>SUPERVERBOSE

Here's another entry in the series of 2012 XYZZY nominees game reviews: Robb Sherwin's Cryptozookeeper. It's the most Sherwin-esque Sherwin game I've yet seen. It's gonzo, it's funny, it's extreme, and it's shambolic, and it's all these things to the most highly refined degree I've ever seen Robb accomplish, which means it's all these things to the most highly refined degree I've ever seen anyone accomplish.

IF-Review has published the second in my series reviewing all the Best Game XYZZY nominees of 2012. The game this time is Wade Clarke's Six. I don't think I've ever been so charmed by an IF game.

It's been a long, long time since I reviewed a text game, so I'm embarking on a mini-project of reviewing all four games nominated for the 2011 Best Game XYZZY award. First up: Zombie Exodus. My review is up now at IF-Review. Thanks to Mark Musante for publishing it.

At Geek Bowl V last year, my team The Anti-Social Network ended up winning all the marbles, except the marbles were actually considerable sums of cash. Hooray! This year, the event moved from Denver to Austin, Texas, and we didn't fare quite so well, coming in 10th out of 146 teams. Still a respectable showing! But not enough to get paid, as only the top 3 teams win money.

Nevertheless, a great time was had! I got to spend quality time with my wonderful teammates, met the delightful Valerie Thatcher, spent a great afternoon with the estimable Rob Wheeler, and got to experience the Austin 6th Street bar strip during a pretty freaky power outage. Turns out that the bar scene is really not my scene, and the bar scene when none of the bars or streetlights have electricity, and thousands of people are roaming through darkness, is really REALLY not my scene.

Of course, the reason I went there was Geek Bowl VI, which now bills itself as the biggest live trivia event in the U.S. It's a pub quiz multiplied by 20, and every year, Geeks Who Drink does a little better job with the event. It's never without its flaws, but it's quite impressive to manage 150 or so teams and deliver a variety of good questions in a fun way. Not to mention the cash prizes, which make for a very cool incentive.

Here's the format: each team has its own small table, with 6 chairs. Quizmasters read questions from the stage, and the questions are also projected onto large screens throughout the venue. Once all the questions in a round have been asked, a two minute timer starts, by the end of which you must have turned in your answer sheet to one of the roaming quizmasters. The game consists of 8 rounds, each with its own theme. Each round contains 8 questions -- usually, each question is worth one point, so there's a maximum possible score of 8 points for each round. However, some rounds offer extra points -- for instance, Round 2 is traditionally a music round, with 8 songs played, and one point each awarded for naming the title and artist of the song. In a regular GWD pub quiz, it's only Round 2 and Round 8 (always the "Random Knowledge" round) that offer 16 possible points. However, in this year's Geek Bowl, two other rounds were upgraded from 8 potential points to 16. Finally, teams can choose one round to "joker", meaning that it earns double points for that round.

For posterity and enjoyment, here are the questions from Geek Bowl VI. Note that I'm reconstructing these from memory and notes, so they may be missing any clever turns of phrase that they might have had originally, and any inaccuracies that result from my paraphrasing are solely my fault. I'll put any commentary about our team's experience in [square brackets].

At the request of Geeks Who Drink, I had taken these down. Then, in a pleasing and surprising turn of events, we had a good conversation over email in which they decided that having the questions posted might be okay after all, as long as they were posted at least a week past the date of the event. So, I'm pleased to say, the questions have returned to this entry! Thanks, Geeks!

( The questions )

A couple of years ago, I wrote about my annual Christmas traditions with my friends Siân and Kelly, a mix CD of songs I've been listening to that year. The songs generally reflect a little something about my life in one way or another, though not perfectly so -- sometimes they're just songs I've imprinted on for some reason. The liner notes tradition has continued as well, but I didn't post the notes from 2010. See, 2010 was a terrible, terrible year. Professionally, it was by far the unhappiest I'd ever been in my job, and personally, my marriage tailspun into a major crisis right at the same time we moved into a new house and my work life was at peak misery. It was very difficult, and painful, and I withdrew from many things and people.

Then came 2011. In January, I started a new job, thank god. I am in a much healthier atmosphere now, and am much, much happier at work. Laura and I finally found the right counselor in the spring, and have healed a lot of things. By the time November rolled around, I had started to emerge from a fair amount of depression, and it was in that mood that I made this year's CD. I feel really happy with the collection, both as a musical collage and as a reflection of my year.

