In the name of baseball, amen

So I should probably hate Shoeless Joe.

I mean, really. I don't have much reason to like it. The language is, at least at first blush, really needlessly florid. Every sentence has a simile or a metaphor or an adjective, and it gets ridiculous. I don't know who talked to one Mr. Kinsella, but they forgot to tell him that not everything needs extra detailing. This florid language honestly tripped me up more than I really like to admit, so it was a pain getting in to the book in the first place.

And then you get to the subject matter, which really stopped me full on for most of the book. I mean, it's about baseball.

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike baseball, per se, so much as I think it's the most boring and ridiculous sport that is actively played. And I say that knowing full well that some people take Quidditch seriously.

I mean, I just don't see the appeal. You put a bunch of people in a field, some guy throws a ball, some other guy hits it, and then the guy that hit it runs in a circle and the other guys throw a tiny white sphere around. At least hockey has brutal checks, football has pileups, and tennis and soccer are both way more kinetic. So, of all sports, baseball is the one that I absolutely have no attachment to. So I was happy enough to read through the book, and near around page 150 I was just slogging through to say that I've read it.

It doesn't help that it's pretty much the exact same as movie it inspired.

But then I hit page 150, and the book veered wildly, both from the movie and from my previous expectations of the book.

At that point, the book becomes something transcendant, something that isn't about baseball. Sure, it's based on and uses the lexicon and syntax of baseball. I've no idea what an ERA is besides a period of geologic time, but it's mentioned. I don't know exactly how good a .300 batting average is, and I don't care. The book knows, but it doesn't care. Baseball isn't the point anymore.

The point is finding something to love more than life. The point is finding something that drives you and a group of like minded individuals. The point is religion, but without that pesky God shit behind everything.  The point is being a fan, regardless of what happens when and to whomever it happens to. And that ultimately everything can be transcendant enough to become that way.

I don't understand the first thing about baseball. But I understand fandom to the point of obsession.

And at that point, the book had me, completely. I could, and did, forgive it for it's purple prose, because it needs its prose for something more. I could tolerate its baseball speak, because Kinsella is just using baseball as a relatively simple metaphor for a greater understanding of something uniquely huge and human. And I could based entirely on the strength of its convictions. Of its absolute acceptance of nostalgia and shared understanding and a religious fervor shared by all fans of a certain level of obsession of everything, from Jesus to Gundam to baseball to politics to Midwestern tourist traps.

When I was planning on writing this post (which was supposed to happen tomorrow), I was going to start off with "I hate Shoeless Joe" because that's how I was feeling at the time.

Then it had the gall to actually hit me right in the understanding. Right in the understanding! What a dick move! But it did it, and I think I actually have to say that I love Shoeless Joe. What a difference 100 pages can make.

That said, I'd really rather they had just left the author as a reference to J.D. Salinger rather than actually using J.D. Salinger. That bothers me, for whatever reason. Maybe because I really, really love the idea of Darth Vader talking about "Peace, love, and dope, man."

So is this more or less sad...

...than the people who cheered for the guy who killed a lot of people while in office?

Yeah.

In other, not quite as sad news....

It approaches.

9/11: A Decade Later

(Photo found here.)

So yeah. It's been 10 years since 9/11. I mean, yeah, I could just post my story here and call it good, since that seems to be what everyone else is doing. And I mean, that's pretty big. I was in class when we first heard of the towers being hit, specifically.... somethings like printing? Anyway, the teacher for that was a hard ass on the best of days, and told us to just continue working throughout. That was that. The next class was band with Reynolds, and he took us to the library to watch the TVs for the hour. The rest of the day was pretty dour.

At the time, I know I commented as such that this was the beginning of World War III. Personally, I'm glad that hasn't happened! Yet, anyway.

So with that out of the way, I figured that a better way to spend today would be reflecting on exactly where we are after 10 years. I mean, it's tragic, yeah, and the fact that it happened should never be forgotten, nor should the people who risked their life to help as many people as they possibly could.

That said, in my reflection, it's a little depressing just how applicable the picture at the top of this post is.

Now, that photo (if you're too lazy to click the link to the article) was taken not terribly long after the incident, as you notice from the smoldering pile of the then-fresh wreckage. But unlike every other photo from the time, people aren't rushing in. They aren't standing around in awe. They aren't praying to flags or saluting or anything. They're sitting around, shooting the shit. It's like the disaster is the furthest thing from their mind. They're complacent to it already.

