Writer with no Readers

The Grace 9

2009-06-26T04:02:00.004-04:00

It's been a long time, but the Grace 9 is now complete:

Link is right here.

I know that Grace is a hard story to follow along with as it goes along. I add things in earlier chapters and sometimes I take a fuckload of time between one chapter and the next. All I can say to the people that regularly read my work as it comes out is sorry and, also: Thank you. I think I would be writing Grace regardless, even if you guys both dropped it and called it shit, but having people to say some things at the other end of chapters is a tremendous help.

Few notes for the future:

1) I consider this chapter to be the halfway point of the story. I can't say for certain how many Chapters are left, but this is certainly a spiritual halfway point at least.

2) This may make the story even more confusing for everyone reading it right now, but I'm going to add two more chapters to the earlier parts of the story. One chapter will replace the First Interlude (probably) while another will be something I was going to do in later chapters but really belongs in earlier parts of the book. It'll probably end up between chapters 2 and 3.

They will be good chapters though, so don't worry. One will have lots of Nari.

3) I worked so hard on this bloody space battle and the concepts behind it, so if you feel it completely sucks and want to condemn it as garbage, please don't. There's only so much a man can take. That said, I do want to hear your takes on how it went down. A good two months of rewrites went into that stupid space battle.

4) The 'Grace Discarded' file that contains a fair chunk (though not all) of the crap I write and then throw out of the story is now longer than 4 chapters put together.

5) The song that will play during the space battle in the movie/anime version will be Kawai Kenji - Emiya

Re: Address to the Muslim World

2009-06-05T22:12:00.002-04:00

So I figure that since it's directed at me (I guess?), I may as well talk about it. It's here in case you want to hear it, although ever since this speech was uploaded Youtube has been unusually slow. I'm not sure if this is because it's handling that many incoming connections from crappy Middle Eastern cybercafes or if Zionists are interfering or if adding an HD feature to a website that doesn't make any money has proven to not be such a great idea.

When I said after his election that I didn't expect him to do much in the way of change from the status quo, I guess I sort of underestimated him and his speaking abilities. It doesn't cost much to deliver a speech after all and he apparently has a speechwriter that has a passing familiarity with Islam, which is a lot more than Bush could ever say. Indeed, I suspect that they probably brought in some Muslims from somewhere when they were writing the thing and consulted a couple of academics at a few of the big universities' Near Middle Eastern departments.

It was well researched, it was respectful and it was eloquently delivered with the kind of power that one normally associates with Obama's oratory. And let me say, this is not what Muslims are used to hearing from American presidents. And I'm not talking about Bush, I'm talking about all of them. That reason alone makes it a bit of a historic change-of-tone and most likely a positive one. Talk is cheap and all that, but it's better than nothing. So good thing a man such as this was elected President.

But nonetheless, there are a few things that gave me pause. First the content, then I'm going to talk about the structure of the speech because I'm an English minor geek.

The content is the easy part, because he said nothing particularly special. Reiterating long-standing calls for freezes on Israeli settlements was nice and I think he might almost be serious about them. That's great. I don't think they actually will stop building the settlements, but at least we as a world are starting to recognize that the militant asshats swimming in their pools amidst Palestinian drought might actually be an aspect of the problems of the region.

Calling on Hamas to renounce violence is an old line, though for what it's worth I think they probably should. Speaking from a perfectly practical perspective: Violence only really works when you have it in sufficient quantities to serve as a deterrent against an aggressor. Right now whatever meagre losses Hamas inflicts upon the Zionists are outweighed severely by the political effects of Palestinian disunity. That's a harsh reality that one must acknowledge.

Overall, the speech is pretty much what I imagine a lot of us would have wanted to hear from an American president. It's a bit preachy, but it at least offers some of the basic respect that most of us feel has been completely absent from American-Muslim discourse since the last forever. So that much is nice.

The structure is pretty important. At a very basic level the speech's objective is to sort of butter up Muslims with flattery and Obama's certainly good at that sort of thing. His campaign strategy did often boil down to making people feel so good about themselves that they just had to support him, after all. I personally enjoyed the reference to Cordoba.

But there's this problematic quotation:
... when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.

I honestly think this quotation will spoil the speech for a lot of the people it's directed at.

Isra is the story of the Holy Prophet's Night Journey from Mecca to Jerusalem. The short of it is that the Prophet was taken to Masjid Al-Aqsa in a single night, where he met with his predecessors and led (not joined, that's a complete distortion) them in prayer. This story is the reason why Al-Aqsa is so holy in the first place and it sorta encaspulates on a symbolic level the doctrine of Islam as the ultimate and final successor to the Abrahamic religions.

But... well let me explain:

The faith of Islam is composed of two aspects. First there is the acknowledgement that there is only One God and that he has no partner or offspring. The second is that Muhammad (pbuh) is the legitimately inspired Prophet that He employed as His Messanger. Both aspects are extremely important.

So at the center of the Night Journey is the issue of one's faith in the Holy Prophet. Muhammad is a Prophet of few physical miracles and there is no physical evidence that proves that the Night Journey occurred and that Muhammad travelled from Mecca to Jerusalem. It is an article of faith that each Believer (and Disbeliever) must come to terms with. If one acknowledges its truth, one is for all intents and purposes a Muslim.

Barack Obama obviously did not convert in the middle of his speech, so one can say that he's using the story in the same way I use the stories of Menelaus' battles at Troy to illustrate why Frank sucks at DotA. And that's a really bad idea. Most Muslim will know that story as well as I do and the theologically-minded ones will recognize the manner in which he's using it.

It won't kill the overall effect or have destructive results, but it's still something that will have a souring effect.

Anyhow, that's all I've got to say about it. I'll release more Grace... soon. I'm not sure when.

The Grace 8

2009-04-05T03:37:00.004-04:00

Wow, I managed to finish Grace 8 without taking months to do it! Here it is.

My comments on the Chapter:

1) I think I should have described the Reception Hall a bit more last chapter, but that might just be me. Let me know if you have any trouble keeping track of the action here and things will go well.

2) Does it feel that the story is going anywhere from a reader's point of view? From my own perspective, I'm slowly revealing mysteries from the past while Eisa struggles in the present, but I was thinking the other day that Eisa keeps running into superior forces in the present storyline. I hope that doesn't leave anyone with feelings of stagnation? Please let me know.

3) I've been meaning to go back and alter Weedy's backstory from Chapter 3 for a while, but haven't got around to it. Originally Weedy was going to be from the Lantern, but that back story has sort of been transferred to someone else. I'll get to writing Weedy's real back story soon.

4) Next Chapter is in space. Finally!

5) Only two people read this. The rest of you are bastards.

The Grace 7

2009-03-15T06:15:00.005-04:00

Man, it's been a while.

Okay, so Grace 7 is complete.

Few things before link:

1) Ignore the last revision.

Yeah, sorry about that, but I ended up changing my mind and going back to the original chapter idea. You know, with the Archivist at that reception and Eisa planning Something. So err... that's what's happening now. Here's the remodified Grace 6. It's not that much different than what it was originally, but the names 'Claude' and 'Wire' were dropped as being members of Eisa's faction back on Solar, who will got to war if it comes to that. Ctrl + F them in the document if you're curious.

Once again: I'm very sorry.

2) This took so long because I wrote it four times.

There are about 90 discarded pages of this chapter. Probably more if you count the ones I just deleted. Sometimes writing this damn story can be bloody painful. Ugh. I hope the next chapter flows a bit more smoothly.

3) I will try to get Chapter 8 done a bit more quickly.

So, all that aside, here's Grace 7. Yay.

Be sure to check out Unity Plaza if you want to hear about other things by the way.

Open Office is a steaming pile of garbage

2009-01-31T04:59:00.003-05:00

Here is my extended review of Open Office 3.0:

This shit really sucks. It's designed for assholes writing reports for their superiors in the corporate world. The plugin system is unintuitive and you spend so much fucking time playing with this setting or that bit of interface that it's impossible to get anything done. The layout is sexy, but the whole program is a fucking mess and needs to die. After a month of struggling with this thing, I think I'm just going to give up. I blame this at least partially for Grace delays.

I'm sorry, Microsoft Office 2003... take me back. I shall never be unfaithful to you ever again.

The Grace 7 woes and Unity Plaza

2009-01-21T01:13:00.005-05:00

So some news for these parts.

First, about Grace...

There are times during the writing where I hit a brick wall. I've thrown down a lot of keystrokes in my attempts to write Chapter 7 and it was, in fact, 'finished'. But the problem is that I hate it and it doesn't feel right. So I'm scrapping it and starting from scratch. This required a bit of an edit to Chapter 6, which you may find here.

All that's changed is Eisa's conversation with Vincent at the beginning of the Chapter. The gist of it is that instead of the deal with the Archivist, Eisa is going to stay focused on Abel. This actually doesn't change much of the overall direction of the story. It just changes the order of a few events, really. So hopefully that'll work out.

Next... it's been mostly true for the last year that this has been my writing blog. Occasionally I post about something else, but it's mainly Grace in here. Which I think is cool, I like this blog like that. But I do miss the spontaneous sort of blogging that just sounds off about anything. So I have now made a second blog dedicated to non-serious topics. You might still see posts in here about politics and other serious life-related matters, but for your gaming, your anime and your books you should head over to Unity Plaza. I intend to update it two or three times a week. I also intend to make it bloody awesome.

And to answer the unanswered question: Unity Plaza is from this. I like the name mainly because its origins are obscure, but also because in Tau we are strong.

So anyhow, stay tuned to both my blogs for more great stuff.

This and that

2009-01-07T13:06:00.002-05:00

Quick update.

Firstly, Grace 7 is being worked on but as always it's hard and my efforts have borne little fruit so far. I've been on the down for the last week or so, which makes the whole process a bit difficult. I'll get it done sooner or later though. I'm not really sure when.

