#"Traitor" (radio play)

[russianreader]

Traitor(s)

Traitor by Dennis Potter. Source: Internet Archive Traitor First broadcast in 1981, this Hidden Treasure play by Dennis Potter stars Denholm Elliott as Harris and Ian Ogilvy as James. It has not been heard for over 40 years. In a dingy flat in Moscow, he sits alone — a traitor to his family, his friends, his colleagues. Then the international press descend upon him and he gives his first…

[leseigneurdufeu]

Papy fait de la résistance !

I've got absolutely NO context so I'm going to have to interprete ok?

Are you asking if I know it? If I can sum it up? OK:

I know it. Papy fait de la Résistance is a french parodic war/resistance movie in which acted essentially the Troupe du Splendide (a theater kids group except they knew each other as theater kids but also went on to have cinema and theater careers, mostly in comedy, mostly in movies where they were all or many of them at once like Les Bronzés, Le Père NOël est une ordure, etc.). Brief (who am i kidding i'm unable to sum things up briefly) it starts with the father of a family of three who dies in stupid circumstances after a whole day of bad luck, except he was in the resistance. Two years later, the germans decide to take his house because they need a couple rooms to lodge a general (who not only has a name that only sounds german but is most probably czech or something, his name also sounds exactly like "sponge"). THe resistant father was living with his flamboyant wife, his mad-scientist-vibes-but-not-a-scientist father-in-law, his gay-caricature-with-collabo-undertones son and his two daughters. After his death, they took in a latin teacher to get rent and make ends meet, and he ended up getting engaged to the eldest daughter.

So when the general arrives anyway, they get the fiancé out of his room to give it to the general (despite the fiancé noting that there are other rooms in the house, a big mansion, which are empty and could be used, to which he's told back that everyone has to make sacrifices, big cliché of the resistance movie turned absurdist because of the other rooms). The grandfather procedes to loudly insult the germans (believe me he knows what he's doing, it's not like he was not as bright as in his youth or anything, he will procede to gleefully lie to the germans about menial things to wreak havoc in their orders for the rest of the movie, completely unprompted) who in retaliation put the whole family in the cellar (again, spacious because under a mansion) instead of the one-bedroom-and-one-bathroom that were confiscated.

The son of the family proceeds to say that after all the germans won so they can do whatever they want and adds that the german radio has very good songs after all (so he listens to it), which horrifies the rest of the family. Since they're all musicians, they take their piano, tuba, everything, and start playing and singing the Marseillaise, which prompts the general himself, arrived in the mean time, to arrive, compliment them for their talent because he's an art-enthusiast, ask them what the heck they're doing in the cellar since the house is full of empty rooms, and quotes Goethe to prove he likes art. The Goethe quote is identified by the son, so the general congratulates him, then leaves. THe whole family turns on the son and calls him a "dirty traitor" for knowing a bit of german/idenfiying the quote.

But plot twist! The son is actually Super-Resistant, a guy dressed like the phantom of the opera (except for the mask which is different) who terrorizes the nazis in Paris ever since his father died. To get what I'm talking about I'm going to pull some screenshots from my archives.

he looks like this... aaaaand i just realized that's my header so that might be why you sent the ask but too late I'm invested in this so I'll keep going.

Message by him found at the former general's place, which he bombed (also the guy apparently had his head against the bomb because it was against his pillow and is in better shape than the appartment so it really doesn't make any sense:)

the guy on the left is the new general, pointing to it to ask the former one "what the heck is this". It translates as "bon voyage fat ass (signed) super-resistant".

Anyway the son goes back home via a secret passage between the mansion and the Louvres (I think? or maybe another museum) and sneaks on the general (who obviously uses the room in which the passage arrives).

The mother, the eldest daughter and the fiancé go to the Kommandantur (administrative place where the germans govern the location and around, and where they take complaints if need be) to complain that they were put in the cellar (which... again, absurd, because the general offered them to get the rest of the house back because his soldiers were stupid to put them in the cellar, and they refused) and there they see an english (scottish?) soldier, wounded and prisonner, who is obviously left unattended for a good five minutes during which they pass him a weapon. He uses it to kill the collabo (used that word twice already, if you don't know what is it's a french guy who collaborates with the occupation forces) who was trying to get the family to denounce any jews they would know (other big cliché as far as i know) and they all run away, except he's shot in the leg and they split up, the family bringing him back home (re: in a house full of german soldiers) and the fiancé forced by the eldest daughter to go find him so medicine. He manages to be made a prisonner by the germans because of some dumb mistake/altercation and is about to be shot, along with other guys including a resistant, when Super Resistant arrives and saves them before trying to make a fundraising for the resistance (hence the Croix-de-Lorrained metal pots on the picture) but everyone dodges the collect and tries to flee which... i mean, is logical. The fiancé starts pestering the other resistant to join the resistance and the other resistant ends up telling him about a secret reunion when the fiancé tells him about the british aviator in his cellar.

In the mean time, waiting for the fiancé to come back with the medicines, the family is operating the british guy, the grandfather having been a military doctor during the first world war. The gestapo arrives at that moment, led by Mr Adolfo Ramirez, who used to do oddjobs at the Opera de Paris and who was at odds with the family because of a mix of inferiority complex and political disagreement. Ramirez starts insulting the family while the british guy is trapped head-down in a wardrobe, then as the german general arrives in his back, Ramirez doesn't see who is arriving and tells him to shut up, calls him a gay slur and threatens him then asks his name and the guy is like "sponge. general sponge." anyway shenanigans ensue.

Half of the family and the british guy go to the secret reunion that the fiancé was told about, it's in a brothel (which is alas the reason the movie is PG rated or should be) but the fiancé sees Super Resistant entering the brothel for the reunion and thinks there's a masquerade ball inside, so he disguises himself as hitler before entering and stumbling upon a bunch of german soldiers having a good time. Awkwardness ensues.

The secret reunion is upstairs where Super Resistant and a british envoy conclude an alliance, but Ramirez arrives, starts shooting blindly, someone shoots him back, he is then arrested by german soldiers for starting a shootout (the resistants ran away safely) despite being part of the Gestapo himself. Super Resistant and the others steal the car the family had come in, and see inside it the aviator and the younger daughter in a passionate make out session, which infuriates Super Resistant (which, remember, is the son of the family) who starts calling the british names and loses control of the car to bash him over the head. The alliance is moot. It lasted like 5 minutes.

In the mean time, the eldest daughter and general squarepants (er... Sponge) start a romance because after all he's not that bad and he doesn't want war etc. At that moment the general receives the news that Hitler's hidden twin brother (or was it half-brother?), field marshal von Apfelstrüdel (german for... Apple Pie) is about to go visit Paris and they want to organize a party for him because with how Super Resistant is messing things up, a party is the only way to save themselves from prison/destitution.

Turns out Apfelstrüdel hates parties, and the only way Sponge can save the night is to have the family sing and play, because Apfelstrüdel has nothing against opera. The family refuses because the reason they needed the fiancé to pay rent in the first place was because they refused to sing in front of nazis, but Ramirez finds the secret passage in the house and Sponge blackmails them with that (although they had no idea there was a passage, also they don't know where the son has gone). THe fiancé gets a bomb by the resistant he met when they were almost shot and places it under the table but Apfelstrüdel invites the family to eat with him, which prompts the fiancé to go under the table to try and deactivate it. He only manages to break the table in... a suspicious way let's say.

and is arrested, but not before Apfelstrüdel had a whole musical number about how the mother of the family looks a lot like this girl he knew in Germany (who he makes a very unflattering description of) and sings with an awfully inaccurate german accent "Je n'ai pas changé" (I didn't change, literally) which was a popular pop song at the time the film was released.

Anyway the fiancé is arrested. The general tries to take his defense but is arrested too. Ramirez gives Apfelstrüdel an earful about how he, Ramirez, is the only real nazi in Paris and is arrested too because why not.

At that moment Super Resistant arrives, slides down a banner with a dagger and sends a sword to Apfelstrüdel to do this mano a mano. The more I write about this movie the more I have to check the dvd on my shelves because it feels more like a fever dream than a real movie but alas.

Anyway they take Applepie hostage and steal a tank before riding into the sunset. Then twist! What we saw was actually a movie inspired from real events that the protagonists were watching in this french emission in which people who participated in the movie comment on it during the second part of the night.

The journalist (the same who did the emission in real life) starts the emission by introducing everyone: we've got the fiancé who became minister after the war, we've got Adolfo Ramirez Jr, who came back from Bolivia especially to participate to the emission, we've got Sponge and the older daughter who are now married, and we've got the brother/son/super resistant who looks more stereotypically gay than he ever did at the beginning of the movie.

Chaos enfurls as the minister tries to monopolize the conversation, the brother denies having ever been Super Resistant, and Adolfo ramirez jr (played by the same as AR Sr) not only pretends his father was never a nazi (ARJr: "my father was never a nazi! He was actually a double agent! He had wormed the gestapo to fight them from the inside!" / the minister: "Mr Ramirez if your father was a double agent then I'm working for the KGB" / ARJr: "well I've got no proof you don't!") but also starts digging up dirt about everyone. He pretends the couple consumed their marriage way before the wedding (the details he gives pinpoints the "consumation" to a part of the movie where his "father" intruded on the couple kissing), that the minister embezzled millions, and that Super Resistant killed his best friend because he was sleeping with the youngest daughter. The couples leaves, outraged, and the other two start beating Ramirez up on air while the journalist concludes the emission alone.

So anyway hey that's my "brief" summary of Papy fait de la Résistance (Grandpa is in the resistance, lit.) which I can't encourage y'all to go watch if you can, if you speak french, and if you're more than 15 because there are a few scenes (mainly in the brothel) which contain nudity.

[douxreviews]

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - ‘The Other Thing’ Review

"I've been to a lot of worlds. Some good, some garbage. But I've never been to one where people recognize my face."

Now, this was more like it, wasn't it? A solid, confident episode that goes right into the arc story and doesn't disappoint. Three parallel plots unfold and converge to the same place, while propelling the characters forward in great directions.

May vs. Coulson

May started off this year in a placid state of mind. Happier, more relaxed, ready to enjoy the goodness of life. The arrival of Sarge, though, changed that. It didn't send May back to an unhappier place, but I've never seen her so focused against an opponent before. One could presume that Sarge wearing Coulson's face would soften her, but she is repelled by Sarge's methods and cruelty. He is the antithesis of Coulson in many ways, which is why she wants to take him down so badly. When Sarge says "I thought you loved his face," May unleashes all her rage and beats him until he passes out. Then she puts his fallen arm on his lap, the same thing she did for a very tired Coulson back in Tahiti. I didn't read that as a sign of affection, but it is curious nonetheless. It's a reflex, a muscle memory, something she's ought to do, and she does it nonchalantly.

That's terrific writing for a character that becomes more interesting with each year. May could be a one note character, the stone cold archetype, but she is so much more than that. I loved how she subverted Sarge's accusation that Coulson was an impostor and had him question his own existence for a bit. He didn't let her see, but when he turned to get the radio, you could tell her words had hit him. Sarge may say that he doesn't look his age, that he's been around for 100 of Earth's years, but I still believe he's a version of Coulson from another dimension. Maybe that's wishful thinking, but it can't be a coincidence that the word "Coulson" ringed a bell and May's verbal attack affected him.

The use of the flashbacks to Coulson's final days in Tahiti was clever. Coulson and Sarge echoed one another but the phrases had different meanings, another sign of how these two characters have something in common (beyond the looks) but are not the same. It was nice to see Coulson again, so loving and caring. Coulson, you are dearly missed. Dare I say, though, I think Clark Gregg is doing an even better job as Sarge. He plays Sarge with such confidence and distinction that I can't help but appreciate his work. Sarge could've been a poor excuse to keep Gregg around and not scare away the already small audience, but the writers and Gregg's efforts have paid off.

It turns out that Sarge and his team – as it was obvious since last episode, but for some reason the writers only wanted to spell it out here – are not creating the evil birds, they are hunting them. Sarge says they are called the Shrike and that they serve their creator, a monster whose purpose seems to be destroy planets. Bring death to everything. The problem is that Sarge's approach to take down that monster and stop the plague from spreading to other planets now involves destroying Earth. This is a good development, for it keeps Sarge someone our heroes must fight against, even though he is not the actual villain of the tale.

It's all connected, within the TV series, at least

I wasn't expecting the Monoliths to have anything to do with this new threat, and I appreciate that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. constantly goes back to elements from previous seasons to create new storylines. They did that really well last season, to the point that I didn't think there were any lose threads left (except for that Inhuman dude in the bottom of the ocean), but now here we are dealing with Monoliths again, and then it hit me that they are kind of a lose thread because we never learned what that third Monolith did. It deepens the mythology of the series and gives me confidence that the writers know what they are doing.

But how exactly are the Monoliths connected to what's going on? Is the rift that created the fear dimension last season responsible for bringing this Shriek plague to Earth? I'm lost and intrigued. How does an Incan word fit into all this? Pachakutiq means "the death of everything," but how would an interdimensional traveler know an Incan word? I can only assume he came from a different version of Earth, and the same could be said of Sarge. Luckily, Dr. Benson's research will give us some answers.

In the Lighthouse, Mack checks on Yo-Yo to see how she's doing – spoiler alert, she is totally not dealing with Keller's demise –, but ends up opening up about his own struggles. I have the impression that the writers are still figuring out how to write Mack as a leader, and so far they have relied on his broken relationship with Yo-Yo to show how he has been processing his new role. He wants to keep a distance, be responsible, but can he keep it all together on his own? I thought it was very telling that he couldn't be there for Yo-Yo and instead their conversation went completely off the rails. It was a weird dialogue, I'm not sure how much of that weirdness was intended, but it worked as a moment between two ex-lovers who don't speak the same language anymore. It looked like Mack was willing to bring some barriers down, but Yo-Yo wasn't having it.

I have great respect for Yo-Yo as a character. She is even more loyal to her work ethics than Mack is to his, and that's saying a lot. Being someone willing to do what's necessary no matter the cost demands a lot from her, but she doesn't let her spirit get broken. Her relationship with Keller wasn't developed enough, but her reaction to his death is well written here. She doesn't allow Mack to comfort her, but Dr. Benson is able to reach out to her. I liked how he brought the death of his husband as a parallel to Yo-Yo and Keller's situation. Both Benson and Yo-Yo had to end the life of their significant other who wasn't really there anymore. Now they have to live with the burden of that choice, even though they know it was the right one.

Enoch, the Traitor

The third plot of the episode revolved around the Space Crew, and now that storyline started to fit into the big picture of the season. Many Heads, One Tale is how this show rolls, isn't it?

The Chronicoms had their home planet destroyed, and Atarah, who seems to be the leader of the surviving few, said that minor distortions in the fabric of space released a plague, which is pretty much what is going on on Earth right now. Initially it looked like the Chronicoms were after Daisy et al. to punish them for tampering with the universe... but they too want to tamper with the universe: go back in time and save their planet from destruction. Kidnapping Fitz was part of their plan to get Daisy and Jemma to tell them how to travel through time. Interesting that the noise Daisy had been making on their search for Fitz backfired and turned them into targets. Of course, they couldn't know someone else had their eyes on time travel and, consequentially, on their intelligence.

The agents find themselves cornered, and it's a trap they can't escape of. They didn't create the technology that sent them to the future and then back to the present, how can they help? In order to keep Fitz alive, Jemma says that he could figure out how to build the technology. It all leads to Enoch's betrayal, who sides with Atarah on a move of loyalty to his race. It's a switch of sides that makes sense. Enoch left his home behind to observe humanity and now that his own planet met a similar fate to the one he helped stop on Earth, wouldn't he try to help? I also believed him when he told an enraged Fitz that he did what needed to be done to keep them all alive. Enoch is a decent being and I felt for him when Fitz called him a useless automaton.

The noble move of the episode comes from Jemma when she realizes that she needs to surrender herself in order to keep the others alive. I loved that she gave credit to Daisy, Piper and Davis, acknowledged their help, thanked them and said that she couldn't keep putting them in danger. This is enough of a redemption after dragging them to another place of the galaxy against their will, and a nice bookend to their adventures together. It's also a necessary development for Simmons: her likability rises just in time for the Fitzsimmons-centric episode coming next. It is set up perfectly when Simmons says that, whatever happens, she will be with Fitz. For the two of them, that's all that matters.

Intel and Assets

- Could the Monoliths have some connection to the infinity stones? There is a Time Monolith, a Space Monolith and the third one has something to do with life and death, like the Soul Stone.

- Chronicoms have no gender.

- Chronyca-2 was destroyed by a plague. What about Chronyca-1?

- I liked the continuity of the Confederacy trying to exploit the remnants of a destroyed planet. Also convenient to save some money on set design.

Quotes

Yo-Yo: "I've made hard choices before. Being right doesn't stop it from feeling wrong."

Enoch: "They will never release Fitz." Simmons: "And I'll never stop fighting."

Sarge (to May): "You keep staring like that, my head is bound to catch fire."

Atarah: "Lies. A favorite human pastime."

Sarge: "Our tracker shows [Deke] is not from here, but he's no Shrike. What is he?" May: "Exhausting."

A good ol' Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode. Three out of four flashbacks.

---

Lamounier

[denisehq]

HOW THE FUCK DID THIS HAPPEN?

WHO: Tobias Berry / Noah Puckerman ( @puckmanhq​ ) / Aliyah Puckerman ( @alipucks​ ) LOCATION:  Toby and Aliyah’s place DATE & TIME: June 28, 2019, 1 AM  - June 28, 2019, 8:30 AM SUMMARY: Puck visits Aliyah at her apartment to clear his head and get away from IHQ, but ends up spending the night with Toby instead.  WARNINGS: Excessive drinking and non-descriptive nudity

1 AM

Well, shit. Puck thought as his sister walked off to her room, her middle fingers the last thing he saw before she completely disappeared. “Fucking charming.” Ha, I got the last word. Less than a second later the sound of an opening door before, “Fucking dumbass.” One final door close and now it was painfully quiet. Puck started bouncing his knee, looking around like he’d never seen the inside of an apartment before. See, now he was just chillin’ in the room with Tobias and honestly, he’d never really hung out with him, even though he was technically family, as Joey’s uncle. Guess they just didn’t have that much in common. Probably should have got the fuck up and taken his tipsy ass home but he really couldn’t be bothered. So instead he looked over at Toby. “Beer or tequila?” He asked as he poured himself a shot, ready to pour another.

“Fuckin’ traitor,” Tobias mumbled. How could Aliyah leave him right now? They weren’t even halfway through their movie. It’s not like it was-- Tobias checked his phone. “Shit,” he exhaled gently. “It’s later than I thought it was.” Which, if that was the case, why the hell did Aliyah let Puck inside in the first place? Tobias rubbed his eyes, still red from the makeshift hotbox in the bathroom earlier, and dismissed his own question with a shrug. Nope. Practical thought just didn’t exist when it was past midnight and you were still high as fuck. Tobias slowly turned his head towards Puck, interest finally piqued by his presence and the classical conditioning of the promise of alcohol. “Well, shit. If you’re pouring, then whatever cost the most.”

