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Roamin’ Empire

Posted May 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

Barry Kitson is one comics’ top pencilers. He first attracted notice on the science fiction title L.E.G.I.O.N. ’89, and has since done stints on some of DC Comics’ most famous characters, including Superman, Batman, and the Justice League of America. Last summer he branched into creator-owned comics, publishing Empire with longtime creative partner Mark Waid under the Gorilla imprint for Image Comics. The story of an evil overlord who falls victim to none of the classic blunders and does take over the world, Empire‘s first two issues were a fascinating glimpse of a world gone mad. Look all you want for sympathetic characters; those few you find may not be around long. Unfortunately, the Gorilla partners were misled by people outside of Image on certain matters of funding, and the resultant financial problems meant the end of Gorilla. For some time it looked like Empire would not be back.

Fortunately, Waid and Kitson have found a new home for Empire at the Homage Comics imprint of DC’s Wildstorm division. Fresh off the news, I had the chance to talk to Kitson about the book, its new lease on life, and his career.

DT: So what is the news with Empire?

BK: Basically that the book will be becoming an Homage title as part of the DC group and that we will get a chance to – at last – publish the whole story without having all the problems with were struggling with at Gorilla – none of which were Gorilla’s fault! Mark and I will retain creative ownership and the whole team will be as per issues 1 and 2 . . . [with inker James Pascoe and colorist Chris Sotomayor] which we are hoping to have reissued in a special package so people who missed it first time round can pick up on the story!

DT: Now what exactly is the difference between publishing through Image and publishing through DC/Homage?

BK: The main difference is that under Gorilla’s arrangement at Image we had to pay for all the publishing, printing, a fee to have the Image ‘I’ and pay all the creators upfront – well before the books could come out. Also as a smaller imprint the printing costs were vastly higher under Image than for DC so the book cost alot more to produce than it will under the DC banner. We could have reduced quality of paper, story length, etc., but we really didn’t want to do that! Actually I may have got that wrong about the order the bills came in – printing, etc. may have been after publishing… but before we made any money 🙂

DT: Are they handling more of the logistics? On the Gorilla message boards, it sounded like you were one of the guys having to keep track of all the pieces.

BK: As to the logistics – it’s true there really was no one other than ourselves putting everything together for production at Gorilla. Ann Busiek was working really hard to keep all the editorial pages running and stuff, for which we will be eternally grateful – but as for getting all the pages put together it was down to us and paying the guys at Comicraft to do the work – like put ‘film’ together for printers etc.

DT: Which must have made the financial issues even more fun. At some point I’d like to get back to the whole Gorilla project, but for now let’s talk about Empire itself. You say you’re going to publish “the whole story” — does that mean that Empire is a finite series now?

BK: Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything about the length of the Empire tale other than it can go on being told . . . right from the start we said it might run for years or it might end tomorrow . . . we want people not to be able to assume too much . . . We have got definite objectives to reach in the story and we know where it will be going for a certain number of issues, but we also wanted the characters to drive the book – so that we will be ‘in their hands’ to some extent. It’s very possible that all the characters we’ve seen so far will not survive for long 🙂

DT: That element of surprise has got to be one of the fun things about the book. Even though I should have, I never saw Sebirus’ death coming in the first issue.

BK: That was exactly what we wanted… in fact it surprised us a little in our initial planning he had been going to be an ongoing figure! That’s what I meant about character driven events! 🙂

DT: At exactly what point did you realize, “No, he has to go?” And was there any resistance on your part to change plans right from the get-go?

BK: We just realized half way through plotting issue one that killing him was the ‘logical’ thing for Golgoth to do despite their history. Retaining power is Golgoth’s paramount concern.

DT: OK, that brings up something else I’ve been curious about. The credits of the book say Mark’s the writer and you’re the penciller, but it feels like you’re involved in the plotting. How exactly does the creative process with Mark work?

BK: Well we used the term ‘storytellers’ for both of us on JLA Year One and that confused a lot of people 🙂

DT: I saw you had that credit on the first issue of Brave and the Bold, then switched to more conventional titles on the second issue.

BK: What happens is that we discuss the story together initially and form a rough outline of events then Mark will prepare an initial plot, which we’ll go over together. Next I provide a set of ‘thumbnails’ for the story for Mark to look through and react to with new ideas etc. and we have another discussion – after that I will draw up the pencilled pages and Mark will add the dialogue to those. So every step of the way we’re in contact and honing the story – I really enjoy the process!

