News You Can Bruise for 2006 June

"You're the apple-finder!"
"Wait, I'm the Apple Finder?"

This is a good movie but, pace Brendan, not the best ever made. The problem is that while it's stylistically excellent, it follows the noir mystery formula too faithfully. The best noir mysteries have a non-stylistic twist on the formula (The Big Lebowski, which for my money remains the king of stylistic twists as well). The best noir movies abandon the mystery element altogether and just go after the depravity of man (Double Indemnity). Or you can just be an extremely confusing mystery like The Big Sleep, which gives you some points in my book. In between you have movies like The Maltese Falcon and Brick, which are very stylish but formulaic.

I think the other major noir subgenre is the underworld film, but I haven't seen any of those yet, so I'm even less able than usual to pass ill-informed judgement. Those movies seem kind of sensationalistic and Manichean, but I could be wrong.

Phyla

"We are the whales," says Phyla. "the ocean's voice. Keepers of the deep eternal secrets." She strokes the fishbowl of warm seawater.

"We want krill," she says, surprising herself. "You have boats. Go north. Bring us krill." Even this crowd hoots and leaves. A few stay.

"Prepare to be boarded!" says Phyla, still translating. "Drop nets, me hearties!"

"Good job," say the whales. "Now..."

Then, Phyla gets another radio in her head: one eye's made of crystal. "Fishing craft, change course ten degrees."

"I know who you are," she says, "and why you're here."

To her crew: "Load the cannons."

"Parrots don't make that noise!" said Sumana.

"They do if they're around penguins."

We met Dorothy of Cat and Girl, who was as shy as I would be if I had written an amazing webcomic and had to stand around while people fawned over me all day. WHAT I AM SAYING IS THAT I SYMPATHIZE.

We wandered for a while (usually but not always a good strategy) and found a good vegan pan-Asian restaurant and a chocolate-obsessed store. Now we are admiring our huge stacks of comic books.

Here's a still Jimbo sent us, though not from footage that was actually used. I wonder if this qualifies us for IMDB entries. I'm only credited as "Leonard".

I recommend you watch it if only to use our gaudy dress as markers for the amazing continuity errors. We warp around the bar, appearing in almost every scene because we were the only extras who showed up on time for the shoot.

The episode itself is best summarized by a Trevor line: "That's the second-best song I've ever heard about big butts!" Later I'll tell you about a funny scene that they cut.

PS: our band is called "early internet".

Then we went to karaoke, which was fun. Jake and I did a duet on "A Boy Named Sue". Karaoke tip: if you're going to sing "Piano Man", save it for the karaoke contest.

Then I think I figured it out with a Flatland analogy. Suppose Flatland exists in a 3D universe, but one in which nothing is more than a Planck distance tall. The Flatlanders extend in three dimensions, but they only perceive two. They would say that the third dimension was "rolled up very small", even though that doesn't make sense.

Wikipedia seems to back me up on this one, ladies, so the first question is, am I right? Does the analogy hold? Second question is, what is with the "rolled up" nonsense? Are they trying to convey that the structure of space makes it impossible for something to be large in that dimension ("the universe measured along these additional dimensions is subatomic in size")?

"I got a map of the Pacific Ocean."

"I don't like maps of oceans. They're too big. I thought you knew that."

"Well, what if it's like a MAD fold-in? See? Now you can walk from Idaho to Japan."

"That's better."

Then we practiced and played the gig (which went well), and the next day my left hand hurt. The elasticity of the inner tube that made it so easy on the shoulders made it very hard on my left hand, which had to support the neck of the guitar as well as do the fingering. Take that, people who reflexively build anything they see described on a weblog! Fortunately, the pain is now mostly gone.

If we can figure out a way to do that kind of strap that doesn't stress the left hand, we'll have it made. It was really comfortable until I stopped using it.

Sumana likes the highbrow comic books they put out nowadays. I've read some of hers and I didn't like those a whole lot either. So what does picky me like? Well, I like ACKs. I like books of comic strips. Though I don't like the comic books themselves, I love the insane crowdedness of the Marvel and DC universes, caused by the respective companies having to crank out twenty books a month for decades.