"Tequila it fucking is then." Pouring a second shot he handed it to his unlikely drunking buddy and riased his own glass. "To whatever the fuck this night's gonna be." Clinking his glass against Toby's, Puck did the classic frat boy table touch before throwing it back. Feeling the familiar burn, he chased it with a swig of beer before pouring himself another one. Already feeling the temperature rising which caused him to pull at the collar of his tank before leaning forward to place his beer on the coffee table. Looking at the screen he couldn't even remember what they were watching. "Dude, you look high enough to hear colors right now." He said as he took off his hat, because really was it 78 degrees in here? "And what the fuck is this movie?" He asked handing the younger man another shot.

With an exaggerated wince, teeth bared and all, Tobias placed the glass down. His technique was amateur, greedy even. But thankfully he didn’t have to smell and savor the damn thing. He just had to throw it back and accept that clear liquor was a foul ass invention. He drew a line with his eyes from the bottle to his empty drink, and gave Puck his best DJ Khaled impression. “Another one.” Condensation was already pooling around the base of their shot glasses, and the coasters they should have been using were sitting in a neat pile off to the side. Tobias exhaled warmly, shrugging off his signature denim jacket, before running a hand through his hair. Toby and Aliyah’s AC had been fucked for about a week now. The superintendent was taking his sweet ass time (as usual) in fixing it. Tobias hit at his sternum with a weak fist to break up the burn. “Oh, that?” He pointed at the screen. “It’s that one movie where that dude’s chest gets caved in and bites this other guy’s hands off?” Tobias started giggling. “It’s real great when you’re high,” he sang. “A classic.” Tobias’ cat, Mercutio weaved around Puck’s legs, purring happily. “He likes dudes,” Tobias spoke earnestly, before snatching up the bottle of tequila from the coffee table. “I’m pretty sure he’s gay.” He took a gulp. Or two. Or three. “It’s so fucking hot. Are you hot?” Toby handed the bottle back over to Puck. “I’m hot as hell.” He wiped at his forehead with his arm. “You can stay and roast but--” he pulled his shirt over his head “--I’m not trying to die in my own apartment.”

Raising an eyebrow at the description of the movie they'd been watching, Puck shouldn't have been surprised. Aliyah was definitely into some weird shit and somehow she was pulling that off in a cool way and honestly Puck had never been more proud of a sibling. Looking at Toby, he assessed him, trying to decide if he was cool or not. On the one hand he quoted DJ Khaled and couldn't take a shot of tequila with looking like someone was feeding him fire. On the other hand, he quoted DJ Khaled and took a shot like he was eating fire. So, unclear where he was on the Noah Puckerman dope-o-meter. "You and my sister really found each other." Standing up for no apparent reason just to immediately sit back down, it was definitely approaching 'fuck it' levels of intoxicated, which is where any potential impulse control peace-ed the absolute fuck out. Looking down at the cat, Puck smirked, "Don't blame 'im, I'm fucking hot. Good taste, bro." And then he tried to bro fist the cat and Puck could swear he could hear the thank god you're pretty coming from the little dude. Hearing that it wasn't just him burning the fuck up made him want to facetime his brothers just to flip them off, because fuck you guys clothes are dumb when you're drunk. Standing up, and this time with purpose, Puck pulled out his phone because obviously his magic mike ass needed music for this moment. Turning up his phone after picking Hot In Here by Nelly, he removed his tank in a very aesthetically pleasing and manly way. Alright, so what really happened was, his drunk ass picked Metro Station's Shake It and as he went to take off his tank with one hand it got stuck and ripped and he just kind of through it to the ground and then he winked like a jackass. "Gotta give 'em a show." But who the fuck was he talking to? Oh, right, the gay cat, naturally.

Tobias’ laughter slipped past his teeth and fingers. “Dude, I can totally see why you get so much play. You’re amazing,” he slurred. Tobias’ giggles died down, but the ache in his cheeks remained as the room tilted. “I can almost see why Lucky slept with you.” Toby squinted. “Where are my glasses?” He patted over his face. Sheer force of will would definitely make his vision clearer. “Do you ever think that, like, your eyes are so blue because you’re sad?” Toby cradled his head in his hands,hoping his over-saturated sponge of a brain wouldn’t leak out of his ears. Every blink was heavy, every movement slowed-down to an unbearable rate. “Fuuuuuuuuck. That weed was too strong.” Sweat slid down his back. “I have no idea how--” Tobias undid his belt ”--Aliyah is sleeping through this. I’m about to off myself.”

"Almost?” Puck said momentarily alert. “I’m the most fuckable.” As if to prove himself, he removed his pants, swearing feet weren’t usually this fucking difficult to get through a damn pant hole. Now, he was just standing there in his stripey boxer briefs vaguely gesturing at himself to accentuate his point. Honestly, at this point sounds were muffled and everything sounded kind of far away, maybe that’s why he was hyper focused on the younger man’s mouth. Not that he was secretly a master at lip reading, but when you’re drunk you’re pretty convinced you’re the master of everything. Picking up his phone again he pulled up his camera and started recording before standing stupidly close to Toby and making the camera lens face them, because there was no fucking way he was capable of remembering the invention of the fucking front facing function. Throwing his free arm around the taller man’s shoulders, he pulled him in close before tuning his face toward him. “You ever seen what happens when Ali gets serenaded?” He asked pausing for a moment letting a drunken smile creep on his face and he handed Toby his phone. “I think we oughta find out.” Honestly everything that happened next was..... something that never needs to see the light of day.

What the fuck is going on? Something that sounded a bit like Post Malone’s Sunflower was sounding through her room . As Aliyah hazily rose from her almost slumber, her feet dragged along her floor as she moved, feeling around, refusing to give in and turn on a light. As she was becoming more aware she noticed the song was becoming louder, yet not clearer as she moved closer to her door. Noticing the light shining underneath, she got ready to tell the neighbors to shut up as she opened her door. Unfortunately, the sight she was met with almost alerted her into a fucking heart attack.

Stood before her was her dumbass clearly drunk brother in the worst striped underwear she’d ever seen. When he saw her he began singing Wind Beneath My Wings. Peaking her head out more she wondered, how the fuck is Toby sleeping through this? Why the fuck is my loudest brother still here? and last but certainly not least, since when could he legit sing?

“Sing another word and I’ll make sure you’re left with a face only good enough for radio.” Suddenly she noticed more movement. “Fucking move.” She said and to his credit he did move, even if he hadn’t stopped singing.

Immediately upon seeing her actual favorite person, in a state of undress she fucking knew, he was drunk too. “Oh Toto, no, not you too. Fucking betrayed, dude, not cool.” Honestly, how was she supposed to control Puck in this state he was literally bouncing around like a 90′s rubber ball and apparently had been a hype man for Toby who was shamelessly smiling at him like this shit was normal and they weren’t drunk.

“Just havin’ a blasty blast, Al, and the AC doesn’t exsit and–” Then he just started moving. Was he holding a phone? Was it recording.

Walking over to her best friend she plucked it out of his hand and was kind of pleased it was, A) Puck’s phone and B) recording. Quickly she stopped the video so she could send it to herself before hitting record and handing it back to Toby. “Good Boy.”

Suddenly there was a woosh of fabric flying by her face, landing on Toby’s foot which he just laughed at and Aliyah without taking a proper look at what had been thrown turned around and was met with a fully nude Puck singling Sweet Child Of Mine while living his best nude air guitar life. With the quickest turn around ever, she ran to Toby and used him to balance herself as she pulled one of her socks off and throwing it at Puck. “I’m gonna kill you both and I’m keeping this.” She said snatching Puck’s phone out of Toby’s hand.

“You’re a fucking buzzkill anyone ever tell you that?” Puck said way too damn loud, at least he wasn’t singing anymore. Turning to look at Toby as she heard him snort she saw he was pointing at Puck, smiling, “He’s got a sock on his thingy.” Thank fuck it’s covered, was all Aliyah could think. Somehow they ended up on the same side of the room as she was poking around on Puck’s phone and before she knew it she looked over and it looked like they’d tripped over each other and just… fallen asleep. Taking a picture of their already drooling selves with her own phone, she sent it to Toby with the message; this is why I rebuke heathens from our lives. Then to Puck with a slightly more serious message; stop drinking, you’re someone’s father.

After sending out a few way too forward texts and taking over his twitter and insta, she threw the phone at him and watched as it hit his leg. Exhaling she went over to the fridge and took out their half gone bottle of Orange Juice and drank the rest, because she knew that shit was like the base of Puck’s cure to a hangover. Leaving a charming note saying, ‘FUCK YOU.’ on it. Looking at the time she was ten kinds of pissed and ended up leaving the room the same way she had two hours ago. Middle fingers up as she disappeared back into her bedroom. “Assholes”

8:30 AM

Pulling a mess of curls back into a messy bun, Aliyah had been staring at the rather amusing sight of a blanket covered, naked, hardcore cuddling Puck and Toby. "Oh that's totally on what the fuck, bingo." She said to herself as she got her phone out to take about 15 different pictures. Seriously contemplating posting a couple on insta. Making a mental note to create the WTF?! bingo card for real, Aliyah watched as her best friend stirred to life. 

Tobias whined, refusing to open his eyes. “Why are there such things as hangovers,” he spoke groggily. His cheek was stuck to warm skin, a slow heartbeat making a tender home inside his ear. He was too comfortable to move, but Mercutio’s timid cries were annoying as fuck. “And why does my mouth taste like literal ass?” Finally lifting up, Puck’s heavy arm slid from around his form. Toby’s eyes widened. “Oh no.” Suddenly launching himself into space seemed like the best out, but then he spotted Aliyah, standing smugly in front of the couch. “I… this isn’t what it looks like.” His voice was thick with sleep (and hopefully nothing else). “Pretty sure there’s a valid explanation for...” Tobias examined the crime scene. His and Puck’s clothes were strewn about the floor and the entire bottle of Tequila from last night was empty. He wiped the drool he left on Puck’s chest, nausea bubbling in the pit of his stomach. No matter what Toby said, he didn’t know what happened, and that meant there was a lingering possibility that Puck’s dick had been in or around his mouth. Or worse. “Please don’t tell anyone, Al.” 

As he looked at her, Aliyah raised an eyebrow, listening to his pleas and getting way too much of a power trip out of it. “You know I don’t talk to people.” Grabbing her thermos of espresso she bent down to flick Puck’s nose until he opened his eyes. “I’m going to work.” Then she was gone. 

Smacking the hand away from his face, Puck slowly opened his eyes, and all he could really see was a combat boots moving further away. Shit, the IHQ pride games or whatever is today. He thought to himself, not even noticing the second body lying with him, he sat up ready to get up before he finally realized there was a whole ass person on him and out of instinct he caught them around the waist. Just like that he could feel them breathing, his sight was clearing up and soon the dark head of hair and skinny frame were starting to form a face in his mind. “Fuck.” Moving Toby off of him, he stood up, some discomfort in the Puckzilla region. Looking down he noticed all the clothes strewn everywhere and the cause of his dickcomfort (if you will). “Why’s there a sock on my dick?” Adjusting it he looked for his underwear. “Why the fuck is it so scratchy?”

[coffeeandpurplepens]

WIP Questions Tag Game

Yo, I was tagged in a tag game (which is always exciting) by the creative and talented @fair-folk-nonsense

1. Describe the plot in one sentence

A magical teenage girl and her nerdy human best friend blackmail an assassin into going on a cross-country road trip to find a secret treasure that will end a generations-long war.  

2. Pick one sight, smell, sound, feel, and taste to describe the aesthetic for your novel

Sight: A magical box siting on a dashboard, the road stretching out for miles

Smell: Coffee covering the decaying leaves of the forest floor

Sound: Banter and laughter over a Folk-Indie band on the radio

Feel: Chest wound tighter and tighter while wearing a cozy sweater

Taste: hazelnut coffee and blood

3. Which 3+ songs would make up a playlist for your novel?

Death And All His Friends – Coldplay

I’ll Be Good -- Jaymes Young

We Might Be Dead By Tomorrow – Soko

4. What’s the time period and location of your novel?

Modern day.  Home is in southern Indiana, but their quest takes them all over the country.

5. Are there any former titles that you’ve considered but discarded?

I particularly dislike picking titles.  I call the project “Treasures of Tallow”, but it’s really a series (3 or 4 books, still figuring that part out), and none of the books have a title yet.  That’s future me’s problem.

6. What’s the first line of your novel?

Book 1: “It was forbidden in the Dunn household to tell the story of the assassin. That rule was inspired by AJ.”

Book 2: “AJ Dunn had started a civil war and she didn’t even know it.”

7. What’s a line of dialogue you’re especially proud of?

I don’t know if I’d say “proud” (because the ones I’m most proud of require context to feel the impact), but here’s what I’m rather fond of at the moment.

“You’ve been living with the humans, haven’t you?”  When Coy nodded, she added, “And they grew on you?” with a sense of wonder.

…Her eyes were expecting, so he settled on, “Some of them are very kind to dogs.”

8. What line from the novel most represents it as a whole?

“You three goofballs are going to save the world?”

9. Who are your characters faceclaims?

*shrugs*  I had to Google “what are faceclaims”?

10. Sort your characters into Hogwarts Houses

AJ is a Gryffindor.

Daemyn is a Ravenclaw, though he has Slytherin moments.  

Coy is also a Gryffindor.  Maybe a Hufflepuff.  

11. Which character’s name do you like most?

AJ’s full name is Adeline Joan Dunn.  I love the homage to St. Joan of Arc, who has one of my favorite quotes, “I am not afraid.  I was born to do this.”  While she’s always been AJ, what “AJ” stood for has changed about a dozen times over, and I like what we landed on.

I’m also particularly found of Daemyn’s name.  His name means constant or loyal.  He fit his name so perfectly, and it’s always been that way.  

I didn’t want to name Coy “Coy” and he knows it.

12. Describe each character’s daily outfit.

AJ wears skinny jeans with holes in the knees, oversize sweaters, and canvas sneakers.

Daemyn has the most diverse wardrobe, as he prefers both to give impeccable first impressions in a variety of situations.  He favors collared shirts, bright colors, and falls somewhere between preppy and hipster.  The boy tries hard to look nice and it shows.

Coy wears hoodies, even in hot weather, so he can hide his face.  He also wears jeans and steel-toed combat boots.

13. Do any characters have distinctive birthmarks/scars?

I have a character named Tony who I haven’t talked about here yet who has a branded T on his cheek (for “traitor”, not for “Tony”.)  Tony is one of Coy’s best friends (Goose being the other) and is an excellent little chef.

14. Which character most fits a character trope?

Coy is a chosen one.  Because I am an absolute fool for Chosen One Trope.  Give me ALL the Chosen Ones.  You can take this trope from my cold dead hands.  One of the key questions that inspired this whole story is, “What if the chosen was raised by the bad guys?”  I’d like to think I’m being creative about the whole ordeal, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

15. Which character is the best writer? Worst?

Daemyn’s the best writer.  He’s won numerous writing contests.  AJ’s probably the worse, simply because she doesn’t have the patience for it.

16. Who’s the best liar? Worst?

AJ is the best liar, unless it’s her mom.  Daemyn’s more of a manipulator of facts rather that straight out lying.

Coy can’t lie for shit.  He’s not particularly talented at talking in general.  

17. Which character swears the most? Least?

See, I swear a lot.  And my characters have all picked up my bad habits.  Do I have a character that doesn’t curse?  I really don’t think so?  Maybe some of the adults?  

18. Which character has the best handwriting? Worst?

Coy has the best handwriting.  Daemyn has the worst.

19. Which character is most like you? Least?

I don’t think anyone who knows me would say this, but Coy is most like me.  

I don’t think anyone who knows me would say this, but AJ is the least like me.

20. Which character would you most like to be?

I would love AJ’s fearlessness.  

Tagging people in things like this gives me low-key anxiety.  Interestingly enough, using gift-cards gives me the same sort of low-key anxiety.  So if you’d like to play, do it.  I’d love to learn more about your WIP/characters

[everythingeren]

Drabble idea: Eren is really insecure around Jean and can't stop thinking about how PERFECT he is then one day he gets caught staring and Jean hits him up and Eren fucking dies the end (this was so strangely specific sorry)

So this is porbably not what you imagined but it somehow fits the idea so jsdfsj sorry. 

Also, posting this for @snkpositivityweek day 2: ship positivity day

Erejean comming your way~ 

It’s 8 minutes for 8:15pm.

Eren hates that he is so aware of this. He has been looking at the clock for the past hour without meaning to. He tells himself he is not going to look next time but he always ends up looking at the right corner of their fridge, where the thinnest hand of their toast-like clock advances steadily around its axis and disturbs Eren’s mind and the room’s silence with it’s insistent tik tok tik tok, as the two other hands spread across and announce that it’s 8 minutes until Jean’s usual time of arrival hom–to their apartment.

He decides he is too stupidly anxious to continue writing on his assignment so instead he flops on their couch and watches as the ventilator spins around and wonders when the hell he started behaving like a damned pet dog waiting for it’s master to arrive.

It was all rather pathetic. Because he and Jean didn’t even refer to each other as friends, they just talked about the other as “my roommate” or “the annoying guy I share a room with”.

But it was only recently that things started to…change for Eren. And he surprised himself staring at his roommate for longer than was probably appropriate. At his sculpted jaw and cushion lips and the slight freckles around his nose. His slitted eyes and sharp look and the way he stuffed potato chips on his mouth while being glued to his phone.

Jean was attractive, alright, alright. He had thought that the first time he laid eyes on him. But his personality was huge enough to very quickly draw attention away from that fact. Jean was not only beautiful enough to become a model for some expensive brand of clothes. Jean was arrogant. Jean was delusional. Jean was obnoxious. Jean was-

Jean…

He was…

7 minutes for 8:15pm

At this point Eren has taken out his phone and is looking for any way to distract himself. He is too on edge to play any phone games, and they bore him anyway. He only has them because Jean has them, and because Jean had looked so self-assured every time he surpassed his own score in Subway Surfer, Eren just had to try and beat him at it. And so they proceeded to download every stupid game that was trending on the Play Store, spending hours trying to beat each other in a variety of games that ranged from the Pokemon emulator to Cooking Mama, which resulted in each winning half of them. Which then resulted in them having to take matters into their own hands and settle it all with a game of arm wrestling, with Eren emerging as the victor and the winner of a weekend of Jean’s cooking.

Eren smiles at the memory, and curses himself.

