Saalon Muyo

I like screwed up horror films.  I admit it.  I watch flicks like Hostel and Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes and The Night Train Murders and enjoy the heck out of them.  They’re a little sick and maybe a touch depraved, but they’re sick and scary and usually a wild ride.

So in that spirit I got out Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, on the advice of Flick Chick Maitland McDonough and am currently watching it.  I expected fun.  I received boredom.

I’m so bored that I started reading reviews of the film to see if other people had also fought oncoming coma while watching it, hoping for some helpful advice.  That’s not what I found, so instead I’m keeping myself alive by writing this post.

People divide neatly into two camps: This Film Is So Screwed Up It’s Offensive, and This Film Is A Dark Mirror On Humanity.  Interestingly,  horror fans seem to go for the former, while real movie people fall into the latter.  They’re both wrong.  This movie isn’t good enough to be either offensive or insightful.  For a film about the torture, rape and murder of a 13 year old girl, it strikes me as downright silly.

Anyway, I needed to take one crack at the people praising this movie as important, because that’s what I do.  A lot of people who enjoyed this dumptruck loaded with boredom like to note how much less icky and graphic this movie is compared to Hostel and it’s like, insinuating that, as a horror film, this one is less seedy than its contemporaries.

Yes, yes, folks, you heard it right.  The film about tying up a naked 13 year old girl and burning her girl parts with a blowtorch is less inappropriate than Hostel, which keeps its depraved eye fixed firmly on adults.  I’m properly educated.

And bored.  Really bored.

It’s been two weeks since our last talk.  Welcome back to the spotlight.

thanks, eric … yikes, two weeks already?

Scary, isn’t it?  We’re almost to the finish line.  I’d like to talk a little about your interaction with the community this time.  But first, the important question: Are you going to make it to 14 and a half?

that’s looking grim, man…. on the plus side, i got the half-song done last night. but i’m cutting it really close. i have only 8 completed songs, and there are just 5 days and change left before official event cut-off… ok, let’s say YES. yes, i will make it to 14. but take that with a big grain of “i hope.”

I have faith in you.  Your writing, to me, seems to be getting stronger and more confident as the month goes on.  Is that just my perception?

well it’s interesting that you should say so, cause any changes you might see in my writing over the course of this month stem from a complete deficit of confidence.

i keep having ideas that are about 10 x more ambitious than my skill on any given instrument, and end up feeling so awful about the whole thing that i’m really stripping it down to basics. of the last 5 songs i posted, 4 have had simpler arrangements than anything i’ve done before

that might come across as me being more confident in the songs themselves, or my voice, or whatever, but in the spirit of full disclosure, i’m arranging within my instrumental prowess.

that being said, i’m becoming more enamored with the stripped down isaac sound, and i just may carry on in that vein after this torturous month is over.

It’s funny you should mention the simpler stylings.  I challenged you earlier this month to produce a stripped-down song, and was surprised to see not 1, but 3 far simpler arrangements.  Did I cross a journalistic line?

hahah i’m so totally your bitch

well as you saw on the site, i originally wrote a piano and vocal piece based on your challenge, although i did put in some sound effects. after that, i found that things just seemed to work better with the bare-bones instrumentation. i do have a song in progress that’s in-your-face loud and elaborate, so i haven’t given up on that aesthetic…. but yeah, i’d say your challenge opened me up to what i’ve been doing over the last week for sure.

but you were my friend and an artistic inspiration long before you became my interviewer anyway. if anything, this journalism gig is crossing a friendship line.

Touche, and thanks for the segue to community involvement.  What effect does the feedback from the community have on your writing?  In such a compressed time frame with such a small social circle it must carry a different impact than normal critique.

indeed it does.

comments on one’s early FAWM songs can really inform the creation of future ones.

last year, i set out to make a bunch of pop songs, and it was people’s response to my branching out that led to fawm 2007’s output being a mishmash of genres and mood experiments.

this year, i’ve found that the feedback has influenced me in slightly different ways.

i’m not so much striving to capture more sounds or more styles…. but rather i want to write more honestly.

i never noticed how many people comment primarily on lyrics.

obviously lyrics hold a place of supreme importance in music, and have differing value to every music listener.

but it’s almost like i didn’t discover until fawm 2008 that i could use lyrics to actually move people, instead of just making them laugh or roll their eyes or whatever.

some people in the community picked up on the poignancy behind some lines in my first few songs, so that kind of drove me off that cliff of “too much information”

and i posted this ridiculously revealing song about my relationship with my father. well there was no turning back from there. i’ve still been posting a mixture of fictional songs with autobiographical songs, but i feel like everything has been more raw and emotional.

