El Conde Logs

Monday, January 15, 2001

It's sad, but it's true...

This blog is moving off of this server. in fact, it won't be a blog at all, but a normal web page. And yet, you probably won't notice too much difference!

The new page can be found at http://www.eyrie.org/~frobozz/ramble/ramble.html.

This page will remain up for historical purposes, at least for a while.

Peace and joy, man.

posted by Chris Angelini 1/15/2001 08:28:19 AM

Friday, October 27, 2000

    Have you noticed a paucity of blogging going on here? The reason for this has been manifold (not that you've noticed anything unusual about me missing a big chunk'a time here. The biggest reason you haven't heard my sage words of *cough* wisdom has been the onset of everybody's friend: Tendonitis! Yes, let's give this condition a big hand! Ow... let's stop now...

    I hear you asking: what, then, will you use to break today's silence? I will use this drum here! Hah hah! Ahhh, crud.

    Well, there won't be much of an update going on because my hand's still achin' despite my popping enough anti-inflammitaries to turn a rowdy redneck into a beatnick. However, there is a new ecological disaster going on where I live. So why don't I fill you all in on that?

    It turns out that some Japanese farmers had various crops that would benefit from the Home Field Advantage of some Home Field Insects; to wit: Japanese lady bugs. However, these bugs (duh, anyone ever heard of Cane Toads?) spread into this Nifty New Ecological Niche Which Had No Freakin' Checks And Balances Against 'em (well *duh*, anyone heard of the rabbit?). And now they're everywhere. And they bite. Yes, someone has imported Attack Ladybugs!

    Gods, I hate this world sometimes...
posted by Chris Angelini 10/27/2000 06:27:47 PM

Monday, September 25, 2000

    Over the past few years, I've aquired a taste for Chinese Buffet. It's a fast, cheap way to get your fix of crispy fried wonton under plum sauce, and you don't have to fight with the waiter to get extra Sweet'n'Sour chickenballs. And I just visited one last night, for the first time in a long time. Which is where I encountered the social organism that is.. the standard Buffet Goer.

    

How To Pass Yourself Off As A Buffet-Zombie

    (You can tell today isn't going to be a heavy blog, can't you?)

• Stare at the food. Stare at allll the nummy, steaming food. Never lift your eyes from it... if your eyes rise to the point where you can see your fellow human -- lower them immediately! Someone might notice! Though if they're all keeping their eyes down and staring at the food, maybe you can get away with breaking this one. Hmmm....
  
• Walk with slow, shuffling steps. Ideally, walk through waist-high snowdrifts for a few hours to get some practice. You want to move as if you're lining up to work a factory in Metropolis (the film, not Superman's home town). Ideally, vultures should circle you as you move, thinking that you're ready to provide them with an all you can eat of their own!
  
• Your fellow human does not exist (see point 1). Move accordingly. Shuffle-step in front of other people. Block their motions with your bulk. Stand before one entree that everyone likes and stare at it as if you could see the MSG with your Ultra-Vision. If someone has a steaming hot plate and just wants to get back to his/her seat, get your sweet patootie in front of that fella and stand there for at least a full minute.
  
• If there's a dish that everyone likes and there's only a limited amount of it available, pile it all onto your plate, ignoring the glares of those about you. For bonus points, leave half of it untouched and toss that remainder away.
  
• Bring children. Bring lots of children. Bring whole strings of children. Bring a horde of children to run free 'mongst the plains. They will obey their own set of rules, so don't restrain them in any way whatsoever. For more bonus points, don't order for them -- just feed the waifs off of your plate.
  
• Eat like you're a barnyard animal feeding at a trough. Being a Zombie is hungry work -- why bother with table manners?
  

    I hope that these tips will help you. Remember, only you can make a buffet a less livable place! The power is yours!
posted by Chris Angelini 9/25/2000 07:44:53 AM

Thursday, September 14, 2000

    Well, I've begun to live without potable water -- that's not the subject of today's Rambling. Likely it'll make it onto the page sooner or later, but for now I'm just feeling excessively wry that our city can't even keep one of the Essential Services of civilization running.

