My assumption, after the third failure, was that the CAPTCHA system was screwy. But now, after 10, I’m in the midst of a full-blown existential crisis. Like, maybe I can’t read CAPTCHAs. Maybe this is a Rachael-in-Blade-Runner scenario.

Hahaha, but that’s ridiculous. I mean, some of you have memories of me as a child. Right? Memories of me as a child? Anyone?

Also, have you ever listened to an mp3 CAPTCHA? It sounds like The Ring: The Novelization: The Audiobook.

Also available on Spotify and MOG.

This card, which I bought a little under a year ago, was my second. The first was purchased after a consultation with a weight trainer who, after evaluating my physical capabilities, told me not to darken his dumbells until I returned a little more limber. That came as no surprise, honestly, as inflexibility runs on the maternal side of my family. Even as a beanpole of a child I spent the “touch your toes” portion of gym class getting reacquainted with my kneecaps at best.

So, yoga. My gym has a “Happy Hour” session every weekday at 4:30 (so named because “Agony Hour” went over poorly with the focus group, I presume), each with a different teacher. I tried a few different days before finding an instructor with the perfect mix of patience, mercy, and amazing playlist.

The first thing I learned about yoga is that it has a profoundly screwed up incentive system. When you do something wrong, a lovely and/or handsome instructor comes over and places a hand on you and murmurs words of encouragement. If, on the other hand, you accidentally improve, you are able to more closely approximate the ideal pose, and wake up the following morning feeling like you were on the wrong end of a grapeshot cannon. The ideal strategy, I have found, is to just sort of flounder around aimlessly. In this regard I am a master strategist.

The only thing worse than bringing a knife to a gun fight is bringing a cellphone to a yoga class.

— Matthew Baldwin (@matthewbaldwin) March 4, 2011

Prior to this I had only done Wii Fit yoga, which is to actual yoga what playing with a Hotwheels car is to piloting the space shuttle. The Wii Fit yoga instructor tells you to hold your pose for a mere 60 seconds, and only comments if you seem “shaky”. This is because the sole input device used by Wii Fit yoga is the balance board. Real life yoga instructors, on the other hand, can evaluate a multitude of other factors, such as whether or not you are audibly sobbing. And they make you do yoga for a full hour instead of for just 10 minutes. And “taking a breather” in the middle to drink beer and play Wii Lego Star Wars is frowned upon. It’s pretty draconian.

On the up side, “gym” yoga is not like “yoga studio” yoga, in that many of the participants are just dabblers. Even so, I have rarely seen another as inflexible as myself. In one class I was behind a woman who seemed to be struggling as much as I during the initial, limbering up exercises, and it was only when we began the routine proper, and she turned to the side, that I discovered that she was in her third or possibly fourth trimester.

Still, for all that, I eventually grew to enjoy my sessions, and got in the habit of attending every Thursday afternoon. I even used up my punchcard and purchased another. But, alas, about halfway through the second, my Thursday afternoon instructor introduced us to the “Knife In the Back” pose, by resigning from the gym and moving to California to open her own studio. BOOO TO YOU PRETTY YOGA TRAITOR LADY!

My yoga studio will be called NOTHIN’ BUT CHILD’S POSE!

— Matthew Baldwin (@matthewbaldwin) January 28, 2012

I tried a few other instructors thereafter. Some were mean (“If you’re going to make faces you may as well smile” one told me), and others employed Bad Music (one just played Sufjan Stevens’s “Illnoise” album during our session, which was fine until the phrase “cancer of the bone” rang out during the downward facing dog). Eventually I fell off the yogatic wagon altogether.

Until earlier this week, that is, when I dug out my card and found it set to expire with five boxes unpunched. And so yesterday, after six months of absenteeism, I returned to Happy Hour Yoga … only to discover that Tuesdays are now the “core workout” session. As I have the core strength of a bundt cake, and will sooner become the Secretary of the Agriculture before planking for longer than a handful of seconds, it Did Not Go Well.

At least the instructor constantly urged us to “tighten your stomach muscles”. This is the functional equivalent of “sucking in your gut”, something I habitually do in yoga class unbidden, so I was pleased to discover that there is one maneuver I can perform flawlessly.

One down, four punches to go. Hopefully they won’t all feel like they were delivered to my midsection.

I did not, however, remember to specify the potency, and so hastily added, “a double”. The achingly young barista smiled and chirpily replied, “duh!”

