Tea Leaves

For all of you out there who enjoy blowing that college fund on shiny pans that you don’t need, here is a reminder that the twice-a-year All-Clad sale is going on this weekend, starting Friday.

You can typically get the same pans that you see in the mall at Williams-Sonoma for about half the price. The sale happens because the company is based in Canonsburg, and so twice a year they collect up all the factory seconds and put them in a big room in the South Hills. This year, the sale is June 2 and June 3 at the Washington County Fairgrounds. The directions are rather involved. But here is a google map.

Super-premium cookware is generally more about looks and the aspect of gratuitous consumption than any real advantage in functionality. But at these prices, the All-Clad stuff is a good value. My favorite pieces are the medium sized soup pots and the round saucier pans. The pans hold heat well and can take a beating and come back to life with just a bit of scrubbing. I’ve burned up my soup pots multiple times on the stove, and they always come back for more.

This year, I’m going to branch out and get a saute pan. I usually just use small non-stick aluminum omelet pans. But I’ve been feeling paranoid about the coatings that wear off, and I’m tired of not having any yummy brown bits to scrape off the pan when I make meat or caramelize onions.

Doors open at 9am. Be there with your small blunt weapons so you can get all the good stuff before it’s gone.

It’s gotta be 90 degrees here in Pittsburgh today. So here’s a simple drink to beat the heat: Campari.

Campari

It’s an odd drink, with a Shirly Templish bright red color and a citrusy, grapefruit sort of taste. Really, that taste is that of the chinotto, or bitter orange. But if it helps with your hipster friends, you can call it the Fresca of aperitifs.

You can mix it with soda, if you like. That dilutes the bitterness and turns it into something weaker, something fruitier, something lamer. Something French, in other words. Some people mix it to taste with orange juice. If you’ll take my advice, just pour some on the rocks and add a twist of orange.

What Campari really tastes like, to me, is summer.

PS: Dear Cynthia: I stumbled across your entry on Campari while searching for images to use. So now you know three people that like Campari.

Six years ago, Karen and I heard rumors about a place in Bellevue that was serving up fancy food. For a long time, we regarded these rumors with some skepticism. Bellevue, after all, is a working class town that is pretty far out of the city. It seemed like an unlikely home for a wonderful high-end food experience. When we eventually hauled ourselves out there we found to our surprise that the rumors were true. Vivo served up an eclectic menu that was both varied and consistently excellent.

The place itself has an understated elegance. There is a bare iron awning over the door and a small sign in the window that says “Vivo”. There is a large picture window that looks out on to the street. In the winter, this window is dark, but in the spring and summer it splashes the whole room witha nice diffuse light. There are nice tables and large comfortable chairs. The long wall in the back of the restaurant is covered with black and white photos which I assume are family snapshots from one or more generations back. As you sit down, Sam or Lori will say hello to you from the kitchen. If they aren’t busy, they’ll come over and chat about things. When we were in there last week, Sam asked about the Pittsburgh Magazine best restaurants party, and then kibitzed for 15 minutes about the state of the restaurant “scene” in Pittsburgh.

Later on, someone will come and recite the menu to you. Earlier in its existence, Sam had long hand-written menus with specials and all that. After a couple of years, he switched to essentially a weekly menu, filled with the interesting stuff that he found in the market at the time. Unusual ingredients is something of a speciality here. Sam does this in a matter-of-fact way that does not exude pretension. And yet this night we had great oysters on the half-shell, fiddlehead ferns, and the chance to order lamb with candied endive, which we had to pass up in favor of other things. Vivo is the first place in Pittsburgh that we ever had abalone, or halibut cheeks. There is always some interesting ingredient or preparation on the menu. But it is not presented to you as high art, or something that took a lot of inspiration and perspiration to create. It’s as if you went over to his house, and Sam pulled the stuff out of the fridge.

