Twenty-seven hours into Mass Effect 2, and I’ll write something up when I’m finished. For now, this dialogue choice encapsulates my experience of the game.

Nothing really important to impart, just bored on a Saturday. I swung by Barnes and Noble today because I had to pick up some ass-chapping Penguin’s Guide to Literary terms. While I was there, I tried to find the book Infoquake because it had been recommended to me. Not finding it, I seethed and went to buy my shit. I find B&N generally exasperating, because of the complete lack of want when it comes to shitty, soccer mom drivel, but the inability to find anything random or esoteric.

But as I got to the counter, I noticed they had the paperback edition of Oscar Wao up to be peddled, and I had to smile a little bit. I don’t understand how something as dense and esoteric as Oscar Wao has garnered so much mainstream attention, but it makes me grin. It’s equal-parts fictional nerd biography, centering on references to the Danger Room and Watchmen, and a historical account of the last century or so of the Dominican Republic. When I saw a girl reading Wao on the train, I was all, oh shit!

As a nerd, who relates to Oscar Wao’s tale more than should be healthy – obesity, being a virgin until 25, self-deprecation and suicide attempts, it makes me glow inside to see it up there. If you haven’t checked out Oscar Wao, and you’re a fan of nerdculture, historical fiction, or more important, really fucking gorgeous prose, check it out.

It was a fine afternoon in the autumn of 1946. The war was over and if you were a sailor you were guaranteed a piece of ass. Every night. These weren’t the worst of times, they were the goddamn best of `em. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Anyways, it was in a Brooklyn coffee shop that Socrates and Plato had their now infamous conversation about brewing beer. No, I won’t deny the fact that Aristotle was there too. But it’s important to remember that he was just tagging along. Had he not been Plato’s boyfriend, he would’ve never slimed his way into annals of the Drunken Kingdom. But the dude could smooch with the best of them, so he was there too.

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I came across this trailer for The People Vs. George Lucas over at Slashfilm, and man it gave me goosebumps and rekindled by need for therapy. I know I’m sick, but every time I think of the prequels a lightning bolt of hate and nausea rockets down my spine, and my loved ones have to prevent me from committing suicide by eating my Dash Rendar figures.

Nothing is as such great a source of mutual bliss, innocence, and unfettered cynicism in the Drinkwater family as the Star Wars saga. Those who know Pepsibones intimately know that the Star Wars Prequels broke him permanently. He was transformed from a chubby, cute little wide-eyed kid into an emaciated, hairy, full-blown cynic. He went from loving life and all the potential that laid before him into dismayed at his beliefs over the eventuality of all his heroes letting him down, the plight of the artist and their eventual decline into failure, and creating alternate personalities for himself. If not for Jar Jar Binks, I may have a brother nicknamed Bubby still, and not rambling about hypertextuality under the name of Pepsibones Krueger.

This trailer captures almost perfectly the tension between the sides of the Star Wars equation: unfettered love, and immeasurable, incomprehensible dejection. I got goosebumps watching it, and while thinking of the beauty of the Binary Sunset, I bit the inside of my cheek wanting to weep over the idea that a long-eared douchebag who spoke Jive brought down the Galactic Empire, and Boba Fett was the clone of a Kiwi asshole.

One of the things I find interesting about delving into LA X is that Jack and Locke both seem to posses a measure of the other’s Island-bound thematics. Locke waxes spiritual about the physical and ethereal location of Christian, before declaring with an empirical stamp that he is forever paralyzed. Jack comments on the physicality of his father, and then declares with an unusual amount of faith, “Nothing is irreversible.” This intersection of the two themes intrigues me, and no, I can’t stop thinking about LOST.

[ picture courtesy of slashfilm ]

[images & words is the comic book pick-of-the-week at OL. equal parts review and diatribe, the post highlights the most memorable/infuriating/entertaining book released that wednesday]

The theme for this week’s Images & Words is blood and thunder. This is the phrase that I couldn’t stop thinking of as I read the second issue of Siege, the limited series that sees Norman Osborn and his cronies trying to trash Thor’s crib. Built upon the premise of gods and superheroes duking it out, the expectation is that Siege would be an action-packed fanboy wet dream.

So far, the expectations are being met. And then some.

