Tea Leaves

A couple of weeks ago, after reviewing RiffTrax and its cousin project, Cinematic Titanic, I had the happy opportunity to speak with Mike Nelson, the face of RiffTrax. In particular, I was most interested in talking to Mike about some of the business model issues I raised in that earlier article. He graciously agreed to discuss them.

You started RiffTrax in 2006. How long did it — let me just ask this very bluntly. Is it a living?

It is, yeah.

And how long did it take to become self-sustaining?

It’s interesting that you ask that, because it’s a topic that…I want to be careful about this. I think there’s a point where people think “If someone else is making money, they’re doing something wrong or they’re exploiting me” and we are not to that point, believe me. It is a living. But I also try to insulate myself from the financial part of it, and that’s why I teamed with a going company to create it.

So, you don’t want to be deciding what jokes to make based on popularity or something like that.

Yeah, to be poring over a financial statement is not what I do, so that is why teaming up with a company that was already in existence made sense to me.

How much has the ability to riff on current movies, “A-List” movies for lack of a better term, made a difference to you? One of the things that excited me about RiffTrax was that I could hear people make fun of a movie I loved, rather than a Roger Corman B movie.

That was part of it. I had always thought that this process of riffing on stuff will make sense with movies that are good as well, because we certainly had plenty of people at Mystery Science that thought some of the movies we did were good and instinctively went “Oh, how could you do that to that movie?” and it’s like “Well, y’know, the movie exists without us on there. We didn’t go paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa. You can watch the movie without our commentary.” And so it’s kind of a metacommentary that can add to and make the movie funny, but it’s also — when the movie deserves some ribbing it gets it, but otherwise it’s just kind of floating on top of the experience, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, it does. Actually, One of the things I like about the audio-only experience is that it feels much more like people in the room with you rather than watching a performance. Obviously, it is still a performance, i’m sure you rehearse a lot, but it feels like less of a performance to the audience.

We work really really hard on the script, and then the moment where we perform it is just like it sounds, where we’re having a lot of fun, and it is a bunch of guys and now we can relax because we’ve done all this work in advance and perform this thing that we now really all agree upon that we like. Hopefully, that feeling comes across that we’re not laboring in the recording studio. It’s fun, at that point. We’ve done all the work and labor up front.

How did you end up working with Weird Al? Did you find him or did he find you?

We found him, actually. He was one of the people that I’ve always wanted to work with. I’ve admired his work ethic. He seems to have a philosophy — and he sort of confirmed it for me — that he just wants to make people laugh, he wants to make them happy, and he wants to make as many people laugh as possible. And I share that. So I was really happy to get him on board. And then to find out that he was just an amazing performer and really enthusiastic in the studio was fantastic.

Do your relatives watch RiffTrax? Have any of them had trouble getting it to work?

I have a lot of nieces and nephews of the age that would be interested, and they had been spontaneously listening to it and knew more about it than I had ever imagined. I’ve always been one of those people that loathed working in front of my family. In fact, I hated it whenever any of my family members came to see any of my shows. “I don’t stand over you at work, please don’t think you have to come see me.” But several of them have started to get on the RiffTrax bandwagon. None of them have had any trouble getting it to work.

If there is any fly in the ointment of RiffTrax, it’s that there is this process of synchronization. How much do you think that impacts — not sales, so much, but the experience?

I think — you can only know anecdotally, but it’s definitely a factor. Before we even started the business we wanted to make sure there were a number of people who understood the concept and were comfortable doing it. But yeah, you meet plenty of people who just immediately shut off to the process and that’s a problem, and we’re working all the time to get it working for those people. And it does no good to explain that it’s not difficult. There’s enough people (obviously, along age lines and along tech savvy) who are able to do it without any problem or explanation. So, it’s a problem and we’re working on solutions, yet at the same time the number of people who have no problem with it is growing all the time.

There’s a phrase that people bandy about called The Long Tail. One way to look at that idea is that you have a large back library of things, and you may only sell a few of each one, but that the depth of the library leads to many sales, which adds up. Have you seen that in effect for you?