The menus generally consist of five or six appetizers and five or six dinners. The dinners are a mix of meats and mild fish and other seafood. Each come with a pasta course ahead of the dinner and a salad course after. You can split dinners for an modest up-charge. The up-charge buys twice the grilled vegetable side dishes as the normal entree. This is a good deal, but does not really reduce the amount of food you have to deal with. The food is uniformly excellent. I think Sam’s predilections for simple preparation and the use of the grill makes the meat dishes better than the fish. This might just be my imagination, or it could be a function of how hard it is to get fresh fish in Pittsburgh. In any case, I highly recommend the tenderloin, however he is making it. We had it with a simple red wine sauce, grilled mushrooms, fiddlehead ferns and taleggio cheese.

If, after all of this you still have room, the dessert menu is always populated with whatever Lori has recently concocted. She once made us a chocolate panna-cotta, a chilled, extra thick custard. We always forget to ask her to make some ahead of deciding to go to the place. There is also the obligatory four pound piece of flour-less chocolate “cake”, a mix of gelato and sorbet, and anything else that she might have thought to make. The coffee isn’t super, but it’s made better by the large mug and the dessert.

Every time we go to Vivo, we seem to forget how good the place really is, and we come out of the experience almost as surprised as we were the first time. How can a place like this exist in a place like Bellevue? However they manage it, Vivo has been there for the long haul. What Sam and Lori have built here could survive in any food “scene” in the country. We are lucky to have them in Pittsburgh. You should go out there and thank them for it.

A Note

By Pittsburgh standards, Vivo is pretty expensive. The appetizers all go for about $10, and the dinners are in the $40 range for all three courses. I have seen complaints on the net that this is too much money, and that the portions are on the small side. The people who write such things are clinically insane.

Also, here is a map to the place.

“I want a hamburger. A really good hamburger.”

This is me, talking to psu.

“Go to Tessaro’s. They have the best burgers in town.”

That’s psu, talking to me.

But Tessaro’s doesn’t have the best burgers in town. In the abstract, yes, a Tessaro’s burger is almost the platonic ideal of a great hamburger. The meat is cooked perfectly, over a wood fire. It’s big and juicy. It’s perfect. Except…

Except they don’t have french fries. Therefore, their perfect burger sucks.

This is, perhaps, an entirely pre-rational belief. Obviously, I don’t really think that the Tessaro’s burger sucks qua sucks. But when I crave a hamburger, when I need a hamburger, that’s not a mere desire for a certain type of food. It’s a spiritual thing; it’s the quest for the Great American Hamburger. And listen, the Great American Hamburger does not come with potato salad. It does not come with disgusting, soggy home fries that are some sort of punishment for all my former sins. It does not come with broccoli and cauliflower.

The Great American Hamburger comes with french fries, and anything else is second rate.

This is beyond issues of mere taste. It is magical, alchemical: even bad french fries make a good burger taste better. It’s just like transubstantiation, except it actually improves your life.

We ended up going to the new burger joint (part of a chain) called “Five Guys”, in Oakland. They made a good burger — very good. The meat was thin and cooked through, but still juicy. The buns weren’t too big. They had fried onions, and good relish, and good mushrooms, and other things to put on the burger. It wasn’t as good as the $11 burger at Eleven. But then, it didn’t cost $11, either. And, most importantly, they had french fries.

Their fries weren’t that good, but they were there, and that made their very good burger taste better than Tessaro’s great-but-fryless burger would have.

What I somehow need to do is convince Tessaro’s and Dee’s to open up a shack somewhere midway between the two places. They’d serve Tessaro’s burgers, and Dee’s fries, and they would make a million dollars every night.

But until then, see you at Five Guys.

I took Madden ‘06 for the 360 to Pete’s house the other day so he could get a look at the Zombie Peyton Manning. On a whim, I tossed in my controller, figuring that some head to head football goodness would be fun. After all, the controllers are wireless, they should just hook right up and go, right? Wrong.

One of the few good moments you have when opening and setting up an Xbox 360 is pushing the big button on the controller and watching the console light up from across the room. Some magic has happened, you reason, and the controller and console are just able to find each other in the ether. You then get to enjoy the freedom of playing with the gamepad, unhindered by any man-made constraints on your position or motion.

