Self-extension, Video game characters, and the horror of discovery... Oh my?

It took me a really long time to write the previous article because I just had too many topics I wanted to bring up, and that led to an over-long and meandering article.  I'd still like to discuss them a bit, so while I edited them out of the previous post so it could focus on SCP-087 I'd like to visit some of them now.

Firstly, when I was writing Bro-Horror I became really interested in the nature of horror games vs movies.  Video games are in a unique position to tell their stories because you interact with them, it's an active experience instead of a passive one like watching a movie.  In a movie you can connect with a well written character and vicariously experience the horror they're going through, but that doesn't quite compare with the depth of connection you have to a player character in a game and the game world.  People always talk about the immersiveness of video games, and how a great game can pull you into the story.  I think there's also more at play here, because as SCP-087 shows: it's not just the world/story/character, you can immerse a player with nothing but an in-game avatar.

Gordon Allport

What I'm referring to are the theories of psychologist Gordon Allport (1897 - 1967).  Allport was one of the first humanist psychologists, and his theories on personality and self went on to influence other major players like Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Needs.  He posited a concept he called "Self-extension", basically that at around age 4 we begin to incorporate external identifiers into our sense of a self.  Concepts like "I'm a New Yorker" and "I'm a software engineer", and also why we take damage or slights to our cars or other possessions so personally.  There's something really special about controlling the car that really gets people to identify with it.  We often take damage to our cars personally, and we talk about things that happen while we're driving without referencing the intermediate vehicle.  Think of how often you hear "That guy cut me off!" vs "He cut me off with his car" or some other variant.  It can't just be the constant use or the cost because I don't feel like this about my shoes or other property like my computer.

We tend to incorporate the car so far into our sense of self that it becomes part of "us" instead of "ours", and it seems this extends to video game characters.  When we talk about video games we always refer to our characters in the 1st person instead of talking about them as characters.  If you think about the sentence "So I cleared out all the Medusas." vs "Kratos cleared out all the Medusas." or "I had Kratos clear out all the Medusas.", the first seems more natural.  If we're talking about God of War we talk about what we did in the game, not what Kratos did.

It's not surprising with this, that horror games have historically been really effective at creating a lasting connection with players.  Some of the bigger games that came out of the PlayStation/PS2 era were survival horror games: Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Clocktower.  But more recent AAA titles have failed to recapture that magic, but other people have already contributed enough to why that is.  The games that have succeeded have been smaller indie titles.  I'm not entirely convinced this has to do with the budgets directly, but comes about as a side effect of where a studio has to focus their energies with the small budgets.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Enter, one of my favorite games: Amnesia: The Dark Descent was released in late 2010 by Frictional Games and was a great hit, even notoriously difficult to please Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation enjoyed the game and said he was scared by it.  In the game you are Daniel, a helpless British guy with no memory or so much as a sharp stick to defend yourself with. 

The game tells its brutal and Lovecraftian story through flash backs and diary entries that force you, as Daniel, to remember a past that you obviously didn't want to remember.  Although at first glance it seems a little trite, the amnesiac protagonist trope does something very useful to the story: it equalizes your knowledge with Daniel's.  Even in a game like Skyrim or Fallout where you have a huge amount of customization available, your character has had a rich life before you got ahold of them.  That gap will always insulate you from the character, but because both you and Daniel know exactly as much about Daniel's life as he does that element of separation between you and the character is removed.

Amnesia's story is based on the need to know more and what happens when you learn terrible knowledge not meant for man.  This theme is present in the game as the Orb, and the Shadow that kills anyone who attempts to learn its secrets.  However, it's also present in what happens to you as the player when Daniel learns more about his past.  His past was filled with very unsavory things, and as you continue to uncover them you can't help but feel that you didn't want to know that.  What's important is that when you learn that Daniel had done these things, you actually feel a little bad about them because Daniel is a part of "you", to some degree.  This makes the first play through so uncomfortable, but the affect does diminish.

Silent Hill 2

In the Silent Hill games, particularly Silent Hill 2 because I've never played 1 or 3 at all, James is a fully fleshed out character with a life, personal connections, and flaws to put it lightly.  And you know none of it, but the both of you have been placed in the middle of all this craziness that neither of you understands, that similarity can connect you.  In this game part of the horror relies on the story, and the connections to James, so they need to have a character they can tack all these flaws on and build a connection to the town into.  Those things themselves are disturbing so they can still be scary when they're not internalized to the degree that Daniel's actions were.  Also, they're unknown to you at the beginning of the game so when the connection is revealed to you and James there is still some of the horror of discovery because you've both had the same experience in the town.

