I Can’t Quit You, Frasier!

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is one of the best shows on television. It is the perfect send-up of televised situational comedy, applying real world rules to formulaic sitcom antics. Sitcom characters are monsters whose despicable behavior is normalized by their absurdist environment. The characters in Always Sunny follow sitcom rules, but they are a pathogen in an otherwise healthy and familiar world. The characters aren’t locked in stasis, as is the case with many episodic shows, but they don’t enjoy much personal growth either.

Always Sunny is a descent into madness and dysfunction. The gang’s charismatic leader/sociopath, Dennis, states that “We immediately escalate everything to a ten. It’s ridiculous. I mean, somebody comes in with some preposterous plan or idea. And then all of a sudden, everybody’s on the gas. Nobody’s on the brakes. Nobody’s thinking. Everybody’s just talking over each other with one idiotic idea after another. Until, finally, we find ourselves in a situation where we’ve broken into somebody’s house. And the homeowner is home.” The chaotic spectacle of plans gone awry while friends and family throw each other under the bus in a bid for self-preservation is a thing of beauty.

All this needs is a sprinkle of My Little Pony and a vampire to qualify as fan fiction.

So why am I watching Frasier yet again?

The show is an intellectualized farce, or rather, it unravels pretentious snobbery into sideshow buffoonery. Frasier is defined by his hubris, and it is hard to stomach his many defeats without a certain sense of schadenfreude. The storytelling is patient and precise, building up toward a moment instead of garnering a bunch of cheap laughs. The acting is top-notch with comic timing that rarely misses a beat. Kelsey Grammar has a powerful stage presence, but he never overshadows his supporting cast. In fact, David Hyde Pierce was the driving force behind many of the best plot lines.

Most of all, this is my comfort show. Frasier has a warmth reminiscent of vinyl records or human voices and radio static on NPR. NewsRadio aired around the same time. Funny as it was, it never transcended the sitcom formula of canned laughter and pratfall gags. The audio grates a little as background noise, and the antics feel tired after repeat viewing (fun as it is to see Bob Odenkirk cast yet again as a lawyer in his cameo). Fraiser has the same canned laughter and is burdened by many of the tropes that it tries to transcend. It was a transitional show that elevated the format but never completely escaped its mooring in the formulaic storytelling of Cheers and Wings. The casual pacing was paired with a mellow atmosphere, bland jazz, and tasteful set design that imparted the aesthetic of the waiting room at a classy doctor’s office. That vibe could have been off-putting if it had been handled less adroitly, but the end product makes for great television and potent nostalgia.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Just about any fat nerd (skinny nerds have notoriously bad memories) who lived through the 1980s is going to remember Jack Chick’s Dark Dungeons, an infamous anti-D&D tract that was equal parts hilarious and depressing. Chick’s ministry was doing Infowars before Alex Jones was even born. His tracts attacked Halloween, evolution, homosexuals, and the majority . . . of other . . . Christians. The goal is for gullible dupes to have terror-induced epiphanies after discovering a tract in a public restroom (with bonus points if a glory hole is involved), so basically it’s an illustrated Breitbart News. People still break anti-littering ordinances with them today.

I make fun of it, but this pretty much sums up my last D&D session.

Under Chick’s umbrella, so-called occult experts, like William Schnoebelen (an ex-Satanist, Illuminati vampire), warned mankind about the dangers of the Necronomicon and dread Cthulhu, stating, “There is now a whole line of materials based on the hellish H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos, a form of magic that we practiced in the darkest days of our satanic career – a system of magic prominently featured in THE SATANIC RITUALS by Anton LaVey! Contrary to the ramblings of D&D defenders like Michael Stackpole, the Necronomicon and the Cthulhu mythos are quite real.” That’s right. Cthulhu is real. Schnoebelen knows it, because he personally saw the actual Necronomicon . . . while flying the Kessel Run in the Millenium Falcon on his way to visit Mickey Mouse. To reiterate, this “Christian” publishing company warns us that a massive pantheon of monsters really and truly exist, even though this mythos would completely undermine the validity of every world religion . . . ever. You can’t prove Christianity with Cthulhu! Bombastic scare tactics are a better gauge of character than veracity.

I had wanted to include an illustration in tribute to Dark Dungeons in anupcoming RPG book. It was meant to show the world’s second worst gaming group. Oops! I noticed my mistake and ran it past a couple friends. They both agreed that now is not the best time for an illustration of a social outcast murdering his peers, no matter how poorly drawn. My intent was more along the lines of Greg Costikyan‘s Violence RPG (free to download from the author’s site).

