YOUTUBE!?

Well, it is another week and another blog that I am getting in under the wire. It was a lot easier to write stuff when I was keeping a journal. Adjusting to things has made doing this rather hard, but I ain’t no quitter! So this week, I am giving ya’ll some youtube links! YEEHAW!

Neko Case - Man

I intend to review this whole album at some point, but until then, enjoy a track!

Sufjan Stevens - That was the Worst Christmas Ever!  

It isn’t even October yet, and I have had the itch to re-listen to the Sufjan Stevens X-mas albums. While they include a lot of standards, some of the tracks are just full-on good music for any season.

YMO - Rydeen 

I was having a discussion about how music that came from video games was actually inspired by earlier bands such as the Yellow Magic Orchestra, and it is something that I think still leads people to make incorrect assumptions about a lot of electronic music.

Let’s Play: Bravo 2  

Watching people playing video games may be mostly reserved for the most hardcore of video game players, but the way these two guys do it never fails to put a smile on my face. Their taste in strange, amateur titles certainly does help.

Katy Perry - Teenage Dream  

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY HONEY! WOOO! LOVE YOU LOTS! THREE YEARS AND COUNTIN’!

Well, hopefully things get done next week. Either way, I guarantee something will be here. Something...

On Sleepiness

I waited all day for an idea to hit me, but by the time I got some, it was too late. Now I am sleepy. Can a person write while being sleepy? I am not sure. Usually, I have to constantly drink cups of coffee while I write while listening to piano music. It works most of the time, but I decided it would be a good idea to exercise a lot before writing to “clear my head.” It sure did clear my head, but now I have nothing to write about. So, let’s haiku!

Autumn is here guys

The chill and the sun mingle

darkness is coming

To dance is to feel

to feel is to be alive

C & C Music

Haikus make more sense

in the original prose

Japanese or bust

I have ideas for next week. Hopefully I will be able to write more. Have a great week in the meantime!

My Journey in Cyrodiil

It is hard to write about what makes video games enjoyable. Perhaps this is because video games offer a large variety of experiences, but I have found that sometimes relating a story about a video game with people who are unfamiliar with them can be challenging. That is why it is important to not just write about theoretical and philosophical aspects of video games, but also just write about a game experience. There has been one game experience I always wanted to relay to an audience, and that is the time I spent in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Oblivion is a role playing game set in the province of Cyrodiil. The game allows the player to create their own character and do various quests to progress the world story and create their own warrior. When I was confronted with the character creator, I was at first was going to try and make a character that resembled myself. I couldn’t quite get the tools to do what I wanted to create, so I ended up with a character with the head of David Attell and the body that had a grey skin color. I couldn’t figure out why everything below the neck looked like a zombie and why the head didn’t, but at that point I was ready to play already. My fantasy adventure was going to be manned by a famous comedian with a skin condition.

Imagine this guy with a zombie body.

As I went through the jail the game started me in, my mind began to wonder about the possible origins of my character. I made him a warrior that could use magic, so I assumed that he was a bright guy, but due to his unfortunate skin situation, he also had to endure the ridicule of his peers. Dave (I actually named him “Carlton” in the game, but Dave seems more appropriate in retrospect) was forced to defend himself against bullies which made him physical fighter. Then the ridicule forced him to be introverted, and he relied on books for escapism, which then made him proficient in magic. I imagined one day he finally confronted the bullies from his youth, and he went a little too far. I supposed that is why he ended up in jail.

Now, there was no prompt from the game to create some sort of backstory, it was just the time I was spending in the world lead me to use my imagination. The game gave me the colors, and I decided to paint a picture. Once I got out of the jail dungeon, I had a quest given to me by Patrick Stewart (actually, just a king played by Patrick Stewart, but I was too busy thinking about what Dave’s deal was that I wasn’t paying too much attention) to save the world, but instead I just wandered. I tried to do some sort of fishing quest for some farmer, but I got bored and decided I wanted to get stronger so fish wouldn’t pose a problem for me. Also, I figured what Dave really wanted to do is buff up a bit and become an actual warrior and not just a rogue with a short temper. I tried to find a “fighter’s guild” because I figured that was the best route, but the nearest big town didn’t seem to have a fighter’s guild. Instead, I went to the colosseum.

