Good Point: 31 May 2007

I was going to start this out with some blather about the Wikipedia article on Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, and how it links to a Usenet post and stuff, but my father beat me to the punch by two months. Dang.  Well, whatever.

Hmm… what else… Oh, yeah, in case you didn’t notice the link in the sidebar, Rachel Lucas has come back to blogging, to little fanfare and minor note.  Reading her posts, I realized that she contains a bit of the irreverence that I’ve attempted to encapsulate in my bloggery. Unsuprising, given that I essentially grew up on her blog, Kim du Toit’s, and Steven den Beste’s.

This just in from the magical land of Japan: a guitar simulator for your (or, more accurately, my) Nintendo DS. This is no mere game, a la Guitar Hero. This is a simulator. All that Amazon has on it is a name and release date, but it’s already on the top of my wish list. In the words of the SRHS class of double-oh-seven motto, “ballin!”

Tuesday was my last physical day in school, graduation is Friday. Time to get a serious job at SAS, or fall back on somewhere else if they don’t seem interested. Maybe I’ll work with my good friend over at Target. She keeps telling me it’s nice. Always seems a pleasant enough shop, although the time I spend there per month is roughly equatable to, let’s say, the time I spend listening chainsaw rock.

23 and 24 July are Orientation. Classes start 22 August. It’s coming.

Oh yeah, and Fred Thompson is running. Oooh-rah.

Pop Culture Roundup

Okay, here’s the docket for today: Item 1, Pirates of the Carribean: We Made Another One. It was confusing, mostly because they really made it feel like you were dealing with pirates, who were constantly backstabbing everyone. It was tricky to keep up with who was working for whom when. Plus, the just-in-time nature of their plot-device introduction grew a little thin. On the other hand, I went to go see it with my good friends, and we made constant jokes, which made the whole experience approximately a jillion times better. I wasn’t sad I spent my money, although I should have known better than to follow the crowd out at the end, because once again, there’s a little surprise at the end of the credits, or so I’ve read. Also, it seems the franchise has economical merit that it’s almost guaranteed to continue into a few more sequel; they even threw in a plot hook at the end for more. It was a night well spent.

Item 2: Vin Diesel. I just saw Chronicles of Riddick Monday and, hot damn. I’ve not seen anything like it: a solid sci-fi kick-ass action movie with just enough over-the-top that you know everyone working on it cracked a smile at least once. I mean, seriously. Riddick, a stone cold killer, wading through a crowd of Space Romans with his “Space Kukris” flashing, and not having any of them touch him because, well, he’s Vin Diesel. I’m not sure what any negative critics were thinking in voting this one down, and I hope they make a sequel to this before Pirates because Pirates clearly takes itself far too seriously. Plus Riddick could cut Jack Sparrow into thirteen pieces before Sparrow could espouse a witty one-liner. And, of course, Riddick would use a one-liner of his own over Sparrow’s body in the vein of, “Plot device this.”

Item 3: Pan’s Labyrinth. I also saw that Monday, and I’m conflicted on this one. In a shallow sense, it’s an excellent movie. Very good production values, excellent acting, all of it. But on the other hand, it felt like it needed more a longer director’s cut to really flesh out some of the plot. It wanted to be both a story of a magical kingdom and princesses while also being about Spanish commie rebels fighting against Franco’s fascists. It really told the latter story and made that one really pull at you, but the fairies and princesses stuff seemed kinda second-tier. I feel like there’s something there that the director really wanted to show us, but couldn’t find the time.

Item 4: Anime. I spent this past weekend at our local Anime con, Animazement, and there were some interesting surprises. For example, every year, there’s one anime that’s really heavily represented by cosplayers, usually it’s one that’s gained recent popularity in the states; it’s never been Mario or Dragonball Z because those have both been around for ages. In the past, it’s been Trigun and Naruto, but this year, it was pirates. Uncapitalized, unitalicized, pirates. There were probably half a dozen Jack Sparrows and others just dressed as generic pirates. I can safely say I didn’t see that one coming.

