Two months now? Seems like the time's gone by too fast and not too fast enough. Things are different now.

I'm still standing on the edge of an expanse. The setting is different, but the emptiness is the same. I'm trying to fill it with what I can. I haven't had this much room to fill in...a long time. I'm not used to having to fill this space on my own. The possibilities should be exciting, but I'm finding them paralyzing. Too much choice can be a bad thing.

The new place is set up, and amazingly, does feel like a place I could stay for a while. That's good, and I like it there, I just wish I had someone to show it to and share it with. A victory that isn't shared isn't really a victory at all, at least in my head.

I want to fill that space with music. I'll be borrowing a friend's guitar in a few weeks, and hopefully that will give me something to do. My attention span has been almost nonexistent for the last few months, which does tend to put a crimp in filling time. I can't sit and read a book for the entire evening because I lose interest after a half hour. Same with movies, but at least with those I can let them run while my mind wanders, but even my interest in movies is pretty thin right now.

I want to make something. I want to create. I just don't have anything to say right now, which makes no sense.

I wonder why I don't take pictures. Some people take pictures all the time. I don't. At the time, I think "I'd rather just experience this than take pictures." Then I forget the experience and I'm left with nothing.

The great expanse

Here comes a post by one morose motherfucker. Feel free to eject now if you'd rather avoid that sort of thing.

--------------------------------------

Sometimes, things change slowly. One bit of the riverbank is washed away, one snowflake shifts out of position. Slowly, over weeks, months, and years, things change. Sometimes, they never stop changing, and you only notice years later that the course of the river is different. But sometimes, the small changes add up, and the whole thing comes crashing down, altering everything in its path. The river overflows its banks, the snow comes down in an avalanche, and nothing can stop the rushing tide of change.

Sometimes, this happens in life. The rushing change may or may not be in our direct control, but sometimes they happen. I suppose the inevitability of change happening, of life happening, means that we have to be prepared when it happens.

After the flood, the landscape is different. Places that you used to know, paths you walked daily and thoughtlessly, are forever different, and some are unrecognizable. Things that you thought would always be there vanish in an instant, never to come back. The only certainty left is that you're not certain of anything any more.

I'm standing in the middle of a receding flood now. The reality of everything is still sinking in, even though the waters are still flowing. I'm not sure where to go or what to do when they're gone. There's a whole new expanse to explore. I'm human. I should want to go and explore, meet and experience. I don't though. Not yet. I want to find those old paths I used to walk, those places I loved, and stay there. I know that they're gone, washed away by the rushing waters, but my feet and my heart still look for them, because they can't do otherwise.

In time, I may convince them to stop, to finally accept, and go in search of new paths and new places. But, they tell me, we might find what we're looking for. So I'll let them look. Because part of me wants to believe that they may be right. So while I know that someday I'll stop looking, that day isn't here now. For now, I stand in this ruined place, waiting for the waters to recede, part of me clinging to a futile hope, knowing and embracing that even if I find those paths, it will take untold effort to clear and walk them again. The rest of me knows that the place I knew is gone, and that I can't stay here.

But all of me knows that during those weeks, months, and years that the river was carrying its bank away bit by bit, I sat. And watched it. And did nothing to stop it.

Captive Audiences, and the Things They Read

That thing I was working on? That thing that contributed to me assessing myself as "physically and emotionally shattered"? That thing? Yeah, that thing wrapped up last week. There was much rejoicing. The rejoicing looked and sounded very much like sleep.

Since I haven't had much time or energy to do anything since my last post, here goes a bunch of random thoughts. You, dear reader, get to deal with it. Ah, the power of the writer over his captive audience. You are captive, right? Not going anywhere?

Singing solos be hard. I'm still working on convincing myself that yeah, I really do know my part, and I should damn well sing it right, cuz nobody else is going to. I think it'll all work out in the end. Also, high E flats can go die. Everything should be at least an octave lower than that.

Which reminds me, why are there so few baritone or bass rock singers? Hell, outside of classical or theater, there just aren't that many. The only bands I can think of with singers in my range are Type O Negative, Crash Test Dummies, Stone Temple Pilots, and Great Big Sea. Everyone else is a tenor. I can't sing along with that. I need to start my own band, or at least figure out how to play guitar and start transposing stuff down a few keys.

