Yes, another final fantasy 8 post. I cut this off from the previous installment and I have to use it because there is one joke in it that I like at all.
I wanted to get into the game’s story a bit. Because I already wrote all this, so it would logically follow that this is what I want. In fact the story is really grim: it is about a bunch of kids at school being trained to kill kids from another school. You don’t realize they’re kids because they look to be in their 30s, except for Quistis who looks closer to 40, but the instruction manual insists all are 17 and 18 years old. Quistis just looks old because, as I indicated last time, she is possessed by a 30,000 year old malevolent hate spirit and I suppose she is holding up rather well, overall.
The heroes soon get assigned to kill the president of Galbadia, the nation/city/tiny isolated village on a huge empty world map that the other school is from. But then that school forgives them when the president teams up with the evil sorceress Edea, so then the kids try to kill the sorceress. They fail and somehow end up fighting against the school that forgave them earlier anyway*.
Then the sorceress Edea forgives them because they are all orphans and she was actually their muppet-baby-like nanny from years ago, and actually married to the principal Cid of the school that trained them, whose original purpose was to train kids to kill Edea who Cid is married to. The real enemy is actually Rinoa, the hero’s love interest, who is, after Edea (the orphanage sorceress), next in line to inherit evil from a different sorceress, Ultimecia, from the future, who wishes to be reborn in the past and therefore present. So then everybody goes to the future to kill Ultimecia, including Rinoa, her reborn self from the past, who has become more powerful but resisted becoming evil, but not Edea, the first sorceress, who is also not evil but doesn’t seem any worse for having received enough power that her husband started an army with which to kill her and therefore useful to have on your own side in a fight. And then I wonder why not let the evil sorceress give evil power to everybody since they seem to shake off the evil without losing the power fairly consistently and within a short time frame. By the way when I said the story was grim I meant uncomfortably ridiculous.
And you have a hard time wearing a complete sweater. We all have deficits to work on.
One of the secondary heroes, Irvine, is from the Galbadia school and the only cowboy in the world, complete with a big stupid hat and riding chaps, which typically goes unmentioned because in addition to lacking other cowboys, the world also lacks both horses to ride and cattle to herd. There are chocobos, strange large yellow birds, but you only ever see Squall riding one and his regular leather pants seem sufficient. Also, from my recollection, despite taking approximately forever and being out of character with everything else in the game, completing the side-quest that gives you access to the chocobo doesn’t actually confer any manner of benefit, since there is no place for the bird to go apart from places that your space ship can already land next to, and you need the space ship to find the bird.
Irvine, despite being from the other school, doesn’t seem bothered massacring his former, conveniently-anonymous helmeted comrades. Which I could also tie into Star Wars 7 but hopefully I won’t because by now that movie is two months old and nobody is going to care. Though it must be said that Finnegan only switched sides in the first place after he saw his chum get shot by the guy he later broke out of prison.
Irvine is the love interest of Selphie, who dresses for the complete opposite weather that Irvine does. Also, even though in 1999 nobody said “selfie” to refer to uninteresting photographs of yourself, Selphie in the game is still adequately annoying. I don’t feel like getting a picture of selphie! I don’t need a picture of everything I describe! And I’m telling me that, not you! Although sometimes I call me “you.”
This is the world map. Notice that there are only about 15 land marks on it, which are the only points you can engage with. And that is fine; you can’t expect to go everywhere in the world. What is annoying is that the game makes not the slightest effort to imply there is more to the world than the places you can enter. Of course having a superficially place-filled world that you could not go anywhere in would also be annoying but that only feels bad on my side. This here looks bad on their side. The two southern land-masses seem to have one destination between them.
Late in the game you come to esthar, which looks like this. And it’s great. In the context of a first generation low resolution playstation role playing game it is great, I mean. You have to travel on the highway a while before magically switching to the “inside the city” view. You can see neighborhoods and roads beneath the highway. You feel like there’s stuff going on. That’s exactly what the other cities should do.
Although even this abruptly ENDS at nothing instead of tapering off into less densely populated areas.
