Biased Reviews, Boring Ramblings
tl;dr: Final Fantasy: A vicious classic enhanced by nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a tough thing to shake sometimes. You get it stuck in your mind that something from the past was great. Then you start to desire to recreate that something. Pretty soon, you’re at the car dealership, wearing a Member’s Only jacket, buying a Trans-Am.
However, the object of my nostalgia wasn’t a car or a jacket. In my childhood, I never finished the original Final Fantasy. This wasn’t the fault of the game; even back then I understood that in terms of scope and presentation, it was a tour de force. The fault was simply my own. The realization that I’d have to grind a few more levels to be able to complete the Earth Cave was not compatible with the easily-distracted child I was.
This bout of nostalgia, then, was more than just reliving a piece of classic gaming. It was about actually finishing it for the first time.
Adding to the fun, I had access to two versions of the game, and started out playing them in parallel. Originally, I did this to see what the difference was. I played an emulated, unpatched version of the original NES cartridge and the PSP remake (which itself was a port of the DS remake). I would abandon the PSP remake about halfway through, though. Despite the promise of bonus dungeons at the end, I just couldn’t continue playing it.
Why? Because it was Final Fantasy Lite. Easy mode.
What really came into sharp relief during this nostalgic playthrough (which I finished, by the way) was how unmerciless Final Fantasy was at times. Mind you, that’s a different word than “hard.” Plenty of games can be “hard.” But what I realized, especially in contrast to the softened PSP game, was that the NES version of Final Fantasy made no concessions to you, and if you didn’t like it, you could get the hell out and find another game to play.
Some examples? Sure, I’ll give examples.
- Saving the Game: You could only save by visiting an Inn, or using one of the three items in the overworld. Unlike the PSP version, you can’t just save anywhere at your whim. Unlike later games, there isn’t even the idea of “save points” placed halfway through the dungeon and just before the boss. You saved just outside the dungeon, and if you met your unfortunate end, you had to do it all over again.
Now, I understand that the PSP version has this because it’s supposed to be a “mobile” edition, and when your number comes up at the DMV, the clerk isn’t going to wait for you to slog through two more dungeon levels before she rejects your driver’s license application because you used blue ink instead of black ink. But there are of course other ways to do it!
Wait a second! you yell, sensing something is amiss. You played on an emulator, which has something better than saving. It has save states! You are correct in that I played on an emulator, and you are correct that save states are even better than game saves (since it’s an exact snapshot at any given point), but you are incorrect about how I used them. If my party got killed, I’d reload from the game’s internal save, not from the save state. In some cases, that’s hours of experience and gold lost.
-
Limited Save Files: This is probably more a limitation of the hardware the original was created on, but you also get one save file. That’s it. Accidentally dropped and destroyed the Masamune and then saved your game? Too bad, it’s gone forever.
- Limited Inventory Space: It’s interesting to note that nearly every MMO uses limited inventory space as a control. Heck, in some games, the tools to increase a character’s inventory space are some of the most valuable and sought after tools around, making those players that can supply them rich beyond belief. It’s odd, then, that more non-MMO games have gone to the kitchen sink inventory. In the PSP version, for example, you can carry everything in the world.
Not so in the original. Here’s how many inventory slots you have: 16 weapons, 16 armors. That includes things you have equipped, and most characters (Black Belt / Master excluded) will have 4 armors and 1 weapon equipped. You can see that you’ll rapidly run out of free space to loot and sell from the late game dungeons.
Adding to the “fun,” if your inventory is full and you open a chest, it’ll just say, “Can’t hold anymore.” You don’t get to know what fun piece of treasure you’re missing out on until you drop an item and reopen the chest. And the designers knew this would happen. That’s why there’s a treasure chest in the last dungeon containing “Cloth,” an armor you probably bought for your Level 1 characters within minutes of starting the game. I can only imagine the rage at dropping a set of Opal Plate Armor only to replace it with… Cloth.
- Limited Item Selection: This is something that plagues the later Final Fantasy games, especially. There is an item for everything, and sometimes more than one. You’d need a spreadsheet to keep track of the different grades and costs associated with healing potions.
Not so in the cruel world of Final Fantasy. You get three consumables: A healing potion that never scales, and potions to cure poison and stone. That’s it. The only place you can get them is from an item store and treasure chests; enemies don’t drop loot. And you’re limited to 99 of each item, so after a tough fight and high levels, you’ll burn through your stock of Heal potions fast.