Naturally, after this, you expect that adding a second controller to the box will be similarly magic. So I sat down in Pete’s living room, hit the big button, and watched as my controller flashed its lights, blinked, danced, and did everything but actually become usable as a gamepad. Were my batteries out? Was the Xbox confused? We turned the box off, and I hit the big button on the controller. Nothing. We changed the batteries. Nothing. Finally, defeated and demoralized, we did the unthinkable. We opened the manual.

It turns out that the console and the controller do not automatically discover each other. It turns out that you must power the console on, push a button on the console, and push another button on the controller (conveniently located on the back of the pad, where you can’t see it, and labeled with, well, nothing intelligible), and only then will the controller and the console talk to each other. From an engineering standpoint, I can understand the edge cases that this mitigates. What if you have four controllers and four consoles in a room and they all power on at once? That sort of thing.

But, as a user, it is criminal that I need to read the manual to figure out how to hook up a second controller to my box, when the first one just worked. Surely, my inner user cries, there could at least be a user interface in the dashboard that would make the box discover a new controller. Surely there is some industry standard protocol for short range wireless devices that would allow the 360 and the controller to discover each other and pair up. Surely I don’t have to walk all the way over to the box and hit a tiny little button on the front that isn’t even labeled.

Then, an even more horrifying thought came to me. The controller and 360 in my premium pack had talked to each other immediately. Out of the box. How is this possible? As the answer dawned on me, my spirit fell. Somewhere in some back room of a dank Chinese factory, there is an army of people powering up a 360, hitting a button on the front, then hitting a button on the back of the controller, waiting for the lights, and then packing the console into boxes. All this, so the first time I hit that button, the console turned on. Maybe it wasn’t worth it.

Note: Because of the formatting used in this article, it likely won’t look quite right in an RSS reader. I suggest reading the entry in your web browser.

When I first invited psu to be a co-blogger, the thing he was most leery of was the fact that Tea Leaves had support for comments. His previous blog didn’t. Pete claimed that he didn’t like comments because he didn’t want to read what people had to say, because most people on the internet were crazy anyway.

But really, the true reason that psu’s old blog didn’t have comments is that he is a gay lamer who doesn’t know how to program and is stupid and gay and lame and probably uses a Mac.

Oops, sorry — I was channelling some of our more crude visitors there. It happens. In any event, psu is not alone in his opinion. I showed my sister what I think is one of my better pieces, and when she read the comments she asked, “Why are you letting these people put their words in a space meant for your work? What do you get out of it?”

That’s a good question, and I am deeply ambivalent about the value of comments. On the one hand, we have a number of regular visitors who regularly contribute thoughtful commentary. For example, Green LA Girl manages to point out where I’m being a closed-minded snob about fair trade issues. Chris from Only a Game often points out some of the deeper reasons behind the videogame mechanics we complain about. There are too many to name here, really, but when I see that there are new comments by Adam Rixey, or Christina, or Brian Hook, or Zarf, or any of the ex-CMU Zephyr crew, I’m always confident that I’ll read something intelligent, something thoughtful, something that brings a new perspective to the issue. Even when I disagree with them.

On the other hand — well, the other hand makes up the rest of this article. It turns out that the more you write, especially if you are an opinionated asshole ardent critic, the more you find people willing to hate you. Here are some of our “favorites.”

People Who Love P.F. Chang’s

Read the original article: PF Chang’s: Why It’s Evil

psu doesn’t like the chain faux-Chinese restaurant P.F. Chang’s. This is because he is a gay hippie intellectual loser.

and…

People aren’t shy about getting personal:

People From Iceland

Read the original article: Björky Had A Little Lamb

I wrote an article urging people to buy local produce instead of meat shipped in from another country. In return, the descendants of Erik the Red came for me. Most of them were polite in their disagreement, but one guy in particular took it very personally:

We did. It turns out Americans don’t kill the most whales, and if you exclude the aboriginal catch, we don’t kill any. Frailty, thy name is Guðmundsdöttir.

