As the spirit wanes, the form appears

The story of M

2009-09-07T13:00:53Z

The world has moved on from pages to status updates to 140 characters, so I've mentioned Mr. Mellotron Mooncreature (aka Moonkitty) on Facebook but never the story of his adoption. It's a pretty good story.

Shepherdstown, WV is one of my favorite places on the planet. It's a tiny college town with as many students as locals, and perhaps because of the strength of its environmental program and the type of person who'd come to a small town in West Virginia for a liberal arts education, there's an incredibly organic and friendly vibe there. Essentially the anti-DC and only an hour away.

I'd noticed that Jana Hunter was playing there at the Blue Moon Cafe, and that sounded like a good adventure to have once I was persuaded to have it. I picked up my friend Hallsi and we navigated the winding country roads and arrived, it turned out, early enough to see three girls playing with and trying to give away the most adorable kitten ever. Said adorable kitten was foisted upon me by everyone, so I sat through the entire show with him on my lap (applause only freaked him out the first time) or on the laps of others, and EVERYONE is your friend when you have a kitten, especially when the kitten is that awesome and friendly.

Jana Hunter's band was a little loud for the little guy, so, somewhat ironically, we had to leave shortly into her set. But I have a kitten!

The bunny has learned to climb stairs to get away from him... but I *think* I saw them sort of snuggling together this morning on either side of the cage wall.

bewilderedhero @ 2009-07-18T09:22:00

2009-07-18T13:26:34Z

The Able Birds played our first good show in a while; we were second, opening for the amazing Caleb Stine. Afterwards, everyone sat around on the steps outside. Allison played violin while Caleb played a few more songs, then I tried my slightly screechy hand and found that I could actually sort of play a bit. Finally got home, exhausted, at 2:30.

What would we do without music, really?

Flying Lessons

2009-06-12T02:50:02Z

bewilderedhero @ 2009-03-09T16:02:00

2009-03-09T20:00:55Z

bewilderedhero @ 2009-03-09T06:17:00

2009-03-09T10:19:05Z

The worst nightmares ever are those in which you wake up, look at the time, start going about your morning, and then something terrifying happens.

And then you wake up again -- at the same time as in your dream -- and the entire morning you're not sure if you're still asleep and you know it could become a nightmare at any second.

You meaning me.

bewilderedhero @ 2008-12-07T08:21:00

2008-12-07T13:21:30Z

I dreamt that it was impossible to find good diner food in Alaska.

bewilderedhero @ 2008-12-04T07:18:00

2008-12-04T12:18:38Z

And at Home Depot last night...

Me: "This trap doesn't hurt the mice, right? Just making sure."
Him: "You're going to kill them anyway, aren't you?"
Me: "Uh, no... this says it's a live trap."
Him: "Yeah, but you're supposed to just throw it in the trash with the mouse inside."

What is wrong with people?

...

$35 all-you-can-eat tapas are actually a good deal as i don't think i'll ever have to eat again. ood lord. we'd decided that we needed some festive reason for spending that much money, so wikipedia delivered: in 1904, the Jovian moon Himalia was discovered.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, due to slight communication issues, the waiter now thinks Hallsi discovered it.

"Congratulations!" he said, and gave us extra rice pudding to take home.

bewilderedhero @ 2008-12-02T21:10:00

2008-12-03T02:11:39Z

So I have a mouse in the house. He lives on scraps of rabbit food. Having one cord-chewing miscreant already and having heard scary things about hantavirus, I called Target to ask if they had any mousetraps. Yes. Okay, good. How about ones that don't kill the mice?

"Sure, we've got all sorts of glue traps."

Not quite what I was asking, guy. That's some psychopathic reasoning right there.

Edward Ka-Spel & me

2008-10-31T20:22:41Z

Hallsi forced me to ask for the picture; I was basically inarticulate.

bewilderedhero @ 2008-10-26T09:59:00

2008-10-26T14:01:20Z

Tomorrow: the Fallout 3 midnight launch event
The next day: Hallsi's birthday and a trip to Virginia
The next day: driving back from Virginia
The next day: the Legendary Pink Dots
The next day: Halloween
The next day: The Zombie Lurch

....

