Anchor Christmas Ale

 
I first had Anchor Christmas a couple of years back. I wasn't impressed. Christmas beers are hard, either nothing special or too heavy on the nutmeg. A few manage to get it about right, but for the most part it's nice packaging around something that would work just as well any time of the year (I'm looking at you, every brewery that puts out a passable porter/stout and tells me it's holiday-themed). But in the spirit of seasonal forgiveness, I decided to give Anchor another chance to get me drunk this Christmas.

The winter warmer-style beer pours medium dark; I'd call it mildly translucent.

It smells heavily of malt (in deference to the style), with light hints of some vague spice.  Let's call it clove?

Nutmeg (here we go) hits the tongue first, but is soon washed away by dry, hearty malt, which dominates the flavor until the end. The post-malt swim is short and dry, like the ghost of a beer.

Medium-bodied, the beer feels like it's aiming for heaviness, but falls a little short. It's makes for a decent session beer, good news for those who run the family-presents-meal marathon today.

Overall, this one is mild and inoffensive, but short and pleasant enough that a second may well be in order for a Christmas afternoon.

Grade: B

The Disaster Artist

"I'll do my own project and it will be better than everybody else. You think this movie we just saw was tragedy? No. Not even close. I will make tragedy. People will see my project and... you know what? They will not sleep for two weeks. They will be completely shocked. You watch."
-- Tommy Wiseau, per The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell 

I'm not going to try to explain The Room. Because I can't. Anyone who claims they can adequately explain the film in less time than it takes to watch it is lying. But as a psychological case study meets film-making how-not-to crash course, The Disaster Artist is worthwhile. At the very least, it's entertaining.

Greg Sestero is a struggling actor and much-too loyal and forgiving friend, which, combined, help to explain how a good-hearted guy with potential and a wild dream fell into the orbit of Tommy Wiseau and thenceforth into The Room. First brought on as a line producer, Sestero eventually inherits the role of "the Mark," best friend and cuckold-maker to Wiseau's protagonist "Johnny." With ghostwriter Tom Bissell, Sestero spins a yarn of the inept production of a bad movie and a decade-long friendship with the incomprehensible Wiseau. 

Alternating chapters are dedicated to Sestero's stop-start acting career. These chapters make for a decent story and the reader feels for his frustrations, but they are fraught with a burning question: Where's Tommy?

Luckily, Tommy is never more than a page or two away from calling Sestero, or showing up at the apartment he's let to Sestero, or moving in with Sestero. All the while, Wiseau manipulates the poor kid (at least twenty years his junior, though no one's totally sure of Wiseau's true age, likely not even Wiseau himself) into hanging out with him--and no one else, ever--or indulging him in his self-evidently awful "feature movie" project. These traits--the manipulation, the neediness, the pitiable misconceptions about himself and the world around him--veer from funny to sad to terrifying at a pace that leaves the reader marveling at Sestero's hardiness.

The world has plenty of people who exhibit these behaviors, of course, but few of them have a bank account that an uncircumspect teller would describe as "a bottomless pit." However and whenever he attained his fortune (Half-Drunken theory: Tommy Wiseau is an exiled heir to the Habsburg throne, allowed to keep his money in exchange for never returning to Austria), he has been insulated from ever having to embrace anything like reality. Sestero calls The Room a testament to "unrelenting drive and determination," proof that a dream--however ill-concieved--can be made real. But it helps a lot when you're able to put up six million dollars of your own money to ensure that that dream is realized.

And by all appearances, Wiseau believed that The Room would be a genuine masterpiece, a modern day Sunset Boulevard, a comparison Sestero makes in regard to his relationship with Wiseau, except that Norma Desmond's pretensions to talent and fame weren't entirely delusional. It's hard to know what he'd make of this book. Or the title. But when his film continues to make money hand over fist, it's hard to tell him otherwise. It's not Avatar, but people on multiple continents continue to line up to see The Room--and convince their friends to join them--in a way they don't for films that they think are well-made. Blame my generation's love affair with irony (though I'd argue that many people's love for The Room punches straight through irony, passing into total sincerity), but Tommy Wiseau has done very well for himself, if not for the reasons he might think.

There's a lost chance toward the end of Disaster Artist, when the world premiere of The Room brings Wiseau's dream to life, to explain how that first small, cobbled together audience interpreted the film and how it shifted from that into the cult hit acknowledged in the introduction. All we get is a beaming, tearful Wiseau and a dashed-off "proud of you, buddy" from a guy who's spent the previous 300 pages catering to everything that the cult is dying know. But maybe that's not Sestero's story to tell. As he observes, "The magic of The Room derives from one thing: no one interprets the world the way Tommy Wiseau does."

Wiseau is a perfect little mystery: an indeterminate origin, an unfounded self-confidence, a palpable disconnect with human experience; the money might help explain those last two things but where did that come from? Sestero takes a stab at unpacking the mystery, outfitting Wiseau with a thin biography informed by vague, sparse, and largely unverifiable facts. This biography does provide an plausible source for The Room's funding, but the explanation for how that money was generated is not a tidy one, by Sestero's admission.

The Room should be some kind of Kaufman-esque hoax (Half-Drunken theory: Tommy Wiseau is Andy Kaufman), but if it were a hoax, we'd know. Wouldn't we? No parody could be this perfect; we'd see the strings. There'd have to be some kind of wink to the audience. But there isn't. The Disaster Artist seals it--this movie really, somehow, was allowed to happen. Real human beings experienced and endured Tommy Wiseau in all his paranoia, poor judgment, and financial schizophrenia (sometimes a miser, sometimes spending lavishly and nonsensically).

Tommy Wiseau exists and the way he interacts with the world is every bit as bizarre as fans would suspect, while simultaneously so disappointingly benign. He wears his insecurities on his sleeve, making for an awkward obsessive whose every short coming is telegraphed. And his failure to assimilate is not through a lack of trying; at heart, he's more American than you or I. Wiseau is not a mad villain, just mad. And if The Room brings joy to audiences, he can't be a totally awful filmmaker. Just kind of an awful filmmaker.

The Room is still a terrible movie, after all.

Grade: B+

Now You're Just Making Crap Up, Part II

A while back, I asked if any members of my generation had experienced the fabled scoreless youth sporting event, the kind that were supposed to have ruined us for the real world. I'll get to those momentarily.

To start, Google turned up this from The Western Center For Journalism (I don't know, either) whose motto is, "Informing And Equipping Americans Who Love Freedom." No, really. This obviously well-oiled news organization links to a piece from Glenn Beck's The Blaze (at this point, we'll pretend we buy every word--fragile egos, you see) about a youth football league in California fining teams $200 when winning by 35 points or more. The fine is overkill, sure, but as discussed in my previous post, a simple skill imbalance and the easily-flustered nature of children could easily produce a four-touchdown deficit. How many youth coaches would feel good about themselves nabbing another TD at that stage? What's to prove? It would be considered classless even in the NFL. And this still doesn't exactly fit the "scoreless" bill. But both articles run on the assumption that these sorts of things are becoming "more and more prevalent," while providing no evidence outside of this particular anecdote.

A similar presumption is made in this overlong piece in the Boston Globe, which at least has the courtesy to acknowledge the complicity of gutless parents.

So we're back to nothing on this. On the whole, no one I heard from was familiar with these leagues. A few seconded my memory of mercy rules, but nothing quite like the neutered, feelings-oriented farces that we've heard tell about. One aspect I hadn't thought of, though: memorabilia--the ribbons and trophies commemorating participation. Yes, the famous 'participation trophies,' shiny harbingers of millennials' presumed entitlement. There might be something there: years of receiving physical manifestations of the most basic commitment to a youth sports team. Didn't matter if you were a star or a benchwarmer. How is that not supposed to spoil children and warp their expectations of success?