People Who Have Sex With Their Cousins

Read the original articles: O Cousin! My Cousin! and Cousin-Lovin’ Haiku

We were mean to people who have sex with their cousins. They fought back!

And…

This thread took a turn for the seriously weird when some people read the article and apparently didn’t understand that we were mocking them cruelly, and began actually asking us for advice:

Snow White and Other Fictional Characters

Read the original article: Idlewild

I wrote what I thought was a thoughtful reverie about childhood, growing up, and the nature of perspective. A bunch of people who worked at “Storybook Forest” decided I was a hateful bastard who hated all children. I can joke about it now, but I was truly scarred by this — for literally weeks I was saying, in wonderment, “Jesus! Snow White is yelling at me.”

To Snow White’s credit, she wasn’t actually yelling all that much — in retrospect, she was quite polite — and she didn’t call me a gay lamer who probably uses a Mac. Her manager (Cinderella!) was a little harder on me:

Others agreed with the manager:

Vegans Who Feed Their Cats Vegan Diets

Read the original article: Vegan Cats

We’re often a little bit mean to vegans, in a sort of offhand Tony Bourdain way, but frankly we’re not that brutal; having to eat what they do is punishment enough. But an article I wrote pointing out that feeding a cat a vegan diet was immoral and unethical apparently touched a nerve. Like Snow White, the vegans were reasonably polite. The one comment that stands out is that of the person declaring that by recommending that cats be well-fed and healthy, I was simply projecting my bourgeois morals on to the poor carnivorous creatures:

People Who Like (or Hate) Some Game We Said Bad (Or Good) Things About

Original articles: too numerous to list, but some of the better examples are Gran Turismo 4, Metal Gear Stupid, God Of Bore, and the sine qua non that inspired this article, Dumb and Dumber

It turns out that in certain circles, it is safer to call someone’s mother a crack addict than it is to say that you disliked their favorite videogame. For instance, these fans of Gran Turismo 4, a game I panned, were quite clear about what they wanted to see happen to me:

Bugs Bunny?

“Go kill yourself” is one of the more popular sentiments.

I actually liked this one:

Metal Gear Solid fans are quite eloquent:

God of War:

Usually people are offended when you say a game sucks. Recently we discovered that people can get incoherent and screechy when you say a game is good, too:

The Punchline

Well, if you’re still reading after all of that, I am impressed. You are truly hardcore. I think, on balance, the interesting people and their positive contributions to the comments threads here matter. I don’t plan on shutting down the comments any time soon, for that reason. Rather than letting the bad chase away the good, it’s important to find a way to let the good rise to the top.

To that end, we are, as of right now, adopting a rule from one of our favorite web sites, Gamers With Jobs. To wit:

“4) You Must Attempt to Follow English Standard - This is not a rule meant to squelch the voices of those who do not use English as a first language, but to remove those for whom English is their primary language but can not be bothered to form coherent sentences. We won’t ban you if you choose to haphazardly split infinitives, but the basic conventions of the language are a requirement, I think, for intelligent discussion. That means employing punctuation, capitalization, sentences, paragraphs, subjects/verbs, and the recognized and proper use of alpha/numeric characters (meaning W is not \/\/).”

In other words: you may disagree with us. You may disagree strenuously with us. You may even make ad hominem arguments, up to a point, and call us gay lamers who probably use Macs.

But while doing all that, you have to spell correctly.

This post violates several of the meta-rules I have for the site: it is, quintessentially, “blogging about blogging.” But sometimes it’s important to take a break and review what you’ve done. If the quality of one’s writing can be judged by the number of people it offends, then psu and I are kicking ass and taking names. We’ve been at this for a few years now, and it’s still fun. Thanks to all of you who have come along for the ride.

All fitness hobbies require appropriate accessorization. In many ways cycling is one of the most accessory-intensive activities that you can be involved in. As a public service, I will provide you with a list of things you need, and the real reason you need them.

