Killed in a smiling accident.

I finished Last Argument of Kings a few weeks back, and I’m still not quite sure what I think of it.

To sort of sneak up on it unawares, I’ll talk around it for a while, with a few Western references, so apologies if you’re not into cowboy films. Minor (sort of, not terrible I hope) spoilers may follow…

So you have “classic” westerns, say the Lone Ranger: a sound, morally upright, heroic, white hat wearing hero, doing battle against injustice, never shooting to kill. Then you have films like Leone’s spaghetti westerns, of which my favourite is probably For A Few Dollars More. The morality is more complex, everything is much grittier, much more violent, but, broadly, you’re still rooting for your heroes against villains (though it’s harder to tell them apart).

The first two books of Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, The Blade Itself and Before They Are Hanged, are like For A Few Dollars More compared to the Lone Ranger of more traditional fantasy. They’re gritty, violent and morally complex; they use a lot of common elements, but twist them into something new, so although you’ve got wizards, and kingdoms at war, and a quest, the key characters are a fop, a crippled torturer and a couple of psychos instead of a lantern-jawed farmhand, a jovial beer-swilling warrior and a sneaky thief with heart of gold (only stole from the rich and all that, bonus points if it’s a feisty teenage orphan/runaway). There’s a barbarian, but rather than a Schwarzenegger-as-Conan type, Logen is reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven, older and weary, and Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter, living with the notoriety his actions have brought.

Last Argument of Kings carries on where the first two left off (weird, that, for the third book in a trilogy), with lashings more war, torture, stabbing and humour (mostly black). It serves up further twists on fantasy clichés, particularly a lovely take on the mysterious orphan finding his True Heritage, but if the first two books had kicked down the door of The Shed Of Fantasy Tropes, leaving it battered but standing, Last Argument of Kings lobs a grenade through the window. One thread you can normally cling to in stories is that main characters are heroes, The Good Guys, and they fight, and beat, The Bad Guys, whether it’s in a simple, Lone Ranger, white hat-wearing way, or a more complex blood-soaked scenario where one side are only good on a relative scale as they’re killing the really, really bad guys, and a lot of people get caught up in the middle. The first two books of The First Law, that’s pretty much the case. None of the main characters are saints by any freakish definition, but when the other side are cannibalistic devil-worshippers, you know who you’re rooting for (hint: it’s not the ones that snack on the odd leg here and there).

By the end of Last Argument of Kings, though, there is no winning, no vanquishing of great evil. There is no Greater Good. There isn’t even “Well At Least They’re Not As Bad As…” There are surprisingly few deaths in the key characters; if the Good Guys don’t win outright, another sure fire way of wrapping everything up is to kill everyone off in a massive shoot-out (c.f. The Wild Bunch), but Abercrombie doesn’t do that either (not least because it’s harder to do a shoot-out with bows, and stab-outs don’t seem to have caught on so much). It’s quite an unsatisfying finish in some ways; although some strands are tied up, many are (quite deliberately) left dangling. It’s challenging, thought provoking, not something you put down and wander away from whistling, and that’s why I’m still not sure what I think about it. Which is a good thing. I think. Probably.

The various statistics for these blog sites can be fascinating: browsing through who came to visit you and from where, what posts they read, where they went to afterwards, the colour of their underwear at the time.

I assume then, that it isn’t only me who can’t help experiencing the “I see you” Eye of Sauron effect, every once in while.

I see you. I see you, Frodo Baggins, and your webmail links and Google searches.

One post to rule them all; One link to find them; One keyword to bring them all and in the blog-feed bind them…

By Balin’s braided beards! A calf was born with two tails last night. A grey fox crossed my path. The auguries are ill indeed for the dawning of Age of Conan. Thirteen rooks were perched in a tree. Thirteen! Worst of all, though, worse still than all those, the head start requires a 13Gb download, the Funcom patcher manages to stumble along at about 50k/s (possibly because it’s torrent-based and swamping the upload, even with an upload limit set) giving an estimated time to completion of “when the moons of Voron align with the twin towers of the temple of Veerun (or about two of your earth weeks)”, so, leaving it downloading overnight, I come down in the morning to check how many nanometres the progress bar has shifted to find the devil himself has kicked me square in the nuts through his earthly emissaries of Microsoft. I’m *sure* I have XP set to “Download your myriad security patches (if you really must) but don’t bloody apply them until I say so”, but the PC was sitting there with a smug just-rebooted expression, and sure enough the event log shows it applied an update and rebooted around 3am. I’ll leave it running the next couple of nights, but unless the patcher pulls its finger out (and Micro-bleedin’-soft can refrain from rebooting the PC) I suspect the client won’t be ready for THE VERY INSTANT the head-start servers are up, which is clearly an outrage of Tony Harrison proportions, but not to worry, who wants to be cooped up when it’s such a lovely weekend in prospect? What’s that, you say? Thunderstorms forecast for Saturday? Oh.

