Wii-itis

We got the Wii about a year ago, but still have only about a half dozen games. The most recent addition to our collection is Godzilla: Unleashed, a fighting game featuring the King of the Monsters himself and nearly all the allies and enemies he's fought with/against over the years. I'm sure I don't have to remind anyone about how cool that is.

Although all our Wii games use a combination of buttons and motions to play, most of them require only slight and relatively slow motions (at least the ones I play). However, in Godzilla your attacks (punches, kicks, and monster-dependent heavy attacks) are modified by how you swing the Wii remote. Jumping and rushing are controlled by swinging the nunchuck. When you're playing a fighting game, you're not going to restrict yourself to slight and slow motions. So, somewhere between last week's mortal combat with Gigan and an epic battle with King Ghidorah (which left the cities of Seattle and Osaka in ruins), I ended up with a pretty sore right elbow. Today's fight between me (I was Anguirus at the time), Godzilla, Destroyah, King Ghidorah, and Space Godzilla didn't help matters.

Before we got one, everyone we knew with a Wii had two things to say about it. First, they would tell us how much fun they are. Second, they'd warn us that you can hurt yourself if you're not careful swinging the controls around. I agree with both statements.

Computer Addicts

So, the wife is playing on the laptop (Bob), the kids are playing on the old desktop (Robby), and I'm playing on the newest edition to our family (HAL). It's amazing how you can have the entire family in just two adjacent rooms and yet have absolutely no personal contact.

HAL (pictures to be forthcoming) is truly a monster of a computer that was built for us by a coworker of mine. It has an AMD 2.61 GHz quad core processor, 4 GB of dual channel DDR3 RAM (it's the fatest RAM available; the sticks actually have their own heat sinks), one of the best video cards on the market (the card has its own cooling fans), dual 18.5" LCD monitors, and (my pride and joy) a solid state hard drive. The hard drive has no moving parts and some of the fastest read and write speeds you can find. HAL has a brag-worthy Windows performance index of 7.1 on a scale from 0 to 7.9.

I'm also pretty sure that HAL has absorbed a noticeable portion of my soul.

I Don't Get You

Every so often I interact with someone I just don't understand. It's not that we disagree politically, although we very well might. It's not our religious beliefs that are different; sometimes the only commonality between me and such people is our religion. It's not even culture or language; once I understood Spanish better I actually felt more of a kinship with the people in Veracruz, Mexico than in many parts of the United States.

What I'm talking about are people whose thought processes and logical sense are so diametrically opposed to my own that I almost feel like I'm talking to some alien being. I can't even guess what motivates them or why they make the decisions they do. Sometimes they do things that I find immensely rude, but they seem completely unaware that their actions are offensive. Trying to engage them in conversation is fruitless since I can't come up with anything that interests both of us. I've even found myself talking about the weather if only because the fact that we're both experiencing it is the only thing we have in common. It's difficult to explain the sensation; I can only describe it as if there were a wall or a thick pane of glass between them and me that makes it hard to communicate. Is this an unusual observation or do other people feel this way?

This sense of strangeness reminds me of the concept of the "Hierarchy of Foreignness" introduced in Orson Scott Card's science fiction novel Ender's Game and its sequels. This hierarchy divides our relationship with other intelligent beings into several tiers: utlanning ("the stranger we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country"), framling ("the stranger we recognize as human, but of another world"), raman ("the stranger we recognize as human, but of another species"), and varelse ("the true alien, which includes all of the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purpose or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it").

Now that I think about it, that last paragraph probably puts me into most people's "alien" category.

Something from the Nightside

A coworker of mine, who happens to share very similar interests in books and entertainment, recommended that I read Simon R. Green's Nightside series. He even loaned me the first book: Something from the Nightside. Before I was halfway through that book, I had bought the first four books from Amazon.com.

The book is told in the first person by John Taylor, a private investigator in London. Taylor has an interesting background: he was born and raised in "the Nightside". As described on the back cover, the Nightside is a "square mile of Hell in the middle of the city, where it's always three AM. Where you can walk beside myths and drink with monsters. Where nothing is what it seems and everything is possible. A region that, although supposedly in the middle of London, actually appears to be larger than London itself." The description is not metaphorical. The Nightside, and other realms like it, are meeting points for people and beings of all time periods, worlds, and realities. It's visited by gods, demons, and everything in between. A person visiting the Nightside may find genuine miracles, or he may meet a grisly fate. Taylor left the Nightside several years ago and swore never to return. But now he has bills to pay and a wealthy woman in distress wants to hire him to find her runaway daughter.

Once in the Nightside, we find out several things about John Taylor. First, Taylor was effectively orphaned after his mother left and his father drank himself to death. Second, his father drank himself to death after finding out that his wife (Taylor's mother) wasn't actually human. Third, like many born in the Nightside, Taylor has a supernatural gift; he is able to find almost anything. Fourth, despite his kindness and loyalty, most Nightside residents are absolutely terrified of John Taylor. This last aspect remains a mystery throughout the book. I can only assume the author further elaborates the reasons for this in the sequels (the 10th book in the series was released just this year).

