Sep. 29 - My School's Newspaper Blows Ass
It's no secret that Trinity's school paper, The Trinitonian, has always sucked. But this year, it's gotten even suckier.
Its layout is an eyesore, its opinion writers are talentless narcissistic hacks, its editors couldn't find a sentence fragment if it were rolled into a bullet and shot into their eye, and its reporters make numerous errors, from simple name misspellings to to a comprehensive misunderstanding of what it means to be a journalist, writer, English speaker, or well-rounded human being.
This week's issue put me over the edge. Not only did they interview me for Bad Movie Club and not print it, but they miscaptioned a picture I was in, insulting me and the person they cropped out.
Rather than firebomb their office, which would waste valuable fuels and destroy University property, I spent my Friday afternoon making a satire of the paper. Hopefully you'll get a laugh, as I'm sure this kind of journalism is indicative of numerous college campuses (except yours, Emily. You da bomb).
Click on the image to embiggen it.
Sep. 16 - For the Love of Mjolnir...
I haven't posted anything in a while, and I got really bored while reading Neitzsche...so...now you have to look at my cruddy mouse-drawings in ye olde photoshoppe.
-G
Sep. 11 - A real second opinion about BioShock
BioShock is not that good. Don't get me wrong, it's a good game, but it's not THAT good. You can read plenty of reviews extolling the game's virtues. The virtues of great art direction, engrossing environment design, engaging story, and all-around fantastic production values are accurately reported and I agree heartily that they denote a top-notch game. The game is also of an enjoyable length and even though some of the story extensions are a bit contrived they are still entertaining and provide more depth to a history that you never get tired of exploring. Probably because it really feels like you are exploring. It is a wonderfully constructed world. My highest praise of the game is this: in my opinion BioShock has the best opening of any game I have played. I'm not going to define "best" but after I experience my introduction to Rapture, city of free men, I knew it was the best. So, maybe it's like porn. The intro to BioShock is like porn.
However, like porn, with its bawdy and clever titles and enticing women adorning the cover, your expectations are inevitably crushed and you just end up feeling a little empty inside. OK, maybe that's some commentary best saved for another time, but, anyway, the gameplay in BioShock is disappointing. But it's an RPG and a shooter, right? Shouldn't that be awesome? Well, the RPG elements are diluted by crappy character upgrades that don't really develop your character. A lot of the upgrades revolve around hacking. Hacking is accomplished through a mini-game where you have to control the flow of conductor fluid through a circuit by arranging pipe pieces. Personally, it got tedious after a while. But just because I didn't want to go through the procedure of hacking didn't mean that I had to give up its benefits. Auto-hack tools are easy to create (you can even use an auto-hack tool on the machine that makes auto-hack tools to make them cheaper). This is a symptom of the larger problem that you can't create a unique character. You don't have to sacrifice one thing to gain another. Every character can use every weapon and every genetic superpower. To me, this is a detractor. Let's say, very hypothetically, that I like to set people on fire. The power "Ignite" would be right up my alley. BioShock neither rewards nor punishes me for liking this power. It neither opens nor closes any doors for character development and the only thing I need to do in order to upgrade to Ignite II is to find the machine that sells it. Sure you have to decide what to spend your upgrade points on, but the dearth of good new abilities makes character development rather linear. I found the most exciting upgrade was increasing my health. Lame!
Well, it's still a shooter, right? What about that? The shooter part is ruined because you cannot die. Every area has Vita-Chambers sprinkled about (rather generously) that respawn you whenever you die. You never run out of respawns and you don't even have to activate the chambers before you can use them. Occasionally I died and was transported forward in the level because the nearest Vita-Chamber was actually in front of me. It's also sometimes advantageous to die when you have low health because you respawn partially healed. This takes the urgency right out of combat. Should I use a health pack? Who cares? I can just die and come back for free. Weapon upgrade stations are also free (though you can only use them once) and after the first few you don't really care what you upgrade.
Big Daddies are scary until you realize that death is only a minor inconvenience.
