I’m not what I would consider to be much of a gamer. My Wii was a prize I won at work, and the most attention it gets from me is when I’m dusting. My PS3 came bundled with the TV I bought, basically thrown in for nothing because retailers were panicking about sales a week before Christmas in 2009. I used to reliably play the premier Nintendo titles like Mario Kart, Metroid and Zelda, but I stopped playing Metroid about 10 percent into Metroid Prime 2 and haven’t played Mario Kart in longer than I can remember. I’d rather watch youtube clips of pros playing Starcraft 2 than play myself. I suck at first-person shooter games and online multi-player holds no interest to me. I never played the last Grand Theft Auto game. Whenever somebody would ask me if I played RPGs, I would tell them that I draw the line at Zelda when it comes to that sort of thing.

This year, I put the latest “Zelda: Skyward Sword” game aside after playing it for a night and being sore the next day from all the flailing around with the motion controls, which I never really felt comfortable with. I probably didn’t need to be swinging my arms around quite so vigorously, but nevertheless, I wasn’t really enjoying myself.

So why have I spent over 200 hours of my life these past 6 weeks playing fucking Skyrim?

Maybe part of it was spite. A little, “fuck you Zelda, your graphics suck now and I hate this wiimote. Imma go get a real HD game where you kill dragons with a normal controller! And blackjack and hookers!”

So off to the dreaded all-night Wal-Mart I went, becoming that guy who buys video games at 2 am. When I got home and opened the box for my PS3 copy of Skyrim, the case was empty. No disc. This was probably some sort of cosmic warning from the universe, but rather than heeding it, I went back and exchanged it for another.

I wasn’t lying, I don’t normally play RPGs. They always seemed like way too much work and not a lot of fun. And this is basically true. Also, I wasn’t into all that Japanese animé shit. But there’s an element of detail and control, combined with a seemingly endless list of tasks available in these games that’s like catnip to a certain kind of mind. My kind of mind, apparently. You hit the start button and there’s this handy lists of quests and tasks that you’ve been assigned, and it always seems to be getting longer. I hate clutter. I crave order. I must shorten that list! It would be sloppy of me not to.

And look at all these skill categories you can upgrade. I want to be able to decapitate people! I want to make those cool-sounding weapons! So I had better get to work.

The dragons are definitely part of it. There’s something undeniably rad (yes, rad!) about taking on a dragon with a sword and shield, and winning as epic music thunders on the soundtrack. Why am I screaming “Sit the fuck down, asshole!” at my TV? Because I just kicked that dragon’s ass after dying the 20 previous times trying, that’s why. I am 31 years old.

The irony here is that I’ve still barely done anything in the main questline of the game. I don’t want to yet, because there’s all this other cool shit to do. And before I do that cool shit, I gotta level up my character so I don’t have to worry about getting my ass kicked all the time. So I level up Smithing to make better weapons.

The easiest way to do this is to buy lots of iron ingots and leather strips and make tons and tons of iron daggers with them. You can then sell the iron daggers back to the merchants, but at a fraction of the cost. I am seriously destroying the market for daggers in Skyrim. Somewhere in Whiterun I surely must have put some other blacksmith out of business by flooding the market with these cheap daggers at commodity prices.

So I have a money problem. You can make money by doing small jobs for people, or stealing, or looting corpses. But you can only carry so much shit around with you at once, so you need to buy a house to put it in. Once you’ve got that house, you should really buy some furniture for the place. Oh, and now that you killed that first dragon, you’ve got this assistant named Lydia following you around, so you’ve got to make some better weapons and armor for her too.

And every other time you talk to somebody, you get a new quest added to the list.

Do quests, loot corpses, sell your loot, buy iron and leather, make daggers, level up.

Oh, but if you want to make yourself really powerful, you’ve got to use potions and enchantments too, so you better start gathering soul gems to level your Enchanting ability, and lots of ingredients to level your Alchemy.

Do a quest, loot corpses, gather any ingredients you can, sell your loot, buy more ingredients, buy iron and leather, make potions, make daggers, sell potions, buy soul gems, enchant daggers, sell daggers, make a new set of armor, use your new enchanting powers to make that armor raise your Alchemy skills, put on the new armor, make potions that improve your enchantment skills. Buy more soul gems. Make more armor. Drink the enchantment potion to make this new set of armor even better at raising your Alchemy skills.

