Dorks in Sweaters

Headline has nothing to do with anything. But.

I'm going to be writing for the comics section of the pretty major web-zine Pop Matters. It's a very exciting prospect for me, and I'm currently weighing some other neat options outside of Robots Fighting.

Again. RF is going to become a more experimental publication and I think we'll all be better because of it.

Sick

I'm sick.

I'm either not sick ever or just slightly sick all the time, but either way I don't get like this so often. But when I do I can I feel my body fighting itself, which oftentimes gets personified in my dreams with whatever strategy game I'm playing. I remember having some horrible nights reliving Starcraft and Command and Conquer scenarios. Most ended up with me dashing to the bathroom to puke. Warcraft has been much nicer to me and has held the diseases in check better. Am I just better at Warcraft and so can use it to command my white blood cells more effetively?

Not likely.

Shake it like a Polaroid picture!!!

"This is my happy song," my cousin Tim turned to me and said as I did about as much getting down as is possible for a bundled up white boy constrained to a seat in a freezing Soldier Field.

"It's probably everyone's happy song right now," I responded like a jerk on the subject of Outkast's "Hey Ya!"

Even though the song has become love-it-or-tired-of-it party driving vernacular and Tim Martens' official Happy Song, I've been wondering about how really happy the song is. Somewhere between the body moving hand claps and peppy guitar strumming and the get-unmoving-bodies-moving call and response, there's real despair in the song. The lyrics, about the seeming impossibility of love being able to hold two people together for long, tends to show that. Even if we aren't paying attention to (or making out) the lyrics the first hundred thousand times, the song still reaks of a melancholy darkness. Just listen to the wilting delivery of the title phrase, or the eerie lonely echoes of the chorus chimes and Andre's calls.

But it's a song that overwhelming makes us feel happy. Do we find joy in this celebration of our mortality? Do we just ignore the song's mood of impending disaster so that we can clap along? What does either say about our relationship with music as it relates to ourselves?

Is it even worth thinking about or should I shut up and dance? Hey ya!

The Times They are a Changing

A little forewarning. I'm making the move to fold the creative writing of Robots Fighting into Dmitry's xpehb.com . This is the first part of a number of moves which will be enhancing the experimental aspects of RF, and will be a major move in establishing the magazine. Regular features will be bolstered but organization will be less formal, making more room for informal experiments in presentation while keeping a focus on interesting style.

I want to create a sort of frontier of writing and visual art that can be explored and consistently be filled with surprises. I don't want people to say, "Who the hell is Tim Howard?" and never read about his approach to songwriting. I want readers to stumble upon things and make connections and most importantly feel like RF is a place, that it is as intended a sandbox in a warzone.

I also want more psychological freedom for myself. A magazine is measured in issues and volumes and for a personal project like RF, I don't want to get caught up in an expectation of linear production. As I've come to realize, I dig myself into holes in order to dig myself out of holes. If I can produce laterally... spend 8 hours working on a cryptic flash animation or the script to a comic book and not feel that what i needed to do is finish that Shattered Glass review. The way I work, I feel the refocused concept for the RF website will actually help me improve production.

I know that may sound odd. But that's my thinking.

Anway, Dmitry is being given a great amount of access to my creative writing, so a lot of poems which were only ever publicly read or printed up for classes will get an expanded audience. I am excited to be able to share a lot of these pieces to a bigger audience, and I continue to commend Dmitry for the exquisite site he produces.

The Google War Begins

Do a Google search for "Miserable Failure" and look what pops up as the #1 response.

The battle for America's #1 Miserable Failure is beginning as folks like Glenn Beck are looking to get Michael Moore's name to be king.

The process of creating this is called Google Bombing and has been a realized Google weakness for about a year or two. Now that it's hitting the mainstream and with political debate heating up with the election year, you may notice it more regularly.

For a full explanation of Google Bombing : check here.

You and Me Were Never Meant to be Part of the Future

The great grandmother of a gaming clanmate passed away several days ago. Although he's not one that I have gotten to really know yet, I've been trying to think of some encouraging words to pass on to him.

At funerals we often end up mourning the inability of a person to continue with us, instead of accepting the ceasing of that person's mortal walk and seeing their place here for what it was in the past. Maybe I am fond of the latter idea because of the solace I find in the theology of and surrounding predestination, but I think there's a certain truth to it no matter what your doctrine or creed is.

That said. I would like to have the Flaming Lips play at my funeral. I am officially abandoning my prior request to be trebuchet'ed into the sunset, but I do with great sincerity thank those who kept this knowledge with them. You have done a great service to me and I am indebted to you. I abandon that plan because looking back it seems less romantic and more a giant logistical hassle for everyone involved in planning. I mean, if you can make it happen... great, I appreciate it. But you can move it out of the special request category. Anyway. The Flaming Lips. Really, if they could just play Do You Realize I think I'd be happy enough (knowing this would happen), because that song captures in a moment the way I feel death should be universally dealt with better than many others. "Do you realize - that everyone you know someday will die - and instead of saying all your goodbyes - let them know that life goes fast it's hard to make the good times last." That is, to me, you can't get caught up in the finality of mortal things, you make the best of the moments you share and you share the understanding that there's no reason to waste mortal time bidding farewell... "The sun doesn't go down, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning 'round."