Astute observers will notice that, unlike the PSP version, there’s no mention of Phoenix Down to revive dead allies. Why is that? Because it doesn’t exist. Which leads to…
- Limited Magic Use: Before the PSP version, Final Fantasy scoffed at your concept of Mana / MP / Ether / whatever. Instead, you had spell charges. You could know up to three spells per level (and if you made a mistake, you were stuck with whatever spells you’d chosen), and casting from a level consumed charges. The only way to restore those charges was to use a Cabin outside the dungeon or return to an Inn.
This meant that magic was a precious resource and always in short supply. Did you use up charges to cast FIR2 during a fight, or should you save them for the boss fight? Should you drink a ton of Heal potions, or burn your magic charges of CURE? Did you let your mages pointlessly wail away at enemies with physical attacks, gimping your team but saving charges?
It also added to the merciless nature of the game. Did your only White Wizard die? Too bad, no resurrection spells are available; you’ll have to use the Clinic in town. I hope you can make it there.
- And, of course, Merciless Enemy Groups: There are a few enemy groups that deserve a kick to the face. But again, it added to the harsh and sometimes fickle nature of the game, and encouraged the grinding gameplay that I’d once not had the capacity for. The playing pattern was simple: Go into a dungeon as far as I would dare, and then make my way back to the surface. Restock. Repeat. Each time, I’d get a little farther, get a little more treasure, and be earning experience. When you were ready to take your shot, you’d go for the boss, since beating the boss meant a free teleport out. If you were wrong, you’d die.
Even then, however, sometimes, the random number generator would decide that it was time for punishment. In one particular case, 9 Frost Wolves that spawned with first attack all cast ICE2, wiping 3 of the 4 in the party. The Fighter ran, and was promptly one-hit killed by a Sorcerer’s physical attack (which had the potential to one-hit kill anything in the game) in the next encounter. There was literally nothing I could have done to save my party in this situation.
Did I complain? No, I reloaded my game, and tried again, hoping that I didn’t run into those Wolves.
The outcome of my experience and the point of all of this rambling? It’s not terribly easy to encapsulate into words, but I’ll try: I miss the days when games weren’t afraid to swing the pendulum a long way from the easy center. Sure, getting murdered by 9 Frost Wolves sucks hard. But there were other times when I got first attack, and nuked a group down with FIR3 before they could even exclaim in surprise.
When games were challenging, there was some feeling of accomplishment, too. Surviving the final dungeon and beating Chaos to end the game was a genuine thrill, despite the fact that I did it sitting on my couch playing a handheld gaming system emulating a 20 year old 8-bit game. I’ll take that over, say, a Call of Duty game where you can complete levels without firing a shot.
Is there a larger lesson here, too? Something about how the steady progression of games into a more casual tract is simply mirroring the American public’s desire for normalcy and comfort instead of pushing the limits of what we do, how we think, and where we go?
Nope.
What it did do, however, was prompt me to add some more challenge to my gaming library. Having heard of the brutal exercise that was Demon’s Souls, I asked for and received said game for XMAS. I’ll write up my review of it… as soon as I can beat more than 2 levels.
Biased Reviews
tl;dr: Windows Live Mesh: a lot better than I gave it credit for.
In terms of geek cred, there are a few things wrong with Microsoft’s “To The Cloud” marketing campaign:
- It’s cool to bash on Microsoft. Heck, this is even seeping out of the geek world and into the regular world. My Dad recently made a snarky comment about Microsoft; I was simultaneously amused and terrified.
- There are open-source options available. You’re not hardcore geek unless you’re managing file stacks with a command line and switches.
- The commercials themselves don’t really do a good job communicating, to an uninformed person, exactly what “the cloud” does. Heck, it took me a while to figure it out.
Once I figured it out, however, I’ll freely admit: I rather enjoy the Cloud. And the exact impetus for that enjoyment might not be quite what you think.
One of the persistent problems with a residential broadband connection in the United States is the upload speed. You might have a 10 Meg cable modem connection, but chances are, that’s a totally asynchronous connection. You’ll get nearly 10 MB/sec download, but your upload is probably still somewhere around 768 kb/sec.