Second... I don't see much value in talking at length about Gaza. Everything that's happened in the last few weeks is rather predictable. Israel is exploiting the odd period of political flux in American politics to do whatever it wants. Abbas is happy to see his Hamas rivals suffer, since it will mean his reinstallment in Gaza. The Arab states don't want to do anything about it and, even if they did, couldn't do anything about it anyway.

The main innovation I see in this particular conflict is that the IDF now have a Youtube channel (which I refuse to link here) that lets the 4channers of the world see their precision airstrikes in action. One of those precision air strikes ended up being on just some truck that was carrying gasoline, but never mind that. Key is that it looked good.

Obama has been criticized for his silence, which is I think a bit silly. I would be very doubtful that Obama would be a check on Israel. But okay, even if he wanted to do something constructive right now, he couldn't. He hasn't been sworn in and if he contradicts the Bush administration on a foreign policy matter at this point he'll be getting into a counterproductive spat with the outgoing administration.

Though of course, that's an easy excuse. The timing is just as convenient for Obama as it is for Israel itself. His international celebrity will be preserved for a long while longer. But as I said in the post on that matter, all indicators seem to point towards Obama's primary agenda being domestic. He won't do anything for the Palestinians... but that doesn't really differ from what any other American president would do.

I don't believe that the Zionist state in its current form is viable in the long term. Brash thuggishness is not a long term strategy, no matter how many billions in gun money comes in. I know that Israel has a strongly martial culture, what with the draft for both genders at 18, but you have to wonder if war fatigue is ever going to set in there. The Arab states are about the same as ever in their non-action, of course, though one wonders how long that can go on too. The only encouraging thing I've heard from the region is the Turkish Prime Minister making a tour of the region in opposition to Israel, though this provoked at least one Arab guy saying 'what is he doing? This is an Arab affair!'

I have little hope for any short term solutions. But in the next few decades, maybe this sort of thing will stop.

The Grace 6

2008-12-14T06:21:00.003-05:00

So we're done another chapter. Incidentally, this is also apparently my 200th Blog entry.

Grace is a challenging story for me to write because it isn't really what I usually do. I mean, sure there's conflict, but just as important as the conflict is the gradual exploration of Eisa's character. I'm six chapters in now and I really haven't revealed a whole lot about his past. I think I've got a character in him that is pretty interesting, but what I'm always trying to do with Eisa is make him sort of ambiguous and almost contradictory. I consider that to be very hard and I'm never really sure if I'm succeeding. But I sure do try.

Grace 6 probably leaves something open from Grace 5 that I imagine a reader would normally want closed. But that sort of mystery is part of what I'm going for with Grace. But in any case, here it is. Enjoy.

Few fresh ideas that came in this chapter:

-I was often using the Arabic names for stars when thinking of names for places while writing, so it occurred to me to just do that consistently. And so I did. I'm not sure if I'll stick to this system (the story is already pretty Mid-East oriented, what with Vincent's Arabic oaths and such), but for now if you want to know what star is what just click here.

-I gave the Chapter a name ('Manipulation'). I think that I'm going to do that from now on. Here are some tentative names for the other five chapters

1 - Arrival
2 - Letter
3 - Clash
4 - Blood
5 - Choice

Though I might decide to just go back to generic 'first part' stuff.

- I was thinking of removing the 'The' part of 'The Grace'. But for now it can stay.

In other matters:

- My computer melted down. Getting a new one Wednesday, most likely. Right now I'm on an old junk computer that cannot open PDFs. Though at least the new one will be a bit of a powerhouse, at least compared to what I had before. And I obviously didn't lose any of my data, so it isn't as bad as it could be. I was thinking of getting a new computer next year anyhow.

- I've been tutoring high school kids lately and I have to say, I really enjoy it. It's easy and refreshing.

- I wonder if anything will ever come of any of this stuff.

- Ugh @ Canadian politics

Metal Gear Solid III: Snake Eater

2008-12-11T01:02:00.013-05:00

So Andres lent me his Playstation 2 with a copy of Metal Gear Solid III: Snake Eater. One can speculate on his motivations... Perhaps he wanted to read the resulting blog entry or maybe he thought I'd genuinely like it or it's possible that he hates me. Maybe all three.

For those who are not familiar with Metal Gear, it's... ich. How can I even describe this thing? The only word for the first two games is awful. Take my word for it. I don't want to have to even think about the other two games again.

So Metal Gear 3 is the prequel to the other two. It's the 1960s and you are a guy called Snake and have to infiltrate a Russian facility in a jungle somewhere in order to stop a rogue Russian Colonel (who has the power of lightning) from overthrowing Khruschev and making a nuclear battle tank. If that sounds stupid, it's because it is. The less said about the story, the better... it is penned by a braindead hack by the name of Hideo Kojima who fancies himself an artist. I will simply give you a few choice quotes as a taste:

A name means nothing on the battlefield.

There's no such thing as luck on the battlefield.

So they've no place to die but on the battlefield, huh?

Politics determine who you face on the battlefield.

That's the kind of writer we're dealing with here. Mounds upon mounds of tripe being passed off as something original and deep. There are people out there that consider Metal Gear to be art. Such people make me very sad.

Anyhow...

The actual game is supposedly a stealth game, wherein you're supposed to sneak by a bunch of guards without alerting the authorities... you infiltrate the facility without being detected, etc. If a guard does spot you, he'll get on the radio and call even more guards and they'll all shoot at you. So you better sneak.

But what I discovered early on though is that the best cure for a bad case of guard is either a bullet to the head or a knife to the throat. The fact that the guards you're currently fighting will call more guards doesn't really change that. Couple that with the your uncanny ability to regenerate all your health in a minute or so by devouring (almost) any of the tiny creatures you stumble across and the fact that when you shoot the guards you can raid their bodies and take their stuff and you can pretty much forget the whole stealth thing.

And herein lies the virtue of the game. In every area I came into I would immediately open fire at the first guard I saw, in the tradition of Gordon Freeman. And I would keep shooting until there were no guards left, pausing occasionally to munch on raw goat meat or raid bodies. As my advisors continued to prattle on about stealth, I couldn't help but get the feeling that I'd caught the game designers unawares as I killed three guards that I was supposed to be hiding from with one shotgun blast. Even at the point of the game where they took all my guns away and left me with nothing but a fork, I still went in head first and killed every single guard I could find using my bare fists and liquid malice. And hey, this part of the game was quite fun. I mean, sure the guards were so stupid that it was pretty comical... I don't know how many of the buggers I killed by just standing at a corner waiting for them to come looking for me... But in spite of the repetition, it was pretty fun.

But the problem with the game was... well pretty much everything else. But that's a lot of game to cover, so I think what I'm going to focus in on here are the bosses. In the game's storyline, you're fighting the Cobra Unit which is an elite commando that is creditted with winning the Second World War. They are led by 'The Boss', who is a blonde lady that is also Snake's mentor. Anyhow, so long and crappy story short, the Cobra Unit comes after you one by one and you have to kill them in boss fights. Let me go through these boss fights one by one...

First up... Ocelot. Actually, fuck Ocelot, that guy is boring.

First up... The Pain...

As you can see, The Pain commands the power of bees. I was thinking of speculating about what his role in the Second World War might have been, but it made my head hurt.

The Pain will use grenades against you, but he doesn't actually throw them at you... no no, that's far too pedestrian for The Pain. What he does he gets his bees to slowly float them over to you. He also sends his 'bullet bees' to buzz at you, though it makes little different because all you really have to do is dive into the water to avoid them and then shoot the stupid bugger and then he dies. Thus does Snake prove once and for all that bullets >> bees.

The obvious question here is 'Why?' ... and it is, I feel, a legitimate question. This is, after all, supposedly a story about espionage and intrigue and such. Why the hell am I fighting a Bee Man? Previous Metal Gears have featured Vampires and Psychics, but really... bees? Fuck you Hideo Kojima.

Next up... The Fear...

After the failure of The Pain, the Cobra Unit decides to upgrade from bees to bows. The Fear is an unlikely combination of poisoned arrows and the very latest in cloaking technology. He also is apparently Spider Man and jumps from tree to tree invisible shooting arrows at you. But here's the catch! His cloaking technology draws on his life force in order to work and he thus has to replenish his energy by catching food in the middle of a fight!

Let me repeat that. In order to power his cloaking device, he needs to eat food. Just imagine this stupid bugger flitting from tree to tree shooting easily dodged arrows at you until he gets hungry and starts hunting rabbits. You can actually set up poisoned food for him and basically stand there with your shotgun waiting for him to come down for a bite.

Tedious and badly thought out... and not only that, every time he hit me with a stupid arrow, I had to go into the cure menu to use my knife to pull out the arrowhead. Pointless menu work that makes the fight last longer artificially. I've heard it said that the 'cure' system, wherein you have maybe two dozen healing knicknacks (bandages, disinfectant, ointment, splints, etc.) to patch up your wounds as opposed to one generic healing kit, is in place for the sake of 'realism'... but why the hell are we doing tedious realism stuff for when I'm fighting a guy with a crossbow and a cloaking device?

Seriously, fuck you Hideo Kojima.

But even the Fear is nothing compared to...

This guy is possibly the dumbest thing I have ever had to fight in any video game. He has Hideo Kojima's name written over him. At first glance, I actually thought he was going to be a bit more legitimate of an opponent in this story that is supposedly about high politics (at least compared to Bee Man and Arrow/Cloak/Spider Man)... he looks like some old hobo with a sniper rifle after all. But in actuality, he is a plant. He can use photosynthesis to replenish his health and is also able to commune with the forest spirits.

So he's a sniper and you have to kill him. He's hiding in a really big forest area waiting for you. The theme of this battle is PATIENCE! You're told by your advisors to search for his position on the map and to be ready for a long battle of endurance and stamina. But what The End actually does is sit around doing nothing waiting for you to either provoke him or find him. It took twenty minutes for him to fire the first shot. But here's the thing... he doesn't use bullets. He uses a tranquilizer round, which hits stamina instead of health. So when he does shoot you he doesn't actually hurt you and you can replenish whatever stamina by eating whatever animal is nearby (and there are a lot). So what you essentially have is a boss that is incapable of actually killing you, but who is a complete bitch to find.