I was little irritated, of course. But I was also filled with pride, that my generation’s method of mocking the elderly is still employed by the youth of today.

Update: Well I’ll be pickled. I have.

Occasionally the other members are even so foolish as to let me pick the book. Such was the case with this month’s selection, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which I chose for three reason: (a) Neven Mrgan recommended it as part of my 2011 Booklist Project, (b) it is written by David Simon, creator of The Wire, and (c) we desperately needed a non-fiction book as a counterweight to the “contemporary fiction” we have gnawed through thus far in 2012.

The “Year in the Killing Streets” subtitle is literal (well, the “year” part is; no one is killed by a street), with David Simon joining the Baltimore homicide division on January first of 1988 and chronicling their actions for 12 months straight. In this respect Homicide presages the “do a crazy thing for a year” genre so popular as of late, although shadowing a bunch of cops came natural to Simon: he had served as a crime reporter for the The Baltimore Sun for a number of year prior to the project. And Simon is not the focus of the book. Indeed, he fades effortlessly into the background, never once referring to himself while reporting on the force. He does so (as explained in the afterword) by dressing like the detectives, behaving like the detectives, and essentially doing everything short of explicitly identifying himself as a member of the homicide department. As a result, the book is a true “fly on the wall” account, with the reader cast as disembodied spirit, hovering on the edge of the crime scene and eavesdropping on everyone.

If you’ve seen The Wire or NBC’s 90s-era police procedural Homicide (for which this served as the source material), you are already familiar with the tone and cadence of the book. Simon classifies Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets as “narrative non-fiction”, which is to say that it reads more like a novel than a criminology textbook. This is accomplished by including copious amounts of dialogue, using narrative arcs as framing devices, and focusing heavily on the “characters”. And, of course, the very premise of the book–a “year in the life”–lends itself to the format, as the passage of days propels the story forward.

Simon picks a few cases upon which to focus, updating readers as to their status over the course of the year; interspersed are shorter vignettes: of “dunkers” (crimes that are solved almost as soon as the cops arrive on the scene), of “stone whodunits” (cases that lack even a trace of usable evidence), and of the officers when they are simply lounging around the office, killing time during an overnight shift. Occasionally shoehorned into the calendar are essays on a variety of tangential subjects. One sidebar discusses the wide-spread fear amongst police departments that interrogations would become useless after Miranda warnings became required, and Simon recounts the many psychological ploys officers subsequently adopted to coax suspects into waiving their rights. Simon documents a criminal trial during another lengthy aside, to show us what happens to these cases when they leave the homicide department and enter the courthouse.

Homicide was not our book club’s most popular selection. The host quit 150 pages in, decrying the repetitiveness of the crime scene descriptions. Another member was unable to attend our meeting, but sent her summary of the book via email:

The topic and characters were interesting enough for an hour or two in front of the TV, but I really did not need to spend countless hours reading a 600 page book. On the other hand, if I ever get pegged for homicide, it will be nice to be prepared for some of the interrogation techniques.

And yet, for all that, we had one of our most interesting and engaging discussions. We talked about the discrepancies between the cinematic portrayal of homicide detectives and those found in the book; we discussed our experiences on jury duty, and how they informed our opinions of the legal system; and we wondered what the two books I have thus far selected for book club said about me. (The first was Columbine by Dave Cullen, another work of narrative non-fiction in which a lot of people got shot. Hm.)

Personally, I found Homicide rivetting, every bit as engrossing as The Wire. It kept me up late on many a night, both the reading of it and the mulling of it over. Fans of David Simon or police procedurals will find plenty to like here, as will anyone interested in a fascinating, exhaustive, and often unsettling portrait of how murders are truly investigated … and sometimes solved.

P.S. Next Monday we’ll we’ll be discussing our next book, The Sisters Brothers, which I read in three days. I liked it quite a bit, and not only because people got shot.

My first, Fitz & the Tantrums at the Showbox on 01/20, is what convinced me to make music a priority this year. The lead singer Michael Fitzpatrick, reminiscent of David Byrne in both appearance and intensity, is a seemingly bottomless well of energy and enthusiasm. And the opening act, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., was fantastic as well.

In February I saw Veronica Falls, who sound like my long-time favorite Heavenly but with all the sunny optimism replaced by dirge. (I like dirgy music, so that’s a rave.) The real revelation of the night, though, was opener Bleached, who blew the doors off the joint. Between the two I was transported back to my days as an Evergreen State College slacker in the early 90s, catching Riot Grrl bands in downtown Olympia. Ah, youth.

