holiday boredom

I've haven't updated in a while. I've started a couple of entries, but I seem to always get interrupted or bored with what I'm writing. I'm currently at home for a month-long break from school, and I'm fighting holiday depression with lots of movies and sleep. Finding the motivation to get dressed and actually do something outside the house is incredibly difficult when you have no one to do it with. Anyone who knows me would tell you that I'm a pretty private person, but that is not to say that I don't need to be socialized every once in a while. I'm content to spend my nights at home, but, ideally, I would have someone around to be my partner in couchpotatoism. All this time to myself with no school or job to cloud my mind has graciously allowed me plenty of time to reflect on my past failures regarding the opposite sex. I honestly try not to dwell on these things, but you try ending a (relatively) serious relationship then spending a month away from your circle of friends. See how that works out for you. My mind has been filled with what-if's and I-should-have-'s. So I'm trying to be optimistic, and the truth of the matter is that I am genuinely very hopeful for the future. In less than a year, I'll graduate and hopefully land a well-paying job. I'll have my very own apartment. I'll have no one to answer to. No curfew, no ridiculous rules, no homework, no political or religious pressure, no one paying my bills for me. I can't even express how appealing that is. I've been thinking about one-bedroom apartments, used cars, HDTV's, surround sound systems, and dating girls who have never even heard of [my university]. I'll be able to live my own life. It's these daydreams that are going to get me through my last 2 weeks at home and 2 semesters at school.

Today I got more religious experience out of 1 song than months of church

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be
Let that grace now, like a fetter
Bind my wandering heart to Thee
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love
Here’s my heart, oh, take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above

Broken Flowers Review

Broken Flowers (2005)

Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Bill Murray
Jeffrey Wright

Jim Jarmusch's 2005 film exposes the viewer to the life of Don Johnston, a stoic and lonely Don Juan played by Bill Murray. Don, due to the constant prodding of his neighbor Winston, sets out on a cross-country journey to find the author of a mysterious letter. This person claims to be the mother of Johnston's heretofore unknown son, but offers no clues as to her identity, except the fact that her son is 19 years old. Armed only with Winston's internet research on his girlfriends from that era, Don embarks, and we go with him.

Unfortunately, Broken Flowers' narrative fails in that it simply doesn't go anywhere. At the end of the film, Murray's character doesn't know anything about his son (or if he even exists), nor does he appear to have learned anything. There is no character transformation or development, no affirmation or condemnation of his lifestyle, no "a-ha" moment. Where the film succeeds, however, is in creating within the viewer an affinity for Johnston. From the moment the letter finds him at the beginning of the movie to the final shot, the camera is always by his side. At first, this made for a claustrophobic and sometimes boring experience, but by the time the second act rolls around, I felt more like a sidekick than a voyuer. By the end of the movie, I felt that I knew Don Johnston. I knew who he was, how he felt, and why he made the decisions he made.

If Jarmusch intended this movie to be a biopic, then it was an enormous success. As narrative fiction, however, it falls a bit flat.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the best show on TV

Title says it all. I have never laughed harder at anything in my life. Please, please watch this show

CryGear of BioFortress Duty 3: Shadow of Episode 2.....Part 2

This series of posts was never meant to be a series, but was originally envisioned as a simple listing of new games with a 1 or 2 sentence review accompanying each. Clearly, that didn't work out. So lets dive back into it, shall we?

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl - Several years ago, first-person shooters were going in a very different direction. While Western developers were making narrative-driven games that funneled the player down a single, unchangeable path, European companies like Ion Storm (Deus Ex) were making games that let the player make all the decisions. These games could be played in a variety of ways, allowing the gamer to progress through the story using stealth, brute force, or even words. Sadly, this style of game never reached the level of popularity their linear cousins enjoyed, and were mostly abandoned. Someone apparently forgot to break the bad news to the Stalker team. Stalker drops the player into the irradiated boots of a lowly mercenary trying to make his way on the outskirts of Chernobyl. The game features a wide range of missions that can be completed or ignored, an emphasis on inventory and cash management, and requires the player to monitor his standing with the games many factions. I'm only about 8 hours in, but I'm really enjoying it so far. It's a unique blend of true RPG elements and action that is truly fun and challenging. If you have a desire for exploration and a bit of patience for unorthodox game experiences, you will have a lot of fun with this one.