It’s just that he has grown used to Jean’s presence, that’s all. What was that old quote? “Man is a creature of habit”, (he is sure Jean would tell him exactly who said that quote) and he, well, he wasn’t as annoyed with Jean as he first had been. Underneath that (annoying) harsh exterior and that (attractive) vain persona, Jean could be rather sweet. Jean would kill him if he ever heard him say this, but he had sort of a motherly personality. When Eren was sick, Jean would take care of him without Eren even asking him to. It was an earth-shattering discovery when it first happened. Eren had catched a cold and was sniffling grossly all over the place, and Jean had not only provided him with all his tissues, but also made warm soup for him, under the pretense that he didn’t want him vomiting all over their sink. With time, he grew more bold, going as far as to forbid Eren from leaving their place when it was winter and the brunette was sick and needed to go outside, taking whatever task Eren needed to do on his own.

Eren would have teased him about it –hell, he wouldn’t let him hear the end of it– if he himself hadn’t been so taken aback. Not only by Jean’s behaviour but by his own reaction to it. He should have been amused, or even mad. And he was both of those things, a little bit. He never liked people being overly concerned for him. But mostly he was…flattered. And a little bit happy. And a little bit like his heart might drop out every time Jean touched his forehead with the back of his hand to check his temperature.

4 more minutes…

Alright, so maybe it had little to do with having grown used to Jean and more with getting to know Jean. Living with him had let Eren know him quite well. He knew his ups and downs, the stuff he didn’t like to talk about, the stuff he never could stop talking about, the type of coffee he ordered at coffee houses, (caffè mocha, as he called it, the idiot) his annoying habits, his cute habits. Like scratching the side of his nose when he doesn’t understand something, or when he can’t help but sing along to whatever he’s put on the radio even though Eren knows he is self-conscious about his singing voice (Eren loves it).

And maybe Eren is a little in love with him, and maybe it’s a fact he has been concluding over and over and over again. And maybe that means he is more than fucked.

He is ruminating about the possibility of moving out when he hears the door open. Jean’s hair is a bit messed up by the wind and he immediately adjusts it as he closes the door and takes his jacket off. Eren observes him with something like fear, because he doesn’t know what else to call the painful pressure at the center of his chest as he looks at him. He is immediately brought back to the image of an adopted puppy, shyly observing his new master and unsure of how to properly greet them like every other good dog would. The thought almost makes him shiver.

“God, I nearly wish I kept my old job. I don’t think I have ever been more bored in my entire life,” Jean comes in, complaining, as usual.

For once, Eren doesn’t have a clever retort.

Apparently, this alarms Jean because the guy’s eyes are on him immediately. Eren pulls his gaze away.

“What’s the matter, Jaeger?” He cocks an eyebrow at him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Eren snorts humorlessly, but doesn’t say anything. The silence between them stretches, a physical entity now alongside the continuous ticking of the clock

“Hey,” Jean presses, and crosses his arms in that way that means he means business. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Eren takes his opportunity and stands up, intending to pass Jean and go to his room to gather his complicated thoughts on his own.

The idiot grabs his arm.

“It doesn’t look like nothing,” he cocks his head. “You have that look you have when you are thinking about the indifference of society or about your own place in the world or whatever thing you’ve decided to torture yourself with for the day. What is it this time?”

He is so close.

“Nothing’s the matter, I told you,” he should shake his hand off him, but he somehow can’t bring himself to. Eren makes the mistake of looking into his eyes and he is lost. He is sure Jean can hear the mad galloping of his heart in the silence. He must see how he is suddenly out of breath. And if that wasn’t obvious enough, he is sure his own eyes would betray him faster than any of his other traitorous biology. He is sure Jean is seeing what an absolute mess he’s made of him. Eren wants to cry.

It’s in that moment that he sees Jean look down at his lips.

It lasts less than a second, but Eren saw it. And suddenly he notices how Jean is looking a bit red. The air between them changes in an instant. Electricity coursing through Eren’s veins as he is suddenly made aware of both their breathings. Eren has never considered himself a coward, and he has been praised and scolded multiple times for throwing himself head-first into all kinds of situations but this…this is beyond terrifying.

Eren jerks his gaze away. He wants so much it’s devastating, but he pulls his gaze away.

“What were you thinking just now?” Jean asks all of a sudden, his voice warm like the chocolate milk he calls caffè mocha.

“What was I thinking?” Eren huffs through his nose, still not looking at Jean. “Why do you ask me that?”

“Because I was just thinking about how much I wanted to kiss you.”

He looks up at him at that, completely overcome.

Jean’s hand is still loosely grabbing at his arm, but he let’s go to grab delicately at his jaw, then. The world flips on it’s axis in the few seconds that it takes for Jean to pull him towards him, and rearranges itself the moment his lips connect to his. It’s a delicate press of sensitive skin that shouldn’t make Eren feel like he was just shot through the chest. It’s so gentle that it should feel inadequate, given the nature of who they both are, and yet it feels like so much, it feels like too much.

Jean Kirschtein had managed with a kiss what no amounts of fights and arguments and gaming had managed to do before. Eren was absolutely wrecked.

“You still look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the two-brain celled asshole says to him when he pulls away, looking at him with that teasing expression Eren hates and completely adores.

“Jesus Christ, Jean,” Eren regards him with an almost angry expression, and grabs him by the front of his expensive shirt. “Shut the fuck up and kiss me.”

[indispensible-pencil]

Tag Thingy

“I was tagged by @belongtohufflepuff thanks lovely!

rules: answer all the questions, add one of your own and tag as many people as there are questions (I can’t tag like 55 people I’m sure that was great at the beginning haha)

1. coke or pepsi? Mmm I’ll go with pepsi only because I drink coke with whiskey so much I can taste it in any coke which, when hungover, is not a good. 

2. disney or dreamworks? I’ll say disney but dreamworks has some rad 2D movies spirit owned my ass. 

3. coffee or tea? I’m from yorkshire tea is my lifeblood.

4. books or movies? Both tbh

5. windows or mac? Windows I have never touched a mac. 

6. dc or marvel? Marvel

7. xbox or playstation? Playstation (I switched from xbox 360 to ps4 cos I’m a traitor)

8. dragon age or mass effect? I’ll say mass effect I love the overall world and story more. 

9. night owl or early riser? Night owl what is the sun. 

10. cards or chess? Cards, it’s difficult (but not impossible) to play drinking games with chess.

11. chocolate or vanilla? I dislike strong vanilla scents and flavours (especially vanilla vodka omg). 

12. vans or converse? I...don’t wear either? 

13. Lavellan, Trevelyan, Cadash or Adaar? Took me a second to realise these are DA heroes. I’m an elvish rogue in any fantasy RPG so Lavellan. 

14. fluff or angst? Angst. Feed. Me. Pain. Fiction

15. beach or forest? I love the forest aesthetically but am allergic to many kinds of vegetation so beach

16. dogs or cats? Cats (I love dogs too but omg cats)

17. clear skies or rain? Rain unless I am going out somewhere that requires nice hair. 

18. cooking or eating out? Cooking I am a starving student that cannot afford to go out :(

19. spicy food or mild food? Spicy but like not painful 

20. halloween/samhain or solstice/yule/christmas? 2fast2spooky

21. would you rather forever be a little too cold or a little too hot? Cold. There’s only so many layers you can take off before it’s illegal. 

22. if you could have a superpower, what would it be?

Invisibility. if people could sometimes stop perceiving me physically that would be grand.

23. animation or live action? Both. Unless we’re talking live action disney remakes those can burn

24. paragon or renegade? Paragon like I could never do a renegade run. You expect me to be mean to video game characters and hurt their feelings?!

25. baths or showers? Showers mostly but catch me in a coma bath when mistress cramps hit

26. team cap or team ironman? Team cap

27. fantasy or sci-fi? Ooooh you can’t make me. I love fantasy but the Tolkien ‘standard fantasy’ format is wearing a bit thin. Dark/supernatural/urban fantasy and mythology though sign me the fuck up. 

28. do you have three or four favourite quotes, if so, what are they? "I would rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me."

“Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission and placing them on the table in the guise of candles?”

“Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.”

29. youtube or netflix? Netflix 

30. harry potter or percy jackson? harry potter

31. when do you feel accomplished? Accomplishment machine broke

32. star wars or star trek? Star Trek

33. paperback or hardback books? Whichever is prettier to be honest but paperbacks are cheaper...

34. horror or rom-com? Horror but I’m very VERY picky about them. 

35. tv shows or movies? Good stories can exist in any format.

36. favourite animal? Oh wow anything that’s in front of me. Sharks, cats, snakes, cute things that can kill me. 

37. favourite genre of music?

This is the part where I sound like an arsehole. New wave/post-punk/gothic rock/ punk 

38. least favourite book? The road or martyn pig are the worst I’ve ever read. 

39. favourite season? Winter

40. song that’s currently stuck in your head? Be prepaaaaaaaaaaaared.

41. what kind of pyjama’s do you wear? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

42. how many existential crises do you have on an average day? Constant and neverending.

43. if you can only choose one song to be played at your funeral, what would it be? Highway to Hell (no honestly that’s been my choice since I was 9). 

44. favourite theme song to a TV show? Hannibal.

45. harry potter movies or books? books

46. you can make your OTP become canon but you’ll forget that tumblr exists. will you do it? Two birds one stone 

47. do you play an instrument and if so, what is it? The hearts of men. Just kidding! The violin, heartstrings don’t produce great noise. 

48. what is the worst way to die? Suffocating alone in the vacuum of space (the opening of mass effect 2 fucked me up.)

49. if you could be entirely invisible for a day, what would you do?

Stand in the middle of northumberland street holding a python. 

50. If you could have personally witnessed anything in history what would it be? Storming of the bastille off the top of my head.

51. If you could understand animals but you could never understand humans again, would you? Probably not my cat licks his arsehole in front of me a lot I really don’t need his personal input on life.

52. What is your most favourite album currently? I’ve been listening to Green Day: Revolution Radio a lot lately that’s very good (lots of dissing donald trump). Also Disintegration by the cure because listening to that while dissociating launches your into the shadow realm where you can fight your mirror self. 

53. What is your favourite TV show character? Currently Rosa Diaz is the top of my list I think. Mylene Cruz from the get down owns my gay ass also. 

54. What is something you were obsessed with as a child? I was completely obsessed with the ocean and everything in it. I do marine zoology at university now so follow your dreams kids and you too can voluntarily do a dissertation on seaweed. 

55. Do you have any tattoos/piercings and if not would you like any? 

I have a few piercings and there are so many tattoos I want like for someone scared of injections I sure want needles in a lot of places. 

@shiremaiden, @anemonestarfish, @ochsespatz, @drunkswan, @vikingsandrevolutions, @arorevan, Hello naughty children it’s question time. (many many questions only if you want to)

[onceuponatimewasnow-blog]

MacFans.com "Pro Mac Fan" Feature, 7/24/02

Real Name: Emilie Autumn Personal Web Site: www.emilieautumn.com Marital Status(kids?): Never have, never will. Occupation: Mac Musician Professional Summary: I started out a classical violinist at age 4. I went on to compose, conduct, and perform on international podiums before discovering my voice in my late teens. I began to write and produce alternative rock music (whatever that really means) and started my own label, Traitor Records (www.traitorrecords.com), which symbolizes my complete disassociation with every organization I have ever been a part of. I fell in love with Apple computers, which enabled me to become a graphic and web designer alongside my career as a Mac musician. I am now recording and releasing both classical and rock albums while running my label, and trying to make the world more artist-friendly. Latest Project: "Enchant" full-length album, recorded entirely on Macs. Career Goal: I would like to help make the world an easier place for artistry and creativity to thrive...to set a precedent that says you CAN be free and successful, independent and respected, artist and label-head, electronic and acoustic, classical and rock, magical and real, smart and beautiful, strong and female. Personal Hero: Queen Elizabeth I Personal Motto, Quote or Philosophy: The readiness is all... Greatest Ambition or Lifetime Goal: To make everyone use Macs, drink tea, and believe in faeries. My Passions Are: Music, music, music, music, tea, music, Shakespeare, music, Apple computers, music, music, and sometimes, music. Biggest Thrill: Playing the "Star Spangled Banner" on my electric violin for hundreds of high school kids a week after 9/11/01. Strangest Experience: Having to dress up like a 12-year-old boy in order to be a violin playing body double for a horror movie. I discovered that suspenders are not cool. Shameless Plug: Actually, this plug isn't for me directly, though I would benefit in the long run: SUPPORT INTERNET RADIO!!! iTunes hooks you up with a plethora of great online stations, and there are thousands more just waiting to be discovered, that is, unless they are shut down for good. Listen to more variety, more quality, and more NEW music. Oh, and come visit me at www.emilieautumn.com.

Favorites

Magazines: MacAddict Magazine, MacFormat Magazine, Horse Illustrated. Books: The Complete Shakespeare, Queen Margot by Dumas, Remembrances Of Things Past by Proust, Mac OS X: The Missing Manual by Pogue, Webster's Dictionary, The Faerie Queene by Spenser, The Natural Superiority of Women by Montagu. Web Sites: apple.com, MacMinute.com, sex-pistols.net, horseclick.com, marthastewart.com, vegan.com, peta.com, amnesty-usa.org/women, Barnum's Animal Crackers at www.oreo.com/Barnums/default.htm, and of course, MacFans.com. Software: Cubase, ProTools, Final Cut Pro, iTunes, iMovie, Quicktime, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Mozilla, MediaCleaner. Music or Band: The Smiths, Annie Lennox, Eurythmics, Sting, Etta James, Fabio Biondi, Nigel Kennedy, Sex Pistols. Movie/Films: Elizabeth: The Virgin Queen, Hamlet (Branagh version), Much Ado About Nothing (Branagh version), Labyrinth, Rebecca (Olivier, oh yeah). TV Shows: I really liked the X-Files before it sucked. Now I don't have much time to watch TV though I often fall asleep in front of the History Channel. Joke(s): new error messages currently under consideration for the new Windows XP operating system... 1 Smash forehead on keyboard to continue. 2 Press any key to continue or any other key to quit. 3 BREAKFAST.SYS halted... Cereal port not responding. 4 Close your eyes and press escape three times. 5 File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N) 6 Runtime Error 6D at 417A:32CF: Incompetent User. 7 Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue. 8 Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner. 9 Windows message: "Error saving file! Format drive now? (Y/Y)" 10 Windows VirusScan 1.0 - "Windows found: Remove it? (Y/N)"

What was your first Mac?

The first Mac I was ever introduced to was a Tangerine iMac. I was then loaned a PowerBook, and finally bought my own iBook, "Puppy."

What is your current Mac set-up?

I use "Puppy," the iBook to sequence electronics live on stage during my performances. I also do some recording and film editing with him, using Final Cut Pro. At my home studio, I record with Cubase and ProTools on G4s.

How did you personally get into using a Macintosh?

When I was recording one of my albums, I was working with ProTools setup on a G4 just because that's what the studio had. Then, I began using Macs to produce my album artwork via Photoshop, and I realized that I had been using the wrong tools up until that point; the Mac is the ultimate machine for the creative professional.

Why did you choose a Mac over Windows?

The first time I sat down to a Mac, I felt that I was working in cooperation with a machine and an operating system to produce my desired result, music. That is something I have never experienced in all my years of working with PCs and Windows. I had learned to debug a computer, but never to enjoy one.

How has using the Macintosh computer changed your life?

Macs have completely enabled me to expand creatively in ways I would never have otherwise. For example, due to my use of Macs, I am able to incorporate a good amount of electronics into my live stage show without giving up the freedom to be spontaneous. I am able to record at home in a comfortable (and inexpensive) environment. I can produce professional quality graphics and websites myself, rather than soliciting a company to do it for me. I can even create and produce music video and other film utilizing Apple-made programs like Final Cut Pro. Without Macs, I would still be a musician and an artist, but the road would be infinitely more difficult.

If there was a time in your life that you really had to Think Different™, what was the situation and what did you do?

When I was performing professionally as a classical violinist, it was my job to care what everyone around me thought - teachers, conductors, critics, and other musicians. There came a point where I had to decide whether to sacrifice my free spirit or my approval within the industry, and I chose the latter. After getting over the initial shock, I got used to being different and learned that the only respect that matters is the respect I give myself. I am now enjoying the benefits of being creative, free and unpredictable, and I know that I not only made the right choice, I made the only choice.

If you became Apple CEO, what would you change first?

Nothing. I think Apple is right on target with its goal to gain customers gradually, elegantly, and honestly.

[ciathyzareposts]

Chief Gates Comes to Oakhurst: A Cop Drama

One day in late 1992, a trim older man with a rigid military bearing visited Sierra Online’s headquarters in Oakhurst, California. From his appearance, and from the way that Sierra’s head Ken Williams fawned over him, one might have assumed him to be just another wealthy member of the investment class, a group that Williams had been forced to spend a considerable amount of time wooing ever since he had taken his company public four years earlier. But that turned out not to be the case. As Williams began to introduce his guest to some of his employees, he described him as Sierra’s newest game designer, destined to make the fourth game in the Police Quest series. It seemed an unlikely role based on the new arrival’s appearance and age alone.

Yet ageism wasn’t sufficient to explain the effect he had on much of Sierra’s staff. Josh Mandel, a sometime stand-up comic who was now working for Sierra as a writer and designer, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him: “I wasn’t glad he was there. I just wanted him to go away as soon as possible.” Gano Haine, who was hard at work designing the environmental-themed EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, reluctantly accepted the task of showing the newcomer some of Sierra’s development tools and processes. He listened politely enough, although it wasn’t clear how much he really understood. Then, much to her relief, the boss swept him away again.

The man who had prompted such discomfort and consternation was arguably the most politically polarizing figure in the United States at the time: Daryl F. Gates, the recently resigned head of the Los Angeles Police Department. Eighteen months before, four of his white police officers had brutally beaten a black man — an unarmed small-time lawbreaker named Rodney King — badly enough to break bones and teeth. A private citizen had captured the incident on videotape. One year later, after a true jury of their peers in affluent, white-bread Simi Valley had acquitted the officers despite the damning evidence of the tape, the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 had begun. Americans had watched in disbelief as the worst civil unrest since the infamously restive late 1960s played out on their television screens. The scene looked like a war zone in some less enlightened foreign country; this sort of thing just doesn’t happen here, its viewers had muttered to themselves. But it had happened. The final bill totaled 63 people killed, 2383 people injured, and more than $1 billion in property damage.

