Whenever I run across advice for commercially-oriented writers, there’s always something in there about “hooking” your readers. Because, frankly, most people who read find it exhausting and have to be perpetually poked and prodded down the page, lest they abandon your work for some less taxing distraction. Keep your reader in mind, and try to taunt them into finishing what you’ve started.

You may have noticed that I don’t do that sort of thing. In fact, as I go on (and on and on), I actually get more difficult to follow. I whip back and forth from idea to tortured metaphor, like a fox trying to break a sentence’s neck.

Other writers — that is, writers who aren’t passive-aggressively trying to alienate their readers — may not want to follow my example. Instead, they’re looking for tips, tricks, and cheats, that will enable them to capture the audience’s attention. Well, you’re in luck! I don’t know any of those!

I’ve managed to do a few things, in my life-time. I’ve written a 50,000 word novel, a full-length screenplay, recorded a full album’s worth of music — and yet, I’m not a novelist, nor a screenwriter, nor even a musician. And why?

The answer is coming, please bear with me. A clue might be the fact that I haven’t told you these things about myself in some kind of effort to toot my own horn. The novel? Think Bulwer-Lytton. The screenplay? Think Basic Instinct 2. The album? No comparably bad example exists in this universe.

And that’s why I don’t do these things professionally. In order to improve a skill, one must practice. Practice takes determination. And, whenever I complete a task, in the moment that comes afterward, the inevitable self-assessment and reflection, I discover that all my effort and thoughtfulness has produced utter garbage, too poisonous even for composting. And that drains the determination right out of me.

I’ve said before that artists must have an incredibly high tolerance for crap, that they can’t let it get them down. Well, I don’t have that tolerance. Because when I look at the trash I’ve produced, it’s not informative. All I see is what’s wrong, all I know is that it felt right at the time, and I can’t make the connection between these two facts work out. How does something go from “Okay, this will work,” to “This is the worst thing ever produced,” in the space of one night’s sleep?

The answer is to practice. Over and over again. To build a mountain of offal in the hopes that, somehow, it will teach you right from wrong. But after failing so badly, so utterly — I lack the will to try again.

That’s what makes a great artist; what destroys my resolve is what fuels their ambition. To be able to look at their own shit and say, dammit, I’m going to try again. Oh, and talent, that helps.

If I wanted to fix this problem, I know what I’d do: I’d pick one thing and try to do it a million times. I would avoid the distractions that new opportunities represent, with their promises of potential, instant virtuosity — hey, you never know until you try, right?

Except, there’s still that nagging doubt: writers are anointed by God, not created through education and practice. But talent must sometimes be nurtured in order for it to blossom. Thus, the question: am I nourishing some latent, buried aptitude? Or am I just shoveling shit?

Oh, I know the answer, for myself at least. And, if you’ve read this far, you know exactly what that answer is.

Being able to embed a video in Wordpress.

What’s that? Easytube, you say? Another dozen similar plugins, you say?

Nope.

They don’t work for some reason. Either Wordpress changes all the ampersands in the video URL’s to “&” (which doesn’t work), or the plugins just truncate the URL so it shows up as http://www.youtube.com/v". Which doesn’t work.

Yeah, I followed the instructions. About 25 different sets of instructions for different for 20 different plugins. It doesn’t work.

Custom template? Doesn’t work in Kubrick either.

See?

Doesn’t. Fucking. Work.

Have a nice day.

It’s been interesting to observe the changes in advertising wrought by our non-recession. With Americans saving their pennies (then turning around and spending them on gas), it’s going to be more difficult than ever for advertisers to convince tight-fisted consumers to part with their hard-earned dough. Wait — check that: It’s going to be harder than ever for advertisers to convince their clients that they’re convincing Americans to part with their hard-earned dough. Hmm.

Ignoring local radio spots (which can be produced with alarming speed), the first reference to the economic slow-down we caught in an ad was from the folks at Hyundai. Their pitch was, essentially, that since times are getting tough, now might be the best time ever to buy a car — or something along those lines. We weren’t particularly concerned with this tactic; an admission of the economic problems, followed by a claim that purchasing a Hyundai is a good strategy for dealing with them.

On the other hand, we’ve just seen a commercial that really pisses us off. It’s a 30 second shill for the city of Las Vegas. Their come-on? “Don’t think — just go!”