My book’s central theme is comparable:  Role playing is better when you don’t murder everything in sight. My character’s unhealthy fantasy life bleeds over into the real world, much like Tom Hanks in Mazes and Monsters, another classic gem of anti-D&D propaganda. There was a lot of baseless hysteria like that, way back in the good ol’ days, about D&D derailing youth and turning them into sexually-active, drug-addled occult assassins (if only). It was funny back then, because the accounts were exaggerated or fabricated. Now, there is an overhanging threat of real violence made worse by people attributing mass shootings to sex, drugs, and rock & roll, instead of seeking a solution. The radicalized sides of the argument each want to shoot their way into heaven.

I can see how this would be interpreted as insensitive. Sorry.

We need a contemporary Ars Moriendi, a shift from our culture’s detachment from and fear of death to an acceptance that gives life perspective. Perhaps we are transitioning right now from a culture that glorifies violence in every medium to one that reconciles death as part of the human condition. Probably not. To die well and with dignity after a long and meaningful life, isn’t that the counterargument to these incessant battles of Pyrrhic attrition? Worth. Dignity. Life is meaningful and death is significant, which is a hard point to make when the “good guys” discuss morality like a fan service debate over whether Han Solo shot first. It is healthy to laugh at death, so long as death is not an abstraction. Good humor speaks to truth, a salutation of memento mori, which translates as “remember that you have to die.” Birth and death, joy and mourning, this is what unites us as human beings.

— Derek Kagemann

Life is Precious Until It Leaves the Womb

Can I write this? The answer will always be an emphatic “yes!” Any qualms that I have are consumed by the narrative. The story tells itself, and I do the typing.

Should I publish this? Setting aside the consideration of literary merit and whether my work deserves the attention of an editor or publisher, writing poses an ethical dilemma. It feels egocentric to think that anything I produce could impact someone’s life, but apart from entertainment value, moral introspection and social awareness are inherent features of good fiction. Can my good intentions go awry?

Will someone get off on this? That is my biggest concern when I write about violent and/or sexual situations. One of my stories involves a bully coercing a child from a lower income bracket into an uncomfortable situation. There is a sexual element pertaining to how the nascent curiosity of an innocent can be twisted by abuse, and we see that the bully is acting out what he has suffered. The intimacy of the narrative is meant to be discomforting but also to put the reader in a vulnerable state that evokes a sympathetic rapport toward both parties. Yet, I fear that someone capable of sexual abuse would find that arousing. No amount of recognition or money would be worth a single pedophile interpreting my work as erotica.

Added to that, there is the potential that someone would get the wrong impression about me. Editors deal with enough fictionalized accounts of the funny thing that a friend said at the grocery store. A fair share of amateur fiction revolves around wish fulfillment and unhealthy fantasy lives. Having worked for a vanity press, I have seen some terrifying stuff written by schizophrenics and narcissists. Seemingly innocuous fiction is sometimes the faintest ripple at the surface of someone’s fantasy life, and the depths of their imagination may prove hideous when plumbed. At a glance, I do not have the backlog of work to establish my credentials as a non-creep. I am not sure I could convince myself.

So, does it need to exist at all? If the subject matter is so squirmy and uncomfortable then why write it at all? That’s easy to answer. I feel unsettled all of the time. Sometimes it concerns me that other people don’t. I am incapable of building the emotional barriers that insulate other people from the human condition, and I react with the full intensity of my being to everything that most people can shrug off and forget. It is exhausting. The coping strategies are exhausting. Even the medications make me tired. The only filter between me and the world is prescription lithium.

Plenty of writers and artists are like that. It feels important to unsettle people, because a story might be what helps one single person to identify some moral quandary in an inescapable context that can’t be rationalized away as irrelevant, inevitable, or unsolvable. Maybe writing is not the ideal medium for epiphanies anymore.

— Derek Kagemann

Helix Ate My Balls

The implication is that your mind will be blown. It won’t be.

Helix is to science what Lost is to lazy writing. It’s kind of like how SyFi did Z-Nation as a slightly more bearable, low-budget alternative to The Walking Dead. This feels like their dollar store knock-off of The Strain, alternating layers of Michael Crichton and Richard Matheson beneath a thick icing of John W. Campbell — if they were all Suzanne Collins. Overall, it’s about people vomiting into each other’s mouths. I spent most of the show hoping that the protagonists would fall into a plot hole, but honestly, I watched it for the monkey torture.

