From aardvark.dj: the story of a Detroit man, the woman he’s trying to woo, and a little bit of poop.

What can I say? We love this show. It was hard enough to lose Buffy, but now Angel?

Here’s one way to help (or at least feel like you’re helping).

And here’s another.

Keep my Wesley and Spike on the television, where they belong!

First he signed to a label, then he named his album. Now we have a definitive release date (not to mention a spiffy Kray-inspired photo) for Morrissey’s latest effort, You Are the Quarry - May 18th in the U.S.

I can’t wait!

As I reflect on my MMORPG experiences, all I can say to this article is… Dude!

Sure, it was neat in the Xbox version of Raven Shield, but I’ve got two words for the voice control in UT2004 - holy crap.

Mike at Silent Corner posted a link to a WB press release stating that the current season of Angel will be its last. This is pretty disappointing, since it is, in our opinion, the best show on television.

The premise for Buffy the Vampire Slayer was very clever - take the simile that high school is like an endless parade of horrors, interpret it literally, and then convert it back to a metaphor for the modern high school experience. Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, may have been inspired by Jeph Loeb’s significantly less successful attempt at this trick in 1985. (Jeph, buddy - love the comic books and the consulting work you do for the WB on Smallville, but the filmography is a little weak.)

If Buffy’s a metaphor for how hard it is to grow up and become independent, then as its spin-off, Angel has been a perfect companion piece - what do you do once you are grown-up? Rather than focusing on school and young adulthood as its parent show did, Angel can be seen as a metaphor about one’s career. Season one saw Angel, the vampire who is (mostly) unique because he has a soul, struggle to make ends meet and get his paranormal detective agency off of the ground; currently in season five the members of “Team Angel” are dealing with the consequences of their own success - they’ve got a greater ability to influence the things that are important to them, but at a cost of needing to delegate. With very limited ability to dive in, get their hands dirty, and work on solutions themselves, the characters are conflicted - have they sold out the dream of their life’s work (helping the helpless), or have they simply become more pragmatic? I’m guessing that constantly wondering if evolving from a plucky, “resourceful because you have to be”, hands-on worker to someone who influences direction through negotiation and politics is either progress or compromise resonates pretty well with people’s experiences in their careers, and it’s one of the many levels on which Angel works for me.

Angel also has the built-in appeal of Whedon’s rich Buffy mythology - vampires and other demons, slayers, champions, et al. - for the long-term fans who have learned its intricacies over the years. While I’ve railed against the WB for making a Batman show without Batman in it before, the fact that Angel is the WB’s stand-in for noir antihero archetypes in general (and Batman in specific) is also a big selling point for me. Think of the parallels: Angel and Batman - detectives who do their best work at night, serving justice in the hopes of assuaging their guilt about living when so many others have died. Wesley and Alfred - the improbably helpful Brits who help their hero find his center; Cordelia and Oracle - adoring associates whose unique talents are a source of useful information; early Gunn and Robin - hard-luck sidekicks; season 5 Gunn and Lucius Fox - men who run the business so that the hero is able to focus on their true mission; the newly-acquired Spike and Nightwing - capable heroes in their own right, yet following too closely in the primary hero’s footsteps to see eye-to-eye with them… the list goes on and on. If Buffy and friends were the “Scooby gang”, then Angel’s ensemble is definitely the “Bat-family”.

Still, even with the infusion of Spike into the cast due to Buffy’s cancellation, this season of Angel has been difficult to watch. This is not because of the radical change in setting from the previous four seasons, which many fans have complained about. Taken as part of the progression of the underlying theme of the show (as discussed above), I think it’s brilliant and makes a lot of sense. The real shortcoming of this season is that all too often, we’re given very little in terms of character development or interaction to care about. Whereas in previous seasons the strengths, weaknesses, and banter among the supporting cast has been critical to the atmosphere of the show, season five sees them as little more than props. In fact, during last week’s episode (”Why We Fight”), they were LITERALLY props, on display in the atrium of Wolfram & Hart as mostly inanimate objects to be saved by Angel. In other words, the problem has been at the surface - the soul (no pun intended) of the show is still intact, but the storytelling just hasn’t been able to capitalize on it. Maybe this is due to network interference in the creative process - season four was basically one giant story (which, other than taking a little longer than necessary to get to the point, was incredible) and as a result, the network “powers that be” said that the current season needed to be more accessible to people who flipped on an episode midseason - but as a viewer, I guess I don’t care what the excuse is.

If this is the best that Whedon and company can do (or are allowed to do) with their property, then maybe it’s best that we let Angel go quietly… all the better to remember how good the show was and could have continued to be.

My gaming has been largely centered around older PC games recently, but to paraphrase Steve Martin in The Jerk, “The demos are here! The demos are here!”

• Unreal Tournament 2004. Faster and with vehicles. w00t!
• Hidden and Dangerous 2. Single player AND multiplayer demos available.

Also, make sure to grab:

• Desert Combat 0.7. Still the finest mod ever made - with no apologies to Counter Strike. Requires the BF1942 1.6 patch.

Speaking of patches, these are pretty useful:

• Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield 1.53
• Call of Duty 1.2

Finally, Microsoft (of all organizations) has done something really cool. They once had a little-played space sim called Allegiance. On paper, it sounded very cool - there was a lot going on, jumping from tactical team-based play with roles (think BF1942 with everyone in vehicles) to resource management to the ability to pop out into a 3rd-person, RTS-style interface and issue orders. I think my brother-in-law was one of the 12 people who bought it.

At any rate, it died due to lack of interest but there is still a hard-core following. In order to keep the Allegiance legacy going, Microsoft has released the complete source code (including comments) to the public. Score one for making old games part of the public domain!

After hearing about the Ender’s Game adaptation, it struck me that very few books have won the two most prestigous prizes in Fantasy/Sci-Fi literature - the Hugo, given out by the World Science-Fiction Society, and the Nebula, awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

They are:

Dune, Frank Herbert (1965)
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)
Ringworld, Larry Niven (1970)
The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov (1972)
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke (1973)
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman (1975)
Gateway, Frederick Pohl (1977)
Dreamsnake, Vonda McIntyre (1978)
The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke (1979)
Startide Rising, David Brin (1983)
Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (1985)
Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card (1986)
Doomsday Book, Connie Willis (1992)
Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman (1998)

Has enough time passed since the B-movie debacle that was Starship Troopers, the event that single-handedly set the sci-fi genre back 20 years in terms of credibility, to make another film about insect-like aliens hell-bent on taking over the Earth?

Is there enough distance from The Lord of the Rings trilogy to have another epic about fighting for the existence of your people and their values?

The answer to both questions is yes, when posed in response to the adaption of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, one of the few books to win both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and quite easily one of my five favorite books of all time.

David Hayter’s co-writers for X2 will adapt the script based on Card’s quiet sale of the film rights to both Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow, a more recent novel which tells the same story from another main character’s point-of-view.

As with all of the upcoming adaptations - Watchmen, Hitchiker’s Guide, etc. - I am hoping for a LotR-quality transition to the big screen but preparing for the worst.