PAX 2009 -The Grinder

Fyre and I have been here since Friday morning, gaming away, staying up late nights for concerts, and generally running around having fun in a concentrated quantity that I can’t remember experiencing since, say, summer camp.

My body is not in shape for this amount of… doing stuff. I’ve noticed a corresponding effect on the quality of my gameplay. I got warmed up on Friday, really hti my stride on Saturday, and some time around last night the machinery began breaking down and I started losing control of my fingers, tongue and brain.

Fyre bought herself a copy of TF2, so we’ve been playing that. It has a certain mindless, twitchy quality that goes well with my current mindset of “Buh? Guhhhh… Gah!”

-ssr

PAX 2009 – Genius!

Kudos to the marketing Svengali who got No More Heroes 2 characters printed on the toilet paper in the PAX bathrooms. Nothing predisposes a demographic of self-congratulatory snark-tards (i.e. gamers, game bloggers, nerds gerneally) to like your product better than literally allowing them to wipe their asses with it.

I detect the guiding hand of game developer/free-roaming psychopath Suda51 here.

-ssr

PAX 2009 – In Which All Nerds Turn Their Backs on Lucas

Awesome PAX moment while Fyre and I were in the lineup to watch Gabe and Tycho make a strip in a giant theater setting. As we all stood together, winding through the waiting arena – I shit you not, the arena next to the real arena – a bunch of guys in Jedi costumes arrived and stood there while a really, really annoyingly chipper man attempted to hype us for the new Star Wars MMO. It was bad enough that he attempted to hype a bunch of prequel-weary hardcore dorks merely by asking us “Hey, do you like Star Wars?” Then he asked if we’d all seen the trailer for the Old Republic MMO. When treated with a massive chorus of “Yeah”, this man had the gall to ask, “You wanna see it again?”

As one, the nerds rose up and howled “NOOOOOOO!”

He didn’t care; he couldn’t, I suppose. Too bad, he said, and the trailer played again, projected two stories tall on the wall of the room and loud as a bomb going off.

We were a captive audience, and Lucas had his way with our eyes and our ears, but nobody can pretend that we liked it.

-ssr

PAX 2009 – Savory

Overheard last night at PAX, an attendee was telling friends over teamspeak that the event is “a total sausage fest”. I don’t know what sort of gaming events she’s been attending, but this is one of the most female-heavy nerd events I’ve ever been to. The male-female ratio is probably somewhere between 3-1 and 4-1, which is phenomenal in my experience. I suppose it deopends on what you compare it to; relative to, say, a yaoi convention, sure, this is probably a bit more guy-heavy.

-ssr

A Dangerous Business

It’s getting hard to avoid the near-constant ticker of celebrity death news gushing redly from the jugular of the internet. Jackson-Fawcett day was the worst so far, but while the parade has slowed, it nevers stops. I was wondering what’s going on with this, and a couple of trends popped up in my mind.

The most obvious to me is that there are so many celebrity deaths now because we have so many celebrities – their fame is so fleeting that there are more than ever before. You can be famous for managing someone famous, for being on a reality show, for landing a jetliner in a river. You can be famous for winning or losing at politics, for being rich and skanky, or for being on TV for any period over 5 minutes. The TV networks’ endless thirst for new content to shovel at us has led to this death march of low-grade micro-celebs into the maw of our popular culture, with every giggle, tweet, comment and fart offered up as relevant and entertaining.

I’m not saying that pop culture is new, by any means. But it is a young person’s game, and I’d suggest it’s taken this long for the bloated corps of pop culture talent, first formed in the 50s and ballooned grotesquely in the 60s and beyond, to begin to age and die off. We’ve spent 40 years feting youthful product as a kind of nouveau nobility, and now the first few waves have withered, brown leaves fluttering out of the consciousness of the corporations who crowbarred them into our lives.

As a related issue, I think more and more deaths are saturating our cultural consciousness simply because these same content creators need more and more content to flog. Death sells, even if it’s the death of entities like Billy Mays or the Taco Bell chihuahua, passings that would have gone un-noted and only privately mourned twenty years ago. Nowadays a culture conscript serves from the moment he is noticed and dragged into the spotlight until the day his passing can be packaged and sold, if not beyond. God dammit, there are 500 channels to fill.

Or maybe I’m being self-centered in thinking this is some sort of universal phenomenon, this apparent acceleration of celebrity mortality. Maybe I’m just noticing more; maybe the people who are dying off are the ones I grew up with instead of strangers from my parents’ lives. Maybe I’m just more cognizant of death generally. Maybe my parents began to feel the same way around this age, once the stars of their favorite kids’s shows were all gone.

It will only accelerate. Soon a celebrity, a real one that you remember, will die every day. Then every hour. One day, which I hope to not see, a babbling mutlitude of talking heads will offer up a constant stream of potential vicarious bereavements, their regretful voices like rain on a tin roof, so constant and insistent that it becomes no sound at all.

-ssr

Waiting For the Gate to Open

glad_pee

It’s kind of sad, but even with all the online matches I’ve played by now, I still get butterflies in my stomach right before my first match of the day. I’ve played a jillion WoW battlefield matches, I’m getting pretty confident in my DoW2 play, and that first loading screen always feels like I’ve been called up to present my book report. Win or lose, the feeling goes away after a match, usually during the first match once I’ve gotten a few orders off, but til then I’m a sweaty-palmed wreck.

What the hell, Fyre? Does this ever go away? Or am I just some sort of congenital foie blanc?

-ssr