The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing

So, apparently Animal Crossing is a game that people play. I've never played it myself, and haven't a clue what actually goes on in it. But whatever it was I thought, it wasn't anything like this:



Neither, apparently, was it what Something Awful poster Chewbot thought he'd find. So shocked was he, it seems, that he twisted his screen caps -- taking very few of them out of context -- into a narrative called "The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing." He began adding his own artwork to the tale to provide depth and backstory, and the result is spectacular. He even brought in a choose-your-own-adventure aspect in the final act, giving readers a vote to make a choice for the protagonist (and then provided an alternate ending, showing the results of both).

I wanted to link to this a few months ago while it was still ongoing, but you wouldn't have been able to read it without a Something Awful membership. Now that's it concluded, though, someone has gone to the trouble of putting up a mirror. So you can enjoy the madness without paying for an SA account. A winner is you!

Seriously -- read it if you have the time. It's quite the chilling tale.

I love the internet.

(One note, though: you'll see mention of an audio track -- several readers are putting together a dramatic reading of the story, complete with sound effects and music. It isn't quite finished yet, so don't bother looking for it. Though the final part does feature a brief video.)

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Now playing: The Tragically Hip - Inevitability of Death
via FoxyTunes

Here, at the end of all things (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

[Spoiler-free!]

The door was partially open, so I saw her coming. She bounded up with a distinctly gleeful skip in her step, clad in blue, as you'd expect, and her hands filled with packages. She wrapped on the door twice with her elbow and called to me, "Harry Potter!"

As though accepting a precious heirloom, I took the small box from her. It was white, with a machine-printed picture of an owl clutching an envelope. DO NOT DELIVER OR OPEN UNTIL JULY 21, 2007, a red banner warned.

"Thank you very much," I said, still looking at the package. When I did glance up at her, she smiled and gave a little nod.

"You're welcome," she said, already heading for her next delivery. "Happy reading!"

I looked at the box again. In a little square on the side, in a now-familiar font, was more print. YEAR 7.

And so it was, thirty-two hours ago, I received my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And so it was, a little less than one hour ago, I turned the last page and finished my journey through those books.

What a long, strange trip it's been.

It began in 2001, with perhaps my greatest example of one of my great pet peeves. I took an English class at College of the Mainland, and on the first day glanced at the course syllabus. After the expected lists of short stories -- Poe, Faulkner, Hemingway, naturally -- and Shakespeare, I noticed this unusual entry:

Novel: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

What? What?

We're gonna read Harry Potter for the course novel? In a college English course? Have we completely lost our damn minds? The professor, it turns out, is a huge Potter fan. She wore her Gryffindor Quidditch jersey to class one day. At the class's skepticism at her choice of novel, she pointed out its long-reaching influence and popularity, and surmised there must be something worth studying there.

"Plus," she said with a smirk, "it's a really good book."

The next day, I dutifully picked up a paperback copy at Waldenbooks. Now, this is before the first movie was released, before it had even been filmed, and adult acceptance of Mrs. Rowling's book wasn't yet widespread. So I got a few odd looks.

I took it home and tried to read it, but I only got two pages in before tossing it aside. I couldn't get it out of my head that I was reading children's literature. I told my mom. She joined me in scoffing. I mean, come on.

Three months later, our professor reminded us, "You need to have at least the first half of Sorcerer's Stone read by Thursday." This being Tuesday.

Oh, shit! I'd forgotten about it completely.

When I got home that afternoon, I dug through boxes in my room until I found my copy. I poured a glass of Dr Pepper, sat at the dining room table, and forced myself to read it.

Four hours later, my mom came home and saw me. "Reading the Potter book?" she said, her voice teasing me.

"Yeah," I said, not looking up. "Do we have any barbecue sauce?"

"What?" She was in the middle of pouring herself some iced tea, and my out-of-nowhere question confounded her.

Still without looking up: "Do we have any barbecue sauce?"

"Uh, yeah," she said. "Why?"

"Because I need to eat my damn words."

I finished the book during lunch the next day. Within a week, I managed to convince both my mother and my sister to read it, too. With two further days, my mother had acquired the next three books, which were the only ones published at the time. The books were like a foul virus, and I had exposed my entire family. We were goners.

I read Chamber of Secrets in two days. I read Prisoner of Azkaban in one sitting.

And now, that journey is over. The series is complete.

Am I happy? Yes. Am I sad? Oh yes.

