Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

The pros and cons of Sarah Palin:

- This interview with Palin from before her VP nomination, when she was in town to do Charlie Rose, is surprisingly likable. She’s no rocket scientist, but you can see what everyone likes about her when she’s not barfing out talking points or fighting back against essentially the entire political establishment. Kinda sad to think that if she loses in November, she’s finished nationally and given the bad blood over Troopergate and other McCain campaign interventions, she’s damaged in Alaska, as well.

- Last week I interviewed Ben Jacobs, aka Max Tundra. I tried not to gush too hard, but I did get the chance to talk prog with him for a few minutes. He recommended I check out Gentle Giant’s Interview as an example of prog done right. Based on this clip of the title track, I will:

- This TV on the Radio thing from Letterman is fantastic.

- Last, back to Palin. This would be the cynical train-wreck to end all cynical trainwrecks: totally unsubstantiated speculation of a Bristol Palin wedding right before the election, featuring the prospective VP’s daughter offered up like a vi- … like a sacrifice at a volcano to appease the media gods. I see no way this wouldn’t backfire. But if they want press, well, they would get that.

After all that fanfare, pretty much seemed like a draw. You could score or dock points here or there, but if you liked one guy going in, you probably liked him coming out, and for the same reasons.

Thoughts?

Today at Jetpack Comics – the best comic store in New England – I picked up a flier for the Portsmouth Comic Book Show, scheduled for Sunday, November 16. They’ve booked not only the cream of the local scene – Rich Woodall of Johnny Raygun, the Severed Head Comics guys and The Fatsquad – but Craig Rousseau, Scott Wegener, and guest of honor, David Petersen of Mouse Guard.

The Petersen announcement has me especially pumped. I’ve enjoyed both seasons of Mouse Guard, but more importantly, so does my kid. Along with Bone, it’s his favorite comic. We skip the dark and political sections and enjoy the fight with the snake, Sadie escaping the crabs or blinding the owl, the hissing bats in the underground weasel city. He’s Saxon, I’m Kenzie, mom is Sadie, and Liam’s the cat. He got the collectible figurines and mangled them. And now he can get his Fall 1152 book signed!

I was pumped to think he’ll get a chance to meet the man who came up with it all. And then I realized, he probably won’t care.

At my kid’s age – three and a half – you can love books and comics and music, but you don’t really care where they came from. The guy who did Mouse Guard is an adult just like the folks at our coffee shop or the woman at the newsstand. Sure, you could say he’s already exposed to a number of artists: mom’s a children’s book illustrator, and he already has a number of signed books from her friends. But he has no sense that doing this kind of thing is special, or that the people behind it are interesting, or that he should think up any questions for them. Sometimes we’re listening to a record and I say, “Hey, I interviewed this singer.” Shrug. Adults talk to each other all the time.

Kids don’t get starstruck, and it takes more than fame to impress them. I can’t wait to get a signature from Petersen, and I know I’ll enjoy talking to him, but if somebody showed up in a Saxon costume, he’d be a way bigger hit than some guy sitting at a table at the Best Western.

Have I mentioned yet that Rock Band 2’s drum trainer is hands-down the educational game of the year?

I’ve been hella busy, so I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to play Rock Band 2 myself. Here are some links to recent stuff:

Spore - I resisted all the hype and gave it a B. Now I can’t wait to see what Little Big Planet will do to kill my buzz.

Castle Crashers - Also not as blown away as I’d hoped, but I dunno, it was cute.

Max Tundra, “Which Song” (incl. mp3/stream) – I have a ridiculous man-crush on this guy and on his amazing, fantastic new album. My God.

Shugo Tokumaru, Exit – Nice listen.

This has actually been a great fall so far. So many pre-Christmas promos and new releases are dropping in my lap. I treated myself to a whole night of The Force Unleashed last week and liked it a lot better than I expected to. Max Tundra of course is blowing my mind. And this one, coming out next week, is turning out to be a serious motherfucker:

TV on the Radio, “Golden Age” (go to their official site for a better stream of both new singles)

UPDATE: While I’m doing work links here (and not doing new blogging), I’ll throw this one in too: my review of TV on the Radio’s Dear Science,.

