I know I’ve been whining about it pretty much incessantly for the last five years or so, but dammit, it bugs me how my beard decided to skip “salt and pepper” altogether and proceed directly to “whiskey-soaked derelict.” It’s almost enough to make me convert to Buddhism in the hopes that I can re-roll for some more color-safe genes. Either that, or start pushing a shopping cart around the city, with a boombox playing “Purple Rain” on infinite loop and yelling at invisible people.

One thing it has taught me, though, is about tact, and how I don’t have it. A while ago I ran into someone I hadn’t seen in years, and her first comment as, “Wow! You look so distinguished!” Of course, my brain instantly translated distinguished to old, but I was impressed at how someone could so effortlessly come up with the right way to comment on the ravages of time, without skipping a beat.

I’ve never been able to do that. It’s not even that I’m thinking “Holy crap, you got old/fat/weird-looking and I can’t stop staring,” I really am a nicer person in my head than I seem to be on the outside. And I think that’s the problem; I hardly ever even notice stuff like that, so my brain is struggling to come up with something to comment on. It sounds like I’m struggling to think of something polite to say, when in fact I’m struggling to think of anything to say.

I’ve seen a lot of links to this article about introverts being passed around, and while it seems a little — I’m not sure what the word is, maybe “twee?” — it does convey pretty well the idea of social interaction being exhausting. But I’ve gotten old distinguished enough that I’m no longer envious of the “life of the party types.” Now I just want to be the kind of person who can make the kind of synaptic leaps to be able to see a person and think of something polite to say in less than a second with nary an “Uhhh….”

Ever since production started on SBCG4AP, Nick and Jake have been working on a video series documenting the development process. The first part was released today:

When I first heard about Tropic Thunder, I thought it was going to be just another two hours of Ben Stiller and Jack Black hamming it up, or at best one of Stiller’s MTV Movie Awards parodies stretched out to feature length. Turns out it’s got plenty of both, but it manages to be surprisingly good. Those movie parodies were always funny, after all — apparently all you have to do to get a whole movie out of them is to add a few hundred million to the budget, throw in a few more celebrities, and most importantly: get Robert Downey, Jr. involved.

He’s kind of awesome in this movie. There’s one line — I can’t remember the gag, it was pretty forgettable — but his delivery is so perfect it’s almost scary funny. After the scene ended, a few people in the audience actually clapped. I’d never seen that in a movie before, people applauding the delivery of a line.

Everybody else manages to do the kind of thing they do best, they rein in the goofy camera-hogging but still manage to make it over the top, and the gags are all over the place. Most of the scenes have slapstick, puns, fart jokes, and satire all going on at the same time. Whenever Hollywood types make a satire about Hollywood, it generally makes me uncomfortable — I wonder if they’re in on the irony of making a movie to make fun of yourself for being self-absorbed. Here, they got the balance just about right.

And, probably not all that surprising, the parody trailers are perfect. I can’t remember a movie where the opening worked so well. It set the perfect tone for a movie that’s going to go balls-out goofy for the next two hours. The movie does kind of run out of power towards the end, but it’s got so much momentum from the beginning, the coasting speed is still pretty damn funny.

My favorite TV show of the moment is called “Nounai Este I.Q. Supplement” [that link is in Japanese], a game show where a panel of celebrities answers Brain Age-type puzzles. It’s not subtitled, so I understand 0.01% of what’s going on, but for me, that’s a large part of the appeal. When I am able to solve the occasional “spot the difference” puzzle, I feel smart, and when I can solve a kana puzzle, I feel like a genius.

The episode that aired here last week was themed to GeGeGe no Kitaro a manga series by Shigeru Mizuki. (Presumably because one of the frequent guests on the show starred in last year’s live action adaptation). The characters kept popping up in the show, effects were superimposed on the celebrities, and the whole thing seemed like a ton of fun.

