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I’ve always wanted to make video games, but that hasn’t worked out yet. However, I’m very accomplished in thinking up video game titles. A while back I came up with “Hold Still While I Kill You”, inspired by the little “Finish Him!” interludes in Mortal Kombat, and more recently “I Punch Things”, which would of course be a game where you walk from left to right, punching things.

It hit me recently that this could be a great opportunity for catharsis. If you pay attention to the news, which I don’t recommend, you’ll eventually start to think that the world is full of unsolvable problems. What we need is a game where you can solve all the problems of politics, the environment, and general human misery the way we solved the kidnappings of martial artists’ girlfriends in the 80s: by walking from left to right, punching things. “I Punch Things” is that game.

I PUNCH THINGS

a video game by M. Zole

Level 1

SECRETARY: Lance, moveon.org is on line 1.
LANCE: Hello?
MOVEON: Lance, we’ve got a problem.
LANCE: Talk to me.
MOVEON: President Bush is abusing his executive power, eroding the separation of church and state, and leading us into an unwinnable war in Iraq!
MOVEON: We need you to walk from left to right, punching dudes.
LANCE: Got it.

Level 2

BUSH: Darn it, Lance! You punched so many dudes in level 1 I got kicked out of office! I realize now what a jackass I was.
LANCE: …
BUSH: But we’re still in an unwinnable war in Iraq. Can you do it, Lance? Can you walk from left to right and punch dudes?
LANCE: Iraqi dudes?
BUSH: I’m not sure it matters. Bill, does- OK, they can be pretty much any dudes. But the background needs to look vaguely Arabian.

Level 3

BROWN: Lance! Oh, man. I’m in over my head.
LANCE: What’s up, Michael?
BROWN: It’s like this… I’m the head of FEMA, and I’m supposed to help people recover from major disasters. But I have no idea what I’m doing! New Orleans just got hit by a huge hurricane, the levees broke, and now thousands of people are homeless and starving. And I’m going to be late to my restaurant reservation in Baton Rouge.
LANCE: So you need me to walk from left to right, punching dudes?
BROWN: Would you?
LANCE: Sure.
BROWN: You’re a pal, Lance.

Level 4

JON STEWART: Lance, thanks to your dude-punching skills, thousands of hurricane victims have had their lives un-destroyed. But the American people still suffer from malaise and apathy; voter turnout is abysmal, everyone has become more and more isolated, and not enough people are listening to Shonen Knife. We need you to get to the root of the problem.
LANCE: By walking from left to right and punching dudes?
JON STEWART: Good man.

Final Boss

LANCE: So, it was you all along!
PARIS HILTON: That’s right! I was at the root of all America’s problems! My tiny dog was at the root of some of them.
LANCE: Your reign of mediocrity ends here!
PARIS: Probably not! Your punching dudes style is no match for my Vapid Head Tilt!
LANCE: We’ll see about that!

(4500 punches later)

PARIS: Noooooooo!
LANCE: Gasp! You’re actually Hitler!
PARIS/HITLER: That’s right! And I would’ve gotten away with being a shallow media whore if you hadn’t walked from left to right, punching dudes! (dies)

THE END
(peppy end music)

Apparently Viacom wants to push Spongebob Squarepants on the Japanese market, and they’re having some success. I used to be a big Spongebob fan, although that kind of tapered off after the movie came out, and I also watched Japanese children’s shows for my Japanese class in college. Thus, I feel qualified to point out what you already know: Spongebob and Japan are kind of a weird match. I like their strategy, though:

1. Appeal to trend-setting young women
2. By saying, basically, “Look at this whacked-out character from America”

That’s the way it looks, anyway. The article mentions parents using the show as an introduction to English, which is totally not what I care about: I want to hear Spongebob dubbed in Japanese. YouTube is no help.

Last year I went to Ecuador with my girlfriend to visit her family there, and not knowing much about South American culture, I was most surprised by the proliferation of Spongebob (”Bob Esponja”). He’s huge! Sometimes literally, in the case of Año Viejos (papier-mâché dummies burned on New Year’s Eve) we saw that ranged from small to colossal. The fascinating part is not the exported products — this is America, of course we’ll push our culture on anyone who doesn’t specifically forbid it — but the fact that people were making their own unlicensed stuff. I didn’t get a good picture of any of the Spongebob dummies, but here’s a bunch of kids loading a giant Mumra into the back of a pickup. Apparently even retro is an international language. Just to be clear: those kids are going to burn Mumra later.

