Social Orbit

Face book is fascinating. Such self involvement in closed social circles.

So many people circling their own tiny little orbits of social inclusion. Just thinking about it makes my brain leap to so many philosophical conclusions. Just think about our perspective, we only get one head to see out of, we only get one set of organs to commit our rude biology with. Ancient philosophers and pioneer cosmologists believed that all celestial bodies orbited our planet. This was of course after we figured out that no, our world isn't completely flat and made of only what we could see in front of us. Ancient conquerors wanting to control the world only meant the "known world" which was usually just the majority of a continent, be it Europe or Asia or both with parts in between.

But the point, we live inside our heads. Even meeting other people doesn't always convince us of the existence of a life outside our brains. Everyone has had that "maybe no one else is real and I'm the only real person" thought. It takes time convincing us of the validity of other people. And if you've ever tried to convince someone else of your opinion you know how hard it is to make someone see things your way. Right now technology makes it so people on opposite sides of the planet can hold a conversation. Our lens is growing wider everyday. We have people fighting this, saying that if the focus gets to wide individuality will suffer. Only time will tell if we'll ever be able to reach outside our heads.

First Impression: Silent Hill: Homecoming

I remember playing Silent Hill alone in my room, scared out of my mind. I was so terrified when my mom came home from work I had her come in my room and sit with me a second. She of course suggested if the game was scaring me I should stop playing it. But I was engrossed by then, I had to know the ending. Maybe some background will help, when I was a kid I had a lot of nightmares. Maybe this is because I'd go to sleep after watching horror movies and science fiction with my brother. For a long time after that I decided I didn't like scary film and actively avoided them. I liked video games, and video games could never really scare me. Then there was Resident Evil, a game that was unintentionally hilarious because of the voice acting. Then Resident Evil 2, which let you blast zombies into splinters with a shotgun. Resident Evil 2 had it's scares but you had the assurance that whatever horrors you faced enough shotgun shells or grenade rounds would bring it down. Resident Evil, in the end, was more fun for it's action than it's scares. I started

But then in 1999 Silent hill was released. It had the same game play as Resident Evil but had another layer. Instead of fighting zombies you were fighting weird children with knives, skinless dogs, skinless flying bat things, and zombie nurses. And the simple fact that you're in a town and basically given free reign to run where you want. And the story wasn't about zombies over running a town, it was about a town being swallowed by some type of eldritch evil. And the most important part, it had atmopshere. The atmosphere was usually what gave the scares. You were always getting this idea that there was something just beyond your view waiting and watching. That the town itself was out to get you. It scared the hell out of me, and taught me to like being scared.

Now it's four games later and the game is in the hands of a new developer. It's interesting, seeing a game come out that's basically been handed to it's fans. Silent Hill: Homecoming has all the atmosphere and uneasiness that the series is known for, but frustratingly brought along many of the kinks, while adding some of it's own for posterity.

First, the story is ridiculous. You are a marine, come home to your small quaint little town of Shepard City, no wait, Shepard's Gate, oh wait it's Shepard's Glen. Sorry it's Shepard's Glen, my mistake. Anyway you are brought home by a trucker, and find the town full of fog, with many of the roads ending in seemingly bottomless cliffs, and the first person you meet is the judge, Holloway. She tells you that things are bad (duh) and that people have stopped caring for the roads. Also she tells you to speak with Elle. First of all, when you don't do road maintenance there's just more cracks, the roads don't spill away into the abyss. Second of all, no duh things are bad the towns empty of people and full of creepy mist. Third of all, who is Elle, maybe you should explain. We're left to assume that Elle is an old friend of protangonist Alex's. It's lazy, she says "You should talk to Elle." not "You should talk to your old friend Elle." And the voice acting is bad. It's not like funny bad, it's just actors being lazy bad. Or maybe it's actors struggling with bad writing.