Picking up where the first issue left off, Siege #2 takes the reader right into the middle of the battle for Asgard. As was to be expected, Ares (yes, the god of bloodlust exists in the Marvel Universe) realizes that Norman Osborn’s been playing him for a damn fool! Jumping ship, Ares has himself a slugfest with the Sentry.  And it’s this slugfest  that ends up stealing the show.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say this – the fight ends with a fatality. Actually, it’s a two-page dismemberment, with entrails and blood and bodily fluids flying all over the damn place.

Yeah, it really is the artistic team of Coipel/Morales/Martin (pencils/inks/colors) that makes this comic especially worthwhile. Bendis’ scripting isn’t bad (in fact, it’s quite good) but the stunning visuals are what elevate the book. In addition to the aforementioned gorefest, even the more mundane sequences are sexy. Coipel’s pencils give Captain America a youthful sensibility which really shines through during his conversation with Steve Rogers.

Hell, the team even manages to make a snoozer of a meeting (between…well, some of Earth’s mightiest heroes) worthy being framed and hung poster-style.

I’m not going to waste time with one of my exhausting complaints about comics-events – but only because Siege is genuinely enjoyable. I think the series is pushing the Marvel universe in an interesting direction, and is doing so with guns and gods and explosions and all that other good shit. I’m sold.

If Ben Kenobi didn’t make his noble sacrifice, he’d be sensing an unprecedented disturbance in the Force right now – as though millions of geeks were crying out, only to be silenced.

Word started spreading today that Dan DiDio, Executive Douchebag of DC Comics, is going ahead with plans to publish multiple series and projects based on Watchmen. Apparently Paul Levitz, former Decent Publisher and Respectful Fellow of DC Comics, had repeatedly turned down proposals to create spin-offs based on Watchmen out of a respect for Alan Moore (the kook/genius responsible for writing the series).  Now that Levitz is  out of the picture, DiDio is willing to cash-in on the DC-owned property, with nary a regard for the wishes of its original creators.

I believe that Watchmen is the greatest fictional narrative I have ever experienced, a perfect work of unparalleled excellence. As such, I understand that any attempts to capitalize on its reputation  could never affect the power of the original series itself. But I can’t help get but pissed off when I think of schmohawks using my favorite piece of literature as means to sell bullshit crossover series, coffee mugs, and action figures. (Especially when the series lampoons such flagrant cash-grabs).

I dropped a post over at Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel forum, hoping to elicit response from the rare breed of nerd I call those whose opinions I value. To my delight, Warren offered his two cents:

Finding someone to work on it will be interesting. It’s not as cut and dried a thing as, say, working on an old Stan-and-Jack property.

And this got me thinking — What type of fucking asshole actually signs on to write/pencil/ink/color/letter/edit Watchmen 2? I’ve arrived at  two answers; 1) A greedy fuck who doesn’t care about besmirching the legacy of the seminal work of the comics medium as long he’s paid well. 2) An arrogant prick who (laughably) thinks he’ll be able to live up to the standards of Watchmen.

This is fucked. I understand that the comic book industry is fucking shameless, more of a research & development department for the Movie/Cartoon/Toy Industry than an artistically-minded field. But I guess my inner optimist is deflated to realize that nothing is sacred anymore.

Who’s going to watch the Watchmen? Anyone that wakes up before 9AM on a Saturday.

[source]

[source2]

And a thousand nerds creamed their pants at once, as the last season of LOST was underway. We had traveled through time ourselves, arriving in front of our televisions, our pants soggy, our lungs shuddering, our heart thundering. Sweet Jesus Christ, I had my mind fucked and left for dead last night. You know how sometimes a dog gets too excited, and it piddles on the floor? Well unfortunately, I’m a human, and I had the misfortune of running around my room screaming in-between commercials and peeing all over brother and friend alike.

Where to start? Where the fuck to start?

The episode starts and already I’m hyper-ventilating. I had a good suspicion that the episode was going to start with the plane crashing. Wrong, I’m already wrong. Jack’s sitting in the cabin and I’m vibrating back and forth and saying annoyingly out loud “Is this the actual footage from Season One? Is it? Pepsibones? Is it? Is it?” and he isn’t paying attention to me and I don’t blame him.

Turbulence starts! And I’m like, alright, they’re going back to the Island I knew it! Suck it, destiny prevails! And then I have the experience of being wrong twice in a row. So then they show the sunken Island, and I’m all like, we’re not on our Island anymore!

And then they come back from the commercial and they’re on the Island? What the fuck is going on? Oh, only one of the nerdiest things ever: alternate dimensions! As in Dimension X! LA X! Get it?! Is it only so amazing to me!? I’m shitting myself just thinking about it. Was anyone else hyper-paranoid and staring at all the passengers trying to see if they were conscious of some sort of shift? Because I think there may be one guy who knows all the different timelines.

