Book Review: Brain Rules for Baby, by John Medina

One of the more overwhelming aspects of impending parenthood, I’ve discovered, is the infinite amount of advice people would like to give you. Searching for a book on pregnancy and parenting leads one to vast, candy-colored landscapes of literature, with each book insistently tugging in a different direction. It’s nearly impossible to separate fact from opinion, largely because most parenting "facts" boil down to opinions, anyway. This book caught my eye because it offers parenting advice within a framework I find particularly interesting: brain development, neuroscience, and quirky scientific studies.

Which isn’t to say that this is dry, boring nonfiction. This is definitely science for the layperson, and it’s fascinating. I wasn’t really in the market for a parenting book until I flipped through this one and browsed through a couple of Medina's interesting summaries of studies on baby brains, and the accompanying anecdotes from his own experience.

This book offers a mountain of interesting facts and extremely useful advice, but Medina takes great care to warn readers about taking parenting advice with a grain of salt. He writes up front that the data coming back from this sort of science is dangerously seductive, and that it's all too easy for parents to jump to the wrong conclusions and freak themselves out because "that's what the scientists say." The esoteric factor that makes neuroscience so interesting tends to complicate things for frustrated, sleep-deprived parents that just want someone to tell them what to do. Ultimately, for all of the information this book gives, Medina's advice for creating a smart, happy baby boils down to simple stuff we should be doing anyway: love your spouse, and love your kid.

His full disclosure regarding the ambiguity of the data is comforting, considering how he can't quite keep a few of his own biases out of the mix, including a definite grudge against video games and television. But, hey, everyone's got an opinion on parenting, right?

I don't usually go in for this kind of book, but I will definitely recommend this to anyone who is expecting or has young children.

Verdict: 4 out of 5

Book Review: Black Thorn, White Rose, by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

This is one of what I gather to be a whole host of “alternative fairy tale” short story collections. It has sat on my shelf for years, forlornly waiting to be read. I recently started picking at it, a story at a time, while reading other things. It’s solidly average-to-decent, but I actually liked it more than I thought I would.

As with most genre short story anthologies, the entries in this book all revolve around the common theme of turning a classic fairy tale on its head. The stories approach this from a number of angles, resulting in everything from alternative viewpoints to entire transplants of the setting; I only knew that some of them were related to a classic tale because they were in this book to begin with. Even so, each tale does what it sets out to do, as the settings are suitably evocative and the morals (altered and revised though some may be) are crystal clear by the end of each.

This collection suffers from the hallmark lack of consistency that plagues most short story collections, but I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of duds in this one. Granted, only one or two stories struck me enough that I’m still thinking about them, but each and every one of them were fun to read. I liked some less than others, but there were none I outright disliked, which is rare in a collection like this.

Turns out, this collection is perfect for the use I had for it: fun, escapist, bite-sized reads. Most of the tales presented have a sensual, feminist bent, but there really is something for everyone, with altered fairy tales of all different moods and directions. I’m not exactly chomping at the bit for another in this series, but I will definitely pick one up once I’m in the mood for it again, and would definitely recommend this one to those who are fans of the adult fairy tale.

Verdict: 3 out of 5

Book Review: Shadow Bound, by Erin Kellison

Hoo boy.

I saw this on my Nook store the first time I powered it up and messed around with it. It popped up as a free download, and after reading the little description it looked to me like an interesting urban fantasy. Not usually my cup of tea, but they’re sort of the new hotness, so why not give one a try?

I got about five pages in before one of the characters started making sweet, metaphor-laden love to the Grim Reaper and I realized my mistake. This is a paranormal romance, isn’t it? Sigh. I should have expected that, given how “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” are interchangeable terms, but in my defense, the cover didn't give it away, either. But hey, it’s free, right? Plus, I still hadn’t read anything like it in quite some time, so I gave it a shot anyway.

Talia O’Brien, a recent PhD in a vague, paranormal-type field of study, is searching for work and navigating the waters of post-academic life. Her plans, however, are violently interrupted by the appearance of soul-sucking creatures called wraiths. She is hunted for months by the beasts, and nearly killed one day before being rescued in the nick of time by one Adam Thorne, the independently wealthy head of the mysterious Segue Institute. Turns out, there are thousands of wraiths prowling the streets, and their numbers are growing. They have even organized under the name of The Collective, and the Segue Institute is dedicated to learning how to stop them from taking everything over. Adam has been searching for Talia ever since reading her dissertation on near-death experiences, convinced that she could help in the upcoming war. But she is more essential than even Adam realizes; born from a dalliance between Death and a mortal woman, her unique Faerie ancestry (and its associated power) may be the only thing that can stop the force behind the wraiths.