In everyday use, that’s just fine. The majority of our time on the Internet is spent downloading movies, downloading pictures, downloading games, and downloading porn (which is usually included in the first three categories). Upload speed is very rarely an issue.
Until, of course, it is an issue. Here’s the real-world scenario: I have a murder of videos (“murder” is the official name for a group of videos, look it up) on my home network that are neither illegal nor pornographic, and I want to watch them while I’m on vacation in Florida. Option 1 would have been to put them on my home server and download them when I got to Florida. However, since that server is cramming data through the tiny upload pipe, that becomes hideously slow, and requires you to tie up a computer for the eons it’d take.
But there’s an Option 2. To the cloud!
First, I packaged the video files into 50 MB chunks with WinRAR. That’s due to a limitation in Windows Skydrive, and to be honest, it’s an okay limitation since downloading 350 MB files through the Internet is just asking for problems. Then, I uploaded that murder of video chunks to Skydrive, letting it run from my unattended home PC whilst I traveled. When I arrived at my destination, I only had to connect to the Internet for a few minutes to pull those files down to my local computer.
It’s so simple, even a caveman could do it. It actually sounds harder than it is.
But honestly, it gets better. Because in addition to the storage available in SkyDrive, there’s Windows Live Mesh. While you only get 5 GB of online storage (as opposed to SkyDrive’s 25 GB), your per-file size limit increases to 2 GB and, more importantly, it’ll automatically sync folders on your computer to the online drive. Folders on all of your computers.
By the end of the vacation, I needed another murder of video files, but I’d discovered Live Mesh. I created a synced folder on my laptop, I created a synced folder on my desktop through Remote Desktop, and I dropped video files into it. Once the hideously slow upload was complete from the desktop, the files were pulled down by my laptop the next time I connected to the Internet. Automatically.
Yes, purists are going to howl and gnash their teeth and complain that rdist has been able to do such things for years. And they’re right. But if you wanted to setup, say, a synced picture folder between your computer, your parents’ computer, and your aunt’s computer, are you honestly going to teach your parents and relatives how to use rdist? Or are you going to set them up with cloud access with Live Mesh and explain that the pictures appear by magic?
Biased Reviews
tl;dr: A big holiday update brings more joy to Gran Turismo 5.
In my original review of Gran Turismo 5, I noted that there were a few rough edges surrounding the diamond-like center that was the core driving and racing experience. The core game was good, but there were a few peripheral items that could have been addressed better, and a few things that were on fans’ wishlists for the game.
It’s old news, but it’s new to me, since the patch dropped while I was — quite literally — on a plane heading out for vacation. The end of December saw an absolutely massive patch for Gran Turismo 5, bringing the game to 1.05 at the cost of a nearly 700 MB download. Sure, if you have a slow internet connection, you’re going to whine about the size of the required download that couldn’t be queued in the background while you played some more PixelJunk Monsters. But the patch is worth the wait.
 No one in the history of Gran Turismo has ever bought and tuned a Fiat 500. Until Bonus Race 1-1 offered a quarter of a million credits in rewards, that is. There’s a pretty substantial feature list out there, but here are the three big things that just add a cherry on top of Gran Turismo 5′s already delicious cake:
- Online racing rewards. Racing online was always kind of a… hollow… experience. Sure, it was a thrill to take your car into battle against other real people, but the brutally efficient part of my brain kept reminding me that I could have been earning credits and experience in offline play, instead. The time to recoup the expense of tricking out a Honda Civic is really long when races reward you with 0 credits per win. Now, that feeling of brutal efficiency is gone; online racing will help you build up your virtual credentials.
-
Online Dealership. Okay, it’s a bit of a misnomer. It’s not a dealership where players can put cars up for sale and be purchased by other players. That would be truly awesome. But what it is is nothing to slouch at: It’s a rare car dealership. In its first day of activity, a few sought after cars were already posted in its hall. And since they don’t cycle out as fast as the used car dealership, you have plenty of time to go earn cash in order to buy them before they disappear.
- Seasonal Events. The hallmark event of this new feature is, of course, the GT Academy program, which purports to take the best Gran Turismo drivers in the world and give them a shot to become a real race driver. Players who want to take their shot can compete in fixed-car time trials, driving to earn the fastest combined time of three trials in order to advance to the next round.