    No, today's rambling deals with another subject and it's a subject that those of you who have low tolerances for other people's faiths might want to bow out of. In fact, if you're that sort of person, you might want to bow out of this site entirely, since there's very little room for intolerance on my pages.

    Are they gone yet? Good. Very good. Break out the salsa and chips, we're going to have a fiesta! Er, no, wait, we were talking about religion, weren't we?

    I have a fairly robust religious outlook -- my personal believe is that the Godhead (whomsoever it is) is (by faith) perfect, and thus any Human (and thus flawed) religion will be inherantly incorrect in some fashion in attempting to capture the meaning of the Deus. Ergo, there's no need to fight about who's righter, simply because you're already wrong. Rather than using this as a tool by which to abandon faith, I believe it's a permission to allow one's self to pursue whatever faith is most comfortable to the person in their quest to make the Godhead (however they configure it) a part of their lives. This isn't as wishy-washy as it sounds, honest Injun, because in in the end you still need to wrestle with the Deus (I personally believe in two falls out of three) for all of your life to get a grasp on what's important to your own faith-life.

    Where am I going with all of this? I was just reading the final book in the Hyperion quartet (read Hyperior, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and Rise of Endymion and then weep when you are finished, for you will never read the likes of them again) when a few thoughts struck me about Messiahs.

    Yes, Messiahs. Hold on tight, and if you're not comfortable with this topic, bail now. However, I won't tell you to scat from my site -- if you've read this far, you're likely an open-minded person who just has certain topics set you on Uncomfortable. That I can utterly deal with.

    One of the realisations I've come to of late is that a lot of my personal problems stem from a degree of perfectionism that's only been on the rise with me. Now I'm not going to get into my feelings on the Bible. I'm also not going to get into my feelings on Christ. That's for a whole 'nother Blog. Right now I'm going to talk about Christ as Messiah from the standpoint of someone examining the character portrayed, rather than from faith or personal convictions. Wishy-washy? No, not really. Bringing 'I Believe' into this would disrupt the point I'm making (so get to it already, Frob!).

    In the Bible, Jesus (alias the Son of God, alias the Son of Man, alias Skippy) was a darned good person. He taught, he had the answers, he kicked butt at the temple, and he took a Crossing for humanity. True he lacks market appeal today, as he didn't own an AK-47 nor did he possess the attitude to use it, but still for my money he was a pretty cool frood. But you know what the problem could have been? This guy was just too perfect. I mean come on, when you're trying to control your temper over being cut off in traffic and he's accepting a crown of thorns, you feel a tiny bit inadequite, don't you?

    So maybe this is why he gathered twelve Average Joes along with him. Take a look at them sometime, especially Simon -- they're really the guys you'd expect to find out in the pub knocking back Miller Lights and shooting pool. And yes, they followed him around, and we often paint them as saints and thus outside of our pitiful mortal reaching but... let's face facts. They fscked up pretty bad sometimes. How often did they have to get rebuked for turning back kiddies who wanted to sit on Skippy's lap? How often did they doubt, forget something important, make assumptions or lose their temper? I really don't think we should look at them in the way my Church has often painted them: as something much grander than the rest of us slobs. Christ likely had these guys around to teach and also to show us 'gosh guys, I kind of realise you're all flawed. That's how you're made. But, see, it's okay to be'. They give us permission to strive to be like our Ideal (which may or may not be like Christ -- that's up to each of us), but they also give us permission to fall short of that ideal.

    So maybe it's time to let go a bit. Who knows? Personally I'm glad that those slobs made it into the New Testiment. They sound like my kind of guys.
posted by Chris Angelini 9/14/2000 05:36:13 PM

Thursday, September 07, 2000

    Damned phone.

    You Americans, be glad that you live in a world where phone companies compete against each other for your business. I still live in the land of tele-monopoloy and my phone went out two days ago. I'm still waiting for someone to come 'round and fix things. Along the way, I've been cut off, rescheuled without notification, informed that I'm being unreasonable and generally treated as if my telephone use is really quite a millstone around their necks.