The End is, in essence, the ultimate timesink.

I killed him in what is possibly the least stealthy way possible. I pointed an AK 47 at the sky and fired into the air like it was an Afghani wedding. The End then shot me. I would then run in his direction, eating a goat if the need arised, until I stumbled across him and shot him. Repeat that process for about forty minutes and you get my battle with The End.

Only Hideo Kojima would think of something this stupid. It's completely typical of him... you see, Kojima loves to innovate. If he can cram something into his game that he hasn't seen anyone else do, he'll put it in. "I've never seen anyone make the player swap controller slots from first player to second in the middle of a boss fight before," thought Kojima when he made the first game, "I will do it, even though it is utterly pointless." The same line of thinking went down here when he made this stupid fucker. It doesn't matter if it aggravates the player... it's new.

Fuck you Hideo Kojima.

Next is this joker...

He has a jetpack and a flamethrower. I think he was supposed to have been an ex-astronaut, but I guess he gave that all up so he could become a jetpack flamethrower man. But he is unfortunately also blind or something. I was talking to Jacob and my sister as I fought this guy and only occasionally paying attention to the fight and I don't think he landed even one hit, which is a bit of a feat when you're using a flamethrower. So I shot him until he died and that was the end of The Fury. It was a relief to beat a boss so quickly after the horror of The End.

Though of course, the cutscene after the fight lasted a good three times longer than the actual fight. So once again: Fuck you Hideo Kojima.

The Sorrow is a ghost.

Yeah, I know.

When I commented on how stupid this sequence was to Frad, he defended it by saying that Snake had just gone through a bad experience and that it was really all a dream. But no, after the sequence Snake calls his advisors and they tell him that a guy called the Sorrow, who Snake had no way of actually knowing, died in the same place where he had 'the dream'. So he was a fucking ghost that visited Snake with a ridiculously stupid vision (you walk through a river that is filled with the ghosts of everyone you killed, which for me was a lot of guys) that took a good eleven minutes to walk through and finish.

Another Kojima idea at work. Fuck you Hideo Kojima.

Anyway, with that guy gone, you're done with all the Cobra flunkies. Next up is...

Volgin here is the bad Russian who stole a nuclear battletank and wants to use it to overthrow Krushchev and make the Soviet Union rule the world. I don't really know what it is about a tank with nukes in it that makes it so much better than a... you know... nuke dropped from a plane or nuke shot through a missile. The logic is that the nuke tank can shoot from anywhere... but can't submarines pretty much already do that? What does having a tank that does it really change? But whatever, Kojima says that this will completely alter the balance of power so let's take his word for it.

So you eventually rig Volgin's nuke tank with explosives and he naturally reacts by challenging you to fisticuffs. Volgin isn't an ordinary Russian though. No, he is a Russian with the power of electricity. It's never explained why he can do that, which is something I'm thankful for as I'm convinced that whatever explanation Kojima provides would inevitably be stupid. But regardless, he shoots lightning out of his hands and has an electric shield thing that makes it so he can't be shot from the front and you need to get around to the sides. This makes for a really tedious fight that involves dodging his silly lightning attacks and waiting for him to bend over to pick up a penny so that you can shove a shotgun shell up his ass.

But it doesn't end there. A few little old bullets aren't going to stop a guy like Volgin and, after a really long and silly motorcycle chase, he uses his command over electricity to physically merge with the aforementioned nuclear battletank. Strangely, however, the nuclear battletank is easier to kill than he in on foot. All you have to do is get in a turret and shoot him and he'll die before he can even hit you.

The game's broken difficulty progession really boggles my mind. I was fighting all that time to destroy this stupid can of crap? The cutscenes took longer than the fight! Geez. Fuck you, Hideo Kojima.

Anyhow, just when I was hoping the ordeal would end soon, I had to suffer through another motorcycle chase and then shotgun a few dozen more guards (which was getting old by this point), until finally I reached the end and faced...

So The Boss appears at various points in the game, usually riding her white horse. You're treated to various cutscenes of her punching and flipping Snake around and she occasionally helps him, because she was Snake's mentor as the game repeats over and over. She is constantly descibed as the greatest warrior ever and all that crap. She appears at the end and gives Snake a really long and stupid lecture about the Second World War and how the world lost its unity after that war. Because obviously everyone got along before WWII. Anyhow, Kojim... I mean The Boss eventually shuts her yap and challenges you to a duel.

Unfortunately, the Boss turns out to be nearsighted and all you really have to do is run away from her, get out the sniper rifle and shoot her in the face as she goes around saying 'DURRR WHERE'S SNAKE?!' Occasionally The Boss does manage to spot you (usually after being shot several times) and charges you for a kung fu duel. I'm not really sure how this worked. I would basically mash buttons when she got close to me and this would somehow result in Snake flipping her onto the ground. Whatever, it doesn't matter. She died as easily as a guard with too many hit points and the game came to a blissful end.

So in summary, we have in MGS a unique combination of the frustrating, the disappointing and the downright stupid. The game wasn't completely painful thanks to the wickedly stupid guards, but it came close to being taken out of my borrowed PS2 and broken in half a few times, either due to disgust with the story or frustration with the shitty gameplay.

As I always have said though, Hideo Kojima gives me hope. If a man so thoroughly talentless can through some accident of fate forge a ridiculously popular video game franchise that is lauded as art in some circles, then any idiot can succeed in this world.

Oh and fuck you Hideo Kojima.

And that's all I ever want to say about Metal Gear from now until... forever.

The Governor General

2008-12-05T04:49:00.003-05:00

Next Grace will be finished soon. Not as soon as I'd hoped, but I shall strengthen my resolve.

But let's talk about something.

I felt a twinge of anxiety on Tuesday when I heard a lot of talk about Stephen Harper meeting with our Governor General about proroguing parliament. There was a lot of talk on the news about the Governor General's decision and how Stephen Harper's fate really rested in her hands... but the reason this gave me pause isn't really because of the high politics aspect... what made me nervous was something deeper than that: The Governor-General was going to make a decision.

For my foreign readers, the Governor General of Canada is our symbolic head of state. She is supposedly the Queen's representative and is not supposed to have any actual power. The usual functions of our Governor General are purely ceremonial. She dresses in nice clothes and travels the world smiling and making friends, at taxpayer expense. The Governor General also has some vestiges of the old royal legal power in theory, but it was always been my working assumption that the Governor General would always accept the political reality in the House by default. So, for instance, if two parties were to band together to throw out the ruling party and presented a pledge to forge a working government, her only answer would be 'okay'.

So hearing the words 'Governor General' and 'decision' in the same sentence felt just a little alien. I dimly recalled that our Governor General was named Michelle Jean and that she was appointed by Paul Martin. I think she was a journalist at one point. But who she is is completely irrelevant. She is a symbol and, more importantly, appointed. The very idea that this woman could have any practical effect on our politics is absolutely insane. The Governor General should decide what sort of dress she wants to wear and how she wants her hair done. She should NOT have any real power over our parliament.

Stephen Harper is really the master of parliamentary dirty tricks and certainly the bulk of the blame for his dastardly tactics lies on his shoulders. But one must question the state of Canadian democracy when a silly and egotistical woman is able to, with the full knowledge of the intentions of the majority of the elected members of the house, prorogue Parliament to save a Prime Minister from a non-confidence vote? And for what reason? I can understand Stephen Harper using legal dirty tricks and abusing his office to preserve his power... but why in the world should a Governor General's ceremonial power be made into one of his gimmicks?

I've been reading up on the prorogue process and its history throughout the British Commonwealth. Thus far, I haven't found any precedent for this ever happening in a British-style parliamentary democracy. If Harper is ever successfully removed, serious thought needs to be given to some of the 'traditional' aspects of our government. The Governor General... The Senate... all these relics of the monarchist system seem benign and nostalgic when they're not doing anything other than collecting a paycheck from the taxpayer, but we've just seen how open to abuse they really are.

Tradition be damned. This kind of thing should never be allowed to happen.

Grace 2 Revised

2008-11-30T02:38:00.004-05:00

Quick update. Image unrelated, but in Tau we are strong.

I've made some revisions to Chapter 2 of the Grace. The reason I am able to maintain my enthusiasm for Grace is that not everything is nailed down. If I have a good new idea, there's no reason I can't just put it in. Though of course, that means having to change things from earlier chapters to fit what you're currently doing.

So here's the revised Chapter. And here's a handy change log that details will tell you what was changed without you having to go through it all. The big changes were to Abel and Nari. Abel had a minor backstory change, while Nari had an important bit of dialogue about her completely altered. Foreshadowing is easy when you can go back and change things!

I'll talk more about this when Grace 6 is done, which I think will be around next week.

Other matters:

- I hope the Liberal and NDP team-up works out. We act as one, lest we perish alone.

- I now have a fan. Most of you are my friends or family members, which I think really colours perception of a story. It's a story by me, after all, and you all know me really well. But I met a smart guy called Itsuki on a forum who is a really voracious reader and has literally read almost everything I've written over the last half decade, minus my two unfinished novels. And he really treats the stuff pretty much like anything else he might read.

In the last two weeks he's been reading Grace and... well, let's just look at this piece of a conversation:

Itsuki says:
Nari deserves the world
Itsuki says:
and then some
Naelok - "Abort the plan! Abort! Abort plan!" says:
man you really like Nari
Itsuki says:
yes
Itsuki says:
Anyone who hurts her shall receive divine punishment

I don't think I've heard any of you guys talking about my characters like that! Or really, maybe you guys do think that but don't say as much? Or maybe it's a personality thing. Still, it's pretty disorienting to see that kind of reaction, though it tells me that I'm at least doing a fair job with the characters, if they can inspire the sort of fanboyish protectionism that usually gets linked to say Hermione from Harry Potter or Kallen from Geass.