And earlier Irvine claims to have searched the entire continent looking for the city while his associates take a Gogurt break (on railroad tracks). The city is holographically hidden from view, but the game text outright states that there is nothing in existence that you cannot see from the world map, and that the speed you move on the world map is not artistic license to keep it from taking weeks to walk from town to town. Gosh that’s the third thing I hated about Earthbound. It’s supposed to be so modern and hip and with it but only the main characters have houses and only one town has a school and I didn’t actually finish it because I only rented it once and didn’t care much and thought it was ugly anyhow.
Also apparently it has the world’s biggest game box and costs twice as much as the next most expensive cartridge on the secondary market, if you are insane enough that you think playing a console rpg on native hardware without speed acceleration when you don’t have to isn’t the world’s biggest empty time-sink and worth spending extra money and living space for the privilege of and also on tracking down a 24 year old super Nintendo system that still works AND the last remaining gamepads that nobody ever stepped on. As if this is more honorable to the Nintendo company in some way than emulating the game, even though it isn’t because Nintendo doesn’t get a cut of resales and has re-released numerous games like this one as pay downloads that it gets FULL proceeds from, that are a fraction of what the games cost new in the 1990s, which was a fraction of what resellers are sometimes charging for them old in the 2010s. Hooray for a hipsterism based economy! We honor the cutting edge technology of our youth by treating it like the antiques of our grandparents’ youth! We honor the advancements that astounded us in the past by treating improvements on them with the obstinate backwardism of an author who takes it as a point of pride to still use a typewriter!
I know somebody who criticizes me over my use of the commercial applications photoshop and fl-studio for artwork and music when there are free alternatives with ostensibly the same capabilities. But the commercial software does what I need in efficient, non-backward ways that I already understand, and typically have larger existing support bases. I know people who can explain to me how to use that stuff. I pay extra for convenience. You don’t buy a super nintendo game on a cartridge in 2015 for convenience. A typewriter is superficially more efficient than a computer to somebody accustomed to typewriters, but a typewriter does not have the same capabilities.
And then six paragraphs about how much I hate Fisherman’s Horizon, Shumi Village and Trabia, the most boring and endless mopey, exposition-only areas in any video game, and the stupid boring card game that for whatever reason needs to be played the most in the most boring areas of the main game. I need convenience NOW to make up for all the time I wasted on THIS kind of stupid garbage back when I had time. And I need even more convenience because I wrote all those paragraphs and will never use them.
That’s no way to talk to somebody who has it all figured out!
(I put the paragraphs here)
This is a very thematically incongruous website!
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This was already half-written when I posted the last one. Backing out was not an option.
I suppose my previous item is more a criticism of “news” in general than the individual humans I mentioned. I am meant to take “news” more seriously than “tabloids” or tv shows about boring people in mansions, but it has no journalistic standards. It promotes the two party political system and the associated agenda of fearmongering. CBS news was on that day instead, but presumably ABC did the same thing: When reporting on the recent, widely publicized San Bernardino murders, carried out by supposed Isis sympathizers, beside the reporter were displayed pictures of convoys of dark-hooded people in deserts riding in jeeps carrying huge guns. San Bernardino is not in a desert! The shooting was done by TWO people, who look JUST THE SAME as anybody else, in a NORMAL city like any other, just as we have HUNDREDS such mass bullet murders yearly. One of those people is from HERE, United Statia. And the other had been here for a solid year, and was considered a permanent resident. We have a murder problem HERE, done by people who live HERE. 3000 angry druids did not drive jeeps across two oceans and start firing freedom-seeking missiles as soon as they touched blessed American dirt, and if they continue to not do that it will not be because Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Ronald McDonald stood at The Border, like that is a place, and stopped them.
This San Bernardino mention, I should add, came amidst a story about a man with a KNIFE and a FAKE BOMB who ran into a POLICE STATION in Paris. That idiot had a note declaring allegiance to Isis. That’s the dumbest story I heard all year, and even half a month in that’s saying something. I could duct tape a colecovision to my chest and get shot, too. That I tried doesn’t prove anything, and that you shot me to death only proves that I cannot be questioned. You could shoot me first and write a note that says “I is Isis I hate good guys signed me ps. only true patriots can stop me and prevent forest fires” and I couldn’t stop you. When The News is going to report on stuff like that, they need to present it so that I don’t assume they made it up.