The colosseum was a basement where the two teams that fought against each other hung out and then the arena area is where people fought. I talked to everyone, the fight coordinator, a tough guy, but willing to give me a chance, the old lady who seemed to hate me for no reason, the woman on the rival yellow team, a guy who seemed enthused that I joined, and a grey orc by the name of the “Grey Prince.” The orc intrigued me the most because supposedly his father was a great human lord and his mother was an orc maid. The birth was rumored to be a great shame to the lord and she was thrown out of the castle. I went from a ragamuffin with no goal I wanted to achieve, to a gladiator with friends and rivals. There was comfort in the community that sprung up around me as I went into the arena and won battle after battle. The guy on my team expressing how good I was, the rival lady hating my guts, the old woman being all cynical and being skeptical that I would amount to anything, it all felt like I found a place I really belonged.

As I was going up the ladder and becoming a ranked gladiator, the Grey Prince, the champion of the arena, asked me to investigate a lead into his real family. He found the castle his father came from and he was too busy to investigate it himself. He asked if I would be interested in doing it myself. I was curious about what the truth was, so I decided to go. I approached the abandoned looking castle and I went inside to try and prove that the Grey Prince was really related to royalty. Maybe if the Grey Prince was royalty, he could rise out of the colosseum and really make something out of himself.

As I went into the castle, it had an ominous atmosphere. I wasn’t sure if I was going to find anything, but I went into the basement to see what secrets I could uncover. I eventually came upon a room that seemed a bit nicer than the rest of the castle and maybe recently used. I looked through the books and found a diary of the lord. The lord wrote about how he had become a vampire and that he must not let anyone know. He wrote about an affair with an orc maid, and how once she found out his secret, she fled the castle. I began to realize that the story the Grey Prince believed was probably a lie that his mother told him in order to give him hope. I was not sure how this news would affect things, but before I could really collect my thoughts, I was ambushed by a group of vampires. With my new gladiator skills, I was able to dispatch them pretty easily, but after the dust settled, I realized I killed the Grey Prince’s father. When I went back to the colosseum, I told the Grey Prince everything that transpired, he seemed to take it calmly and thanked me for my help.

It was then that things started to go downhill. Dave started to have nightmares about bloody banquets and eating people. As I rose through the upper tier of the ranks, I began to kill the community that I had been gathering, and all my rivals started to fall like flies. The implications of my actions started to hit hard. I probably should have stopped, but I was determined to become the champion. I came here to become the best, and, gosh darn it, that is what I was going to do. I still got encouragement from my peer (only one was left), and I continued my climb to the top. The final match came, my championship battle with the Grey Prince. I knew if I could beat him, I would be number one. I was prepared for a tough fight, but to my horror, the Grey Prince instead begged me to kill him. He relied so much on the lie, that he could rise out of the colosseum and live in nobility, that he wanted out of the constant cycle of violence that was being a gladiator. The Grey Prince had nothing left, and he wanted me to perform assisted suicide in front of this audience. The angel on my shoulder said that I should honor his wish, and the devil on my shoulder wanted the fame and power. So I honored his wish and I executed him. I became the champion of the arena. My peer grew to hate me for killing the Grey Prince he looked up to, and the cynical old lady now loved me and my newfound champion status. There was not much left of the community that I began this journey with. There was this empty feeling I had. Sure, I was much stronger than I was, but at what cost? Everyone I cared about either hated me or was dead, and I still had those nightmares.

It turns out the nightmares were a warning that I was becoming a vampire. I had no idea that one of the vampires bit me when I was fighting them, and soon I was going to change. To add insult to injury, I was also visited by the Dark Brotherhood, a guild of assassins that visit anyone at night who have killed an innocent person. I was offered membership, but I felt so wrong about it that I refused their invitation. Dave had went to a well meaning person trying to get stronger, to a murderer. I tried to get him cured from vampirism, but it was too late, and I had to go to a witch in order to figure out what I could do. She told me that I needed to get certain ingredients to create a anti-vampire potion. I was not well traveled, only knowing the colosseum, so I could not figure out where most of the ingredients were. Though, one of the ingredients was magic crystals which I figured could be found in a magic guild. So, I took off to the nearest one in the guise of night, as now that I was a vampire, I could not travel during the day.

