I like words what are words what I am.

I do confess that I must truthfully assess myself as prolix, being as I am a being incapable of brevity; of using one word where two might more aptly or gracefully serve; and most given to verbal floretries, flourishes, falderal, and so on, and so forth, et cetera.

I like our apartment. I really do. The construction people updating the exteriors have been inconsiderate, slow, and aggravating, but the management has been very nice whenever I’ve complained. However, I may end up sending yet another complaint their way - even though the construction has pretty much moved on beyond our building. On Wednesday, full of joy over the day’s events and not full of remembering to watch Smallville (d’OH!), I walked up to our door laden with baggages, packages, and paraphenalia, as well as my Wednesday comic books. Our door smelled of paint, and was no longer blotchy. Yet more cause for joy! I unlocked the door and pushed. It held firm. Perhaps it had been unlocked, and I had just locked it. Ker-clack, heave! No go. I dropped all my stuff and clack-heaved for a few minutes until Matt pulled it open from the inside. They had painted our door shut.

So the next day I rush through my morning routine, run for the door with all my stuff…and it won’t open. After a cold night left alone, it’s even stiffer. Matt is in the shower, and I can’t get out. It was really astonishing. It’s not like I LIKE going to work - not the going, not the work!—but being unable to leave is really rather frightening! I tried bracing myself on the corner of the wall, I pulled until my hands were aching and my back and knees were making ominous popping sounds. Finally, bawling like a 6-year-old, I got Matt to de-soap and open the door with manly strength and bad grace.

Being trapped is a very odd feeling. It’s humiliating, and robs you of your feeling of power. I mean, it was my own apartment, I wasn’t in any danger, and I cried like a child. Scary.

One-two punch! WHAM! I got an interview for a job! BAM! We are closing on the house.

Now we just have to add some garlic and kick it up a notch!

The other day a link from Penny Arcade led me foolishly hither. I say foolishly, not for the reason some of you may suspect, as you recoil in fear from the prospect of Whisker Bob the cellar-dweller posing in a Speedo and draping himself artisticly over a vintage pinball machine – but rather because it was foolish to expect such a contest, promising a valuable prize rather than just bragging rights, would really have that indefinable something we call authenticity. One has only to click on the “top 10” to notice that, instructions not withstanding, nary a one of the female contestants has any trace of gaming paraphenalia in her pin-up – in fact, in many cases, you’d be hard-pressed to find paraphenalia of any sort. As an aside, I will say that this is really rather awful. Assuming such a contest to have some amusement value, is it really that unlikely that there are sexy gamer girls about, so we must allow random cheesecake entries to fill the ranks? And gaming references can be very cheesecakey — see the burgeoning subculture of cosplay or slap one of these across your tracts of LAN.

But I digress. The point here is that these NPC chicklets (Ling Xiaoyu and I do humbly entreat them to bring it.) had a list of favorite games next to their pictures. Three apiece. I was staggered. Three! I mean, I don’t even play that many games by web standards, but mostly there are about half a dozen I like equally well — how would I ever pick THREE? And then, even as I pondered the complexity of the question of “favorite game” and how no ONE video or computer game could ever really hold such absolute sway, I remembered nethack.

Nethack is my favorite computer game. It’s portable — I can play it anywhere I can utilize ssh. It’s got GREAT graphics. Look at this jabberwock: J. See how the dangerous curves of the beast are only sketched, leaving the rest to the imagination?

In all seriousness, nethack’s strength is its simplicity. New versions come out all the time. They’re free. They’re made for the love of the game. The game is endless in its variety — the jokes, the versatility, the way you can tame almost anything, polymorph into anything, eat anything (if you’re polymorphed properly). You can ride your pets. You can tame a dragon, or become a dragon and lay an egg, then protect it for an instant pet who wuvs you. You can swim (or fail to), if you don’t mind your potions diluting and your scrolls and spellbooks fading. If you throw a boomerang, or even the mighty hammer of Thor, at an orc or a troll, he MIGHT JUST CATCH IT! You can CAN corpses for later consumption. You can steal from shops, and get the Kops called on you. You can pray to your god, or tick her off. You can rub a magic lamp and make a wish.

Why is nethack so multifarious, so deep and ever-changing? Because it’s simple. To add a new weapon, a new class, a new monster, a new level, all you need do is write some code. No graphics, no rendering. Its limits are the limits of imagination. That’s what a game should be.

