This is Epth Nation 2.6

(He’s blue, ba-ba-di bab-ba-doo)

I feel especially qualified to comment on the movie Darkon because of all the nerd cred I’ve accrued over the years.  I do work with computers, after all.  And I have played role-playing games.  Therefore, I think I understand the deep inner-workings of men (and a few women) who would form a completely fake medieval territory in their spare time.  That’s right — they formed their own land, on top of, you know, America.  But don’t worry — it’s not illegal if it’s imaginary.  Keep that in mind as I explain this.

Essentially, Darkon is a role-playing game come to life.  “People” play “characters” and are divided into “countries” with “armies” under “gods” that have “wars” for “land” and “resources.”  They even have fake currency!  It’s all well-organized, and there are strict rules governing everything, from costumes to battles.  These are some no-nonsense nerds, let me tell you.  Everyone has names that are straight out of boring fantasy novels — “Bannor,” “Keldar,” “Croaker,” etc.  It’s all about Serious Imagination as opposed to Funny Imagination, and therefore I was bristling at it for the entire movie.

I’m beginning to really dig documentaries.  I can’t remember the last time I saw a bad one, or one that didn’t engage my mind.  They always get me thinking.  So, what did Darkon make me think about?  Well…

1) These people, especially the leaders, spend a LOT of TIME playing it. They make flyers, organize battles, pay off people with fake money, plan and make high-sounding speeches to inspire “troops,” keep track of what fake country owns what fake piece of land, and have overnight campouts once a month IN CHARACTER.  Talk about a beating-and-a-half.  Two straight days of living in tents and watching other people (and your own self) live out weird D&D-related fantasies.  Wait…that sounds like a renaissance faire!

2) The movie tried to compare the fake-life and real-life accomplishments of the two main characters, as a way to make the point that “People are what they are, and no fake country is going to change that.”  The corporate ubernerd ends up beating the pants off the guy whose brother kicked him out of the family business, just like in real life.  It’s a bit like an action movie where the bad guys win, actually.  Not the best move, from a filmmaking point of view.  The director should have paid people off in fake money to get a better outcome.  Now that would have been a twist.

3) Poingant scene: When the “loser” (named Bannor — not Bruce Banner, or even Banner, but Bannor) goes to Denny’s to meet with one of his friends who has just betrayed him in the game, and they have an awkward conversation where the real and role-playing worlds collide.  Bannor/Loser really takes it personally, which leads one to suspect that his interest in the game has reached unhealthy levels.  It would be like me getting mad at the fake Noah Bromley* for killing me in Unreal Tournament.

4) Some of the “people” in the game have real girlfriends/boyfriends/spouses, and some have fake “in-game” relationships, and some have both(!)  Makes me wonder how many divorces Darkon has caused.

5) These guys really, really like Braveheart.

6) All that praying to fake “gods” was funny.  The most powerful country’s “god” is a griffon named Kodos.  All that careful serious planning, and they end up naming their deity after one of the aliens on The Simpsons.  Hah-hah.

I liked this movie a lot.  If you want to see what happens when nerds grow up, gain resources, and take their nerdiness to its logical conclusion, I recommend it.  However, if fake pontification and/or people in blue makeup bother you, then you should probably steer clear.

Now I’m off to play some Doom…

*Way, way, too far inside.  I can only hope Noah Bromley googles himself and wonders who the heck I am.

Dallasites have an addiction to other people’s stuff.  Every morning I wake up and turn on the news, only to find that 1-10 ATMs have been ripped out of convenience stores overnight and thieves have destroyed some poor business’ air conditioning unit to steal the copper wire inside.  I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing, a drug thing, a southern thing, or what — I just know I nail down all my posessions every day out of a fear of massive and ubiquitous theft.

They could pass a law to make it harder for copper stealers to sell to scrap yards (and the cops are pushing hard for it), but instead Dallas has decided to cap the total number of pets in one household at 6 and force all dogs and cats to be spayed or neutered.  That’ll solve the great pet crisis we’re all feeling*, but what about the people taking other people’s stuff?  Don’t we need freedom from them?

Dallas has passed laws forbidding smoking in restaurants, It’s passed laws that forbid talking on cell phones in school zones.  It’s about to pass laws that forbid menageries.  How about we actually tackle a problem that affects people in a really adverse way?  What’s worse — secondhand smoke or having to replace an air conditioner unit in 100 degree weather?  Living next door to 7 cats, or having a truck drive through your convenience store window?  Where’s the perspective?