Just this week there was a suicide attack in Istanbul. Isis supposedly claimed credit. First of all, since it was a SUICIDE attack, the attacker is dead so Ladysmith Black Mambazo could claim credit. This story I saw back on good old ABC again, and the graphic showed TANKS this time. Isis is not driving 50 tanks into Southern California to back up those jeeps it also isn’t sending! When are we going to stop thinking of these conflicts in World War 2 terms? This is not us vs them. It is us vs him and him and him and mostly him and her and him and on like that. There is not an organized military infrastructure to target, that tells you when it is coming, and that is itself all on the same “side.” USA is obsessed with world war 2 because that is the last war that it looked good in, because that was the last war it understood at all. Millions were dying in Europe for years and the US came in late to be heroes. It had casualties but not on the level of any other country involved, and consequently learned nothing from the conflict except “we’re always right and we’re always the strongest,” which it already believed. And so all our policy makers grew up continuing to believe that. Network news programs showing me armored hoards advancing in formation in daylight when it talks about murderers hiding in crowds and blowing themselves up has two purposes: to make me afraid, and to make me seek safety in conventional western military counter-measures, and likewise to trust the reports I get of that military’s accomplishment.
Even Nazi Germany was a western power, which used western tactics and western rules. The US does not know how to engage what is actually out there now, but its military industrial complex knows how to keep getting paid to make big dumb expensive things that can fly around and kill random people, and then boast about all the “enemy combatants” that got blowed up. We bombed crucial Isis installations! We killed Al Qaeda’s number 2! We GOT the BAD GUYS! So why are there more bad guys than ever? Either we aren’t really getting anyone, or whatever we are getting is making more guys go bad. We hear about French or Turkish forces striking back after recent supposed Islamic State attacks, but why is there anything for them TO back-strike? Why did they WAIT, and why didn’t they finish?
And we don’t even necessarily have real pilots involved who can personally verify or be held accountable for anything. We are sending robots to kill and trusting whoever runs the robot to tell us what they thought the robot saw.
Even scarier is considering that such an absence of outcome is deliberate, that there is no intention of resolving or concluding conflict. So I am scared anyway, doubting the people who try to make me afraid. And they are afraid. Always terrified that some other country not aligned to American interests will build an atomic bomb, and convinced that any country with the means to do so will, since that is what Americans would do. Americans are afraid of the force that they set the precedent for using.
Which is not to say the US is alone in perpetuating warfare to keep its own interests on top, but as the one with the most soldiers and the most distance and safety from the countries it is trying to control, when this stuff goes wrong we suffer loudest and venge least discriminately.
These are the conclusions I reach, quite on my own, when my information is delivered so clumsily, and the clumsiness seems deliberate. And if
Strictly regarding frivolity that I understand, I previously griped about ABC news devoting extensive coverage to “leaked” Star Wars junk that could only possibly have been leaked by the people who tell ABC news what to report on. Incoming kardashian trashian facts are also desirable, and if there aren’t any, that is still a story. Each winter they report that it’s cold outside. Unless it isn’t cold outside yet, which means they report that it isn’t cold. When Pope Francis was in the US this September, that was the top story for a whole week even though Mr. Pope did the same thing each day of the week, which was to get driven around and address an audience. In fact the same exact stuff he does when he isn’t in the US. No other head of state gets that kind of coverage, but no other head of state has that many followers. So the story wasn’t what the pope was doing or does, just that he EXISTS and how popular he is. And people still think The Media has an anti-christian bias. That’s not it at all. The Media has an anti-substance bias. I pledge to you: If I have nothing to say, it will be nothing about me or nothing of personal relevance. I will not share the nothing of others, and will not ask others to distribute my own nothing.
A longer story of my year transition, of which I will tell a remarkably vague and short version, is that I was visiting my father at a hospital(s) from December 28 to January 6, and related duties then resumed or introduced themselves for the first time.