I finally got around to listening to Arcade Fire. I should've done this before. I also started re-listening to Great Big Sea and Counting Crows. Now I remember why they're two of my favorite bands. August and Everything After was also one of my very first CDs ever.

Chasing Amy is still a really good movie, but it shouldn't be. Back then, Kevin Smith would just set up a camera, put an actor in front of it, and have said actor rattle off this long soliloquy that no actual person would ever really say. Yet, once they get into the actual relationship between Holden and Alyssa, those soliloquies somehow manage to totally work. It's still a really good portrait of how humans being human will consistently manage to take something beautiful, and only figure out what they did wrong after they've already broken it. Silent Bob's speech is still one of the best scenes in anything, ever.

It's amazing how you can have so much stuff, think for years that you need it all to be complete somehow, and suddenly realize how little of it is really worth having. I guess the trick is to remember that when you see something new and shiny that you think you want to take home with you.

When games are art

This is one of those debates that's been running around in industry circles for a few years now. It was recently given a shot in the arm by Roger Ebert weighing in on the subject, first by flatly declaring they weren't, then eventually admitting that he didn't know (or care to know) enough about them to have an informed opinion. That's a extremely reasonable response, and one I can absolutely respect. I myself may not particularly enjoy Swedish Death Metal, but I also know that I know squat about it, so who the hell am I to go on about its merits as a medium.

Of course, the argument itself is a pretty defensive one from both sides. On the one side are game fans who passionately want their "new kid" artistic medium to be given the same weighty respect as visual art and literature. On the other side are the anti-gamers who see this new thing as loud, vulgar, and crass, and flatly deny that there's any way good can come of this. The people involved are fighting to keep control of their own little moral islands while taking over the other side's island.

The brilliant bit about the whole thing is that this has all happened before, and will all happen again. Let's make a non-comprehensive and thoroughly un-researched list:

-live theater

-photography

-film

-comics

-television

-rock and roll

Both sides are acting as though this fight is utterly unique, when it's really almost identical what happened to all the other mediums on that list. New medium shows up, spends ~30 years developing, many people during that time have this argument, and eventually it settles comfortably into the general cultural psyche until we get to the point that it feels like it's always been there in the form it's in now.

So do I think games art? Of course I do. Are all games art? Absolutely not. Neither are all films, all paintings, all TV shows, or all books. Do I really give a rat's ass if people like Ebert agree with me? Nope. What I do care about is that enough people think games are worth making that eventually we don't have to have this debate at all. What's great is that I think that'll be happening within the next ten years or so.

Now the whole reason that I started writing this post: why I think games are art. If pressed to give a single response to "what makes something art", it would be that something intentionally created is memorable. Plenty of things are memorable, like seeing a guy get hit in the nuts with a football, but that's not art, it's just funny. In order to be art, someone has to consciously create something that has such an impact on another human that it's remembered many years later.

Here's an example from my memory: the game Mafia. This game came out in 2002. It's, unsurprisingly, a game about a guy who accidentally finds himself wrapped up in the mob. In the game, you first see him as a cab driver who gets drafted as the getaway driver for two made men. After impressing them with your driving skill, you get "invited" into the family. The rest of the game charts your rise through the ranks as you kill and steal your way through a '30s era not-Chicago. Along the way, you fall for a girl, and eventually decide to get out by turning snitch on the mob. Miraculously, this works, and you escape with your family into the arms of suburban American to start your new life.

Here's where most games, and movies for that matter, would end. Mafia doesn't, and that's the vital bit. In the epilogue, you see your character as an old man. He seems happy, having made it out of the mob to live a good and happy life. He goes to the diner, and sits down for a meal. A man walks up to you, says "Salieri sends his regards", and shoots you in the head. But rather than being a cheap "oh, your character dies, ha HA" ending, it's actually bittersweet. Yes, you died. But from the moment you joined the mob, that was likely. You got a full life. You raised a family outside of the chaos they would have been in. Yes, the mob caught up to you, but did they win, or did you? It's bittersweet and complex in the way that great art is. And most importantly, I remember it eight years later. That's what art does.

The surfeit of options

You know what sucks about having unexpected time off? Too many damn options. Yup, I'm about to whine about something I shouldn't. Feel free to eject now if this sort of things gets your undies in a bunch.