The same innocuous visage that was now to become Sierra’s newest game designer had loomed over all of the scenes of violence and destruction. Depending on whether you stood on his side of the cultural divide or the opposite one, the riots were either the living proof that “those people” would only respond to the “hard-nosed” tactics employed by Gates’s LAPD, or the inevitable outcome of decades of those same misguided tactics. The mainstream media hewed more to the latter narrative. When they weren’t showing the riots or the Rodney King tape, they played Gates’s other greatest hits constantly. There was the time he had said, in response to the out-sized numbers of black suspects who died while being apprehended in Los Angeles, that black people were more susceptible to dying in choke holds because their arteries didn’t open as fast as those of “normal people”; the time he had said that anyone who smoked a joint was a traitor against the country and ought to be “taken out and shot”; the time when he had dismissed the idea of employing homosexuals on the force by asking, “Who would want to work with one?”; the time when his officers had broken an innocent man’s nose, and he had responded to the man’s complaint by saying that he was “lucky that was all he had broken”; the time he had called the LAPD’s peers in Philadelphia “an inspiration to the nation” after they had literally launched an airborne bombing raid on a troublesome inner-city housing complex, killing six adults and five children and destroying 61 homes. As the mainstream media was reacting with shock and disgust to all of this and much more, right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh trotted out the exact same quotes, but greeted them with approbation rather than condemnation.

All of which begs the question of what the hell Gates was doing at Sierra Online, of all places. While they were like most for-profit corporations in avoiding overly overt political statements, Sierra hardly seemed a bastion of reactionary sentiment or what the right wing liked to call “family values.” Just after founding Sierra in 1980, Ken and Roberta Williams had pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and moved to rural Oakhurst more out of some vague hippie dream of getting back to the land than for any sound business reason. As was known by anyone who’d read Steven Levy’s all-too-revealing book Hackers, or seen a topless Roberta on the cover of a game called Softporn, Sierra back in those days had been a nexus of everything the law-and-order contingent despised: casual sex and hard drinking, a fair amount of toking and even the occasional bit of snorting. (Poor Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, who arrived in this den of inequity from a conservative neighborhood of Houston inhabited almost exclusively by straight-arrow astronauts like his dad, ran screaming from it all after just a few months; decades later, he still sounds slightly traumatized when he talks about his sojourn in California.)

It was true that a near-death experience in the mid-1980s and an IPO in 1988 had done much to change life at Sierra since those wild and woolly early days. Ken Williams now wore suits and kept his hair neatly trimmed. He no longer slammed down shots of tequila with his employees to celebrate the close of business on a Friday, nor made it his personal mission to get his nerdier charges laid; nor did he and Roberta still host bathing-suit-optional hot-tub parties at their house. But when it came to the important questions, Williams’s social politics still seemed diametrically opposed to the likes to Daryl Gates. For example, at a time when even the mainstream media still tended to dismiss concerns about the environment as obsessions of the Loony Left, he’d enthusiastically approved Gano Haines’s idea for a series of educational adventure games to teach children about just those issues. When a 15-year-old who already had the world all figured out wrote in to ask how Sierra could “give in to the doom-and-gloomers and whacko commie liberal environmentalists” who believed that “we can destroy a huge, God-created world like this,” Ken’s brother John Williams — Sierra’s marketing head — offered an unapologetic and cogent response: “As long as we get letters like this, we’ll keep making games like EcoQuest.”

So, what gave? Really, what was Daryl Gates doing here? And how had this figure that some of Ken Williams’s employees could barely stand to look at become connected with Police Quest, a slightly goofy and very erratic series of games, but basically a harmless one prior to this point? To understand how all of these trajectories came to meet that day in Oakhurst, we need to trace each back to its point of origin.

Daryl F. Gates

Perhaps the kindest thing we can say about Daryl Gates is that he was, like the young black men he and his officers killed, beat, and imprisoned by the thousands, a product of his environment. He was, the sufficiently committed apologist might say, merely a product of the institutional culture in which he was immersed throughout his adult life. Seen in this light, his greatest sin was his inability to rise above his circumstances, a failing which hardly sets him apart from the masses. One can only wish he had been able to extend to the aforementioned black men the same benefit of the doubt which other charitable souls might be willing to give to him.

Long before he himself became the head of the LAPD, Gates was the hand-picked protege of William Parker, the man who has gone down in history as the architect of the legacy Gates would eventually inherit. At the time Parker took control of it in 1950, the LAPD was widely regarded as the most corrupt single police force in the country, its officers for sale to absolutely anyone who could pay their price; they went so far as to shake down ordinary motorists for bribes at simple traffic stops. To his credit, Parker put a stop to all that. But to his great demerit, he replaced rank corruption on the individual level with an us-against-them form of esprit de corps — the “them” here being the people of color who were pouring into Los Angeles in ever greater numbers. Much of Parker’s approach was seemingly born of his experience of combat during World War II. He became the first but by no means the last LAPD chief to make comparisons between his police force and an army at war, without ever considering whether the metaphor was really appropriate.

Parker was such a cold fish that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who served as an LAPD officer during his tenure as chief, would later claim to have modeled the personality of the emotionless alien Spock on him. And yet, living as he did in the epicenter of the entertainment industry — albeit mostly patrolling the parts of Los Angeles that were never shown by Hollywood — Parker was surprisingly adept at manipulating the media to his advantage. Indeed, he became one of those hidden players who sometimes shape media narratives without anyone ever quite realizing that they’re doing so. He served as a consultant for the television show Dragnet, and through it created a pernicious cliché of the “ideal” cop that can still be seen, more than half a century later, on American television screens every evening: the cop as tough crusader who has to knock a few heads sometimes and bend or break the rules to get around the pansy lawyers, but who does it all for a noble cause, guided by an infallible moral compass that demands that he protect the “good people” of his city from the irredeemably bad ones by whatever means are necessary. Certainly Daryl Gates would later benefit greatly from this image; it’s not hard to believe that even Ken Williams, who fancied himself something of a savvy tough guy in his own right, was a little in awe of it when he tapped Gates to make a computer game.

But this wasn’t the only one of Chief Parker’s innovations that would come to the service of the man he liked to describe as the son he’d never had. Taking advantage of a city government desperate to see a cleaned-up LAPD, Parker drove home policies that made the city’s police force a veritable fiefdom unto itself, its chief effectively impossible to fire. The city council could only do so “for cause” — i.e., some explicit failure on the chief’s part. This sounded fair enough — until one realized that the chief got to write his own evaluation every year. Naturally, Parker and his successors got an “excellent” score every time, and thus the LAPD remained for decades virtually impervious to the wishes of the politicians and public it allegedly served.

The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts burns, 1965.

As Parker’s tenure wore on, tension spiraled in the black areas of Los Angeles, the inevitable response to an utterly unaccountable LAPD’s ever more brutal approach to policing. It finally erupted in August of 1965 in the form of the Watts Riots, the great prelude to the riots of 1992: 34 deaths, $40 million in property damage in contemporary dollars. For Daryl Gates, who watched it all take place by Parker’s side, the Watts Riots became a formative crucible. “We had no idea how to deal with this,” he would later write. “We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. It was random chaos. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare.” Rather than asking himself how it had come to this in the first place and how such chaos might be prevented in the future, he asked how the LAPD could be prepared to go toe to toe with future rioters in what amounted to open warfare on city streets.

Chief Parker died the following year, but Gates’s star remained on the ascendant even without his patron. He came up with the idea of a hardcore elite force for dealing with full-on-combat situations, a sort of SEAL team of police. Of course, the new force would need an acronym that sounded every bit as cool as its Navy inspiration. He proposed SWAT, for “Special Weapons Attack Teams.” When his boss balked at such overtly militaristic language, he said that it could stand for “Special Weapons and Tactics” instead. “That’s fine,” said his boss.

Gates and his SWAT team had their national coming-out party on December 6, 1969, when they launched an unprovoked attack upon a hideout of the Black Panthers, a well-armed militia composed of black nationalists which had been formed as a response to earlier police brutality. Logistically and practically, the raid was a bit of a fiasco. The attackers got discombobulated by an inaccurate map of the building and very nearly got themselves hemmed into a cul de sac and massacred. (“Oh, God, we were lucky,” said one of them later.) What was supposed to have been a blitzkrieg-style raid devolved into a long stalemate. The standoff was broken only when Gates managed to requisition a grenade launcher from the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton and started lobbing explosives into the building; this finally prompted the Panthers to surrender. By some miracle, no one on either side got killed, but the Panthers were acquitted in court of most charges on the basis of self-defense.

Yet the practical ineffectuality of the operation mattered not at all to the political narrative that came to be attached to it. The conservative white Americans whom President Nixon loved to call “the silent majority” — recoiling from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the hippie era, genuinely scared by the street violence of the last several years — applauded Gates’s determination to “get tough” with “those people.” For the first time, the names of Daryl Gates and his brainchild of SWAT entered the public discourse beyond Los Angeles.

In May of 1974, the same names made the news in a big way again when a SWAT team was called in to subdue the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical militia with a virtually incomprehensible political philosophy, who had recently kidnapped and apparently converted to their cause the wealthy heiress Patty Hearst. After much lobbying on Gate’s part, his SWAT team got the green light to mount a full frontal assault on the group’s hideout. Gates and his officers continued to relish military comparisons. “Here in the heart of Los Angeles was a war zone,” he later wrote. “It was like something out of a World War II movie, where you’re taking the city from the enemy, house by house.” More than 9000 rounds of ammunition were fired by the two sides. But by now, the SWAT officers did appear to be getting better at their craft. Eight members of the militia were killed — albeit two of them unarmed women attempting to surrender — and the police officers received nary a scratch. Hearst herself proved not to be inside the hideout, but was arrested shortly after the battle.

The Patti Hearst saga marked the last gasp of a militant left wing in the United States; the hippies of the 1960s were settling down to become the Me Generation of the 1970s. Yet even as the streets were growing less turbulent, increasingly militaristic rhetoric was being applied to what had heretofore been thought of as civil society. In 1971, Nixon had declared a “war on drugs,” thus changing the tone of the discourse around policing and criminal justice markedly. Gates and SWAT were the perfect mascots for the new era. The year after the Symbionese shootout, ABC debuted a hit television series called simply S.W.A.T. Its theme song topped the charts; there were S.W.A.T. lunch boxes, action figures, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be like Daryl Gates and the LAPD — not least their fellow police officers in other cities: by July of 1975, there were 500 other SWAT teams in the United States. Gates embraced his new role of “America’s cop” with enthusiasm.

In light of his celebrity status in a city which worships celebrity, it was now inevitable that Gates would become the head of the LAPD just as soon as the post opened up. He took over in 1978; this gave him an even more powerful nationwide bully pulpit. In 1983, he applied some of his clout to the founding of a program called DARE in partnership with public schools around the country. The name stood for “Drug Abuse Resistance Education”; Gates really did have a knack for snappy acronyms. His heart was perhaps in the right place, but later studies, conducted only after the spending of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, would prove the program’s strident rhetoric and almost militaristic indoctrination techniques to be ineffective.

Meanwhile, in his day job as chief of police, Gates fostered an ever more toxic culture that viewed the streets as battlegrounds, that viewed an ass beating as the just reward of any black man who failed to treat a police officer with fawning subservience. In 1984, the Summer Olympics came to Los Angeles, and Gates used the occasion to convince the city council to let him buy armored personnel carriers — veritable tanks for the city streets — in the interest of “crowd control.” When the Olympics were over, he held onto them for the purpose of executing “no-knock” search warrants on suspected drug dens. During the first of these, conducted with great fanfare before an invited press in February of 1985, Gates himself rode along as an APC literally drove through the front door of a house after giving the occupants no warning whatsoever. Inside they found two shocked women and three children, with no substance more illicit than the bowls of ice cream they’d been eating. To top it all off, the driver lost control of the vehicle on a patch of ice whilst everyone was sheepishly leaving the scene, taking out a parked car.

Clearly Gates’s competence still tended not to entirely live up to his rhetoric, a discrepancy the Los Angeles Riots would eventually highlight all too plainly. But in the meantime, Gates was unapologetic about the spirit behind the raid: “It frightened even the hardcore pushers to imagine that at any moment a device was going to put a big hole in their place of business, and in would march SWAT, scattering flash-bangs and scaring the hell out of everyone.” This scene would indeed be played out many times over the remaining years of Gates’s chiefdom. But then along came Rodney King of all people to take the inadvertent role of his bête noire.

King was a rather-slow-witted janitor and sometime petty criminal with a bumbling reputation on the street. He’d recently done a year in prison after attempting to rob a convenience store with a tire iron; over the course of the crime, the owner of the store had somehow wound up disarming him, beating him over the head with his own weapon, and chasing him off the premises. He was still on parole for that conviction on the evening of March 3, 1991, when he was spotted by two LAPD officers speeding down the freeway. King had been drinking, and so, seeing their patrol car’s flashing lights in his rear-view mirror, he decided to make a run for it. He led what turned into a whole caravan of police cars on a merry chase until he found himself hopelessly hemmed in on a side street. The unarmed man then climbed out of his car and lay face down on the ground, as instructed. But then he stood up and tried to make a break for it on foot, despite being completely surrounded. Four of the 31 officers on the scene now proceeded to knock him down and beat him badly enough with their batons and boots to fracture his face and break one of his ankles. Their colleagues simply stood and watched at a distance.

Had not a plumber named George Holliday owned an apartment looking down on that section of street, the incident would doubtless have gone down in the LAPD’s logs as just another example of a black man “resisting arrest” and getting regrettably injured in the process. But Holliday was there, standing on his balcony — and he had a camcorder to record it all. When he sent his videotape to a local television station, its images of the officers taking big two-handed swings against King’s helpless body with their batons ignited a national firestorm. The local prosecutor had little choice but to bring the four officers up on charges.

The tactics of Daryl Gates now came under widespread negative scrutiny for the first time. Although he claimed to support the prosecution of the officers involved, he was nevertheless blamed for fostering the culture that had led to this incident, as well as the many others like it that had gone un-filmed. At long last, reporters started asking the black residents of Los Angeles directly about their experiences with the LAPD. A typical LAPD arrest, said one of them, “basically consisted of three or four cops handcuffing a person, and just literally beating him, often until unconscious… punching, beating, kicking.” A hastily assembled city commission produced pages and pages of descriptions of a police force run amok. “It is apparent,” the final report read, “that too many LAPD patrol officers view citizens with resentment and hostility.” In response, Gates promised to retire “soon.” Yet, as month after month went by and he showed no sign of fulfilling his promise, many began to suspect that he still had hopes of weathering the storm.

At any rate, he was still there on April 29, 1992. That was the day his four cops were acquitted in Simi Valley, a place LAPD officers referred to as “cop heaven”; huge numbers of them lived there. Within two hours after the verdict was announced, the Los Angeles Riots began in apocalyptic fashion, as a mob of black men pulled a white truck driver out of his cab and all but tore him limb from limb in the process of murdering him, all under the watchful eye of a helicopter that was hovering overhead and filming the carnage.

Tellingly, Gates happened to be speaking to an adoring audience of white patrons in the wealthy suburb of Brentwood at the very instant the riots began. As the violence continued, this foremost advocate of militaristic policing seemed bizarrely paralyzed. South Los Angeles burned, and the LAPD did virtually nothing about it. The most charitable explanation had it that Gates, spooked by the press coverage of the previous year, was terrified of how white police officers subduing black rioters would play on television. A less charitable one, hewed to by many black and liberal commentators, had it that Gates had decided that these parts of the city just weren’t worth saving — had decided to just let the rioters have their fun and burn it all down. But the problem, of course, was that in the meantime many innocent people of all colors were being killed and wounded and seeing their property go up in smoke. Finally, the mayor called in the National Guard to quell the rioting while Gates continued to sit on his hands.

Asked afterward how the LAPD — the very birthplace of SWAT — had allowed things to get so out of hand, Gates blamed it on a subordinate: “We had a lieutenant down there who just didn’t seem to know what to do, and he let us down.” Not only was this absurd, but it was hard to label as anything other than moral cowardice. It was especially rich coming from a man who had always preached an esprit de corps based on loyalty and honor. The situation was now truly untenable for him. Incompetence, cowardice, racism, brutality… whichever charge or charges you chose to apply, the man had to go. Gates resigned, for real this time, on June 28, 1992.

Yet he didn’t go away quietly. Gates appears to have modeled his post-public-service media strategy to a large extent on that of Oliver North, a locus of controversy for his role in President Ronald Reagan’s Iron-Contra scandal who had parlayed his dubious celebrity into the role of hero to the American right. Gates too gave a series of angry, unrepentant interviews, touted a recently published autobiography, and even went North one better when he won his own radio show which played in close proximity to that of Rush Limbaugh. And then, when Ken Williams came knocking, he welcomed that attention as well.

But why would Williams choose to cast his lot with such a controversial figure, one whose background and bearing were so different from his own? To begin to understand that, we need to look back to the origins of the adventure-game oddity known as Police Quest.

Ken Williams, it would seem, had always had a fascination with the boys in blue. One day in 1985, when he learned from his hairdresser that her husband was a California Highway Patrol officer on administrative leave for post-traumatic stress, his interest was piqued. He invited the cop in question, one Jim Walls, over to his house to play some racquetball and drink some beer. Before the evening was over, he had starting asking his guest whether he’d be interested in designing a game for Sierra. Walls had barely ever used a computer, and had certainly never played an adventure game on one, so he had only the vaguest idea what his new drinking buddy was talking about. But the only alternative, as he would later put it, was to “sit around and think” about the recent shootout that had nearly gotten him killed, so he agreed to give it a go.

The game which finally emerged from that conversation more than two years later shows the best and the worst of Sierra. On the one hand, it pushed a medium that was usually content to wallow in the same few fictional genres in a genuinely new direction. In a pair of articles he wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine, John Williams positioned Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel at the forefront of a new wave of “adult” software able to appeal to a whole new audience, noting how it evoked Joseph Wambaugh rather than J.R.R. Tolkien, Hill Street Blues rather than Star Wars. Conceptually, it was indeed a welcome antidote to a bad case of tunnel vision afflicting the entire computer-games industry.

In practical terms, however, it was somewhat less inspiring. The continual sin of Ken Williams and Sierra throughout the company’s existence was their failure to provide welcome fresh voices like that of Jim Walls with the support network that might have allowed them to make good games out of their well of experiences. Left to fend for himself, Walls, being the law-and-order kind of guy he was, devised the most pedantic adventure game of all time, one which played like an interactive adaptation of a police-academy procedure manual — so much so, in fact, that a number of police academies around the country would soon claim to be employing it as a training tool. The approach is simplicity itself: in every situation, if you do exactly what the rules of police procedure that are exhaustively described in the game’s documentation tell you to do, you get to live and go on to the next scene. If you don’t, you die. It may have worked as an adjunct to a police-academy course, but it’s less compelling as a piece of pure entertainment.

Although it’s an atypical Sierra adventure game in many respects, this first Police Quest nonetheless opens with what I’ve always considered to be the most indelibly Sierra moment of all. The manual has carefully explained — you did read it, right? — that you must walk all the way around your patrol car to check the tires and lights and so forth every time you’re about to drive somewhere. And sure enough, if you fail to do so before you get into your car for the first time, a tire blows out and you die as soon as you drive away. But if you do examine your vehicle, you find no evidence of a damaged tire, and you never have to deal with any blow-out once you start driving. The mask has fallen away to reveal what we always suspected: that the game actively wants to kill you, and is scheming constantly for a way to do so. There’s not even any pretension left of fidelity to a simulated world — just pure, naked malice. Robb Sherwin once memorably said that “Zork hates its player.” Well, Zork‘s got nothing on Police Quest.