I should mention you get dialogue options, a first for the series. Maybe this is why I don't like them. They're always so transparent, a virtuous, slightly dopey response, or a hilariously shitty response. For example I was looking for the town doctor, and I found him at the bottom of a creepy steel mill/hospital cutting himself, muttering "have to bleed out the sin, but it grows back!" You get the response of "stop I can treat those wounds." To which he yells at you OR the hilarious "What the hell are you doing you crazy fool, you're gunna hurt yourself!" Who calls people fool, let along a crazy fool? It breaks up the game, and while it gives you more control, it means there's less awesome cut scenes.

Also, this being an American developed game they had to revamp the action. So of course you have a combo system with light and heavy attacks, heavy attacks stunning and light attacks being fast and doing damage. There's a dodge button but the game can be a real jerk about whether a dodge worked or didn't. The enemies as well are ridiculous, the all have silly one word names. Like the skinless dogs are more like skinless bull dogs, and drip blood as they run around, but they're called "Ferals". Seriously, Ferals? Every enemy has a shitty little name, that the game tells you about in the between area loading screens, like "hit lurkers in the head, they're very weak there!" Lurkers by the way are weird guys who lay down and have claws with big metal hooks on them, they're heads are just one big mouth. I would enjoy naming them myself. One thing they do right is atmosphere, the game is genuinely creepy. The music is just lifted right out of the other games with some new stuff added for kicks.

Overall the fact that the game didn't see release on Japanese shores should be down right telling. It's not very good, but it's serviceable. Take it or leave it.

Assassin's Creed II First Impressions

I hated Assassin's Creed, well maybe that's too strong. I wanted to love Assassin's Creed, it had a neat story based on historical fact, cool setting, great artistic merit, and the combat and running jumping climbing up trees was easy without losing challenge. All that is very difficult to pull of together. But it was so repetitive! You had to go to point A to hear about this guy you gotta kill then do the same six side missions to get information. Well it was the same six missions but you usually only had to do three. Even with that, it was still repetitive and terrible. So what possessed me to buy the sequel, let along pre-order it? Well the videos showed something very important, something that set my soul on fire with a desire to play this game. They showed someone buying poison from a shop.

Now previously on this very blog I talked about Far Cry 2 not fully utilizing it's RPG elements. This game takes those ideas and runs home with them. I'm at about the ten hour mark maybe (being charitable) and I've come to a point where I'm frantically collecting money on side quests in order to build up my stronghold so I can get more money, so I can get better armor, so I can do better in the missions. That's the most interesting thing really, there are all the standard weapons from the other game, sword, knife, throwing knives, hidden blade, and armor upgrades. But you buy them, at stores, scattered around every city. And get this, your armor? It gets damaged so you have to go to the blacksmith and get it repaired. It's never very much but if you're running around with broken armor you get one less life jewel thing.

And how you get that money? Well you can do side missions, you can find treasure boxes scattered around the city, or you can just pick pocket people. And there's lots of statistics to watch but they're not presented as such. Like you have a notoriety meter that slowly fills with red the more you act like a murdering psychopath. When I got the double hidden blades I accidentally preformed unlicensed tracheotomies on two guys walking down the street. I immediately was given away to the guards and had to run away, quick and fast. Speaking of guards, there is both more and less you can do about them now. The limberer ones will follow you atop roofs, so that's not an instant get out of jail card anymore. And some will just block anything you throw at them. There's these big armored gorillas that just knock everything away and then smash you with axes.

That's all I can think of at the moment, I'll wait till my next update to talk about the story.

I Have a Problem

I compulsively search for new games on the internet.

There I've said it. I have a problem, a dumb dumb problem. I avoid sleeping and interacting with other humans to search for games on the internet. Specifically role playing games. The terrible thing is I know I won't find what I'm looking for. It's about the search not the results. Recently, I found a community based around a Japanese application to make Kings Field style 3D first person games. I downloaded the game, and played it for maybe ten minutes before becoming frustrated with the controls and quitting. I then spent twice that amount of time digging into and searching for information on the community around this application. It was fascinating, the idea that people can obsess and specialize so particularly.