That’s right: Don’t think to hard about it, just get your ass to Vegas. Because in dangerous economic times, what better place is there to go than a town where you’re never more than fifty feet from a machine designed to take your money, and give nothing in return. (Actually, the odds on a slot machine are slightly better than the odds on the vending machines in the break-room at my office.)

That’s the point, of course; chucking it all and heading for Las Vegas is, quite possibly, the worst, damn-stupidest thing anyone trapped in a sinking economy could possibly do. (Unless you plan on checking out in a body bag.) And, rather than dealing with the fact that the last thing most Americans feel like doing right now is spending money to come to the place most effectively designed to take away more of it, Vegas is trying to bamboozle us into doing just that.

If you happen to be a casino, let us just say that we’re very sorry. But just because you happen to be stuck with a glitzy pleasure-palace that costs millions of dollars a day to operate, doesn’t mean that the rest of us have an obligation to put our paychecks on the line for your benefit.

Remember our slight obsession with the Dyson Vacuum tag line? We firmly believe in the power of de-contextualized slogans. And, in the case of this new ad tactic coming from Las Vegas, we can think of only one defense — the slug from the Tylenol commercials. Tylenol just wanted you to choose their particular brand of analgesic based on its low potential for harmful drug interactions, but we see their tag line as a clarion call for our age (apologies to Malcolm Gladwell about this): Stop. Think.

Seriously. Stop. Think.

Oh, and fuck Las Vegas.

From a post over at The Millions, that refers to an article by Nick Paumgarten, that reveals this “shocking” bit of information: “In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works.”

Sorry, did we put quotes around the word “shocking”? Why yes, indeed we did. Because, frankly, there’s nothing shocking in that fact. We’ve known this for years. We also know that most people aren’t aware of this fundamental truth.

How did we find out whether or not the door-close button works? Because we’ve worked in lots of buildings that had elevators. (A minor benefit of being a temp.) Often, we would step into an elevator by ourselves, with not a single person in sight, trying to muscle their way into the cab with us. So, trying to speed up the whole process, we would press the door-close button. We noticed, after about a hundred or so attempts, that the doors did not seem to respond to even the most insistent button-mashing. We actually counted for heaven’s sake.

And it made sense: what’s the point of having a button to close the doors, if there’s what amounts to a huge delay between pressing and closure? None! We’ve come across exactly one elevator that had a functioning door-close button; it was a freight elevator. And when somebody hit the door-close, everyone else had best get out of the way, because those heavy, steel bastards would snap shut. Instantly. After one push.

So, remember kids: if you’ve got to push “door close” more than once in order to get the button to “work” — it doesn’t.

We’ve told lots of people about this; nobody, as of yet, has believed us. Nobody.

We know we’re not a trust-worthy looking individual, but c’mon. These people knew, in their hearts — hell, their souls — that we were right. The just didn’t dare believe.

Garth Risk Hallberg said, “[...] I expected this news to spread rapidly - and to lead to a sharp decline in door-close-button pushing.” We hope he’s right. We’re doing our part to spread this information — but bigger guns than ours might be required for it to become general knowledge. Quick! Somebody call Jeanne Moos!

Watch Mr. Wizard
Standard Definition DVD (NTSC)
90 Minutes, black and white
Digiview Entertainment
Original Price: US$1.00
What I Paid: US$1.00

The smokers at my local Wal-Mart know patience. There’s only one register at which a customer may purchase tobacco products; and the local policy is to put the slowest, meanest, or least experienced employee at that station. This means a lot of standing around, while the checker wrestles with the complex operations involved in ringing up items and accepting money for them.

The other day, trapped in this unmoving line of the damned, I wound up looking at a pile of $1 DVDs. There were a lot of the things you’d expect to see for that price — terrible, unwatchable movies, and collections of terrible, unwatchable movies. And, a three episode collection of the old, “Watch Mr. Wizard” show.

Now, I know Mr. Wizard pretty well, but I’m not old enough to have seen the original program, which ran from 1951 to 1965. But I did see the later, “Mr. Wizard’s World” version that played on Nickelodeon. (Can you believe it? Educational shows on a kids’ cable channel?) I loved that show, which says a lot about me. (NERRRRRRRRRD!) But, feeling nostalgic, and willing to throw away a dollar, I added it to my other purchases. And so, for the first time ever, we present a very special 100 Penny Review: Our first video.

So, how was it? Um… kind of dull.