The show starts out with Dr. Alan Farragut explaining the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak to his colleagues at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a surreal lecture from a condescending prick (and I’m no stranger to those). Everyone in Farragut’s audience has an advanced medical degree, so they should be yawning and texting, not listening with expressions of rapt fascination. They memorized this story as undergrads! It’s like flight-splaining the Wright brothers to a professional aviator. Even the cafeteria workers and custodial staff at the CDC probably recall Broad Street from high school.

“The balls in question are here . . . and here, at the intersection of Broad and Jump Street.”

The conceit is understandable. It’s like reading a Michael Crichton book. He wants to make sure that everyone understands how much research he put into his story, so he shoehorns 90% of it in there. This epidemiology stuff is fresh, new, and imposing for the show’s writers. They assume the same of the show’s viewership, which leads to two pitfalls, underestimating your audience and diminishing your protagonist. Both undermine a story and destroy the narrator’s credibility.

During his lecture, Farragut nonchalantly tosses a vial of cholera to a woman in the audience. Everyone loses their shit, because if that vial were to break then . . . the janitor would have to clean the floor with bleach. We are talking fecal-oral transmission here, so the human centipede lurking in the background, he has a lot to worry about. I love watching TV extras overact, and this scene did not fail to disappoint. One extra holds a hand over her heart with an “Oh my lans” expression for the rest of the scene. Let me reiterate that she is playing a doctor, not someone watching cat fail videos at Walmart. It’s beautiful.

This is a recurring problem. Later in the first season, the CDC protagonists discover a vial of Yersinia Pestis. They react like someone just opened the Ark of the Covenant. In another Crichton-esque moment, they take turns namechecking it as the black plague and Plague of Justinian. Scary right? Except that Americans can still contract the bubonic plague from squirrels and prairie dogs. It’s not quite exotic, and not nearly as terrifying as the Ebola that they were nonchalantly handling. It is curable with readily available antibiotics.

“Careful, these balls may be infected.”

Not everyone is going to know that, but the characters really should. A youthful Arnold Schwarzenegger can’t fail to bench press 300 pounds and then crush a parking meter with his bare hand in the second act. His physique sets an expectation. Viewers unfamiliar with bodybuilding may overlook the initial discrepancy — 300 pounds, 500 pounds, whatever — but it becomes incongruous when he then performs a superhuman act. Likewise, mental powerhouses can’t be stupid half of the time, especially not if the plot hinges on them being extraordinary. Characters who brag about the string of letters after their name definitely should not begin the show reciting a high school history report. It only takes one maven in a room full of laymen to point out the inconsistencies, and then we all know that it is the writer speaking down to his audience, not the character patronizing his peers.

Better Off Ted resolve this by having the protagonist break the fourth wall and address the viewers. It works in a comedy, and House of Cards proved that it can work brilliantly in a drama. Contrast that with Kolchak: The Night Stalker or Burn Notice, which are as semi-serious as a show with voice-overs can get. One work-around, which cracks the fourth wall but maintains the audience’s voyeuristic role, is having the character narrate into a audio recorder. We watch the protagonist as he rants, hear it as a voice-over, or listen as the tape plays a not so final confession as the character gurgles in a pool of blood. That approach would have suited Helix. Speaking to the audience establishes a rapport, whereas remedial shoptalk establishes an adversarial relationship, because either the viewer or the protagonist is not especially smart.

— Derek Kagemann

Dork Tuesday: Trenches and Terrain

I have been crafting a lot of terrain lately. Most of it is for a Shadow War:  Armageddon game that I intend on playing with my son. Making it reminded me how much fun I used to have selling terrain online, so I expect to have several pieces available for sale in the near future. The photos here are a little rough. I took them to show a few friends without worrying about lighting or composition.

I was inspired to start this project by the huge pieces of Styrofoam packaging that came with my wife’s printer. I didn’t have space to store them for later, and I didn’t want to just throw that lovely garbage away. I have also wanted to make some trenches for quite some time now, so it was a great opportunity to use up some irregular scraps of blue board that have been sitting around for years. I am especially pleased with the utility poles, which started out as plastic sprues from an old Thunder Road board game.

I have treated this project as an opportunity to improve my technique. Each game board section is a 1’x1′ segment on a hardboard backing. This modular arrangement allows me to rearrange the battlefield for each session. The barbed wire is hardware cloth cut into pronged strips and then rolled around a pencil. The effect wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I think I have an idea of how to perfect it in the future. Those sandbags were made by Fortress Figures and are over twenty years old.

