Kleenex, Monasteries, and Vituperation

I was horrified to find the following message on the bottom of my box of Kleenex:
"Say goodbye to the stiff upper lip... [their ellipsis] Tell calm, cool and collected to take a hike. Whoop it up! Laugh, scream, cry and holler! And when tons os stuff stuffs up your nose, blow it loud and blow it proud! Show your heart and show some tears... of joy and sorrow, in awe and pride. Just let it out!"

I don't want to believe that my Kleenex is telling me to behave like a simpleton and a lunatic, abandoning decency and decorum for the sake of becoming an emotional mess and a public nuisance, but I can't help but think that's exactly what my Kleenex is saying. To me, this speaks to a broader issue, one that continues to replace the educated gentleman of previous generations with the rude, ignorant, and utterly reprehensible self-absorbed man-child of the twenty-first century, the kind of willfully stupid Philistine who refers to a well-spoken man such as our president as a "snob," who dismisses the arts and history as "artsy", and who finds a purpose in television and sports.

Well, my friends, the raving populace has always been weak to bread and circus, but when I start to despair about the state of humanity in the modern day, I reflect that the world has always been filled with a cacophonous rabble who, among their more heinous offenses, belittle their betters for their knowledge and refinement. Not that I am particularly either, mind, but I do aspire to be. Not only has there always been this noisome crowd, there have always been refuges where proper sensibilities and learning are protected.

Even in the Middle Ages, when the majority of the world ran around burning witches, the wisdom of the ages was preserved in manuscripts copied in monasteries. While there will always be the threat of Dark Ages, whether through the collapse of civilization or, as we see today, through a purposeful preference towards ignorance and idiocy, there will always be a minority of people who stand up against this kind of barbarism and hold out.

Thank you, ancient monks. And thank you to you, too, if you are also someone who loves reading and writing, and all things worth preserving.

Sometimes I take myself much too seriously.

Here's Looking At You, Google.

Just for fun, I decided to run a line from the poem "Over the Misty Mountains Cold" by Tolkien in Google to see what it came up with. I didn't use any Boolean functions (no 'ands' or quotes). The line was "The heart is bold that looks on gold." Google arbitrarily decided that the word "looks" is not relevant to my search and told me so at the bottom of my page. Instead, it filled up my page with ads for things like heart-shaped gold trinkets. Despite the fact that I included the line word for word, Tolkien only appeared on page 4 of the search results. Smartest search engine? Sure. My conspiracy theory is severely disappointed.
I was originally going to make this my Facebook status, but then I realized that would make me the biggest nerd ever.

Borderlands

As readers of this blog will know, I'm a big fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, particularly of the Mad Max movies, which I think are still the epitome of that world. It's not a stretch, therefore, that I should be interested in the new game Borderlands, which a friend of mine rented for me for the PS3. Before I continue, I should include that my friend and my brother both like the game a lot, so it seems I'm the minority opinion here.

The graphics are cell-shaded and stylized, which makes the game feel like a weird dream. The characters you meet are all varying degrees of ridiculous charicatures, which is a major strike against giving the world the right feeling. A lot of the apocalyptic (the game is actually set on a border planet, but let's call a potato a potato) elements are played for laughs. There are also no conversations: the characters, of whom there are precious few, are only there to give you quests, and shops are just dispenser machines.

The game is marketed as a mixed FPS and RPG, but it doesn't hold up as either. I've been playing FPS since the Doom days, so I've developed a bit of talent, but the game requires none. It's a slog of shooting each other a lot, and hiding when you need your shield to recharge. Since the game is heavily hit point dependent, it translates to just a lot of lead in the air while you whittle down the opponents' health bars. The controls are fine, except for the vehicles, which always move in the direction you're facing rather than turning the direction you're turning the control stick, which just doesn't feel right.

The game doesn't work as an FPS, because you really don't use any skill in fighting, but it doesn't work as an RPG, either, because you can't make any choices in the story or even interact with the other characters. Character customization is pretty flat (you get a tree of buffs like in World of Warcraft, but they're really not that great), and you get a grand total of one special ability. This might change later in the game, but I played to around level 20 of 50, so I'd like to think I at least scratched the surface.

You've seen these characters before. The big brute, the magical slender woman, the standard soldier, the skinny sniper. Hell, apart from the woman, you've got them all in Team Fortress 2, and in that they're actually more fun.

