BEDA 5: The Arm Gun

Ever realize that you only have fifty minutes to write a blog before the day is over during the month that you promised to write a blog everyday?
Probably not.
Alright, so I just watched Mystery Science Theater 3000: Laserblast, and I was going to write a review of the movie to squeeze this blog in real quick, but I realized a few things that made me deter from that idea. One: If you want a full and excellent criticism of said movie, just watch the MST3K. Two: There is a larger social criticism to be made here: the arm gun.

Arm guns are amazing. Arm guns are universally accepted as being the most badass thing ever. Why? I don't know, but it's true. A gun attached to your arm in place of a hand is so undeniably sweet that you see it everywhere. You see it in Final Fantasy VII via Barrett, you see it in Laserblast, and you see it in 9 year old me.
That's right. When I was about 9 years old (or 11, or 13, I don't know) my dad had a roll of carpet in the basement about three feet high with a hole in the center just big enough for me to insert my arm and pick it up. This served as the undisputed best gun in the history of my imaginary gun games. Suddenly I was transformed from a kid with a plastic gun into a force to be reckoned with. A three-foot long gun on my arm was the perfect weapon of ultimate destruction. Half kid, half machine. Half killing machine, that is. With this giant gun, I was unstoppable in my own imagination, and it was a toy/carpet roll that I cherished more than all of my cap guns and Nerf guns put together.
I just find it interesting that I as a 9 year old, and the writers of Laserblast and Final Fantasy VII (and many more I assume) all independently thought of this amazingly powerful concept. You just can't beat it.
Oh, you've got a gun?
MY WHOLE ARM IS A GUN!!!

P.S. Watch the MST3K of Laserblast, it will not disappoint.
P.P.S Big shout-out to my parents, who made this year's Easter possible and brought out a ham and cheesy potatoes and green bean casserole. Without you guys, I wouldn't have had any leftovers for lunch today.

BEDA 4: Christianity and Paganism on Easter

Another Easter come and gone.
I like Easter because of all the major holidays I think it is the least big of a deal. Thanksgiving and Christmas are typically these big family events with big meals and a lot of tradition tied in. There are routines on these major end of the year holidays that take up your entire day. Family and turkey and football and schedule present-opening. Easter is mostly for little kids. Baskets and egg-painting and all of that good chocolate bunny kind of stuff. Beyond that, I mean, what do you really do on Easter?
Also, Easter feels sort of thrown together, you know, with the whole nonsensical bunny rabbit and painted eggs. It's a lot of imagery coming out of left field that, even as a kid, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. As an adult the whole thing is pretty ingrained, and while it doesn't cause any confusion or raise any questions, it is still impossible to puzzle out logically.
Here's a connection I never made before:
Easter, a Christian holiday, happens in the spring, a time of fertility, which was widely recognized by the pagans. And what is a universal symbol of fertility? That's right: bunnies!
I'm not 100% on all the details, and I kind of don't care. But it seems to me that Christianity said something like "Hey, as a compromise, how about you come over to our religion and we'll incorporate your traditional symbols?"
This is similar to the whole "Winter Solstice vs. Christmas" thing. Where, you know, Jesus's birthday got moved around on the calendar just a little bit to compete with the pagan Winter Solstice.
I don't want to condescend to you like you've never realized this stuff before, I just think it's interesting and I had to bust out a blog real fast in the dwindling hours of Easter.
In other news, I shaved my winter beard today and Lindsay took a series of pictures that led up to the final shave. They feature me with a goatee, a handlebar mustache, and a regular mustache. I laughed a lot.
Now my face is smooth and Easter is over. What adventures will tomorrow hold?

BEDA 3: Final Fantasy XII

I'm planning on using this BEDA thing to my advantage over the course of this month by using it to kill two birds with one stone. So, over the next few weeks you might see some book reviews and video game reviews and other short pieces that I can add to a growing portfolio of work I use when applying for jobs. This will not be one of those blogs.

I'm currently playing Final Fantasy XIII, but I'm not to the end yet, so I don't want to jump the gun and review it before I complete the game and see it as a whole. However, playing this excellent game automatically brings to mind other Final Fantasy experiences. It just can't be helped. Even though the games take place in totally different realities and worlds, major themes persist that tie all of the games together. The summons, the items, and the chocobos really jump to mind. So I've found myself thinking about the other games in the series these past few weeks, and one thing in particular keeps coming back to me:
The overwhelming shittiness of Final Fantasy XII.

Man I really hated this game. Everything about it was awful. The battle system was the first to break away from the traditional turn-based style, and it's like the developers were so heart-broken to be moving away from their classic format that they couldn't muster the strength to come up with a better one. Without any time to consider my actions during battle, I found myself thrown into a fast-paced system with just as many options and menu screens as a turn-based battle. The menus were too long and took too much time to scroll through. Enough time for bosses to pick your allies off with ease. The AI at the time was simply not good enough to take care of itself, and so you have a team of inept jackasses casting the wrong spells and healing the wrong party members. Also, if memory serves, you had to scroll through the menu screens to select spells and items while also moving your character around the actual battle. Do I have two left thumbs, Square Enix? How could you possibly let this past the testing stage?

Also, the characters, the plot, who cares? Everything about this game was lack-luster from the get go. Our story begins in the great kingdom of Vlfnzkdy, who are at war with the Frnkrlvmy. King Zlrmnka and Duke Rzlzslzlby are at battling for the right to control the Hrklmshiroo. Or something like that. My point is, every piece of exposition in this story was abrasive. The names and places were hard to wrap your mind around, remember, or invest in at all. This coupled with bland, washed-out, beige and white scenery made for a game that was impossible to get excited about.