It's kind of funny for me to think about what it would be like if the book were finished and published and read by a decent audience. Would the Weedy and Eyce fanboys argue with the Nari fanboys over which is perfect for Eisa? Would it generate crappy fanfiction? Hm. Let's leave that in the realm of fantasy for now.

Until next time.

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

2008-11-20T04:35:00.005-05:00

So the purpose of this blog is not to review games. In fact, while I've talked a fair about a bunch of games in the past, I don't think I've ever done an actual review of one before as I have with anime and books and voice actresses. But I'm going to do one today for Tales of Symphonia Dawn of the New World. Why? Well, there are a few reasons, but the main reason is because IGN hit the game with a 6.7 review, which I thought was rather shocking score for a game I've been anticipating for months to receive. I usually trust IGN's judgement, but I got the game anyway and have discovered that they were... well... pretty wrong. And I figured that it'd be interesting for a few of you to talk about why that is.

Let me start by saying what's wrong with the IGN review. It's pretty simple, really: The guy assigned to review it hadn't played the fucking first fucking game.

Imagine someone going to a bookstore and picking up a copy of Harry Potter of the Prisoner of Azkaban without first reading Philosopher's Stone and Chamber of Secrets. Now imagine that same person publishing an article in a big name literary review site and complaining about how he had trouble keeping track of what's Hogwarts and Voldemort and all these weird details about Harry's early life that he just can't get his head around. It's an absurd way to premise a review and it's more or less exactly what this Daemon guy did here. The IGN guy complains about how he has trouble following the dialogue, but that's because half the dialogue in the game is referring to events of the first game. Geez.

So anyway, I will now give the internet a review of the game from the perspective of someone who has actually played the first game.

In short: It's not as good as the first Symphonia, but it's still a pretty damn good game.

Dawn of the New World is set two years after the events of Symphonia. I won't talk about the plot, since Frad is a lazy fuck and hasn't even started the game yet, but the new story centers around a fellow named Emil and a girl called Marta. The original Symphonia cast are still very important (Lloyd especially plays a rather surprising role), but the focus of the story is on those two.

Often when you have a sequel to successful game, you have a tendency on the creators' part to be conservative. Just make the same sorts of sights and noises that the player is used to and you'll go far. And to a certain extent, this is what Namco did. I'd say about 60% of the game occurs in locales are places that are from the first game. Which makes sense, of course. Why, after all, would Meltokio suddenly look completely different? Although I do wonder who it was that went into the old dungeons and refilled all the chests.

But when it comes to story, Namco was much bolder. The original Symphonia hit on themes like racism, betrayal, slavery, revenge and just generally trying to walk the best path in a difficult situation. The Affection system could provide a love subplot, though that was just a subplot. In any case, Lloyd's unwavering optimism could make me feel a naceous at times, but it really was part of his charm. Dawn of the New World, on the other hand, does touch on those themes but make no mistake: this is a love story.

When I heard that they were scrapping Symphonia's famous Affection system, I wondered what the hell they could be thinking. I figured it was because they were making budget cutbacks or something, but the real reason turned out to be because they wanted to focus in on these two in a deeper way. And while occasionally the story lapses into bouts of cheese, you do have what I think is an interesting tale here. Emil, while initially extremely hatable, has a few interesting surprises inside of him while Marta, while being a tad over-the-top in some respects, is pretty well made with recognizable human emotions. Most importantly, the two go well together and I applaud the creators for taking this path rather than rehashing their past success.

Beyond Marta and Emil, there is still quite a lot to be said. The original Symphonia cast was way more rich and well-developed than pretty much any other J-RPG I've played, but what the creators seem determined to do in this game is fill in any gaps in their dynamics from the first game. You get to find out how Sheena gets along with Regal and how Presea interacts with Raine. It's not just random ToS fan service, but rather genuine character development.

Going beyond story, the biggest change to the game is probably changing the world map into a sort of Mario 3-esque level system. When you clear dungeon A or town A, you pick the next point on the map and go there. This saves time, but it really brings the immersion level down a notch and Namco actually admitted that the only reason they switched to something so low-grade because of time constraints. Weak. Also, since I was pretty interested in the main story I spent most of the time just clicking ahead to the next town, so needless to say I missed a crapload of subevents. Oh well.

The combat system is a sort of beefed up version of Symphonia's with a better camera and the ability to run in any direction you like. Occasionally you'll have a giant dragon ass blocking the entire screen, but that hasn't been a huge problem. The game also isn't as hard as the first game and being able to map 16 move keys (B + stick/D-pad/Wiimote shakes) makes fights more engaging as you aren't locked into a certain move pattern as you were in the first game. It isn't too difficult, though there is a hard mode to be tried.

Less exceptional is the pokemon system they added with 'monster pacts'. This addition is retarded for many reasons, but here are three:

1 - There are only four damn slots in the party. Why do I need to capture monsters? I have humans I can put in those fucking slots.
2 - Capturing the fuckers is a pain.
3 - It's horribly abusable. The second creature I caught was a wolf who has evolved into this snow-wolf demigod thing. It's around level 90, has as many hitpoints as Emil and Marta put together and deals like 1500 damage a hit. I rarely use the damn thing because it's stupid and I'd rather have humans in my team rather than some stupid snow dog, but its existence bothers me.

On a brighter note, customization from the first game is also back and beefed up. Enemies will drop all sorts of crap and you can use said crap to make shinier weapons and armour. The system itself works well and if you use it properly you can keep your equipment ahead of the curve, but the interface could really have used an overhaul. Dividing items into categories (weapons/armours/accessories/etc) would have saved me a lot of scrolling. Materials are pretty easy to find, with an abundant supply available through the game's subquests.

But that brings me to the game's biggest flaw. Remember the Sword Dancer from part 1? Or Abyssion? Or any of the many many subquests in the game? Yeah, Dawn of the World has almost none of that. Instead what you can do is go to the local Katz guy and ask from a quest. You then are teleported from town to some sort of quest zone. Quests vary from everything between hunting down some thieves to delivering some food. Interesting, no?

But here's the catch: They're all the fucking same! There's a wind cave, a fire cave, a mine and maybe two or three other quest zones. So if the bandit quest is in the wind cave, you get to her by dropping a rock to open a door and then going in to kill her. If the delivery quest is in that wind cave, then guess what? You do the exact same fucking thing with the rock dropping!

I don't know what the hell they were thinking when they made that crap. The things are optional and don't detract from the main storyline at all, but the fact that Namco decided to make these stupid pointless things rather than the robust subquests you had in Symphonia tells me that they are lazy fucks.

The voice acting... sigh. Rie Kugimiya originally voice Marta. I've chosen not to rant too much about what a crime it is to dub over Rie though, so I won't. (Oh, and for the record, in spite of what impression you might have gotten from the last entry, I am not stalking that woman. Or well, not yet at least.)

The voice acting is solid. Of the returning cast, some of them retain their original voice actors and some don't. Quite frankly, of the ones that have been changed, I think they sound better. Don't get me wrong, the new actors sound a lot like the old ones and only Lloyd's voice sounds completely different. But their delivery is just a lot better. Genis especially I think sounds a lot better now.

There are a lot more battle quotes, though occasionally they'll clash and break the immersion. Like for instance, this is something I often hear in boss fights:

Marta: "You're using too many items!"
Emil: "It's to win!"

*two seconds later*

Emil: "Don't use so many items!"
Marta: "But this is more fun!"

So apparently they think alike. Or something. But other than that, the battle quotes are still nice and quirky. There have been a few times when the victory quotes have made me laugh aloud even.

Still, while the game lacks some of the depth of the first game, what with no world map, pokemon and a paltry number of real subquests. However, the story has many virtues, the characters you know and love from the first game are back and better than ever. The voice acting is good (though it needs a dual-audio Japanese) and combat is fun.

Overall, I would give it an 8.5 of 10.

As a side note, do you see how this blog has a 'There's More' and 'Contract Post' button? Anyone know how I can do that here? That'd be nice, I think.

Rie Kugimiya

2008-11-18T01:41:00.006-05:00

So now that I've made another big old Obama post, let's talk about some lighter matters...

So my actual life... actually, let's not talk about that. You can just ask me if it means anything to you. In a nutshell: I'm applying to teach abroad, I'm volunteering at the NDP and at a High School and am also writing. I'm doing a sort of slow and purposeful thing in terms of getting my post-graduate act together, but let's not dwell on it now.

So then, it's been a while, so let's geek out.

Let's see... oh I know. I've checked out a few series lately and a few of them actually have a thread in common, so let's talk about that in a way that I hope will be accessible. I warn though that this will read as being pretty random and obscure to the uninitiated

I recently I came across the interesting case of a voice actress by the name of Rie Kugimiya. I've recently been giving her some thought and have been trying to comprehend the underlying meaning of her considerable talents and so now I will write a blog entry about her.

I first came across the lady in a lead role when I watched a comedy called Zero no Tsukaima last summer. It's about a girl named Louise (played by Rie) from an alternate world where there's magic who summons a familiar from 'our' world to swing around a sword around for her. That's about the gist of it. Anyhow, Louise is a character type called a 'tsundere' that's really unique to Japan, as far as I know. The word 'tsundere' comes from two Japanese which Wikipedia tells me mean 'pointed or angry' (tsun) and 'affectionate' (dere)... the basic meaning then is basically a female character who will hit the guy she likes because she doesn't know how else to deal with him. But in that template, one finds great potential as what it really is describing is a character whose nature is contradictory.

Louise is a character who's very proud and even haughty, but also rather shy. She can be insanely jealous and vindictive, but also incredibly affectionate and forgiving. I have thought of what it would take to write a character like that and I find that it's would be very difficult for me. But what you had in ZnT you have all those contradictions woven together into one coherent personality by the masterful voice acting of Rie Kugimiya. Entire thought processes get across with a stutter here or a laugh or sudden pause there. Her voice takes the swirlling mass of contradiction that is Louise and makes her into a coherent and utterly charming character.

