Bad Technology

I was listening to the Scriptnotes podcast tonight and the guys on there talked about the future of watching movies and how it is more or less inevitable that everything will be delivered digitally and it reminded me of something I'd been meaning to write about: copyright technology as it's seemingly going to be deployed in the next iteration of the Playstation (though maybe not). It's a big, controversial topic in the gaming world and it strikes me not so much for the disruption in the sales model now in existence for gamers (buy games you really want right when they come out, buy stuff you're less excited about used in a couple of months) but for the problematic implication of the game delivery systems themselves. We're getting an entire extra round of games being sold on plastic discs.

I get that the availability of the kind of fast and secure internet that would be sufficient to stream games at super high res with little to no distortion isn't there right now but a new system is going to be a flagship for at least 5 years, more likely 7-8 years. So the gaming companies are locking into this whole physical presentation for at least that much longer. That's kind of awful, isn't it? I, for one, like the future that is promised by DLC even if the pragmatic reality is much more cynical in nature. Sure, gaming companies are only putting out DLC to ring a few dollars more out of a gullible or, at least, prone public but the system is in place to download entire games straight to your system.

It makes my soul itch to think that I need to own discs. I really don't. Streaming/downloading games would actually help the bottom lines of the companies if you accept that gamers would pay the same price for their electronically conveyed entertainments that they are currently paying for physical delivery. I don't think that's much of a leap. There isn't the same sort of cult of display for games that there once was (thankfully since abandoned) for movies. The portability of downloaded content is as attractive for me, at least, as any silly special edition boxing could ever be. So I could buy a game to my system and then play it, or at least some pared down version of it, on any device that I might own. This could actually be the boon that Sony hoped for with PS Vita and Nintendo assumed with Wii U: games can be ported across platforms and carried into and out of the home but the system needs to be more sleek and attractive.

I have always held that DLC is poorly implemented in the first place and actually inhibits some growth in the sales of video games. EA Sports does itself some bit of disservice (obscured by already gargantuan sales) by forcing gamers to buy full versions of its sports titles on yearly basis when for the vast majority of consumers all that's really important are roster tweaks and stadium improvements. If you released Madden every other year or every couple of years when an entirely new game interface needs to be presented and made people pay for updates to rosters and such as DLC for a lower price point, my guess is that a floodgate would open in the sales. Charge $15 for an update at draft time, another $10 for an update at the start of preseason, $20 for an update at the start of the season that implements all jersey, stadium, firmware updates, and $90 for the hard copy of the software (with an activation key like you use for MS Office) and you will take out a lot of the worry about used copies eating sales while also getting casual repeaters (those who buy the game every couple of years or wait to find a cheap used copy) to repeat every year while also shoving the revenue that was going to Gamestop straight into the pockets of EA. It's easy, right? It also fends off a resurrected nemesis like 2K sports because the investment cost will make people think twice about jumping to the upstart. It's sinister and beautiful and slows down the overcrowded dev cycle for sports games in particular, but it can be of similar use to other games as product platforms (though a franchise like COD or Red Dead might need to stick with a software cost of closer to $60 to entice customers).

Not that anybody comments here but if you yell at me on twitter about my bloggering then tell me if what I'm saying here is organized enough to even make sense. I've got a clear idea in my head of where gaming needs to go but I don't know if I'm imparting a plan or a series of lines from a couple of unconnected sketches. So let me know, if you would be so kind.

OUTRAGE!!! Te'o, Top Chef, and Twitter, Too!

First off, Happy New Year! Whoops. I didn't mean to take a vacation from blogging just like I didn't mean to stop exercising and didn't mean to slow down to writing only on the weekend. It just happened. Here I am, though, confused and feeling a little reckless. The Manti Te'o bomb that Deadspin set off this afternoon has been reverberating around the internet and around my head since about the time I finished my lunch. I really bought that hard luck story on Manti and was maybe even giving him some slack as a football player/pro prospect because of his tough times. No, not consciously but, come on! Of course it colored (minds out of the gutter) my perception of him. And then I watched Top Chef. And then I watched Argo. So today is a day filled with outrage in my media consumption.

