Belladonna's Bad, Mmmkay?

2012-06-23, 9:15 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

This one's only tangentially related to Frank Zappa, but I figured I'd include it because it's a fun read (for certain values of "fun"). I just saw this in a BoingBoing post by Mark Frauenfelder: The Belladonna Shaman, by RU Sirius, detailing his experience, at the age of 15, taking a recreational drug called asthmador, which, as the title implies, contained belladonna.

So what's this got to do with Frank Zappa?

I entered Our Lady of Lords Hospital wrapped up in a straightjacket and was immediately given a shot of morphine. Once they got me to stop flailing, they were able to find my wallet. They pulled it out to see who I was. In those far less paranoid times, teenagers didn’t necessarily carry ID cards. But my friend Vinnie had found these sort-of IDs that had a space on them to write your name and address and phone number and we’d had some fun one night writing the names of our heroes, or of odd characters, onto the cards and sticking them in our wallets. I had two cards on which I had written two different names. Since the admission authorities knew I wasn’t Ho Chi Minh, they figured the other ID must be the correct one. I was admitted as Frank Zappa.

So, uh, don't do belladonna, kids.

(And, ironically, Zappa was pretty vocally opposed to drug use.)

Not My Batman

2012-06-23, 8:39 pm
Categories: Cartoons, Comics, Games

I've been talking about fanboys and entitlement. It's kind of amazing the extent to which fans can be territorial and proprietary about characters they don't actually own or control.

To wit: you've probably heard the phrase "That's not my Batman."

The wonderful thing about Batman is that he is, quite possibly, the most versatile superhero in all of comics. (The most versatile supervillain, on the other hand, is Dr. Doom, and Chris Sims did a great job of laying out the reasons why in a recent column.) He's been around for close on 75 years and has, in that time, appeared in virtually every kind of story. You've probably got a "your Batman", the one you consider definitive and canonical -- and it's probably the one from when you were a kid. I'm no exception -- more on that in a moment.

I saw an Amazon review of the Arkham Asylum game that gave us this great bit of That's Not My Batman:

No, this is not the BAM, WHAM, KA-POW batman you saw David West in and it's not the weird new batman from Batman the Brave and the Bold cartoon and that is such a relief !!
This is the TRUE Batman, the one Bob Kane had in his mind even in the late 30's[.]

Yes, who could forget the famous Batman TV series starring David West? It was a huge departure from the TRUE Batman who Bob Kane had in his mind in the late 1930's -- you know, the one who wore a red costume, wings, and a domino mask, and was called Bird-Man, because that was Bob Kane's pitch until Bill Finger suggested some changes. (There's more on the origins of Batman at Dial B for Blog, and I strongly recommend the book Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones.)

Of course, the funny thing is that the guy who wrote the script to Batman: Arkham Asylum, Paul Dini, also gave us the following exchange (on Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the one with "that weird new Batman" -- specifically, in the episode Legends of the Dark Mite):

I always felt Batman was best-suited in the role of gritty urban crime detective, but now you guys have him up against SANTAS? And EASTER BUNNIES? I'm sorry -- but that's not my Batman!
Batman's rich history allows him to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. To be sure, this is a lighter incarnation, but it's certainly no less valid and true to the character's roots as the tortured avenger crying out for Mommy and Daddy.

(You can see the clip on YouTube, too, but the uploader prevents embedding.)

Because Dini doesn't just understand that there's more than one "valid" interpretation of Batman, he excels at jumping between them. He's a true chameleon like few Batman scribes in the character's history -- Grant Morrison springs to mind, as does Bill Finger himself, who wrote everything from Batman's earliest appearances and origin story to a two-part episode of that "BAM, WHAM, KA-POW" TV series with Adam "My Name is Not Even Remotely Similar to David" West.

And the funny thing is, playing Arkham Asylum, I've realized something: this isn't my Batman.

He sounds exactly like my Batman. And the Joker sounds exactly like my Joker. And the writing sure sounds a lot like my Batman too.

But it's meaner. It's more violent. An asylum littered with the bodies of murdered security guards. Batman himself sticks to the "no killing" rule in this version (unlike, say, the Burton movies), but he's brutal. The game features fetishistic slow-motion beatdowns that look like something out of the Watchmen movie; Batman may not kill, but he snaps bones and smothers perps until they lose consciousness.

