Muxing Things Up a Bit

Credit goes to Mechberg, friend to children everywhere, for bringing Muxtape.com to my attention. Just the cassette imagery of the site is enough to give me nostalgia pangs for the good old days of making mixes on tapes!

For me, making mixes in college was frequently a procrastination technique, something to do when I really should have been doing something else. It was also often a chance to re-discover music I loved but hadn’t listened to in a while. That much still holds true, and the first song on my muxtape is from one of my all-time favorite albums, but I probably hadn’t listened to that song in years.

Also, making mixes back in the days of cassette tapes had complications that CD mix-making doesn’t have, like wanting to fill up each side of the tape as much as possible, without leaving too much dead space at the end, and while maintaining the flow and momentum of the songs. Oh, the agonizing decisions about what to include and what had to be cut! Looking back, I think these limitations somehow actually made the process more fun, since I had to think that much more about what I was doing. It certainly made the process more time-consuming, which was a definite plus. I feel sorry for college kids these days with nothing to do but drag the songs onto an iTunes playlist and hit Burn Disc. It takes no time at all! No thought! Where’s the art, the craft?!

Anyway, here's a little something I threw together. 12 songs isn't a whole lot to work with, but I had fun with it anyway. If you make one yourself, post the link for me to check out.

http://carolyn.muxtape.com/

Lost: Via Domus

More like Lost: Via Dumbass LOL amirite?!?! Lost: Via Domus is a game in which...well, for starters, it's barely even a game at all. It's more like a checklist of inputs that you enter using a gamepad. There is, at least for me, no enjoyment to be gleaned from the "gameplay" of Lost: Via Domus. There are only two reasons to play it--only one if you're not a fan of the show. The first reason is that, yeah, if you're a fan of Lost, it's kinda cool to walk around inside the hatch. The second reason is damn, those are some easy points.

It's especially disappointing to me because, while watching Lost, I was frequently reminded of some of my favorite adventure game experiences, and Myst in particular. Sure enough, according to Lostpedia (which can't possibly be wrong), it seems that Myst has been an influence on at least some of the show's writers. A show that has so many adventure game elements built right into it has great potential as the basis for an adventure game. Unfortunately, Lost: Via Domus fails utterly to capitalize on this potential. Firstly, the puzzles, so vital to any engaging adventure game experience, suck. (There's really only one kind of puzzle in the game, involving these panels into which you need to place fuses which you find all over the island. They start out simple and become increasingly complex but never become interesting.)

Equally disappointingly, the story sucks. It takes the form of a series of Lost episodes, and just like actual Lost episodes, each game episode involves a flashback to an event that happened to your character before he boarded that fateful flight. But the game seems to miss the whole point for these flashbacks. The reason why these flashbacks are so effective on the show is that they provide insight into the characters' pasts that helps us understand them in the present, that illuminates their behavior and their interaction with the other survivors. It's that interaction with other survivors, the complex web of relationships that's formed between them on the island, that makes Lost so compelling. And here, your interactions with other characters couldn't feel more rote or insignificant. Sure, each character does their schtick. Sawyer uses lots of nicknames. Locke says "Don't tell me what I can't do!" Charlie sings "Hey All Everybody!" But there are no meaningful relationships formed whatsoever. When the game hints in the later stages at some sort of connection between your character and Kate, it comes across as ridiculous, because you've hardly interacted with her, or anyone else, for any length of time.

Normally I'm opposed to using FAQs, but that's because normally I find that they take some of the fun out of playing a game. There's no fun to be found in playing Lost: Via Domus to begin with, so after a short while I resorted to a FAQ just to make sure I didn't miss any achievements and could spare myself having to play through any part of the game again. The only thing Lost: Via Domus gets right is some of the locations, particularly the all-important hatch. The gameplay is tedious and dreary, the characters are completely underdeveloped (and some of them look downright freakish), and the relationships are non-existent. Mercifully, the whole game can be completed in just a few hours.

Review score: 4/ 4 8 15 16 23 42

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Condemned 2: Bloodshot

Condemned was one of the most impressive early games for the Xbox 360. The first-person combat really packed a wallop, and the game was also an impressive piece of art design, with extremely creepy, gritty environments and chilling sound effects throughout. Now the sequel, Condemned 2: Bloodshot, is here, and it's both a step forward and a step back from its predecessor. The combat has seen some nice improvements, but the story and overall scariness of the game fall short.

