Monday, June 14, 2010

Red Dead Redemp---HEY! Get back here!

Howdy, fellow video gamers!

What's that? You...oh. I see. Okay. I'm still gonna talk about it, though.

It all started with the purchase of a recently released video game that perhaps even you have heard of: Red Dead Redemption. The game, made by famous and infamous developer Rockstar Games, puts you into the digital boots of a digital man named John Marston.

I could go into the story, but I'm not. I'm also not going to talk about the gloriously free, open-ended gameplay and "sandbox" style level design that allows you to see a mountain in the distance, start running, and eventually (holy crap, it wasn't just a picture of a mountain!) climb it, but I'm not. I could even talk about all hookers and shooting and violence in the game. But I'm not. Because I'm sure all the paranoid parents with stupid kids have told you all about it.

I guess you can see which side of the fence I'm on when it comes to "mature" content in video games. I figure if you didn't bother teaching your kid the difference between real life and sweaty button-punching, then you deserve to have him turn out weird. If you forbid him to play a game and he gets a hold of it anyway and manages to play through it without you finding out, then he's outsmarted you. And you should be proud of him for that.

The videogame nerd sites had multiple orgasms about the game's depth and how "fully realized" the world is. Just chock fulla minor characters, this world, all dynamically generated on-the-fly, along with an entire ecosystem of animals! And all of this goes through a day-night cycle with dynamic weather!

Poppycock. I'll admit that the weather effects and lighting are pretty darn impressive. But except for the cutscenes, all the human characters in the game are animated like retarded marionettes. Occasionally you'll catch one moving in a somewhat realistic manner, but I guarantee that if you watch them long enough, you'll see all the corners Rockstar cut to keep the game under budget. When the physics system twitches, it's like the puppeteer sneezed, sending the marionette flailing around like a startled hamster.

Oh, and all the fantastic realism you see along the side of the road during your travels on horseback? Why, you'll actually believe you're in the Old West, on accounta all the Old Westy things you see happening out there! A fully-realized world with endless opportunity for interaction!

Spoiler alert! Here, "endless" means "four".

You'll see four things happening out on the plains: a lone man standing in the middle of nowhere shooting at birds, a lone man being shot at by two or three others, a lone man being chased by coyotes, or a lone sheriff who needs help recapturing escaped prisoners.


Why is that man just standing in the middle of the moonlit desert shooting at owls? Why the hell would he or anyone else be willing to pay you ten dollars if you can shoot four owls in 30 seconds? What did they ever do to him? That man just really hates birds, I guess. Maybe one of them touched his wife.

And the guy being attacked by coyotes? If you shoot them, he will be so grateful, he'll pay you five bucks for saving his ass. A little bit poorer but a whole lot wiser, the man will then happily wander off into the desert, where he will almost immediately be set upon by more coyotes. An attentive gunslinger could probably make a good living shadowing this particularly stupid and tasty individual.

I dunno. Maybe that is realistic? I wasn't around back then.

The gunfights also end with the survivor(s) wandering off into the desert to be attacked by coyotes. Probably because they didn't have any bullets left to shoot at the owls.

So it's not realistic.

But here's the thing: that's the best part. This is why I love this game! The main narrative be damned. The best part of this game is the unintentionally funny things that happen all the time when you see it bonking its head against the wall of finite technology resources.

Picture a dusty little town in the sun-drenched plains of New Mexico. Picture all the wooden buildings with their hanging gas lamps and horses hitched to the rails out front. There's the saloon with its bat-wing doors, the general store, the town doctor, the train station. It's late afternoon, and the shadows are stretched long over the hoof-pounded dust of the main street. Men lean against the walls of the saloon, under canopies, their faces shaded by their hats. The horses swat flies with their tails, their pointed ears swiveling. It's a peaceful evening in one of the hundreds of little towns in the Old West.

But wait! Here comes a crazy man! He leaps from the roof of the saloon and lands with a grunt in the middle of the road. He jumps to his feet and breaks into a run, moving from standstill to full-out sprint faster than humanly possible. He runs at breakneck pace into the side of a horse! Undeterred, the stranger continues to run, his arms flailing wildly, his legs pistoning up and down in a blur. But he is not making progress; just running as if the ground beneath him were made of ice with his face planted in the horse's flank.