I suck at decisions. I do much better if I get to choose between A and B rather than having to choose one letter from the entire Scrabble bag. In a way, working so much is good for that. If you know you've only got an hour to do something that doesn't make you want to blow your brains out, it focuses your options a bit. Exhaustion notwithstanding.

Give me an entire extra day though, and I'm just fucking lost. I've got a bunch of chores I should do. I've got a bunch of games I want to play. I've got a bunch of books I want to read. I've got a bunch of movies I want to watch. Enter the analysis paralysis. The stupid part? I usually wind up just dicking around on the internet. It's easier to do that than make a decision.

I think I don't like to pick one thing because when I pick something, my brain tells me "No, no, no, you're not choosing THAT thing, you're NOT choosing all those OTHER things! Think of all the missed opportunities!" So, in a beautifully-executed logical backflip, it decides that the more noble thing is to just not choose anything. That way, none of the inanimate objects feel offended. Huh?

So today, I made myself a list of chores. Then, I did them. Woah. This apparently was too much for me, so my stupid self decided to get really tired. So I had coffee. I might have more later and stay up til 4am. You know what I'm going to do tomorrow? Probably less than I could. Because I'm dumb.

Too drunk to fish...

Okay, so it's really more like too tired to _______ . Let me tell you, working 50-60 hour weeks is draining. I've been at this off and on, mostly on, since May. Now, this ain't my first time around this particular block, but it's hitting me pretty hard. When I get nights off, I have all these grand plans of "holy crap, I've got three hours to rub together, I'm gonna do all this stuff."

Then I get home, and all that stuff feels like a ton of work. I wind up watching whatever stupid movie I asked Netflix to send me, or worse, poking at the shit on the internet. By the way, resist the urge to watch Open Water. There's promises of folk getting eaten by sharks, but it takes 45 minutes to get there, and then the shark eating is incredibly underwhelming. Plus, all the pre-eating bits are poorly shot and even more poorly acted. Though I'm pretty sure Lou Ferrigno has an uncredited role as "annoying hairy diver guy", so there's that.

The upshot is that I'm apparently not too tired to blog. Go figure. I guess sitting here and typing stuff is less work than moving pixel dudes around the screen. Whoda thunk that'd be the case?

And just to provide some continuity, by the end of Bioshock, I was more than capable of exploding heads. Though I usually just caved them in with my Monkey Wrench of Doom. I'm not even kidding. Though I may have taken some license by adding caps. Maybe.

More evidence that I'm old

I'm not as young as I once was. My rapidly-aging self has a hard time keeping up with action games these days. Not that I've ever been really good at games. In the old days, I used to have to pull my younger brother in to get past particularly tricky parts of games. Of course, that never worked out that well, because the parts that followed were usually harder, but no matter.

Basically, I suck at aiming. I can really only do it semi-well with a mouse. Since the things they have you aim at are usually shooting back at you, shooters can be pretty stressful for me.

I just finished playing the excellent Mass Effect 2. That game sort of plays like a shooter, except for the vital ability to pause the game mid-fight to assess the situation and set up your powers to fire off when you unpause. The fights are still action-y, but they were much more laid back because you can always stop and figure out what all is going on. Fallout 3 had a really similar system, except that after you queued up your shots, you got to watch your character make heads explode in sweet slow motion.

I just got done replaying the first hour or so of Bioshock. This one's also a shooter, but no pausing and heavy on the atmosphere. Way, way more stressful. I don't think I've really come close to dying yet, and even if you do die, there's handy resurrection stations set up all over, so you just pop up again like a Buddhist on speed (with guns). So death, not so much something to worry about, yet not being able to stop and look around during fights makes all the difference.

I could play Mass Effect for hours at a time and end up pretty relaxed. Bioshock, I find myself feeling pretty tense after I'm done. I think I need to figure out that getting killed ain't so bad. Also need more ways to make heads explode.

Line management 101

Or, how to annoy multiple people at midnight.

There's an indie horror movie making the festival/art house rounds right now called Paranormal Activity. The trailer makes it look like Ghost Hunters done by amateurs where they actually find something. I put it on my "to watch" list.