While it's not related to self-extension, I think the horror of discovery is worth mentioning because it does play such a huge role in making these two games psychologically disturbing, and plays to Amnesia's Lovecraftian theme.  While everything in both games is pretty messed up on its own, it's passive: the monsters are just being presented to you.  Discovery is active: when you think about the story while you play, and put James' or Daniel's actions into context and discover for yourself how they relate to the situation.  You've been forced to participate in the disturbing realization and that really makes it internal to your thoughts...you've been incepted except instead of "break up my father's empire", the idea planted in your head is "James murdered his infirm wife and half the monsters in Silent Hill are manifestations of his own sexual guilt.".

In Dead Space, which is a technically wonderful game that I've yet to get around to finishing, the best and most skin-crawling parts are when I see logs with Dr. Kyne or encounter Mercer.  It's that feeling of realizing your trapped in a tin can breached to the vacuum of space with an absolutely insane and truly zealous adherent of some Necromorph religion.  Unfortunately, what should have been gut-wrenching tension spent most of the game as frustrated nervousness because everything is a jump scare and Necromorphs kept sneaking into my camera's blind spot and eviscerating me in one blow.  I did the same battle probably close to 20 times before I finally got through it, that made it annoying and not scary.  The game thought the monsters were creepier than their story, so I had to get through them before continuing the story and that ruined the atmosphere.  Nothing takes you out of the immersion like a game-over screen every few minutes for a few hours.

Anyway, those are just some ideas I had.  What do you think?

Horror games only work if you want to keep playing

I don't often discuss games publicly because I just don't feel qualified to talk about most aspects of them with any sort of authority.  However, horror games are definitely something I feel like I understand, since I spend so much time talking about horror outside of games.

Recently, someone on reddit.com/r/horror posted a link to a small game based on the horror/creepypasta project called "The SCP Foundation".  The game is specifically based on SCP-087, the code name given to a bottomless stairwell located at an unnamed college campus, and is one of the most terrifying games that I have ever played.  I'm not lying when I say I lost sleep because of how deeply frightened I was after playing this game for like 20 minutes at 3 in the afternoon.  This is despite the fact that it has maybe 3 distinct textures that don't even wrap correctly, no story beyond the SCP itself, and seems to have been made in spare time then released for free by a bunch of guys from 4chan's /v/ board.  I noticed something interesting about what exactly made it so compelling and horrifying at the same time and I wanted to talk about it.

SCP-087 is cheap and ugly but it is, knowingly or not, a brilliant exercise in purely experiential gaming.  Video games, while generally being pretty immersive always break that immersion in a very fundamental way:  You aren't your character.  You always know something or see something your character doesn't, and the disconnect is either integral to the story or the gameplay.  It's either creating tension by giving the players knowledge of events that affect the character but that the character doesn't know, or assisting gameplay by giving the character knowledge or skill that the player doesn't know about until told.  I can't think of very many games that have stories that are told entirely during the run time by what happens to the character.  Maybe some of the early FPS games that are more about the run-and-gun experience and don't need more than a very simple story.

The story frames the experience, but a story needs characters so in order to exist in a story you have to have a vessel to act through, and this will always be not-you.  The horror you experience in these cases is a lot more like the horror you get when you're really immersed in a movie or a book.  It can be really terrifying but there's always a comfort in the fact that it's happening to a character in a story, not you.  The eventual resolution of the main plot is also a satisfying experience which gives you a nice payoff.

By doing away with an in-game story SCP-087 has removed the need to have a character for you to act through.  By not having any sort of goals, the game no longer needs any of the traditional mechanisms for interacting with the player so it has no options, no HUD, no inventory or anything.  With all of this out of the way there's nothing separating you from your in-game self, for all intents and purposes you are in the game and that makes it uniquely terrifying.  There's no more disconnect, or comfort because this is all happening to a character.