Yeah, it is helpful. And one of the things that almost directly correlates to sales is availability of the movie, that’s a component of it. But having a bigger library and appealing to tastes that are just slightly outside of the mainstream is a goal of ours. And having a varied library is important so that when a big title is released, people will come to check it out, but then say “Oh yeah, here’s this movie that nobody else knows about.” It may not sell many on its own, but it will cause an up-tick over time. Having the library definitely does help, and makes it a a richer experience. Some people don’t want to see Star Wars at all.

You did a commentary on someone else’s DVD — I believe it was Night of the Living Dead. Do you anticipate that happening again, or does it take a particularly open-minded director to allow someone to make fun of his movie?

You know, it’s funny. I pitched a network show called “What The Hell Were You Thinking?” where you bring in someone who has had a long and successful career and you look at their less-successful things and you get them to open up about why they failed, and what they were thinking, and what were the pressures, and I just got all these responses that there would never be anybody who would do that, and I just don’t believe that for a second. And I think they were just saying that because they were afraid of talking to these people. I think it would be a fascinating show. So, my point being, I think there’s plenty of people who would like that, and would enjoy commentary where you actually talk frankly about critical and financial failures in the industry, in a fun way, and in a funny way, without trying to tear the person down. So I think it’s quite possible, and I’d love to do it.

I have one question that I’m sure everyone asks you. Out of all the riffs you’ve done, do you have a favorite?

They all have their fun side. I’m partial to the movies of the ’80s, the Over the Tops, the Roadhouses and yet I really got a lot of joy at grinding away at movies, to solve the movies that are troublesome. To get through a section where there’s nothing and turn it into something. So that said, I like the more action-oriented movies. Of those movies that I’ve done with with Kevin and Bill, the big blockbusters yield the most fun for people. So that’s my wormy answer. Personally, I love to do the ’80s movies, but on a satisfaction level I love “solving” the action movies.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you.

I’m probably the only food dork who hasn’t been watching Alton Brown for the last 9 years or so. He became a fixture on the Food Network just about the time that I felt that I had learned everything I needed to learn, for the moment, about the whole food and cooking hobby. So it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago when we were filling the Tivo at random while the flu rampaged through the house that I happened to watch Good Eats for the first time.

And I like it. It’s not so much the content or the recipes themselves I like. After all, he has at least one show where he tells me that brown rice tastes good (bah!). No. What I like is the visual and narrative style. Narrative style in a cooking show? Well, yeah.

It took a few shows for me to figure out what it was that I found refreshing and enjoyable in this series. The first thing I realized was that the man never uses that ANSI standard boring straight on or three quarter shot of the cook standing behind his stove. He also never uses the standard above the pan mirror shot. In fact, he hardly ever uses a regular shot at all. There are goofy wide angle shots, off kilter tilted shots that dance back and forth as he talks, point of view shots looking out from the oven or up from the bottom of a pot of boiling water and on and on.

I also like how this show has characters, rather than just the personality of the host alone. The food police show up from time to time. There is the “nutritional anthropologist” and the “culinary scientist”, both of whom are light-hearted caricatures rather than dry academics types with a tendency to drone. Finally, there is the “hand” that is always taking stuff off the set or bringing stuff on the set.

The hand is also one of many ways the show manipulates time during the presentation. Most cooking shows just present the execution of a recipe as if the cameras were rolling on the cook working live. Good Eats is produced so that some important techniques in real time for illustrative purposes, but the progress of the cooking is accelerated via judicious editing. This allows Brown to concentrate on teaching you techniques or general principles rather than the particulars of a specific recipe. Being an engineering dork, I like the way he abstracts away the details to tell you about what is more generally applicable.

Since he skips the boring parts, he can fill the rest of the show with his unending patter about the trivia surrounding various ingredients and techniques. This often takes the form of Alton Brown talking into the camera, usually with some sort of outlandish prop that looks like something he stole from a preschool. But just as often it is fed to you in what can only be called a series of scenes, with “actors” playing characters. Each show comes off more like a short film with a little narrative centered around food. This is a refreshing change from the literal style in the rest of food television.

There was the show where he repeatedly takes different kinds of cookies to his sister, only to be rejected over and over again. There was the show where he works on getting okra a TV deal. There was the show where a giant monster made up of green leafy vegetables invades his kitchen. There was the show where he gets busted by the church ladies for stealing casserole. And so on and so forth.

