Have you ever been at a bar, and there’s a band playing, but they’re really terrible?

Well, I guess not really truly terrible. Because when a band is really terrible, they know it. I mean, they have to. As a musician, I’m able to hold onto few erroneous notions about the quality of my own playing.  Like, I know that my C melody – like a majority of antique C melody horns -  is notoriously pitchy, that my tenor has a very small phantom air leak that I couldn’t even completely correct by changing all of the pads.  These things come from just knowing my instruments and from having the sort of basic critical sense that even people who get quoted on movie posters have evolved. I can listen to myself and think I need to work on my articulation.

Apparently, there are musicians who lack that kind of critical sense, because I’ve seen them play at plenty of bars and most recently saw one play at the Steamtown Original Music Showcase amid a few other bands, all of whom were better than this band. This band was from Philadelphia and you would think that a band from such a major metropolitan area would be a little better because it’s a competitive market where there are like a million bands – I mean, everybody has a band; heck, I could start a band right now (let me know if you play bass in the comments because we need a bass player) – and significantly fewer venues than there are bands. I don’t work in the industry, but I drink alcohol and listen to music, so I know maybe a little about bands playing in bars, maybe. I’m just saying it seems to me like the ratio should suggest that low-quality bands start self-selecting out at a certain point due to lack of gigs or angry drunks hurling barstools at you because that Papa Roach cover was really abhorrent.

These guys were maybe proof that my theory on the bar band ecosystem is flawed.

You’ve seen that YouTube video, right? The one where the band is playing Europe’s “The Final Countdown” outdoors at like a fair or whatever and it’s really awful, to the point where you make bets on how long someone can watch it like those kids in Rings.  You watch that video and those kids get it, you can tell they do even from the distance they’re at. They’re up there and they’re playing, but they are completely aware that every sound they make is like a cat on fire. When you’re bad and you get that you’re bad, you’re a little less intolerable. In my mind, I’ve found consensus with the band and we’ve kind of said “we’re cool” to each other when they have that look in their eyes.

The band that I saw Sunday night they didn’t get how not good they were. They had lots of energy: the lead singer was jumping all over the place and launching himself off of the dais the drum kit sits up on and the lead guitarist was rock-cocking all over the place and the bass player occasionally did something that made his hair fly around because his hair was carefully cultivated to what I tend to think of as ‘bass player length’ as opposed to my hair, which is maybe around ‘frontman length’ right now. And then the lead singer was frolicking around the stage dry humping the rest of the band and they were all really into it and the music was just so incredibly mediocre and unintelligible and you realize that there are these guys in their thirties up there in costumes, basically, because they were all aggressively dressed as rocker stereotypes, jumping around and touching each other and screaming and they thought it was absolutely aces and it’s all really kind of sad. The more you try to become rock apotheosis by rote, the easier it is for rock apotheosis to elude you.

They had lots of energy, but they didn’t transfer it to the audience. The audience is as important to live music as the band – some bands realize that and they are good live bands.  Other bands don’t and they end up opening for a polka band at a sausage festival or end up playing Christmas music at the mall or recording jingles. The audience wasn’t drunk enough to blindly shout and dance and so the band was faced with their withering scrutiny.  I’ve seen other, better bands respond to this sort of pressure by admitting that they were bombing and attempting to come back and once, at a festival, I saw a band just bail mid-set with a mumbled “Sorry” into the mic and then nothing.

During part of the accepted band/audience call and response ritual, the singer will ask the audience to do something or ask them if they’re having a good time or ready to rock or whatever and the audience usually goes “YEAAAAAAHHHHH!” and then the band is like ‘that sucks’ and then they’ll do it again and there will be a larger cheer. During “Desperately Wanting” on Better Than Ezra’s live album, Kevin Griffin kind of tongue-in-cheekly talks about the economics of kicking it up and breaking it down when performing a rock song and, though it’s a little different, this kind of audience engagement is exactly what he’s talking about. The horrible band from Philly tried to get this to work, but when the audience’s genuinely unenthused response was met with a ‘You guys are terrible’ from the band’s frontman, it was followed by an equally unenthused response from the crowd. Not abrasive or negative, just eternally blase’.  It was as if we were Sir Robin’s retinue. I almost shouted back “So are you!” but I try not to heckle.