Mr. Desmond Hume.

I mean, I’m not really basing that on anything, other than the fact that he fucking disappeared off of the plane. But if this is a guy who has been traveling through time and space for a long, long time, maybe he has been aware of the different possibilities? He’s seen Charlie die a zillion different ways, in what I assume are different dimensions.

So now it becomes apparent where the wrinkle in the narrative is coming for this season. When I was told that they were no longer doing flashforwards or flashbacks, I was like, well then, what does that leave us with? The producers are calling it “Flash Sideways”, but we can just call it following the alternate dimension that occurred when Juliet smashed a hydrogen bomb with a brick and “fixed” everything. It’s a neat twist. I had always assumed that if they had prevented the pocket of energy from being released, that reality would have rebooted. Instead, there’s another splinter reality that broke off from the one we already knew.

It’s going to be interesting watching where this LA X goes. Thematically, you can already see them suggesting that a reality in which they never crashed wasn’t the Utopia that they had perhaps deluded themselves into thinking it was. Charlie wants to die, Kate’s on the run, Locke is still a crippled mess.

During an intermission, Pepsibones began rambling about how the Island is the means through which perhaps these people were able to correct their flaws, and they needed the tragedy to improve themselves. There may be something to that.

Let’s take a break from LA X, shall we?

Meanwhile, on the Island, the grand reveal I had been prognosticating with a lot of others came true: Smokey is fucking Jacob’s Nemesis. The entire reveal was immeasurably fucking awesome, and centered around an action sequence that had me shitting my pants, and one of my favorite lines in a long, long time. After thrashing all of Jacob’s bodyguards as Smokey, Facob comes back and tells Ben:

I’m sorry you had to see me like that.

My brain actually exploded in an alternate dimension when I heard that line. In this reality I just moaned uncontrollably and pissed off my friends with fist-pumps and hand-claps. I’m slowly realizing I’m like a toddler when I get worked up. You’ve probably all known that way before me though.

And since I’m still bragging about being correct, Smokey wants exactly what I predicted: he wants to be free from the Island. The dude has been bound to the Island, and I assume Jacob, for god knows how many centuries. This entire time Smokey has been manipulating people to get exactly what he wanted: Jacob dead, himself freed. All of this was detailed in an epic speech given to Ben by Facob as they laid in the Shadow of the Statue. The speech also contained one of the most heart-breaking moments in the show for me.

Locke’s ultimate fate is heart-smashing, and the speech that Facob gives about it laid waste to my skin with goosebumps.

You should know, he was very confused when you killed him…Do you want to know what he was thinking while you choked the life out of him was, Benjamin? I don’t understand. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard? But it’s fitting in a way. Because when John first came to the Island, he was a very sad   man. A victim. Shouting at the world for what he couldn’t do. Even though they were right. He was weak, and pathetic, and irrepairably broken. But despite all that, there was something admirable about him.

So what are they going for here? We have had the clash of the titans, Faith versus Reason since the show kicked off. Jack Shepherd versus John Locke. And both of them, both of them are miserable, sad bastards. My first inclination is to hold up Faith and say “See, this is what you get when you believe in something so blindly. You get choked to death in a hotel room for nothing.” But that isn’t entirely true, because as Facob said, there is something admirable about that dedication.

And I find that poor bastard’s fate to be entirely more heart-wrenching than the Sawyer and Juliet bullshit. Shit, she died. Oh well. And the Freckled Hussy still lives. But while Sawyer and Juliet hugging and making out covered in each other’s hemoglobin were one of the few times I was bored, hearing Facob describe Locke’s life nearly broke me. I got goosebumps, feeling for the guy. And I can’t help but hope that both Locke and Jack have happier lives in LA X, as suggested by the idea that Jack could cure Locke’s paralysis.

And I hope so for Jack’s sake, too. For reason has clearly failed Jack where faith has failed Locke. Jack wakes up, somehow being nuclearly-propelled back into the present day. Juliet’s dead, and they’re hanging out in the Temple of Doom with Jacob’s followers or some shit. It seems that the writers are trying to stem a bridge between the worlds of Faith and Reason, suggesting that the two of them are useless to an extent without the other, and suggest that staunch adherence to either of them gets you….Choked out in hotel rooms or fighting for you life on the set of an Indiana Jones movie.