But what is this? Could it be the Yale New Haven Hospital was the point marked on corny cartoon treasure maps all these years? And nobody bothered to dig it up yet?
I’m rich! That means I no longer need to feel like my life is a complete joke when I see things like
This millionaire who is already famous and whose moderately tolerable and occasionally not completely dissonant songs have been played incessantly for the past five years really made the tough decision by agreeing to receive more money to appear in the front page cover story of this magazine about how she doesn’t do that and doesn’t she look so glamorous.
In related news, I have devised a test to determine sanity:
If you have ever spoken to the press about “haters,” even though there are actually people paying you just to do that, then the people paying you are insane. Especially if you only have a first name. If you are being paid just to exist and complain about people who don’t like you, you floating indistinguishable head, then congratulations, you didn’t win, but everyone else lost. Your silver spoon golden calf family gets everything and is not permitted to be criticized. How could I hate that? I should aspire to it. I will work really hard at being born to rich parents next time who can have frivolous surgery on a whim and be praised for it instead of because there is a mass of goop in their brains slowly killing them and without the confidence that they will be financially stable afterward.
This is the best advice I have ever received from a magazine rack.
In the interest of fairness, “Khloe’s” biological father, Robert Kardashian was killed by esophageal cancer at an age 4 years less than my own cancer father currently lives at, although I could say his quality of living has been rather crummy for over ten years, having already dealt with prostate cancer and continues to deal with a loss of motor skills inspired by cerebral ataxia, and he also never volunteered for the Orenthal Jingleheimer Simpson criminal defense team. Perhaps Kabloe makes the point “hey life is hard even when you’re rich careful what you wish for you just might get it mo money mo problems ok guys I’m literally terrified I’ll wake up tomorrow and still be loaded” but since I’d have to buy this stupid magazine and make some effort at comprehending the text to know, that will remain a mystery.
I remember months ago, ABC World News Tonight, at the start of the broadcast and before each commercial break, teasing an update on Lamar Odom’s condition. It was not specified who Lamar Odom was or what was wrong with him, so that his “condition” should be of interest. I listened for the story just to find out who he was, but that information was never delivered. When I looked up Kloby today, I saw that she was married to whom? Lamar Odom. So either I am supposed to know who Lamar is exclusively based on his Kardashian konnection, or the fact that I am supposed to know about him already is what made him kardashian-worthy.
In fact, they supposedly had a tv show together in which both lacked last names and were presumed noteworthy merely through being masses of cells.
Consider: one of the most viewed information programs in the country, if not the world, has 21 minutes to deliver all the information in the world, and it found cause to refer to this random basket-ball player –which, admittedly, is more of a definition than Khloe can achieve– four separate times possibly only because he did sex on a kardashian. And then the story itself was, essentially, “Oh, Lamar? He’s fine.” The dumb teases had as much content as the actual story. The story could have been delivered in the space of the first tease. “Tonight on ABC World News, Lamar’s fine, so we won’t mention him again and waste the time of people to whom he is not important.” But that wouldn’t happen because the news is just as fake as real reality. THAT observation is not even news! Clearly I need to observe less. Which we have established previously, but avoiding all information is not a realistic expectation. So I will try and reach a conclusion on this matter so that I do not not feel so compelled as I presently do, and can change from perpetually reporting on bad reporting that is perpetually unchanging.
Comments made toward my 2015 summary:
of course I celebrated the same way I always do, with an evening at the theatre.
I think it goes without saying that I am quite depressed!
SHUT YOUR BEAK, BIRD!
2015 in pictures
Ordinarily I post this on the last night of the year. This time I did it on the first night of the next year to give people the chance to recover from my explosive shop rite reporting. Undoubtedly future historians will regard that as the story which defined 2015 so the literal definition of the overall year was less urgent. Nonetheless it must be delivered.
january
february
March
April
may
june
july
august
september
October
November
December
Usually I would say that is everything that happened that year, but I concede that nothing happened at all in a few of those months, and I wish that yet less had happened than that!
Excuse me shouldn’t there be a spoiler alert in that ad? You have already told me that Frosty survives the first movie! Imagine watching Star Wars if you knew in advance that the Empire was going to Strike Back.