Now you’re out of money and all the merchants are tapped out of supplies. Gotta do another side quest or kill some giants. You’re on your way to the bandit hideout you’re going to clear out for the Jarl when you talk to a random person or find a mysterious item and then boom, even more tasks added to the list.

If this sounds incredibly tedious to you, you’re not wrong. It is. I can’t stop. Not when I know that my weapons and armor could be even better than they are now.

Jump to six weeks later.

I went and re-bought the game for PC because the Playstation version was too buggy and slow. Lydia’s dead. That bitch was weak and in the way, I looted her corpse and sold her armor to buy more iron ingots. My Smithing, Enchantment and Alchemy skills are maxed out. My sword now one-hit-kills most bad guys I come across. I’m basically unstoppable. A human killing machine. The list of quests keeps growing. Apparently the game generates them automatically, so they’ll never end. I still haven’t done anything else in the main storyline. There is no joy in these sidequests, it’s just another item in my list that needs clearing. I plow through every new dungeon, slaughtering my foes and ignoring all the cool loot they leave behind. Loot means nothing now. I have too much money. I am the 1 percent of Skyrim. Why bother picking up some enchanted iron armor? It weighs 25 and is only worth a lousy 200 gold. Fuck that.

Oh look, I just killed a Dragon Priest and claimed his mask. It enhances your archery skills by 25 percent. Big fucking deal. I made my own necklace than raises archery by 48 percent. I two-hit-kill dragons now. No randomly generated reward is going to match what I’m packing.

Decapitations are still satisfying.

My main concern now is finding a new set of armor that is aesthetically pleasing. Why put my character in a big bulky helmet when she could be showing off her cool war paint and pixie haircut? At various mansions that I own, I have mannequins to show off all the armor I made and then got tired of wearing. I keep a chest full of sacred artifacts and weapons that I can’t be arsed to carry around because they’re shit next to my custom-made kit. My garden grows all the ingredients that I need for potions, but I have no need  for potions anymore.

I don’t see the epic HD vistas and endless draw distance anymore, I just see a bunch of progress bars and lists. I won’t be satisfied until every item is checked, every bar at 100 percent. You’re not a dragon, you’re just a little piece of Light Armor skill improvement.

And when I’m all done with that, I can focus on improving the Thieves Guild. It only takes 125 quests to max them out. And then there are the Dark Brotherhood assassination jobs, and so many bounties to hunt down and collect. Or maybe I’ll just start all over and be a mage this time, or a thief, instead of a warrior. Sometimes I find myself using sub-par equipment, just to make it a little interesting.

I’m only getting about 4 hours of sleep a night. I forget to eat sometimes, so I think I’m actually losing weight doing this. I stopped paying much attention to the internet. I have a bunch of podcasts I want to listen to. TV shows I want to watch. People I should call. I forgot to pay my water bill. They were probably close to shutting it off by the time I noticed.

Some of the other guys at work play Skyrim. When I told them what I’ve done, they frown and say I’m taking all the fun out of the game.

I told myself I’d stop at New Years. Then on Martin Luther King Day. But I still have so much to do. This game is ruining my life.

Clarification is always necessary. If you hold the viewpoints of one of the things on this list, or you sorta liked or kind of agree with some of the things mentioned, it doesn’t mean you irrecoverably have bad taste. But you might.

“Bridesmaids” is Oscar-Worthy

A thoroughly lazy and mediocre comedy. Too long, too many stretches where you feel like you’re watching a tossed-out SNL sketch idea get beaten into the ground. I probably wouldn’t hate this movie so much if it weren’t for the ridiculous praise it gets from lazy bloggers and media people. Oscar-worthy? Be fucking serious. There is a fallacy I see a lot of writers fall into, especially those writers who live in LA, where when something is successful its inherent quality becomes this unquestionable given. This is not a well-made movie. It’s standard Apatow hackery, just with more girls this time. And put away your aspirations of Feminism, it’s a movie about weddings and stupid wedding bullshit, about as gender-stereotyped as you can get.