As always, LOST follows the formula of giving us four mysteries for one answer. Alright, Smokey is Facob. But who the fuck are these people? What is this temple? What’s going on? Jesus Christ. The entire show has gotten entirely more epic in scope, for it appears that the fate of the world rests on Jack and his Buddies. They need to stop Smokey the Amorphous Cloud of Doom from leaving the Island, but how! And just who the fuck is he? Or Jacob?!

Facob is clearly heading for that Temple, where Jack and the rest are, and he does so after putting a serious stink onto Alpert’s face. Seriously, my heart seethed when I saw my boyfriend get laid out by Not-Locke. There was a serious ass-whupping dealt out. Facob comments that it’s good to see Richard out of “those chains”, which makes it clear the dude was summoned to Island by Jacob as part of the Blackrock. In addition, it would fit in with my idea that Richard was bound to Jacob just like Facob was bound to him. Not only would Facob have freed himself from serving some unaging-fish-eating master, but he would   have let Alpert off the leash as well.

And then, the episode ends with Sayid waking up, after being resurrected in some Fountain of Youth/Lazarus Pit. Two hours of mindfuck, doled out to all of our unsuspecting asses. The entire experience has blown me away, and I cannot, for the life of me, stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it prior to it airing, and now all I want to do is watch it again.

The questions are overwhelming: why are Jack and everyone else important? Who are the people in the Temple? The amount of awesomeness that occurred in two hours far too much for me to cover. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned Hurley, who is beyond hilarious, and scripted to say exactly what the viewing audience is thinking, “Why aren’t you answering any of my questions?!”

This week’s 24 answered the question: how do you pass yourself off as a German who wants to buy nuclear materials? You wear a pair of four-dollar glasses from the local Big Party and you smoke a cigarette. Seriously, what the fuck is going on with this show? It’s a clusterfuck of awful storylines and non-action. There should be a drinking game where you have a shot every time a line of dialogue makes you laugh, and two shots every time you’re bored to the point of yawning. You’d be covered in your own bile and dead by the midway point.

Renee doesn’t get killed despite the fact that she’s cutting herself and begging for death. Instead, she’s brought to some dungeon where Vlad the Impaler is stationed. Vlad asks Jack for fifty-zillion dollars in exchange for information, which I thought was a shocking fuckload. But what was even more amazing, was how he was instantly able to get the money for Vlad.

Then, inexplicably, Renee is coming out of a shower in the dungeon. Let me ask you something: WHY THE FUCK WAS SHE SHOWERING?! There’s absolutely no reason for her to have been showering, other than to set up the scene where Leoben from Battlestar Galactica demands that she gives it up to her. They wrote in a scene where she’s coming out of a shower, just to give us a scene where she can be molested. That’s dedication towards being molested.

It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But that’s a running theme this episode.

But that’s okay, because we’re also treated to Dana Walsh’s storyline. Which no one gives a fuck about! If you thought her yokel ex-con ex-boyfriend (say that three times fast) asking her for a “Six-figure payout” was awkward and hilarious, the high-five between him and his b-boy when she has a deal for them was even more amazing. Nothing on this show makes any sense. Why doesn’t she just tell her ex to go fuck himself? Instead she’s going to settle for participating in a robbery.

I’m impressed at how quickly she can find a con for them to pull off. It only took her ten minutes in the middle of an international crisis or some shit.

Also doesn’t make sense? Her ex-boyfriend’s gang member bringing a shotgun to the warehouse where the money is stored. Dana specifically mentions that there will be no one there and they won’t be noticed. This is as remarkable as the purposeless shower scene, because it also makes no sense is only written into the episode to create tension further down the road.

Meanwhile, Jack is absolutely no where to be found. This is still his show, right? Because he’s never on it. It’s like those seasons of X-Files without Duchovny or Anderson. What the fuck is going on?! Where is he?!

That’s okay though, because we’re treated to enjoying the shitty Russian Mafia Dad’s storyline with his kids. Which, like the rest of the episode, makes no sense whatsoever. The Russian Mafia Dad orders his two sons to be retrieved from some cancer clinic place, where one of the kids was being saved from his poisonous uranium exposure. How, you ask?

Simple! Well, at first the treatment was going to have to be a complete bone marrow transplant. But then, somehow, the doctor realizes that there was just some pill he could take that would fix him in seven to ten days. He goes from dying, to needing a bone marrow transplant, to taking some sort of pill.

What the fuck?