DT: Does that work better because you’ve worked together on so many other projects, or is that an approach you can take with other writers?

BK: The approach generally depends on the writer – but I’ve been lucky enough to work this way with a lot of my past collaborators – Alan Grant in particular. Doug Moench is also very open to sharing ideas, but he likes to get everything down in plot form first before I get involved. Karl Kesel was also kind enough to let me chip in on the plots on Adventures of Superman too. I think it was really only on Azrael – where Denny O’Neil liked to work with full scripts – that my input was pretty minimal as to the plot lines.

DT: Getting back to Empire: what is it, in general terms, you want to accomplish with this story? What motivated you to make it your first creator owned story, and what motivated you to work to find a second home for it?

BK: We wanted to tell a story that had elements that readers would feel familiar with . . . costumed characters etc, but be able to take a totally fresh look at the genre . . . which I think we were [doing]. . . we wanted to try something away from all the accepted conventions of superhero books . . . i.e., the bad guys won, major characters die, etc., etc. Just play with the conventions and people’s expectations and have fun! The reaction to the book was so positive and we enjoyed working on it so much that we really didn’t want to let it just disappear because of things outside the creative process. It was important for us to tell the story if we could and keep the creative team together – we’d all enjoyed working on the book, the readers had liked it and we didn’t want to stop! 🙂

DT: We’re running short on time for this first section, so let me ask you this: besides Empire, what else do you have in the works?

BK: I’m just finishing up a Legends of the Dark Knight arc, written by Doug [in issues 146-148]. There will be a second one to come too. I have a prestige format book with Howard Chaykin and David Tischman [a sequel to the Secret Society of Super-Heroes miniseries] coming up and there’s a good chance of a regular DC monthly book too – so I’ll be going back to penciling only 🙂

Continued in Part 2

Filed in Comics
        

Left of Center

Posted April 1, 2001 By Kevin Ott

Lots of times, political cartoons just manage to get me all peeved and make me throw the paper down on the table and want to just say “screw it all” and watch Friends just to avoid being a part of the political process.

See, I hate political junkies. I hate TV pundits, I hate most political columnists, I hate political reporters who think that they’re actually writing for an audience that includes more than just a bunch of other political reporters.

That’s why Scott Bateman is so freakin’ cool.

Bateman is my political cartoonist, and your political cartoonist, and he’s part of this really cool vanguard of young political commentators that focus on how our elected leaders actually affect us, as opposed to making symbolic graphical platitudes about school violence or campaign finance reform. In a Bateman cartoon, you’ll never see a big whale labeled “foreign policy” with whoever happens to be president at the time dressed as Ahab, running after it with a harpoon labeled “tax cut,” or a cherry tree labeled “education initiative” and some senator dressed as George Washington holding an ax labeled “tort reform bill,” or something equally cryptic and completely unfunny. Reading Scott Bateman’s work, it looks like he realized a long time ago that guys like Berke Breathed and Garry Trudeau and Bill Watterson had it right: Tell a good story in pictures, and you’ll make a great point, and people will laugh. It’s that easy.

More recently, Bateman has been creating and posting his very own Web animation, which often deals with more everyday pop-culture situations, like his “Coffee Achievers” strip does. But you know what? I suck at describing this. Go to his website to find out how cool he is.

Bateman was also cool enough to answer some questions for notnews. Here they are: Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media
        

Self-Help for the Rest of Us

Posted April 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

Back when I was in college, the career guidance office was fond of pushing a book called What Color Is Your Parachute?, which was allegedly chock full of helpful advice for planning a career and hunting for a job. I don’t know for sure, as I never read it. I was a carefree, the-future-will-take-care-of-itself kind of guy. Besides, I knew exactly what I was gonna do for a living. I was going to be a journalist. No, wait, a philosopher. No, wait, strike that, I was going to move out to LA and try and break into writing for TV and film. Or did I decide against that? That may have been the week I was going to be a graphic designer. Regardless, I was not big on the whole life planning thing, but I know people who were.