I’ve got a lot of technology to talk about these days, so it looks like I might take the old electric paddles to the tech blog here very soon.  I recently discovered:  KDE 4 (interesting), Object Dock (greatness), Firefox 3 (newness), and many other things that would make your eyes roll up in your head and produce in you a technological coma.   That’s why I have a tech blog.

Speaking of technology, some magazine somewhere did a study on so-called “early adopters” — you know, those people who get their iPhones the day they come out.  Turns out they’re not only young and affluent, they’re also driven, assertive, arrogant, and the types of people that make one run and scream when one sees them coming ’round the bend.  Early adopters, of course, are saying that they “know what they want and aren’t afraid to go after it,” which in turns proves the whole point.

Belated congratulations to the Celtics and their star player Ray Allen for winning the NBA championship.  The sad part is, if the Ray Allen trade had never happened, Ray would have never gotten his ring.  Man, why did I have to bring that trade up?  Now I’m mad again.  Anyway, good job beating Kobe and his surly disposition.

(This, my friends, is what arrogance looks like)

My viewing of Enron: TSGITR (heretofore referred to as just Enron) two weeks ago has become a little watershed event in my life, as it forever changed the way I view rich people, energy, business in general, the markets, and those guys you see on TV talking about investments.  I knew the generic facts about the Enron story going in:  The accounting scandal, the fact that top execs sold off millions in Enron stock and didn’t let their employees do the same, Enron CEO Ken Lay’s conviction and death,  the Bush administration’s deep connections to the company, etc.  Those things didn’t surprise me.  What got to me were two enduring images:  Enron employees calling power plants in California after deregulation and asking them to shut down for a while, then gleefully talking with each other about all the money they were about to make as rolling blackouts hit the state like a jackhammer; and, Enron uberdouche Jeffrey Skilling and all the employees who trusted him and kissed his butt to the bitter end.

I hadn’t realized to what extent Big Energy manipulated the California markets, and how much misery they caused in the name of making money.  And they even used the ensuing crisis to get Governor Gray Davis recalled in favor of the pro-deregulation Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The whole situation floored me.  It’s humanity at its most callous, and it was all caused by love of money.   Who was it that said that greed is good?  We all think that profit is an acceptable motive, but clearly it can’t be allowed to be the only motive.  Where were the curbs?  Are the robber barons still out there?  Enron was allowed to be dreadful because of laissez-faire economics, plain and simple.

The meager safeguards we had in place didn’t catch Enron until thousands of people’s lives were financially ruined.  The company used its influence to bully journalists not sympathetic to their unique brand of market manipulation, and therefore nobody noticed their strange immunity to market downturns (caused almost solely by illegal accounting practices).  It’s amazing what people will turn a blind eye to (or flat-out lie about) if money and influence is involved.

Which brings us to Jeffery Skilling, the man who everybody wanted to be.  I can’t imagine how much of his butt was kissed in the 90’s by employees and others who thought he was a genius…and all the while he was lying about the profitability of his company.  Of course, being a genius, he abruptly quit and sold his stock right before the crap hit the fan.  I could go on and on about Mr. Skilling as he’s portrayed in Enron:  His insane hubris, his internal disconnect between the truth he had to know (that Enron was failing) and the lies he was trying to get everyone else to believe, his worship of risk, his belief that he was smarter and better than everybody else, his annual firing of a certain percentage of Enron employees based on performance reviews (why do all the scuzzbags believe so strongly in Darwinism?), the fact that all the genius ideas he had turned out to be so very tragically bad, etc.  He’s truly a cautionary tale to all the d-bags out there who would flatten their own grandmothers to make a buck, or at least those who think it would be cool if their office had its own staircase.

Yeah, so go rent Enron.  I can’t say for sure that it’ll change your life, but it will make you think about capitalism and corruption.  And in an election year those are probably good things to think about.

Taking a short break from arrogance week to write:

You know those keys on your keyboard that do stuff?  I.e., in every word processor ever made the “return” key does a carriage return?  Well, in Opera, when you press the return key, you move the cursor to the beginning of the paragraph and drop the current paragraph down a line.  Also, hitting the “tab” key from the title line will highlight the title line for no reason.  They didn’t tell me this when they offered Opera as a free download.