(hopefully without being trite or cloying…. feedback thusfar looks like i pulled it off, knock on wood)

How about other people’s music?  Do you find that’s an important influence as the month stretches on?

in some ways it is. to be completely honest, commenting slows to a crawl at this time of the month. basically, you have hundreds of fawmers desperately hurrying to reach the quota of 14.5 songs, and the total number of streamable demos has grown so large (2,428 as i type this) that every individual song starts receiving less and less attention.

but up until that turning point where people stop listening as much and focus primarily on writing (usually mid-week 3), people take tons of inspiration from others’ music.

i know that for me, hearing another person do something unexpected is the most inspirational for me.

i mean, there are lots of amazing songs posted by some very talented people… but when someone breaks free from their creative comfort zone and does something risky or reckless, that’s when i look over at jackie t (that’s my electric) and start wanting to write.

Do you have a tight circle within the community who you keep in contact with?

i wouldn’t say it’s tight. you see the same names recur on the same FAWMers’ songs a lot, mostly because of the way they have the site set up with a “watchlist” of your favourite songwriters.

there’s a few people on there whose music i appreciate so much (and it seems to be mutual) that we interact a bit more personally than with others. and a handful of FAWMers have ended up on my chat software.

your question actually shines a light on the biggest thing i would want to tell an outsider about FAWM… and that is, the community will give back to you whatever you put into the community. someone who joins FAWM, posts a bunch of songs but never comments on other people’s songs, and the only time they post on the forum is to put up a whiny message like, “how come [name]’s songs have 20 comments apiece, but nobody’s even listened to mine?” well, that guy isn’t going to be too welcome.

but if you’re there to have fun, and you’re sharing your thoughts on other people’s ideas and music, they’ll listen to yours. it all sounds very obvious, but every year i’m surprised to see that some people just don’t get it.

You mentioned you were planning on collaborating this time.  Has that happened?

it has! i had a collaboration planned out with elaine dimasi, the FAWMer from new york who covered my “nisku” song. but i ended up begging off until next month because of the tight deadlines, etc.

then last night, i received an IM from burr, the guy who runs the site (the “founding FAWMer”), and he invited me to contribute to a song he’d written.

it’s interesting, i’m actually quite self-conscious about the creation process itself. i very rarely let anybody hear anything until it’s in a state i consider presentable… so for my very first collaboration to be so spontaneous, and for it to be with the guy who runs this whole shebang… well, i’m impressed that i didn’t get all flustered or flake out.

it’s a good song! he had a killer riff to begin with, and after i added my verses, he went back and put the whole thing together. so while my contribution was minimal, it was a great introduction to the world of collaboration.

now i’m itchin’ to do more…. after FAWM, of course.

Does a collaboration count for both of you?  How does that work?

only one person is supposed to put a collaboration up (so it only counts towards one person’s “total” ticker), but they put the collaborator’s name in the song title so it comes up in searches.

so our collab shows under burr’s songs, as “talking in code (with Isaac Quatorze)”

but we can both count it as our half song

How about your non-FAWM life?  Is it surviving the month?

it’s surviving. i can’t remember if this came up during our last interview, but there’s a term on the site for the spouses / significant others of those participating in the event: FAWM widows. it’s sadly appropriate. i’ve been seeing my honey for brief 3-hour visits on saturdays, and i can barely focus on work these days.

Are the loved ones understanding of what the month does to your relationship?  Any tension?

well my family has been annoyed but they put up with it. and my very own best beloved FAWM widow has been nothing but supportive through it all, even offering to play any instruments for me while i carry on to writing the next song.

the biggest tension would be with work.

the timing is just so unfortunate. i was put on a new special project from february to april, which is very brain-intensive and requires frequent interruptions to meet with the group and share information, so i constantly have to fight the urge to start writing lyrics at work, and if i do fall into that trap, then my work suffers as a result.

Is it worse this year than last?

it is worse… much worse, for some reason. last year i had days and nights where i could sit at the piano or guitar for hours without anything coming to me. this year, i’ve had 3-4 day periods where i didn’t even want to see an instrument. it’s strange, i made a conscious effort not to let myself feel pressured by FAWM this year, and instead i’ve probably felt more pressure than i did in ‘07. AND i’m further behind by far.

I don’t want to keep you from your final sprint, so let’s wrap things up with this:  How bad is he last week of February going to be?

only time will tell…. i did, however, have the foresight to book off work on the 28th and 29th, so those will be two long days of the mad sprint. thanks for your encouragement eric, and for these thought-provoking interviews

And thank you for humoring me. Good luck!

Bush admin: U.S. has ‘lost intelligence’

Yes.  Yes it certainly has.

No, really, Microsoft’s obfuscation was necessary and in no way purposefully opaque!

Joel Spolsky seems like a really good programmer with solid design skills and a fantastic looking product, FogBugz.  On the other hand, his blog, Joel on Software is…not bad.  A lot of what he writes is at worst worth thinking about, and occasionally right on target.  Then every once and a while, his misplaced Microsoft sympathies come creeping out and he writes something like today’s post.  In it, he points out the absurd difficulty in reading and understanding Microsoft’s Office file format specifications just before telling us all why it was such a good idea and that its inherent unreadability and utter lack of portability were simply necessary side effects of good programming.

