Houses.

There are many decoy houses, I have noticed. Around Commercial Drive many houses stand ugly, with exteriors and yards that look quite bad. As though someone forgot about them, stopped caring when they had finished milking the mortgage from the random tenants they let to. They just stopped caring. It was sad in the day to see the paint-chipped peeling shingles.

But in the night, and long after the owners stopped caring, in the night the tenants who left their curtains open let me see that they had kept the house beautiful. The inside was painted odd colours and the art that I could see looked very interesting.
Whenever I go outside to smoke a Marlboro I stand at the gate, and lean into the fence. Just across the alley from me, when I look up into a window, it is the kitchen window, at about 9 or 9:30 p.m. I see two blonde girls doing dishes together. They are always beautiful and laughing and smiling, sometimes they are even singing together.

I want to fuck them.

I don't want to know their names or hobbies or sob-stories or ages or anything. I don't want a single word spoken. I just want to drink some whiskey one night and walk up their stairs and into their house and have them know why I am there and then I just want to fuck them, both.
I want to see them squeeze each others hand in the sink full of dish-water while I lick them and fuck them like that, bent slightly over the sink, one watching the other take the fucking, looking on in as much pleasure as jealousy. I just want to see their faces when I fuck them. I want to see those special facial muscles contract, the ones reserved for getting fucked and cumming.

Many houses here may have external damage, but looking in, at those blonde girls across the alley, makes me happy and shy and even hard in my jeans as I imagine the inside of their house.

Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

I remember seeing a picture once of the Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In this picture there was young woman tenderly holding a baby and smiling. The woman had on loose, flowing clothing. She had beautiful and long chestnut hair. The baby in the picture was just small and mostly covered by a white blanket. Maybe the baby was smiling, too. They sat together like that the smiling woman and the baby on a carpet or shawl or scarf, or some fabric like that. Directly behind them was the side of a maroon van with the side door open. It looked like an Econoline.

There was a tarp erected from the side of the van outwards, to provide shade for the woman and the baby seated in the sun of the Kill Devil Hills, that small desert. Smiling.
That photo was taken in the summer of 1973, two years before the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam.
I was four months old in that picture. My mother and I were waiting for my father, who was sailing off of the dunes, hang gliding. I loved that picture but I can not find it anymore.

I had just finished my second day of eight hours straight-armed-hauling, no pulley, five-gallon pails of wet pea-gravel up a 12 foot wall and then dumping it behind me, on the other side of the frame. We were building a swimming pool at a country club in West Vancouver. We had finally met grade and were done. But it was funny because I imagined that I was a slave in ancient Egypt, building for life. It made things seem more interesting as I envisioned a large statue of Horus, and my blood and sweat and strain and loss would make that statue. I also imagined how the pool would look in one year, with aqua-yoga classes, or whatever. But I also thought of when I was a boy and loved the pool at Kinsmen in Edmonton.

The country club is on the side of a mountain in West Vancouver. The land is beautiful. In the morning I love the smell when I am standing by the tool trailer. It isn't construction, but the smell of the cool air rushing down the mountain as the sun rises. It smells like 5 a.m. camping, before the fire. It makes me feel new, too.

I like the work. I am on a roof, there, framing, chipping concrete, zip-disking rebar and sometimes smoking a Marlboro.
I get to look out over the mountainside and down to the water. I see the ships go out and the birds are curious as the trees stand close to me, dwarfing me even when working on the second floor.

After the last bucket of pea-gravel had been filled, lifted and dumped, I carefully stood on the top of the frame at the deep end of the soon pool. Above the pool there is a large circular window that looks North up the mountain. I did my best to lean back a little without falling and out of that window I saw the para-gliders coming off of the peak of the mountain. They flew beautifully and seemed to just keep catching the same updraft as they flew from side to side. I didn't watch for too long because I was tired but at the same time I wished I was there, too. It made me think of that picture in Kill Devil Hills.

"In that moment, Govinda realized that his friend was leaving him and he began to weep."