Then I noticed that the art house theater down the street was having a midnight screening tonight. It was the only screening in Boston, and it was one of the ones where you RSVP, but you're not guaranteed a seat. Those of you who notice timestamps on posts might guess where this is going.

Having done several midnight movies at this theater, showing up a half hour early is usually plenty to guarantee a good seat. So I wander over there at about 11:30. When I arrive, I notice that the line is coming out along the street instead of going back toward the parking lot. Chalking it up to stupid people, I get in line, pull out my phone, and start reading (did I mention that a nice Kindle feature is that you can also sync your last read page to the Kindle app on the iphone and keep reading it there?), content in my proximity to the door.

After about five minutes, a guy with postcards comes by. The guy ahead of me asks him if we'll all get in. Postcard guy says he doesn't know, but they were coming this way with wristbands. He then wanders off. A half hour goes by (it's now 12:10), and we hear a cheer from near the door. The line doesn't move. At around 12:25, we start going forward. As we draw even with the alley that contains the door, I realize that what's happened is that the line has wrapped completely around the block, and I'm on the wrong end of it.

It's about this time that a different official sounding guy starts yelling that if you don't have a wrist band, there isn't a seat. Turns out that they handed out all the wrist bands over a half hour ago, but they never bothered to come down the line and tell us unlucky folks that we weren't getting in.

Now, I have no problem with not getting in. I showed up late, that's my fault. But if you have 500 seats and 500 wrist bands, once you've attached those to 500 wrists, you know that your theater is full. Your next (and only) job is to continue walking down the line to tell the rest of the people waiting that they shouldn't bother. It's an incredibly basic part of line management, and they didn't bother to do it. So instead, I got to stand in line for nothing for a half hour too long.

It's minor, but it's really soured me on wanting to see this movie. If it ever gets a wide release, I'm actively not going to bother going to see it. I'll toss it on my Netflix queue, but it's going to be a low priority. It's a good example of how a poorly-run promotion can easily lose as many potential supporters as it gained. Instead of telling everyone how disappointed I am that I didn't get to see this sweet movie, I've now gone on for several hundred words about the annoying line practices. That won't get the asses in the seats. At least, not my ass.

And now I have to go occupy myself for another hour while I wait for the coffee I drank to stay awake through the movie to wear off.

We don't need no steenking paper!

I got a huge suprise on my birthday when kt got me a Kindle. I'd been wanting one for a while, but hadn't gotten up the gumption to get one. Turns out kt has 100% more gumption than I do. Probably due to her awesomeness. I've had this thing for almost two months now, so I figured I'd write up some thoughts.

First, it's damn small. I have it in a case, so it's slightly bulkier, but whenever I take the case off, I'm always amazed at how thin and light it is. That's awesome. The screen is exactly as paper-like as you've heard. When it arrived, it had a plastic film with a diagram of how to plug it in and turn it on. When I took the film off, the diagram stayed. It was being displayed by the screen, and completely looked like it was printed on the plastic. The screen is almost completely non-reflective. This is awesome when reading outside. Or really any time.

For those of us who sometimes ride on crowded trains or busses and have to hang on with one hand, reading can be tricky. Particularly when trying to wrestle a 1000 page Stephen King hardcover into submission. The Kindle has the "next page" button on either side, under your thumb, so one handed reading isn't a problem. Of course, it's also possible to bump it accidentally, and the "previous page" button is only on the left, so that can be kind of a pain.

Of course, the elephant in the room is that you basically have to start buying your books from Amazon, and the prices aren't a ton cheaper than the print versions. Personally, I have no problem with that, because I've never operated under the illusion that when I buy a book/movie/game that I'm paying for the physical component, but rather the creative effort that produced the content. Still, a lot of people feel like digital copies of things should be cheaper than physical copies. For those people, the Kindle isn't going to make you happy. However, I certainly don't mind having fewer books to sit on shelves. I can definitely see a future Chuck who has one bookshelf filled with elaborate leather-bound collector's editions of a select few books that are worth it (I'm hoping for a fully illuminated and illustrated version of Lord of the Rings), and everything else in electronic form.

