The comments function has broken again, and I think I know why. Blogger assigns every posting a unique number, which the comments code uses to reference which post a comment is attached to. Recently Blogger’s master numbering rolled past 10,000,000. It’d been 7 digits for a long time, and now it’s 8. I took a cursory look at the commenting code (a php script) and found one place where it appeared to use a 7-digit number as the base number. It hasn’t retained a single comment since Blogger hit 8 digits a few days ago–though it still emails me what you type in–leading me to believe this is the problem. I don’t know php at all, so it’s not something I can fix. If any php wizards out there want to take a look at the code and see if they can fix it, let me know. The commenting system I’m using isn’t supported by the author anymore, and the last time I tried to find the site I got it from, I couldn’t even locate it. I’ve been planning to switch blogging systems this summer, but whether or not I can do that before my travel starts, I don’t know. Nag dabbit!
Category: Uncategorized
Ah, heck. I’m way behind on Dispatches because I’ve been spending evenings watching the second season of The Sopranos. And on Sunday night we had a mafia dinner party at Ray & Christine’s. She made grilled sausage & peppers, and a seafood marinara on spaghetti, and then we watched The Godfather on Ray’s ginormous home theatre. What can I say? Leave the gun, take the cannolis. We even had cannolis for dessert.
Booked solid now. Wednesday night next week I’m going to NYC, no return ticket. Might be a week or two. It’s a shuttle airline, flat rate, $130 direct Seattle-NYC. Amazing. Mike and I are shooting a bunch of short digital video pieces for his website, and happily his publisher is paying for the whole thing. The day I get in, Thursday, Mike is doing an appearance on TechTV and wants me to appear in the bit posing as Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple. I need a black turtleneck. No idea if I can act, even in a comedy bit. Mike on IM: “Best way to find out is to stick you on live national television.” Should be completely stupid and fun if it goes off. Must remember: no profanity. Fuck. I’ve never been to New York before.
Double booked: Seattle to Copenhagen to London on April 23rd with Karen. We actually fly over the roof of the world instead of via NYC then across the Atlantic. We stay with James Wallis in London for a bit, and then eventually take the chunnel to Paris. Then it’s the train to Switzerland to visit Karen’s college roommate, and then a flight to Barcelona. Two weeks or so in Spain. My aunt and uncle live in Malaga now on the southern coast, and the guys who do the Spanish editions of Unknown Armies, Three Days to Kill, and Puppetland are in Seville. Our trip is much inspired by looking at who we know lives where. We have to travel cheap, so we rely on the kindness of friends and family over there. Poor as church mice, but at least we can take a trip.
Triple booked: Back to the UK in July as guest for a convention called Convulsion. Then, I expect, at least six months of no travel whatsoever. Second half of the year is about hunkering down and writing something or other.
That’s what I did today. Worked on UA2, back after a week away from the project to push forward on Mike’s website revamp. So much to do still. Started writing new stuff for the GM section. I get to write up the profiles of the Sect of the Naked Goddess/the Affinites and what used to be the True Order of Saint-Germain. Finally nailed these things down after several years of hand-waving. In UA2 you can play a Room of Renunciation! Bwah hah hah…
There’s another DG computer game image I forgot about. It’s not a live, in-engine screenshot like the one linked in yesterday’s dispatch, but it is kind of cool. It’s at Flying Lab’s site.
Here’s the funniest damn thing I’ve read all week, a beautiful, savage skewering of a journalist whose laziness and presumption are a wonder to behold.
Much to write about, including a night of city politics and a morning at an athletic club, but time is short and I must fly, you fools!
Finally, our work on the Delta Green computer game bears a little public fruit. Check it out!
The new issue of Tablet is out, and their web site has two of my pieces: my film column and an interview I did with film archivist Dennis Nyback about his collection of early-cinema erotica.
Happy Birthday! Dept.
It’s about 5:30 in the morning and according to the laws of the land, I turned 31 five and a half hours ago. Ugh.
My friend and colleague Allen Varney wrote me tonight to say happy birthday, and to ask why, in his characterization, I was so driven to do things. I don’t have a ready answer, though he says I told him something a few years ago by way of explanation that he no longer remembers. I don’t recall myself what facile answer I gave him. It seems like the kind of question that boils down to, “Why are you the way you are?” and that’s a question only a lifetime can answer, if then.
It does call to mind a handful of random notes, which I set down herein.
For starters, it makes me think of this weekend. I got up late Saturday morning and went to work, arriving at my studio by 11am. I worked for about four hours on Mike Daisey’s website, beginning to implement the revamp I designed a few weeks ago. It’s still underway and not yet live.
