I have seen Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on so many unfortunate occasions. That's the second one in the trilogy and 90 minutes of it are boring. Fortunately (well, not really), it's a 2.5 hour movie, and there are some wicked cool stunts -- and fortunately (really, this time), it is on TV all the damn time. It's also not a very good movie. However, a poor movie can make for entertaining TV. Bad TV can do a lot for you, and it's an important garnish to your entertainment dish.

Remember that part in All Dogs Go To Heaven when the dog goes to hell? No, of course you don't. Because there's scar tissue over that part of your brain. But it happened. There were little bits of secret trauma in the cartoons that kids of the 90's watched that are probably ruining your life right now, sitting there, reading a blog when you should be making dinner or calling your mom.

Man, America. We don't need more jobs -- we need better jobs. Ones that make you proud that you've earned an honest day's pay by the sweat of your brow and the strength of your back. The mental health of the citizenry is at stake if we don't make creatively-demanding jobs available. Now, there are some jobs that don't exist yet, maybe because we don't have the technology, but also because we haven't thought of them yet. However, in an ideal world, the following nine would exist. And I'd be good at them. Especially number 7.

Stephen King once said that getting into a good state of mind for writing is like getting ready for bed. You need to get into a mindset that is unique to the activity. With that in mind, consider good writing music to be like brushing your teeth before sleep. It activates an association in your brain, iterateing that, "yeah, it's time to sit down, focus, and imagine."

Good writing music is something that you ignore until you don't. It invites focus. If you drift  away from the creative process, it the music re-activate the focus, helping you think or study or plough through a spreadsheet at work. It shows you things unimaginable thoughts and block wandering throughts, especially if you have a good set of headphones.

So, let's get down to it:

"Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is simply the illusion of control via the illusion of simulation."

Before there was cleverness in videogames, there was cruelty. Metal Gear Solid 2 is a game made by Hideo Kojima, a man that doesn't like you. He doesn't you, he doesn't like his fans, he doesn't like making Metal Gear games over and over. He tried to quit a bunch of times, but then Japanese people rioted. He probably wanted to just produce games instead of directing, throw some good ideas at hungry developers so they could make things like Zone of the Enders (* * out of 4) or Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (* * * out of 4). He's an abstract and an "ideas man." He's too resentful to expect the player to understand his message when he speaks his mind within the context of a game. Kojima likes messing with people, offering a co-worker a handful of M&M's, and then laughing at them when they bit down on what were actually painted pebbles that he'd stayed up after lights-out to prepare. His is a character with no motivation -- he just does.

There is no such thing as zero-expectation. That probably makes some people happy. Heck, it's roughly 96% of what a marketing department does, fostering and metering expectations. If a marketing department is doing its job for a TV show or a movie, you're going in with familiarity about what's going to happen—or what's supposed to happen. Elsewhere, if the storyteller is doing his or her job, they're aware of expectations, and while not necessarily playing up to those assumptions, they do not treat the crowd as a bubbling mug of stupid. The astute storyteller makes precipitous speculation a vital part of the story's existence and validation. They use every tool, character trope, and twist on the norm that they can to accomplish this. This unsteady line-walking is a dangerous place to be, both creatively and financially. Either half could collapse the other if it's not handled with precise aplomb. I imagine every time somebody gets to minute-15 of a very expensive movie on release weekend and grumbles, "I have no goddamn clue what is happening," somebody in marketing is killed, and then probably hollowed out to be used as a pinata at the next Dia De Los Muertos party.

". . .an adventure set within the architecture of a sub-human mind."

"It's bad parenting."

". . .(it does not turn) escapism into algebra."

". . .the sequel to youth."

In a mixture of moods, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword's first hour contained abundant, bizarre sexual innuendo, and a fully-orchestral soundtrack that sounded like an actual French horn trying its hardest to mimic a bumbling 8-bit Famicom chip-tune. We had arrived at an unanticipated challenge. Well, we thought we had, but then we were rescuing agreeable seed-creatures from piggish malcontents in the forest fifteen minutes later, cementing Skyward Sword's status as a veiled insult from an old friend, a notion that probably has its own word in German or an older Russian dialect with no direct translation into English.

". . .a science, fiction film."

Fragile and grand in its insignificance, life is soft in a deafening universe. It comes in short moments and it's remembered in even fewer of them. We cannot meditate on its expansiveness without dividing ourselves from it, distancing ourselves from the only thing that makes us tangible, pondering theory and meaning, pondering our own biology and our own ego.

The human spirit is boundless, should we desire it to be, capable of comprehending our place and our size in ways that would be heresy in centuries past. The question now isn't "Who, or where, do we come from?" but "What do we come from?" We most certainly go to death, if that even is a thing worth mentioning. James Cameron once said that nobody every really dies in science-fiction.

"Independent art, free music, and free books are the nobler objective."

Imagine a hay wagon on a dirt road alongside some train tracks. Now imagine a Japanese bullet-train speeds by.

The wagon and the train were alongisde each other for a nanosecond. The hay wagon's driver caught a glimpse of somebody on the train but he doesn't think much about it. He can barely tell the smeared faces behind the glass apart. These passing trains are sleek. They break up the monotony of rolling down this dirt road.

They're not too quick for the human eye, but they are too fast for the wagon driver's brain to comprehend.

These trains are your social media feed blasting along beside you on the internet. They're free entertainment. I'd argue independent art, free music, and free books are the nobler objective.

Saints Row: The Third

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(originally published November 30, 2011)

". . .[Saints Row: The Third] a super-deformed, weaponized-speedball that knows the difference between good and evil."
 

There has been serendipitous fun in videogames for more than 25 years. Beating The Legend of Zelda in one sitting is serendipitous fun. Running through a grand prix cup in Super Mario Kart with the always-tiny cheat is serendipitous fun. Juggling a velociraptor with a quad rocket-launcher in Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is serendipitous fun. Doing backflips off the highway median in a stolen Yakuza sportscar in Grand Theft Auto III is madness and all-consuming and fun. These things are special because we discover them within a defined, but easily violated, set of rules that the videogame has laid out before us (. . .rules like gravity). This madness becomes ours and becomes true, golden escapism. Even if we are told somebody else discovered that exact same bar of gold, it's never theirs, it's ours. As far as we're concerned, dad invented speedruns when he accidentally beat Super Mario Bros. in 1989 in eight minutes.

Saints Row: The Third was probably made by a covenant of college students that spent a lot of time avoiding responsibility for their actions in Liberty City, probably the GTA3 version, and they learned where serendipitous fun came from, challenging us now with the question: "Why brew our game from anything that isn't instinct, projected?" That's freedom -- not being given the ability to do anything and told to find your fun, but rather anticipating what people will want to do with the dark materials given to them.