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| Wednesday, January 12, 2005 04:25 AM |
| Fight the Power |
 by Fëanor |
- You folks, geeks that you are, have probably already heard about Microsoft's embarrasing crashes at the Consumer Electronics Show, but I saw the video this morning on Comcast and thought it was pretty funny, so I've decided to talk about it anyway. Gates was trying to smile when his Media Center PC crashed, but you could tell he was really, really pissed. And then some dude presenting a new game on the Xbox got a blue screen of death. Priceless!
- I also want to support this idea, which is currently winging its way through the blogosphere (I found it at Sarcasmo's Corner, as you'll see if you clicky the linky). Fight the MTV power and the terrible music the youngsters are listening to these days by going to MTV's TRL page and voting for Devo's "Whip It"! Devolution, man! Woo!
As I said in a comment on Sarcasmo's page, I really do find myself already feeling like the stereotype of the cranky old fellow shaking his liver-spotted fist at the whipper-snappers of the world. I guess I never really loved the "popular" music, but it seems like there used to be more of it that was tolerable to me than there is now. What happened? Did I get better taste, or did the music get worse, or am I just totally uncool?
- Before you answer that, let me move on. I finally finished the extra material in the back of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2. Whew. It's a big chunk of writing back there--an exhaustive travel guide to fictional sites of interest all over the world. I think it took me longer to read that than the comic itself. I can't say it was quite as enjoyable, however, as it is more of a list or catalogue than a story, though there are certainly some interesting chunks of narrative and character development in there, too. Regardless, the amount of detailed work and research Moore must have put in compiling all that stuff is just incredible. I mean, besides the obvious works that the league's characters come from (Stoker's Dracula, Haggard's various adventure stories, Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), he references stuff as diverse as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, multiple stories by Poe and Lovecraft, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Golding's Lord of the Flies (via a clever and funny premonition--"that would be a particularly bad island for a bunch of English school children to be marooned on..."), Coleridge's "Xanadu", the Babar stories, dozens more I'm forgetting, and hundreds more I didn't recognize. And every reference and allusion is viewed through Moore's twisted sense of humor, so that Alice's Wonderland becomes a strange parallel dimension that kills or drives mad those who enter into it, and Santa Claus is a crazed shaman who travels the world on Christmas via a drug-induced out-of-body experience, and who, when disturbed in the midst of his trances, ends up killing one of the Coca-Cola ad men who have come to proposition him (they're also up there hoping to hire a race of talking polar bears). I wonder if there's an annotated version of this piece that identifies and documents every reference? I'd be curious to see such a thing. Many times as I was reading I felt that I was missing allusions, due either to a lapse in memory or an unfamiliarity with the source material. Apparently I need to read more!
- In other news, "Third Age" is getting even more awesome the more I play it. There's always new abilities and items and characters and enemies popping up to keep it interesting. And there's so much of it! I only just got to the second disc last night. It's taken me over ten hours to get this far, and there's still about 70% of the game left to play, according to the meter on my save game. And I've already barely survived an encounter with a Balrog (thanks to the intervention of Gandalf, and a large stockpile of Elf Medicine--which is the item that brings dead folks back to life in this game, btw), and killed three Nazgul. That's right, I killed three Nazgul!! They exploded and everything! I wasn't expecting to have to do that, I can tell you. I'm just walking through some hills in Rohan, and bam! Three Nazgul jump me! WTF?! I totally freaked. I also hadn't really expected to fight the Balrog in Moria, since that's not exactly how it happened in the book. But I really wanted to, so I was okay with it when it happened. It was a true ordeal, just the way you'd think a fight with a Balrog would be, with my guys constantly getting killed because they were totally outclassed by both our enemy and Gandalf.
Even Evil Mode is getting more interesting and more challenging. I had to try the last section three times before I made it through. You have to be quite smart about who you attack and when, and what attacks you use. But the good thing is, the game has yet to get so hard that it's frustrating. In fact, "Third Age" is so fun that I think I could happily play it for hours on end, which is rare for me. Most games tend to wear on me after a long period of constant play--even games I like, such as "Knights of the Old Republic." Speaking of which, I'm getting nearer and nearer to the end of that one. Soon enough I'll be ready for KotOR 2! I'm really hoping they make a sequel to "Third Age," but I can't imagine how they would--they've kind of milked the story dry at this point. Maybe it's time to go back and cover The Silmarillion? That would rock. I'd love to take on Gothmog, the captain of the Balrogs, or fight Sauron with Beren and Luthien in my party.
- As a final item, I'd like to mention that, unless I've gotten mixed up somehow, it's my choice at movie night tonight. I thought I'd already decided on Tron, since I recently discovered that far too many of our supposedly geeky group of movie fans have not seen it, but this morning I was looking over my collection for likely contenders and ended up hauling along a whole bag full of movies to choose from. So we'll see what happens.
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