Like a lot of gamers in their first dozen or so hours of Spore, I’ve had moments of confusion, hatred, and sometimes, intrigue. I didn’t know – ’cause I didn’t read Kieron - that the first four of five stages are really just a warm up and a personality test for the fifth, where you launch into space and the game really gets going. I keep getting tripped up on my expectations: is this really a game about evolution, and if so, why is evolving so easy? Why does my agency and my opposition keep changing – from one species fighting against many, to one tribe against other tribes with the same DNA, until finally I’m one individual, representing my entire species across many worlds in a weird kind of military admiral/trade-leader/privateer/terrorist function? Why does my own species treat me as both a gofer and an all-powerful dictator? Why does everyone like spice so much? If my own species can cough up a new spaceship every time I wreck mine, why can’t they give me a whole damn fleet so I can shut down the opposition once and for all?

Lots to take in. But let’s focus on one thing, which is, my confusion.

The first time through each stage, you’ll have a lot of questions. What am I supposed to do? How does the interface work? Why are these people dancing and singing at me? This gets worse with every stage. In civilization, you have to figure out a lot in a little time – hey, I can’t get at those people on the other continent, because I have no coastal access. Hey, the most efficient way to take out a neighboring city is with a blitzkrieg (and by the way, enjoy that – in space, it doesn’t seem to be an option). Wait, what the hell is this religion thing? By the time you really get a feel for it, the stage is over – which makes sense, since they’re really just helping you develop a species for space. But it’s still disorienting.

When you get into space, it’s most confusing of all. I gave it 2-3 hours and rebooted because I had gotten myself so deep in a hole, with enemies on all sides and no colonies to speak of. You’re guided into missions, but nobody walks you through the interface – which is not simple – and noone warns you that missions aren’t always the best use of your time. Charged with identifying all the species on an alien planet, I didn’t realize that I could select them one by one in the food web map and then use radar to hone in on them. When I had to capture them, the tractor beam was a nightmare – I didn’t realize that I had to click on it and then hold it until the creature made it all the way up to my ship; instead, I kept letting go or trying to mouse up and help them along, which led to my flinging them into the ocean. And on and on …

After a while – and only because I’m reviewing it and was basically obligated to stick with it – I finally got into a rhythm, with a galactic empire that could sustain itself and a good set of allies and a plan for where to go next. I’m earning badges at a satisfying clip, and getting into a routine of trading and terraforming, and I’m ready to basically keep doing this until I realize that it’s the same damn thing hour after hour and I can just quit. And that’s the real joke: by the time you get the hang of it, all you can ask is, “Is that it … ?” Yes, you get to experience all the user-generated content. Choosing someone else’s designs for my colony’s houses and factories is fun. But what does that have to do with the game? Shouldn’t I be competing against someone else’s strategies?

(Michael Abbott persuasively argues that Spore lets you invent your own narrative in a fairly open-ended system – but so far, the best part of my narrative has been the part where I stopped getting my ass kicked.)

Here’s the thing. Better documentation and in-game training would have made the whole experience a lot smoother – insofar as it can be much smoother, because I still think this is a weird and disjointed game that changes the subject every time you ask it a hard question. (Like: does the evolution really matter when each of the civilizations in space basically has the same attitude and traits? While you get a couple bonuses here and there based on how you evolved, none of them are dealbreakers. Once you’re sentient, how you do is based entirely on your skill.)

Okay, I changed the subject again … so again, here’s the question: does the documentation suck because they want us to be confused? Does the game try to keep you in the dark and make you figure out how to get around in the world, because that is the challenge – just as our ancestors had to figure out how to deal with their strange new environments, and adapt to new circumstances, and invent diplomacy (when they weren’t inventing a-bombs)? Because if that’s the point, then sometimes it works. When another species is dancing and singing, I like that I have to figure out on my own the best way to respond.