"Good evening for it, mister," says the horse's rider. This inappropriate response seems to snap the furiously running man out of his reverie, for he immediately stops trying to force his body through the horse and stands there briefly. Then, as if remembering an important appointment, he punches the horse and runs off at full tilt, the rider's parting words hanging in the dust behind him: "Billy James once sawr a wolf th' size of a barn door, no foolin'!"

Blam! The strange man parts the bat-wing doors of the saloon with his face and makes a flying leap onto the bar top, scattering shot glasses and beer steins. The bar's patrons greet him with polite howdies. He responds by going into a crouch and punching air for a bit. Tiring of this, he jumps down and sprints around the room in mad circles, plowing into everyone. The unlucky townsfolk in his path seem to offer no resistance; as soon as the stranger's body comes into contact with them, their muscles all relax at once and they crumple to the wooden floor with indignant cries of "hey!" and "you'd better watch it, mister!" and "my outhouse gots sticks in it!".

Evidently not satisfied keeping his barging spree confined to one floor, the strange man heads upstairs. He is greeted there by the establishment's sultry escorts. "You lookin' for a good time, mister?" they inquire sweetly. The man responds by shoving them over the rail and onto the floor below! What a bastard. Obviously, this sociopath is dangerous. The ladies take defensive action by...calmly walking over to a post and leaning seductively against it. "You look like you could use a good rubdown, mister," one can be heard saying to a nearby man.

Infuriated by the womenfolk's total fearlessness, the stranger runs face-first into a locked door for ten seconds.

Cut to a shot of the saloon's outdoor balcony. Two women (probably twins) dressed in identical outfits rest languidly against the railing. One of them is smoking a cigarette. Suddenly, the doors in front of them burst open, and the strange man comes charging out at full speed. He hits the railing opposite the doors with his pelvis, taking the full brunt of the hit without flinching or toppling over.

"Howdy, mister, you look like--" one of the women starts to say before the crazy man shoves her down the stairs. The other woman continues smoking her cigarette until the man pushes her over the railing. She lands on her face, gets to her feet and stands there a full two seconds while her PowerPC-based brain decides what to do next. She settles on screaming and running off into the desert to be eaten by coyotes.

An entire streetful of people watch this little exchange without breaking stride. The stranger then jumps from the balcony, landing with an "ooomph!" that turns the screen red momentarily, and whistles for his horse. The horse, standing ten feet away from the West's laziest sociopath, trots over. The man mounts, and without saying a word, gallops off into the open desert. On his way, he purposely knocks down three people.

If we were to follow our strange new acquaintance, we would find him dismounting occasionally to kick armadillos, chase skunks and pick flowers. Happening upon farms also affords him the opportunity to kick goats and lasso pigs.

This is where we must leave him, because it gets pretty monotonous from here on out. The man is driven, evidently, by a powerful and insane urge to punt chickens and shove donkeys, and will not rest until he has kicked one of each species of animal in the game. He tackles this mission with steadfast resolve.

Oh, and I've been told that there are bears somewhere in the game. I can't wait to kick a bear.

Friday, June 4, 2010

The FooDaddy's Adventures in Pipe Land - Conclusion

I'm going come right out and spoil the surprise right now: I did manage to get my drain unclogged without calling a professional.

I figure I had better get that out of the way so my hordes of adoring fans can finally rest easy. No more lying awake at night wondering whether or not I had defeated the Mashed Menace. "Did he prevail?" you were no doubt asking your haggard reflection in the toaster at 3AM. "Did the pipe burst and coat his basement with goo? Wouldn't it be easier to butter the bread, then toast it?"

Since I'm pretty certain that answers from your toaster were not forthcoming, I will answer them for you. No. If you butter the bread first, it makes a huge mess. If you did get answers from your toaster, reading this blog is probably the last thing you should be doing if you value your mental health.

If you don't, why, read on then! When you're done, you and I should get some cardboard, make some signs and go yell stuff in public. I'll wear my tuxedo.