Thing is, they didn’t necessarily follow their plans either. Why? Because life gets in the way. Some other jerk gets promoted even though you did most of the grunt work. The company you work for was counting on an Internet business to invest capital. Your significant other decides that, contrary to his or her previous opinion, yak farming is a preferable substitute to your continued company. Your pet turtle runs away. Other people, in other words, are almost never cooperative with your plans, even though it is clear that your plans are by far the most sensible possible way the world could work out.

There’s actually a very simple reason for this. Other people are morons.

No, actually, that’s not true. Actually, everyone is a genius, and if they only saw things your way, they would certainly defer to your sound logic and reasoning. In fact, they’d arrive at the very same conclusion themselves! So how to explain the apparent idiocy? I realized the answer when reading an issue of Powers a while back. I put the relevant piece of dialogue up on our Quote-a-rama thread, but even then, I did not understand its significance:

“It’s like: How do I know that when I see the color blue — how do I know that you are seeing the same blue I am? It’s one of those questions you just try not to think about–“

The simple truth is, you are not seeing the same blue everyone else is. Color perception is an extremely subjective thing, and even though we can all agree that blue is the color of the sky and green is the color of grass, who knows what shade of what color each of us really means by those words? And these subtle shifts in hue shift the way we look at the world, so that what makes perfect sense to you makes absolutely none to someone who looks at a banana and sees the color you see when you look at an apple.

Having finally cracked this infernal code, I am pleased to announce that I will be publishing my own life-planning guide, entitled What Color Is the Sky in Your World? The book will provide examples and exercises that help you translate from one color scheme to another, along with special color-changing lenses (which I have acquired at a wholesale liquidation discount from an out-of-business 3D glasses manufacturer) that will finally give all of us a common frame of chromatic reference. A few examples of the lessons to be learned from What Color Is the Sky:

  • You are a former denizen of Wall Street who gets it into his head that selling books and all sorts of other things on the Internet would make a dandy business. You start the business, everyone loves it, Time names you Man of the Year. Just one problem: you forget to actually make any money in the process, and the value of your company drops 90% and you find yourself deeply in debt. The color of your sky is red — readjust your vision right away, but make sure you’re sitting down when you look at your balance sheet afterward.
  • You are an Australian individual prone to saying ‘Crikey’ a lot and shoving your fist down the throats of crocodiles. The color of your sky is a light brown. You’re pretty much harmless, so there’s no rush to change . . . but really, man, those teeth are not bee-you-tee-ful. They’re just damned sharp.
  • You are that guy who stands right in front of the entrance to the train and tries to cram your way in while the rest of us are trying to get out. What the heck is your rush, anyway? The color of your sky — chartreuse — is clearly preventing you from realizing that the train will not go anywhere until we all get off. Your blood pressure will thank you for getting that taken care of.
  • You are Kathie Lee Gifford and you don’t understand why the ratings for Live! with Regis and Anybody Else have gone up since you left to pursue your other endeavors, including but not limited to your relief efforts for the sweatshop workers who make your clothes for Wal-Mart. Readjust your vision so that the sky is no longer fuchsia, watch a few of your old tapes, and get back to us.
  • You are the guy that mugged me last November about 100 feet from a Temple University Police watchtower. You clearly chose your spot well, since the cops never saw you, but you tried to mug a graduate student, the form of life on this planet least likely to have any money. Once the color of the sky in your world is no longer green with yellow stripes, you will hopefully apply your keen planning skills to a more lucrative, and hopefully legal, venture. (You may want to talk to the Man of the Year, while you’re at it.)
  • You are Joel Schumacher, director of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. I am still trying to figure out what the devil you’re looking at.

Clearly, we are at the dawn of a new Golden Era (one that will, perhaps, match the brilliance of the sky in Bill Gates’ world), and all it takes is one slight, teensy-weensy, itty-bitty life-altering shift of perspective. It’s a small price to pay, really. So pick up your copy of What Color Is the Sky in Your World? today, and —

What’s that? You want to know what color I see when I look up at the clouds? Blue, of course. Clearly, I have the proper perspective on everything. It’s the rest of you pikers that need to get with the program. So c’mon, get those Visas and MasterCards ready.

Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

Locke, Stock and Barrel

Posted April 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

I’ve always been fascinated with the uniqueness of our own experience — how the way things smell, feel, taste, and look to us is something that can’t help but be private. I can’t look through your eyes, you can’t hear through my ears . . . we have to use words and concepts that assume some common frame of reference. And the fact that we get our point across more often than not is a good sign that we do have some kind of common reference. But — as this month’s Humor piece points out in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way — there’s something unavoidably subjective and personal in the whole affair.