I was aware of Mizuki’s work, mostly from SH Morgan’s excellent Obakemono Project website and a mention on the Drawn! blog. His artwork directly inspired the parade scene in one of my favorite movies, Pom Poko, and just about anything that deals with yokai (Japanese goblins and spirits) is drawn directly from his interpretation. Plus, there’s a museum and a road lined with statues of Mizuki’s characters in his hometown. But I’ve got to admit that I’d dismissed it as a cultural blip, like Rat Fink.

You can’t really appreciate what a huge impact GeGeGe no Kitaro has in Japan — and is slowly, gradually getting outside Japan — until you see a bunch of people who grew up with the comics and cartoons and are really getting into it. And really, how could you not get into it? It’s early 60s cool combined with Japanese folklore, and I think it’s time we in the US admit that Japanese ghosts and monsters beat ours by several orders of magnitude. I’m guessing the closest equivalent we have in the US would be if The Munsters had been based not on a bunch of movies, but on centuries-old folk tales. Or if Charlie Brown had magic powers and lived in a graveyard with the eyeball of his father and was charged with keeping peace between the human and goblin worlds.

And had a really catchy theme song. Here’s the opening to three of the manga’s animated incarnations on TV. The late 60s (unquestionably the coolest):

The mid 80s:

And last year:

Now I’ve got to make a pilgrimage to Sakaiminato to see the yokai up-close and in person.

And here’s a clip of “I.Q. Supplement” in case anyone’s wondering what that’s all about. If it helps anybody figure out what’s going on: the only one I could get was around 0:50,because a Japanese word for “squirrel” is risu.

Somehow I’d gotten the idea that the new X-Files movie was about werewolves. I think maybe I mis-heard “Wendigo” when someone was saying, “When did it go horribly wrong?” So if you go see the movie expecting werewolves or yeti, you’re going to be disappointed.

Of course, if you go see the movie at all, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s really not very good. But at least it’s educational. I learned:

• Much of West Virginia is covered by icy tundra and snowdrifts several feet high.
• Except for the skyscraper-filled cities.
• You don’t have to be any kind of specialist to perform neurosurgery, you just have to know how to google for “stem cell research.”
• Experimental stem cell procedures are surprisingly easy to get green-lit in a Catholic hospital.
• And the stem cell samples are so easy to get, you can be on the operating table the same day you come up with the idea.
• Same-sex marriage inevitably leads to mad science.
• When performing transplant surgery, it’s important to get the correct blood type, so the patient doesn’t reject the donor head.
• People with rare blood types wear MedicAlert bracelets to advertise that fact, even when their blood type is the universal receiver.
• In West Virginia, public pools are segregated by blood type.
• You can shave off a thick beard without trimming it first, as long as you avoid the spirit gum.
• People’s arms can give off psychic vibrations even after their head has been severed.
• Dana Scully is steamin’ mad at pedophiles, and she’s also amazingly good at reading mailbox addresses at night during one of West Virginia’s frequent blizzards.
• “Reaper” must be filmed in Canada, since one of the guys from that show has a small part in the movie. I already knew Leoben as our gay Russian villain was Canadian, and I was expecting the Kids in the Hall and Alanis Morisette to show up any minute.
• “The X-Files” only worked when it didn’t take itself seriously.

Considering how the movie completely falls apart if you think about it for even a second, it’s surprising that the biggest complaint isn’t that it’s ludicrous, but that it’s so dull. But that’s really how “The X-Files” always worked — the production values and performances were always high enough to make you believe it was smarter than it really was. And Mark Snow’s ever-present keyboard would lull you into a false sense of significance.

That, combined with the brilliance of the occasional Darin Morgan episode, would distract you from the fact that an awful lot of the series was just Mulder and Scully standing around having exasperatingly pointless conversations that are meant to sound meaningful. But at least back then, there was genuine appeal to the characters; in I Want to Believe, they’ve had all the charisma drained out of them as if they’d been exsanguinated.

As an added bonus, here’s what I learned from the trailers:

• Rain’s theory is correct; Jason Statham is the Jean-Claude Van Damme of the next generation. I predict he’ll become a twin of himself any moment now.
• Michelle Yeoh hates me, because she keeps making me go see horrible movies just by being in them.
• Joan Allen has just stopped caring.