In most other games, horror or not, the motivation to keep playing the game comes from a desire to reach the end.  If a game is too long, without giving us anything new most people will stop playing, but if a game continues to weave new and interesting events into the narrative people will just keep playing.  Look to RPGs, especially Mass Effect and Fallout for evidence of this.  A game like Amnesia uses this to great effect since as you go on you learn more and more about Daniel's past and experience the dawning realization that Daniel has done horrible things.  The very act of continuing the story contributes to the horror of the experience and also has the effect of strengthening the player's resolve to reach the end-game and take revenge on Alexander.

SCP-087 doesn't have an end game, but you keep playing beyond the point where you've seen everything because you want to continue the experience.  I had always thought a good horror game relied on a compelling story and a great player character, with mechanics and visuals that supported the themes of the game, but now it seems like everything else is just a means to an end because you can have a truly terrifying game without any characters or story.

This just goes to further my theory that major studios simply can't produce a good horror game anymore, because how on Earth would you market a game without characters or a story?

Games are weird, man.
--PXA

Horror Off-Season: 13 Ghosts 1960 and 2001 compared

13 Ghosts is one of my favorite movies.  It stars a post-American Pie Shannon Elizabeth and a pre-Monk Tony Shalhoub.  The movie is a remake of William Castle's 1960 13 Ghosts, which is interesting in itself in that it involved a pretty cool and specific gimmick: Illusion-O.

Rather than write a standard review, since even the remake is over a decade old at this point I thought it would be fun to sort of compare/contrast the two and see how the material was updated 40 years later.

So, first off, William Castle was famous for inventing tons of gimmicks to get audiences into his movies and get his movies talked about.  Just to name a few:

• Macabre (1958): Lloyds of London insured each audience member for $1,000 in case they die of fright during the movie.
• House on Haunted Hill (1959): Emerg-O, where a glow-in-the-dark skeleton was suspended over the audience for a climactic scene.
• The Tingler (1959): Percept-O, where he had theaters install electric joy-buzzers in some seats to give people electric shocks during a section where the monster came off the screen and into the audience.  
• Homicidal (1961): The Fright Break, immediately before the climax audience members who were too afraid would be allowed to leave the theater and be treated and calmed by a nurse in the lobby. 

Illusion-O was an early form of color filtering, where the majority of the movie was in standard black & white while certain scenes with ghosts in them where tinted blue and the ghosts were overlayed in red.  The audience could choose to either watch with blue tinted glasses or red ones, supposedly provided by the character Dr. Plato Zorba (Cyrus Kriticos in the remake).  The blue glasses would make the ghosts invisible and the red ones would make them stand out.  These glasses mirror the glasses in the movie the characters have to use to see the ghosts, and makes for a really interesting interactive element where you can choose how you want to see the scene.

Basic concept
The brief concept of the movie is largely the same as the original:  A rich relative dies and leaves his house to his nephew, who is struggling to financially support his family consisting of an attractive daughter and a son with an odd obsession.  In this house are 12 distinct spirits, and the nephew has been branded as the 13th.  In the original the supernatural happenings are more or less incidental to the main story arc, which is the lawyer's attempt to find the uncle's hidden fortune.  The remake obviously places a greater emphasis on the supernatural aspect making it the main focus and inventing a ghost-powered mechanism.  This is pretty obvious as the opening scene in the remake is Cyrus and Dennis in the act of entrapping a ghost named "The Juggernaut", a scene that establishes the uncle's character as a ghost hunter with massive resources and also a lot of the internal mythology invented for the movie.  The original opened with a short title sequence and then started the story with a short bit of Cyrus lecturing at an archeology museum.

The Family
The characters are pretty similar in archetype, as mentioned above but the remake differs slightly.  The original had a "complete" family of Cyrus and Hilda as husband and wife with son, Buck, and daughter, Medea.  The uncle is Plato Zorba and the lawyer is Ben Rush.  Elaine Zacharides is the maid at the house and Cyrus has a friend named Van Allen, they serve as exposition speakers.  The remake has a "broken" family, because the wife has died and the husband has to continue as a single father...something that wasn't nearly as accepted in 1960.  So the father is Arthur Kriticos with son, Bobby, and daughter, Kathy.  The uncle is Cyrus Kriticos and the lawyer is Ben Moss.  The remake invents the characters of Kalina Oretzia and Dennis Rafkin to serve exposition, but they are unfamiliar to Arthur and more closely related to the uncle, Cyrus.  They've also invented Maggie Bess to serve as Bobby and Kathy's nanny, although I think the motivation for the character's creation was really to have a sassy black female played by a popular musician.