And I don't know who told Square Enix that villains are not important anymore, but someone needs to set them straight. When was the last time we had a major villain worth caring about in Final Fantasy history? 1996? When did VII come out? Because Sephiroth was the last great villain, and this was also the nearly undisputed greatest title in the series. Coincidence? Probably not. Oh, and I suppose if you wanted to, you could count Sin from X as the last great bad guy, but I think that's a little different. He was a giant embodiment of evil so huge and ridiculous that I think he can hardly be considered a villain. He took absolutely no time to create. Villains like Kefka and Sephiroth, maniacs bent on becoming living gods, are the kinds of villains we want in our games. XII joins VIII and IX in failing to do this.

Lastly, my final complaint about XII is that there was actually one mission in which the main character had to run around town proclaiming that a fallen prince was still alive. During this part there was a little meter at the top of the screen that showed you how many of the citizens you had convinced, and you had to reach a certain number before you could move on. How lame is that? I absolutely hated that part of the game, regardless of how short it was, and I think it took little more than that for me to condemn it completely and turn it off, never to be played again.

Anyways, all of these things come to mind for me while playing XIII because I think Square finally got their heads on straight and produced the best Final Fantasy I've played in a long time. The radically different battle system is so improved from XII that, like I said, I can't believe XII was even allowed to be released.

P.S. Writing a blog a day is gonna get hard, everybody. Expect to see me cutting some corners really, really soon. Like tomorrow maybe.

BEDA 2: Kalamazoo Exodus

I have to leave for work in ten minutes. This is the perfect time to start writing this blog.

August is coming up on me pretty fast, a lot faster than I thought it would. It's one thing to say "I'm going to move out of Kalamazoo eventually," or "next year," but when it starts to be four months the reality of it is a little daunting. I have to find a new apartment and a new job in a different city, and that's a process I'm not looking forward to. But it's something I have to do.

Last night was my friend Paul Rich's final Kalamazoo hurrah before he moves onto bigger at better things in St Louis, and something became apparent to me: we're all on our way to somewhere else. The people that I associate so closely with Kalamazoo will not be here five years from now, and if I were to stay I would watch them trickle out one by one. I like that idea in one sense, because it makes me optimistic about the future and happy for everyone because their ambitions will lead them to better things. In another sense it makes me sort of sad, because Kalamazoo is so unlike my hometown. I can always go back to Commerce and see familiar faces, friends and family that all live in one convenient place. But five years from now, and maybe in less time than that, I suspect Kalamazoo will be virtually deserted of all the people I knew here. They'll all be somewhere else, and big nights out at the bar and parties with these specific people will be an indefinite thing of the past.

That bums me out, but it's not all bad to leave the past in the past.
Here's to the future.

BEDA 1: It begins.

Oh sweet Jesus, day one and I already don't know what to write about.
I feel sort of inclined to write about April Fool's Day in some way or another. Sort of tough though, since I haven't pulled any pranks today and I'm not really interested in the origin of April Fools.
I think instead we're going to talk about Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzche is going to shatter you world view and then beat you to death with his mustache.

Nietzsche is one of those guys that you hear about all the time but that you've probably never read. For me he was never required reading in my education or a man to whom I attached any specific ideas. Instead he was a name peppered throughout movies and television to make a character seem smarter by having read him.
Example:
"I don't get you Locke. One minute you're killing boars, the next you're quoting Nietzsche." - That guy from LOST who died when he climbed up in the drug-smuggling plane, and then it fell.*
Basically, I wanted to read his stuff for two reasons. One was to see what all the fuss was about. My second reason is this: the most masturbatory thing I do, besides fine-tuning my facebook page to make me as interesting and likable as possible, is to read great and notable authors who I already know I will agree with.
Everything I ever heard about Nietzsche before I read any of his work led me to believe that I would agree with and enjoy him. There is something dark and existential about his reputation. I just recently heard a critic of Chuck Palahniuk's say that he writes like a 16 year old who has just discovered Nietzsche and Nine Inch Nails.
I can think of no greater endorsement.
So, it's the case with Nietzsche as it is with Noam Chomsky and Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I can sit and read these works and say "Yes! Exactly! This is exactly what I was thinking! I am exactly as smart as Leo Tolstoy OMFG!"

So anyways, I'm reading Nietzsche's The Gay Science right now (the title of which applies to the combination of wisdom and laughter) and I'm really enjoying it. More on Nietzsche later this month as I approach the end of the book, but for now I'm going to leave you with some of the lines and passages that have struck me so far in my reading:

"What is new, however, is always evil being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and old pieties; and only what is old is good."

"Believing that they possess consciousness, men have not exerted themselves very much to acquire it; and things haven't changed much in this respect."

"Blindly raging industriousness... is represented as the way to wealth and honor and as the poison that best cures boredom and the passions, but one keeps silent about its dangers, its extreme dangerousness. That is how education always proceeds: one tries to condition an individual by various attractions and advantages to adopt a way of thinking and behaving that, once it has become a habit, instinct, and passion, will dominate him to his own ultimate disadvantage but 'for the greater good.'"

"So far at least, culture that rests on military basis still towers above all so-called industrial culture: the latter in its present shape is altogether the most vulgar form of existence that has yet existed."

"What the workers see in the employer is usually only a cunning, bloodsucking dog of a man who speculates on all misery..."

*Sorry LOST fans, this is not the precise quote. But it does express basically what the actual quote was getting at, so get off my back.