Month: December 2012

Contrast immediately. Mention of Walmart. Decidedly modern. Considered what I may have read that was more “classic” or “universal” but c’est la vie and all that.

Are video games really as niche?

“In games, where it was so often so easy to lose perspective, but also in life.” This line was not necessary. This story could’ve been a parable. I’m going to be thinking about it the whole way through.

“The ill-gotten fruits of not being and not knowing.” Is this an attack on denial of responsibility? Is existence an acceptance of the responsibility to exist?

The Road is about a father and son. Its style is more barren. Prose to match the landscape. Their journey is one for survival. Literal life and death. This one’s father and son are also on a journey. Is it metaphysical? Is their journey towards completion of the game—towards not being—also about survival? The title is plural. They’re in it together. They’re mapping the world towards the goal of nonexistence.

Why is the character in the game a woman? Aping Metroid’s protagonist? How do things change when the lead is a female? How does this affect the perception of it?

The first moment of understanding is the loss of her wings. She is a bird girl and then she is weighed down by her choice to don the metal boots. Their choice, not hers. She can’t take them off. She loses her flight before she loses the added weight.

In Shadow of the Colossus, the player character goes on a journey of sacrifice. Double-edged sword: sacrifice the creatures, sacrifice your humanity. He becomes a monstrous doppelganger of himself. The gargoyle’s significance. Why must it look like Alicia but with horns and healthy wings? As she sacrifices, others gain strength? Laughing in her face? Aesthetic choices on the author’s part, probably. From a game design standpoint, you simply reuse what you have. One less in-game art asset to design from scratch.

Cheddar scabs are fucking great.

“where dollars and coins flew at Alicia from all sides and clung to her body, briefly rebuilding her wings in their own green image.” Money is only a temporary fix for permanent problems. Okay.

The dirt clod beneath the chamber of commerce. The dirt clod beneath the chamber of commerce. The dirt clod. The chamber of commerce. The dirt. The chamber of commerce. The dirt and the chamber of commerce. The chamber of commerce. Dirt and commerce. Dirt and money.

Kill the orchestra. Kill the music. Kill art. Silence.

This kid’s dialogue makes him seem older in places, younger in others. Wonder if that’s intentional.

Looking for a replacement for mother?

Perhaps the dialogue is indicative. Joshua’s getting older. He’s learning things.

You forget fear. You forget love.

To be, then, is to forget. To be is to not know you are.

Waiting.

The repeated statements about Jonas’s general apathy and indifference to living, and the success that is thrust upon him by others through their adulation and support of him. He is made a child. He is a child never grown. He is a caricature of a type of person who hasn’t had to work because he does not desire. Jonas is given success and comes to expect it. Simple entitlement. If there is a syndrome of being an only or favorite child, case in point.

I sense bitterness in this story. The excess of details and sparse dialogue tell it. “Look at this fuckin’ guy! Look at his ridiculous existence and life!”

A holy man is made holy by his followers. They elevate him. They tell him what they learn from him. The pretentiousness of art, sure. But the pretentiousness of man, definitely.

“Some concerned Jonas’s art, while others, far more plentiful, concerned the correspondent, who either wanted to be encouraged in his artistic vocation or else needed advice or financial aid.”

Truest words.

“‘And what about you?’ Rateau said. ‘Do you exist? You never say anything bad about anyone.’ Jonas began to laugh. ‘Oh! I often think bad of them. But then I forget.’ He became serious. ‘No, I’m not sure of existing. But someday I’ll exist, I’m sure.’”

Someday you’ll be a real boy.

Jesus, clutter is a huge part of this.

I think anyone who has tried to make a career or life out of creating things can understand what’s happening here. They extoll your virtues and then turn away just as quickly. It’s a fickle existence. Even more disheartening is the pace with which enthusiasm and the work deteriorates. It’s first an hour lost, then a day, then weeks, and so on. Soon you’re talking about it more than you’re doing it.

The word at the end puzzles me. I’m still thinking on the meanings and which applies more, if not both.

This story left me with an uneasy feeling. There was too much familiarity. I like it.

