It all stems from the Death Note: a book found by a sociopathic hyperintelligent schoolkid that will kill someone if you write their name in it. You have to be picturing their face, and you can specify the time and circumstances of their death. He starts using it to rid the world of violent criminals, but gets into such hot water so quickly that his immediate objective is mostly self preservation.

The detective is never entirely sure if it’s really him doing it, since the flexibility of the book lets him schedule killings of people he’s never met, by natural causes, at times he has a perfect alibi for. But nor can the villain find a good way to kill his rival and get away with it: the two keep manoeuvring so that the villain could always feasibly be innocent, and the detective cannot be safely killed.

It’s a terrifying mind game of questions.
“He’s asking me what the killer would do – do I answer accurately and risk looking like the killer, or throw him off and risk playing dumber than he knows me to be?”
“If he’s telling me that openly, does that mean he knows that I know, or is he trying to find out if I know he knows that I know?”

Luckily, the complexity is kept readable by a completely frank expositional dialogue style, where people actually say things like, “If this had happened sooner, it would have been bad for me!” and “Please could you explain a little better.” You’re forever wondering how the hell the series is going to last more than a couple of episodes further, because massive developments tighten the circle around these two players in almost every one. But it keeps finding clever ways to scupper the dominant player, and luck never sides with either of them too long.

I haven’t finished the whole thing yet, but I can say the first 24 episodes are essential brain fodder. Thanks to Graham and Lisa for recommending it in the pub the necessary five times for me to get around to checking it out. If you’re in the US, PleasingFungus points out that the whole series is available on Hulu for free.

The pilot establishes a rich guy as the villain, getting away with murder, as if that’s going to be the overarching plot for the whole season. Instead it’s picked apart and inverted in a few episodes, and the jobs-of-the-week get much more inventive and entertaining as they unravel it.

Everything else I’m watching at the moment treats its series-scale plot with kid gloves, never daring to move it more than an inch in a single episode to preserve precious plot juice for the finale. Terriers goes at its own with a wrecking ball.

Basically my only complaint has been totally overturned, and unless I’m forgetting something big, this is the best new drama since Dexter Breaking Bad.

The fact that it’s about the founding of Facebook, which I’m aware is controversial but have no actual knowledge of, is ideal. “I will feel like I’m being informed about something I’m interested in,” I thought, “and be unable to refute any liberties the film takes with the truth, allowing me to enjoy it entirely.”

Yep, that happened.

The last Sorkin film I saw, Charlie Wilson’s War, was good but didn’t really have his stamp on it. Given that this is also a book adaptation, and also based on nonfiction, I figured that would be the case again. It’s absolutely not: the film opens on a conversation in a bar that would be utterly tedious if it were written by anyone else.

“Since we started on the topic of Final Clubs, I think I may have missed a birthday,” Zuckerberg’s girlfriend says, some way into it.

About a series of painful lawsuits, it doesn’t seem like an immediately funny topic. But right from the start, Sorkin finds masses to sink his teeth into: Zuckerberg’s morally bankrupt hot-or-not project, his withering dryness in the discovery sessions, his inability to stand in the same room as a Carribean themed party showing a loop of Niagara Falls.

And it’s strangely exciting. Knowing the world-changing degree to which the idea will ultimately explode makes their early celebrations of “600 members!” and the selling point of “exclusivity” tantalising to watch. And makes the ethics of the transgression all the more important.

As the film depicts it, Zuckerberg’s deception makes him absolutely guilty of something, and something we instinctively feel should undermine Facebook. But rationally, what’s shown in the film doesn’t constitute intellectual property theft. It’s just a sort of extreme breach of contract. If you had to convict him of anything beyond that, it’d be several counts of – as the film eloquently puts it – “trying really hard to be an asshole”.

Painting the whole thing as an attempt to impress an ex-girlfriend is mawking it up a little, but at the same time I do buy the frowny nerd rage it entails. Eisenberg does a great impression of the kind of balled up neuroses that really do drive a certain type of genius to do something spectacular with his good ideas. Whether that’s a hint of authenticity or just good acting, I don’t know.

So they siphoned all their thick, sticky innovation into the single-player for StarCraft 2, where they can stick with the old high-level rules but make more interesting missions out of them.

In fact, they got a bit carried away. I’m used to high-budget strategy games giving me a lot of special-case missions, but StarCraft 2 never stops. I spent half the game waiting for a “Make a base, go kill theirs” mission that never came. Literally every single one is a custom showcase for one particular unit, an unusual objective, a pre-built base, no base at all, or revolves around a new rule they have to teach you on the fly.

At the risk of sounding like a tiny child, I don’t like it. I like to make my own bases. I like to choose the units I like, rather than have a whole mission structured to force me to appreciate one the game wants me to use. And I don’t like new rules.