Look, I don’t want that to color your impression of this particular DVD with a pat, snap judgment, but it’s true. Yet, in spite of the dullness, I watched this thing with rapt attention. The world of science that we grown-ups have to deal with is complex and confusing. It’s kind of fun to recall all the things we learned in 3rd grade science class, and I was pleasantly surprised about how much I remembered. It’s nice to feel smart.

How strange it was to see this relic of 1950’s television, and to be reminded of how gentle and slow-paced it once could be. “Watch Mr. Wizard” was interesting not just because of the demonstrations (which only made up something like 10% of the episodes), but because the facts themselves were interesting. And kids used to sit there and watch this stuff. Well, why not? What else was on? The kids of today have constant 24 hour cable networks vying for their attention, which might be more exciting, but what have you ever really learned from, say, the Jonas Brothers? Aside from the fact that bad music can occur at any age?

Don Herbert, by most reports, was a pretty good guy. Of course, as a children’s television host, he was often the butt of a number of off-color insinuations. But there’s nothing sinister to be found, thank goodness. Mr. Wizard is a kindly, but stern figure here. In later years (especially for those of us who saw his demonstrations on Letterman) he became a good deal more avuncular.

Back in the 50’s, though, he didn’t let up on the kids a bit. Question after question after question — and the kids held their own. Sure, there might have been some hemming and hawing, some wrong answers here and there, but they gave as good as they got in a sportsman-like way. Nowadays, of course, you’re more likely to get a, “Hey, fuck you, man!” than a, “Gee, Mr. Wizard!” out of even the most well-behaved school-kid.

(Before you get too nostalgic about the “olden days”, don’t forget that back when these shows were taped, homosexuality was considered a mental illness, mixed-race couples could be arrested for being together, smoking was advertised on television, and women had only gotten the right to vote a scant 30 years prior.)

It does bother me a little bit, thinking that this might have been some cheap attempt to capitalize on Don Herbert’s death; There are indications that the makers were in a bit of a hurry:

So, ultimately, the question is this: Is it worth a buck? Well, that depends.

People who fondly remember Don Herbert, but have never seen the old, 50’s era version of Mr. Wizard would probably enjoy it. That makes it very much a product for adults, I’m afraid. Kids, I suspect, would be bored to tears, break the disc out of frustration, and sneak over to a friend’s house to get loaded on the Bacardi Silver in the fridge in his garage. But, if you’re a member of the former group, go for it.

The rules of language do not come from authority; they come from the language as it is observed. This unfettered license for change has given “English” its marvelous adaptability. But, sometimes, we feel a strong desire to ask for a team of experts to huddle up in the middle and set some boundaries.

Addiction is a word that we’ve got problems with. There’s the dictionary definitions, of course. But it’s also a word that has been taken up by health professionals, and used for diagnostic purposes. So now “addiction” an refer to a habit, a compulsion, an activity that causes trauma when ceased, physical dependence on a chemical or substance, or much, much more.

The perceived misapplication of the term seems to really piss some people off. Which is kind of understandable, given the context. If a lay-person defines something you do as an addiction, well, that’s solid — backed up by Websters, as long as we all agree to stick with what they say. If, on the other hand, a psychiatric professional wants to make something that you do into the definition of a widely recognized disease, well, them’s fighting words.

The paranoid may have a point: say, for example, two people seem to be addicted to the Internet, but one can handle it and the other is losing his mind, a diagnostic definition had better be very clearly and carefully built.

You can go too far with this sort of thing: William Burroughs, for example, suggested in his writings that every aspect of human life came from an addiction (except language, which was an alien influence acting on humanity); government, for example, came about due to “power addiction.”

Still. If we’re going to block every attempt to used addiction as a descriptor for any compulsion that has no direct chemical or biological basis, then we’re kind of stuck for a good word.

There is a woman of our acquiescence who really enjoys those little Starbucks Frappacinos that you can pick up at the grocery store. And when we say “enjoys” we mean that she will beg us to go to the store at 3 o’clock in the morning if she should happen to run out. She once accused everyone in the room of betrayal, calumny, bad faith, and heartless unconcern for her well being. It was like a tantrum from Hamlet. If you don’t provide her with these Frappacinos, she will ask and ask and ask until you want to kill yourself.

Is she addicted? Possibly — there are chemicals involved. But not anything that she couldn’t get from a regular cup of coffee, right? Diagnostically, she is not diseased or anything, and there are lots of people who drink ten “lite” Starbucks Frappacinos a day, who manage to not cry, yell, and accuse family members of neglect, when they run out.

So? What do you call something like that?