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The second piece is an abandoned comm relay center, which can serve as an objective in some game scenarios. I put a lot of effort into painting Styrofoam white. Even funnier, the grime and streaks of green algae were inspired by foam litter out in the woods. The satellite dish is made from an old Games Workshop flying base, a PVC pipe cap, a spent Scotch tape roll, and a couple bits of sprue. A good friend of mine was kind enough to gift me with tons of bits that feature prominently in each piece. I had yet to apply any weathering pigments at the time that I took the photos. I also added some graffiti cribbed from sidewalk scribblings and the opening sequence of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Cybernetic Buzz Saws to the Face!

Modern prosthesis aren’t keeping up with one fundamental cyberpunk promise — gimmicky inbuilt weaponry. Science fiction assures us that every replacement appendage will be augmented in some fundamentally lethal way. Will your cybernetic finger double as a lighter or a vacuum cleaner? No. Will it pulverize concrete or conceal a hidden spring-loaded blade. Absolutely!

Awww, hell no.

Prosthetic arms are a miracle of modern science. When I was a kid, there were ultra-deluxe hook hands and the mannequin leg from the lamp in A Christmas Story, which is still amazing compared to a wooden peg leg. Modern artificial appendages are inching into William Gibson territory. All that’s missing is for a buzz saw to emerge as the hand recesses back into the metallic arm. “Let me slice that,” Gordon says as his office co-workers wheel in a birthday cake.

This is what prosthetic arms looked like when I was your age.

I suppose the problem is that in most fiction, war veterans with weaponized prosthesis are inducted into covert organizations or criminal syndicates, where buzz saw arms are practical upgrades. Insurance isn’t going to cover the twelve-inch titanium foldout blades for the guy who does office work for a government contractor. Ultimately, you can’t blame someone for turning to crime to cover the costs of their blowtorch hand or bladed running legs. Medicaid doesn’t cover those upgrades. You’d be lucky to get a corkscrew thumb or a micro-missile index finger hypodermic needle loaded with a paralytic agent. Thanks Obama!

Ultimately, human evolution has only one logical outcome . . .

Kitten Fangs: A Tale of Cats, Chocolate, and Disgustingly Lurid Vampire Romance (part II: The Middle)

<<< Chapter 4

Chapter 5:  Ghosts of the Past That Are Actual Ghosts

Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids
all over the world, I can’t help but cry,
I mean I’d love to be skinny like that,
but not with all those flies and death and stuff.
— Mariah Carey

“Looks like it’s just you and me tonight,” Melantha said after Salvador had left to return to his mausoleum. Between him catching on fire and arrival of the gillman pizza delivery guy, the evening’s sensual mood had been completely ruined.

“Yeah,” Gary replied. “I guess I had better break out some ice cream and the VHS collection of Frasier. Boooooo . . .”

Melantha felt grateful that even though Gary was dead, he could still be in her life. They had been dating for a year and had just broken up when he had died of mysterious causes that she still didn’t quite understand. There hadn’t been a funeral, or even an obituary. One day, he just showed up and explained that he had died and had come to haunt her for being such a bitch to him. His spirit still remained even after they had reconciled and become best friends.

“You’re not going to get me with that trick, Gary! I know that you can only become a ghost if you drink chocolate milk after midnight, and I know that all we have in the freezer is chocolate ice cream, which I saw you left out on the counter to thaw. Frasier though, I’ll take you up on that offer!”

“You got me! Boo. But you know it is lonely being a ghost with you being the only one who can see me on account of me having to hide in the closet whenever there are people around.” That was certainly true enough. There was still a pair of her underwear stuck to his ectoplasm, although that was kind of confusing. Gary typically hid in the linen closet, whereas most of Melantha’s underwear was on the floor of her bedroom with the rest of her clothes. “People don’t understand ghosts. They don’t understand me . . . nobody but you, that is. This white sheet makes me look like a racist.”

“No, Gary. They have pointy heads,” Melantha replied. She touched him where his shoulder would have been had he been human still. His ectoplasm felt like two-hundred thread count linen, and it really did feel like there was a human shoulder beneath his spectral outer layer. Gary had explained that she was the only one who could touch him on account of her being a deep and caring person who felt more and felt more deeply than other people. This was true.