But when I’m wrassling with that damn food web/world map interface, and figuring out how to doohickie around with the controls to terraform a planet? That’s just frustrating. I know that explaining a poor interface isn’t the same as fixing it. But jeez guys, give us a hand.

It makes me suspect that for as long as this was in development, and as much faith as we put in Will Wright, the vision that underlies this game may be flawed. The “vision” is a thing that you talk about sometimes when you’re in the consulting biz. A client brings you and you say, “Okay, what’s your vision for this website?” And they say, “We want to have the best e-commerce website in the world that sells everything – but especially soap – and it should be elegantly simple and richly-featured, and we want to come in under budget.” And you say, “Okay, well, you’re going to have to start making some choices there.” Setting a clear, simple vision leads to a better product. I suspect that Spore never had that – or if it did, I haven’t found it.

The user-generated content seems to have fundamentally nothing to do with the competitive and challenging aspects of the gameplay. At times it’s fundamentally about evolution, and at other times, it’s fundamentally about how (relatively) non-evolving species interact on a vast scale. And maybe that’s why the documentation’s so sketchy: even they don’t know, really, what they’ve put in front of us.

As an aside, I’m getting hundreds of hits a day to my blog from people searching on “Spore,” just because of a post I wrote last year that mentioned the game. This is clearly a huge topic for the blogosphere. Or are we all just as confused one another?

UPDATE: I take back everything I said about the combat. After I picked up some allied ships and upgrade my bombs and shields, I decided to raid another empire that had been picking on me and charging me tithes. I started swooping in and bombing up their planets one by one. In no time, chased by dozens of fighters, I was marching across their homeworld blowing up city after city – no captures, no surrender, just blood and ash in the streets. In no time I’d wiped out their entire civilization. It was incredibly satisfying. longer interested in surrender or capture, ’cause all I wanted to do was smash the race that had given me such a hard time. Finally I’d wiped out their entire empire. It was unspeakably satisfying.

Judge for yourself – here are the top six most-emailed articles as of this moment:

1. Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes
2. Thomas L. Friedman: Making America Stupid
3. Frank Rich: The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket
4. Maureen Dowd: Bering Straight Talk
5. Bob Herbert: She’s Not Ready
6. Editorial: Gov. Palin’s Worldview

Noticed this because I was e-mailing that first one to my father-in-law. Not sure that’ll do any good – earlier I heard my wife arguing with her mother and trying to convince her that Obama’s not a Muslim.

The Frank Rich column (#3 above) was really good. In all the fuss about what a train-wreck she is as the person who’s a heartbeat from the presidency, I never considered what she’d do before taking McCain’s place. When this all started, people said that McCain didn’t take her seriously and would never listen to her; now, it’s pretty obvious that she’d be running roughshod all over him, pushing her agenda and so, the right wing’s. I wonder just how much he regrets this decision.

And in that light, her reference to Harry Truman is pretty fucking disturbing. When they picked him as FDR’s VP in ‘44, the party had a pretty good idea that Roosevelt might not make it through his fourth term. Now we’ve got a 72-year-old man with melanoma on the top of the ticket … if you wanted to get really conspiratorial you might ask, what do they know about McCain’s health that we don’t?

Also, this is awesome: Alaskans themselves rally to reject Sarah Palin. 1,400 people showed up – and if that sounds small, remember that the entire state has fewer people than Brooklyn. Lots of great pics. A friend of mine said that the Palin thing has made him rethink his opposition to ANWR: now he’s ready to turn the whole state into a nuclear waste facility. But maybe this rally will change his mind.

UPDATE: Man, they nailed it on SNL.

And not prolific:

Mary Margaret O’Hara.

“Bodies in Trouble”

“When You Know Why You’re Happy (Live)”

“Don’t Be Afraid” (Kurt Weill cover)

Huge influence on Kristin Hersh among others. And yes, she’s Catherine O’Hara’s sister.