There are volumes I'd like to say about the book itself, but refuse to -- I absolutely refuse to spoil anything. (There are legions of bastards running around out there doing exactly that -- I saw spoilers dropped in comments on YouTube videos...freakin' Family Guy videos, at that. I will not join those douchebags.) I went into this one blind as can be, and believe the experience the better for it: I didn't even read the table of contents, afraid the chapter titles might give something away.

The big pre-publication spoiler from Madame Rowling was that "two major characters" would die. I will say that that is...true. In a technical sense, it is very, very true.

Am I satisfied at the conclusion? Yes. It is logical, it is emotionally resonant, and it has enough closure to feel like the end of something epic. (Nor is it psychologically harrowing and terrifying, as Mr. King chose to be at the end of the Dark Tower.) The book is unflinchingly dark, and ceaselessly depressing...and yet filled with -- and ultimately about -- love.

If I were to meet Mrs. Rowling today, I would thank her for the seven books of wonderful stories and memories. And then I would slap her in the face for her wicked cruelty.

And then I'd remember these are fictional characters she was cruel to, and I'd remember my own wicked cruelty, and I'd apologize profusely and offer to get her some ice, and she'd have me escorted off the grounds and thrown in British jail.

Goodbye, Harry, Ron, and (sigh) Hermione. Goodbye, Ginny, Snape, Dumbledore, Sirius, Fred, George, Professor McGonagall, Hagrid, Grawp, Lupin, and Tonks. 'Bye Moody, Draco, Lucius, Narcissa, Mr. Weasley, Mrs. Weasley, Dudley, Neville (the man!), Luna, Cho, Cedric, and Percy. And goodbye to Nearly Headless Nick, and Peeves, and the Fat Lady; to Bellatrix Lestrange, and to Dobby, and to Kreacher, and to S.P.E.W., and to the D.A. And Bill and Fleur. And Professors Flitwick and Trelawney, and Cornelius Fudge and Peter Pettigrew. And Lily, and James. And even to You-Know-Who.

You will be missed. Sorely.

Going off the grid

Four years ago, I very nearly had the ending of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix spoiled for me. I didn't get the book right away, and soon after its publication, a newspaper in Toronto published an obituary for, um, the character that dies, and I almost read it. I managed to click the "back" button fast enough to avoid reading the name. (And look at that -- the book is four years old, and I'm still not willing to spoil the ending. Ain't I grand?)

Not again! I will not inadvertently have The Deathly Hallows spoiled or revealed to me in any fashion. With my copy set to arrive tomorrow by owl package delivery person, I will go into complete radio silence until I'm finished. I'm not taking any chances. I'm going to sign off the internet, and I won't be watching any TV, outside of what I have already DVR'd.

See you on the other side.

(Thankfully, I read really fast. It shouldn't be long.)

List of the week: The best of Stephen King

Sorry if this one's a little brisk -- at the moment, my brain wants to continue reading Adam Cadre's marvelous Ready, Okay!, write the new Revolver episode, write a short story that popped into my head yesterday and won't leave, watch the last few nights' episodes of Keith Olbermann, eat lunch, listen to the Beatles, and go to sleep. Plus, this. At least it's in there somewhere.

But one of the things that's been left at the wayside is Richard Bach-- oh, who the fuck am I kidding -- Stephen King's Blaze, which is sitting next to me as I speak. I haven't read more than two chapters of it yet, and I've been working on it for a week. (Contrast that with Ready, Okay!, which I retrieved from the mailbox yesterday, and my bookmark is currently resting between pages 368 and 369.) It is not, at least so far, among the King's best work.

So what is the King's best work? I'm glad you asked, because it gives me another chance to shove my opinion down your throat. Behold: my personal picks for the 25 best things Stephen King has ever written. (Or, at least, published. I'm sure he's written a wykkid bitchin' birthday greeting or two.)

25. Needful Things
Oh, sure, it gets goofy-crazy in the last few pages (FRINAN and I are never going to stop making fun of the Magical Flowers of DOOM, never ever), but on the way there it's one of the most complicated, deranged tales the man has ever written. And is it just me, or were the sexual fantasies about Elvis the scariest parts?

24. Desperation
Kicking off with perhaps King's most perfect opening (a dead cat nailed to a speed limit sign), Desperation is a tale that manages to be both epic and intimate simultaneously. He creates one of his most ominous villains in Collie Entragian, and even the "God is Love" stuff in the last chapter doesn't come off at all cheesy.

