Samizdata

If you have a spare half hour, you might consider reading a long essay by Bill Whittle entitled CELEBRITY (on Eject! Eject! Eject!) about silly Hollywood stars mouthing off about politics and not being challenged by the media but just being allowed to say it and get clean away with it. Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the whore throughout history, as I seem to recall a pre-WW2 British Prime Minister once saying about the media themselves, of his time.

Example: Viggo Mortensen. He played a good guy in Lord of the Rings, but is now, it seems, batting for the bad guys, arguing for “peace”, that is to say for the rights of despots not to be knocked off their perches, and the duty of the victims of despots to just go on suffering indefinitely. Apparently Mortensen recently said that many more people died in Afghanistan as a result of the US bombing there than the (just under) 3,000 who died in 9/11 attack on New York, when the true Afghanistan number is generally reckoned now to be about 500. As Whittle says, this person should most emphatically be allowed to say such things, but only in a world where the Viggo Mortensens of it are used to being worshipped, regardless of what they say, do such things get said by them so loudly.

There are many interesting responses one might have to this long essay of Whittle’s, but one of the more interesting things about it for me is that it is indeed long, around twenty or so scrollings-down of my computer screen. But since Whittle was nailing down a whole cart-load of thoughts that many others were three-quarters of the way to nailing down for themselves, many people, including me, found it great reading, and just kept reading and reading until they finished it. When I started work on this posting there were already 68 comments, and now as I’m giving this its final polish there are 73, so I definitely am not the only one to have read this thing.

What I think this demonstrates is that blogging is not a particular way of writing; it is just a technology to enable writing. How you do the writing is up to you. Samizdata has half a dozen postings or so per day, of Samizdata type length. That’s us. Whittle has pieces of very variable length, from Samizdata-short to massive, every day or two, with absolutely none of those rat-tat-tat fusillades of very short postings that Instapundit specialises in. That’s him, and that’s Instapundit. Blogging doesn’t have to be done any particular way, except that, I would say, it helps a lot if you can find a way of doing it that suits you, and you then stick to it. Sustainability is all. But I guess if you’re good enough you can even break that rule. I seem to recall writing here about this before. Yes. Do I now contradict myself? Somewhat.

One final thought. Those 68 rising to 73 comments included some interesting speculations about the possibility that saying things which are way to the left of regular public opinion might actually harm an actor’s career by making the regular public stay away from his/her movies, with, in particular, Alec Baldwin’s recently faltering movie progress being put under the spotlight. So, I wonder what will now happen to Viggo Mortensen’s career. Will all those working stiffs on aircraft carriers whom Whittle writes about so vividly and respectfully, and their millions of land-locked ideological brethren, want to see Mortensen pretending to be someone like them (or like they’d like to be), when he has now so plainly declared that actually he isn’t one of them in any way except physiology (or physiological aspiration)? I genuinely don’t know, and will be genuinely interested to see.

After playing some excellent games like tongue-in-cheek No One lives Forever 2 and the the awesome & ultra slick Splinter Cell, I was starting to get the impression computer games were starting to really enter another era: an era in which equal attention is paid to scripts, story flow, voice acting and the ability to interact other than by shooting someone.

Splinter Cell: ultra cool
Shoot people, be stealthy, climb, jump, sophisticated interaction…
take hostages and extract information without saying ‘please’!

Boy was I wrong! Having just played Soldier of Fortune 2, I realise that even quality companies like Raven can produce clunkers. SoF2 is as linear and predictable as the original Doom, the cut scenes are filled with flat and indifferent declaiming and the characters are cliches (in itself sometimes amusing but in this case, not). Even the graphics are nothing to write home about. Level design ranged from uninspiring (“Ah, yet another blind corner… I might as well chuck a grenade as there is bound to be a bad guy lying in wait like the one before. And the one before that. And the one before that…”) to the idiotic (as in ‘my allies will try and kill me if I get too far ahead or behind the patrol I am helping to defend’…. riiiiiight) to the baffling (‘so I shot the guard dead with a silenced weapon, he was nowhere near the bloody alarm button and the alarm goes off anyway instantly? And the logic behind that is…??’).

Soldier of Fortune 2: suspect moustache
Shoot people, occasionally push buttons, try to hide (almost impossible)
plus shoot some more people… and then some more. And again…

I guess that the SoF & Raven brand names are responsible for the game’s excellent sales and I gather that multiplayer in reasonable in SoF2, but I would certainly urge anyone who likes a good plot line, thoughtfully designed scenarios or snappy dialogue in a single player game to look elsewhere and give this by-the-numbers First Person Shooter a miss… Deus Ex or Half Life this game ain’t.