gems among the alibis

Since the release of Haughty Melodic, I’ve been on a major Doughty kick. Go listen to The Only Answer, and then read the lyrics. Jeebus H. Menendez, man. I read things like this and wonder how I can call myself a
writer. I’ve got a long way to go before I truly believe I’ve earned it.
Skittish and Rockity Roll have totally fucked up the rating curve in my
iTunes library. Mike Doughty writes and plays music that I don’t just hear; it’s music that I feel.

I was so sad when Soul Coughing broke up, but if it had to happen, so
Mike Doughty could head out on his own, and create music like this . .
. well, the Ruby Vroom CD is just a bookshelf away.

True story: years ago, Mike Doughty mentioned me on his message board.
Somehow, word got back to him that I was a fan. He sent me a really
cool e-mail, and I was so star struck, and so afraid that I would come
off like a drooling fanboy dipshit, I never got the courage to reply. I
wonder if he remembers . . . maybe I’ll finally send him an e-mail of
my own, and save all my drooling fanboy dipshittery for a nice public
forum like my blog.

there ain’t no whales, so we tell tall tales . . .

In Games of our Lives this week, I took a big risk and tackled an incredibly popular coin-op game: Moon Patrol. I sent my editor about 45000 words, which he skillfully cut down into 300-ish good ones.

Witness:

Gameplay: The moon isn’t very safe, and thanks to budget cuts,
your buggy explodes as readily as a 1972 Pinto. Luckily, you’ve tricked
it out with a dashboard Jesus, lasers, and hydraulic shocks, so you can
blast the rocks and jump over the bottomless craters that get in your
way.

Kids today might not like it because: They can’t pick up a hooker, nail her in the back of their moon buggy, then kick her out, run her over, and take her money.

Kids today might like it because: Moon Patrol is much more realistic than the car-racing games they’re used to playing.

It’s easier to do games that people may not have crystal clear memories of, and passionate attachements to, because if I don’t cover that game exactly the way they want me to, people can get really worked up. When I poked fun at Midnight Magic, some Atari Nerds wished that I would die. Because I wrote a humorous column about a game that is over 20 years old. Uhh . . . yeah.

So I’m a little nervous about the reaction to Moon Patrol, but no matter what happens, I got to sneak in a Futurama joke, (which made me almost as happy as my Obscurity Hall of Fame reference to Jon Byner in Anteater), so I am TEH WINNAR!!11

like a dog without a bone . . .

I’ve written a post at Card Squad which may be of interest to WWdN:iE poker readers.

If I adhere to the "it’s just one long session" philosophy, I am
still way in the black . . . but for the last thirty days, I am
seriously in the red, and poker just isn’t very much fun. In fact, I
haven’t picked up a deck of cards, or logged into PokerStars in almost
two weeks, because I am so sick to death of losing. It’s frustrating,
it feels like a waste of time, and it’s hard to go into a game with a
positive attitude.

The experience is uncomfortably similar to the long streaks of fruitless auditions I’ve experienced the last several years. Attitude is an incredibly important part of success, and it is sofaking hard to let past defeats go, and face each new deal hoping for the best, ready to play to the best of my ability. It’s easy to fear that I’m a lousy player who got lucky, or even worse, just another mediocre player who isn’t able to realize that he just isn’t that good. 

Wow, that’s a perfect metaphor for auditions, too, I just realized. I have to go think about that for as long as it takes to smoke a cigar.

If you’re interested, my post is called Riding Out the Bad Times.

a vote for greg is a vote for freedom, kittens, unicorns, flowers, apple pie, and the american way of life

My friend and fellow ACME-ite Greg Benson is one of the funniest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. If you saw ACME Love Machine, Greg played Dave in my William’s Tell sketch, and he also wrote and played the title character in Let’s Gab with Saul Bernstein.

He has a production company called Mediocre Films ("They’re better than they sound"), and one of his super-short films (1:39) is a finalist in the Amazon.com Tribecca Film Festival. It’s called Coming Home. I don’t want to tell you anything else about it, but I will tell you that I didn’t rate it five stars because Greg is my friend. I rated it five stars because it’s that good — it made it to the top five out of 297 films for a reason, after all.

So if you’ve got a minute and thirty-nine seconds . . . well, plus the time it takes to click the link and sign in, then you watch the film and vote on it . . . okay, so if you’ve got two minutes and ten seconds, I  don’t think you’ll regret taking a look at Coming Home.