What's interesting is that in the original, Cyrus was characterized much more as husband and family man.  He had a slightly adversarial relationship with his wife and seemed firstly concerned with the family unit as a nebulous whole and then his wife.  When the character becomes Arthur in the remake he's very much the father and is concerned with his kids over all else.  His emotions and reactions to any threats confronting his kids are much more powerful and immediate while Cyrus seems restrained and sometimes even uninvolved with the situation.

The Ghosts
The original's ghosts are all fairly unique, and they explain some of them in the story.  None of them are particularly hostile towards the family, apart from one scene in which the ghost of a chef in the kitchen throws a kitchen knife at the wall and almost hits Cyrus.  The ghosts don't really serve any particular point in the narrative except to be spooky, and they don't even have particularly involved backgrounds.  The two that are explained the most are a lion tamer, who's head was bitten off by a lion (and the lion) and a chef who catches his love with another man and kills them both.

One of the things that I really liked about the remake is the ghosts were central to the story about the house being a machine, and they all had rich backgrounds which were alluded to in the movie itself and expanded upon further by a DVD extra.  The ghosts all are made to fit distinct archetypes from a "Black Zodiac" created for the film.  Since the whole story is more focused on the supernatural aspect they spend a lot of effort creating and showing this internal mythology with quicksilver flares, spoken spells on reel-to-reel tapes, written spells carved into the glass walls of the house, cubes, even the glasses take a more consistent and frequent role.  I noticed that in the original there was only a single pair of glasses, often worn by Cyrus.  Buck seemed to be able to see the ghosts pretty well without the glasses, as evidenced by him telling his parents to move out of the way of the knife before it was thrown in the kitchen scene. 

In Closing
Neither movie is particularly scary, but I think if you're in the right mindset and especially with the glasses the original has a lot more potential even though the entire story and supernatural aspects in particular are a lot weaker.  The remake suffers from everything being so well designed and just "Damn, isn't that COOL?!" to really get under your skin and unnerve you.  However, I think that also makes its production design and visual style strengths as entrance to Bro-horror.  Although I wouldn't call this bro-horror in the strictest sense because it does hit some very good emotional cues.  A lot of people absolutely hate Matthew Lillard, but I don't think he's that bad of an actor and the way his character, Dennis, grows attached to Arthur's family and even sacrifices himself in the end is quite touching.  It's also got a lot of depth to the universe because of the spell rules and the backstories given to each ghost, it all feels very solid and fleshed out.  I would almost want to see more movies that play around with the mythology established for this remake of a William Castle gimmick movie from 1960.

Horror Off-Season: Splatter Disco

I picked up a DVD of Splatter Disco at the Chiller expo a few years ago, and really wasn't expecting much except "enjoyably retarded".  The featured indie movie that year was heavily promoted at the show and was called Late Fee, which was trying to be a clever anthology but was just really bad and thrown together.

Splatter Disco markets itself as the first Slasher Musical and the DVD cover features a furry wielding a knife overlaid onto a disco ball, so it's easy to understand where my initial expectation came from.  However, it's actually a really cleverly written and well-crafted low budget genre movie.

Released in 2007, Splatter Disco was written and directed by Richard Griffin and stars Ken Foree, Trent Haaga, and Debbie Rochon.  It's got a decidedly low budget Troma-films feel and Trent even got his start with Troma.

The basic story is that Kent Chubb (Haaga) is the owner of the Den 'O Iniquity, a fetish dance club in a small New England town, and is forced to contend with the corrupt city government trying to shut down his club (for being immoral), his dying father Shank (Foree), and his wife (Rochon) running off with his drugged out lawyer.  All while a psychopathic killer is picking off his patrons.  There's also a terrifyingly endearing B-plot concerning one of the clubgoer's efforts to stand up for himself and win the affections of a cute girl who's dating a jackass.

It's a low budget movie so there is definitely some awkward acting and sets, but it's still really funny.