So is “Drive”

This movie reminded me so much of all the bad LA crime film knock-offs that exploded out of the woodwork in the mid-90s after Pulp Fiction came out. Oh look, it’s a an overly-stylized troubled anti-hero in a cliched heist plot where there’s lots of over-the-top violence and some scenery chewing by cast-against-type comedy actor playing a mob bro. But the main guy doesn’t talk much, cause the director read a book about Sergio Leone once! And there’s an against-the-grain soundtrack! And… … Why the hell are so many critics in love with this movie? I’m baffled. The visual style evokes a freshman film school student discovering the low-light setting on his Canon 5D. I really wanted to like this movie, but the longer it went on without any discernible substance, the less I did.

Andy Serkis deserves a nomination for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

No he doesn’t. Also, his Gollum was totally over-rated. If you think that’s good acting and not just scenery chewing, you’re probably amazed by the performances in high school plays too. Plus, he’s just providing a rough draft, there’s an army of animators and effects people working on every frame of his performance to make it better.

(Note: I did not see “Attack the Block” nor do I intend to, but judging by the way Harry Knowles and his acolytes gush about it, I’m just going to assume that it actually sucks.)

The Swedish version was better

No it wasn’t. It had all the quality and production value of a Lifetime channel movie. Noomi Rapace was a formulaic goth chick straight from central casting. You’re just saying that because you think pretending to like foreign films makes you more cultured. Fincher’s version is so well made that you kinda regret just a bit that his talents aren’t being put to use on better source material.

(The 2012 version of this is going to be “‘The Hunger Games’ is just a ‘Battle Royale’ rip-off.” It isn’t, and despite my distaste for Jennifer Lawrence, it will probably be much better than the supremely over-rated “Battle Royale.”)

I’d like to talk about a concept of punishment he puts forth in his novel Anathem. It’s called the Book. A brief primer: Anathem takes place in a world similar to our own, but where scholars live a quasi-monastic life of simple means behind the walls of big stone concents, cut off from the rest of society for a period of one, ten, 100 or 1000 years. This separation allows the “avout,” as they are called, to dedicate their lives to scholarly work without distraction or interruption. While there are your typical chores and kitchen duty that can be assigned to reprimand bad behavior, there is also the Book. When an avout needs sterner discipline, the administrators can “throw the Book” at them.

The idea of the Book, as the main character Erasmas explains it, is to punish the mind of the wayward avout. It’s 12 chapters long, filled with inane, inaccurate and possibly insane content that must be memorized and tested against. Imagine a mathematician being forced to learn and apply false proofs, or a writer who must memorize incorrect definitions. The Book is designed to poison the mind, taking a sledgehammer to the foundations of an avout’s critical thinking and logical faculties. And each chapter is exponentially harder than the one before. In the novel, it’s said that only 3 men ever completed all 12 chapters, which took a lifetime, and they were all thoroughly insane when they finished. That the avout have dedicated themselves to learning makes it all the more heinous a punishment to them, as they are forced to corrupt their minds and waste their time working counter to their own life’s work.

One example Erasmas gives is a chapter full of nursery rhymes that almost, but do not quite rhyme. Another is five pages of the digits of Pi. In the novel, he is assigned the first five chapters as penance, which takes him several weeks to complete. And the idea is that, if you get in trouble again, you could get assigned even more. It is suggested that going higher can permanently damage one’s ability to process and organize information effectively.

I mention all this as prelude to my latest movie review:

Surely, if the Book were real, Chapter 6 would be the shooting script to Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. And the less said further the better.

–Benjie

It made me wonder, why do we go through life judging things based on our expectations? Obviously, there are a lot of low-level heuristic reasons for this in terms of everyday brain processing. But why do we do this for movies, books, events, personal experiences? It’s tempting to say this is a modern age phenomenon. That we didn’t do this before the internet. I mean, did people in Colonial America really walk around saying “man, that play didn’t live up to my expectations. The town cryer totally over-hyped it”? But I’m hesitant. Any time you start thinking that anything new is happening in society, you’re probably going to be wrong. Just ask the lorites. Still, the internet has a way of amplifying the echo chamber in ways that didn’t used to be possible.

