My American Literature course (pre-Civil War) is a solid class, but in terms of reading material, it’s a little bitter, like a disproportionate part of vodka in your drink. I signed up to major in English for the purpose of reading stories. The course so far has given my 90% of anything but. This isn’t anybody’s fault, really. Puritan peeps just didn’t write a whole lot of fiction back then. Lies and damn lies, you see.
Anywho, we’re on to Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and nobody told me this man was a philosopher (as well as a poet) with a tree-hugging bent (I’d rather hug people and sleep under trees, but there you go). Midway through reading his work Nature I realized that philosophy was indeed what blotted the white out of these thin pages, and everything promptly stopped making sense. Philosophy is the discipline that has the potential to create nations (i.e., ours) and influence great minds, but every now and again it just seems like people are thinking too hard. I like to think (ignorantly, probably) that we could have stopped at Aristotle and the world would still be in one piece. I put up with philosophy because it makes a good companion discipline to theology, which… isn’t exactly doctor’s office reading either, but I hoping that sticking to C.S. Lewis, Scott Hahn, and John Paul the Awesome Great will be enough to get me though a post-college life. I guess the Bible would work, too. I hear that’s a fan favorite.
I played the demo for Wanted: Weapons of Fate on Tuesday. Games based on movies (commonly known as “licensed” material) are always a gamble, and the odds are never in their favor. As it happened, Wanted rolled some snake eyes too.
Tell me this: when you’re meeting someone for the first time, say, someone who may give you money in the event of a good impression, you want to make sure you give the best darn impression possible, right? Wanted’s tutorial levels begin with a hazy image and a well-acted voiceover of the player character, who promptly derides me for playing the game and getting fat (Thanks. I’m still a 30-32 waist, bee-yotch), but through playing more and getting fatter we can enter a world where we are in control. Oh yes, my friends, and the only way to be in control is by becoming an assassin.
I never knew this about assassins: they fight a whole lot like Marcus Fenix and co. from Gears of War. The Wanted demo is Gears on rails (more or less), where taking cover isn’t just a sound tactic, it’s a way of life (read: breaking cover is like breaking the leg off of a chair; difficult, and awkward afterward)! My decidedly not fat assassin man skirted and rolled his way down a couple corridors of an airplane, shooting baddies and absorbing extra pistol ammo into his bloodstream. Gimmicks apparently inspired by the movie included failing bullet physics class, and freezing time.
Maybe I’ll see the movie someday, likely when it gets absorbed into the ebb and flow of the materials of my county’s library. Until then I’ll just be disillusioned with the idea of illegitimate authorities killing in order to save more lives.*
Thanks to Jonathan I’ve sampled, and then drowned myself in, the nectar that is root beer flavored milk. My sister and I had a discussion on where this kind of milk comes from. White milk comes from white cows, chocolate from brown cows. Where then, does root beer milk come from? I answered her thusly:
Udderly unhelpful,
-Pat
*Yeah, ok, I was a little grumpy when I played that demo