It had been four years of constant farewells. I think that is something that can not translate very well. After leaving my friends and family the last time, again, the feeling was subtle and numb. Not that it was without sadness, it had just become routine; the hugs and back patting, the see-you-soon.
In Edmonton it was sweet and warm and drunk while old friends felt joy together again. Sometimes it was sad, too, to see things which had been missed so achingly, to do things which used to make me feel like a man. The sudden wave of being liked and loved and invited was almost overwhelming. I had not felt that way in a very long time.
The only time it rained while I was in Edmonton was on the morning I was loading my truck. I chose to use ratchet straps, which were tighter and more assuring than rope. A good trick is that they need to be given a full turn so that there is a visible twist in the strap. The wind on the highway will make a straight ratchet strap flutter and hum loudly. It might even begin to wear on the integrity of the strap itself. The rain made the loading and tarp-strapping unpleasant and counterproductive, as the rain would pool in wrinkles on the tarp and when I shifted the tarp the water would dump onto the cardboard boxes.
That morning it rained. The three weeks previous had been clear and hot and the Alberta sky was huge, dizzying to follow from horizon to zenith to horizon. It was delightful to escape the heat by simply slipping into the shade. The humid summers of Japan were heavy and relentless. Even the air conditioned rooms, when there was one, were foes. The danger was always catching a chill after being outside and sweating profusely. August in Alberta was easy and casual. It only rained once while I was there.

Chickadee

August was good and the sun was high and bright for the long days. It only rained once in Edmonton. The trip South was on Highway 22, the Cowboy Trail. You can see the mountains from 22 about 160km South of the Yellowhead Trail, West of Edmonton. The Rockies, coming in from Alberta, are sentinels. The vast golden plains give way to awkward crags and hills where the wind bends the trees on the hills and the distant mountains loom until suddenly you are upon them, immense. Driving was hypnotic, which posed little threat, as the road was flat and straight and there were no cars to be seen in either direction; only the Rockies on the skyline. I drove like that with my windows rolled down so I could smell the sweetgrass and horses and hear the birds. Especially the birds. Sometimes I would pull into the entrance of a ranch field, park the truck and just listen. For four summers I had not heard a Chickadee even once. It was strange to realize that.

I deserved it

Kismet. Destiny. Inescapable fate, whether it's the thread of aViking's life as spun by the blind Norns, the store of a man's days as set down in the Book of Life... or the operational lifespan of a piece of electronics as determined by its warranty period. Hidden actuaries project these things out, and their voodoo math makes reality: a warranty is a death-spell, a terminator gene like the time-bomb killswitch coded into Blade Runner replicants...

... except, unlike Rutger Hauer, my iBook didn't get to have a dove flutter heavy-handedly skyward as it took its fatal plunge to the tile floor, less than a week after its AppleCare period elapsed. It's time was up; the power of warranty expiration basically shoved it out of my hands and into eternity.

And so. You know what happens now. Out of retirement, out of necessity, comes the old war-horse, the beaten-down ThinkPad that'd been put out to pasture (i.e. coffined in a banker's box and shoved in a closet) so many years ago. You pick it up, and... you know the feeling of exquiste delicacy you get when you pick up a really old cat? That's what it's like to handle my laptop.

A creaking, crashy bit-rotten install of goddamn Windows ME, the system restore discs long since lost in a seires of moves; no wi-fi capacity; a single functional i/o port (USB) and an unhinged monitor; some kind of deep, deep trouble that makes opening any web browser impossible so I have to type URLs directly into the address bar of an empty folder, force the desktop itself out onto a Web that's ten years beyond its comprehension... every minor hang, hiccup or crashlet requiring rebooting.

You've got to be a silver-lining type in these situations, channel a little Pollyanna for the sake of your own sanity. A half-dead, unreliable, breeze-fragile laptop from the Clinton years? Well, its lack of now-basic functionality will actually enhance my productivity! All my online time-wasters are dead to me -- even a whiff of an embedded YouTube video sends it to crashland, only the cleanest, simplest of sites come close to functioning properly,and the six-versions-ago Flash player eliminates the possibility of playing any of the browser games that've been eating up five or so hours out of evey day. The only thing on this machine that actually works realiably is WordPad, the stripped-down text editing program. There's nothing to do here but write, right?