The musical numbers are often pretty tongue-in-cheek, including a really interesting rendition of Cole Porter's Let's Do It, Let's Fall In Love featuring a horde of yiffing furries.  There's also a number which is actually a drug trip in the mind of Kent's lawyer as he attempts to defend Kent in court immediately after dropping acid and includes a singing Angel.

Towards the last act of the movie the killer plot takes a more center roll with all the characters banding together to save themselves, which is a nice contrast to standard slashers which typically only include a single (female) survivor.

There's not a whole lot of gore, just suggestive blood effects.  There is some T&A, but being as low budget as the movie is it's not all good.  And really it's not often focused on, the movie is more interested in playing sex for laughs.  I like that they play fetishes lightly and laugh at the absurdity of it when you really look at some of it.  It's more judgmental of the "moral crusaders", while the people at the fetish club are just doing what they like and enjoying the acceptance.

I've seen this movie a few times since first watching it after Chiller that year, and it's still a really fun, campy, genre flick.  Well worth checking out.

--PXA

Horror Off-Season: The Innkeepers

Sunday became a bit of a Ti West-fest.  After watching the nicely creepy House of the Devil, I just had to check out writer/director Ti West's follow up: The Innkeepers.

In contrast to House of the Devil, this movie is set in modern day at a Connecticut inn called the Yankee Pedlar.  Interestingly, this inn actually exists and the movie was even shot there...though how much varies depending on where you read.  The inn's site obviously claims the whole movie was shot there.  This is also the 2nd film he's shot (maybe set?) in Connecticut, so there might be a Stephen King/Maine style relationship developing between the New England state and Ti. (Update:  I just watched an interview with Ti West, apparently the crew stayed at the Yankee Pedlar during the filming of House of the Devil, and weird things kept happening at the hotel but he didn't have the idea to make the movie until a year later.  Interesting connection between the two movies.)

The story here is that the Yankee Pedlar is closing (it really isn't, feel free to visit), and the two remaining staff members, Claire and Luke, are keeping up a largely empty inn.  Outside of their rooms, there are only two rooms occupied at any given time.  To entertain themselves in the off time, the two innkeepers are performing a live-in paranormal investigation to uncover the inn's haunted past.  Specifically to confirm the haunting of the inn by a tragic widow named Madeline O'Malley who hung herself in the inn.

A lot of the movie is really just the two of them bantering and doing EVP sessions in various places during the night.  The movie really takes its time getting into things, spending a lot of time just watching the characters' daily lives...guests checking in, forgetting towels, fangasming at a famous actress, being creeped out by an oversharing barista, etc.  I really liked this, partly because I was expecting something to happen and when it never did, I started getting nervous.  Also partly because it was entertaining.  I liked watching the characters interact and actually got a feeling for them outside of the context of the movie.  It was really good that they didn't take everything deadly serious, and neither did the movie.  They felt real, which made it even better when the creepy stuff started to happen.

I really loved the way they approached the creepy things, because it was very suspenseful and discomforting.  You spent a lot of the movie tensely waiting for something to happen, and when something did happen it didn't jump out at you and then cut quickly because it wasn't actually something scary, it was presented slowly and deliberately.  You could see the thing coming into frame and KNEW that once you saw it, you'll wish you hadn't...but you just keep looking.

The ending sprint is a great, panicked payoff after the setup and development.

This whole movie was really well put together, it had some very funny bits and the characters were great.  The horror elements were carefully placed, but the build up and atmosphere made them super effective.  I'm definitely on the look out for more Ti West.

--PXA

Horror Off-Season: The House of the Devil

The House of the Devil is a 2009 thriller written and directed by Ti West, starring Jocelin Donahue and Tom Noonan.  The story is set in the early 80's, and feels like it could easily have been filmed then.  Ti uses a lot of 80's techniques, and even shoots on 16mm film.  This sort of dedication really makes the movie.  When I first started watching it, I told people it was really good at being set in the 80s.  A Haunting In Connecticutt is one of my favorite movies, but it's terrible at being set in the 80s.  It felt so modern I just didn't get that it was supposed to be set in a different decade.

Between this movie, The Innkeepers(2011), and being on the horror anthology v/h/s Ti West has really been making a name for himself that is surprisingly unmarred by having directed Cabin Fever 2.  And he deserves it, man makes a mighty fine movie.  And this is his IMDB picture.

Where do I sign up to have Buckaroo Bonzai direct my movie?