After collecting about half a dozen episodes of the show, I found myself curious as to where this production style came from. It surprised me that a food guy would do something so different from all of the other drek on the Food Network. It turns out that the style of the show makes perfect sense when you find out that Alton Brown got his start in the film industry and not the food industry. For me, this approach serves to keep my interest in the show even if I am pretty familiar with the food ideas that he is discussing.

So, I say, do not fear the fact that he populates the Food Network. Put this stuff in your Tivo. It’s good TV and as a bonus, will lead you to good eats too.

But, he is lying about the brown rice thing. You can’t trust anyone who gets long grain white rice from his chinese takeout joint.

I’ve returned from my sojourn across half of the nation. Along the way, there were plenty of adventures: the Priceline reservation that turned out to be in a crack den, the fabulous KC barbecue, delicious and hard-to-get booze, and, of course, the disaster that ended in my being stranded in Indianapolis for an extra day. All of that will be written about in good time, once I’ve collected my thoughts.

But for today, I’d just like to share one discovery that has nothing to do with the trip other than it was an album I bought to keep me company: Richard Thompson’s 1000 Years of Popular Music

Thompson does a great job of explaining the concept, so I’ll take the liberty of quoting him here:

The idea came from Playboy Magazine — I was asked to submit a list in late 1999 of the 10 greatest songs of the Millennium. Ha! I thought, hypocrites, they don’t mean millennium, they mean 20 years — I’ll call their bluff and do a real thousand-year selection. My list was similar to the choices here…starting in about 1068, and winding slowly up to 2001.

The album is, simply, breathtaking, combining an incisive editorial sensibility with Thompson’s virtuoso guitar and willing, if not always appropriate, vocals.

I can be forgiven, I hope, if I find the earlier tracks more compelling than the more contemporary material. Everyone, it seems, is familiar with his cover of Oops… I Did It Again. For my money, the standout track is Bonnie St. Johnstone, a murder ballad whose structure will be familiar to anyone who has heard Nick Cave’s interpretation of Henry Lee.

Thompson is accompanied by Judith Owen on keyboards and Debra Dobkin on percussion, and each of those performers get a turn at the vocals on appropriate songs. The simple instrumentation works extremely well for the breadth of the album.

To give you an idea of some of the breadth of the material, here’s a brief promotional sample from YouTube:

The album is available on iTunes, but I couldn’t resist paying just a bit more to get the DVD and CD combined set. The DVD/CD set comes in a lovely little case with an integrated booklet giving a little information on each song. It’s nothing you couldn’t find on the web, but it’s a nice package in and of itself. And although I shouldn’t have to say this, given Thompson’s role as an independent artist, I’ll say it anyway: don’t steal this music. Buy it. Although as Michael Collins notes, “Thompson’s an artist who has spent most his career figuring out how to accomodate bootleggers - his major revenue stream is now a collection of authorized bootlegs (Celtschmerz, Ducknapped and the like) that are only available off the website. Looking at this disc, it’s the most “fan-friendly” thing I’ve seen”.

Most of Richard Thompson’s music can also be ordered from his web site, where he shows a wonderful degree of communication with his fans.

1000 Years of Popular Music by Richard Thompson. If more artists were creating albums like this, more people would be buying albums.

I remember a couple of months ago I got a little notice from Amazon.com when I visited the web site saying that the credit card information I had given them was about to expire, and that I should go to my account page and fix it. So I went to my account page and fixed it.

Apparently the same thing happened at Xbox Live. Because Microsoft is going to crush all comers in the online service sweepstakes, you would think that they’d have a similarly streamlined scheme for dealing with this issue. Of course, if you think this, you will find yourself at home at 9pm on the phone with some Indian guy who really doesn’t give a shit. This is because Microsoft customer service is retarded.

Let me go over all the mistakes Microsoft has made here, one by one.

Mistake 1: No warning

Every time I turn on the Xbox, it calls up the Xbox Live mothership and logs me in. Presumably, it also downloads a bunch of account information at this time. Yet, I never got one message warning me that I’d have to update my credit card info or lose my access in the last three or four months. Not one. Never. They hold my TV hostage while I watch the little “you just logged in” spinning lightshow of death for 45 seconds and they tell me nothing until my account is already suspended. This is because they are retarded.

