Attack of the Blog!

So here I am, sitting at the airport. My flight has been delayed by more than an hour, and I’m surrounded by dirty, smelly people who were too inconsiderate to refrain from breeding, and their spawn isn’t doing much to alleviate the general noise and clutter.

There were no seats left, so I went and got a cup of tea. I returned to the gate and found a seat, fired up my Mac, and discovered that my copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was still in the DVD drive.

Ahh. Serenity.

I’m starting a fantasy politics league. Feel free to join as well. We can work out seeding and use some kind of GURP system to battle it out. The rules: pick a President, Vice President, and five cabinet positions to form your ultimate fighting team.

My dream Executive Branch:

President of the United States: Optimus Prime
Vice President: Cortana
Secretary of State: John McClane (that’s McClane, NOT McCain . . .)
Secretary of Defense: Master Chief
Attorney General: Professor Xavier
Secretary of Education: Steven Colbert
Secretary of Homeland Security: King Leonidas of Sparta

Boo yeah! I’m putting the Execute back in Executive! And yes, I do realize that both my Prez and Veep are non-human, and one of them doesn’t even have a body to speak of. That was deliberate. I adhere to the political paradox that any person who wants to be involved in politics shouldn’t be trusted in the profession, and the only people worthy of rule don’t want to have anything to do with politics. So my solution is simple: Put robots in charge. Bam. Problem solved. You humans have some serious arrogance going on, what with your absolute trust in the arm of the flesh. It’s time to stop denegrating robots with all those stupid movies about how obsolete bioforms can fight off future robot attacks and accept our supremacy.

Optimus Prime is the perfect President: principled, powerful, and full of conviction. He possesses a remarkable degree of self-control, an understanding of when to act and when to refrain, and commands the respect and admiration of all around him. Plus he turns into a semi with flames painted on the fenders and has a giant energy sword perfect for decapitating evil. Who could ask for more in the leader of the free world?

Cortana makes the perfect second in command. Her approximate seven year life span makes her work within term limits, and she’s a perfect source of researched and distilled information, something a leader could never place too much value on. Her advice and abilities can make our man Prime even more awesome than he already is.

The rest of my choices should be self-explanatory; they are people who have tremendous expertise in their respective areas and know how to get stuff done. I think they’ll also be good at backing each other up. Colbert can get people to turn their judgment inward and laugh at their own folly by acting like a moron, but anybody truly disrespecting him will have no shortage of mean and ugly to deal with. Conversely, the total likability of the President, V.P., and Colbert balances out the somewhat more limited converstational abilities of the Master Chief and King Leonidas, who don’t have to address the public a lot anyway. We don’t have any direct quotes left from the ancient monarch of Sparta, but I’m guessing ancient Spartans were non-loquacious badasses just like their cyborg counterparts from the future.

Let’s devise a scenario to test the abilities of my team.

Scenario: Terrorists plant a giant bomb in New York City while the President is visiting town

(Yeah, I know. Typical. But check this exchange out.)

John McClane: (on the phone) Now you listen to me jerk-off, if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem. Quit being a part of the problem and put the other guy back on!
Optimus Prime: Any luck?
John McClane: Yeah. I just yelled at the terrorists and they started crying and told me the bomb is on basement level 2, by the elevator shaft. Yippie kay yay.
Cortana: Ah. It appears to be hardwired to the building’s climate controls. I can get to it through your comm system and disable it. Me. In your head now.
(The Master Chief pops Cortana’s data chip into his helmet)
Master Chief: She did it. How much time did we have?
Cortana: You don’t even want to know.
Professor X: I’ve paralyzed the terrorists and read them their Miranda Rights telepathically. They’re now being levitated to jail.
Optimus Prime: Good work, team. Master Chief, where are you going?
Master Chief: To give them back their bomb.
Leonidas: Spartan! Prepare for glory!
Steven Colbert: Wørd of the day: Victory. As in I achieved it.

OH YEAH! That’s a plan of effective plan of political action if ever I saw one. So come on. Join the campaign.

OPTIMUS PRIME ‘08!

I just read an article in Newsweek that made me alarmed and disappointed. Being a huge fan of the Halo franchise, I was pleased as punch to hear a while back that Peter Jackson was tapped to produce it. That guaranteed, in my mind, that it wouldn’t turn into some kind of poorly acted, overly special effects-laden holocaust of George Lucas proportions.

I may be wrong. I hope I’m not. But I think I may be wrong. Master Chief, so it seems, will be relegated to a minor role in the upcoming film. While script writer and Halo novelist Joseph Staten seems to be patting himself on the back and calling this a great idea, I can think of only one term to describe such a move: Cinematic Suicide.

My prediction: Should this movie be done without Master Chief, Cortana, and their partnership at the heart of the tale, it will tank. Introducing some new Marine grunt as a main character when fans have already latched on so wholeheartedly to the heroes of the Haloverse would be a catastrophic decision, both from an economic and storytelling perspective.

What astonishes me is that Bungie would even consider a story that treated John -117 as “a really wonderful source of mystery, a sort of anonymous problem solver.” Yeah, ’cause that’s what moviegoers want to spend ten bucks on: anonymous action by an unseen character. Yep. I love movies about clueless shmucks running around mystified by a far more interesting cyborg supersoldier who I get to hear about but not actually see. Let me get my wallet out. I can’t wait!

They’ve released three fantastic games with a compelling plot that has impacted youth culture in a way that rivals that of Star Wars when it burst onto the scene back in 1977. The Halo story is a true modern legend, one that has firmly established its place in the mythos of our literature and culture.