But that's the interesting part, the result was uninteresting and ultimately forgettable, I tell myself I'll get back to it like I tell myself I'll get a gym membership and work out (HAHAHA). The fun is the chase, the hunting. It's like some kind of mismatched hunter instinct. I want the game, but getting it is boring. The fun is finding it, retrieving it, getting it to work. Once that's done I'm through with it.

Let me reiterate; I spend hours searching for a game and when I find it, I discard it. I'm looking for something obviously, but what I'm looking for is the next thing, not the thing I'm finding. The hunt is the fun. It's so male psychosis, not being satisfied with what you have and always looking for what's next. I've crossed terrible planes to get what I want. I've downloaded mystery files that turn out to not be running games but viruses meant to end the search. I've been to file dump style sites that have broken search functions making me dig through page after page of files looking for tell tale warning signs. I've been to websites so fragile that clicking through pages too fast makes them collapse. I've been to torrent sites, slogging through pages. I've been so deep into google results that I lose sight of what I was even looking for.

My name is Harley, and I Have a Problem.

Well Nevermind

So I said I'd finish Far Cry 2 and then talk about it and no, I did not. So yeah no more Far Cry 2. I will wrap it up. I played more missions and I found out "oh, it is intensely formulaic" and stopped playing. Everything I already said is true about the whole game it seems. Unless something crazy happens later.
So, instead I'll post some "Features". For instance I'm planning to write a essay about the differences between Fable Lost Chapters and Fable 2 and the difference between the games and the concept. Also I'll do a sort of series retrospective of the Clocktower series of games. I'll need to get the last one and play it though.

Anyway, NEW CONTENT FORTHCOMING.

Poems are Easy

So I got some comments about my poem earlier because of the connotations it gives. Namely that it was a sexually charged poem about a dog. Well, the sexual connotation is picked up by the reader, if you have a clean mind you will perceive clean things. But because I believe in giving people what they want I now present "Cute Poems that Don't End Well."

The first is a short one I wrote called "the house is full of children" that starts out kid's book sweet then goes weird.

The House is Full of Children
by: Harley Dean Ziembicki

The House is full of children
Ages four to seventeen
The house is full of children
Some of them are getting mean
The house is full of children
Packed in wall to wall
The house is full of children
I can hear their high pitched calls.
The house is full of children
I can't make it to the door
The house is full of children
Now their lining all the floors
The house is full of children
And it's hard to be very nice
The house is full of children
One is reaching for a knife
The house is full of children
Now they're stabbing at the masses
The house is full of children
Blood staining all the glasses
The house was full of children
Now it's fulll of blood and meat
The house was full of children
Now a smell so sickly sweet
The house was full of children
And i know i cannot run
The house was full of children
Now i kiss the loving gun
The house was full of children
But it's children of the flies
The house was full of children
Now it's full of whispers and their lies
The house was full of children
But now only dwell the ghosts
The house was full of children
Now they seek new hosts

Ok now you read that and think "oh my god he killed all those children" but you did not even read the poem did you? The kids killed the kids, not the narrator. But he knows if he leaves he'll be implicated for it so he kills himself. Now then you can make some ridiculous fantasy story about it how it's about a orphanage that gets too full so they start killing kids but where does it say anything about an orphanage? I'd use some great emotional imagery on a poem like that. Oh just think of it. All like "the blood we have been spilling down the gutters it does run, we look down at our bodies and wonder what we've done" see, powerful.

I didn't have a point this time I just wrote a gross poem and wanted to post it.

Far Cry 2 Impressions The first Five Hours

So I at first intended to play the game for just an hour and then report on my findings, then do a sort of interim thing and then a review when I'd finished it. Unfortunately I've played way more than an hour, so this is sort of a "The first Five hours" sort of thing. And I'm not sure I've even played that much, but anyway let's get started.

