Back in the Cockpit

It seems that no matter how hard I try to be respectable, I just can't escape my Star Wars roots. Like the tentacles of the Sarlacc, it just goes too deep. Ever since my brother came to visit for Christmas, we've been doing all sorts of Star Wars things: playing video games, watching the animated TV show, and even watching the movies. Why is a grown man still playing with lightsabers?

Well, because they're just that cool.

It's worth thinking about, though. I think that we as a culture embrace some things as a guilty pleasure without stopping to consider their true depths. Star Wars is a fairy tale for the present, full of wise wizards, brave knights, even the princess in need of rescue. The same cultural principles that bound society for thousands of years continue to be passed on in this new medium, and we also encounter and experiment with new styles of thinking. That's one of the advantages of science fiction: you can create whole new worlds of thoughts and norms without having anyone label you a rebel (or perhaps they will... if they're Imperial! :)).

From ancient samurai to modern fears of an oppressive government regime, Star Wars is a chronicle of our culture. Best of all, the exploration of a galaxy far, far away helps us better understand who we are and what we could be.

Now, if only I could make things levitate with the power of my mind....

Fine Eyes

"I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow." - if you don't know where this quote is from, you don't get a cookie.

I haven't written about it in my blog before, but I felt it was time to do so. This blog really hasn't been so much about my life as about my thoughts, but over the last few months my thoughts have been very agreeably engaged in the company of the finest young lady I know. We met at the local poetry reading, and we are engaged in the same great enterprise - that is, of course, the infinitely noble pursuit of writing literary criticism nobody cares about, not even the writer. Of course, it's not half that bad most of the time, but this is Christmas vacation, when any thought of academia (or, even worse, teaching composition classes) brings the kind of hideous terror that only mention of Cthulhu usually produces.

But I'm on a tangent. The simple truth is that I'm finding myself becoming increasingly cheesy and even, dare I say it, cliche. There's truth to all those things that used to make me cringe, things like just finding joy in being in her company and feeling like I'm a better person when I'm around her. It's hard to talk about. Love doesn't lend itself easily to writing because it feels like everything wonderful and worthy on the subject has been written.

Let it just be said, then, that as I'm surrounded by my family for Christmas, and she is with hers, I am nonetheless filled with happiness and contentment. I feel like Scrooge waking up on Christmas day.

Merry Christmas!

In Like Him

I dreamed I was in an old-fashioned magical movie theater with huge ceilings and all sorts of carvings, and all the old stars from the black and white era were arriving. They came larger-than-life, fifteen feet tall as a solid hologram. Each name was announced as the star appeared by an invisible voice, and the huge image was a three-dimensional representation of the star from a famous role. Olivia de Havilland, Fred Astaire, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn. But I, of course, only wanted to see one person, whose giant Robin Hood made me just about pass out when I finally saw it. But as the stars became human and started to mingle, drinking champagne and laughing, he sat apart. While the others were themselves from their heydey, he was different, an air of palpable sadness and majesty around him.

Errol Flynn was his aged self, a faded relic, but he was sitting in a high-backed chair apart from the rest looking regal and wearing a blue tragedian mask, one half comedy, the other half tragedy. I had tears in my eyes when I saw him. I pulled up his mask just for a moment, and his hair was white and his face lined. I helped him put the mask back on, seeing that he wanted it that way, and he knew better than I that it was meant to be so. And when I spoke to him, he told me that he saw what his life had become, a symbol of an ephemeral ideal and a charicature of himself, the real man destroyed by drugs, alcohol, womanizing, and cigarettes. This was his final performance, as a shadow of himself, the man gone while the actor remained for one last show.

Novel FAIL

As much as I wanted to write a 50,000 word novel this November for National Novel Writing Month, I didn't make it. I could complain about having too much to do (I had my thesis defense and a lot of papers to grade, primarily), but that's not right. I have long been a believer in the fact that you find time to do the things you really want to do, and I just didn't come through.

