BuggBlog

So, WTF have I been doing lately, anyway?

Excellent question! I wish I had a simple answer. So I’ll treat it as a multiple choice question where every choice is a correct choice because even though I’ve been away it’s still my blog and that’s the way I want to do it.

Focusing on myself: I know, I know, the idea of me descending into a solipsistic revelry is so totally not like me. But while I came back from my vacation feeling relaxed, I also came back feeling like...oh, how should I put this...a fat fucking cow. Not only did I demure from going to the beach with Cavin because I didn’t want to be the beached whale sunning itself next to his Jack Sprat, I managed to gain about 10 pounds of weight and more than an inch on my waist -- all that despite the fact that I was playing at least two hours of tennis a day for the first week and a half.

Yes, that means the food in Provincetown is really, really good.

All that said, I hit 215 pounds and I can’t blame it all on two weeks of buttered lobster and scallop rolls. And since it’s nobody’s fault but mine, I realized I needed to fully commit to hitting the gym, doing some real work, and eating healthier. Which I’ve done, at least for the past five weeks, and that's gotten me back down to 195 pounds -- not exactly svelte, but certainly a very noticeable difference in a short period of time. I have a ways to go before I’m where I want to be, but I feel more like I’m going to get there than I have in the past couple of years.

Focusing on my book: I don’t want say too much about it yet, other than it’s coming very soon. I had mentioned through Facebook or Twitter or something a few months ago that I was thinking about self-publishing a collection of my columns from over the course of Metro Weekly’s first 15 years of publication, and I got a surprising amount of positive response to the idea. I’ll have a lot more information on when, where and how on the book soon.

Reading other people’s books: As always, my reading pile is daunting and likely insurmountable, but I’ve been in a particularly good groove on novels lately -- credit, again, to free time in P’town. I’ve resisted the siren call of re-reading Infinite Jest once again, and finished off some of the science fiction I’ve had waiting for me. One hearty and enthusiastic recommendation from me to you: go read Iain M. Banks. Consider Phlebas is actually a couple decades old but recently reissued in a very nice trade paperback; I wish I’d read it when it debuted, because it flat out blew me away. This morning I finished his more recent Matter, which had the same effect on me, but more so. I’m not going to try to summarize them beyond saying that they’re extremely literary, densely complex and hugely entertaining.

That’s enough reason to go go, buy buy, isn’t it?

Refocusing by disconnecting: Not only have I been remiss in blogging, I’ve radically curtailed my Facebook and Twitter updates, as well as taking an unannounced hiatus from Bilerico D.C. None of this was particularly planned out in advance, but the more I realized my attention span was being destroyed by a million small, constant tweets and beeps, the more I realized I needed some time away from it. Perhaps in the future I can see these things coming earlier and actually plan for them or something, but that wasn’t the case this time and I just tuned out. And while it’s cost me some blog traffic and friend requests and followers and so on, I’m glad I did. Now let’s see if I can get tuned back in....

That’s it, no more? Of course there’s more: family events, lots of tennis, video games to catch up on (another recommendation: go play Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, it’s a blast), recipes to try, and, oh, yeah, a husband who takes priority. In short, I really don’t have anything to complain about.

For the moment.

In the future, I will be known as BigGayBugg

At least if Microsoft ever gets around to sorting out its hamfisted policy disallowing the use of "gay" in our gamertags on XBox Live, because they're so sensitive about the possibility of us gay gamers getting our feelings hurt by  woefully unsupervised suburban tweeners who scream "FAG!" into their microphones at the slightest provocation.

Kotaku highlights the discrepency -- a nicer word than hypocrisy -- in Microsoft allowing the upcoming Grand Theft Auto expansion, "The Ballad of Gay Tony" yet disallowing "gay" elsewhere in the XBox network. A Microsoft exec says: "I can say that we are working on that issue."

Not exactly an issue of earthshattering importance, but still a minor stick in the craw.