    I do bloody well wish that the world could get back to serving the customer. Heck, despite what I said above, even competition isn't doing much to improve quality these days. We live in a world of half-baked OSes and software... diet foods that will cause you elephantitis... tires that can cause eighty deaths before anyone even thinks of recalling them... foods we're mutating in potentially harmful ways to get better yields... we're accepting too damned much crap because there's 'nothing we can do'.

    Makes me pretty sickened to be human some days. I'm not sure if there's any solution either; mass paradigm shifts don't seem really possible any more. We've locked ourselves into a banal existance... a closed-system of mediocracy which will eventually spin down into a heat-death of Big Macs, Diet Colas and mutated cattle.

    Crap, I'm sounding Goth right now. Hey everyone look! I'm taking a pie in the face! Pie! Pie! When there's pie, all's well!

    Oh to hell with it, let me be depressed at least one day...
posted by Chris Angelini 9/7/2000 05:54:02 AM

Tuesday, August 22, 2000

    Aiiiiiiieeee! I'm up! I'm up! I'm Blogging! Aiiiie!

    Oh, it was all a bad dream? You mean there really aren't people beating at my door to get me to write a log on-line?

    That's pretty depressing, come to think of it. Oh well, I'll continue to write here in Blogspace, content to know that my wisdom is carefully being preserved for future generations. It's actually in a small, lead-lined jar in New Mexico somewhere deep in Area 51. I'm left with this piece of crud that keeps churning out log-pages full of dross and crap!

    So here I am, once more searching for some means of gaining the capital to support my life of debauchery and vice. I'm starting to wonder why I bother; I just don't seem to have that much vice in me to give any more. I remember days when it was really fun to head down to the classic arcade by the riverfront and sink an hour into Galaga. Or Joust. Or the Holly Effin' Grail, Super Pac-Man. These days, though, I think I've started to get a bit depressed with our fair city of Windsor and so its fun potential has dropped considerably in my mind.

    To properly grasp Windsor, you must understand the study of contrasts which make it up. Windsor is not just a city. No... it is a border city, which means that (like all Canadian border cities), it lives and it dies by the commerce which it receives from the States. Which in turn means that it needs to have some sort of draw to get them to cross our border and consume like madmen within our fair nation. Once, we held the record in Good Beer, Cheap Cigarettes, Cuban Cigars and parks full of flowers on which no one had ralphed (recently). We still have those things, but lately I believe that the draw of such natural wonders has become lessened... and so the Casino opened.

    I remember a time when Windsor actually had *four* stores that sold Role-playing games! And six comic stores! And fun little gimmicky places that appealed to the geek in me! And all kinds of weird little movie stores that had all the B-Film crap I could stomach! Windsor used to be a paradise for anyone who was in the market for new and weird things. Unfortunately, the town is now very much geared towards the 'if you can't smoke it, drink it, sleep with it (or all three at once, woo!), then we don't want it' mentality. I buy my role-playing goods at one tiny store that I've tracked down and discovered by sheer luck. There's a tiny, single, tired comic store whose owner cares more about scratching his stomach than customer service. However, geeks can still make one killing here -- because Windsor's lopsided economy supports two boom industries.

    Computers AND porn!

    Basically, you can get cheap silicon in some capacity or another any time of the day or night.

    I really hate this city.
posted by Chris Angelini 8/22/2000 05:05:56 PM

Thursday, July 13, 2000

    Mrgfl

    There are some days when you feel like the weight of the world's on your shoulders. Then you have to go outside and turn the garden hose on yourself in order to say 'stop angsting, self!'.

    Ever felt like you have absolutely no ability to communicate with anyone, any more? Sort of like when you're in Quebec (insert your own favorite foreign locale here, like France, Yemmen or Iowa...) and trying to remember your high-school French and though you think you're saying 'Ou est la salle de bain?' you're really saying 'your wife is a bloated warthog'? Doesn't that leave you with such a nice, deep-down crappy feeling, because suddenly the only basis by which you have to send a message from the island that is You to the island that is Someone Else has managed to spring a leak? Don't you sometimes wish that people would be more ready to understand what you're saying, and less wrapped up in what they expect you to say (for instance, if they're angsting and haven't got easy access to a garden hose and thus have yet to master the Garden Hose-Fu method of Angst Extraction?)

