Last week I bought Skeptic magazine for the first time. The issue was dedicated to the subject of evolution and its ideological opponent, so-called “intelligent design.” The topic interests me for reasons both professional and personal. My job requires me to occasionally field calls from pissed-off creationists objecting to Nova or other science documentaries. And my dad refuses to believe in evolution because he sees no point in existence if God isn’t involved.

As for myself, I’m both repelled and fascinated by such pseudoscience. On one hand, I feel that it has caused great damage to our culture. Used by cynical manipulators for political ends, it has sown confusion about the nature and process of science, leading to irrational, foolish actions. And yet, I can’t deny that there’s a part of me that yearns for the supernatural and the paranormal. I don’t truly believe in the Loch Ness Monster, but wouldn’t it be cool?

Reading the articles in Skeptic got me thinking a lot about my own beliefs about the origins and purpose of life, and most of all, my lack of faith in a traditional God.

Yes, this is going to be one of those long, navel-gazing blog essays. Bear with me. Or don’t: come back in a week or so and I’ll be writing about kittens or comic books instead.

Next: How Long Is Forever?

Dave Rant evolution, me of little faith, pseudoscience

No time for blogging this week, so instead you get kittens playing with a box:

Dave General kitties

Question: Could the trailer for Dragon Wars rock any fucking harder?

I. AM. SO. THERE.

Dave Movies D-War, dragons, freakin' awesome, trailers

Heroes star Hayden Panettiere turned 18 today.

Dave TV Hayden Panettiere, sigh of relief

Last Friday my friend Brian and I attended Gen Con, a massive gaming convention held annually in Indianapolis. Gen Con, which turned 40 years old this year, began as a local affair up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (hence the name), which was not coincidentally also the birthplace of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Growing ever larger over the decades, it has moved to bigger and bigger locales, the most recent being its current home at the Indianapolis Convention Center.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I attend solely for access to the dealers’ room. And frankly, that’s all I have time for in one day. The last couple of years I’ve been threatening to stay overnight, and I’m thinking that next year I’ll have to do just that. Eight hours in the dealers’ room left me still scrambling around at the end, trying to quickly get in on a few game demonstrations before closing time.

It didn’t help that I spent way, way too much time in the Wizards of the Coast booth. Every year they play a game in which attendees get to roll a giant 20-sided die in hopes of winning free swag. The catch is that to win the bigger prizes, you need to participate in demos of their various games; you get +1 to your roll for each game checked off on your form. This year there were 13 in all, and it took forever to get through them, even though for the most part my participation was limited to wandering up to the table halfway through a session and allowing myself to be seen pretending to look interested. I did win something I actually wanted (a set of D&D Dungeon Tiles), but it took much too long.

Most of the day I wound up looking for deals and filling out my various miniatures collections: Heroclix, D&D, Star Wars, etc. I find that I usually spend most of my money on components rather than actual games: dice, minis, game aids and such. While most of the major game manufacturers are showing off their latest wares, I know that I can get that stuff at my local store; what I’m there for are the odd little bits and pieces that I never knew existed.

Gen Con is an opportunity to at least get a look at what’s new, or what’s coming soon. I did sit in (very briefly) for a demo of Fantasy Flight’s newest, Tannhauser, a horror board game set in one of those worlds where the Reich never fell. It certainly had flavor to spare, but the all-too-quick look at it I had didn’t give me much sense of the gameplay; their demo covered only the very basics of combat, which seemed awfully quick and deadly. (Apparently, there are mission-based scenarios which should be more involved, but we didn’t get into those.) Still, it was very pretty, as was their forthcoming Starcraft boardgame, which I will be hard pressed not to add to my collection.

I also sat in for half a round of Zombie Fluxx, which not only adds an undead overlay to their popular Fluxx card games, but appears to make some significant changes to play by adding “Creepers,” cards which you do not want (usually) but must play anyway, and even an “Ungoal” in which the zombies can win the game. It looked fun, and I’ll definitely pick it up when it’s released later this year.

