Sorry about the lack of updates this week — I just staved off CMS apocalypse.  Next week should see more of a return to normal.

Salon has a piece today about the David Foster Wallace suicide.  It’s worth a read.

I have to say, it was a bit of a relief to turn away from politics. Limiting myself to a few blogs in the morning, and no cable news coverage, allowed me to get a much-needed break from the day-to-day back and forth that was grinding away at my soul.

The polls seem to be trending in Obama’s favor — but as with McCain’s advantage two weeks ago, any kind of advantage in popular opinion so far out from Nov. 4 (which would mean any day other than Nov. 4) should really be taken with a grain of salt. This is going to bounce back and forth both ways until the election, and then it’ll come down to enthusiasm, GOTV, and Diebold’s representatives in Ohio.

Politico has a story up today about how race is impacting Democratic voters and their support for Obama. This is hardly a surprise, after all. An acquaintance of mine who has long been involved with political campaigns (and ran for congress himself many years ago) told me as early as last spring that this race will come down to whether or not white working class voters can bring themselves to vote for a black guy. If anything, this Politico story proves the point, but I if Obama’s core supporters — ie young people — are as underrepresented as I suspect they are in polling, the level of disadvantage may not be what people presume. I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m just saying that the outcome maybe surprising. We’ll see.

Robin Williams, who is rarely funny these days, had a moment of brilliance on the Late Show with David Letterman last night where he addressed the greatest fears of these voters about Obama. I’d post the YouTube if it was available, but it made me laugh. Let’s just say Williams revealed that Obama is secretly DMX.

I’m still kind of bummed about David Foster Wallace’s suicide. Stories about him continue to trickle out over the Internet and depress me whenever I read them.

I’ve been playing the SOCOM: Confrontation beta all week. It’s got a lot of problems still, but it’s more playable. If only my damn Bluetooth headset wouldn’t keep running out batteries …

David Foster Wallace, author of such books as Infinite Jest, Girl With Curious Hair, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again, is dead, of suicide.

Not sure how this news hits me — I greatly enjoyed Wallace’s essays and short stories. Infinite Jest was something I struggled to finish, and ultimately abandoned, but I appreciate his talents and the things he brought to literary fiction (such as copious footnotes). He certainly had great ideas and a unique command of language — he was a huge young literary star in the mid-1990’s only to be supplanted by David Eggers, Michael Chabon and the young writers of the McSweeny’s movement. But you couldn’t have had McSweeny’s without Wallace to pave the way.

One wonders why he decided to take his own life. It’s saddening, and of course, it adds to my overall sense of melancholy.

I’ve been waiting anxiously to get into the SOCOM: Confrontation beta for PS3.  There were actually three reasons why I even bothered to buy a PS3 — 1) Blu-Ray, 2) SOCOM, 3) Metal Gear Solid 4.  Alas, the beta has been an unmitigated disaster.  By all accounts, the game is broken — and it’s yet another PS3 game without adequate friends list support.  The PS3 is a great system on a technical level, and the built-in WIFI and networking is much, much better than the XBOX 360’s (you have to buy a $100 add-on if you want WIFI access).  But without the integrated gaming service that XBOX Live has, PS3 is just a mess.

I can’t even believe they’re bothering with beta tests.  I’ve been in two XBOX 360 betas (Halo 3 and COD 4), and they both went smoothly (well, the Halo 3 beta had about 48 hours of trouble, but after that was well-handled).  I purchased the online PS3 magazine Qore to get access to the beta, and Sony has now decided not to let you download the beta through Qore, but are instead sending out codes via email.  I really don’t have a lot of faith in this crew to actually get the codes out.  And they certainly haven’t done a very good job of communicating the change in distribution method to their customers.

Seriously, the should hire me to do their communications.  My content editors at work are a lot better informed than Sony’s paying customers.

But besides this, word on the street is that the game is marginally better looking than its PS3 ancestors, and that in terms of online functionality, it actually has less than the original SOCOM games.  I guess this is what happens when you hire a PSP developer with no online gaming experience to develop a triple-a title for a major console.

Can Sony screw up the PS3 any more than they already have?

I will not blog about Sarah Palin … I will not blog about Sarah Palin …

I just came across this draft of a post I meant to publish back in January, but someone how never got around to it.  So here it is, one year late!  My best list for 2008 to come in only a few short months …

Well, the year has come and gone, and I played more games than any adult human with children should. The XBOX 360 is still my primary platform, although I’ve recently branched out onto the Nintendo DS, which I’m finding to be the gaming equivalent of the iPod —  well engineered extremely cool. Still, most of my gaming has been on XBOX 360, so that’s my focus for this “Best of” list.

So without further adieu, here are the games I enjoyed the most this year:

5. Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

4. Halo 3

3. Call of Duty 4

2. Elder Scrolls: The Shivering Isles

1. The Orange Box

Biggest disappointments:

1. Mass Effect
2. Bioshock

Best games on other platforms:
1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass
3. Resistance: Fall of Man

Last night, while Tina and I were trying to watch Alan Ball’s incredibly tedious, idiotic vampire drama, True Blood, we heard a knock at the door. And then, suddenly, the door knob began to violently shake, as if someone was trying to get into our apartment.

I jumped up and quickly locked the deadbolt.

“Who’s there?” I said, cautiously.

No response.  Then the door knob began to shake again, as they continued trying to get into the apartment.  It continued for another moment, and then whoever it was left and began trying to get into another apartment.

“Maybe it was a drunk who got lost?” Tina wondered.

Occam’s razor would say that was probably the case.  But I’m not so sure.

There are times when you realize that living in the city isn’t as safe a proposition as you sometimes think.

