Some people are obsessed with physical pain: fight fans, some sports fans in general, some video game players, and so on. The people who seek out the visceral thrill of seeing blood and bruises and another person's body go limp. Maybe it's about power, maybe it's about stress, maybe it's just about a fondness for red. Whatever it is, we condemn them, or at least tolerate them, but never encourage them. It's wrong to enjoy another person's pain.

But in the same stroke as we dismiss such inclinations as sadistic we embrace their mental counterpart as high art. What is the catharsis of tragedy but obsessing over and, to a greater or lesser extent, enjoying emotional pain? It's not enjoyment, we may say; but it satisfies some craving, does it not? It makes us feel something that we want to feel. How is that different from the "sadists"?

Over lunch today I had an odd thought. I was considering what kind of people play D&D, and this is the list I came up with: the people who are interested in the math and statistics (call them the mathematicians), are the people who are interested in the social aspect (socializers), the people who enjoy the experience of the world and narrative (narrativists), and the people who can only think well of themselves when they're pretending to be a Level 50 Badass Motherfucker of Doom (the creepy fucks who get off on hitting on female NPCs and fucking with other PCs).

And then I realized that these on-the-spot categories map rather well to the four MMO player type model of Achievers (the mathematicians, who want to maximize their stats), Socializers (duh), Explorers (the narrativists, who want to experience the world), and Griefers (who want to dominate other players). Maybe I was just unconsciously influenced by my knowledge of the model, and the model itself is not particularly concrete, and my own player type list certainly holds little weight, but it's interesting nonetheless. I sort of wonder if these four player types rather correspond to generic types of people in general? Achievers are the businessmen interested in accomplishment for itself, Socializers are people people, Explorers are individualists, artists, creators, and Griefers are the jerks. Hmm.

Okay, so I think I figured out why Heroes appears to oscillate between strong women and traditional sexist tropes... and it's a simple reason that people have already figured out long before me and even coined an aphorism for: "always assume incompetence before malevolence" (with variations, of course). In a nutshell, sexism such as in Heroes isn't the result of deliberate intent; it's just stupidity and laziness.

Mad Men's first season ended tonight. The confirmation of a second made me grin with giddy enthusiasm; the date of summer 2008 barely dented that smile, since I knew that would the likely date anyway (and I'm used to long waits from Battlestar).

It's interesting that while I've fallen in love with Mad Men over the past thirteen episodes, it wasn't until tonight, after it had ended, that I began to realize how truly transcendent it is as a television show. I submit that it is not just the best new show of the year, which I think is without question, but I think that it may be the best television show I have ever seen, better even than my golden babies of Firefly and (gasp) Battlestar. Both those -- and other brilliant first seasons I might name, like Veronica Mars' -- had their ups and downs, with the downs simply being greater than nearly everything else on television and the ups being some of the best productions ever put to film. But with Mad Men -- and perhaps this is just the rose-colored glasses of post-finale bliss -- has never hit a wrong mark.

Minerva is a Half-Life 2 single-player mod, which immediately makes it notable simply because there aren't many of those. And its being good as well puts it practically in a category unto itself.

After at least a year (I don't remember when the last chapter was released exactly) the final two chapters (for a total of four) were released about a week ago. Having loved the first two -- I thought they were in many ways an experience superior to that of the actual Half-Life 2 -- I eagerly anticipated more great level design, pretentiously enigmatic Marathon-esque narration, haunting music, and so on.

I was disappointed. (Spoilers in this review . . . as always.)

Interesting comment from a friend:

A woman shouldn't be president because women are fucked, and we don't want our country to be fucked. Our country should be doing the fucking.

I don't want to seem alarmist so early on, but what started as a few sour notes in the premier seems to be continuing without abate in the second episode:

• First, most obviously, is our new characters, the Wonder Twins Maya and Alejandro. Not even touching on how this plays into the diseased immigrant stereotype, Maya has an uncontrollable power that kills people by making them bleed out of their eyes (which is not as creepy as I think it's supposed to be due to both Firefly and The 4400 having already done it, and from more than just the eyes), and the only way to stop her is for her brother to be around. So her brother follows her everywhere, insists that he always be with her, constantly tells her that he's going to make everything okay . . . which would be perfectly acceptable, even interesting, since that is almost certainly what the dynamic between a pair of South American siblings would be, except that for the show this is apparently all true. Again, it's early in the season, but we've no indications that Maya will learn to control her power without her brother's help, which is . . . disturbing.