Now I'm not really one to follow specific actors and actresses. I can appreciate a strong performance when I see one... as I said last summer, Heath Ledger in Dark Knight was possibly one of the greatest works of acting in our time. But it didn't make me want to watch Brokeback Mountain or whatever else it is the poor guy starred in before he died. My feeling is that the writing is what essentially make a screenplay good, not the actors and actresses. You can have a good story told by bad actors, but my opinion is that good actors can't really salvage a bad story. I'm sure all of you can think of awful films with exceptional actors that prove this.

So I didn't actually run to grab the next Rie anime after I finished ZnT. But after a while I did get pressured by Frad into watching Hayate the Combat Butler, another comedy anime, I did so because it sounded pretty awesome. Rie plays a girl called Nagi in that who is, like Louise, a tsundere. 'Hmm,' thought I, 'I guess she's typecasted into this role' and so I shrugged and enjoyed the fucking awesomeness that was Hayate. Afterward I figured Rie could do no wrong and checked out Shakugan no Shana, which was a serious fantasy piece that once again saw Rie taking up the mantle of tsundere to play Shana.

It's not like she's playing the same character over and over, mind you. Louise, Nagi and Shana all have contradictory personalities, but take away the voice of Rie and they're actually quite different. Nagi is this intensely creative and warm person, while Shana is pretty stuffy and cold. They both get filed under 'tsundere' because they tend to get angry at their male love interest (Nagi much less so), but that's a bit of a simplification. So I don't think what's happening in Rie's career is that whenever anyone has a tsundere character that needs a voice she gets dialed up. There are other tsundere voice actresses out there, after all, though none quite as good as it as her.

So that got me thinking from the prospective director or writer's perspective. Most of Rie's animes are made by the same company (JC Staff), so it stands to reason that when the writers sit down to hammer out a script (although to be fair most of her animes are adapted from novels, unless I'm mistaken), they know that they're going to have her. The writers can thus treat Rie's voice as a resource to be used as any other. Instead of dwelling on this thought process or that, they can just ask for a certain inflection or perhaps a stutter or gasp to get the idea across. In such circumstances, you wouldn't have good writers making a good script for actors to perform... rather instead, you'd have the writers actually gearing their work towards the actor's specific talents.

(Hmm... you know, after going through all these mental acrobatics I have to say that this great point I was trying to make actually seems a bit obvious. Oops. Oh well! That's what this blog is for. Let's come to a conclusion)

There are a lot of different types of writing that I don't really get the opportunity to really try, since I'm just an amateur. I certainly don't have much/any experience writing dramas, but I have to say that the idea of having an actor or actress that can do so much of the important characterization work for me with just a bit of acting power is pretty appealing. Obviously I won't be able to do that any time soon/ever. But it's a cool thing to think about.

Incidentally, not that it matters, I don't think any of my non-anime fan readers would like ZnT or Shana. Hayate has universal appeal, although some of its humour is a tad obscure.

Obama, Foreign Policy and the Homefront

2008-11-18T00:37:00.004-05:00

So I said I'd write an Obama foreign policy post last time, but I was hoping that Obama would announce a Secretary of State soon and that hasn't happened. The leading contenders that I've heard of are Bill Richardson, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. The latter two I think of as complete scum, while the former I have no real opinion of.

I was listening to Al-Jazeera English talking about the signals that Obama's cabinet sends to the world. The host pointed out that Rahm Emanuel is about as Zionist as you can possibly get (I can see Googling him that his middle name is, in actual fact, 'Israel'). And none of the three names Sec State names can be expected to harbour much personal sympathy for any particular Islamic cause. Hell, Hillary certainly did her fair share of saber-rattling against Iran during the primary. So the AJ host I think had a good point... what the hell is going to change if that's his team?

Well, the answer is not much. Obama's foreign policy agenda has never really been as ambitious as he's made it sound. It boils down to cutting American losses in Iraq, pursuing a dialogue with Iran and making a few token gestures in Afghanistan. Beyond that, he seems most interested in pretty much preserving the status quo. Obama has no radical agenda to reshape the Middle East to suit American purposes. The impression I have is that he wants to basically live the quiet life while he pursues an ambitious domestic agenda.

And you know what? I think that's actually a really good thing. It's not really realistic to expect America to see the error of its ways and work towards building a better world. But an inward looking America is less dangerous and given to fewer bouts of imperialistic hubris. If the Americans stay at home and worry about getting a decent healthcare system and putting together a good economy, then I think we can count on the next four to eight years being relatively peaceful.

So on that note, how about we take things down a notch around here? I haven't really blogged seriously this year. Guess I kicked the habit. But I think I'll make another post after this one about some lighter matters.

Obama and the Power of Speech

2008-11-06T16:15:00.005-05:00

Okay, so now let's talk about the recent American election.

My attention first turned to Barack Obama after I listened to a few of his speeches after Iowa. I'd first heard of the man when he got into the Senate in 2004, when they showed clips of the guy on CNN with his daughters and wife. After that, I heard little of him until I read an article at the BBC about him launching his presidential campaign. I didn't think much of him or his chances. He was black, he was running against Bill Clinton's scummy wife and he had a sort of idealism about him that felt too sincere for politics. Such men running in such conditions do not become president.

As the months wore on, I learned a bit more about who he is. He had a mixed racial background, was raised by a single mother and had spent a few years in Indonesia. This made me conclude that he was an interesting man, though his peculiar 'attack Pakistan' position seemed (and still does seem) more than a little boneheaded. I remained ambivalent towards him as I saw clips of him on the news along with the Daily Show and Colbert. In the lead up to Iowa, I watched an ABC interview with him and easily preferred him to the unscrupulous and power-hungry Hillary Clinton, but I did not expect him to win.

Then there was Iowa and then I heard the man give a few speeches.

For obvious reasons, I am a big believer in the power of words. After I heard Obama balance out the pathos, ethos and logos and weave in impassioned words of hope and that spectacular phrase 'yes we can', I did not just become a fan... I became fairly convinced he would win. Why? It's simple... he was bringing poetry, high-minded rhetoric and lyricism to American politics. He can elevate the discourse and speak in broad strokes of American history and then, in the same breath, outline a three point plan for bringing about Universal Health Care. Unleashing such a force into the American culture of Hollywood one-liners and primitive political jingoism that has prevailed for the last few decades is like bringing a tank to a knife fight. As his opponents tried to mock him as an empty suit, you could feel the terror inside of them. It wasn't a simple matter of their policies against his... they were facing someone who could make the English language itself into an army and send it to war.

I could speak at length about Obama's techniques... I've probably listened to all the Obama speeches that he put up on Youtube. But let's save that for a future blog entry. Essentially, my belief in Obama's victory stemmed from those speeches. Firm sets of ideas persuasively brought forth are what change history. And so it was that my belief in words was vindicated last Tuesday.

The power of speech cannot be underestimated. The right idea expressed with the right words at the right time can change the course of history. It's a talent that so very few people have, but which absolutely demolishes all opposition when used correctly. There are all sorts of stories about how Obama did it... Newsweek has a series of stories that detail the campaign from start to finish. But I think the thing that made it all possible in the end was Obama's voice.

One more issue:

I'm a sceptic of American exceptionalism. I don't think America is as unique a place as Americans would like to believe. But credit is due where credit is due and I certainly can't think of another country that's gone in 50 years from sending black people to the back of a bus to electing a black person to lead them. I certainly don't know of many prominent Algerians in French politics, for instance. I believe that the bulk of the credit for Obama's victory lies on the shoulders of Obama himself... only a candidate of that magnitude could ever acheive such a thing. But Americans could and should take pride in being able to make a lot of collective political progress in a very short space of time. Not many countries can boast that.

Next time I'll talk about Obama and foreign policy.

Grace 5 - Yes We Can

2008-11-06T06:32:00.004-05:00

Obama reacts to the death of his grandmother

I know. I haven't updated that in ages. But like many things this November, that soon will change.

Grace 5 is now done. Some of you might ask why it's Grace 5. Last Chapter was Grace 5. Well, last chapter was scrapped and redone with what you see here. That's one of the reasons why it took so long. I don't mean to come off as whiny, but Grace is hard to write. And no one reads it either so I sort of wonder why I write it instead of just random short stories. More people read the random short stories of last year. But oh well, I guess the only conclusion is that I really believe in this story and these characters.

Next part of Grace is the fun stuff, so it should be a bit easier to go through. I hope that the second swing at Grace 5 doesn't prove to be a disaster.

Here it is.

On another note, I intend to update the blog more over the next few weeks. Not just with stories, but with normal entries like I used to do. I still want this blog to be primarily my writing blog, but I'd like to comment on recent events a bit.

The Grace 5

2008-07-25T05:08:00.006-04:00

So I think this is more or less done. Man that took a lot of work.

Here's the Grace 5:

Doc format//RTF format.

Edit: Some bloody asshole took a bunch of images from my fileden and ran it out of bandwidth. Fucking jackass. I don't have anywhere else to put it, so here it is on bloody Megaupload.

Grace is a really hard story to write. The story is always looking backwards, to Eisa's past, even as it goes forward. It's really hard to balance that out. Then on top of that I need to make the non-Eisa characters engaging, which is also very hard as Eisa is the sort of guy that keeps a few degrees of separation between himself and those around him. And, of course, there's the actual plot which is probably a little bit more complicated than it strictly has to be (although I do like the current pacing).

Sometimes I wonder if the ideas of Grace are simply too complicated for my writing ability to handle. It's really difficult to know whether to offer one piece of information now or to save it for a chapter or two down the road. With this chapter, I chose to bring something in first and explain what it is later on. The idea behind doing that is to make the reader think 'hey what's up with this' and read on... to risk temporary confusion for long-term reward. But I have no way of knowing if it works.

I guess it's at least good that I'm giving it my all (or at least as much of my all that I have to give right now). I'm never going to be able to make anything good if I don't do that.