I don’t want to go point by point through his post.  Joel makes a lot of technical arguments whose validity is irrelevant: he’s working from a lot of goofy and faulty assumptions.  I imagine these are the same goofy and faulty assumptions that Microsoft’s design team works under when they produce their bloated, only occasionally functional monoliths.

There are a lot of things like: They were designed to be fast on very old computers.

And: They have to reflect all the complexity of the applications.

As well as: They were not designed with interoperability in mind.

The designed to be fast on very old computers thing amuses me, since the very argument Joel made in defense of Excel was that, unlike IBM’s Lotus package, Microsoft largely ignored the speed and hard drive limitations of the day, knowing that computers would get better quickly and thus having a product out that worked was more important.  I don’t buy that “efficiency” required a format no one could manage to implement today, even with the specification.  I’d like to note that the UNIX world managed to get by just fine without ever coming up with an equivalent binary monstrosity.  Plus, Word files were bloody huge, partially because of junk like Word’s “fast save” feature just slapping document updates onto the end of the file, leading to documents that grew in file size every time you saved a minor change.

I think it’s telling that the feature Joel suggests as the kind of complexity that necessitates massive binary specification is a “Keep With Next” function I never knew existed and have never seen anyone use.  This isn’t to say this is not a vital part of 5% of the user population’s day, but building a file format design that no one will ever be able to unpack so that you can add features most people don’t know exist is putting the cart far in front of the horse. Once again I must point out: The UNIX world managed to get by without binary madness filling in for reasonable document markup.

That’s what I can’t get past.  Other people have solved this problem, and they’ve solved it better.  We’re talking about tables and text files, here.  UNIX managed to get by with a minimum of crazy opaque binary formats, and largely due to this became the backbone of the Internet.  To suggest that Microsoft just couldn’t have anticipated interoperability being this important is insane.  UNIX hackers were making decision that facilitated interoperability since the 70’s, not because they pre-visioned the rise of the Internet, but because it was good design practice.

It’s possible Microsoft wasn’t prescient enough to see what was coming.  Microsoft certainly isn’t known for being forward thinking.  At best, they’re quick to react, purchasing or stealing the technology they needed to keep up with the market.  Even so, they never rectified their binary-file-format mistake, and I have no doubt it was for the same reason Microsoft obfuscates all of their formats: Because they can.  Microsoft’s control of the market relies on maintaining that control.  Not on producing better technology, or anticipating market trends, but simply by using its current market share to make switching to competing software so inconvenient that user laziness will sustain that market share.  Word 2003 had a big, opaque binary format so that people couldn’t easily switch to Linux and still read Word documents, thereby alienating them from the rest of the business community.  That this was not working is the only reason Word 2007 uses XML.

I can’t end without mentioning the flaw that cripples every Microsoft product, as spoken by Joel: They have to reflect the history of the applications.

Microsoft has been hobbled by the poor design decisions of its past for decades.  Everything from an MS DOS file system to the Registry to a lack of robust multi-user functionality is and must remain a part of the Microsoft codebase.  Every product by Microsoft has to be 100% compatible with every prior version of that product.  Word 2003 couldn’t have just imported in Word 97 formats, it had to stick with it, shoving even more binary madness into the spec to accommodate feature enhancements.  We’re not even talking about being backwards compatible with the OS here.  We’re talking about a marked-up text file.  It’s one thing to be backwards compatible with sane designs, like much of the UNIX world has been.  It’s another thing to be shackled to bad ideas you made in 1980.  Apple found itself in the same position, and scrapped their entire historical codebase.  Would the company still exist without OSX?  Maybe, but it certainly wouldn’t be growing its market share at all, let alone at their current rate.

There are reasons Microsoft’s dominating presence in the home and office spheres did not translate into the same market share online.  Most of them are laid out rather nicely in Joel’s post.  So check it out.

In honor of a holiday I don’t even like, I bring you the Top Ten Movie Romances that Aren’t in Romance Movies. Because Romance Movies are lame. Of course.

10. Paprika

You won’t know that you’re watching a romance develop until you’re almost at the end, but somehow the sweetness of the thing will overwhelm you if you let it. After a movie’s worth of slightly too much anger over her coworker Tokita’s lack of care for himself, we suddenly realize that Chiba really does care for her overweight friend. And Chiba’s really hot.

After a million Beauty’s-on-the-inside-but-can’t-be-seen-unless-you-get-a-makeover stories pouring out of Hollywood, seeing a romance blossom between a hot girl and an obese man simply because he’s a really good guy will make you heart melt. Unless you’re a hot guy who’s angry because the cool fat dude stole your girlfriend. In which case: Nyah-nyah!

9. Heavenly Creatures

Ok, so it’s a bit twisted. I mean, these two 16 year old girls become completely obsessed with each other, and end up killing one of their parents out of fear of being separated. But before all of that madness, there’s just a brief moment of the two of them showing the kind of maddening love that only two teenagers can feel for each other. Anyway, Valentine’s Day is way more twisted than simple matricide.