Don't get me wrong -- I like the game. It plays fantastically; it's expertly designed, fun as hell, and it fits Batman -- at least, a version of Batman.

I guess that's what this comes down to: I can recognize a Batman as Not My Batman and still enjoy and appreciate it.

PC Gamer's Dilemma

2012-06-22, 10:08 pm
Categories: Games, Status Updates, Stream of Consciousness

Well, I finally got me an Xbox 360.

It was free. My fiancée got a new computer with one of those student "comes with a free Xbox" deals.

Here's the thing: I've got a pretty solid gaming rig. And another pretty solid media rig. So I haven't felt much need for Xboxin' up to this point.

The advantages and drawbacks of PC gaming are pretty well-documented. A PC can support crazy high-end hardware, but while the games are cheaper the gear is more expensive and fiddly and there's a whole lot that can go wrong.

Me, I'm something like a niche of a niche of a niche of a niche -- I run Linux on a Mac Pro as my primary OS and keep Windows around for gaming.

This is pretty cool when it works. But here's the thing: even a good Apple makes for a pretty crummy gaming system.

Last year I bought a pretty high-end Nvidia card. ATI has better Mac support, but I've had nothing but headaches trying to get ATI cards working with Linux. Nvidia's always run smoother for me -- galling considering their total lack of cooperation with Linux and the open-source community, but true.

But it's not an officially-supported card. It works under OSX (as of 10.7.3) but it's not entirely reliable under Windows -- when it gets taxed too heavily, I get a bluescreen.

It happened a few times when I played through Witcher 2, but, perversely, it's given me more trouble on Mass Effect 2 -- a game I had no trouble playing through with all the settings maxed out on a lower-end (but officially-Apple-supported) ATI card.

I thought it might be a heating problem but it occurs, consistently, even when I crank up all my system fans with third-party software.

The game worked fine up until Omega, and then started BSoDing randomly. I managed to recruit Garrus in-between crashes, but by the time it came around to Mordin's quest I couldn't get past loading the corridor.

I could just try some other missions, but seriously, you want me to put off getting Mordin? Hell no.

I've found, from searching, that this appears to be a fairly common problem with ME2, even among people not running eccentric hardware configurations such as mine. And I've found a few suggested fixes, but none have worked for me.

I've tried running the game under WINE on both OSX and Ubuntu. Under OSX it plods (I suspect my helper card may be to blame; maybe I'll try disabling it to make sure my higher-end card is the only one the system's putting a load on); under Ubuntu it runs fine up until the menu screen but then doesn't respond to mouse clicks or keystrokes (other than system stuff like Alt-Tab or Alt-F4). I haven't turned up any other reports of this same problem, so I can't find a fix -- maybe one of these days I'll try a full clean install and see if it still does it. Nuke my WINE settings too if I have to. (Or maybe I could set it up on my fiancée's new computer...)

Needless to say, I haven't tried Mass Effect 3 yet.

And that's before we get into all the DRM bullshit plaguing the PC platform.

Never played Batman: Arkham Asylum, largely because of the SecuROM/GFWL/Steamworks Katamari of Sucktitude. Similarly, I gave Dragon Age 2 a miss once I heard reports of people unable to authenticate their legally-purchased games because they'd been banned from BioWare's forums for saying mean things about EA. (Which obviously totally disproves that EA deserves to be called names.)

It's a great damn time to be a PC gamer for a lot of reasons -- a huge indie scene supported by the likes of Steam and the Humble Indie Bundle, with both pushing more gaming on OSX and even Linux -- but it's a lousy time for other reasons.

Anyway. Now I've got an Xbox. All else being equal, I still prefer to play games on the PC, but for cases where the Xbox has less restrictive DRM (like Arkham Asylum) or titles that aren't available on PC (like Red Dead Redemption) or just shit I can get for under five bucks (like a used copy of Gears of War I just picked up), well, it's kinda cool to have one.

Playing: Batman: Arkham Asylum.

More Trouble Every Day

2012-06-21, 9:02 pm
Categories: Music

Not quite sure which show this is -- I'm thinking maybe Roxy '74, as it definitely seems to be that arrangement of the song.