So, yeah. Pretty standard supernatural fare. I did like what Kellison did with the Faerie angle, and I particularly appreciated how the various supernatural parts come together (for example, the contrast between the lifeless ghosts and the deathless wraiths). All of that is kind of secondary to the contrived sexual tension between Talia and Adam, though. I don’t understand what’s so appealing about Adam. He’s a complete turd from beginning to end, exhibiting the most crass and overdone manly stereotypes and not evolving as a character in the slightest. He’s rich and handsome! Tall and smells “dark” and “spicy!” Brooding and angsty, with just enough of a dark side to be a bad boy without actually being bad in any real way! Overprotective of our heroine, and noble to the point of genuine stupidity! And let us not discount the virtues of his six-pack. And that’s what it’s written as, because apparently “abs,” “stomach muscles,” or “hot washboard of love” would be too clinical.

In short, everything likeable about this man is skin-deep at best, and yet Talia, an intellectual, independent, dangerous woman, falls in love with him after a week or so. Which passes for careful deliberation, here, since he declares her his soulmate after only a couple of days. I mean, I get it. I know how romances work, and this one works just fine. I’m just saying.

My biggest complaint is how abruptly the writing changes once we get into the steamy confines of this relationship. Despite the setting and story being somewhat run-of-the-mill, Kellison is a pretty good writer. The world-building she does is interesting, and Talia is a neat character, both in the mundane details and in the supernatural powers and legacy she possesses. But as soon as these two start hooking up, the storytelling goes all askew. Suddenly we aren’t dealing with two mysterious adults anymore, but with whiny teenagers in luuurve, both in style and substance. Things start to go downhill around the Ferrari vs. Lamborghini car chase, and bottom out about the time we get to the puzzlingly unnecessary “King and Queen of the Goths” party. And it’s not just the story that gets sidetracked, but the writing, as well. All of the neat stuff Kellison was doing in the beginning gives way to multiple passages on the direction of Adam’s blood flow any time Talia does anything.

If you see what she’s doing, there. Wink wink nudge nudge tee hee BONERS.

Sorry, I don’t know why I can’t take harlequin romance seriously, but it really does defy my attempts to read it with a straight face. Between my various experiences with erotica, pornography, and simple sex scenes in books and movies, I guess I’m just accustomed to a more serious, straightforward form of titillation, be it by what they are showing me or by what they are not showing me. So, when the florid, overblown romantic scenes in a book like this really start going, I find myself reacting in the manner which I imagine women do at male strippers: slight, incidental interest, tempered by a heaping serving of unintentional hilarity. Which is not a problem in itself, but once I got to the second half of the book, I couldn’t help but feel like everything, from story to characters, was really just a crude excuse for creating sexual tension between two ciphers and then having it consummated. And this is romance, so of course, that’s exactly what it was.

I don’t think this is a bad book. In fact, I kind of liked it. But I feel about it like I felt about Twilight: it’s a book that is surgically aimed at its target readers, among which I am most definitely not. This is a must-read for paranormal romance fans, as far as my limited experience with the genre can tell, because the world is interesting and the romance doesn’t lack for heat. If you’re just looking for a good supernatural fantasy, though? Meh. Find something with more meat to it than this one.

Verdict: 2 out of 5

Book Review: Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick

I’m appalled and fascinated by North Korea. Given how closely they guard the details of their society, and how unsatisfying our general knowledge of their country is (with most of my impression of Kim Jong-il coming from the cartoonish propaganda posters in the history books, and of course, the Team America movie), I tend to snatch up any crumb of information about North Korea that looks remotely credible. I first heard about this book through a radio interview with the author, and have since noticed it in fairly high demand in my area. The book is fascinating if somewhat imperfect, and shines an illuminating, unforgiving light on the Hermit Kingdom.

Nothing to Envy chronicles the lives of six North Koreans, from the relative heyday of Kim Il-sung’s government through the famine of the 1990s, and describes in detail the hardships each had to endure until their eventual defections (a dangerous hardship in itself). The bombast of the infamously psychotic North Korean government serves both as antagonist and backdrop; the stories themselves focus on how these people, unfortunate enough to be born where and when they were, try to survive and find some semblance of normalcy. What we think of as mundane, everyday concerns- conversation topics, romance, travel, self-improvement- are all harrowing journeys with potentially deadly consequences. I was particularly struck by how the defectors have reacted to the “outside world,” as the realization of a life beyond the cocoon of Dear Leader’s whims seems to be both freeing and paralyzing to those who have never known that sort of self-determination. Moreover, the happy endings that one might expect from escaping are warped into surprising forms by the enormity of the culture shock involved.