Mistake 2: Conflicting User Interface Messages

Here is what happened when I tried to fix my accont from my console. I would tell the console to login. It would fail and give me a message about how my account was suspended. It would ask if I wanted to go to the account management page to fix it. I would say “sure, go to the account management page and fix it.” The account management user interface would appear for 10 seconds and then immediately disappear. I would try to login again. This time I would get no error message. I open up the profile editor and try to get into the account settings. It tells me I have to be logged in to Xbox Live. I try to login, and again it does not fail, but apparently does not succeed either.

Is my account suspended?

Am I logged in or not?

Is there any other way to the account management interface?

For grins, I try to get to the account settings page at Xbox.com and it says the that the page doesn’t exist.

Nowhere in this space age online service is there a single screen telling me what is wrong and allowing me to fix it. This is because the interface is retarded.

Mistake 3: No Backup Authentication

The Xbox Live account is primarily hooked up to my credit card number. I understand this. It makes sense. But, I also have a login and password on the Xbox.com web site and gamertag info on my console hooked up to this authorization information. Unfortunately, neither of these cookies allows you to manipulate suspended account information. Once the credit card authorization goes bad, you are basically dead in the water for convenient online account management. There is no other way to gain access to the account. Even though Microsoft has arranged for you to hook up multiple pieces of identity information to your Xbox Live presence, none of it does you any good if the primary key goes away. Thus, we are left with the final failure of the system (since it is retarded).

Mistake 4: If I have to Call You on the Phone You Have Failed

The fundamental theorem of online commerce is that I should never have to call you on the phone. Aside from tracking packages, this is the most important role that the Internet plays: phone avoidance.

But since they failed so horribly, I had to call Microsoft on the phone and spend 20 minutes talking to a completely apathetic Indian man so that he could go to some internal user interface and type in my credit card number for me. This brings the total time I have spent on the phone with Microsoft in the past 12 months to about 150 minutes, which is about 145 minutes too many.

For a system that is supposed to be the world’s most advanced integrated online gaming experience, this is a failure of monumental proportions. The whole point of putting the service on the network in the first place is that I should never have to actually talk to one of your worthless phone drones. I pay Amazon good money for Amazon prime and I have never had to talk to them on the phone. I expect nothing less from any other for pay online service. The only acceptable level of phone usage is zero. Ok, maybe just above zero.

Sadly, Xbox Live fails at this. Because they are retarded.

Maybe I’ll go play some Halo now.

Tonight a simple tip: size matters, so make sure you give the food enough space. This tip comes with a story.

Back when I was younger, I used to actually ride my bike regularly in the summer. Wednesday nights. So one Wednesday I left to do my ride and I left my lovely wife with the task of prepping some aromatics for whatever we were making that night. The recipe called for her to cut up and saute off some celery. This should have gone well, but I forgot to give her tonight’s tip.

I got back from my ride to find a pan full of about 2 pounds of celery at various levels of doneness. She had not used the right size pan, or, if the right size pan did not exist, had not done the celery in batches.

So: give the food enough space. Make sure that when you put the food in the pan you still have enough room to swish it around, stir it, toss it in the air. For most saute purposes, you don’t want the pan to be much more than half full unless the food is going to shrink a lot, like greens do.

This doesn’t just apply to pans. I can’t count the number of kitchens I’ve been in where they expect you to cut up food on a board that is smaller than the screen on this laptop. Such a device leaves you no room to move the cut food out of the way. It barely leaves you enough room to even have the food and the knife on the board at the same time. Don’t let this happen to you. Get the biggest board you can possibly carry. Which brings me to a tangent about cutting boards. Leave those crappy glass and soft plastic boards in the store. They will ruin your life. The commercial style plastic boards are OK. Various synthetic/wood mixtures are OK. But for me, wood cutting boards are by far the best. Ok, end of tangent.