( Songs behind the cut )

Last year, I wrote about the Beatles album Love, an astonishingly brilliant mash-up of Beatles songs crafted by George and Giles Martin. That album is the soundtrack to a Cirque Du Soleil show of the same name, which appears in only one place in the world: the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Well, when I knew I would be going to Vegas, exactly a year after writing about Love for the first time, I seized the opportunity to see the show.

I'm finding the experience of the show very difficult to put into words. Here are the words I gave it in an email I sent that night:

Oh my god, I think it may have been the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I couldn't stop crying. Seriously, I must have cried through like 70% of it. I kept thinking, "I can't believe this is happening to me."

Why? Well, a big part of it had to do with sound. I've never heard anything like the sound in that theater. They built the theater at the Mirage especially for this show. There are something like 6,000 speakers in it. Every seat has speakers embedded invisibly, including a speaker that faces the seat behind it. Hearing the incredible sound collage of Love in that theater... it feels like being inside the music. No, that's not it. It felt like the music was inside me. I've been to plenty of concerts, including some where I was seated in the front row, directly in front of the band, hearing them play. This was different. The music was everywhere, not just in front of me, with pieces separated out -- some close, some far, but all incredibly crisp and clear. It was perfect. It sounded perfect -- like a sonic diamond. It would have been a moving experience just to sit in that theater and listen to the album, with no show at all.

But of course, there was a show. This was my first (and only) Cirque show, and it had what Cirque is known for: acrobatics, feats of daring, movements so graceful and gorgeous you can hardly believe they're possible. "Humans in the service of beauty" should be their motto. And all of that was wonderful, and thrilling, but it wasn't what was causing the tsunamis of emotion in me, or at least not in itself.

There was something remarkable, though, about seeing those movements synchronized with music that I love. Sometimes, the bodies on stage gave physical expression to the soaring, giddy feeling that was in me, inspired by a particular sound or lyric. Or a hopeful feeling, or a loving feeling, or sorrowful, or whatever. In a DVD extra to All Together Now, a documentary about the show, Yoko says, "Beatles were like acrobatics of the mind, and Cirque Du Soleil is the acrobatics of the body. When it comes together, it makes a kind of... something that's whole." She's absolutely right. The other crucial quote from the film is from Dominic Champagne, director of the show: "You know, bodies go. George Harrison is dead, but we can really say that his spirit is with us, and we gave a body to that spirit. All together."

It seems ridiculous to even try describing the various pieces of the show in any detail. It's even worse than the old "dancing about architecture" bit, because the show is already dance, and theater, and art, about music. Not to mention, my powerful emotional reaction to it all makes me keep reaching for superlatives in a way that feels authentic to write, but I suspect is rather tedious to read.

So I'm not even going to try anything like a systematic recounting of the show, but instead just mention a few things that resonated intensely with me, and that remain strong memories of the show:

• The kids: For whatever reason, I just did not expect there to be kids in this show. The way they were used just blew me away. Since becoming a parent, I've gotten rather softhearted about children as symbols. Consequently, seeing them sit in happy meditative poses in front of a huge ball of candles for "Here Comes The Sun", or rocket towards the sky on a bed whose billowing sheet envelops the audience in dreamy atmospherics, or scramble through the rubble of the Blitz, was quite moving for me.
  
• The imagery: Champagne calls the show "a rock and roll poem", which aptly captures its astute use of imagery. Rather than just a greatest hits dance performance, or a musical homage, or, as I had originally imagined it, "a bunch of guys in tights, swinging from trapezes, forming human pyramids, and so forth", the show is actually an evocation of some of the most important emotions woven into Beatles music. It does this with a deft use of images. Liverpool just after World War II -- crumbling or destroyed brick edifices, exploded further by youthful energy. Groupies and Beatlemania -- a girl with a dozen legs, frenetic in her movements. Longing and disappointment "As My Guitar Gently Weeps" -- letters raining from the sky onto a solitary dancer. Lucy in the sky with diamonds -- twinkling LED stars hang down everywhere, illuminating the swings and arcs of a trapeze artist.
  
• The voices: I don't just mean the singing, though that was breathtaking, especially the a capella voices of "Because." But beyond that, at several points in the show, Beatle shadows are projected onto screens or hanging muslin, and they move in sync with recordings of the Beatles talking, from studio sessions or casual chatter. Combined with the amazing sound quality, this produced an amazing feeling of intimacy, like you were right there with them. It was an especially wonderful surprise because those sounds are not included on the album.
  