    Me too. Please send $5.00 to the Collective Telepathy Development Foundation. Your money will be well spent by our scientists in Aruba, looking into the politics of dancing and feeeeelin' good, with an eye to eventually establishing a very intimate rapport with other people...

posted by Chris Angelini 7/13/2000 07:43:05 AM

Thursday, June 29, 2000

    Micro-double epsilon update: I am a filthy, dirty liar who deserves nothing more than thirty lashes with a wet noodle. Opera will let me publish my blogs under BeOS. It just required the right sort of virgin sacrifice. Ain't that always the way?



    So today is a short ramble, mostly because I'm wincing in pain slightly, though nowhere nearly as badly as last night when I had to type one-handed. No, not for that reason, you bleedin' perv. Let me take you back to the day before, when things were bright and cheerful...

    Ah, I remember it as if it were only yesterday. I've taken to walking on the closed-off road behind my house, 'cause it's like closed-off and like a road, so you can like, walk on it and not be, like, killed by a car. There's this little yappy dog who lives in the house by the road (at the bottom of the seeeea...) who's claimed this road as his own. He constantly chases me around, never touching but always trying to let me know that I was tresspassing! His owners assured me on my walk down the road today [Irony alert ahead] that he simply would not bite, and as I've passed this little yapper before, I believed them!

    So after this dog finishes mistaking me for his Kibbles and Bits and Bits and Bits I rush to the nearest walk-in clinic. They'll save me, won't they? But no! I'm intercepted at the door... no more patients! Oh the pathos! Oh the humanity! Oh well, go to another clinc...

    CLOSED! Damn and double damn, go to another cli--CLOSED! Good thing I don't actually have anything really wrong with me, or I'd be a dead man right now. As it was, I was losing blood pretty fast -- damn, that dog looked small but he sure has his secret ninja dog moves down pat -- and I was running out of paper towels (Lint in your wounds... priceless) to soak it all into.

    But... wait. I'd watched Thursday night NBC before... there was a place. A magical place called the E.R. that would save me! Yes, George Clooney, get out your suture and don't spare the chest spreader!

    Triage is a noble art, and one that probably takes nerves of steel and balls of a strong copper-alloy. I respect triage; how can you not respect someone who has been trained to say 'you will go and you will stay'? That said -- was the triage nurse on duty doing crack? Had they been sniffing the surgical glue in the back room again? I'm still bleeding here, guys, and you're letting in the splinter patients? Argh, and I don't deal with boredom well either. All I have to watch is The Sports Network, so I learn all about how... someone... did... something... somewhere... er... right. I guess I didn't absorb all that much from it.

    I'm in! I'm in! I'm admitted past the gates of paradise, oh happy, frabjuous day! Salvation is but a few minutes' wait! wait... wait... wait... wait...

    Three hours later, I've played my walkman (I was bitten on a jog, y'see) continuously and the batteries are wearing low. So's my patience. So's my tolerance for The Phantom of the Opera. Finally, a doctor wanders in. He stitches me up (I'm partially immune to anaesthetic, so I get to feel the whole damn operation) and puts me on antibiotics (which I hate with a passion for what they've spawned) and sends me home.

    Total trip time: eternity. Next time this happens, I'm getting two shots of whiskey (one for my hand and one for me), a needle, a thread and sewing up the damned thing myself.

posted by Chris Angelini 6/29/2000 05:22:31 AM

Saturday, June 24, 2000

I haven't updated in a while. Before the two of you who read this say 'well *duh*', let me hasten to add that there's a reason for this. Very recently I've left the Windows world behind (for personal usage, at any rate) for the wonderful, magical land of BeOS.

For those of you who have never had the joy of using Be, let me say that it's a Godsend for me. I have a tendancy of following the Underdogs in the computer rat-race: my first serious computer was an Amiga 2000 (RIP...), followed by a Macintosh Quadra 605, followed by a long dalliance with Windows (I wish it would RIP...) until finally I washed up on the shores of Island Be. It's a great OS that not only feels like my old Amiga days (those innocent days...), but also just has a great deal of power behind it that you don't get in the Windows world.