Nevertheless, Police Quest struck a modest chord with Sierra’s fan base. While it didn’t become as big a hit as Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, John Williams’s other touted 1987 embodiment of a new wave of “adult” games, it sold well enough to mark the starting point of another of the long series that were the foundation of Sierra’s marketing strategy. Jim Walls designed two sequels over the next four years, improving at least somewhat at his craft in the process. (In between them, he also came up with Code-Name: Iceman, a rather confused attempt at a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller that was a bridge too far even for most of Sierra’s loyal fans.)

But shortly after completing Police Quest 3: The Kindred, Walls left Sierra along with a number of other employees to join Tsunami Media, a new company formed right there in Oakhurst by Edmond Heinbockel, himself a former chief financial officer for Sierra. With Walls gone, but his Police Quest franchise still selling well enough to make another entry financially viable, the door was wide open — as Ken Williams saw it, anyway — for one Daryl F. Gates.

Daryl Gates (right) with Tammy Dargan, the real designer of the game that bears his name.

Williams began his courtship of the most controversial man in the United States by the old-fashioned expedient of writing him a letter. Gates, who claimed never even to have used a computer, much less played a game on one, was initially confused about what exactly Williams wanted from him. Presuming Williams was just one of his admirers, he sent a letter back asking for some free games for some youngsters who lived across the street from him. Williams obliged in calculated fashion, with the three extant Police Quest games. From that initial overture, he progressed to buttering Gates up over the telephone.

As the relationship moved toward the payoff stage, some of his employees tried desperately to dissuade him from getting Sierra into bed with such a figure. “I thought it’s one thing to seek controversy, but another thing to really divide people,” remembers Josh Mandel. Mandel showed his boss a New York Times article about Gates’s checkered history, only to be told that “our players don’t read the New York Times.” He suggested that Sierra court Joseph Wambaugh instead, another former LAPD officer whose novels presented a relatively more nuanced picture of crime and punishment in the City of Angels than did Gates’s incendiary rhetoric; Wambaugh was even a name whom John Williams had explicitly mentioned in the context of the first Police Quest game five years before. But that line of attack was also hopeless; Ken Williams wanted a true mass-media celebrity, not a mere author who hid behind his books. So, Gates made his uncomfortable visit to Oakhurst and the contract was signed. Police Quest would henceforward be known as Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest. Naturally, the setting of the series would now become Los Angeles; the fictional town of Lytton, the more bucolic setting of the previous three games in the series, was to be abandoned along with almost everything else previously established by Jim Walls.

Inside the company, a stubborn core of dissenters took to calling the game Rodney King’s Quest. Corey Cole, co-designer of the Quest for Glory series, remembers himself and many others being “horrified” at the prospect of even working in the vicinity of Gates: “As far as we were concerned, his name was mud and tainted everything it touched.” As a designer, Corey felt most of all for Jim Walls. He believed Ken Williams was “robbing Walls of his creation”: “It would be like putting Donald Trump’s name on a new Quest for Glory in today’s terms.”

Nevertheless, as the boss’s pet project, Gates’s game went inexorably forward. It was to be given the full multimedia treatment, including voice acting and the extensive use of digitized scenes and actors on the screen in the place of hand-drawn graphics. Indeed, this would become the first Sierra game that could be called a full-blown full-motion-video adventure, placing it at the vanguard of the industry’s hottest new trend.

Of course, there had never been any real expectation that Gates would roll up his sleeves and design a computer game in the way that Jim Walls had; celebrity did have its privileges, after all. Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: Open Season thus wound up in the hands of Tammy Dargan, a Sierra producer who, based on an earlier job she’d had with the tabloid television show America’s Most Wanted, now got the chance to try her hand at design. Corey Cole ironically remembers her as one of the most stereotypically liberal of all Sierra’s employees: “She strenuously objected to the use of [the word] ‘native’ in Quest for Glory III, and globally changed it to ‘indigenous.’ We thought that ‘the indigenous flora’ was a rather awkward construction, so we changed some of those back. But she was also a professional and did the jobs assigned to her.”

In this case, doing so would entail writing the script for a game about the mean streets of Los Angeles essentially alone, then sending it to Gates via post for “suggestions.” The latter did become at least somewhat more engaged when the time came for “filming,” using his connections to get Sierra inside the LAPD’s headquarters and even into a popular “cop bar.” Gates himself also made it into the game proper: restored to his rightful status of chief of police, he looks on approvingly and proffers occasional bits of advice as you work through the case. The CD-ROM version tacked on some DARE propaganda and a video interview with Gates, giving him yet one more opportunity to respond to his critics.

Contrary to the expectations raised both by the previous games in the series and the reputation of Gates, the player doesn’t take the role of a uniformed cop at all, but rather that of a plain-clothes detective. Otherwise, though, the game is both predictable in theme and predictably dire. Really, what more could one expect from a first-time designer working in a culture that placed no particular priority on good design, making a game that no one there particularly wanted to be making?

So, the dialog rides its banality to new depths for a series already known for clunky writing, the voice acting is awful — apparently the budget didn’t stretch far enough to allow the sorts of good voice actors that had made such a difference in King’s Quest VI — and the puzzle design is nonsensical. The plot, which revolves around a series of brutal cop killings for maximum sensationalism, wobbles along on rails through its ever more gruesome crime scenes and red-herring suspects until the real killer suddenly appears out of the blue in response to pretty much nothing which you’ve done up to that point. And the worldview the whole thing reflects… oh, my. The previous Police Quest games had hardly been notable for their sociological subtlety — “These kinds of people are actually running around out there, even if we don’t want to think about it,” Jim Walls had said of its antagonists — but this fourth game takes its demonization of all that isn’t white, straight, and suburban to what would be a comical extreme if it wasn’t so hateful. A brutal street gang, the in-game police files helpfully tell us, is made up of “unwed mothers on public assistance,” and the cop killer turns out to be a transvestite; his “deviancy” constitutes the sum total of his motivation for killing, at least as far as we ever learn.

One of the grisly scenes with which Open Season is peppered, reflecting a black-and-white — in more ways than one! — worldview where the irredeemably bad, deviant people are always out to get the good, normal people. Lucky we have the likes of Daryl Gates to sort the one from the other, eh?

Visiting a rap record label, one of a number of places where Sierra’s pasty-white writers get to try out their urban lingo. It goes about as well as you might expect.

Sierra throws in a strip bar for the sake of gritty realism. Why is it that television (and now computer-game) cops always have to visit these places — strictly in order to pursue leads, of course.

But the actual game of Open Season is almost as irrelevant to any discussion of the project’s historical importance today as it was to Ken Williams at the time. This was a marketing exercise, pure and simple. Thus Daryl Gates spent much more time promoting the game than he ever had making it. Williams put on the full-court press in terms of promotion, publishing not one, not two, but three feature interviews with him in Sierra’s news magazine and booking further interviews with whoever would talk to him. The exchanges with scribes from the computing press, who had no training or motivation for asking tough questions, went about as predictably as the game’s plot. Gates dismissed the outrage over the Rodney King tape as “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and consciously or unconsciously evoked Richard Nixon’s silent majority in noting that the “good, ordinary, responsible, quiet citizens” — the same ones who saw the need to get tough on crime and prosecute a war on drugs — would undoubtedly enjoy the game. Meanwhile Sierra’s competitors weren’t quite sure what to make of it all. “Talk about hot properties,” wrote the editors of Origin Systems’s internal newsletter, seemingly uncertain whether to express anger or admiration for Sierra’s sheer chutzpah. “No confirmation yet as to whether the game will ship with its own special solid-steel joystick” — a dark reference to the batons with which Gates’s officers had beat Rodney King.

In the end, though, the game generated decidedly less controversy than Ken Williams had hoped for. The computer-gaming press just wasn’t politically engaged enough to do much more than shrug their shoulders at its implications. And by the time it was released it was November of 1993, and Gates was already becoming old news for the mainstream press as well. The president of the Los Angeles Urban League did provide an obligingly outraged quote, saying that Gates “embodies all that is bad in law enforcement—the problems of the macho, racist, brutal police experience that we’re working hard to put behind us. That anyone would hire him for a project like this proves that some companies will do anything for the almighty dollar.” But that was about as good as it got.

There’s certainly no reason to believe that Gates’s game sold any better than the run-of-the-mill Sierra adventure, or than any of the Police Quest games that had preceded it. If anything, the presence of Gates’s name on the box seems to have put off more fans than it attracted. Rather than a new beginning, Open Season proved the end of the line for Police Quest as an adventure series — albeit not for Sierra’s involvement with Gates himself. The product line was retooled in 1995 into Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT, a “tactical simulator” of police work that played suspiciously like any number of outright war simulators. In this form, it found a more receptive audience and continued for years. Tammy Dargan remained at the reinvented series’s head for much of its run. History hasn’t recorded whether her bleeding-heart liberal sympathies went into abeyance after her time with Gates or whether the series remained just a slightly distasteful job she had to do.

Gates, on the other hand, got dropped after the first SWAT game. His radio show had been cancelled after he had proved himself to be a stodgy bore on the air, without even the modicum of wit that marked the likes of a Rush Limbaugh. Having thus failed in his new career as a media provocateur, and deprived forevermore of his old position of authority, his time as a political lightning rod had just about run out. What then was the use of Sierra continuing to pay him?

Ken and Roberta Williams looking wholesome in 1993, their days in the hot tub behind them.

But then, Daryl Gates was never the most interesting person behind the games that bore his name. The hard-bitten old reactionary was always a predictable, easily known quantity, and therefore one with no real power to fascinate. Much more interesting was and is Ken Williams, this huge, mercurial personality who never designed a game himself but who lurked as an almost palpable presence in the background of every game Sierra ever released as an independent company. In short, Sierra was his baby, destined from the first to become his legacy more so than that of any member of his creative staff.

Said legacy is, like the man himself, a maze of contradictions resistant to easy judgments. Everything you can say about Ken Williams and Sierra, whether positive or negative, seems to come equipped with a “but” that points in the opposite direction. So, we can laud him for having the vision to say something like this, which accurately diagnosed the problem of an industry offering a nearly exclusive diet of games by and for young white men obsessed with Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings:

If you match the top-selling books, records, or films to the top-selling computer-entertainment titles, you’ll immediately notice differences. Where are the romance, horror, and non-fiction titles? Where’s military fiction? Where’s all the insider political stories? Music in computer games is infinitely better than what we had a few years back, but it doesn’t match what people are buying today. Where’s the country-western music? The rap? The reggae? The new age?

And yet Williams approached his self-assigned mission of broadening the market for computer games with a disconcerting mixture of crassness and sheer naivete. The former seemed somehow endemic to the man, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it behind high-flown rhetoric, while the latter signified a man who appeared never to have seriously thought about the nature of mass media before he started trying to make it for himself. “For a publisher to not publish a product which many customers want to buy is censorship,” he said at one point. No, it’s not, actually; it’s called curation, and is the right and perhaps the duty of every content publisher — not that there were lines of customers begging Sierra for a Daryl Gates-helmed Police Quest game anyway. With that game, Williams became, whatever else he was, a shameless wannabe exploiter of a bleeding wound at the heart of his nation — and he wasn’t even very good at it, as shown by the tepid reaction to his “controversial” game. His decision to make it reflects not just a moral failure but an intellectual misunderstanding of his audience so extreme as to border on the bizarre. Has anyone ever bought an adventure game strictly because it’s controversial?

So, if there’s a pattern to the history of Ken Williams and Sierra — and the two really are all but inseparable — it’s one of talking a good game, of being broadly right with the vision thing, but falling down in the details and execution. Another example from the horse’s mouth, describing the broad idea that supposedly led to Open Season:

The reason that I’m working with Chief Gates is that one of my goals has been to create a series of adventure games which accomplish reality through having been written by real experts. I have been calling this series of games the “Reality Role-Playing” series. I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not as games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

The idea sounds magnificent, so much so that one can’t help but feel a twinge of regret that it never went any further than Open Season. Games excel at immersion, and their ability to let us walk a mile in someone else’s shoes — to become someone whose world we would otherwise never know — is still sadly underutilized.

I often — perhaps too often — use Sierra’s arch-rivals in adventure games LucasArts as my own baton with which to beat them, pointing out how much more thoughtful and polished the latter’s designs were. This remains true enough. Yet it’s also true that LucasArts had nothing like the ambition for adventure games which Ken Williams expresses here. LucasArts found what worked for them very early on — that thing being cartoon comedies — and rode that same horse relentlessly right up until the market for adventures in general went away. Tellingly, when they were asked to adapt Indiana Jones to an interactive medium, they responded not so much by adjusting their standard approach all that radically as by turning Indy himself into a cartoon character. Something tells me that Ken Williams would have taken a very different tack.

But then we get to the implementation of Williams’s ideas by Sierra in the form of Open Season, and the questions begin all over again. Was Daryl Gates truly, as one of the marketers’ puff pieces claimed, “the most knowledgeable authority on law enforcement alive?” Or was there some other motivation involved? I trust the answer is self-evident. (John Williams even admitted as much in another of the puff pieces: “[Ken] decided the whole controversy over Gates would ultimately help the game sell better.”) And then, why does the “reality role-playing” series have to focus only on those with prestige and power? If Williams truly does just want to share the lives of others with us and give us a shared basis for empathy and discussion, why not make a game about what it’s like to be a Rodney King?

Was it because Ken Williams was himself a racist and a bigot? That’s a major charge to level, and one that’s neither helpful nor warranted here — no, not even though he championed a distinctly racist and bigoted game, released under the banner of a thoroughly unpleasant man who had long made dog whistles to racism and bigotry his calling card. Despite all that, the story of Open Season‘s creation is more one of thoughtlessness than malice aforethought. It literally never occurred to Ken Williams that anyone living in South Los Angeles would ever think of buying a Sierra game; that territory was more foreign to him than that of Europe (where Sierra was in fact making an aggressive play at the time). Thus he felt free to exploit a community’s trauma with this distasteful product and this disingenuous narrative that it was created to engender “discussion.” For nothing actually to be found within Open Season is remotely conducive to civil discussion.

Williams stated just as he was beginning his courtship of Daryl Gates that, in a fast-moving industry, he had to choose whether to “lead, follow, or get out of the way. I don’t believe in following, and I’m not about to get out of the way. Therefore, if I am to lead then I have to know where I’m going.” And here we come to the big-picture thing again, the thing at which Williams tended to excel. His decision to work with Gates does indeed stand as a harbinger of where much of gaming was going. This time, though, it’s a sad harbinger rather than a happy one.

I believe that the last several centuries — and certainly the last several decades — have seen us all slowly learning to be kinder and more respectful to one another. It hasn’t been a linear progression by any means, and we still have one hell of a long way to go, but it’s hard to deny that it’s occurred. (Whatever the disappointments of the last several years, the fact remains that the United States elected a black man as president in 2008, and has finally accepted the right of gay people to marry even more recently. Both of these things were unthinkable in 1993.) In some cases, gaming has reflected this progress. But too often, large segments of gaming culture have chosen to side instead with the reactionaries and the bigots, as Sierra implicitly did here.

So, Ken Williams and Sierra somehow managed to encompass both the best and the worst of what seems destined to go down in history as the defining art form of the 21st century, and they did so long before that century began. Yes, that’s quite an achievement in its own right — but, as Open Season so painfully reminds us, not an unmixed one.

(Sources: the books Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick and Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko; Computer Gaming World of August/September 1987, October 1987, and December 1993; Sierra’s news magazines of Summer 1991, Winter 1992, June 1993, Summer 1993, Holiday 1993, and Spring 1994; Electronic Games of October 1993; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 26 1993. Online sources include an excellent and invaluable Vice article on Open Season and the information about the Rodney King beating and subsequent trial found on Famous American Trials. And my thanks go out yet again to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

The four Police Quest adventure games are available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama-2/

[saffrongamer]

Bioshock Remastered Review

*SPOILERS*

Bioshock remastered is a fresh take on the 2007 hit by Take-Two Interactive. The original game received a lot of praise and awards throughout the industry. I completely missed the boat on it at the time since I didn’t own a PS3 or an Xbox 360. I was too busy with Pokemon Diamond and Mario Galaxy. I decided to enjoy the game for the first time through the remake of the original game. The remastered version can run at 1080p vs the original’s 720p. And that’s all I know about the differences. I will be judging it purely on my impressions of remastered.

The story of Bioshock involves your plane crashing over the ocean and you finding a mysterious entry to an aquatic elevator down to the town of Rapture. As your ride takes you down fathoms of water you are treated to a voice recording from Andrew Ryan; the city’s creator. He gives you a dramatic  speech of hard work and integrity as we gaze upon the stunning undersea city and the surrounding marine life around it. As we arrive, we see a man named Johnny killed by a mutilated woman with hooks for hands. She tries to break into your safe bubble, but she has no luck and decides to leave. You hear a some static on the radio near you and a voice asks if you would kindly pick it up. He introduces himself as Atlas and promises you that he’ll help you get away if you help him save his family. You come across a strange needle and put it into your arm. Atlas tries to calm you down as your fingers are sparking with electric and you fall over the banister and go unconscious. You lie there as two splicers investigate and then flee as a little girl and a monster come to look at you. Only to pass you up because you’re still alive while mentioning about something called ADAM. When you wake up, you discover your ability to shoot lightning from your fingertips. Which allows you to proceed through the hallway.

As Atlas guides you, you come across a monster rescuing a little girl from splicers. You’re told that they are big daddies and little sisters. They collect ADAM from corpses. A mysterious woman named Brigid Tennenbaum appears and offers you a deal. Save the little sisters and she’ll make it worth your time, while Atlas urges you to kill them for their ADAM. The ADAM functions as a means to upgrade yourself as you explore rapture. In this town it’s seen as a source of power and strength.

You proceed through the next parts of Rapture performing a laundry list of tasks to advance. Kill  a mad surgeon, take photos of mutants, and try to save Atlas’ family. As you arrive, Andrew Ryan destroys the bathysphere that his family was hiding in. Enraged, asks you to help him take revenge on Ryan in exchange for his escape.

Now that Ryan is very aware of your interference, he wants you out of his way. As you reach Arcadia he has all the trees killed. Destroying the oxygen supplying Rapture. You must then save the forest by collecting the necessary parts.

When you save yourself and rapture’s few inhabitants, you and Atlas are ready to confront Ryan. You hop in your bathysphere with intentions to take down the big cheese. Unfortunately you are intercepted and taken to Fort Frolic. A mad artist, known as Sander Cohen, offers you escape for helping to realise his artistic vision. His magnum opus. You take photos of his 3 traitors and he’ll grant you your freedom. He lets you go mostly unharmed, but you should be glad you’re not trapped in plaster like his other works of art.