On the plus side, I got to see Underground Saints for the first time and they were pretty much the opposite of the guys who were on before them – they weren’t playing parts, they were just out there playing some rock. The lead singer sounds very Morrissey-like, which creates a weird Muse meets The Smiths aesthetic that is strange, but good strange.

Last week (which seems like a lifetime ago online), video game publisher THQ filled gamers with delicious anger, restricting multiplayer access for some wrestling video game or another to first-run buyers only via a single-use code.*

The angry gamers’ argument seems to be: “We are your customers and you can’t treat us like this!”

THQ’s rather blunt and caustic rebuttal is “If you buy pre-owned games, you aren’t our customers, chucklefuck.”

And seriously, it pains me to say that THQ is right here, but THQ is right. At no point – at no point in the mainstream gaming retail process – do any of us buy anything from the developers of a game. We go to a store and we buy the game at the store, which has ordered it from another link of the supply chain that is, in most cases, still removed from the actual entity that is making the product, the game.  Even the NPD sales figures treasured by the exact sort of geek that will be infuriated by this new marketing strategy reflect the buying habits of retailers, not consumers.

Consider that. The gamers are not the customers of the gamemakers.

And as the gamers choose which side they’re going to pile onto, whether it’s rushing to the defense of the developers or championing the savings that the middleman, be it GameStop or the shady used game store down the street, offers their cash-strapped selves.  Of course, we’re so used to easy dichotomies that very few people will opt for Team Mike Newton here and say ‘fuck this argument, I’m supporting myself.’

You don’t owe THQ a damn thing. You owe GameStop even less.

It’s incredibly easy to fall into the ‘Scott Pilgrim Trap’ – the notion that spending your money in a certain way, independent of your needs or wants, is your job. That spending is as much your job as earning. That’s a devious fucking idea, and it insinuates into every subculture you can identify. If you like X, you need to buy Y to send a message to Z. Otherwise, they will stop making X forever. That is the trigger they pull.

It’s novel to picture things the way that THQ wants you to: that you are a patron of their arts. You really like wrestling games, so you’re giving them money to create a game that you will enjoy.  In reality, though, gaming does not run on a patronage economy.  I have spent years reviewing games, and lots of games – probably the majority of games – are unfortunate shit-heaps and, in a lot of cases, you won’t even realize how bad a game is until you’ve bought and paid for it, because any media outlet covering games is governed by the access that some public relations professional has granted it, which leads to a journalism that is really little more than a series of hype gatekeepers (witness magazines like GameStop’s Game Informer, which is essentially a large advertisement for games that GameStop would like you to pre-order and is also full of actual advertisements and which is basically a venus flytrap – or Hotel California, choose your preferred metaphor – of marketing). Witness this summer’s Alpha Protocol, which spent years being lauded as it was developed and then, once it was on shelves, was almost universally panned, for proof of this.

On top of most games not being any good, gaming is an expensive hobby. The standard MSRP for one game on a next-gen console is $59.99. The attach rate for a next-gen console is nearly 9 at this point. Which means that, for every two hundred dollars an average new buyer drops on a PS3, he’s also paying out an additional $539.61.  Just on games.  And that attach rate is an average – most people who self-identify as a ‘gamer’ probably have multiples of that magic number of 9.