Last month I attended the show of the lovely Lomolo. And a few days later I finally saw Nada Surf, a band of which I have been a fan for some 20 years. I enjoy Nada Surf’s new album The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy so much that I actually bought the CD, to play in my car. A CD! Remember those? Well I own one, again.

Not bad for an old square, eh? And I already have April in the bag. Last Tuesday I was a guest at an exclusive performance by The Lumineers, which you can watch on the Chase Jarvis website. And last night I had the great fortune to see Typhoon–or, at any rate, as many members thereof that could fit onto the Tractor Tavern stage (11 of 13).

Honestly, this has been one of the easiest projects ever. My problem, if any, has not been finding shows I want to attend, but deciding from among the plethora of great options this city has to offer.

Here are some that I have resolved to attend in the coming weeks.

First Aid Kit, April 11 at the Crocodile Cafe: I am entranced by First Aid Kit’s first single Emmylou, and listened to it incessantly for a week and a half after its release. First Aid Kit adds compelling evidence to my hypothesis that I am a total sucker for Swedish bands.

M83, April 26 at the Paramount Theater: “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming” clocked in at #6 on my list of Favorite Albums of 2011, and has only risen in my estimation since. Love that frog song!

Washed Out, May 2 at the The Neptune: The only song by this band I have heard is Amor Fati, and yet that alone has the show on my radar. It’s either going to be them or The Jezabels, who play The Crocodile the following evening. Decisions, decisions … Update I just listened to Washed Out’s “Within and Without” and The Jezabels’ “Prisoner” back-to-back, and it was The Jezabels by a landslide.

Destroyer, June 3 at the Showbox: “Kaput” is another from my list of 2011 favorite albums (#2!), and I cannot wait to see these guys (or, rather, this guy, Dan Bejar) live.

Lomolo (again), June 29 at the Columbia City Theater: I bought a ticket to Lemolo’s CD Release Party as soon as it was announced, as a way of showing support for a band I have long enjoyed; apparently I am not alone in my enthusiasm though, because the show sold out about an hour later. Fear not: Lemolo added a second release party for the following day, the tickets for which go on sale Monday, April 9th. I will send out a reminder that morning via Twitter.

That’s just a fraction of the many shows I have my eye on. I mostly track these via Songkick, which auto updates my Upcoming Seattle Shows Google Calendar as new concerts are added. I also maintain a Spotify playlist, which you can find here. Drop me a line if you intend to catch any of these, or if there’s something you think I should add to my list.

In 2003 I began to hear rumors of a forthcoming video game based on Call of Cthulhu. My interest was piqued but my hopes were not high. I assumed that the game would be a routine first-person shooter, with the thinnest veneer of Lovecraft slapped on so as to justify the license. After all (thought I), how could a video game approximate the experience of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game?

That question soon became moot. In early 2004 I became a father, and my career as a gamer came to an end–at least for a spell.

I was, however, reminded of the game last month, as I continued research for the H. P. Lovefest. And I discovered, to my surprise, that Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was not only released, but released to mostly positive reviews. Even more encouraging to me, though, were some of the negative comments made by gamers on Amazon and Metacritic. They accused the game of being overly linear; they lamented the long and unskippable cut-scenes used to provide voluminous expository information; and they railed against the ridiculously high difficulty level.

A frustratingly lethal game with a focus on narrative and a proclivity toward railroading players? This sounds like a better adaptation of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game than I’d expected!

And so, for the sake of the H. P Lovefest, I downloaded a copy of the game from Steam and played it all the way through. Oh, the things I do for you.

My fears that the game would be heavy on first-person shooting and light on Lovecraft were allayed immediately. Dark Corners opens in 1909 with the protagonist, Private Detective Jack Walters, venturing into the homestead of a strange religion called the Fellowship of the Yith. As Walters explores the house, searching for clues as to the purpose of the cult, he discovers paintings of the Great Old Ones upon the walls, finds the Pnakotic Manuscripts on an altar, and stumbles across some horrible Yithian technology in the basement. And, significantly, he does all this unarmed. Even from the get-go, the focus of the game is on investigation, stealth, and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.