Gary would have smiled had he been alive. Instead, his face was an unchanging white expanse punctuated only by two black eye holes through which Melantha sometimes thought she could catch a glimpse of his human eyes. At least once, a nose had protruded through one of them, which Gary had explained was a ghost glitch, like when his ectoplasmic exterior fell off and he looked like his old naked self. Ghosts were much more confusing than other supernatural beings.

“Hey baby, I hear the blues a-callin’, tossed salad and scrambled eggs!” Gary crooned while inserting the Frasier tape into the VCR, which was like a Blu-ray player but bigger and with an oversized rectangular slot.

Melantha laughed, because he sang like shit. He inserted the tape slowly and sensually, teasing the tape into the gaping orifice. It reminded Melantha of their time together, the countless nights of . . . passion? No. It had not quite been passion. Gary was awful at foreplay and had once punched her in the breast because he hadn’t known what else to do. He said that the spirit world had taught him a lot about sex, but everything Melantha had read about ghosts said that they did not have genitalia. Gary denied this. She didn’t argue, because embarrassing a ghost was too sad to imagine.

Yes, this exists.

While she waited for the show to begin, Melantha slipped a Licki brush into her mouth and began grooming her cats on the couch. The brush simulated the action of an actual cat tongue, which allowed Melantha to bond with her cats as though she were a true part of their pride. She felt a rush of feral feline hormones as she pawed at the couch on all fours, running the artificial tongue down the back of her favorite cat. Excitedly, she realized how much Salvador would enjoy it if she licked him with its silicone bristles.

“Why are you fondling yourself while licking the cat?” Gary asked. “Boo?”

“Sorry. I was just thinking about someone special. This device bonds me to the cat on a physical level, but it bonds me to my vampire lover on a spiritual level that transcends all understanding. I forgot you were here.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot vampires were real. That was really scary having a monster in the house.” Gary almost sounded sarcastic, but Melantha knew better.

“How can you say that? You’re a ghost!”

“Oh . . . yeah. I forgot about that too. Boo. By the way, all of your beer was sucked into the spirit world again along with the leftover Chinese food.”

“Crap. It’s just like in Ghostbusters.” That was the worst part about having a ghost in her apartment. Her fridge had become a gateway to the other side, his poltergeist powers kept clogging the toilet and filling the shower drain with hair, and some otherworldly agent kept shopping online with her credit card. Gary insisted that supernatural purchases couldn’t be returned, refunded, or donated to the homeless, but what was she supposed to do with a men’s electric razor?

“Yeah, I know, but fortunately I’m here to stop angry spirits and demigods from escaping your refrigerator. Booooo!”

“What would I do without you, Gary?” Melantha said more than asked, because it was a rhetorical question. Frasier had started playing. It was the episode where Niles and Frasier have to handle an awkward situation involving their father. She had seen it already, but every fresh viewing revealed some overlooked detail or deeper meaning. Melantha was quite sure that their psychic housekeeper, Daphne, was a reincarnation of her. She was always freaked out by the screaming skeletons in every episode though. Nobody else ever seemed to see or hear them.

Gary plopped down on the couch and threw a spiritual appendage around Melantha’s shoulder. His ectoplasm shifted, and she was reminded how even in death he wore the same black, size 10W SAS sneakers that he had inherited from his grandfather. Somehow, they looked even more worn out than they had been before he had died.

“You know, boo, that I’ve been haunting you nearly as long as we were dating,” Gary said.

“I do.”Their situation reminded Melantha of nearly a decade ago when she had been the only survivor of a plane crash in the Rocky Mountains. A charming man, named Downy Soft Feather, who was half Bigfoot and half Native American, had gently nursed her back to health with his pillow-soft hands and butterfly kisses. She could have stayed there forever, but an aggressive rescue party had killed Downy Soft and burned down his log cabin in the process of retrieving her. They had then attended a Metallica concert before bringing her back to civilization.

“Well . . .  booooo . . . I was just thinking that maybe we could make it official. Maybe we could go back to being a couple again.”

“Silly, Gary! You know that ghosts can’t date mortals. You are only able to have romantic entanglements with fairies, Valkyries, and hardcore Norwegian black metal bands. Plus, I hate to remind you, but . . . ghosts don’t have penises.” Melantha gave the approximate area of his crotch a friendly rub to demonstrate. It felt weird.

“Right, because you have books about this stuff, dammit — I mean, boooo! But what if I told you that all of those books were wrong, and I’d know, because I’ve been to the other side –”

“You can’t have passed on or you wouldn’t have been able to come back and be a ghost. Trust me, Gary. I know a lot about the supernatural. Sometimes ghosts think that they still have human attributes, which is why you sometimes manifest as a naked man in my bed or generate ectoplasmic discharges into my used underwear, but that is all tied into the trauma of your passing. We really need to get around to resolving the unfinished business that is binding you to this plane of existence.”

