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In my day if we wanted to kill a woman we'd just turn into giant skeletal hands and SQUEEZE!
I can't believe I watched all that. Especially into when they got all 3-D ... that doesn't look as fun. Of course, I spent most of my experience with Mortal Kombat watching others play and not actually playing myself. I think when I actually got to play MK3 myself I went, "Bah! Too hard!" and moved on. (Although I could do Mileena's moves, because they usually consisted of "hold down key for two seconds and throw your sais." That only got me past three people, though.)
But yeah ... looking back I remember the conventional wisdom, even among some of the gamers who wrote into those magazines seemed to be that the fatalities were horrific and nausea inducing (although somehow also cool). Now ... they just look ridiculous ... a little gross, especially with the detailed intestines, but mostly ridiculous. And I think around MK3 they were deliberately trying to make them look ridiculous.
And I just wonder if why all these people have such godlike powers that they can morph into animals or grow into giants why did they wait to do these moves until their opponent was useless. I mean, that's just kind of obnoxious.
This seems like a good opportunity to say that I haven't played my Nintendo DS since I got decently far into Cooking Mama and then promptly got real world guilt. ("I could be ACTUALLY COOKING." -- And no, Phoenix Wright does not make me want to be a lawyer and Sonic Rush doesn't actually make me want to turn into a little ball and collect rings. Knock it off. :-P) I haven't played it much since.
BUT -- I am happy that I got the assignment to cover the new video game store in town. I'm the one who would appreciate it the most out of everyone in the office.
I have two ideas for works circulating in my head, and they've somewhat taken hold and I want to do them. One is related to Charles Dickens and the other is related to classics.
It makes me kind of happier ... I always hated how college never let me focus on the stuff I really loved. And I really do love classical literature, as much as an effort as they usually are to read.
In fact, I was thinking today of how it's sort of weird that Charles Dickens is my favorite author as I do think he has faults as both a writer and a human being. Fagin was an example of casual Anti-Semitism, and his young female characters are mostly him beatifying his sisters-in-law. And in real life he was pretty much a prick, what with the divorcing his wife to get some actress tail and then disowning anyone as a friend if they told him that probably wasn't very nice. (My favorite part of the story is when he wrote a letter insinuating that his wife was a crazy bitch and a bad mother but his mistress was totally nice but he really, really wasn't doing anything with her. Then the letter got to the press and he was like, "They did that without my permission even though I clearly wrote it to a wide audience!" Very "Shit! I didn't friends-lock that post!")
I mean, Roald Dahl makes some anti-Zionist remarks and I'm remiss to read him, but Charles Dickens ... well, I don't care as much. He's a jerk and yet I read his stuff and it reads like he's talking to me as if I'm his best friend. And his melodrama just WORKS in a way a lot of writers can't pull off. I think it's because he really cares about what he's writing about and yet doesn't lecture. He just shows you everything that's going on in one the poorhouse. And while he cries over the little children he kills, it doesn't seem to have a "DONATE MONEY TO MY CHARITABLE CAUSE NOW!!!" sort of smell to it. At least I don't feel like it does. Don't know how he does it, either.
I'm also reading John Keats' poetry (like I mentioned before). I like him. Mostly because of all the poets we managed to read in English III Honors in high school who weren't like, "PSST! Everything is evil and awful" (i.e. Samuel Taylor Coleridge) or wrote the "Hey women, enjoy your life now that you're young and pretty because it's not all it's cracked up to be." (Oh come on, you have to know what poem I'm talking about here.) Although oddly enough I don't mind it when Shakespeare does the latter ... maybe because he also espoused the eternal flame of poetry as he did it ... Anyway, John Keats always seemed to do the dual job of being pretty and happy at the same time, which I always appreciated. I'm not sure if that's because he lived for too short a period of time to become pissed off or maybe he just had kind of a good humor about everything. (The bad reviews of Endymion didn't seem to stop him.) Although I'm only three poems in and, having scanned through the book of his complete poetry, he does seem to recycle some themes. ("Yay, flowers!" "Yay, Endymion!" and "Please come back from the grave and sleep with me, Edmund Spenser!") I may be a little too early to judge, though. :-)
Looking at him made me also scan some of the other Romantic poets on Wikipedia, particuarly Lord Byron, i.e. the badass of the Romantics. I had a homophobic friend once who, when I told her about her favorite poet, said that his doctor probably made it all up to make him look bad. Probably the dumbest thing I ever heard anyone say about literature. The other being this:
Idiot: "The Oz stories are scary! I mean, hello. Dorothy was subjected to electroshock therapy in the books."
Me: "Um, no. I read both books that 'Return to Oz' was based on, and neither have electroshock therapy."
Idiot: "They do so."
Me: "No, they don't. I read the books."
Idiot: "Well, I read it on the Internet!"
Me: "..."
Which also makes me think of how while there's some who want to whitewash our old classical authors, it seems others are eager to make them have sex with corpses and fart blood ... I think of Edgar Allan Poe when I say this. "You know, he actually did write nice things once in a while. 'The Bells' isn't exactly a poem of evil." Not that it'll stop the stupid dolls of him and Lenore in Hot Topic, but whatever.
