Best. Game. Ever.

To give that state­ment a lit­tle con­text: I’m a novice gamer at best. My cruel, heart­less, Dick­en­sian par­ents wouldn’t let me have an Atari grow­ing up (kid­ding, Mom & Dad! I’m the bet­ter for it) so I’m a late­comer to all this beep­ing, flash­ing, vibrat­ing ana­log joy­stick­ing stuff. A few years ago, I was engrossed in The Matrix films to a degree that seems silly now. But at the time, I was design­ing the offi­cial shop so I can explain away my obses­sion as hav­ing arisen from spend­ing all day every day Pho­to­shop­ping dis­tressed metal boxes with glow­ing green screens. Word was that the Enter the Matrix Playsta­tion game was a ver­i­ta­ble rev­o­lu­tion in gam­ing, an unprece­dented merg­ing of cin­ema and inter­ac­tiv­ity, nec­es­sary to under­stand the upcom­ing sequels, yadda yadda yadda. Sucker that I am, I actu­ally bought a Playsta­tion 2 on the strength of this hearsay, and… the game sucked. I had never even touched a PS2 before and I could tell that it sucked.

Worse than that, it was unbe­liev­ably vio­lent. Before you call me naïve for think­ing it wouldn’t be: My favorite of the Matrix series is No. 2 (yes I know that’s against pop­u­lar opin­ion, but what does Pop­u­lar know?). If you watch closely, you’ll notice that although our osten­si­ble heroes Neo and Trin­ity mow down dozens of inno­cent humans (not, tech­ni­cally, their bod­ies, but their con­scious­nesses in the Matrix, result­ing in their real-world bod­ies dying) with machine guns in the first film, not a sin­gle liv­ing per­son dies in the sec­ond. Unfor­tu­nately the game takes after the first film and the player’s very first task is to sneak into a post office and kill as many armed guards as possible.

Where to start? First, is it inten­tional irony that you’re going postal on poor USPS work­ers? Sec­ond, why in the hell are they all pack­ing heat, as opposed to pack­ing tape? I for­got to men­tion that you start out the game unarmed, and the included instruction/hint book help­fully sug­gests a com­pli­cated combo move (or what­ever gamers call it… you have to move the joy­stick up and to the left, press a dozen but­tons in a com­plex sequence, turn around three times and toss salt over your shoul­der) to sneak up on some­body and break their neck.

Now let me say here that I am against cen­sor­ship in all forms, and all the talk about ban­ning or even cre­at­ing a rat­ing sys­tem for vio­lent videogames sets off all my lib­eral alarms. But when a game like this actu­ally encour­ages the player to sneak up on an inno­cent human being just doing his job (as opposed to a non-sentient but mali­cious com­puter pro­gram, as the Matrix mythos call a vil­lain) and break his neck instead of con­fronting them head-on and poten­tially cost­ing you health points in a fist-fight… well, I nearly had the urge to call my rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Congress.

So my Playsta­tion gath­ered dust for a good long while. I would occa­sion­ally take a stab at other games, but wound up sell­ing most of them back. I did enjoy one quite a lot: The Simp­sons Hit & Run, a sort of Grand Theft Auto (or so I’m told) with­out the hook­ers and whack­ing and stuff. Great fun! Seri­ously, you should try it.

But then I read about Kata­mari Damacy in Time Mag­a­zine, and was intrigued. Partly that the media would focus on a game for any rea­son other than to decry its poi­son­ing our nation’s children’s pre­cious bod­ily flu­ids, but also by it sound­ing totally unique. And it is, as far as I know. Basi­cally, you roll a big sticky ball around the place and pick things up. The big­ger your clump gets, the big­ger things you can pick up. Soon it becomes clear that if you play long enough, every­thing around you is pick-uppable, includ­ing peo­ple, sky­scrap­ers, and even clouds. It’s insane! Totally weird! Addictive!

I just picked up the sequel We Love Kata­mari this week­end and have fallen in love all over again. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge con­cep­tual advance over the orig­i­nal, but there are many more worlds to explore, more com­plex goals, and more gen­eral loony­ness all around. Yay! I’m a gamer!

After an entire sum­mer of no TV at all (Net­flix, like Ben & Jerry’s, doesn’t count), I watched three hours in a row tonight and my eyes are still uncross­ing. Every­body knows the old saw about tele­vi­sion being the opi­ate of the masses (opium must flour­ish in vast waste­lands). But when exactly did TV’s drug metaphor of choice change to crack?