“Right, but it’s like I said, booo! I think that unfinished business is us having sex.” Gary rose from the couch, and although he never actually quite floated, it looked like he was standing on his ghostly tippy-toes.

“Which isn’t possible, because you have no penis, so it is clearly a symptom of you avoiding your true purpose.” Melantha felt sad that there was no attraction between her and Gary. It wasn’t that he was a ghost — that would have been a huge turn-on in any other case. It was just that he was . . . well, Gary. “I mean, Gary, your parents still think you are alive. They bring groceries here, thinking you are my roommate, and I don’t have the heart to tell them you are dead.”

“Fuck’s sake! Don’t do that! Boo!”

“You need to give them peace. We already tried the pricey prostitute idea you had, and you know how that worked out.” It was a gross idea, and Melantha had only went along with it because she felt sorry about the Post Traumatic Death Disorder that he suffered from.

“I think, boo, that it would have gone better if you hadn’t told her that I was an invisible ghost, and that she could just keep the money if it turned out that she couldn’t see me. That woman was a very deep and caring person, and it would have worked out if you hadn’t biased her . . . uh . . . chakra against me. I mean, bit — er, boo! Look at the bulge in my ectoplasm! That’s all for you. Boo.”

“Well, we need to figure out something, because Salvador will soon turn me into a vampire, and I don’t know if the undead can interact with the dead. They certainly can’t watch Frasier together, because as a vampire my media preferences will change.”

“Yeah . . . right, a vampire. I’m sure that will work out. Boo.” Yet again, Gary’s spectral voice could easily be mistaken for having a tinge of sarcasm to it. “Listen, I’m going to go haunt the bar for a few hours and blow off some steam doing poltergeist stuff. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the leprechaun broke in again and stole twenty-dollars from you.”

“Again! Dammit, Gary! You were supposed to stop him. We spent six hours working together building leprechaun traps. We were supposed to have his gold by now!”

“Yeah. Boo. You keep believing in that stuff.” Gary turned away, and since he was a considerate ghost, he opened the door and closed it behind him instead of passing through and leaving a nasty stain that looked like grape jelly. Melantha heard him greet Mrs. Halls, although sadly Mrs. Halls would not hear him.

Poor Gary.

 

 

I Survived Watching Resident Evil and All I Wrote Was This Lousy Article

The Resident Evil movie franchise is barely coherent, but it could be worse. It should be worse, because the games are total nonsense. RE games are all about brief glimmers of horror, ludicrous premises, and ridiculous crap that totally undermines any sense of eeriness or suspense. They are made by Capcom, so inevitably you need to shoot a bad guy in his vulnerable spot to turn him into an even more powerful bad guy powered by several glowing nodules that are its only weak spots. Then you fight more zombies. Then you find out things aren’t really what they seemed and someone probably betrayed you.

Having watched what is hopefully the last Resident Evil movie, I have some advice for the director of the inevitable reboot on how to stay true to the franchise’s video game roots:

Camera Angles:  Resident Evil movies can’t stay true to the games without awkward camera angles and abrupt transitions that leave the protagonist confused and often running in the wrong direction. As a bonus, the audience could be left totally disoriented, as though they were watching a Transformers film.

Alice, the protagonist, is running away from a zombie with no apparent goal in sight, suddenly the camera angle switches, she looks confused but notices a door that she had overlooked before. She rushes toward the door, and the camera angle changes again, leaving her so befuddled that she actually reverses course and runs into the zombie that she had been trying to avoid.

Green Herb:  The central theme of the RE video games is finding green and red herbs, which you use to restore your depleted health.

Alice sits in a burned out car smoking marijuana. She is motivated to leave the car when she sees a pot plant through the window of a nearby house. She fights several zombies to gain access to the house and then harvests the plant to prepare another joint. She sits down and smokes it, which relieves her chronic pain condition.

I’m the first person to make this joke.

Smashing Crates:  True, Alice does search the movie set on occasion for equipment, but her visual pat downs are a mere tip of the hat to the game franchise.

Alice enters a room in which several crates are stored. She immediately pulls out her knife and slashes the crates until the wood explodes into tiny fragments. She finds a single box of bullets inside of each crate, which leads her to question what sort of company would package single items in such unnecessarily large and unwieldy containers without any packing material whatsoever. She then rips open every locker in the room in search of green herb and white powder.