To start, kids know what those baubles are. They see every other kid get one, regardless the merit, and they know. I was crap at most youth sports. I played badly and got frustrated. Or I got bored. Either way, I usually ended up following through because my parents wouldn't let me quit I was afraid of letting someone down. I learned to ride the bench. Sitting was a better fat kid sport, anyway. Except for that one year of youth basketball when all the other kids came up to my shoulder--I grabbed every rebound without having to jump. Those were good times.

In all other cases, though--baseball, football, two weeks of soccer--I knew I hadn't earned those ribbons, didn't deserve those trophies. They were reminders of a mandated charity of which I was the recipient. They didn't make me feel good and some part of me knew I couldn't expect that to go on forever. I won't say the trophies lit a fire in me, or prodded me to work harder for future trophies. But they did teach me which achievements meant something and which didn't. I'll take your trophy (refusing would be a dick move). But I know what matters to me. I still regard that as a pretty good lesson.

Finally, and slightly more interestingly, even if those trophies had imparted entitlement issues upon myself and my generation (and I'm sure they overinflated some poor kid's head), who was handing them out so recklessly? Did we ask for them? Possibly, after we saw other kids get trophies. Kids always crave what other kids have, even if they don't actually want it. 

However. Aren't these the occasions to explain to your stupid son or daughter that they hadn't earned a trophy? That they needed to work harder next time and maybe the trophy would be theirs? Or was it easier to throw a hunk of metal at the brat and get on with your day? The same goes for the presumptive scoreless games.

I've said before that I don't believe in generation blaming. It's entirely dependent upon a myopic single lane perspective, it creates needless division, and it gets us nowhere. But let's recognize our own faults, shall we? Take a serious look at what we're bringing to the table before we huff at somebody we don't know for being conceived thirty years before or after we were? Because we have real problems to contend with.

And there are no points for making shit up.

So... Something Happened

Wow, it's been a while. I'd like to say that school is sapping all of my time and energy but that's not totally accurate. I should probably explain. You deserve that much.

I woke up in the hospital a couple of days ago. And I had no memory of the previous few weeks. Well, not no memory. Just a very... fuzzy one. I recall some faces and places, filtered through the dense fog of a particularly intense bender. Doctors said I had been in a coma after battling a particularly intense "fugue state," in which I was totally out of my own head. That explained the empty memory bank. They wouldn't go into details, of course. That's doctors for you: they'll go on in excruciating detail about your brain aneurysm or your clogged aorta or your unhealthy-looking genitals. But when you want to know what the hell happened, then it's all patient-confidentiality this and the-police-will-explain-further that.

That's about when the police showed up.

Turns out that, in my fugue state, I had... done some things. To storefronts, peoples' homes, city property. I maimed more than a few people; broken bones, mangled limbs, one poor guy's rectum will never work right again. Plus the emotional trauma. Witnesses described a miniature tornado. Cars tossed into buildings, police and firefighters swatted away like so many mosquitoes. It required a t-shirt cannon loaded with two-liter bottles of Dr. Pepper to take me down, apparently (they weren't sure why that ammunition was more effective than the t-shirts and rubber balls they had been using before; something about the sugary explosion, perhaps).

I'm being sued by at least a dozen different people and organizations. Best case scenario: they consolidate it into a single class action so I can save time and only end up out a few tens of thousands of dollars.

The officers asked if I had any memory of why I had done this. What might have initiated my fugue state (I wasn't aware that cops were in the habit of encouraging an insanity defense, but they were very nice gentlemen, given what I had done to some of their colleagues). And, truthfully, I didn't. One moment I was searching the Internet for some blog material, the next I was in one of those beds that jackasses like to move up and down, up and down (I only did it eight or nine times).

The last thing I really recall, with any kind of clarity, was stumbling upon that old Fanta commercial on YouTube. You know the one, with the impressively obnoxious song: "Wanna Fanta, don't you wanna, Fanta Fanta."

Then I... blacked out... and I don't know how or... or... blacked... wanna... Fanta... it's like--oh, oh God no... wanna FANTA WANNA FANTA!!!!!!

Batman: Arkham Origins

WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS

It would be easy--if accurate--to complain that Warner Bros Games Montreal has done nothing new with the Arkham franchise. On the one hand, Batman: Arkham Origins does give the impression of stagnation, as though the series has already become afraid to try anything new. On the other hand, more Arkham is fine by me.

Given a new studio at them helm of this installment, a brisk change of pace may have been unnecessary, anyway. It might even have made a great big glowing target of WBGM (God, the acronym is somehow just as cumbersome as the full name) because any significant change would've proved--at best--controversial among the fan community. So in Origins, it appears, the studio chose to prove they could deliver the same beloved product, plus a couple more things. In that, Montreal succeeds.

And Origins does tempt fate, allowing Batman to glide and run around "old Gotham City," which players will remember as the setting of Arkham City. And it looks here exactly the same as it did in the previous game if a bit less, um, decayed: same courthouse, same steel mill; a few buildings missing, a few more added, and Batman cannot interact with this portion of the city precisely as he did in the previous game. But it's undoubtedly Arkham City. The player can explore this area (and a brand new half of a city, as well) using the exact same orgasmically-intuitive game mechanics they've become accustomed to. If nothing else, it would be ballsy to remind players of a game they love while giving them a game they don't. Not going to lie: I smiled a bit, reliving old memories.

While we're tempting fate with a new studio trying to replicate near-perfection, we've gotten new voice actors to replace the near-unreplaceable Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill. But happily, Roger Craig "Ezio Auditore" Smith's Batman is a reasonable facsimile with a flawless criminal-intimidation voice. Meanwhile, Troy Baker (who you will not recognize from here) ratchets Hamill's unmatchable rendition into a younger, more eager Joker. Both are solid enough and talented enough that I almost wish they had been allowed to break free with their performances rather than imitate what's already been done. Origins gave me that feeling frequently.

At this point, I realize I haven't gotten to the Batmanning. But that aspect is mostly the same as it was before. Crime scene reconstruction is a fun, only occasionally tedious, addition. And the Batplane quick-travel is a nice relief when having to traverse a game world that verges on over-sized. Otherwise, no big surprises here. Players who didn't like the Riddler's scavenger hunts still won't like them, and still don't have to do them. And players who love fluid fights and challenging predator sections (that is, every player) will still love those. It feels good to be back in the cape and cowl again. 

Side note: a brief jaunt into the challenge rooms left me disappointed, coming off as more a series of structured stunt-performances requiring none of the creative criminal-bashing I loved about the previous games' challenge rooms. Maybe opening up a few more rooms will improve that experience.

Joker aside, Origins opts to showcase the more obscure segments of Batman's rouges gallery. From semi-knowns like Black Mask and Deathstroke to out-of-left-fielders like Copperhead (now a chick!) and Anarky (whose inclusion is worthwhile solely for Batman's walk-out on a mopey manifesto). Bane, in a pleasant surprise, is a decently well-constructed villain: an enormous, hyper-intelligent tactician with a mercenary focus on killing the Bat. However, it's tarnished slightly by reverting him to the over-muscled, lumbering Bane we know from past games for the climactic battle, which is somewhat more thrilling than previous final Arkham boss fights. On that note, boss battles are decent this time around (special mention to the Mad Hatter section), but nothing like the spectacular Mr. Freeze fight from City.