The main story, set six years after the prologue, keeps you in the role of Jack Walters, and deprives you of weapons for at least the first quarter of the game. Which is not to say that you lack opposition–far from it. After you travel to Innsmouth (yes, that Innsmouth) you are beset by enemies on all sides, and must survive by skulking in the shadows when possible, running like hell when necessary, and patching up your wounds with first aid kits when you can find a moment’s reprieve. The flight-not-fight tenor of the game is so emphasized that, even after you acquire a gun, you’ll tend to use it as a last resort rather than as a first.

The story of Dark Corners is impressive, on par in detail and faithfulness to Lovecraft with the best of the Call of Cthulhu scenarios. And it even incorporates CoC’s most interesting mechanism, the sanity attribute. When Walters encounters horrors, key aspects of the game change to reflect his mental distress: the video becomes blurry, or wavers in and out of focus; the audio warps and wafts; and the controls become unreliable. Too much terror in too short a time frame and Walters may well go insane–with deadly consequences.

The devotion of the Dark Corners writers to the source material–both Lovecraft’s stories (The Shadow Over Innsmouth foremost among them) and the CoC RPG–is immensely gratifying, and shines in every chapter. I actually played the game through twice: once on the regular level of difficulty, and a second time on the easiest level, so as to enjoy the story without being murdered every forty seconds.

And you will be. Murdered, that is. Often. Even I, a fan of the notoriously fatal role-playing game, found myself exasperated at times by the lethality of the game. There is, for instance, an scene about a third of the way though, in which you must escape from the Innsmouthian locals, that is inexcusably unforgiving. I am also going to side with many of the game’s critics in declaring the save points in the game to be way too few and far between. I understand the philosophical unpinning of this decision on the part of the game designers–preventing players from saving at will makes the game all the more scary–but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel like defenestrating my laptop on more than one occasion.

All that said, I enjoyed Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth as much as any game I have played recently, a list that includes the both the Halflife and the Portal series. As a Lovecraft aficionado I am obviously biased, but even so it does not surprise me that the game was included in this compendium of Best Games of All Time.

Dark Corners is as close of a Call of Cthulhu campaign as you’re going to get without five other people and some ten-sided dice, and it’s a loving tribute to the master of dread.

Huge Caveat for PC Gamers: Dark Corners was originally developed for the XBox and, as I understand it, the PC port was performed hastily, in the last days before Headfirst Productions went belly-up. As a result, the PC version has some bugs. Some are small and ignorable; others are large and obnoxious. One however, near the end of the story, literally renders the game unfinishable.

The bug doesn’t occur on all systems, but it occurred on mine and, I suspect, on most modern systems. It takes place on the ship, when you are asked to fire a cannon at Devil’s Reef. The reef is supposed to show blue lights to indicate your targets, but the bug prevents them from appearing, making this mini-game all but impossible to complete.

Here is the solution:

1. Get to the point where you are supposed to shell Devil’s Reef, which takes place in the “A Dangerous Journey” chapter. Look through the viewfinder and, if the blue lights aren’t obvious, exit the game.
2. Download this zip file.
3. Unzip the file and copy the “A Dangerous Voyage 5-28-2011 6.11.26 PM” folder into “C:\Users\[yourusername]\Documents\Bethesda\Call of Cthulhu”
4. Relaunch Dark Corners, choose “Load Game”, and select the “A Dangerous Voyage – 05/28/2011″ save slot.

A bug of this magnitude is clearly unacceptable, and I therefore cannot recommend the PC edition of this game (even though that’s what I played). But reviews of the XBox version make no mention of this glitch; that version is presumably unaffected by this and several other errors.

I was not alone in observing the 75th anniversary of Lovecraft’s death on March 15, 2012. Here are some other commemorations:

• HP Lovecraft: The man who haunted horror fans, by Ramsay Campbell for the BBC News Magazine.
• Lurid: Love Love Lovecraft, from Lit Reactor.
• Lovecraft’s Influence, from Pelgrane Press (publishers of the excellent “Trail of Cthulhu” role-playing game).
• That Is Not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie: An Homage To Lovecraft Comics, from Bloody Disgusting Comics.
• The Blagger’s Guide To HP Lovecraft, from The Independent.
• Happy Death Day, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), from Harken’s Blog of the Unspeakable

A: In college. I wanted to impress girls.

Me: Ah. You had an ulterior motive.

A: Not really.

Me: But you learned guitar specifically to impress girls.

A: In college, “wanting to impress girls” is the primary motive for learning guitar. An example of an ulterior motive would be, “and I thought I’d enjoy playing guitar”.