In the original game, you played as Ethan Thomas, an SCU agent who was tracking a serial killer who had framed him for murder. Also, there was some goofball nonsense about Ethan maybe having some sort of superhuman powers, but the game didn't really develop this too much so I kinda forgot about it. The second game goes way more into this sort of comic book territory than the first game did, culminating in a final confrontation with a villain whose lair would make a Bond villain proud. You wind up taking on the Oro, a secret organization who believe that sounds can cause people to commit evil acts, and, having heard Avril Lavigne's song "Girlfriend" about a thousand times while playing Burnout Paradise and now wanting to kill Avril Lavigne myself, I can see their point. Personally, I wish the series had stayed closer to the realm of reality, as I think a series of games about a forensics officer who actually solves somewhat realistic crimes would have been a whole lot more interesting than a series about a cop who discovers he can emit noises that kill people. But maybe that's just me. In any case, while the first game's story certainly had its shortcomings, your pursuit of Serial Killer X made for a strong throughline. The plot here feels really weak by comparison.

When the game starts, 11 months after the conclusion of the first, Ethan is just a shadow of his former self. A very drunk shadow. He's such a drunk that you actually benefit from drinking liquor from bottles you just find lying around, as this steadies your shaky hands while aiming a gun. Condemned 2 is probably the first game in which at one point your objective is "Defeat Alcohol Demon." Lots of people struggle with their personal demons when it comes to alcohol, but none quite as literally as Ethan Thomas. Perhaps to go along with Ethan's new hardcore image, he is no longer voiced by the likable Greg Grunberg of TV's Heroes. That's too bad, as the new guy (Andre Sogliuzzo) just tries too hard to convey what a nihilistic, alcoholic badass the new, unimproved Ethan Thomas is.

Throughout the game, you'll explore a bunch of dimly lit places, including a creepy museum, a creepy doll factory and a creepy bowling alley, though none of the places in the game are quite as creepy as the coolest locations from the first game. (Creepy department store, anyone?) In these places you'll encounter plenty of drunken hobos and people who fight like drunken hobos. Even the museum security guards fight like drunken hobos. The people you fight make all kinds of awesome guttural exclamations and swearing noises that sound so authentic, you'll almost think they got actual crazy people to provide these voices. And the combat itself is as good as the sound effects that accompany it. You can clobber people with your bare fists, but you're usually better off picking up something lying around, be it a steam pipe, battle axe, bowling pin, or what have you. Each item you grab can only dish out so much punishment to the homicidal homeless people of the city before it breaks, so you'll have to keep picking up new items as you progress. The combat in Condemned 2 hits as hard as ever, and there are a number of nifty combos you can now pull off if you can avoid being hit by your wildly flailing foes. There are also brutal new finishing moves which allow you to use aspects of the environment to finish off weakened enemies. Many players felt that the combat in the original game was too basic, and that as a result it got repetitive by game's end. The added depth to the combat in Condemned 2 helps keep the combat enjoyable throughout.

There's also a bit more emphasis on gunplay this time around than there was in the original, particularly during a few sections where you have to fight off assault-rifle-wielding agents. These sections, while not quite as hard-hitting as the close-range combat in the game, are competently done. The fact that you can blow dudes' heads clean off, though, seems like an unnecessary byproduct of the game's desire to come across as even more brutally violent than its predecessor. Also, your opponents will make good use of cover, kicking tables over and crouching behind them and so forth, and while this is kinda cool, it also calls attention to the fact that you can't do anything like that yourself.

In between all the fighting, you'll also periodically have to examine crime scenes. Sometimes these sections are fun, and sometimes they involve a bit too much pixel-hunting as you try to figure out exactly what it is you're supposed to look at. Sometimes they're humorously easy, as when looking at a victim's cap and needing to decide if it's a policeman's cap, fireman's cap, hard hat, or baseball cap, and at other times they're a good bit tougher. (Blood spatter analysis? Do I look like Dexter to you?) Also, you'll sometimes be given a choice between three possible questions to ask your partner Rosa to advance the investigation, and some of the choices are so boneheadedly hilarious that I wanted to select them just to see how Rosa would react. "Have human beings even been around for 2000 years?" "How do you spell Oro?" You're rated on the accuracy of your investigation, as well as your performance in completing other objectives throughout the level, and as you progress through the game you earn upgrades based on your performance like added health, a stun gun, and so on.

