"[The Last Story] is Gears of Swords."

Sometimes, when you're walking along in the cobblestoned Lazulis City early on in The Last Story, the princess Calista might get careless when she's following you and whack her head on the sign hanging above the blacksmith's shop. It looks like it hurts. She winces the same way anybody would.

You helped her give some guards the slip. She is following you because she likes you. She hurt her head because she's a person. The Last Story is going to teach you how to love.

We are very aware. 

In a space occupied half a century ago in America by baseball heroes, war heroes, and The Splendid Splinter -- who was both! -- our admiration of the famous, skillful, and merit-worthy has become an obsessed dependence because they are viewed as those who have won the day while inside The System. We're all stuck within The System, aren't we? And these visible, modern heroes are just like us, flaws enhanced because we asked them to be magnified mortals, enlarged to show texture. We have unwittingly bestowed the kiss of death on our former aspirations that we abandoned long ago. Our own dreams were killed years ago. Our heroes disgust us now, weird-shaped things in a very aware word being pounded into square holes. We certainly want them to fit. We would like that very much. We want to see their failure as one they are sharing with us. We observe their troubles and co-opt their drama, nodding assuredly at one another at their unenviable lives when the tragic turn arrives.

We think there are no more heroes.

Some modern games have their auto-pilots set to: "cruise," a plush rug that's nice between your toes and looks good next to a Metacritic score of 86. Final Fantasy XIII-2, however, has its auto-pilot set to: "beautiful," or, at least, beautiful to somebody that has stared at the moon for too long. Whatever Final Fantasy XIII-2 was intending to make you "feel," it has failed, because nobody would try to mass-distribute a sugarcane-enema-simulation for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 on purpose.

Do you read Gawker? I read Gawker. Lots of people read Gawker. I started by reading Kotaku and Gizmodo and Lifehacker, not even realizing they were all part of the same network, and then I stumbled upon Deadspin for sports-coverage and Gawker's main site itself for pop-culture minutia. There are a few other sites on Gawker's family of blogs too, with io9's TV recaps and Jezebel's gender politicking probably being the physically best-written stuff when the writers can keep themselves from being trashy on purpose and keep from tripping over their own snarking keyboards.

It's not the end of the world that so many written words are being read off of LCD screens instead of newsprint -- we aren't livig in a tactless, social-media hellscape, even if your basket-case uncle insists we are.

Half on the sidewalk and half on the asphalt, the limp drool of the coldest piss the devil ever took was raising me just north of a blackout, and in a long second, I imagine a world of forgetful people. It felt good to be alive, but then it escaped me before I had a chance to thank her. Then I found my brain, and it fit back into place, and I remembered that reality had kicked my legs out from under me. I needed a coffee. Something hot. Something empty with flavor. First though, I had to do somebody a favor. A couple of flat-footed reptiles without an ounce of warm blood between them had put me on the concrete. I owed them now. I had to return the favor. It's just common courtesy. I wasn't raised by wolves.

We really don't need to honor America all that much. America is a self-perpetuating Honor-Machine that runs on liberty and pisses freedom. We invented the 4th of July. We invented the President and the lightbulb and the helicopter and the eagle, and the eagle is the baddest bird ever invented. It was also America's idea to put the words "fuck" and "yeah" next to each other when watching movies. That's why we've got to count down the best Fuck Yeah, America movies on Earth, which is the planet that America is on.

The following is a transcription of a telephone conversation with my father concerning Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a movie by the man who directed WANTED.

Any sci-fi fans that saw Prometheus and disliked it have plenty to complain about—they also have plenty of things to discuss too.

"It was tangible, inky, and deep. We could now bottle sensations. We could distill joy. We could inject awe."

America stood still below carbon-caked skies. Nothing went in, nothing came out. No trade, no communication, not even porn. A few people probably maneuvered through their new country's firewall and had a little communication, but not enough for real news to get through. It was more trouble than it was worth. More people just ended up dead.

On occasion, some refugees from other parts of the world would be exiled to the US as punishment, most of whom were shot for fun by the Coast Guard before they reached dry land. Those that weren't killed and managed to make into society were called the Noir -- the blacklisted.

Fuck the USA. Rightfully so. The diffused-Americans needed time to think. Nobody attacked us, fortunately, since it was assumed that we were strung-out addicts with itching trigger-fingers, which was a three-quarters truth. We had no foreign policy. Alone in the universe. All sides in the Schism, were in shock, a silent agreement that things had gone too far, that much was true. The country rotted, and what didn't rot, rusted.

Take a look at the above image. It's a banner poster for The Dark Knight Rises. It speaks volumes about what this movie is going to be about, and while we can only speculate at this point, it's becoming clearer that director Chris Nolan is approaching the Batman mythos, and the superhero movie in general, through critical lens. Superheroes are destructive psychos that cause trouble and confuse the masses more than inspire them. Stranger still, they are difficult to interpret when they start showing up on the wrong side of a social revolution.