Gloves

There is no doubt that gloves are important. The gloves protect your hands from potential harm in a crash, and they have a thin and mostly useless layer of padding to shield your palms from too much pressure from the handlebars. But, none of these reasons are why you want the gloves. The truth is, you don’t crash much, and if you are riding the bike correctly, you should not have a death grip on the bars anyway. So, you may wonder what the real reason for the gloves is.

It is this. All cycling gloves have a little patch of soft fleecy material on their back. You use this area to wipe the snot off your face. That’s what the gloves are for.

Shirt

There are a variety of cycling specific tops on the market. These clothes seem to serve two purposes. The first is to make you look like an advertising banner. If you are female, the second is to give the males in the group something to stare at. Or at least that’s what I assume the tightly cut sleeveless short mid-riff tops are for.

It is also important that the shirts are made out of plastic. This plastic is marketed as space age material that will suck the sweat and the wet off your skin and literally pour it out on to the road. Really it’s just plastic that absorbs less water than cotton so you don’t freeze to death in a cold rain.

Probably the only really useful thing that the cycling jersey provides is the pockets in the back. In the old days, these would hold tools, food, maps, and so on. These days, they can make the pockets smaller because all you need to bring is a cell phone and GPS.

Shorts

Bike shorts make you look funny. And, they have that padded area around your ass. The padding is not there to make your seat feel softer. Nothing will do that. The padding is there to be something slippery against your skin on longer rides, when something not slippery would cause, er, damage to your sensitive skin.

The truth is that if you are younger or you are not riding long distances (more than 20 miles or two hours at a time) you don’t really need the shorts. But if you are going longer than that, they are really nice.

Shoes and Pedals

My first bike had plain pedals which I pedalled with plain shoes and no special attachments. Toe clips seemed tedious and annoying, and tricky to get in and out of. Then, one day I was riding to school, and my shoes were wet. My right foot slipped off the pedal, and an instant later, in one swift motion that I can still visualize in my mind, I landed on the top tube of the bike.

I got toe clips the next day.

There is a fundamental truth that it is more fun to ride the bike if your feet are bound to it tightly, and if you are used to this then having your feet dancing and slipping around on the pedals is just pure torture. These days, you can buy wondrous pedals that use spring loaded jaws to lock onto a special cleat and hold your feet to the bike like the it is an extension of the shoe. This is a great way to ride. You can get power into the pedals all the time, and clipping in and out of the pedals is much eaiser than toe clips. The nice ones even hide the cleats in the soul of the shoe, so you can walk around.

The only downside is that you need to buy special dorky shoes to take the cleats. You’d think that someone would make SPD compatible Birkenstock or something.

Shades

NIce sunglasses shield your eyes from the bright fireball in the sky that burns us. They also keep the wind and dust off your face and from getting into your eyeballs. These are all useful functions, but they are not worth shelling out the big bucks for fancy Oakley shades.

Really, people wear them so they can, er, observe the other people on the road and surrounding environment, shall we say, surreptitiously .

Final Thoughts

In addition to all of these items, you should pick up a helmet, for the obvious reasons.

With this information in hand, head out to the REI or you local bike store and load up.

There is, as I alluded in my first article on the subject, plenty to dislike about Oblivion. If you read various reviews and comments on the game, you’ll discover there are two rough sets of comments on the negatives.

First, there are the opinions of people who actually identify and discuss specific problems in the game. Secondly, there are the opinions of people who make the broad claim that the big problem with Oblivion is that it is “dumbed down.”

This charge of “dumbing down” is — appropriately enough — pure fantasy.