8. Magnolia

Somewhere in the middle of pt anderson’s sprawling, 3 hour opus about crisscrossing lives in Los Angeles, an incredibly touching relationship between a cocaine addict and a loser policeman begins. You keep waiting for the thing to end in some kind of train wreck, because the girl is just so screwed up and the guy is almost anti-social. But it doesn’t.

Even if you ignore the hopeful feeling this guy’s pure (if slightly pathetic) love for this damaged woman gives you, you can’t help but swoon when the two share one of the awesomest movie kisses ever.

7. The Empire Strike Back

Do I really need to go into this? Ok, ok, I’ll give you something:

Leia: I love you

Han: I know.

See?

6. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

What’s better than a movie romance where the couple in question never kiss, let alone consummate anything? One where they also do lots of flying kung fu and have goofy hairdos. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon manages to portray an unrequited romance that never comes off as melodramatic or contrived, even though one of them dies in the other’s arms by the end. I can only attribute this to Ang Lee’s superior kung fu magic.

Ok, in all seriousness, this film’s romance between Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien is both delicate and subtle, portraying a couple in love but separated out of the kind of honor and duty that you only see in martial arts films. Because Shu Lien is the widow of Li Mu Bai’s brother, they can never be together. That doesn’t stop Li Mu Bai from refusing to center himself at the moment of his death, though, thereby forsaking an eternity of enlightenment for one more moment with his love. Makes me to cry.

5. Batman Returns

Another twisted mess of a relationship, only this one has the added fun of latex bodysuits. Terminal headcases Batman and Catwoman fight in costume while their headcase alter-egos Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle fall in love and make out. The scene where they fool around on the couch, trying to avoid the other touching their battle wounds is wonderful. The scene where they repeat lines last said to each other in costume, and realize who the other is, is even better. It’s the only Batman romance that ever worked, but it worked like a charm.

4. Jackie Brown

Just like Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien, Jackie and her partner in crime Max Cherry never seal the deal. That doesn’t stop them from making your heart thump just a little bit harder when they get to flirting, though. While Crouching Tiger’s protagonists stayed celibate out of duty, Jackie and Max stay apart out of necessity. There’s just too much to worry about with all that money at stake, and once the crime is committed, there’s just that little bit of worry that maybe Jackie was using Max to pull off her scam.

Maybe if Max had taken a bigger share of the money, Jackie could have felt less guilty and stayed. And maybe if there had been no money, Max would have asked her. But as it was, all we get is a single kiss before Jackie drives off into the sunset. It’s all we need.

3. 12 Monkeys

Insanity! Time travel! Weird dreams! It’s a Terry Gilliam movie, for sure. Only this time, apart from all of his surreal madness, Gilliam throws us genre-loving closet romantics a bone.

It may start in kidnapping, but by the time Cole and Kathryn, the film’s stars, find themselves in a theater watching Vertigo and finding the eerie parallels in their own lives, you should be hooked. Or you should watch The Notebook.

And speaking of Vertigo…

2. Vertigo

Hitchcock had a lot of great romances stuffed into his thrillers, but none of them were as screwed up and passionate as the obsessive affair at the heart of Vertigo. I’m sure it has something to do with Hitchcock’s own personality flickering before our eyes, but Vertigo has a romantic tension unequaled in thrillers. The fact that it ends in a nun scaring the confused heroine off of the roof and to her death is besides the point. This love affair has some teeth, that’s all.

1. Terminator

“Come with me if you want to live.”

All great romances start with a great one liner, right? And what’s more romantic than saving someone’s life and impregnating them with the future savior of humanity?

I can’t really defend putting this one at the top of the list, except to say that the order of this list is arbitrary as it is. Still, Sarah Conner and Kyle Reese’s love affair has the kind of burning, desperate passion that’s born of life or death struggles, minus any attempt to translate it into a long term relationship. Cameron’s script keeps our lovers in the fire from start to finish, so when Kyle Reese finally buys the farm at the hands of the endo-skeletal terminator, you can only wish the two had more time to experience the kind of bitterness and disappointment the rest of us feel in our real love lives.

Wait, is my wife going to read this? Crap…um…

Happy Valentine’s Day!

When I last spoke to Denys about his participation in FAWM 2008, we were hours away from its start.  Now we’re a week in and songs have been written, which gave me the chance to talk a little about his writing process and what being a part of an event like FAWM feels like.  Read the full interview below.

One week down.  How are you feeling?

you’re leading with a biggie. ok… well in terms of my own writing, i’m feeling mostly-still-good … the panic hasn’t set in, although i haven’t completed a song since tuesday night.

as far as the whole event goes, i’ve got that euphoria i remember from last year, from the plentiful interactions with other participants, and especially from taking in all the great music being written by folks from all over.

big picture: i’m fine, thanks…

How about the small picture? Are the doubts starting to creep in yet?

indeed they are… but they haven’t reached that intolerable point yet.