23. Misery
In On Writing, King writes that his drug-addled mind came up with Misery as a way of sending himself a red flag. In the metaphor, he was poor Paul Sheldon, sick and immobilized; and the drugs were Annie Wilkes, a wicked witch who held him down and forced him to write. As far as drug-addled metaphors go, you can't get much better than Misery, which is one of King's most spellbinding reads. Interesting story: I once had a copy of this book taken away from me in 7th grade, because it was "inappropriate for school." What class was it? Reading.

22. "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away"
He doesn't crank them out nearly as much as he used to, but when Big Steve writes a short story, it's usually something interesting. The very idea that a traveling salesman would collect bathroom graffiti and write a book about it is fascinating enough -- but then King takes you inside the mind of Alfie Zimmer, and the view is heartbreaking. And I love the perfect ambiguous ending.

21. "The Boogeyman"
Let's not kid ourselves here. Some works are entirely dependent upon their endings for their success. This is one of them. Sure, the story leading up to it is high-quality stuff, but it's that last half-page that brings it all home and earns the story a spot on this list.

20. Hearts in Atlantis
The second appearance of the Dark Tower mythos on our list (Desperation was the first, if you missed it). King's lament for the folly of his generation -- the Baby Boomers -- is funny, sad, poignant, and it feels so very, very real, despite the can-toi running around and such. And I wish I'd though to call a story "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling" before he did.

19. Faithful (with Stewart O'Nan)
Steve hasn't done much non-fiction writing outside of Danse Macabre and On Writing, but we should write letters convincing him to do more. While O'Nan's half of the book is certainly entertaining, and a wonderful chronicle of a man lost in obsession (in a good way -- c'mon, it's baseball, obsession is my thing, too), it's the half written by King where the book is truly masterful. King's eye for detail is razor-sharp here, even when he doesn't provide the laundry list of stats one would normally expect in a baseball book. And what starts as a mere baseball diary becomes something much more -- a meditation on...well, love, and faith, and patience. And obsession. Maybe that's why the publisher put everything King writes in the book in bold. (Really.)

18. The Long Walk (as Richard Bachman)
King's taste for The Long Walk would decline over the years -- he'd later declare it full of "windy psychological preachments" -- but of the works he published under the name of his "evil twin," Richard Bachman, this is clearly the one that holds up best. A harrowing tale of mental horror, The Long Walk is a book that you simply cannot stop reading. Much like the race itself -- stop and die. And it features one of my favorite closing lines ever: "And when the hand touched his shoulder again, he somehow found the strength to run."

17. "Umney's Last Case"
One of King's many (many, many) looks at the relationship between a writer and the characters he creates. Of course, it doesn't start out that way -- it starts out as a simple Raymond Chandler pastiche, but he turns it upside down pretty quickly. And another of my favorite closing lines: "This time nobody goes home." (And I'm quoting these from memory, of course. Um, geek.)

16. Bag of Bones
Leave to New England's Horrormeister to wait until he was in his fifties to do an old-fashioned ghost story. But Bag of Bones is so good that it was worth waiting for. It was this book that finally got the uptight literary types to pay attention -- critics who'd scoffed at him before actually read the thing and realized, hey, he really can write. Five years later he'd win a really fancy award.

15. The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
(Yes, I've decided to rank the Dark Tower novels seperately. Why? 'Cause they're different novels. Silly. And they actually vary quite wildly in quality. To say nothing of style. They were written individually, so I shall rank them so. And my, what a long parenthetical.) For three books, King kept Roland as the stone-faced seeker of the Dark Tower, the unflinching Gunslinger that served the great wheel of ka. But in Wizard and Glass, King breaks Roland open and shows us the pieces, and the picture they paint is terrible indeed. And it also features a mind-bending Wizard of Oz sequence, and a surprise revelation as to who the Man in Black he's been chasing really is.

14. The Langoliers
Stephen King doesn't like flying. You'd never be able to tell that from this novella, no sir, not with its horrifying premise -- what if you went up in an airplane and when you came back down the world was gone. Not the buildings, not the places, but everything alive. Talk about horror. And even though the blind girl with mental powers is a rather odious cliché, he makes up for it with Craig Toomey, one of his most fully realized villains.

13. Insomnia
This is a hefty tome indeed -- I tried three times to get through in junior high school and couldn't. But once I finally sat down and made an effort of it (and got past the first 200 pages or so), I became so lost that I think I read the last 400 pages in one sitting. And hey, it's not only phenomenally entertaining, it also explains a lot of the mechanics of -- guess what -- the Dark Tower series, even showing us the Crimson King.