Finally, this tip applies to the dark arts of cooking pasta correctly. It’s taken more than 25 years, but I think I’m finally learning the basics. The most basic basic is: use a pot that lets you have enough water around the pasta. Then it won’t stick together and it won’t sit on the bottom of the pan and become a mess. A 6 quart stock pot with 3-4 quarts of water is the minimum you need for (say) around half a pound of pasta. For up to a pound, I use an 8 quart pot with 5-6 quarts of water in it. That’s pushing it though, bigger would be better.

So there you have it. A simple and obvious pointer that will save you time and aggravation. Give the food enough space.

Those of you following me on Twitter know that I managed to find not just one, but three of the types of booze I’ve been looking for last night. This is one of the nice things about travelling out of state: I get to shop at liquor stores that aren’t run by people who are profoundly uninterested in selling liquor.

Here in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, there are at least two local chains that are worth visiting: the larger Berbiglia, and, my new favorite, Gomer’s. Why I like Gomer’s so much can best be illustrated by a short story.

A couple of months ago, I went into a PLCB store — one of their “premier” locations — and asked for a bottle of maraschino liqueur. I needed maraschino in order to make some of the drinks in the Savoy cocktail book, because I was following along with the (somewhat train-wreck-like) Stomping Through The Savoy “make one of every drink” discussion at eGullet. There are a couple of brands of this type of liqueur. There’s Luxardo, and Maraska, and probably a few others. When I asked the clerk for some help, her response was to simply look up and say “There’s no such thing.”

It exists.

“There’s no such thing.” It’s hard to capture the wrongheadedness of this response to a customer. First, it’s inaccurate. Second, it’s insulting. Third, it evinces an almost pathological fear of improving your inventory. Now, one could be generous and assume that what she really meant was “We don’t have it,” but you know what? I am completely done being generous to the PLCB. When a customer walks in to your store and asks for a product you don’t have, you should find out what the product is so that you can obtain it (or, at least, consciously decide not to obtain it). Somewhere deep in the bowels of a building in Harrisburg the PLCB has a buyer, who is probably a very nice person, who has to decide what spirits they carry. That person, unfortunately, has no goddamn idea what their customers want, because when customers walk into stores and ask for a product, the idiots at the counter tell them “Sorry, it doesn’t exist,” and then never mention it to the store manager or the buyers in Harrisburg.

The PLCB is a large retail operation. Large retail operations succeed or fail by creating processes that their employees must follow to remove uncertainty from the transaction. When I walk into a PLCB and ask for something they don’t have, I always get a different response. Sometimes I get the unhelpful brush off. But not always. Sometimes I get well-meaning but ineffectual assistance from some nice employee who spends 15 minutes trying to look up the product in a huge book that doesn’t have it. Sometimes I encounter someone who knows what the product is, but not how to obtain it. And then, the best case is that I encounter someone who knows what the product is and can help me special order it, which means I only have to spend 15 minutes at the store helping him fill out a form and giving them money, and then coming back later in the week to pick up my product. The point here is that the very uncertainly in how my requests are going to be processed creates a huge disincentive for me, the customer, to even bother asking. I start from the assumption that it’s going to be too painful to get a bottle of liquor from the store that sells liquor.

Here’s what happened when I asked for the Luxardo Maraschino at Gomer’s: the clerk said “Oh, are you making Aviations?” Then he asked for my phone number, scribbled it down, and said “OK. We’ll have it here by Friday. We’ll call you. Bye!”

Feeling lucky, I then asked “Do you have any creme de violette?” The clerk said “Well, there are a few brands of that, but most are pretty bad. I think we can get you the Marie Brizard, though. Let me check.” He spent about a minute typing into a computer, and confirmed that he could get it. I added 2 bottles of that to the order. All of this took less time than it took me to explain to a clerk at a PLCB “Premium Spirits” store what Armagnac was.

In summary: the next time you need to buy liquor, you may find it more convenient to drive 15 hours to Gomer’s in Kansas City than to go to your local PLCB store.

Gomer’s also had a bottle of the Suntory Yamazaki single malt whisky. I’ve been a bit obsessed with Japanese whisky ever since I started reading Nonjatta, but this is the first time I’ve managed to taste any. The Yamazaki is a product that the PLCB does actually carry, but only as a special order, and as I’ve detailed before, placing special orders with the PLCB is too inconvenient to bother with.

