Finished Business

A few days ago, I made a milestone achievement in my life. After over 200 hours of working relentlessly to attain absolutely every possible achievement, I fought and defeated the final boss of Final Fantasy XII, beating the game. I took it out of my PS3 with a sense of accomplishment. A story was written regarding my harrowing attempt to conquer the digital opponent, as chronicled here. Congratulations were issued by several people, who then wondered what my next move would be. I am currently exploring options.

If you don't know me, or are just unfamiliar with my modus operandi when it comes to video games, beating them is not something I typically do. Don't get me wrong; Super Mario Bros., Mega Man 3, Contra, all the big NES Classics are solidly in the "Beaten" file. While I may not have been as excited as this kid to receive a console, that Hanukkah in 1986 when the Nintendo from my grandparents arrived was a pretty special day. Well, special for my older brother, I'm not sure I even knew what video games were at that point, but that didn't stop me from reveling in his excitement before spending the next month or so diligently hammering away so that I could beat the first level of Super Mario. Almost two and half decades later, there are naturally a slew of games I've played through and beaten across nearly every console made since. Except Bayou Billy, but man, even Captain N couldn't beat that game, so screw it.

But the thing is, as long as the list of games I've beaten might be, the list of games left unfinished occupies much more room in my collection. It's not just that I haven't beaten them, though. This list includes games that require a time investment of 100 hours or more to get through in their entirety. I'm talking about games like Xenosaga, Harvest Moon, Dragon Quest VII, Final Fantasy IV, VI, and VIII, Robotrek, Breath of Fire III, Kingdom Hearts II, Valkyria Chronicles, and more - oh, so many more. These are games where I made it to the very end, sometimes right up to the final boss even, and then . . . I'd stop.

There's no real reason, no common unifying factor which dictates I stop playing. I make it all the way to the end and then just lose interest. A few days will be spent saying "man, I should really go back to that and beat it," and then I don't. So the games sit there, unfinished, added to a pile that I should totally really beat one day, you know, because I put so much time into it.

That's not the real issue. I could never beat another video game again and nobody would ever be affected. I could quit playing altogether and the only people who would care are GameStop employees whose Christmas bonuses I'd no longer be funding. Video games are the least important part of this story.

What's important is finishing things.

I've had an idea for a movie I want to write since like, forever. I've even started a few times. Then it's not perfect, so I quit. I actually did finish a script for a play and a different movie, and even submitted them a few places. Initial rejection told me they weren't perfect, so I forgot about them. I think that might be the cause of the end of many of my game-based endeavors. It's because I get so close to the end that I give up; I get hung up on the one or two things I have to do to make the game perfect and then the thought of the effort involved makes me walk away.

I don't want to become the kind of person who touts their personal laziness as a shield against putting effort into anything. You know the type - when asked why they don't take steps, regardless of how complex or simple they might be, they'll give a long-suffering sigh and reply "but I'm just too LAZY," or "it shouldn't have to BE that hard," as if that were a reasonable excuse against doing work. I don't want to be one of those people, but I am constantly afraid that I already am.

I should let you know right now that in the course of typing this post, I twice almost deleted everything because it wasn't just right. There was brief consideration of just giving up and putting up some kind of placeholder or promise for a better attempt next week. That's the kind of thinking I grapple with almost every time I undertake any sort of project. "This is not what I wanted, so I may as well just quit." And the truth is, up to this point in my life, I really haven't made a lot of progress.

But I'm trying.

I established The Backlog, my video game blog, specifically for the purpose of making myself go back and play through all my unfinished games. I've been working on a script for a video which has had its fair share of hurdles, and I continually contact my friends to try and get them involved in the project as well and make me keep moving forward on it. There's a story I've been writing for nearly four years now and I make everyone reading it give me feedback and their thoughts on good ideas for future chapters every time I can. I want to stay motivated. I want to just do something with all these ideas I have.

I had a recurring nightmare, or maybe more accurately a dreaded vision of the future when I was with my first serious girlfriend. She never really had much interest in my goals or ambitions in life, all she really cared about was that we were together. As long as we got married, she'd be happy; after all, she was smart and rich already, so why should I have to accomplish anything? And that was my fear; that I would grow old and my only accomplishment in life would be being her husband. I could not let that happen. We're not together anymore, but that doesn't keep that future from still coming to pass, just without the years of marriage. The only that that can stop it is if I make sure it doesn't happen by making something memorable out of my life.

