two

Posted on By Wil

Two things you probably didn’t know about me:

  1. I’ve always wanted to be a bartender.
  2. This Nextel thing with the guys dancing around to Salt-n-Pepa makes me laugh real hard whenever I see it.

so my friend is in this contest . . .

Posted on By Wil

My friend Dawn is up for MySpace Girl of the Week on Attack of the Show. I can’t say anything about the other girls who are in the contest, but I know that Dawn is a real geek girl. I can guarantee you she’s the only nominee who knows the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel, and odds are she’s the only one who knows the correct answer to the question, "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

So quit reading my non-cute-girl-having blog, and go vote for Dawn.

insert coin

Posted on By Wil

Kungfumaster
This week’s Games of our Lives makes me giggle. The subject is one of my childhood favorites, Kung-Fu Master. Here’s a little bit:

. . . Thomas found a note from "X": "Your love Silvia is in custody now.
If you want to save your dear Silvia’s life, come to the Devil’s Temple
at once. 5 Sons of the Devil will entertain you."

Well isn’t that nice? Mr. X doesn’t want to kill Thomas, he just
wants the Kung-Fu Master to enjoy his temple’s top-quality
entertainment. Maybe when Thomas finds Silvia, they can join X at the
late-night comedy buffet, which we hear gets a little blue.

Gameplay: The Devil’s Temple is a lovely five-story building,
decorated in the style of a ’50s Chinese restaurant. Each level is
filled with those Unknown Guys from the prologue, who attack Thomas
using the ancient "raised-arm hug of death" technique.

At the end of each level, a different Kung-Fu Bad Guy must be
defeated before you can move on, and all your favorites are here:
Beating You With A Stick Guy, Boomerang Guy, Wizard Guy, Freakishly Big
Guy, and, of course, Mr. X himself.

Kids today might like it because: Okay, we all know that she’s
just a cartoon, but holy shit, is Silvia hot. She’s got this totally
sexy china-doll thing going on, and that silk dress is just—what?

Now check this little bit that had to be cut for space, which my editor and I both thought was funny. From Gameplay:

Level one is pretty easy, but starting at level two, Jumping Midget Guy will join Knife Throwing guy and the Unknown Guys, and they’ll have help from the various Jars of Death: snake-releasing jar, fire-breathing dragon jar, and deadly exploding confetti ball, uh, jar.

Hyuck. Hyuck. Hyuck.

Remember this game when it was on NES? I remember playing it like crazy, marvelling at how much it was like the arcade version. In fact, the only real difference between Nintendo’s Kung-Fu and Irem’s Kung-Fu Master is the graphics. The game played almost exactly the same at home as it did in the arcade, and if you played it on PlayChoice10, it was identical.

Do you associate certain games with certain arcades or places?

  • Donkey Kong will forever be associated with Verdugo Bowling Alley in La Crescenta, because that’s where I first saw it. In fact, I thought it was some weird bowling game because the barrells on level one look like bowling balls, if you’re nine years old and in a bowling alley.
  • Centipede will always be Shakeys Pizza in Tujunga, where this young couple in their 20s let me play their last man at the cocktail version because their pizza was ready, and Ms. Pac-Man will always be associated with this head shop in Sunland, where I got to the pretzel level on the first try.
  • Super Pac-Man, Defender, Gyruss, and Mouse Trap take me back to Sunland Discount Variety and Hober’s Pharmacy (they’ve become interchangable in my memory) and Donkey Kong Country on SNES will always remind me of when I lived in
    Nice, France, during production of Mr. Stitch, and my brother and I
    beat it when my family came out to vist me for Christmas.
  • Crystal Castles is Alladin’s Castle at the mall in Eugene, Oregon, during the filming of Stand By Me, and Burger Time and Tutankham will always remind me of the smell of chlorine and concrete, from the basement-level pool at the Eugene Hilton.

Funny, just writing about those places I can almost conjure up sense-memories, like smells and other ephemeral things that I can’t quite put into words but I can feel, but I can’t quite make them out, like the boobie channel on cable in 1984 that was scrambled but would occasionally resove into view for two or three glorious seconds, which would be the subject of much discussion the next day at school.

There are also all these games that just remind me of the happiness of my childhood, too: Journey, Riddle of the Sphinx, and Dodge-Em on Atari 2600, and the robot gyroscope game, Excitebike, and Super Mario Brothers (the turtle trick!) on NES are just a few. Writing about those, I can feel the orange shag carpet at the house in Sunland, the blue berber carpet in La Crescenta, and I can see the little television in my friend’s bedroom where we played RC Pro-Am until we had "NES Thumb."