After watching a rerun of South Park that happened to feature Malcolm McDowell as a guest-star, we got to wondering whatever happened to the guy. Oh, we know where he’s been, of course; what we mean is, what the hell happened to this guy? He had a shot at becoming one of those great British actors, rather than simply a ubiquitous one.

Wait, was it Caligula? We bet it was Caligula.

Holy crud, that was a terrible movie, wasn’t it? We’re not talking about the gratuitous sex-scenes and general moral repugnance that the movie is famous for: no, in terms of film-making alone, this thing was a dog. There are versions of the film out there, which have had the X-rated scenes cut (they add little or nothing to the plot), that prove this point.

The fact that the movie was financed by Bob Guccione kind of doomed the thing from the start. It takes a kind crazy of optimist to believe that the worlds of legitimate film and hard-core pornography could be combined in some financially solvent way. Guccione was that optimist, but his meddling ruined what could have been a decently mediocre film. Instead, the world was now saddled with a movie that’s held in lower regard than its eponymous main character.

Did Caligula produce any serious repercussions? Perhaps the saddest thing about the movie is, no, not really.

The actors and performers might have to live with some pretty awful images in their heads for the rest of their lives, but it didn’t really sink anybody career-wise, did it? Nor did it change the way pornography was then currently made — nobody wants to emulate an expensive stink-burger. Even so, it didn’t even stop other film-makers from attempting to tell Caligula’s story.

It may have sparked a brief skirmish in the debate between obscenity and art, but it didn’t last long, and only proved something that most people already knew: When art and porn collide, art doesn’t stand a chance. (That’s why we have such tortured buffer-terms like “erotica”.)

These days, with the Internet acting as a perpetual maelstrom of genital exploitation, we wonder if kids still root through their fathers’ closets and garages, seeking the illicit thrill of restricted content. But, even if they are, and they managed to find a tape of ol’ Caligula, we’re certain about the singular thought they’ll take away from the experience: This was a terrible movie.

I often draw inspiration from things that other people might find stupid. No, check that; from things that people definitely find stupid. You’ve probably seen those Dyson vacuum cleaner ads on TV. The one with the guy who spends the whole 30 seconds whining about how all vacuum cleaners fail to suck in such a way that you wind up with the kind of clean floor you deserve. Like I said, stupid, right?

Not so fast. See, the there’s one part of the ad, in which the designer (or the guy playing the designer — who the hell knows) tosses out a phrase which attempts to justify the years and millions of dollars spent on vortex research. I love that part. Because it’s a statement that serves as a glorious contradiction of the ethos of our age. That phrase is this: I just things should work properly.

It’s beautiful, simple, elegant. Yes, I wanted to shout at the TV. At last. This should be one of the great axioms of engineering. Things should fucking work properly. The fact that this had to be an explicit statement in an advertisement is bad enough — we have to de-contextualize the thing to access its true power as a statement — but it’s also the part of the ad that bothers people the most.

At least, it bothered a lot of the people I worked with at the time. And that’s the other thing I loved about that statement: it really pissed people off. Now, that might have been primarily due to the fact that the guy who said it did so in a fey, effete, throughly British way. But I think that the reason so many people took issue with the declaration that things should work, rather than not work, is because that sentiment runs counter to everything we, as a people, in thrall to cheap consumer goods, hold dear.

Yes, I said it. In our heart of hearts, we don’t believe that things should work properly. When you buy a mop a the 99 cent store, you expect the head to snap off before you’ve actually managed to clean even a full square-foot of your kitchen floor. You don’t feel angry or disappointed, because we know that, in the Platonic ideal of 99 cent mops, head snappage is part of the bargain. We expect them to break. In fact, we want them to break. Chiefly because we really don’t want to actually clean our kitchen floors — we want to sit on the couch and watch Scrubs re-runs. But, the broken mop gives us an excuse: Well, I tried to clean the floor, but the mop cracked like an old man’s femur, so, you know, pass me the Cheez-Its.

We don’t think things should work properly, and neither do the corporations who sell us these products. The level their shooting for is “It should work well enough for us to avoid having to pay out product liability settlements.” This “Feh, good enough’ attitude has crept into every part of our lives — kids need only be kept alive long enough to avoid criminal charges of child-neglect. Cars only have to last until the loan is paid off. Mortgage investments only have be solvent until financial-firm CEO’s can cash in their gigantic bonuses. Global warming only has to be slowed down long enough for me to die in a tragic Hummer collision.