The reason why beating Final Fantasy XII is important is that I didn't wait until I had everything perfect. I didn't give into the self-imposed pressure to spend unnecessary hours completing a project only I cared about just for the sake of doing it. I started a blog dedicated to writing about completing my unfinished games, and dammit, I have to deliver to my readers. So I put aside the excess and I just did it. That's what I'm aiming for in life. If I spend all my time worrying about whether or not something is just right to the point of not doing it, then I accomplish nothing. You can always improve upon something, but nothing can only be nothing.

So that's where I'm at. It's a process to be sure, and maybe video games aren't much of a start, but it is a start. The journey of a thousand miles and all that. Next I'm working on my writing. Then law school. I want to start a workout that I don't drift out of after six months. I want to fulfill my goals, and I want to do it well. And if it's not perfect the first time, I'll just keep trying.

Because I want to be something. And I refuse to be nothing.

Because if I live my life deciding that things just aren't worth putting effort into because they don't come easily enough, or they don't fit my ideal of how the outcome should be, then whatever blip I might have made on history's radar will disappear as if I'd accidentally said Candlejack, and nothing will be the only th

Peanut Relations Lead to Peanut Babies

When I was in the seventh grade, I lived in Atwater, California and I was required to take a quarter-long class called Teen Skills.   We learned about peer pressure I think, and drugs, and being awkward.  I remember specifically a story about a boy who tripped over his own damn feet in the middle of the quad and leaped up, raring to fight whoever tripped him, only to find out that puberty done it.  At the time I remember looking around my class as the teacher assured us that our horrible, life-ruining awkwardness would pass, and thinking, "We're not that awkward."

But this isn't about how I was blissfully unaware of our boy/girl height ratio, our pimples, our gangly limbs, despite my teacher's telling reassurances. This is about peanut babies, and I how I really didn't get that.

We had a project in which we had to choose one or two peanuts, draw some faces on them, and call them our children for a period of a week or so. This, I suppose, was meant to teach us how hard it is to have tiny edible children that do pretty much nothing, and thus deter us from the sexual activity that I didn't know we were having.

I had done this project once before, in the second grade, with a potato. I left it on the swing set in my backyard overnight once and was horrified when my mom informed me that if it was a real baby it would have died.  I do not know why this was a lesson I needed to learn in 2nd grade, except that it was Kentucky and I went to a Catholic school.

Regardless of the life lessons I may or may not have taken away from my time in Kentucky, we were doled out our peanut babies  and told it was our responsibility to keep them alive(?) and happy for the period of the project.  I named mine Sherloch and Zaidee and put them in a shoebox with most of the furniture from my dollhouse, and my friend Becky put hers in a Barbie convertible with a rubber dog.  Then Becky, envious of my sweet household arrangement, kidnapped my peanut babies and we spent the rest of the next period (Science? Literature? I clearly learned nothing in middle school) passing ransom notes back and forth and driving her Barbie car up and down the bars of our desks.

I said this isn't about awkwardness, and it isn't about the failure of the California school system to properly teach sex ed; it's about the fact that when I was in seventh grade, I was a child.   My barbies may have been awfully sexually active, but I was gripped in terror (and a little bit disgust) at the thought of kissing a boy.

I played house, I ran around outside, I ate my weight in donuts and pizza and never gained a pound.  I was still growing.  I had baby teeth. I was a kid.  I did not have sex.

I didn't think about sex as a thing that my friends or I should (or could) do; I didn't wonder about it, I didn't want it.  It didn't occur to me that people my age might be having it. But lo and behold, many years later, I learned that they did.  Kids I knew were having consensual sex with other kids I knew, gangly limbs, sparse pubic hair, mosquito-bite boobs and all, in the seventh and eighth grade.  Maybe I lived a charmed life, in which I was never pressured and didn't have close friends who were sexually active that young, but I still don't understand it.  Sex complicates things far more than necessary at any age, but at an age in which people are only just beginning to begin to learn about themselves, their beliefs, their feelings, their egos, and their bodies, I can't imagine the emotional consequences.  Also, OMG AWKWARD CITY.