The game will probably take you about 12 hours or so to complete. After that, you unlock FPS mode, which lets you use guns throughout the game, but that kind of seems to take away a huge part of what makes Condemned Condemned. If you want to play a first-person shooter, play Call of Duty 4. There are also some multiplayer modes available, but they leave a lot to be desired. If you want to play a good multiplayer game, play Call of Duty 4.

Many players will probably find Condemned 2 to be an improvement on its predecessor thanks to the deeper combat system. For me personally, aspects like mood and story were at least as crucial to making the first one a great experience, and because this one can't match up in terms of creepiness and because the plot goes so far into typical video-game sci-fi you-are-the-prophesied-hero territory when I was hoping for a series about a cop who hunts serial killers, I came away from Bloodshot a bit disappointed overall. But there's still a good deal of impact to the game's combat, making it a worthwhile playthrough for anyone who wants to punch people in the face without actually punching people in the face.

7/10 whacks with a foosball rod

Let's Call This the Flashback

With all the Lost I've been watching, I've taken to imagining my life frequently being interrupted by dramatic flashbacks that reveal previously unknown aspects of my past that are somehow relevant given whatever challenging situation I currently find myself in. For instance, while faced with a really difficult choice between two products at the grocery store, I might suddenly remember that time my dad conned me into giving him one of my kidneys. Oh, wait, that wasn't me. That was a character on Lost.

Anyway, it's no joke that I am in a challenging situation at the moment. Still job-hunting, and putting lots of effort into it, but it's taking a lot longer than I would have liked. I've even found myself in the humbling position of asking friends for a little money to help until I'm on my feet again. How did I get into this position? It's not a particularly interesting story, but I'll tell it anyway.

Woooooooooooooooooooosh! (That's the Lost flashback sound effect.)

By last summer, I'd been working for the same company for nearly three years. Things at work were pretty okay, I guess. I basically liked the company and the people I worked with, and I was good at my job.

Then, sometime in July, I got hit by a pretty nasty case of depression. To be frank, being depressed isn't something particularly new or unusual for me. I think that I've struggled with depression in greater or lesser degrees for a large part of my life as a result of my gender issues. I mean, there's just no getting around the fact that not being able to be the person you feel you really are every single day kinda sucks, and some days the weight in my chest when I wake up in the mornings is heavier than it is on other days. My least favorite thing about being depressed is the way it makes me feel kind of self-absorbed. It's harder to focus out on other things when you're depressed, much like, if you have a knife in your chest, it's probably hard to think about much other than the fact that you've got a knife in your chest. And I know I'd be better at everything if I didn't feel this way. I'd be a better writer, a better employee, a better friend. But still, at least I've always managed to pull through, to do what needed to be done, to force myself to get out of bed no matter how tough it was.

But this was an unusually rough period, where getting out of bed was suddenly more difficult than it had ever been before. And I found myself running a few minutes late to work on a few occasions. I was promptly pulled aside and warned about this, and I apologized, sincerely feeling bad about what had happened, and communicated to my managers that I was struggling with depression and was seeking help for it, which I was.

Then it happened one more time, and they let me go. That was that.

That sucked, no doubt about it. But I immediately tried to see it as something that could end up being for the best. The reality was that, while I liked the company and my coworkers, I'd started to find the job a bit dull. It was rare for anything at work to really challenge or stimulate me anymore. What's more, I wasn't seeing opportunities for growth in the workplace, and I really didn't feel that the company was paying me what I should have been making considering the amount of time I'd been with them. There was certainly no doubt that my next job could be a considerable improvement.

And it was. I found a job that was more stimulating and challenging, and that paid considerably more. The job was a seasonal position with a company that's significantly busier around the holidays than it is throughout the rest of the year, but I was told from the beginning that there was a chance I would be hired on full-time after the holidays were over. I knew this wasn't something I could count on, but I busted my ass at this job, and I know I impressed the managers, because many of them started talking to me in ways that made it clear they felt I'd be sticking around.

But alas, things didn't go as expected, and when news came down that I wasn't being kept on permanently, many of those managers seemed as surprised and upset about it as I felt. Every last one of them offered to give me a glowing reference and wished me the best of luck in my job search.