And what of the pipes? I'm pleased to report that after a trip to Wal-Mart and $11 later, water and assorted solids and semi-solids are once again trekking happily through them. I had to make the trip to the store, because I did not have the clogbusting equipment I needed here at the house. This isn't to say that I did not have any equipment at all. I did.

It's just that it sucked.

You may recall that I had decided to resort to chemical warfare after the miserable defeat of my twin plungers and Sink-Perched-Drain-TurboHumping (patent pending). Sadly, the half-bottle of dollar-store drain slime I half-heartedly tipped into the sink had no effect whatsoever on the diabolical potato flakes. All it did was add a bleachy smell and an "in case of skin contact, flush thoroughly with water for 5 minutes" to the festering bog of spudwater.

Instead of fixing the problem, I'd gone and made it stinky and poisonous. I also couldn't try plunging it again, because I had to open the window to let the bleach fumes out, and the neighbors might see me. I settled for swearing and stomping around the kitchen in an angry little circle.

Ah, but hope was not lost! There was always the basement. The basement of this house is full of ancient tools left behind by three generations of people I'm named after. Also, spiders.

Oh, I spoke too soon. Hope was indeed lost. The only thing I found was this misbegotten piece of equipment designed in the dark by vengeful elves with access to only 19th century metallurgy and bottomless buckets of mischief.

Have you ever opened the back of an old spring-driven pocketwatch? Have you ever then proceeded to drop it? The part that goes "twaaannng!" and sends a cloud of microscopic bits of brass raining down all around you is the mainspring. It is a ribbon of steel twisted into a reluctant coil that spends the rest of its miserable existence fighting to untwist itself. Harnessing this struggle is what powered your watch during its non-dropped phase of life. Freed, its years and years of pent-up hatred for you comes out in a catastrophic explosion of tiny gears and bits of glass.

Now imagine a coil fifty times the size of the one in your watch. Imagine that it has been rusting away in a basement for untold decades, getting shit on by spiders. Also imagine that it is inexplicably tipped with a little spring-loaded brass dildo.

Now imagine that I want to heap insult upon insult and stuff this thing into a pipe full of bleach-flavored potato gunk.

Needless to say, it did not end well. Thirty minutes of wrangling the wretched thing around the cramped space under my sink, fending off its attempts to lacerate my face and arms served only to splatter everything with unspeakableness and to fill me with a deep hatred of pocketwatches.

"Screw this noise," I said, casting the springsteel demon into a corner. I pointed at it. "Fuck that thing and everything that looks like it," I announced to the cats. "I'm going to have to break down and do what I'd been trying to avoid all day: put on pants."

I cleaned myself up and, fully pantsed, drove to Wal-Mart. I believe I have mentioned before my reasons for hating shopping. This had to be done, though, so I sucked it up and strode purposefully into the store.

Let's see now...I need plumby stuff. Bathroom stuff? That's gotta be close enough. Bathrooms are, like, 90 percent plumbing. Right?

I found myself staring at a veritable cliff-face of toilet seats. Thousands of them, stretching to the ceiling and yards to the left and right, in every color you can imagine. More colors than the screen on my laptop is capable of reproducing. Some of them were cushioned. Some of them had the logos of professional sports teams on them.

"Why would anyone want to crap on the Detroit Lions?" I asked the wall of seats. "Oh, yeah," I answered myself, rolling my eyes.

I moved on to a section labeled "Do It Yourself," which yielded results. I found a device called a "pipe auger" that looked like some sort of surgical tool designed by perverts for use on other perverts. It was a big funnel with a bunch of (electrical conduit?) coiled up inside and a corkscrewy bit of wire coming out the end. It had a handle mounted perpendicular to the funnel's pointy end, and a wingnut, and a sort of crank knob thing, and...

Yeah. Like that.

I picked the thing up by its knob and carried it at arms length to the checkout aisle. I threw it down on the belt and watched it glide up to the cashier.

"Did you find everything okay?" she asked, eyeing the device.

"God, I hope so," I said, wishing that she would hurry up and put that thing in a bag. It sort of scared me.

