Simpson's Paradox

I went to the Mission Park premiere and reception at the Brattle Theater the other night. Bethie wanted to turn back when we saw the limos and camera flashes, but I’m a blogger! That means jeans are the perfect ensemble for all occasions! (And also, I like superheroes.)

Mission Park is an independent movie about Boston superheroes, written by Chip Perro. Superteam Tessa Faux, Apple Orchard, Timothy Note, Victor Strength and Chris Ember dash around Boston fighting crime (except when they’re, you know, causing it), evading the police, protecting the innocent and saving the world. The story hinges on an Evil Corporation who commissions an artist to create the perfect work of art, a painting so aesthetically perfect that everyone who sees it immediately gets superpowers.  It’s hard not to be reminded of the Monty Python sketch about the funniest joke in the world as the artist finishes her masterpiece and keels over with newfound superpower.

Mission Park is the first of six planned movies, each one to focus on a specific character from the superteam. I’m hoping that later movies will explain some of the ill-defined powers the superfriends have. I’m also hoping that Victor Strength, underused both for the character’s superstrength powers and the actor’s ability to deliver superhero apocalypse lines believably, will have a bigger role.

Ensemble movies are hard because there’s a limited amount of time to develop so many characters. Each superfriend had a catchphrase or overwhelming character trait, so I was never left wondering who someone was, but there wasn’t much growth and change, either.

Tessa Faux, the oversexed vigilante, is racking up body count or bedpost notches in every scene. Every supergroup needs one character who’s ruled by sex drive, and bonus points to Chip Perro for making Mission Park’s playboy a girl. But, meanwhile Note’s girlfriend also tries (desperately and unsuccessfully) to drag him to bed, and every girl in Boston tries (desperately and unsuccessfully) to sleep with Ember. Too many girls chasing the male leads for sex started to have a male MarySue feel.

I forget the exact wording, but I think there’s a theater maxim if the audience sees a gun in the first act, there will be a shot fired in the second act. I guess the corrollary to that is when a character keeps saying that now’s not the time for foul language and that she never swears, you know an F-bomb is coming. I was not disappointed.

The story’s final resolution was… odd. I’m ok with superheroes who cause massive collatoral damage and leave high body counts. (Bethie: But I wish they didn’t kill everybody in the lab!) I’m also ok with superheroes who decide to give the world superpowers and trust to individual conscience to keep the world safe. But, like chardonnay and raw cookie dough, sometimes two things I like don’t work well together.

The story of Mission Park was endearing and frustrating by turns, but it was always visually interesting.  Rick and Chip Perro aren’t sneaky about greenscreening. Characters appear with colored outlines in front of hand-drawn backgrounds or still photographs of Boston scenes.  An overturned car, used for cover in a shootout, bears a distinct resemblance to one of my nephew’s toys. The final result is a perfect format for the magical realism of superheroes.

Dear editor,

Thank you for considering me as a recipient of your rejection letter. I received an overwhelming response from many talented publications, and I reviewed them all carefully before making any decision. Unfortunately, your letter does not suit my present needs.

I wish you all the best in your continued search for an author to reject.

Sincerely,

Meg

I got this sticker from my dad the other day.

Now I just have to find the guys from The Kartel and steal one of their hats, and I’m all set to be an old-time reporter!

So my favorite Facebook game, MyTribe recently added sending gifts and begging for gifts, and that’s pretty much the day I lost interest in the game. It was extra frustrating because there were so many great ways MyTribe could have implemented social trading — trading island resources and crops, for example — but instead it went the way of FarmVille spamming.

MyTribe also has collections made of random drops now, but I haven’t seen them add anything to gameplay, so virtual packratting doesn’t appeal to me. I’d like at least a veneer of gameplay over the acquisition of imaginary items. I mean, I’ll still rerun Van Cleef a dozen times to get the whole set of matching Defias armor…

But… I started playing MyTribe again because there are new mysteries to unlock. Flotsam’s Call (or as I like to call it, the Hatch), is the first of six new mysteries, so start building your Great Ark now to get to a new island with three new mysteries.

Solving Flotsam’s Call takes advantage of the new crafting recipes. Crafting was a great addition, I tend to like crafting (If I’m not wearing the Defias leather, I’ll endlessly mine and level my blacksmithing to craft another complete set of armor) and it adds a little bit of individuality to your tribe’s island. You’ll need to craft 4 torches, so to solve the mystery, you’ll need the recipe for torches (found under Supplies, then Decorations, then Decorative), 40 wood and 40 mushrooms. Then place one torch in each hole in the hatch. The reward is an increased drop rate for regular and silver crates and barrels, a nice bonus if you are interested in completed collections.