Where should I start poking the outrage? The thing that bothers me the most out of those three topics is the Top Chef stupidity. It's going to be hard to take the show even half-seriously ever again. The product placements and corny challenges were tough enough but they just kicked off the chef that has won like 80% of their stupid challenges this year because annoying retread Josie was unable to cook her food properly. Which means they kept Josie because she isn't a high caliber chef. Which makes my head hurt. There are two (maybe 4) really hotshot chefs on this season and they got rid of one of them because she had ambition. Also, because she is tall and pretty and Padma campaigned really hard to the other judges to make sure the tall and pretty, super-talented chef, got sent home in favor of the middling slow asshole. What a dumb thing to do. Padma has grown on me negatively for the last year. I used to like her, at least as a TV personality, but now she makes me uncomfortable. I took a cursory glance at twitter and, from what I can tell, fans of the show are unanimous in their love of Kristen and their hatred of Josie. This is my high-water mark for personal outrage today.

Argo is a really good movie. I really liked it all the way from conception to execution. It looks great, sounds great, is populated by great acting, and it has a satisfying bit of tension-building followed by relief. It's one of my favorite movies of 2012. If it won Best Picture at the Oscars I would be entirely OK with that. In the same sense that I was and am OK with American Beauty winning in one of the most over-stuffed years in Hollywood history. I don't think that it breaks ground or that it will endure as one of my favorites but Argo was good all the way through and I can understand the fans reacting to the "snub" of Ben Affleck in the Best Director category. I don't feel any sort of outrage but I congenitally hate awards shows of any stripe. American Beauty was a fine movie and so is Argo.

Now we've got Te'o. Oh, Manti. Ohhhhh, Manti. I am not outraged by Manti's lies and coverups. He is a college kid and he's a dummy. It's OK. He just ended up on a massive platform. I can't wait for more news about Manti. I don't think I've ever been so wrapped up in a gossipy piece of shit story as I am with this one. It's fantastic!

Bonus OUTRAGE!!! Good bye, Henry's Tacos, I like your food OK. I liked being interviewed for the news. I am OUTRAGED!!! that some dude is going to tear the building down for lord knows what reason and it's a terrible plot of land.

My eyes are hurting from closing so much and so hard (Oh, yeah!!!) so I'll go to bed now. Goodnight, angry and innocent world.

Matt Millen & Drake

OK, 140 characters couldn't capture my disappointment in finding out the origin of this amazing picture

It made so much sense to me that Matt Millen would be a huge Drake fan. Alas, Maria Taylor's original tweet says that she taught him who Aubrey is.

Ok just taught Matt Millen who Drake is...that means I've got one Orange Bowl Mission accomplished!! instagr.am/p/T3bnPoiS3J/
— Maria Taylor (@MariaTaylor7) December 30, 2012

(exhale) Matt Millen is exactly who should be buying Drake CDs and finding out that he doesn't even know who Drake is just moments after seeing this picture is a heart-rending discovery. It's like I was given a pot of gold and it was taken away from me. I had marshmallow extract bubbling away to create "real" marshmallows and I spilled it and had to replace it with stale store-brand marshmallows and that cup of hot chocolate was not only ruined because it wasn't as good as it might have been, it turned out that it was actually bad. If you had a blind taste test of my hot chocolate with store-brand marshmallows in it you would have guessed that it was a cup of mud. So, thank you, Maria Taylor, for this truly inspirational photograph but I wish you had kept the origin of it a secret.

A Day Of Football

Hopefully I don't slide into this tomorrow but I watched a lot of football today. That isn't the worst thing ever but I've got work to do and I've got a whole separate life to live. One where I get paid for writing instead of just writing as an escape from reality. This is a theme of my life. I'm sort of stuck dreaming instead of doing. How do you fuckers do it? I'm a better writer than lots of shitheads getting paid a livable amount to just pound on the keys. What is the entry point that I'm missing? That write for free shit is a poison. If the person not paying you to write is making money for what you wrote then you are a part-time (or worse) slave. This doesn't, of course, preclude spec writing. You need to have something to sell. A body of work. But... what? I don't get it. This whole selling myself thing has escaped me for 35 years or so. I just don't get it.