As you’re reunited with Atlas, you’re back in the hunt for Ryan. However in order to enter, you’ll need to shut down the power plant as the entrance won’t let you through otherwise.

Upon your visit to Ryan’s office he has set the core to self destruct. He believes that the city is either his or no one’s. You head forward to Ryan and discover a wall of photos and red letters that read “WOULD YOU KINDLY”. A recording by Dr. Yi Suchong has the doctor instruct a little boy to kill a puppy after saying “would you kindly”.

As you try to understand the circumstances you proceed to confront Ryan. He reveals who you are in a dramatic monologue. He explains that you’re controlled by the phrase “would you kindly” And then ordered you to kill him.

After you kill Ryan you run over and turn off the self destruct. Atlas breaks character introduces himself as Frank Fontaine. He thanks you for your help taking down Ryan and he sends the security after you. You escape with the help of Tennenbaum and the little sisters.

Tennenbaum tells you what you need to do and you start your adventure towards Fontaine. Unfortunately this is where the story begins to feel like it’s already wrapped up. At this point in the plot, in my mind, I felt that you were simply getting beefed up to take on Fontaine. You receive the majority of your weapon upgrades and are even showered with supplies right before the final fight. This was the first time I had maxed out my wallet, and I didn’t even have anything to spend it on. We do get to explore a chapter where we learned about where the big daddys and little sisters came from. But that only leads right into the conclusion of the game.

Frank Fontaine appears and as you defeat him, a swarm of little sisters appear to purge him of the last of his ADAM. Depending on if you saved the little sisters or not, you will receive different endings. If you saved them all, you will get a cutscene where you escape rapture with the little sisters and live out as a father. You receive what none of you ever had; A family. However if you kill any of them or all of them, you view a cutscene where you take the power that you’ve gained and rise up on the surface with the splicers. Implying that you attacked the surface.

The most powerful aspect of Bioshock is it’s presentation. It’s such a stunning experience to see Rapture as you travel from level to level. Everything in this sci-fi horror tells you that you’re at the bottom of the sea. From the leaky halls, dilapidated rooms, and 1940s style architecture. The horror in this story directly comes from the atmosphere of the game. I was definitely creeped out for quite a while. But It dies down very hard after you defeat Sander Cohen. The first chapter is definitely the spookiest. I backtracked for supplies once and found a room that I missed. Then was jumped by a splicer that I immediately once shot on trigger.

Throughout the game, you come across recordings that citizens of Rapture have left behind. This is the main way that you are told the story of its people. The struggles of the lower class. The ideals of Ryan. And the power of Fontaine and his rebels.

My favorite recording is the demise of Dr. Yi Suchong. As we hear him speak of his failures with the big daddies, we hear him overcome and murdered. And we can look directly to a corpse eternally pinned to a table by a dusty drill.

Andrew Ryan was such a thrilling antagonist for the game. His dramatic speeches that he showered on you in your story made every moment more exciting. I quote him to my friends sometimes just for fun. I know Fontaine was the final antagonist, but he just seems to take a backseat to Ryan. But it is thrilling to know that there never was a family for you to find, and Fontaine called for you just to use you to rise up. After all, everyone thought Fontaine was already dead.

Lastly they leave director’s commentary film reels littered throughout the game. As you find them, you unlock the ability to play them from the main menu. I feel they should have been unlocked from the start or after you finish the game. They just kinda get in the way as you explore and take you out of the experience. I don’t want to go hunting for them while I go through the game. I’m usually only thorough in exploring on my first playthrough. But they do offer some cool insight into the development of the game and how some concepts came to be. And if you like giant commercials, Geoff Keighley hosts the interview.

My only other gripe with the presentation is the little quips that you hear from enemies. They’re creepy sometimes, but mostly just annoying. They can be very obnoxious when you are fighting a horde of splicers. Occasionally you can hear them through walls. Which I know is supposed to be atmospheric in some situations, but sometimes it felt like it was a bug that I could hear them

The mechanics of Bioshock are simple. You like magic sci-fi powers and guns? Well here we go. You get an array of guns and weapons at your disposal. I personally like using the shotgun, with occasionally the pistol or crossbow. You also have a chemical thrower, tommy gunn, grenade launcher, and your trusty wrench. All of these function exactly as you would expect. You’re given several upgrades to these weapons that can be quite helpful if you like that weapon. Such as power, ammo count, or knockback decrease.

Your other abilities stem from your plasmids. You can get abilities like electricity, fire, ice, telekinesis, wind, etc. Most of which range from being useful in combat to acting like a key to progress through the chapter. These plasmids are what gave power to the lower class to rise up and start a war within Rapture. And explain why there was such a desire for ADAM.

The game introduces you early on to the idea of hacking. See a security camera? Shock it to open up a hacking minigame. Then you can have security bots summoned to defend you from splicers. You may also hack turrets to shoot splicers for you. I feel that the hacking was used very ineffectively. You see you have to arrange the pipes to cause a flow of green something to get to the end of the course. It’s an easy enough minigame that only presents challenge when the developers increase the amount of traps or the speed of the flow. I think they should have introduced new ways to do hacks or more new pieces as the story went on. Instead you can only get upgrades that reduce flow speed or traps on screen. And tapping all these boxes to see what's inside doesn’t make it more fun to play. Don’t make me do that.

Combat wise it’s fairly basic. You see a mook. You shoot ‘em until they’re dead. Rinse and repeat for the entire game. Occasionally, you’ll come across a big daddy that requires some patience for you to defeat. Which is where the game shines when you have to struggle to take them down.

I noticed that the developers make some mooks easier to kill then others. I know it’s not me and my gun getting stronger. As the splicers in one room are weaker than in another. Sometimes taking just a single shot to kill, vs several shots.

By far the biggest offender is the final boss. Which apparently I’m not the only person to have complains about. Frank Fontaine appears like Jesus Christ from his cross while pumping himself full of ADAM. This final fight looks cool and all, but it’s extremely easy and Fontaine goes down with little issue. I think this boss needs a redesign or something.

Overall I feel that Bioshock is a thrilling adventure with impressive presentation, an interesting story, and a charming cast of characters. The original and the sequels had no impression on my opinions of this game. And I’m absolutely going to give them a fair shake as well.

This has been Saffron, thank you for listening.

[abdifarah]

Beyoncé Gives and Beyoncé Takes. Blessed be the Name of Beyoncé

Years ago I attended this fancy gala in Miami honoring famed Russian dancer and activist Mikhail Baryshnikov. The party boasted a live band fronted by a 50 something blond lady in a blue pants suit (think Hillary Clinton) that performed every top 40 song on the radio at the time. Its was 2005 so think, Lil’ Jon, Usher, Gwen Stefani, and Britney Spears. Contrary to their Ann Taylor/Brooks Brothers appearance, the band killed it, putting to shame the original performers. The lead singer (again, think Hillary Clinton) even spit all the rap verses. And without needing to grade on a curve (generally a given for white rappers), the flow was official. Beyoncé’s shape shifting performances across Everything Is Love reminded me of that party. But like the lady in the pants suit belting out, To the window, to the wall, til the sweat drips down my balls, there is something unsettling about a musical assassin the likes of Beyoncé absorbing and redeploying everyone else’s best moves like a berserking T-1000.

Everything Is Love plays like an immaculately curated jukebox, sifting choice samples and quotes from all of your other favorite artists, and as a bonus you get Beyoncé performing it all. A line here, a turn of phrase or dialect there, Everything Is Love and Lemonade before it lay bare a treasure chest of Beyoncé’s stylistic conquests and acquisitions, gathered throughout years of pop music pillaging. And like the raiders of the artifacts of oceania or King Tutankhamun's tomb that now populate the world’s museums, she didn’t ask. I commiserate with Jacobim Mugatu exasperatedly explaining to the world that Blue Steel and Le Tigre were the same look! I would regularly interject during the radio deluge that was Lemonade in 2016 that the refrain from Beyoncé’s revenge anthem Hold Up was eerily close to Karen O’s on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs classic ballad Maps. Hold up they don’t love you like I love you///Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.

On Friends, Bey smoothly rap/sings, “fuck you, fuck you, you’re cool, fuck you,” quoting Kid Cudi. Instantly recognizable from the sacred text, A Kid Named Cudi, the artist’s early mixtape, which remains a charmed relic witnessing Cudi’s as yet unreached potential. Over the past few weeks I have heard a number of people quoting that line, and from the sassy smirk on their faces as they speak the lines I know that they are embodying Beyoncé and not Cudi. In my Shang Tsung voice: the line is now hers. On Apeshit Beyoncé and Jay-Z do Migos better than the Migos, ad-libs and all. To make the stunt even more stuntful, the actual Migos are on the song trying desperately to keep up. I imagine the Atlanta trio in the studio with huge grins tinged with a bit of fear watching Bey mimic their style to perfection while adding a little stank to it for good measure.

Track to track the campaign of conquest continues. Heard About Us is literally a SZA song, down to SZA’s particular pronunciation of the N-word – Nikas. Not to be left out, Jay gets in on the action, quoting Common’s line from Erykah Badu’s Love of My Life, “Y'all know how I met her/ We broke up and got back together/To get her back, I had to sweat her,” not once but on two different songs! In summary, The Carters be stealin’. But it may be impossible for artists as prolific and influential as the Beyoncé and Jay-Z to steal. Beyoncé can make a SZA song, no questions asked, because SZA probably doesn’t exist with Beyoncé. On Nice Bey raps, “I give you life!” Beyoncé, like the God of Job, giveth and taketh freely. The rampant, borderline problematic, appropriation of this peak career Beyoncé and late career – yet still razor sharp – Jay-Z (last year’s 4:44 may be his best album, just saying) is The Carters ultimate flex.

The story goes Marvin Gaye originally wanted to sing the American songbook like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, but save for a few exceptions like Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. black men were not easily granted this venerated position within the music industry: to have your voice so purely appreciated and be so celebrated and accepted for who you are that you had the honor of singing only the standards. Not burdened with the added pressure of writing and arranging, these mavens were liberated to explore and perfect the full artistry of their voice. On Everything is Love The Carters avenge Gaye, subsuming and filtering the whole of pop music into their version of singing the standards. Jay-Z for one has been on a career long mission of righting historical wrongs. One 2001’s Izzo off the seminal The Blueprint, Jay raps, “I’m overcharging niggas for what they did to the Cold Crush;” a forerunning hip hop group egregiously exploited by record company executives. The Louvre, the site of the Apeshit video serves as the perfect fortress for the Carter coup. All culture, from high art to trap music, is theirs to do with as they please. The Louvre after all simultaneously represents the best of human artistry as well as serving as the consummate shrine to imperialism. Everything in the building – the Nike, the Venus De Milo, even the Mona Lisa – arrived there through some wresting of power and shift in dominion.

Everything is Love is not about music, though the music is fun. It's a corporate merger bordering on monopoly, and the two principals can not be bothered by human sized questions like originality or who said or did what first. This is enterprise level. Steal the technology, rename it Instagram Stories and bet the consumers will ultimately stay at home with their preferred providers, Bey and Jay, instead of toggling between apps. Even the title Everything is Love sounds like ad copy for some behemoth brand, dogma from a hollywood cult, or the utterance of an actual deity; Mr. Manhattan hovering both over the globe and between every atom, seeing things at such a macro and micro level that birth and death, a summer breeze or nuclear blast, individualist capitalism and collective communist revolt all become one. Identities merge. On Black Effect Jay-Z vaunts, “I’m Malcolm X!” Two verses later Beyoncé proclaims, “I’m Malcolm X!” The transitive property in all its splendor. Beyoncé spanning gender tells the sycophants to “get off my dick.” In the prelude to Black Effect, my favorite song on the album, an older lady with a Caribbean accent expounds on the mysteries of love, concluding that love for all mankind should be the culmination of things. Perhaps this love for all mankind, and not some myopic power move, is the ultimate goal of Beyoncé and Jay-Z and the higher purpose behind all of the stealing, and appropriation, and craven capitalism. Beyoncé doesn’t want to steal from SZA, she thought CTRL was dope and wanted to make some music just as good. Bey likes A Kid Named Cudi just as much as your college roommate did. And while Jay doesn’t casually throw compliments toward other rappers, he regularly reminds that he’s a fan of Common* and even if the world does not think of him in the list of the greats, Jay does. At a time when borders are becoming less malleable, conservatives and liberals must stay in discreet boxes and feign hatred for fear of appearing traitorous, genuine love and enthusiasm gets you labelled a Stan, and the slightest whiff of cultural appropriation is abruptly stamped out, Beyoncé and Jay-Z want everybody to lighten the fuck up. Feel free to try on someone else’s style, root for a country other than your own in the World Cup, vote on behalf of someone else and not just in your own interests, grab your dick and go apeshit while still being a lady, or strap on an apron like Darius and get in touch with your inner auntie by putting your foot in some greens. In the end everything is love.

[helloworlddemo1122-yahoopar-blog]

Celebs React to Robert De Niro's Viral Anti-Trump Tony Awards Speech

Robert De Niro definitely didn't hold back on his thoughts about President Donald Trump on Sunday at the Tony Awards in New York City.

The 74-year-old actor introduced a performance by Bruce Springsteen, and took the opportunity to denounce Trump in NSFW language. Although De Niro was heavily censored during the U.S. telecast, his comments weren't bleeped during the Australian telecast.

"First, I wanna say, 'f**k Trump,'" De Niro said, as many in the crowd cheered, with some eventually giving him a standing ovation at Radio City Music Hall. "It's no longer 'Down with Trump,' it's 'f**k Trump.'"

Robert De Niro was bleeped twice during the Tony's on Sunday night. What viewers at home didn't hear, was that De Niro dropped two F-bombs while hurling insults at President Trump. https://t.co/t0OWrdXmB6pic.twitter.com/sAsZtq56i6

— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 11, 2018

On Tuesday, Trump fired back on Twitter, seemingly referencing De Niro's Oscar-winning role in the 1980 boxing film, Raging Bull.

"Robert De Niro, a very Low IQ individual, has received to [sic] many shots to the head by real boxers in movies," the president tweeted. "I watched him last night and truly believe he may be “punch-drunk.” I guess he doesn’t realize the economy is the best it’s ever been with employment being at an all time high, and many companies pouring back into our country. Wake up Punchy!"

Robert De Niro, a very Low IQ individual, has received to many shots to the head by real boxers in movies. I watched him last night and truly believe he may be “punch-drunk.” I guess he doesn’t...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2018

...realize the economy is the best it’s ever been with employment being at an all time high, and many companies pouring back into our country. Wake up Punchy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2018

While many Tony Awards audience members showed their support for De Niro, some celebs were critical of the remarks on social media. 

“When you’re talking about how Trump is degrading our national discourse with his language, this is not the way to combat Trump, it only helps him," Meghan McCain said on The View on Monday, adding that she felt his comments were "gross."

"I thought it was gross," @MeghanMcCain says, pointing to the jab feeding into tribal tensions. "This is not the way to combat Trump — it only helps him." https://t.co/nL9SOejxYp

— The View (@TheView) June 11, 2018

Meanwhile, Mark Hamill clearly loved it.

How to get a STANDING OVATION at The Tonys? Give the people what they want...always a crowd pleaser!!! #SpeakingTruthToPower#TuckFrump. https://t.co/EkTwqppMxK

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) June 11, 2018

Read on for more celeb reactions:

THIS IS HOW YOU TALK ABOUT FASCISTS. This is how you remind the country that the most corrupt, racist, traitorous government in America’s history is going down, hard, SOON. #FuckTrumphttps://t.co/BvFwJ0Xndw

— Joss Whedon (@joss) June 11, 2018

The Fuck Trump Club pic.twitter.com/5Baxp0pmlM

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) June 11, 2018

Damnshame RobertdeNiro turned into such a hypocritical America hating drug addled jerk

— Ted Nugent (@TedNugent) June 11, 2018

Ah, the tolerant Left. The article has a quote from some Broadway guy saying "Who's gonna argue with De Niro?" Ah, tens of millions, maybe. Just because he plays tough guys, doesn't make him one. So all the Socialist, Communist, Leftie supporters... https://t.co/SStOmuD2gE

— Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) June 11, 2018

In other Tony Awards drama, Neil Patrick Harris live-tweeted the show and thew some shade at actress Rachel Bloom, who epically clapped back.

Watch below:

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[ciathyzareposts]

Chief Gates Comes to Oakhurst: A Cop Drama

One day in late 1992, a trim older man with a rigid military bearing visited Sierra Online’s headquarters in Oakhurst, California. From his appearance, and from the way that Sierra’s head Ken Williams fawned over him, one might have assumed him to be just another wealthy member of the investment class, a group that Williams had been forced to spend a considerable amount of time wooing ever since he had taken his company public four years earlier. But that turned out not to be the case. As Williams began to introduce his guest to some of his employees, he described him as Sierra’s newest game designer, destined to make the fourth game in the Police Quest series. It seemed an unlikely role based on the new arrival’s appearance and age alone.

Yet ageism wasn’t sufficient to explain the effect he had on much of Sierra’s staff. Josh Mandel, a sometime stand-up comic who was now working for Sierra as a writer and designer, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him: “I wasn’t glad he was there. I just wanted him to go away as soon as possible.” Gano Haine, who was hard at work designing the environmental-themed EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, reluctantly accepted the task of showing the newcomer some of Sierra’s development tools and processes. He listened politely enough, although it wasn’t clear how much he really understood. Then, much to her relief, the boss swept him away again.

The man who had prompted such discomfort and consternation was arguably the most politically polarizing figure in the United States at the time: Daryl F. Gates, the recently resigned head of the Los Angeles Police Department. Eighteen months before, four of his white police officers had brutally beaten a black man — an unarmed small-time lawbreaker named Rodney King — badly enough to break bones and teeth. A private citizen had captured the incident on videotape. One year later, after a true jury of their peers in affluent, white-bread Simi Valley had acquitted the officers despite the damning evidence of the tape, the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 had begun. Americans had watched in disbelief as the worst civil unrest since the infamously restive late 1960s played out on their television screens. The scene looked like a war zone in some less enlightened foreign country; this sort of thing just doesn’t happen here, its viewers had muttered to themselves. But it had happened. The final bill totaled 63 people killed, 2383 people injured, and more than $1 billion in property damage.

