I

Before me on my dining room table is a card sent to me for the holidays by my mother, with whom I speak far too rarely. Three times a year on average: Mother's Day, our shared birthday, and x-mas. The town of 600 in which she lives has one grocery store that almost seems too large for the town itself, and I suspect it was there that she purchased this non-Hallmark card. It's mass-produced but somehow less mass-produced. By being more generic it somehow seems more special to me.

I get these cards from friends and relatives and wonder how many other people got the same cards, but with different signatures and personalized notes contained within. Only this card has my mother's now-awkward but ever-improving script. I know how much she hates writing and how difficult it is for her, so when she writes "Love from both of us" in thick blue ink it seems more sincere than usual.

And these cards are collected. I stack them, I put them in a pile, I dump them in a box, then a bag, and several moves later I find them again. I'm not aware anymore which year produced which card; after a while I get around to throwing away the envelopes. Anything personal or personalized I find it hard to throw away, and so I become a packrat.

Use objects become divorced from their use. One of my advisers explored how modernism mostly equates to a culture of fetishism.

Being a packrat has causes and effects. Symptoms and pathology. Treating the effects and symptoms does not address the underlying issues. I at one point addressed the symptoms via the digital: scan cards, exchange print books for ebooks, archive email and get beyond hand-written letters, rip music CDs and keep only the mp3s/ogg-files on a hard drive, and so on. But the urge to collect, the feeling that these things are somehow important, remained.

It's possible that one year in the past I made a New Year's Resolution not to be such a packrat. It probably worked for a while. Now I know better.

II

One of the side effects of listening to my music directories alphabetically by artist & album is that I come across of stuff where I think to myself, "Self, why the f*ck do you have this?"

This is especially the case with soundtracks. Not the case at all with classical music, and only rarely an issue with the pop-rock-folk collection, in which it was mostly limited to a few artists/song/albums that friends had recommended. "Dude, you so have to listen to ..." Or not.

My friend A is one such friend, one prone to making recommendations. I appreciate recommendations, just not his. I don't quite understand the part of "I don't want your alt-pop and comedy recommendations" he doesn't grok. I didn't care years ago that "The Office" is hilarious or that I absolutely have to listen to some obscure act with these deep lyrics. So I mostly ignored his recommendations. I did not ignore the recommendations of another friend, A2, whose birthday was yesterday. Easy enough to remember. Her taste in music also sucked, though she did pass on her sister's debut album, which was worth it for "My Professor is Hot" and "The Female Reproductive System Song." I last wrote about those songs on February 27th of last year. I tend to get better recommendations on HuSi, in fact.

A called this afternoon as he was walking back to work from his lunch break in the City. So I got the sound of heavy breathing as he walked up a hill, the rush of wind, and the clack-clack-clack of his connection dying. I hate cell phones. But one cannot let the connection actually die—that, dear reader, is the behavior of L, who talks and talks and is suddenly no longer there—so instead A hung up and called back minutes later, interrupting my all-important movie viewing (see: below). Very important.

Several years ago I developed a rather irrational feeling that A was too close. He annoyed me (present tense?): there would be questions about what I was cooking (A is a foodie), what I was reading, watching, listening to, etc. I developed a shell; the stock answer is "nothing much." It's not a good way to treat a friend.

But it's none of his business.

I noticed that if I liked something and mentioned it, a month or two later I'd hear word of how he was reading or watching the same thing, and then he'd ask, "So, what do you think of X?" He recently did a BtVS marathon. When he called today he mentioned reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (currently available at great overstock prices at Borders and other fine literary retailers—only $4.99, for example!); I was not going to engage in any sort of discussion of its merits, so I left my responses at the level of "That's interesting" and "ah." Deep.

The overlap between what I have read or watched and what he's reading or watching is too great for coincidence, and at times I feel this is a behavior on his part to find more common ground with me, something for us to discuss (our tastes are otherwise distinct enough), and so my responses are, in a way, counterproductive, leading him not to give up, perhaps, but to try harder, to seek greater connection, in a vain hope of me saying, "Yeah, let's discuss XYZ." I think I began this almost PA approach a decade ago in response to invasive inquiries that seemed like attempts at pop-psychology analysis on his part; I'd heard his analyses and critiques of other acquaintances and had no desire to provide data for a similar evaluation of my psyche.

I find that this is the only person—and a friend at that—with whom I do this. It's almost like a reversion to the fourth grade when my younger brother copied everything I did.

When A and I talk we do find things to discuss, though, and not all of them merely filler.

We both felt sad for that poor SF zoo tiger and perversely had cheered for said feline to consume more zoo attendees.