Other interesting costumes included Jewish Wolfwood. He’s a character from Trigun who walks around with a giant metal cross as tall as he is that serves as a weapons rack for practically unlimited firearms; he usually keeps it covered with cloth to hide its purpose. He’s a common cosplay subject because all you need is a suit and a cross-shaped something, a bedsheet, and some belts. But this fellow actually was walking around with a Star of David covered in the cloth and belts, which was immediately amusing to anyone familiar with the anime. Also of note was the girl walking around in the torn and bloodied Union Wells High School Cheerleading uniform. Oh yeah, and some idiot who looked like Sylar had taken a crack at him.

In for the long haul

The other day, Bob wrote about his overnight camp out at the dorm housing office of his college, which oddly remind me of a similar incident. I actually undertook a similar endeavor this past winter, although for somewhat different reasons.

On the evening of 18 November 2007, I gathered together with a few of my friends for our regularly-scheduled D&D game, although with a few supplies for the evening stashed in my car. We’d planned to break up around midnight, as per usual, but ended up growing impatient and stopping our game at about 8pm. We adjourned to Waverly Shopping center for some pizza, and then set up our chairs in front of the near by Wal-Mart and settled in to wait. In only 10 hours, the store would open and the Nintendo Wii would go on sale.

I wasn’t actually planning on getting one myself, but the two friends that I accompanied were each interested in one for themselves. Luckily for us, we were the first ones there. I can sympathize with the doubt and questioning that Bob went through at being the first and only: we went through the same thing. Three of us, camped out with lawn chairs in a designated zone along the front of the store for queuing up, watching perfectly normal people file in and out to buy real things. However, after about an hour or two, another pair of guys showed up, and we felt relieved: we had chosen correctly. (If we’d waited until midnight as planned, we would have been rather far back in the line.)

Similar to Bob, we had come prepared, with chairs, snacks, Nintendo DSes (trend, anyone?), drinks, books, and music. The one thing that we really had to prepare for, that Bob didn’t have to contend with, was the cold. This was a North Carolina November, so it got below freezing that night, and we were cold. Clad in heavy jacket and a sweatshirt, I was warm from the waist up, but below that, it got a little chilly. One rather ingenious fellow bought a space heater from the Wal-Mart we were sitting in front of and hooked it up for his friend and himself to enjoy. The rest of the line was envious of him.

The system we used to track who was first in line was much more primitive, being solely based on first come, first serve. There was a modicum of honor at the front of the line where we were, especially when the line was shorter. One quick-witted and rather unscrupulous fellow, about 8th in line, actually set up shop with a For Sale sign, offering his spot in line for a measly $80. (The console itself only cost $200 retail.) He spent most of the night there and only sold his spot minutes before the doors were opened.

The person who purchased the spot was rather far back in the line, which, by the time that the doors were opened, was quite long. A number of censuses were taken of the population of the line, figuring out who was what number in line, based on an estimate by an employee of 30 consoles in stock. I think I was the only person in line not buying, and there were likely at least 40 people in line by the time it was all done.

One thing that was unexpected was the idiotic behavior encountered against us. For example, an employee at the Wal-Mart itself came out and cajoled us with talk of there only being 3 consoles, not 30, and other such idiocy. It was quite clearly very amusing to her, but was just annoying to the rest of us.

In the early Sunday hours, there were actually some guys that showed up to literally do some drive-by harassment, such as throwing fast food drink cups at the line or mooning us. After a little while of this, one of the liners made an official petition to have his spot saved, and went out to his car, where he sat idling and waiting for the idiots to make another pass. When they did, he threw on his high beams and tore after them. After a brief chase around the parking lot, they left with great haste.

Aside from that, it was a relatively uneventful night. My friends and I played Elite Beat Agents and Advanced Wars: Dual Strike. We also intermittently napped and I read from a copy of World War Z I’d brought along. I wasn’t sad to see dawn coming in the east, but neither was I sad that I’d come along. And since I wasn’t buying, during the final stages, where everyone was packing up and preparing to move inside, I left the line and started putting all of our stuff in the cars we had come in.