In order to understand what “dumbing down” means, we first have to take a brief digression and understand what “Computer Role Playing Game,” or RPG, means. There are plenty of definitions, but the one that is apropos here is “An RPG is the game that I played when I was 13 years old and didn’t have any friends, and any game that isn’t exactly like that I will complain loudly is not really an RPG.” For me, that game is Wizardry, for younger people it might be Final Fantasy, or Fallout, or Baldur’s Gate. The specific game doesn’t matter. The important thing is to realize that the moment someone trots out the tired phrase “dumbed down” what they really mean is “doesn’t suck in the precise way my 13 year-old self wants it to suck.”

My personal definiton of an RPG is that any game with an epic plot redolent of adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasies and “progression” of a protagonist qualifies. But if you want an even simpler definition, here goes: any video game that at any time, for any reason, shows you more than three numbers on one screen is a computer RPG. End of story.

There are two specific criticisms the Dumb Brigade frequently throws at Oblivion. The first one is especially hilarious. The claim is that Oblivion is really “just an action game” (and by implication, not an RPG), because of the real-time combat and the smooth animations and the dexterity required to play it. Oblivion, the argument goes, is a heinous betrayal of the deep, interactive role-playing offered by the previous Elder Scrolls games.

This, of course, is a load of crap.

Deep, interactive role-playing == Boobies!

The Elder Scrolls games have always been action games. I recently played Arena, the first game, for a significant amount of time, in preparation for a review. It is a game of mindless, nearly constant real-time combat, right down to having to “swing” the mouse in order to make your character swing his sword. Anyone who claims that Oblivion has more real-time action than the previous games in the series hasn’t actually played them. The main difference between Oblivion and the earlier games is that the real-time combat isn’t quite as boring and stupid and irritating and the terrain isn’t randomly generated (by “randomly generated,” by the way, I mean “boring and stupid and irritating”).

Second, deep interactive roleplaying? Did these people live through the same 1990s as me? Compared to the canned, cookie-cutter, bloodless dialogues in Morrowind, the “Name! Job! Health!” routine from Ultima III seems like freaking Dostoyevsky.

The second complaint of the Dumbfgruppe is that there are fewer skills in Oblivion than in previous games. This, I suppose, is the expression of the belief that more content is always better; presumably these are people who are bitter that various scenes were deleted from the theatrical cut of Lord of the Rings. As for me, I know a good cut when I see one, and the “missing” skills were good cuts. I’m intimately familiar with the skill system from the previous Elder Scrolls games, and frankly I can’t say that I miss any of the disappeared skills. The smaller number of skills makes it easier for me to get a vision of who my character is and how he is developing.

Which brings me to my real complaint about Oblivion. It is not that they cut too much, but that they cut too little. Why not get rid of levels altogether? You have all of these skills and a system for tracking them. Then you go and ruin it by coming up with some formula that determines how my exercising those skills, coupled with the phase of the moon, whether or not Saturn is retrograde in Aquarius, and the derivative of the previous week’s changes in the Nikkei stock index affect my “stats.” Why have non-skill stats at all? Why bother telling me how “strong” I am? Just use my skills to directly determine how well I do, rather than adding unnecessary and wanky complexity.

And make no mistake: the skill and levelling system in Oblivion is unnecessary and wanky. Put simply, you cannot understand it without reading about it on the Internet. That’s really all you need to know to know that it is poorly designed.

But it is “poorly designed” in exactly the opposite way that the most vocal critics claim. And if Oblivion was changed to be the more contemplative, intricate, and baroque game these commenters claim to want, it would be less fun than it is. And, not coincidentally, wouldn’t sell.

Developing software is always a tradeoff between the planned and the possible, between adding features and meeting the schedule. Oblivion demonstrates this. Many, if not most, of the features of the character system are in place not because they are “being true to the Elder Scrolls universe” or because they are “good”. Rather, they were already implemented, were “good enough” and it was more important to get the game they could actually build released, rather than build the perfect game and never ship it. In the meantime, you have to feel sorry for Bethesda as, every day, they have to read complaints from obsessive-compulsives who shout to the rooftops that the game is ruined, ruined, because it won’t let them collect candles.

