Journal of No. 118

Wyrd Con 4 is next month.

It finally fully registered that I'll be running "Exodus 22:18" on my birfday.

So I guess it'll be more like Exodus 40:4, if you know what I mean.

And thou shalt bring in the table, and set in order the things that are to be set in order upon it; and thou shalt bring in the candlestick, and light the lamps thereof.

Yeah, more or less sounds like set-up for a live game.

Let's see how brief I can make this...
( not very, as it turns out )

I was not edified by the creationist's unusual interpretation of varves, but I was gratified to be reminded of the Wham-O Magic Window:

The nerdosphere had a nerdgasm about Ready Player One. I was curious enough that I checked out the author's appearance on (friend-of-the-blog) The Dork Forest. He seemed like a hoopy frood, so I kindled the book and just now got around to reading it.

To be honest, I was a bit worried about the first few chapters. It seemed like there was little there except 1980s nerd allusions. In brief, the set-up is that in the not too distant future, an aging (ok, dead) bajillionaire sets up a Willy Wonka game/contest to choose his successor. And getting the bajillion dollars requires you to know all about 1980s nerd stuff. The whole premise seemed like a strange psycho basement nerd's justification for all his toys and games. 'You just wait! My mint-in-package action figures, Robotron skills, and extensive trivia knowledge of ALF will be worth billions some day! Mwahaha!' It's a little grotesquely self-indulgent that it seems just about everyone in this world-of-the-future spends their time obsessing over the 1980s (give or take a decade), rather than inhabiting their own world. As far as you can tell from the story, there's no such thing as new music or films in the world, just recycled music and TV shows from th... oh shit.

Fortunately, after the nostalgia enema, the plot settles down and provides a fun ride. And, yes, I am not immune to a story that can reawaken the remembered thrill of hearing some crazy word-of-mouth friend-of-a-friend story (in the pre-internet age) about a little dot in Adventure. And then finding it. Or recognizing that the bad guy's employee number is the same as little Alex's inmate number.

In short, if you are a nerd about my age, this will provide at least some cheap thrills and a pleasant trip down memory lane, or maybe through some twisty little passages all alike. Not that non-nerds not my age would be left out entirely (unfortunately?). One of the clumsiest things is that occasionally Cline takes the time to explain something that everyone reading his book probably already knows. You don't need to explain Tempest to me, dude. Even if I did suck at it. (Incidentally, Tempest is not an easy thing to describe in words.)

Saw the sad news of Don Cornelius' probable suicide.
Back in the day, Soul Train used to come on right after some cartoons on Saturday morning, so I sometimes kept myself glued to the tube to see the Jackson Five or whoever else was on the show, giving me a glimpse into that parallel musical universe that was generally much better than the disco-infused one that surrounded me (but not as cool as the acid rock & metal & (dare I confess it?) KISS that I really dug as a kid).
Now for story time. I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but my hypothetical reconstruction goes like this. Mom is at a loss for what to buy me for my birthday. She sees me watching Soul Train grooving to the live performance. She asks me or assumes I really dig it, and buys me the album. This is how I came to own the Ohio Players' Fire, with a cover that it would be many years before I could fully appreciate. It was the Seventies.

Wikipedia has a somewhat awkward list of non-black performers that appeared on Soul Train. Whereas Bowie would be welcome anywhere in the musical universe as its rightful lord and master, it is hard to understand the reasoning of having Michael Bolton on Soul Train.

A strange and strangely enjoyable experience. I hadn't seen any of these people in the flesh in 25 years, though FB has helped to make things less mysterious. I mean, I went to school in Brea for 5 years, 8th-12th. Now five times that much time has elapsed since then. I feared that it was going to be like a roomful of complete strangers, but the odd thing was the feeling of familiarity, at least among the people I knew -- there were still plenty of people who I have no idea who they are (and I can only perversely hope I didn't know who they were back in the day!) It's not like no time had passed, but I guess five years is enough time to get a good sense of people and personalities, and those people and personalities were still there. I feel like the Magic Mirror on Romper Room... "I saw Franz and Jennifer and Teri and David and Charlene and Lisa and Christian and Jesus and August and Shawna and ..."

Naturally, I was the only member of the Apathy Club to show up, and I believe that means my membership has been revoked.

A little catching up, and a big margarita. A good combination. Okay, see y'all at the 50th!

Managed to play a lot of LA Noire yesterday. Not, like, 'truckers' friend' a lot, but a lot. I did also manage to, um, grill some chicken and clean the grungy remotes.