Lost

Gone are the days of The A-Team, where one could switch on any ran­dom episode and know imme­di­ately what’s going on. Lost, like kissing-cousin action/dramas Alias and 24, depends at least as much on plot con­ti­nu­ity as char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. Not coin­ci­den­tally, these are the only three shows I watch. I’m pass­ing on 24 this year, because no mat­ter how excit­ing the plot­ting, the pol­i­tics became too unpalat­able for me (the over­ar­ch­ing theme of the entire last sea­son boils down to the fol­low­ing: tor­ture is a great tool for fight­ing ter­ror­ism. OK… I might lis­ten to such an argu­ment… if our inept intel­li­gence com­mu­nity ever man­ages to catch a ter­ror­ist BEFORE strik­ing! Please, give me a break. And mak­ing fun of Amnesty Inter­na­tional was just wrong. Can you tell I’m angry?). I’ve yet to decide if I’m going to com­mit to another whole year of Alias. No mat­ter how sexy Lena Olin is, the show has lost its fun plot-driven nature and con­verted into a more typ­i­cal wing-it-week-by-week for­mat. So that leaves Lost, the only one of the three about which I’ve actu­ally been impa­tient all summer.

Like any good drug, with every­thing Lost gives, it only demands more. The addic­tive nature of the show is to eke out infor­ma­tion in tiny lit­tle dime­bags… I mean, pieces. So I’ve waited all sum­mer for the answer to count­less ques­tions, at least one of which was “answered” tonight. I put that in scare quotes because all it did was metas­ta­size the num­ber of ques­tions to absurd pro­por­tions. But dis­ap­point­ingly, I found it a bit of a cheat to dis­cover the con­tents of the hatch to be a new char­ac­ter intro­duced just 5 min­utes before. Where’s the sus­pense in that? Imag­ine if it had been Jack’s father or fiancé instead. Wouldn’t you just have jumped out of your chair? OK, maybe just junkies like me.

To add a lit­tle spice to the evening, the local ABC news affil­i­ate broke in repeat­edly to keep us informed on a Jet Blue plane mak­ing an emer­gency land­ing with its land­ing gear twisted side­ways. Would they have been so mor­bidly enthu­si­as­tic about the story if Lost wasn’t about the sur­vivors of a plane crash? And just to top all the breath­less action off, we’re treated to a Jet Blue com­mer­cial! Oops… awk­ward! (Aside: my friend Dave help­fully sug­gested they should sim­ply land side­ways. Thanks Dave!)

Inva­sion

Uh… so? In short, this one did noth­ing for me. I guess they fig­ured keep­ing “of the Body Snatch­ers” in the title added up to too many syllables.

Neil Gaiman

I went to the Neil Gaiman read­ing & sign­ing at Barnes & Noble here in New York City tonight. Even though I knew he’s about as much of a rock star as a writer can get, I naively didn’t get in line until after he fin­ished speak­ing. Neil hero­ically pledged to stay as long as it took; B&N like­wise promised to stay open (would they do that for, say Salman Rushdie?). A slow real­iza­tion set in that I would have to hun­ker down for sev­eral hours to get my book signed. Turns out I had the whole night free (which is a sub­ject for another time), so I thought what the heck? I have to sit some­where to read the book, why not here and now?

And so the first hour passes. The Farts & Igno­ble car­pet­ing is some­what less than plush and my rear is a bit sore. But sal­va­tion! An employee offers us wrist­bands free­ing us to leave and return at will. Well, at will until 8:45, that is. So I go have an enor­mous burger and fries (a crav­ing, what can I say?) and come back.

Neil (he of the super­hu­man wrist) has already signed a hun­dred or so copies; I could sim­ply buy one and call it a night. So the whole time I’m think­ing, why am I doing this? I’m 31 years old! Not an 18-year-old goth chick or a pony­tailed middle-aged book dealer look­ing to make a killing on eBay. I don’t even have any­thing clever to say or ask him!

Turns out I’m saved any awk­ward­ness around Neil by the woman in front of me. She had a whole spiel pre­pared, thank­ing him for turn­ing her on to sev­eral other writ­ers. On one hand, I’m pri­vately embar­rassed for not hav­ing read a thing by any of those men­tioned, but on the other, it frees me from the pres­sure of strik­ing any kind of rap­port with him myself. So as he signed my book and a first-edition Sand­man hard­cover I had brought along (I’m such a nerd), I sim­ply thanked him for stick­ing it out. He replied that it’s quite easy when every­body is so nice. Poor fel­low looked exhausted, stand­ing just to keep his cir­cu­la­tion mov­ing, but he remained pleas­ant to the end.