That being said, over the last three days I dedicated myself to trying to get as close to 50,000 words as I could. I only started with around 16,000 and I told myself that I could do it if I really tried. On the last day, with the seconds counting down, I told myself that if only I reached 30,000, I wouldn't be an utter failure. When I saw the clock in the corner of my screen hit 12:00, I finished the word I was typing and took my hands off the keyboard. Microsoft Word told me I had exactly 30,000 words. Spooky.

That still doesn't disguise the fact that I was 20,000 words short of victory.

Cyberpunk FAIL.

That being said, I did learn an important thing. The key to cyberpunk is that feeling of hot tech. Of course, it's more than that. The two keys (or so I think right now) to making a scene feel cyberpunk are making it feel techy and making it feel crowded.

Oh, and also run down.

The three keys to cyberpunk....


Now, for something completely different:

One of my favorite websites.

There are fewer than 80 characters in the full HTML of the site.

Yakuza front for secret data smuggling, or just a really awesome website? You decide.

Teaching

I like teaching. I like discussing things with students and hearing what they have to say. Even when they wander a bit from the topic, facilitating discussion is wonderful. When they start to debate each other and get into complicated issues, I feel like I've done something worthwhile with my life.

That being said, I hate grading papers. I don't mind reading student papers, which are usually at least enjoyable in some way. But I hate having to correct them, to mark them up, and to justify the grade I give them.

I'd rather just sit down with them each individually and talk about ways they could improve their writing. And then just give them all an A if they put in the effort.

Nostalgia is Hazardous to My Health

Now that I'm attempting to write cyberpunk, I have become nostalgic for some of my first experiences with the genre. Perhaps the first time I was floored by cyberpunk was when I read the introductory story to the game Spectre when I was probably not much on either side of 10. I loved that game fiercely, man, so much so that I forced my parents to buy me a copy of it even after my dad got a pirated copy from a friend. The story was surprisingly intricate for something in a video game manual, perhaps because they had to justify having a manual for a game with seven buttons for controls and no story whatsoever in the actual game.

As I got nostalgic for good old Spectre, I also started thinking about the sequel, Spectre VR. Unlike the first game, this one actually had video (as much video as any game had back in the early-to-mid 90's), and I remembered it in a rather fond light. It set the mood of the noir, gritty world of hackers and whatnot, or at least that's what I thought. Eager to see the videos again, even for a bit, I started checking out the usual warez and abandonware sites, only to find that the game is apparently open to download if I sign up for something else. Twenty minutes and a lot of headache later, I finally managed to make one of their third-party programs work. One figured out that 01 My Ass Street wasn't a real address and assured me they would contact me to resolve the issue (good luck contacting yourmom@isaho.com), and another reminded me to enter a ZIP code when I tried to send the form, even though there was no ZIP code slot.

When I finally got the game, it didn't come as a .exe with the necessary files clustered around it, because that would have been too convenient. It came as .zip files that I had to extract, piece together, run with a special emulator program, and then spend five minutes messing with virtual drives to convince it that these files were, in fact, part of three separate disks in my floppy drive. When I browbeat the computer into submission and bent it to my indomidable will, the game finally started.

With no video. The game itself worked fine, but that's like saying the radio works in a car with no wheels.

I asked YouTube, and it gave me a couple of videos, really just enough to brutally remind me that my judgment on cool when I was ten doesn't stand the test of time. I also thought the Smurfs were cool.

This reminds me of the time I spent an entire morning and afternoon trying to get Red Baron 2 to run on my computer....

That being said, if I could find the original CD game, I'd probably still be tempted to play it just for the videos. Cheesy though they are, I at least want to play the game through to see what happens in the cutscenes. Assuming the game does end.

I HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED!

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Genuinely Amazing

Don't get me wrong; I'm glad Obama won. But have a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2008_General_Election_Results_by_County.PNG

That knocked me on my ass. I know, I know, population density and all that, but SERIOUSLY, dude!