The same innocuous visage that was now to become Sierra’s newest game designer had loomed over all of the scenes of violence and destruction. Depending on whether you stood on his side of the cultural divide or the opposite one, the riots were either the living proof that “those people” would only respond to the “hard-nosed” tactics employed by Gates’s LAPD, or the inevitable outcome of decades of those same misguided tactics. The mainstream media hewed more to the latter narrative. When they weren’t showing the riots or the Rodney King tape, they played Gates’s other greatest hits constantly. There was the time he had said, in response to the out-sized numbers of black suspects who died while being apprehended in Los Angeles, that black people were more susceptible to dying in choke holds because their arteries didn’t open as fast as those of “normal people”; the time he had said that anyone who smoked a joint was a traitor against the country and ought to be “taken out and shot”; the time when he had dismissed the idea of employing homosexuals on the force by asking, “Who would want to work with one?”; the time when his officers had broken an innocent man’s nose, and he had responded to the man’s complaint by saying that he was “lucky that was all he had broken”; the time he had called the LAPD’s peers in Philadelphia “an inspiration to the nation” after they had literally launched an airborne bombing raid on a troublesome inner-city housing complex, killing six adults and five children and destroying 61 homes. As the mainstream media was reacting with shock and disgust to all of this and much more, right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh trotted out the exact same quotes, but greeted them with approbation rather than condemnation.

All of which begs the question of what the hell Gates was doing at Sierra Online, of all places. While they were like most for-profit corporations in avoiding overly overt political statements, Sierra hardly seemed a bastion of reactionary sentiment or what the right wing liked to call “family values.” Just after founding Sierra in 1980, Ken and Roberta Williams had pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and moved to rural Oakhurst more out of some vague hippie dream of getting back to the land than for any sound business reason. As was known by anyone who’d read Steven Levy’s all-too-revealing book Hackers, or seen a topless Roberta on the cover of a game called Softporn, Sierra back in those days had been a nexus of everything the law-and-order contingent despised: casual sex and hard drinking, a fair amount of toking and even the occasional bit of snorting. (Poor Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, who arrived in this den of inequity from a conservative neighborhood of Houston inhabited almost exclusively by straight-arrow astronauts like his dad, ran screaming from it all after just a few months; decades later, he still sounds slightly traumatized when he talks about his sojourn in California.)

It was true that a near-death experience in the mid-1980s and an IPO in 1988 had done much to change life at Sierra since those wild and woolly early days. Ken Williams now wore suits and kept his hair neatly trimmed. He no longer slammed down shots of tequila with his employees to celebrate the close of business on a Friday, nor made it his personal mission to get his nerdier charges laid; nor did he and Roberta still host bathing-suit-optional hot-tub parties at their house. But when it came to the important questions, Williams’s social politics still seemed diametrically opposed to the likes to Daryl Gates. For example, at a time when even the mainstream media still tended to dismiss concerns about the environment as obsessions of the Loony Left, he’d enthusiastically approved Gano Haines’s idea for a series of educational adventure games to teach children about just those issues. When a 15-year-old who already had the world all figured out wrote in to ask how Sierra could “give in to the doom-and-gloomers and whacko commie liberal environmentalists” who believed that “we can destroy a huge, God-created world like this,” Ken’s brother John Williams — Sierra’s marketing head — offered an unapologetic and cogent response: “As long as we get letters like this, we’ll keep making games like EcoQuest.”

So, what gave? Really, what was Daryl Gates doing here? And how had this figure that some of Ken Williams’s employees could barely stand to look at become connected with Police Quest, a slightly goofy and very erratic series of games, but basically a harmless one prior to this point? To understand how all of these trajectories came to meet that day in Oakhurst, we need to trace each back to its point of origin.

Daryl F. Gates

Perhaps the kindest thing we can say about Daryl Gates is that he was, like the young black men he and his officers killed, beat, and imprisoned by the thousands, a product of his environment. He was, the sufficiently committed apologist might say, merely a product of the institutional culture in which he was immersed throughout his adult life. Seen in this light, his greatest sin was his inability to rise above his circumstances, a failing which hardly sets him apart from the masses. One can only wish he had been able to extend to the aforementioned black men the same benefit of the doubt which other charitable souls might be willing to give to him.

Long before he himself became the head of the LAPD, Gates was the hand-picked protege of William Parker, the man who has gone down in history as the architect of the legacy Gates would eventually inherit. At the time Parker took control of it in 1950, the LAPD was widely regarded as the most corrupt single police force in the country, its officers for sale to absolutely anyone who could pay their price; they went so far as to shake down ordinary motorists for bribes at simple traffic stops. To his credit, Parker put a stop to all that. But to his great demerit, he replaced rank corruption on the individual level with an us-against-them form of esprit de corps — the “them” here being the people of color who were pouring into Los Angeles in ever greater numbers. Much of Parker’s approach was seemingly born of his experience of combat during World War II. He became the first but by no means the last LAPD chief to make comparisons between his police force and an army at war, without ever considering whether the metaphor was really appropriate.

Parker was such a cold fish that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who served as an LAPD officer during his tenure as chief, would later claim to have modeled the personality of the emotionless alien Spock on him. And yet, living as he did in the epicenter of the entertainment industry — albeit mostly patrolling the parts of Los Angeles that were never shown by Hollywood — Parker was surprisingly adept at manipulating the media to his advantage. Indeed, he became one of those hidden players who sometimes shape media narratives without anyone ever quite realizing that they’re doing so. He served as a consultant for the television show Dragnet, and through it created a pernicious cliché of the “ideal” cop that can still be seen, more than half a century later, on American television screens every evening: the cop as tough crusader who has to knock a few heads sometimes and bend or break the rules to get around the pansy lawyers, but who does it all for a noble cause, guided by an infallible moral compass that demands that he protect the “good people” of his city from the irredeemably bad ones by whatever means are necessary. Certainly Daryl Gates would later benefit greatly from this image; it’s not hard to believe that even Ken Williams, who fancied himself something of a savvy tough guy in his own right, was a little in awe of it when he tapped Gates to make a computer game.

But this wasn’t the only one of Chief Parker’s innovations that would come to the service of the man he liked to describe as the son he’d never had. Taking advantage of a city government desperate to see a cleaned-up LAPD, Parker drove home policies that made the city’s police force a veritable fiefdom unto itself, its chief effectively impossible to fire. The city council could only do so “for cause” — i.e., some explicit failure on the chief’s part. This sounded fair enough — until one realized that the chief got to write his own evaluation every year. Naturally, Parker and his successors got an “excellent” score every time, and thus the LAPD remained for decades virtually impervious to the wishes of the politicians and public it allegedly served.

The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts burns, 1965.

As Parker’s tenure wore on, tension spiraled in the black areas of Los Angeles, the inevitable response to an utterly unaccountable LAPD’s ever more brutal approach to policing. It finally erupted in August of 1965 in the form of the Watts Riots, the great prelude to the riots of 1992: 34 deaths, $40 million in property damage in contemporary dollars. For Daryl Gates, who watched it all take place by Parker’s side, the Watts Riots became a formative crucible. “We had no idea how to deal with this,” he would later write. “We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. It was random chaos. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare.” Rather than asking himself how it had come to this in the first place and how such chaos might be prevented in the future, he asked how the LAPD could be prepared to go toe to toe with future rioters in what amounted to open warfare on city streets.

Chief Parker died the following year, but Gates’s star remained on the ascendant even without his patron. He came up with the idea of a hardcore elite force for dealing with full-on-combat situations, a sort of SEAL team of police. Of course, the new force would need an acronym that sounded every bit as cool as its Navy inspiration. He proposed SWAT, for “Special Weapons Attack Teams.” When his boss balked at such overtly militaristic language, he said that it could stand for “Special Weapons and Tactics” instead. “That’s fine,” said his boss.

Gates and his SWAT team had their national coming-out party on December 6, 1969, when they launched an unprovoked attack upon a hideout of the Black Panthers, a well-armed militia composed of black nationalists which had been formed as a response to earlier police brutality. Logistically and practically, the raid was a bit of a fiasco. The attackers got discombobulated by an inaccurate map of the building and very nearly got themselves hemmed into a cul de sac and massacred. (“Oh, God, we were lucky,” said one of them later.) What was supposed to have been a blitzkrieg-style raid devolved into a long stalemate. The standoff was broken only when Gates managed to requisition a grenade launcher from the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton and started lobbing explosives into the building; this finally prompted the Panthers to surrender. By some miracle, no one on either side got killed, but the Panthers were acquitted in court of most charges on the basis of self-defense.

Yet the practical ineffectuality of the operation mattered not at all to the political narrative that came to be attached to it. The conservative white Americans whom President Nixon loved to call “the silent majority” — recoiling from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the hippie era, genuinely scared by the street violence of the last several years — applauded Gates’s determination to “get tough” with “those people.” For the first time, the names of Daryl Gates and his brainchild of SWAT entered the public discourse beyond Los Angeles.

In May of 1974, the same names made the news in a big way again when a SWAT team was called in to subdue the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical militia with a virtually incomprehensible political philosophy, who had recently kidnapped and apparently converted to their cause the wealthy heiress Patty Hearst. After much lobbying on Gate’s part, his SWAT team got the green light to mount a full frontal assault on the group’s hideout. Gates and his officers continued to relish military comparisons. “Here in the heart of Los Angeles was a war zone,” he later wrote. “It was like something out of a World War II movie, where you’re taking the city from the enemy, house by house.” More than 9000 rounds of ammunition were fired by the two sides. But by now, the SWAT officers did appear to be getting better at their craft. Eight members of the militia were killed — albeit two of them unarmed women attempting to surrender — and the police officers received nary a scratch. Hearst herself proved not to be inside the hideout, but was arrested shortly after the battle.

The Patti Hearst saga marked the last gasp of a militant left wing in the United States; the hippies of the 1960s were settling down to become the Me Generation of the 1970s. Yet even as the streets were growing less turbulent, increasingly militaristic rhetoric was being applied to what had heretofore been thought of as civil society. In 1971, Nixon had declared a “war on drugs,” thus changing the tone of the discourse around policing and criminal justice markedly. Gates and SWAT were the perfect mascots for the new era. The year after the Symbionese shootout, ABC debuted a hit television series called simply S.W.A.T. Its theme song topped the charts; there were S.W.A.T. lunch boxes, action figures, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be like Daryl Gates and the LAPD — not least their fellow police officers in other cities: by July of 1975, there were 500 other SWAT teams in the United States. Gates embraced his new role of “America’s cop” with enthusiasm.

In light of his celebrity status in a city which worships celebrity, it was now inevitable that Gates would become the head of the LAPD just as soon as the post opened up. He took over in 1978; this gave him an even more powerful nationwide bully pulpit. In 1983, he applied some of his clout to the founding of a program called DARE in partnership with public schools around the country. The name stood for “Drug Abuse Resistance Education”; Gates really did have a knack for snappy acronyms. His heart was perhaps in the right place, but later studies, conducted only after the spending of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, would prove the program’s strident rhetoric and almost militaristic indoctrination techniques to be ineffective.

Meanwhile, in his day job as chief of police, Gates fostered an ever more toxic culture that viewed the streets as battlegrounds, that viewed an ass beating as the just reward of any black man who failed to treat a police officer with fawning subservience. In 1984, the Summer Olympics came to Los Angeles, and Gates used the occasion to convince the city council to let him buy armored personnel carriers — veritable tanks for the city streets — in the interest of “crowd control.” When the Olympics were over, he held onto them for the purpose of executing “no-knock” search warrants on suspected drug dens. During the first of these, conducted with great fanfare before an invited press in February of 1985, Gates himself rode along as an APC literally drove through the front door of a house after giving the occupants no warning whatsoever. Inside they found two shocked women and three children, with no substance more illicit than the bowls of ice cream they’d been eating. To top it all off, the driver lost control of the vehicle on a patch of ice whilst everyone was sheepishly leaving the scene, taking out a parked car.

Clearly Gates’s competence still tended not to entirely live up to his rhetoric, a discrepancy the Los Angeles Riots would eventually highlight all too plainly. But in the meantime, Gates was unapologetic about the spirit behind the raid: “It frightened even the hardcore pushers to imagine that at any moment a device was going to put a big hole in their place of business, and in would march SWAT, scattering flash-bangs and scaring the hell out of everyone.” This scene would indeed be played out many times over the remaining years of Gates’s chiefdom. But then along came Rodney King of all people to take the inadvertent role of his bête noire.

King was a rather-slow-witted janitor and sometime petty criminal with a bumbling reputation on the street. He’d recently done a year in prison after attempting to rob a convenience store with a tire iron; over the course of the crime, the owner of the store had somehow wound up disarming him, beating him over the head with his own weapon, and chasing him off the premises. He was still on parole for that conviction on the evening of March 3, 1991, when he was spotted by two LAPD officers speeding down the freeway. King had been drinking, and so, seeing their patrol car’s flashing lights in his rear-view mirror, he decided to make a run for it. He led what turned into a whole caravan of police cars on a merry chase until he found himself hopelessly hemmed in on a side street. The unarmed man then climbed out of his car and lay face down on the ground, as instructed. But then he stood up and tried to make a break for it on foot, despite being completely surrounded. Four of the 31 officers on the scene now proceeded to knock him down and beat him badly enough with their batons and boots to fracture his face and break one of his ankles. Their colleagues simply stood and watched at a distance.

Had not a plumber named George Holliday owned an apartment looking down on that section of street, the incident would doubtless have gone down in the LAPD’s logs as just another example of a black man “resisting arrest” and getting regrettably injured in the process. But Holliday was there, standing on his balcony — and he had a camcorder to record it all. When he sent his videotape to a local television station, its images of the officers taking big two-handed swings against King’s helpless body with their batons ignited a national firestorm. The local prosecutor had little choice but to bring the four officers up on charges.

The tactics of Daryl Gates now came under widespread negative scrutiny for the first time. Although he claimed to support the prosecution of the officers involved, he was nevertheless blamed for fostering the culture that had led to this incident, as well as the many others like it that had gone un-filmed. At long last, reporters started asking the black residents of Los Angeles directly about their experiences with the LAPD. A typical LAPD arrest, said one of them, “basically consisted of three or four cops handcuffing a person, and just literally beating him, often until unconscious… punching, beating, kicking.” A hastily assembled city commission produced pages and pages of descriptions of a police force run amok. “It is apparent,” the final report read, “that too many LAPD patrol officers view citizens with resentment and hostility.” In response, Gates promised to retire “soon.” Yet, as month after month went by and he showed no sign of fulfilling his promise, many began to suspect that he still had hopes of weathering the storm.

At any rate, he was still there on April 29, 1992. That was the day his four cops were acquitted in Simi Valley, a place LAPD officers referred to as “cop heaven”; huge numbers of them lived there. Within two hours after the verdict was announced, the Los Angeles Riots began in apocalyptic fashion, as a mob of black men pulled a white truck driver out of his cab and all but tore him limb from limb in the process of murdering him, all under the watchful eye of a helicopter that was hovering overhead and filming the carnage.

Tellingly, Gates happened to be speaking to an adoring audience of white patrons in the wealthy suburb of Brentwood at the very instant the riots began. As the violence continued, this foremost advocate of militaristic policing seemed bizarrely paralyzed. South Los Angeles burned, and the LAPD did virtually nothing about it. The most charitable explanation had it that Gates, spooked by the press coverage of the previous year, was terrified of how white police officers subduing black rioters would play on television. A less charitable one, hewed to by many black and liberal commentators, had it that Gates had decided that these parts of the city just weren’t worth saving — had decided to just let the rioters have their fun and burn it all down. But the problem, of course, was that in the meantime many innocent people of all colors were being killed and wounded and seeing their property go up in smoke. Finally, the mayor called in the National Guard to quell the rioting while Gates continued to sit on his hands.

Asked afterward how the LAPD — the very birthplace of SWAT — had allowed things to get so out of hand, Gates blamed it on a subordinate: “We had a lieutenant down there who just didn’t seem to know what to do, and he let us down.” Not only was this absurd, but it was hard to label as anything other than moral cowardice. It was especially rich coming from a man who had always preached an esprit de corps based on loyalty and honor. The situation was now truly untenable for him. Incompetence, cowardice, racism, brutality… whichever charge or charges you chose to apply, the man had to go. Gates resigned, for real this time, on June 28, 1992.

Yet he didn’t go away quietly. Gates appears to have modeled his post-public-service media strategy to a large extent on that of Oliver North, a locus of controversy for his role in President Ronald Reagan’s Iron-Contra scandal who had parlayed his dubious celebrity into the role of hero to the American right. Gates too gave a series of angry, unrepentant interviews, touted a recently published autobiography, and even went North one better when he won his own radio show which played in close proximity to that of Rush Limbaugh. And then, when Ken Williams came knocking, he welcomed that attention as well.

But why would Williams choose to cast his lot with such a controversial figure, one whose background and bearing were so different from his own? To begin to understand that, we need to look back to the origins of the adventure-game oddity known as Police Quest.

Ken Williams, it would seem, had always had a fascination with the boys in blue. One day in 1985, when he learned from his hairdresser that her husband was a California Highway Patrol officer on administrative leave for post-traumatic stress, his interest was piqued. He invited the cop in question, one Jim Walls, over to his house to play some racquetball and drink some beer. Before the evening was over, he had starting asking his guest whether he’d be interested in designing a game for Sierra. Walls had barely ever used a computer, and had certainly never played an adventure game on one, so he had only the vaguest idea what his new drinking buddy was talking about. But the only alternative, as he would later put it, was to “sit around and think” about the recent shootout that had nearly gotten him killed, so he agreed to give it a go.

The game which finally emerged from that conversation more than two years later shows the best and the worst of Sierra. On the one hand, it pushed a medium that was usually content to wallow in the same few fictional genres in a genuinely new direction. In a pair of articles he wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine, John Williams positioned Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel at the forefront of a new wave of “adult” software able to appeal to a whole new audience, noting how it evoked Joseph Wambaugh rather than J.R.R. Tolkien, Hill Street Blues rather than Star Wars. Conceptually, it was indeed a welcome antidote to a bad case of tunnel vision afflicting the entire computer-games industry.

In practical terms, however, it was somewhat less inspiring. The continual sin of Ken Williams and Sierra throughout the company’s existence was their failure to provide welcome fresh voices like that of Jim Walls with the support network that might have allowed them to make good games out of their well of experiences. Left to fend for himself, Walls, being the law-and-order kind of guy he was, devised the most pedantic adventure game of all time, one which played like an interactive adaptation of a police-academy procedure manual — so much so, in fact, that a number of police academies around the country would soon claim to be employing it as a training tool. The approach is simplicity itself: in every situation, if you do exactly what the rules of police procedure that are exhaustively described in the game’s documentation tell you to do, you get to live and go on to the next scene. If you don’t, you die. It may have worked as an adjunct to a police-academy course, but it’s less compelling as a piece of pure entertainment.

Although it’s an atypical Sierra adventure game in many respects, this first Police Quest nonetheless opens with what I’ve always considered to be the most indelibly Sierra moment of all. The manual has carefully explained — you did read it, right? — that you must walk all the way around your patrol car to check the tires and lights and so forth every time you’re about to drive somewhere. And sure enough, if you fail to do so before you get into your car for the first time, a tire blows out and you die as soon as you drive away. But if you do examine your vehicle, you find no evidence of a damaged tire, and you never have to deal with any blow-out once you start driving. The mask has fallen away to reveal what we always suspected: that the game actively wants to kill you, and is scheming constantly for a way to do so. There’s not even any pretension left of fidelity to a simulated world — just pure, naked malice. Robb Sherwin once memorably said that “Zork hates its player.” Well, Zork‘s got nothing on Police Quest.