Of course, this did get me to thinking -- a shock to everyone, I'm sure. The reason that I haven't been Blogging is how dependant Blogger is upon Javascript, and how deficient Be is WRT Javascript compliant browsers. I'm praying to God and Grud and Murphy that Opera doesn't explode on me as I type in my thoughts, periodically saving them to Eddie so I don't lose them... is it me, or have we just started to take high-end for granted? Time used to be that I could happily browse the web with E-Mosaic, not worry a whit about plug-ins and LiveScript and leave cookies safely off... but now, honestly, that's an impossiblity. When did we pass through this portal of bigger is better? Was it when most of us sold our collective souls to the MS-Borg in exchange for apps that were pretty to use, but took the power of their utility out of our hands?

I dunno. I'm learning just how much of our web has been Borged since I left the Mac and my days of using MacLynx, E-Mosaic and the occasional foray into IE 4. I do kind of miss text and content... I do miss the days when we weren't trying to splash orgasmic miasmae of colour across the screen in an effort to get today's Twitch-Kid to stay on our site for a second longer than they would have without it. I kind of miss the days when you could lose yourself for hours in the web, but those hours were spent reading and linking instead of waiting for a trickle of data to seep into your browswer whilst you tapped your finger.

I sort of miss those days. But if things hadn't changed, I wouldn't have a blogger, now would I?



(Micro update -- darn it, Opera holds no joy for me. I can blog but not publish.)
posted by Chris Angelini 6/24/2000 10:30:26 AM

Tuesday, May 23, 2000

    More and more, people are becoming a mystery to me.

    Let's face it, we're all islands to each other. We all have vast, beautiful landscapes which would awe others if only they could see them, but of course we only spy one another from afar and so miss vast tracts of each other's land.

    Now how did that rambling turn perverse? Hunh... gotta watch that.

    Do you ever get the feeling that all you're good for is harming someone else? I do, I do! I hate the feeling. And yet I seem powerless to escape it sometimes.

    Maybe this is why we should spend time in each other's shoes. But how do you FIND them? I'd gladly put myself in someone else's moccasins but they're on that other bloody island!

    What I'd give for a sociological Adidas store...
posted by Chris Angelini 5/23/2000 05:49:25 AM

Monday, May 01, 2000

    I've been doing my level best not to get involved in the various arguements about how games do or do not train the human mind to [violence|murder|killing|mayhem]; to me, it's old news. I lived through this in the 80s, when mass-hysteria's designated whuppin' boy were (evil) the (Satanic) role-playing (Hissss!) games that I enjoyed in my youth. Perhaps I'll ramble about that another time -- growing up in the middle of a country town, where no one really had anything to do except peer into each other's lives, I have plenty of tales to tell of needless discrimination and fear based on recreational choices -- but for now, I'd like to finally break my silence and ramble on the nature of the beast. Please revive that Puritan lady in the back... the beast of which I speak is that of Video Games.

    No, on second thought, better leave her fainted. This could get ugly.

    I'm not going to talk about what violent games do to you in the psychological sense; better men than me have wrassled with that gater, and I'm fairly sure I wouldn't live to tell the tale later. So, to begin my ramblings I'm going to embark upon a one-hundred eighty degree tangent to even begin to make my point

    One of my favorite books from my university years is Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey, which is one of the first drug book on record for those of you keeping score. It was written in a time when Turks were not the best loved of people (I'm praying that I get the facts right... it's been a few years since I've reread the book), and in the midst of this political climate, there is a passage where a Turk comes knocking on the protagonist's door. After the encounter, our 'hero' hands the Turk enough opium to kill a man thrice over,dividing the dose into three, which the Turk takes and bolts whole. Now. The Turk was stated as having known what Opium was and recognizing it on sight. We have accepted him as a knowledgable user of this drug, and so he must know what this kind of a dosage would do to him, mm? And yet, in accepting this, we as the reader ignore that he was given three doses of the drug, each of which was enough to kill him. We become complicit in the Turk's death by acceptance and by failing to resist the subtle political movement of the text, in which the protagonist kills an enemy (who had done him good) with a soft poison.

    So what the HELL does that have to do with FPSs, Cartman?