Before the holidays I got hold of some old games, none of which I played oh-so-many-years-ago when they were popular. In the late 80s I was a great fan of SSI's Phantasie III (on my Apple; the Atari had the best graphics for that gane, mind you), and in the 90s I enjoyed some of their Forgotten Realms offerings, in particular the Eye of the Beholder Series. There is a side tale dealing with summer school and old 286 and 386 boxen running Wizardry and Sorcerian. I've never been a hard-core gamer. In college I loved the social aspect of Warlords ][; it was A who took over my dorm room completing level after level of Wolfenstein 3D and, later, Ultima VI, which brings us to today's discussion, after we skip over matters of Baldur's Gate I & II, Diablo I & II, and some other pieces of archaic software.

Back to Ultima VI: Sherry the mouse, whom A unwisely killed during one session.

You could keep Sherry the mouse in your party and give her experience to level up by killing repetitive enemies like dogs and the giant ants. She is only strong enough to hold a lightning wand, but when she is stronger she can use regular weapons and armor like any other character.

It was also possible to "move" a cannon into a bag and then carry the bag with you if you had enough strength. Then you could simply drop it and look in the bag during combat to blast your enemies.
[ s o u r c e ]

That is all.

III

This is just my mind rambling.

The Ultima VI link continues, by pointing out that there is/was a project to recreate U6 for the Dungeon Siege engine, which then brings us to In the Name of the King ("A Dungeon Siege Tale"), an upcoming (January 11, 2008) movie by the god of video game movies: Uwe Boll.

But In the Name of the King has much more to "recommend" it: Burt Reynolds! John Rhys-Davies! Ray Liotta! And More! As well as the female Terminator for T3. I turned the TV on the other day during a football bowl game and got a face full of TV-exclusive-trailer-action. Before that I'd never heard of the movie; Apple's sight doesn't carry it (for shame!). The trailer steals heavily from Gladiator, Jackson's LotR, and even from the old, shittastic Dungeons & Dragons movie of several years back. It can't lose.

The sad thing is that Boll seems to be becoming competent. Soon he'll lose whatever touch he had for making movies so bad they could just about be enjoyed if you were wasted off your ass. Soon he'll just be another Paul W.S. Anderson, another Michael Bay wannabe.

Speaking of Apple's site, based on trailer's that I recently viewed—not that they're necessarily particularly recent, mind you—I am looking forward to, well, not much. But Teeth looks hilarious. Hancock will be mediocre, but isn't out until the summer. "Blockbuster." In Bruges is 2008's slightly more comedic version of Shoot 'Em Up; I forgot to mention it in my end-of-year list of movies seen in the cinema in 2007. I've also been waiting a long time for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days to get a domestic release (scheduled for January 25, 2008).

Nothing else—among the as-of-yet-unreleased movies—really makes me want to go to the theater this winter.

Because it's from Pixar and because the robot is adorable I might want to watch WALL-E.

And returning, albeit briefly, to video game movies, today I decided to lower my standards even more than usual (though I have watched an Uwe Boll movie, once) and take in an under-appreciated gem from 2005: Doom.

This, you see, relates back to A and taking over my dorm room in the early 90s. The campus computer labs used to be taken over on a frequent basis by impromptu Doom death matches. It wasn't until my senior year that I moved into dorm with ethernet access (I always managed to choose/get one of the last hold-outs), by which point it was all about Quake. Yet all these years later Doom and and Doom II maintain nostalgia value, and unlike Wolfenstein 3D they never gave me motion sickness.

As for the movie, most of what is wrong with it has been summarized, with sufficient humor, by Roger Ebert. I see it as the bastard offspring of Resident Evil ("T virus") and Serenity (the "PAX") applied to the general Aliens template. Say what you will about its other merits, but the first Jurassic Park flick was one of the only in a large crop of action/adventure/hybrids feeding off bio-engineering and corporate paranoia to actually integrate its to a great extent bunk-science into narrative in a meaningful way. Doom, the Resident Evil movies, and their cousins work as well in terms of plot, better perhaps, without the techno-babble, which is clearly cobbled on but never integral. In Doom it doesn't matter whether it's genetic engineering, radioactivity (the old zombie-creator), a virus, space ooze, or any number of other other sci-fi-horror concepts at work.

But I love the exposition to and explanation of such setups. It's why Boll's Alone in the Dark amuses me. Collected, condensed, and properly displayed these would all work as a kind of Conceptual Art exhibition. Over-analyzing, intellectualizing, these abortions is really the only way to enjoy them, for they're often not even competent in the action/adventure/horror departments.

Tomorrow I might raise the bar a bit and watch The Last Picture Show. I need to rent F for Fake.