The first time I can remember this sort of “didn’t live up to the hype” attitude permeating culture was when the Seinfeld finalé aired. Not that this didn’t happen beforehand, but this is when I started to notice. So Much Hype, they would all say, and the show had Failed To Live Up To It. Soon, this way of thinking seemed to spread to practically any form of entertainment or news event. Y2K? Overhyped! Star Wars Prequel? Didn’t meet my expectations. New Franzen book? HYPED! And so on.

But why does hype matter? Why do we go through life with the need to judge entertainment and events against our expectations? Why is it no longer sufficient to just say “I thought X was okay, but not great.”

The answer probably lies somewhere is the middle of modern internet shared culture, man’s fear of being made a fool, and the apparent need for everyone to have an opinion about everything. I guess it’s easier to talk about yourself and what you wanted from something rather than to articulate a critical viewpoint on it.
I would just posit this: it’s no way to live. Stop thinking about the hype. Ignore the hype. Don’t worry about whether your expectations are too high or too low, because in the end, nobody cares what you thought you would think, and you shouldn’t either. Just take it as it comes. (editor’s note: that’s what she said)

I really liked Super 8. Not a perfect movie by any means. Not a classic. And that’s okay. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a movie like this. Visual storytelling! Steady pacing! Kids who act like kids, not precocious one-liner machines or dead weight! People call this Spielbergian, but I feel like this is a disservice to both Spielberg and JJ Abrams. There was a time, lets call it “the 80s,” when this is what tons of movies looked like. They weren’t just a handful of CGI set pieces strung together by the weakest of scripts with lowest common denominator humor. Sure, maybe the idea wouldn’t be that groundbreaking or original, but at least they made some movies that weren’t remakes, reboots, sequels or adaptations back then. I miss this kind of movie. There should be more like it.

Also, Elle Fanning is ridiculously good in this. Worth seeing it just for her. Star-making.

This is what August Bravo thought. (editor’s note: no, we don’t know what he’s talking about either.)

August Bravo: Ok, I’ll get this off my chest first. The teaser for Super 8 had me really excited to see this movie. JJ Abrams could literally touch my bowel movement and make it into art, so I knew this would be an astonishing movie with some mediocre(ha) special effects.

The great thing about a teaser, especially like the one for Super 8 which I thought was just a working title, is that they say nothing. Ideas are populating your mind.

Naturally, I’m thinking Cthulhu.

Naturally, I’m wrong. How much is this guy going to fuck with us(me)? It’s cool, because it was still very awesome. Not as awesome as I’m thinking in my head because teasers let the mind wander. While most aren’t this broad, people can’t help but think of things beyond their imagination. Why else release a teaser trailer? Because they don’t have enough content to fill a whole trailer? Well yeah, probably. But they want to give the audience a ride. They want their expectations to be high.

And then with the full trailer, they want to smash all your Cthulhu-loving dreams and just show you it’s a movie about some kids with a camera. Albeit, still a very very good movie, with a very meaningful(aliens!!) plot. But audiences expect nothing and something. And I’m sorry that with Abrams I expect everything.

So what if it wasn’t Cthulhu, I still thought it would be something more. Yeah, it would have been cornier if it was more about (spoiler alert!) aliens, rather than having it very down to Earth. But I’m into bad movies. I think expectations are what get the movie going, the audience going. I’ll end it with this. Don’t put practically nothing in your teaser if you don’t want me to dream big.

As far as expectations go, I set mine at an all-time low and I’m generally never disappointed. Generally.

Straight up.

The weather is March is typically cold, wet and shitty. It’s not wintery, Christmas-y cold. It’s “when the hell is spring going to arrive?” cold.

February is short and full of holidays, which makes March feel interminable. In school, you get like three 4-day weeks in February, and none in March.

Football season is over, and baseball hasn’t begun yet, making college basketball the headlining sporting event of the month, and college basketball sucks beyond belief.

With Oscar season over, films in March are typically forgettable fare as the studios unload tweener movies as they gear up for the summer movie season. Any “big” movies that come out in March are movies that the studios know are crap, and will bomb in the summer (i.e. Sucker Punch).

On the television side, February is sweeps, and March is full of re-runs.