We went to see “Bubba Ho-Tep” last night. Wonko, Matt and I were all fairly excited (I cannot speak to the feelings of our other friends) about the prospect of a new Bruce Campbell movie, especially one billed as “One man is Elvis. The other thinks he’s JFK. They live in a rest home and fight the undead!”

As Matt said on leaving the movie, “Well, it was good, but it wasn’t the movie I went to see.” It certainly wasn’t an absurdist retro campy zombie romp. I think it would be better billed as “Old men reclaim dignity and identity by battling the unknown.”

In short, “Bubba Ho-Tep” is a lot more serious than you would think. While Bruce Campbell does a really superb Elvis voice - totally believable yet not over-exaggerated, and the film does have some laugh-out-loud moments, the real “horror” in the movie is not the undead monster, but rather the true horror of growing old. People leave you, they no longer care about you; you’re seen as a child, less than a person; you can remember your glory days but not reclaim them; you move slowly, your body fails you; and lastly, you become so involved in your own misery that you start to lose yourself, your joy, your personality. It’s a very serious topic for a movie about a mummy in cowboy boots - and that’s one of the movie’s problems. It’s based on a short story - and it’s much easier in a literary form, especially a short one, to play with betraying people’s expectations of genre and mood. In this case, it’s hard to reconcile the soul-sucking monster in a feathered hat with the palpable pathos of the main characters - it’s hard to know what you’re watching.

That said, it’s a good movie. It’s well-directed, the effects are quite sufficient. The pacing is quite slow - the “building dread” section of a horror movie is here expanded and kept rather low-key. The most impressive thing is, I think, the serious message. There aren’t many movies that I am aware of about the horror of growing old - the first one that pops to mind about a rest home is “Cocoon”, which is of course partially about CHEATING old age, and therefore can’t really be said to depict its horrible visage. The real villain of this movie is anonymity - it’s not that Bubba Ho-Tep kills, it’s the fact that he destroys the soul and personality in so doing. The real fight is against complacence, conformity, and the demands of the body over the spirit. That’s why, I think, it’s important that the main characters are or think they are Elvis and JFK - and why it doesn’t matter whether they are or not. Their glorious heroic identities are the things they are protecting, not their fragile and dwindling lives. You could say that it’s about finding a good death. (And takin’ care of bidness.)

7.5 out of 10. Bottom Line: A little slow/boring, but full of character (mostly Elvis’s) and a compelling human struggle. Slightly schizoid mood. If I’ve told you once, I’ve now told you twice—I reserve the right to waffle!

I have a weekend coming to me! A real, honest-to-gosh weekend, where I can sleep in (rather than getting up before 7 to keep my grandpa company) in my own bed! (rather than my grandpa’s or my sister’s guest beds) It’s kind of dizzying (rather than sweeping up my sister’s kitchen while dancing to the soundtrack of Soapdish—wait, no, that’s dizzying, too.)

Stay tuned for updates on our house situation (to sum up: made offer, offer accepted contingent on them getting the house they want. They find out about their house today.) We’ll see whether my dreams are prophetic—I dreamt we got the house.

In the far-away days when I rode Tri-Met to work (probably sometime this summer), I once found myself seated by a girl of about my age. I had been in a hurry to get to work that morning, and so I had pulled on a sundress, handed down from my sister. The sundress in question was one of a series of products of my sister’s love of celestial fabric. This one featured yellow moons and stars burnished with bright orange and red, cavorting around a royal blue sky with several florid cupids and puckish men in the moon. The cut of the dress makes me look about 9 years old, my hair was pulled back in a lazy half-back, and I much doubt I had had the time or inclination to busy myself with cosmetics that morning. My legs were bare, and probably a few days past a shaving.

The girl who sat down beside me was a vision. I do not pretend that I approve of monochromatic wardrobes, so I did not covet her outfit—but she was very well put together. She was a blonde with lightly tanned skin, wearing a pair of jeans with a white hibiscus print on a beige background, a beige crop-top, and platform sandals of a fibrous description. As I’ve said, this stuff is not my style, and I wondered that wearing nylons with platform slide-sandals hadn’t claimed her life ere this; but she looked good, and I was suddenly keenly aware that this girl had put a lot more time into what she was wearing shopping than I had into presenting a professional appearance at my job. I was suddenly very embarassed of my sundress (ironically, all the extreme low-maintenance clothes I have are gaudy and noticable) and buried myself in my book. A few stops later, she got up to go, and bent over to say to me, without a trace of sarcasm, “I adore your dress.”

I grinned, and decided not to worry so much.