Tuesday night i posted a song without being completely happy with it…. the intent was to move on, as i’d been working on that song for 4 days straight and i knew i would obsess over it forever if i didn’t force myself to call it a “done demo” for february and turn my attentions to new ideas.

the nasty surprise that followed was a drought of ideas. or rather, tons of things to say but no inclination to say them musically, hahah!

i took an intentional break from writing on wednesday, sat at the piano all evening thursday, played guitar all night friday… and nothing to show for those three days’ work, really.

i have a couple more songs in progress, but they’re very far from done.

How’s the caffeine ban holding up?  Had any more mochas?

that first weekend i blasted my body with three straight nights of caffeine, and was up until 3:30am on saturday.

haven’t touched caffeine since then, which — hmmmm — also happens to be the period of dried up musical output

i think you’re onto something, eric… the mochas might hold the key.

Well, well all know that drug induced states are the key to creativity, right?

what does it say about me (or my music) that i garner creative bursts from a maxwell house tin?

I think that puts you in the same boat as me, for whatever that’s worth.  What are you working on right now?

one of the songs i have in progress is a piano dirge which i sing in french… that one was inspired by a challenge you made earlier this week. you had essentially dared me to record something completely naked. i.e. take off the layers and layers of instruments and production i usually drench my songs with, and make something bare.

well that one’s just me and a reverbed piano… although i might not be able to resist putting a wind sound effect behind it.

a couple other ideas i’m working on are sort of on hold while grant partridge records some bass parts for me. i can’t play the bass or the drums, so he records parts based on demo clips i send him, and then i use his performances to build the tracks i end up completing.

Let’s talk about your work so far.  You’ve gotten 3 songs done .  Tell me a little about them.

sure, i’ll go in chronological order.

the first song — which veritably burst out of me like pent up ejaculate — was a bit of an eccentric slow-building piece built on repeated phrases, polyrhythmic guitars, claps and tambourine. it starts out a circular folk song with acoustic power chords, and by the end it’s almost a live drum ‘n bass track (around 160bpm with chirping synths). i started off strong, i think. the response to that song has been quite positive!

next i took my first dip in the “novelty/humor” category of the site’s offerings, something i never would have done last year. i wrote a sunny beach-pop tune about finding a severed leg in the snow and needing to call CSI Winnipeg to come investigate. it is what it is, i guess. it made people laugh, and i had fun recording it. can’t deny that recording anything tagged as “novelty” does feel a little bit hollow.

lastly, the song i spent four whole days on… it’s called “hoop of fire” and it basically turns the concept of johnny cash’s “ring of fire” on its ass, using the titular metaphor instead to represent the shoddiness of sexual hookups… and it examines the aftermath of such a hookup from a few years’ hindsight vantage point. musically, i’m really proud of where this one went, although i could still tool with it at length i’m sure. it’s a bouncy, jazzy pop number, sort of explodes from the speakers with organ slides and spiky guitars, and grant on the drums.

Do you have a favorite among the 3?

definitely “hoop of fire,” which incidentally is the demo i’m least satisfied with. but i never even knew i had a song like that in me. it’s basically…. grown up isaac quatorze, if that makes any sense. i feel like it’s musically more mature than i have made in the past.

Tell me a little bit about the anatomy of writing a single song.  When do you name it?  Where does it start?  What lets you know you’re onto a good idea and not a dead end?

generally, i don’t name a song until it’s almost done. most of my ideas start either with a phrase, or a pair of chords that sound real nice together. occasionally i’ll start with a melody, too. i’m very fortunate to be able to leap off from various starting points, so if i find i’m getting stuck with one idea, i can move to another instrument (or another language, apparently) and build another idea from scratch.

as for good ideas vs. dead ends, i can’t say i’ve mastered that distinction yet. as vague as this sounds, when something doesn’t work you just KNOW. it’s like putting your shoe on the wrong foot.

each of the 3 completed songs this year developed in a different way. “showered in nisku” assembled itself sonically without much help from me. “csi winnipeg” kind of grew out of those two words, and the song bloomed in my head before i even sat at the synth. “hoop of fire” came about from hours of toying with a capo and fucked up chord fingering.

Is this year feeling different than last year?

yes, in a number of ways…. i feel less pressured. all my moaning above about writer’s block notwithstanding, i really don’t mind if the month ends and i only have these 3 songs, as i’m enjoying myself and hearing lots of great music.

on another level, my interaction on the site is very different from last year. i was new blood in fawm 2007, kinda shy and didn’t really know what to say or how to draw attention to my songs. well this year, after having one of my songs featured on the FAWMpilation cd, and having my album up for free download since last year’s event, i almost feel like a mini-celebrity on the FAWM site.

two songs so far have been written that reference my own songs, and one of my 2008 songs has already been covered! go to youtube and search for “showered in nisku”… a really rad girl named elaine covered it with a live looper.

so the differences from last year are not in the writing, but in the community. i’m really enjoying that.