It should be no surprise that this revelation has sent many philosophers, focused on classifying and explaining everything, into fits and intellectual contortions. During the modern period, where the search was on for an indubitable and universal truth, something had to be done about this subjectivity. We’ve seen Descartes’ attempts to deal with the problem, and how they were not wholly satisfying. Next up the plate: John Locke, who is probably better known as a political theorist than an epistemologist, but who nonetheless introduced a couple of vital concepts to the dialogue.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy
        

Self-Help for the Rest of Us

Posted April 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

Back when I was in college, the career guidance office was fond of pushing a book called What Color Is Your Parachute?, which was allegedly chock full of helpful advice for planning a career and hunting for a job. I don’t know for sure, as I never read it. I was a carefree, the-future-will-take-care-of-itself kind of guy. Besides, I knew exactly what I was gonna do for a living. I was going to be a journalist. No, wait, a philosopher. No, wait, strike that, I was going to move out to LA and try and break into writing for TV and film. Or did I decide against that? That may have been the week I was going to be a graphic designer. Regardless, I was not big on the whole life planning thing, but I know people who were.

Thing is, they didn’t necessarily follow their plans either. Why? Because life gets in the way. Some other jerk gets promoted even though you did most of the grunt work. The company you work for was counting on an Internet business to invest capital. Your significant other decides that, contrary to his or her previous opinion, yak farming is a preferable substitute to your continued company. Your pet turtle runs away. Other people, in other words, are almost never cooperative with your plans, even though it is clear that your plans are by far the most sensible possible way the world could work out.

There’s actually a very simple reason for this. Other people are morons.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

A Healthy Paranoia

Posted April 1, 2001 By Pattie Gillett

Back in my college days (which are now embarrassingly long ago), my knowledge of con artists was limited to the three-card monte dealer a few blocks off campus who for some reason, always seemed to find a few marks among our students. Being a paranoid native New Yorker trained since my toddler days not to make eye contact with anyone, not even my stuffed toys, I never actually saw the guy, I only heard the stories. Despite the university’s warnings and despite the fact that the con itself was older than dirt, a fair number of students blew their beer money in search of the red card. At 19, that kind of loss is a life lesson, a reminder to keep your wits about you at all times. It’s also mockery ammunition for your friends for well into the next decade.

These days, working at a financial institution (and having a slightly unsettling fascination with illegalities), my knowledge of frauds and cons has grown to the point where I’m just one big knot of suspiciousness. I’m going to make myself useful by sharing my paranoia in the form of information about the recent spike in “tech” cons (cons committed using the telephone or Internet). With these types of frauds, there’s much more than beer money at stake. When it becomes common for someone to lose thousands in a phony online auction or their savings in a phony stock scheme, life lessons like these are way overpriced.

Internet and Telephone Frauds (including telemarketing fraud) are unique for a number of reasons. In face to face cons, the con artist typically needs time with the victims to establish rapport and build trust. They’re literally building your confidence in them (which is where the term comes from). For some would-be victims, this is sufficient time for their own intuition or common sense to kick in and tell them to pull out of whatever schemes the fraudster has planned. Of course, not everyone does. Moreover, people who have been conned in person usually have a description, paper trail, or other lead for authorities to handle whereas many “tech” con artists are impossible to trace. Finally, our three-card monte dealer and his accomplice, the $20 Rolex salesman, have nothing on telemarketers and online scammers when it comes to volume. Good telemarketers can make hundreds of calls per day and online scammers are limited only by their own bandwidth and imaginations. Anyone see a problem here?

The National Consumers League, the Consumers Union (the folks who publish Consumer Reports) and the FCC are just a few of the people who see a problem. They’ve started tracking telemarketing and Internet fraud more carefully in recent years. The National Consumers League, a hundred-year-old consumer advocacy group, published a report last year, which placed online fraud losses at well over $3,500,000. (Of course, they didn’t count the NASDAQ because for some reason, getting people to invest in online pet retailing is actually legal). Tops on the list of Internet fraud were online auctions, though work-at-home schemes and multilevel marketing cons have found a home online as well. Even the tried and true Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud is alive and kicking around online. The Internet is still relatively new, and as more people move online, the number and variety of online crimes will surely increase.