What’s America’s favorite science fiction spaceship? You might say the U.S.S. Enterprise, that gleaming, elegant example of futuristic technology. Under the surface, however, it took an engineer of surpassing brilliance, and a complete lack of an over-time pay structure to keep it humming. (See Star Trek: TOS from season 1 onward.)

The second favorite fantasy space transport is probably the Millennium Falcon. Yeah, it was neat. And it was piloted by Captain Cool and his shaggy life-partner (also cool), but that thing was always breaking down. As a matter of fact, the hunk of junk’s reliability issues was a sodding great plot-point in The Empire Strikes Back. If it hadn’t been for a duff hyper-drive, the Falcon and its crew wouldn’t have had to take a pit stop at Cloud City, Han wouldn’t have been made into a decorative bas relief wall-hanging, Luke wouldn’t have lost his Lonely-Moisture-Farmer’s Wife, and, ultimately, Leia would not have wound up wearing a metal bikini whilst chained to the biggest, slimiest, Muppet of them all. I mean, nobody wanted to see that, right?

I sometimes dream of a magical world that could never exist, based on the premise that things should work properly; it is a place where products behave as advertised, where Windows is not the worst operating system since punch-cards, where the food in the box looks a little like the food pictured on the box, where nerds don’t beg their girlfriends to dress up in embarrassing outfits when they go to conventions (it’s sad, seeing women dressed in practically nothing, while their mates get to wrap themselves in voluminous Obi-Wan robes and play with light sabers). Oh, and everything at the store costs a million dollars.

The market for video games has gone through a pretty dramatic expansion over the past thirty years. What was once an obscure, specialist hobby has now become just another sector in the mainstream entertainment industry. What was once yet another refuge of skinny adolescents lacking athletic talent or social acumen has become a respectable pastime for the cool and uncool alike, largely thanks to the first Sony Playstation, and its large selection of games that appealed to jocks.

As these gamers got older, they did what a lot of people do: they became collectors. But there was a difference: While many avid game collectors could be found in the kinds of places one would expect to find their more action-figure oriented comrades, (like pawn shops, thrift stores, and swap meets) a new venue arose to meet the demand. It was the used game store.

In our town, it was a place called Funcoland. We can’t speak for every location, but the one in our town was a revelation. They bought and sold used games, of course, but if you don’t remember how it was back then, you would be shocked at how different the experience was than it is now at places like Gamestop. Every month or so an actual price list was distributed, effectively taking the pulse of the used game market. People were often shocked at the standards they would have to meet in order to sell a game for a good price. Back then, they would even take the original NES cartridges — but you’d better have the sleeve, the instruction manual, and the original box if you wanted to get a good deal. If you spent any time in the store at all, you were bound to hear arguments break out over things like bent corners and faded logos.

It was tough on sellers (because, let’s face it, Americans don’t take care of their games), but it was great for buyers. Beloved classics, once lost, could be found again. It was great.

Now, not so much. But, you know, it’s a sign: The mass market, the vast throng of people from all over the economic spectrum are now involved in the buy, selling, and trading of games, in a quantity that, some say, drives out quality. You look at the stores now, and they’re a mess, half the games lack any original packaging, and used games out-number new copies because new copies have lower profit margins. That’s just the way it is, people think. It’s how it’s got to be.

Well, no — we don’t think so. Gamestop, driven by capitalist impulses, has gone too far. The standards have gone too low. They will take any game from any person because they can make money off of software in generic boxes, with discs that don’t work, and the poor folks that come in will use that store credit to take home overstocked garbage and repeat the cycle again. Nobody takes care of the games they sell back because, frankly, it doesn’t matter. Even the abused and scratched will find a home on Gamestop shelves.

The people who decide how Gamestop will operate have every right to choose money over love — this is America, after all. But someday, as Tycho from Penny Arcade so accurately noted, it won’t be long before games are delivered exclusively via broadband Internet connections. The dubious disc will no longer exist. What happens to Gamestop then? Nothing they don’t deserve, frankly. And the collectors won’t save them: anyone who’s serious about vintage games has already fled to the Internet. They’re not going to set foot in some crap-filled dungeon to get their fix.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to take a wallet full of the same garbage you already aren’t selling. You don’t have to accept game discs with blood on them from a guy who won’t give you his phone number.

And if you change your behavior, and your image, maybe we’ll support you when the digital delivery revolution takes place. You don’t need to traffic in garbage. Please stop now.