". . .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.

"The American man is neither chiseled from stone nor from crispy-chicken batter. The American man isn't helpless. . . He doesn't shirk on his responsibilities. He does work hard and he does not pick on his friends. He loves rock and roll and he hates Nickelback. He loves football, but he's smart enough to hate the NFL's greed."

You are an idiot. You are an obsessed idiot. You are a zealous, obsessed idiot. You are part of a nation of zealous, obsessed idiots. You shall find camaraderie amongst others in that nation of zealous, obsessed idiots. You, and your comrades in arms, know of a deeper love than those who are not part of your nation of zealous, obsessed idiots -- noses turned up at you as if their farts smell like Cinnabon and Carebears. You know that even amongst the other citizens in your nation of zealous, obsessed idiots, in your heart of hearts, there is no doubt that you are unique in your understanding. You know how far, and how strong, this empire, your empire, of zealous, obsessed idiots truly reaches. You, idiot, are part of something so grand that you understand your place in the world, despite that those unlike you will see your idiocy as idiocy, and not as a badge of honor.

ExciteTruck

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(originally published November 9, 2011)

"ExciteTruck is the best game created for the Nintendo Wii."

With the grace and civility displayed by a boxcar dweller performing "King Lear" while on acid, the Nintendo Wii, despite its side-show freakery, did not need to exist. It was an inelegant success for a year and a half. You could control it with a bathroom scale and pretend to ski-jump with Bowser and Sonic the Hedgehog. The best thing about the Wii was that it reminded lapsed videogame players that they had once been children that were capable of grinning. The system's design had the word "nostalgia" written on top of every brainstorm document and it was always written in pen. Lines shot out of that one big word, leading out to smaller bubbles that held words like "Mario," "Mario Kart," and "Your Older Sister." The system was based around the same idea that Brad Pitt's character, Tyler Durden, thought up in Fight Club -- level the playing field and take everybody back to zero.

Dark Souls

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". . .we've never seen a girl go as a sexy-marmot on Halloween, but, c'mon, that's a total double-whammy. You'll be all, 'Nice marmot.' And she'll be all, 'I'm a sexy-marmot!' Allow it!"

Halloween is a special day that brings out a person's full potential. The competition is intense. You either step your game up or you die, probably in a gutter, or in a vat of acid, or crushed in a glass-recycling machine. Normally, people are complacent and restrained, uncreative and sleepwalking. Not on Halloween though! No, no, you party at a post-graduate level of child-like euphoria on Halloween. More universal and fuzzy than Mardi Gras, it's the Super Bowl of partying.

Fuck you if you say anything about New Year's Eve! All you have to do is show up on New Year's. That's an exhibition game. They let the pine-riding scrubs come out to play on New Year's. Most of those people will get cut from the party team before the regular season even starts.

No, you have no choice but to show up with your game face on for Halloween. There is no avoiding it. It's the holiday you can actually, truly, legitimately enjoy without suffering contempt for other people, family members, religions, or whatever (more on the religion thing later though).

All you need to survive Halloween is a decent quantum of liquor and a straight-bangin' costume.

"Everything was terrible and none of it was true."

A lot was said in that shortened minute and the problem was that the Organist couldn't hear what the whispering men were saying further up ahead. Then again, if he had, he was sure that they would have stopped him, and everybody else, all just to talk to him alone. No, the whispering men stayed in their invisible voices, looking back at the Organist and carrying on with their conversation as they led the tramp party onward, parting the wire-branches that reached and bent at their arms and legs. They had begun their walk what he estimated was a few miles back inside the hollowed-out crater that harbored their boats and their road had been smooth the entire way with packed mud that left no tracks. The line kept in single-file, two prisoners, then one of the whispering guards, two more prisoners, then so on in the same order. Hungry and weakened, nobody tried to run, even though they weren't bound in any manner to speak of. Their restraints were much simpler. The sky-red rocks reminded the Organist where he was and the air he was breathing would no doubt hold him back, hardening his lungs like treated horse-hair. The oxygen was too hot, he knew he couldn't escape, not right now, and the whispering men hadn't talked to him yet and he wanted to keep it that way.

"An inexperienced film-junkie still in his larval form though might call it the best mobster movie since Goodfellas and he'd be unanimously fucking wrong."

The trouble with good movies is that people often try too hard to like them. Hungry people try too hard to like them. Students are particularly hungry for identity and for understanding and there's a lot to like in movies they've been told are great and there's no reason not to like them. Like scarves and black coffee, great movies pick up fair-weather fans, and more relevantly, gloom-weather fans. They can be powerful. These movies can cause pretty heavy impact, unloading weighty messages that free minds can't help but cull for meaning. It can be too much though. In the vernacular, they can fuck with young heads.