"Even if all the trees come back, it won't be His forest anymore."

For some reason, I've spent a good majority of the last month or so watching stories dealing with the death of God: the final season of Lost; Hayao Miyazaki's anime masterpiece Princess Mononoke; and Toy Story 3. Plus Neil Gaiman's Sandman continues to head the list of my favorite pieces of literature. What attracts me to these, I wonder? Maybe it's the fact that I'm a teenager, and its well known that Nietzschean rejection of Judeo-Christian values is an essential adolescent experience. But more likely it has something to do with their quality being as high as a deadhead on 4/20. Lost ended on an amazingly high note (although I've noticed that this means I'm writing for the minority), while Princess Mononoke and Toy Story 3 are my favorite offerings from people who seem constitutionally incapable of making bad films.

This awesomeness probably stems from the fact that DOG stories have pretty much every element that contributes to a good story. They are at once as epic as the works of JRR Tolkien and as emotionally intimate as the works of Raymond Carver. In addition, its not a stale, 'been there, done that' archetype. Every story is different, because just as everyone has their own unique relationship with God, they each have their own views on God's death and just what the hell that means. The story of two starcrossed lovers pretty much reached its apex after Romeo and Juliet's double suicide, but DOG stories are still going strong 150 years after Zarathustra first came down from the mountains.

Honestly, it's pretty hard not to like dog stories. After all, they celebrate human strength and ingenuity. In a world devoid of absolute meaning, it's up to us to subjectively grant it meaning. As the title of this post, a quote cribbed from Princess Mononoke, states, even after gods death, the great world he created continues to spin. The gods die and Asgard burns, but humans continue to inhabit the branches of the reborn Yggdrasil. DOG stories are not about epic battles between good and evil (although they do have plenty of that) so much as they are about human resilience, even in the face of the greatest of threats.

I suppose DOG stories are powerful because they're always relevant, especially today. When the Soviet Union fell in the 90s, some people liked to say that we were witnessing the 'end of history,' the emergence of a new world order of peace, prosperity, and universal democracy. The last ten years have taught us that there's still plenty of pages left in the book, but it's undeniable that we've reached a point where classic worldviews are starting to collapse. Tactics used to fight communists and fascists don't work so well against terrorists and insurgents. In addition, central authority is finishing it's downward spiral into complete farce. How can a man be infallible when he allows pedophiles to run amok? How can a man lead the free world when he is incapable of either a) keeping his fucking pants up or b) utilizing the English language better than a sixth grader? The closest thing we have to objective truth in the modern, Fox News-tinged world is Wikipedia, and its well-established that Wikipedia is slightly erroneous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_in_wikipedia if you don't believe me). To answer the question time posed years ago, god most certainly dead. But the forest will grow back, if us resilient humans have anything to say about it. It won't be His forest this time, though. It'll be our forest, imbued with our own values. A final farewell to objective truth.

That's why Toy Story 3 kicks ass.

Fucking Water

After two years of waiting, I finally got a short story published in Menagerie, my high school's literary magazine. That piece, "After the Flood," was about a teenage boy wandering around in a flooded, postapocalyptic Chicago. When the magazine was published and I got a chance to read the piece again, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it held up (usually I hate my stories; I look at them the same way Richard Nixon looked at those incriminating 'Smoking Gun' tapes). I found that the piece had good voice, a decent plot, and a message that was subliminally meaningful without being obtusely in your face. However, whenever people approached me to comment on the story, all they could talk about was the story's excessive use of swearing (the title of this post happens to be the first two words of the story).
My view on it was this: if you were trapped in a flooded, postapocalyptic Chicago, you wouldn't try to censor yourself in your expression of how you felt about that. I didn't use the swearing in order to intentionally provoke uncomfortable feelings among my readers, but rather to build a realistic voice for the story's narrator. Swear words are a part of our colloquial dialect, and they shouldn't be ignored. Granted, they shouldn't be used gratuitously (and I don't think they were in my story), but they also shouldn't be outlawed altogether.
In addition, talented writers can also make beauty from swear words. This isn't a horn-tooting implication of my own greatness, mind you, but rather a recognition of the potential of swear words to sound lyrical. Here I'm thinking mainly of graphic novels-particularly Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, Garth Ennis' Preacher, and Brian Azzarello's 100 Bullets-but I'm sure there are books out there wherein authors have achieved the same level of awesomeness with swear words.
So don't hate on the swears, please. Just treat them as part of the piece.