Demick worked for years as a foreign correspondent in Seoul for the Los Angeles Times, and this book definitely has a journalistic flavor as a result, for good and for ill. The vignettes Demick presents for each of the six North Korean citizens offer intimate portraits of their struggles without being voyeuristic or sensationalist, and include only enough editorializing to draw out the sad facts within. That being said, I can see the seams between the news pieces that were stitched into a narrative, here. Demick follows the nonfiction convention of organizing her chapters thematically rather than sequentially, with each of the six stories blended into a constantly shifting perspective. On top of this, Demick has an unfortunate tendency towards redundancy, with the same factoids being repeated in separate chapters. I’m normally not too bothered by either issue, but together, they make for a book that can be somewhat hard to follow at times. Honestly, though, the content makes up for any stylistic quibbles I might have had, since I found the stories of daily life in North Korea so fascinating that I even consumed the chapter notes at the end of the book with fervor.

This is a fantastically interesting book, but it also instills a sense of disgust and sadness at what these people have to live through. Even if some of what is presented is exaggerated (which is a distinct possibility, since a lot of Demick’s information comes solely from the anecdotes of the disaffected), the existence of such a totalitarian regime on the basis of outright lies should be anathema to any person capable of independent thought. One particular passage from the book has stayed with me: one of the defectors discovered that 1984 was one of his favorite books, as he was amazed that George Orwell could understand so perfectly how the North Korean government could seize and maintain control over its people. I think there are people in our own country that should read this book and take note of the consequences of relentless animus, historical revisionism, and blind ideology. The horrifying social stagnation in North Korea says to me that 1984 is always the end result of such repression of contrary ideas, no matter which religious or economic creed drives the bus.

Verdict: 4 out of 5

Book Review: Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

I’m constantly and embarrassingly behind the curve with most things pop culture-related. However, the one nice trade-off that comes with not being an early adopter of the latest book craze is that I can experience the conclusion with the wide-eyed enthusiasm from the beginning still fresh in my mind. Such is the case with the Hunger Games trilogy; I read Mockingjay right on the heels of my first readthrough of the previous books, which had been out for a bit already. This made the anticipation and reading of the third volume much sweeter, but possibly made my view of it suffer a little by comparison.

Mockingjay completes the impeccable symmetry Collins insists on in her trilogy: with Hunger Games focusing on the Games themselves and Catching Fire seesawing between the Games and the growing rebellion in the districts, the finale is all rebellion, all the time. With District 12 bombed into oblivion, Katniss and a handful of survivors from her old home and the Quarter Quell huddle in the catacombs of the draconic District 13. Traumatized and wounded, Katniss nevertheless finds herself pushed into the role of the Mockingjay, a face and mouthpiece for the rebellion, which is making a slow but inexorable march towards the Capital itself, district by district. Even here, though, Katniss’s fate is not her own, as she is groomed and shepherded into staged “propos” and watched closely by the mistrustful President Coin of District 13. Nor has President Snow forgotten about our heroine; Snow uses Peeta, left behind and captured after the Quater Quell breakout, as devastating leverage against the public head of the rebellion. Katniss, however, has her own agenda. Driven by sorrow and hatred, she does her best to navigate the bloody war and dangerous political machinations of its perpetrators in order to fulfill her true goal: to personally bring justice to President Snow for his crimes against those she cares about.

The pace is quick and relentless in the final book, and while this whole series is dark and violent, Mockingjay pulls no punches. Katniss operates in a haze of shell-shocked gloom for the entire book, and beloved characters are irrevocably affected by the war and routinely killed without ceremony, especially in the last third of the story. Even without the inclusion of the Hunger Games’ novelties, the book retains a definite dystopian sci-fi feel, especially as the fight moves into the streets of the Capital. So, naturally, this one got into my head a little deeper than the first two, because I love the realistic sort of story where the characters don’t necessarily get what they want, and have to struggle to make sense of what they have.

I’ll keep this as spoiler-free as possible: I’ve never been one to care about who gets to be whose boyfriend in books like these, but I have to say, Peeta and Gale were both very interesting here. Gale gets particularly interesting, as he must make a transition from a clever and ruthless hunter into a clever and ruthless soldier. Collins plays with all sorts of themes, here, including the definition of terrorism. I liked how the relationships Katniss has with these two get turned on their heads, for various reasons.