I was looking at the stats that The Black List put out today and I noticed that the second batch of scripts they rated got a little better aggregate score than the first batch. I've got to figure that has more to do with leniency than some mass jump in quality but here's the thing: I was in the second batch. And my scores were horrible. Below average no matter how they push it on me. I feel I've estimated myself too well for a long while now. It's a debilitating thing for me. I've been looking down on people that are objectively better at my craft than I am. I'd rather beat off all day than deliver anything of value. I meant that literally. Crap. I'm in a sinkhole. I've got to dedicate myself. 15 pages into the second draft tomorrow or I've failed. That's got to find it's way into a day of health and activity. Damn the world.

Spinning like a top

Back to the, back to the blog, y'all. What am I doing here? The same thing I always do: making excuses!

I haven't started my rewrite yet. I'm still pretty down about not getting a 10.0 review from The Black List. You see, I'm very realistic in my goals, so if I'm not universally and unanimously considered the absolute best of all time at anything I'm actually trying in, it's a crushing blow to my ego. That's at most a mild overstatement. But at the same time I'm pretty sure I've got the greatest idea ever even if I didn't pull it off 100% the first time around. So I'll head down that hole soon enough. Tomorrow night? Probably. I'll go ahead and turn on Lawless tonight and dream about how great it would be if John Hillcoat could see through the bad parts of my script and give me a call.



Yep. This blog drops panties. That's why it is so popular with spam commenters. Sell them dick pills, y'all!

The New Paradigm

In a couple of hours, the Mayan long count calendar will expire. This perhaps means nothing but it's the end of at least my lifetime's worth of speculation. I wrote yesterday about my own doomsday premonitions (well, maybe not quite doomsday) but I've never been one to put much stock in the Mayan calendar. Once I found out how closely my own private end day related to the Mayan calendar I pretty much lost interest in it all. I lost religion in it. It's just another piece of garbage jutting out from some collective stupidity.



So why do I feel compelled to keep going back to re-visit doomsday scenarios? This one about to pass has always been the monster of them all. I don't know what the next big one is after the Mayans. I love symbols of all stripes. I used to argue quite passionately in favor of the obvious symbolism in Tim Burton and Spike Lee's movies. They've both kind of gotten away from those styles that I loved so well but I'm thinking now that there, openly symbolic film language, is a field in dire need of exploitation. I'm working on it. Slowly, I'm working on it.

Hopefully the new paradigm is very sexual. I love sex and I'm addicted to porn. I hate prudishness. We should all be thankful for sex. It's the best thing in the world. Hopefully, more than anything, there actually is a new paradigm. I'm bailing on this post. I don't have a clear line of thinking and I'm sleepy. Good night and good luck sleeping through the apocalypse. If you see those ghostly riders, tip your cap to them for me.

On The Verge Of Ending An Era

When I was 18 or 19 and puffed up on more self-importance than I knew what to do with and eager to be filled up on any and all types of medicines that I could put my greedy hands on I had this flash realization of an important date. I fixated on it. It felt like it was an important concern for myself and the rest of the world. I credit myself for it because it's slightly wrong in the face of the massive millenarian jocularity (and some devotion) around the end of the Mayan long calendar. My date is/was December 23, 2012. I plotted that as the end of... something. I didn't really have a specific project in mind.

I wanted to buy Super Bowl ads and billboards proclaiming Inche Clyffe Clique: 2000-12, The Generation of the Dead. Inche Clyffe Clique was the sort of (art collective?) that I had with my friends, and one cousin, but it wasn't really that cohesive. We recorded shit on 4-tracks that we never bothered to send to anybody for radio play or to play in shows. I painted stuff and plotted movies that I never wrote and outlined story ideas for books that haven't been written.