You'd think so. But the truly dedicated -- maybe pathological? -- procrastinator, work-shirker and gaming addict will always find a way. And so, a way was found.

One of the cool/interesting things about pulling a years-ago machine out of closetbound dotage is that, if you're like me and didn't do any housekeeping before shoving it into the darkness, is that it's kind of like a time capsule. There's the last things you were working on, the last photos you uploaded, the last sites you visited. Memories, nostalgia... maybe a little bit of heartbreak. In my case, just past the old reviews (I'd forgotten how much I hated the Minority Report game) and sunny pics of distant girlfriends was an old, familiar doom: when last I used this machine, I still hadn't worn away the novelty of NES emulation.

So, there was the emulator -- NESter.exe, public beta 2, (c)2000 -- but... where were the ROMs? For some reason -- maybe in the poorly-thought-out disc-space-clearing frenzy that originally destroyed my web-browsing capacity -- I'd ditched my library of ripped Nintendo classics, the Bionic Commandos and Little Nemo the Dream Masters, and left myself with exactly two titles: Snake, Rattle and Roll and Phantom Fighter.

Now, these are both more-or-less terrible games. Phantom Fighter is a frustrating, repetetive, side-scrolling kung-fu adventure that's only interesting for its weird ancient-Chinese-vampire-hunter premise; Snake, Rattle and Roll is a mechanically interesting isometric action game rendered nearly unplayable by some of the most aggressively, purposely, sadistically aggravating music I've ever heard. But I took what getaway I could get: midnight of my first day of enforced "nothing to do but write" found me with my dust-crusted old gamepad in hand, grimly kicking the digital shit out of vampire after pink, hopping vampire.

Destiny... kismet. There are some things that simply must be; they're part of the Math of the Universe. A service plan expires, and a laptop must die. His laptop dead, the true vidiot (this term must make a comeback!) finds a way, any way, to snatch empty entertainment from the jaws of productivity.

The circle will not be broken.

Firday Freakout: The Price

It's Brian Adams on the phone it's Brian Adams on the phone it's Brian Adams on the phone it's Brian Adams on the phone it's Brian Adams on the phone it's Brian Adams

Dwarf Fortress, pt 2

Sweet southern springtime, the last late skiff of snow evaporated, the lawns lousy with more robins than a Teen Titans cosplay convention. I really ought not to be spending these golden-crisp sweaterweather days indoors, quasimodoed over a laptop, but… other worlds have other seasons and their attendant responsibilities. Besides, I’m parked here by the picture window, plenty of Vitamin D flooding in; I even get a bit of a social life, when I make eye contact with passers-by.

Maybe I should have shaved.

Or taken a shower.

Or at least changed out of my pajamas.

“I can smell you from here,” my lady calls from an adjoining room, and I know she’s not exaggerating. I can feel it on me, familiar as favorite socks: old-time Gamer Sweat, sour scent of The Zone, pheromone cloud biologically calculated to attract… who? Not the female of the species, for sure. Maybe it’s a primitive, cellular matchmaking service, XBox Life: caveman nerds would catch a whiff across the glaciers and know someone nearby was up for a few rounds of StoneThrow 10KBC…

I’m still playing Dwarf Fortress, you see, and though you all come here for only the freshest videogame coverage I’m going to take a Mulligan on last week’s column – time, tide and deadlines forced me into it too early: I’d only logged twenty or so hours, and most of that in a series of pathetically stillborn Fortresses. I’ve since sunk another twenty into this most intricately geeky world-simulator and managed to see one noble outpost through two whole game years without collapse… and I’m still Holy Shitting every half hour or so, at the crazy crap that emerges from the simulation’s natural chaos.