Course, I’m a fool for being in such a rush anyway. A wise man would give any MMOG six months or so to get early kinks worked out, let the population distribute itself over the whole gameworld rather than everyone being crammed into the starter zones like an episode of Mythbusters testing that “entire population of the whole world could fit onto the Isle of Wight” theory, and allow the developers to release an update or two so it finally has all the features they really wanted to get in for launch but didn’t quite have time for (like an end game, player housing, different character classes, combat, graphics instead of the interface being a text parser, that sort of thing). Unfortunately I’m not a wise man, I’m a rash impetuous fool, and worse still a rash impetuous fool with a credit card who’s easily swayed by shiny baubles like a three day head start, so I’ve brought this all on myself. Oh well, I’m off to see what a sheep’s entrails say the coming week holds…

Note: no sheep will actually be harmed in the fulfilling of this post, unless the forecasts are totally wrong and it is a lovely weekend, in which case some minted lamb chops might get barbecued.

Two and a bit weeks in to the Wii Fit regime, and I’ve lost four pounds. Then gained two pounds, lost another pound, gained several, lost a few, and generally fluctuated. I don’t know if my weight is really changing that much or the game’s having a bit of a laugh about it, but the general trend, broadly, is down (except for the up bits), so that’s got to be a good thing.

Apart from the balance games, there’s not much in Wii Fit that you couldn’t do with a pair of scales, a notepad, a hunk of plastic to step on and off and a random celebrity fitness DVD picked up from a bargain bin for 49p (Step Your Way To Fitness With Reginald Maudling, perhaps, or Andrei Tarkovsky’s Dancercise Workout). I doubt I’d be able to get terribly motivated with those, though, whereas Wii Fit, with it’s game-veneer of unlockable activities, high score tables and record keeping hooks right into my Achiever lobes, so I’m going to beat it, just see if I don’t…

One area that could use some work is the aerobic exercises; three minor variants of jogging on the spot, using the Wiimote as a pedometer, is a bit naff. Hula hooping is a giggle, but not a great sustained exercise. Rhythm boxing, stepping on and off the board and flailing around with Wiimote and nunchuck, would be excellent, but the pace is plodding, and you spend half your time standing watching the forthcoming sequence so hardly optimal for calorie burning. The first two modes of step aerobics, following on-screen steps (with occasional crazy variations like going sideways) are also rather slow, and the single jangly tune drives you insane after a while (daaa da da daaaa da da da da da, da da da daaa daaaaa), so I’m mostly using the final option, free stepping, where you set how long you want to step, then switch channels on the TV and step away while the Wiimote burbles away to itself from the built-in speaker (”Keep your back straight!” “You’ve been doing this a while!”)

Zoso wrote to me at work this morning - I’m offline in the evening at the moment for reasons that I’m sure I’ll go into in a meandering and flannelling fashion sometime soon - huzzahing the fact that we’re both set for a rhino riding rampage in Age of Conan should we ever reach the heady level of the forties in said game. He also mentioned, however, that we would at least have our bonus order belts for extra carrying capacity in the meantime; apparently you get a free belt in lieu of the mount which you can’t use until level forty. This was news to me, and I realised that I’d not fully read the deal before making my order for the game, I’d just skimmed it and hit purchase.

And now I worry that I’m speed reading various things in real life as though they were quest texts, and I wonder what sort of trouble that could get me into in the future:

You are purchasing blah blah blah Conan blah blah rhino blah blah blah blah blah early access blah blah. Blah blah blah 24 pounds blah. Blah. Blah blah blah.

Yes, yes, yes. Whatever. 24 pounds, rhino, early access. It’s all there, just let me purchase the thing already. Click. Click. Done.

<Two months later>

%ding dong%

Me: “Hello?”

Delivery Man: “Good morning sir, a delivery for you.”

Me: <Looks at delivery note> “Hmm, there seems to have been sort of mistake.”

Delivery Man: “Sir?”

Me: “Well, it’s just that this seems to be a delivery note for a female African black rhino implausibly called Conan, an artificial insemination kit and twenty four pounds of black rhino semen.”