Norman Mailer Was Such a Dick

If you read the blog of comic book writer Warren Ellis (and if you don't you should, as long as you like good writing with a bit of randomly Gothic underground tinge to it), every couple days he posts links to cool things he's found. Sometimes these 'cool things' are stories or works of art by his friends, but mostly they're stories from scientific magazines detailing the latest breakthroughs on the transhuman fringes of science. This makes sense, given that so much of his work, especially the so-awesome-you-should-definitely-read-it-if-you-haven't-yet cyperbunk comic Transmetropolitan.
The point of all this is, I'm shamelessly aping Warren Ellis' idea, and every couple days (or hell, whenever I feel like it) I'll post links to things that have caught my eye. Here's round one.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/10158517.stm (that's the kind of thing Ellis would post a link to)

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-21/the-11-greatest-literary-feuds/ (where this post gets its name)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uhi2_oBdXM (oh the self-referential irony!)

That's all for now. Hope your Memorial Day was good (unlikely considering we're currently in Final Season).

First Up: The "Lost" Finale

As the long anticipated Lost finale came to a close with a final, look- how-it's-all-come-full-circle close up of protagonist Jack Shephard’s eye, I felt all the nerves in my body tingle with a sense of overwhelming awesomeness the likes of which I hadn't felt since I learned Kevin Spacey was Keyser Soze. Like any reasonable fan, I immediately logged on to see whether or not the majority of critical interpretations were in sync with my own. As I tentatively waited for my home page to load (my computer has an uncanny knack for being lethargic precisely when I want it to move with Usain Bolt-like speed), I almost stopped my effort, partly because I hate slow Internet and partly because I found it hard to conceive of a situation where anyone in the world (particularly intelligent, cultured critics) would disagree with my opinion that the lost finale was one of the most epic feats of televised entertainment ever conceived by mankind, the perfect ending to a once-in a generation, world changing piece of science fiction. However, I persevered. Imagine my surprise when it dawned on me that almost everyone disagreed with me.The first thing I logged onto for a quick fan survey was Facebook, where I did not find a single status that appreciated the finale ( though I did find many statuses that used the miles quote from which this post takes its name). Okay, I thought, no big deal, really. It's only Facebook, after all, and as much as I love my 383 (or thereabouts) high school friends, they're not exactly the be- all end all of criticism or pop culture judgment. So I moved on to the Daily Beast, one of my go-to sites (granted, it's more of a stylized gossip site than a legitimate source of news, but I think it's pop culture criticism is pretty good). To my shock, the Daily Beast’s headline about the Lost finale called it ‘infuriating.’
I’m afraid I must disagree. In my opinion, the Lost finale was incredibly awesome. It didn’t answer all the questions, but then again no sane person should’ve honestly expected it to. The questions are always (ALWAYS) more potent, powerful, and thought-provoking than the answers. This is why the show Heroes failed so spectacularly after its outstanding first season: it answered everyone’s questions right away, and so there was really no longer anything to keep viewers hooked. Sure, there were the superpowers, which kept nerds like me invested for awhile, but even we eventually left when we realized that the writers were just throwing the same old plots at us. There weren’t any lingering mysteries, so there wasn’t any sustainable plot fuel.
The weakness of answers in relation to powerful questions is especially relevant on science fiction-oriented shows like Heroes and Lost, because when you try to explain how things work in those worlds, all you end up doing is exposing how ridiculous the mythologies are. Mystery keeps them interesting, but transparency makes them stupid and unrealistic. Unrealistic? Why yes, as a matter of fact. Real life is never fully explained to the people living it. As the fantastic comic book writer Grant Morrison said in defense of his “RIP” storyline in the Batman comic (another masterpiece that derives a lot of its power from lingering mystery and unsolved questions): “life is much more like a David Lynch movie, full of people you never meet again and unexplained phone calls.” Life is full of questions, and so is the best entertainment. I love open questions, because it leaves the piece open to audience interpretation. And this was always the ‘X Factor’ that made Lost so unique: everyone had their own reasons for watching it, based on their own interpretations of show events (interpretations that were constantly revamped and modified as more elements came into play).
My interpretation of the finale, for instance, is an awesome conclusion that ranks up there with the endings of the best epics: The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Book of Revelation. When Christian Shephard opens the door to Eloise’s church at the end and lets in the blinding white light, it’s just Aslan telling the Pevensie children that the Narnia they knew is gone, but a new Narnia (or was it New Jerusalem?) has come to replace it, a white utopia. This dramatic ending incorporates not only the epic elements of the show (Chronicles has been referenced before, namely in the ‘Lamppost’ Dharma station), but also the time-space elements. The question at the center of the whole show (and the finale) was ‘how are we here?’ Or ‘why are we here?’ Although it doesn’t answer the meaning of the Numbers or explain precisely how the island moved or what Jacob’s exact powers were, the finale did answer this, the most important question. Its answer? There is no ‘here.’ ‘Here’ is everywhere, and ‘now’ is all the time.
This answer was foreshadowed in the show’s previous references to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, the science fiction masterpiece that features a race of aliens who are capable of seeing any moment in time. To them, nothing is past, and nothing is future; everything is now, everything is eternal. And this is the message of the Sideways universe in Lost: don’t worry about it when someone dies or something is lost, because they’re alive somewhere.
That’s my analysis, anyway. The rest I leave up to your interpretation, just as it should be.

