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I miss Zodon. He featured heavily in the first several issues of PS238, a humorous comic book about a grade school for superheroic, or at least super-powered, children by Aaron Williams, but hasn’t had much attention in the last several issues.

Zodon is not a young superhero; he is an unabashed megalomaniacal villain in the making. He is extraordinarily intelligent, with a bent for high technology. All you ever see of him is his face and upper torso; the rest, is concealed in a levitating, egg-shaped vehicle of his own construction, complete with mechanical pincers. What really defines him, however, is his sardonic remarks. Like a proper villain, he likes to lord his intellect over his fellow students, dismissing them with comments like, “Some day, when we are pronounced villain and hero, I will look back fondly on the days when I could have defeated you merely by confusing you to death.” Why is he tamely agreeing to a supervised education? That’s not clear; perhaps it’s to size up his future competition, to gain access to PS238’s extraordinary facilities, or just because mocking the good guys is so much more fun than actual world domination. Add the fact that the faculty has corrected his potty mouth by implanting a chip into his brain that inserts random words in place of any curses, and forces him to sing show tunes when he really loses his temper, and the guy is just hilarious. (“What the gumball did you do to me, you windshield?”)

Unfortunately, Zodon has taken a back seat for several issues, and what space he has is wasted with Victor von Fogg, another will-be villain. Both consider one another far greater rivals than any young superheroes, so do nothing but trade cheap shots. They aren’t funny. One mean-spirited wunderkind is great; two is strictly dullsville.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a second self-appointed evil genius with a gift for cutting remarks ruin a terrific character. Zodon is cut from the same cloth as the Brain from “Pinky and the Brain,” Stewie from “Family Guy,” and Brent Sienna from the “PVP” strip, and I really, really like all of them. (Feel free to speculate on what this implies about my own personality.) All of them are smart, though not as smart as they like to think. All of them get their kicks from manipulating and belittling everyone around them. And every one of them has a creator who thought it would be fun to pit him against a mirror image. It never works. The idea of characters like these being more concerned with the evil genius pecking order than actual evil geniusing looks good on paper, but the execution always descends into a rapid-fire exchange of insults. With no one to play straight man, the mockery falls flat, partly because there’s no set-up, partly because the audience can’t identify with a single, superior alter-ego.

Comedy creators! Preserve what makes bitchy egotists worth our attention. One insolent wit, good; two insolent wits, bad.

Posted by at 3:07 PM | Permalink

We gave our barbecue the first run of the year yesterday, although we’d missed the quick peak in the weather that would have made it perfect. Naturally, I was a bit out of practice. I didn’t get the characteristic “smoke ring” just under the skin, and I had trouble getting the charcoal lit on the first go, despite the technique I learned last summer of tucking a few splints of wood into the pile as kindling.

The barbecue books Eileene got for me last year are quite specific in their requirements. They insist upon natural charcoal (which I haven’t found yet in the area), absolutely no lighter fluid (which is what makes the job of lighting it so damnably difficult), and a metal chimney to light the briquettes in. If you are so rank an amateur as to own no specialized charcoal chimney, the books reluctantly allow you to fashion a makeshift conical chimney out of aluminum foil. The idea is to create a shell to reflect the heat of the nascent fire back inward, and to create a draught to stoke the coals as the hot air funnels upward. Being a rank amateur, I use the aluminum cone.

I set the match to the newspaper, dropped the tin foil over the charcoal, and took the grills off for a hot scrub. By the time I returned, several minutes later, the fire showed no progress. The newspaper had nearly burned to black soot, and what was left was pouring out a choking smoke. I pulled off the cone, preparing to knock apart the charcoal pile and lay a fresh bed of newspaper. *Poof!* With the first breath of wind, the whole pile burst into flame. I tossed the tin foil cone aside, and within another few minutes, the charcoal was a cheery orange-and-gray.

I trust experts, but only so far.