Telemarketers, on the other hand, have been at the fraud game for years, honing their skills. Many are nearly impossible to differentiate from legitimate salespeople (not that anyone who calls you during dinner should really be called legitimate). A study by the NCL puts losses to telemarketing fraud in the area of $40 billion per year. The FBI estimates that there are 15,000 illegal telephone sales companies at work in this country. While they may not all operate in boiler rooms, they’re all out to separate consumers from their money selling phony investments, goods, and services.

Here are just a few examples of the telemarketing scams that have worked for many years, courtesy of www.crimes-of-persuasion.com:

You may have already won — Scammers have used “advance fee sweepstakes” for years with tremendous success. They call of thousands upon thousands of winning “entrants” (not that the people called ever remember entering anything) to tell them that they’ve “won” a large sum of money or other “valuable” prize. To collect, all the need to do is send in a check or money order (or give them a credit card number) to cover the taxes, release fees, subscription costs, etc. Companies like these target the elderly; 80% of the scam victims are over the age of 65. In one case, a pair of telemarketers impersonated federal tax officials to bilk elderly victims out of $20,000 or more each.

You may have already been scammed — If you’ve been scammed once, beware of helping hands, at least those not attached to recognized law enforcement agencies. The bottom-dwellers of the telemarketing world are those who prey on the victimized. (They actually buy “sucker lists” with names of previous scam victims). They promise to help you recover your lost money – for a small fee. Many of these scammers operate under official sounding names such as the Fraudulent Action Network and charge anywhere from $200 to $1000 to “help” victims. At best, victims receive a list of organizations to contact about the crime which the victim could have easily gotten for free out of the phone book. At worst, the victim gets a double asterisk next to his or her name on the “sucker list.”

Boiler Room not starring Ben Affleck — Real life “boiler room” (they actually use rented space in reputable looking office buildings) telemarketing operations may have up to 50 reps each making 250 to 300 calls per day selling everything from penny stocks to gemstones to time shares. The best work much like three-card monte dealers, working to gain your trust with multiple phone calls. One ingenious operation called and gave victims stock forecasts until they bit. What the victims didn’t know was that the boiler room made 200 calls, they told one hundred people that the stock would rise, and the other 100 that the stock would fall. After watching what actually happened, they simply called the correct 100 and made another forecast, cutting the groups in half until they had a working pool of victims ready to invest.

Sure, knowing a handful of the methods that scammers use may help, but aren’t con men constantly coming up with new ideas, new methods? How are you supposed to protect yourself? Many consumer advocacy groups have free fraud prevention web sites on the Internet available for consumers who have been scammed or who just want to protect themselves. Many sites are updates regularly with the latest scams and the latest on criminal investigations. Visit the links I’ve included with the article for more information. You can also check with you local news organizations to see which frauds are popular in your area. Many scammers are methodical, especially if they’ve been successful in a given area.

The surest way to avoid being scammed is to not be afraid of paranoia. I’m serious. Ask questions. Press for more information. A legitimate salesperson should be happy to answer them. A scammer doesn’t want to give away too much. Here are some questions that will help you tell the difference:

How did you get my name?

Be very suspicious if they say “the phone book” or some other vague answer.

What is the risk involved?

If they try to convince you that it’s a guaranteed investment, hang up. Investments, particularly securities, always carry risks, by their nature.

Can you send me this information in writing?

If they tell you that you must “act now,” hang up.

Would you mind explaining this information to my lawyer?

Again, if they tell you that they can’t because you have to “act now,” hang up . . . loudly.

Can you give me any references?

This may not always be 100% effective in itself because they could just give you the number of the person sitting next to them in their boiler room, but if they can’t even give you that, it’s a big red flag.

New cons and frauds pop everyday and even with advocacy groups pushing for privacy legislation (itself a controversial subject), we can’t rely on the laws to stay ahead of the criminals. Each person needs to exercise their common sense, ingenuity, and self-restraint when dealing with con artists. They make big promises but in the end, they’re only looking out for themselves. Confidence crimes are aptly named. In the end, it’s your judgment and your trust in other human beings that is stolen. How much money is that worth?