But even with a whole workweek’s worth of time dropped into DF, I’m still scrambling up the lower slopes of the game’s craggy learning curve, the rest of the mountain rising before me. Dwarf Fortress is a pain in the ass to play, DOS-shell-style menus on top of submenus on top of sub-sub-menus detailing everything from, for example, the attributes of each individual morsel of food, to where each individual Dwarf sits at dinner, to how that Dwarf feels about her seating assignment and how those feelings affect the healing of her sprained wrist. And it’s all displayed via an indecipherable textlike GUI that looks like somebody’s dog ate the Rosetta Stone and barfed it up all over the Matrix.

Some tips for prospective Dwarven castellans. After grabbing the zip from Bay 12 Games, go immediately to the Dwarf Fortress wiki, devour as much of the newb material (esp. “Your first Fortress”) as possible -- and plan on keeping that window open for a week or so, even though DF’s omniscient God-brain snarls at sharing process time with other programs. And even with your hand held minute-to-minute by these thoughtful tutorials and walkthroughs you’re going to be frustrated – and, let’s be honest, kind of bored -- to the point of Fuck It and beyond… the only way to endure through this is to have a source of hope, a vision of what your manky, poorly-sited, starving cavern of losers could become, of what wonders Dwarf Fortress can offer the stalwart.

I personally recommend the Saga of Boatmurdered, a “succession game” in which multiple players guided (or tried, mostly in vain, to guide) the fortunes of the titular citadel, handing off the controls at the end of each game year and recording the events of their turns in-character. The writing is spotty as you’d expect from an ad-hoc rota of geeks, ranging from workmanlike to comedy gold, but without the example provided by their tale – complete with marauding elephants, genocidal lava traps, grand achievements, hubristic vanity projects and eventual mass insanity – I’d never have had the will to force my head into DF’s maddening depths.

So now I’ve finally got a thriving little outpost going, known to the Dwarves as Thikutostuk: “Booksneak”. Irrigation’s all figured out (only a single puppy drowned in the flooding, this time!), I’m mining a tidy little ore vein, got some lukewarm trade links established, and hopeful immigrants are filling out the population, bringing with them much-needed expertise – or, at least, strong backs and an Old World work ethic (also alcoholism). And speaking of filling out the population, I note that my engineer, Ilral Knifemachine, has been dallying with foredwarf Logem Relicsalves… might the pitter-patter of tiny (yet sturdy) feet soon echo through the halls of Booksneak?

Time – hours of precious, precious time – will tell, and damn me but I’m willing to put in those hours… because I’m more involved in Boooksneak than I have been in any videogame character in a long while. That’s the terrible secret of Dwarf Fortress: behind the savage wall of user-unfriendliness lies a world-simulator of constantly surprising complexity, and the extreme abstraction of the world’s presentation requires reactivation of imaginative capacity long lulled by the advance of graphics technology. More than any other sim game, Dwarf Fortress really lives, and lives inside you...

...which makes it pathetically tough to live outside it.

Dwarf Fortress, pt 1

From the journals of Solon Playfulcastle, Bossdwarf:

Arrived at fortress site early Month Granite. Mood best described as ‘hopefully wary’—the very defensible box canyon location is unfortunately too far above the treeline for anything to grow. The only available timber is from a meager stand of scraggly pine a few miles down the mountain, and from our own dismantled wagons.

There are no game animals around, and on the sterile schist of the canyon only an inedible lichen thrives. With luck, we’ll manage to get the brook dammed and a farm cavern dug and irrigated before we starve to death, or run out of booze.

Oh, and the oracle at the Dwarven Mining Co-op chose the name “Bustmystery” for this enterprise. Great.

A Mac OS port of Dwarf Fortress was recently released, an exciting piece of news; since the middle of 2006, I’d watched longingly through the glass as the various tribes of indie game geeks, hardcore roguelike mavens and other gaming masochists sung the praises and cursed the cruelty of Bay 12 Games’ fantasy base-building sim. At last, I’d have the chance to find out for myself how my fellow nerds were finding tragedy and triumph in those impenetrable screensful of multicolored letters, numbers and punctuation.