Let me say a little something about EVE

Because what I need in my life right now is a massively involved online role-playing starship game and time-suck built around the manipulation of capitalist markets mixed with some explode-y pirate action, I'm giving EVE Online just one more chance to make sense for me. Really, EVE, one more time I will beat my head against the wall of your beautifully lit yet insanely perplexing rules and strategies. The New Player Experience you've touted will be the one that lifts the wool from my eyes so I can comprehend the sublime intricacies of your science-fictional nature.

At least, it better be, since this is like my sixth character and I'm running out of ways to rearrange Cavin's name as my nom de screen. (As an aside, I almost always name my game characters Cavin or some version of his Vietnamese names, which combined in American order results in Myle, roughly pronounced May-lay or melee, which is just too perfect for games where the main point is to hit things, and hit things a lot.) Unlike World of Warcraft, which generally holds my interest up until the time I actually have to start finding people to play with -- people online are much like people in the real world, undependable, unreasonable and far too often unpleasant, just more so -- EVE fascinates me simply because I can't quite get my head around the famously steep learning curve. When you can do everything, it's easy to find yourself doing nothing.

Then again, just as my fingers seem to have lost the dexterity for high-level Street Fighter goodness -- all these years of typing and this is what I get? -- maybe my brain just doesn't have the capacity to spare for running an interstellar smuggling ring.

In which I am a very good boy

When it comes to violent videogames, I'm generally happy to enjoy the opportunity to blow the heads off my adversaries. It's a visceral thrill -- luckily, even today's high-def gaming hasn't reached the squicky realism of movie horrors such as Hostel or Saw, so I'm unlikely to feel strong guilt over mindless violence until somewhere around 2015 or so.

But as much as I enjoy those bloody thrills, it's only within a certain context. I'm currently playing both Gears of War 2, which, despite much hoopla about its storyline, is an essentially mindless experience, and Fallout 3, where the blood and body count is every bit as high yet the context is radically different.

I feel guilty when I do bad things in Fallout.

Unlike the run-and-gun Gears of War where you simply blast, bomb or chainsaw any enemy that's before you, Fallout often declines to identify the characters you see as an enemy. Or as a friend, for that matter. You find out through your choices of play: how you choose to speak with them, whether you choose to help or harm them, whether you choose to steal from them. All the acts contribute to your karma, which gives you a "good" or "bad" reputation.

Right now, I'm well on my way to sainthood.

That's not because I've declined to blow some heads off -- I've shotgunned more than my share, but as Arnold Schwarzenegger might say, "Yeah, but they were all bad." But you can shotgun -- or stab, or beat, or bomb -- any adult character in the game, something I just can't bring myself to do. I even feel a bit guilty for accidentally getting a local sheriff killed when I went all goody-two-shoes and tattled on a mysterious stranger who offered me large amounts of money if I would set off a nuclear bomb in the post-apocalyptic small town.

How was I supposed to know that the mysterious man was hiding a shotgun under his coat? Of course, I blew his head off. And got good karma for it.

Much later in the game, I was talking to a character who was addicted to a performance enhancing drug called "psycho." He was in obvious need of a fix and, given that my character doesn't use it because getting addicted in Fallout 3 is a pain the butt, I gave him some of the psycho I'd found lying around in the wastelands. Better than having him go off and steal it, right? Or do something even worse.

Unfortunately, my little act of harm reduction gave me some bad karma. Maybe I was getting a little too morally complex.

Nothing I can't overcome by giving a few bottles of pure water to that poor irradiated beggar outside the city gates. My goodly nature is intact.

In the videogame, at least. Out here in the real world, all bets are off -- although, in reality, I don't come armed with a boomstick. Diplomacy will have to win out.

A little bit of Buggery for you

If you've been around here for a while, you probably already know that I buy more books than I'll probably ever be able to read. They're just so pretty and shiny and they feel so good when you pick them up and they smell really nice. They also, you know, contain some information you can absorb if you open them up. This week's Buggery column at Metro Weekly tries to explain my passion for the printed page and, as a bonus, make up a new word,"arboranity." I have a  feeling it won't be the new word of 2008.