To me, this boils down to BioShock being a one-shot game. After I played it and experienced it once I have yet to have the desire to play it anymore. Yes, I concentrated on the bad things in this review, but only because they're the things no one else is saying and I think they're worth saying. The good things about BioShock make it a good game, and a game worth experiencing. The bad things about BioShock keep it from being a great game. Instead of these 9/10 or 10/10 reviews it is getting, I think it deserves an 8 or a 7. Wait until the price comes down ten or twenty dollars and then pick it up.
It's a great ride and a good experience, there's not much to make you want to get on again.
Another reason why I wrote this review is because I hate GameInformer magazine. Its reviews are worthless pieces of industry-promoting trash. I get it for free with my GameStop discount card and I still think it's crap. Most reviews have a "second opinion" mini-review that rarely differs by more than a half a point from the original review score. They gave BioShock two tens. There is no way for them to rate a game higher than that. No game will be rated higher than BioShock. Ever. If I could somehow buy a publication that takes money away from them, I would. I cannot trust published console gaming magazines. It's too easy for them to be infiltrated or blinded or both.
Sep. 9 - What'll They Think Up Text?
At the risk of decimating my street cred, I'd like to reveal to the world that I, in fact, text message. A lot. Not at competitive levels mind you, but way more than a straight 21 year-old male (who doesn't even own an iPod) should. Not only that, but I'm good at it. With the help of the underused T9 feature, I'm able to compose entire, properly constructed sentences complete with clauses, capitalization, and punctuation.
I didn't start texting until the recent past, but once I discovered its usefulness, there was no stopping me. Combining the mobility of a cell phone with the impersonality of an instant message, texting allows me to directly contact anyone I want without actually talking to them.
Most would cite numerous locales in which this would be useful--classrooms, movie theaters, funerals, bar mitzvahs, brothels, deaf schools--but to do so is missing the point entirely. No, what texting did was transform the way we communicate. With a telephone call, the experience is engaging, time-consuming and, unfortunately, personal. AIM is almost just as bad; online contact runs the risk of instigating an actual conversation.
With the advent of instantaneous forms of innocuous communication, our globalized society has turned into a constant stream of one-liners and non sequiturs. Need a four second David Caruso fix? YouTube can help you with that. Need to know how your Apple stock is doing (I'll give you a hint: very well)? Scan CNN's stock ticker while you simultaneously watch Lindsay Lohan ruin her life. Need to know what your friend is doing RIGHT NOW without actually talking to him? That's what texting is for! Take a look at this one I composed the other night:
From: Nick
Sept 7, 8:57 pm
What you up to?
Or watch as I respond to something I find amusing:
From: Nick
Sept 8, 7:38 pm
Ha ha.
And finally, an engaging micro-anecdote gains my approval:
From: Nick
Sept 8, 8:03 pm
Tight.
See how easy it is? The great thing about texting is that I may not care in the slightest what you up to. I may not actually think your previous text is funny. I may find your anecdote to be rather loose. But the recipient doesn't know that. I don't need to force my vocal inflection into any kind of faux-sincere tone. On top of that, once I've expressed my opinion (real or not), I can close the phone and be on my way. Those Futurama episodes aren't going to watch themselves, you know.
There are those who tell me that there was a time before texting even existed. Some call it "the 90s" or even, if you really want to get prehistoric, "the 80s." I simply refer to this time (roughly before 2002) as B.T., or "Before Text." During the B.T. years, if you wanted to instantly contact someone, you had to actually talk to them. I'm told telephones were attached to the wall, making them useless for those not immobilized by polio or morbid obesity. It's hard to imagine this level of intimacy, so I retain a theory that the especially clever constructed an elaborate mobile communication system involving Post-It notes and small rodents (or flightless birds, as the case may be).
I've heard rumors that there was even a time, roughly around 200 B.T., when people didn't even have phones to communicate! I prefer to ignore this frightening Dark Age and look to the future. I'll leave you with this final text that I sent not once, but twice in the same day:
From: Nick
Sept 7, 1:21 pm
K.