My search got off to a promising start. Almost immediately, I had the interview for a technical writing position that I mentioned in an earlier blog post. Of course, that didn't end as well as I would have liked, but still, it was encouraging. However, since then, I've had a lot of phone interviews and face-to-face interviews and I really feel like I'm putting my best foot forward, but landing a job just hasn't happened yet. On Thursday I have another phone interview for a job that sounds pretty cool, but tomorrow I'll also be dropping off applications at a nearby Starbucks and other retail stores, as I'm at the point now where I absolutely positively need to start pulling in some money.

Admittedly I feel pretty desperate--I wouldn't be applying at places like Starbucks otherwise--but I still feel like in the long run all of this might end up being for the best. I'd gotten complacent in my job, but I wasn't really happy, nor was I earning what I should have been, so at this point, even if I have to earn even less for a while, I think I have the motivation to keep looking until I find a job I'm a bit more satisfied with. This is certainly the biggest failure of my adult life, and I admit I've felt some shame and embarrassment about it all, but I know that it's not really a reflection of who I am, but rather of something I was struggling with. I think I've learned a lot from this experience, and that when I do get back on my feet, I'll be better than ever.

And as bad as things get, I can always be thankful that at least my dad has never conned me into giving him one of my kidneys.

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As an aside, a friend recently recommended getrichslowly.org, and I wanted to take a moment to recommend it myself, as it's quickly become a favorite of mine. Interestingly, not long before I lost my job, I'd really started to try getting a hold on my finances, and I think I was applying a lot of the common-sense stuff that J.D. talks about on Get Rich Slowly, but it's really nice to have it reinforced and expanded on by someone who's done a lot more reading about finances than I have. The website is really readable because J.D. doesn't talk down to the reader about this stuff. He comes across as just a regular guy who, like many of us, had struggled with money, and he talks about how he got things under control. There's also just enough of his own personality in the pieces to make things interesting. It's obvious that he's struggled with social anxiety and other challenges, for instance, and that in some ways tackling his money issues and tackling his personal issues have been related endeavors, and I really like that idea, that personal growth can come out of, or is necessary for, better money management.

I've made a lot of progress in terms of how I handle money, I think. I've cut out lots of unnecessary expenses, cut way down on expenses that aren't unnecessary, and I had started saving and tackling debt, as well as starting to think realistically about how I'm going to pay for this whole ridiculously expensive gender thing that I really need to deal with sooner rather than later. Of course, now that I'm not really making any money at all, things are kind of on hold, but I'm confident that I'm more ready and better equipped to deal with these issues now than I was before.

The Queen of Kong: For a Few Brawlers More

Amidst laying in bed coughing, watching hella Lost and dragging myself off to a few job interviews, I also watched The King of Kong this past week. What a neat little movie. Of course, my interest in video games probably made it more enjoyable, but in fact, I'd recommend it to just about anyone, as it's not just about going for the all-time high score in Donkey Kong. It's about the personalities of two distinctly different people. Steve Wiebe is a likable hero and underdog anyone can root for, and Billy Mitchell, with his hilarious tendency to spout self-aggrandizing statements with the affect of a zen monk, is, to me, a compelling and amusing villain of sorts. "I'm the most seasoned person in the hot sauce chicken wing business."

The movie did make me want to play some arcade-perfect Donkey Kong. DK was always one of my favorite arcade games, and I still think it's one of the very best games of all time. It's so rare for games these days to test one's skill on anything resembling that level. For instance, I got 100% completion in Burnout Paradise this past week as well, but as much as I love that game, I don't feel there's any sort of accomplishment involved there. Just about anyone, if they put enough (read: way too much) time into it, can get 100% completion in Paradise. But you and I could play Donkey Kong for hundreds of hours and never get to the level of play at which people like Wiebe and Mitchell compete. Still, I'd love to have a go and see what my own personal best high score could be.