I've also got a new Gears up on the 2008 Mini Cooper S. In short, there's a lot to love about the Mini, and the new enhancements, mostly stylistic, don't do anything to change that. The new Mini Clubman -- a larger version of the car that should address some of the Cooper's problems with storage area and back seat passengers (it doesn't have any and it doesn't hold any) -- is out soon and I'm awaiting my chance at the wheel. Given the interest in the car, though, I don't expect to get a crack at it until mid-summer at the earliest.

Because I've been sort of slacking on the one hand and obsessing about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the other, I totally forgot to highlight a couple other recent pieces. First, I have a quick overview of my video game obsession, Rock Band -- although I'm not playing it around the clock at the moment, as I'm in the midst of working my way through Lost Odyssey and leveling up some characters in World of Warcraft -- more on those later. Second, I had my first Food article for Domestic Partner, with suggestions for putting together an easy but impressive Valentine's Day dinner.

I do like to keep my interests broad.

Twits, tweets and...um...

I'll just leave the vowel progression on that phrase to your imagination.

Twitter seems to be back up, so it's full steam ahead on posting mindless effluvia and ephemera under Bugg Bites. Hmmm. Effluvia and Ephemera sounds like a good band name -- at least, not any worse than Coheed and Cambria. Sounds like a project for Rock Band.

I will resist the Xbox. I will resist the Xbox. I will resist the Xbox.

My secret shame

No, not pornography. I said my secret shame.

And that would be the point where the handful of family members who still read this blog decide to bail out.

Anyway, my secret shame is something far less sexy. Well, depending on how sexy you think porn is, which is definitely in the territory known as "subjective." But whatever your opinion on that may be, I'm pretty sure an addiction to Guitar Hero II is even less sexy. I believe it was about on my fiftieth run through Deep Purple's "Hush" on "Hard" difficulty -- and believe me, that song's far more difficult than you would think -- that I realized, "I have a problem." Between that and my repeated attempts to get at least four out of five stars on "Freebird," I knew I had to have a break.

And if my high-school self heard my adult self whining about not getting a high score on a country-rock classic like "Freebird" -- the redneck "Stairway to Heaven" -- my high school self would have kicked my ass. Or, at least, gotten some bigger, badder friends to kick my ass for him. Although, in my defense, I got five stars on "Shout at the Devil," so sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll all the way baby, wooooooo! It's just like being back at that triple-bill concert of Accept, Aldo Nova and Blue Oyster Cult back in 1983. Rock rock 'til you drop, man!

And that just proves my point. Now you see why I had to bring my rockin' toy guitar and the game disc to a friend of mine for safe keeping for at least a couple months. But when August comes around baby, it's five stars all the way.

That's a lesson learned

Telling God to "bring it on"? Bad idea. A snow day is a blessing for those of us who love the chance to spend a weekday sprawled on the couch leveling up our Phantasy Star Universe characters or tackling some Gears of War on "Insane" difficulty. In my case, a snow day on a Wednesday means leaving behind my oh-so-comfy couch to brave the snowy to meet an unchangeable Wednesday printer deadline. Poor, poor me. Well, at least I don't have a journalism job that requires me to brave the snow to listen to nonsensical presidential press conferences.

I'm jesting, naturally. Well, except for the Bush part. But my commute this morning was actually a little faster than usual, given that there were only about 20 other people on the road. That would be 20 other people who can't drive worth a good goddamn in the snow, but I managed to steer around them. After the hour-plus commute home last night, I was irrevocably convinced of the fallacy of the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing (not the actual book, per se, but at least the popular culture interpretation of it as "everybody's doing it so it must be good!"). Nothing brings out the stupidity in humanity like taking a little spin on a snowy road, which is amazing, given that everyone I know considers themselves to be the world's best snow driver. Myself included.

Anyway, here's hoping for a quick end to the day. Those aliens aren't going to kill themselves, and my couch is getting lonely.