Yet for those who crave cheap books, or those who want to convert their already-purchased physical books to electronic format, all isn't lost. There are hundreds of completely free public domain works both on Amazon and at various other websites that are totally legit. I've got the complete Sherlock Holmes waiting to be read. The other option is to locate "alternative download sites" that can provide copies of the books that you already own. You've paid for them, so as long as you maintain possession of them, I feel you're entitled to an electronic copy. The Kindle also lets you download the first ~30 pages of any book they sell as a trial, which is a pretty good way to find new books. Amazon also gives away free current books from time to time. Long story short is that through various means, I have 43 books on my Kindle, of which I've paid money for two.

Since I have that many books, including all the books from the series I'm currently reading, I haven't had to make use of one of the major features, which is the free wireless. You can shop and buy books directly from the Kindle, and they automatically download. You can also shop on a PC, and then have any books you buy delivered directly to your Kindle. It's very slick, and could be handy if you somehow finish your last unread book on the thing.

So is it worth the $300 price? I think of it like the iPod. You didn't buy an iPod to save money, you bought it for the convenience of being able to carry and listen to music wherever, and do it more conveniently than you could with a CD player. This serves the same purpose. It's smaller than most books, and easier to use in certain situations. Like with mp3s, you lose the nice bits of physical media. There's no cover art, no big shelf of books/music to impress guests with, and it's certainly not as romantic to curl up with the Kindle in front of a fire with a cup of tea to read. But it's sure as hell easier to travel with, which is definitely something I'm looking for right now.

As a lifetime bibliophile, it kind of pains me to write this. In my own small way, I'm contributing to the inevitable demise of the physically printed word, and that's certainly very sad. But in a way, the transition to digital media might actually bring the status of a physical book back to where it was in the days before Gutenberg. Back then, a book was an almost revered object, something rare, to be treasured. Now, books are basically disposeable, sometimes more useful for propping up a broken table than for their intended purpose. Would it be such a bad thing to keep the written word accessible while returning the physical book to it's past glory? Not in my book.

It was a hard day's night

We had our unofficial Beatles release party the other night. It could be differentiated from the official release party because it had 100% fewer white russians made with Bailey's instead of milk, and 100% fewer tequila shots. However, the lack of tequila shots meant that the unofficial party had 100% fewer extremely bad ideas.

So we had the party. We started playing the game at around 6:15pm. I turned it off at around 2am. Kt's dad sang for the entire time, along with everyone else at various points. We did ever song in the game at least twice.

It was an awesome time. I really liked seeing everyone finally getting to see this thing, and everyone seemed to have a really good time. So that was pretty awesome.

The Beatles have landed

It's finally arrived, and it's been a long time coming. There's good vibes all over the office today. Heck, even Deval Patrick thinks we're awesome.

I'm really looking forward to the mini-release party on Saturday. After spending so long looking at a game during production, finding every little thing that's wrong with it, it's easy to lose perspective and forget about all the many things that are right with it. You guys playing it for the first time are my fresh set of eyes. Really, for me, a game isn't officially out until I've gotten to play it with the folks that I care about. (Hopefully) seeing all of you excited, happy, and having a good time is the point where all the incredibly long hours of frustration when it's all coming together pays off.

So I can't wait to get everyone over and give this thing a shot. Hopefully it doesn't suck.

After the party

I just got home from our release party. I stumbled off the train at about quarter past midnight. As I made my way home, I happened to look up, and saw a bus headed toward me. Through the window, I could see a guy cradling a Beatles: Rock Band bundle in his lap.

I smiled the rest of the way home. Yup, The Beatles is officially out. Holy crap.

Kurt is rolling over in his grave

The new Guitar Hero game comes out today. Their new thing is to include actual musicians that you can choose to play as. That's a bit strange, but fine.

The trouble is that when they create the animations for the musicians, they hard code the animations for the song. Which can also be fine, and means that the musicians move exactly the same way every time you play the song.

The trouble happens when you combine those two things. Since you can have any character play any instrument on any song, you get some really strange things going on. Here's some examples from Youtube.

Kurt does a mean Flava Flav, and also loves him some Bon Jovi.

Kurt and Johnny Cash both love them some Elton John. Did you know that Cash can wail on the drums, or that Kurt only played lefty by choice?

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but there's something very strange about seeing Cobain in something like this game in the first place, and even stranger seeing him miming Flava Flav.