The repeated statements about Jonas’s general apathy and indifference to living, and the success that is thrust upon him by others through their adulation and support of him. He is made a child. He is a child never grown. He is a caricature of a type of person who hasn’t had to work because he does not desire. Jonas is given success and comes to expect it. Simple entitlement. If there is a syndrome of being an only or favorite child, case in point.

I sense bitterness in this story. The excess of details and sparse dialogue tell it. “Look at this fuckin’ guy! Look at his ridiculous existence and life!”

A holy man is made holy by his followers. They elevate him. They tell him what they learn from him. The pretentiousness of art, sure. But the pretentiousness of man, definitely.

“Some concerned Jonas’s art, while others, far more plentiful, concerned the correspondent, who either wanted to be encouraged in his artistic vocation or else needed advice or financial aid.”

Truest words.

“‘And what about you?’ Rateau said. ‘Do you exist? You never say anything bad about anyone.’ Jonas began to laugh. ‘Oh! I often think bad of them. But then I forget.’ He became serious. ‘No, I’m not sure of existing. But someday I’ll exist, I’m sure.’”

Someday you’ll be a real boy.

Jesus, clutter is a huge part of this.

I think anyone who has tried to make a career or life out of creating things can understand what’s happening here. They extoll your virtues and then turn away just as quickly. It’s a fickle existence. Even more disheartening is the pace with which enthusiasm and the work deteriorates. It’s first an hour lost, then a day, then weeks, and so on. Soon you’re talking about it more than you’re doing it.

The word at the end puzzles me. I’m still thinking on the meanings and which applies more, if not both.

This story left me with an uneasy feeling. There was too much familiarity. I like it.

I predict an emotional response to the part about a long-imagined relationship and using it as both the sole reason and sole distraction, and eventually its rejection as the sole motivation.

“They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there—the tunnel walls squeezing in—how the flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the hand and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense, compression in all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in—ass and elbows—a swallowed-up feeling—and how you found yourself worrying about odd things: Will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would they have the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.”

This was good. I could feel the walls of the tunnel closing in.

“Dense, crushing love.”

I read it again, and it’s just a back puncher. Your breath goes out, more I suppose if you’re identifying with what they’re carrying. Not being a vet I can only imagine what it is to trudge in hot, dense jungle carrying everything—and I mean everything—on top of the stuff anyone else carries around.

The whole story is weight. You get dragged further and further down by it. Deeper and dirtier, like he doesn’t want you to forget.

“… mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would.”

And of course, to someone like Martha, everything he is experiencing is unreal. We’re Martha.

“It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.”

Fight the heroic fight, be the honorable warrior. Die as a man, not live as a coward.

The switch between ethereal florid and straight lists is not exactly jarring, but necessary. All lists and they’re just what you see—all florid prose and it’s that embarassment he writes about. Need both sides.

A good-luck pebble is a good-luck marble is there’s no fuckin’ luck at all.

I hate Martha, too.

“He might just shrug and say, Carry on…”

I predict an emotional response to the part about a long-imagined relationship and using it as both the sole reason and sole distraction, and eventually its rejection as the sole motivation.

“They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there—the tunnel walls squeezing in—how the flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the hand and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense, compression in all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in—ass and elbows—a swallowed-up feeling—and how you found yourself worrying about odd things: Will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would they have the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.”

This was good. I could feel the walls of the tunnel closing in.

“Dense, crushing love.”

I read it again, and it’s just a back puncher. Your breath goes out, more I suppose if you’re identifying with what they’re carrying. Not being a vet I can only imagine what it is to trudge in hot, dense jungle carrying everything—and I mean everything—on top of the stuff anyone else carries around.

The whole story is weight. You get dragged further and further down by it. Deeper and dirtier, like he doesn’t want you to forget.

“… mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would.”

And of course, to someone like Martha, everything he is experiencing is unreal. We’re Martha.

“It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.”

Fight the heroic fight, be the honorable warrior. Die as a man, not live as a coward.

The switch between ethereal florid and straight lists is not exactly jarring, but necessary. All lists and they’re just what you see—all florid prose and it’s that embarassment he writes about. Need both sides.

A good-luck pebble is a good-luck marble is there’s no fuckin’ luck at all.

I hate Martha, too.

“He might just shrug and say, Carry on…”