It’s my strong belief that John McCain and Sarah Palin are not serious about changing this country’s course. They have no policy prescriptions for the serious problems that face this country outside of the same failing Republican policies of the last 8 years, and if you want to go back further, back to the Gingrich revolution of 1994. Cut taxes for corporations and the super-rich, cut social programs that help the poor, and push a privatization of public schools so that tax money meant for a free and non-partisan public education can be diverted to religious private schools. Oh yeah, and engage in more expensive “preemptive war” financed by our Chinese creditors, pretend Global Warming isn’t real and that peak oil is not upon us.

In regards to their personal qualities, Sarah Palin clearly supported earmarks before she was against it, and abused her office as governor to try to fire her ex-brother-in-law based on a personal vendetta she had against him, and not based on his professional performance. She tried to get books banned from her local public library in Wasilla, Alaska, and when that failed, she tried to get the librarian fired. This is the same kind of politics we’ve enjoyed during the last 8 years of the Bush administration — policies, such as what was practiced at the Gonzalez Justice Department, where qualified lawyers for non-political, career civil service position were denied jobs simply because they were Democrats. These are the same kinds of political methods used in the third world, and any hope of getting back to a less politicized government bureaucracy goes out the window the day McCain/Palin are elected. Of course, these aren’t documented facts, they’re “smears.” Just Obama and the Demoncrats trying to besmirch the reputation of yet another morally upstanding Republican.

John McCain, the “maverick” of old, is just another Republican politician, running endless smear ads in attempt to emasculate his opponent, turn him into an object of national derision, just as was done with John Kerry and Al Gore in the last two cycles. Obama is a celebrity, he has no honor, he would lose a war to win an election, he called Sarah Palin a “pig,” blah, blah, blah. But what policies does John McCain stand for? To listen to his convention speech, he stands for “change” broadly, admits the Republican party fucked up, but hey, they’re Republicans. The Presidency is their possession by right. Trust us guys, we’ll fix things if you give us four more years. No worries — forget that Bush’s attempts at fixing the economy have done absolutely nothing. Forget that as health care costs spiral out of control, the Republican administration and congress did nothing when they controlled all three branches of government.

This election is becoming a replay of 2000 and 2004. The Republicans have no record to run on, they’ve had no legislative or policy successes on the domestic front, and the surge has only been a success if you supported the war all along. Our nation is in shambles, the military is strained to its limits, and my kids are billions in debt to China. We’re supposed to believe that John McCain, a man who doesn’t sweat the details, Sarah Palin, governor of a state with a population smaller than that of any major metropolitan city, are going to right the ship? Especially, with the same Bush-era bureaucrats and political appointees running the government? He says Democrats would serve in his administration, but would the Republican party machine let that happen. But that’s the same bullshit rhetoric that Bush, the “uniter not a divider” used back in 2000.

Come on, wake up. McCain is a third term for Bush. Our country is slipping into the third world, the middle class is dying out, the dollar has been overtaken by the euro as the international currency of choice, and we’re going to support a ticket because the Presidential nominee is a “maverick” POW and the VP is a “soccer mom,” a “regular gal” who knows what our lives are like?

The media vetting about Sarah Palin is about figuring out who she is, what she stands for. And the narrative doesn’t hold up to the facts. But what does it matter? Americans don’t like facts, and the Republicans are great at spinning narratives. In the comments, James believes that the Republicans will win based on narrative, on the Democratic attacks on Palin failing to stick — and if things go like they did in 2000 and 2004, they very well might. McCain and Palin make us feel good about being Americans, not like Barack Obama and his elitist policy positions. Who needs a policy position when you have a lot of spunk?

It’s the McCain/Palin apologists, the same people who were Bush/Cheney apologists, that are wrong time and again, and yet they’re perpetually rewarded for being wrong. Our country is in such bad shape after Bush that the same people who insisted and yelled and screamed that Bush was the only one to see us through the Iraq War, are the same people now saying that McCain is the only one who can right the ship. They were wrong then, and they were wrong now.

I take no pleasure in saying that if McCain is elected the middle class will continue to decline, the national debt will continue to swell, and American greatness will continue to be a thing of the past. The Republican party, the party that hates government a matter of principle, is not the party that should be in control of the government when the crises of our day require government action. From 9/11, to Katrina, to the economy, the Bush administration and the Republicans always made the wrong choices, and those choices have lead us to wear we are now.

But hey, who cares if they’re competent? They’re more likable, less elitist, why they’re just good folks. Not like those babykilling Demoncrats! Who needs having uppity, educated people in power, when we could have McCain and Palin? They may be in the tank for Big Oil, but drilling off the coast and in ANWR will fix all our energy woes. They may be in the tank for Wall Street, but privatizing Social Security and putting our futures at risk in the stock market is the key to salvation. McCain likes to gamble, so we should gamble the national retirement insurance plan in the always stable and reliable stock market!

Watching the same narrative play out again and again is getting really tiresome. How many times does it take before people realize that following the same failed Republican policies will lead to the same catastrophic failures? It’s time to change power in Washington and give the Democrats a shot at fixing the government. The Republicans couldn’t do it in 8 years, why not give the other party a chance to see if they can turn things around?

Anyway, the point here is that the election is making me seriously depressed — it’s seeping into my subconscious and making it hard for me to stay positive about my own life. The only thing I can do to fix this is to focus on things outside of politics — to try to ignore the election and let things play out as they will. So, I’m going to impose a self-inflicted ban on political blogging and blog-reading for a few weeks. I’ll resume again during the debates, but the day-to-day coverage of the campaign narrative is just too bleak a hobby to pursue for now.