It's definitely a blast to cruise around 1940s Los Angeles, fighting crime. Probably what I need to do most is slow down and enjoy the ride and the sights, but with senses honed from plenty of GTA, I drive everywhere at about 85 miles an hour. And at that speed, my vision narrows down to a tiny circle of asphalt ahead of me. But from time to time, there's the pleasure of seeing some familiar landmark or streetscene. Or better yet a quasi-familiar landmark, like Angel's Flight in its original location, or Bunker Hill as it was then.

The game is pretty cinematic, which is both good and bad. The main narrative is very linear, as you tackle cases in a set order. It's not quite as bad as it sounds, since after the first few cases, they start to get more complicated, and you may have to choose among several different locations to visit, and doing things in different orders does -- it would seem -- have an effect on how things work out. And also, you're almost guaranteed to get a radio call announcing some random crime in progress that you can get involved in as a little side mission, and some of them are fairly involved and written with as much care as the main missions, if not as much depth. And really, so far, perhaps my favorite five seconds of game play was getting a radio message of 'shots fired, officer down', turning on the siren, and executing a brilliant bootleggers turn on rain-slicked streets to get pointed in the right direction. It's one of the strengths of GTA as well -- it can be fun to just drive around town.

I'm still getting a hang of the interrogation/interview. It's interesting, but one of its real strengths is you don't have to be perfect. You can sort of muddle through a case, biff your questioning really badly, know that you've fucked things up and not gotten the juiciest info, and yet still collar someone for the crime -- maybe even the wrong guy. *And* you get reamed out for it by the captain. And you feel bad for messing up, but it now becomes part of the story that's being told. And it makes it feel so much better when you really ace the next one.

There's some really good incidental music. Ominous little snippets that remind you of this film or that film. Sometimes they seem a bit random, with Psycho knife music as you're driving to a bar just to interview the bartender about a customer. But sometimes the music and the action are perfectly in sync, and you're hooked.

Okay, minuses. There is sort of a strangeness that all you do is fight crime. You do not sleep; you do not eat; you do not go home; you do not talk to your wife. Someone could, and no doubt will, make some bizarre existential bloviation about this. I half-expect a magic negro to appear and explain that I'm in the Matrix or Dark City or something, 'When was the last time you slept? Do you remember what you had for breakfast this morning?"

There is a bit of sameness to the gameplay. It's all well-written and acted, but if I were to unfairly boil the game down to its essence it would be:

Go to crime scene. Walk all over everything and examine all clues you bump into.
Go to other places and do the same thing, interrogating everyone interrogatable and asking them all available questions from the menu.
Now for the flurry of button-mashing and joysticking! A suspect runs! Chase him down on foot or in car in scenarios requiring greater and greater manual dexterity.
Enjoy the lengthy cutscene.

Now as I say, that's a bit unfair, but I can see that this movie/game may not have much replay value. Once more to hone the questioning, perhaps, and see some things you missed, but there's not a lot of incentive to redo the twitchy game parts -- what, I should try to catch the guy with less damage to my car?

And the cut scenes involve a lot of flashbacks, which I assume will become more relevant as the story comes to a close, but at present they're a little mystifying, bordering on annoying.

But again, these grumbles remain pretty minor in the face of what's a very absorbing and beautiful game.

Picked this up at the book sale at the Masonic Lodge in Culver City. It's a quick read, with a lot of stills from silent comedies and such. Not so much a biography as it is an edited series of interviews, primarily with Harold Lloyd himself, but also some input from contemporaries. Looks like the book was made to capitalize on the Lloyd's issuing of the film of the same name in 1962, which was sort of a greatest hits compilation of his gags.
Nothing too insightful, but a good look at the very early years of Hollywood. Also interesting to see Lloyd's opinion of those up-and-coming kids of comedy like Dick van Dyke and Carol Burnett. At one time, Lloyd had perhaps the most extravagant movie star estate in town, a 20 acre property with a 44 room house, complete with a 9 hole golf course and the largest swimming pool in Southern California. Retired from films, he kept up numerous pursuits, ranging from swimming and tennis, to microscopy, to becoming the Imperial Potentate of North America, to taking pictures of Bettie Page and Marilyn Monroe.
The estate was chopped up and sold as individual lots, but the mansion survives, and was ultimately bought by Ted Field, who "lived there with his wife Susie and their three children." Which is a little odd, since I tutored one or two of the daughters for a while, though sadly it was not at Greenacres, which the Fields sold some years before the tutoring gig.

Azathoth's favorite words:
though(91), still(89), since(83), school(78), years(76), first(73), certainly(72), students(68), perhaps(67), enough(65)

ETA: karma: 529 (informative astute interesting funny)