Just flew in from Germany, and boy are my arms...

I got back from Germany last week. The convention we were at pulled in a hair under 250,000 people over the course of five days. The days were incredibly long. We had a bunch of stages with both Beatles and RB2 set up, and people could come up and play. Our job was to facilitate the rocking, and fill in for anybody that was missing. That mostly meant that we were singing the whole time.

Of course, another part of the job is to make the games look awesome, which meant putting on a performance. So I was singing in full-on rock voice for five days. I made it 3.5 days before blowing out my voice.

Generally it was awesome, but really tiring. Some things about the trip, in bullet point format:

- Germans bring the metal. I sang Run to the Hills at least a dozen times per day. They also have some kind of fascination with Papa Roach, and Last Resort was the most-played single song on the RB2 stages all week. Second place was Linkin Park. Third place was Metal as a category.

- Germans really like Yellow Submarine. On the Beatles stages, they couldn't play metal, so they defaulted to Yellow Submarine. I think this had something to do with them being less comfortable singing in English, and 90% of that song is "We all live in a yellow submarine." One day's count had that song played 46 times on a single stage.

- Our main stage was 7.5 feet high. It was ridiculous, and also stupidly loud.

- We handed out shirts, but by the last day, we had a bunch left that we didn't want to take back. So we started what I called T-shirt Apocalypse. We'd get all of us Harmonix folks on stage. We'd play "Birthday", and everyone without an instrument would run around, dance, work the crowd up, and throw shirts. It was a ton of fun, and really got the crowd going. Slightly more scary was the time when we knocked over an amp from one of the piles at the front of the stage. It fell backwards onto the stage, which is good, because if it had fallen forward (off the 7.5') stage, someone would have died.

- Turns out I like wiener schnitzel. I don't know about sausages, as I had no wurst of any kind.

-I had no idea my feet could hurt that much, and I worked a lot of retail.

- If I sing loud enough, I can actually sing AC/DC in the correct octave. I'm not sure when I'll be able to replicate that feat.

- Lufthansa seats become solid after four hours, and actually grow spikes after six.

So that's Germany. In other news, The Beatles: Rock Band comes out in a week and a half. That's nuts.

Leaving on a jet plane

I'm going to Cologne, Deutchland for a week starting Monday to work a convention. What should I bring that I'm forgetting?

In defense of torture porn

tor' - ture porn - A genre of horror film in which significant portions of the film are devoted to depicting the torture of an individual or individuals, usually in graphic detail.

This is a sub-genre of horror that's come into being over the last five or six years. One of the earliest movies that was categorized as torture porn was Saw. What usually happens in a torture porn flick is someone is captured by the bad guy, and then brutally killed, usually slowly, and with no punches pulled in terms of showing things on screen or showers of blood. After one or two characters are slaughtered, it usually switches to the "hero" character escaping the bad guy after being captured too.

Now here's the thing about torture porn: it's not new. Really, it's not. It's been around for a long time. You can go back to things as early as the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I Spit on you Grave, and others that are usually categorized as slasher or suspense flicks and find definite elements of torture porn in them. That's because really, at its core, torture porn is a blend of the slasher flick and the standard abduction suspense flick.

At its heart, torture porn is really all about suspense, and that's where the real guts of its horror elements come from. Of course, while the torture scenes happen, the audience gets a gut sense of "ewwww", but that type of scare is and always has been fleeting. Where the real horror elements of the genre happen are when the hero character starts making his/her escape. Why do these suspense elements work differently than your basic suspense flick? Because we've seen, in detail, exactly what will happen to the main character if he fails to escape from the killer.

That vital difference is what sets the genre apart from the rest of the horror genre. In most suspense flicks, the hero has to escape the villian because the villian will kill him in undefined bad ways, and the mechanics are left to the audience's imagination. Frankly, most people don't bother thinking in detail about what those bad things are, so the sense of danger is fairly non-specific. By showing you that the hero will, for example, be fastened to a table with screws, have their eyelids cut off, then their entrails extracted one by one and shown to them, you feel much more strongly about the hero's escaping.