Caroline John, RIP

2012-06-21, 4:51 pm
Categories: TV

I read, today, that Caroline John, Doctor Who's Liz Shaw, passed away. There are obits at the Beeb and io9.

That's her, Elisabeth Sladen, and Nicholas Courtney all in the past year and a half -- I imagine Katy Manning's feeling a little nervous about now.

At any rate, I'm going to jump out of my original posting sequence and include one of my reviews on a Shaw-era episode: Inferno. Originally posted 2008-12-28.

Inferno, it turns out, is another great Pertwee serial that is available through Netflix (disc only, no streaming).

Essentially, it's like Mirror, Mirror, except instead of Spock with a goatee, it has Brig with an eyepatch.

It's a little long (could be one episode shorter -- he spends the entirety of the first episode in the parallel universe trying to explain to everyone that he's from a parallel universe), but really it runs at a great pace overall and has a whole lot more action than most Who from that period.

The parallel universe is used to good effect, emphasizing characters who are much different (the Brigade Leader is a coward hiding behind his gun and his rank) as well as characters who are more or less the same (the pompous Professor Stahlman, who would doom the world rather than take a blow to his ego, and the dashing Greg Sutton, who defies him), with companion Liz Shaw somewhere in-between.

The best device, IMO, is that in episode 4 or 5 the Doctor outright tells the parallel cast that they're screwed and past the point of no return and there's nothing he can do for their world, but that he can still save his own, leaving several episodes for the parallel cast to come to grips with their certain impending doom and react accordingly.

The "there are some things man wasn't meant to tamper with" premise is stale, but works well for an apocalyptic "Earth ends in fire" story -- the ending of the penultimate episode, with a wave of lava coming toward the cast, while cheesily green-screened, is a striking image.

The finale is another episode that could safely be chopped in half, but it mirrors the events of the parallel world, with slight changes, satisfyingly. The ending is vintage Third Doctor, with the Doctor and the Brigadier butting heads and then one of them forced to eat crow.

The transfer has all the usual flaws I've now come to associate with Pertwee-era serials, an often-grainy picture and occasional wavy lines. I watched one episode (3 or 4) on an SDTV and it was a lot less noticeable.

There's also a second disc with extras on it; I assume they're neat but I'm not going to bother.

All in all, classic Who; worth renting, worth buying. (It DOES help to have a cursory background knowledge of the Third Doctor's setup, that he's been exiled by the other Time Lords and trapped in 1970 London, and that at this point he's trying to fix his TARDIS so he can travel again.)

Titties 'n Beer

2012-06-20, 7:36 pm
Categories: Movies, Music

We were talking about Zappa's Senate testimony on the boards today. I mentioned that I loved the incredulous tone in Zappa's voice when Senator Hawkins condescendingly remarked that she would be interested to see what kind of toys his kids played with and he responded, "Why would you be interested?"

And something hit me:

Listen to the bit starting at 3:16. Bozzio as the Devil adopts the EXACT SAME tone of voice.

And this brings up something I hadn't thought much about before: Zappa not just as musician, composer, and conductor, but as director.

The 200 Motels credits say "Characterizations directed by Frank Zappa/Visuals directed by Tony Palmer". And sure enough, even in his music you can hear Zappa's direction on characterization.

Tangentially, I remember when Charlie Daniels played Devil Went Down to Georgia at the Super Bowl XXXIX halftime show. We were talking about what a great damn song it was, and my roommate Mike said, "Yeah, but you know what the best song about making a deal with the Devil is?"

You can probably guess which one he was talking about.

Duchess

2012-06-20, 5:18 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

It may seem odd, to somebody from out of town, for me to say that the news that Duchess the orangutan has cancer hit me like a punch in the gut.

It may seem odder still that that was the top story this morning on azcentral.com.

But for those of us who grew up here, Duchess is like a neighbor and an old friend. She's been at the Phoenix Zoo since 1962 -- and for a bit of comparison, my mom was born in 1963.

We lost Hazel the gorilla some years back (cancer as well), and Ruby the painting elephant not long after (complications giving birth). I suppose that, by contrast, Duchess has lived a long life. But still, it sucks.