True, Batman's early years--being hunted by cops, the slow-building trust with Gordon, his first meeting with Joker--have been done before. Sometimes better than this. There's nothing new or canon-shattering here. We even get a brief Knightfall retread. Montreal is not trying for the road less traveled here. But if it works, it works. And Origins works.

If Rocksteady never gets another shot at the franchise, at least Arkham is in steady (hm...) hands at Montreal. If it ain't broke, yadda yadda. This can get old quickly, and Montreal will need to do something of their own eventually. But so long as future games avoid the trap, I can live with evolutionary lull for one installment.

Grade: B+

At This Rate, I'll Never Shoot Lincoln

Today I am as old--to the day--as John Wilkes Booth was when he shot Lincoln. At this rate, I'll never shoot Lincoln. Steve Bartman was roughly my age when--ten years ago this week--he entered a strata that, in the eyes of slightly stupider Cubs fans, is roughly Booth's moral level.

I don't believe in quarter-life crises; one of about sixteen reasons I don't work for Buzzfeed. I enrolled in grad school to reach toward better, happier life. And I'll make it there, I'm starting to think, even if if 2016 seems years away. As I inch closer to 27, a quiet and dignified jaunt to 30 and beyond seems less shameful.

My writing was not a ticket to premature fame. Maybe it's the Dogfish Head Raison D'Etre talking, but for the first time in my life, I'm entirely okay with that. I was always at least mildly comfortable with it, or I'd never have gone the self-publishing route. I've made my peace with all that. I was never built for public scrutiny, anyway.

If it happens one day, if I explode out of here, well... it happens. And it'll be unfortunate for me and for the rest of the universe. But I'll be better prepared for it than I was at 25, when I self-published Nos Populus, when I started this blog. If it doesn't happen--if this poorly-named blog is all the outlet I ever have--that might be better still.

Buy Nos Populus here. Or don't. Up to you.

America's Dump

America sends its garbage to Washington and then blames the city when the stench wafts their way.

This Washington Post piece has been popular with the "at least you don't have to live with them" crowd, but because it was run under the Post Local heading it's not getting much play elsewhere. Also because no one gives a shit about the human beings who, you know, live here. Actual Washingtonians are, as I said when this masturbatory exercise got underway, an abstraction to most of the country. Granted, people are often abstractions when they live far enough away, but at least it's kind of fair to blame Texas for Ted Cruz. The District of Columbia, for reasons both arcane and childish, has no representation for itself. The only advantage to that situation is that Washingtonians are the only Americans who cannot share in the blame for any of this.

Not that it enures us from the shutdown. Just the opposite. We're the ones who live and work here, either for a government that legally prohibits us from working, or for a business that's suffering because federal employees' cash is no longer flowing their way (each had been hit badly enough by the sequester). Even those of us not directly impacted know people who are: friends and family who are angry, bitter, and bored, and who will receive back pay... eventually. In the meantime, they get to deal with the psychic impact of being forbidden from doing their jobs. For an area that has a lot of people who chose to go to work serving their country, that's no small thing.

But it's, "Washington," sneered through the fat lips of the ill-informed, that's the problem.

Example: a group of truckers thinks it'll be a good idea to "shutdown the Beltway" this weekend. The plan, near as I can tell, involves driving slowly around the Beltway for the duration of the three-day weekend, blaring their horns and generally forcing all and sundry to listen to their loud irritation with the present state of affairs. For those not familiar with DC's geography, the "Beltway" is I-495, a highway that branches I-95 into a loop around (not through) the District. It's an important road for drivers in the area and we all hate it. Here's the kicker: the politicians to be protested aren't using it. Many of them stay here on weekends and those that don't have little use for 495, anyway (Reagan National Airport is inside the Beltway). Capitol Hill will not hear your sirens. And I promise Obama will have no use for the road this weekend, either: he has a helicopter. The only people this punishes are the people who live here and who will need to get somewhere. They are the ones who will bare the brunt of the frustration of people who, in line with the inconvenient realities of democracy, are at least partly responsible for our terrible, terrible government.

As if it wasn't bad enough getting bullied by the self-serving, under-qualified, assclown members of Congress who manufactured the problem. Members sent here entirely by other people.

We, as a nation, have to live with the mistakes of the American voter. Some more intimately than others. Washingtonians don't ask for an apology (apologies mean more when they're volunteered); just an acknowledgement of that fact. And for everyone else to stop lumping them in with the other people's refuse.

Shutdown

Mrs. Half-Drunken Scribe is a non-furloughed federal employee. So she gets to keep working, probably for real money. Too many others aren't so lucky. That includes a lot of friends.

If congressional Republicans want to strike Obamacare from history, they need to appropriate funding to build a time machine, and use it to get Mitt Romney elected president. Obamacare may not be the most popular legislation (though it becomes less unpopular when referred to by its proper name), but it was installed by a democratically-elected House and Senate, and backed by a president who ran on a platform to improve access to healthcare. It survived a Supreme Court challenge. And when that same president, who banked his job on this very law, won reelection, that was end game. That was the signal from on high that this law, warts and all, must be allowed to go forward. To aim for anything less is cheap, cowardly, and unconstitutional.

And those were the appropriate adjectives before a government shutdown and a default crisis got thrown into the mix. But, after all, this is the Tea Party: the self-important, half-informed, thin-skinned, cosplaying, paper patriots. People for whom the democratic process becomes moot as soon as it coughs up a result they don't like. People who love America so much, they're willing to kill it before anyone else... gets access to healthcare.

They're not fighting against something that was rammed down America's throat, as they would have you believe; America's had ample opportunity to shut this thing down. Sure, the law isn't great, but when Republicans make every effort to block the thing, it's not because they have a better idea. They didn't have an answer for preexisting conditions and the subsequent millions of uninsured aside from "get a job." They didn't have--and still don't have--an answer for healthcare's abominable costs, only part of which will actually be addressed by Obamacare (again, not a great series of laws, just the best one possible (apparently)). They keep flogging free market approaches, cheerfully forgetting that the market is in no way capable of handling healthcare costs. They've got nothing. And they know it. Or they'd have had something substantive to add.

Now we get no government. For anyone or anything except "essential services." No one who matters seems to care about the blind-spots that will impact even the still-operating agencies. Or how the national economy will be impacted.

And then there's the $200 million that the Washington area could lose every day. Whenever you hear someone talk about DC, it's never about the people who live here. These people are abstractions, even the ones who don't work for the federal or city governments. But we feel the impact when spending gets cut, because we all know people getting furloughed, going without paychecks. There's a word for people who threaten livelihoods to prove ideological points. I'd tell it to you straight, but it'll stick better if you figure it out for yourself.

This will almost certainly hurt Republicans in the short and medium terms. And it probably won't affect the Affordable Care Act too badly (it may even give the program a crutch if people can blame any holes on a lack of government). But it's hard for me to care about either of those things right now.

I just want my friends to go back to work.

Nos Populus MatchBook deal

If you've ever bought a book from Amazon --e-book or physical--then starting this weekend you can purchase a Kindle copy of Nos Populus for $1.99.

That's right: my self-published, little-regarded book still exists and your chance to grab a cheap copy is now soon. Keep an eye on the page because I don't know exactly when the deal begins (Kindle Direct Publishing needs a few hours to process, apparently; Bezos now runs everything on the old media schedule, I suppose). But when it does, it'll continue into December (e-books work as stocking stuffers, right?).

And tell your friends, too. Annoy them even. Toss this deal in their stupid faces until your relationship with them is in serious jeopardy. And then burn their houses down. You can tell the police I told you to do it. Don't worry, I'll deny the whole thing.