Acting my age

I turned 39 on Friday, so naturally I celebrated by playing Gears of War, going out for dinner at Gordon Biersch, stopping by the Ritz-Carlton for and early nightcap, then heading home to play more videogames. And somewhere in between I found the time to pick up a copy of World of Warcraft. If I were a single straight guy, you'd have good reason to be worried. Granted, you have good reason to be worried anyway, but now that I've discovered that there's an actual queue that I must wait in before I can get online in WoW, I'm not sure my time there will be the lifechanging sort.

But my point is, I'm so acting my age these days. For example, I went to Target today to pick up an ironing board cover and other items of domestic docility (ooooh, a fabric shaver!). Sauntering by the electronics section, I just happened to see what looked to be two 60 gig Playstation 3's hanging out inside the locked display, eagerly awaiting a chance to go home with me. The rest of my time in the store was a titanic struggle in my own head not to buy the damn thing right there and then. And the temptation was mighty, kind of liking dropping a newly recovered heroin addict in a shooting gallery and telling him to just say no.

But I said no, and I'm proud, dammit. Anyway, there's only one game I'm interested in playing on PS3 right now, Resistance, and since I'm so enamored of Gears of War at the moment -- it is one of the best games I've ever played -- I'm thinking it's going to have to be pretty damn special to warrant spending about $800 for a new system, peripherals and game discs.

Maybe when I'm 40.

I kill a forest and behave totally selfishly

Although my Christmas shopping is woefully behind, that doesn't preclude some self-centered shopping. A Friday night stop at Barnes & Noble went fairly predictably, in so far as I bought yet more books to pile up around the house. This was particularly daunting pile, however. First off, I found the new 10th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest. I've been trying to get friends, family or anyone else I know to read the David Foster Wallace opus for years now, to no success. I understand that a giant, footnoted novel can be intimidating. But I can't stress enough how much the effort pays off -- it's one of the funniest, saddest and most moving things I've ever read. So, somebody, anybody, in my circle of friends and family needs to read it and love it, so everyone won't just think I'm crazy for having read the cinderblock of a book three times already.

After grabbing that tome, I stumbled across a "new translation" of War and Peace, and given that I'm in the middle of The Brothers Karamazov, it seemed right to pick it up and continue my efforts to complete some of the giant Russian novels I should have read, but haven't. Up to now, my big Russian forays have been Anna Karenina and Gogol's Dead Souls. Nothing to sneeze at there, and I recall enjoying Gogol's novel for reasons other than that it was short. But that's not really enough to make me feel all smart and stuff, so War and Peace goes onto the nightstand.

Add in the new Cormac McCarthy and the Japanese novel Ring -- yeah, what the movie came from -- and it was a big spending night at the old B&N. Just FYI, if you get the copy of Infinite Jest from me for Christmas, know that I did spend a few minutes reading the new introduction by Dave Eggers. I hope it doesn't bother you that some of the pages are pre-read. I only ask, because I know it would me.

So, after contributing to the deforestation of the planet in the pursuit of Russian literature, on Saturday I finally found my mom's Christmas present. Along the way, I stopped at Best Buy "just to look." Ooo, there's the Final Fantasy XII guide -- maybe that'll get me past the dungeon I'm stuck in so I can finish the game and consign my Playstation 2 to the great closet of videogame systems past. See, there's a practical reason for it, so I have to get it. Then I spotted the wireless headset for my XBox 360, which would eliminate the last unsightly wire tangle associated with that console. Again, practicality.

Right below that was the new HD-DVD add-on for the XBox 360 and, well, I do have the big HDTV I invested in last year. And it's such a shame to have to watch standard definition DVDs when the option for eye-searing color and clarity is so readily and relatively cheaply available. I'd be wasting money not to get it. Right?

Right or wrong, I got it. Plus a couple movies. Best Buy frickin' owns me. Arrgh. The worst part? I still have to go out this week and finish my Christmas shopping, plus do a small something for the Le-Bugg  fourth anniversary tomorrow, Dec. 19. Flowers -- they'll just die when we leave for the holiday. Chocolates -- he doesn't like 'em. Something expensive -- he'll say it's a waste of money.

Ah, romance.