Category: random

Sustaining the Energy for Change

If you’re looking for direction, you’fe come to the wrong place. I’ve got no clue. I’m writing this as I’m thinking it out, muddling through it. I’d say this was an attempt at dialectic but there isn’t anyone here to respond to my questions. The name doesn’t really matter, I’m throwing out ideas as they come and we’ll see what sticks..

So there’s the question. How do you do it? How do you overcome the inertia of your life when you get a brilliant idea or you recognize areas of your life that you don’t like? The idea, the revelation, is easy enough it doesn’t take any energy or persistence. Ideas come all the time to everyone, acting on them, and then sustaining them that’s the difficulty. I have journals, txt files, scraps of paper, indez cards, stick-its, all full of great ideas, and I’m not bull-shiting you either. Some of these ideas are the kind that you can build a career, life, empire out of even.  I’ve even half-assed followed some of them through, laid part of the groundwork for something great. So what though, I’m not bragging here, telling you how great and smart I am, great ideas like that come to everyone, everyone. Sit in a coffee shop or diner for a day and take notes you’d walk out with enough great ideas to last a lifetime. My ideas are shit as long as they stay on all that paper.

See, there we are back at the problem, is it fear of failure? fear of greatness? fear of standing out of the crowd? I’ve started on some of these ideas, put some time and effort it, only to see myself lose the energy to follow through, lose interest in the idea, and I’ve sat and watched everything I’d worked on cave in on itself. So why looking back on my life so far do I only see lots of foundations, some even have the beginnings of a superstructure, there are no monuments though.

I’m going around the idea in my head, over and over, and perhaps that’s the problem. I sit here thinking about an idea so much that by the time I DO something about it I’ve already become bored with the idea. You can live a thousand lives in the blink of an eye, and see the actions of all your decisions in a heartbeat. Reflecting constantly on what the consequences of your actions will be so thoroughly so that, you no longer are even intrigued by those consequences can go a long way in killing any desire to act on them.

I’m not going to advocate acting on a thought or idea without any forethought on what it entails, that’s too irreponsible. I’m going to try and stop living so much in my head though, less time thinking just what and how I should do something and just try doing it… Maybe then it’ll stay fresh enough, I can sustain it long enough to see some of the change I want to see in my life, or not. I don’t know how thise thing works 😛

So talk back to me here, am I wrong? right?… Let’s go ahead and try that dialectic thing I talked about. It worked for Socrates and look where it got him……..Oh.

Random Code

I finished playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village look for my review over at Gamestooge soon. I enjoyed the game but you won’t find it sneaking onto my top 10 DS games. I’ve picked up Etrian Odyssey mostly on the recommendation of everyone at Toastyfrog. I haven’t gotten into it yet so I can’t tell you my thoughts on it, I know that when it came out there was no fanfare and that it still sold out of its initial run and can only be found at a high price on the second hand market, apparently its a sleeper hit.

Finished my two applications for the government fellowships and mailed them out just in the knick of time. I’m not getting my hopes up, if I get it fantastic if not I’ll live. I have heard back from the graduate programs I applied to sadly I did not get into any graduate school. I have my internship which starts in March it goes until August, what happens after that? I couldn’t tell you. I’m living for today, or for the next few months.

EDIT: The review is up now! Follow th HTML! Link

Franchises that really must end, now, for real, seriously.

I play video games as most of you know, I even get to review them sometimes. As the video game industry has expanded and become more mainstream. It has also become more cautious and established games have become more and more prevalent as publishers look for a sure thing to return on their investment. There are some franchises though that no longer deliver on the promise of great game play, or have become so bastardized and watered down that they bear no resemblance to their progenitors. So here is my list of game franchises that the most be put to rest, some quickly and quietly other violently and extreme prejudice! Now in no particular order:

10. Sonic the Hedgehog – What started as Sega’s edgy assualt on Mario Brothers has become a tired mess. Sonic stopped being good around the 2nd game. The move to 3-d for Mario created new exciting gameplay and opened up the Mushroom kingdom, it put Sonic on rails and saddled him with a terrible camera. I stopped paying attention to the horrors of the franchise when their new game was about a black, gun-totting hedgehog… Please Sega put the poor guy out of our misery!

9. Final Fantasy – I’m a hard core Final Fantasy fan. I own every single one, including FFXI which I played for 25 minutes before deleting from my hard-drive (the irony being that it took me over an hour to install the game and jump through all the hoops SquareEnix wants you too (damn those codes!)). I’m done though now and I’m ready for the next thing. I’m tired of buying these games and playing through them for nostalgia’s sake. The developers must have other ideas and games concepts they rather explore, so why cram that in to a FF and load it with all the baggage that comes with FF, the good and the bad. It’s had a great run but the last few instances have been hurt more by their association with Final Fantasy then helped. XII is a great example of this, a great game with innovative gameplay that takes flack for not being close enough to it’s predecessors. Also I’m sick of whiny spiky haired blond kids being the protagonists and girly goth looking bad guys.