The only holiday in March is St. Patricks Day, which is one of the lamest holidays of the year. The upside of encouraged binge drinking is tempered by having to tolerate Irish People. Nobody should get excited about eating corned beef and cabbage.

The Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in March. The Boston Massacre was in March. The Alamo fell in March. My Lai was in March. The disastrous second Iraq war started in March. The Exxon Valdez ran aground in March. Three-Mile Island happened in March. The worst accident in the history of civil aviation happened in March. Caesar was killed in March.

Did I mention how fucking long the month feels?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those backward-looking saps who swears that Everything Was So Much Better *Before* before, before whatever time period that was long enough ago that we can idealize it. I fully endorse Neal Stephenson’s metaphor of Human Civilization as a Shipwreck in Five Acts. (If you don’t know what this is, you should go read Quicksilver. And no, I won’t link to it, take some initiative.) Things really are better now than in the past. Even with the recession. It just doesn’t seem that way, and the reason for this is The Internet.

We’re just so much more aware of how stupid people can be. And not just the proles, but people who should, or at least give the appearance of, knowing better. It’s too late in the night for me to go into detail on this, so I’ll write a more detailed post later. But I’d like to introduce to you all my concept of The Antillectual. Not to be confused with the ignorant dipshits who make up most of the population. These people actually know something, or at least know how to look it up online. This is the person who complains about The Social Network not being accurate. Who has lots of simple solutions (that wouldn’t work) to difficult problems. They say things like “I support Google because they’re open.” They read the Huffington Post health and wellness section. They think college is a waste of time, but assume that with their half-baked idea, they can end up just like Zuckerberg (even though they won’t go see the Facebook Movie, because it’s not what really happened.)

The Antillectual, thanks to Wikipedia, stands on the shoulders of the combined intelligence of all of human civilization. All the knowledge of the world is at their fingertips. And none of the wisdom. 2010 was a big year for the Antillectual. Modern information technologies like twitter and smartphones have swelled their ranks like never before. But that was just the prelude. In 2011, they’re going to take over.

Don: Is it a problem that I now root for Don Draper the same way I do for Jason Stackhouse? I’m like, “Attaboy, Draper! For an encore, do your neighbor!” Probably. I don’t know if television has ever given us one character, let alone two, who deal with this kind of “pussy overflow” on such a regular basis. Old Don would be hopelessly drawn to to the self-assured marketing analyst, because just like Rachel Mencken, girls who say no turn him on. New Don… well, we’ll see how much he’s really changed. He’s single now, so women are viewing him as a potential partner instead of just a fling now, and he’s having trouble getting used to it.

Peggy: Her talk with Freddy was a little “on the nose,” as they say, but we get the picture. Peggy knows this dork isn’t marriage material, so she’ll fuck him for now, knowing this will hasten his exit. While we’ve certainly gotten hints of feminist angst from her before, I think this episode was the closest she’s come to outright voicing them. I liked the half-grimace she, Joan and the marketing chick all seemed to share when White Pants were brought up in the meeting.

Roger: I think SCDP will not end the season with Lucky Strike as a client.

Betty: Fuck Betty.

Glen: Him too. Creep. The world, August Bravo aside, was not asking for more Glen.

——-

But what’s really on my mind tonight/this morning is the new Arcade Fire album: The Suburbs.

As soon as I read about the title of this LP, I had a feeling I’d like it. I’ve always had a complex connection with suburbia, and it sounds like Win Butler does too. I’m only on my second listen-through, but I can tell that this is an album that’s going to keep growing on me.

It’s a sort of choppy, stream of consciousness series of vignettes on the love/hate relationships between the suburbs and the city. The sprawl is an inescapable malaise of crushed dreams, but go downtown and maybe those shallow hipsters aren’t your kind either. Two years into an economic catastrophe and a lot of those downtown bohemia promises can start to sound like so much happy bullshit. Something fascinating about the line, “Now that San Francisco’s gone, I guess I’ll just pack it in.” There’s a theme of weary resignation here. But in The Suburbs, resignation feels a lot like growing up, and who says that’s a good thing, even if it’s unavoidable.