My first impressions of the game where as a sort of FPS RPG, but it's very light on the RPG. It reminded me of STALKER but much lighter. It is however an FPS RPG but just a streamlined simplified one with the BS taken out. You could say stuff like "there's no quests and there's no inventory" but that's not exactly true. Doing that discredits the minimalist thinking the developers have done. You can only carry a primary, secondary, melee, and special weapon, as well as five morphine ampoules (for health, but sometimes for starting the day right hyuk hyuk). You could describe this as an inventory, a limited inventory. And you don't get Quests, you get Missions.

Missions are actually quite interesting and do take alot of hints from RPGs, ecspecially more modern RPGs with different outcomes and paths. Each mission you get from a major faction has a vanilla go from point A to point B kill/protect/interact with C style set up but they have a wrinkle in that your buddies offer you optional outs. For instance you have to head to a desert location to kill some parachuting special forces guys. But you buddy offers you another solution. If you find their informant and change the drop location, you can kill them in a more tactically advantageous position. Everyones happy then, your buddies like you more and the factions always pay in advance.

Going back to buddies, this is the most interesting mechanic in the game. Instead of giving you lives, if you're out and about and get taken down (whether by shotgun or by barrelling jeep) your buddy will show up and toss you over their arm and carry you out, blasting people as they go. Sometimes though your buddy will get hurt and you have the choice of mercy offing them or using your meds to save them. It's a very interesting system and the animations for this stuff are pretty good.

Speaking of animations, if you get critically wounded you're treated to scenes of your character graphically removing bullets from themselves. This ranges from them pushing a bullet out with their finger to digging in with a knife and pliers. It's bloody, it's gross, and it almost makes it worth it to get hurt.

Now for things I don't like. You get a journal which is sufficiently well written, maybe a bit to verbose for a mercenaries war journal but it's an entertaining read. But on the Xbox 360 where i'm playing it you can't flip pages and look at previous entries. Also you can't track your standing with factions, just your buddies. Maybe this is because there are no faction standings, or maybe I'm not far enough into the game, but it's annoying.

Also, everyone, and I mean everyone, who isn't a mission giver, a buddy, or a weapons dealer, wants you dead. This is explained that you're a rogue element. Even if you're doing missions for a particular faction you're a no name nontrackable asset so the grunts of the faction you're working for don't know you. Needless to say this is annoying. It speaks of laziness on the part of the developers, to me anyway. I can understand not wanting to allow for allies, and even your life saving buddies are pretty useless after they rescue you, but it's still annoying. I don't need squad commands, I just want people not always shooting at me. I'd like to pass through a gaurd outpost without getting shot at. Is that to much to ask for, ubisoft?

As for my playthrough, I picked the chinese guy, Xianyong something. He's the same age as me so I thought it was meant to be. I've been favoring boats because of his Chinese smuggler origins. I also started with a machine gun, but hated how inaccurate it was so I switched to a shotgun. More later I suppose.

Video Games Finally

I'm going to start writing about video games. I don't really do this because I don't think I'm qualified. I remember in college I would try to write opinionated essays and end up making the case for what I was arguing against. But this is very personal, I'm going to start writing about a game I just bought, also I might buy an old game and review that. The game I just bought was Far Cry 2, which I'd heard a lot of interesting things about. I'll post a First Impressions later.

There is No Truth

If this thing has a time posted display you may notice the late hour. I can't sleep and instead of telling my brain to shut up and go to sleep I've decided I'm going to power through to the next sunset then slip off to dream land. I like staying up, it's late hours like this that make me question reality. I was contemplating something about myself. I like to think I'm the first to admit I'm wrong, but people who know me well tell me "no, you're the exact opposite, you fight for your point of view no matter how wrong."

I was trying to figure out why that was, and the reason is because I know a lot of stuff. I like to boast that "I have a general knowledge of all things" and to many peoples annoyance this proves sort of true. I can tell you about half of what you'd want to know about anything. But it's hard separating knowledge from opinion. And this led me to something I've said to annoy people, "There are no facts, everything is an opinion." That's me experimenting with extremism. Now what did I mean?