So that's that. If they want to play a couple other songs, I'm cool with that but see if they can somehow not make my traditional relatives walk away saying, "That was weird." Because it's for them as much as it is for anyone else. As much as I might like them to appreciate that weirdness, it's not necessarily a forum they should be doused with it in. A bit like how Christianity is handled in the same situation; it's laid out for anyone who wants to understand the calm it brings those who embrace it, but you don't have altar calls and trash like that.

I'm still hanging onto having "Be Thou My Vision" played, but I wouldn't want the Lips to be forced into it unless they were really feeling it. If they are, word. If not, you can try to pick up Pedro the Lion or just whoever has the song in their blood. But don't have Kirk Jackson or Michelle LaGroue sing "Do You Realize?"... They have wonderful voices, but I really wouldn't feel right about it not being The Flaming Lips.

Of course, what do you care? I'm dead.

Digital Millenium

Yet another story of a guardian getting the lawsuit for a child's Kazaa downloading.

Intellectual property lawyers who have the upbringing and understanding of digital issues may still be too young to make a difference in the courtroom, so it is disheartening to see the media (generally considered younger and hipper) failing so miserably to alter perception of file-sharing. Stories of people too stupid to make a plausible argument only make the broader battle more difficult.

The lady in the story above, for instance, has decided that her best vocal defense is to ignore the issue altogether... As if pretending she doesn't have to settle or fight will make the lawsuit disappear. How zen.

Grandparents, working class moms, 12 year old teeny-boppers... these faces are meant to elicit sympathy against the big bad wolf of the RIAA... but it's not what we need. Watching straw and stick huts fall isn't going to spark people. Make a story out of a house made of brick; somebody who's standing their ground and might actually have a shot at holding their own. There's gotta be such a case somewhere... The anti-share defense is so simple and so ignorant of legal sharing that I find it hard believe that someone in the position to do so is not closing in on not just a loophole but a solid legal stance for peer-to-peer.

Killing in the Name of

A number of gaming sites have been reporting with a not-so-subtle flair of irony the release of Medal of Honor: Rising Sun in Japan. The game, developed in America, places the player in the role of American soldiers during World War II's Pacific Campaign... You know, the one where the US fought the Japanese.

Game Girl Advance's write-up and discussion on the release is here. The basic questions stem from Japanese players simulating the slaying of what could in real-life have been their fathers, uncles, grandfathers, etc. There is generally this type of pondering when a game based on recent historical conflict is released, but this debate is possibly greater because it relates to a work in the birthing place of the art form.

Now, I don't want to say this is a non-issue, because there are without a doubt a number of very interesting issues involved with this release of Rising Sun.

But.

When a person plays a video game, they are knowingly entering a fiction... No matter how detailed and realistic it may be, it is a known fiction. This is what allows a gamer to "kill" in the video game world and never give even a thought to killing someone in the physical world. We play Grand Theft Auto or even Midtown Madness with an understanding that oncoming cars could--in the real world--potentially be us or our families...

There is a definitive line between fact and fiction; although we may try to blur it, although we may astonish audiences by nudging them closer to the line than they have previously witnessed anything go, it is there. Our maturity is in some ways measured by our ability to discern each side of this line, and it is definitively immature to claim that a Japanese player is killing a relative while playing a somewhat accurate portrayal of World War II's Pacific Campaign.

Or... to claim that there is betrayal against the nation in fighting against Japan within the game. The problem is in a critic's application of the player's reality onto the fiction of the game. The avatar and the player are two separate entities and such projection ignores this. While I eat a bean burrito from Taco Bell, my character could be starving in Siberia. As much as the game or I may try to trick my mind in order to make the game's fiction more absorbing, any bond between character and player is an artificial one.

While my character dies from a gruesome head wound, I sit in an upholstered chair at a computer desk sipping a glass of milk. While an enemy may be killed in the game world, its code still exists just as it did before and can be resurrected by simply reseting a level or the game entirely (and arguably, just by coming across an identical enemy). If I kill in the real world, I wipe out the code for that being; there will be no revival or cloning. It's gone. By nature, the deletion of a crappy game from your harddrive is closer to real-world killing than in-game slayings. Shouldn't it be considered more morally absurd to kill the avatar of a friend down the street in multiplay, than to halt an autonomous character? Well, maybe not... because both events are equally part of an entirely fictitious universe.

Again, our eyes may be fooled by pretty particle effects, but the game is still fiction. Only in the most tremendous of Philip K. Dick stories, does the line between the real and the artificial become blurred to an extent that there is a problem of morality. The key to these stories, though, is the erasure of an individual's memory of entry into the fiction.

But the Rising Sun issue is one based not on morality but on business (specifically, marketing). How do you get Japanese players interested in the Rising Sun story? Once they decide to play the game, they are knowingly entering a fiction. It's getting there that's the tough part.

If we try to turn fiction into reality and force ourselves to put real constraints upon the fiction, we destroy the purpose of it ever existing in the first place. No longer could we explore the unreal. And that's the real danger.

Whoops

My apologies to ANU readers. The book which contained the strips is lost. If I can't find it by the end of the week, I will start anew. Thanks for hanging with me until it gets back on track.