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I can remember watching this and feeling a mixture of grief and comfort. It's what I needed to be told at the time. All I wanted was for someone to make me laugh again.

And sitting under your desk with cottage cheese is pretty cool.

10 Years Later

It's time to talk about something that's not fun. It's not amusing and it's not for entertainment. However, given the situation, I really feel like I need to write this down.

Today is the 10th of September, 2011. I don't need to tell you what event has it's 10 year anniversary tomorrow. For the past week, maybe longer, I have heard talk of 9/11 crop up in virtually every outlet I have for news. I won't lie; for the most part, I've been ignoring it. Part of me feels guilty about it, but part of me is completely jaded about the whole thing.

Me only months before 9/11.

Consider this: I was fourteen years and a few months old when it happened. I was old enough to understand the gravity of what was happening and yet young enough to have my formative years bombarded by the post-9/11 culture of the United States. I traveled A LOT as a kid (flying back and fourth between parents) and watched what had been a fairly enjoyable and exciting activity for me turn into one full of anxiety, suspicion, and high security. I grew up in a country where there was an intensified fear, suspicion and even hatred of the "other" - even though the terms that defined the "other" varied somewhat from time to time. People talk about how the United States came together after 9/11 and that is certainly true in the people to volenteered time, money and resources into helping their fellow man. But that's not the America I really ever got exposed to. I never saw any of that behavior (even though I know in retrospect it was happening throughout the nation). I watched the news very often as a teen, so I grew up with the stories of the latest threats and crimes, not the kindness in people's hearts. I felt the intense potential for coming together, like people desperately wanting to cling to each other into one giant national hug. But within months, that just seemed to slip away. The desire to feel some sort of resolution, to have something positive come out of the event, went unfulfilled for me. Instead, I just watched the country go back to the same in-fighting and pointing fingers that it has always done. To my young mind, it seemed that nothing had changed in the way we treated one another, just the way in which we wrapped ourselves in the flag and declared that those who disagreed with us must want to hurt America- be they our countrymen or not. I also had a family friend who is a close relative of John Walker Lindh... which, as you can probably imagine, gave me a fairly unique perspective on the "American Taliban" who was absolutely demonized into a two dimensional cartoon villain by most of the news reports I saw. (Note: I am not making a judgement here about what he did or the degree to which he deserved punishment, etc. I only bring it up because I grew up with a very real reminder that the "enemy" is a real human being and it's easy to forget that the real world is a very complicated place if you just listen to what you're told in the media.)

I couldn't help but feel jaded about the whole situation, as this anniversary approaches. I didn't want to hear news stories of people re-informing us about something that we haven't allowed ourselves to ever forget. Combine that with the fact that I thoroughly disagree with the direction our country has taken in reacting to the attacks, and I end up seeing 9/11 as just the beginning in a huge senseless tragedy.

And then I watched this absolutely stunning video about 9/11.

I think the simplicity of it is what really struck me. After all the talk about 9/11 and what it means, what changes it has or hasn't made in this country, the religious prejudice that has come out of it and whether or not it is justified, etc. etc. etc.

But to simply see it all again left me with no other option than to write this. It took me back to that morning, to waking up and going downstairs and seeing the second tower fall. It took me back to that feeling of absolute helplessness and confusion as I tried to process what had just happened, wanting desperately to watch the news but instead being shuffled off to school with no understanding of who or why or how, just that so many people had just died in a grotesque and completely random way. It took me back to being a young teen who realized that life is completely taken for granted: that I could have my life snuffed out in an instant and that it could have nothing to do with what I do with my life or how I choose to treat people. Being alive, I realized, was completely out of my control. Outside of suicide, living or dying was not something I could choose or control and I could be the most altruistic human being on Earth and still be killed in a completely random and senseless way. All those people had died, hadn't they? None of them had done anything to deserve it. Any ideas that I had about a world that was structured or purposefully fated was destroyed. Any faith that I tried to convince myself I had in anything beyond the great capacity for human goodness and evil pretty much vanished in the process of trying to understand and cope with what had happened. I will never not feel sorry, so intensely sorry, about those who died that day and the damage that was done. 9/11 is not something that is frequently on my mind, but I can't deny that it has had a huge effect on who I have become.

Photo from my trip to Ground Zero some years ago.

Deep breaths everyone. Thank you for letting me have that moment. I promise things will be more lighthearted shortly.

News Travels Fast v1

Maybe one day I will come up with a better title, but for now News Travels Fast will be my occasional post picking a few bits of news and geekery from the internet that I feel like sharing. Why News Travels Fast? Because I have no delusions that I'm going to be posting these with any particular speed in relation to when the stories broke. I only post 'em as I see 'em.

Talks of a Sequel for X-Men: First Class  
(Source: Screen Rant)

No surprise here, really. The movie was successful, financially speaking, and many critics liked it. As I've said here, I saw problems with it (big ones) but it wasn't a complete load of garbage. Here's hoping they give a little more thought to their thematic structure the next time around.

Or they can just throw a bunch of random mutants in there and call it a day.

LA Noire tech will change the future of Adventure Games 
(Source: Edge)

The old lady in the bowling alley is played by my fiance's godmother. Yeah. That was a weird surprise.

Again, kind of a 'duh' statement, but it's cool to hear Kojima agree with my view of the facial capture used in LA Noire. I really look forward to this kind of tech being implemented in other games. (The idea of Bioware using this in a game similar in style to their current RPGs makes me giddy.)