"What's so funny?" she asked, this time eyeing me.

"Those potatoes don't know what they're in for," I said. I pointed to the auger. "I'm going after them with that." I winked. "Fuck them," I added.

As I left, I saw the cashier carefully place the bills I'd paid her with into a plastic bag and then place the bag into a small cardboard box and then set that box on fire.

Once home, I placed my auger on the floor in front of the sink. I gathered a few towels and a pitcher of water and a crucifix and made sure my cellphone was charged up. Confident that I was fully prepared, I grabbed a bottle of beer out of the fridge. if I was going to do this right, I was going to need fortification.

Basically what I'm saying here is that my bottle of Michelob had a better idea of how to go about this project than I did, and that I would have to drink it if I wanted to absorb its precious, precious knowledge.

Holding the auger by its handle, I gave the crank on top an experimental twist. The bit of wire on the end turned lazily. Ah HA! So this was the part of my ultimate weapon that was going to claw its way though the clog! This fearsome, chrome-steel...tiny...bit...of...corkscrewy wire on the end of a cable that rotated in a slow-motion ballet of flaccid unremarkability no matter how fast I hauled away at the crank.


I dunked the corkscrew into the pipeful of goo. Then I loosened the setscrew on the end of the auger and fed in some more of the auger's cable. I tightened it back up again, and tried the crank.

A noise like a chipmunk trying to claw its way out of a bowl of pancake batter drifted out of the pipe. This was followed by the situation displaying a stunning reluctance to improve.

The next twenty-five minutes or so was pretty much a repetition of this. I shoved more of the cable down the pipe until I encountered resistance and cranked away until my arms hurt. Shove. Crank. Repeat. Shove, swear, crank. Swear. Pull some cable out. Marvel at how much gunk was stuck to it. Swear at gunk. Take off pants. Swear at pipe.

Toward the end, the situation had degenerated into this scene: a pantsless man, covered in splattery bits of mashed potatoes furiously stabbing a pipe with a cable and yelling insane threats into the end of it. "Don't make me come down there! God help me, I'll use the gasoline if I have to!"

Finally, miraculously, the potatoes gave way under the sheer brute force of my assault, and with a parting "blorrrrk," they shoved off downstream to trouble me no more.

I cheered. I poured pitcher after pitcher of water into the pipe, cheering each time the contents went down without impediment. I pulled out the nearly fifteen feet of the auger's cable I'd stuffed down the pipe and watched helplessly as wad after wad of gunk pattered onto the floor before I could catch it with a towel.

There was a lot of cleanup and the plumbing still had to be reassembled. Before I tackled that, though, I had to get something to eat.

A dish involving mashed potatoes.

I would eat them with the pointiest fork I could find.

I would eat them angrily and out of spite.

And I don't care what the restaurant people said, I wasn't going to wear pants while I did so.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

The FooDaddy's Adventures in Pipe Land

No, not that kind of pipe. Or that one. Or...eeew. What's wrong with you people?

It's a plumbing mishap, you sickos. Or, rather, it turned into a plumbing mishap. It started out really really fun. But in order to pad this thing out and make a story about plumbing even remotely interesting, we're going to have to go back in time about eight years.

Wheeee! Wasn't that fun? Now, let's fast forward six years. We didn't need to go back eight. We just did that because we could. Wave a big middle finger at time-space and its stupid continuum.

When I moved into the house I'm in now, it was full of stuff left behind by its previous occupant, my grandmother. This meant that in addition to entire drawers full of unopened toothbrushes, lipsticks or hair curlers, there was enough food stashed around the place to feed a man with an undiscerning palate for years.

As a side note, I would just like to mention that my grandma was awesome. Sure, when I was little she scared me, but when I got older I learned to appreciate people who scare little kids. She also blamed my dad for any and all of his children's deficiencies, which was handy, since I am quite deficient and the last thing I need is to feel guilty about it.

But she was a homeowner and parent during World War II and the Vietnam war. Living through this taught her two things: never throw any food away because you never know when it might be rationed, and that her government was comprised of thousands of dopes galumphing around inside big marble buildings and making moron decisions.

