The Things That Dreams Are Made Of

My dreams have taken a turn for the worse.

Whereas once I would have anxiety dreams over missed homework assignments or labyrinthine trips in foreign countries, I now dream of broken iPhones.

Of taking a dip in the ocean only to discover I left my iPhone in my pocket. Or of scrapping the back pane of my iPhone against my jean rivets.

Apparently, it is the losing teeth dream of the 10s.

Never before has an object I owned wormed its way so insidiously into my unconscious. I can't help but wonder if I alone suffer this malady because I used to work in the iPhone morgue or if this is an early indicator of the brain cancer I am bound to develop from our love affair with RF waves.

A Slime Draws Near! Command?

Dragon Quest IX
If you like Dragon Quest, you are bound to like Dragon Quest IX.

Unlike the Final Fantasy franchise which has always developed through punctuated equilibrium with mixed results, the Dragon Quest series operates by phyletic gradualism. The only way you would be able to place IX sequentially in the series (besides the roman numerals, of course) would be to catalogue the traits it has inherited from its forebears (Mini Medals from IV, Alchemy Pot from VIII). You will feel right at home during that terribly unlucky moment when some slime critical hits and slays your only Cleric steps before a Boss fight.

By all standards, it should be the perfect Dragon Quest game -- but it doesn't quite feel like it.

Despite the radical (pardon the Final Fantasy slight) "paradigm shift" of releasing a marquee franchise game on a portable gaming system, Square-Enix devalued the impact of Dragon Quest IX by releasing two excellent remakes of IV and V within the past two years. What should have felt like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night instead feels like Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.

The paint-by-numbers Dragon Quest plot does little to dispel this notion. Nothing in the game matches the emotional impact of re-exploring Alefgard in Dragon Quest III (the NES Chrono Trigger) or finally uniting your party in Chapter V of Dragon Quest IV (the NES Ulysses).

Dragon Quest IX is mechanically sound and a pleasure to play, I just doubt I will remember anything about it in a year.

Well, maybe the magical flying golden train.

Grade: B+

An open letter

Dear Microsoft,

I was alerted this morning that there were two new software updates for Office '08 (Mac). One of the updates was quite large, but that's always been your style. As usual, I went through the remarkably cumbersome update process. Upon completion I was informed that there was a second update in the queue, this one more than twice the size of the last. Nearly a full gig and two full rounds of your clunky update processes later, my new-and-ostensibly-improved Office '08 is back to providing the same mediocre functionality and user experience that I've come to expect from your company.

I am a former Microsoft devote and current Mac user. Even today I find myself hoping that you'll produce products and user experiences that will woo me back to you. Alas, all you seem to do is push me further and further away. Perhaps you will never figure out how to design and execute quality products, but some part of me still holds out some glimmer of hope.

I would be extremely grateful if you could find it in your heart to please suck less.

Regards,

Ben

God isn’t dead, he’s going to college

Pixar can make a good movie, even if their films have reached a level of nuance and meaning that is almost overwhelming for me to watch.

Looking in to the abyss

Case in point, Toy Story 3. I went to see it on a Monday afternoon, a day off. And I was expecting a good film, something with more depth than modern “thoughtful” blockbusters (like the surprisingly shallow Inception, with its meanings so unambiguously dictated—including the ambiguity) but that would allow me to think as much as it would allow me to “escape.”

Nope.

Instead Toy Story 3 made my mind do the sort of existential backflips that kept me up all night when I was 16 (and nearly caused a stress-fracture in my metaphorical thought spine).

For instance, the driving image of Toy Story 3—the one that will make you cry—is the image of the toys running up a continuous hill over the fires of hade... err... the garbage incinerator was just one of the many, deep and graduate level references embedded in Toy Story 3 that had my head spinning.

I mostly saw Albert Camus (the French Absurdist or Existentialist—depending on when your Professor was tenured) trying to find purpose in life, or explain the lack thereof, with his concept of an absurd hero. Instead of Sisyphus, there are plastic toys who are “tragic, that is because [the heroes are] conscious [of their situation].” These tiny, anthropomorphic figures are the absurd heroes that they fully understand the futility of their life and work—the Andys of the world will always grow up—but are willing, and joyful, about doing it anyway and are thus able to prove that they are more powerful than their situation.

I also saw Nietzche (notice my title) and think about these uber-toys, controlling there own destinies. Mafia movies. Heist movies (a Toy Story staple). I could have talked about Gilgamesh (see the photo).

Toy Story 3 was unsettling. Yet, I’ll be thinking about it for far longer than I spent thinking about that other, shallower summer heist movie people are talking about.

Union

Dave Attell tells a joke about how if you’re afraid of a terrorist attack, you should only travel by bus. Because any terrorist cell would get to the bus station and think, “Damn. Somebody already hit this bitch.”

It was like that at the credit union today. I rarely go there. Most everything I do now is online or in the cloud. (I don’t even carry a thumb drive anymore because dropbox and the iPhone have made them obsolete.)

The point is, that there was this little old lady behind me in line at the credit union. And when I say little old lady, I mean short as the “Wait here” sign, old lady hair and odd-colored, silky looking clothes.

And when I said in line behind me, I mean driving me crazy by standing next to me in line, or slightly in front of me outside of the line. All the way forward. Someone goes to the counter. I take two steps forward. And old lady spins and then walks forward to an equal spot as me, or a half step ahead. All the way forward.

I made sure she didn’t cut in front of me in line. But the question is: After you’ve been alive for a couple of hundred years, haven’t you had enough time to figure out how a line works?