On the PlayThis Thing! blog, Greg Costikyan described Dwarf Fortress best when he called it a game from a parallel universe, a universe whose computers are just as powerful as ours but where the revolutions in graphics and user-interface design never happened, where games are powerful simulators displayed in ASCII text and controlled through cludgy shell menus and an arcane repertoire of hotkeys.

To someone from our world, where the wand-waving magic of the Wii is getting senior citizens addicted to virtual bowling and the fastest-growing sector of the games market is in “casual” games that require one mouseclick and two brain cells to play, Dwarf Fortress seems beyond daunting. But on the other side of the insane – sadistic, really – learning curve lies one of the most intricate, involving, entertaining and flat-out satisfying simulation games ever devised…

From the journals of Solon Playfulcastle, Bossdwarf:

Bad idea to schedule the construction of the whisky still and the bunkhouse before excavating the farm. I thought it would help morale, but nothing’s getting done; the big plan now is to give up on gem-mining and just export organic lichen liquor.

Hang on; I think I hear the head mason hauling himself out of bed. As much as I hate to get all hierarchical – this is supposed to be a progressive, collaborative enterprise – I think I’m going to have to lean on him to finish building those irrigation floodgates. The food situation is getting worse.

Dwarf Fortress amazes with is its ambition; developed by a single programmer, Tarn Adams (with design assist from his brother, Zach), the game is a world simulator on every level from the planetary – the world is built fractally, according to rules of geology, hydrology, biology and meteorology – to the visceral: the dwarves working on a Moria of their very own are resolved physically down to individual limbs and organs, and psychosocially to the level of fundamental needs and preferences.

The result is all the wonder of a living world, a game whose challenge and entertainment arise from the barely-predictable chaotic interaction of systems: accidentally digging into an underground aquifer floods a cavern, which kills a dog, which depresses its owner, who stops working, which holds up a fortification project, which means the goblins get in… ad infinitum, on every level, constantly. Eventually, the effects of countless butterfly wings push the whole system over one brink or another and the fortress fails spectacularly.

The Dwarf Fortress motto: “Losing is fun.” Not only is it fun to watch your little ant-farm world of dwarves finally succumb to goblinish or demonic invaders – or to depression, madness and mass murder/suicide – but there’s a whole other Adventure Mode to play, a straight-up roguelike dungeon crawler through which you can explore the ruins of your fortress, discovering its treasures and records, experiencing its rise and fall though the lens of dungeon archaeology.

While the industry encrusts itself into formal genres, cranking out trivial variations like a tavern Blues band barfing up cover after 12-bar cover, Dwarf Fortress comes on like underground punk rock: revolutionary, independent, free, uncompromising… and more than a little terrifying.

From the journals of Solon Playfulcastle, Bossdwarf:

We’re going home. Nothing will grow here, the irrigation system is fucked, we’re dismantling empty ale barrels (there are lots of them) for scrap lumber because nobody can go logging without getting mauled by bears… and now our chief engineer is possessed, or something.

Farewell, Bustmystery. And fuck you.

Manufacturing Badassery

Devil May Cry 4 and the Asskicking Arms Race

In the hack-and-slash action genre, market success depends on establishing a game’s protagonist as a grade-A badass… and there's an arms race going on. Run-of-the-mill Navy SEALS, ex-Green Berets, veteran Marines and hardboiled cops might as well be tree surgeons. Even the go-to Asiatic badasses, samurai, ninja and kung-fu masters need much more than bushido, ninjustsu and the Mantis Fist to turn heads. Gimmick after grim gimmick piles up, and last year’s over-the-top asskicker looks this season like a 19th-century gentleman pugilist.

Ninja Gaiden’s “super ninja”, Ryu Hyabusa, can absorb enemy essences and unleash Ultimate Techniques? Well, maybe he can get a job hassling skateboarders down at the mall now that God of War’s hate-driven, deicidal maniac Kratos has made the scene with his pair of demonic, whirling chain-daggers. And who’s going to relegate Kratos himself to appearances on game shows and faded-celebrity reality series?