Thus, as soon as my two friends got the first two available units, we got in our cars and drove home, where they passed out and I played Zelda: Twilight Princess on a Wii. It was pretty fun, but I got stuck on the stupid fishing part, and gave up, passing out myself.

Good Point: 24 May 2007

Bill Whittle’s at it again. I wasn’t going to mention this in particular, because if you’re interested in his writings, you’ve probably read it by now. But in a fit of final-days boredom and the “I can make a difference” feeling left over after that essay, I ended up realizing a blog concept I’d been tossing around for a while. Here’s a rough version of the header, and the title would be changed to match (“Sitting on the Hill”).

I actually went so far as to implement the changes, when I realized that this blog isn’t nearly that serious. I’ve made a couple of political posts, but by and large, they don’t make for interesting writing. At least not from my pen. I might use the idea again some time, but for now I actually think that the original title that I came up with at 3am for this blog, But Seriously…, encapsulates the tone rather well.

It is in that frame of mind that I echo the rest of the internet and Penny Arcade by asking, “How did Blizzard keep Starcraft 2 under wraps for so long?”

Heroes Season 1 is over

Don’t worry about spoilers on this one folks. No secrets here.

So the season finale to the best show on television aired this past Monday, and it was then that I realized that it was indeed the best. In my mind, it had been contested in this chiefly by Battlestar Galactica, although Jericho was a narrow second; this isn’t a problem since Jericho is regrettably now cancelled. And BSG has been knocked off the list for one reason, plain and simple: ten month hiatus. I’m not sure exactly why, but for some reason or another new episodes ended around the end of February 2007 with a message that BSG would return in 2008.

Sure, the show is really impressive, especially visually, but ten months? That’s just too much for me. Heroes, on the other hand, which just finished its first season, is planning to do 24 regular season episodes next season, and six “spinoff” episodes. Each of the spinoff episodes will feature a new hero, and the one voted highest will be brought in on the show itself. It’s going to be the same level of production, just a sort of second unit deal, because they don’t want to leave people hanging over the hiatus for too long.

The characters are just amazing as well. I’d kind of felt the last few episodes dragging down, with the original villain becoming your favorite good guy, and someone you thought was good really seeming very, very evil. But in the last two acts of the season finale, everything fell into place. It was amazing.

Probably one of the coolest moments is one in the final act, where there is text on screen saying that this is the end of Volume 1 (Season 1), and then immdiately cuts to Volume 2 and leaves the cliffhanger of the finale a few minutes in to there. They’re saying, “Yeah, we’re starting a different story. But it’s all the same. Stay tuned.”

I can safely say I will be.

Words about words. Quaint, no?

With school rapidly winding down (3 days of class including today, 4 days of exams, then Graduation), I find myself increasingly bored in class, with the constant preoccupation with my impending career as a world-famous guitarist. Well, okay, at least learning to play, and then becoming world famous. I actually ordered one of the starter kit things online, because it’s pretty much what I need: amp, strap, tuner, guitar, picks, etc. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have a shiny new Epiphone SG in my possession.

But anyways, being bored in class, I’ve taken something of a diversion from my usual random fiction writings to stay amused in class and turned towards the lyrical. The problem is that, instead of coming up with songs for the guitar, when I put pen to paper, I keep ending up with songs in my head that sound like hip-hop. Well, the verses at least. I think it may be because I’m trying to be overly verbose, so the words always sound like they’re coming out at the machine gun pace characteristic of hip-hop.

This isn’t entirely unexpected, since I recently have been listening to bits and pieces of Fort Minor’s work. It’s a side project of Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, who characteristically offered rap-like vocals to LP’s songs, causing them to be placed in the nu metal genre. But Fort Minor’s stuff is much more hip-hop, although the thing that makes it palatable to me is the subtle differences from most hip-hop — the artist is a respectable person, the songs are interesting instead of rehashing the standbys about the police and women. It’s an interesting style for me, because I’ve never really exposed myself to it much.