Alternatively, you and your friends can check out excerpts from the book here, here, and here. And some in-depth examination here, here, and here. That'll be better for your friendships in the long run and save you the cost of gasoline and matches.

Now You're Just Making Crap Up

In the middle of an already fantastic article, Adam Weinstein pens one of the most phenomenal paragraphs I've read recently:

But there's nothing for us to suck up, really. As a rule, our parents did end up much more dedicated to their careers than we have. But as a rule, they were laid off less. They didn't intern or work as independent contractors. They got full medical. They were occasionally permitted to adopt magical unicorn-like money-granting creatures called "pensions." Or, barring that, they accumulated a huger 401K to cash out before the Great Recession, because they saved more. And they saved more because the costs of college, of kid care, of health care, of doing business and staying alive and buying groceries and staying connected, were far less than they are today. They could raise a family on one salary if necessary.

Go ahead and read the rest. I'll wait.

Good, right? There's a lot to say here (and I've already said some of it) but Weinstein does it well enough and there's something else I want to focus on.

Now, if you're like me, you're stupid and therefore scrolled down to the comments section after reading the article. There, you found that the first comment was a real piece of work, painfully oblivious to everything Weinstein had just said and writes him off as a coddled, entitled Gen Y-whiner (I refuse to turn that into an easy portmanteau). Weinstein rebuts him beautifully, and it's cathartic, but something sticks out in "shootingfan's" tone deaf, self-serving reply. He leads off--leads off, mind you--with this:

A generation that grew up with soccer games that weren't scored because we wanted everyone to feel like a winner.

Okay, stop. I've heard this canard before. You probably have, too: youth sports leagues eliminating competition, thereby turning kids soft, thereby leaving them unprepared for the real world, thereby something-something off-my-lawn. You're probably even aware of the recent satire of this phenomenon that too many people assumed to be legitimate because confirmation bias is a bastard. Problem is, I'm not aware of any specific examples of this kind of thing. I'm not saying they don't exist--though I seriously wonder--but in casual polling of friends and acquaintances my age, I've not heard of them experiencing such things.

The closest I've come to this is my own experience. My youth baseball league instituted a slaughter rule: if one team scored five runs in an inning, the inning ended and the game moved on. This seems to me (looking back) to be more about practical matters regarding baseball. No clock means a game could go on forever and if one team tacks on five runs in one inning in youth baseball, we may be dealing with a skill imbalance or a perpetual momentum situation and a game could go on for hours. Understand: the game didn't end when a team scored five runs, we just moved on (and I definitely remember playing on at least one team that saw the merciful side of the slaughter rule). Because our games went six innings, a game could still end 30-0 and a tally-mark would still be added to the loss column: not exactly a coddling of the young if things got that far.

For now, I'll ignore the question of who is responsible for such rules (a point I've touched on before), until we can establish whether they exist and how pervasive they are and what impact they've had on us. What I'm looking for is evidence, anecdotal though it may be, of people of my generation who remember these rules. If you were born in the roughly 1980-1995 window--kids for whom the coddling is assumed to have been in the ascendant and who are now aging into college, the workforce, etc--do you have memories of scoreless games? Of activities that were more feel-good-oriented than learning-oriented or even fun-oriented (subject for another time: kids mostly don't give a shit about scores, they're just fine having fun until another kid or some sad, lonely adult insists on inserting hyper-competitiveness)?

Or is it all bitter horseshit, spewed by people too alienated and desperate for self-affirmation to admit that some gripes--like Weinstein's--are legitimate?

NFL 2013, Physics and Predictions

Here we go, another five months of pretending that the process of American football doesn't hideously obliterate the human brain and body and that former players don't go on to lead hellish lives that disproportionately end tragically.

I watch Jon Bostic make a hit like this and I know for a fact that such a thing is not healthy; for him or for the recipient. I also know that that $21,000 fine is probably not a hefty enough to discourage either Bostic or other young players whose brains and bodies are still mostly intact. On the other hand, I watch Jon Bostic make a hit like that and I get giddy, knowing that this is the explosive linebacker the Bears have needed since Urlacher's joints turned to dust some years back. I also know that a few well-timed hits like that should elevate the Bears deep into the playoff hunt in a division of seven to eleven win teams.

And thus the physics of large men throwing themselves at each other degrades us all. Some more immediately and intimately than others.

Here are my picks for 2013.

• NFC North winner: Green Bay* 
• NFC East winner: New York
• NFC South winner: Atlanta
• NFC West winner: Seattle
• NFC Wild Cards: San Francisco, Washington
• AFC North winner: Cincinnati
• AFC East winner: Buffalo**
• AFC South winner: Houston
• AFC West winner: Denver
• AFC Wild Cards: Kansas City, Baltimore
• NFC Title Game: Seattle over Atlanta
• AFC Title Game: Denver over Houston
• Super Bowl XLVIII: Denver over Seattle

*Ugh. When I mentioned a "division of seven to eleven win teams?" There's your 11-5 team. The other three look to be teasingly mediocre. Unless Bostic wants to shorten a few more life expectancies.

**Please, AFC East, quit being so boring. The whole division is a snooze orgy. Even the buttfumbling chaos that is the New York Jets has become dull in its predictability. We should just have New England skip the regular season, say they went 12-4, and then watch them lose hilariously in the divisional round.

Or You Could Take Everyone With You

"To everyone who has ever emailed to ask me for advice on writing, my answer is: get a deadline. That's all you really need. Forget about luck. Don't fret about talent. Just pay someone larger than you to kick your knees until they fold the wrong way if you don't hand in 800 words by five o'clock. You'll be amazed at what comes out."
-- Charlie Brooker

But I use my knees every day.

Productivity's a funny thing. Too little and you feel like you've wasted a chunk of your life. Too much and you wind up tired and groggy, less capable of appreciating your production with an appropriately rested eye. It even makes weekends daunting: do I do something valuable or do I rest for the week ahead? Damned either way, aren't you? And three-day weekends do not solve the dilemma; they just give you more time in which to enact your bad choice. And don't you dare think about striking a healthy balance by doing some of both. I can see you working it out in your head right now. Just stop. Stop it immediately.

This is to say that I've started grad school. Hopefully that won't hold up productivity here too much. If I get some free time, it'll be between the wife, video games, and you lot.

Bat-Affleck (at least it's not Nic Cage)

(via Modern Myth Media)

Okay, to be as fair as possible about this, shut up. Everyone just... shut up and let me think.

Deep breath... here we go. 

Ben Affleck really should've been behind the camera for Batman. We were denied that chance already. But by taking a promising if flawed Man of Steel franchise and throwing Batman into the mix immediately--all because Marvel has them chasing ghosts--DC/WB is already risking one unforced error. Might as well follow through.

Argo. The Town. State of Play. As stated, he's a better director than actor, but we decided that he had redeemed himself. We agreed to that as a society, didn't we? We let Matt Damon off the hook years ago. Scroll down Affleck's IMDb and realize how long its been since he deserved our derision. And by the way, Affleck is not what was wrong with Daredevil. Not that you or anyone has ever given a shit about Daredevil. He's a poor man's Batman who somehow got a movie in an era when studios still didn't know what they were doing with superhero movies. It was 2003--they were just throwing whatever they had at the screen, not really caring if it would stick. 

Maybe I'm hedging, fooling myself into believing that this won't fall flat on its face. Maybe it will, in which case, we still have the Nolan trilogy, unharmed. And here I remind myself of my reaction when Heath Ledger got Joker. Yes, it was a different (better) director who made that call, but we can't always see how these things play out.

