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Purple Clothes

On that note, I have recently begun to dress myself. That is to say, as I near twenty-first century adulthood (at thirty) I have begun to actively seek clothing that I think will flatter me — compared with wearing whatever may fall into my possession. This has mostly come out of the sudden realization that I am a handsome man. Or as someone recently described me, “tall, dark, andvery handsome”. Not at all photogenic, to be certain. It’s like a rock concert; you have to be there. Just add a dash of the confidence of ownership, and bingo. Instant sexpot.

I’m calling my new look “glam fop”. I hope it doesn’t catch on, as I don’t often get this creative anymore.*

These days, half my mind is taken up with angst about things I can’t possibly change and another quarter with hope that I can change them anyway. It seems the only way around that is to say to hell with everyone. If I’ve only got so much energy, I might as well focus on bringing myself as much joy as I can. I’m so unused to paying active attention to what I want, and what I need. For me, life is like standing up after several hours of frustrating work and realizing you’ve had to pee since two o’clock, and that’s what’s been making you so cranky. Then finding the toilet is backed up.

At least now I look gorgeous while I’m doing it.

*: I’m strongly in the market for a pocket watch with a built-in mp3 player. I’d call it an “iFob”.

(July 27th, 2008 @ 4:30am)



No response?

Too many legs under the table

I’ve fallen out of the habit of recording my thoughts like this. It’s so hard getting back into the active first person mode.

Today I found myself, for the first time, wishing I had paid more attention in college. Or that I possessed something that might pass for a short-term memory. Where everyone else was happy citing page numbers and quotations from famous philosophers, I wasted my time trying to reason out my own understanding of things. And see where that’s gotten me!

For the last few months I have been consulting-cum-testing-cum-designing for a company designing an online… game-thing, that is very difficult to describe. Which is just as well, as I probably shouldn’t describe it! A few days ago, the man in charge called and asked me to conceptualize and write… well, everything. All of the game’s mythology and rationalization and narrative context. Which is a novel request. Perhaps in more ways than one.

By its nature, the game presents a mire of epistemological and phenomenological questions. It’s like End of Evangelion crossed with Facebook. If that’s not already redundant. You would think this would tie directly into my interests, and it does. The problem is, it’s been so long since I’ve had to write a paper on Sartre’s back hair that whenever I reach for a concept, all I wind up doing is gyrating my hand in the space where I know I once must have left the blasted thing. Whoever has been nibbling the Merleau-Ponty, I do wish she’d put it back where she found it. This reminds me of the time the cat ran away with my glasses. I only found them a week later, under the couch, with one of the earpices half chewed off. That did excuse my buying a new pair, of course — which I proceeded to sit on within a day.

After moping around the apartment for several days, sleeping, walking, showering, buying too many lattes from the girl around the corner and listening to her history with cheese, I do have a starting place. It’s right; it feels inevitable. Now, how on Earth do I build on this?

Annie Get Your Gun

The obvious answer: play Space Invaders Extreme. I do not believe I have seen it described as Space Invaders by way of Meteos. Well, that’s what it is. I would not put it in the same box as Pac-Man Championship Edition or OutRun2, as I am unsure how musical candy warp zones reflect the fundamental experience of Space Invaders. It is, however, made with joy. It’s a short game. Unassuming. No nonsense. Yet there are always more nuances to master.

The first time you play, the game just starts. You have no idea what’s going on, so you wave your arms and try to keep afloat. Gradually a sort of logical order presents itself. Then you notice something that shatters that, then something that shatters the new order you resolve.

The one innate quality of Space Invaders that the game seems built on is the (retrospectively obnoxious) delay between shots, and therefore the mixture of rhythm and precision required to play well. Thus, we have a rhythm game, based around the player’s shots. Now if we could make it terrifying, maybe we’d be onto something.

Several months ago I accidentally bought the other DS Space Invaders. Which is ill-conceived in almost every way except for its soundtrack, and not quite as much fun as tweezing ingrown leg hairs. If anyone is rushing off to Amazon after reading this, don’t confuse the two. Don’t be like me. Never be like me.

