Winter is better than summer, yes, but that doesn't mean we can't adapt. Unfortunately, some marketing genius at Starbucks decided to charge extra for iced coffee by filling the entire cup with ice and cooling it below room-temperature. There is more water, less liquid, less coffee, and less caffeine. And less flavor, which is something that a lot of people go without in their coffee, adding sugar or milk instead of making, you know, nice-tasting coffee.

The notion of "Who would win in a fight between...?" is one of the oldest debates in the history of man. After the cavemen got fed up arguing over whether a mammoth could kill a saber-tooth tiger in the midst of a starvation-hallucination, they decided to invent intangible, imaginary gods that were totally way more powerful than the ones the other cavemen worshipped, dude, because their god can throw lightning and shapeshift into a bull if he wanted to. The arguments raged for centuries, gods and men have warred, cities burned, crops were sewn with fire and salt, all because people were insistent that these rivalries were worth arguing over.

Without further adieu, let's debate.

Killzone 3

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(originally published May 18, 2012)

"It's just your gun occupying Killzone's world. If the gun was a more fun person to pal around and goof off with, then this would be acceptable..."

Put down your vaporizer and that bottle of Quaaludes, we're going to deconstruct concept of "winning" at online videogames. Killzone 3 does not do this. It does not win at offline videogames either. It's the expensive chew-toy that your dog perpetually ignores because it's spiky and it makes her gums bleed. It mashes its terrible haircut, let's say, for example, a weave, into a discolored biomass. Interacting with this world is a joyless affair.

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This will just take a second, and unfortunately, we're going to focus almost exclusively on all the negatives that you'll encounter when you step out of college and into the real world. Sad, right? You're graduating college. You've been handed an intangible victory that simultaneously feels very final and stressfully anti-climactic. You might feel dead already! You can't live inside your college diploma, and it won't cook you breakfast or pat you on the back -- at least not yet. And it's seriously not as bad as I'm about to make it seem, but these are some of the realities that you're going to have to deal with. You can't dodge all of these bullets -- you can lessen their damage by seeing them coming though.

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.