All I know is that I'd really like to hear Affleck's Batman voice before I rule on this one.

Still Drowning

Imagine a movement that urged former students striving to pay off their student loans to just stop. Don't make the payments, dry up the coffers, and force an overhaul of the system that many of us are drowning in. Sounds fun. And it would probably open up some funds for a Playstation 4.

Two problems spring to mind, though. One, it's hard to imagine the agitators of this hypothetical movement not getting taken down on some kind of criminal conspiracy charge. This would need to be an overwhelming movement with a lot of visibility and a central leadership to keep this borderline-extortionist movement steady. If the point is to send a shock to the system, we need everybody. Which leads us to problem number two: if even a third of former students continue paying up, those of us opting out are sunk: still in debt, and now also defaulting on our debt, with no message being sent and little leverage to be had. I'm pulling that "one-third" number out of my ass, but you see my point.

As Matt Taibbi's recent Rolling Stone piece, "The College-Loan Scandal," makes painfully clear, the only thing worse than owing the government for that diploma of yours is defaulting on what you owe and watching your $38,000 debt balloon to $100,000. That's the actual story of Alan Collinge, one of several cases that Taibbi highlights in his investigation of the government's surprisingly well-run student loans racket.

Taibbi is most interested in these cases of default, the mob-like tactics of the creditors--whose returns on defaults are stunning (see 'Collinge' above)--and why no one in government is willing to do anything about it (in short: Democrats like to brag about sending people to college and Republicans don't care about anyone who isn't them). The defaulters provide dramatic examples; students paying off their crippling debts is less dramatic because it's more commonplace. It's commonplace because these debts are, well, necessary. Taibbi mentions the New York Times article from earlier this year about how a bachelor's degree is what a high school degree used to be and writes,

"If they don't have the degree, then they have no chance at all. So if they even want a clerking job, they must dive face-first into the debt muck and take their chances that they won't end up watching the federal government take bites out of disability checks while their law degree gathers dust downstairs somewhere. So, yes, a college education is a great thing, and you probably need one now more than ever – the problem is that it may very well be mandatory, may have less of a chance of ever getting you a job, and you may still be paying for it on your deathbed no matter what."

And there's the rub. College is no longer a status symbol for the manor-born. Those still-spiking tuitions are the entry fee to adulthood for people my age.

I've sung this song before. I piled on debt (fairly light compared to my peers) mostly obliviously because I was a goddamn teenager. Now, I can live with that. But, in order to have the career I want in the field I want, I'm going back, knowing it'll fling me further into debt on the chance that it gets me where I want to go. That's the gamble I'm taking and while I'm not exactly forced into it, neither am I doing it entirely willingly. If you don't understand the difference, you may not be ready for this debate.

A final note: in the next lane over from myself and my cohorts are all the teenagers choosing not to go, as enrollment continues to fall. Opting-out in a different way. I don't know whether this will be a wake up call to schools to reassess tuition rates (I suspect not) or how these people will fare in a job market still not inclined to let go of its degree requirements (well, I hope). But perhaps it's a start. It might at least get some heads out of the sand.

Zombie Mascots and Rainbow Dragons

Despite the best efforts of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, I am back in the States. Now, I normally don't like to indulge in these look-at-what-I-did shenanigans, but I want to highlight a couple of things that caught my eye while strolling the motherland of pale, drunk gingers. 

I wrote about the Easter Rising briefly in Nos Populus, so I couldn't not include this. Relatedly: as we passed through Heathrow, we told British customs that we'd be continuing on to Ireland before returning to the UK. The guy asks us if we were going to "Northern Ireland" or "Southern Ireland." I just figured the guy was so retro that he refused to recognize an independent Hibernia. 

Zombie Uncle Pennybags, spotted somewhere in Dublin's Old City, a ways west of Temple Bar.

Edinburgh, Scotland. Probably the most gorgeous city on the planet...

...which happens to to be home to arguably the ugliest building on the planet. See more here.

Found this guy in Chinatown in London. The wife was fairly sure that he was going to climb through our hotel window one night. The hotel was some two miles away... and yet that still seemed plausible.

A short walk from Puff up there, I found myself in a pub near Covent Garden, where I got mistaken for a local a couple of times. It was probably the beer in my hand in the middle of the day, but I took the compliment. There's magic in sipping a local craft beer outside on a calm, clear 68º day, not a care about work or bills or laundry. As my wife returned from some light shopping in the market, she found me standing outside a pub with my third beer of the day in my hand, and opined that "this would be so sketchy in the States." And that, dear readers, is why we do drinking wrong.

Good to be back, I suppose.

... But What Can I Do?

Okay, fellow drunks, I'm out of here for a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I recommend watching Charlie Booker's Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque take on our abusive relationship with the television, computer, and smartphone screens that put us in touch the terrible world all around us. One episode has recently been optioned for a film by Robert Downey, Jr., so if you watch it now, you can say you were on board with it before it became popular State-side.

I'll write at you soon. And remember to Love Each Other. 

Doorman review

Full disclosure: I donated $20 to the Indiegogo for this project. I also stand to gain nothing from it's potential success, save some measure of pride. So take this review as you will. 

A person toiling much below the upper-middle class strata assumes a sponge-like experience, absorbing abuse and humiliation as an understood aspect of earning room and board on this cosmic rock of ours. Some among us use that fodder to fuel outside projects that, at bottom, provide a catharsis and a bonding point with our fellow drones. At the other end, a select few create something like art. Doorman is closer to the latter.

It's hard to do a spoiler-free review of a ten minute film. So if this seems short, there's the reason. The Doorman project is best understood as a pilot, introducing the world to the filmic version of Doorman's truly excellent blog, with more to follow, should the festival scene prove fair. The pilot is funny, stuffed with pathos, and even features a touch of redemption toward the end--the kind of minor, fleeting victory that provides working slobs with just enough energy to keep us coming back for more. Minor nitpick: that redemption comes a bit too easily. But within the time constraints, Doorman gives the story all the breathing room he can. The blog has too much material for a feature length, so one must temper expectations (and I would watch a three-hour epic of this).

In a world stocked with Sharknadoes and Adam Sandler's Fuck It, They're Paying Us Anyway 2, it's beyond refreshing to get a project that has a more than a few sprigs of heart thrown in. You can't watch it yet. But I hope one day you can.

Grade: A-

Dogfish Head Sixty-One

Dogfish Head Sixty-One, essentially their famous 60-Minute IPA tossed with Syrah grape must, pours dark red, almost purple in the right light.

It smells softly of grapes (there's red wine DNA in there, after all), but lacks a strong nose.

Those grapes are apparently saving themselves for the mouth, hitting the tongue first and last, with dashes of sweet malt in between.

Sixty-One has a pleasantly dry finish and borders on the thick-bodied, but its hop character is disappointingly low, given its roots in the "continuously hopped" IPA (and being from a brewery that's never feared hops... or anything else, really).

Dogfish Head once again earns points for an appealing idea, but the final result is flat enough to leave the drinker wanting for the original 60-Minute IPA.

Grade: C+

The Student Loans Grotesque

There's nothing like starting the week in a boiling rage over this country's surrealistic student loans situation. For me, it actually started last week, when a friend of mine posted this Seattle Times article to Facebook, describing how, once upon a time, summer jobs could pay for college because college costs were stunningly low. And how that experience taught an entire generation--the awesomely responsible people who are in charge today--that hard work and elbow grease were the ticket out of debt, so they can comfortably look the other way on the debt their children have incurred. They graduated debt-free (or debt-negligible, anyway) and then shut the door behind them. As Danny Westneat writes,

[L]ast week The Seattle Times featured a crop of harried UW students looking rueful and broke. The story said skeptical state legislators often say how “they worked their way through college. And then they ask: Why don’t students do that today?”