I Swear I'm Serious This Time

I know, I know. My attemtps to revive this blog in the past have been about as successful as BP's 'Top Kill' solution. But I'm going to try it again. I think I can do it this time. I'm ready and willing to write, I've got some interest in it (Nick Burt, this is all on you), and I have some subjects I want to make my view known on. I don't want to waste my time with promises, because it's highly probable that I won't keep them (I've said that I'm going to revive this blog like three times already, 'revival's that lasted about two posts before I shrunk away into negligence).
It's going to be different this time, I think. I've started the renovation, removed most of the old links and generally stupid sidebars (God, how long was I gonna have 'My Favorite Super Smash Brawl characters' on the side of this page?). I haven't added anything new yet, but hopefully I'll get around to it soon. In additon, all my old blog friends are gone, sucked away into the high school machine. It's just me this time. Hopefully I'll enjoy this isolation as much as Jason Derulo.
Obviously one of the blog's previous drawbacks was my lack of a constant schedule. This time, I'm going to try for an update every other day (daily updates are a pretty unrealistic concept, unless some sort of news breaks that demands my immediate response). It's going to be different, and it's going to be awesome. Unless I forget.

The Best Four Days in Gaming

This is actually from a couple weeks ago (GenCon is usually the second week of August), and it originated as a Facebook note. However, I've decided to put it here as well so that my loyal readers unfortunate enough not to have Facebooks can enjoy it as well:

Yesterday, I just got back from another four-day trip with my dad to GenCon, a worldwide gaming convention held annually in downtown Indianapolis known as the 'Best Four Days in Gaming'. Every imaginable type of game is represented, from rpg's to board games to card games (which is what I go for). And when they say 'four days', they mean four days: there are different tournaments and stuff going on around the clock, and everyone runs on no sleep and irregular eating times. Trolling around the huge gaming hall in between rounds, it's common to find people with their heads down among suitcases and cards, desperately trying to get just enough shuteye to stay alive through 14 hours of grueling card game tournaments (if you don't think fourteen hours of playing cards is tiring, then you have obviously never done it).
A quick overview of my schedule: woke up on Thursday morning at...well, it was early. We drove for a couple hours into downtown Indianapolis and commenced the card-gamery with a 'crossover' tournament wherein you played a deck made up of either Naruto cards or DBZ cards. Sounds great in theory, since both the games and the series themselves are strikingly similar, but unfortunately the games were just too different to really work together in a balanced way. When we finally checked in at our hotel at 10:00 (both the street we were supposed to take and the hotel had changed names since last year, causing some obvious confusion), we ordered some Papa John's for dinner. Remember what I said about irregular eating schedules during GenCon? It's not GenCon without pizza for every meal.Friday was another day-long tournament, this one comprised solely of DBZ. Nothing really noteworthy happened, other than the fact that (surprise, surprise) we didn't eat pizza for dinner. Instead we had some pretty awesome Angus burgers at eleven o'clock at night. On the way to the restaurant, we were offered a brochure from a group of revolutionary artists from West Virginia that told us to "stop bitching and start revolting". I don't know what the name of this underground movement was, but it was pretty hilarious and I laughed for a couple minutes afterward.Naruto took the spotlight for Saturday's big tournament. As far as the basics go, it was pretty much like the previous two days. However, things were a little shaken up when the fire alarm suddenly went off between the sixth and seventh rounds, forcing everyone to immediately evacuate the convention center. This didn't have as much of an impact on the tournament as everyone thought, since we were given the all-clear and were back in the convention center within half an hour. This obviously caused a slight delay, and we didn't get back to the hotel until after midnight, falling asleep immediately as we were too tired to even order pizza.
Some interesting/miscellaneous things I saw/did:
T-shirts: I usually spend my Christmas gift cards buying T-shirts at GenCon, and this year I used it to get three new Lantern t-shirts (because you can never have enough). I also saw a bunch of guys in Lantern shirts walking around; I think I saw close to five Blue Lanterns in the span of an hour on Saturday. As far as the shirts everybody else was wearing, I spied the usual "Han shot first" and Cthulhu shirts. Awesome graffiti: Most card tournaments are played on white tablecloths. Since they're not changed over the course of the four days that is GenCon, you would assume that people would eventually get bored and start doodling. And you would assume correctly. I must say, the table graffiti this year was above par. From scribbled messages like "the rare hunters are a' rare huntin'" to drawings of Boba Fett in a tuxedo, the graffiti really cracked me up.
Cosplayers: Here it is, after all the waiting...the complete list of every cosplayer I saw at GenCon 2009! Get ready: Sora, Auron, Joker, Rorschach, a Knight who Says Ni, the Witch-king, the ugliest Wonder Woman I've ever seen, Ichigo Kurosaki, more Toshiro Hitsugayas than you could shake a stick at, pretty much every member of Akatsuki, and tons of miscellaneous samurai, fairies, ninjas, and monsters. And although he doesn't exactly qualify as a cosplayer, we did spy one guy with the inscription of the One Ring tatooed on his arm. No freaking joke.That's pretty much all I can think of now. All in all, it was awesome, and if I think of anything else, I'll edit it in.