Then the Russian Mafia Dad brings them back to their Russian bar or whatever it is, and yells at Sark from Alias because he was trying to save his brother’s life. “Don’t you think I care about him?!” And then he shoots his son! The one he cares about! Uh, what? First he gives no good reason for bringing them back from the Cancer Clinic, other than it jeopardized the mission or something. But he was cool with killing everyone in the clinic.

Please, someone save me.

Then he pimp slaps his son, and embraces him. This dude is loco.

Finally Jack makes the deal with the Russian Rapist Guy, and of course they try and double-cross him. The guy from She’s All That saves Jack’s ass by sniping the show’s equivalent of Stormtroopers, and Jack says a few cool lines. All of it returning me to my initial point which is: PUT JACK ON THE FUCKING SHOW.

24 is awful and hilarious when Jack’s on the screen, but it is enjoyable. I’ll take implausible action scenes, action movie dialogue, and Jack being a thug. It works, it’s awesome. It’s slop, but it is entertaining. When he is on the screen, I’m entertained. Why he’s only on four minutes of an hour of his show is beyond me, but it is driving me towards Hulkian-rage.

Man, I ain’t read shit in two weeks. There’s comic books piling up on my computer desk at an increasingly rapid rate. They sit there, begging to be read. I tell them, “Shh children, I will attend to thee soon”, and then I return to whatever activity I am currently caught-up in. All of this shit started when I began my grad school classes last week and I actually had to read real things.

The fucking pile continues to increase in enormity, and then it begins to intimidate me. I’m all “Holy fucking shit, I have ten comics I have to read”, and I say to myself that I don’t want to short change them, so I say “I’ll read them when I’m not exhausted and resentful of the written word.” Apparently, the time when that occurs is never. Sure, I could be logical and just read one at a time but that makes too much sense.

The entire thing runs tandem with a desire to actually comprehend the shit I’m reading. Earlier last year, I realized a several of things. First that I read comic books and things in general way too quickly. And because of this, two things happen, I retain very little of what I’ve read over the long term, and I analyze even less. I thought it was something just particular to me, but I asked around and some of my friends shared the same plight. They read a lot, but what happens and to whom slips their mind quickly.

Of course, it’s all compounded by the fact that you have to wait an entire month for the next installment, and you’re reading ten or twenty titles at a time. Everything begins to blur and blend and the next thing you know, you’re thinking of Daredevil fighting Cyclops while Batman jacks it in the corner. And as far as actually picking apart what was going on in the comic books? I really wasn’t.

So I decided to do what a college professor and mentor of mine recommended back in the day, “Read more, less.” Spend more time reading less material, and thereby ingesting that shit more thoroughly. But of course, that shit takes way more time than rushing through an issue, checking out the epic fights and the snappy dialogue. As well it requires a bit more of a higher brain function, and for anyone who reads this column regularly, it is apparent I struggle at composing sentences that are halfway intelligible, and don’t contain the word “cock” or “cunt” every other noun.

So along the way, and adopting something my bro told me, I really only allow myself to read a comic book every half an hour or so. It stems from him telling everyone and anyone to only read one issue of Watchmen a day back when all of our friends were checking it out prior to the movie release. It made sense to me, and since then I try and give every comic book its own time. Maybe the actual reading won’t take a half an hour, but then I’ll sit there, and rework what happened in my head. Recall the main characters, ask myself what is going on thematically.

I may be doing this while writing something up, or while vegging out to a video game. But there’s a secondary ingestion that goes on after I eat up the comic book itself. And by god, the shit has worked. My memory retention has gone up, my appreciation for the underlying shit has increased, and I have found it way more fulfilling that I did prior to adopting this method.

And then grad school came in and fucked it all up.

I’ve found myself reading five-hundred pages a week, going over dense literature and scholarly articles, and by golly, it vexes my brain. When I throw three or four hours a day into the wind by reading something by Sarah Fielding, my brain is spent. My eyes hurt, and I can’t fathom staring at more pages or giving them worthwhile attention. So I say to myself, “I’ll get to them when I can give them the attention they deserve”, which it seems, is never, lately.

Maybe my entire process is too rigorous, especially for a guy who reads almost exclusively books featuring aliens named Clark and fascists named Bruce and genetic freaks named Scott Summers. Maybe I’m digging too deep into them, but I’ve always thought there was something to be said for what is being done in the more “mindless” comic books featuring the typical tired tropes and enormous muscles.

Interlude out, regularly scheduled vapidity will return next week.