Delivery Man: “That’s right, sir. One rhino and an ‘early access’ insemination kit. Starting a breeding program are we sir?”

Me: “I… really didn’t read that order properly, did I?”

<Another delivery man arrives>

Delivery Man 2: “Morning, sir. Just sign here for your order of a warhammer on a line, an aged Nganasan shaman and twelve dismembered heads.”

Me: “Oh dear.”

I don’t think that it’s necessarily conditioning on the part of MMOs that has caused this, because I understand that there are plenty of people out there who play MMOs and read the quest text in full, and that these people are still able to lead fulfilling and healthy lives. I think, in fact, that my altitus is as much to blame as anything, what with constantly rolling new characters and repeating old content, one generally begins to accept quests automatically because they’ve been experienced before. This is habit forming, though, and eventually you begin to see every set of quest text as an overly lengthy interruption to your game-play, even if reading that text would take only a matter of tens of seconds. It’s often a false economy though, even with the excellent quest trackers in modern MMOs, the quest text is usually there to explain where you are required to go, and what it is that you have to kill ten of this time. So you end-up revisiting the quest text, skimming it to find the pertinent information, and wasting more time than if you’d just read it all in the first place. Alas, the habit is formed, and it is a strong one: text is your enemy and must be ignored at all costs!

The problems lies with the fact that it translates too easily into the real world; it crosses that ineffable boundary between fantasy and reality and haunts your ways, like when you’ve just woken from a dream and have yet to shake it off as the fictional creation of your subconscious. Of course, you soon realise that there is not, in fact, a giant space octopus with tentacles made of creamy pasta and a single fulgurating eye of pure topaz trying to steal the collection of George Clooneys from under your bed.

I’m sure you can relate to the experience now, because even if you don’t skip the quest text, I think we’ve all had that dream.

You know that you’ve been playing a game too much, and that there’s cause for concern, when you start basing your enjoyment of a new song played on your iPod by whether, for example, the solo would be too tricky for you to perform when combined with that awkward to reach orange button.

In unrelated news, Audioslave’s Your Time Has Come was just piped into my head hole.

I received an email this afternoon when I got home that contained the code granting early access for, and subsequent rhinoplasty of, my characters in Age of Conan. Or something. It’s definitely got something to do with horns, at least. Or maybe that was getting the horn? Must be all the mature boobies in the game. Not sure what the sexual attraction of antiquated seabirds is, but I suppose that there are stranger things in the worlds of Robert Ervin Howard.

So that’s it. Strapped in, locked down, doors to automatic, turbines to power, all systems are green for go. F.A.B. All ready for the take off of Age of Conan. I’ve given up reading the general bloggerama because there’s no real firm information. Vanguard looked like a train wreck in the making from day one. Age of Conan seems more like Pirates of the Burning Sea in this case: it could go either way, and nobody is really sure which. But there’s more drama in soothsaying doom.

So it’s just a case now of gripping on to the armrests, singing the Golden Grahams song and waiting for the g-force of launch to kick in, followed by the rickety rockety ride through the atmosphere, and then either the weightless elation of orbiting through the gaming heavens, or plunging back to earth in a crimson ball of pure forum-ite flame.

Oh, those Golden Grahams.
Oh, those Golden Grahams.
Crispy, crunchy, Graham cereal,
brand new breakfast treat.

Well, the intention was to write a little reviewlet of Miéville’s Iron Council, but to be honest, in browsing around to see if anyone else thought, like myself, that the book was the expression of an incredibly imagined world of wonder wrapped in a story that dragged like the hind foot of a zombie on fright night, I stumbled into the Debating Iron Council blogstravgansa over at Crooked Timber.

Warning, spoilers abound! I’m putting the warning here, after the link, to punish all those of you who have shot off to read somebody else’s post before finishing with mine. The Internet really doesn’t teach the best of social graces when it comes to the art of conversation, it teaches us more about how to… Ooo, look, goldfish everyone! Goldfish!.

What really interested me was the link about two thirds of the way down the post which pointed to China’s responses to the points raised by several of the bloggers. It’s an interesting read, and gave me an insight into the man behind the book which coloured my opinion differently after having read his point of view, and more importantly showed that he felt that there were some valid criticisms, some of which he had received in the past, which he had tried to correct in Iron Council, obviously with varying success depending on each critics point of view.

