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 don’t think I had high hopes for 2011, or at least I didn’t expect much from it, and by those same criteria, it didn’t exactly let me down. It was a year that just happened when it was happening, and now it’s time for something else to happen. I’m a little more excited about the onset of 2012, maybe not right now, but I’m certainly more excited about the possibilities that come with this new cycle of love and weather and suffering and laughing and music and despair and happiness and beautiful strangeness. It’ll either be the end of the world, or I swear to God, I’ll certainly squeeze the kind of fun out of it that I would similarily take from the end of the world (as we know it).

“Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Picture from here.

What happens when the scary predictions of speculative fiction start to come true earlier than expected?

I guess you could say that I’m excited to see A Dangerous Method.

Best Coast and WAVVES.

An interesting interview with Steven Soderbergh about Contagion.

Did Chris Martin cheat on Gwyneth Paltrow?

J.J. Abrams is doing some cool new shit.

Science fiction magazines and The Joy Of Sex.

from here.

Noah Baumbach is developing Jonathan Franzen‘s The Corrections as an HBO series.

Post-apocalyptic porn. Sure, why not?

Matthew Fox could be in some trouble.

Saturn is beautiful.

The critics of Joan Didion.

This is Peanut St. Cosmo’s new favorite picture on the internet.

What does clitoral stimulation do to your brain?

Post-Sept. 11 Saudi Arabia is modernizing, slowly.

Mos Def will no longer be Mos Def.

Kitty Ravenhart’s selection for The Best Of Yahoo Answers.

Did you drain your balls at DragonCon?

More leaks from David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

from here.

“A guy jerked off to me in the subway and the NYPD didn’t do a thing.”

I feel like with each passing day I’m a little more amazed that The Avengers movie is happening.

The beginning of the end for Yahoo?

Johnny Depp to star in another fucking remake, this time of The Thin Man.

Female blogger threatened with defamation suit after writing about TSA rape.

Jeff Tweedy and the Black Eyed Peas.

Tech company to build science ghost town.

A new story by Haruki Murakami.

Very cool fan art.

A huge list of deleted scenes that are awaiting you on the new Star Wars blu-rays.

Yelping with Cormac McCarthy.

NYC bans dogs from bars.

A movie about Keith Richards?

Reality as a failed state.

…that’s a masterclass in a subtle, yet mesmerizing thespian’s breathing of life into the cinema again. And into our jaded, hard hearts. Thanks for the memories, K-Stew.