    Video games from the very beginning have been an exercise in degrees of catharsis and culpability. Let's start from the very top -- the First Person Shooter. When you put yourself behind the crosshairs of your Strogg, Merc, Doomguy, Nazi-Hunter or what-have-you, you are doing more than simply changing your perspective of gameplay -- you are accepting that role onto yourself. Every time you point your crosshairs and fire at someone, you are directly culpable for that on-screen death. There's no layer of abstraction between act and action -- you, not a marine and not a Demon-Hunter and not a heart-crushing ninja are destroying... whatever it is you're trying to destroy.

    Let's move up a level, to what I call the Second-Person shooters. The best examples I can think of are games like MDK, or any flight sim where you're taking a chase-plane perspective. In these games you're now a degree apart from your onscreen avatar... you command and he acts. You are not the one destroying what is seen; he is, and by his hand does destruction rain down upon the rasterized foe.

    Then we have the third type... the Starcrafts and the Myths and the Warcrafts and other such third-person games (yes, these divisions are horribly artificial. I'm making a point, rather than trying to create cohesive categories to last through the ages and beyond like a neo-Platonic configuration). In these, you are only guiding your thralls towards the enemy... you take very little direct responsibility for their actions once they've reached their foe. It is their lot in life to kill and act as their instincts dictate and it's your sad role to keep those virtual peons alive, at the cost of their enemies' lives.

    And yet, even in third person games, are we not culpable for all of the destruction which our on-screen puppets wreck? We enter into the game knowing the purpose and the point; it was not thrust upon us, but rather, we accpet our position willingly by installing and running the games which we play. And without saying 'one game is good, one is bad', because this is meaningless -- if you haven't figured out that I"m talking about culpability and not morality, please join the lady fainted on the floor and don't bother getting back up -- I will say that First Person Shooters are the most honest of these games, as we accept that we are slaying and looting and pillaging (up and down the coast!) and perform these actions directly, rather than hiding behind layers of protection which shield us from our actions.

    Enough philsophy. Back to trying to murder Diedrianna. Or sorry, no. Having my mercenaries attempt to sanction her. Isn't it nicer when it's all wrapped up in a pretty package?
posted by Chris Angelini 5/1/2000 09:38:11 AM

Thursday, April 20, 2000

    Yesterday, I went to see Fantasia 2000. Well, who wouldn't? I had a chance to see how Disney had butchered one of the most magical, yet hardest to sit through movies that they had ever made (Fantasia was much better in the advent of the video tape. You could watch the movie in segments. I have a pretty decent attention span but I've never enjoyed a full run of Fantasia without a signifigant break, and I've watched it with friends more than a few times. I really recommend the film about five in the morning, with a bunch of people who are similarly stressed out from exams, low on sleep, whom you have never seen before in your life.). I was blown away, surprised that the magic was still there, found myself getting scene ideas for writing left and right, and generally having a great time. Oh, and Steve Martin must die. Nothing personal, Steve, you just can't ever live down the shame of that host segment.

    However, I don't feel like waxing poetic on this film, no matter how good it was. What I'd like to talk about is a little phenomenon that took place afterwards. I was standing around outside the theatre, waiting for the friend with whom I'd gone to see the film, and I noticed that people were... gasp... trading smiles with each other. I was the victim of several of these shared moments. We'd all experienced an eighty-six minute joyride of the senses, found ourselves thrust into a very intense experience and once we came out the other side, we knew that the only people who could appreciate it were others who'd shared the same experience. For a moment, we were almost joined by a common bond of Mickey and Donald Duck, and gosh-darn it, this actually felt good.

    And then you look beyond this, at Diz-Nee's other Empires across the globe, and you start to wonder -- if that was the magic, what's this? Is this like that Twilight Zone episode where a man got three wishes, but the genie who granted them warned that each one carried with it consequences? To get something magical like this, did we have to wade through the Disney animated film machine turning into utter tripe for a decade, the amusement parks changing into the Most Expensive Commercial Enterprise on Earth and Disney Animator going down with the ship when the Amiga tanked (I'm BITTER, damn it!)?