We’re now two and a half months into the End Times, and of course here I am, still writing “Living in a Righteous and Just Society” on my checks. As I’m sure you’re all aware, what’s brought about Imminent Rapture is the California Supreme Court ruling that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.

Of course, San Francisco made a big hoo-ha about it, trotting out their first married “couple” in an act of political showboating and promoting the gay agenda — nothing epitomizes the promiscuous homosexual lifestyle like two women in their late 80s.

But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of a ballot initiative that will allow California residents to vote on the legality of these so-called “marriages.” And I say November can’t come soon enough. It’s not that I’ve got anything personal against these “couples;” I just think that the Supreme Court overstepped their bounds. If we have judges taking it upon themselves to interpret laws, what’s next? People having sex on the streets with dogs and shoe trees, that’s what. Last I checked, we live in a democracy. And who better to make life-altering decisions about individual couples than thousands of strangers living hundreds of miles away?

As a concerned citizen, I’m doing my part to get ready for the November vote. I’ve already decided on a bunch of “marriages” I’m going to vote against:

1. First is the Coens, who live in the condo behind my building. Nice enough people, but you know, Jewish. Marriage is a religious institution, after all, and that means Christian ceremonies where we have enough sense not to waste a perfectly good glass by stepping on it.
2. Then there’s that couple who just moved in down the street. They’re Pakistani or Iraqi or Indian or something with some name I can’t pronounce, and of course you know what that means. “One Nation Under Allah?” I don’t think so.
3. The McAllisters are a tough call, since they’re a really nice couple. Unfortunately, one or the other of them is infertile — I never could find out which. Marriage is about procreation and raising children, and it has been for millennia. We can’t go changing the basic definitions of words just because a couple of people claim to be “in love.”
4. Jessica Alba and that dude she married, because we all know she can do better, am I right, guys?
5. Then there’s the Brown “family.” Peter, Sarah, and their daughter Julie, but there’s a problem: it’s their first marriage. And we all know it wasn’t “Adam and Eve,” it was “Adam and Lillith, then Eve.” I just feel sorry for the children.

And that’s just to start. It’s not going to be easy to make decisions for millions of people, but it’s our duty as Americans to decide these things. Not to leave it up to the couples themselves, and definitely not to put it in the hands of some “judges” who were “trained” to “interpret” the “law” on a “rational basis.”

Update: I’ve just been informed over e-mail that the November ballot initiative won’t let us vote against all marriages, just same-sex marriages. That doesn’t seem fair at all! How am I supposed to make decisions about the lives of people who don’t share all of my personal beliefs?

[Via John Scalzi's blog]

My degree is in computer science, which means I’m perfectly suited to buying comic books and geeking out over television series, but not so much for public speaking. So naturally, this weekend I haven’t done much of the former, but a ton of the latter.

Which is okay, since this was a business trip, not a vacation. I think I stopped caring sometime Friday afternoon, when I was doing an interview about a game I didn’t work on (it was Mark and Mike’s episode), by a half-naked woman in a Slave Leia costume. I realized that no matter what else happened this weekend, I couldn’t get any more awkward than that.

I’m not sure when it was, exactly, that “I’m never going to the San Diego Comic-Con again” turned into “Sure, sounds like fun! I’ll take a day off work!” But it didn’t take five minutes at the convention center for it all to come back like a sense memory… there are people who love this kind of thing, and I’m not one of them.

On Friday, my friends Polly and Kevin came by the booth and showed me a bunch of pictures around the show floor; it looked like they’d made it to all the big panels, and stopped at every character costume to pause for a photo op. It was a great reminder that these things are a blast for an awful lot of people who can just relax and get over their noise and personal space requirements, and just go with the flow.

There are still way, way, way too many people. Coming down, I’d marked off the stuff I wanted to see, optimistically thinking I could make it to a panel scheduled 30 minutes after an interview. It didn’t take long to realize that was a ridiculous idea.