12. The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
King's technophobia goes wild: we've got a giant cyborg bear, a city run by a giant computer, and a self-aware train set on committing suicide. In between all that, he gives us a dog/raccoon thing that can talk and a gripping scene in which young Jake is pulled from our world into theirs. It was reading this book that made me realize what an idiot I'd been for ignoring those Dark Tower books on the shelves on the public library for all those years. Stupid, stupid!

11. Apt Pupil
Years before Columbine, King wrote this chilling novella, an examination of the dark allure of evil. A simple all-American boy (he plays baseball, he has a paper route, he'd probably eat a whole apple pie if you put it front of him and recite the Pledge of Allegiance while doing so) becomes so obsessed with the Holocaust that he blackmails a Nazi war criminal into describing it to him. He just wants to know what it was like. Of course, evil spreads like a fungus, and it isn't long before people start dying. The film version was pretty good, but loses several million points for its cheap, weak, cop-out ending.

10. "The End of the Whole Mess"
You can write it off as a stylistic gimmick if you want, but King's story about the end of the world is all the more harrowing because of its gimmick. The ending is indescribably sad, as you realize the world's last remaining human is left to babbling "i hav a Bobby hiz name is bruther." No good deed goes unpunished, indeed.

9. The Dead Zone
Oh, how FRINAN won't like that. And I admit, The Dead Zone is another of those books I just couldn't get into at first. But years later, I picked it up again and wondered why I never finished it before. Everyman Johnny Smith's struggle with his special power is incredibly moving, especially when he meets weasel-of-the-millennium Greg Stillson, who will one day start a nuclear war. And I love, love, love the book's final scenes in the graveyard.

8. Pet Sematary
The scariest book I've ever read. And I'm not the only one who thinks so -- King himself was so horrified by it that he hated it, didn't want to finish it, refused to publish it once he had, and only did when he found himself contractually obligated to do so. Aside from its literal horrors -- walking dead of every stripe -- Louis Creed's descent into madness is so distressing that I almost didn't finish the thing myself.

7. The Shining
Speaking of descents into madness. Pretty much everything that can be said about The Shining has already been said, being among King's most famous novels. And it's famous for a reason, of course -- its terrifying look into the mind of Jack Torrence, who falls victim to the ghosts of alcoholism and those that reside in the Overlook. And if you're curious why I'm so phobic of wasps, I'm pretty sure reading this book at an impressionable age had something to do with it. Thanks, Mr. King. Thanks.

6. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
Frank Darabont's film adaptation was so wonderful that it's easy to forget the novella on which it's based. But the diary of Red, Shawshank's lone penitent inmate, is a story of such beauty and grace that it's probably the best thing to force on people who wrinkle their noses at the thought of reading Stephen King. The only monsters here are human; the only magical powers are those of redemption and -- above all -- hope. I love this story.

5. The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
The ending is the hardest part of any story to pull off. So it's beyond spectacular to note that King completed his magnum opus, the Dark Tower series, perfectly. Not just a good ending, or a great ending; not even a brilliant ending. It is perfect. And the final page is the most horrifying thing Stephen King has ever written. (And people can whine about the death of a certain someone all they want to. Guess what? That was perfect, too.) And if you didn't like it -- hey, he warned you. King stops the book cold to tell the reader to stop reading, because the ending isn't pleasant. And then he breaks you. How marvelous. I love this book.

4. The Eyes of the Dragon
King's leap into the realm of fantasy. We apparently have his daughter Naomi to thank for this one -- he wrote this book for her after she expressed her dislike for his horror novels. But who wouldn't love this tale of magic, murder, wizards, kings, and, um, napkins? And there's a dragon, of course. I have yet to find a single person who's read this book and not liked it. Is it the Stephen King novel for everyone? It just might be. I love this book.

3. It
One of King's two "massive" tomes. He's written many (many, many) times regarding the mythical power of childhood and the imagination, but It remains his pinnacle of the style. It's absolutely gigantic -- spanning twenty-seven years and well over a thousand pages. The whole thing is perfect, but I especially love the final chapters, where King lets the past and present flow through one another seamlessly. I love this book.

2. "The Last Rung on the Ladder"
The saddest thing King has ever written. It's an easily overlooked little story -- it's in the Night Shift collection, if you haven't read it -- but it's one of his very, very best. It's hard to talk about the story at all without giving the whole thing away, so I won't. But read it. I love this story.