Jake has a bunch of comic books, and I trust Jake's taste, so when I was in Worcester I decided to give the traditional comic book a try. Verdict: not great. The plots are pretty dull and the dialogue is either stilted or fake-casual. The drawing's good but I don't really notice that kind of thing.

Highlights:

• The community of comic book creators, as revealed in the books, is interesting. They dish dirt on each other, make up ridiculous retcons and silly nicknames. It seems pretty tight-knit and full of love-hate relationships.
• The Green Lantern comics are a lot like really old science fiction, especially the Lensman novels. I think those stories work a lot better as comic books. But I wasn't crazy about the Lensman novels and I don't want to read a lot of Green Lantern either.
• Silver Surfer has a ludicrous story and some of the most stilted dialogue I've ever seen, but it's really compelling. I think this is what comic books feel like to big fans.
• The Nethack phrase "undergo a freakish metamorphosis" shows up a lot in comic books. I don't know what the original source is.

But the big highlight was Jake's set of Ambush Bug comics, which were everything I want comic books to be. Unfortunately, Ambush Bug can only exist in the context of everything I find boring about comic books.

Ambush Bug is if Checkerboard Nightmare lived in the DC universe and thought he was Superman's pal. He had bit parts in Superman comics (including one where he kind of casually figures out Superman's secret identity), and then two mini-series of his own. Which actually ended the same way Checkerboard Nightmare ended. But which mainly focused on the weirdness of obscure comic book characters and the nature of continuity. It's really funny stuff and I recommend it. The miniseries also has parodies of those comic book ads that sell junk that doesn't work, which aren't that funny, but you can never have enough parodies of those ads.

Now I've read it and I'm happy to report that there's not much overlap. It's true that these are the only two pieces of fiction I know of that use MAME as a dramatic device, but the purpose is totally different. I would actually say this book is closer to Frog/Antifrog.

Okay, about the book itself. The middle is a Douglas Coupland-esque slog, but the beginning is fun and the end has a twist that I should have seen coming but didn't. Good job--the best kind of twist. Plus, there's a tiny piece of exposition hidden in the book that makes the central reveal semi-plausible sci-fi instead of squishy novel mysticism. I think many people who didn't like the ending missed that piece of exposition. But I say, thanks for including it, D. B. Weiss.

• Flatland goes to war in Dangen, the geometric shoot-em-up. Minimalist Galaga-like sharpshooter action. Fun and elegant.
• Less elegant but more three-dimensional-looking is Triplex Invaders, featuring hot triplex action. Everything is rendered in real-time as big Dactyl Nightmare-style polygonal shapes. Cool Ghostbusters-like beam weapons add to the fun. Lousy projectile weapons subtract from the fun. Can this game achieve a fun surplus?
• Lämmerlinge is a fun Javascript game where you guide sheep around a board, feeding them flowers and preventing them from wandering off or drowning. Documentation is both in German and totally superfluous. Levels are password-protected: also superfluous since the passwords are right there in a supplimentary Javascript file.
• Deadly Rooms of Death is a fun shareware puzzle game with a video game sense of humor. This is not a sophisticated sense of humor, not an interactive fiction or Ealing Studios humor. Maybe a ZZT game humor. If you saw it in a sitcom it would be undistinguished, but so few video games these days have any sense of humor that DROD's juvenile antics are charming. DROD has lots of puzzle elements and scriptability that make it more enjoyable than Rocks 'n' Diamonds. Fun voice acting separates this game from free software games with no voice acting.
• Trackballs (Debian: trackballs) captures the sleek futuristic look of Marble Madness but seems really obsessed with narrow passageways for your marble to navigate, instead of the sweeping ski-slope wireframe mountains of the original. On the plus side, your marble can jump, and the game levels are scriptable with Guile. So make some levels that don't rely on split-second marble manipulation cause I don't do that. Oh, this game also has enemies that you can squash with your marble. Unfortunately this does not make your marble bigger a la Katamari Damacy.
• How's that crackpot scheme of yours to mine Mars for mercy and sell it back on Earth? Not going too well? Maybe you should have played the cautionary game Mars: Land of No Mercy. You'll find out that anything that lands on the surface of Mars can only move once and then has to wait for the opponent's move, which never comes. Basically the game is still in a very early stage. Nice realistic Mars graphics though.