Everyone’s favorite snowman. I think that’s supposed to be Frosty also. But now that you mention it, I don’t know a whole lot of snow-men.
Ones that are eligible to be my favorite, I mean. Between this and the
creepy cartoon frog “Kandoo” that wipes itself in front of your children we as a nation have enough uninvited smilers sharing this space with us.
Okay buddy the facial expression was actually beside the point and in fact you are making this worse.
Back to snow-men, I used to not like them at all, but then I found out that Battletoads hated them and I decided they might be doing something right. Kandoo of course grew up to be a battle toad.
For favorite snowman I did consider Parson Brown, but I remembered I was only pretending that was who it was.
The only other one that comes immediately to my mind is Bad Mr. Frosty, presumably of no relation to regular “Mr. Frosty is my father” Frosty. But he is no good and is not my favorite. He is almost as bad as a bad-tle toad, despite them declaring genocide on his species. He is a traitor through and through. My source informs me that Bad Mr. Frosty’s buttons and facial features are made not from coal but from leftover Shop Rite logo pieces.
You know, those old stories about Santa Claus giving coal to naughty children are a lie. Coal was a valuable commodity in days of yore. You couldn’t heat your cold Victorian hovel without it. Shop Rite pieces are only good for bad. They will burn your house down without generating any warmth. Fire is a neutral force of nature, but the Shop Rite logo means to harm you, have no doubt. Consider that only the “hop ri” part of the logo is underlined. It deliberately omits S t and e just as an affront to notorious video game artist Ste Pickford. When Shop Rite is around nobody else is allowed to spell their name weird.
Or perhaps it holds a grudge since Ste-drawn Kuros was, historically, the first person to ever get kicked out of a Shop Rite.
part 1 of this investigative series on shop rite
part 3 and I’m not saying that twice
Hey ya’ll, it’s me, boo berry. so I wanna tell you about my cereal? It’s like MADE with boo berries, even though I AM Boo Berry? uh-huhhhhh… yeahhh….. just picture this, ok, like, I’m a GHOST, though, uhkay. I like, ate this stuff, for a long time? And now I’m DEAD????!?!? SOOOOOOOOO….. but trust me, it’s GOOD?????!?!? Like REALLY good????????? like better than FRANKENBERRY even??? If I EAT this stuff where does it GO idk lol XD Check it out, my body is see-through, but not my mouth, even though my mouth is a HOLE. Anyway, this is the perfect cereal for halloween, so like… no seriously that was last week? my bad lol. And these are fruit roll-ups BASED on the cereal? Blowin’ my mind, dude. I guess the fruit in question is uh cereal. Or boo berries I guess. Hey speaking of ROLLING UP… heh heh heh. You can just call me Doobie-rry heh heh. Hey where do you think boo berries come from? Are they also, like, the ghosts of berries? But if you like, made the berry ghosts come out of the berry bodies when you ate the berries, what happens when you eat the GHOST berries? Do they have like GHOST ghost berries? You’re seriously freaking me out, man! I gotta get out of here.
I will watch the newest Star Wars film, but I will not watch any trailers for it, however hard or frequently ABC World News tries to trick me into receiving promotion for it immediately before Jeopardy by pretending ads for their parent company’s other properties count as World News. And if during the film I hear the words “viceroy,” “senate” or “files,” as in “only a jedi could have erased those files,” I shall plug my ears during dialog and imagine my own story.
And above all, have FUN.
There is much more to say about this image! I will work hard to keep myself from doing so!
Nonetheless, that bowl has shown no intention of ending. In honor of this, I continue my annual tradition of not going to Olive Garden.
And I say that as somebody who has agreed to go to Chip’s Pub, the restaurant with this menu, on numerous occasions. It is not as if I have standards. Honestly I can’t be waiting around for that bowl to end all day.