But wait, there’s more. Though GT Academy was the hallmark introduction, other events also appeared in the Seasonal Events menu when the patch went live. These events are time-limited; the first set ends on the 5th of January, while the second set ends a few weeks later. They’re also a blast. Currently, there’s an online drifting competition, an online time trial competition (similar to GT Academy, but without fixed cars, allowing the tuners a chance to show their stuff), and a bonus race. The bonus races are interesting in that they use cars readily available from the in-game dealerships, allow a minimal amount of tuning, and challenge you to go from 12th to 1st in a limited number of laps. Though the rewards from bonus races are one-time only — finishing in a given place will award all rewards for that position and lower, and you must improve your finish to earn higher rewards — those rewards are absolutely massive and make these events something that should not be missed.
Biased Reviews
tl;dr: Despite its flaws, Gran Turismo 5 is a worthy successor, and well worth your playing time.
 People from the small Italian village of Uncanny Valley mill about my Lamborghini. As I write this, Gran Turismo 5 is playing in the background. An AI driver is lapping a track in a tuned Honda Civic, holding the lead, winning in-game credits for me to spend on shinier, more powerful cars. I’ll talk more about B-Spec in a bit; there’s a lesson to be learned here, somewhere.
Unless you’re totally devoid of gaming knowledge, even if you’re not a fan of the series, you probably know what Gran Turismo is, and the PS3 debut of the series does not deviate from the core values that the series has always espoused. You’ll have the eye-popping graphics you demand. You’ll have the top-notch physics simulation. These things have always been strong in Gran Turismo games, and there’s no exception in GT5.
About those graphics: The screenshots I took to include in this review don’t do them justice; click each picture if you want to see the full resolution images, which are eye-popping. The graphical package that GT5 delivers this time around is absolutely, positively, amazingly beautiful. Well… mostly. There are two tiers of cars in the game: Premium and Standard. Premium cars are more elaborately modeled, include stunningly detailed interior “driver’s eye” views, and take full advantage of the PS3′s graphical horsepower. Standard cars are a more mixed bag. When in motion, they all look good, but some of the standard cars look far better in stills than others, ranging from “nearly as good as a premium” to “PS2 quality.”
The graphics that surround the cars are a mixed bag, too. The courses are vibrant and detailed and amazingly lifelike, but every once in a while you’ll catch a flat polygon texture or out of place seam or some chunking around smoke plumes. People, as opposed to cars, look awkward and stiff; the game features a particularly unnerving cutscene with a zombie-like Jeff Gordon. Again, when the game is running at full speed you’re not going to notice these flaws too much, and in all honesty, there’s enough amazing graphical output to forgive those flaws that you can notice.
 Should the front tires of your Skyline light on fire, please remain calm. GT5 ups the “car porn” quotient with a truly decadent photo mode, accessible either through the game’s Photo Tour mode (which allows you to drop a car in a wide variety of pretty worldwide locations) or from the Replay Theater (which allows you to take photos from your completed races). What makes this mode special is the camera itself: The GT5 virtual camera has an array of features that you’d expect on a good DSLR, from F-Stops to shutter speed.
The simulation of driving in GT5 is similarly polished. There’s obviously been some tweaks to the physics model that we last saw, but cars still handle with the heft and lethargy expected of their individual metal skeletons. Veteran racers won’t have too much trouble stepping in here and remembering the concepts of weight transfer that lead to success; I question the wisdom of my decision to play Grand Theft Auto for a few weeks before the game’s release. Tires will blossom with smoke (and leave skid marks on the track) if you push them past their grip limits while braking, turning, or accelerating, and you can feel the tugs of a turbo car as the turbine reaches critical pressure.
So, if the graphics are great and the simulation is great, how is the game that those elements underpin? That’s a more complex answer, to be honest.
Taking a page from some other recent games, GT5 introduces a leveling system. In order to buy a car, you need to meet the level restriction for that car. In order to run a race, you need to meet the level restriction for that race. It’s an interesting concept, and through a good chunk of the first 40 levels, it’s not gotten in the way of my progress too much. Things do seem relatively well-balanced for the most part. When you’re Level 0, you don’t have the money to buy anything more than a Level 0 car, and the only races that car can win are Level 0 races. By the time you unlock Level 2 races, you’ll have enough money to buy a better car or tune your original car.