Today: food poisoning from bad sushi or hot chocolate.

Awesome timing.

bewilderedhero @ 2008-10-17T16:56:00

2008-10-17T20:58:33Z

I would seriously buy this house tomorrow if it were closer to DC. And if I could still get a loan without putting $50,000 down.

How awesome are these doors?

http://www.503rialto.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=ad&utm_campaign=HouseCville

Someone, move to Charlottesville. Buy this house. Then let me visit.

bewilderedhero @ 2008-10-15T15:31:00

2008-10-15T19:31:55Z

I just looked through a book about bats. There's a bat with the head of every creature in the world. You name it, there's a bat for it.

...

In Soviet Russia, thumbs oppose you.

bewilderedhero @ 2008-05-18T08:41:00

2008-05-18T12:43:47Z

I dreamt that the MTV of the future had a show where people were injected with ketamine and hooked up to machines that translated the activity in their visual cortices into images on screens. Callers would vote for the best closed-eye imagery and the winner's would become a song's video.

bewilderedhero @ 2008-05-06T10:55:00

2008-05-06T14:55:14Z

Saturday I took part in what could be described as an epic hybrid of tag and scavenger hunt. By epic, I mean three hundred people running around most of NW DC.

One of the best times I've had recently.

I think a necessary condition of genuine fun might be the reinterpretation of the familiar: it's not a city anymore, it's a playing field.

...

The neighbor has a leopard cat who comes to visit via the balcony. It's really part leopard. Beautiful. I can't believe Bengal cats exist.

...

I am wondering if there's any way to turn this into a tattoo on my upper arm. The only reservation I have, besides the level of detail necessary for any successful adaptation, is that it's also sort of the cover of Tool's "10,000 Days." Great album, but I'm not sure to what degree it's already recontextualized the art.

...

Also, new shoes (I've coveted them for months):

bewilderedhero @ 2008-04-11T23:46:00

2008-04-12T03:47:08Z

Just finished the third season of Lost.

Mind. Blown.

bewilderedhero @ 2008-04-08T16:07:00

2008-04-08T20:11:58Z

I cleaned my friends list a bit, removing those who'd deleted their journals. There are people and ideas of people I miss. There is gray in my beard and at my temples.

The world moves on.

Meanwhile, this sluggish, reluctant gloom outside is getting old. The air makes me think of mushy apples.

How do you feel like you've lived enough for the time you've spent living? Does anyone? Can anyone?

bewilderedhero @ 2008-01-14T00:43:00

2008-01-14T05:45:31Z

Since I've been playing a lot of Rock Band lately (it's crunch time in the game mines, and something has to keep us sane):

(Stolen from monsterhouse)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together.

These were unexpectedly very slightly interesting. And I like the name "Expander Cycle" a lot.

bewilderedhero @ 2007-11-25T13:08:00

2007-11-25T18:10:18Z

Self-portrait With Prone Anatomically-Correct Sculptures of Giraffes Found Inexplicably on the Front Steps of My Workplace After Thanksgiving Weekend

bewilderedhero @ 2007-11-05T16:57:00

2007-11-05T22:02:03Z

i've been reading this little book called "the devil's larder," by jim crace. it's a collection of sixty-four very short stories about food that aren't really about food at all, and i want to share almost every single one with almost everyone i know.

...

but i don't feel like typing that much.

...

i wonder how much of closed-eye imagery we actually see and how much we just think we see, and whether or not there's a difference.

bewilderedhero @ 2007-09-14T08:05:00

2007-09-14T12:06:06Z

My mind is blown.

Thorns and prickles, most notably those on roses, are common literary symbols for the hidden dangers or woes of something beautiful or pleasant, as in "Every rose has its thorn". Roses lack true thorns since their prickles emerge from the epidermis rather than the pericycle. Growth from the pericycle would make it a modified stem and therefore a thorn. Some roses have been bred not to have prickles.

...