Most of the problems in Oblivion come not from the innovations it introduced, but from the fact that it is the ultimate expression of what it means to be an Elder Scrolls game. The things that annoy in Oblivion annoyed in the earlier games. I don’t blame Bethesda for not throwing the setting out — given their succeess with Morrowind, I’d probably think them stupid if they did so. The people I blame are those who, through some sort of mass hallucination, have convinced themselves that they once found Utopia in a buggy, crashy game, and who criticize Oblivion for not living down to that standard.

Every Elder Scrolls game has improved on the past by cutting out more and more. I can’t wait to see what they cut out of Elder Scrolls V. It’s going to be great. Lest anyone believe that I am being sarcastic, I assure you I am perfectly serious.

Cut deep, Bethesda. Show no mercy, and cut deep.

We were in the local Border’s a couple of days ago. I guess we hadn’t been there for a while, because all the books were in different places, and the store had cunningly replaced inventory with empty floorspace in order to maximize profit in some way that only makes sense to someone who has studied modern retail more closely than I have. I also noticed that the name of the store should be Borders BOOKS and Music because the selection of available CDs has been constantly shrinking over the last few years, replaced by new shelves of basically nothing, and more floor space.

However, on this night, neither of these annoyances were foremost in my mind. This is because from entering the store until I paid for the couple of CDs that I did manage to find, it was absolutely impossible to avoid eye contact with some piece of the Da Vinci Code hype machine.

There were Da Vinci Code books, Da Vinci Code movie guides, Da Vinci Code travel guides, various treatises on the “truth” behind the Da Vinci Code, Da Vinci Code documentary videos, Da Vinci Code quick reference guides and geneologies. There were encyclopedias on the Sacred Feminine, Pagan Worship Primers, and Symbology compendiums. Finally, there were many other non-fiction tie-ins to Da Vinci Code all dealing in some way with the Early Church, the Knight’s Templar, or the role of Lee Harvey Oswald in the single bullet theory of how Da Vinci, no wait, Jesus, was assassinated by the CIA back in the day. OK, I made some of those up, but I bet they really exist.

Here is my question: why.

My wife and I listened to this book on tape on a long drive a few years ago. To call the writing pulp is to insult the great pulp writers of, say, the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The writing is just bad. Not bad in a funny ha-ha way. Bad in a way that indicates that the writer is really going after something that is not bad, and is missing badly. The plot is predictable and moronic, the characters are paper thin and not particularly likeable, the dialog is wooden and serves no purpose than to push the plodding narrative forward through the mud to its ultimately unsatisfying conclusion. The book is B A D. Even worse, on tape you actually have to listen to every word. This makes you notice little things, like how all the expository passages are repeated over and over again in the scope of a single short chapter in case you put the book down on the toilet and then forgot where you were when you come back the next morning to take another crap.

What I can’t figure out is why we ended up listening to the whole thing. The book was objectively awful even while we were listening to it, but there is something in it that keeps you pushing the button to listen to the rest so you can get to the end. Your right brain tells you that in the name of all good things you should shut the thing off, but the rest of your brain just can’t do it. The book has a hook like a bad pop song that just will not exit your brain (I’m thinking of Hungry Like the Wolf by Duran Duran). This makes it an entertaining romp, while also being a complete piece of shit.

Which brings me to my real question. Not why would you like the book. I enjoyed the book. What I can’t figure out is why in the name of Jesus this book should become the center of a national obsession over some shady conspiracy that allegedly happened in the first decades of the A.D. Seeing the displays at the Border’s just makes you want to scream at the world: it’s just bad fiction. It is not history. It is not archeology. It is not anthropology. It is not some journalistic exposé on the early Church. It is just a piece of pulpy entertainment. That people can read this book and assign to it some kind of truth is mind boggling in the extreme. So my message to you this day is: get over it. There is no secret code, there is no grand mystery, there is no hidden truth. At least not in this book. This book is strictly what you see is what you get. Here endeth the lesson.

I’ve spent a couple of weekends playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and that means it’s time to share my ignorant impressions of it with all three or four of my readers. The question is, since all of the cool kids have already discussed the game in depth, what more can I bring to the table?

