Sex Up
There’s been some hoopla about a fan-modified version of the protagonist in the Parkour video game Mirror’s Edge. Image here:
The fan added a rounder face, reshaped the eyes, and utilized an industry-standard Photoshop boob job.
I’m sorta on the fence on the developer’s hardline stance here — I think fan fiction is okay as long as credit is given to the original creator and no money changes hands. I’m a fan of DIY solutions.
The modification aspect is tricky though. Fan mods can result in awesome stuff. But it can also result in Lara Croft nude texture swaps.
And is it wrong that I actually find the modified character more attractive? It’s not the boobs — I like people with rounder faces. She now looks more Korean than Chinese. Am I being racist? Boobist?
Also, I really like this picture of this dog:
Southern Comfort
Watching David Attenborough’s Life in the Freezer got me interested again in what’s going on at the international South Pole station.
It’s called the Amundsen-Scott Station, named after the first men to arrive there in 1911/1912. It used to be a couple of underground rooms, and then it was a geodesic dome. Five years ago they built a brand new station that rises above the snow on stilts. It looks like this:
Scientists that find themselves stationed there spend six months in complete darkness and isolation — so there had better be a bar there. And of course, there is. It looks like this:
It’s fun to think that on the southernmost tip of the earth, there’s a bar.
It’s also amusing to note that this bar was probably the site of last Christmas’s drunken bar brawl where one of the participants had to be airlifted out for his own safety.
So these guys, Amundsen and Scott, were the first people to arrive at the South Pole. Amundsen (Norwegian) arrived first in December 1911; Scott (British), to his dismay, arrived a month after Amundsen.
They both arrived on foot after eight hundred miles of walking. Eight hundred miles. EIGHT HUNDRED MILES. Even typing those three words in all caps doesn’t convey the massive undertaking the phrase describes.
Walking eight hundred miles in temperate weather is one thing — walking it in -17 to -70 degree F snow storms, across shifting ground with massive crevasses and high-low elevation shifts is another.
Imagine the mental torment, the numbness of constant forward movement. Imagine the willpower required to proceed.
And then once you get there, there’s no helicopter waiting to take you back — it’s another EIGHT HUNDRED MILES of walking for the return trip.
I remember when I first started running — the thought would creep into my mind after about 2.5 miles: “We’ve done enough today, what do you say we call it quits and go eat a Snickers bar?”
Eight hundred miles. EIGHT HUNDRED MILES.
And now there’s a bar there.
How to Be Successful
Now reading:
I really liked Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point and Blink; I’ve read various criticisms of both books and I agree that Gladwell’s findings may not be entirely sound — but the anecdotes and stories he’s collected are just so darned interesting that I gobble up his books like candy.
How can you not be intrigued by a chapter that begins by describing a super-intelligent man — someone who is not only off the charts on standard IQ tests but only got one answer wrong on an IQ test specifically made for people with extremely high IQs — going on the game show One Versus 100? Gladwell starts with a very interesting real-world character and reports on his experiences in a very interesting experience that tests his supposed abilities.
That is what we call great storytelling. So for me, the science of the book isn’t as important. Sure, it argues a point, but for me that point is secondary to the stories being told. The stories are the sweet, sweet candy.
Superheroes
Okay, so Netflix to Xbox streaming is freakin awesome. It is the thing of the week. Having instant access to a fairly large library of titles is pretty darned great. There are a few hiccups — sometimes it’ll lowball the bandwidth for no apparent reason, delivering painfully compressed video. But you can often stop playback and restart it immediately, and it’ll give you maximum quality again.
So I’ve been surfing through the library of insta-play titles, specifically looking for great documentaries. I love a good doc, and I give big UPS to the people that make them. I’ve met a few of these documentary film makers, and they’re people that seriously go after the truth.