But that’s not the really great part, the fun comes further down. In the mire that is the comments. Anyone who has blogged, read a blog, or once knew a man whose auntie’s dog was featured on a blog, will understand what happens in the comments. Generally, you get the nice people, writing to share their thoughts and perhaps heap a little praise on you for being able to do no more, if we’re honest, than string a few sentences together in a vaguely entertaining fashion. Then you get the Commentards; these are the people that have to pick a hole in something that you’ve said - not really justification in itself: debate is, after all, the art of war refined into a slightly less ‘head cleft in twain by sword’ fashion - but crucially, should you dare to respond and attempt a defence of your position they will essentially resort to calling you a Nazi and correct everything you’ve said as though you know nothing about the subject under discussion and that you’re simply trying to oppress them, even if the subject at hand happens to be the best selling book that you wrote.

Fun side-entertainment, head on over to China’s response post, and see if you can spot the point where the poor author’s soul is sundered into a thousand tiny little pieces. Hint: it’s his last post to the comment thread.

Those of you who stayed to finish this post before heading on over there, well done, award yourselves a biscuit and a small caffeinated beverage of your choice. Those of you just coming back from the other thread where you shot off like a puppy after a stick, those of us here who stuck around are now ignoring you like the bad puppy that just peed on grandma’s favourite Victorian winter shawl. While grandma was wearing it. That’s some mighty fine projectile peeing you’ve got going on there.

The wonder of it all though is this: more and more authors are making their presence felt online, and I’m not talking about the stand-offish token page, where you get the impression that the author is wearing industrial marigolds and a face mask, and holding the page out to you at arms length pinched between their finger and thumb so as to make sure that the amount of time that they will be in contact with you, via the page, is as little as possible. No, these authors, the Gaimans and Abercrombies (and I’m sure many others, these are just two of the prominent ones that I happen to read) of the online world, respond to readers either directly in comments or as the focus of their own posts. This rather brave behaviour gives an ‘indirect direct’ access to them that provides insight into the mind behind the stories and the person behind the characters, such that all of their works are enhanced tremendously from knowing them that little bit, as much as you can know anyone online. As much as you know me. For all you know I could be a fifty year old transvestite boxing champion with a walrus moustache, called Marjorie.

I did feel a tinge of sadness though. It was the idea of having such access to luminaries of the past, contact which in the past would have been reserved for only a close circle of friends, that triggered the melancholy; specifically I was thinking of the inimitable Bard himself, seeing as I find myself endlessly marvelling at his wordsmithing. I wondered what he would say to us if he had a blog and could respond to our questions and comments, briefly I marvelled at the possibility of contact with that mind and what insight we could have garnered, until I pulled-up short and realised the inevitable, the one and only comment that he would post: he would tell us all to fuck off, because he was fed-up with having to answer to the griping pedantic diatribes of a bunch of ingrates.

But it would be the most beautiful blog comment ever composed by man.

Amongst many splendid podcasts, Mark Kermode’s film reviews from Simon Mayo’s radio show are always a highlight. “Wittertainment at its most wittertaining”, as Wikipedia definitely doesn’t say. Highlights are the quotes you really wish they would put on film posters instead of “The best comedy of the year!!”, “The best film of the decade!!1!” and “The greatest work of art ever in the history of mankind!1!1!!!”, such as The Santa Clause 3 being “the cinematic equivalent of tertiary syphilis”, and for Captivity: “It’s a Russian-American co-production, and on the basis of this I want the Cold War to start again now”.

On this week’s podcast, Kermode mentioned that someone had taken his Iron Man review, featuring typically Kermodean impersonations of actors that are so bad they’re good, only worse than that so they’re bad again, but then even worse still than that so they wind up being brilliant, and added actual Iron Man footage, and sure enough the result is the greatest ever work of art in the history of mankind (ever).

Earlier in the week Rock, Paper, Shotgun pointed out an Audiosurf update, and I’ve really got back into that over the last few days. I’m now the undisputed MASTER of many songs, thanks to a cunning two-pronged attack of obscurity (nobody else seems to be playing Bad News’ Masturbike or Sizzla’s cover of Subterranean Homesick Blues) and incorrect tagging. Not in a deliberately cheating “tag a high-scoring song as something else” way, just having an MP3 collection spanning many years of using many different rippers with differing ideas about punctuation, character limits and how to tag compilations, so there may be fierce competition on the leader board of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”, but I’m out there on my own for “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack o”, and I suspect my high score for “Oliver s Army” wouldn’t fare so well against those of “Oliver’s Army”…