To open the Jewel Vault (because, seriously, what tropical island doesn’t have a jewel vault?), you’ll need to find four gems, one each from the Common, Uncommon, Rare and Scarce categories. Apply these gems to clothing, and dress your tribespeople in their sparkly new power-up clothes.

It seems you can use the same tribesperson wearing different clothes each time to unlock the mystery, but that even if he’s wearing two or more gems at a time, he can’t fulfill two or more requirements at once.

As a reward, you’ll get four new gems. Any one know if these are the same four every time? You’ll also be able to remove gems from clothing by putting a gem-wearing tribesperson on the Jewel Vault. So, hey, getting gems stuck on clothing isn’t a design flaw! You just need the Jewel Vault mystery!

More mysteries will be out on August 23rd.

What do you think? Are you excited about the new MyTribe  mysteries, or burned out on all the giftspam?

When I wasn’t teaching or running around Manhattan with packs of teenagers, I checked out The Daring Game For Girls on the DS. I know this is the girl-player stereotype, but I just can’t overstate how important a customizable avatar is for making me feel connected to the game. I felt a bit guilty playing demos at E3 and, as the demonstrator told me about system reqs and combat styles, I’d ask if I could change my battle bikini, but The Daring Game For Girls is, well, for girls.

So I was pleased to see a variety of coloring in the four choices for your avatar, but disappointed that race seemed to be the only distinguishing characteristic. I’d have liked to choose my hair and my clothes, or just been given some differing accessories, so I didn’t feel like I was choosing between Blonde, Hispanic, Asian or Black, but between, say, Artist, Tomboy, Bookworm, etc. This disappointing start set the tone for a well-intentioned but ultimately flat game.

Regardless of which ‘toon you choose, your character has recently moved to a new town, and you parents promise to take you on a super exciting trip, if you can achieve Girl Scout-style badges in different areas, like life skills, arts & literature, world knowledge, sports & games, adventure and ‘girl lore’, and make enough money to fund your trip.

To do this, you’ll play a bunch of minigames based on summertime activities and friendly interactions. You might plant seeds (and you won’t even have to harass your friends to water them) or help a friend find missing homework or jump rope. You can make and sell lemonade and craft projects to earn money. There’s enough variety in the items that the game avoided the awful cycle of making money to buy materials to craft items to make money to buy materials…

Crafting puzzles were a slightly less sadistic version of building in Lost in Blue 2. (I guess Cooking Mama has ruined me for games that are essentially tracing a stylus along a dotted line.) The items for the collection missions respawned fast enough to avoid frustration, but there wasn’t much difference between walking back and forth looking for feathers, or between walking back and forth looking for science homework. Overall, the minigames lived up to the game’s promises of female protagonists and family-friendly activities, but they weren’t particularly challenging, innovative or even fun. They felt more like phoned-in mini-versions of other popular DS puzzles.  I think it takes more than the absence of boobs and beer to make a really good game for preteen girls.

If the female-empowerment message is supposed to validate a pretty underwhelming collection of minigames, what about the other messages in the game? What about the stereotypes in the game, the shy glasses-wearing girl who does literature trivia or the black girl who only wants to play double-dutch? What about the in-game warnings that caving and fire-starting are dangerous should not be tried at home, which seems to defeat the whole girl-power theme of the game? Be daring with your stylus only!

And what is up with the friendship bracelets? Throughout the game, you’ll meet shy or suspicious girls who don’t automatically warm to your friendly overtures, and the solution is to give them a bracelet and automatically become friends. I don’t know if the message here is trust people who give you stuff or maybe gifts are the same thing as affection or just girls are shallow, but either way, I don’t like it.  I’m confused that we should read realism into girls starting campfires or exploring, but not into little girls trading trust and affection for jewelry.

Overall, The Daring Game of Girls gets close to success on gameplay and close on theme, but ultimately falls flat on both.

The last few days of school had a lot of angst for my students as summer couples separated. I always enjoy being the older confidante in teenage adventures, but this particular situation reminded me so much of being exactly my students’ age and meeting a certain British exchange student on a similar program. And yes, the relationship went exactly the way everyone (except me) knew it would: Angst, bad poetry, and occasional transatlantic phone calls until, you know, school and computer games and boys who were actually around got in the way.