So how is that any different than slasher flicks, you say? Tone. Most slashers, especially in the later years of the genre's prominence, played things for laughs. The whole thing was about tongue in cheek, formulaic violence. You were never rooting for the characters, you were rooting for the killers, and cheering as they took out the victims in more and more ridiculous ways. Moreover, few of the kills were given a lot of screen time. Yes, Jason just impaled a couple with a harpoon, but the whole thing happened in less than 30 seconds. Your average torture porn killer is utterly unsympathetic, and the killings can take many minutes. These kills are not intended to be funny, and because of that, you automatically sympathize with the victims.

Another vital difference is that it's way more common for torture porns to have bleak endings. Slasher flicks almost always have the last girl emerge victorious (or at least not dead). In tortuer porn flicks, the "hero" has at best a 50/50 chance. Because of that, you can't ever really relax into "well, I know she's going to live".

The problem that the torture sub-genre has is that it's very difficult to make a good one. It's extremely easy to fall off into just showing tons of blood and violence, and ignoring the vital elements of suspense. A perfect example of this is Hostel 2. The first Hostel was a shining example of how the genre can be extremely effective. In the second, the director opted to keep piling more and more bodies up on the screen, and worse, actually tried to make the killers sympathietic. Unfortunately, he lost sight of what made his first film so good, and wound up making absolute dreck.

So what are some examples of good torture porn? The first Hostel is an excellent example, as is the first Saw. The subsequent movies in the series have actually done an admirable job of not sucking, though they're getting too bogged down in their own mythology to really qualify for this list. The first Texas Chainsaw Massacre fits here, though it's almost completely bloodless. Some of the best examples of the genre actually come from France, with High Tension and Inside being amazing.

Now, this genre is absolutely not for everyone. They're incredibly graphically violent, and the good ones have an intensity that simply doesn't let up for the entire movie, which is what makes them so good. You don't so much watch these things as you experience and survive them. You really have to get past the ultra-violence to appreciate them as something other than gore for gore's sake. Even for horror film fans, these things can easily get written off as pure gore. But if you've got the stomach for them, and are willing to stop and consider what the film's actually doing, the genre has a surprising amount of depth. If anyone's interested in a screening, let me know.

Coming soon to Rock Band: your band

This falls completely into the category of shameless self-promotion that you probably won't care about (though Jay may find it interesting), but here it is anyway:

Harmonix announces Rock Band Network

For those who don't want to read the article, here's the gist. We're releasing our song authoring tools to the general public so you can author your band's songs for Rock Band. You need to have the rights to the songs, so what you won't be seeing is five hundred versions of Stairway to Heaven. But basically, you'll use the full set of authoring tools that our audio department uses to make tracks for the game, author the song on the computer (using your master recordings), and then upload them to the community for peer review. If your song doesn't break copyright, and passes muster for playability and content (swears are bad, kids), then it gets uploaded to Xbox Live, and you can set a price for the song. Anyone with Rock Band can buy it, and you get 30% of all the sales.

Why is this awesome? Because it allows a ton of small, unsigned, indie, etc bands access to the platform. They can take it upon themselves to use it as a marketing tool, or just use it to get a bunch of free exposure to a huge audience.

Basically, it's a really cool opportunity for a lot of smaller artists to get involved and get their music out into the world. And it's way better than MySpace.

Babylon 5: WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME?!

Did you know that I watch TV shows? Holy hell, it's true! Did you also know that I'm a giant geek? No, the full-size replica of Sting (the sword, not the singer/actor/addonis) hanging on my wall isn't for home defense. So it follows that I probably like sci-fi (not SyFy, as certain networks have been forced to call it) shows.

Why then has nobody told me before now how incredibly awesome Babylon 5 is?

What TV does far, far better than movies is long form narrative. If you have a two hour movie, you can only tell so much story. Even if you have three three-hour films, you're still limited in scope. However, if you have multiple 13 or 22 hour-long episode seasons, you can tell a crap ton of story. I like story, so I like TV that tells long stories.

Of course, most shows don't. If you sit down in front of an hour of Law and Order from season 8, then watch and episode from season 3, it probably won't matter. They'll probably also be the same episode. Good TV will tell a story over the course of the season. Things change in meaningful ways between the first and last episodes.

Great TV tells stories that have implications across multiple seasons, but not always in the same way. Think of a story as an arch. Most TV (think Law and Order) has an arch that stretches over a single episode. That's fine, but those kinds of shows are like popcorn, and ultimately, they're forgettable. Even excellent shows like The Simpsons do this.

