February 2012

This week, our assignment was to watch the two episodes “The Cure” and “In Which We Meet Mr. Jones” from Season One of Fringe. (You can read the Television Without Pity Recaps here and here, while the AV Club has their recaps of the episodes here and here. The post dedicated to the Pilot episode is here and the subsequent episode posts are here and here.)

As always, here are the ground rules: nothing that we have seen so far is considered a spoiler, anything that we have not yet seen should be considered a spoiler. Crazy nutbar speculation is *NOT* a spoiler, but confirming or denying said confirmation would be.

Here’s my idea for spoilers: please rot13 them. That’s a simple encryption that will allow the folks who want to avoid spoilers to avoid them and allow the people who want to argue them to argue them. We good? We good! Everybody who has seen the two episodes, see you after the cut!

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The demo for Mass Effect 3 came out on Valentine’s Day.

In the ancient times, this would have been known as “a test”. Thankfully, everyone in our household was sick and, as such, the Valentine’s Day can was kicked down the road a ways (next weekend). This allowed me to play the demo and get back into the idea of Shepard.

Now, if you haven’t played Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2 (wait for the Game of the Year edition, though), you should. You remember Sturgeon’s Revelation, right? Ninety percent of everything is crap. Well, these games are an exception. You could change Sturgeon so that he said ninety-nine percent and these games are *STILL* an exception.

However, they take, like, sixty hours to play the first time and if you don’t like shooting games then you won’t like these even if you’re a big fan of sci-fi and, as such, you should know that you can skip the experience of playing the games and get the major plot points of the games and, yes, The Demo after the cut. (Repeat: Major spoilers for the first game and Middlin’ spoilers for the second and details from the dinky pieces of story the demo gives us after the cut.)

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Apart from keeping up with the bookclub (and sneaking ahead on my own… HOLY COW I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW AWESOME SEASON THREE IS) and bugging Maribou about Season 2 (she watched White Tulip yesterday, you see), I haven’t had much time to do any watching (well, without spoiling anything) or reading much of anything. Enough about me.

So… what are you reading and/or watching?

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Well, it’s been a year. The first post was on February 25th, 2011.

Here we are a year later.

I’ll talk a bit about what I intended, what I think worked, what I think didn’t, and wonder aloud what needs to change to make this place better.

The main thing that I wanted to do was create a place that was, if limited to one word, “comfortable”. I liked the idea of the same thing happening every week, week after week. I still very much like the idea of big essays on Monday, music on Wednesday, commercials on Saturday. It feels like the internet version of a hoodie taken right out of the dryer. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)

I am also still tickled by the “one word title” thing. Probably much more than I ought to be… but I am.

Since we started, I’ve added the whole “asking about the weekend” thing on Fridays (and dropped the Friday night bottle of wine thing) and am reconsidering the whole “recommendation on Tuesday” thing given that it’s so very close to Monday’s big essays (and the background for most recommendations require an essay about the size of a Monday essay)… and so I may move recommendations to Thursdays. We’ve also started the Bookclub (which, at this point, I consider a rousing success) and, after that, maybe we could do a bookclub with an actual book, maybe. (We’ll see, of course. No hurry. No pressure.)

The stuff that didn’t work, I find, is discussions of various movies. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t talk about them the way that I would *WANT* to talk about them. (Some paralysis may come from the fact that one of the first movies I’d want to post about and dissect would be Fight Club.) I wrote an essay about Captain America, for example, but it was *WAY* political. I rewrote it to take the worst of the politics out, and it became an essay that merely complained for four paragraphs. “Why would someone want to read four paragraphs of you complaining?”, I asked myself and then deleted it. Talking about some of my favorite movies from the past would involve stuff like Religion (Fearless… the Jeff Bridges movie, not the Jet Li movie), Politics (Fearless, the Jet Li movie, not the Jeff Bridges movie), or Philosophy (Fearless, the Taylor Swift album… no, I’m just kidding, The Fisher King). (Now, yeah, I know that Philosophy is one of the main subjects always bubbling under the surface for anything we talk about… at the very least aesthetics.)

Which brings me to the Philosophy of the blog in general… the “no politics, no religion, no philosophy” thing was intended to actually open up conversations… allowing people who may have seen themselves as enemies in the one place come here and, I dunno, maybe see that they’re just rivals or something. I don’t know how successful it’s been at that. It feels like it’s been more successful at getting people not talking than at getting them talking. (Then again, maybe it’s monumental hubris in the first place to even make the attempt.) So part of me wonders if we shouldn’t lighten that part up… I mean, we can’t talk about Captain America without talking about what happened in WWII and what national narratives mean (part of my essay talked about what a movie from 2070 that took place around 9/11 might look like). Is it better to just not talk about Captain America at all? Well, that’s what I did… and I don’t know if that was the right response.

In any case, I couldn’t possibly be happier about the last year and couldn’t be more excited about the year to come.

Not that I have any big plans, or anything. (Maybe I’ll move recommendations to Thursday or something.)

Thank all of you all for coming along for the ride. (Write a guest post!)

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So… what are you playing?

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One thing that is probably an essay in itself is how the whole “Great Man” theory of history has had an impact upon video games (I mean, has there ever been a single-player RPG that didn’t have this as its foundational assumption?) but it’s interesting to see how some games tweak this theory here or there.

Drox Operative is a game where you play the role of a mercenary captain in the middle of a war… as opposed to one of the leaders of one of the races hoping to win it. So, yeah, it’s still pretty much going to assume that the fate of the galaxy is in your hands. That said, I think that Masters of Orion from the perspective of an operative (as the guy in this gameshark interview compares the game to) sounds pretty sweet.

That’s one I’m looking forward to.

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I’m beginning to wonder if maybe the opening line to this post shouldn’t be set to “Holy crap, tomorrow is Friday?”

Then the second line could be set to “indeed it is.”

Though, honestly, there are some weeks where it takes *FOREVER* for Friday to get here and that wouldn’t be appropriate for those weeks… however, I have not seen one of those weeks for a good, long time and have instead been peppered with weeks that just fly past like nutzo. Which, I suppose, is preferable all things considered.

Anyhoo, there is a thing at a local watering hole (one within walking distance) tomorrow night, there is gaming on Saturday (we continue our adventures in Vornheim, and Sunday will be devoted to *LAUNDRY*.

So… what’s on your docket?

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Okay. We’ve watched the first five episodes of Fringe.

We unanimously agreed that two episodes per week is “just right” until we GO NUTS BECAUSE OH MY GOD DID YOU SEE THAT but that hasn’t happened yet and so we are still at two.

Anyway, the two this week are “The Cure” in which it’s Olivia’s birthday and “In Which We Meet Mr. Jones” in which we meet Mr. Jones.

(As always, if you want to discuss spoilers, please rot13.)

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