I don't understand it, I doubt I will ever understand it, and that terrifies me in the event that my future child or student or Little Brother/Sister will decide to become sexually active as a pre- or early teenager.   I, having no experience and little empathy for this, would most likely freak out and do none of the things they tell you to do in order to be the kind of parent or parental figure your child feels comfortable approaching for help in situations just as this.

Children should be allowed, by their parents, by the media, by each other, to be children, and being an awkward, geeky, underdeveloped late bloomer saved me in that way.  I was impervious to the world because I lived in my own, and I didn't care (actually was a little proud, if I'm remembering right) that I was unpopular and had no dates to dances.   All children don't have that nerd shield, however, and I don't know how to deal with that.  It makes me a little sad, a lot confused, and very worried for kids everywhere.

Sex should just not be on the table if you are a child, physically or emotionally.  It should not be on the table if you are not ready, regardless of how old you are or the state of your virginity.  Teenage sex is so glorified in a way, in media and pop culture, sung about and acted out by people in their twenties.  But the reality of the situation, and the fragile, volatile state of pre-pubescent ids and egos, is so much more important to know, and teenagers don't have the presence of mind to think about it. I know, I was one. You were (are?), too.


The most important thing I learned from peanut babies was that I still had time to play; adult activities could wait. And they did. And I don't regret it, even a little bit.

Infinite Jest

After a month of reading I finished up Infinite Jest last week. There are a number of reasons people talk about the book, although the most often referenced is it's length - the books is almost 1100 pages long and the last 100 pages are endnotes that range from descriptions of drugs in the main text to extended conversations between main characters.

So yes its really long, but it was also the work of an incredibly intelligent but often troubled human trying to write a modern novel. Not the great American novel, per se, but something that speaks to end the 20th century. It's no coincidence that it's a novel centered around a deadly piece of video entertainment. This book was an attempt to speak to present and near future of the internal and external damage of American life. Placing the book in what was at the time the near future, (the years are now about concurrent with out time, the main year was either 2009 or maybe 2011) was a ballsy move. Not surprisingly, the technological predictions were going to be off, but the work has a boldness that defined what Wallace did in everything he wrote, both fiction and non-fiction.

The book's two main settings are a tennis academy and drug rehab house. And between these we get the two main drives of America: fame (all the academy kids refer to going pro as "The Show") and for excess. But this is not a novel with a simple narrative arc of a person's rise and fall. It's an odd and moving book that wears it's weirdness proudly. There are wheelchair bound Quebecois terrorists, a disturbing string of pet murders, a teenager memorizing the Oxford English Dictionary and Subsidized Time, brought about by a crazy OCD president whose platform for running is Howard Hughes-ian in it's craziness.

Why read this? I'm going to put it boldly - if you've watched The Wire and are looking for the next great piece of art of our times, this is it. It's as immense and sad and beautiful, even thought it's nothing at all like the Wire. But it's a journey worth taking.

Get Healthy for the Future!

An experiment: a soundtrack for this blog post. Go here and listen to that in the background while reading! (There's no video to speak of, so don't feel you're missing anything while not watching.) It's THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE.

Speaking of the future...

I had a thought the other day while riding my bike for some much-needed get-out-of-the-house exercise. It's often said that our technological innovation increases at an accelerating rate. It's not a great leap to believe that within this century, we will see at least a few of the most mind-boggling amazing technologies from science-fiction and futurist prediction:

Space tourism, nanomachines (good ol' nanomachines), AI, teledildonics and giant mind-controlled mechas, virtual reality, mood organs, or, most relevantly to this post, curing aging.

So I thought:
Wouldn't it suck something awful if I got old, decrepit or died before these technologies were achieved?

We (I assume most readers are of my generation) may just be living at just about the cusp. There's no way to tell, of course, but it's entirely possible that these technologies - particularly ones that halt, cure or reverse aging and damage to the body - will be invented and implemented just in time for us to be too damn old to get any benefit from them.