Other matters:

- Dr. Horrible was really good. Great and catchy songs. But Joss Whedon is such a damn tool. I read an interview with him about the thing where he talked about his influences and, of course, he didn't mention Jonathan Coulton. No one can look me in the eye and tell me that Joss Whedon made that thing without first listening to Skullcrusher Mountain or the Future Soon. Because the whole fucking musical was just the lovechild of those two songs.

Hey, did you hear Fox is making a live action Cowboy Bebop? At first I thought "Man, that's going to be a total trainwreck" but then I remembered they'd already made a live action interpretation of Cowboy Bebop. And it wasn't so bad! Although it's a shame that they cancelled it after fourteen episodes.

Yeah, that's right. Fuck Joss Whedon.

- I have class in like 6 hours and haven't slept. Yay.

- I was thinking of seeing the Dark Knight again, but I'm not sure. Anyone want to?

Aside: Why so serious?

2008-07-19T06:02:00.003-04:00

Grace 5 is technically done now, but it needs another scene and a crapload of polish. I expect to release it by the end of next week though, depending how it goes.

Let's talk about Dark Knight.

It was excellent. A true masterpiece, I would say... it was well scripted, planned and executed. Batman Begins was a solid movie, but its main flaw was that it spent the first hour on the origin story.. I mean, is there honestly anyone who doesn't know why Batman is Batman? Considering that that problem is erased by default in Dark Knight, I had extremely high expectations going in. I was not disappointed.

If you haven't seen it yet, then you should. That's all there is to say.

Spoiler discussion:

Holy fuck the Joker.

I really don't know anything about this Heath Ledger fellow. Looking through his bio, I see that I haven't even seen any of his other films. But man, what a spectacular actor. He had everything down about the Joker, right down to his strange mannerisms, stutters and small gestures. He was doing so much more than reading from a script as so many actors will do. He was the Joker. I heard tell afterward that Ledger was a method actor and that his playing the Joker's mind brought him into a sort of downward cycle as he peered into that void. I don't know if that's true, but it seems plausible. And I have to admit that I find the idea of the genius actor being killed by his own craft to be a bit appealing. But whatever the case may be, what a loss.

I honestly never would have thought that the Joker could ever be such a serious and sophisticated character. I mean, he's a crazy clown. The way it was done here though made him into a sort of genius schizophrenic. hey never really give a straight answer about why he is the way he is, though the strength of Ledger's performance made that unnecessary. He's completely believable. A twisted nihilist that wanted to validate his own existance by proving that, if subjected to sufficient pressure, anyone would be like him. It wasn't that he just liked hurting and killing people, but rather that he wanted to prove that laws and human order were fleeting and flimsy institutions.

In a way, I feel as though the movie backed away from the brink a bit at the end, with the boat detonator scene. It's as though the director himself was afraid of what would happen if he gave too much validation to the Joker's anarchistic philosophy. I thought it would've been more compelling if the civilians hit the switch while the criminals didn't. The way both sides backed out... it felt a bit artificially moral.

Harvey Dent was amazing too.

The way Two-Face was done in my memory is that he had two personalities, one good and one evil. So I kept waiting for that to happen in the movie and it didn't. A lesser film would have made it so that Rachel told him she loved Bruce and then have her die and him go crazy and somehow find out that Bruce is Batman and go after him with his evil personality. This took a much more arduous route... Harvey Dent was one guy throughout the film. His breakdown was a steady downward transition rather than a product of multiple personalities. Much harder to do.

I know this is a bit silly, but I've got to say that I really liked the symbolism of the coin. I've always liked Two Face's coin... it's one of the cooler little villain symbols. Even back in the old 90s Batman cartoon it was pretty menacing. But the way it was done in the movie was cool... using a coin with identical sides to make decisions is really a way of saying you're in control, after all. The scraping of the coin after the Rachel incident... that's such a great way of conveying what Harvey went through mentally. It's a great visual symbol of the loss of control.

What else? Oh I guess there's Batman.

I'm glad that there was a lot more Batman and a lot less Bruce Wayne in this movie. There were times in the movie where his detective work actually reminded me of L vs. Light. I have to say though that some of those gadget things were a bit farfetched. Cellphone sonar on the whole city? Say wha? The way he was steadily pushed to the edge was really cool too... the way he took Rachel's death with a stiff upper lip was just superb.

One of the things I always was disappointed in with the Spider Man films is that they never really highlighted his role as a detective. With Batman though, they really go all out with that. It's not just a matter of beating up the bad guy and winning... there's a planning and investigative stage. Gathering information actually matters. I like that... makes for a much more intellectual hero, rather than just the brute force.

The style though is without peer... gotta love it when he has a chat with Commissioner Gordon on a rooftop and then the Commissioner turns away for a moment to contemplate the skyline of his city for a moment, only to turn back to see that Batman is gone. I love that.

Anyhow, I could go on and on about this film, but that is all I will say for now. In summary: It was excellent.

Look forward to Grace 5.

Grace Revised

2008-06-04T04:04:00.006-04:00

(We act as one... lest we perish alone.)

Okay, so I've now finished going through the first part of the Grace and changing what needs to be changed. Here's the edited document and here's the handy guide to the important things that I changed. The changes aren't huge, but they are fairly important. I know not many people are reading this now, but now I can be accused of less contradictions if it's ever all done. There's one big change to the end of the chapter that I still might make (I noted it in the guide), but not at this moment.

Only one person (Jacob) has read Chapter 4 so far. He seemed to really like it. Like he made a line from it his MSN name, which is pretty high praise since he usually has various quotes on alcohol and politics in there. Go me! The other two people that are reading this haven't got to it yet, but hopefully that will happen soon.

What happens next is I write the fifth part. I'll fix up what I don't like in the second part after that's done, but there's less to do. The main offender was really the first part. Right now I'm anxious to do the fifth part, as there are many ideas I've had for a while (and some more recent, of course!) that I want to put down into writing. It's going to be cool. Or at least I think so. You may disagree.

Other matters:

- My foot is good. Nothing was broken in there. It still hurts a bit when I put all my weight on the heel, but less-so every day. I can ride a bike and everything now though, so yay.

- Me and Andres are an unstoppable TF2 team. If we go Heavy/Medic on a 2fort server then we invariably end up in first and second place. It's bloody amazing what we can get done. There are times when we'll be planted outside an enemy spawn point, slaughtering everyone that even tries to dislodge us. Once we break through enemy lines, we usually get a solid 15-25 kills before we finally are brought down. Sometimes even more than that.

- Do any of you have some really weird friends? I have some. One's name is Fradener. That isn't his real name, but allow me to share this tale:

There's an anime he wants me to watch called TTGL. TTGL stands for something, I forget what exactly... A bunch of moonspeak words. It's about a world where people live in holes... this little kid is digging a hole in one of those holes and finds a stupid looking mech. Joining forces with this other dude and some chick that doesn't wear much clothing, he goes out into the surface world to fight the beastmen and have an adventure or something.

If this sounds horrible to you, then the reason for that is because it is. I watched two episodes of it and just couldn't bear the pain. Frad though? He loved it... And hey, nothing wrong with that... different strokes and all that. But the thing is with Frad is that whenever someone he knows doesn't like something he likes, he takes it as something of a personal affront and tries to convince them that they are wrong and should like it anyway. And that's okay, because I'm actually kind of like that too. Over the years, this has resulted in a system of barter, where I'll only watch/read some of the things he recommends if he'll reciprocate by watching one of my series or reading a book or what have you. I got him to read the Grace that way even. The most recent trade involved him getting the Name of the Wind, which is a book that I think he'll enjoy. I think I generally like the system... after all, some of my tastes are so obscure that it's necessary to just sort of enforce them on others if I'm going to have anyone to talk to them about. I'm sure Jacob has noticed my doing this over the last few years too.

But in the case of this TTGL thing it's just gone too far. I was talking to him about how I'm not going to watch the crap and he was insisting that I should anyway, because it totally gets good after I watch like twenty episodes. While talking to him I was reading through some info on the upcoming Tales of Symphonia sequel, and so I went ahead and said 'hey play ToS and I'll watch this thing'.

Now in any negotiation there are certain tactics one uses to fulfill one's objectives. I remember very well the words of the Fuhrer to Henrich Himmler concerning what tactic the German Nationalist Parties in the Sudetenland should take in its negotiations with the Czech Republic, mainly: "We should always demand so much that we can never be satisfied." I wanted Frad to stop pestering me and so I said 'hey why don't you spend about sixty bucks on a Gamecube controller, a memory card and a Gamecube game, and then I'll watch your stupid crap.' I figured that since he just bought a new computer, such an expense would be out of his budget range and he'd be forced to say no.

But instead he ordered it that night. Moreover, I think he paid like 90 dollars because he has this weird eccentricy where he refuses to buy anything used (even if it's a five year old game). Now Symphonia is a fantastic game and I think he'll enjoy it (although I'm not sure if he'll get ninety dollars worth of enjoyment. That's like double what I paid for it when it was newly released). But the fact of the matter is that he still put down ninety dollars in order to make me watch something that I hate. In my opinion, that's just going too far.

So yeah, in conclusion, I know some weird people. Also: Shit, now I have to watch a shitty anime. Fuck.

- Obama won, yay!

The Grace 4

2008-05-27T06:23:00.006-04:00

(I honestly tried to find a pic that wasn't of cats, but nothing I could find compared to this one)

So Grace 4 is finally done. Here it is in rtf format for those of you into that.

This thing has been in the making for months. I think if you were to add up every discarded and deleted page of this chapter, it would be longer than the rest of the story put together. I don't know what took so long. So many times, I'd thought I'd figured it all out only to run into one snag or another. Hours and hours of work went into making something work that wouldn't. I had to restart from scratch at least four times. At one point, it was so discouraging that I actually considered abandoning the whole story. But in spite of everything, I still believe in Grace and so I pressed on.