When I was in Los Angeles a few months ago, I was at a party talking to a guy about the internet and indie entertainment and the long tail (Do I know how to party, or what?), and the example he used for web movies going mainstream was Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog and the Evil League of Evil, and Lord Stabbington, and I might have started shrieking. Just a little bit.

“LORD STABBINGTON! NO WAY! THAT’S STEPHEN‘S MOVIE!!! I had the biggest crush on him when I was seventeen! We totally held hands once! And he wrote me an email and signed it ‘Love’!” I realized at this point that jumping up and down and shrieking may not be the social norm. “I mean, uh, yes, I’m familiar with Joss Whedon and Dr. Horrible. You were saying?”

This type of reaction is probably why I don’t get invited to more parties.

And, kids, I hope that’s how your summer romances work out. I hope that years after your conversations about Film and Writing and Art,  you become a struggling writer and when you hear about a filmmaker, it makes you smile.

And I hope you’re better at parties than I am.

Tonight was the end-of-term dance for the students, and some of the responsible adults also grabbed the chance to dance around the gym/auditorium, gossip by the water fountain, hang out with the smokers on the stairs and generally act like high school kids.  I’m not hip to Euro club music (or whatever that was), but there was still at least one song I could really dance to.

Student: Miss Meg, where did you learn the ‘Poker Face’ dance?

Meg: Oh, I picked it up from the Dance Central booth at E3.

Eye-Rolling Student: No, be serious, how did you really learn it?

The other day, I had my students make menus and play restaurant. I’d put them in groups and let the kids choose whether to be waitstaff or customers, polite or rude. Usually this class is le tired, so I was quite pleased to see the kids create roles as flamboyent European maître d’s or bored, gum-snapping waitresses.

I was walking around the room, proud of my awesome ESL lesson, when my friend Lynn sent a mayday text asking where a friend of hers could find, um, certain Western feminine products in Beijing. I immediately texted back subway directions, with the additional notes about the secret DVD shop in the basement of a menswear shop nearby.

I have a unique skillset.

I’m teaching at an ESL summer camp for the next two weeks. This school is as poorly organized as a typical Chinese “English center”, which allows me to test my theory that I would absolutely love that life, if only I could eat decent food after a crazy day. And it’s perfect for me right now, the epic rawness of teenage emotions (Teenagers, Cicero and Meg love the superlative), working with other ESL adventurers, and complete, bone-aching exhaustion at the end of the day.

A new group of students was dropped on me the other day, so I set them up to play Who Do You Love?, my go-to game for surprise classes. After a few minutes of dead, sleepy stares, the teenagers caught on and were soon tormenting their classmates and testing the limits of appropriate classroom vocab.

“I love people who wear thongs!”one of the boys called out.

I was halfway through my lecture on appropriate classroom vocab when I realized they’ve got a British English textbook, and everyone but me thought we were talking about flip-flops.

Tom Lasseter, who replaced Tim Johnson as the China correspondent for McClatchy, mentioned today on his blog that Beijing plans to renovate all the hutongs around the Drum and Bell Towers. Renovation is hardly news in Beijing, where the pre-Olympic facelift hasn’t stopped and chai (Chinese for demolish) regularly marks aging walls for demolition. When I lived in Beijing in 2008, I took as many photos as I could of buildings with chai on the side, trying to record as much of old Beijing as I could.

This news hits home, though, because I lived on Brick Workers’ Lane, a hutong in the shadow of the Drum Tower. I was told it was named because it was originally housing for the builders working on the drum tower, and I loved the connection to the past as we made our way down the twisting pathways. Lasseter says that at least one block’s already been razed, with plans for more to go, and I wonder if WarCraft Man or Grandma Waitress or any of my old neighbors have been moved on.

I liked the neighbors in the hutong. I was still a tourist attraction — like in Yantai, I often found neighborhood children hanging on my gate waiting to see the white girl — but the hutong grandmas would fight through my toneless Mandarin and limited vocabulary to ask if I was warm enough, or cool enough, or wanted to drink some tea. I’ll never understand the Chinese love of tea in hot weather, but it was lovely to be asked. Especially after Stick had gone home, and I was alone again.

I loved the area, down back alleys to the small grocery or noodle shop, or out of the maze of twisty little passages and across Dianamen Wai Dajie to the real brewed coffee and rooftap bars of Qianhai.  I loved walking home with takeout Xinjiang barbeque and beer, and passing Beijing-ren who were living just as Beijing familes have lived for generations.

It’s sad that this neighborhood will be over soon.

Via McClatchy blog: China Rises (well worth a visit for the hutong snapshots)