Entering some of the races, however, can be frustrating. As an example, one of the fairly low-level race series requires a classic car, something built before 1970. Heading to the Used Car lot is a mixed bag, where you’ll see a lot of potential purchases that you can’t afford or can’t buy due to level, and it changes every time you enter a race. When that classic car does pop up, if you don’t have the credits to buy it, it might cycle out when you run another race to earn the money to buy it, prolonging your waiting.
Adding to that frustration is the fact that many of the prize cars earned by completing events are novelty cars… at best. That classic car race, for example, awards the prize of… a classic car, something that could have won that race. While it makes some sense (it would seem strange to get a Skyline from a classic car race), it doesn’t help the player progress to the next set of challenges. A good chunk of those prize cars are pretty useless, too. I don’t want to count the number of 14 HP 1960′s Subarus I have in the garage.
Tuning is a bit strange this time around, too. With the exception of individual gear ratios (a strange omission) and brake improvements (another strange omission), the full range of incredibly-detailed tuning information is here again. But if you’re like me, you’ll use it a lot less. Why? For one simple reason: You can’t save different tuning profiles for a car. It means that, unless you’re hardcore enough to create a notebook to write tunings into and manually apply them before each race, you won’t be spending 100 hours running laps around Grand Valley to get your setup perfected so that you can load it every time you come to that track. It seems like a definite step backward. GT3 let you save as many profiles as you wanted, until the memory card filled up. GT5 Prologue had five tuning slots per car. GT5 has zero. On a game system that can support (practically) unlimited storage.
 You'll never forget your first night under the cherry blossoms with your brand new Civic. The other big miss in the package is the damage modeling. This is probably the biggest let down, unfortunately, since virtual racers were looking forward to something other than invincible cars circulating around a track. While GT5 boasts a damage model, there are significant caveats associated with it. It doesn’t unlock until higher levels. It takes a truely massive amount of contact to do any sort of significant visible damage to a car. And with the exception of online races with the feature enabled, there are no mechanical consequences at all.
Despite all those caveats, however, the gameplay is still very compelling. Sure, there are races where you can totally outclass the competition and win by 80 car lengths, but if you play fair and match the cars listed on the Typical Opponents screen that’s available, you’ll have some good races. The AI also evolves as you climb the ranks. It’ll start out as the classic Gran Turismo Zombie AI (which, to be honest, is good for beginners), but will slowly get more aggressive, more unpredictable, and more organic. There’s a good old fashioned sense of growth that will overtake your game, and it transmits that sense of wistfulness as you abandon the Civic that won 20 races for a shiny new Mercedes Race Car.
B-Spec mode returns, though unlike in GT4, its in a separate continuity now. Winning races in B-Spec is separate from winning races in the default A-Spec mode, though you still use one garage and one pool of money. In its current form, B-Spec is basically (for me, anyway), “housework mode.” If I’ve got things to do around the house, I’ll start a B-Spec race and let my AI driver improve and earn me money. The races in B-Spec are longer and are crippled by the lack of any sort of fast forward control. “Actively” playing B-Spec would be more akin to watching someone else play. Sure, it’s beautiful, but you want to be at the controls. That said, improvements have been rumored to be on the way for B-Spec, including a remote race feature where you can start AI races from a web portal, and a feature where you and friends can race against those AI drivers you’ve spent so much time training.
 A Mazda 6s at IMS? Why ever would I use this picture? For those that hate license tests, don’t groan that they’re back, because so far, they’ve not impeded any sort of progress, and the Bronze goals in them are now almost laughable. The game also includes Special events, ranking from Karting to Nurburgring training to Rally, which are fun, challenging, and, most importantly, profitable (albeit only one-time, but in terms of credits and experience) diversions. Online play has been shaky since launch, in part due to server instability, but it also has been steadily improving despite the challenge of supporting the gazillion people that all logged on to race Civics at once. The game’s soundtrack ranges from forgettable to terrible, but there is robust support for custom playlists from any media you have stored on your Playstation.
Final verdict? Gran Turismo 5 is spectacular, despite the rough edges. Almost none of the problems are game breaking; the core gameplay doesn’t break down because of them mentioned. It’s like getting a 2 Karat diamond in a plastic bag instead of a red velvet bag. Sure, it’d be perfect to get it in velvet, but are you really going to complain about a massive diamond delivered in plastic? Probably not.