Finally, After Months of Waiting, A Detailed Story of How I've Spent My Summer Vacation

Now that I've officially started Bizarro World back up again, I think that I'll commence the latest wave of blog posts with, as the story says, the kind of writing that you used to have to do on the first day of school for the first ten years (or so) of school: how I've spent my summer vacation. Granted, it's not over yet, and rest assured I will have stories to tell about this year's trip to GenCon when I return on Monday, but since five-sixths (yes, I just worked that out) of it is over, it seems fitting to regale you with reasons (more like pathetic excuses) for why I've been so negligent of this here blog, interspersed here and there with interesting stories of the summer 2009 (which I fear will be known forever more as 'that cold, wet summer when Christian learned that summer school is most definitely NOT FUN no matter how many Study Halls it gets you). So, without further ado (and I apologize for the amount of ado that has taken up the last minute or so of your reading; I'm just excercising those writing muscles again after so long and it's just so darn fun I can't help but extrapolate), here is my summer vacation.
-Knowing that I was scheduled for three AP classes this year, I signed up to take Physics over the summer so that I would have a Study Hall, which in turn would mean that hopefully I wouldn't kill myself during junior year. When I told my family about this, they were almost mortified, giving me adivce/sucks-for-you comments along the lines of "You're going to hate it" and "You're CHOOSING to take summer school?". However, my hopeful optimism was not daunted by these not-so-helpful comments; I believed that five days a week wouldn't be too bad. However, it was pretty annoying; I spent eight weeks of the summer waking up at 6:30, and the second week we were stuck inside the air-conditioning-less LT North building in 90 degree heat. Luckily, the summer cooled down and we didn't have to face that again. Time will tell whether a Study Hall is worth going through such a harrowing ordeal (rest assured, I will update you when the new school year commences)
-Luckily, the Powers That Be aren't completely cold-hearted, because summer school starts after a week of summer. I spent this glorious week (the calm before the storm) cleaning my room for the first time in God knows how long (conservative estimate: 4 years). That was very worthwhile, as I succeeded in throwing away a crapload of papers dating back to the seventh grade, and allowed me to move in a new bed that is much comfier and much bigger than the one I've been stuck with for God knows how long (conservative estimate: 8 years). The 'last hurrah', as it were, of this week was this year's nightlong Relay for Life fundraiser, which I spent in a pink T-shirt and sombrero.
-After PhysX was over and done with, I embarked on my family's annual weeklong trip to the Chalet on the Lake resort in Michigan. I basically divided my time between swimming in the pool, swimming in the lake (all this swimming was much needed: it struck me in the midst of Physics that until August 1, I had gone swimming a total of ONCE this whole summer), and rereading trade paperback collections of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic series (amazing stuff; I forgot how good it was). A couple years ago, I finished the last four volumes of Sandman on that trip, and ever since I've associated them together, so I decided to rent some from the library and reread them (needless to say, a decision that led to a lot of good beachside reading).

And that's basically my summer vacation in a nutshell, up to this point. As I've said, I'll update next week with how I spent GenCon, and if anything else happens in the last week (LAST WEEK! Jesus Christ!) of summer, I will most definitely post about it.