The guns have varying effects, including shocking your enemy, eating through their armor, or setting them on fire. This does provide a level of picking the right weapon for the job, which is nice, but the plethora of guns the game advertises just isn't attractive to me. The guns have a bunch of different modifiers, like the yellow weapons in Diablo, that make them more or less unique, but they're about as consistent and useful as those weapons: just because you can pile a bunch of random modifiers on something doesn't mean it feels 'right', which many of these guns don't. A gun that shoots really fast AND has low recoil AND does fire damage is just... fair, since it really just boils down to raw damage output. If the guns were closer in damage potential, like they are in most FPS games, you could pick the flavor that suits your style best. When it comes down to it, I'm really not that excited about shooting weird guns, particularly when it's shooting them at the same enemies over and over.

Which brings me to one of the biggest downfalls of the game: the enemies level along with you. I don't understand why games these days all seem to have a level-up system. It makes sense in games like Dungeons and Dragons, where it means (or should) that you can fight bigger and more interesting enemies, but what's the use if you never get other enemies to fight, but just tougher versions of the same ones? In a world where most of your enemies are human anyway, it doesn't make sense. Why should one particular noggin take ten (or a hundred) times as much destructive power to go 'splode as another? For that matter, is any one gun really a hundred times more deadly than another?

Now, I know that these complaints can really apply to many games, even games I love, such as Fallout 3, but those games have elements that rise above the rest, elements such as writing and interesting characters and mood. Borderlands lacks all of these. It's a long grind. There were a few standout moments of "hey, that was kind of cool", but really it was hours and hours of slogging through the same enemies with little to make it worthwhile.

It's NaNoWriMo again!

National Novel Writing Month is almost here again! In less than a week, thousands, perhaps even millions, of people across the world will be tapping furiously at their keyboards for a solid month, struggling to reach that golden mark of 50,000 words. For everyone who has been putting off writing that great novel because there just isn't enough time in the day, NaNoWriMo takes away the excuses. If so many other people are doing it, so can you! I've participated twice in the past. I actually finished a 52,000 word novel in 2007, and I participated but only made it to 30,000 words in 2008, mostly because I'm lazy. I was also writing my Master's thesis at the time, but that's just an excuse! Just like with all things in life, if you really want to do something, you do it. You don't complain about how much else you have to do.

This year, I fully intend to participate, and to win! I think the real joy and success of the project comes from the communality of it. Novel writing is a generally lonely business, full of self-doubt and misery, asking myself why I'm pretending to be a writer when everyone else is out having fun or being productive. NaNo is the time everyone else is engaged in the same struggle, and with that comes strength and a sense of real purpose. The website lets you keep track of what your friends are writing and how they're doing. There are also forums to let you talk to both local and other writers about your trials and your triumphs. Really, the overall feeling is that we're all in it together, and that, for one month, whether you're writing about sweeping tragedy or ninjas, all that matters if that you keep going. Everything is positive, encouraging, and optimistic. We can do this! We can write a novel in a month!

Now I just have to buckle down and do it.

If you're like to do it, please do! ^_^ And we can be friends on the site and share encouragement and all that stuff!

Future Love

Warning. I'm not very politically correct. I apologize to everyone who is offended. If you're not offended, I'm not apologizing. I won't be giving you any links to what I mean because, really, I don't want to do that to you. If you're really curious, a simple keyword search will bring you all the horror your fragile sanity can stand.

The Internet, namely YouTube (which is about a third of the Internet anyway, the other two thirds being Facebook and porn, and maybe a little 4chan), keeps trying to make me watch videos of fat peoples' stomachs. And fat people poking their stomachs. And stroking their stomachs. I must admit I first clicked one of these links because I was baffled about what could be in such a video (not to mention baffled by why the Internet thought that I would be interested by it). The videos themselves are pretty tame, as far as I can tell: fat people sitting around playing with their bellies. It's the kind of thing children do when they're bored. And let's be honest, we all enjoy a bit of belly button lint picking every now and then.

But it's the comments that disturb me. Just for you, dear Internet, I'm going to delve into one of these videos to give you a sample:

"I wanna rub her belly and stick my finger in her belly button."
"So beautiful, darling you should try to make it to the point of almost exploding. But be careful~"
"Please pull your pants down just a little bit so we can see you underwear. Thanks"

And each of those comments had people clicking the thumbs up button to recommend it. I would think the other button was the one that meant "Creeeeeeepy!"

Now, I'm all for a realistic body image, but doesn't encourage people to eat excessively fly in the face of everything we know about good health and diet? I'll be the first to give a bony model the sammich she so desperately needs, but this is people encouraging obese people to be even more obese.