Of all our delusions, we old farts cling to this bootstrap one the most. We worked our way up on sweat and chicken grease, we say. Can’t this generation? What’s wrong with them?

What’s wrong is that after we got ours, we cut it off for them.

And then this morning, Salon's Joan Walsh explores the toxic student loan culture, aided and abetted by, yep, Congress, those lovable scamps. On one end of the Hill, we have a Senate that apparently refuses to stop the coming student loan interest rate hike from 3.4% to 6.8% (which goes into effect today). On the other end, the House has a bill that introduces market based reforms. This is presumably the same market that's going to take a staggering blow when an entire generation can't buy houses or cars, or generally engage in the "consumer economy" market-obsessed wonks think about when they masturbate.

Walsh links to this piece by David Dayen, who describes how student debts are lot more like indentured servitude than traditional debts. They can't be altered, refinanced, or even forfeit via bankruptcy. Even those who don't graduate end up paying their tab, which would be a reasonable rule, if not for the fact that we're taking about 17- and 18-year olds doing what they're told to do and signing on for ballooning tuition costs. Dayen, after highlighting various congressional proposals, says that "this entire system must be overhauled," which is a terrifying revelation in our current problem-solving climate.

I ended up lucky among some of my fellow private school alums, amassing merely $16,000 in debt. And my wife didn't have any. But now she's just finished grad school and I'm going to start in the fall (at an in-state public school this time). When all is done, she and I could be looking at six figures of debt and can anticipate paying that off for the next thirty years--or longer, if interest rates rise again. And why the hell shouldn't we expect that?

If you want to tell us that the problem is ours, just for having gone to school, you can--politely--fuck right off. We live in a part of the country that all but requires post-graduate degrees, particularly for people whose career prospects have dwindled in a stagnant economy that crippled our generation's prospects before we even entered into it. Maybe we can blame ourselves for buying too much into the allure of education as the silver bullet, and for (speaking only for myself here) not taking school as seriously as I should've. But even those admissions are distractions, shouted into the maelstrom in an effort to downplay the very real concerns about spiraling costs and an economy that still demands college diplomas. The conversation is driven into the quagmire of lazy talking points, from which no problem emerges solved.

This is the problem with issues that affect other people. In the future. As long as the media has aberrational Joe Mihalic figures to point to, student debt will never seem severe enough and it will never garner the attention it deserves. Never mind the fact that it deeply affects a rising generation that has enough problems averting lost generation status, with belittlement and patronization flying at us from newsstands. Student loans will, by extension, impact everyone in the not too distant future. But we can't deign to fix these problems, to examine why college is so expensive, to reinvest in public education, perhaps even to explore debt forgiveness. We can't do those things.

Because... money, I guess.

I'm not even entirely joking when I say that global warming and a post-apocalyptic future suddenly don't sound so bad. As I stalk the wastelands, fending off the hungry fangs of the über-mutants, hoarding the half-gallon of fuel that I wrested from the stiff fingers of a small child--my only currency save my poor, worn out asshole--I will take significant solace in the knowledge that no one will be left to extract student loan payments from me.

The Supreme Court Like Gay Marriage. Good For Them.

Anybody else remember this vain, tone-deaf exercise in poorly-written victimization? 

That happened. So did DOMA. I don't know what either of those were about. And neither will future generations.

Maggie Gallagher wants not to be lumped in with the segregationists of the mid-20th Century. Her best tack would've been to not hop on the discrimination train in the first place (I imagine it looking like the armored train from Goldeneye: archaic, paranoid, shuttered windows, and while impervious to bullets is extremely vulnerable to Court-triggered explosions). She can wring her hands all she wants now. Forty years down the road, she's Bull Connor without the dogs.

It's probably classless to stick the knife in like this.

.@ChickfilA Any specials today?
— rob delaney (@robdelaney) June 26, 2013

If it's hard not to, it's because there are still 36 states that have outlawed gay marriage. 6 more only allow marriage lite. Until those are fixed, this isn't over.

Man of Steel

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Man of Steel: in which Hollywood continues to insist on re-telling origin stories. I don't want to lean too hard on this point, as the temptation to re-tell Superman's iconic origin story must be strong, if only because it's the most obvious way to get the audience to identify with a character, something that's hard for Superman generally. And MOS handles Superman's origin reasonably well, but as with The Amazing Spider-Man before it, even when done well (and this is the most thorough film adaptation of the end of Krypton and Clark's youth in Kansas, narrowly beating out Superman: The Movie), there's a distinct feeling of deja-vu that brings the pacing to a crawl.

This origin has been told a thousand times. Grant Morrison told it in one surprisingly poignant page in All-Star Superman. Mark Waid's excellent Superman: Birthright tells the whole story with pathos, managing to fit the brunt of Superman mythology into a psychologically-realistic package. Some small examples: MOS ends with Clark getting hired at the Daily Planet, with no mention of a journalism background; S:B has Clark working as a reporter before becoming Superman is ever a thought in his head. S:B also features Clark fleshing out his identities (Superman and bumbling Clark Kent) with John and Martha, the Kents studying acting and costume design and working out all the kinks of Clark's plan before he goes and does it; MOS has Clark receive his costume whole cloth from the ghost of his dead Kryptonian father.

Side note: I wasn't a fan of them killing off Jonathan Kent again, and especially not a fan of Clark accepting that that was how it was supposed to be because he "trusted" his father; a personal thing, just rang false to me.

Now, are these metrics not fair because I've read the source materials? Yeah, probably.

But as though to apologize for treading old water, director Zack Snyder does what he was hired to do--the action in MOS much improved from the deeply disappointing Superman Returns. Especially worth highlighting is Superman's battle with Zod's lieutenants in Smallville, which earns special attention as perhaps the most exciting fight scene in recent superhero history. Many reviewers have focused on the relative lack of heart of the second half of MOS, and that's fair, because even viscerally exciting action will lose its soul if it goes on too long--something that Snyder can and will do unapologetically; he levels Metropolis with surprisingly little pathos. But at least this action is something new for the character on film. This is what we wanted after SR and Snyder doesn't disappoint.

But when the action is done, we're left with the character we were introduced to and kind of like (he is saving our asses, that helps) but, like the people he protects, we still don't really know him. He's not as accessible as Iron Man, not as fantasy-worthy as Batman. The focus on his Kryptonian backstory comes at the expense of Clark the human being (Ghost Jor-El tells him that he is equally from Earth and Krypton, which gives short stick to the place he was raised in and planet he identifies with); the Kryptonian aspect should be largely superficial not just because that makes the most sense psychologically, but because it's what makes us like him. We Superman fans revere Clark, not Kal-El. Warner Bros. is almost certainly going to expect sequels and the "who" of Superman has time to be fleshed out, but that needed to be done here, especially given a worldwide audience that has no innate reverence for the character. Henry Cavill mines a few moments of likability, despite a grin that often looks too much like a smirk; I'd love to see what he can do with a deeper script.

A related point: We know Superman wants to protect us, not dominate us; motivation is what makes him the hero and Zod the villain (quick word: Michael Shannon is a lot of fun in the villain role). And that's important because that knowledge is the difference between Superman and Nietzschean Superman for the viewer (that goes for superheroes in general, actually). But it's easy to identify with General Swanwick at the end of the film; this guy is asking us to trust him, when we don't know him. In light of the news out of the NSA these past weeks, could we trust him? Should we? MOS never gets into that, save a cameo from a Predator drone (funny: Gen. Swanwick complains about it costing $11 million dollars days after a major city is reduced to rubble). Again, probably a good basis for the sequel and that's what a character like Lex Luthor is meant to do. But a large problem for Superman the last few decades has been relative tone-deafness and I wonder how much longer his stories can afford to ignore present conditions.