Scripting a mission around a unique scenario always involves a degree of Bullshit: Bullshit you couldn’t have seen coming, Bullshit you’re forced to do, Bullshit to stop you taking shortcuts or being clever. Blizzard are so good, so big, rich and talented, that they’re able to avoid almost all the Bullshit that scripting causes on one, maybe two missions. The rest of the time, I’m punished for doing my own thing so much that I eventually learn to just play the way the mission designer wants me to. Use the unit he tells me to. Click what he tells me to click. It works, but it’s basically a waste of my time.

The zombie-frying mission is the one I’m thinking of as an example of pretty much Bullshit-free scripting. It does dictate certain aspects of the way you play, but the New Rule is easy to grasp and has a certain intuitive logic to it. And you can build whatever works for you: any effective army is effective here. Accordingly, it’s fun.

The other one I liked was the optional mission where you play as a female Ghost, separated from but supporting a larger army. Plenty of Bullshit, but the way it turned existing RTS mechanics into puzzle logic was interesting, and the mind-control ability has so many great applications. I’ve heard the alternative mission, with Utter Tosh, is good too, but his abilities seemed less exciting to me and I didn’t get anywhere with it.

I’m also a fan of the research system between missions, and the ability to postpone some missions for ages. But both are pretty minor bonuses. Two good missions, among thirty, isn’t enough to make me want to sit through the embarrassing cutscenes.

Prohibition-era Sopranos. Steve Buscemi is a corrupt county treasurer in Atlantic City in the 20s, and it’s lovely to see him play a position of power. I’ve got so used to him as a snivelling loser that it’s surprising how well his perpetual sneer works as one of superior disdain. The tone is just right, for me: Buscemi’s character is a villain, but not repulsive so far. It’s possible to enjoy the early twentieth century opulence of his life without being put off by the guy himself.

• The world has ended. No further world can be built.
• Oh wait, you can still get everything for free.
• This is fine, so long as they don’t make the free route slower.
• Hey, they made the free route slower!
• Man, now they won’t even want to make a drop system that doesn’t suck – one that lets me work towards what I want, or ever gives me a hat.
• I’m glad crafting the new stuff is pretty easy, though.
• Wait a minute: finding a load of stuff I don’t want, plus easy crafting and trading, wavy-equals working towards what I want?
• Yes – very, very slowly, and with no hope of getting a hat.

So it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been. But I think it’s been mishandled: if the point really is to channel money to community contributors, only sell community items. Add your own when players demand it. And if you don’t want to make non-purchasers feel left out, launch with a few Valve-made weapons unlockable with achievements, and make them the focus.

Because that’s how I feel, as someone who doesn’t want to burn through a lot of cash on this. TF2 isn’t a game for me anymore – the only people who get to play it all are the ones prepared to pay. It’s nice that there’s a lot to unlock, but in practise, even the much lower crafting requirements are way too high for someone like me. It takes seven items I don’t want to make one that I do, and that’s more than I find in a month.

Even after months of play, I won’t have the +25 health that Scouts who pay do. The chances of finding all the items required for a set bonus, particularly the hat, are negligible.

I do really like the Black Box, though – a vampiric rocket launcher with a smaller clip. It limits your aggressive capacity, but suits the calculating way I play Soldier: safe distance, medkit near, Equaliser ready, Buff Banner steadily charging.

The item that’s closest to one of my suggestions, the knife that rapidly steals your victim’s identity, is a total bust. The ability itself is a satisfyingly stylish flourish, but they’ve paired it with a wildly disproportionate drawback: the inability to disguise at will.

That’s such a massive, constant pain in the arse for an advantage that’s really only useful when facing exactly two people, both of whom are looking the wrong way, and even then only if the second of them looks round less than a second but more than half a second after your kill. And doesn’t spy check.

They should have actually stolen my idea, rather than independently coming up with their own that has just enough in common for me to make false accusations about it on my blog. My knife had some trivial drawback that would rarely hinder anyone – it’d sell even better.

You’ll spend a few episodes trying to figure out which one of the central partnership is the dopey archetype, which one’s the womaniser, which one’s the genius, which one’s the loser. Eventually I realised none of those templates fit any of these characters any better than they do real people. Basically, the hook is that it’s written by someone who doesn’t think you’re a moron or have an insultingly reductive attitude to human nature.

They kind of had to do an episode like this – skipping over it or doing anything fun would have been a betrayal of the emotional punch of the finale. But that didn’t make it any easier to watch. The theme of discovering your humanity through a relationship just hit a little hard. That makes this an effective episode, but I can’t claim to have enjoyed it over the lump in my throat.

So a thought occurs: Brevity Week, in which I rapidly post about these things in as few words as I can manage, possibly not bothering to find images if it’s in any way hard. How was Vancouver? Great.