I know I would be damn upset if, when I'm 60, space travel suddenly becomes as affordable and accessible to the average person as a trip to Six Flags... and I can't pass the physical. Meanwhile, folks just ten years younger than me - or folks who are my age or older, but in better health - can not only pass the physical and make the trip, but, thanks to medical improvements, will be able to remain in that state of health for decades and decades, taking weekly trips to Freeside space station to play zero-G hoopball with sexy robots.

So, methought... I better get healthy for the future!

The tricky thing about living when we live now is that people living in the time periods before and after us might be said to have good reason to treat their bodies poorly when they are young. The generations before us could argue that it was better to enjoy your body while you were young - rough it up with sex, drugs, loud music, tattoos and piercings, sports, junk food, weekend-long gaming sessions, etc. - than to be all prim and proper and careful with it, only to find out you'd gotten old anyways and your youth was wasted.

And the generations ahead of us might have the medical technology (easy body repair, mind-body uploading, nanobiomachinermagimechanicals, whatever) to abuse their bodies as badly as they wish, because the damage isn't irreversible.

But we, living now, may just have incentive to really do our bodies good so that we can preserve them until technology allows us to be more reckless.

The tricky thing, again, is that, barring a highly unlikely major breakthrough in the next couple years, we won't know until it's too late to change strategies.

Of course, I'm presenting a false dilemma here. It's not like it's not possible to enjoy yourself, party hearty and often, and still, as is preferred in our culture, keep in good health and keep your body looking good (the incentive being sexual appeal instead of personal health). The question is whether it's worth it to, I don't know, expend the effort to become a strict vegetarian gym-rat Zen monk marathon-runner on the off-chance that, when you turn 63, you'll be able to laugh in the faces of your run-down peers as your still-lithe body is now ready for decades upon decades of life-extended sex, drugs and space-adventuring.

I don't want to go on too long, particularly with all those links, and risk your awesomely retro Kraftwerk awesomeness background track run out, so I'll end somewhat abruptly here, by turning it over to you, Dear Reader, by asking you one question:

When you go about trying to improve your health (exercising, dieting, making New Year's Resolutions), are you doing it more so you can be fit and good-looking for Right Now, or are you doing it so you can be hale and hearty in Your Future?

We Might Post about The Facebook Too Much

I'm pretty sure everyone gets anxious. It's just a fact of life. But because of the glut of social media that connects us these days, I get anxious about some really stupid things. The stupidest of which is birthdays.

And it's all thanks to you, facebook.

It used to be that I had a few very good friends whose birthdays I was expected to remember. And my family members' birthdays, of course. But even that usually involved writing things on a calendar as a reminder. And that made it all the more special when someone with whom I wasn't particularly close remembered to call me on my birthday (Thanks, Dan Schwartz!) or vice versa.

But now we have facebook. And every day, at least two people pop up on the side of my profile, reminding me that their very special day is today and if I were really their friend, I'd be acknowledging it. Sometimes it's as many as 6 or 7 people. And sometimes I just forget to check that little side bar, so I won't know to send a happy birthday wall post. Or I'll be reminded that a dear friend has a birthday because everyone and their mother (often literally, these days) has shown up on my newsfeed wishing them a happy birthday, but then I don't want to seem like I only jumped on the happy birthday bandwagon because everybody else reminded me, so I'll wait to post MY happy birthday wish later, as though I'm only just now getting on facebook for the first time that day and OF COURSE I knew it was your birthday but then sometimes I forget to go back and then it's the next day and everyone else has shown me up and now it's NEW people's birthdays but what if I wish them a happy birthday and it shows up on your newsfeed and you get offended that I wished someone else a happy birthday today but didn'twishyouahappybirthdayyesterdayandthen ALL MY FRIENDSHIPS AS I KNOW THEM WOULD IMPLODE.

While taking the FacebookBus to Crazytown, I passed this cozy little cul-de-sac!

So I've just stopped wishing people happy birthday on facebook. I'm sure I'll pick it back up again when I realize that my fears are TOTALLY INSANE.

Disillusioned

I wrote this post three times and deleted all three drafts.

Each one was radically different than the others, despite trying to say the same thing each time. Each time I looked at it and said to myself "wow, this is straying really far from my original point."