    Apparantly so. I'm not saying anything you've never heard before, am I? (Except for the animator software. No one's heard of that *sigh*) What I hope that I am saying is that there's still a little spark of magic coming out of Disney, and it only took an eight-story IMAX theatre to deliver it.

posted by Chris Angelini 4/20/2000 04:50:49 PM

Thursday, March 23, 2000

She's so... Felicity.

Gods how I'm starting to hate those words.

Let me set the stage a little here and keep in mind that today's ramble is about a non-issue. You might not care less about television. I know that I find it pretty hard to do so. However, have you ever had something get under your skin and just start it to itching so powerfully that no matter how hard you scratch, it just burrows deeper and deeper, and you only really succeed in shredding your own skin?

My countrymen of the great nation of the web? I have a name for my pain, and that name is Felicity.

A little background, if you'll permit. The TV show _Felicity_ came out some time in the hazy past (I could look it up, but if this abstract number will improve the quality of your life even a whit, then your life requires more fine-tuning than I could ever hope to do). It seemed to be aimed at the aprez Dawson's Creek hour, to give faithful viewers a treat for surviving to the end of an episode. Unfortunately, much like Spam-flavoured ice cream, what you intend to be a treat can wind up leaving you heaving on the floor of your local emergency clinic, begging for the sweet, merciful release of death.

That near-meat treat that's good to eat? Felicity.

This show is yet another in the WB Network's endless parade of muddled and confused teen fare, the trend itself apparantly being an aftershock from the era when Beverly Hills 90210's slightest murmur could dispace medium-sized land-wars in terms of newsworthiness. Felicity chronicals a young woman's escape from the comfortable nest of her over-dominating family, into the uncertain world of a New York university, as she chases a boy who never really noticed her in high school. Her flight was presented to us in terms of a growing up, and moving on... a growing of wings to fly!

If you'd asked me at the time, I would have told you that it seemed like Felicity was a little brat who, at some point in her high-school career, had volunteered to have her brain stuffed with cotton baton in the name of science, and who had forgotten to have it removed in her haste to graduate. If any other person in the world had made this decision, they would fairly soon remark to themselves 'oh dear, I appear to have just fscked up my life. Perhaps I should reconsider my impulsive ways'. But not our spritely heroine (perhaps that should be heroin, as I've seen junkies with more sense than the title character). No, it seems that she blossoms at university, where blossoms is a word I use to take the place of the phrase 'loses her cotton baton in the campus pool and operates on the cognitive level of clotted cream'.

I stopped watching Felicity as soon as my ears ceased to bleed, and the two demons from the nether pits of Hell untied me so I could turn off the television set. However, I just couldn't get away from the show. Every other commercial summarized the life of our pixie-haired beauty in a fifteen second sound-bite that was fourteen-seconds too long in comparison to my interest in it. Discussions started to flare up about the show. The WB began to show 'very special episodes' for those of us unlucky enough to have missed pivotal moments in the title character's life, as an alternative to leaping from a tall building for having missed even a second of Felicity's chronicles. (What could we have missed, oh gentle reader? Well... it seems that there was this one very special episode of Felicity that would have the cosmos themselves buzzing with excitement... for on that day... Felicity had... cut... her... hair! My stars, I may pass out...)

And now? Now the WB is attempting to sell its non-product by telling us that her behaviour is so... so... Felicity. Yes, in that fond, puzzled way that you reserve for discussing the capricious play of kittens and the killing-spree actions of axe-murderers. We're having the exploits of Our Favorite Ditz's life being breathlessly recounted just in case we've somehow missed the fact that she has all the common sense God gave to an olive-pitter. We're meant to see how wonderful and complicated and engaging Felicity's life has become, from its humble roots as a simple act of rebellion...

IT AIN'T WORKING, HON!