Posted by at 8:00 AM | Permalink

When we picked up a second copy of World of Warcraft yesterday, so as to be able to play at the same time, I saw The Political Machine on the shelf, for a mere $10. A bargain for me, but it does seem a pity to find it tossed into the bargain bin so quickly. CGW gave it a good review, and the game seems to have found that golden spot where play is accessible enough for a casual player to spin through without losing unduly often, but complex and subtle enough that a hard-core player can keep occupied for months, if he’s willing to take the time to crunch all those numbers.

But a review of The Political Machine is for another day, after I’ve had a chance to give it more than a single cursory play (where I managed John Edwards to a gratifyingly hefty victory over Condaleezza Rice). Rather, I want to warn of the corrupting influence of politics. Witness:

Eileene got a chance to play first, since my writers’ group meets Thursday evenings. When I came home, she was closing on the final weeks of her 41-week campaign, and frantically whipping through a menu of states, seeking opportunities for last-minute stumping to push marginal states into her camp. She talked aloud as she played, more to herself than to me, though I was obviously interested in what was going on, and her fragmented sentences were meant in part to explain it all.

Finally, she settled on making a couple of speeches in Georgia. Only after her candidate arrived did she click open a review of issues to address and demographic opinions on them, saying aloud, “Let’s see, what do these people want to hear…”

In mock horror, I asked, “You’re just telling them what the polls want? Aren’t you campaigning on any principles of your own?”

“Yeah, I got ‘em all over, in lots of states.”

“No, principles! Don’t you have any principles?”

There was a pause. Without a hint of irony, she turned from the screen and asked, “What are principles?”

Later, there were denials. While I cackled, Eileene hastened to explain that she thought I was talking about principals. From schools or something. Which is why she was confused. And she wasn’t picking positions she didn’t believe in, anyway; she was just looking for a topic she could endorse without alienating Georgians. What the presidential candidate’s advisor meant to say was… But the damage was done. Her momentary lapse is going to be immortalized on the web.

If an hour or two at a mere simulation, complete with silly pictures and can turn an opinionated young woman into a moral vacuum, imagine what a lifetime of politics can do, when the brass ring is leadership of a world hegemony. And why can't we get Tom DeLay to ask the question that's in his heart out loud, in front of a microphone?

Posted by at 4:56 PM | Permalink

It’s embarrassing. Last week, I upgraded my computer for no other purpose than playing a game. And it may not even be a game I play much.

The real point of MMORPGs is multiplayer. Sure, you can trot around solo if that’s what curdles your cream, but then you may as well play a game designed for solo play, where the developers needn’t worry, for example, about what impolite players may do to exploit a potentially entertaining device. Although I’ve got a character that joins groups ad hoc, he still spends much of his time soloing, and both forms of play are beginning to pall. So we’re going to try playing a dedicated group – that’s a group of characters used only for that purpose, not a group of enthusiastic players. Eileene, her sister, and I will create alts for a three-man group and play at once.

Since Eileene will, of course, use her computer for this, I have to use my own, and it wasn’t really up to the task. Oh, the program ran, but memory shortages created all kinds of weird blips across the screen as I moved, and the sky flashed with bizarre colors. Worse, lag, the pause between a function’s execution on the server and its display on a player’s screen, was deadly; I could be slaughtered by a monster before it appeared on my monitor. So off my computer went for a memory upgrade.

I felt like I was compromising my principles. The massive spiral of memory requirements is in large part to the importance of eye candy to the market. Computer games live or die on the quality of their graphics and sound. A game can enjoy good sales legs with mediocre play and bitchin’ explosions, but a drab game with otherwise top-notch design is, at best, an also-ran, destined for the bargain bins, no matter how many review magazines appreciate its ingenuity or balance. So I plant my flag in the sand next to classic games, playing them until I squeeze out every drop of juice. Zork and Imperialism and SimCity 2000 are still great, with or without all the bells and whistles. The freedom from frequent upgrades is a happy side effect of my policy, rather than the purpose, but I get used to feeling like a purist. Running out of memory feels like selling out to mere video games.

Posted by at 1:10 PM | Permalink