She was looking for her phone, her mother’s old galaxy s4, and asked me if I knew where it was. When I told her I didn’t she said “It’s probably in my room.”
Probably in my room. Not yet three and correctly using probably.
Uncategorized
the kid: jesus christ
I was working through a stressful situation and had evidently expressed some verbal frustration because when I came into the house the kid came up to me and asked “Why did you say jesus christ daddy? Why did you say jesus christ?”
“Because I was upset.”
“Okay.”
far cry 4
I finished farcry4 recently and while being a pretty decent shooter the story got a little weird. In a weirdly political derailment the ending(s) of the game became statements about corruption and power. The game has 2 possible endings based on decisions made throughout the campaign. A third option also exists provided you do nothing but let the character sit in a chair for 13 minutes.
Ending A is a crazed despot turning the country you’ve just liberated into a drug mill. Thus enslaving the briefly freed people as drug growers. The biggest problem I had with this was how sympathetic the character appears to be. Just about every hint you get seems to say the other ending is the worst one.
Option B is a crazed despot turning the country you’ve just liberated into a religious zealots dream. Complete with beheadings of infidels. The problem with this ending is that a character that has been touted as ridiculous important to everything just despawns and is gone. Just poof. No more Bhadra. So it’s not just a depressing ending it’s an incomplete one. It’s like the dev’s couldn’t be bothered to wrap it up.
There is no happy ending. No satisfying conclusion to all the violence and work your character has put in. It seems to be some sort of statement about power and how it corrupts. A grimdark parable of religious zeal and greed and ultimately it’s disappointing.
I don’t play video games to understand the heart of darkness. Instead of spending all that time fighting to save my little pixelated kingdom and bring peace and happiness to it farcry4 forced me to leave the place just as fucked as when I arrived. My experience in Kyrat completely meaningless.
Sometimes a guy just wants to save the fake world.
the kid: snow day
Took the little one to the snow for the first time. She, at almost 3, fears nothing. Upon witnessing other people climb the hill and slide down the designated paths she demanded I get her to the top of the hill as quickly as possible so she could throw herself down the sledding track. No sled, just a fully insulated snow suit.
At one point she was so eager to make it down the mountain she ignored the trail entirely and just fell down the side narrowly missing trees and a submerged parking sign.
Absolute maniac of a child. Seriously.
carson for trump
I was raised an SDA so now that one of their icons (Ben Carson) has endorsed the dogwhistle fascist that is Trump I am unsurprised. Fundamentalism and authoritarianism go hand-in-hand.
What strikes me as staggeringly ironic is SDAs believe that an authoritarian government will persecute them for not worshiping on Sunday. I suppose voting for Trump might get the ball rolling on that so the apocalypse can get started and trigger Christ’s second coming. Maybe that’s Carson’s endgame.
Also, this sets up Trump nicely because now he has the whole “one black friend” thing to lean back on. Success!
Further reading:
Carson Endorses Trump (NYT)
king of the hill
I like the show but there’s this undercurrent in Hank, like, he’s never truly happy. Mainly because Peggy doesn’t stay in the kitchen and his kid is a weirdo. He loves them and takes care of them because “that’s what you do” but he rarely takes joy in it. He’s ubertraditional stuck with wildcards. The older I get the more I see Hank as the hapless conservative stuck in a liberal world. Got dangit, he’s just trying to live the heteronormative dream.
On the other hand the way they ended the Cotton storyline because, yeah, that horrible man did a number on Hank so it explains a lot of his behavior which for a throwaway animated sitcom is really quite extraordinary.
micro aggressions
Whenever someone makes a joke about a wife’s cooking or nagging, or a comment about woman’s style of dress/appearance, or a “my daughter’s not dating til she’s 40” joke, or say chivalry is dead, they’re reinforcing an ideology that women only exist to appease men.
So much of our culture revolves around these tropes. A recent superbowl commercial featuring a father chasing his daughter around on a date to “protect” her reduces her to just being an object without will or agency.
