Terrible First Line Competition Entry 2

By the time the puddles of olive oil and poodle fat had stopped burning, Terrence found himself deeply annoyed- not so much because he was dead, but because he would now never be able to tell Tina how little the last three years worth of Friday Fish n' Fungus meals had meant to him.

I swear, the quest for completed content will be brought to conclusion, dear readers.

Sweet memory: For lo the bridges burneth

Attempting to play Dwarf Fortress puts me heavily in mind of my five-year old self's attempts to play Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards: It's colourful, very pixelated, and I have absolutely no idea about what I am doing or how to do it. Should my dwarves spontaneously be run-over by taxi's or mugged by someone dressed as a villain from Cigars of the Pharaohs, my heart will be warmed by nostaligic childhood memories. Should my dwarves suddenly drop dead of STD's, then it'll be the memory of a an older child who tried to track down his childhood game memories and learned, for the first time, that LSLLL was game that you win by having safe sex, something of which my five year old self was unaware of.


However, I'm pretty sure my memory is lying to me. Our first computer (that I can remember) was the Mac Classic, which had a nine-inch monochrome CRT screen (And, Wikipedia tells me, ran at the now quaintly bizarre 512x342 resolution, and had 4MBs of memory). And I am also sure that the LSLLL mugger was not dressed in the weird purple Cigar of the Pharaohs outfit, partially because that doesn't make any sense, and partially because as I said, our CRT screen was monochrome- black and white, which means no purple robes.


I remember Felix the Cat: The Movie being something I was obsessed about for a brief period, but when I tried to watch it again, I had to turn it off in disgust. "Terrible"... doesn't even come close to describing it. Since then, I can't revisit treasured childhood classics, like the Lost in Space remake or David Lynch's Dune (I was a strange child) for fear that they won't be deserving of the the shinning altars I laid them on as a small boy. I'm sure Jim Varney will no longer be funny (although the theme song from Ernest Rides Again remains totally kick-ass). Ghostbusters I and II were actually funnier when I saw them as an adult. I'm sure Alien³ isn't as good, although I am sure the lovely Ms. Weaver is as intense as always. Pee-Wee is also better as an adult than a child. 


Still, the bad outweighs the good. I used to watch Sonic Underground, which had Sonic and his siblings... fight evil villains by turning into nineties rock musicians.... who are hedgehogs. Yeah. Or the Caspar movie? It's really best not to think about that one. And the less said about Beyblade the better.

Better authentic mammon than a bogus god

When is passion forgivable? 


Gastrimargia, porneia, philargyria, lupē, orgē, akedia, kenodoxia, hyperephania. Working from Greek, the monk Evagrius Ponticus writes these down- to warn, to preach, to proselytize. Time and tide play with them, and these eight sins are later whetted down to the manageable seven, and as the language of scholarship becomes Latin, we get luxuria, gula, avaritia, acedia, ira, invidia and superbia. Socordia replaces acedia, but the intent remains the same, and we reach our modern Seven Deadly Sins, which most of us know- Lust and Gluttony, Greed and Sloth, Wrath and Envy, and ever ascendent, Pride. 


Theologians have always been partial to our friends the sins, that is when they aren't fighting over Arianism, Nestorianism or Chalcedonian doctrine, which is just as fun as it sounds. Saint Aquinas, the dear, felt the need to divide gluttony into six different subcategories, the sort of inane minutiæ so beloved of scholars when they run out of the truly ground breaking ideas. Some enterprising fellow chose to whittle it down to three groupings- the sins of lustful appetite, irascibility and intellect. But all of this is the splitting of hairs- our sins are all those of the passionate bent. We find that this extends into both the social and legal milieu- we have crimes of passion, we accuse others of getting heated or riled up, and we mean it pejoratively. While we may describe a speaker as passionate, we also apply it as a derogatory adjective- the passions of "Latin women"- a euphamism to affectionately describe the same attitudes one might find in an angry, toy-throwing toddler.