I’m inspired to recount a few other sign­ings I’ve attended here in New York:

Sarah Vow­ell

I have a lit­tle bit of a crush on Sarah Vow­ell. Brains and wit (prefer­ably snarky and tart) always turn me on, and it must be said she looked a bit sexy that evening. At the post-reading sign­ing, I asked for it to be inscribed to “Chad.” She looked a bit curi­ous and asked me to repeat it. So I did and man­aged to say some­thing about how she had resisted the oppor­tu­nity to make a dim­pled or hang­ing chad joke. I can’t remem­ber what she said in reply, because she looked me straight in the eye and held it for a moment or two, smil­ing her lit­tle curlicue smile. Whew! Maybe she sim­ply didn’t hear my name the first time, but I’ll cer­tainly remem­ber that look and will con­tinue to enter­tain the fan­tasy that she doesn’t look at every­body like that.

Dave Sim & Gerhard

The writer/artists of the comic book Cere­bus. This was maybe 1998 or so, and I think I had already stopped read­ing Cere­bus; no mat­ter how bril­liant a comics writer/artist Sim may be, I couldn’t deal with his sex­ual pol­i­tics (in short, he started using Cere­bus to expli­cate his increas­ingly para­noid and hos­tile feel­ings towards women — yes, all women. Per­son­ally, I like women a lot). But I found out he was going to be show­ing some orig­i­nal art and sign­ing at a gallery in Tribeca, and decided to go. The orga­niz­ers really laid down the law: Mr. Sim and Mr. Ger­hard will sign only, and not do any sketches. Nev­er­the­less, peo­ple were being quite rude and demand­ing mul­ti­ple sketches on their stacks of Cere­bus books any­way, and I recall the gen­eral atmos­phere being a bit neg­a­tive. So when I came up, all I had was a sin­gle slim issue of Cere­bus and didn’t ask for any­thing. And he sketched a Cere­bus head by his name. How about that? The tetchy misog­y­nist drew me a cute lit­tle cartoon!

Ray Brad­bury

This is a good story. Brad­bury is quite a char­ac­ter; imag­ine a huge red-nosed stone-deaf Santa Claus out of uni­form and you’ll get the gen­eral idea. Amus­ingly, an assis­tant stood by loudly repeat­ing in his ear every­thing peo­ple said to him. A film stu­dent at the time, I asked him if he had ever con­sid­ered pub­lish­ing his Moby Dick screen­play. After a brief delay as my ques­tion was relayed to him at greater vol­ume and prox­im­ity, he rose up and bel­lowed (the­atri­cally out­raged) “OF COURSE NOT!!! When I was a BOY in ILLINOIS, I peeked behind the CURTAINS at the CARNIVAL and had my INNOCENCE SULLIED! Movies are MAGIC, and read­ing a screen­play is like learn­ing how a MAGICIAN does his TRICKS!” (etc… I’m para­phras­ing) I stam­mered some­thing about how I was a screen­writ­ing stu­dent and I only wanted to read it. His assis­tant mer­ci­fully repeated me, and then Brad­bury just as abruptly changed tack: “OH! That’s DIFFERENT!” and pro­ceeded to say some­thing about how a writer can learn a lot by read­ing as much as pos­si­ble. So I can proudly state I’ve been pub­licly and loudly dressed down by no less than Ray Brad­bury, but nonethe­less man­aged to save face.

I go a teensy, einey-weiney, itsy-bitsy, ooney-wooney bit drunk at the New Line Cin­ema 2005 Sum­mer Party:

And so. Here we are with a regen­er­ated FringeDig­i­tal blog. The pre­vi­ous iter­a­tion started last sum­mer but petered out for one sig­nif­i­cant rea­son… I got a girl­friend! How many blogs have been orphaned by rela­tion­ships? Actu­ally, no doubt many blog­gers view rela­tion­ships as addi­tional mate­r­ial, but per­son­ally, at the time my bat­ter­ies reached their full capac­ity. I have a dif­fer­ent girl­friend at the moment (feel­ing a bit chilly down there, Mephisto?), and I’m going to take another stab at doing two things at once.

What will this one be about, then? Same thing. Sec­ond verse, same as the first! I thought I might try to keep track of the movies I see and con­certs I attend, each with a rat­ing on a 5-star scale. And when I feel moti­vated, a few com­ments or a full-fledged review.

Per­haps I’ll explore famil­iar blog ter­ri­tory such as half-witted, ill-informed polit­i­cal com­men­tary and post­ing pic­tures of my cats. Hey, even real writ­ers like Neil Gaiman do it, so why can’t I? (even­tu­ally, that is, once I fig­ure out how to post pho­tos on this thing…)