Return of the Malaise

My hypothetical readers (and my two real ones) may have noticed that it's been two weeks since I've seen fit to plumb the depths of my geekery or complain about minor irritations here. Not really sure what happened, other than that I've been pretty much uninspired in all facets of life. It happens to me every now and then; It's usually marked by severe insomnia, and side effects include hours upon hours of reading mindless drivel on craigslist. But I've realized that if I read one more grammatically horrifying all-caps post my brain will melt. So without further ado, here are random musings as I attempt to bore myself to sleep (if that doesn't entice people to read this, nothing will)...

2004 called, it wants its buzzwords back

Had a conference call this week with some fellow tech nerds and my manager's manager. She's a good, reasonable boss, but she doesn't have much technical knowledge. We nerds were discussing how to adapt a tool to solve a problem we'd been having getting our information out to people who need it. Someone asked what other tools we were considering, and she confidently announced that we were thinking about using Web 2.0 to fix things. Cue horrified silence as all the nerds had these two thoughts in sequence:

1. Oh my god, she has no idea what she's talking about.
2. I'm not going to be the one to call her out on it.

If you're scoring at home, it only took four years for a meaningless buzzword to worm its way into the consciousness of my huge tech company's upper management. Now all they need is for someone to explain it to them.

Then again, I'm not sure if it's worse to be totally ignorant, or totally enraptured; the slightly hipper, more web-savvy folks in our corporate communications division have decided that since people ignore their work and screw around with social networking sites all day, they'd get really fired up about knock-off company-only internal social networking sites. Blog about work! Twitter about work! Build a MySpace-type page to talk about work with coworkers! None of the productivity of actual work and none of the escapism of actual socializing, all in one inconvenient package! Yippee!

Brief sports detour, NBA playoff edition

New Orleans, the lone remaining team I actually liked, lost in the conference semifinals. Which means I had to generate a rooting interest based on which team I despised less. My rankings, from most loathsome to almost tolerable:

• I hate the Lakers. The whole team, especially Kobe and Phil Jackson, gives off a smug, arrogant vibe. And Pau Gasol just looks like someone I'd enjoy punching in the face.


• I hate the Spurs slightly less. I like Tim Duncan, but Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker have taken the flopping/whining act way too far to be respected. Can't for the life of me figure out why the referees continue to fall for it.


• I was all set to root for sentimental favorite Kevin Garnett and the Celtics, but every time I catch them on TV they're pounding their chests and yelling after mundane plays. Paul Pierce fell on a loose ball and called a timeout the other night, and even though he was the only guy who had a shot at the ball, he let out a victory scream that put William Wallace to shame. I don't even want to imagine the self-congratulatory acts we'd see if this team actually won the title.


• Guess that leaves the Pistons. They're still obnoxiously playing the "nobody respects us" card and strutting around like the defending champs even though it's been four years since they won, but all that is offset by my latest man-crush, Jason Maxiell. A big, burly dude who blocks shots, throws people around, shows zero concern for his own well-being by diving for every loose ball, and is such an intimidating badass that he inspired this? Yes, please.

One final craigslist posting before I go...

Couldn't resist. The Hyperbole Committee has declared this to be the greatest posting of all-time. Ever.

As close to politics as I'm going to get

I am utterly fascinated with the Indiana primary coverage on CNN. I could do without the talking head spin people yelling at each other and I zoned out whenever the candidates started speaking, but that big map thing that John King is playing with has me absolutely hypnotized. It's like a super version of Google Maps projected on a 72" version of the iPhone, with a touch screen display that he can zoom in and out on and draw on in different colors using only his fingers. The display shows the counties color-coded by which candidate they've voted for, but he can also bring up results from past elections, show histograms that represent the county population, or zoom in on the county to show the precise voting numbers, which update in real time as they come in. At one point he even turned the display into a satellite photo of the state to show which areas were rural and which were urban, which officially blew my mind. I don't know where one procures a 6-foot election board touch screen, but I really, really want one for Christmas.

My second-favorite part of the coverage was watching a senile, twitchy Larry King berate some poor hick mayor from Evansville for late election results, when Evansville's in a completely different part of the state than the tardy county. The poor guy looked completely shell-shocked (not that I'd have performed any better), and they mercifully cut away to talk to the mayor of Hammond, who was extremely nervous at first but warmed to the spotlight after a few minutes. It looks like they've finished with him, which is good, because you could literally see his ego swelling out of control the more time he spent on camera.

Gotta go. They just busted out the map thing again.

Grand Theft Apologist

Bought Grand Theft Auto IV last week after an impressive string of perfect reviews popped up on Metacritic. Ah, who am I kidding? I'd have bought that game no matter what the reviews said. Enjoying it so far, except that they made driving too realistic (it's now difficult to pull off 90 degree turns at full speed without doing a few inadvertent donuts). Also, I don't seem to have the attention span for just screwing around with the game world like I used to, which is too bad because it's a doozy of a game world. But enough pseudo-review. Instead, I thought it'd be fun to be the nine billionth person to weigh in on the moral implications behind the game.

It's true that you can do some horrifying stuff in GTA without serious repercussions. Anybody looking for a misogynistic streak in the game isn't going to have to look very hard, and any watchdog organizations searching for something to offend them are going to strike gold early and repeatedly. It's a pretty hard game to defend; you can call it satire, you can argue that the scenes of the protagonist shooting cops are taken out of context, you can claim that some of the most morally repugnant actions available aren't necessary or even encouraged by the game itself. But that doesn't change the fact that this is a game where you can kill policemen and beat up hookers. I almost wish people would stop trying to defend the game at all; I'm certainly tired of trying.

It seems like a generational thing; the generation currently running the mainstream media, the one in charge of being outraged over things, sees video games as an activity exclusively for kids. To them, GTA is the equivalent of some network showing hardcore porn as part of its Saturday morning cartoon lineup. Video game publishers can stamp "Not for kids!!!!" all over their game boxes in size bazillion font and it won't matter, because the "games are for kids" mindset is too deeply ingrained. It won't get any better until a younger generation, one that grew up with video games and sees them as a form of entertainment that needs to be filtered for children like music and movies, takes over the controls of the Outrage Machine.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep playing GTA, and I refuse to feel bad about it. It's a great way to blow off steam and relieve stress. It's got an interesting story that will take me as long to complete as a 1,000 page novel, and will hopefully be as rewarding.

Bonus Unsolicited Media Thoughts!

• Go see Iron Man. It's the best comic book movie since the X2 (don't even bring up Batman Begins; Katie Holmes was awful and the Batmobile redesign should have resulted in criminal charges). I'm developing a man-crush on Robert Downey.


• I can't think of a single movie that I want to see less than the new Mike Myers... thing being previewed right now. I told my wife I'd rather pay money to see the Sisterhood of Traveling Pants sequel, and I was completely serious.


• Wanted is probably going to suck, but I'm still excited to see it.