I expected that, in the name of experience, I was simply paying too much money for a bottle of whisky that was going to taste like a mid-tier blended scotch. I was wrong. The Yamazaki is absolutely fascinating, and I highly recommend it to fans of single malt. It has a clean, almost aggressively clean highland-like taste, fresh malt and just a hint of peat. The strangest thing about it is the body; most Scottish single malts I’m familiar with have a certain weighty mouthfeel. “Oily” isn’t quite the right word, but they definitely have a heft and presence that is distinctive. The Yamazaki was feather-light and delicate. Normally it’s a mouthfeel I’d associate with liquors that are overly attenuated, but attenuation carries a host of unpleasant flavors with it, and this had none. It is, truly, a superb whisky, and one that I will buy again, even at its given price, which compares to that of mid-range Scottish single malts. It also makes me regret that more Japanese whiskys aren’t imported into the US: it’s clear to me that we’re missing out on quite a phenomenon here.

The flu hit the household a couple of weeks ago, so just before I was taken down with fever, chills and that whole body ache, I stocked us up on the main defense against this sort of thing: chicken soup.

This soup is similar to another lazy recipe I talked about before but it’s been refined a bit and is slightly more work. The basic idea is the same. First you spend a day making a nice chicken stock. Then the next day you combine this stock with more fresh vegetables and roasted chicken meat to put the final soup together. So, on to the details.

Basic Chicken Stock

This is the easy part. First, buy a two or three pound package of chicken wings, necks or whatever. Now make a about a cup or two of diced onion. I find that one of the huge onions at Whole Foods is enough. If you have smaller onions, use two. Do the same with 2 or 3 carrots, and 2 or 3 stalks of celery. Saute the veggies in a soup pot with some olive oil and salt. Then add the chicken pieces, peppercorns, a bay leaf and water to cover or a bit more. Bring the liquid to a boil, then turn the heat down to get a simmer. Simmer uncovered for a while then covered for a while for a total of three or four hours. Play some Halo.

You should end up with a couple of quarts of strong stock. After a night in the fridge it should look like chicken stock jello.

Roasted Chicken

This is the fun part. Get yourself a small roasting chicken. I found the horrendously expensive free range chickens at Whole Foods to be the right size. Regular Purdue chickens or whatever tend to be too large. Chop a clove of garlic and stuff it into the cavity of the bird along with a couple of pinches of salt. Then rub the outside of the chicken with olive oil, salt, thyme, rosemary, and whatever else you like.

Put this in the oven in a shallow pan and roast it for around an hour or a bit more depending on how big the bird is. Take it out, let it cool off and then pull the meat off. Eat some of it for lunch, and then chop up the rest for the soup.

Chicken Soup

This is the last part. Start with your chicken stock and the pieces of meat you made. Then take another onion and dice it as small as you can. It helps to buy a hideously expensive Japanese knife for this. Do the same with two carrots and one or two stalks of celery.

Now get that soup pot out again and heat up some more olive oil. Add the veggies and some salt and pepper. Mix that around for five or ten minutes until the onion is soft. Now add the chicken, a quart or a bit more of stock, about the same amount of water and some white wine. The only thing you really need to worry about is balancing the amount of liquid with the solids. Just do it until it looks like soup. Simmer this for a while, add more salt and pepper to taste. To give it a Chinese feel, add Chinese cabbage and white pepper.

If you want noodles in your soup, cook them separately in another pot, then put them in a bowl and serve the soup on top. Noodles in the soup are pointless because the next day they’ll get nasty.

Matzoh balls are also nice.

So there you have it. This basic scheme works for almost all soups. Try adding bacon in the last part. Bacon makes all soups nicer.

Credits

The idea for adding the roasted chicken was stolen from the cookbook we got from my son’s school. Thanks to Brenda for this idea. I don’t know why I never considered it before.

For a while now I’ve wanted a microscope for performing various silly home science experiments. This week, I found one.