After four hours or so of this I left and arrived at Ray and Christine’s house for my birthday party. Christine made a taco feast, with apple pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert, per my grateful request. It was wonderful. Karen, Scott, and Jane arrived for the little soiree. I stayed for more than twelve hours of eating, drinking, and movies, finally leaving after 4am. I brought two films: the worst movie of all time, Battlefield: Earth, and the best movie of all time, Chungking Express. We also watched Girls Town, a Mystery Science Theater 3000 entry from the late 1950s, a juvenile delinquent melodrama starring Mamie van Doren, Mel Torme, Paul Anka, and Dick Contino, among others.
I got up this morning late–again–and hit the studio a little past noon. I worked for twelve hours straight, continuing my revamp of Mike’s site, finally bailing just after 10:30 pm. Then I returned to Ray’s to watch another MST3K flick, Double 007, a stunning late-1960s Italian James Bond knockoff starring Neil Connery, Sean’s brother. The theme song, “OK Connery!”, was a wonder to behold. Ray and I killed ample time before and afterwards jawing over this and that, including an extended discussion of the gaming industry. Like any small group, the gaming industry has an ample share of love affairs, doomed relationships, and so forth, and this sort of shopworn gossip and reminiscence proved to be the bulk of our latter conversations. We concluded with Ray’s plans for what to do should he ever become rich as Bill Gates; his primary goal is to build a 100-story statue of Ricardo Montalbahn in the heart of Manhattan, ensuring that no one could ever get a helicopter shot of New York without audiences breaking out in spontaneous laughter.
I came home and flipped through a copy of Delta Green, rereading the opening vignette supposedly by Maj. General Reginald Fairfield. That fictitious email, if you look at it closely, is dated February 25, 1994. It has this date because that’s when I wrote it. I typed it up the night of my birthday then, drunk and miserable for various reasons, intending it to start the book. It was three more years before the book finally came out, with that piece of writing there at the start of it, just as I’d planned.
A year or two before that, a friend told me I was the only person he’d ever met of whom he could truly say, “That guy is driven by demons.”
I had no better explanation then than I do now. I only know what I see and feel. The moving hand, having writ, moves on.
Movies Good and Bad Dept.
Well, Ray and I saw Queen of the DAMN! this afternoon and it was dogshit. The voiceovers were particularly grating, and the final scenes broke faith with earlier strong positions the film took (early, vampirism = barbarism; late, vampirism = romance). Worst of all, however, is the clear feeling that it was scripted by someone who really did like the book and wanted to make it work and just failed to do so. It’s a never-shoulda-been kind of project. But it’s no Battlefield: Earth or Mission to Mars, which remain two of the worst big-budget films ever made.
Tonight I saw a far better film: Dersu Uzala, a 1974 film by Akira Kurosawa I wasn’t familiar with. It’s based on a memoir written by a pre-revolution Russian officer and explorer who surveyed the frontier of eastern Russia. During his expeditions he traveled with a local hunter/guide, Dersu Uzala, and they became good friends. It’s a story of a guy whose entire life is in the wild, and ultimately how he is just as much a creature of the woods as the animals around him, and equally as unsuited to life in civilization. It’s a sad story but a beautiful one, and the wilderness looks fantastic in Kurosawa’s capable hands.
In between I went by the comic book store for the first time in a couple months and emptied out my box. The standout was the latest issue of Eightball, the series by Daniel Clowes of Ghost World fame. This issue, #22, is perhaps the best yet. It’s the story of a small town, Ice Haven, and a missing child. Instead of doing one story straight through, however, there’s twenty-nine separate stories that overlap and interconnect. Major characters in some stories are minor characters in others, or even just glimpsed in the background of a panel. The cumulative effect is very powerful, a mix of humor, tragedy, and pathos. It’s amazing stuff, completely relying on the medium of comics to work properly. If you haven’t checked in with comics or with Dan Clowes in a while, order a copy of Eightball #22 and be amazed at what a master of the medium can accomplish. No prior knowledge of anything except basic literacy required; it’s a completely self-contained work. Get it.
Music and Cultists Dept.
Karen and I went to see jr play tonight. She’s a singer-songwriter type of gal, and I’ve been going to her performances for almost four years now, several dozen times at this point. jr has a beautiful voice and a way of playing guitar that’s unique, an amazing crystalline clarity somehow flowing liquidly at the same time. I’d encourage you to listen to some of her songs at her page on mp3.com; there are high and low bandwidth versions, and you can also just download some of the songs in mp3 format to play on your computer.
When I’m not a jr cultist, I’m writing about cultists. Today I was at Flying Lab again writing material on a cult we’re using in the prototype for E3. It’s a cult I made up for this purpose, but it’ll probably turn up in the game in some form. I took the inspiration for it from the work I did on The Golden Dawn years ago, and specifically the whole Sheela-na-gig thing. If you aren’t familiar with the Sheelas, this site has info and photographs.
Friday, it’s time for the Bad Movie Club to reconvene. Our selection for the morrow is, of course, Queen of the Damned, whose reputation precedes it. We expect it to be atrocious. Damn shame it’s the last film from Aaliyah; I quite liked her in the enjoyable Jet Li flick Romeo Must Die.