Other Helpful Links:

Internet Fraud Watch
The Cagey Consumer

Filed in Life in Practice
        

Stripped, But Not Stripped Down

Posted March 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

We spend most of our time in the Comics section of Not News focused on comic books, whether they’re monthly magazines, collected edition, or original novel-length works. But if we go back to the definition of comics suggested by Scott McCloud (in a nutshell: words and pictures arranged in a sequence), there is one area of American comics that we have pretty much neglected: the comic strip, long a standby of your local paper and now making its way onto the Web.

Part of the reason for the neglect is probably a frustration with the modern limitations of the form — short, three-or-four-panel strips tend to lend themselves more to gags and punchlines than complex storytelling. It’s exactly that frustration that led Judd Winick, for example, to end publication of his Frumpy the Clown strip and move on to projects like Barry Ween and Pedro and Me. At the same time, newspaper comic strips have a far wider circulation than even the most popular American comic, which might reach about 100,000 people a month. Obviously, comic strips are doing something to connect to readers that comic books aren’t; their contributions to the medium should not be ignored, even while we keep their limitations in mind. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Comics
        

Paying the Bills

Posted March 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

Last time my smiling mug appeared in this section, I promised a discussion of how exactly we could go about paying for an education system that would do the job right. I was all ready to write that story for December, but then we had that whole wacky election and Kev just wrote one hell of a piece, which shifted Pattie’s article over to Policy and left me standing when the music stopped . . . so you got to read their pieces and I got another couple of months to think about the issue, which I think is a win-win situation all around.

When last we spoke, we were discussing the disparities in spending between distressed urban school districts and well-to-do suburban districts. My argument then, as now, is that it is patently unfair to demand that the Philadelphia School District live up to the same standard as the smaller, more affluent Jenkintown District when the latter outspends the former almost 2 to 1 on a per-student basis. I want to turn now to different approaches that are being taken to how parents, districts and states fund the education of their children. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy
        

Sim-ply Irresistible

Posted March 1, 2001 By Pattie Gillett

Will Wright could probably teach the big tobacco companies a thing or two about marketing addictive products. In fact, I’m seriously considering reporting him to the ATF or the FCC or whoever the heck is handling that sort of thing these days. Well, as soon as save enough money for Walter to buy a hot tub so he can have a party so he can make some new friends so he can advance in his career.

Hmmm, I should probably explain what I just said. No, there is too much. Let sum up. I put this computer game on my Amazon.com wish list. My sister brought it for me. I played said game and pretty much everything else in my life came to a screeching halt. That’s probably not enough so I’ll give you some more detail. The computer game in question is called The Sims. It was created by an evidently sadistic chap named Will Wright, who had previously contributed to the decline of productivity in this country by creating the hugely popular Sim games.

For those who are not up on the computer gaming world (and I don’t pretend to be either), Sim City is a simulation game that allows you to build and control a major city from the ground up. You build buildings, design neighborhoods, fight crime, control the power supply, etc. While the Sim series has been enjoying tremendous popularity for ten years, The Sims has only been around since March 2000. However, most people who find themselves unable to turn the game off at three or four o’clock in the morning (present company included) don’t seem to mind its relative infancy.

Basically, with The Sims, instead of controlling cities, you control people. That got your attention. The game takes place in a neighborhood, according to the game literature, actually a suburb of Sim City. There are several predefined homes, some with predefined inhabitants. There are also other lots available for the user to add new homes. Your task: create or import new Sims (people) into the neighborhood, find them jobs (or not), acquaint them with their neighbors, and keep them happy.

How do you know if they’re happy? Well, there’s this slick-looking dashboard on the bottom of your screen that keeps you informed of each Sims’ needs: hunger, bladder, (you don’t actually have to watch them go, the bathroom scenes are mostly censored), energy, social, room, hygiene, comfort, and the all-important, fun. Depending on your Sims’ personality traits, these needs can move up or down pretty fast, and it’s up to you to direct your Sims to do what it takes to meet their needs. So, if your Sim is hungry, you can direct them to cook a meal, have a snack, or call for a pizza. But wait, Mr. Wright has thrown in another curve: if you haven’t directed your Sim to bone up on his or her cooking skills, he or she just might burn the kitchen down if they try to cook. Or, if your Sim hasn’t been going to work regularly, he or she might not have the cash to afford the pizza. I made the unfortunate mistake of directing a mechanically inept Sim to change a light bulb; the poor shlub was electrocuted. Oh, I should have mentioned, your Sims can die if their needs get perilously low. You’d think they would have put that in larger print somewhere on the box.