For some reason, though, I still found myself not quite as enamored of the final book as I was of the first two. For a while, I even questioned whether or not I liked it at all. Turns out, I do. Big sigh of relief. But I had trouble letting go of a few nagging problems.

When I say the pace is quick in Mockingjay, I’m not kidding. Katniss goes from Quarter Quell survivor to participant in the final battle in short order, and all of the action sequences in between zoom by in stark, brutal flashes. While I appreciate the aesthetic quality of this sort of storytelling (war is hell, boys), I would have liked a little more time to reflect on what was going on. This isn’t inconsistent with the other books, though. I just felt too rushed, in places, whether it was due to the jerky nature of the action or the time compression between important milestones in the rebellion. It made other things seem rushed, too. Such as Katniss’s transitions between incoherent trauma victim and cynical soldier-propagandist, which seem to go back and forth rather suddenly and excessively, despite the understandable triggers for it.

Speaking of Katniss... hmm. I began to get annoyed with her in the second book, and I remained so for most of Mockingjay. She grated on me the same way that Harry Potter did in the Order of the Phoenix. Look, I understand that teenagers are naturally sulky and irrational, and that it is truthful and observant of an author to portray them that way. I also concede that poor Katniss has every reason to be sulky and irrational, and I even appreciate the harsh impatience with which she approaches the triviality of her love triangle, in light of everything else she has to deal with. I’ll even go as far as to say that I support and enjoy works from young adult authors who give teenaged drama a serious treatment; for all that we “wise” adults like to mock the histrionics of the average teenager, we tend to forget how life-and-death everything seemed when we experienced it for the first time. All that being said, I can only take so much of Katniss pouting in closets and snapping at people who are trying to help her before I begin to roll my eyes. It’s an instinct I just can’t repress, okay?

There were a couple of other little things that bugged me, but were easier for me to let go. Collins shoehorned in a reference to the Hunger Games that seemed hokey and unnecessary, right before the climactic battle, but redeemed it with a much better reference (and an exciting, if predictable, twist) at the end. The book ended particularly abruptly and without any excess sentiment, but I realized after I finished that I kind of liked that. Sometimes, we don’t get closure, or even the satisfaction of knowing if we really got we wanted; Mockingjay’s bittersweet ending may not do much for those who like a bow wrapped around the end of their tales (read: Deathly Hallows’ triumphant epilogue, or Breaking Dawn’s mad fit of masturbatory wish-granting), but I think that the ending was written remarkably well and had a lot of emotional impact, even if it wasn’t quite what one would call satisfying.

So, not bad. Not bad at all. It wasn’t the gripping page-turner I expected it to be, and I think that it’s my least favorite of the trilogy, despite how excited I initially was to get out of the arena and into the uprisings. But Mockingjay rounds out the trilogy nicely, and is a fun and exciting read on its own.

Verdict: 4 out of 5

Book Review: Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Kay’s latest history/fantasy mashup takes the reader to a simulacrum of Tang Dynasty China, with all of the flowery, evocative prose that could be expected from such a journey. Under Heaven drew me in quick, and I finished it with the wistful satisfaction that is the hallmark of a good story. Somehow, though, I think I wanted just a little bit more out of this book.

The book begins on the haunted shore of a lake called Kuala Nor, in a mountain valley on the border between the nations of Kitai and Tagura. For two years, Shen Tai has toiled alone to bury the bones of dead soldiers from past battles in valley. Tai, an ex-soldier and former Kanlin Warrior-in-training (think Shaolin monk), chose this penance as mourning and tribute for his father, a renowned general with an uncharacteristic pacifist streak. His willingness to live and work among the shrieking ghosts of Kuala Nor has attracted the attention and awe of both nations, which typically spend their time staring at each other and waiting for another war to start. As the story opens, the Taguran royalty (which happens to include a Kitai princess) chooses to reward Tai’s perseverance and respect with an unthinkably lavish gift: 250 Sardian horses, the graceful mounts from the far west that inspire art, poetry, and legend among the Kitai. Before Tai can even begin processing such a gift, he finds himself fending off an unexpected assassination attempt. Reluctantly, he journeys back into the empire of Kitai, in order to discover who wants him dead and why. However, his herd of horses gives him a newfound wealth and power that makes him a new player in Kitai politics, which have taken a dangerous turn since his self-imposed exile.

