Kaz

Some time in the very near future I will watch a movie. Breaking the streak of movie viewing failure I’ve managed since seeing Will Smith’s rendition of I Am Legend. Which is not so much a reflection of that movie’s quality as my apathy towards movies as of late.

As my free time becomes more limited I find myself culling out activities based on their cost versus their value. Actually, I don’t think the amount of free time I have is changing all that dramatically, so much as the value of my free time is increasing. I think I’m hitting the point where I am beginning to realize just how daunting the real word is. How the promise of week after week of monotonous work will drown out the rest of my life. Until I pray for the day retirement takes the last breath of my usefulness to society, or death takes it’s icy hold, whichever comes first.

So, with this cosmic view of life, it’s easy to see how wasteful it is to spend fractions of the few cosmic seconds we have left on a non-interactive experience that gives me very little in return. It is also easy to see how this describes 99% of all television programing and films.

I cannot tell you how irritated I can get over a news story on cable TV, especially because I can’t let the people on the show hear my voice. Growing up in an age of increasingly fast interpersonal communication makes watching regular programming feel somehow un-whole. I’m so used to being able to share my view with everyone on the planet at once via Internet message boards and forums that I feel emotionally stunted when I watch regular programing.

What’s the point of watching a debate when you don’t care what each panelist thinks. Watching a debate makes sense when trying to decide between political candidates (although this, too, feels futile sometimes).

Is this why I can’t watch movies anymore? I can’t have any input?

It seems like a poor excuse; but I feel disillusioned with the whole movie-going experience. Especially at nine bucks a pop.

I’ve felt this before, specifically with the music industry. There was a time a couple years back where I felt like there was no new music coming out, nothing of any value at least, and this may have been true at the time. There was always classic music to delve into, though.

I did this with reckless abandon and listening to a lot of older music that I hadn’t done my entire life seems to spark an interest in music for me. To that end, I’m going to try and jump-start my appreciation for movies by revisiting some classics I may have missed and going back to some older movies that I would never have thought to watch. Luckily for me, I know plenty of movie aficionados who can readily recommend a plethora of good films.

But I’m probably going to need Netflix.

Crap.

I’ll start by finishing the Bourne trilogy, since I conveniently own the third one. How anticlimactic.

Moving is the worst. Plain and simple.

It has been nearly two weeks since I finally retrieved all of my belongings from my parent’s house and I feel no closer to being settled.  In addition to my accommodations being a mess, my utilities still aren’t setup correctly. I haven’t figured out the correct voodoo I have to perform to get my radiators to hit the right temperature without hissing like a banshee all night. And Time Warner is no closer to bringing me the damned DVR that I order 4 weeks ago.

At least I have the interwebs, there’s that. I suppose.

The primary reason my apartment is in such disarray is the same reason I can even have the apartment in the first place: my job. You don’t know the meaning of pain until you work serious overtime and don’t get paid for it (salaried isn’t as great as it’s cracked up to be kids). However, I think I’ll feel a lot better once I can get into a better rhythm with my work schedule.

On the bright side winter has finally settled in Cleveland. Not that I’m particularly enamoured with fighting through snowy traffic, although I am enamoured with snow. Or that I have fallen in love with temperatures that result in conditions that can only be described by the term “shrinky dink“. But at least the bitter cold is finally accompanied by a thin white layer over everything outside my window. Cold without snow seems, weird.

On the dark side of things there has been some talk that rekindles my ire. Some of which pisses me off. We go into the latter of these links in some depth in the newest episode; which will come out by Wednesday. But the thing that I can’t get irritated over is the one that should irk me.

This blog post by 1up’s Sam Kennedy goes into more depth than I have seen so far in covering the aspects of the story. But I’m not incensed over it like I was back when the story originally broke. Just like the boxes stacked in my dinning room, the whole incident has so much baggage that I’d rather not open it up for fear of being stuck in the shit forever.

If you frequent gaming news sites or message boards of any nature you’ve likely already seen the news of Soul Calibur IV’s special characters.

And you couldn’t be more… (a. Happy; b. Angry)

Apparently, you have to choose one or your opinion doesn’t count. I’m surprised by how divisive the addition of two belovedcharacters can be. On the message boards out there there are two acceptable reactions: elation or douchebagism.

And the conversation hasn’t even turned to console fanboyism yet. I can’t wait until that happens. I can already picture the ridiculous lengths fanboys will go to in deriving reasons why their version and character is better than the other’s. (Although picture Joe McHaloGearsOfWar defending how cool Yoda is when his preferred protagonist is masked badass Master Chief or the armored-sequoia-voiced-by-Bender that is Marcus Fenix)

I’m totally thrilled with their addition, and seeing as Yun-Seong (Yunsung in SCII) already had a weapon that was essentially a lightsaber as an alternate I’m not to terrible torn up over the fact that a katana can block a ligtsaber. Although I will be interested to see how they make Vader fight, in the original trilogy he fights like an ogre. I’m sure they’ll end up using fighting similar to how Anakin fought in Episode III, but here’s to hoping you can force throw random stuff at your opponent.

In actuallity this whole setup was to ask an almost unrelated question: why do people make and hold themselves to random allegiances to products?

This really only occurs on message boards, where anonymity leads to making baseless statements of little factual value.

I’m always disappointed when I visit a well populated message board. only to find that all of the topics degenerate after 2 pages into an argument over which system is the best. Is it so hard to discuss games without getting into a console fanboy argument. The only reasonable explanation is that there is a certain percentage of the population that goes online only to annoy others.

On almost every message board there is a group of people who post in threads expressly to derail them. They can turn a thread about Bioshock into a console war. Bioshock is only on one console; why are they talking about console wars!?!

The one thing I would love to keep on our message boards as we move forward and welcome more people into our community is this: the world of gaming doesn’t have to be binary, there can be gradients of opinions. Even though we are inclined to talk only in hyperbole there can be more than two sides to an issue. We should never let ourselves slip into the “Best ___ Ever!” or “Worst ____ Ever!” mentality.

Except about FF7. There are only two opinions of that game.

Since moving into my new apartment things have been a mess.

I refused to rent a U-Haul like I had promised myself I would do after the last time I moved myself in 42 trips with my family’s minivan. Somehow I thought that moving in stages would make my life better. It doesn’t.

Now I’ve managed to move in the basics of survival: a bed, some clothes, a dresser and basic furniture. I’m capable of going to work, sleeping and eating. Seems complete, no?

Except I’m missing the one basic survival tool that all engineers require: the interwebs. Due to no fault of my own, Time Warner (send hatemail here) has decided that I am unworthy to receive their Digital Cable and Internet before the 12th of January. What do people do when there is no internet?

If their like me they mostly crawl into a dark corner of their apartment and sob.

What I’ve found, however, is that most people are not like me. Instead, they find means of entertaining themselves that don’t require electricity or the internet.

Does that thought give you shivers too?

I’ve found myself able to entertain myself with the following activities in lieu of having my tube connected to the greater series of tubes:

• Check my DS and Laptop for an unsecured wireless access point in my building.
• Give up on stealing internets from the neighbors and playing Planet Puzzle League.
• Unpack the 2 foot thick layer of crap in my dining room.
• Recheck the area for unsecured wireless.
• Cry.
• Play with the disturbing collection of Nerf armaments I’ve amassed.
• Visit people under the pretense of friendship but with the underlying motive of checking email.
• Remember why broadcast TV is irritating (That’s not interpretive dance that’s me trying to situate myself so that I don’t interfere with reception my antennae are getting).