Most of the kids in my generation — if they could afford to, if they didn’t get shackled with a burdensome spouse or child, or military service — they moved to the city as soon as they could get away. Me, I moved back to the suburbs. I guess I’ve always felt there was something important going on here. Something that, if I came to understand it, would understand everything about modern American life. I don’t think I do yet, but I’m getting closer.

I’m confident that one day I will, and then I’ll leave.

No, I haven’t gone to see it. I don’t hate myself.

Ai! Ai! A balrog! A balrog!

Yes, I’m going to heap even more scorn on the oxygen thieves responsible for this franchise. Because lets be honest, reading about how terrible this movie is has to be more entertaining that suffering through its 2.5 hour running time. It’s rocking a 14% right now on Rotten Tomatoes. Many are calling it the worst movie of the year. I’m calling it cultural terrorism. That touchstone you can point to when you’re talking about what’s wrong with the world.

Kudos to Horseface and her hack director Michael Patrick King for producing the first Hollywood-financed Al Queda propaganda film. I mean, that’s what this is, right? You’re trying to make the world hate America, aren’t you? You aren’t? Seriously? No, come on, tell me this is some sort of extremely bold satire. You want us to stab women who say “fabulous” too much. It’s all a big put on, right? At least spin me some bullshit about camp and the queer gaze. No? Are you fucking kidding me? You meant this? You really put in a scene where this rich bitch who doesn’t work and has a housekeeper AND A FUCKING NANNY is whining about how hard it is to be a parent? You intended this? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Was the goal to validate everything haters like me always said about the show?

I find it repulsive that this tripe still gets passed off a progressive in some circles. Contort your ideals all you want, there’s nothing empowering about consumerism and staring at your belly-button isn’t Feminism.

* not pictured: reason, accountability, self-awareness, shame, respect...

Some choice review quotes:

“Everyone’s phoning it in for the first two hours. And let me point out something that I’ve just said there: ‘The First. Two. Hours.’”

from here

“The most grotesque aspect of Sex and the City remains the central characters, all four of whom (to varying degrees) are obsessed with the trappings of wealth. They exist to consume. It’s a three-ring circus of materialism, narcissism, and entitlement.”

from here

“Carrie immediately reveals her kiss to Big, who ultimately forgives her because “I took a vow”—and gives her a big fat diamond ring to “remind her that she’s married.” Charlotte and Miranda bitch about their kids, then raise a glass to the hard work of stay-at-home mothers who do it all—and without help.”

from here

“The stakes are so low that, during the girls’ final madcap sprint through an outdoor market disguised in burqas, the unspeakable outcome they’re trying to forestall is the possibility of having to fly home in coach.”

from here

“The tagline states that we should ‘Carrie on.’ The publicity dept. almost got it right, but the spelling’s off. It needs to be ‘Carrion’ because nothing says putrefying, rotten and vile quite like this sequel.”

from here

“This is the new torture porn.”

that one was my favorite, from here

Do Not Want!

“When Marie Antoinette did this, the people tore down the f’ing Bastille.”

from here

“When Carrie asks Big, “Am I just a bitch wife who nags you?” I could hear all the straight men in the theater — all four of us — being physically prevented from responding.”

from here

This is actually David Duchovny in a wig and shades, SJP was busy the day of the promo shoot.

and finally

“Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of Sex and the City 2 are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row. … Carrie also narrates the film, providing useful guidelines for those challenged by its intricacies. Sample: “Later that day, Big and I arrived home.”"

–Roger Ebert

And Chris Noth, as Mr. Big.

]]> http://counter-force.com/2010/05/28/something-something-bad-pun-menopause/feed/ 1 Benjamin Light light her on fire to see what color she burns written and directed by a gay man? GTFO! tacky song choice Together, they're older than the Constitution. I may not be a fashion buff, but... woof. undesireable Airbrush ahoy Cat don't lie http://counter-force.com/2010/05/18/now-youre-like-me/ http://counter-force.com/2010/05/18/now-youre-like-me/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 05:39:52 +0000 Benjamin Light http://counter-force.com/?p=8319 ]]> I’m sure Marco will have plenty more to say about tonight’s awesome LOST episode later, but for now, I just wanted to get this out there:

ps. who else nearly jizzed in their pants when it looked like Desmond was going to run over Locke all over again?