8. Half-Life – the FPS game on the PC, Half-life revitalized single and on-line gameplay when it was originally released, and Valve continues to make great games using the engine, which is what they should be doing more of market the engine and create new content using it. I no longer care about Gordon Freeman and the world he lives in. I’m also sick of waiting forever for episodic content, if you’re going down that route you have to deliver more often than every 2 years. The long wait is half the reason I’m no longer interested in the Half-Life world.

7. Guitar Hero – I don’t want to ever see Guitar Hero IV. There isn’t any need for it, all that needs to be done now is sell music to those who already own the game. There really shouldn’t have been a 2 either. All you need to sell is the engine and the guitar at brick box stores and then sell content on-line through Playstation Home or Xbox Live. There isn’t anything else you can do to change the guitar to make it easier and there isn’t anything new to add gameplay wise (Guitar hero is just a rhythm beat game with a different peripheral).

6 . Pokemon- I’ve caught them all, next please.

5. Warcraft- World or otherwise. I think Blizzard has made enough money cribbing ideas from Games Workshop, let’s see something new now Blizzard (this doesn’t mean Diablo or Starcraft either, new means new).

4.  Halo – Maybe I’m at heart a PC gamer but I’ve never. ever been impressed with Halo and I doubt I ever will. The story-line is cribbed from a half dozen sci-fi standards and is overall weak, as is the gameplay. I’m so glad Bungie left Mircosoft and I hope they never ever make another shooter. Halo is about the most over-hyped franchise ever. Doesn’t help that 80% of the people you’ll end up playing with on-line are immature fucktards.

3. Metal Gear Solid – I love MGS, I forced myself through MGS2 and 3. I’m not buying a Playstation 3 to play the fourth.  I don’t care about Kojima’s take on cold war politics or his convoluted (read: unreadable) storylines. I ignore the storylines completely in Metal Gear, as they make no sense whatsoever, I’m there for the gameplay and that has gotten worse through the iterations. I don’t understand how they teach history and politics in Japan but one has to wonder if illegal substances are involved. Anyway, the gameplay has stalemated and I don’t care about Solid anymore so let’s all move one

2. Mega Man – This is a given. Has any franchise been exploited as much as poor Mega Man? I’ve lost count of the games that have the little blue bomber in them. None of which have been as good as Mega Man 2, which was released in 1989. There you go, 18 years of Mega Man games that can’t live up to an original NES game. The latest games to have his name branded on them are wholly unremarkable. Capcom needs to end it or put the guy out to pasture for a while. We’ve all had enough.

1. Metroid Prime – The first Gamecube game got rave reviews from the industry for bringing Samus into the 3rd dimension successfully. I don’t know what game they were playing. I hated the controls for the game, the cycling through visors, the clunkiness of Samus, and the shrinking of the game world. I think the DS, PSP, and Indie game market on PC have proven that 2d games are still viable.  If you want to continue the Prime series of games Nintendo needs to farm out the coding to someone who knows how to do FPS, maybe make some contacts with PC game developers. Cause they are doing it wrong. End it or fix it.

Deal with the Devil

The story of Faust is an old one, and not that original. Man makes deal with the Devil, man is duped by the Adversary, man is dragged down to hell to suffer torment unending. It’s a fairly standard “happy” Christian tale. The moral being don’t ever consort or bargain with evil. Goethe added some subtlety to the tale. Not surprising as the man spent 60 odd years working on it. His tale while having a happy ending still re-enforces the belief that any encounter with “evil” or the devil will only leave one suffering. Salvation and happiness only come from God, specifically the Christian one.

My question is where did this idea come from? What makes this a classic tale? I imagine the opposite tale goes much the same way. Who ever got out of life better because he mad a deal with God? If you are a Christian or a Muslim or whatever, don’t delude yourself into thinking your bargain with the deity of your choice is sacred or special. Stripped of its poetic language it boils down to you giving up your independence and free choice, (allegedly given to you by the very being who wants you to give it all away) your soul in exchange for happiness everlasting. A bargain that you must take wholly on faith. No one has ever come back to tell us that God (or whoever) keeps his side of the bargain. Don’t bother mentioning Job or any other lucky fellow you might happen to know. Their happiness is far outweighed by the misery of the countless millions who have made the same deal and gotten only soul crushing poverty and misery as their reward. This in sharp contrast to the Devil, who in every story I’ve ever read at least keeps his end of the bargain. The Devil unlike the Man upstairs delivers on his promises.

So if you get a chance to make a deal with Mephistopheles (a slim possibility) I’d go for it. You’ll at least get something out of it. And when and if you burn in Hell (an impossibility) rest assured you’ll be burning with all the other poor saps who made a deal with the other guy, only to compound their pain and misery!

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