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First of all, I want to apologize to my readers for the recent lack of posts. I have had no time to work on this lately for a mix of personal and work-related reasons. I work in politics, and this is prime time for us. It’s like working as a tax preparer the week leading up to April 15. You probably will not see posts in earnest as before until after this Tuesday.

This is a blog, not a diary, but I just wanted to say a few things. In today’s world, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. I know because I feel overwhelmed much of the time. We’re less than a week from an election that people on both sides seem to feel is of dire importance. I would say that the tension level of the average person is as high as I’ve seen it. We hear every day about people killing each other somewhere in the world, sometimes in our own cities. No matter if you’re candidate’s ten points up or ten points down, sometimes things can just seem hopeless. I received an e-mail today, in 2008, going on at length about how all of our problems in America are caused by “negroes” and arguing that we should send them back to Africa. It urged me to “pass this on to everyone you know!” And, to top it all off, tomorrow’s Halloween, and everyone I know is so busy preparing for the election on Tuesday that I have no plans. For the first time in my life, I don’t have a Halloween costume this year. So all in all, things seem pretty depressing.

What’s difficult to remember in all this is that we are here, on a planet full of dazzling love and beauty. Today when I walked to the bus stop, it was bitingly cold and the grass had all turned white overnight. The sky in the East was laced with lines of pink, a tone poem of color. And, as I walked, I watched flock after flock of birds fly out of the sunrise and over my head. They were huge, dense masses, with hundreds of birds packed tightly together. I’m not sure what species they were… they were very small, and beat their wings hard. And the last flock was the biggest. It stretched all the way across the sky from north to south. I watched it with my mouth open and my neck craned upward, until a car honked at me and I realized that the light had changed and I could cross the street.

And the greatest thing is, you never know when moments like that are going to come. I’ve found that when things look bleakest, the rays of sunshine stand out even more. Pleasant conversations with total strangers that you think about for hours afterward. An engrossing chapter of a book. A compliment from a friend. I think that there’s something in all this. I’m not a messiah or a great philosopher, and couldn’t tell you what, but we have to hold onto that something through everything else.

And, hey, if you’re a Phillies fan, and I know a few, you don’t need any of this. It can be easy to be jealous of someone else’s happiness, but sometimes it’s also good to get swept up in pure jubilation, whatever the source. A grown man running in from left field, jumping for joy like a little boy at accomplishing the dream of his life. We are here in a world where that happens every day, somewhere.

As a dying Rowena Allister might sternly order, “You… flowers.” “Watchers” fans will get that… I think they’re most of our readership, anyway. Anyway, I’ll see you all soon. Happy Halloween!

Machinima: Like Fan Fiction, but in Reverse

A few days ago I mentioned in a "Bits" post an online project that is animating Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 comic book series using machinima. I'm sure at least a few people didn't know what I meant by that, and so I decided to expand on what machinima is a little bit. It's an interesting subject that I'm sure my Communications Theory professor would have been fascinated by.

Basically, Machinima is animation accomplished with the use of video games. The name is a merging of the words "machine" and "animation." Rather than expensively rendering their stories, creators tell them with the tools that they have. Some have compared it to a digital version of puppetry. In other words, creators take the pieces of a computer game and rearrange them to tell their own story. You might think this would just result in a recording of someone playing a video game, but that's definitely not the case. Complex editing tools are often used, and some games now released come with their own built-in machinima capabilities.

Machinima began as a very small niche with the gaming community, but has become more and more mainstream in the years since. It has adapted to new games as they are released. Wikipedia credits the 1996 piece "Diary of a Camper" as the first Machinima to gain a wide audience. It was created using the game Quake. In 2006, the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" featured extended Machinima sections and was credited with bringing the form to a wider audience. Today there is a national Machinima Film Festival and even an Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences.

I (along with plenty of others) was first exposed to Machinima via the popular, and even critically acclaimed (the Director of Lincoln Center supposedly called it "as sophisticated as Samuel Beckett"), webseries, "Red vs. Blue". Created using Halo 2, the game of choice for, well, everybody circa my freshman year of college, the series ran 5 seasons and 100 episodes, from 2003 to 2007, and has since spawned a spin-off. The series is about two sets of soldiers fighting for control of a valley (and each other's "flag"), a standard Halo scenario. The series began as a simple, sitcom-type parody, mostly of video games, but soon evolved into a more general science-fiction comedy that even occasionally took itself seriously. And in its scenario of two sets of soldiers (who often find they have pretty much everything in common) set down for an interminable period of time to fight over a piece of ground nobody wants for reasons neither of them understand, the series manages to send up echoes of everything from Kafka to M*A*S*H. The series almost immediately became a huge online hit and is now available on DVD.

Now, as for the title of this post. Reverse probably isn't the best way of putting it, but let me explain what I mean. In fan fiction, writers use their own materials (i.e., usually prose writing, but there are fan films, as well) to tell more stories about their favorite show, movie, game, book, etc. Machinima creators use the materials of a game to create their own, original story, usually relating only tangentially, if at all, to the actual subject matter of the game. Both are perfectly valid forms of expression, but I find the contrasts interesting. In both cases, they are putting the materials provided by the creators of media to a use that wasn't originally intended by their creators. And the internet has proved the magic bullet that has exponentially accelerated both the spread and cultural acceptance of both forms.

Someone Took "Advance Wars" Too Seriously

The big news from the gaming world this week wasn't the release of the latest big game. It was the real-life murder of one Matthew Pyke, a student at Nottingham Trent University in England. Pyke, age 20, was heavily involved with the community surrounding Nintendo's Advance Wars, a turn-based war tactics game for the video game company's hand-held Advance platform. Pyke ran a strategy website for the game with his girlfriend, as well as writing Advance Wars fanfiction and regularly posting to forums devoted to the game. Authorities are now saying they believe that the murder may have been because of a grudge that started in the virtual world and seeped into the real world.

According to a report from The Times of London, detectives are investigating whether this was some sort of revenge killing for events that happened while playing the game online. Among the strange events among investigation is a post by a german citizen on the Facebook page of Pyke's girlfriend, in which the poster, David Heiss, vaguely implied he was responsible for Pyke's death. A man matching the description of the Heiss was reportedly arrested by Nottinghamshire Police.

Obviously there are a lot of details about this that are still to come out, and we will try to bring you a follow-up. Many media outlets will immediately point to video gamers being somehow disconnected from reality. But, in my opinion, this is the sort of unfortunate incident that has the potential to happen in any competition that people start caring about out of proportion to its actual importance. Is this really so different from that Colombian soccer player who was tragically murdered after allowing an own goal to the USA during the '94 World Cup? Or from Tonya Harding's boyfriend hiring someone to attack Nancy Kerrigan? As video games and online interaction become important to more people, we'll see more of this sort of tragedy, not less.

In any case, my thoughts go out to Pyke's loved ones who are going through this difficult time.