Your work seems more whimsical this year.  Is that intentional?

i haven’t really been in a serious place this month… but just you wait, i got 11 more up my sleeve….. (knock on wood)

How has the reaction to your work been so far?

surprisingly positive, actually… i did actually worry that people who enjoyed the “sin of the summer” album would be scared off by some of the directions i’ve gone in, but so far everyone seems to be coming along for the ride. most of the constructive criticism i’ve received (both on and off the site) are production- or performance-related, rather than songwriting-related.

it can be hard not to obsess over the feedback. they have the site set up so you have a “my fawm” page, almost like a dashboard you start out from, and it updates instantly whenever you get a new comment.

you almost get to the point where you go all OCD on that “my fawm” page, checking and rechecking, even if only a few minutes have passed, because the feeling of positive feedback is so uplifting.

What about the nonconstructive criticism?  Are you getting much of that?

no, i haven’t myself. there have been a few incidents on the site with one participant in particular being rather harsh in his reviews of other people’s work (including rating them 1/10 and 2/10, or telling them they have “no business doing this”)… people like that are usually chastised politely.

in this one person’s case, it led to a big debate about why people sign up for an event like fawm if they don’t want to make their music more marketable, which then led to a debate about the music industry, and whether it should bend to accomodate creativity, or songwriters should adapt to pop “rules”

You said you won’t mind having only the 3 songs at the end of the month.   Do you have something you want to accomplish before this FAWM is over?  Or have you already done it?

i still have that 14 song goal in my mind, don’t get me wrong… but no, i have no other accomplishments or targets in mind. in a way, that was the whole point for me this year. i’ll do what i can do, and not push any harder than that. erm, perhaps that makes me a boring interview subject!!

Take comfort in the fact that you’re more interesting than the interviewer, at least. Good luck, and we’ll talk again mid-month.

good luck with your own challenges, friend.

The strike has made it so.

At least, that’s what the studio heads are saying in an attempt to make it sound like this writer’s strike has finally unshackled them from their mountain of obligations, allowing them to remake their networks into the lean, mean entertainment machines they are destined to become. The public glee of the programming chiefs might lead you to believe they wanted this strike, that having writers around creating shows for them was putting an unfair strain on their corporate wallets. It couldn’t be spin, could it? Multinational corporations don’t spin!

It’s no secret that the Big Networks are struggling and have been for some time. Numerous articles have been written about the slow bleed of the network audience into cable, and there was a great deal of fear that this strike would be all the motivation the rest of America needed to leave network television for good. Is there any surprise that, once the strike actually occurred, that the VPs of programming start to talk like this was a good thing for them? And is it any surprise that the ratings are not backing them up?

I found the article above while writing this. If you go there, you’ll find them saying the same thing I’m about to say: the demise of network television has nothing to do with the strike, but is only hastened by it. I’m also going to say something they aren’t saying. In their attempt to punish the writers and lessen their control over the creative process by ordering less shows and relying on the “gut feelings” of business minded programming executive, network television is handing cable outlets a bigger win than the strike ever could have.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know the networks are owned by the same big media conglomerates as who own most cable channels, and the big daddies will be getting their payday one way or another. But if you read between the lines, you start to see how the network’s entire model of programming has become toxic, and only their broadcast affiliate monopoly has allowed them to survive.

For instance, the networks will spend $10 million on a pilot for a show that’s budgeted to cost $2-$3 million when on. Yet that same show, which they’ve spent in excess of $40 million on by the time the show is going to air ($10 for the pilot, plus 10-13 episodes at $3 million a pop) has a reasonable chance at being canceled by the fourth episode. I don’t have a count of the number of shows which have been pulled from the air before the already shot and paid for episodes have been shown, but it’s a lot.

What this means is the networks have built a business model where every major dice roll will cost them tens of millions of dollars, but in which they will not even release all of the work for which they’ve paid. This has two effects. It means your overall profit for the shows that do succeed is reduced by the expensive failures. It also means the viewers who spent an hour a week for the past month becoming invested in your show get to see it suddenly canceled, knowing full well you have another 6 episodes you can’t even be bothered to show at some garbage dump time in the early morning.

So you’ve: A) wasted money and B) alienated the people you need to make money. Shows on cable channels run for the full production slate. They might get canceled at the end of a season, but they don’t yank a show when there are still episodes to burn. The networks have turned unaired episodes into a business model, slapping them on ironically named “Complete Series” DVD sets in an effort to get back their money.

Even if they do, they haven’t lessoned the anger felt by their audience. That anger, building for at least a decade, has left the increasingly unprofitable networks reaching for a solution. Like always, they’ve misunderstood the problem. The strike is indeed giving them the opportunity to rework things. But canning production deals with writers and constricting the development process won’t do the trick. Things are changing. Even if the same corporations are the ones rolling in the dough, they won’t be doing it through their affiliates for long.