I got to the magic city and I had no real money to buy the magic crystals. I had been focusing on power so long that I had no dexterity to attempt to steal anything. I decided that I needed to try, and I attempted to pickpocket a storekeeper. I was immediately caught and killed by the city guards. The last thing I could hear was the guards disgust of how vile vampires are, and how they did the world a favor by killing me. I was a beside myself. Dave went from a plucky, smart guy trying to just get ahead in life, to a warrior that conquered all his rivals, to a  poor pickpocket that was murdered in the streets with no remorse. The rise and fall of Dave made me reflect on my life. I felt like one of those movie stars that get to the top of fame, but then fade away as they crash and burn through their unfortunate life choices.

What amazed me the most was how poignant  Dave’s life had become, and how the game was able to support it despite it not being really directly programmed into the game. I was supposed to follow Patrick Stewart’s quest to save the world, but instead I followed my own path and created my own story arc. There was something so much more real and hard-hitting about Dave’s story than any other story in any other game. I made choices, and the game, and my imagination, formed around those choices. I think that is what separates a good game from a great game. A good game allows choice, but a great game allows those choices to have real weight and meaning. I could have just restarted Dave’s life from an earlier checkpoint and fix everything, but the only thing I was really cheating was myself. I had a full story, and it was something I was willing to let stand on its own.

It is these types of experiences that drive me to spend so much time and thought to video games. It is a relatively new medium with many problems, but if these type of experiences are possible now, who knows what the future may hold.

Getting Cyrus, and getting into the Thicke of it

Pop culture is a hard thing to get a real grip on. It is incredibly accessible, but the reach across so many different cultures and peoples make much of pop culture almost formless. For me, it is easier to think of pop culture like hamburger helper; it comes to you unfinished, and you have to add your own “ingredients” in order to digest it. Everything from movies, music, TV, video games, etc. rely on the viewer to add some psychological need in order to have them keep coming back again and again. Some media can do this via good writing and/or execution, but the only real way to guarantee that people will come back is if the media fulfills some sort of conscious or subconscious need. The easy example of this would be something like Adele’s album 21, and the need for people to reconcile their own romantic relationships. This allows for catharsis, pathos, etc. so the viewer can feel fulfilled in some way. The human brain has so many needs that are apparent, and not so apparent, that this recent deluge of media that has only been increasing for the last few decades makes pop culture study important. People need to know how what they view affects them them and the positives and negatives of their consumption.

So when something like the Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke controversy pops-up, I feel a need to throw in my thoughts to the current storm of public opinion. I think it is important for people to try and understand how they feel about something because it is that communication that helps people understand each other. Unfortunately, a lot of the dialog seems to be dismissive of the other people’s opinions, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of real communication really happening. The crux of the argument has seemed to settle on how what Miley Cyrus did was “offensive” and how what Robin Thicke did was just as “offensive” if not more so.

One distinction that should be made that I don’t hear a lot of people making is that we should make sure not to confuse Cyrus’ and Thicke’s performance with how they feel personally. It is important to remember that they are performers, and while their acts can come from a real place, the purpose of their job is to elicit a reaction from the audience.    Whether or not they feel their actions reflect who they are as a person is practically meaningless, for they are already biased. In the world of pop culture, anything that could affect the popularity of the people in question can’t be trusted. The armies of people who depend on the success of Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus make any sort of definition of their true character muddled in a fog of image construction and press relations. The pothole of judging people based on their performances that I see many other people fall into.

If the performances don’t necessarily reflect the performers, then the projections that people try to force on them reflects the individuals that are projecting onto them. Pop culture in this way creates something of a “dark mirror,” a reflection that shows us culture’s insecurities and needs. The “offense” from Miley Cyrus’ performance (especially in conjunction with the anecdote that this encouraged parents to discuss with their daughters about their own sexuality) seems to come from her juxtaposition of imagery of childhood (dancing teddy bears) with aggressive sexuality. On the other hand, Robin Thicke gains “offense” by also being sexually aggressive, but towards a woman who is half his age and how this fits into rape culture.

Once again, it is important to remember is that performers want a reaction. Improvisation and in the moment changes can occur, but these sort of stage productions require rehearsal and careful planning. Both Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke knew exactly what they were getting into. The only people that didn’t know what they were getting into was the audience. One might wonder if the origin of the strong responses came from the unexpected nature of the performance and maybe much of the outrage is actually misplaced. The suddenness of the performance coupled with the ability to send video internationally within seconds creates a reaction that people then have to deal with. It is problematic because the viewing, reaction, and then people’s reactions to others’ reaction was so fast that it is almost impossible to differentiate between.