The House of the Devil's premise is a pretty uninteresting throw back to the haunted house/slasher movies it's trying to emulate.  Our main character is Samantha, a "nice" college girl who's trying to find her own apartment because her roommate gets too much late-night nookie.  To pay for her new apartment she takes a babysitting job being advertised by flyer on campus.  The call is decidedly shady, but she takes the job any way.  Even after meeting the person placing the ad and having him explain in the creepiest way possible that everything he said about the job until now was a lie.

The house is creepy, all the characters except Samantha and her roommate are pretty creepy.  It's a little cheesy, almost, but still very creepy.

The movie builds nicely and then goes totally sideways with a great Satanic twist.  There's nothing really remarkable about the ending, but it is gripping to watch.  There's a lot that reminds me of Rosemary's Baby and When a Stranger Calls.  The ending would be completely ineffective, and downright silly, without the great buildup and characterization from the rest of the movie.

It definitely moves slow, which lends to some of the early atmosphere building feeling like it's laid on too thick, but it pays off because it involves you in the story.  This was a really nice throw back to early 80s movies, but with better quality and more interesting pacing.  I thought this was a great movie, but it could definitely come off as too slow or too dull or too weird to some audiances.

If you like the old school, or really appreciate a good creepy slow burn without a lot of jump scares or gore, this is worth checking out.

--PXA

The Beerening: Review: The Alchemist's Heady Topper

In 2011 Hurricane Irene struck the east coast, causing an estimated $2.6 billion in property damage.  Flood waters caused massive damage, and one of the casualties was Vermont's Alchemist pub & brewery.  Thanks to community and industry support and a massive amount of determination Alchemist was back in the business of selling beer barely a month later, using the profits from those batches to rebuild their business.  In February 2012 they began to export cans of their Heady-Topper double IPA to Massachusetts.  Although, it's still exceedingly difficult to find.

Heady-Topper is a pure and beautiful exploration of American hops, with almost nothing getting in the way.  The style, Double (or Imperial) IPA is defined as a strong malt backbone balanced by a high to absurdly high hop bitterness.  Heady-Topper is really neither of those things, as it is not bitter and not malty.  It's pure, unfettered hops.

The beer recommends drinking it from the can, so I had one from the can and then another a day later poured into a pint glass, and I can definitely understand the recommendation.

Aroma
Even from the small opening in the can the beer is overwhelming fragrant.  Just a gorgeous collection of American hops, particularly the ones that smell like tropical fruits.  The beer smells like oranges, and mangos, and tangerines.  Very juicy.

Flavor
Taking a taste of the beer is a cool, smooth, explosion of hops.  It's not sticky, or bitter, it barely tastes like beer.  There's a small amount of a light grainy maltiness to provide a slight sweetness behind all those fruity hop flavors, but it's barely noticeable.  The same flavor persists pretty much all the way through the can, albeit with a diminishing explosion each time you drink.  What's interesting is that it doesn't get sweeter as it warms up, which is often the case with beers with really strong flavors.  It keeps a surprisingly refreshing smoothness the entire can.  At no point does it hint at its 8% ABV.

Body
The beer has a very light body but at no point does it feel thin or prickly.  The carbonation is very light and just lifts the hop aromas out of the beer but doesn't try to make the beer feel fuller than it is.

The next day I poured the beer from the can into a pint glass.

Look
The beer is a little hazy, which is very unsurprising given how much hops are obviously in it.  What is worth noting is how light it is.  The color is a pale golden yellow more like a regular Pale Ale, or a Wit.

Flavor & Aroma - Part 2
When poured the effect of the beer is noticeably more subsided.  It's still a wonderful, juicy, hop bomb but feels a little more dull.  One advantage of pouring is that the aroma spreads out more, so it becomes a gift that keeps on giving.  Since the hops have calmed down a little bit, the malt character is a little more present.  It's still a very light flavor and is just slightly sweeter than from the can.

Overall
I am far more impressed with this beer than most other ultra-hoppy beers, which tend to feel very thick and bitter.  This is so clean and easy drinking while also having a tremendous amount of flavor and aroma, it offers me absolutely nothing not to enjoy.  It's not something to drink every day, besides its price point this amount of glorious hop aroma is too much to have very often.

But it's definitely worth it to find, haven't really had anything like it.

--PXA