This isn’t neccessarily bad, except that the tentative idea was that these were the kind of songs that I could be putting to music made my newly-created guitar skills. Fort Minor-esque music has little to no guitar in it, mostly just having the heavy beat of a drummer and some other hip-hop mix-ins. In my mind, I was shooting for something simple but fun and fast: essentially, power pop. Something in the vain of Code Monkey or MxPx’s Before Everything and After album.

Oh well, maybe I can turn these words around into something a little more palatable.

Rage against something…

So apparently Rage Against the Machine is getting back together. Initially, I was cheered by this, because I still listen to their old stuff since musically, it’s amazing. Tom Morello, the guitarist, is a genius. But then it started to dawn on me what this will really mean.

For those of you not familiar with the band, it’s a radically and militantly liberal and socialist outfit. They’re proud of their politics and many of their songs are chiefly about politics. They all have messages. But I’m not sure they’re really the message that’s all that good right now. For example, one of the issues they championed was “immigration reform”, in the form of amnesty for all illegals and completely open borders. Nail in the coffin: Michael Moore directed one of their music videos.

When Rage broke up, the musical elements (guitar, bass, drums) reformed into Audioslave with another vocalist and began making music under the new moniker. The name was different, the political message was gone, and with it, almost all of the Rage style, much to my dismay. So this reformation means maybe new, more Rage in the classic style; it does occur to me that maybe they’ll rethink their style and change it completely.

Just seems to me that there’s nothing quite as persuasive to the starry-eyed teenage as a strong political message presented by a rock band. I’d really hate for them to tip the scales in the ‘08 election towards the Marxist end of the political spectrum.

I do have hope though, because I’m not sure even re-united Rage can stand up to the towering might of Fred Thompson.

Guitar Hero?

“One of these days, you really should think about getting a real guitar.”

It’s one of the loading screen tips on Guitar Hero, and one that I laughed off when I first saw it. I like to play GH, not a real guitar. But the idea’s been growing on me. And growing.

It probably started when I began really paying attention to guitar work on everything I listen to. I mean everything. That’s why I just had to get a Dragonforce album (thanks to the person who gave that to me for my birthday; if it were vinyl, it would be smooth by now) — they have such amazing guitar parts that they basically are in a genre by themselves. If you want to see what I mean, here’s a youtube video of one of their songs. Watch around time index 3:20 for the dueling guitar solos. It’s beautiful.

So anyways, where was I? (I’ve just spent 20 minutes watching YouTube videos about Dragonforce including this one where the two guitarists, not including the bassist, show you how to play their songs.) Right, and then I noticed something happening. I found that really good guitar parts really have the power to move you. Maybe it’s a manifestation of my teenage, but a good, solid, loud guitar part just … I dunno how to put in to words. It rocks.

So, I’m a teenager, and I love a good guitarist, but I have been sort of tossing that over my shoulder with the argument that it takes more time than I really have and it wouldn’t be any fun learning. Okay, I’m deluding myself here, folks. Dunno if you caught on, but I’m good at it when it’s for my own good.

And now for something completely different: cars. We’ll get back to guitars in a minute. I have a white ‘93 Hyundai Excell. Love it to death. She’s no beauty, but she runs well, gets amazing gas mileage, and might as well be made of glass in terms of visibility. But she’s busted her distributor and she’s in the shop getting fixed by the nice mechanic man. So I’ve been playing musical cars with the rest of my family to get around the past couple of days.

Now, normally, I have my MP3 player and a tape adapter in my car to interface between digital and analog. However, none of the other cars in the Berry Armada have such advanced technology as tape decks. They only play CDs. So I’ve been shuffling around for good driving music CDs, like The Matrix Revolutions Soundtrack. Good album. To quote Abraham Lincoln, “If you like this sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing you’ll like.”

