Yeerks

I'm here today to talk to you about yeerks. I know I already wrote a blog about the Animorphs this year, but I don't care. Here's another one.

The reason that yeerks have been on my mind lately is that I've been watching a fair amount of Doctor Who with Lindsay. The premise of the show is that the Doctor is in possession of the last time machine in the universe, and he can use it not only to travel through time but to travel through space. The appeal of this show is that, like with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the possibilities are infinite and the overwhelming size of the universe is a central focus of the plot.
Now, I am the kind of person that immediately wants to emulate the things that impress me the most. Case-in-point, I read a lot of fiction when I was a kid, it made sense to me and I enjoyed it, so now I am trying to create my own fiction. Stand-up comedy also has this effect on me. This characteristic applies to more specific genres as well, so when I see a good science fiction epic, all I want to do is write one of my own. And what do you need to write a good epic? You need good and evil. You need the hero and you need the arch villain. You need other things too, obviously, but these are the most important and without them you might as well forget everything else because it'll never work.

And so immediately I find myself unable to write a science fiction epic, because I can think of no greater enemy than the yeerks. I mean seriously.


The yeerks are a race of parasitic slugs that enslave worlds from the inside out by slowly and methodically conquering the minds of each individual in the population. They squeeze their bodies in through the ear canal, wrap their bodies around the actual brain of the person they're occupying, and take full control of that person's every action and movement.

What evil this is! What an incredible concept. These things imprison their hosts within their own bodies. Forever. The host must watch helplessly as the yeerk uses his or her body as a disguise and tricks the host's family members and friends into suffering a similar fate.

But, there's a twist. Because without conquering other species and without inhabiting the mind of other creatures, the yeerks are condemned to a blind existence swimming around in muddy pools. Once they feel the sun on their skin and see the world and learn to eat and speak and run and do all the great stuff other creatures can do, they can't ever go back to that. So it's sort of a bitter-sweet war for them, and a nightmare for everything else in their path.

It's absolutely brilliant and I can't top it. Of all the infinite possibilities that the vast nature of the universe allows me, I simply can't beat a mind-controlling army of emotionally complicated slugs. And neither can anyone else. Just watch Doctor Who. The arch enemies of that show are goofy-ass robots with high-pitched nerd voices.


EXTERMINATE!

BEDA 30: The Final Day

You're probably wondering:
What was it like to blog every day for an entire month? Was it exciting? Was it frightening? Did you feel stretched too thin and run out of ideas and have to talk about muffins?
Well... yeah. That happened one time.

Mostly what happened though was that I took the thing that was most consistently on my mind that day and wrote about it. Writing is an outlet, and it's just about the only one I have. I need to get all of this stuff out of my head, even if it is like trying to express the size of the ocean by seeing the trickle it would become if you were to push it through a funnel. Which is, pretty much, what I think all art is.

Not to say that blogging is art.

Anyways, blogging every day was an interesting experience and I got to make up for a lot of lost writing on this blog. I mean, when I started this thing I thought I'd be updating three times a week about something I learned in college, the book I was reading, and a news and human rights article. It was only after embarking on this mission that I realized this was a goal best left to someone without a full-time job. It was just too much work, which is what BEDA almost turned out to be. More obligations are unwanted in my life, and I'm glad to be done with this one even if it was small.

This year in It's Turtles All the Way Down will probably be a more relaxed year. Less of an attempt at organization or agenda. No more College for Free, no more News and Human Rights. Probably the occasional book, but probably a lot more of the stuff you saw during BEDA. Relaxed observations about the world with attempts at humor.

Now, expect a long hiatus from me. BEDA is over and I have other stuff I need to do.
Not adult stuff, though. I mean like write more web comics.

BEDA 29: XIII Is Not As Good As VII Because...

Man, I am such a liar.
Two things I lied about in the past 24 hours:
1. That the blog I wrote yesterday would be a work in progress.
Nope! It's done. Aside from a few spelling and grammar mistakes I cleaned up just now, that blog is over with. We're moving on.
2. That I would write about something more interesting that Final Fantasy XIII today.
Nope! You get more of the same. Sorry, Dad.