Despite largely mediocre reviews, MOS is almost certainly going to warrant that sequel, if only because Warner Bros. really wants to get a jump on that Justice League project. And MOS may prove a decent base for a larger DC Universe. It's not hard, at this stage, to imagine some of the other heroes coexisting with Superman--Wonder Woman and Green Lantern in particular (watching Metropolis get flattened gives me some pause about Batman, but they're not going to attempt JL without him). However, we need a further look at this Superman first. Because for all the pretty, pretty fireworks, we've only just absorbed the first rays of yellow sunlight of why the hell we should care.

Grade: B

The NSA Pees In The Pool

I was refraining from saying anything about the NSA data-mining, also know as PRISM, also known as "you know how you know that there's urine in the pool, but you don't think about it?" In part because there's probably more to come. But also because what I have to say pales in comparison to what others have already written. Then I remember that I wrote a book about an overzealous surveillance state. And that I'm probably not allowed to let it pass just because that government is being operated by a president I kinda like.

We knew that private companies were compiling our information--for targeted advertising or for simpler customer service--and we had little problem with that. We can opt out of those, right? We knew that Google had a running record of our porn searches, but we didn't need to think about it. And we knew that with evolving communications technologies, we were creating our own records of ourselves: our movements, our purchases, our major and minor life events. Again, we were fine with that because that was our choice and whatever resulting wounds were self-inflicted.

But simultaneously, we also knew that the government was fighting a War on Terror somewhere in the background. We knew the Patriot Act existed (and had been reauthorized by Obama) alongside the NDAA and so many other innocent-sounding acronyms. We may not always have been conscious of it, and we kicked up brief fusses when something new plopped down in front of us: body imaging at the airport, removing our shoes at the airport, no liquids at the airport... a lot of it had to do with inconveniences when flying (we could've started taking trains, but trains are for Euro-fags). The point is, we could've--and some of us did--put two and two together a long time ago. We're not allowed to be shocked now. We can be outraged, on the understanding that we may look silly doing so. As of this writing, nothing appears to be illegal. On that level, some outrage is probably called for.

It was understandable of liberals to expect better of Obama, but never totally realistic (though, hey, torture's gone, so... whoo?). It's always been on us. We get the government we deserve. We wanted Internet, cell phones, and security. Welp.

From my time in the federal government, I know that low- and mid-level abuse is vanishingly rare (yes, I'm aware of the IRS thing). That kind of tinkering is both extremely illegal and also pointless for most bureaucrats to think about, because they don't want to intrude on your life--it creates more work for them. And I think of the hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras in operation in a place like London, where too much information is granted to an entity--however nefarious--to be of any good to anyone; they have to really want to track someone to get use out of the system and that initiative has to come from the top. I generally trust President Obama to use these methods with the right intent. I may, however, not trust his successor, just as I did not trust his predecessor.

And there's the rub.

If we're comfortable with one government being able to do a thing, we have to be comfortable with every subsequent government being able to do that thing. The government does not cede authority: that would be irrational on its part. And that goes double when presidents of both parties have done something. So now we ask questions. And it is we, because congressional Republicans can and will weasel out of investigating and fixing this (Benghazi this is not, apparently) and Democrats will be all too happy to slump away from the scene. Calmly, rationally (again, this is all legal and we only have ourselves to blame in the first place) we find out how the government uses the info and where's it been successful in the past (did it help get bin Laden? That would be bolster the case). Is the price of swimming in someone else's urine worth the convenience of being able to pee in the pool?

... I might have that analogy backward.

Maybe now we finally get the grown-up discussion about security and civil liberties. Maybe we don't let fear and anger rule the day. Maybe a kind of libertarian awakening occurs and we start pulling back the security apparatus we've allowed to be erected in our name. But that doesn't appear to be happening yet. And if the distracting argument of Edward Snowden's heroship or villainy is any indication, we're not yet ready for the adult conversation. That and the fact that I'm sure someone laughed at my use of the word "erected" (that person was me--I'm not ready for the conversation). 

Character Allignment (explained via The Wire)

I played Dungeons and Dragons once, in high school, and I haven't had the desire to replay it since. I was too fat to be beat up over playing the game, so that wasn't it. Some have suggested I had a bad dungeon-master, which is possible (I don't even remember who the dungeon-master was, even though I remember most everyone involved). But for me, D&D is too much like writing on the fly in a group, which is never ideal for producing stories. Teamwork and imaginative problem solving, sure, but not so great for a narrative, which I somehow came to assume was the point of the game (it's not). And then there's characterization. While many imaginative players can and will create interesting characters, it's all too easy to wind up with characters who are dull, single-dimensional, and monomaniacally focused on a quest or a single, vague character trait, like being greedy or noble or drunk. I blame the D&D alignment chart.

As fun as the chart can be for we nerds to play with, it's a seriously flawed tool for character building. No real, live human being can fit into one square perfectly. Abstractly, one's personality might be most at home in a particular cell, say Lawful Neutral, but will tend bleed out into adjacent cells (Lawful Good, True Neutral) as the pressures of the world force different, non-dice controlled reactions out of them. Be honest with yourself: do you fit into one of those nine paradigms every day of your life? Do your friends?
 
And if a real person has no comfortable home on the chart, what chance does a compelling, realistic character have? Or at least a character that a writer wants to be compelling and realistic. Batman, for example, after seven decades of different creators and continuities, can be made to fit into all of the alignments at once. Superman can do it, too, but you have to stretch a bit more.

Then you have something like The Wire, one of the most compelling dramatic narratives ever allowed by the powers that be to grace our television screens, with characters based on real world drug dealers, cops, and politicians. Those who have seen the show (otherwise known as The People Who Should Be Allowed to Vote) know that many of the characters contain staggering shades of complexity, shifting back and forth as the crushing reality of the Baltimore drug wars impinge upon them, playing off of each other like characters in a really good novel. It shouldn't be possible to do an alignment chart of The Wire characters, right? Probably not, but here it is:

That's... actually not bad. I wonder about McNulty, though--Chaotic Neutral seems to fit him just as well, but as much as a self-destructive fuck-up as he is, he does typically work to benefit others.

Also, if Avon is Chaotic Neutral, I'm tempted to slide Stringer into Lawful Neutral; but then I get to thinking about D'Angelo and suddenly Stringer's placement here works a bit better. For balance, you could drop Avon into Chaotic Evil, since he's just as much a part of Baltimore's rot as Stringer, but no one beats Marlo Stanfield for that title (except maybe Snoop).

And Omar is about as True Neutral as they come ("It's all in the game."), but seems to me to slide across the middle, into Lawful ("A man's gotta have a code.") and Chaotic ("Well, you see Mike-Mike thought he should keep that cocaine he was slinging, and the money he was makin' from slingin' it. I thought otherwise."). Recall season two's "All Prologue," in which Omar casually obliterates Maurice Levy.

Real people, and realistic characters, have no true alignment. Fans are welcome to have fun guessing, but writers and creators must note that, for the same reasons that their creations can never be their own, dynamic character relationships will always be too messy to fit into the alignment chart. And that to try is to needlessly diminish a character's potential.