I wonder if this sort of widespread reaction is possible, if pop culture needs to become more complex in order to fit the demand for discourse. Both “Blurred Lines” and “We Can’t Stop” both seem to suffer from a sort of lyrical generalness and musical simplicity. Both are most probably created to be able to relate to as many people as possible (including possibly international audiences that may not even speak english) and therefore, are diluted as a result. Trying to read any sort of message, including one about rape culture, is going to be more reflective of the people enjoying the music than anything the artist intended. This is probably a result of the thinking of Laura Mulvey (read a good summary here), but the sort of shortcuts people are using in various blogs and criticism lead to a lot of misunderstanding. That will always be the case whenever someone tries to blanket and generalize the subconscious of an entire audience. A good way to avoid this is for the creator in question to create something more complex and personal that actually speaks to a point of view, instead of leaving a canvas for their audiences to paint with, positive or negatively. Though this may instead lead to the content not being as popular.

The only thing we can hope for is that as pop culture only becomes more and more accessible, that people discussing and sending their thoughts out into the world can create an environment of empathy and understanding instead of an environment of vitriol and misunderstanding. I think that the fact of this discussion is happening is a positive one, and if it doesn’t lead to something that enhances people’s lives, then it will be abandoned. I just hope by “enhancing people’s lives” it adds more perspective into the world rather than stirring up controversy for the sake of attention like the current pop music scene advocates.

End of Vacation

Vacations are tough. Not only can they cost a lot, but the heightened expectations make every decision important and full of consequences. Oh sure, you can just relax, but then what else are you missing? Is the ideal vacation one where a person can relax, or is it packed with excitement? It depends on the person, and the place, but part of taking a vacation is also understanding why the vacation is taking place in the first place. For me, the “vacation” that is currently ending as I am writing this, was one out of necessity.

The vacation in my case in my vacation from blogging. Coming back from Japan and now living in the US hasn’t gone exactly to plan. It has been a lot of making up new plans as things progress, and well, it has been good. Living back home and getting reacquainted with friends and family has been a valuable experience for me. If my new plans do work out, it would be great, but it is that constant remaking of “plan B” that makes me hope that "plan a" would just work out already.

I do want to apologize to all those who were disappointed by my lack of writing. You all are a small bunch, but ya’ll are the ones I don’t want to let down the most. For about two months I just felt like my personal life and problems were taking front stage and everything else was becoming irrelevant. Which is a shame, because it will now take a while to get the rust off of these writing muscles. It was an odd feeling, not really thinking about what to write every week. There is something about sitting down and sending something into the world that has become important to me.

I struggle with the feeling that my writing isn’t living up to my potential sometimes, and this blog allows me to explore that feeling. I hope that one day all this writing might lead somewhere, but if it never does, I can at least say that I tried, even if it is just a little bit. Even if no ones reads an entry, at least I was able to form my thoughts into something solid, perhaps even tangible (as much as text on a web page can be tangible, anyway).

So the plan is to get the blog back on the rails on a weekly basis. I am going to move the blog date to every Sunday instead of the sort of Friday/Saturday thing I had going on before. I figure that will give me plenty of time to type one out, even if I have to do it at the last minute.

Anyways, other than than finally getting back into writing, I have been doing pretty good. I finally got my jet-lag under control, which is great, but for a while I as able to wake up at 6:30AM with no effort and seize the day. Now I have to make sure to set an alarm and get coffee if I ever hope to wake up that early. I gained a few pounds, and now I have to be extra diligent to lose them. I was planning to get a good work out routine started and this is just a good excuse to get it started. Still eating rice and miso soup every morning, though mostly because my parents have a rice maker and it is the most convenient thing for me. Getting part time jobs has not been difficult, but landing a full time job has been tougher than I thought. Still doing my best, and hope that my skill and a little bit of luck will carry me to where I want to be.

Not sure what I will write next yet, but I have several ideas. I was thinking of writing about that whole Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke thing, but the work I would have to put into it combined with how played out it seems to become may deter me just enough to not do it. I have things to say about World’s End, I have thought about comparing Iron Man 3 to Cyborg 009 (comic books movies at opposite ends of the spectrum of comic book movies for the mainstream and comic book movies for a niche), and maybe writing about some things about video games now that the PS3 and Xbox 360 generations seem to be coming to a close. I also got a sequel to COMPARTMENTALIZATION in the planning stages called ORGANIZATION. Whatever I write about, I hope that everyone (and more) will tune in and read!

Have a happy Labor Day!