Shows that tell a season-long story still have the short, episode arches, but each of those small arches also goes into a bigger, season-long arch. Buffy and 24 are examples of this. You really can't watch those shows out of order, or you start to miss things.

Which brings us to Babylon 5. This show was on for 5 seasons. One guy wrote them. The amazing part? He knew how the series was going to end before he wrote the first episode.

Think about that. This guy must have had a massive pair of brass balls. I can't imagine walking into a network exec's office and saying "I have an idea for a sci-fi show that's not Star Trek that will last for five seasons, and tell one complete story in that time." It would never happen in today's landscape. It's a minor miracle that it happened back in 1994. But someone gave him a tiny budget and Bruce Boxlietner, and let him have at.

It's brilliant. This show is essentially one large story arch that extends from season 1 to season 5. At first blush, a lot of episodes in the first season come across as one-offs that don't tie in. Then, two seasons later, something that happened in the first season suddenly turns out to be a pivotal moment. Because he planned everything out, he's able to do actual, honest to God foreshadowing in ways that are just never seen in TV. It's like reading a well-constructed novel over the course of five years.

Of course, it's not perfect. The show was done in 1994 on a budget of $5 and baling twine (they couldn't afford shoe strings). The acting is sometimes iffy (though often brilliant), and the special effect are...well...quaint. But once you get past all that, it's one of the best TV shows I've ever seen. Just thought you should know.

Apocalypse groceries

I'm a big fan of post-apocalypse fiction. For some reason, seeing what happens after the world ends is really interesting to me. I've read books and comics, and watched movies dealing with the end of the world by way of:

-zombies

-aliens

-earthquake

-flood

-asteroid

-vampires

-meteor

-blindness

-fog/monsters

-nuclear war

In most of them, the survivors wind up scavenging food from the remnants of human society, usually in the form of canned goods. Seems that produce and freeze pops don't keep well.

It occurred to me this morning, that not a single one of the apocalypse scenarios I've ever seen has had its characters resort to eating one particular item: pet food.

Now, given how many pets there are out there, and how much of their food is canned, there should be tons of the stuff hanging around. It's mostly meat, so should be very edible. Furthermore, it's not generally seen as "people food", so it would be one of the last items scavenged, and thus one of the more likely items for scavengers to find. Even better, being reduced to eating dog food would be a great illustration of how desperate the characters are.

Yet, I can't think of a single time that I've seen a character scarf down a can of Fancy Feast or Alpo. Very weird, and something that's lacking in apocalypse fiction.

Of course, you also never see anyone find any Twinkies, which would obviously survive the apocalypse. Maybe the whole genre is just screwy.

From flying to first downs

For the first time this year, I'm giving up on a game. That's sad, but I'm kind of glad that it's taken me six months to have that happen.

The casualty is Prototype. On the surface, karate kicking helicopters is awesome, as is elbow dropping tanks. But after around 10 hours, which is about halfway through, I realized that I spent most of the previous five hours of playing being very frustrated. I think that right now, I want something a little slower paced than Prototype's balls-to-the-wall karate kicking choppers and hacking dudes in half. Hopefully I'll be coming back to it in a few months.

What's usurping it? Blood Bowl. What is Blood Bowl? It's what geeks play instead of Madden.

The short version is that Blood Bowl is what you get if you take a really violent fantasy universe and have them play football. If the old Genesis game Mutant League Football rings a bell, well, that was a ripoff of Blood Bowl. It's very similar to football, except that there's no downs, killing players is a valid strategy, and having the play by play announcer say something like "The goblin looney Grimnak just pulled out his chainsaw, and is chasing the elf across the field and...OH! The crowd just threw a huge rock at Grimnak, knocking him unconscious! Now the rest of the fans are charging the field! They're going to have some trouble with that tree man!"

Of course, the whole thing plays out in turn-based format, because the video game is a faithful translation of the original board game. The real meat of it is playing in leagues, where your players can earn extra skills (or in the case of some teams, extra heads and limbs), injuries can knock players out for several games, and the road to the playoffs is paved with the bodies of your opponents.

So basically, it's just like rugby.