I can't believe I watched all that. Especially into when they got all 3-D ... that doesn't look as fun. Of course, I spent most of my experience with Mortal Kombat watching others play and not actually playing myself. I think when I actually got to play MK3 myself I went, "Bah! Too hard!" and moved on. (Although I could do Mileena's moves, because they usually consisted of "hold down key for two seconds and throw your sais." That only got me past three people, though.)
But yeah ... looking back I remember the conventional wisdom, even among some of the gamers who wrote into those magazines seemed to be that the fatalities were horrific and nausea inducing (although somehow also cool). Now ... they just look ridiculous ... a little gross, especially with the detailed intestines, but mostly ridiculous. And I think around MK3 they were deliberately trying to make them look ridiculous.
And I just wonder if why all these people have such godlike powers that they can morph into animals or grow into giants why did they wait to do these moves until their opponent was useless. I mean, that's just kind of obnoxious.
This seems like a good opportunity to say that I haven't played my Nintendo DS since I got decently far into Cooking Mama and then promptly got real world guilt. ("I could be ACTUALLY COOKING." -- And no, Phoenix Wright does not make me want to be a lawyer and Sonic Rush doesn't actually make me want to turn into a little ball and collect rings. Knock it off. :-P) I haven't played it much since.
BUT -- I am happy that I got the assignment to cover the new video game store in town. I'm the one who would appreciate it the most out of everyone in the office.
I have two ideas for works circulating in my head, and they've somewhat taken hold and I want to do them. One is related to Charles Dickens and the other is related to classics.
It makes me kind of happier ... I always hated how college never let me focus on the stuff I really loved. And I really do love classical literature, as much as an effort as they usually are to read.
In fact, I was thinking today of how it's sort of weird that Charles Dickens is my favorite author as I do think he has faults as both a writer and a human being. Fagin was an example of casual Anti-Semitism, and his young female characters are mostly him beatifying his sisters-in-law. And in real life he was pretty much a prick, what with the divorcing his wife to get some actress tail and then disowning anyone as a friend if they told him that probably wasn't very nice. (My favorite part of the story is when he wrote a letter insinuating that his wife was a crazy bitch and a bad mother but his mistress was totally nice but he really, really wasn't doing anything with her. Then the letter got to the press and he was like, "They did that without my permission even though I clearly wrote it to a wide audience!" Very "Shit! I didn't friends-lock that post!")
I mean, Roald Dahl makes some anti-Zionist remarks and I'm remiss to read him, but Charles Dickens ... well, I don't care as much. He's a jerk and yet I read his stuff and it reads like he's talking to me as if I'm his best friend. And his melodrama just WORKS in a way a lot of writers can't pull off. I think it's because he really cares about what he's writing about and yet doesn't lecture. He just shows you everything that's going on in one the poorhouse. And while he cries over the little children he kills, it doesn't seem to have a "DONATE MONEY TO MY CHARITABLE CAUSE NOW!!!" sort of smell to it. At least I don't feel like it does. Don't know how he does it, either.
I'm also reading John Keats' poetry (like I mentioned before). I like him. Mostly because of all the poets we managed to read in English III Honors in high school who weren't like, "PSST! Everything is evil and awful" (i.e. Samuel Taylor Coleridge) or wrote the "Hey women, enjoy your life now that you're young and pretty because it's not all it's cracked up to be." (Oh come on, you have to know what poem I'm talking about here.) Although oddly enough I don't mind it when Shakespeare does the latter ... maybe because he also espoused the eternal flame of poetry as he did it ... Anyway, John Keats always seemed to do the dual job of being pretty and happy at the same time, which I always appreciated. I'm not sure if that's because he lived for too short a period of time to become pissed off or maybe he just had kind of a good humor about everything. (The bad reviews of Endymion didn't seem to stop him.) Although I'm only three poems in and, having scanned through the book of his complete poetry, he does seem to recycle some themes. ("Yay, flowers!" "Yay, Endymion!" and "Please come back from the grave and sleep with me, Edmund Spenser!") I may be a little too early to judge, though. :-)
Looking at him made me also scan some of the other Romantic poets on Wikipedia, particuarly Lord Byron, i.e. the badass of the Romantics. I had a homophobic friend once who, when I told her about her favorite poet, said that his doctor probably made it all up to make him look bad. Probably the dumbest thing I ever heard anyone say about literature. The other being this:
Idiot: "The Oz stories are scary! I mean, hello. Dorothy was subjected to electroshock therapy in the books."
Me: "Um, no. I read both books that 'Return to Oz' was based on, and neither have electroshock therapy."
Idiot: "They do so."
Me: "No, they don't. I read the books."
Idiot: "Well, I read it on the Internet!"
Me: "..."
Which also makes me think of how while there's some who want to whitewash our old classical authors, it seems others are eager to make them have sex with corpses and fart blood ... I think of Edgar Allan Poe when I say this. "You know, he actually did write nice things once in a while. 'The Bells' isn't exactly a poem of evil." Not that it'll stop the stupid dolls of him and Lenore in Hot Topic, but whatever.
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