A broadened market, full of specialty outlets can only be good for creative types. Writers may not see millions heaped onto their untested shows anymore, but they’ve got a better shot at finishing a full season on fX and ABC Family than they did on the big brothers of those networks. The Wire, Weeds, Big Love and The Sopranos are proof that networks using a subscriber model, rather than an advertiser model, are capable of producing more adventurous shows without risking a sudden drop in income due to failing one of network television’s most artificial tests: Sweeps Week.

As for the studio’s noise that canceling upfronts - the time when advertisers are given a chance to buy into upcoming shows - is some kind of solution: yawn. You’re losing viewers because you produce crap that looks and smells the same as last year’s crap, and you can’t even be bothered to give that crap a shot at a full season. The insinuation that reality television - a format not coincidentally free of pilots and the upfront process - is the magic bullet may also be wrong in the long run. After chasing off viewers like me, what you have left are the 5-10 million people in the audience who only want the showiest, most degrading thing they have to offer. Do you think that audience will be there forever? Do you think the law of diminishing returns only applies to Frisbees and scripted television shows?

Will American Gladiators make you more money, over the next ten years, than Seinfeld has?

Broadcast affiliates aren’t going anywhere. They’ll still be broadcasting Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Deal or No Deal and Moment of Truth long after the strike ends. The death they face is the death of irrelevancy. They’re losing to cable outlets, and cable outlets aren’t even the future of distribution. When people, desperate for something new, are defecting to the Hallmark Channel, how do you expect to stand up to YouTube when it starts getting pumped directly into people’s 50 inch televisions?

Oh, right. No pilots, no upfronts and the gut feelings of 50 year old white guys. Sorry. You win.

They have one of the worst reputations of all games now, but there was a time when the Adventure Game was king. It wasn’t a short time, either. One of the earliest Big Adventure Games was the Zork series which launched in 1980. Even as it was dying, classics of the genre continued to come out as late as 1999. The genre as it was is all but gone, but its reign was long and glorious.

There are a lot of reasons why it was so successful at one time and why it’s become nigh reviled now, but I’m not going to waste a lot of time on that. A lot of pixels have been rendered discussing the merits and failings of the Classic Adventure Game, and I doubt I can add anything to that debate. I’m here to talk about what they meant personally to me, and why no other genre has ever been able to match what the Adventure Game did for me.

Late to the Party

I’m not an Old Skooler when it comes to the genre. I didn’t play many text adventure games, and the ones I did play I got angry with after a few

• > Get Ye Flask
• You can’t get Ye Flask!

exchanges. Something about the semantic requirements of those text adventures just infuriated me. So while I know what Zork is, I don’t get the references and I can’t claim to have been a fan of them in the least. Yeah, I know. Heresy.

A lot of this may have had to do with what computers were in my house and when they got there. I had an old Atari PC whose designation I can no longer recall, and that was all I had until my dad picked up our very first 386. By this time, the grand old age of text adventures had largely passed, as had the first round of graphical adventure games that were really just text adventure moving billboards, such as the early King’s Quest games. No, I didn’t get involved until the advent of Point And Click.

I wish I could remember what the first Adventure Game I played was. You’d think that was important, but those early games of my youth blur together. If I had to guess, I’d say it was King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! So yes, I was a latecomer, but once I was hooked, I was totally fished in.

<Something> Quest

If anyone is responsible for cementing my gaming tastes, it would be the developers of Sierra. There may have been single better games created by LucasArts, but it was Sierra that kept the adventure flowing. They had a series for every taste. King’s Quest was lighthearted, slightly Disney-ish adventure. Space Quest parodied any science fiction it could get its hands on. The more action-oriented Quest for Glory (which started as Hero’s Quest) was like playing through a straightforward sword and sorcery yarn. And let’s not forget the less successful but still sorta-interesting Police Quest, which tried (and occasionally succeeded) to tie the game’s puzzles to investigative police work.

There was something that the Sierra machine pumped out that was always missing in the other games I played. Story. These things were written. Not always well written and not usually deep, but they had a frickin’ plot behind them. One of the criticisms of the genre is that they attempted to be interactive stories, but failed; all you could interact with were the puzzles, which had a single solution. True, but that wasn’t why I loved them. I didn’t need an interactive story. I wanted an immersive story. I wanted to feel like I was there, but I still wanted someone to rip a yarn for me.

Were the puzzles annoying? Yeah. Was the gameplay largely following a pre-laid railroad track from puzzle to puzzle? Uh-huh. But at the end of it all, I had just experienced storytelling in a way nothing else could match. I might remember the way the lights flickered in Doom, but it can’t match the sense memory I have for the lion kingdom in Quest for Glory III.

And it definitely can’t match the emotional swell I still feel when someone mentions Gabriel Knight.

Jane Jensen - Queen Of All Game Writers

I wish I could say that I expected something extra out of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers when I picked it up, but I don’t think that’s true. I think the draw had something to do with the voice cast, which consisted of cult actors like Tim Curry, Michael Dorn and Mark Hamill. Plus it was a Sierra adventure game. I thought I knew what I was in for. It didn’t take long to realize I was in for something completely different. Later, when I got older and smarter and realized that writers were responsible for games just like they are for television, I’d come to realize that the Something Different was a writer named Jane Jensen.