Here is the reality of pre-owned games: they are affordable. Or at least more affordable than the alternative. Most of the time, I buy games new. But the pre-owned market lets me try more games than my wallet could otherwise justify.  Like the cel-shaded Prince of Persia relaunch (which was very pretty and hugely disappointing) or Operation: Darkness (which was clunky and ugly and absolutely fascinating both in its premise – an SRPG set in World War II and stocked with vampires, werewolves and the undead – and its play mechanics).  Some other games that I’ve found secondhand include Persona 2, Koudelka, Fatal Frame 2, Ring of Red and a ton of others. But the ones I’m calling out, they’re quirky cult-favorite games. Games that were either tough to find first-run or slipped under the radar until it was tough to find them new.  Suggesting that I’ve somehow done a disservice to Atlus or Sacnoth because of this is silly. Because I’ve doled out the cash for every Shadow Hearts game that followed Koudelka and have spent an ungodly amount of money over the past ten years on Shin Megami Tensei games.  Games like Valkyrie Profile wouldn’t have gotten played by as many people as it has if it weren’t for aftermarket sales. Anecdotally, I can’t believe that aftermarket sales don’t lead to future first-run purchases. Unless you’re talking about games that are predominantly licensed shovelware, in which case you probably don’t want to do that. Unfortunately for THQ, that’s the bulk of their library.

In today’s interview with Avoid the Future, Kevin Church says that the economics of webcomics are “well and truly fucked” and the same thing is very much true of the videogame industry. There are a lot of people working long hours to make games that are, on balance, not that good. To cover the cost of those long hours, that mediocre product is sold at an inflated price point and then the people involved act slighted when buyers don’t trample one another to buy it. And it’s not fair to the devs. I know plenty of the people who create games, who are trapped in the spiderweb, and they are good and talented people. But at the same time, regardless of what various corporations may think, it’s not our job to buy their products, especially not on their terms.

*Regardless of how you feel about the tactic, this implementation of it is absolutely terrible. There are plenty of examples of content codes getting hacked and first-run buyers getting screwed out of the very same bonus content they pre-ordered to get access to. More importantly, now that THQ has angered the lazy, greedy, ‘everything I want should be free’ community of gamers, the unlock code is a bright, happy target.

I’m hoping really hard for Wes Craven’s My Soul To Take. Craven is a masterful director and, his novel Fountain Society aside, has always been a solid writer, though his best work will probably stand as his collaboration with Kevin Williamson on the Scream saga (and he gets bonus points for co-writing Alex Aja’s remake of his own The Hills Have Eyes – which stands as one of the better – and perhaps the best – 70s horror remakes).

But the long-delayed film (I read a draft of the screenplay back in 2008, back when it was called Bug two title changes ago – from Bug to 25/8 to My Soul To Take) doesn’t do a lot to instill confidence in me.  First, after a disappointing round of screenings in Spring 2009, the film was rumored to have been called back for tinkering and reshoots, code words that seem to mean ‘let’s let it sit for awhile until people forget about it’. With last week’s release of the film’s trailer – which looks serviceably haunting  in spots and a bit mediocre throughout with a truly leaden voiceover from the film’s lead character – it was formally announced that My Soul To Take would be released in completely unnecessary 3D, which is as sure to keep it from raking in money as the producers were sure it would help it before the brief life of this last 3D bubble was burst (and it has – bad news for next summer’s tentpole films).

Anyway, I’ll go to see it, because this sort of movie is candy to me. But I expect it to be more black licorice and less Pretzel M&Ms.

This weekend, I nearly died of hipsters. Luckily, I not awash in dismissive, smug conversations about Best Coast, Small Black, School of Seven Bells and Grizzly Bear and how Animal Collective and MGMT are ‘so over’.  It is probably good that music wasn’t a topic of conversation, because I’d have been taken down in a hail of skinny jeans, Salvation Army eyeglasses and ironic t-shirts.

I was celebrating friend Gerard’s birthday when it all happened. “I’m just warning you,” Natasha warned me, “Gerard’s friends are pretty hipsterish.”  But I was not prepared for the fashionably unwashed and forcibly ironic wave that washed over me when I answered the door to let them inside.

After being in close proximity to the hipsters for more time than a sane man could have stood, I don’t really think I hate them anymore. They’re all just kind of naive and anchorless, and I kind of identify with that. In fact, so many of them are disillusioned English majors. Was that me? I don’t think it was, but I knew them when I was their age.  There was a guy I knew in grad school who was one of them and I don’t remember his name but he was one of those people who is rude all the time because he has Great Thoughts about art and you don’t.  I personally can’t think of any art that is more important than the viewer, but that’s how I roll, I guess and that’s maybe the wrong way to roll up in the scholarhood.