There are plenty of bizarre fetishes out there that don't involve hurting anyone. I really only know about these because I watch Attack of the Show's "Around The Net." Things like balloons and giving people piggyback rides. I don't understand how this is in any way sexy, but at least nobody is getting hurt. But encouraging people to become obese? That's just about as sick as those people who want to be amputees.

What this all comes down to, though, is that I have a theory. I believe this is an evolutionary coping mechanism. As obesity becomes increasingly common, our brains start to change the way we see beauty to compensate. What would happen to fat Western society if we still held on to our old notions of athletic being beautiful? Imagine that poor minority of women who still fit that image who would increasingly bear the burden of continuing the species. Meanwhile, the rest of women have nothing to do but sit around, eat pizza, and watch Oprah. It only makes sense that, in order to preserve the species, somebody has to "hit that." And, in order to steel those brave souls to the unenviable but necessary task ahead, Mother Nature puts new thoughts into their heads. Thoughts like "your belly looks hot with it all bloated keep it up never stop of course take breaks but its sexy"

Yes, Internet, I went out of my way to find the creepiest comment on there. I hope your appreciation will make up for the mental scars.

I used to think that future babes would look like Raquel Welch. Or maybe Molly Millions. Oh, my poor, poor illusions.

PS I tracked down the source of YouTube's tragic mistake. In Rammstein's "Keine Lust" video, they dress up like fat people. I guess for YouTube it was either an unnatural attraction to fat people or else just burly middle-aged East Germans....

And, of course, by watching the videos necessary to gather the comments for this post, I have only confirmed YouTube's opinion of my deviance, so I can look forward to many more of these videos in the weeks to come.

Rasputin

Sometimes I take a little thrill out of knowing that a man like Rasputin lived in what might still be considered living memory. It's a wide, weird world out there. Perhaps the strangest thing in it ist he human mind and the worlds that mind creates. There are men who, despite the vast systems of power in the world, can control the world with purely the power of their intellect and personality. In that, perhaps, is the greatest magic of humanity. WE MAKE THE WORLD.

An in a world with all that (alleged) poisoning, shooting, freezing, and drowning, there's this:

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/10/all_hail_klenginem.php

Klingon Eminem. Thanks, Lord Admiral. Thanks for BLOWING MY MIND! The dude really has to speak up, though. KLINGONS DON'T HAVE MULTIPLE VOLUMES! It sounds like he's whispering because his mom has her bridge club over and she doesn't want to hear Klingon coming through the vents again.

Strange Thought

It just occurred to me that I can't remember the last time someone tried to convince me to change my mind about something. It seems that people are just too eager to live and let live. Have we gotten to the point that we just don't care how other people see the world? Are we so diluted and soft that we don't care enough to separate right from wrong, to see that some choices are better than others?

Now, I'll admit that I don't know what to associate this trend with. Rather than just picking one out of a hat, as I would normally do, and rant against it, I thought I'd let you write your own rant! So, dear reader, what has caused us to stop trying to better our friends and fellow humans?

1) Hippies. The influence of dirty, unwashed liberalism in modern America has made all conservative values moot.
2) Anthropology. Cultural relativism has infected society in general.
3) Television. We see too much of everything, so it all seems familiar.
4) Urban life. The breakdown in traditional small-town connections and values leaves us without a basis for culture.
5) Space aliens. Divide and conquer!
6. Commies. Because they can't stand our red-blooded American ways!
7) The internet. Everything now has a forum and a support group, so it all seems normal.
8) Secularity. People no longer turn to religion for a grounding basis.
9) 4chan.
10) Loki. He's behind everything, isn't he?

Open Letter to Facebook

Dear Facebook,

We used to have so much fun together. You were a place to post funny or interesting links. I could share my pictures or look at other peoples' pictures. It was good times. Do you remember those times, Facebook?

Because then everyone started using games. Really crappy games. And you kept telling me about it. You kept telling me ALL about it. Then eventually you let me tell you to shut up about it, and it was good.

But then the status thing started getting worse. People started enjoying talking about themselves, and the 'like' button just fed their ego. The results? Chaos. Madness. Now I have friends who tell me half a dozen times a day that they're washing their car. Or going to the mall. Or watching TV.

Facebook, I feel dirty. I feel like I know way too much about the lives of people I don't know. I feel like I need help. I need a restraining order. I need the world to give itself a little more privacy.

Because if I really wanted to know, I could always, you know, ask.

Your friend,
bluefish