Because my point, the only point I want to make, is that I used to believe in John McCain and now I don't. Up until this point I've ignored or excused his erratic behavior, but I've hit my limit of what I can tolerate. He's not a good man, he's not a good public servant, and he's not the person I thought he was.

The breaking point was, of course, McCain's continued filibuster of the move to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Because when you see on a hiring line that the government enforces a policy of non-discrimination regardless of race, gender, ethnic origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, physical disability, or age, they're holding that standard to everybody but themselves. You can't serve in the military and be openly gay. I had really hoped McCain was above this. It turns out he is far below.

Looking back on it, I've probably been fooled by the man's persona for a long time. Like many, I believed he took a strong stance against the things he believed to be morally wrong without caring about the consequences to his career. After all, he sponsored McCain-Feingold, which went against the conservative grain and tried to reform campaign finance. He's come out time and again stating that he believes in climate change and our need to combat it. He voted against the Bush tax cuts which squandered the Clinton-era surplus long before the war ever started. I really thought we had a guy here we could count on. I thought, given the chance, this guy would honestly change things.

If I had been paying better attention, I probably would have realized that he was more than a little duplicitous when he stuck so strongly by President Bush's side despite the fact that during the 2000 primaries, Bush was totally a dick.

I mean, seriously.

I might have thought more about it when Bush decided in 2006 that while signing McCain's bill on torture, he'd decide personally what did and didn't constitute torture and McCain didn't raise a word of protest. It might have stuck out a little more when he voted against a bill which would ban same-sex marriages in 2005, and then had on his website in 2008 that he believed marriage was only between a man and a woman and would appoint judges who felt the same if elected. If I hadn't been so taken with the idea that this guy was a reformer, a real, honest-to-God bi-partisan centrist who was concerned with doing what's right instead of what's easy or good for his career, I might have found it more than a little strange when he marched down the streets in Iraq and proclaimed them "safe," neglecting to mention that he was with an escort of over 100 U.S. soldiers at the time.

But it's hard. This man was my hero.

I don't have a lot of male role models in my life. Up until I was 16, if I needed guidance on what kind of man I wanted to grow up to be, I had to look either to my Uncle or Spider-Man. In 1999, the only thing I knew about politics was that Clinton was leaving office after giving America a lot of money and new definitions for "sex" and "is." Then John McCain shows up and wants to be President, and it seems to me for all the right reasons. Bush to me had the charisma of a goal post, which made him roughly twice as charismatic as Al Gore. I didn't care about them - I wanted this guy. He was passionate, driven; he really wanted to speak to my generation and make sure America, and its government, kept working for us.

In 2004, John McCain said this during an interview with MTV regarding Don't Ask, Don't Tell:

"There's many of us who are not comfortable with this issue, and I'm one of them. Primarily because I hate to see legislation and government involved in people's lives. ... But society is changing. We now have a don't-ask-don't-tell policy in the military. When I first came into the military, that would never have been possible. Society is evolving. Whether it's evolving for better or for worse, I'll let someone else make that judgment."

This gave me hope. Because when you're a public official, you don't have to like a policy - in fact, I'd say it's not part of your job to agree with everything sent your way. You just have to assess if it is what the people want. Vocal opponents of Don't Ask, Don't Tell would probably jump on McCain for not condemning the policy outright with this statement, but you know what? He shouldn't have to. What he's saying here is regardless of how he feels, society is changing and, whether he thinks it's right or wrong, it's his job to serve the American people, and the majority of Americans are against the policy.

So even as an old man, presumably set in his ways, he was not going to use his position to exert his wishes over those of the American people.

And now he filibusters the vote to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He filibusters not because he's trying to support the troops, since there are obviously tens of thousands of armed servicemen and women he's distinctly not supporting. Not because he thinks it's the will of the American people, they've clearly spoken out in favor of repeal. He's doing it because his Senate seat is up for grabs and he wants to make sure he earns the Republican nomination, so he's sticking up hard for the party line.