When is passion forgivable? As a culture, existing in the Western-European tradition of the Song of Roland, the Matter of Britain, Gallic romantics and Mediterranean Lotharios, we raise these passionate people up while at the same time we condemn their passions as our sins. We go so far as to lock ourselves into a catch twenty-two. While we decry those who fall victim to their passions, that killjoy Pope Gregory I felt the need to add Sloth to our little list and thus condemn those one might think we would consider our greatest compatriots- those who have handily rid themselves of any passion whatsoever. Perhaps it's an offshoot of the Catholic guilt that St. Peter bequeathed to Europe, that masochistic glee of the constantly guilty. We let ourselves be passionate, write our stories and then we prostate ourselves in the confessional, overwhelmed by guilt. Then with God's love and our penance we're off again to unleash our passions on the world. For many of us that embodiment of all the sins, Henry Tudor, managed to deprive us of even confession, leaving only heavily mounting guilt as our passions rise and fall and we sin and sin again. The joy of our modern world is that we're free to confess our sins in any number of ways, from psychologist to blog post, but we've utterly eliminated culturally approved redemption and penance, save for the few lucky celebrities who get time in rehab clinics for the very wealthy. You've sinned, shame on you, feel guilty. And then that's it.


If modern culture is going to continue on it's way- so vocally, so at odds with our own conservative morality, than we require a new set of sins. My personal set of even would be Boorishness, Lack of Charity, Overuse of Buzzwords or Academic Jargon, Poor Hygiene, Crudeness, Violence Towards One's Fellow Man and Not Understanding That One Can't Carry A Tune And Yet Singing Anyways.


Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your thoughts. Write in what you feel should be the new sins of our modern world. I'll make it a contest. The one with the best sins will be allowed forgiveness with only three Hail Mary's and a single act of contrition.


...Ideo firmiter propono, adiuvante gratia Tua, de cetero me non peccaturum peccandique occasiones proximas fugiturum par publius Karaoke.... 

What are we?

When they asked
And I knew
It was over, again,
Like before, and before
(What a time is has been!)
And I ask
Why it is
That they're going away-
When they asked
And I know
I have drove them away.

"I am sorry"
The words that I most hate to hear
"I'm am sorry"
Well frankly, my dear, I don't care
Because she said it, he said it, she said it again
And it's great that they're sorry
But they left all the same
They go off unburdened
They leave silence behind
To entreats and paens
They give no reply

And I ask
To my self
When the question is laid
What it is about me that makes it all seem
That absolute silence is preferably seen
As the option to take
Act as though I were dead
To never again hear the thoughts from my head
And I wonder
In anguish
Though detached, it is true
Because of the way that my thoughts are construed
I am always observing my every move
Critiquing myself, here on the outside
To myself I have never successfully lied

And I ask
As I watch it all crumble apart
Why in God's good name did I bother to start?

And yet, (in this moment, I'll unburdened my heart)
If the chance came again..... I'd still play my part.

A very personal letter

Dear authors of Girl Genius,

Stories have ebb and flow. Please allowed this current storyline to come to a goddamned end so we can have a breather and maybe feel comfortable in any given setting. It's been at least a year, JUST RESOLVE THE BLOODY CONFLICTS FOR A MOMENT.

Sincerely,

The Human Race

A Post Delayed

There is a moment where it all makes sense to me again. For a scant couple of minutes, I am no longer in the loop. No longer part of the web. For a moment, fit only for observation- although not an impartial one. I am hardly self centered enough to think that it revolves around me, but I consider myself a considerable force in getting fifty-odd technicians aimed in roughly the right direction long enough to bring us to this point. I am required to stand at the door, inside the house, and watch the show's delievery. For those few minutes, I have no headset, no technitions around me, just a little corner as the lights dim. The audience probably can't feel it, but the tension tastes bitter in my mouth. All those moments in the mind's eye- every failure, every delay, every mistake- they're all bound up in this moment, when I could choke on the tension. But in that moment, I remember why I wanted it in the first place- it was this, this being apart from those in their seats. That energy... that potential- it is Schrödinger's studio. Every waveform of every mistake and triumph exists on this empty stage. And then- the voices go, the lights rise, the actors enter. The play is observed and the waveform collapses. Wether it it will go well or not is now beyond my power. I have brought it to this point, and it is those under me who must now see it through.

So I return to my office, to do my paperwork and to only listen- the birthing of the show reaching my ears through a small black speaker. But that moment will stay in my mind, that little singularity of why.

A Rebuttal to Mr. Ebert

I have so much respect for Roger Ebert, but he recently wrote this awful hate screed called Video Games Can Never Be Art, a sentiment really bothers me. I mean, he doesn't complain that CGI scenes in movies aren't art, after all the love and attention showered on it by artists, so what makes a CGI scene different from a video game? Control.