By the way, I did run Nos Populus characters through the alignments, after finishing the book. James Reso is generally Chaotic Neutral, with forays up and down the Chaotic wing. I'll let readers decide where they think the rest of the characters fall.

Nine Billion Copies!

Over at The Writer's Circle, Mia Siegert has penned a piece on the philosophy of "writing for oneself." She argues that such a claim augurs a kind of narcissism and that many writers use it as a way to avoid having their work peeled apart by others. She says, in part:

I’m not saying nor suggesting that one should write with the sole purpose of gaining audience approval, but observing that the mentality behind writing for one’s self can be and often is problematic. Those writers with too much self often don’t deal well with criticism, if they can cope with it at all...

[t]he way one deals with critique is critical to a writer’s future successes and ability and willingness to improve.

All true. Though, how many people genuinely enjoy criticism, even the constructive kind? By the way, appreciating and valuing that part of the process in helping to improve writing is not the same thing as enjoying it.

Certainly, "I write for myself" can be and is used as a hedge, covering anything from insecurity to laziness. But isn't that also where writers tend to start? How about ultra-personal diary-type material, (though I'd think that a person probably wouldn't discuss such a thing in public)? And what are writing exercises if not "writing for oneself?"

Maybe it's a matter of degree. If a writer claims that all of their writing is for their eyes only, it will sound lame. But, in addition to not having to listen to that person, we should remember that any decent writing will typically start "for oneself"--writing as practice, or therapy--before evolving into something the writer feels will fairly reflect on themselves and their skills in the larger, harsher world. Nos Populus was a combination of the two, vacillating back and forth over a few years until I decided it was ready to hand over to a couple of people I trusted to edit it. Then a few more years until I was girded enough to publish it.

Figured against my costs for publishing, I'm actually still in the red. Not by anything significant, of course, and I don't mind that part. Writing to finance writing is about all that I aspire to, money-wise. And anyway, my dreams of acclaim and royalties were more like outlandish fantasies; almost certainly not going to happen, but "stranger things... " sort of situation. It was about finishing the book, getting it out there, and avoiding the trap of editing it over and over again for years, driving myself irretrievably mad while negligibly improving upon a project that never sees the light of day. For myself, in a way.

Or take self-proclaimed "self-publishing failure" John Winters. He had a book, got frustrated with the query-agent-publisher stage, took his book to Amazon, found the process amazingly easy, didn't sell much, experienced a mysterious sales surge that disappeared just as mysteriously, and sits at the end of it all with a little-noticed, less-sold book. Hits close to home for me and (I shudder to think how many) millions of others. Would you take "for myself," away from him? Then again, Winters also managed to garner a five star review at Amazon; more than I can say for Nos Populus (no reviews is kind of like a perfect rating, right?). He also got to write a piece for Salon, so he's got that going. You can purchase a copy of Winters' book here. And here's his blog.

People sometimes ask me how my book sales are going. It reminds me of when I was unemployed immediately after college and I'd hear "how's the job search going?" They're making me think about this draining, demoralizing, seemingly futile process. And they can't think it's going well, or they'd have already heard about it. It takes whatever remaining socialization skills I still possess not to scream back, "Haven't you heard? I've sold nine billion copies! I'm the McDonald's of self-publishing!" But that's not fair to them. Is it? No, probably not.

I am sorry to sound bitter. Although in a world where Snooki gets to have multiple books published (she can use the words "my new book;" think about that), Paris Hilton gets a record deal, and Grumpy Cat is in talks for a film, one can't be totally surprised when creative-types who bust their asses to realize the same dreams just want to shove a shard of broken glass into their respective jugulars.

The point is, in a field as punishing as trying to write for others, having "the personal" to fall back on is as much a crutch as it is a parachute made of sanity. Just try not to overuse it.

#Doorman Rises

Doorman (who you might remember from here) has spent the last few months working on a web series based on his tragicomic travails in the world of Doorman-ing. With a ferocious desire to escape his shit-tastic job and some generous Internet investment, he's recently wrapped on a pilot for the series. The trailer for that pilot is here, and it's pretty exciting.

I'm not totally sure what's next (ask him yourself), but I imagine it's film festivals, hype, a ten-episode deal with Netflix, coke orgies, a phase of being absolutely intolerable, burnout, back to Doorman-ing, and finally redemption.

Seriously: I'm ecstatic to see any talented and driven writer use their craft to lift themselves from the Everyday. We all need that reinforcement every now and again.

Cheers, Doorman.

Time Dings Millennials, Awaits Sweet Death

Time magazine's cover story this month is entitled "Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation." As the title subtly suggests, millennials have turned out to be shallow, narcissistic, entitled little shits who are tragically destined to wrest control of the world from their wise, patient, sexy elders. Millennials have also achieved some good things, probably, but mostly they have those smartphones and communicate electronically, and that is just the worst. It's author is Joel Stein, an X-er who has been called "a god to people in their twenties and thirties" by boomer and Time editor Richard Stengel. Stein has statistics and studies to back up his claims, so you know he's on the level. And in case you were beginning to think that Time doesn't understand millennials deeper than is necessary to exploit the subscription money out of an aging generation's natural suspicion of everything that will replace it, they made it even more enticing for young people by pay-walling the article; we can't resist paying for content.

If you ask Time why print is dying, they'll stare at you blankly before asking if they can "have money now."

Stein's already been reamed pretty good. Elspeth Reeve pokes some holes in the statistics before digging up a century's worth of exposes on the ever-pending horror of "self-obsessed little monsters," a story originally scooped, I believe, by Socrates.

Marc Tracy takes Stein nearly point for point, concluding:

Right now, older generations are in the process of slowly bequeathing millennials a society more “in debt” than ever before: “in debt” in the sense of living on borrowed time, with only future, merely hypothetical promises as collateral—“in debt” ecologically, financially, politically, culturally. At this moment, Time has decided to focus on the millennials, and to tar them as “entitled” for not feeling totally okay about all of this.

Piling on with Tracy--though actually pre-dating the Time article--Annie Lowrey points out that, whatever millennials' faults, we haven't exactly been given much to work with, observing that "even though the recession is over, this generation is not looking to gorge; instead, they are the kind of hungry that cannot stop thinking about food."

And over at Salon, Daniel D'Addario addresses the media's love affair with our love affair with attention, two phenomenons that would appear to be servicing each other in some kind of accidental circle-jerk. Lowrey and D'Addario's pieces are like better-researched, better-written takes on my own post from last year about millennial self-obsession conflicting with grim socio-economic reality and boomers' tendencies toward self-congratulation. As I wrote (yes, a millennial is about to quote himself; try not to swoon):

Remember: we did not set up the lavish high school graduation ceremonies--ostensibly for our benefit--during which self-important prigs like McCulloch tell us that we actually kinda suck.  Even when not used for the purposes of insulting us, what kind of attitudes do you expect these farces to instill in us?  To say nothing of the middle school, elementary school, and kindergarten graduations that I took part in growing up.  If our achievements are so banal, why throw the parties? 

I don't know how much of this sort of infantilizing castigation is spurred by a feeling of "how dare attention be lavished on people who aren't us; we're still here" (someone recently pointed out to me that Forrest Gump ends in the mid-80s, just about the time that the X-ers started moving in on the sort of culture-shaping that the film celebrates as the birthright of the boomers). But I suspect we can look forward to a few more, increasingly irritating years of this sort of thing. And by then we'll be chastising our own kids for spending so much time on the HoloNet having sex with space aliens, when they should be watching us Google ourselves.

This I can say with some certainty: generations that are given access to social networks can at least provide their own self-love, rather than having to demand that reverence from others.