Yesterday, on a mission to fetch foam core from the nearby framing establishment, I swooped down the office stairwell with great galumphing stomps, humming, if I recall correctly, the Elvis remix of which we spoke of late. My feet, neither broad enough for a normal case nor thin enough for a narrow case, were sloshing around in my low-top Doc Martens. I was glad to be in motion and generally rather pleased with myself.

I rounded the corner at a clip, stomped with my left, stomped with my right—and apparently the heavy sole of my Doc had hit the creaking stair at an angle, for I found myself rapidly stomping my foot into an unnatural perpendicular. Luckily, when propelling myself downstairs at unsafe speeds, I make it a practice to quasi-brachiate between the rails, and both my hands were thus engaged. I was therefore able to pull myself out of my stomp with both arms and, more impressively, I managed to make no sound as my ankle (so it seemed) dislodged from its pinioning tendons, rammed through several fragile muscles, and broke out through the skin to accuse me.

The above did not occur, but it jolly well felt like it did!

For long moments I stood, holding my weight on the rails and staring at my ankle, my mouth imprisoning all species of wail and curse. Finally, I reasoned that the best way to determine whether it was actually damaged was to attempt to walk, and even more finally, I managed to convince myself to do it. It hurt quite a bit, but it seemed structurally stable, and the pain was constant, not throbbing with each step. I limped out into the pretentious lobby, across the marble tiles, and to the glass door. Somewhere in the lobby, I realized I couldn’t breathe. My lungs, small at the best of times, now seemed the size of my cupped hand. Reaching the door, I clutched the handle and stood in the dazzling sun, trying to breathe deeply. I could not. My heart did not seem to be in my throat, but there was the associated feeling of intensity and dislocation throughout my chest. Finally, as the September sunlight dazzled into a white glow around me, it occured to me I might be passing out, and I walked over to the pretentious leather chairs, very overstuffed, that make their den in the lobby. I sat down, and watched with detached interest a troupe of sensations make their way through my body; The dislocation gave way to a crystal clarity that remained to sketch in detail the wave of heat and tingling wave of cold that followed, the sudden throbbing of my pulse in my arms, and the slowly-settling calm.

I realized my ankle felt fine, and that I hadn’t even limped to the chair. The sunlight had ceased its tumescence, and I stepped outside.

So last night we bought the game
Munchkin, and took it over to the abode of some friends. Munchkin is a rather simple game with a lot of rules (no, really) which pokes fun at the stereotypical D&D dungeon crawl — each player controls a “character” who is really no more than the sum of their magic items, and you all kill monsters and take their stuff while lying, bribing, and cheating your way to the top of the pack. Towards the end of the evening, when sleep was seeming appealing and victory was lurking around, waiting to pounce, a little bit of grumpiness entered the atmosphere. Not big grumpiness, not shouting or tooth-gnashing or anything, but I guess I am a big cholerophobe, because when we left, my stomach was clenched like a child’s fist around an enemy’s ponytail.

So today I will be musing on competitiveness in games — not the characteristics in a person which make them prone to it, but the characteristics in a GAME which encourage it.

I mentioned to Matt in the car that he had in the past put his dislike of my beloved
Lunch Money down to its over-competitive nastiness, while he is a big fan of Munchkin. He responded that Munchkin does not force you to attack other players, whereas in Lunch Money, that’s the entire action of the game.

Upon further rumination, I think that may be part of the problem! At first, in Munchkin, you have to be nice to people so they’ll help you. But as the game progresses, attacks start to be advantageous or necessary. In one case, some people are ahead and no one will help them anyway, so they are free to alienate the others. In another, someone will win if you don’t attack them, so you jolly well attack them! Let’s face it, the game has, “Stab your buddy” as part of the tagline. By the end, you’re doing all sorts of nasty things in-game when everyone is used to the more cooperative feel of the beginning of the game. Whereas in Lunch Money, you have to hurt people from the beginning — it’s not a shock, it’s not a betrayal, it’s the way the game is played. You are emotionally detached from the “nastiness”.

Also, Lunch Money is a short game. You die? You get dealt back in in 10 minutes. I think our game of Munchkin yesterday took more than two hours.

Furthermore, I think people get grouchy when they have built something and it is taken away from them or ruined. Magic: the Gathering is prone to this. Settlers of Catan, much less — and you’ll note that almost nothing you have built or acquired in Catan (roads, settlements) can be taken from you. In Magic, every freaking thing can. In Lunch Money or Brawl, you don’t build anything. In Munchkin, you do. I think we get angry when people knock down our blocks. Or our house of cards.