Lindsay asked me last night what rating (1 to 10) I would give Final Fantasy XIII, and I must say I was hard-pressed to answer her question. I mean, what constitutes a 1? What constitutes a 10? Can it be a 9? Is it that close to a perfect game? But then, when considering the entertainment value overall, it must get points for being such a long game, right?
Well, here is my answer:
It was good, but it was no Final Fantasy VII. And nothing ever will be.

FF VII, both because of the game's quality and the time in my life that I played it, will never ever be trumped for best video game in my eyes, ever. It will never be touched. No other game will ever come close. Every aspect of that game was perfect for me. It is the bar by which all other games must be judged, and typically while I play a game I am thinking on some level "This is not as good as Final Fantasy VII because..."

XIII is not as good as VII because XIII leaves very little to the imagination. All the characters speak with voices instead of text. They are extremely well animated and spend a lot of their time in movie cut-scenes rather than silent, text-based, visually unimpressive segways with awesome music playing in the background.

XIII is not as good as VII because the scope of XIII is too narrow. Literally everything that happens in XIII happens in 13 days, and half of those are flashbacks. This amount of time is completely insufficient to build the plot, the lead-up, the sense of a quest, and the camaraderie between the characters. VII's flashbacks span decades and the game-play itself progresses over what feels like months.

XIII is not as good as VII because there was no world map. By nature of the game I understand that going to different towns and flying around in an airship was impossible, but still. I'm just saying. In VII you got to explore THE ENTIRE world. This freedom of space combined with the passage of time made the scope of VII so enormous that after you played for 60 hours, it really felt like you had played for 60 hours. I'm all for linear games, I don't like side-quests, but XIII's extremely linear storyline and narrow world map made the game feel sort of small to me despite the 54 hours I spent on it.

XIII is not as good as VII because VII's materia system was absolutely perfect and Square should just stick to it and stop messing with other bullshit leveling systems.

XIII is not as good as VII because of Sephiroth. Period.

Alright, I'm done talking about Final Fantasy XIII now. For real. That's all I had to say about it.
And that said, it still was a really amazing game and I really enjoyed playing it. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys FF games. Unlike that piece of shit XII.
It's just, you know, not as good as VII.

Tomorrow is my final blog in BEDA! Woo!

BEDA 28: Final Fantasy XIII

In honor of my dad's birthday, I'm going to give you a full review of Final Fantasy XIII!

Alright, so these things aren't directly related, but it is my dad's birthday and I did finish FFXIII today, so they do have something in common.
Actually, this is a totally inappropriate blog for today because I can't think of anything my dad would be less interested in or understand less.
Sorry dad! I'll write something more interesting tomorrow.
Now, for a full review of Final Fantasy XIII.

The Plot:

The Final Fantasy series is one that prides itself on plot. On the title screen you can see that the character designer for the game gets his name right up front for everyone to see. This position of importance for such a specific role should tell you how important plot is here. Some of the greatest characters in video game history have come out of the Final Fantasy franchise, and it's a position that deserves a lot of respect. It's also a position that must create a tremendous amount of anxiety in the creator, as a failure to follow through on the success of the past is simultaneously guaranteed and unacceptable in the eyes of the gamers. All we want is another Cloud, another Sephiroth, another Kefka...

That said, it is amazing to me how often Final Fantasy fails to offer us a central villain that we can focus on. Really, the two character names that stand out most in FF history are the villains, primarily Sephiroth and Kefka. The names of the heroes are numerous and tend to fade in our memories, but you'll never forget the names of those villains that you hated and attempted to destroy for 50 hours of your life. And yet FFXIII fails to deliver here just as 8,9 and 12 did before it.
A lack of a clear cut central villain always takes away from the plot, but FFXIII made up for it in a way by simplifying the story line to a "save the world" mission and pitting the heroes against everyone while on a clearly defined goal.
Well, sort of, it gets a little muddy at the end.