The only ones I missed that I was really disappointed about were the “Venture Brothers” panel and the MST3K reunion. I didn’t even make it over to that side of the building until the Venture Brothers panel was about to start, so it was already packed with no chance of my getting in. And I’d figured all along that seeing the MST3K guys was important enough to me that I’d be willing to wait for 2 hours to get inside — I went there about an hour and 45 minutes before it was scheduled to start, and was told the reason there wasn’t a line was because the hall had long since filled up. I heard that for the “Heroes” panel, people had been camping out since the night before.

So I said it last year, I’ll say it again this year, and I’ll probably say it yet again next year: this thing has just gotten way too big, and the one in San Francisco is about as much as I can tolerate. I’m not sure how they can solve it; splitting it up into separate cons for comics, movies/TV, and games seems like a natural move, but would lose the whole “multimedia” thing that’s half of the appeal. Maybe the only solution is to schedule a bully convention across the street to thin out the ranks a little bit.

One thing definitely in San Diego’s favor: apart from a few predictable examples, everybody was extremely friendly. You’d inevitably get jostled and bumped into and stepped on, and almost without fail, people were saying “excuse me” and “are you okay?” and just being surprisingly polite.

My convention in numbers:

• Panels seen: 0 (unless Telltale’s counts)
• Comic books bought: 3 (all recent B.P.R.D. issues that you could buy anywhere)
• Famous and near-famous people seen from a great distance: 10 (Judd Apatow, Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank), Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Jackson Publick, Nathan Fillion’s back, Felicia Day (of Dr. Horrible), Richard Hatch, about five different guys I’d swear were Seth Rogen, that guy on “Reno: 911″ that I went to college with whose name I forget, and Jon and the Lasagna Cat)
• Meals eaten: 3
• Meals eaten at non-pizza places: 0
• Interviews given: 7? Maybe?
• Interviews I can remember making a single coherent sentence: 0
• Items bought: 2 (a MST3k anniversary T-shirt from the Shout! Factory booth, and a sketchbook from Mike Mignola).

For the first day of Comic-Con wonder and and excitement, I’ve been enjoying the sights and sounds of beautiful San… Francisco.

I got about three hours of sleep last night (one hour less than normal for the past few weeks), and hauled ass down to the airport at record speed. I got there with only about 1/3 of my face properly shaved but with plenty of time to make the flight. I checked in at one of their little automatic kiosks, and learned that my flight at 8:45 had been cancelled, but I could be confirmed on a flight for 9:20. No problem! I went through security, made my way down to the ass-end of the airport to the chosen gate, and was surprised to see no line, no mention of San Diego, or any sign at all that the flight was more than imaginary.

After about a 20-minute wait at the customer service desk, I got to speak to a human being, who started looking through standbys and alternate routes, all the time shaking her head and talking about how it didn’t look good. She told me I was still confirmed on the 9:20 flight, which surprised me, since it was already 9:05. She pointed out that that was 9:20 PM, not AM.

What sucks about that is that it completely defused all the righteous indignation I’d built up. I get so few opportunities to be genuinely entitled to be pissed about something, and I went and wasted it by confusing AM with PM. So when she told me that I was way far down on the standby list, and all the flights were booked solid, and they either wouldn’t or couldn’t give me an alternate route, and my only options were to wait in the airport for 12 hours or come back later tonight, and they couldn’t even reimburse my airport parking, I’d been completely beaten down. Those of us who don’t have planes are completely at the mercy of the people who do.

What really sucks is that this was supposed to be my ease-into-the-horrors-of-Comic-Con day, and I used up a vacation day to do it. Because I really didn’t want to be getting there late at night and having to deal with checking in and all that nonsense, then getting little sleep before getting slammed with a full day of sensory overload. Which is pretty much exactly what’s going to happen.

It also sucks that I missed the panel on episodic gaming with Hothead and TTG, and also Steve’s panel. And those are just the two things I know about without ever having looked at the official schedule.

Ah well, at least I got a nap out of it. Maybe someday I’ll be able to get out of San Francisco and get something resembling time off.

Also: Telltale announced the third game series today, and it’s Wallace & Gromit.