Combine the two, and you get a government that may, without warning, start rationing nonsense food. Like Jell-O or cupcake sprinkles. Her strategy to out-maneuver the dopes was to stockpile these items so that when the inevitable rationing reared its crosseyed head, she'd be ready.

This is what I found when I moved into the house after my grandmother decided that she'd had enough of her deficient grandkids and stupid leaders and went to hang out with Jesus instead; a house full of Jell-O and lipstick and sprinkles. If you want to find out what I did about it, you're going to have to get back into your time machine and fast forward to yesterday. Because it took me two years to finally get around to tossing this stuff out.

To be fair to myself, it wasn't just laziness. Part of it was an ingrained reluctance to throw out anything that might conceivably be useful to someone someday, maybe, possibly, on the offchance. "You kiddin'? This Jell-O still works! I ain't gonna just throw it away!"

Evidently, two years is my limit. If you didn't come to me with your five-pounds-of-ancient-Jell-O needs during that time--whoop! You had your chance. It's gone now.

It was kind of fun, this little cleaning spree I went on. It was equal parts archaeology, accidental cat punting and garbage disposal use. I would open a cabinet whose contents I'd been frowning at for two years, marvel at the 1980s-era packaging, accidentally kick a cat that had wandered over for a marvel of its own, and then dump the contents down the garbage disposal. If I haven't mentioned it before (I have) I love garbage disposals. They're the funnest holes in your house.

All was going smoothly down the drain (even the entire drum of Quaker Oats) until I got to the box of instant mashed potatoes. It was unique in being the only thing in the house (besides me) that was an affront to both God and nature. Potatoes don't come in a box. They come in a bag. A bag that you leave in a dark cupboard until the potatoes get all rooty and sprouty and creepy and then you stuff them, one by one, down the garbage disposal being very careful to not touch them with your skin.

Never in a box.

So after I wrestled the box of abominations out of Satan's grasp, I dumped the contents into the sink where they formed a deceptively innocent-looking heap. Like a child's sandbox filled with asbestos, they were trouble in jaunty clothing. I turned on the water and the disposal and began shoveling the demon flakes into the grindhole.

They waited until the last of their number disappeared down the drain before springing their trap. I heard them laugh, then the drain went "blorp," and stopped being a drain. Water started to pool in the sink, and the disposal's merry whir became a desperate growl. When the whole counter started to shudder, I powered the disposal down.

"Fuck," I said. Don't worry, I was by myself. I was also in my my boxer shorts. Which was awesome.

Repeated utterances of the fuckword did little to remove the diabolical potato flakes from the plumbing, so I fetched a plunger. I hate plungers. They linger in your bathroom, next to the toilet, signaling to guests that you are prone to problems in that area. Nothing says "um, why don't we have the party at YOUR house, Cloggy Flushmaster?" like a prominently visible plunger.

And you can't put them in your closet, because they might touch your towels. Ugh.

I brought the plunger to bear. All this did was amuse the potatoes and splash water all over the counter and floor. "It's like a water park up in this piece!" I could hear them yelling from way down in the pipes. "Like a wave pool!"

I needed more leverage and another plunger. You see, this is one of those double sinks with two drains that meet up downstream. You can plunge one drain all you want, and it's just going to make fart noises come out of the other one. That kind of thing is only amusing for about twenty minutes.

I took off my soggy, potato-scented shirt, and climbed, with a plunger in each hand, atop the counter. The light from an overhead reflector flood glistened on my chest, and I might have appeared for a moment like the god Zeus, astride mount Olympus. If Zeus was a pale, angry man waving two of the most retarded lightning bolts ever.

I prepared to cast down the lightning. Perched on the edge of the sink, bent at the knees and using my entire body as leverage, I basically plunge-humped my plumbing until absolutely nothing changed. The sludgy mess in the sink made the plungers slide all over the place and I could hear the potatoes laughing derisively the whole time.

Then I noticed that the window above the sink was open, and that anyone who happened by would see a sweaty man in his underwear standing on his counter and performing the world's plungiest and angriest rain dance.

I immediately abandoned this approach, and decided to escalate the fight with chemical warfare. be continued!