Though the story lies on the framework of the An Shi Rebellion's beginning years, the novel’s focus remains squarely on Shen Tai, the people he cares about, and the people who have a newfound interest in him and his game-changing horses. Under Heaven is a story about people, who do the best they can when plunged into events they have no control over. In this, Kay does a fantastic job; Tai’s moments of danger and self-discovery dovetail nicely with the occasional bit of omniscient narration highlighting the capricious nature of history and the important role that chance plays.

Honestly, though, the actual plot threads felt like they were tied a little loosely. The plights of the various characters sometimes don’t quite intersect with the main story. This is a conscious choice of Kay’s, as a major theme here is how quickly we can be swept up in the current due to seemingly insignificant choices. However, the subplots that get left unresolved or abruptly halted can be jarring. The pacing gets odd, as well, with the middle being considerable slower than the first act, and the climax appearing almost out of nowhere. Well, not out nowhere, I guess, since political intrigue stories always end with some real shit going down, but I had some sort of cognitive break between the setup and the delivery. I think less time could have been spent on walking from place to place, and more on some of the family intrigue that gets constructed so nicely in the beginning and then oddly short-changed as the story unfolds.

The characters are occasionally unsatisfying, as well, for all that this is a character piece, with many of them needing just a little more nuance and depth; Kay utilizes takes the same “epic archetype” approach to characterization that he did in Tigana. Strangest of all, though, are the characters that are introduced for no real reason. Some are redshirts that are killed off after a few pages of intricate backstory, and one (a courtesan near the beginning) actually takes control of the narrative for part of a chapter, and is subsequently never heard from again. That, in particular, was weird. I spent the rest of the book wondering why I was supposed to care about her. Again, I’m pretty sure Kay did that on purpose- one of those philosophical interjections at the end muses on the truism of incidental, passing characters in history playing out their own dramas and tragedies. Still, it bugged the hell out of me.

But it also made me think of the Chinese epic, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with its cavalcade of minor characters contributing to a more complicated tapestry. Kay researched epic Chinese poetry when writing this, and it shows in these seemingly random intersection of characters, as well as in the attention to beautiful details in the setting and the pensive melancholy that pervades the entire affair. And I’ll admit it; I’m a sucker for epilogues. Seriously, every time I’ve seen people moan and complain about epilogues that are too long or too sappy, I end up loving them when I read them. The epilogue here was the same. I was so satisfied with and emotionally moved by the way in which Kay wrapped his story up that it quelled the growing discontent I was nurturing after getting through the second act.

Overall, this is a beautiful story. Definitely worth looking into if you are interested in historical fiction (the fantasy elements are fairly light, here) or in Asian-inspired fantasy. I don’t find myself quite as awed by this one as I was by Tigana, and I hear that if I liked Tigana, I need to read Kay’s other, better works. However, from a strictly aesthetic standpoint, this is a wonderful elegy that is worth reading simply for its abstractly gorgeous imagery, and for the mood it sets.

Verdict: 4 out of 5

I was 1337. But then they changed what 1337 was.

I picked up StarCraft II a few weeks ago, and am leisurely making my way through the single-player campaign. I am in no hurry to play people online, though. I’m a decent RTS player, but even if I were great at this, past experience with playing StarCraft online has taught me that I’ll still spend most of my time frantically trying to churn out units – anything at all – while some Korean kid is leisurely humping my leg with a few Hydralisks. I’m perfectly happy with my illusory bubble of PC game proficiency, especially considering that this is the first PC game I’ve spent any time with since… well, since the last Blizzard game.

I feel increasingly guilty about that, for some reason. I cut my gaming teeth on the Atari 2600 and the NES, but for many years, I was solely a PC gamer. At some point, though, I strayed off that path. The benefits of playing on specific types of hardware got lost somewhere in the avalanche of legal tender necessary to reap those benefits.

Take shooters, for instance. I play a lot of Team Fortress 2, and while I’m not the best player around, I can hold my own. Ask the guy I played with last weekend. He started bugging me on mic about how bad of a sniper I was until the teams were eventually reassigned, whereupon I gave him repeated opportunities to reassess his opinion, until he finally ragequit after the sixth or seventh headshot. The thing is, I play it on Xbox 360. I would get chewed up and spit out by people playing on the PC, because a mouse is simply better for twitch than a controller. Not to mention the fact that the PC players get content updates and I don’t. Grumble mumble I never get new hats grumble.