Sick again, with an absolute vengeance. What's wrong with me? It does good things for my voice, though. In high school, I tried out for The Miracle Worker and, because my sick voice was so deep and commanding, I got the part of Captain Keller. Little did they know that when I got well it would be an octave higher.

bewilderedhero @ 2007-09-10T09:49:00

2007-09-10T14:02:09Z

I dreamt that there was a section of DC, an expensive shopping district like Georgetown, whose walls you were allowed to cover with graffiti. Seeing a long, empty swath of white brick, I took a marker and wrote my favorite line from a Salman Rushdie novel: THE TRAFFIC DOESN'T CARE WHAT YOUR HEART NEEDS.

...

The Meat Puppets have gotten a lot older in the thirteen years since I saw them last; Cris looks like hell, heroin and prison clearly evident in his face, and Curt just looks tired. Their sound is rawer now, just two guys (and a hired drummer) making music, and their voices are, if anything, even worse.

But that all works for them.

Part of what makes great music great are the collective moments we have tangled up in it, anyway.

...

Also, this is beautiful, if horribly written:

link

Saturday May 26th the VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK group attempted to host a hate rally to try to take advantage of the brutal murder of a white couple for media and recruitment purposes.

Unfortunately for them the 100th ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block came and handed them their asses by making them appear like the asses they were.

Alex Linder the founder of VNN and the lead organizer of the rally kicked off events by rushing the clowns in a fit of rage, and was promptly arrested by 4 Knoxville police officers who dropped him to the ground when he resisted and dragged him off past the red shiny shoes of the clowns.

“White Power!” the Nazis shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

“White Power!” the Nazis angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily."

bewilderedhero @ 2007-09-09T13:43:00

2007-09-09T17:56:47Z

Friday's gig was at a place called the Potter's House -- a coffeeshop and religious/peacenik/leftist bookstore. I've never played in a venue with needlepoint adorning the backstage wall, particularly needlepoint depicting some very fuzzy sheep and quoting from Psalms. We were the second of three bands, there to support the Detention Watch Network; everyone there, from the other musicians to the volunteers to the audience to the people who run the place were so nice. I might prefer playing for hippie Christians over indie kids or soused clubgoers; the former are a lot less judgemental and actually pay attention.

Allison and Alicia and I caravaned downtown to a secret skateboard warehouse party. A red light separated our cars -- leaving Allison missing somewhere -- so Alicia and I pulled over beside a fence in a sketchy area of town. I got out of the car, started walking towards hers to see if she was able to reach Allison on the phone, and noticed the six GIANT WOLVES staring at me from behind said fence. Eesh.

At the party, there was a half-pipe out in the open (I wish I could do what those kids were doing) and, in the caveish indoors, a punk band with a lab coat-sporting theremin player passed around a giant mouse head mask.

I've been listening to "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" in the car. Though I know I'm missing out on the illustrations, I'll pick up the book at a bookstore sometime; the voices of the multiple narrators and their acting is worth the trade. There's a point at which the nine-year-old protagonist asks a centenarian war reporter, whose last war was with a tree, who won. Instead of him or the tree, the old man says, "The axe won."

Maybe it's nothing novel, a near-platitude, but I feel like anyone who really groks that sentence is immediately a better person for it.

bewilderedhero @ 2007-07-24T10:00:00

2007-07-24T14:02:55Z

The New York Times has an interesting article about video games and what the medium is missing, something I've been thinking about quite a bit. A couple of paragraphs in the article are about our little title. We're getting a lot of early kudos and acclaim from various sources, but a lot of that is candy; this is the most thoughtful nod I've read so far.

I'm not sure whether to agree or disagree with it. It's the rare game that elicits tears from me, but it does happen. Only very linear RPGs, though, and only when things happen that are beyond my control (Aeris's death, the ending of FFX, one of the main character's epilogues from Wild Arms IV). So Seth's probably onto something.

link

Even Games That Have Everything Are Still Missing Something
by Seth Schiesel

Earlier this month I visited the famed Concertgebouw concert hall in Amsterdam to hear the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra under Jaap van Zweden perform the Fifth Symphonies of Beethoven and Mahler.

The Beethoven symphony is obviously better known — its opening is probably the most famous musical hook on the planet — but it was the Mahler that made me cry. There are moments of such surpassing beauty and depth in the Mahler piece, and the Concertgebouw’s acoustics cradle them so reverently, that, to use the vernacular, I almost lost it.