I keep thinking about summer. This summer holds such promise. I’ll be done with UA2, and my only major project will be the DG computer game. That means a big chunk of time I can spend on whatever I damn well want to. I don’t even know what I’m going to do yet, but chances are excellent that I’m going to write something for myself, an actual personal project. I’ve been turning things down as they come up, saying no to everything, in hopes that I can keep half of my summer to myself. Here’s hoping.
Saturday some friends are hosting a birthday-ish party. Food and drinks and of course, a screening of the crowning glory of Hollywood: Battlefield: Earth. Oh man. I can’t wait. I’m especially eager to see this massive turd again because they allegedly edited the film for home-video release, changing it around a bit to make it suck less. Hah! I just fear they might have removed the awesome, stupefying scene where John Travolta whips out his blaster and shoots the legs off cows. Wow. Even just remembering the scene from that day in the theater makes me heave.
I forgot to mention: we saw jr play at a great place I hadn’t been to in years, Sit-and-Spin. It’s a combination laundromat/restaurant/nightclub downtown, and it’s fantastic. The performance space in back is actually one of the best in Seattle. It’s beautiful and intimate, and the sound system is actually good. That’s no small feat. Plenty of clubs dump bucks on a great system and then assign a random ass clown to run the sound board. In no time the thing’s so out of whack that few bands emerge intact. But jr’s show at Sit-and-Spin was perfect. Beautifully clear, wonderful sound. Must return. Check out their web site for a precious few shots of the awesome decor. Though I still miss the homey OK Hotel (an earthquake casualty) and the raucous, David Lynch-inspired 700 Club (their ghost of a web site still lives). For a while Glancy and I were quite the clubgoers, spending most every weekend at the OK or the 700, carousing like jackals. But eventually we got respectable or something, and now those clubs are gone. So it goes.
Which reminds me of a night we were at the 700 Club, drunk as lords. We wandered out into downtown and, lo and behold, across the street was a brightly-lit all-night porn shop. In we went, looking for laffs, and man we found them. They had the best porn magazine title ever on display: MANDATE. Oh lord. We laughed ourselves stupid over that one.
Ah, it’s late. Tomorrow I need to take some Godlike files over to Detwiller and then see if the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.1.3 I started before I left my studio on Wednesday worked or if it destroyed everything. Should I drive up to find a smoking ruin where Activspace* once stood, I’ll have my answer.
Then it’s time for Queen of the DAMN!!!
* I love that great description Activspace’s site has of the building my studio is in. They leave out the part where it’s across the street from a gun store.
Ridicule and Randomness Dept.
If you have the misfortune of knowing who author Elizabeth Wurtzel is, here’s the funniest thing you’ll read all week.
Today was another Flying Lab/UA2 split day. I feel like I’m working two jobs right now, and I guess I am. At the Lab, we did an interview with the editor of a computer game magazine who is giving us a feature first-look article for their E3 issue. It went really well. The guy is a Lovecraft fan and really got into the ideas we were discussing. A promising start to our long-term buzz efforts.
After I left the Lab, Karen and I took a long walk all over hill and dale. We retired to her studio for a little dinner and then I went to my studio for some UA2 work. I finished the first draft of Artifacts, the last chapter in the Cosmic section of the book, and sent it off to Greg. He turned in his edits of the first four chapters in that section, and so I tidied them up and sent them off to some folks for their comments. We’re almost done with part three.
Last night I went to a reading and Q&A by S.T. Joshi, who wrote the definitive biography of H.P. Lovecraft and also edited the critical and annotated editions of HPL’s fiction. Joshi is a very entertaining guy and it was a fun evening. He did some readings from a new omnibus of HPL’s poetry, including a delightful one: a poem HPL wrote at the age of seven in which he condensed The Oddessy down to 88 lines, using the rhyme scheme from Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Impressive as hell for a seven-year-old and very funny, with lots of wonderfully strained rhymes and such. Joshi lives in Seattle now, which was news to me.
Afterwards, I joined my friends Daniel and Heather at their house for dinner. They showed me a beautiful, awful, hilarious book called The Museum of Bad Art: Art Too Bad To Be Ignored. There’s no real way to do it justice, but you can visit the Museum’s web site and see for yourself.
Hell, I can’t resist. This is the piece whose discovery spurred the creation of MOBA. All hail Lucy, and read the glorious story of how she came to be.
Now if we can just get her and OMAC together, we’ll really have something.
And Europeans Boggle At Us Dept.
Well, no sooner did the Swiss design a replica of Bespin than the darn French went and created a giant autonomous mobile flower pot. It’s a freaking triffid, I’m telling you. Check out the animated GIF for the full horror. And this atrocity once again comes from James, who has somehow become a eurofillerfilter.