A scene from the evening:

I retire to the living room and turn on Food Network. After awhile, I join Natasha and friend Michael out on the front porch. They both meander back inside as a clutch of hipsters comes outside to smoke ironically.  As they mill about, one of them, completely unaware that it was I who once sat in the living room, peers into the window and says:

HIPSTER: What loser is watching The Food Network?

Like Miranda Bailey, I stayed mum. Instead I watched Charlie die and now I feel guilty about not ever having liked him.

HIPSTER 2: I guess maybe if you aren’t paying attention to it, it’s good to watch. Like, ambient.

HIPSTER 3: Ooooh, CUPCAKE WARS!

Woman: I just want he to know that we’ve done work in their industry before.

Woman: (she to know)

Me: Her to know?

Woman: OK, LOL

So yesterday I made a comment about being biased against Dave Eggers in the comments of someone’s Google Reader item and BOOM – some total stranger swoops in like Batman and says “shut the fuck up Jeff.”

Whoa, right?

My first thought was that the commenter was Dave Eggers himself (who I’ve done a bit of a rollercoastery thing with: really liking him and respecting the mission statement of McSweeney’s – as a publishing enterprise and not as a pretty much one-joke humor website* – when I first became aware of it, but getting really sick of his incessant egoism very quickly, but then well what can you expect from an author who calls his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and spends a lot of time in said memoir talking about how he tried to ride Judd Winick’s coattails onto MTV because he wanted to be on MTV).  But I realized that ‘shut the fuck up jeff’ is not florid and verbose and packed to its gills with a manic plea to see how smart and fucking wordy I am so it couldn’t have been Dave Eggers because he’d have been all, “a comment that siphons ecstatic transport away from the reader with each syllable! Take it into the forest, tie it to a stump and cover your ears as the wood goblins devour it in all their capering majesty!” and I thought about writing a post where Dave Eggers (well, me writing like Dave Eggers), would comment in effusive and vocabulous ways on terrible things but my heart wasn’t really in it, you know, so I’m pulling back the curtain instead to tell you all about the blog post that I almost wrote but didn’t because a stranger was rude to me on the Internet. Besides, how upset can you really get over a dude on the Internet anyway? It’s the Internet after all, and the Internet is not really a place where you go to to have warm feelings about other human beings – warm human feelings are kind of a bonus, even more than they are in real life. It’s like Anonymous – sometimes, you look at them and they’re attacking a mentally ill guy or a twelve year old girl (and I know that Perry is going to be all up in the comments telling me that these people deserve to be attacked by 4chan because they are social poison) and you kind of expect that of them and you go, okay, maybe that’s a little funny but I hate myself for laughing, but then the rest of the time they’re discrediting Scientology or the tea party and you think that maybe you can use hate and misanthropy for social good sometimes. I think this is what makes the handful of legitimate friendships I’ve developed over time with Internet people pretty remarkable, because you kind of walk in the door expecting that everybody else out there is an unrepentant shithead but sometimes you realize that Yoda was right and that there is, in fact, still good in him. Or it.

EDIT: I should probably stop reading Pitchfork Reviews Reviews right before writing posts.

*And full disclosure here, I subscribed to McSweeney’s and Believer for a few years and probably would still read both of them if they weren’t so ungodly expensive. I mean, if Conde Nast can give me Bon Appetit for something like five cents and a wish per issue – and Bon App isn’t just food porn for me because I save those recipes and try to use them – I can’t justify forty-five dollars a year for ten issues of Believer even if the music issue is always really good.

So I’m looking at this terrible website for work, and it’s just a collection of spam links in list format. And they look something like this (all actual anchor text from the site)

PLAN A FUNERAL

GET A DIVORCE

BUY A MATTRESS

START YOUR OWN PERSONAL JEWELRY BUSINESS

I feel like this is a new roadmap for my life.