As I wrote, I tend to buy few actual games at Gen Con, so I always make sure to pick up at least one. This year it was Infernal Contraption, a card game in which the players are goblins racing to assemble steampunk machines to attack their opponents. It was a bit of an impulse buy as I didn’t have time to properly demo it, but it has a lot of flavor and it looks entertaining.

Among the non-game items I bought was a DVD of The Call of Cthulhu, a faithful adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s most famous short story. I’m not usually into fan-made films, but this one employs a very clever conceit to get around the twin bugaboos of bad acting and cheap production values: it’s done in the style of a silent film from the 1920s, the decade in which the story was written. It makes good use of impressionistic sets and jerky stop-motion animation to sell the idea of the monstrous Cthulhu rising from his non-Euclidian angled island city of R’lyeh. It’s surprisingly effective, and manages to more or less tie together Lovecraft’s jumbled narrative.

I don’t have any amusing or annoying anecdotes from Gen Con. I had a good time, my back (mostly) held up, and I bought some cool stuff. Can’t wait for next year!

Dave Games

I’ve had a case of Bloggus Interruptus for the past week. Not that there hasn’t been anything to write about, but that I was short of time and–more to the point–enthusiasm. So, here’s a little update to tide you* over until the Blog Muse calls.

* “You,” as in the half-dozen people who have admitted to reading this on a semi-regular basis.

My dad is still recovering from his recent illness, but he’s doing well and looking more or less normal. As he’s still in need of both physical therapy and intravenous antibiotics, he was temporarily transferred to a nursing home to convalesce. That sounds ominous, but I’m told it’s pretty routine and that it’s by no means a permanent situation.

While I’m on the topic, here’s a correction to my earlier post: It turns out that what my dad hallucinated during his first day at the hosptial was not a giant Pac-Man, but rather that he was endlessly playing Pac-Man. Which, as I mentioned, he still does quite often in real life. I’ll admit to being disappointed to learn this, as the giant Pac-Man made for a better anecdote.

I’m not in the best shape myself. A few days after dad went to the hospital, I threw out my back. That’s not unusual for me; I’ve had back problems all of my adult life, and even had disc surgery in my mid-20s. My back goes out from time to time, and even when it’s not actively painful I have a tendency to tilt to my left side. Usually, the inflammation clears up after a few days, which is why I found it troubling that it was still hanging on a couple of weeks later. When I attended Wizard World Chicago last Friday, the act of merely walking around (for hours, admittedly) carrying a fairly light shopping bag had me in miserable pain the entire day and throughout the weekend. Since then I’ve been back to the doctor and was prescribed some muscle relaxants which have helped a great deal.

What’s more, I’m going to give chiropractic a whirl. Vic had good experiences with it a couple of decades ago, and I’ve certainly met enough people who swear by it. I’ll admit that I’m a little dubious about chiropractic, as I’ve thought of it in the past as being a bit snake-oily. (Indeed, one of the local practitioners also specializes in homeopathy, which is a definite red flag for me.) However, the American College of Surgeons appears neutral on the subject, and my family doctor actually suggested chiropractic to me during my most recent visit.

I went it for an entry exam on Wednesday, and I will say one thing about it: they were thorough. I spent a full hour being examined, questioned and X-rayed, topped off with some sort of electro stimulus treatment. I’m not convinced that the latter did anything other than make my hips feel funky. Next week I’m supposed to meet with them to discuss potential treatment, which I assume would include spinal manipulation. I’m willing to give it a shot; I’m tired of listing to the left.

Tomorrow is my annual excursion to Indianapolis for Gen Con, one of the biggest gaming conventions in the U.S. As with my attendance at the aforementioned Wizard World comic book show, I’m just there to shop, not to participate in games or seminars. There’s nothing better than a fat wallet and a whole convention floor full of game companies doing their best to tempt my tummy. Hopefully my back will let me enjoy it!

Oh, and not only did I finish Resident Evil 4–or as the voice-over guy intones, “Resident Evil…FOUR!”–but I’ve started over again, this time with the benefit of all the weapons I collected during my first circuit. No freaky, vaguely-European, pseudo-zombie is gonna get the better of me!

More later…probably a good bit later.