These are things I already know. I don’t need to be lectured by some seventeen-year-old ball of forehead grease who thinks he’s the first to figure that out. I remember the Wolfenstein 3D shareware, son. I made Doom WADs. I am not impressed by how much Modern Warfare 2 has taught you about the first-person shooter genre.

Back then, though, the effort needed to get these games to run was spent in DOS, not on the motherboard. I remember saving up to buy a 8MB RAM SIMM (I wanted to upgrade my 486DX rig. Sixteen whole megs of memory! I could rule the world with that kind of computing power!), but that was the extent of the hardware barriers I had to cross. Any time a game wouldn’t run, I would spend hours in DOS tweaking settings and rewriting config files, which became almost as fun as the game itself. Especially when the payoff came, because I’ll tell you something: I could get that bastard to run nine time out of ten.

Around the time Quake was released and my beloved adventures games started to die out, though, something changed. That stuff didn’t work anymore. DOS went away and Windows, an operating system I hated from day one, took its place. Game files became more cryptic and hard to access. And the solutions for running games increasingly became homogenous: spend a couple hundred dollars on a new video card, because holy shit, water effects! Pfft.

It eventually got to the point where I had built a brand new computer out of top-of-the-line components that wouldn’t run a new game I wanted, because it needed the newest version of some Radeon card that had been released a month prior. Screw that business. I started playing Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64, instead.

Three prebuilt PCs later, I’ve never really looked back. I like my consoles. The games I want to play will always work on them, and work the way that the developers intended. Considering that I have a full-time job, a kid on the way, and a mortgage to pay, that kind of security is very attractive to me. Never mind the extra money spent on upgrading every few months; I don’t have that kind of frigging time to invest in my entertainment.

But I do miss the superiority of PC gaming. I sunk months into Diablo II. I’ve dipped my toes back in with Warcraft III and Guild Wars. I figured that StarCraft would be a safe bet, and worth the potential headache. My laptop is fairly beefy, and I figured that I wouldn’t have any problems at all unless I tried to run it at top settings. Naturally, I realized my folly when I played it for the first time, and the game politely suggested that I turn all of the graphics settings down to the lowest possible level, with a barely concealed snicker at the sheer foolishness of trying to run it on an integrated video card. Even after an hour or two of experimenting with the settings and twiddling with the config file (old habits die hard) until I managed to get it both playable and somewhat attractive, it still occasionally asserts that I would be much happier in the newb section, where the blue squares fight the purple squares and I won’t have to worry my silly little head over things like “textures” and “shadows.”

I completely expected this, and I can still play around on the backend until it works. And it does work, which is a marked improvement from the way things used to be, where a game would simply not install or run if it didn’t meet specs, didn’t have twine and chewing gum applied to the config file, and/or didn’t have a boot disk to ensure that it didn’t have to compete with any other programs. Even though I can’t get advanced creep lighting (whatever the hell that means), I can get to the core gameplay. And that’s the important part. This game doesn’t disappoint; it has everything that made the first game so addictive, along with the nice storytelling and even some of the gimmicky stuff that made Warcraft III so fun (though, truthfully, I’ve always preferred Warcraft to StarCraft). I’m having a blast, even though I apparently don’t get the eye candy that the “preferred” player does.

No, that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is the fact that the default solution for the gamer in the know is now “buy more crap” instead of “learn how to tweak your system.” I mean, you can still play around with the software. I did. But there doesn’t seem to be much pride in that anymore, because it’s nowhere near as important for being a top-notch PC gamer as having a perpetually-updated rig, on which you have spent over four thousand dollars of your Applebee’s paychecks. It’s the curse of technological advancement, I suppose. I’m remembering a time when people would case mod and overpower their computers just to show off, kind of like the mooks that put a purple light kit and rims on a family sedan. These days, though, it’s like you need to invest in and install a better engine every time you want to drive to the store.

I just don’t want to do that anymore. I’ll be getting Diablo III and Guild Wars II at full retail price, but will probably have to settle for dumbed down graphics on those, too. In the meantime, I’ll still be playing console games with no extra assembly required.

Even so, there’s a part of me that really wants to make sure my laptop can run anything. Or to go all Original Digital Gangster and build and mod my own rig, instead of settling for a prebuilt machine that will always be underpowered somehow. I like to joke about how sixteen-year-old grunge kid me would snarl at me now for living in the suburbs and listening to NPR; it’s a safe assumption that 13-year-old me, who once spoofed his way into an online gaming network for free, would have a similar reaction to settling for grandma’s computer and playing with the Madden meatheads’ game toys.

Too bad I pay the bills, and he doesn’t.