This is an article I wrote for Newsarama. They never ran the article, I assume because of how completely vapid this particular panel was.  Or because I omitted the ten minute rant that Ahmet Zappa went on about Thumbelina, the smallest horse in the world.

“Kingdom Comics is about sucking the cute out of everything.”

The joke kicks off an irreverent discussion full of talk of bacon and velociraptors as Christian Beranek  and Ahmet Zappa from Kingdom Comics discussed the process of creating comics based on Disney licenses, but were still unable to provide any concrete announcements of its publishing slate, vowing that all will be revealed next February in New York, where they will be joined by Disney Worldwide Publishing.

Because of licensing issues, the duo spoke more about what they did not have access to than what they might be working on, but Zappa managed to drop several winking hints about a possible Dr. Sin project, and “can neither confirm nor deny” a Black Hole comic.

Among the projects not being developed by Kingdom are The Absent-Minded Professor (“Flubber”), The Cat From Outer Space, the Swiss Family Robinson and Condorman.

“Our heart has been broken a couple of times,” Zappa weeps.

The issue, Christian explains, is that many of the properties in question are adaptations of novels, which leads to a rights issue. “Condorman is based on a Robert Sheckley novel called The Game of X,” the pair explains, “and the two are completely different from one another. I highly recommend that you track down Condorman.  I was very excited to see it when I was a kid and very disappointed when it came out.”

Beranek expresses an interest in developing a Megaforce comic, joking that he showed up to work in one of the team’s trademark jumpsuits.

While forced to remain mum about their specific publishing plans, the creators could confirm some information about their marketing strategy and spoke with a retailer in the audience about the struggle to bring new readers into comic shops in general, and into Disney properties in particular.  The publisher will be involved in Free Comic Book Day and is in active discussions with Disney marketing about how to give their books a substantial push in the direct market.  The two even discussed different ways of packaging the ‘hypothetical’ Dr. Sin comic, including an edition with a leatherbound cover that “looks like an artifact of the 1800s.”  It is possible that the same product may be presented in different formats depending on the market (for instance, a bookstore vs. a comic book shop).

When asked if their proposed focus on self-contained graphic novels indicated a stronger push toward the big box retail market, both men denied the allegation strongly.

Christian says, “I remember when I first went to a retail shop.  I felt like I was going to Tibet to learn the secrets of the universe, and it was this big, massive thing.  I was 11 and collecting Watchmen and Swamp Thing, so maybe that’s why I’m the way I am today.”

Zappa also shares a personal anecdote about his experience with comics as a young man.  “If it wasn’t for comics, I wouldn’t know how to read.  I had really bad learning disabilities and the thickness of a book really stressed me out.  There was something about seeing the pictures tell the story and having less to read that really helped my education.”

Fans asked about the price point of Kingdom’s OGNs, and as with most details, it is too early to give specifics beyond a promise that prices will be “extremely competitive.”  Christian confirmed that Kingdom is courting established, fan-favorite talent as well as new creators, but again cautioned that it was too soon to name specifics.

After a surreal segue into a discussion of miniature ponies, Zappa closed the panel by leading the audience in a round of “Happy Birthday” for his dog Luna.  It was the second musical number of the panel, with Zappa earlier singing a tear-jerking rendition of “Candle On the Water,” from the film Pete’s Dragon.

I’ve been trying to write about The Passage for awhile, but when I try, I just end up saying “Oh, it’s pretty good,” or something.  It’s an epic book – it spans nearly a century, deals with an apocalyptic event that decimates the U.S. population, and combines eerie supernatural elements with a hard scientific rationale for vampirism. It is a horror story, a survival story and a story about introspection externalized as a physical journey. There is a parallel structure between the modern day story and the future story, and both are inextricably tied together.  It is also a lumbering, laconic tome whose nearly 800 pages are the first part of a trilogy.