But this morning, on my way out, I grabbed a copy of Robert Berry’s Sounds Like Music. And, I’ll admit, it was profound. I hadn’t listened to any of Bob’s stuff in a while, and I found myself awestruck. I’ll admit that I went in to it expecting it to sound like some guy put it together in his study. This is, of course, any number of psychological phenomena that Malcolm Gladwell or Brian Wansink would be glad to tell you. (At this point, I think it’s worth mentioning that I’m running out of tabs on my Firefox bar because I keep opening a new tab every time I have to look something up. God bless 2 gigs of memory.)

But it wasn’t. It sounded good. I even sat there saying to myself, “That’s a drum machine. I’ve seen his study. He didn’t actually do that.” and the other me said, “Yeah? And?” I love it when I’m right. My uncle isn’t a rock star. He doesn’t practice guitar 9 hours a day before going on tour. Now, granted, everything I was hearing was the best of many attempts grafted together, but almost all music is done that way anyways these days. Nothing special about him, compared to professional albums. He could sound just as good as they could.
And that’s when it hit me. If he can be a whole band, why can’t I learn guitar? He learned guitar, and piano, and Java besides. (Bob, if you don’t actually know Java, please don’t call me out on this. I hate it when I’m wrong.) Maybe he makes an album a decade, but that’s more than I’ve ever even tried.

Which is when it hit me: I’ve never even tried. I’ve always written off my sister as the musical one and been happy with that. But no more. I’m going to learn to play guitar (the kind that you plug into an Amp, that takes Amps, and makes real music).

I’m not sure exactly how I’ll manage it, given that I’ve just about tapped myself out of cash to pay for getting my car fixed, I just picked up a Nintendo DS, and a guitar starter kit with amp and gig bag and what not costs in the neighborhood of $200. Plus I’ve got a laptop to buy, and a little thing called college to bother with. But I’m going to do it. By this time next year, I’m going to have a guitar and know at least how to play the Pac-Man noise (Time index 4:30).

Postscript: As you can tell — or should be able to, if you really loved me — from the tone of this piece, I’m excited. I really want to do this. I would compare it to the rush of an impulse buy, except that I’m not buying anything and it isn’t exactly impulse. I think this has been a long time coming. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll see how silly wanting to play guitar is, but I really doubt it. Mostly because that’d make me wrong.

And you all know how I feel about being wrong.

Today is just like any other day

Disclaimer: This post in no way endorses or supports the idea of Greeting Card Holidays or Mothers Day. It’s just a coincidence.

Obviously, my mother is a a major driving force in my life. While much of my critical analysis and login have been learned from my father, my mother has taught me a number of equally useful life skills, like how to understand what people aren’t saying and self-sacrifice.

Self-sacrifice, for example, is a concept that is somewhat fundamentally unfamiliar to me. In my core I am tempted to only do things that will directly benefit me. But with a healthy dose of circumspection, I’ve learned to see that a lot of things, that may not directly benefit me or others, do in either long-term or untangible ways. Take, for example, any given day in middle school, when I missed the bus to school. Even though it was in the opposite direction from work, my mother would unhesitatingly grab her keys and head out the door with me in tow. It didn’t make her day any easier, but the fact that she made my life that much easier was the indirect reward she recieves.

The other, and perhaps more fascinating example, is learning to hear what isn’t said. My mother, in her speech habits, often reveals quite a lot by trailing off in the middle of a sentence or saying something in a certain way. At times, some have taken issue with this by repeating any trailed off sentence back with a questioning tone, with the implication that it should be completed. I’ve even done this in some of my less hospitable moments. But when I stop to think, there’s usually a reason behind all this. One of them is even extremely efficient: don’t finish a sentence without a statement to make. It can often be useful to end something ambiguously, especially if you’re not sure how it should end, but you . . . uh . . . yeah.

Good Point, Bad Time

AP Exams are tomorrow and the day after, so I’m hitting the books pretty hard. Expect light posting until Thursday when I guess I’ll probably put up a real post instead of a Good Point, which is for today.

In the mean time, simply substitute me for Magical Trevor in his amazing and magical adventures.

EDIT: This was supposed to be posted last Monday, 7 May. And, as is obligatory following any post prognisticating, the future-past prediction was wrong.