Devil May Cry 4 developer Capcom would dearly love their new series lead, Nero, to be that Kratos-killer. The former star of the Devil May Cry games, Dante, once the Crown Prince of all stylish slaughter-artists, was getting a bit long in the tooth; sure, he’s a half-demon, but who isn’t these days? His ridiculously outsized sword, legendary though it may be, is still a sword, and even juiced with magic power his twin .45s are still recognizable as something akin to real-world guns. Old, and, for the purposes of vicarious videogame violence in a novelty-driven market, busted.

The new hotness: Nero, an update on the Dante model. The series-trademark overcoat is still there (no badass is complete without swirly outerwear, unless they wear sci-fi armor or go shirtless) but as a younger dude Nero’s hip-hopped it up a bit: now he wears it with a hoodie vest. On the gun side of things, at first glance it seems the kid’s gone old-school with a Dirty Harry-style revolver, but even the “most powerful handgun in the world” isn’t badass enough for the 21st Century; look closer, and you’ll see Nero’s massive handcannon is actually double-barreled, one above the other. Badasssss!

Nothing says “totally awesome” like having one of your arms replaced by something other than your own flesh and blood -- Capcom’s own Bionic Commando was a pioneer in this area, with his extending cyber-arm. A part-demon like his predecessor, Nero has opted for his requisite arm-replacement to take the form of a spooky, glowing, Geigeresque demon limb called the “Devil Bringer” which, as the name suggests, serves to bring devils closer, via telekinesis, so Nero can smash them into the floor, throw them around or, preferably, chop them up with his sword.

The sword, now, that’s the piece de resistance. I can just imagine the brainstorming session that came up with Nero’s blade. Nero needs a sword, and it needs to be outlandishly big – that’s a given. But Dante already brought a seven-foot blade into the series; where do we go from there? A demon sword? Nah; we blew our demonic quotient on that totally rad arm, and demon swords are a little played out besides. A fire sword, maybe? Pfft; yeah, my grandmother loves flaming swords…she read about them in the Bible.

Well, what, then? Our boy will get slaughtered in the marketplace with some manky off-the-shelf hunk of steel, no matter how baroque we dress it up. What do we do with the sword? With what do we gimmick it? What’s the most badass thing?

How about… how about motorcycles? Motorcycles are still pretty badass, right?

Oh, my darling readers; in that moment, badass history was made. In the asskickin’ arms race, Nero’s sword is the hydrogen bomb. Of course it’s enormous; without demon blood or whatever you’d need a forklift to move it. Adding to its mass is, I guess, some kind of internal engine; the sword’s hilt is a replica of a motorcycle handlebar – complete with brake lever forming the handguard – and before he gets into tough fights, Nero actually revs it up like you would a bike -- RUNNN-nunnunnunn-RUNNNN-nunnunnunn-RUNNNNNNNUNNNUNNNNUNNNRRRRR! – and it starts flaming and smoking and vibrating and does a ton of extra motorbike-based damage to whatever hapless hellspawn happens to get in the way. “Kawasaki Ninja” has a whole new meaning.

Where will this mad rush to ever badder badassery lead us? Thanks to the bloody-minded quest for total awesomeness, the world’s videogame characters between them have the capability to kick the asses of every human being on the planet ten times over. And there’s no end in sight – the fact Nero is Japanese will only motivate North American developers to redouble their efforts, and it’s anyone’s guess what abominations lie beyond the sword-that’s-also-a-motorbike barrier.

For the sake of the children, I urge restraint. In Montreal, in Vancouver, in Boston and Seattle and Dublin and Paris, I beg all game developers: walk away from the zero-sum game of badass one-upmanship. Disarm. Return our gameworlds to the core values they were based on, where a simple ex-Special Forces commando who witnesses his family mercilessly slaughtered by the mob could wreak honest vengeance with a good, solid M-16. Where a young ninja, armed only with the volcano-forged, blood-quenched blade that belonged to his betrayed father, could hope to one day earn himself an international marketing deal. Where just ripping a dude’s head off was a treat, and we were happy to have it.

"The shiny guy always worries."

Aw.