In 2008, when John McCain had a chance at becoming the President, I stood behind him. I believed in him, and whenever anyone pointed out his dramatic shift in tone, I brushed it off. "He's just pandering to the conservative base so that he'll get elected," I would tell them. "Once he gets into office he'll go back to his old self." Even though he lost, largely, in my mind, due to his choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate, his concession speech seemed to confirm everything I thought. Obama won, he lost, now it was his job to help the President any way he could, because that was the will of the people.

I was wrong.

The reason I deleted my other drafts is that I spent so much time trying to dig up all the good McCain had done that I meandered completely away from the point. I did this because I wanted to balance what I was saying with examples of how he was a great guy before. But his filibuster finally makes me wonder if that was ever really the case.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell violates the first and fifth amendments of our Constitution. And remember, this is a step forward from pre-Clinton years; Reagan described homosexuality and military service as "incompatible." Why would anyone stand up in support of violating an American's rights, especially a member of our military? Why would anyone stand up to prevent such a violation from being repealed? And asking those questions inevitably leads me to more questions.

Why would McCain suddenly support a fence along the border, blaming illegal immigrants for home invasions and murders? This completely reverses years of opposition to rhetoric which blames immigrants for our problems.

Why would McCain not make a comprehensive statement on his plans to protect Social Security during his 2008 campaign, when he did during 2000?

Why would McCain support an anti-abortion agenda, and then vote No on a bill which would have given $100 million to reduce teen pregnancies through education and contraceptives in 2005?

Why would McCain attack a plan to cut Medicare and Medicaid spending by $491 billion in 2009 when his own 2008 campaign ran on a platform which would have cut over $1.3 trillion?

Why would he pledge to vote "No" on Obama's stimulus plan unless the tax cuts from the Bush era were made permanent - the same cuts he voted against in 2000?

Why would McCain emphasize so strongly his desire to work with the President, support the President, and help make America stronger with the President, healing the red/blue divide in this country, only to become his most vocal critic and opponent?

Because . . .

Because he's not a hero.

He's not an arbiter of change.

He's just a politician, doing what politicians do. Trying to appeal to his base of solid voters to make sure he keeps his job for a few more years. And now that is actively hurting the troops he's claimed to support so actively all this time.

And I have to ask myself, in the midst of all this, what if it was unpopular amongst McCain's base to be Jewish? What if they demanded Jews not be allowed to serve openly in the military? Would McCain stand in front of Congress and say that it's for the good of the troops that no one who's Jewish be allowed to observe while in the armed forces? If that was the party line being taken, would I watch John McCain on the Senate floor filibustering an attempt to enforce the first amendment?

Like he's doing right now?

And in answer, yeah, I probably would, because there's no reason to think McCain would be any different in anti-Semitic America than he is in homophobic America.

I thank John McCain for his years of service to this country during Vietnam. That is where my gratitude for his work ends. Because now I can't tell if all the work he did in the Senate was legitimately for the good of this nation or just the good of himself. Shame on you, McCain, for failing to support our troops in favor of supporting yourself. Shame on you, McCain, for choosing to oppose the rights of Americans because your Senate race was a little tougher than usual this year. Shame on you, John McCain, for costing me my role model.

I wanted to be just like John McCain. I wanted to stand in front of Congress and demand we do the right thing. I wanted to be this dynamic persona who reached across party lines when he needed to because as much as he believed in his own convictions, he believed in helping America more. I wanted to be the one who changed things, who made a difference, who never backed down from what was right even if being pushed down upon by a sea of wrong.

So thank you, John McCain. Because I've decided I still will be. I'll be everything you pretended to be, everything you are not.

And one day in the future, when some young boy or girl looks to our government for a hero, I will not let them down.

Makes Up For It, I Think

I am exhausted, and sick, and went home early from work today. My brain is a sloppy bowl of mush that is beginning to harden around the edges from being left out too long, and thus I have no words for you this week, our darling readers.  I do, however, have a picture for you.  And you will thank me. Because WTF.

picture courtesy of photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com 

Father: Honey, the operation was a success! You have a brand new working leg! Unfortunately, it's still attached to me, and they had to put your right foot on your left leg. And someone else's foot is attached to our shared leg. And my other leg is now a coat.  But we'll do just fine!

Daughter: Hooray! Let's get some ice cream!

Father: If only we could figure out a way to get off this table...