What's neighborly?

Ceteris Paribus. Which is to say, all else being equal, if you're some economist or guy who likes to make arguments based on inconvenient terminology (like an economist).  All else being equal, I prefered "can only sleep with the TV set to maximum volume" guy to "vomiting out a window or perhaps off a balcony" guy, as neighbors go.  

Or so I thought.  VOAW(OPOAB)-guy has been going for about 12 hours now, which has taken on comic proportions, even if the scream while vomiting and a second later, the splash of said vomit isn't any less horrible than it was last night. 

And on that note, please allow me to introduce you to a short post written on Oct 12, 2008, that never got past the draft button:

This might be a difference of living in the city vs. the suburbs, but when I was growing up, if the kids down the street were screaming their heads off, it was part of whatever game they were playing, and you ignored it.

Not the case at a friend's house a few months ago, in a fairly suburban corner of LA, when the neighbor kid started screaming his head off.  Our host dropped everything to go to the back yard and yell 'are you okay?' for a little while, and then went around to go knock at the neighbor's door and see how things were going. Seemed strange, but only to a few of us.  To the rest, we seemed monstrous for being inclined to ignore it.

But what happens when max-volume-TV-neighbor can go to bed and leave some horror movie on, with a woman in distress screaming "HELP ME! HELP ME PLEASE! SOMEBODY! SOMEBODY HELP!" at 2 am?  What's neighborly then?

Maybe the thing to do is to just let one of the other neighbors take care of it.  Relying on 'someone else' to call the cops, or to put out that fire, or to cure cancer is typically a recipe for disaster, but we can rest assured that one nearby neighbor is on the case.  Angry-yelling-out-the-window-guy moved in somewhere around here lately, and I like him.

The family with the new baby does a pretty good job, and the baby doesn't cry very often, but when it does, angry-window-yelling-guy is on top of it.  Someone's gotta tell that baby to shut up, after all, or it'll never stop crying!  He makes me feel like I live in a movie about New York in the 1970s.  There're two girls fighting about something right now, about 1:30am, and angry-guy set 'em straight: "You're both assholes," proclaims he, "now shut up!"

I wish these things were better.

"There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." And yet, just wanting to like something doesn't seem to be quite the same as genuinely enjoying it.

Legends of Zork is a newish browser-based game, nominally set in the world of Zork text adventures.  A more accurate description of the game seems to be turn-based World of Warcraft, with Zork-flavored names for the places and some of the monsters.  There are no puzzles, or, there are things called puzzles which you solve or don't based on a dice roll.  There is no inventory, or, there are weapons you can hold, which, in combination with magic spells you can buy, modify your dice rolling battle results.  There's nothing to look at, aside from maybe a dozen banner-ad sized illustrations, no clever descriptions of things, and nothing to do except grind for points.  Players may fight monsters in order to gain experience points and level up, or they may fight each other for useless fame points and slightly less useless money points with which more weapons and armor are purchased, in order to fight more monsters in order to level up, which increases the maximum allowed wager in the PvP arena, which allows faster money making to buy weapons and armor.  Great.  I've stuck it out so far in the hope of something interesting happening.  Even tried multiple characters with different goals (making money, magic user, fighter) and the gameplay offers nothing to make these characters different from one another.  Still, it's probably a slightly better version of Zork than the novelizations of the late 1980s.  But at least the books didn't keep automatically logging me out.

Parks & Recreation is the quasi-spin-off of The Office (US).  It seems like it leans on the fact that most viewers will see it immediately after The Office on TV, and makes heavy use of all the mock-doc techniques found in the other show.  Granted, I didn't really like The Office either two episodes in, and now I'm a fan, but the thing that makes it seem odd to me is that it doesn't feel like it is or could be a documentary.  Similar to how The Foot Fist Way attempted to use that style without committing to the limits that go with it, maybe, or just too jokey.  I guess I'd rather be wrong, but it's not sitting very well yet.

I saw one Dane watch a Desperate Housewives last night.  That only barely qualifies for this topic because I don't think anything should have to be that lousy.

In which this page's subtitle is made reality, in the third person.