This all would have been happening in 1996 and/or 1997. I fancied myself as some kind of neo-Beat going wherever a bed was available. I criss-crossed the country by car and by train a few times between quitting school in the Spring of '96 and picking it back up in the Spring of '99. I watched a lot of movies. I worked some terrible jobs. I had no sex. I smoked a decent amount of weed and downed a lot of pills, a touch of psycho-tropics, a tiny bit of powdery substances. The sex thing wasn't on purpose but the rest of it was in service to some set of ideals that I might have never really had. I think I was in the thrall of fame's cult but I could have just been a moron.

I keep thinking about that squandered time in my life. It's a funny thing looking back and thinking, "I could have made some serious bullshit and gotten away with it because I was just a kid." Somebody will usually take an ambitious youngster under wing just because of the youth and energy. All you've got to do is make something. I wasn't even finishing my little video shorts that I was making solely for the entertainment of my brothers. I'm a loafer, really, and a shy little twerp who is now and always has been a little bit scared of womankind. And money. Money sucks and it's scary because I am sure that I display all of my barn-raised lack of polish every time I open my mouth or get dressed in the morning. And I hate money for a lot of reasons. The fire, brimstone, and guilt might have never taken a hold of me in my Catholic school upbringing but the pious brotherhood of poverty is still my religion for better and for being the worst.

The end of the world isn't the scariest thing to me. The world ends? Fine, because I'll end, too, and what's scary about that? Nothing isn't scary. A world that was created by chance and lives and burns and dies and just goes away isn't scary. There's comfort there if it reflects at the proper angle. Being alive and feeling trapped and feeling less than and feeling like there used to be potential and now there is nothing but the rotting carcass of something that might be a soul that is taking up space where that potential used to be is a frightening, nuclear-scarred world of internal endlessness.

So the era, the Generation of the Dead is all but over and I don't own the world and I don't have followers or believers. Scrap rock isn't a genre. I've never recorded a Christmas album of songs that aren't thematically linked to Christmas and I don't hawk alcoholic water that competes with caffeinated water for shelf space at the nation's grocery store chains. Is this what regret means? Then I've got regrets and I've got worry. This is all it's fueling, though. I took my movie down from blcklst.com today. I don't want to pay storage for it. I'll get around to changing the story. I'll do it just the way I outlined it last week. I'll get the readers at The Black List to look it over one more time. I'm dead certain that nobody from CAA will be calling me after the holidays to tell me how much they loved the script or how John Hillcoat is really impressed and ready to start polishing the turd for flushing it down past a green light. I'll get it dusted off and if I settle for selling it to some indie producer to make it on a shoestring and it ends up being a corny waste of time, I'll get over it. I'm unimpressed with an existence on that local level but it's fine. This is a dumb little emotional cul-de-sac I've driven myself into, isn't it? I don't even really paint anymore. I can trace that one, at least. When I was in a group show and not only didn't sell anything but didn't even have a single patron ask me to explain myself the sails went in and I shut down. Fuck it. I am a fame whore in my darkest insides of my spirit. If I can't be a star at something I don't want to do it. Cheers to the new epoch.

I'm going to just end this ramble as abruptly as I felt compelled to start it but I want to explain the title if I'm able. The Verge is the original drawing of a cliff that I drew when I was 13 and wanted to design a logo that would be identifiable for anything that I worked on, something along the lines of what Eddie is to Iron Maiden. It was my personal little stamp that I could draw in the corner as a signature for drawings, paintings, et al. When I had collected some friends later in high school, and we were looking for a name that would work for whatever sounds we recorded, I pushed out Inche Clyffe Clique and adapted my signature drawing of a cliff to the name. Nobody loved it, I don't think, but nobody else had any ideas either so it just stuck. Inche Clyffe is the name my grandfather gave to the property in Florida that now sits underneath my mother's house. It is a rare (still short) bluff in the flattest state in the Union, and he gave it an intentionally silly name. He might have even spelled it Ynche Clyffe but I've always started it with an "I" just to make the pronunciation more obvious. So my title is a call back to the little drawing that I snuck in to all of my delusional daydreams and the ties it into my big delusional generationally compelling ad campaign for nothing. Does that make sense you, dick pill sellers? At least in the sense of what I was going for with the title? It works well enough for me.