(ASIDE: I think all reality TV should be made by real documentarians. Not only would the quality jump up, but the subject matter would hopefully shift to something that isn’t garbage. Have you seen the difference between Fox’s Kitchen Nightmares and the BBC’s version? Fox adds goofy cartoon sound effects and dramatic “DOOSH” noises to magnify everything. The BBC just uses clever editing because it assumes that the viewer is a person with an adult level of intelligence. Example: Gordon Ramsay yelling at a chef for using moldy chicken — CUT TO: A customer chowing into a chicken wing. No sound effects required!)
Okay, so here’s a pretty great doc I saw: Confessions of a Superhero.
It’s about these people that dress up as costumed characters and hang out in front of Mann’s Chinese theater, taking pictures with tourists for “tips”. They’re all freelancers — they don’t work for a particular company. They’re out there doing what they do on their own. Some call them panhandlers, others call them a nuisance. Many of them are apparently struggling actors.
This documentary tracks four of them — Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and a guy that dresses up as the Incredible Hulk. One of these guys is a little crazy. Another is a LOT crazy. All of them are really interesting. The documentary itself is well made, catches some very interesting nuggets of truth, and is sad and weird and fun. I recommend it.
At this point I’d like to say a few things about acting as a craft, but I’m going to save that for another post. It deserves more than this. All I’ll say right now is that from what I understand, it’s tough.
Apes
So I’ve got to go back into workshop soon on Year Zero. Year Zero is a play about personal history, so I’ve been revisiting that subject a lot in my mind lately. I think that transmitting your personal history through storytelling is incredibly important; it lets us understand and come to terms with past events. And since we are all shaped inexorably by the past, knowing our history tells us who we are in the present.
One of my favorite stories about the past is this old sorta fable that’s been around for a while — I first heard it told in a scene cut from the movie The Contender. I can understand why it was cut, but it’s such a great bit that it’s a shame that it didn’t make it in.
In this scene, the President (played by Jeff Bridges) tells the story:
So these scientists have a bunch of apes in a room. And the scientists dangle a banana from the ceiling. There’s no food in the room so the apes start getting hungry, so one of them climbs up and reaches for the banana.
As he grabs it, a machine douses the whole room with freezing cold water. This shocks and terrifies all the apes in the room — including the guy reaching for the banana, who falls onto the floor empty-handed. All the apes are now wet and shivering.
But everyone’s still hungry, so another ape climbs up, reaches for the banana — and the same thing happens. The room gets doused with freezing cold water. No one gets a banana, and everyone’s wet and freezing again.
Now another ape can’t take the hunger anymore and reaches for that banana. But before he can get to it, all the other apes grab him and beat the shit out of him. No one wants to get wet.
Okay, now the scientists take one of the apes out of the room and replace him with a New Ape. New Ape sees the banana and goes up to get it, and all the other apes grab him and beat the shit out of him. New Ape has no idea why he’s getting his ass kicked, but it doesn’t matter. It’s happening.
The scientists take another one of the old apes out of the room, replace him with a Second New Ape. The Second New Ape goes for the banana and all the other apes grab him and beat the shit out of him — the first New Ape even joins in, beating the shit out of this new guy even though he has no idea why.
The scientists keep doing this — taking out all the old apes and replacing them with new apes. And what you end up with is a room fulla hungry apes beating the shit out of each other every time one of them goes for that banana — and none of them have any idea why.
So that’s how the past effects us. We are direct products of it. And history is the thing that tells us exactly WHY we keep beating the shit out of each other.
What.
I Meant to Do That
I forgot to mention that a neat quote I heard out of that prior RadioLab show was this: Jazz musicians say that while you’re playing, if you make a mistake, do it twice. Meaning that while you’re improvising, if you screw up you should do it again. Because then it appears that you have a pattern going — a foundation that you can build and continue to improvise off of. At the most you might learn something new; at the least it looks like you did it on purpose.
Like if you fall on your face once it’s an accident. If you do it twice in a row, it’s your schtick.
My Work in Print
Year Zero
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.com
Cowboy Versus Samurai
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.comFor a complete list of books containing my work, please click here.