Arbitrary Collectibles:  Video game characters in general have an obsessive tendency to collect bottle caps, bobble heads, snow globes, and other assorted brick-a-brac. Yet the protagonist of the RE movies does not horde garbage.

Video game characters would look more like the Junk Lady from Labyrinth.

Alice is talking to another character but pauses in mid-sentence when she spots something glimmering in the distance. She clambers up into an air vent and crawls through a convoluted series of obstacles so that she can take a potshot to dislodge the object wedged in a crevice. She returns to her companion with a bottle cap and says, “I think this will come in handy.” It doesn’t. In the director’s cut of the movie an additional half-hour of footage is devoted to her collecting bottle caps.

Bizarre Shenanigans:  From a cinematic perspective, Resident Evil films get an A+ for defying common sense, but Capcom adaptations demand an almost Uwe Boll level of claptrap, as though reality were an inconvenient afterthought sunk in the wake of the S.S. Pandering to Pubescence. There just aren’t enough subterranean shooting ranges beneath small European mountain villages and elaborate columns of spinning blades integrated into prison security systems when you watch it on video.

Alice is fighting Whisker, the feline clone of Wesker, and ducks into a utility closet to avoid an attack. Since this is Resident Evil, it turns out to be a warehouse-sized room where the janitor stored his rusty meat hook collection. She looks around to see if she is alone and calls out, “Is anyone here?” A voice in the darkness responds, “Got some rare things on sale, stranger.” Alice spots a mysterious merchant standing in a corner and purchases some extra ammunition from him while he modifies her gun. She wonders how and why the merchant managed to infiltrate a secure facility rife with death traps and zombified predators to set up shop in a location with almost zero foot traffic. They make out.

So why do I make my wife watch these movies, sequel after sequel? They have zombies in them. Duh! I’d watch Fox News if it had zombies.

Robert A. Heinlein’s Notebook: The Creative Process Behind “Stranger in a Strange Land”

Great idea for a character! He is me, but all of the women want to have sex with me — I mean him!

Had another brilliant idea last night. A guy named Martin . . . something, something, something . . . naked women want to have sex with me — I mean, him! Women have no sexual inhibitions and like well-groomed mustaches.

Flying cars? Maybe, but this guy . . . this guy has two three secretaries. They don’t like wearing clothes, but sometimes I make them — I mean, he does!

Going to call this guy Roger B. Leinhein.

Nevermind. Changing it to Chumba Womba. Jubal Harshaw. My editor thought I was talking about myself, which I wasn’t. Totally different guy!

Boobs

Okay, so this Martin guy — no, wait! Martian! He’s from Mars! — starts a religion where everyone has to have sex with me — I mean, Jubal. Except Jubal plays it cool, and is like, “Nah, I’ve seen plenty of boobs,” but then he joins and has sex with loads of women near the end.

Great idea! Jubal is an author, but he is also a doctor and a lawyer, because he is super smart and really popular. Everyone likes him.

Going to call it Heretic. No, Stranger in a Strange Land. Nah. Jubal Gets Some!

Kitten Fangs: A Tale of Cats, Chocolate, and Disgustingly Lurid Vampire Romance (part II: The Middle: More Middle)

<<< Chapter 3

“Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish?
I know it’s tuna, but it says ‘Chicken of the Sea.'”
— Jessica Simpson

Chapter 4:  Add a Piece of Fish

There was a knock at the door, and Melantha wondered if the pizza had arrived or if something darker lurked beyond the threshold. Had metaphoric tendrils of darkness gathered outside of her apartment to literally pull her deeper into the groping embrace of the tenebrous night? She opened the door by disengaging the lock and twisting, then pulling on, the knob. It was an act of grace and defiance.

“Hey lady,” the pizza delivery guy said. He was tall and mysterious, shrouded in a trench coat with thick-rimmed, hipster glasses and a bristling mustache. He reminded Melantha of a virile groundskeeper she had known back when she had been reincarnated as Judith Pamplona, a syphilitic 9th century viscountess with severe nut allergies.  “I’ve got a large pizza with . . . unh . . . extra bloody, raw ground beef on half and pineapple on the other half, a two liter of diet cola, and an order of breadsticks . . . ummm . . . broken in half so that they don’t resemble stakes. That’s quite a special order.”