Toward the end of the last movement, as I was composing myself, one question ballooned in my head: “Will video games ever be this good?”

One week later I found myself in a hotel room in Santa Monica, Calif., watching a demonstration of Mass Effect, a coming science-fiction role-playing game for the Xbox 360. For days I had been traipsing up and down the beach seeing dozens of new games as part of E3, the game industry’s top conference. And for days I had been trying to refine the question that had emerged alongside Mahler’s horns and tympanis. Clearly, the best games engage the mind on a level that noninteractive linear media simply do not — after all, when was the last time you heard of someone spending hundreds or thousands of hours watching the same movie over and over?

But just as clearly, most games are still missing a very special something that traditional media have spent centuries or even millenia refining. Sitting in that hotel room in California, I realized what that is: emotional engagement. Two decades ago Electronic Arts, now the world’s biggest game publisher, unveiled the marketing slogan, “Can a computer game make you cry?” The answer: not yet.

That I thought this during the Mass Effect demo is not a knock on the game. Just the opposite. Mass Effect, which is forthcoming from Microsoft, seems to play a bit like an epic interactive movie where the player controls the combat, but, more important, helps direct the story. And the story, not the fighting, seems to be the heart of the game.

As in many games, the basic idea in Mass Effect is that you have to save the galaxy from an all-encompassing evil. Fair enough. But without giving away the plot, the depth comes from the fact that you may have to sacrifice friends and decide just what your values are and what the greater good really means.

In Santa Monica the game’s makers showed a scene involving those sorts of choices that literally shut up the whole room. When it was over, a half-dozen normally chatty game writers sat there for a few moments digesting what we had just seen.

It was powerful, but it was still no Mahler.

Much the same could be said of Fallout 3, another of my favorite games from E3. Like its esteemed predecessors, the third installment of the franchise is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where you, the player, decide how to carve out your place in a horrible new version of America. Put simply, you can be a good guy or a bad guy and there will be plenty of heart-rending, suffering people to either assist or exploit.

That is, of course, what makes games distinctive among media: within the confines of the system it is the user who decides what happens next, whether that means turning left or right in Pac-Man or deciding whether to blow up a town for pay or save it in Fallout 3.

But merely providing choice is not the same as generating a deep emotional response.

Yes, when my spaceship in Eve Online gets blown up, I am upset. Yes, when my guild in World of Warcraft beats the latest demon, I swell with pride. Yes, when I finally slay that mythical beast in God of War I feel both insightful and dexterous.

But in all of those situations, I as a player know that the outcome was largely my own doing. And so the emotional connection is more akin to a golfer who shanks a drive or hits a gorgeous approach shot; sure you get happy or sad, but ultimately you can’t be emotionally surprised because you did it to yourself.

And that’s what the best linear media do far better than any game: they generate a response through emotional surprise. I can distinctly remember the first time I read “The Sound and the Fury,” and it was precisely the same kind of revelation as the first time I saw a real Turner painting and the first time I saw the Grateful Dead and the first time I heard Mahler at the Concertgebouw.

Noninteractive media can produce those sorts of surprises precisely because they are not interactive: Every single note, letter, speck of paint or frame of film has been placed precisely in a specific order to produce a specific effect. Ultimately, the only choice the consumer has is whether to go along for the ride or get up and leave.

Of course, a lot of the time people just want to have fun. A few hours after the concert in Amsterdam I went to a disco. For what seemed like the eighth time in three days the D.J. spun a funky remix of Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” And for what seemed like the eighth time in three days the place exploded in gyrating, ecstatic energy.

Was it a deep emotional experience? No. In fact, it felt a bit like playing a video game. And you know what? Sometimes that is just fine.

Harry Potter 7

2007-07-21T04:53:18Z

Yeah, I bought it.

This isn't an original thought or anything, but it's neat to see that many people care about the written word.

bewilderedhero @ 2007-07-03T09:58:00

2007-07-03T14:00:39Z

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
Priest: "No, not if you did not know."
Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"