Unfortunately, inexplicably, there's pretty much no legal way to play arcade-perfect Donkey Kong short of dropping upwards of a thousand bucks on buying a DK machine. You'd think, especially with the film, that there'd be some level of interest in the game that Nintendo could capitalize on to make a few bucks, but the only version readily available right now, via the Wii's Virtual Console, is the NES version, which sucks. It doesn't have the How High Can You Get? screen or the "pie factory" level, so it ain't really Donkey Kong. Of course, plenty of people have bought Donkey Kong on the Virtual Console, because they don't know any better or don't care. It's the same reason so many people go to Starbucks. (The arcade version of Donkey Kong was included in Rare's 1999 Nintendo 64 game Donkey Kong 64, but even that version alters the flow of the game's levels a bit.)



Ah well. I have at least spent some time today playing a Nintendo game, the insanely hyped Super Smash Bros. Brawl. If you're not familiar with this series, the SSB games involve a roster of characters from Nintendo's storied history...Mario, Link, Donkey Kong, and so on...smacking and kicking each other in environments that are also taken from Nintendo's storied history. They're basically Nintendo's big love letter to itself, and as fan service, they're outstanding. As a Nintendo fan myself, I admit I got caught up in the hype and excitement leading up to the game's release. The thing is, as games, despite a multitude of rabid fanboys across the internets declaring Brawl the best game ever, they're just so-so. Playing SSB has reminded me of David Cross' story about having a good time at a Harlow concert until he had a realization. "Wait a second. I hate Harlow."

I don't hate Smash Bros., but it's just really basic. There isn't enough depth to the gameplay to make it rewarding or interesting for me. The only fun I really had with the previous game in the series was when I had a few friends over who were up for some mindless button-mashing fun, because the games are definitely good for some laughs. Especially if a few drinks have been had. Brawl does bring online play to the series so perhaps I'll wrassle up a few friends online and get some mindless enjoyment out of the game that way. And the game is full of awesome unlockables, like the ability to play the lame NES version of Donkey Kong for THIRTY SECONDS! Rad!

Anyway, Lost. Yeah, I finally decided to see what all the fuss is about with that show, seeing as how ABC has put all the episodes up for viewing on their website. The only drawback of watching them on the website is that I have to keep sitting through an ad that makes the mind-boggling claim that, with the inclusion of "stars" like Adam Carolla and Steve Guttenberg, this season of Dancing With the Stars is going to be HOTTER! STEAMIER! SEXIER! than ever before. Yeah, that Adam Carolla is a sexy, sexy man.

What I like most about Lost, not surprisingly, are the elements that feel like something out of an adventure game: the Dharma Initiative stations on the island, the button that may or may not need to be pushed every 108 minutes to save the world, stuff like that. (Also not surprisingly, Lost has just been turned into an adventure game. By all accounts it's a middling game, but I'll probably give it the ol' GameFly whirl anyway once I'm all caught up with the show.) What I don't like about it is how maddeningly little information it doles out in any given episode, but I guess that's how you keep people tuning in.

In other news, I'm stoked about giantbomb.com, the new site from former GameSpot dudes Jeff Gerstmann and Ryan Davis. Not much there yet, but I think when it explodes onto the scene this summer, it's gonna be pretty awesome.

Finally, the job hunt continues. I've had two interviews recently. One of the two jobs is considerably better than the other but beggars can't be choosers. Thank-you cards have been sent, follow-up phone calls placed, and the scouring of craigslist goes on.

Gender Select:

My sense of myself as female is, as you may know, extremely important to me, and, like many women I know who play games, when given the choice between playing as a male character or a female character, all other things being equal, I'll pretty much always go with the female character. Particularly in role-playing games like Oblivion, I just feel a deeper sense of connection to my character that way, and I also really appreciate those rare instances when games with pre-set characters have female characters who are interesting and don't have proportions that would look grotesque on an actual human being. (Alex Roivas in Eternal Darkness is perhaps my favorite female character in a game, but such characters are still all too rare.) However, that's not to say that I feel a particular barrier between myself and my character in those situations when I have to play as a male, which is, let's face it, almost all the time. It's sort of like playing Burnout Paradise, in which you're just a car. I, myself, am not a car, but I still feel every crash in the game pretty intensely. Still, it bugs me when I come away from a game feeling like it would have been pretty easy for the developers to provide the option to play as a female, but they just didn't bother.