Well, I have an angle. Let’s see if I can run with it.

Actually, “running with it” is exactly what I want to talk about. One of the things people like to say about Oblivion is how incredibly huge the game world is — how it brings an entire province, a substantial portion of a continent, to life. “It covers an area of approximately 16 square miles,” is a commonly heard claim.

Here’s the thing: it’s not true at all. Here’s the other thing: that’s OK.

Let’s get this out of the way, first. You don’t want to play a game that lets you travel across a continent. As anyone who has driven across Kansas can attest, travelling across a continent is something you should prefer reading about to actually doing. Travelling across a continent is an experiment in boredom, punctuated by occasional moments of pleasure or little travellers’ epiphanies. When you get old, you only remember the good parts.

It turns out that those good parts are not enough to sustain a viable videogame. Consider True Crime: Streets of L.A., which merely modeled a single city, and which I found to be an excellent substitute for sleeping pills.

If you ignore rivers and mountains, you could probably walk from one end of Cyrodiil to the other in about 30 minutes of real time; the previous game, Morrowind, felt much much larger, even though it was supposedly only half as big.

The real achievement Bethesda should be lauded for here is not for creating a game space as large as a continent, but for creating a game space that feels both huge and interesting at the same time. The world in Oblivion manages to feel bigger than it actually is. Part of this is because of the density of encounters and interesting places to explore, and part is because of the subtle way the biomes and landscape types blend in to each other. Every time I walk to a new city, or set off across country, I am full of anticipation, because so far every single time I have done that, the game has managed to surprise me.

Trust me: you don’t get that feeling driving across Kansas.

Lleyawin

To give just one example: last night I walked from Lleyawin to Bravil. Lleyawin is a port town, a racially diverse town of some opulence in the middle of a swamp. The buildings in the nicer part of town are almost Georgian, solidly constructed, but with frescoed exteriors. Bravil is a frontier town that, apart from the inhabitants, could have been lifted from Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles: cheap clapboard shacks, flophouses, forts, and bars. As I left Lleyawin, I travelled along the river to search for plants to use in alchemy. Along the way I found a cave being used by bandits as a hideout (there are, approximately, 8 hojillion of these in the land of Cyrodiil). The cave turned out to be the site of a turf war between the Black Bows, who I have been hunting for bounties, and a group of marauders. So I could sneak in and pick them off as they fought each other. Further up the road (and past several bandit attacks), I came across the ruins of what might have been a small lighthouse on a tiny island. It had burned to the ground. No apparent plot significance, no great treasure to scavange from the ruins, but simply strange and beautiful in the evening light.

As I approached the walls of Bravil, I was attacked by a troll outside a ruin. Not having fought a troll before, I started to run, and had just changed my mind and turned to face him when a second troll came barrelling through the underbrush towards me. I ran back to Bravil with my tail between my legs and the trolls nipping at my heels, leaving the poor hapless guards to fight them off as I slipped through the city gates.

Bravil

There are plenty of problems with Oblivion, and I will no doubt talk about them in irritating detail in the days to come. But it’s important to not miss the forest for the trees. The game purports to offer a large and interesting game-world, and in this repect it meets and exceeds its promise. If the only thing the game had was empty cities with varied architecture, and different areas of the world with different ecologies, I would probably still play it. The fact that it offers a lot more makes that all the more compelling.

In the week I’ve owned my Xbox 360, I haven’t once had the urge to put a different disc in the drive. A week may not sound like much to you, but to me, when it comes to videogames, it is an eternity. Whatever niggling issues I have with various game mechanics in Oblivion are dwarfed by the simple fact that I’d rather be playing it than any other game I own right now.

Lastly, for those of you who are waffling between upgrading your PC or getting an Xbox 360 to play the game, just trust me on this and spring for the Xbox. You’re going to be playing this game for many, many hours. You’ll want to be on the couch.

If you enjoyed this, be sure to read the next article in the series.