In many ways, it is hard to say that Gran Turismo 5 didn’t meet the designer’s goals. They’ve created a game that’s nothing short of car porn, and like all good porn, there’s something here to suit anyone’s tastes and enough lure to bring you back. The core experience — driving — is so good that you’re compelled to boot the game, hop into your car of choice, and just take a drive. At 140 mph. Around a 24 turn GP track. But a drive nonetheless, and it always leaves you wanting more.
Oh Hell, Politics
tl;dr: No Labellers - Don't call them that. - face an uphill battle for American hearts and minds.
The big news yesterday was Michael Bloomberg. Unlike around Thanksgiving, when he’s filled with helium and floated past Macy’s, yesterday, Bloomberg was on center stage to introduce his new centrist movement: No Labels. As the not-so-subtle name suggests, the group is all about taking those pesky nutrition boxes off of food containers so that there is more room for eye-catching product-selling graphics.
No, that’s not it. In reality, the group aims at the heart of the least DERP-worthy political group: Centrists. But don’t call them that, because that would be a label. Instead call them… hmm… you can’t really call them anything, can you? Even calling them “No Labellers” is a label. Oh the humanity!
The names “they” — Is that a label too? — are using allude to the fact that groups inevitably begin to label each other based on their political and social inclinations. “Democrats.” “Republicans.” “Socialists.” “WHAR BRITH CERTIFCATE WHAR?” “Teabaggers.” “Fascists.” “Packers fans.” “Designers.” “Drivers.” “Golfers.” “Druids.”
I admire the group’s centrist ideals. It’s no secret that discourse in America has substantially changed in the past ten years, thought if it’s changed for the better or for the worse is up to the interpretation of the reader.
The first driver of the decline of discourse is that, once upon a time, you could count on people being able to separate “opinion” and “fact,” but that’s no longer the case. People spout off opinions and demand they be accepted by the masses simply because they have the weight of someone’s college degree, work experience, or really good gut feeling behind them. If you’re having trouble understanding this, remember that an opinion, no matter what, can’t be wrong. It can be horribly misinformed, and it can even directly conflict with one of your own opinions, but it can’t be wrong. You’re free to disagree, too, but you should have more than, “I’m right.”
The second driver is the Internet. In this case, John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is in full effect. It’s magnified, however, by the fact that the current generation has people who have never lived without the Internet. You can see it manifesting in people who say (that is, actual speech in meatspace) things like “LOL” instead of laughing. Then comes the trolling. Accustomed to the anonymity afforded by the Internet, their behavior extends to discussions around dining tables… assuming they’re not checking Facebook on their phone.
Lastly, and most importantly, there’s profit in being extreme. Look at the pundits that make the most money and draw the highest advertising ratings. Bill O’Reilly. Keith Olbermann. Glenn Beck. Rachel Maddow. Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. There isn’t a single one of them toward the middle, and that’s not a coincidence. That’s a planned development by those that create, script, and produce their shows. The actual fringe people watch in support, and more central people watch for entertainment. Sure, Glenn Beck might get schooled when Fareed Zakaria brings facts and logic to the table, but you did end up watching the clip, didn’t you? Ka-ching!
So while I admire No Labels’ attempts at pulling together a centrist caucus, I fear for its success. That’s not to say that I don’t want it to succeed. As a moderate, I desperately would like discourse to return to American politics instead of the “you’re with us or you’re against us” mentality. There’s a strength in having an honest discussion, compromise, and tit-for-tat, instead of calling anyone who disagrees with your position un-American.
But its success will be based on marketing, and that’s a tough sell, because, for the most part, moderates are a lazy, lazy, lazy group. We’re like the flyover states in a presidential election: Ignored until someone really needs us for something. But by that time, we’re so lethargic and lazy that we can’t summon the strength to do much of anything. Consider that in Obama’s “historic” election, voter turnout was somewhere barely north of 50%. Just as bad as that statistic is, if the statistical trend holds, half of the voting age population that didn’t vote wasn’t even registered.
You know who is voting? The people who think Obama is the next Messiah. You know who is voting? The people who think Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim Socialist. Which eats up a lot of that 50%, meaning the vast majority of unvoting people squarely in the middle.
The challenge, then, is getting that middle energized and mobile. No Labels has to try and do that in a place where Internet flame wars are more fun and there’s no television money for those not creating controversy.