These little micro aggressions just teach and instill a sense of worthlessness. We need to stop them.
the kid: spiders
A few days ago the kid came into my room and said “Daddy, get the monsters.” When I asked what monsters she said “The fires.”
For some reason when she says spiders it comes out as fires. We’re always hearing “fire, fire” and honestly I don’t know which is scarier.
At some point she decided that she couldn’t sleep until all the spiderwebs were gone. “Where’s the broom? Let me get it.” I smacked at everything she pointed at with the broom and she yelled “get ’em get’ em” at any hapless spider trying to run away. Devil child.
100 Words
I am going to try and write quick 100 or so word posts about whatever comes to mind. Before I’ve approached blogging in a way where everything has to be longform with research and links and as such have rarely written or posted anything. Longform blogging is daunting. Instead I am going to attempt a goal of 100 words about whatever topic pops into my head. Just a way to get something written down about how I feel or what I think. Too many of my posts are stuck in draft form and will never see the light of day.
What I Learned From Rick and Morty
My mother wrinkles her nose at me in disappointment whenever I mention that I watch cartoons. I was raised on PBS and books. I didn’t see Looney Toons until I was far too old for them. In her mind cartoons still means Saturday morning and for kids only.
The Simpsons changed that idea, South Park defied it and Family Guy did away with it completely. Japan has known this for years. There’s a whole subgenre of animation geared towards adults. Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network has a plethora of short, bizarre, poorly drawn animation that only bores children with dialogue and absurdity.
Rick and Morty is one of these shows. The animation is not awful, very stylistic and relatively normal. It’s co-created by Dan Harmon of Community fame. I think that is very important to note.
I am not going to list all the jokes I liked or outline the plot. These things make Rick and Morty what it is but for me there is one story line that struck me so profoundly that it almost feels like it was written for me.
Rick is a mad scientist of the highest order and his experiments are usually quite successful but due to a serious of poor decisions (and motivations) he ends up destroying the world as we know it. Instead of being able to fix it and make everything okay he ports himself and his grandson Morty to a parallel universe in which their counterparts, Alternate Rick and Alternate Morty, have just been gruesomely killed in a botched experiment. Morty is rightly horrified but Rick shrugs it off as just a part of life.
The episode ends with Morty burying the alternate version of himself. He’s burying himself and as we learn in later episodes he’s burying his childishness and to an extent, wonder.
Rick and Morty is about a mad scientist and his grandson having “adventures.” Rick and Morty is about despair, depression, broken relationships, broken people. Rick and Morty is about being human.
Below is a quote from Metafilter that captures a lot about what Rick and Morty is.
I really can’t express how watching Rick and Morty effects me. There are moments in it that feel so personal that it’s a tad scary. I guess I find affirmation in it, a confirmation of my own view of life.
That might say more about me than I want it to.
Because we are simply incapable as modern people of accepting the idea that one person – who we’re emotionally invested in – is so cosmically irrelevant and easily replaceable. Rick’s “don’t think about it!” isn’t advice we can take. Additionally, it fundamentally breaks storytelling rules (because we can’t cope with it) by having all these things that happened before amount up to absolutely nothing. The R&M universe is a return to the world a thousand years ago where life was meaningless because it was brutish and short and it offends our sensibilities so much we – Morty – just can’t accept it, no matter how much evidence piles up
Hell, Rick can’t accept it either as far as the nature of self-identity. When he’s dropped into a young body it’s not a copy of his consciousness, which would just be redundant with all the other Ricks out there. There’s some gadget that moves him and he has to use it to move back. Why? Because the younger meat computer he’s running that brain on changes him in a way he can’t accept, even if it’s benign by every measurement we’d consider. So he destroys all the bits of project lazarus because even that small tweak in himself is unacceptable. It’s not enough that everyone still sees him as Rick and he still sees himself, mostly, as Rick. That small little bit which we can accept as personal growth is too much.
So for us to know that there’s still a Rick whose adventures we watched out there, rotting in a prison, even if we have a functionally identical one? No go. It makes us confront an irrelevance we can’t stomach.
posted by phearlez at 7:01 AM on October 9, 2015
just write 