I could go on, and on, but I won't. Suffice it to say that if The Beatles hold a special and sacred place in your heart, as they do for me, Las Vegas has just become your Mecca. You must go there and experience Love in that theater, at least once in your life. I don't know that everyone else will feel what I felt, though if you love the Beatles I suspect you will. For me, it was elevation, suffused with spiritual transcendence and love. If there's such a thing as heaven, I hope it feels like that.

I got both a bachelor's and a master's degree in English Literature, and for quite a while there I thought I was going to become an English professor, one of those new media and popular culture types combined with a wide swath of 19th century novels and poetry. Then I watched Laura go through her Ph.D. process, and thought, "There have to be less excruciating paths to travel -- maybe I'll pursue this computer thing."

I don't regret for a second my decision to abandon academia, but sometimes my brain starts to spark, and I think of the classes that might have been. Recent such sparkage has been inspired by Stevie Nicks' new album, which I've been listening to many times over (as should surprise few who know me.) I've been wanting to write about all these flying thoughts, and suddenly I realized the perfect form. It allows me to gesture grandly towards a bunch of broad themes, without having to apply any actual rigor to discussing them. Hooray! Plus, since it's imaginary, I don't have to try to engage with some of the more irritating (to me) aspects of what the field has become, or rather what it was 17 years ago, the last time I read a syllabus. It's my party, and I don't have to invite Julia Kristeva if I don't want to...

( In Her Dreams: The Allusive Stevie Nicks )

On day 2 of TCONA, the first trivia event was scheduled at 8:30am, but it was the Quiz Bowl Seeding Test, which I co-wrote. So I wouldn't be taking it, which was all for the best, since I'd had a late night. I left my sister asleep in our room and toddled on down to the conference room around 9:45, as the test was breaking up.

The next event was "Learned League Live!", hosted by Shayne Bushfield, or rather his alter ego, Commissioner Thorsten A. Integrity. If you're not familiar with Learned League, it requires ( a bit of explanation. )

If you tend to read what I write here, you'll know that this has been quite a trivia year for me. The most recent highlight is that I played in another pub quiz tournament with the Anti-Social Network (renamed The A-OK's for this event), i.e. the same team that won The Geek Bowl. And we won again! This time the purse was $1000. It is astonishing, weird, and wonderful to be part of such a high-performing group.

The highlight before that, though, was the Trivia Championships Of North America, or ( TCONA )

I had a very fun and slightly uncanny trivia experience last week, which reminded me of one more principle I forgot to include in the trivia players advice post:

ALWAYS GUESS

Now, naturally this advice does not apply to trivia games whose format penalizes wrong answers. In Jeopardy!, for instance, I would never advise someone to guess every time, since getting a question wrong costs you the dollar amount of the question. However, there are plenty of formats in which wrong answers incur no penalty, and in those games, I make it my policy to guess even when I have absolutely no idea of the answer. Learned League is such a format, and last week it posed this question to me:

What was the name of cartoon mouse Speedy Gonzales' country cousin, described as "the slowest mouse in all Mexico"?

I have a vague memory of seeing a cartoon that featured this slow mouse, and I mean very vague. I'm sure I haven't seen it for at least 30 years. If it were a Jeopardy! question, I would surely not buzz in. But in Learned League, getting a question wrong doesn't hurt you in any way, so I tried to piece together an answer. I figured that this mouse would probably have a name that is parallel to Speedy Gonzales, but opposite. So instead of Speedy, he'd be something like "Pokey." And although he's Speedy's cousin, I guessed that he wouldn't be named Gonzales, but rather some other common Hispanic name with a similar rhythm, something like "Rodriguez." So the answer I submitted was: Pokey Rodriguez.

The actual answer: SLOWPOKE RODRIGUEZ

This totally blew me away. I could not believe that my wild, out-of-the-blue answer came so close to the actual, correct answer. It felt like a combination of tapping the unconscious (like I talked about in the previous post), solid logic, and pure blind luck. I was thrilled. Now, this story has a less than satisfying ending -- the commissioner decided that "Pokey" was different enough from "Slowpoke" to constitute a wrong answer. However, it totally confirmed my policy of always venturing a guess, because you just never know when you'll strike gold.

This is a story I've told before, but I have a strong early memory of competing in the trivia bowl and venturing a guess on this toss-up:

HOST: "Who has the record for most guest appearances on The Love Boat?"
ME: [After a long pause in which it becomes clear that nobody is going to attempt this.] BUZZ. "Uh... Charo?"
HOST: "Yes, it is Charo!"

That is the moment that cemented my love for the wild guess.