The result is a 25 page chapter that I think is pretty good. It's probably not the best chapter so far. I'm still not 100% satisfied with the way that it ends... and there are certain parts that I think could be somehow better, although I'm not sure how. But it's done. In the process of making this chapter, I also managed to shape my vision for the story a fair bit. Some details are still in flux, but I have a much better idea of what's what now. In any case, I hope you enjoy it. A lot of work has gone into it.

Since it's been months since I last posted a story, here's a brief primer for those with poor memories:

Eisa's old friend Abel wrote him and told him he was being held by an Associate Lord by the name of Aerien Kaistor. Eisa was relying on Abel to do him certain favours to place him into contact with the Archivist and was persuaded by Vincent and Nari to try to fish Abel out of the grips of the Associate Lord (against his better judgement). Oh and Eisa was also shot last chapter.

The Associates are to be the last element of the story that I introduce. Now that I have the Lantern, Solar and the Associates introduced I can tell the rest of the story. No more need to introduce factions every chapter

Over the next few days I'm going to be going over the parts of the story that have already been written and edit a few things. I'll make a post about that later on. There are a few story things that I need to adjust... nothing too big... mainly things that I've already mentally abandoned. The one big change is to Vincent's character. You'll probably notice it in the next chapter, but here are the changes for your reference:

- He is now a potty-mouth and a bit more aggressive (he always was aggressive, but he's just moreso now).
- He will now occasionally will make oaths in Arabic, which suggests that he is Muslim although not a particularly good one.

I would hope that this is a step in the right direction.

Other semi-related matters:

- While I was considering how to change the ending of this chapter yesterday, I took a bike ride. I often do that when I need to go over things in my head. Anyhow, while riding down the northern half of the Cedarville Ravine and thinking about a few minute adjustments to Aerien Kaistor's wardrobe, I hit a rock and lost my balance. I fell at high speed onto my side and skidded for a while. The result are some bad scraps on my left shoulder and knee, a pair of torn jeans and the loss of the ability to walk.

Okay, okay, I'm exaggeratinat the last one. What actually happened is I've hurt my left heel in a weird way. I can no longer put weight on the thing without getting hit with a shot of pain and so I have to walk with all the weight in my left foot set on my toes, which gives me a weird sort of limp. I guess something might be broken or what have you. I'm seeing a doctor about it later on.

- I really don't update this blog so often. I've been thinking of making a non-writing blog, but I don't know how interesting that would be or what I would even put on it. It's not like I do anything else worth noting these days. An entire blog of 'lol today me and Sput rocked in TF2' probably wouldn't be that exciting.

- I've gone through a bunch of anime in the last little while. I won't go into them all here, if only because I'm really tired and also in a bit of pain, but I will mention Clannad which was this beautiful drama/comedy deal. That was good. Yeah.

So anyhow, that is all. Enjoy the chapter. Please. I worked really hard.

Aside: "Do you think that love can bloom, even on the battlefield?"

2008-04-10T13:02:00.007-04:00

I have some time to kill before I hand in an essay, so let me just explore a topic that's on my mind.

I've previously referred to the fact that American journalists are a bunch of stupid assclowns. Not all, but most. I mentioned one name as I went through my list of 'American Journalists who are incredibly stupid'... a guy called Marty Peretz. He's an editor over at the New Republic. The New Republic is a site I started checking out regularly when the American election piqued my interest. It has two regular blogs (The Plank and The Stump) that are normally at least worth reading, even though they really only amount to a bit of quirky political opinion trading.

Then it has a third blog, 'The Spine'. The Spine is basically a series of juvenile Zionist diatribes written by Martin Peretz. Now it's no secret that I don't like Zionism, but what I dislike almost as much as Zionism is profound and willful ignorance. Now Peretz is an uncritical Obama supporter, if only because he really doesn't like the Clintons. But looking at his column today, I see that a nice blanket condemnation of Jimmy Carter on the grounds that Jimmy Carter hangs out with dictators and hates Israel. The fact that unconditional meetings with dictators is one of the cornerstones of Barack Obama's foreign policy programme is completely lost on Peretz. He picks and chooses what he wants to hear to suit his agenda. Jimmy Carter is an opponent of Israeli Apartheid and therefore Peretz tries to tear him down. That's the long and short of it.

Not to mention that he throws in this line: "Many historians think that [Jimmy Carter] was the worst president in American history." As a fairly competent scholar of history, that kind
of bullshit infuriates me to no end. I'm sorry, what kind of fucking historian is out composing "Top ten lists of teh worstest presidents?" Peretz, of course, doesn't bother to cite any.

Oh, and did I mention that he's not just stupid, but also a filthy bigot? Here's a real gem:

Poor Tom Friedman. He is looking for a Muslim Martin Luther King. There is none, Tom. If one were living on earth, they'd break his windows. Imprison him. Or kill him. Finished.

Matthew Yglesias, an excellent American journalist/blogger, thankfully pointed out the profound irony of that statement. But the key fact is that this guy still has a job at an otherwise respectable American news magazine. It's just mind-boggling. To be so profoundly stupid and yet still be given creditability... the other TNR journalists have similar biases, but they at least think before they hit the 'publish' button.

This is why the US media is in such shambles. There are good journalists, but they all have to share the same page space as these sorts of semi-literate buffoons. It's scum like Peretz that just cheapen the entire enterprise of journalism.

Anyhow, I haven't done one of these sorts of blog entries in a while, so consider this a treat. Oh and don't forget about Grace Interlude. No one's got to it yet.

Oh and someone remind me to add a picture to the top of this post later on. Thanks.

Ok, there, pic added. I really like lolcats, as you might guess.

The Grace: First Interlude

2008-04-08T06:53:00.002-04:00

Okay, after nearly two months, I finally have more Grace to release. The Grace: the First Interlude awaits you!

This is the alternate perspective I mentioned last time. I hope you find it interesting. The Chapter is intentionally shorter than the others (10 pages double space, rather than the normal 20-30). The reason for that is that I felt that while a short break from Eisa was necessary for the story to go forward smoothly, it's still his story and the less time I spend away from him the better. Obviously they'll be more interludes eventually, but not for a while I don't think.

I named the chapter the 'First Interlude' rather than Chapter 4. Next chapter will be Chapter 4. Though if people think that the numbering scheme is needlessly complicated, I'll just make this 4 and next 5.

I was thinking of adding a quotation to the beginning of the chapter, but I figure that's a bit of a cliché by now. Oh well. Lemme know what you think.

Other matters:

- I finished this Chapter instead of finishing my last major essay. Said essay was actually due yesterday, but Professor Smyth graciously offered an extension till Thursday. I promptly answered his generosity by doing something else.

- Geass has finally resumed. I think Geass is possibly one of my favourite things ever. It's not a perfect show... hell, there are probably a half dozen or more superfluous characters that could be
just not be in it without effecting the storyline much. But even with that caveat, it's just a magnificent piece of work.

- I rock at Smash. When I play as Snake, the world trembles as my rockets fly and mines explode.

Though I tried one of Snake's games and it was sort of horrible. Though it's probably one of the few games where it's actually funny to be killed. "Snake! No! Please! Get back up! Snake.... SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!" I'll try the sequel soon.

- No, I really don't have any idea what I'm going to do once I finish my stupid degree.

Aside: "It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come."

2008-03-23T03:06:00.016-04:00

(Code Geass season 2 is coming two weeks from now. Hard to believe isn't it? I know I can't wait...)

I feel as though I ought to update the blog more so long as the writing is going nowhere. So let me talk briefly about why the writing is going nowhere.

The short answer is school. And Brawl. But mostly school.

The long answer is that I've actually written a good 30 more pages of Grace already, but I've discarded more or less all of it. This is the problem with developing the story as it goes along, I suppose. I had an idea of what was supposed to happen next, but actually making it happen was a bit awkward. I wonder if that's the fault of the way I ended chapter 3... but there are also a few details that took some sorting out.

Like let's take for example the Associates... I had two ideas of them. The one is that they're a bunch of cabals of mystical geneticists that trade in human life to create bizarre and terrible things. The other idea was to make the Associates an oppressed minority that the Lantern lies on the back off in order to assure its own prosperity. You may make your own political analogy for that phenomenon. In my mind, these two ideas were perfectly compatible... I imagined a bunch of higher-up figures actively colluding with Lantern higher-ups in exchange for local political power and such.

In practice, it hasn't been so easy to reconcile the two concepts. It's a choice between social degeneracy and political corruption... I can't really have one and the other without really detracting from both. This hasn't been my only problem, but it's taken up a lot of mental space. I think I have a fair idea of what I'm going to do now though, so it's good.

Another matter is that of pacing. I've been torn about perspective... do I stick with Eisa from start to finish or do I have another perspective inserted now and again? I've gone back and forth on this... my gut feeling was to add another perspective, though the question of who to add was harder to get around. It came to me a few days ago that there is someone who could potentially contribute a lot to the story with a bit of her perspective, though this thought came in the midst of my conceiving of Eisa's next part so as a consequence I'm sort of writing Chapter 4 and 5 at the same time.

So yeah, if you were wondering why Grace was taking so long to continue, then issues like this would more or less explain it. Two of you seemed to be sorta enjoying it, while one person stopped reading it in disgust after two chapters, so I will try to redouble my efforts after the essay I'm presently working on is complete.

Other Matters:

- The presentation went reasonably well, in spite of my presenting on 3 hours of sleep and no food. Thanks go out to the one person (Jacob) who listened to the podcast. I might make another podcast sometime if it ever strikes me as a useful thing to do. I'd probably need a better microphone though.

- I was very impressed with Obama's speech on race, however its reception was predictably discouraging. The speech was not only profound (and I found it particularly so from the perspective of a brown-skinned Muslim South Asian'er), but it was strikingly honest and sincere. But then you have drooling savants in the US media (and on various websites, but I'd pin it mainly on the media) saying "durrr but da preacher man said bad tings about Amerreeka, why he not swearing at him lots?"