As you’ll quickly discover, playing The Sims becomes a race against time. You need meet all your Sims’ needs while still getting them to put in a good seven-hour workday so they can advance in their careers. Not an easy task, and the Sims’ get very cranky when their needs are not met. Sound familiar? Say you’ve got a Sim on the Pro Athlete career track (one of ten tracks offered in the standard game), unless you keep your athlete in a good mood, he or she will refuse to work out, a necessity in moving ahead or even keeping a job in that field. One of my Sims flat out refused to use the home gym I directed him to buy. Can you believe that guy?

Which brings me to what are probably the most addictive options in the game: Build and Buy modes. If you are so inclined, and your Sim has the requisite cash, you can build the home of your dreams or at least a reasonable electronic facsimile thereof. The standard game comes with dozens of flooring, wallpaper, and landscaping options as well as over 150 items to furnish the home. Believe me, I was knocking down walls and re-tiling patios until all hours of the night just last week. The kicker is, generally the more expensive the item, the better it will meet your Sims’ needs. Sims who sleep in the priciest beds don’t need to sleep as long, which gives you more time to battle their other seven needs.

There is no “end” to this game, no real goal per se, except to keep your little community moving along and keep the interactions between your Sims (they can fight, get married, have kids, etc.) into infinity. And to make matters worse, Maxis, the company behind the game, has started putting out expansion packs with more items to buy, more housing options, and more career tracks. Yes, I have one. The Sims: Livin’ Large Expansion Pack followed me home from the store one day. Freakish thing. Maxis even offers a Sims Exchange portion of the game’s website, where registered users can upload and download Sim families, publish family albums, and chat with other gamers. (Editors’ note: Pattie will be happy to learn that Electronic Arts will soon be releasing another expansion pack, The Sims: House Party along with a game that supposedly mixes Sim City with The Sims, called Simsville.)

From the web site, I’ve learned that The Sims is a game that’s very dependent upon the player’s personality. Having played the game (virtually nonstop) for the past month I’ve developed a key strategy on maintaining happy Sims (one that will probably not surprise anyone who knows me): multitasking. Listing to the stereo will boost a Sims fun level but dancing with a neighbor boosts both social and fun needs. But all this multitasking doesn’t leave a lot of time for decorating so my Sims live in modest-sized homes furnished with the whatever necessary items they can afford at the time. It was not until I downloaded a house created by a fellow gamer that I was apparently not fully appreciating the Build and Buy modes. This Sim home had among other things, forty bedrooms, half a dozen bathrooms, and a casino. I think there’s a reason this is not a multi-player game.

So before I get back to my pal Walter and his woefully inadequate social life, a few final words about this game:

  1. It should come with a warning from the Surgeon General and not one of those wimpy cigarette ones, either, a real one.
  2. I hope the folks at Maxis have had fun laughing at the irony of selling a game that depends upon the characters honing their efficiency skills to consumers who will likely spend hours upon hours at their computer while they should be doing laundry. Real funny. Ha Ha. (I will find out where they live, I swear it.)
  3. If you read too much into the game and extrapolate what it says about our society and our consumerist culture, you will begin bleeding from the ears. Just play.
  4. Simply playing Life when you were a kid will not prepare you for this game, you do need to read the instructions lest your Sims start dropping like flies. It’s quite like the game of Life if you think about it, if the game of Life were designed by mad scientists on steroids.
  5. If you do purchase this game, do yourself a favor and pick up a newspaper or call a friend once a while – just to remind yourself where you are.
Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

Do You Didgeridoo?

Posted March 1, 2001 By Kevin Ott

The diversity of musical forms offered by the native peoples of the world is nothing short of impressive: From the Toltecs of Central and South America, who lull us with their haunting flute melodies, to the pounding drums and rhythmic chants of the Amerindians, to the water drums played by the Baka people of Cameroon, to the Australian Aborigines, who make instruments by blowing termite poop out of tree limbs.

Seriously. One of the most beautiful, haunting sounds carried along frequencies accessible to human ears comes from an instrument which, in its truest form, is created by hungry insects.

I’m talking, of course, about the didgeridoo, also called the didjeridu and, for some reason, the yadiki. Raw, earthy and practically subsonic, the didgeridoo figures centrally in Aboriginal music, and is a strong image in the culture of the Island Continent. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media
        
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