The article I cited said that this picture serves as "...an allegory of America's failure to learn any deep lessons from that tragic day, to change or reform as a nation: "The young people in Mr Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American."" Honestly, I can't disagree.

I mean, just look at 9/11. There are a lot of potential lessons we could have taken away from that most fateful day. Instead of contemplating, perhaps changing, we rushed into Afghanistan after the terrorists who did it. Which is great, but it's also one of the reasons we were hit. Then, to compound matters, we went into Iraq based on faulty evidence that should have been triple checked, and we made things even worse by forcing democracy on a nation completely unprepared for it. We continue to support Israel, which isn't the best nation in the Middle East, but it's also far from innocent in it's own matters.

Socially, the last decade saw the rise of a cancerous McCarthy-esque Libertarian-lite group of the Republican party more coloquially known as the "Tea Party". Corporations are seen as people, and they've ensured that enough of their money is flowing through congress that everyone is either corrupt or powerless. As a nation, we picked up more than a little bit of xenophobia and Islamophobia from the attacks, which has been used by the aforementioned tea party along with dangerously violent rhetoric to foment a political scene that seems more to me like Congress pre-Civil War than anything that should exist now.

No one trusts: Scientists, Professors, Teachers, Experts, Reporters, Analysts, Common Knowledge
Everyone listens to: Pundits: Liberal, Conservative, Hate-mongering far-right

People are more willing to return to the gilded age than reform an institution that's been broken (Unions).

Honestly, the terrorists haven't killed us. But they put us into a decline. We can still pull out of it, but man. It's really, really hard to say they haven't won when the past decade is taken into account.

America: We've got a lot of problems, we can fix them, but a lot of people just don't give a fuck.

Guess that photo's more accurate than I really did want to consider, huh.

Some news and a movie

So I think I'll do something slightly more substantive tomorrow, but I should probably post something today anyway. So.

1. I've got a couple more things starting up. Specifically, a series about Gundam that'll begin soon and end exactly when I want it to. Second, I'll be starting the second book of Fire and Ice soon, so we'll be going back to Westeros. Yay.
2. Google "Deus Ex Visor". Go ahead, do it, I'll wait. Did you do it yet? Cool. Check out the third result. I know right? Too bad it's not a more common search string.
3. ???
4. There is no profit here. None. Ever.

You know what's cool?

Gundam Wing is on YouTube. GUESS I KNOW WHAT I'M WATCHING IN THE NEAR FUTURE.

Orson Scott Card is a terrible person and writer

In that order.

So I'm going to preface this by saying that I loved Ender's Game a lot. A lot a lot. I first read it back in elementary school, and the novel managed to grab my attention and imagination almost as much as Gundam has. I used to re-read it yearly. I've done numerous book reports and essays on the thing. I damn near had it memorized at one point. So I really hope you understand exactly how much had to happen for me to swear the book off.

I did a few years ago, notably around the time the game Shadow Complex was getting a lot of hype. The sequel's to Ender's Game were both fairly forgettable novels, to the point that I wasn't too curious about the rest of Card's output. I still considered myself a fan, though it was more of a lapsed nerddom. That was when I heard about his Empire Duet stories and some of his.... Extracurricular activities. Now, those two things were both enough to get me to swear off Ender's Game. The Empire novels are about a liberal uprising that takes control of the United States through military exertion and then proceeds to hold the nation through a dictatorship.

Anyone with a working frontal lobe can understand why that's a very "Wat." reaction. Subsequently, because Shadow Complex is set in between the novels, I have not (and will not) play it, despite the fact that it's supposed to be very good.

And when not writing, Orson Scott Card is an outspoken Mormon (ew) who happens to be on the board for the National Organization for Marriage and is fairly outspoken in his stance against homosexuality and his want to return to pre-1960's.

Again, working frontal lobe, terrible thing, et cetera and so forth.

So I guess I'm not terribly surprised, per se, that Mr. Card proved himself to be a terrible person again in a new book. But I honestly never would have attributed him as a terrible author.

That new book is, well, not all that new at all. It turns out that Card recently penned an adaptation of Hamlet (Yes, that Hamlet), released as Hamlet's Father. I highly suggest you read that link, by the by. It's for the review that I heard about this from, and I'm going to pull liberally from it.