Good luck. You’ll need it.
My Novel Is Terribad
tl;dr: Did I "cheat" to "win" Nanowrimo 2010?
 You're a Winner In My Book! Almost two weeks ago now, I won Nanowrimo 2010. Of course, “winning” is kind of a vapid term in this case, since there’s not really anything like a trophy, confetti, choirs of angels, cash prizes, or a commemorative plaque. There’s basically a web graphic you get to download.
Also, I feel terrible about it.
Last year, I created a coherent, complete — if short — novel. There were some clunkers in the plot, not enough exposition, but if you weren’t one who was on the lookout for a story that had “quality” or “editing,” you could sit down, pour through the hundred-or-so pages, and get the entire image. It probably would have made a great straight-to-DVD movie that no one watched. I say “great” because every straight-to-DVD movie is great in its own special way. I’m looking at you, Mega Shark vs. Giant Piranha.
This year was different.
Give me a second here; I want to make sure that I don’t accidentally wobble off my high horse. It’s really high, you’ll soon find out.
Most people won’t have the unique experience of creating a longer work of fiction. There’s a certain emotion that is required in order to craft such a piece. It’s almost as if you trade that emotional reserve for the creation of prose. As you write, you get drained. That’s probably true with any great piece of art… and bad pieces of art, too. The creator imbues that work not just with the technical details required, but with a bit of self.
I ran out of emotional reserve way too early this year. There are numerous and complex and private reasons for this, reasons that aren’t ready for publication on the eternal halls of the Internet. Combine that with a story that wasn’t coming together as nicely as I’d hoped, and I found myself stumbling well short of the finish line. Roughly 10,000 words short, to be completely honest.
The bridge of the story, then, is how I finished: I took the easy way out. While the story wasn’t coming together in the way that I liked, there were still a few scenes that I knew I wanted to write. I had them scripted in my head, and I started to (electronically) scribble them out on the page. Disconnected, separate scenes. I’d write one from the exciting starting point up until I ran out of steam. In some cases, they were little more than a page long. In other cases, they stretched a bit longer, but still held no narrative connection to the rest of the novel that I’d been working on. In the most extreme case I ended the chapter in the middle of a sentence. As soon as I eclipsed the 50,000 word goal by writing these vignettes, I stopped, and haven’t looked at them since.
I know I feel terrible about this. I feel like I cheated to win, though much like the “win,” there’s a nebulous quality to the word “cheat” here. The goal of Nanowrimo is to write 50,000 words, ostensibly a (short) novel. Last year, I felt that I really did deserve a win. However, by the letter of the law, one could also paste the word “ostensibly” into a text file 50,000 times and win. That clearly violates, however, the spirit of the “contest.” Which leaves my vignette-penning self somewhere in that nebulous gray area in the middle.
Adding to my confusion is my wondering if I even should feel bad about it. For one, its Nanowrimo. No one really cares about Nanowrimo. For two, I vaguely remember (though at this moment, the exact book and author escape me… it was one of those Southern slave-teaches-white-girl-something books that everyone had to read in a Literature class and it wasn’t Mockingbird) a novel in which the author had said she had written the key scenes first, and then tied them together with narrative later. Maybe I’m just a really progressive and advanced writer already, and not ready for that responsibility. Oops, high horse.
Baseball, Boring Ramblings
tl;dr: The Reds are going to the playoffs!
 Jay Bruce puts his hands in the air with blatant disregard for others' opinions. Last night, with a walk-off home run by Jay Bruce, the Cincinnati Reds clinched the National League Central Division, giving themselves a trip to the postseason. A few fun facts:
- The Reds haven’t had a winning season since 2000.
- The Reds haven’t been to the postseason since 1995, where they got swept in the NLCS by an Atlanta Braves team that had a few good starting pitchers (and Kent Mercker).
- The Reds haven’t won a world series since 1990.
I remember exactly when I became a Reds fan. Growing up in Wisconsin, there was the occasional trip to County Stadium to watch the Brewers. There was even residual buzz, eight years later, about the Brewers team that had gone to the World Series and lost to the St. Louis Cardinals, but I never was really a “Brewers fan.” Blame me, blame my parents, blame the fact that I hadn’t been all that interested in baseball up until then, whatever.