Dave General

A sad development in the world of publishing: the Weekly World News is shutting down after 28 years of enticing supermarket shoppers with bugfuck crazy headlines about Satan’s face hanging in the air above Chernobyl and Hillary Clinton having an affair with P’Lod the space alien.

I’ll admit that while I rarely bought the WWN, I was often greatly amused by its cover stories and occasionally picked up compilation issues. (Bat Boy Lives! is a trade paperback compendium of some of their best “exclusives,” and well worth your entertainment dollar.)

For a time, I thought that the newspaper was simply pandering to those who will accept any hare-brained story so long as it sounds even slightly conspiratorial. But later I came to realize that it was really a humor magazine; it was The Onion long before that publication attained national prominence. (Current top story on the Onion website: “Human Head Found in Hamburger.”) The latter might have the advantage of that Madison, Wisconsin college humorist patina, but honestly, there’s little difference in their phony advice columns and the bizarre rantings of longtime WWN contributor “Ed Anger.”

While news articles suggest that the Weekly World News will continue to maintain a web presence, I can’t help but feel that’s a sorry substitute for the moment of mockery it often provided in an otherwise soul-crushing Wal-Mart shopping experience.

And who else will keep my up to date on the comings and goings of Bat Boy? To heck with Paris Hilton, I need to know which presidential candidate America’s favorite chiroptera intends to endorse!

Dave Weird

This past week has found me, more often than not, hiding in the basement playing with my Wii. My latest obsession in videogame self-gratification: Resident Evil 4. While RE4 has been out for a couple of years, it’s new to the Wii, and some reviewers have suggested that this is the best version of the game to date. Ever since I bought my Wii I’ve been waiting for a good “light gun” game, so I used my hard-earned Zelda trade-in credit to pick up a copy.

I played the first two Resident Evil games for the PSOne, but have been rather lukewarm to the franchise. I loved the spooky atmosphere and the opportunity to shoot a great many zombies in the head, but found some aspects of the games very frustrating. If you’ve played any of the past entries in the series, you’ll know exactly what bothered me: the scarcity of ammunition, the locked-down “camera” and the need to collect “typewriter ribbons” just to save one’s game.

Worst of all was the inability to bypass the cut scenes. During one of the games, I found myself extremely low on ammo and forced into a confrontation with an especially tenacious “boss” monster. I didn’t have enough firepower to stop it and I was unable to procure more because I’d already cleaned out the complex. Every time I failed, I had to endure a long, unskippable cut scene. In the end, the only way I could get past that chokepoint was to restart the game from a much earlier save.

Fortunately, someone at Capcom figured out that hordes of zombies / a handful of bullets + arbitrarily limited saves X unavoidable cut scenes = no fun, and Resident Evil 4 corrects this fatal equation. There have been a few times I’ve run low on resources, but so far the game has been relatively generous with loot.

Resident Evil 4 casts the player as some sort of special forces soldier sent to rescue the President’s very hot daughter from an army of cultists who, as it turns out, are possessed by alien parasites. They take their cues from the fast-moving zombies of recent horror films such as 28 Days Later, and use a variety of weapons to boot. I’m not sure where it’s set; it looks like an Eastern European village, but all of the proper names are in Spanish. The early sequences had me blowing away a nigh-endless supply of pitchfork-wielding zombie peasants, and now I’m in a castle run by a creepy-eyed midget in a Napoleon outfit.

I’m currently about 2/3 of the way through the storyline, and unlike a lot of other videogames, I can easily see myself playing through it again. I’ve found it very satisfying in terms of atmosphere and gameplay. There are the usual collect-the-key quests, but little of the backtracking that plagued earlier Resident Evil games; often I’ve found the key even before I knew I needed it. The puzzles are just puzzling enough to stimulate my synapses, yet intuitive enough that I’ve had little need for a walkthrough. The frequent need to defend the President’s daughter had me worried that the entire game would become one long “protect the convoy” mission–a videogame cliche in which the player is forced to defend a slow-moving, poorly-armored and relentlessly stupid target–but even that aspect hasn’t proved especially frustrating.

I’m itching to get back to it, and unlike my recent experience with Zelda, it’s not because I’m just looking to get the damned thing over with.

Dave Videogames