So right, let's ignore for a moment the fact that Card continues to be a reprehensible person (though it's arguably a greater sin). Here's the changes that Card has decided to make to Hamlet, a play about an incredibly torn prince who needs to do something, but can never decide if it's quite the right thing/time/whatever and so struggles with something that he knows must happen for all five acts.

In this adaptation, Hamlet was never close to his father. The prince is unfazed and emotionally indifferent to the old king's death, feels no sense of betrayal when his mother speedily remarries, and thinks that Claudius will make a perfectly good monarch. Hamlet is also secure in his religious faith, with absolute and unshakable beliefs about the nature of death and the afterlife. He isn't particularly hung up on Ophelia, either.

 So, in perhaps the greatest single instance of Missing The Point I have ever seen, Orson Scott Card has more or less removed everything that makes Hamlet interesting. Gone is the prince that philosophizes on life and action, on death and inaction. Gone is any semblance of sense to the plot. Gone is the artistry with which the Bard did make us empathize with a murderer. Now, this would be bad enough, but Orson decided he needed to take it a step further.

He made Hamlet's Father, the title character of this revision and the entire reason the story happens, a gay child molester. Now, this, in turn, made Horatio, Laertes, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern all gay, because the Old King molested all of them. On top of that, Hamlet's Papa was inadequate at his job anyway (because he was gay), which is another reason that Hamlet doesn't miss him at all.

I just. What. I mean, really. What? In whose deranged mind is it ok to write things like this? It would be bad enough if all he had done was make Hamlet all wishy-washy. That would still rate this as a terrible adaptation unworthy of the very pulp it's printed on. But then to shoe horn in your own anti-homosexual agenda?

Orson Scott Card, you are a veritable waste of a person, and never have I been more ashamed to have once liked a book.

Desert Island 10: Gundam vs Zeta Gundam

Let's say I wind up on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Say some all powerful imp did this to me. And he let me keep ten games for the rest of my miserable life. These are those ten games.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs Zeta Gundam - Bandai, 2004-2005

The Basics

This is one of the weirdest titles on my list, if only for one reason: It's probably the only licensed game on my list. Now, licensing games by and large leads to giant piles of crap shoved onto silicon chips (See also: Nearly every X-Men games made, all of LJN's output). This game.... Doesn't necessarily buck that trend. But it's also nowhere near as bad.

So, at it's core, the Gundam vs. series is a two on two action game, with the player(s) choosing Mobile Suits to fight it out with. These suits all have different abilities, weapons, and stats that all draw from their canon, and then the players shoot each other and slash at each other and blow everything up. It's cool.

The main objective during these fights is to drain your enemies' resource bar, which you do by killing your opponents. However, dying isn't necessarily the end, because you will respawn so long as there's some of your resource bar remaining. Each suit has a different value associated with the bar, so the better your suit is, the more you'll drain. So, for example, let's say you're pitting a team of Balls against a pair of Zeta Gundams. Now, in any ordinary game, the Balls are going to lose, and that's probably going to happen here. However! Balls are only worth 1000 resource points each, whereas Zeta Gundams are worth 3000. Since the resource bar has 9000 (or so) base points, the team of Balls can lose a total of nine lives, whereas the team of Zetas can only lose three. Mind you, because of how terrible Balls are, the Balls are still going to lose, but at least there's some semblance of balancing attempted.

If it were just this aspect, I'd probably still be choosing it, warts and all. The controls are really clunky, the areas extremely plain and boring, and the difficulty wildly vacillates between entirely too hard and way too easy. That said, there's one more reason why I'm including it.

Why It's Here


Ok, I lied, there are two reasons why I'm including it. First, there's a special single player mode included on the home version of the game, and it's one of the best modes of play in anything ever compiled by man. That would be the Universal Century Mode. While this doesn't change the basic gameplay at all, it gives the player scenarios based on both the Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam series. Every major pilot has a storyline that you play through, with mobile suits being acquired at the same pace that they acquire them (So Quattro Bajeena starts off with a Red Rick Dias and eventually picks up the Hyaku Shiki), and the you have to play through from start to finish.

That alone is cool, but not really revolutionary. Especially for certain pilots, who end up dying during the series' (Mind you, this is most of them. Tomino has a reputation for a reason.) So, to alleviate this, playing through certain missions especially well (such as by surviving a pilot's canonical death battle or not killing certain other pilots during their death battles) will unlock alternate routes to take, which in turn lead to alternate ends to the timeline. Sure, the AEUG forces ultimately end up killing off the Titans near the end of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, but their forces are drained and the first Neo Zeon army is in place for an immediate grab for power against the weakened AEUG and Federation forces (This is where ZZ Gundam happens).