“But that’s not all we ordered,” Melantha said out-loud in her most perky tone, which was the opposite of what she had intended, having meant to think it in an ominous tone. Half of the pizza was for Salvador, her vampire lover, but all of the delivery man was meant to sate his dark appetite. “Please come inside.”

“I smell anchovies!” Salvador shouted from the couch, where he convalesced. “I told you I just want pineapple.”

“I don’t think you understand, dear. The food has arrived,” Melantha countered.

“No, it hasn’t!” Salvador shouted from the couch, where he sat wrapped in Melantha’s most recent (and wackiest) quilt creation. “Even without eyes, I can smell it! That’s a fucking gillman wearing a trench coat and a fake mustache like some kind of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle reject. He only came here to crush your skull and hide the remains in his lagoon. Why did you let him inside?”

The pizza man breathed an audible sigh of relief and removed his novelty Groucho glasses. “Wow, wrapped in that quilt over there, I thought you were a mummy for a second, the natural enemy of my people. Vampires I don’t mind, and that quilt is as gorgeous as it is whimsical. Well, your order is twenty-eight-bucks, which includes tax and delivery. Don’t worry. I’m not going to crush your skull. Let’s just say, don’t be the fist person to place an order on Thursdays.”

“I had no idea,” Melantha said. It was such a strange coincidence that a creature like this would work for Pizza from the Black Lagoon, the restaurant just down the block, adjacent to the lagoon. His large, strong hands certainly seemed equally suited to crushing skulls and holding hands on a long, moonlit walk along the shore. His scales were like flecks of passion. She found herself inexplicably drawn to this supernatural sex bomb. She paid him thirty dollars and told him to keep the change. It was a crappy tip, but Melantha always deducted the delivery fee from her tips, because that fee should have been rescinded when gas prices dropped back down.

“Fine.” Salvador sulked. He changed the television channel to an old Doctor Who episode on PBS. “Someone tell me if this is the episode with vampires in it. They are hilarious.”

“It’s amazing. I’ve met three different types of supernatural creatures today,” Melantha said sensually to the delivery guy. Her life had changed so much in such a short time ever since she had found a magical lamp and wished to be true to herself, an individual, and for supernatural creatures to exist postdated to 1673. Then again, this change of events could be attributed to her pushing Stephenie Meyer into the Large Hadron Collider (now, the Meyer Collider) during her visit to Switzerland last year.

“Cool. I’ve met three different kinds of people tonight — four, if you are a lesbian. Isn’t life crazy that way,” the delivery guy replied. He stared deep into her eyes as though noticing them for the first time. His own eyes were like aquarium glass, a transparent barrier behind which underwater life teemed. Melantha felt like he could see into her soul, perceiving the dank darkness that dripped there. Could he smell her, like she smelled him? Could she . . . touch him?

Melantha touched him, and he did not recoil.

“Why is your hand on my face?” he asked.

“What? Why is your hand on his face?” Salvador asked, his passionate voice was engorged with curiosity.

“You are such an old soul,” Melantha replied. She felt torn, like her heart had been divided into three equal pieces and hurled into the waiting hands of a vampire, werewolf, and fish creature. Yet, the pizza delivery man could not offer her the promise of eternal life. Neither did he live a life of apparent affluence without any visible means of support. Unlike Salvador, the pizza man would live a mortal lifespan earning blue collar wages. Also, she could not breathe underwater and was not a very strong swimmer, even if she did enjoy long, scented baths in candle-lit rooms, reading Amish romance stories under the watchful eyes of her cats.

“Totes. We fish folk are servants of Xenu, so I’m filled with a crap-load of Thetans,” he said, as though reading her mind — was he? “I’m all about reincarnation and living multiple lives at once with the intensity of someone who only lives once. YOLO, right?” Fish man laughed. “Not me, but I like the message. This pizza thing is just something I do on the side, kind of to keep a low profile, because I make millions selling the identities of my victims and turning their crushed skulls into bizarre sex potions that I sell on the Deep Web, or whatever it’s called.”

Melantha felt her world change yet again. She had assumed so much about pizza delivery guys, but now all of her preconceived notions were undermined. She wondered if she would feel differently once Salvador’s horribly deformed countenance was restored to its former hotness.

“Well, time to drive my Gibbs Aquada amphibious car back to the sandcastle,” the pizza guy gurgled charmingly. “Hit me up some time if you ever want to crush some skulls together . . . or watch French Kiss, the one with Kevin Klein and Meg Ryan. The only thing I love more than that movie is keeping a diary.”

Melantha loved that too. Almost as much as cats.

Chapter 5 >>>