provides this film with its English title. Attacked in his sleep, Atanarjuat flees naked across the sea ice, chased by three spear-wielding foes. And here, let us take a moment to acknowledge the lead actor in this production, Natar Ungalaaq, for the bad-ass that he is. The man did in fact run naked across the ice during this production. yes, he had some fake feet made, but they didn’t last long, and otherwise he was naked. How cold was it? When he was naked? Well, here’s a clue, the ocean underneath him was frozen! Bad ass. BAD ASS! There is an interesting twist at the end of this movie, which I will not relate here. Suffice to say that there is at least one respect in which the film deviates from the traditional narrative, It was a conscious choice and one that substantially changes the meaning of the story, hopefully rendering it more salient to modern life. To learn what I am talking about, you are just going to have to watch the movie. Okay, this may not be entirely free of sarcasm, but then again it isn’t really Saturday either. What did you expect? Postcript: I have heard good things about The Orator (2011), a Samoan film which is unfortunately difficult to get in the U.S. and more difficult still here at the top of the world. Luckily, a copy has been floating around here in Barrow and I am hoping to get my hands on it soon.

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