I think that, as a very broad generalization that has millions of exceptions, men are a bit more put off by the idea of playing as a woman than women are by the idea of playing as a man, though whether this is because women are inherently more easygoing about this sort of thing, or because of misogyny on the part of those men who have issues playing as a woman, or just because women have been forced to accept that, more often than not, playing a game means playing as a male character, I'm not really sure. And as I said, that's an exceptionally broad generalization. There are plenty of men who regularly play as female characters for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes there's nothing more to it than a sense that if you're going to spend hundreds of hours looking at a character, it might as well be one that you find visually appealing. But there are plenty of more complex reasons behind why some men do this as well. And certainly women will occasionally create male characters, though if I had to guess I'd say this probably happens less frequently than the opposite.

What got me thinking about this was a comment I read from a female gamer in response to this article, an appreciation piece about Gordon Freeman, the protagonist of Valve's exceptional Half-Life games. The piece asserts:

Gordon Freeman’s neutrality of dialogue and lack of overt personality within the game do not make him a non-character, but are in fact his strength. His lack of preconcieved identity provides not a single barrier with which to distance him from the player’s own personality, making him a blank canvas on which they can imprint their own values and outlook. Valve have even made it impossible for the player to ever see Gordon from a third-person perspective, either through cut-scene or reflection, meaning that in no instance does the effect of seeing a character who does not look like themselves pull the player out of the experience of ‘being’ him.

The comment I read about this assertion, which I'm deliberately taking totally out of context because I admit I'm more interested at this point in what it made me think about than what she actually meant, essentially stated that the flaw in this argument was that it was impossible for her to project herself onto Gordon Freeman because Freeman is male. While I would probably have felt a deeper connection to the protagonist of the Half-Life games if that protagonist were female, this argument seemed odd to me, as playing as Gordon Freeman never really impacted my ability to feel engrossed in the story and world of the Half-Life games. But then I realized that it's fully possible that I'm the odd one. People sometimes think that transgendered people have some sort of insightful perspective into gender dynamics, but I usually feel just the opposite, that my own perspective, anyway, is probably pretty limited and distorted, existing, as I do, outside of any gender dynamic I've ever felt at home in.

I guess I just don't feel like gender, while an aspect of our sense of personal identity whose impact cannot be overstated, is the be-all, end-all of our ability to relate to each other as human beings. While I feel deeply that I'm female, there are certainly some men I feel I can relate to pretty well, and plenty of women I can't relate to at all, and my sense is that this is true of most people. And I sometimes think that people give this stuff too much weight, or see barriers between the sexes that don't exist. It's not unusal to hear someone say, of a book written by a man in which the narrator is a woman, that the author didn't convincingly capture the female voice, or to say the opposite about a book written by a woman in which the narrator is a man. (A woman I know recently said she didn't feel that Donna Tartt was entirely convincing in writing from the male perspective in her novel The Secret History, for example.) And sometimes that may be true, but I also think that at times people scrutinize these books more, and latch on to anything that might ring false to them, things that perhaps wouldn't make them bat an eye if the author was actually the same gender as the narrator. Would the narrator of The Secret History have seemed odd to my acquaintance, I wonder, if the book had been written by a man? Or is she right in saying that there's something quintessentially female about the way the book is written, and no man in the history of the world would ever have written a male narrator that way? That's definitely possible.

This higher level of scrutiny is similar, it seems to me, to what many transgendered people experience, when they're held to a different standard of masculinity or femininity than, for lack of a better term, "cissexual" men and women. One might attempt to deny a transsexual woman her femaleness, for instance, by saying, "He's not really female, he likes video games too much," but wouldn't dream of applying this same logic to those cissexual women who love video games.

Anyway, I don't have any pat conclusion with which to tie a bow on this ramble. These are just some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head lately, and if you have any thoughts on playing games as a character of your gender vs. playing as a character of the opposite gender, or about anything else I've touched on here, do share.

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In other news, the job hunt continues! I had an interview today that I think went well, at a place just off Market St. in the hustle and bustle of Downtown San Francisco. If I get this position, I think I'll enjoy having a reason to head into SF every day.

And just to further demonstrate how screwy my perspective on things is, here's the funniest thing I've seen recently: Garfield Minus Garfield. It is exactly what the title says it is, and the header on the main page is spot-on:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness in a quiet American suburb.

Well, spot-on aside from the fact that they spelled loneliness wrong. Anyway, I think the strip is brilliant, and it made me laugh until I had tears in my eyes. And, yes, I even find it oddly poignant. What's wrong with me?