Then there’s the matter of the actual show, which was dubbed, and it seemed to maintain its charm in the process. While I was down there I also saw dubbed versions of two of my favorite shows, Mythbusters and Home Movies, which was interesting since neither of those shows is scripted. That means that whenever Adam Savage singes himself on camera, some Spanish-speaking voiceover actor has to dub the yelp. On the downside, the Spanish version of the show is re-edited in a way that manages to take all the fun out of the proceedings: only one myth per show, and the peppy music is replaced with placid acoustic guitar. Also, the episode I saw did not have Kari Byron in it.

I probably shouldn’t admit this on the open Internet, but I’m a pretty suggestible guy. If you make a reasonable-sounding argument (not “Intelligent Design should be taught in schools”, for example, or “The Streets is a good rapper”), and I don’t have specific reasons to think that you are wrong, I will probably believe you. Not that I’ll accept your word as absolute truth, but I’ll think of your opinion as “something people think”, which is kind of similar.

So I feel good that I finally have an argument that I can thoroughly dismiss, in the form of “Shouldn’t we thank Microsoft for Vista?“, an editorial by Stan Beer. (Thanks to Matthew Montgomery for forwarding it along.) The point he makes is so completely misguided that I feel very confident in declaring it Wrong Wrong Wrongety Wrong (it is not possible to be any wronger). Basically, he says that Microsoft probably won’t bring in much new business with Vista, since most copies will be sold bundled with a new PC, so they deserve our thanks for giving us an operating system that’s better than Windows XP (hold on, we’ll talk about that in a second). Screw the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — Microsoft should write off Vista’s grueling five-year development cycle as a charitable donation!

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Seven comments on my first post! I feel like that is a better blog reception than I probably deserve. I realize that is probably a one-time-only thing, though. From here, I will have to blog-sink or blog-swim on the strength of my blogging skills. Also, I’m thinking I should never say “blog” again.

While Death To The Extremist is still over, I still have a bunch of “bonus material” sitting around on my hard drive, and thanks to some computer problems I wasn’t able to upload it all on January 2nd as promised. So, I’m uploading an “outtake” every day until I’m out (probably two more weeks’ worth) and updating the “Background Gallery” on Fridays. I’ve also uploaded the template I used to make Death To The Extremist along with the ill-advised Arcade font. Go ahead and fill the void with your own comics! Send ‘em to me and I’ll put them on the site, if you catch me on a good day!

Just to be clear, these are outtakes for a reason. This isn’t going to be like those Simpsons outtakes where the problem was that they just recorded too darned much hilarity and had to cut some for time. This is more like meat that is deemed unfit for human consumption but suitable for dog food. This is evidence that, contrary to what many have said, I do have a quality control process.

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Welcome to my blog. I’m very late to the blog party, so I don’t know if I need to make a grandiose mission statement or something. Mainly I’m just hoping I don’t come across like I think my ideas are totally important just because I installed WordPress.

So, I recently quit writing my comic, Death To The Extremist. I’ve been writing DTE on a schedule since sometime in 2001, albeit with some large gaps over the years. So far it’s kind of nice to be off the schedule, since DTE was getting a bit stressful. I never figured out a writing method more streamlined than “open Photoshop and attempt to have hilarious idea”, so each comic took hours to make. In the last year or so, my self-imposed deadlines caused me to run comics that sounded funny in my head but didn’t survive the trip out, and some I just wasn’t happy with. That comes with the territory, of course, but when you’re doing anything creative it’s important to have fun with it. Now that I think about it, it was probably a mistake to step up my schedule so aggressively. I did it to attract more readers, but really, if you don’t like my comic, I’m not sure 50% more of it is going to help. Anyway, that’s the long version of why I quit.

It was a tough decision, though! I will miss being able to turn a sudden obsession with an old L.L. Cool J song into a comic. Also, a bunch of people wrote in to say they were sorry DTE was going away, which is really flattering. I’ve always felt like the most basic version of “making it” as an artist (cartoonist, whatever) is to have people enjoying your work who don’t know you personally. The fact that my crazy talking circles comic “made it”, to some degree, is kind of hard to wrap my head around.

What’s next? There are a bunch of things I’ve been wanting to spend time on, and they’re not all Guitar Hero. I intend to learn Flash, for real this time. I haven’t written or recorded any music in a while; it might be time to get back into that. Maybe I should try stand-up comedy? Well, the main purpose of this blog is to share whatever I happen to do. I guess I could also just write in the blog. We’ll see how it goes.