The Battle System:

Final Fantasy XIII introduces into the series one of the greatest combat systems known to man. It's really like the game designers went directly to the fans and said "What do you like about the final fantasy battle system and what don't you like about it?" and based the style around that.

• Instead of a long and unorganized list of items that you have to scroll through in the heat of battle, you get like five.
• Your AI is beautiful and functions on its own through two flawless systems. One is that through the use of your Libra ability you can see the weaknesses of all your enemies and your AI will act accordingly. Two is that, through the new "role" system, the actions of the AI are limited to one of six roles of combat.
• A rating system after reach battle (based on your speed and represented by 1 to 5 stars) forces you to constantly reevaluate your playing and makes players think differently about the game.

Things I didn't like about the system mostly revolved around the issue of lead-character dominance in battle. I absolutely love to summon, and by the nature of this system you are extremely limited in your summoning ability. By keeping Lightning up front for most of the game, I was limited to her one and only summon any time I wanted to bust him out. Of course I was able to switch around the team and put other characters into lead positions, but once I found a team I was comfortable with and was by far superior to any other team I could think of, I didn't want to mess with all that. Especially as I trudged through a menagerie of harder and harder enemies in order to reach my final destination. I wanted a strong team, not diversity for diversity's sake.
That said, even if I had been able to use all of the summons at any given time, the summons in this game were weird Transformer-esque teammates who came out and fought beside you for a minuscule amount of time, rather than doing tremendous amounts of damage. So, yeah, I thought the summoning aspect was a little on the weak-side.
Also, in the vein of lead-character problems, I was infuriated with the "main character dying = instant Game Over" system. The worst was when the main character (i.e. the one you are controlling) died when the rest of the team remained totally unharmed. Enemies with instant kill abilities and the sudden teaming-up of all your enemies against the main character made this aspect of the game infuriating. However, it didn't happen too often, so it can be forgiven.

BEDA 27: White People

White people are afraid of black people.
It's true! And I think it can best be described by a comparison to an episode of Family Guy entitled "Patriot Games."

In this episode, Stewie has lent Brian a sum of money that he wishes to be returned. After Brian fails to make good on his debt and avoids his toddler aggressor by wearing a fake mustache, Stewie beats the family dog like mafia loan shark muscle beats... well... guys that don't pay them back quickly enough.
I mean, he really goes over the top here. He pushes him down the stairs, breaks his leg with a golf club, shoots him in both knee caps, and fully immolates him with a flame thrower. He also espouses one of my favorite lines in all of Family Guy history.
Stewie: "Where's my money, man? Yeah, you got money to pay for fake mustaches. How much you pay for that fake mustache?"
Brian: "$2.99."
Stewie: *Shoots Brian in the knee*

HAHAHA! Man that's funny.

So, after the thrasing is over and the debt is repaid, Stewie realizes that he was in the wrong and apologizes for his misbehavior. But an apology isn't really good enough, is it? Brian accepts the apology, but it's not quite enough to make them even. And now they have to live together under the same roof with a tension that builds and builds and drives Stewie crazy. By the end of the episode Stewie actually starts hitting himself in the face in order to equalize the situation, wanting so badly for the beating to be over that he's even willing to do it himself.

And that is how white people view the world.
Seriously. That is the story of slavery in this country.
Except black people didn't even borrow money from us in the first place. We just hit them with a golf club for no reason. And now we think that someday, somehow, they're going to hit us back. This is why people say things like "Obama is going to put us all in concentration camps." It's also the reason that white people get nervous when that Jay Z song "Run this Town" comes on. "Oh my god. Are they really going to run everything? You heard it, right? All black everything! Have you seen that video? They look like guerilla warriors."

There is this real serious suspicion that black people as a community are plotting to do something awful to white people, and white people will jump at anything and say "There! There! They're doing it! The time is now, people! We're getting overthrown!"

I consider myself extremely lucky to be both of a skin color and a peer group where, sometimes, I get to go entire days without thinking about racism at all. I know a lot of people aren't so fortunate and that totally sucks. It's so pervasive and it's so incredibly stupid. It would just make my head explode if I had to deal with it all the time.