(July 27th, 2008 @ 4:24am)



3 responses

Portrait of Rumination

You know, having initially dismissing Portrait of Ruin — I only played for maybe half an hour before rejecting it; hadn’t played it in a year and a half — I went back to it the other day. And… it’s actually pretty good, once you’re past some of the initial tedium. Thanks to Mr. Koshiro, the music is the best since Harmony of Dissonance. It controls really, really well. The animation is pretty good, actually. A lot of the enemies are redrawn — though there’s a big disparity in style between the new ones and the recycled ones. The new ones all look like they’re by the Circle of the Moon guys, and the old ones are so clearly Sorrow carry-overs.

There is actual, legitimate level design in places — which is novel. More of it than in Dawn of Sorrow, in fact! It’s just, 1/3 of the real level design in DoS was right at the start, whereas in PoR it doesn’t come in for a couple of hours. (Until then it’s a combination of tutorial and convoluted system introduction, against monsters-on-shelves design.)

And it does actually feel different enough as not to just feel like another GBA/DS Castlevania — which is the fate suffered by Dawn of Sorrow.

I’d say this is definitely not the worst handheld Igavania. Harmony and Aria still compete for the best; Harmony for its feeling and Aria for its reason. I’d have to play some more, but I think I’m now enjoying this about as much as Circle of the Moon…

(July 21st, 2008 @ 8:44pm)



8 responses

Here’s lovely.

A while back I got another DHL notice. I don’t have a clue what they were delivering, or from whom. I yanked it off the door… only to find that it had been used to crush A GIGANTIC WASP! There were legs sticking out all over and it was terrifying.

I copied down the numbers and got rid of the thing.

I entered the numbers into an online tracking thing, so I’d get an e-mail notification when it went back out for delivery.

And then a couple of days later I got an e-mail saying it had been shipped back to the sender, without another attempt to deliver.

…

Don’t use DHL. For anything, ever. Seriously.

(July 14th, 2008 @ 1:30pm)



6 responses

The Threefold Plot

So at the end of it all, “Turn Left” is pretty clearly the first fifty minutes of a three-hour epic. Though that wasn’t obvious at the time, now there should be no question. Thing is, it serves not only as the setup for Donna’s character arc; in story terms it serves to set up both the nature and the significance of the events to follow over the next 115 minutes. Without it, the final two episodes are just so much aimless bluster.

There’s all the foreshadowing of the supporting cast’s fates, were Donna not involved. Rose’s story is a straight through-line — she spends “Turn Left” righting events so she can get straight to work on the timeline in “The Stolen Earth”. They’ve all gone wrong because Donna wasn’t there to help. Heck, Rose tells her right off that she’s going to die — and that she isn’t talking about in the alternate world (where she is incidentally going to die, however). She means the version of her who travels with the Doctor — as becomes more clear in retrospect, especially with Donna’s meltdown about how she can’t die, because she was going to travel with the Doctor forever.

Ultimately, the biggest reason to connect it is that it gives us a starting place. It shows us who Donna was, and why she was as she was; how little support she got from anyone, least of all Sylvia. And then, the story comes full circle. In the first fifty minutes we saw what she might have been, what she was capable of even if she had never met the Doctor, if only someone had believed in her. Then she’s returned to that situation, and Sylvia is given a second chance to do right by her.

The point of the story is basically that the proposal in “Turn Left” is fulfilled. The Donna whom we leave is a Donna who has in effect turned right. Yet the distinction has been pointed out to all concerned parties. The Doctor put a big bullet point on it. If you think she was better with me, he tells Sylvia, then take care of her, dammit. That’s just who she is, if you’ll allow it. And for such an immense story to basically be about that… As a writer Davies really hammers on this issue of faith, doesn’t he. Though it’s always humanist; about how you treat others.

It’s just so much better and more complete a story, when you take it in full. Even the pacing makes more sense that way, with it getting more and more frenetic as it builds, keeping up the tension, keeping things from seeming like they’re dragging after you’ve been sitting there for a couple of hours already.

As a three-parter, I’ve got to say it has to be the most incredible epic the show has ever attempted — just on an emotional level, never mind the spectacle and sinks (and plungers). The scope is nothing to sniff at, of course. Yet without that episode… it’s just so much wank. There’s no anchor. It all seems so much smaller and more confused.

(July 8th, 2008 @ 5:59am)



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