Nevertheless, Police Quest struck a modest chord with Sierra’s fan base. While it didn’t become as big a hit as Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, John Williams’s other touted 1987 embodiment of a new wave of “adult” games, it sold well enough to mark the starting point of another of the long series that were the foundation of Sierra’s marketing strategy. Jim Walls designed two sequels over the next four years, improving at least somewhat at his craft in the process. (In between them, he also came up with Code-Name: Iceman, a rather confused attempt at a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller that was a bridge too far even for most of Sierra’s loyal fans.)

But shortly after completing Police Quest 3: The Kindred, Walls left Sierra along with a number of other employees to join Tsunami Media, a new company formed right there in Oakhurst by Edmond Heinbockel, himself a former chief financial officer for Sierra. With Walls gone, but his Police Quest franchise still selling well enough to make another entry financially viable, the door was wide open — as Ken Williams saw it, anyway — for one Daryl F. Gates.

Daryl Gates (right) with Tammy Dargan, the real designer of the game that bears his name.

Williams began his courtship of the most controversial man in the United States by the old-fashioned expedient of writing him a letter. Gates, who claimed never even to have used a computer, much less played a game on one, was initially confused about what exactly Williams wanted from him. Presuming Williams was just one of his admirers, he sent a letter back asking for some free games for some youngsters who lived across the street from him. Williams obliged in calculated fashion, with the three extant Police Quest games. From that initial overture, he progressed to buttering Gates up over the telephone.

As the relationship moved toward the payoff stage, some of his employees tried desperately to dissuade him from getting Sierra into bed with such a figure. “I thought it’s one thing to seek controversy, but another thing to really divide people,” remembers Josh Mandel. Mandel showed his boss a New York Times article about Gates’s checkered history, only to be told that “our players don’t read the New York Times.” He suggested that Sierra court Joseph Wambaugh instead, another former LAPD officer whose novels presented a relatively more nuanced picture of crime and punishment in the City of Angels than did Gates’s incendiary rhetoric; Wambaugh was even a name whom John Williams had explicitly mentioned in the context of the first Police Quest game five years before. But that line of attack was also hopeless; Ken Williams wanted a true mass-media celebrity, not a mere author who hid behind his books. So, Gates made his uncomfortable visit to Oakhurst and the contract was signed. Police Quest would henceforward be known as Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest. Naturally, the setting of the series would now become Los Angeles; the fictional town of Lytton, the more bucolic setting of the previous three games in the series, was to be abandoned along with almost everything else previously established by Jim Walls.

Inside the company, a stubborn core of dissenters took to calling the game Rodney King’s Quest. Corey Cole, co-designer of the Quest for Glory series, remembers himself and many others being “horrified” at the prospect of even working in the vicinity of Gates: “As far as we were concerned, his name was mud and tainted everything it touched.” As a designer, Corey felt most of all for Jim Walls. He believed Ken Williams was “robbing Walls of his creation”: “It would be like putting Donald Trump’s name on a new Quest for Glory in today’s terms.”

Nevertheless, as the boss’s pet project, Gates’s game went inexorably forward. It was to be given the full multimedia treatment, including voice acting and the extensive use of digitized scenes and actors on the screen in the place of hand-drawn graphics. Indeed, this would become the first Sierra game that could be called a full-blown full-motion-video adventure, placing it at the vanguard of the industry’s hottest new trend.

Of course, there had never been any real expectation that Gates would roll up his sleeves and design a computer game in the way that Jim Walls had; celebrity did have its privileges, after all. Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: Open Season thus wound up in the hands of Tammy Dargan, a Sierra producer who, based on an earlier job she’d had with the tabloid television show America’s Most Wanted, now got the chance to try her hand at design. Corey Cole ironically remembers her as one of the most stereotypically liberal of all Sierra’s employees: “She strenuously objected to the use of [the word] ‘native’ in Quest for Glory III, and globally changed it to ‘indigenous.’ We thought that ‘the indigenous flora’ was a rather awkward construction, so we changed some of those back. But she was also a professional and did the jobs assigned to her.”

In this case, doing so would entail writing the script for a game about the mean streets of Los Angeles essentially alone, then sending it to Gates via post for “suggestions.” The latter did become at least somewhat more engaged when the time came for “filming,” using his connections to get Sierra inside the LAPD’s headquarters and even into a popular “cop bar.” Gates himself also made it into the game proper: restored to his rightful status of chief of police, he looks on approvingly and proffers occasional bits of advice as you work through the case. The CD-ROM version tacked on some DARE propaganda and a video interview with Gates, giving him yet one more opportunity to respond to his critics.

Contrary to the expectations raised both by the previous games in the series and the reputation of Gates, the player doesn’t take the role of a uniformed cop at all, but rather that of a plain-clothes detective. Otherwise, though, the game is both predictable in theme and predictably dire. Really, what more could one expect from a first-time designer working in a culture that placed no particular priority on good design, making a game that no one there particularly wanted to be making?

So, the dialog rides its banality to new depths for a series already known for clunky writing, the voice acting is awful — apparently the budget didn’t stretch far enough to allow the sorts of good voice actors that had made such a difference in King’s Quest VI — and the puzzle design is nonsensical. The plot, which revolves around a series of brutal cop killings for maximum sensationalism, wobbles along on rails through its ever more gruesome crime scenes and red-herring suspects until the real killer suddenly appears out of the blue in response to pretty much nothing which you’ve done up to that point. And the worldview the whole thing reflects… oh, my. The previous Police Quest games had hardly been notable for their sociological subtlety — “These kinds of people are actually running around out there, even if we don’t want to think about it,” Jim Walls had said of its antagonists — but this fourth game takes its demonization of all that isn’t white, straight, and suburban to what would be a comical extreme if it wasn’t so hateful. A brutal street gang, the in-game police files helpfully tell us, is made up of “unwed mothers on public assistance,” and the cop killer turns out to be a transvestite; his “deviancy” constitutes the sum total of his motivation for killing, at least as far as we ever learn.

One of the grisly scenes with which Open Season is peppered, reflecting a black-and-white — in more ways than one! — worldview where the irredeemably bad, deviant people are always out to get the good, normal people. Lucky we have the likes of Daryl Gates to sort the one from the other, eh?

Visiting a rap record label, one of a number of places where Sierra’s pasty-white writers get to try out their urban lingo. It goes about as well as you might expect.

Sierra throws in a strip bar for the sake of gritty realism. Why is it that television (and now computer-game) cops always have to visit these places — strictly in order to pursue leads, of course.

But the actual game of Open Season is almost as irrelevant to any discussion of the project’s historical importance today as it was to Ken Williams at the time. This was a marketing exercise, pure and simple. Thus Daryl Gates spent much more time promoting the game than he ever had making it. Williams put on the full-court press in terms of promotion, publishing not one, not two, but three feature interviews with him in Sierra’s news magazine and booking further interviews with whoever would talk to him. The exchanges with scribes from the computing press, who had no training or motivation for asking tough questions, went about as predictably as the game’s plot. Gates dismissed the outrage over the Rodney King tape as “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and consciously or unconsciously evoked Richard Nixon’s silent majority in noting that the “good, ordinary, responsible, quiet citizens” — the same ones who saw the need to get tough on crime and prosecute a war on drugs — would undoubtedly enjoy the game. Meanwhile Sierra’s competitors weren’t quite sure what to make of it all. “Talk about hot properties,” wrote the editors of Origin Systems’s internal newsletter, seemingly uncertain whether to express anger or admiration for Sierra’s sheer chutzpah. “No confirmation yet as to whether the game will ship with its own special solid-steel joystick” — a dark reference to the batons with which Gates’s officers had beat Rodney King.

In the end, though, the game generated decidedly less controversy than Ken Williams had hoped for. The computer-gaming press just wasn’t politically engaged enough to do much more than shrug their shoulders at its implications. And by the time it was released it was November of 1993, and Gates was already becoming old news for the mainstream press as well. The president of the Los Angeles Urban League did provide an obligingly outraged quote, saying that Gates “embodies all that is bad in law enforcement—the problems of the macho, racist, brutal police experience that we’re working hard to put behind us. That anyone would hire him for a project like this proves that some companies will do anything for the almighty dollar.” But that was about as good as it got.

There’s certainly no reason to believe that Gates’s game sold any better than the run-of-the-mill Sierra adventure, or than any of the Police Quest games that had preceded it. If anything, the presence of Gates’s name on the box seems to have put off more fans than it attracted. Rather than a new beginning, Open Season proved the end of the line for Police Quest as an adventure series — albeit not for Sierra’s involvement with Gates himself. The product line was retooled in 1995 into Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT, a “tactical simulator” of police work that played suspiciously like any number of outright war simulators. In this form, it found a more receptive audience and continued for years. Tammy Dargan remained at the reinvented series’s head for much of its run. History hasn’t recorded whether her bleeding-heart liberal sympathies went into abeyance after her time with Gates or whether the series remained just a slightly distasteful job she had to do.

Gates, on the other hand, got dropped after the first SWAT game. His radio show had been cancelled after he had proved himself to be a stodgy bore on the air, without even the modicum of wit that marked the likes of a Rush Limbaugh. Having thus failed in his new career as a media provocateur, and deprived forevermore of his old position of authority, his time as a political lightning rod had just about run out. What then was the use of Sierra continuing to pay him?

Ken and Roberta Williams looking wholesome in 1993, their days in the hot tub behind them.

But then, Daryl Gates was never the most interesting person behind the games that bore his name. The hard-bitten old reactionary was always a predictable, easily known quantity, and therefore one with no real power to fascinate. Much more interesting was and is Ken Williams, this huge, mercurial personality who never designed a game himself but who lurked as an almost palpable presence in the background of every game Sierra ever released as an independent company. In short, Sierra was his baby, destined from the first to become his legacy more so than that of any member of his creative staff.

Said legacy is, like the man himself, a maze of contradictions resistant to easy judgments. Everything you can say about Ken Williams and Sierra, whether positive or negative, seems to come equipped with a “but” that points in the opposite direction. So, we can laud him for having the vision to say something like this, which accurately diagnosed the problem of an industry offering a nearly exclusive diet of games by and for young white men obsessed with Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings:

If you match the top-selling books, records, or films to the top-selling computer-entertainment titles, you’ll immediately notice differences. Where are the romance, horror, and non-fiction titles? Where’s military fiction? Where’s all the insider political stories? Music in computer games is infinitely better than what we had a few years back, but it doesn’t match what people are buying today. Where’s the country-western music? The rap? The reggae? The new age?

And yet Williams approached his self-assigned mission of broadening the market for computer games with a disconcerting mixture of crassness and sheer naivete. The former seemed somehow endemic to the man, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it behind high-flown rhetoric, while the latter signified a man who appeared never to have seriously thought about the nature of mass media before he started trying to make it for himself. “For a publisher to not publish a product which many customers want to buy is censorship,” he said at one point. No, it’s not, actually; it’s called curation, and is the right and perhaps the duty of every content publisher — not that there were lines of customers begging Sierra for a Daryl Gates-helmed Police Quest game anyway. With that game, Williams became, whatever else he was, a shameless wannabe exploiter of a bleeding wound at the heart of his nation — and he wasn’t even very good at it, as shown by the tepid reaction to his “controversial” game. His decision to make it reflects not just a moral failure but an intellectual misunderstanding of his audience so extreme as to border on the bizarre. Has anyone ever bought an adventure game strictly because it’s controversial?

So, if there’s a pattern to the history of Ken Williams and Sierra — and the two really are all but inseparable — it’s one of talking a good game, of being broadly right with the vision thing, but falling down in the details and execution. Another example from the horse’s mouth, describing the broad idea that supposedly led to Open Season:

The reason that I’m working with Chief Gates is that one of my goals has been to create a series of adventure games which accomplish reality through having been written by real experts. I have been calling this series of games the “Reality Role-Playing” series. I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not as games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

The idea sounds magnificent, so much so that one can’t help but feel a twinge of regret that it never went any further than Open Season. Games excel at immersion, and their ability to let us walk a mile in someone else’s shoes — to become someone whose world we would otherwise never know — is still sadly underutilized.

I often — perhaps too often — use Sierra’s arch-rivals in adventure games LucasArts as my own baton with which to beat them, pointing out how much more thoughtful and polished the latter’s designs were. This remains true enough. Yet it’s also true that LucasArts had nothing like the ambition for adventure games which Ken Williams expresses here. LucasArts found what worked for them very early on — that thing being cartoon comedies — and rode that same horse relentlessly right up until the market for adventures in general went away. Tellingly, when they were asked to adapt Indiana Jones to an interactive medium, they responded not so much by adjusting their standard approach all that radically as by turning Indy himself into a cartoon character. Something tells me that Ken Williams would have taken a very different tack.

But then we get to the implementation of Williams’s ideas by Sierra in the form of Open Season, and the questions begin all over again. Was Daryl Gates truly, as one of the marketers’ puff pieces claimed, “the most knowledgeable authority on law enforcement alive?” Or was there some other motivation involved? I trust the answer is self-evident. (John Williams even admitted as much in another of the puff pieces: “[Ken] decided the whole controversy over Gates would ultimately help the game sell better.”) And then, why does the “reality role-playing” series have to focus only on those with prestige and power? If Williams truly does just want to share the lives of others with us and give us a shared basis for empathy and discussion, why not make a game about what it’s like to be a Rodney King?

Was it because Ken Williams was himself a racist and a bigot? That’s a major charge to level, and one that’s neither helpful nor warranted here — no, not even though he championed a distinctly racist and bigoted game, released under the banner of a thoroughly unpleasant man who had long made dog whistles to racism and bigotry his calling card. Despite all that, the story of Open Season‘s creation is more one of thoughtlessness than malice aforethought. It literally never occurred to Ken Williams that anyone living in South Los Angeles would ever think of buying a Sierra game; that territory was more foreign to him than that of Europe (where Sierra was in fact making an aggressive play at the time). Thus he felt free to exploit a community’s trauma with this distasteful product and this disingenuous narrative that it was created to engender “discussion.” For nothing actually to be found within Open Season is remotely conducive to civil discussion.

Williams stated just as he was beginning his courtship of Daryl Gates that, in a fast-moving industry, he had to choose whether to “lead, follow, or get out of the way. I don’t believe in following, and I’m not about to get out of the way. Therefore, if I am to lead then I have to know where I’m going.” And here we come to the big-picture thing again, the thing at which Williams tended to excel. His decision to work with Gates does indeed stand as a harbinger of where much of gaming was going. This time, though, it’s a sad harbinger rather than a happy one.

I believe that the last several centuries — and certainly the last several decades — have seen us all slowly learning to be kinder and more respectful to one another. It hasn’t been a linear progression by any means, and we still have one hell of a long way to go, but it’s hard to deny that it’s occurred. (Whatever the disappointments of the last several years, the fact remains that the United States elected a black man as president in 2008, and has finally accepted the right of gay people to marry even more recently. Both of these things were unthinkable in 1993.) In some cases, gaming has reflected this progress. But too often, large segments of gaming culture have chosen to side instead with the reactionaries and the bigots, as Sierra implicitly did here.

So, Ken Williams and Sierra somehow managed to encompass both the best and the worst of what seems destined to go down in history as the defining art form of the 21st century, and they did so long before that century began. Yes, that’s quite an achievement in its own right — but, as Open Season so painfully reminds us, not an unmixed one.

(Sources: the books Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick and Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko; Computer Gaming World of August/September 1987, October 1987, and December 1993; Sierra’s news magazines of Summer 1991, Winter 1992, June 1993, Summer 1993, Holiday 1993, and Spring 1994; Electronic Games of October 1993; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 26 1993. Online sources include an excellent and invaluable Vice article on Open Season and the information about the Rodney King beating and subsequent trial found on Famous American Trials. And my thanks go out yet again to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

The four Police Quest adventure games are available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama/

[helloworlddemo1122-yahoopar-blog]

Celebs React to Robert De Niro's Viral Anti-Trump Tony Awards Speech

Robert De Niro definitely didn't hold back on his thoughts about President Donald Trump on Sunday at the Tony Awards in New York City.

The 74-year-old actor introduced a performance by Bruce Springsteen, and took the opportunity to denounce Trump in NSFW language. Although De Niro was heavily censored during the U.S. telecast, his comments weren't bleeped during the Australian telecast.

"First, I wanna say, 'f**k Trump,'" De Niro said, as many in the crowd cheered, with some eventually giving him a standing ovation at Radio City Music Hall. "It's no longer 'Down with Trump,' it's 'f**k Trump.'"

Robert De Niro was bleeped twice during the Tony's on Sunday night. What viewers at home didn't hear, was that De Niro dropped two F-bombs while hurling insults at President Trump. https://t.co/t0OWrdXmB6pic.twitter.com/sAsZtq56i6

— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 11, 2018

While many Tony Awards audience members showed their support for De Niro, some celebs were critical of the remarks on social media. 

“When you’re talking about how Trump is degrading our national discourse with his language, this is not the way to combat Trump, it only helps him," Meghan McCain said on The View on Monday, adding that she felt his comments were "gross."

"I thought it was gross," @MeghanMcCain says, pointing to the jab feeding into tribal tensions. "This is not the way to combat Trump — it only helps him." https://t.co/nL9SOejxYp

— The View (@TheView) June 11, 2018

Meanwhile, Mark Hamill clearly loved it.

How to get a STANDING OVATION at The Tonys? Give the people what they want...always a crowd pleaser!!! #SpeakingTruthToPower#TuckFrump. https://t.co/EkTwqppMxK

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) June 11, 2018

Read on for more celeb reactions:

THIS IS HOW YOU TALK ABOUT FASCISTS. This is how you remind the country that the most corrupt, racist, traitorous government in America’s history is going down, hard, SOON. #FuckTrumphttps://t.co/BvFwJ0Xndw

— Joss Whedon (@joss) June 11, 2018

The Fuck Trump Club pic.twitter.com/5Baxp0pmlM

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) June 11, 2018

Damnshame RobertdeNiro turned into such a hypocritical America hating drug addled jerk

— Ted Nugent (@TedNugent) June 11, 2018

Ah, the tolerant Left. The article has a quote from some Broadway guy saying "Who's gonna argue with De Niro?" Ah, tens of millions, maybe. Just because he plays tough guys, doesn't make him one. So all the Socialist, Communist, Leftie supporters... https://t.co/SStOmuD2gE

— Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) June 11, 2018

In other Tony Awards drama, Neil Patrick Harris live-tweeted the show and thew some shade at actress Rachel Bloom, who epically clapped back.

Watch below:

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