Current Rob (Producing) is working on the SpikeTV show, has a feature coming up in June that could maybe shoot RED, and is making daily visible progress on the new radio show.  It's visible because there's a google doc spreadsheet with delightful color coding to keep track.  It's like this right now:

Current Rob (Consuming) is up to movie #1,452, and the recent lot is made up of some poor documentaries, a bunch of shorts of varying quality (including one he worked on in early 2006, which recently won a prize), and a couple of others.  Role Models, for instance, was much more David Wain-like than reviews may have led one to believe, and whilst editing a UCB video starring an actor with a supporting role in the film, Rob's worlds collided just a little bit.

Hanging around the LA comedy thing has begun the odd but not unpleasant phenomenon of Rob seeing folks he knows in a lot of movies and tv and things lately.  Not to mention in some old conan bits that high school Rob sure enjoyed.

Speaking of, High school Rob is attending the St. Rita's Youth Group Retreat Retreat, which is a planning session for the big 90-kid event weekend to be thrown at the end of the school year.  On Saturday evening, Catholic mass is said.  At the end of the first of two halves that make up the ceremony, the Liturgy of the Word, is the General Intercessions - a series of foci for which the congregation may direct their prayers - common subjects include world leaders, that their decisions may bring peace and harmony to the world; this retreat team, that they might receive guidance to achieve their task; St. Rita, St. Mark, and all the saints; ailing and recently departed relatives or members of the community, that they may be healed or find eternal peace (respectively); and in as small a service as the one being held, individual people or causes on the minds of the group.  High school Rob contributes "stuntmen, daredevils, and people attempting to break or lay claim to especially dangerous world records who jeopardize their lives on a regular basis."  The priest struggles not to giggle and apologizes later in the evening, just in case Rob was serious and maybe knew such a person.  He did not, but played the whole thing very straight, as one must.

Mission Complete

#1,388: 21

WATCHED a lent copy of Foxy Brown this week. Fun and crazy and interesting to see where the different standards used to be. READ a copy of How to Cheat your Friends at Poker, presumably by J.D. Richards. I'm inclined to believe that Penn Jillette really did help someone else get their text into print on his good name, because Penn's never so dull in anything else he works on. Pretty much like reading a bound up handful of old BBS-era textfiles describing how to be a successful cheat with all the usefulness of Steve Martin's advice on how to get a million dollars and never pay taxes. Don't know that I really wanted someone to train me at cheating in a game I don't play, but I wanted more than I got.

WATCHED 21, the Los Vegas advertisement that looked kind of neat in the commercials. I talked with some of the dealers about the movie last time I was there. They said if anything, it was pretty good for the town, since it got more people in thinking they could work the system the movie didn't actually explain to them.

But I was still surprised by how bad the movie was.

While it ran, I had a litany of complaints, but I thought writing them as it played was corny, and now, minutes after the film ended, it almost completely escapes me. The cheesy 80s score, the paper-thin plot twists, the just enough romantic subplot to fill in a spot in the trailer, the reams of voiceover material that tells us how great vegas is. I guess they just didn't sell the fantasy of winning a lot of money, since, like poker chips, it didn't seem like money. They don't use it for anything, and they don't seem to have really worked for or earned it, so there's no reason to care when things go south for the characters, as they inevitably must in order to fulfill the plot formula. There was one fun moment when one character took everything from another character, but that didn't last.

ALSO, this week I saw a bunch of Robot Chicken, which really loses its fun when it isn't fresh; the Rifftrax Live short 'Self Conscious Guy,' which was good; the start of season 3 of the excellent UK series Hustle, and I synced up the last segment of 2001 with Pink Floyd's 'Echoes,' which is like doing Wizard of Oz + Dark Side of the Moon in that it's kind of neat, but doesn't really work any more than how most songs will seem to fit most videos.

OH, and I cranked through most of the Google Reader I'd been ignoring for 3 or 4 weeks. Sweet Christmas I wish people proofread their posts. It's like the /film people are using a speech recognition program, for how often they get simple words and homonyms wrong. Also, even though nobody should have to be told this, if you're a journalist, or even if you're just pretending to be one on your blog, the fact that you're writing the story IS NOT the lead, least of all on your first day on the job. Unless maybe you're 9. Or 93. Yuck.