An audience member at a film is entirely at the mercy of what is on the screen- a director has to show or tell everything via the strictly linear progression of the film it was printed on. In a game, a director has to work around the movement of the audience- should the player choose to run to here or there, or do this or that- a director has to still be able to tell a worthwhile story without obviously limiting the movement of the player.

In film, a masterful director (and writer and so on) knows how to say everything they need to within the time limit of a film or an episode. Can your story survive segmentation, and be told in a two hour film, or twelve forty-five minute episodes, or a six-part miniseries each an hour long? A master film game director and writer (and, god knows, these are often far and few between) know that the length of their game runs anywhere from 30 to 100 hours, and it runs continuously. I mean, people can save and quit and you can have narrative arcs, but the story has to run continuously from point to point. Casablanca is a two hour self contained film- you're left asking questions at the end, but the story's narrative and major plots have been checked off and we're leaving the theatre feeling romantic and tragic and all that jazz. A game has to deal with the fact that by the end of two hours, you may only be finishing the tutorial, and the reveal of the game's villain, or the betrayal of a loyal friend may still be seven hours away, and the hero’s victory may not occur for more than an entire day in real time. That’s twenty-four hours worth of interaction that has to retain its ties to a narrative. The reason so many games are BAD is that they just can't sustain a story on that kind of a level. That being said, not all games are about story; many of them are just about having fun. Crafting beautiful worlds or landscapes to let people run around in, doing absurd things because they're having a good time. A complex musical game, where you've got to meld the harmonies of music into a unified theme to create lovely symphonic sound or the loopy absurdity of something like Mario- the little fat plumber in his overalls flying through outer space on a green dinosaur to save a princess from a giant, fire-breathing turtle. It’s absurd, and it’s hilarious and it is so much fun to inhabit this world.

Film needs to put you in a story- you need to care about the story and the people in it, and you'll suspend your disbelief because you care about who and what your seeing. A game needs to put you in a world, and it has to be a world where your interactions make sense, where things mesh together- and why we call a game broken when the world doesn't act in a way we feel makes any sense- when our ability to control our game-self is clunky or badly designed or where the actions of things around us are wrong.

I think I'm mad because I've been playing a game that understand story better than almost anything I've ever played before, Mass Effect 2, an epic trilogy, full of complex themes. An escaped slave who has no sense of herself beyond property, an angry young woman who was a test subject as a child, and carries around fury and baggage like you wouldn't believe. A scientist who struggles with having had to sterilize an entire species that threatened to conquer the galaxy, and now he has to watch them stagnate culturally and slowly die. The game always offers you a choice- what kind of person are you in this world? Are you the hero, who saves people and helps the downtrodden, or are you the selfish anti-hero, out only for yourself and not caring about who gets in your way. I care about the people in this game, because the actors who voice them aren't just phoning it in. Martin Sheen (Martin Sheen!) is an enigmatic and creepy head of a humanity first organization who funds your resurrection, but you can't trust him a millimeter. Michael Dorn as a belligerent viceroy, Marina Sirtis as a matriarch gone mad, Tricia Helfer, Adam Baldwin, Michael Hogan... the list goes on. These are sci-fi greats, and A-list actors, and they help build this world for you just as effectively as if they were acting on your DVD player.

I normally love Roger Ebert, but here he just comes off as a bitter old man who can't accept this kind of new medium. I can't help but think of Peter O'Toole in Ratatouille, when he gives his speech about how it’s more fun to write harsh criticism as a critic, but a critic really puts himself on the line when he comes to the defense of the new, because the new needs friends. Ebert was writing his piece as a response to a speech by a young woman who wanted to talk about why she thought games could be art- not always art, but have the potential to be. Ebert had to go and spit vitriol all over that. Games are often crap, but I have been as touched by the people of Mass Effect 2 as I was in the characters of Casablanca, or Star Trek, or as I did reading about the death of the boor Bolgs in the nuclear winter comic When The Wind Blows- and there's another medium that has to fight for people to give it a chance, for people to say that it can rise above pulp and be art. Ebert is just being old and spiteful, but it has got to hurt to the thousands of industry people trying to elevate their work so that a grumpy old critic will call it worthy. Andy Warhol painted a picture of a soup can, and we hail it a great art. Why can't we do the same to something like a game, which had hundred of artists and programmers laboring for years, and great actors lending their voices... when I'm old, and ranting that the Twitter holograms they beam into our brains will never be art, I hope I can remember that young people are trying to make something they can call their own.