BioShock - The phrase "attention to detail" must be printed onto the very wallpaper of Irrational's offices. From the moment you get off the bathysphere and enter the city of Rapture, you are in Rapture. The art direction, sound design, music, and graphics all work together to immerse you in BioShock's failed underwater utopia. The world of Rapture is absolutely beautiful, and if you're anything like me, you'll spend lots of time just wandering around looking at posters, statues or out windows. The main story line is certainly interesting, but the real treasure here are the numerous side stories that can be completely ignored if you're only concerned with blasting your way through the city. Explore a bit deeper, and you'll find audio recordings from plenty of other characters that were there before you. Sometimes those off-the-beaten-path rooms are themselves the rewards for your curiosity. Most of the time you won't find a special weapon or extra ammo, but a grisly scene that tells you exactly what happened in that room. Many of them will make you set down the controller and say "Wow. That's fucked up." The environment that BioShock creates and pulls you into is not a happy one, but a horrifying and troubling one that will unsettle you more than any Stephen King adaptation. Find a good pair of headphones and a dark room for this game, and let it scare your pants off. However, if you are one of those aforementioned blasters, you will find plenty to love here. The game's weapons aren't the most original, but the visceral feel of them will make you love the standard progression (pistol -> machine gun -> shotgun -> rocket launcher, etc) all over again. There is also a wide range of "plasmids", or "spells" for RPG fans, to choose from if guns aren't your thing. I really can't say enough positive things about this game, so I'll just cut to what I didn't like. The multiple endings system in BioShock is lame and, as the lead designer has admitted, tacked-on. Since completing the game, I have not felt the urge to replay it, although the fact that it is roughly 20 hours makes up for that. Other than that, I don't have any complaints. So far, this is my Game of the Year.

CryGear of BioFortress Duty 3: Shadow of Episode 2

Over the past few months, there has been a massive influx of triple A FPS shooter titles, allowing you to finally sate your uncontrollable blood lust in a way that doesn't involve lots of elaborate planning, heavy-duty trash bags, or midnight trips to the dumpster. I know it's hard to keep them all straight, so I've compiled this handy list to help you out. Hey kids, feel free to print this out, circle the ones you want for chrismahanakwanza, and send it to your grandma so you don't end up with Xtreme Paintballz under the tree/candles/kwanza thing.

Halo 3 - This is the big one, ladies and gentleman. With a marketing budget surpassing the GNP of several small countries, there is no way you don't know about this game. No movie or game can ever live up to an over-saturation hype scheme like this, but Bungie's newest (last?) Halo game falls particularly short. This game is simply one action set piece after another, very thinly strung together by monotonous and anti-climatic run-and-gun sections. The "series of set piece" style game is not inherently evil, but Halo 3 does it without emotionally drawing you into the world (see Call of Duty 4), without making you care about the paper-thin characters (see Half-life 2), without giving you any degree of freedom (see STALKER), and without creating a compelling locale (see BioShock). Sure, the multiplayer is good, but there's nothing here we haven't seen in games that don't charge a monthly fee to play it. Even the much-lauded replay feature has been featured regularly in PC games since Counter-Strike was launched 7 years ago. If you played the original Halo, congratulations, you've played Halo 2 and 3. Stick with those memories and skip this summer blockbuster of the gaming world.

Gears of War - I'll be honest, I haven't gotten very far into this one. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what everyone liked about this game. Gears is apparently engineered for some niche group of gamers who enjoy shooting blindly around corners, just-plain-dumb AI, insultingly hyper-macho characters, nauseating shaky-cam, writing that consists of mono-syllabic sentences like "Shit." or "Sweet.", and having the game assume control of their viewpoint to say "HEY LOOK AT THAT RIGHT THERE! HOW COOL IS THAT, AMIRITE???" Like that girl in your chemistry class, this game is beautiful but dumb dumb dumb.

Call of Duty 4 - Linear, story-driven shoot-em-up done (mostly) right. COD4 is everything you could ask for from this style of shooter, from the compelling campaign, to the amazing graphics, to the way the game pulls you into it's world. The designers have clearly taken the age-old principle of "Show, don't tell" to heart, as many of the games most fun and breathtaking moments take place with you in complete control of your character. The downfall of an attempt to create a engrossing experience like COD4 is that one serious flaw can rip a player out of the carefully constructed world and remind him that he is, after all, playing a video game. The guilty party in this case is the enemy spawn system. Throughout the early levels of the game, we are taught that each area has a given number of enemies, and if we wish to survive, we must take our time, hunker down, and take them out one by one. This formula is thrown at the window at seemingly random points of the game, where we are expected to break cover and charge the enemy position. If we follow the previously established rules, we are faced with an endless firefight as an infinite number of enemies spawn out of view, then rush out at us as if that house/shed/bunker/ was some kind of terrorist clown car. The moment you realize that no matter how many Deliberately-Vague-Nationality Freedom Fighters you kill, they will keep coming is the moment the illusion shatters. Simply adding an auditory or visual clue that you need to move your squad up would have been enormously helpful. This complaint is honestly just nitpicking a fantastic game (to say nothing of the also-fantastic multiplayer), but it is such a tragic flaw that I feel compelled to point it out. Please do yourself a favor and pick this one up.

More to come...

Everyone should read Achewood

"The best thing that can be said about the Cadillac Escalade is that it has the fuel economy of an oil fire and it handles like a Best Western"

www.achewood.com

The first one

I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while now, not because I believe that I have something important to discuss with you, the internaut, but because I need some place to dump all these things that have been kicking around in my head. Also, I need something to do in class, and typing on a laptop looks much less moody and emo than scrawling page after page of what is clearly not lecture notes in a notebook. I'm going to try to keep this updated regularly, since no one likes a blog that only updates once every 3 months. Besides, if you are reading this regularly, you must be at least a little interested in what I have to say, and who am I to keep my adoring, although theoretical, audience waiting. Stay tuned, we'll see what happens.