The biggest impediment to enjoying The Passage is that the novel itself fools you. The blurb and the first 200 pages tell one story, while the next 500+ deal with something completely unexpected.  This kind of bait and switch walks a fine line between welcome surprise and outright deception and I think it crosses over to deception based on how little of the book is actually what it says it is.

It starts good, gets boring, gets good again at the very end and plays with your goodwill in the middle. Wait for the inevitable movie, which will probably be alright.

I thought I’d had all of the ridiculous games on Facebook blocked from my feed. No Mafia Party, no Crochet Wars, no Farmville, no Zombie Paper Route or whatever the fuck it is that people think is fun. It was a comforting existence. I’ve lived my life without playing any of these games and I feel like my life is rich and full and that’s probably a lie if I want to be all dark night of the soul with myself, but I just don’t need to know every time you fertilize your corn or whenever your castle needs a fucking gargoyle knight or whatever.

I already play a game on Facebook. I Poke my girlfriend and then she’ll Poke me back and we will continue this dance until one of three things happen and one is a murder and the second is that Facebook shuts down permanently.  You can’t not Poke back, because you (I mean I here) fear invalidation deep inside your secret heart and also because Poking is Serious Business. It has to be, because you have to confirm that you do indeed want to Poke. It’s easier to buy prescription drugs on the black market than it is to Poke someone. And I still don’t understand the significance of Poking. I hope that shit is in the Facebook movie, because I need to know.

Anyway, I thought I had filtered all of this inanity out of my feed and that I could live like a joyless curmudgeon in the online world in the same way I do offline. And then I saw that one of my friends “just clobbered a gopher.” No.

This is Frontierville. It’s a game from the same war criminals who created Farmville and Farmville, based on what I know about it, is like that scene in A Clockwork Orange.  It is, as you would guess in a world where self-hate is more abundant than oil in the fucking Gulf, immensely popular.  A high school friend recently reconnected with me and when we had drinks and dinner, she asked me to be her Farmville neighbor.  Maybe people were bored of Farmville and so they decided that maybe if it had different hat and vest options, people would be more interested. This is the same principle that EA uses in its yearly sports games. And thus – Frontierville.

I started playing Frontierville. I stopped after twenty-five minutes and if I ever go back to it, I have instructed Natasha to sneak up behind me with a garrote and end things.

The only more elegant way to make money off of a surfeit of human hope would be to release a Kobayashi Maru simulation and charge players a dollar to try again. Frontierville is equally unwinnable.

The game is designed to give you exactly just a bit less than you need to actually accomplish anything. At least not by yourself. As you solicit friends to help you clobber gophers and bale hay or what have you, your ability to do other stuff increases, but the whole thing is a bit of a joke as you can never play the game in such a way that you can thrive, only have just enough to need to have your friend give you some horseshoes so you can buy a meal so you can beat up a rattlesnake so you can harvest corn so you can make food so you can get more energy so you can clear a tree stump so you can plant pumpkins so you can murder every person in the vicinity of your farm oh my god the monotony is overbearing.  You give them gifts and experience points to get them to do shit around your farm. You develop a trade economy.  This is like playing Animal Crossing and being in a cult at the same time, except you don’t get to be a cute animal and there’s no messiah to have sex with.

There are people who play this game, I’m sure, who look down their nose at people who play World of Warcraft. While I don’t play WoW anymore and kind of look down my nose at WoW players, I’m just being a single hypocrite. You people are double hypocrites at least. Your farmer can’t turn into a giant bear and none of the antagonists in your game are anywhere near as terrifying as a murloc.

After about a half hour worth of this misery parade, I felt the need to stab myself in the eye. I didn’t actually do that – I’ve got a thing about ocular trauma – but that I considered it is telling. This is as fun as walking on a treadmill in a windowless room with beige walls. The key to any massively multiplayer game, no matter what the presiding mechanics or the genre, is to fool the players into thinking that the game they’re playing isn’t the game they’re playing. When I was playing Frontierville, all I could think about was how not fooled I was and about how much the monotony hurts. But I DID have a cowboy outfit, and maybe that counts for something, right? There’s no cowboy outfit in Mass Effect 2.