The kids and I bought this game controller thing in the mall a few weeks ago that has a ton of NES games built into it. It has Kung Fu, Ice Climber, Duck Hunt and Hogan’s Alley, Contra, and a bunch of other NES classics. It is the most fun to play these games that I played from 8th-10th grade at every opportunity, with my kids (I just had this flash: after ten years, I think they’re finally okay with me calling them my "kids" instead of my "step-kids" – that’s awesome) who are just as excited to play these games with me as I was to play them with my friends when I was their age.

You know what I need to find and play again? Castlevania.

reading is fundamental

Posted on By Wil

Last week, I mentioned that I’ve read a few books recently which I think many of you will enjoy. Here they are, in no particular order, with the obligatory affiliate link so I can cash in and blow it all on hats.

If you liked the underlying story in Just A Geek — that story of self-doubt, self-discovery, and (hopefully) finding the courage to do what you want to do with your life, you’re going to love this book. If you liked the behind the scenes elements of Just A Geek, you’ll also love this book. Lindasy Moran is a hell of an author, who can put the reader into exotic and mundane places with equal amounts of passionate, vivid, and totally accessible writing. She tells a brutally honest, thoughtful and hilarious tale of her short career in the CIA, from her training at the The Farm, to her assignments in the Balkans during the late 1990s. Lindsay is candid and compelling, whether she’s talking about the dual life she lived and the toll it took on her relationships with her friends and family, or the cloak and dagger stuff she did in her job. Amazon’s reviews have been unfairly freeped by people who are unhappy that she revealed some unsavory secrets about life inside the CIA, but don’t let the 3 star rating fool you. This is a great book that’s incredibly satisfying to read. I give it an A+.

Have you ever looked at a person, and immediately known you were going to be best friends? Have you ever looked at a person and immediately known that you should do whatever it takes to get the hell away from them? Have you ever wondered what goes into devloping those instincts? Blink is all about that nano-moment when our brains instantaneously process a billion little bits of information and give us an almost-always accurate first impression. This book could have been dry and boring, but Malcolm Gladwell informs and enlightens us in an easily read and entertaining book. I haven’t read The Tipping Point, but I bought it because I liked Blink so much. I give it an A.

Meh. I kept waiting for all that Star Trek stuff to happen, and it never did. Where the hell was it? I mean, it was in the Star Trek section, and the cover is all "Star Trek Enterprise Star Trek Transporter Klingon Star Trek." There was, like, one chapter about working on two days of Star Trek and all this other crap about self-discovery and self-doubt and self-what-the-fuck-ever. What a bunch of crap! Where was the gossip? Where was the real secret behind the inverted isolinear optical chip refractiontational warp matrix? And what the hell is a blog? I give it an F-.

This book and Blowing My Cover have done more to inspire me to get off my stupid lazy ass and finish my next book than anything else in the universe.  I can’t seem to sum up this story, so I’ll let Publisher’s Weekly do it for me: "Angie Neuweather, 16, has it rough: she’s fat and sort of slobby; her
mom’s horrible fiancé has just moved into their low-rent apartment; and
she’s constantly being tortured at school (the kids call her
"Lezzylard"). Spunky girlfriends help Angie weather sophomore year,
including Shelby, a spiky-haired, out-of-the-closet lesbian, and
Heather, who has just one giant breast. Angie’s a little sexually
confused herself: she’s sort of got a crush on Carrie, an anorexic
popular girl, but she also enjoys sexual fantasies that involve
penetration by a giant hairy monster. The friendship of two boys—stoner
Pike and perky Mantis—motivates her to go on a severe diet, experiment
with drugs and attend her first beer party (her mom’s so strict that
Angie isn’t even allowed to wear concealer over her zits). Eventually,
she discovers that she’s pretty, and when a rival calls her a
"manstealer," she has an epiphany."

This book isn’t for everyone, but will captivate people who enjoyed River’s Edge, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Repo Man, and SubUrbia. I give it an A-.

  • Sin City Volume I and II by Frank Miller

I am so late to the party on Sin City, I’m a little ashamed. Frank Miller does for Noir with Sin City what he did for Batman with Dark Knight Returns. The link will take you to a complete collection of Sin City graphic novels, but since I’ve only read the first two, those are the ones I can heartily endorse. Volume I is essentially what became the movie, and at times could have been used as story boards, in fact. Volume II weaves in an entirely different story, with entirely different characters, into the story Volume I. Rather than give you the details of the plots, which aren’t all that important, I can tell you that the drawings are simple but striking, and the dialogue and stories are the type of gritty, anti-hero tales that Noir fans love. If you like stories about the bad guys beating the shit out of the worse guys, and the femme fatales who drive them to do it, you’ll love Sin City. Volume I gets an A, Volume II gets an A-.

Okay, that’s all for me today. If you’ve read any of these stories and would like to add your thoughts, go for it. If you’ve read any of these books and can suggest additional books based upon them, that’s good too. If we can Long Tail Lindsay or Michelle’s books, that would be superawesome.