Are games becoming too easy in order to pander to self confidence?
(Source: The Escapist)

 I love The Escapist for many of their articles like this one. Nathaniel Edwards does an interesting job analyzing how and why difficulty levels in games has been going down. He also compares them to the lack of enthusiasm and willingness to work that his father's middle school students show. I'll give him credit for not saying that video games are the cause of this behavior (after all, these are middle schoolers we're talking about here.) He does make an interesting point about the parallel between game design (aiming to reach the largest audience with an achievable difficulty while giving special challenges and rewards to players who go the extra mile) to American education (not being able to fail a student, so as not to hurt their confidence, and therefore implementing special rewards for those who go above and beyond their peers). While I think it's generally a smart idea for gaming companies to make their games accessible to players of multiple skill levels, I do see it as a large problem to apply the same ideals to how we handle education.

I would point out, though, that a low difficulty does not mean that a game cannot be a rewarding experience and doesn't necessarily sway educational performance to a lower standard. For my own nerdy example: as a child, I loved playing Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego on my old PC. Did I find it challenging? Not in the least.Trust me, there were many games that I outright sucked at. A combination of not a lot of access to a wide variety of games, access to some poorly designed ones, and limited time playing left me believing for years that I was just a shitty gamer. There were many games that I walked away from, frustrated out of my gourd because I couldn't get to the next level no matter how hard I tried or even if I knew the solution. Wishbone, I'm looking at you, you son of a bitch (literally). But Carmen Sandiego gave me a zest for historical knowledge that greatly improved my educational experience in school. My parents were not so lucky when they got me the Math educational tie-in for Sandiego. Yeah. That shit wasn't gonna fly.

In any case, it's an interesting read. Go check it out.

TARDIS arcade, anyone?
(Source: asciimation)

Holy crap. Oh, holy crap. Not only do I love this person, but I also kind of want to rob them.
Someone built a replica TARDIS with a MAME console inside:

Cue the angels' choir, because it is THAT awesome.

Seriously, I want that in my house.

Wouldn't it be cool to have a door hidden behind a TARDIS replica in your house? Like, you'd walk through what looks like a prop piece of furniture into an entirely new room? Just blew my own mind there. I have a thing for hidden passageways.

I scored a 131 point turn in Scrabble on the Xbox the other night.

Now that I've seen it, I need to make one of these for myself.

Okay, so that's not really news. But I certainly felt accomplished. I jumped over the 200 mark while my fiance was still down in the 80s or so. Suffice it to say, he didn't really feel like finishing that round.

And Now for Something Completely Different

My head is running amok with thoughts about a film I just watched. However, as the hour is late and I'm too tired to write more than a rough draft of my thoughts, a review will have to wait. Attempting to write anything of substance right now would seem futile, as it would pale in comparison to the complexity of what is whirling through my head.

So instead, I give you a monkey.

You're probably looking at this thinking sure, it's a nice picture of a monkey. Google can give me hundreds of those on a whim. But this picture is a self portrait. This is the monkey equivalent of a Myspace profile picture.

Photographer David Slater went out into the wilds to take photos of the endangered black crested macaque. The monkeys apparently took quite a liking to him.

Gooble, gobble, gooble, gobble, we accept him, one of us.*

In partying it up with the monkeys, one of them snatched is camera equipment.

‘They were quite mischievous jumping all over my equipment, and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button,’ said Slater. ‘The sound got his attention and he kept pressing it. At first, it scared the rest of them away but they soon came back – it was amazing to watch. He must have taken hundreds of pictures by the time I got my camera back but not very many were in focus. He obviously hadn’t worked that out yet.’

A goofy looking grin from a happy monkey playing with a new toy. That's your little ray of sunshine moment for the day.



* Reference too obscure? It's from the film Freaks from 1932.

Australia Censors the Internet

Oh boy. Here we go.

So news just recently came out that Australia is planning on implementing their internet censoring strategy in July. Immediate reaction? Boo! Hiss! Evil censorship. Then you find out that their primary aim is to block child porn sites. Sounds reasonable, right?

Except they're going about it the wrong way. First of all, there is no appeals process in place for websites that get placed on the blacklist - and Wikileaks has already revealed that sites that are unrelated to illegal activities have made the cut (unless Australia has suddenly outlawed dentists in Queensland).

Donna Ashelford of the System Administrators Guild of Australia pointed out that this plan probably won't have an effect on the distribution of child porn anyway. "Child abuse material is more likely to be exchanged on peer-to-peer networks and private networks anyway and is a matter for law enforcement." Keep in mind now, these blockages are being enforced by the internet providers, not the government. So law enforcement is not the one enforcing the restriction to these materials - it's all private sector. (Enforcement, that is. The creation of the list is coming from the Australian Communications and Media Authority, as well as unnamed sources.) The  Electronic Frontier Foundation claims that there is no transparency or accountability in the process of deciding who gets blacklisted, greatly increasing the chances of sites being wrongfully blocked.

Also, these sites are blocked by their URL, meaning that they can continue to be in operation if they simply change their address by only one character. Effective, no?

As with all censorship, its boundaries are almost never as solid and stable as we would like to think. The positive goal, restricting access to child pornography, could (and is likely to) restrict the rights of individuals who are not engaging in illegal activities who just happen to find themselves on the wrong list. Without a way to appeal and defend themselves, this system is setting itself up for this inevitability. It's effectiveness is rightfully questioned, making us wonder if it is worth it to unintentionally restrict the innocent if the greater good isn't even being achieved. And, as always, when you begin to censor things in a free society, you set a presedent for expanding the boundaries of what is and isn't appropriate for people to see.

Source: news.com.au