However, by playing well, you can find ways to defeat AEUG/Titan forces earlier on in the series, which allows the remaining faction to fight solely against the Neo Zeon movement, leading to better endings for everyone involved. Ultiamtely, it's a fascinating thing to do with a licensed game. It pays the required amount of respect to the original source material by presenting that as the clearly canonical way to play through the game. Then, it offers the player a way to subvert that, and to find a different ending that's better for those involved while not overwriting the canonical materials. In other words, it's a way more respectful treatment of the series than, say, the Zeta Gundam movies, which is a rant for another day.

A day that is approaching, I promise you.

The second reason that this game in particular is coming along on my desert island vacation is because I love Gundam that much. I was not kidding when I said the other day that Mobile Suit Gundam: EXTREME Vs is my most awaited game of the year. That is because I fucking love Mobile Suit Gundam in (most) of its forms. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is the series that got me officially into anime, and so the metaseries as a whole has always been something that has interested me. I like it when it takes on the pseudo-realistic take on war through the eyes of someone who isn't necessarily at the top. I like it when the giant robots punch and shoot and stab each other. I like it when the over zealous drama ends up taking over at times. I just like Gundam and all it's eccentricities and warts. I don't think I'll ever stop being a Gundam fan, regardless of how many shitty series and movies it puts out.

And honestly, I don't really need much more of a reason. This lets me play with suits from three of my favorite series from the franchise. It could be a shitty cover based first person shooter for all I care. I love it, and there's no reason not to love it.

The List

Why haven't I thought of this before? I mean besides the fact that it's a monthly one shot that can only handle for one day.

Everyone has a List. Now, that List's contents depend pretty heavily on the person. Some people's Lists are inhabited by sports events. Some by coupon advertisements that they need to butcher. Yet other people have Lists dedicated entirely to how pretty their cats are.

I mean, I assume, I don't pretend to know what everyone's Lists is.

Basically, a List is what you currently have on your plate as far as hobbies go. Some people have a few, some have one, some have.... Well, less than one and more than zero. Hobbies are weird that way. So the idea with this post is a way to formulate my thoughts, especially with regards to my major List. That List would be stuff I'm playing at the moment. This way I can know what I'm playing, why I'm playing, and what I should focus on. Good times!

(Plus it may or may not give me an easy blog entry while I'm working through my general malaise. Much easier to write when you're not contending with depression, after all.)

So yes. The List.

• Alpha Protocol
• Playthrough...... Three? Four? I do not know. Probably a shotgun asshole run though.
• Dead Rising 2 
• First successful playthrough, possibly a bit more. It's actually really fun, I just kind of shuffled it down the list.
• Dead Space 2  
• Noticing a lot of twos. Second playthrough, focusing on guns that aren't the plasma cutter.
• Demon's Souls 
• First playthrough. I just need to actually sit down and learn this one though.
• Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2 
• Yet more 2. Something something continue running through the game oh help me god help me.
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Hardcore mode playthrough. Samurai of the wastes maybe. Maybe.
• GOD HAND 
• Because fuck you, GOD HAND.
• Mass Effect 2  
• Again with the 2. Insane Renegade Soldier playthrough. To those who haven't played ME2, that sounds really bad.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs Zeta Gundam  
• Build up for importing Mobile Suit Gundam EXTREME Vs. I don't think I've ever been more excited for something. I may need to rethink som priorities. I also really hate that they got Linkin Park to make the theme song for this game. I also also highly suggest actually watching that video, especially if you like giant robots kicking stuff. I know at least 1.5 of my readers do.
• MS Saga 
• Finish playthrough. Shame it's such a blah RPG.

An observant viewer will notice a lack of Deus Ex on that list. That is because I beat it. And quite frankly, if Portal 2 hadn't been perfect in every way, and if Gundam EXTREME Vs wasn't going to be coming out this year, AND if the bosses hadn't been such utter shit, I would likely have crowned this my game of the year.

As is, it'll have to do with the third or fourth place on that list. So tragic, I know.

And on a completely unrelated note, I love the hell out of Blogger's new blogging interface. It's wonderfully minimalistic, while everything I need is pretty clearly indicated. Seriously wonderful.

And I was completely serious about watching the Gundam trailer. It is now on my required viewing list.