By the way, the Sarah Palin interview with Gibson tonight was horrifying – not just because she gave the thought of war with Russia a “perhaps,” but because she defensively pushed back on every question and stuck to her stock, stunted answers. Everyone’s had a boss like this, who uses their ignorance not as a chance to learn and have a dialogue, but as an excuse to dig in and fight harder. She’d be far, far worse than Bush if she ever got the #1 spot. Why aren’t her supporters scared?

… to be a little kid.

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why I’ve been thinking about nothing but the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice-presidential pick, and thinking about it hard since possibly Friday, when she was announced, or maybe Saturday, when we had more time to think about her experience and her state trooper problems, or Sunday, when the weird theories started to fly about her children. But definitely by Monday, when her entire political life blew up like an oil well in the first Gulf War, I was inescapably in her clutches. How could such a weird and total train wreck take place on a national scale? How could John McCain – always an erratic and incompetent manager – pick such a turkey? How could all the Republicans keep such a brave face on this, claiming they’re “excited” and “energized” by a pick who is worth nowhere near the level of chaos she’s causing, considering she’s absolutely unqualified to run the country?

Little revelations keep popping up every few minutes. Nothing as damning as the troopergate scandal – again, doesn’t it feel good to know they have a vice-presidential pick who just had to lawyer up for an ethics investigation that’ll wrap up right before Election Day? And nothing as scandalous or salacious as the pregnant unmarried daughter, who’ll be shotgun wed to “fucking redneck” Levi Johnson at the business end of an automatic weapon. Seeing McCain shake young Levi’s hand and caress his arm today as he made his way to the convention was stranger than stranger than strange. What did he say to him? “Thank you for making sure I’ll never be President”?

It’s all too much. I had overload, actually, for about five minutes last night, but I got over that and hit the blogs again looking for good stuff. Like this earmark the Washington Independent dug up, an earmark that John McCain actually singled out for criticism.

But nobody’s talking about her pork. They’re beating her up ’cause she’s a woman.

I’m not saying the press is sexist. They obviously have her dead to rights on a range of things that the Republican base just doesn’t care about, but that should damn her with everybody else. I don’t think they’re targeting her because she’s a her, or because of photos like the one at the top of my post.

But we are beating up on her harder. Another example, in the gaming world, came to mind this week on Bonnie Ruberg’s Heroine Sheik. In her write-up of the Fallout 3 demo at the Penny Arcade Expo, Ruberg made a few comments that were inaccurate – like, saying that Fallout 3 ripped off BioShock, citing a couple things that BioShock actually ripped off from Fallout 1 and 2. It’s a silly mistake, and Ruberg’s not an expert on RPGs. But the fanboys who found her blog didn’t think it was silly. They went ballistic, and used this as a chance to post 130+ comments about how dumb she is. And a number of the comments pointed out that she doesn’t know anything about games specifically because she’s a woman.

I have a good guess that as a guy, if I had posted the exact same post, I would’ve gotten a fraction of the hate mail. Sure, fanboys would come in and take out their frustration at their lives and their virginity by banging away and repeating the same couple insults again and again. But not that many. It’s just easier when it’s a woman.

Maybe it’s because we perceive women as the weaker sex, and act accordingly. It goes to basic playground rules: if you think a kid is lower on the totem pole, you pile on. You may think you’re not sexist, and you’re not reacting to gender. But by treating the target as more vulnerable, you’re playing off your belief that she’s weaker. And so we pile on to someone like Sarah Palin, when another corrupt right-wing yokel might be just a laughing stock. We don’t just want to see McCain lose over this choice; we want to see Palin go down in flames. Subconsciously, we hope that sometime in all of this? She’ll cry.

‘Course, just because we think this doesn’t mean it’s true. And if she toughs out this week, there’s no way they’ll drop her. She could go down as a legend and a folk hero, even if she loses them the election. Which goes to my other pet theory: we can talk about how we believe the sexes are equal, and we’re all pro-women and pro-feminist, and we want to see women succeed. But when they really are equal, and above our ability to patronize them? We won’t be happy about it. And our happiness won’t even matter.

UPDATE: Actually hell with this, Palin’s out for blood. LET’S CRUSH THE FUCK OUT OF HER.