No matter how much you dress up a clown in a miniskirt, it's still a clown in a miniskirt. This show examines nothing. If you could sit in on a writer's meeting, you'd probably see ten men playing hackysack until the president wandered in and told them that if they didn't do their homework, there'd be no sweet-potato pie for dessert. Felicity might as well pick up some chainsaws and start to juggle them. Then I'd be perhaps willing to suspend my disbelief and watch the show, but only to see when one of those chainsaws slipped.
posted by Chris Angelini 3/23/2000 12:45:27 PM

Wednesday, March 15, 2000

Soooooo, nostalgia. It's one of the 20th century's Stealth Buzzwords. In this age of multimedia and connectivity and LOW FAT!, nostalgia (the breakfast of Champions) is like a shadowy spectre, lurking off on the very edges of our society, waiting to be all... dark... and shadowy... and stuff. You know it's there, I know it's there, the Marketing Men in Black know it's there, but it's never presented in its raw form. Like smack, nostalgia has to be cut with something to be palatable to the general masses. This is why there's so much 'old is new again'; new cars are built with old names... why singers are covering so many old songs... why old TV shows are becoming new movies... and so on and so forth.


Some of us enjoy nostalgia uncut. I've gone through my tour of duty collecting old Atari 2600 carts (have you blown the dust from Atari today?), finding old horror films from the past, and using Java 1.1 when Java 1.3 is in pre-release. So when the nostalgia craze began to sweep across Western Civilization like the Power of Cheese, I was really quite ready to embrace it, shadowy-ness and all.


Of course, I didn't look too closely at what had been delivered to our societal door by the UPS Man of Fads Past. Not at first. Which is the only way that I can excuse myself for missing one, inescapable fact about factory-packaged Nostalgia Flakes.


It's like digging into a biiiiig Hot Fudge sundae and tasting Cream of Wheat. It's not what you ordered, it's not what you wanted, you don't even particularly want it, but you swallow it anyway, because on some lizard-brain level you believe it's good for you.


When we visit the names of cars that were synonymous with Freedom and Adventure, Rebelliousness and Excitement, what is it that we get today? Conformity! Bland lines! Tiny, inoffensive frames! And cream of wheat!


Or look at the movies they make from old shows. Take for example Mission: Impossible -- they take a clever, smart premise and systematically raze it down to even its theme music, building back up in its place a construct that's as stable as Poly-Filla and toothpicks. Or as a more poignant example, Lost In Space, a film that I would have truly loved had they not tried to link it to the campy series of the same name. What we are losing in the rush to shove the product of the past onto the shelves of the present is the spirit of what it is that we're repackaging and stamping with the seal of renewal. What, I ask, is the point of remaking something if you have none of the elusive spark of that thing in your crafting? All that you've really done is mortage your creation on the asset of a name, essentially hiding out behind a thin, cardboard cutout of a legend from yesteryear. Pay no attention to the scriptwriter behind the curtain! I am Oz, the Great and Powerful -- now, with CGI dinosaurs!!!


I've reached the end-point of my rant, and I've yet to sum everything up as a thesis. The temptation is strong to say nothing more, thumb my nose at every teacher who has ever told me to finish my thoughts before moving on, and leave everyone hanging. But no... I feel the need for closure in this. I feel the need to prove that I have a point to convey. What I believe that I'm saying is that creativity is a quicksilver bitch-goddess that gives and taketh away. And as she is more and more often dressed up in whore's clothing for the masses, the clothiers in charge will be turning an eye to what came before for their next Quick-and-dirty product. They need to catch the People's attentions, and the trend in this day and age is to do it by glitz rather than by presenting a superior product, and sadly this is often because we have so many Products all vying for attention that you wonder if perhaps it's not time to clear the board and start the game over again with fewer pieces. I'm not sure. All I know is that I love the past, I want to revere the past, and the more that I see my fond memories being cranked out into Factory-Processed Advanced Meat Paste Substitute, the more I wish that no one had every invented the term 'Cover' (used in the context, oh my GOD, Madonna covered "American Pie"?).


I've also learned that Robert Smith really kicks ass.
posted by Chris Angelini 3/15/2000 05:46:21 PM

Tuesday, March 14, 2000

Well now, I've just discovered the Blog thanks to a friend (Hello there, Gina, you know who you are) and will now begin to hasten the universe a little closer to its inevitable heat-death by expending energy on maintaining a semi-constant ramble of my thoughts, impressions and psychotic episodes which might later be used against me in a court of law. I hope to eventually incriminate myself so utterly that there will be little chance for society's continuing safety until I am safely ensconced in the one place where those of danger mindsets can be kept away from society: politics.

-Chris
posted by Chris Angelini 3/14/2000 07:47:21 PM