In the spring of 1990, one of my Dad’s friends asked me who I thought was going to win the World Series. I picked the Reds. They had been in the news a lot, what with the 1989 banning of Pete Rose and an owner who had no qualms about expressing her pride toward Hitler. And they had a cool, simplistic name. “Reds.” Not something that tried to be funny, or something that tried to describe the team, or something completely nonsensical. Just a simple word that was also a team color. Yeah, it’s a stupid reason, but I was a kid, and kids do stupid things.
Because of that pick, I decided to see how that team did. The rest, as they saying goes, is history. The Reds would go wire to wire that year, on the backs of some great players and a bullpen that earned the nickname, “The Nasty Boys.” They would clinch a berth in the playoffs, scrap through a series with the Pirates (including a pre-enormous-head Barry Bonds), and swept the heavily favored Oakland Athletics team (including a pre-enormous-head Tony LaRussa) for the championship.
I was hooked.
Success didn’t continue to come, though. Baseball is a harsh mistress at times. The key players from that championship team demonstrated in 1991 that their great seasons weren’t the start of something big, but rather, a blip in rather mediocre and disappointing careers.
But by that point, I was hooked. As a kid, I loved books and encyclopedias (yeah, I was a geek), and I’d set forth learning about the history of the Reds. About how they were the first Major League team. About the dominant teams they fielded during the 1970′s. About how Marge Schott was just an old lady who happened to be a Nazi sympathizer who let her dog crap on the field. The team was in decline, and it was hard to follow them day in and day out, but my fandom was established.
I didn’t expect this of the Reds this year. I’d followed the book on them to the letter: Lots of young pitchers, and some hitters coming into their prime. If they can hold together, they might an outside shot at the wild card, and could be a threat next year. That was good enough for me, honestly. I’d watch Votto and Cueto and Bailey develop, and continue the patient waiting game that small market teams must do to succeed.
Then, something happened. Joey Votto was more than just “a pretty good player.” Scott Rolen and Orlando Cabrera anchored an infield that had been a defensive disaster only a few years before. Johnny Cueto found some frontline support in Mike Leake and Travis Wood, bullpen support from Arthur “I’m A Thousand Years Old” Rhodes and Nick “Please Ignore April” Massett. The team started to win. The team started to come back in games. A 1-run deficit in the 5th no longer meant a loss. It’s fitting that the clinch of the playoff berth came on a walk-off home run in the bottom of the 9th.
I refused to celebrate early. Until last night, I’d tried very hard to never mention phrases that envisioned the Reds in the playoffs. I’m sure that there are Mets fans that know what I’m talking about. Even Tuesday morning, when the Reds needed to go 0-6 over their last six games, with the Cardinals going 6-0, to set up a 1-game playoff for the Central Division crown, I assumed nothing. As I’d told people before, “until I can buy the T-Shirt, it’s not over.”
I can now buy the T-Shirt. (And I have.)
I’m absolutely exhilarated right now. There’s an energy and excitement that comes from that satisfaction of victory, and it’s the reason we continue to be a fan. It washes away all the years of watching the black hole of money that was Ken Griffey, Jr. All they years of seeing starting pitching struggle and collapse. All the years of losing 85+ games. All the years of feeling that the team was “so close” but in reality, bridging that final gap was all but impossible.
I’m not saying I want to go another 15 years before getting back into the playoffs. But I am saying it’s a sweet payoff for sticking with a team through the thick and the thin. Winning this every year, however, wouldn’t make it worth anything less. Every year is a struggle, and a journey. Every story is different, and no true fan is going to wish for 15 years of wandering in the desert in order for a 1-year payoff. We want to win, but aren’t going to let a year or two or fifteen dissuade us from our preference.
It’s even more odd that it comes one day after one of the worst football performances I’ve ever seen from the Packers. Tuesday morning dawned under the shadow of a terrible loss to a division rival. Tuesday evening finished with the light of reminder of why we cheer.
Now the next phase begins: The playoffs. Billy Beane once stated that he hated the playoffs, since they were a coin flip. It’s even highlighted in the fact that the divisional series is only 5 games. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates have won 3 out of 5 games against teams this year, and that’s enough to win the series. As a fan, I can’t help but feel, underneath the joy I’m experiencing, that knot of nervous trepidation. But I’ll be watching, hoping, and cheering. After 15 years, I don’t know how to do anything else.
|
|