Americans often wonder why they have a global reputation as being a bunch of uneducated louts. It is an unfair reputation (or well, sort of). But the source of that reputation is the horrific shitstorm that is the American media. I learned to avoid the American media shortly after a few weeks of shoddy Iraq war coverage... give me the BBC, CBC, Channel 4 and Al-Jazeera any day. But as figures like Obama and Ron Paul (who seems to be being proven right more and more these days) piqued my interest, I started looking through the American media more and more. It makes me remember why I stopped.

There are some good American journalists. Hell, I own like three Bob Woodward books. And in spite of his reputation and evil aura, I've always thought Bob Novak's columns had something worth reading in them. And Tim Russert always runs a strong interview (peppered occasionally with retarded questions). But for every one of those, there's a Peretz, an Anderson Cooper, a Joe Scarborough and let's not even talk about the assclowns that I see in those Fox News clips. Ich.

All major networks and newspapers have editorial direction. Accusations of bias get thrown around down south left and right. My view is: Yeah, news organizations are biased but the question is how they go about putting in their angle.

- Now I'd like to talk a bit more about Brawl. Feel free to stop here if you aren't a Brawler or at least interested in hearing about Brawl

It is in many ways the gamer's game. One need only look towards the game's 300+ song soundtrack, representing some of the greatest talents in the industry, to see why that is. Stupid limitations on online play aside, the whole game is really just a love letter to the long-time enthusiast.

Before the game came out, I was thinking about which characters would be my regulars. Story and game wise, my favourite character on the Brawl roster is obviously Link... and yet, I don't play him that often. Instead I've settled pretty comfortably on Snake (though I also like Zelda, Pokemon Trainer [why can't we just call him Ash? In fact, from now on that is what he will be called], Pikachu and Marth). Now Snake is a character whose games I've never even played (yet). So why play him? I think the reason for this comes down to a fundamental question of play-style...

I play Snake because in all games I love artful characters. There are few things more satisfying to me than seeing a guy getting blown up by a mine I placed a minute before. It's something I liken to Sleep on a level 5 Dread Lord in WC3 or the Siren's Net in DotA. People think when they see the mine 'I just have to not step on it and it's worthless', but when you use it well... heh, well, I think a fair few of the people that bother reading this can attest to how it works then. And even if the opponent deliberately avoids it, it's still having an effect because you're checking their movement. And his other skills are just as tricky-though-rewarding... with Snake, I'm always jumping into the thick of things to beat people up and then backing off to shoot a rocket or toss grenades. It's a play style that fits me like a glove.

I think that some of my friends have similar thought processes for selecting a character... Franco, for instance, is a long-time veteran who uses Mario and Luigi. I can't speak for him, but both those characters are well balanced though generally defensive characters, much like the Terrans in SC or Imperial Guard in 40k. Fradener seems to be gravitating towards characters that are steady and sure like Marth and Toon Link, which fits what I know of him as well. The point is that it's not just that Smash has the huge roster of characters from all sorts of games... its that there's really a play style in Smash that can suit more or less everyone, but no single play style truly (in my opinion) reigns supreme.

Also: I thought about this too much.

(No one should play Ike though. He's not hard to beat, but he's very easy to play. Ike is for the 'lazy' play style, as he has two charging attacks that can easily be landed in the chaos of a 4 player match. Whenever I'm in a game with Ike, I beat the living shit out of him so as to discourage newbie players from playing him)

I used to also think that Smash was a purely 'for fun' game and laughed at the blowhards that insist on playing with no items on final destination. And I still think that... the most fun you can have in a game of Smash is with four people on a stage like Spear Pillar with lots of Smash Balls. But after Franco called foul about my beating him with Smash Balls last week, I said 'okay, let's have a match on Final Destination with no items'.

Needless to say, my Snake dispatched his Luigi not once but twice, but the matches were very close, particularly the second one. So much goes on in a Smash game that it's impossible to remember every blow, but I distinctly remember being thrown into the air at least three times. Each time, on my way down, Luigi leapt up to try to hit me with a coup de grace and each time I performed an air dodge to avoid the hit. An air dodge isn't a big deal, but it strikes me that if I'd missed even one of those dodges, I'd have probably lost the match. Makes me sort of admire the folk that do this stuff at tournaments.

So yeah, the Brawl is where its at. Come join us.

Anyhow, so that was a nice big long entry. Don't expect another until I've got more Grace done.

Aside: "The only plan is to persevere"

2008-03-14T04:13:00.006-04:00

I know there haven't been updates in a while. Sorry. But I have here a special treat for you. The first ever WwnR podcast!

Now before you click that link, let me tell you what it is. It's a rehearsal for a seminar I'm going to do this Monday. The subject is Intelligence and the Allied Strategic Bomber Offensive in the Second World War. If that doesn't sound interesting, you should not click that link. If it does though... well, sure, go ahead.

I'm listening to it now... I think the introduction could use some tightening up, along with the explanation of Luftwaffe resistance. Also the way I introduce about the Transport Plan and Oil Plan could be better. You'll notice that I tend to stumble over numbers and dates. That's sorta how I am. If you do listen to it, note that I'm a guy with a charisma penalty. I'm not what you'd call silver tongued and my throat hurts now after all that talking. But I try and this is really the first time I even have gone through the material aloud. I try to make a balance between the analysis and the evidence, but... well, this isn't what I'm really used to.

It's a bit on the long side right now, but I think it's all right. I hope this goes well when I give the actual presentation, as I've put a lot of work into this. I don't expect any one to listen to it, at least not before Monday, but on the off chance that it is listened to let me know if it makes sense or if anything's wrong.

Oh, and yes it's staticy. Blame this crummy microphone. Sorry. It's my first podcast, be merciful.

The reason there's a Phoenix pic by the way is that Phoenix is my reference point for all public speaking engagements. Plus I love that pic. No one but Phoenix can make presenting a document in court look so very dramatic.

Other Matters:

- One of the reasons I'm trying to make this presentation so good is that the Professor of this class (Smyth) has heaped on an unusual amount of praise on me. Like he's referred to me as 'brilliant' and remarked that 'those people with your kind of analytical mindset are condemned to become historians'. I'm not really sure what to make of such words. I don't consider myself particularly exceptional and no, I'm not saying that to look humble. I think to a very large degree, my doing well in school is a consequence of my really not having much else going on in my life (not working while in school, too introverted for extracurriculars and certainly no significant other) rather than any innate talent.

But it's not often anyone has anything like that to say about me, and so I really don't want to disappoint.

- Grace is still on, but I have no time to work on it right now for reasons partially displayed above. I've got eight pages of the next part done. More details on that process when it's done.

- I have Smash Brothers Brawl now. It's amazing, but I've banned myself from it from now until I give this presentation and finish the essay that's also due this Monday.

My main character has rapidly become Snake. I've never played a Metal Gear Solid game before, but Snake's play style really suits me. His attacks consist of various explosives, along with this helicopter thing along with brute strength. He's not so much about getting in close as he is about controlling the flow of the battle by laying those mines, shooting those rockets and tossing those grenades. No other character can surprise an enemy like he does... especially the mines. I've got a fair amount of wins by planting mines, waiting for a good moment and detonating them ("NOW!") at the exact right moment. And they aren't as easy to avoid as you'd think... I even caught the hated Andres in them a few times (though it was hard to).

Speaking of Andres, I dethroned him the other day when I defeated his Mario with my Snake in an epic game. Not only did I win, but I won with two lives to spare. A decisive victory if there ever was one.

- Before the crunch really started, I watched an anime called Full Metal Panic. It's an amazing piece of work. It's a sci-fi mecha romance comedy drama. Genre mixing rocks. One thing I found about it is that the mixture of comedy and drama really did work quite well. The comedy made me care about the characters, so much so that when bad things started to happen they really hit home.

I don't know if any one I know that isn't already watching it would like it, but I thought it was excellent

- The podcast is compressing now. I just hope that the damn thing can be brought to a reasonable size, as in wav format its bloody 2.5 GB.

- I played Apollo Justice. It was good. I talked about it more here.

The Grace 3

2008-01-26T08:05:00.000-05:00

(Japanese comics are read from right to left)

Grace 3 is done. In pretty good time too. I was almost not going to write this chapter and instead forge on ahead with something else, but I'm glad I went with this.

I like this story, but I'm not sure if people will agree due to the retarded boycott. I need support to keep up my writing. Not very much... but seeing how people react to these things is educating. Some of the feedback I get is more useful than others, but just knowing 'I liked this' or 'I didn't like this' is better than the nothing I've been getting for the last two months. So stop it already. It's not helpful.

Other Matters:

- lol John McCain. When I first heard Ron Paul hit McCain with that question in the debate, I thought 'Wha? Huh? Why is he asking about something like that?' Still, even though I'm not exactly an economics expert, I could tell that McCain had no idea what Ron Paul was talking about when he gave him a vague laundry list of economics names and started talking about 1982. But when you actually understand what Ron Paul was actually asking about and what McCain actually said, I think it becomes very funny.

And of course, it's even better in light of what Ron Paul pointed out about the people he named afterward.

It's not exactly the kind of debate zinger that the vast majority of viewers were going to be able to understand and appreciate, but I think it shows why Ron Paul is just a cut above the other candidates from either party. Alas, if only...

- 4chan and its ilk has declared war on Scientology. If you don't know what 4chan is then... well, to be honest, you probably don't want to know about 4chan. Ever.

Thing is, one would normally expect the buggers to get bored with the whole thing and move on to the next meme within a day or so. But somehow that video managed to get mainstream media attention. After getting this much attention, you can count on these guys keeping up this stuff more or less forever. It just goes to show how clueless old media is about the internet. I mean, seriously, it's bloody 4chan. No one who knows anything about 4chan takes anyone that comes out of there seriously.

- I'm assembling a picture collection for the top of blog picture. I've quite a few so far. I guess if I get too many of them, I can start putting a pic at the bottom too.