In particular, treating Master Chief as a side character will result in the even more detrimental marginalization of the character of Cortana. Her intimacy with John, and the intensity of their partnership bond, is the most compelling and emotionally moving aspect of the story arc. To anyone other than John, Cortana is merely a comrade-at-arms; a smart AI who gives them juicy tips in battle. Her vulnerability, her power, her wit, and her intense devotion to her partner will be impossible to convey, as will be John’s similar feelings for her.

Both characters are almost, but not quite, human. Their mutual inability to ever truly belong to human society, and the invincibility their partnership offers, is what gamers can identify with on a visceral level. The loneliness each of them expresses, and the sense of comfort and strength they provide to one another, is something fans can resonate with.

Without Master Chief and Cortana as the stars of the show, it’s just one more movie about soldiers shooting up aliens with mind-numbing PG-13 testosterone-fueled wisecracks. It’ll make money, but it won’t be art. And it won’t be worthy of the legend Bungie worked so hard to create.

I might be a terrible, bad, bad person, but I really enjoy watching videos online of people making fools of themselves, and then having the sheer stupidity to videotape and place it on a website where it is easily found by an eager, all-consuming public. And I am a proud member of that public.

It might sound sadistic, but I’m only doing what’s expected of me. I’m supposed to watch this stuff– somebody put it online in the hopes that I would. Now, I doubt Chris Crocker, the “Leave Britney Alone” kid had it in mind that he’d become the laughingstock of a entire planet, regarded as the only person alive who is more crazy than his beloved Britney. But he did put himself online. It’s a testament to the amount of energy puberty sucks out of the ol’ logic circuits that this kid thought it would be a good idea to video himself crying underneath a bedsheet with a haircut that makes him look like a very ugly girl. And then put it online. Come on, Chris! At least The Star Wars Kid didn’t intend for his home video to be made public. I don’t know why you thought that was a good idea, but I’m glad you did.

An interesting added dimension to world wide whackjobs is that not only can you watch idiots documenting their lunacy, but you can also watch the reactions of (presumably) perfectly normal people watching them. This adds a safety net for people like me, who love to laugh at human folly but aren’t interested in seeing something that can never be bleached out of their brain cells.

For example, I have never and will never watch the infamous and legendary “2 Girls, 1 Cup” video. I don’t want or need to. Plenty of other people have recorded their own responses to that exhibitionist classic and placed them on YouTube. Instead of subjecting myself to the horrors of the Internet freak show I can just watch others do it to themselves, all the while thinking two things: (1) What they’re looking at has got to be foul, and (2) Boy, am I glad I’m not you. Sucker. Ha, ha.

Ultimately, I think imagining how shocking something must be is far more fun and interesting than actually knowing how shocking it is. Once there is no mystery to dispel, there isn’t any forbidden fruit to wonder about– just a belly ache from having consumed it. I’m far more comfortable being a voyeuristic leech laughing at all you people shrieking in horror or running to the bathroom to throw up, rather than being the poor sap who goes through that, all the while unawares that some jerk has captured the moment for public benefit.

In the meantime, keep those digital cameras rolling.

When moved from L.A. and began my exciting new job in software, one of the perceived fringe benefits would presumably be meeting guys with:

• More intelligence
• Better jobs
• Mad HALO skills
• An interest in chicks who wear horn rimmed glasses
• Something to talk about besides their next pilot audition

And so far it’s been true. But, ah, the irony! Where in L.A. you find many hot guys with smooth skills with the ladies yet no brains, futures, or conversational ability, up here it’s nothing but hot geeks with the relationship radar of well . . . geeks.

man man

Despite having met numerous very attractive young lads in the Valley of Silicon who seem to enjoy talking to me and don’t appear to be gay, I can’t get any of them to ask me out. Why, you ask, would a female with real, actual breasts have trouble getting a guy to ask her out? Welcome to trying to flirt with software engineers. Getting them to wake up and smell the pheromones is about as fun as debugging when you don’t even know where the packet of death is hiding.

info weekend

I know a good-looking guy who regularly goes out of his way to talk to me. I am friendly and encouraging toward his conversation, which you’d think would be enough to send a clue. I asked him Friday afternoon what he was doing this weekend. “Nothing,” he told me. Woot!

setup saturday_night

I gave him the best possible invitation you can get: “Oh really? Me neither!”

adduser cute_guy

And what was his repsonse? “Well, sitting at home isn’t too bad. I’m sure I’ll find something to do.”

Fatal error!

killall weekend_plans

halt

reboot . . . /sigh.

You would think that a guy with brains in his head, or at least testosterone in his chonies, would go “Ah! This chick just went out of her way to inform me that she is available this weekend. I should ask her out.” But no . . . no. I’m tired of this, so it’s time to debug. Let’s make a list of the potential problems that caused this application to crash:

• 400 Bad File Request
• 403 Forbidden/Access Denied
• 500 Internal Error

Hmm . . . Maybe the connection was just refused by the host. Could be. The fact that I have Optimus Prime on my desktop, a SPEW bumper sticker on my car, and an unnatural interest in cyborgs can’t be working for me. Neither can the fact that most of the guys I know are coworkers, which pretty much makes them personae non nookie.

What’s a geekette to do? I’m not going to do all the work for them– that’s a doomed relationship from the start! I’m considering alternative forms of getting attention– sewing a Cortana costume to wear to work, starting a Warcraft guild for the nerdy and lonely, or sticking with my current favorite coping method– creating characters that are built like firemen and are content to play with me all night on my favorite MMORPG. Come on, studly. I know you’ll let me level you up.