Well, all we have to mark facts is viewable verifiable phenomena, but how do we know our eyes aren't lying? How do we know we know anything? Let's take something simple, like "The sky is blue" You can confirm that easy enough, look up during the day. And you can make shitty little counter-points like "Well during dusk and dawn the sky changes colors to such hues as pink, crimson, yellow, and darker shades like navy, purple, indigo, black even at night." No, not what I'm talking about.

A long time ago when I was in school I'd grill my science teachers and doctors I'd talk to, anyone with technical knowledge about the world, I've always had a thirst to learn. I was talking with someone about how our eyes see, how white light splits and we perceive the world by whatever fragment of the light is least diffuse when it reaches our eyes. I asked if that actually meant that things were really the color they were, that our perception of the world was in a way a sort of trick. What if the sky wasn't blue, what if that was only our perception? What if in actuality it was gray or white or black or didn't have a color, just a bright place before the stars? How could we know? Our understanding of vision is so entrenched in light that we have a hard if not impossible time understanding other methods of perception.

You see? Maybe the sky ain't blue, maybe we just think that as small minded humans. Who knows?

Not What I Remember

When I was young, I was of course told how we run our country, how America works. The two things that told me then that I was living in a just and beautiful country my two favorite rules were:

1. We don't Torture people
and
2. We don't negotiate with terrorists

The first showed our justice, that we will not torture people to get what we want, that we are human, and that every human has rights.
The second, at the time I suppose, showed that we have honor, and we stand by that honor and by our conviction and never back down, no matter what.

But now, we've changed one of those rules, and I don't know if we've changed the right one...

Something I Found on my Desk

I wrote this when I was working midnights I think, i was really bored so I started writing random crap. I do that sometimes
" Today is a great moment in history, as it is obvious from various sources that time is standing still. The wind does not blow and we have stopped drawing breath. Some of us simply stop moving altogether. But the mind still moves, the eyes still see! Do you understand? We killed time! On this day, an endless day, time has died!"

Yeah, maybe I'll post some more nonsense later. I gotta learn not to write while sleepy.

Life and Death, and Beginnings and Endings

As humans we consider all things in beginnings and endings. We see all situations as two points on a graph. There is good and there is evil, right and wrong. These things are opposites in the truest sense of the word. The universe does not see things this way, the universe can not work this way. We see things this way because of our biology. Life is a situation with one possible outcome, death. You are born, you live, and then you die. Not considering the parts in the middle all lives are exactly the same.

Consider this; at an unfathomable distance from our tiny blue planet a star explodes. It becomes a super nova, and expands in a wave of burning light until it consumes all the planets that orbit it. Maybe some of these planets have life, maybe they are all dead rocks, host to microscopic organisms or host only to the daily chemical reactions that make up an atmosphere. Is this good, or evil? Does it matter on a cosmic scale? No, not really, the universe does not have a morality. It is the functioning of society that demand a moral compass. A good or an evil.

I guess what I'm trying to say is nothing, ever, will matter. So just sit back and enjoy, and try to be nice to the other sufferers of this thing called life.

Second Thesis Statement?

So yeah I guess this blog is alive again? I made another one but this one was easiest to get back to so there.

Song meanings

I've been reading this site, www.songmeanings.net, to try to learn what various songs mean, obviously. It always seems that people post that songs are about unrequited loves or intimate relationships. EVERYTHING IS NOT A METAPHOR FOR A RELATIONSHIP.

Here I'll write a poem that's not about a sexual relationship.

Noise from the floor tells me you're there
You whine for my hand to touch you
Turning away whenever I stare
I can no longer trust you

Black as the night yet shining like dawn
You are the most solemn one
The toys in your mouth now it's on
You stare at me begging for fun.


See, that was about my dog. And I can't trust him, not after he ate that whole pack of gum I left on the table. Doesn't he know gum murders dogs?