The thing about the Gabriel Knight series was that the gameplay was almost secondary to the experience. You didn’t solve the puzzles because you wanted to solve puzzles, you did it because it was part of the story to take the next step. That next bit of plot wasn’t coming without solving the puzzle, and many of the puzzles were tied into the plot in such a way that solving them and solving a mystery were tied together. Sure, like all Adventure Games, the puzzles were often arbitrary and perplexing. It was a weakness of the genre. Never had I played through a game with a story like this one, though. Never.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was the first chapter in a supernatural detective series. The title character, through the course of the first game (I almost typed novel there, no joke), learns of his ancestor, a former Schattenjäger. That means Shadow Hunter, but in another language, which is what we fantasy writers do to make things sound less hokey. It’s a journey of discovery, as a self centered loser detective learns that he’s meant for greater things, if only he is willing to reach for them. The core mystery of the game weaves through the New Orleans underground, voodoo cults and a tragedy sealed by the failings of those who came before us.

It was only the first in a series of games that became an obsession of mine. The world of Gabriel Knight was so tangible, so immersive, that I wanted to go back as soon as possible. I did what I almost never do: I played through the thing, from front to back, multiple times. Just to take in the story again. When the sequel, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery hit, I didn’t even care that the contracting Adventure Game market had forced a silly all-live-actors engine onto the series. I mean, it was a modern detective story about werewolves!

If I hadn’t been so enamored with the storytelling, perhaps I would have seen the writing on the wall. Stupid game engine changes are the first sign of morbidity. It didn’t matter that Jane Jensen was a canny enough writer and producer to shoehorn lots of useless live-action video into a playable adventure game with a moving story. The writing was definitely on the wall.

But the writing - the real writing, not the metaphorical kind - was so good it didn’t matter. The sequel let us split our time between Gabriel and his partner, Grace Nakimura. Grace was the Partner With Sexual Tension, a hoary chestnut of a plot device that still works when someone cares enough about it to make us care. And they did. And so came the second thing I had never seen in a game: a legitimate romance. One that made my heart beat a little bit the same way it did when a read a novel.

By the time Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned hit, the Adventure Game was nearly dead. Unfortunately, despite the best writing of the series (and a far superior version of the story The Da-Vinci Code would later use to huge success) , the gameplay didn’t help the genre any. Many people have torn apart the infamous Cat-Hair-Mustache-Puzzle, and rightly so. The constant changing-engine game Sierra was playing made it even more of a mess from a gameplay perspective. It missed the point. Adventure Games were not keeping up with the advancement of how interactive games had become. It had nothing to do with whether it was 2D or 3D.

Yet my love for the series, and for the genre, was only sealed by Gabriel Knight 3. Never before, and never since, have I been so moved by the story in a video game. When people talk about the stories in most action games, I can only sigh. They’ve got nothing on my girl Jensen. As the mystery of the third Gabriel Knight wrapped up, we watched Gabriel and Grace sleep together for the first time. Then, confused and unsure of whether Gabriel and she could work, Grace slipped away quietly, leaving to study with another man in another country. And all Gabriel, matured by the revelation of the origin of the Schattenjägers, could do was read her goodbye letter helplessly. And that’s how we left him. Alone.

All Things Must Pass

Gabriel Knight 3 is the last Adventure Game of any note. Some of its ideas and concepts have been absorbed into other genres, but the very particular feel that the Adventure Game left me with has never been replicated. I can’t argue with the charges leveled against its outmoded gameplay, but I also can’t get behind the belief that there wasn’t something right about that style of game.

Sure, you can put plot into a first person shooter or an RPG, but both of those require combat, and demand a certain type of strategy that runs counter to the style of writing the Adventure Game was known for. Not all heroes carry guns or fight hoards of goblins, and no combat-based game (which accounts for the vast majority of what comes out) can really stick us into the shoes of some of our favorite character archetypes using that model. The Adventure Game met the needs of a certain kind of gamer, and the intent of that genre was never wrong. They just got stuck on an implementation that got old.

I still fantasize about some resurgence of the genre, some update of the gaming model that makes it all work again. It’s a fantasy that leads directly to Jane Jensen writing another Gabriel Knight game, that lets me follow Gabriel and Grace through their evolving relationship and solve a hinted at mystery about ghosts in Scotland. I believe it can happen. There’s a hole in the gaming market. People like me, who want a game that’s centered around story, atmosphere and discovery, minus the combat and twitch-gaming required in everything else, are not being served.

I still game, but I haven’t enjoyed it in the way I used to in a long, long time. When I think back to the last time I was truly passionate about a game, I think of Gabriel Knight 3, and I realize with the death of the Adventure Game what made me a gamer in the first place died as well.