1. The Stand
I've read The Stand roughly eight times in the last sixteen years. Every time through, it seems I read something new I didn't see before. It's King's other giant book -- the complete and uncut edition (the only one I've ever read) is even longer than It. But rather than spanning time, The Stand spans a country -- a panoramic view of America going to hell during a single summer when the superflu kills 99.7% of the populace. Why have read it so many times? Especially such a long book? It's the book that made me want to be a writer. I mean, I'd written things before that -- I'd been making up stories since I was old enough to speak. But The Stand made me want to write those stories down and have other people pay me to read them. I'm still desperately trying to catch up to The Stand, which will likely never happen. But I keep reading it, going through once every couple years or so. Why? 'Cause I love this book.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the movie)

It's no secret to anyone who's heard me talk about the Harry Potter series that Order of the Phoenix is my favorite of the books. It's gigantic, sure, but it's so wonderfully dark and moody, and brings a depth and enrichment to the universe of the series in a way that hadn't really been done before. It's also the point when the series -- in my opinion, at least -- stopped being a series of children's books. The scenes of emotional turmoil and violence are so intense that I couldn't imagine a parent letting a child read through it, let alone 800+ pages of it.

With all that said, it is with some disappointment, my friends, that I report to you that Phoenix is not the best of the film series -- that honor still lies with Prisoner of Azkaban. But it's a worthy adaptation, and it's actually the first of the films to act like a typical film adaptation: instead of just transposing the book page-for-page (as is especially apparent in the turgid first two films), they took the building blocks of the story and wrote an actual movie with them.

Of course, that comes with the pitfall of all movie adaptations, the one that leads to readers saying "The book was better": things have to change. For whatever reason, things have to change between book and screen, and there are more changes evident in Phoenix than in any in this series before. And not just minor, inconsequential, "The rival schools for the Triwizard tournament show up at the beginning of school instead of the end of October, like they're supposed to" changes. Actual relevant changes. Though, again, I suppose they're not that relevant. The story still gets where it needs to.

But great big chunks of subplot are left out of this script -- including anything to do with Quidditch, leaving Ron nothing to do whatsoever but stand there and look goofy. (A voice rises from the back: "That's all he ever does anyway." Thank you, FRINAN. Thank you.) Several characters don't make it from book to screen, and the entire structure of the big Order vs. Death Eaters battle at the end is reconfigured. (Unfortunately, the Big Tragedy remains just as Tragic -- though even that isn't unaltered. You'll know it when you see it, of course, but suffice it to say a different spell is used to enact the Tragedy. Frankly, the movie version is a lot more palatable. It's certainly less stupid.)

But they cut an 870-page book into a 2:18 movie, so lots and lots had to go. I don't blame them, even if there's a lot of material being left behind in the first five movies -- we've had no mention of who drew the Marauder's Map in the first place (though this movie hints it with one of its slight changes, if you're paying close enough attention), no mention of S.P.E.W., and this film forgets to wrap up one of its plot threads. (Why, dear reader, did the Dementors attack Harry at the beginning? Hmm? The movie won't tell you...but the book might. If you're nice.)

Aside from the alterations (both minor and otherwise), it's a good movie, one that expertly captures the bleak tone of the book. And much praise for Imelda Staunton, who is absoutely terrifying as Dolores Umbridge. Never has niceness been so scary.

And now: we await The Deathly Hallows. Only a few more days.

A few more days.

*looks at watch*

That was fast

Madame Rowling announced just days ago the title and publication date of the seventh and supposedly final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And yet, already, look at this Wikipedia page! I especially dig the endless list of completely speculative "Known plot details." Nice work, guys.

Yes, I'm excited, too. Yes, it's this generation's Return of the Jedi. But come on. At least wait until there's a little more hardcore knowledge before we start wildly speculating. Okay?

Oh, and there's no way she's going to kill off Harry. Snape is going to eat it. So is Ron. Ginny Weasley will turn heel and kill him. And she'll try to kill Hermione and Harry, too, but Harry will be forced to kill her. And he'll cry, 'cause he's a wuss. And an idiot. Oh, and it'll all end when Harry and Hermione lead the charge on Lord Voldemort at a massive battle at Pelennor Fields. With Ewoks!

Here's one perfectly serious prediction: the diehard Potter fans will loathe the book. It won't end the way they want, the characters they want to die will live, the characters they want to live will die, the right couples won't end up together, and they'll hate it and bitch about it for years. There is no way the book can live up to expectation. None.

But then…Stephen King did end the Dark Tower series perfectly. Hmm. She's got an outside shot.

Must read. Must read NOW.

If you've ever read an Encyclopedia Brown story in your life, you have to read Adam Cadre's "Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala." Actually, if you haven't, it's still really funny.