It’s marketed as a children’s toy: the “My First Lab” Duo scope. “Duo,” in this context, means that it has two lights, one above the stage and one below. I had a microscope when I was a kid. I used microscopes throughout college. This silly little thing, at just over $50 — FIFTY DOLLARS — is better than any microscope I’ve ever used. Now, I didn’t major in the life sciences or work in any of the labs with the neat equipment; I only have the beat up, abused freshman equipment to compare against. But as far as I’m concerned, this thing is a god-damned revelation. I’ve spent more on dinner than I have on this thing, and it is awesome.

It comes with everything you need — other than AA batteries — to get started. A few prepared slides, a few blank slides, a petri dish, various probes, plastic forceps, a little scalpel, and a couple of different dyes. I’ve spent the whole night preparing different samples to look at, just for fun (pray for my cats. They are terrified, and rightly so.) The eyepiece is 10x, and the objectives are 4x, 10x, and 40x. The LED lights (you can only use one at a time, above or below) do a better job of illuminating the subject than my pathetic childhood incandescent-and-mirror setup ever did.

This is not heavy duty equipment. It’s very light, and feels relatively fragile. But the one thing is, it does the job and the other point is it was only $50. If you’ve wanted an excuse to own a microscope, here it is. Take two. They’re cheap.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to obsessive-compulsively search the interwebs for a 20x eyepiece.

Apologies to Don DeLillo for lifting his phrase for the title of this post.

I fired up Shadow of the Colossus last night only to find that I had somehow managed to overwrite my “You beat the game” save file. The last save I have is right before the final battle with the last Colossus. I’d rather pull out my own teeth than jump straight into that battle just to unlock Time Attack mode — again — but I see there are all sorts of save files for the game on GameFaqs. Do any of our Alert Readers know the easiest way for me to transfer one of these saves from my PC to a PS2 memory card? Inquiring minds want to know.

Today I got home from dinner and sat down to do some coughing while I surfed up some of my regular web sites on the couch. Today was a good surfing day because I came across two links worth sharing with you, our beloved readers. One is a smart article, one is a stupid article.

First the good news. There’s been a lot of traffic at the game boards on the role of piracy in the PC gaming industry. I have no real opinion on this since I don’t play games on my PC. First, my PC is a Mac. Second, if I felt like playing games on my PC I could just go in the kitchen and cut my fingers off with a kitchen knife. It would be more enjoyable. I’ll stick with my consoles and hand-helds. Thanks. Still, the smart article I found today is about piracy and PC gaming. Since I mostly agree with it I’ll let it speak for itself. I think it is a perceptive commentary on the nature of PC development, PC development houses and the general mentality of the “hard core” PC gamer.

Now the dumb news. As usual, The Escapist is trying to be erudite and literate and instead just comes off as your friend who never managed to completely shed his adolescence. Even the title of the article has a frat-boy sensibility to it.

The premise of this piece is something like “sure, we’d all love to be playing serious games, but that shouldn’t keep us from being juvenile assholes once in a while.” He uses The Witcher as a basis for his arguments, claiming that even though the game is puerile and borderline misogynistic, it’s all in good fun.

Now, I would normally agree with the sentiment in this piece. I, for one, am not one to take anything too seriously. But here is something I think the gaming industry needs to wake up and realize right now. All of those complaints from people that games are in general about nothing but being a juvenile asshole come about because the content in your beloved video games is, for the most part, about nothing but being a juvenile asshole. We’ve ranted about this before, but for some reason no one except our ten readers seems to hear the message.

The quality and maturity of gaming as a medium will ultimately be judged by the quality and maturity of the content and with very very few exceptions there isn’t really a lot of content to be proud of, yet. I think that this will improve over time, but it will not improve if the very people who are supposed to be holding the industry up to a higher critical standard continue to be so delusional. The only way to get better content will be to demand better content and to call out the developers who create crap as the crap peddlers that they are.

Maybe I can help. Here are some things that video games don’t really need any more of:

1. Vaguely racist “crime fighting” games where you shoot minorities for fun and profit.

2. Hooker assault simulators.

3. Games where you collect sex cards.

4. Three-way sex with a God mini-games.

And on and on and on. The problem I have with this article is not the idea that we shouldn’t have some juvenile fun once in a while. My problem is with the claim that there is any content at all in out in the video game landscape that really rises above the level of juvenile fun. I haven’t seen it. I think the Defenders of the Glory of the Mature Video Game are going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that it’s there.