The book moves quickly and introduces a number of interesting secondary characters. By far, my favorite secondary character is Razor Eddie. Eddie was a high-priced assassin for hire until he had a strange experience. As described in the book:

"Something happened to him on the Street of the Gods, something he still won't talk about, and when he came back it was as something both more and less than human. Now he sleeps in doorways, lives on handouts and eats leftovers, and wanders where he will, living a life of violent penance for his earlier sins. His chosen victims tend to be the bad guys no-one else can touch. The ones who think they're protected from the consequences of their actions by money or power. They tend to end up being found dead in mysterious, upsetting ways. And that's Razor Eddie; an extremely disturbing agent for the good. The good didn't get a say in the matter."

John Taylor himself is an appealing protagonist: mysterious (despite the fact that he's the narrator), resourceful, and loyal to the point of ignoring his instincts of self preservation. The Nightside itself even takes on a character of its own, albeit a schizophrenic one. Now that I think about it, the nominal plot of the book (i.e., the search for the runaway) seems more like a reason to introduce the Nightside and its odd roster of characters. However, Green's Nightside is such a fascinating place that I look forward to reading the sequels.

Crazy Drivers

Because of a doctor's appointment later in the day, this past Thursday morning saw me driving to work rather than taking the bus. The road, which is a two lane highway through the Idaho High Desert, was slightly icy that morning while snow affected visibility. Of course, this slowed traffic down from the usual 65 mph to about 50 mph. Well, the more rational people slowed down to about 50 mph. Every few minutes some idiot who thought everyone else was going too slow would pull into the oncoming lane and zip by at almost 70 mph, leapfrogging in and out of spaces between cars. Of course this would happen after the driver had gotten tired of tailgating some slower driver for several minutes. Since us slower drivers were stretched out in lines about 1/2 of a mile long, these maniacs could travel for a couple miles before they could find a space to merge into. I hope that most of us recognize that this behavior isn't appropriate in the best of driving conditions, let alone on a dark, icy, snowy morning.

In the daylight you can often see the little white crosses that appear by the side of that highway, marking the place where a traffic accident had killed someone. Unfortunately, the ones who would most benefit from the lesson those crosses are intended to teach are too busy trying to pass someone who is driving at something approaching a safe speed. Most of these drivers are trying to get to work; why getting there a few minutes earlier is worth risking their lives and the lives of others is a mystery to me.

Another Great Old Movie

The wonders of Netflix continue. This time I saw a creepy little movie from 1962 called Carnival of Souls. The movie starts out with a young college student named Mary and her friends drag racing another car. When the two cars find themselves on a too-narrow bridge, the unfortunate young women end up going over the side. The authorities quickly start their search, but the river's flooding and muddy waters prevent them from finding the car. However, after about three hours Mary is found crawling out of the river, unable to remember how she escaped the car.

Wanting to leave the tragedy behind, Mary takes a job as an organist in a Salt Lake City church (oddly enough, given the setting, it's not an LDS church). While driving to Utah, she sees a cadaverous-looking man standing next to her window. This is especially creepy considering that she's driving along the highway, while he appears to be standing immediately next to the window. The man disappears only to reappear in the middle of the highway later on in the drive. Mary swerves to miss him, just to find that he's disappeared again.

Mary arrives in Salt Lake City and begins her organist job. Not only does she keep having odd and disturbing visions of the man, but she also finds herself inexplicably drawn to an abandoned carnival (the real-life Saltair Palace, which had been in disuse for several years by this point). During one particularly memorable scene, Mary drifts off into a spell while practicing the organ. She has a vision of the man and multiple couples (none of which appear to be alive) dancing at the carnival. During this spell, the church music she had been playing drifts into a sinister carnival theme. It's clear that the carnival-and the man-are calling to her.

I won't give away the rest of the plot except to say that the movie's twist ending appears to have been inspired by "The Hitch-Hiker"; an episode of  The Twilight Zone from 1960. However, the titular Hitch-hiker didn't seem remotely threatening except for the fact that the woman making the drive can't seem to avoid him; no matter how far she drives, he's always a short distance down the road, trying to thumb a ride. The man in Carnival of Souls is most definitely frightening; his pale skin, darkened eyes, and black suit suggest nothing so much as a reanimated corpse.

Just like with the other classic films I've mentioned on this blog, most modern viewers will find the movie's pacing slow. For those who enjoy older movies, or the occasional episode of The Twilight Zone, Carnival of Souls is definitely one to see.

They Left Me No Choice But To Eavesdrop

This past week I went to Pittsburgh for work-related training. It took two separate flights to get from here to there and three to get back. During the first flight of the return trip, I was treated to the continuation of an extended conversation between two young women that had started in the terminal.

Now, these two were five rows behind me. In an airliner, with its relatively high ambient noise and sound-absorbing furnishings, you should not be able to hear every single word in a conversation held five rows behind you. I know that I didn't care to hear their conversation, nor did the people around me. Yet, these two young women thought their conversation was so important, and were so oblivious to those around them, that they blissfully continued talking at such a high volume that people several rows away could hear every detail. The fact that it was a 6:00 AM flight and that most of us had been awake for at least two hours beforehand made it even more annoying.

I have to wonder; have people always been this self-centered and self-important, or is this behavior found mostly in younger generations? I could understand it if these were children and they didn't realize that an otherwise silent airplane at six in the morning is not the place to hold a loud conversation, but these two appeared to be in their twenties. Since I'm not of the disposition to shush a stranger, I didn't say anything and simply seethed over it. No one else said anything either, so I have to wonder if we were all suffering in silence or if I was the only one bothered by it. That may be the worst part of the whole incident; for all I know, no one else took notice of it and I'm just crazy.