This is beside the point, but I was certain I put this on a page years ago, since it is important to me, but I could not find it, even though I posted a different complaint on the topic after realizing it:
At the conclusion of the Disney Aladdin animated feature film, the short fat nameless man rhetorically asks “am I sultan or am I sultan?” In fact, he may be unsure because he isn’t sultan: Jaffar is the sultan. Jafar used the Genie’s power to become so earlier. Nobody ever unwished Jaffar from being sultan. Likewise, Aladdin is really a prince.
Even lurking creepily
and without fingernails, he is a prince, and therefore outranks the jobless dwarf who formerly was sultan, and does not need any rule changed, nor to wish to be made a prince again. The inbreeding that led to his nailless fingers suggests legitimate royal ancestry, besides. And ironically, Aladdin no longer needs to be a prince to marry Jasmine anyway since her way-too-old-to-have-a-teenage-daughter-father is no longer sultan. The genie is just trying to con Aladdin into making a non-wish to make up for the earlier free wish he accidentally granted, because the rules are all in his mind and he cannot mentally handle an inaccurate wish-count, but he can’t admit it because nobody believes he REALLY suffers that badly and could easily stop if he wanted to, and would even point to the earlier event as “proof.” Judgemental privileged non-immortal scumbags.
We never find out the blue genie’s name, either. After Jaffar wishes to be a genie, he continues to be known as Jafar. Unless the blue one was actually named “Genie” prior to becoming one, this doesn’t make sense, and it is rather dehumanizing for the people around him to continue referring to him exclusively as his race. It is like my father watching dumb vote-off shows and referring to the deeds of “the black guy.” Perhaps the genie forgot his old name after “ten thousand years.” But not the weird rules he made up that no other being has the power to hold him to. And after being freed, he legally no longer is a genie, since Jafar, merely through wishing to be a genie, was automatically imprisoned. Prisoner status is inextricably tied to genie status. A freed genie is a geNO. One can still grant wishes, but only if you wish for pizza rolls.
Thankfully, you don’t have to wish for indigestion!
Following from there:
In this morning’s New Haven Register newspaper can be discovered another triumph of my print-ready-file-sending intuition! The painting I am exhibiting was not finished/started at the time when I registered, so instead of that, for my designated 300×300 pixel representation I sent a segment of Cholesteronslaught, one of my historically least hated pictures.
Come see my sickly-colored amorphous blobs at city-wide open studios in New Haven next week-end!
Continued there.
Mum, Peepaw, I know you don’t want to hear this, but… I’m Amy Schumer. Thank you, Ment Weekly magazine at my doctor’s office (oddly enough not in the waiting room), for giving me the strength to come out. Now I am Schuming up a schume-storm over schmere.
And thank you, doctor office pamphlets, for letting me know that other depressed people are happy and photogenic, just like me.
Although in 2015, I think it is disgraceful that we have seven Saw movies, four iPhone 6es, 700 colors of Gatorade, but still only two types of diabetes. If you elect me, Amy Schumer, for comptroller, I pledge we will have Eight different Diabeti by the end of my term.
I finally did it! For the first time since 2012, the cap is BACK ON my ancient tube of Utrecht Ultramarine Blue.
So see you in 2018, Winton Naples Yellow Hue.
What I like best about oil paint: it does not mind if I am a slob. To use acrylic paint I would need “discipline” or “some idea what I was doing.” I have had the same oil tubes since 2010, and they still dispense functional pigment goop, whereas my acrylic tubes dry out completely after two uses on average, since a single mishandled re-capping can destroy it by the time I take the thing out again. Of course the oil paint costs six times as much and is probably giving me respiratory diseases, but I get to die doing something I would love if I were better at it.
This is where the tragic happens this time around.
The painting is an urk in progress.
I thought it was pretty sad until I looked back to 2011 and remembered where the last tragic happened.
Although that seemed to work. Maybe I have gone soft. Maybe I need more lethal paint and less ergonomically reasonable, department of sanitationable conditions.
This is continued roundabout there.
Gosh I hope Stephen Colbert is going to do a totally unremarkable dork wearing suit at desk with a house band and celebrity guests show so I do not make myself watch it. I do not have time to want to. I do not want to drop everything at 11:30pm to deal with it five minutes later! And my internet is too wimpy to let me watch it later. It had better be bad bad bad.
The Kentucky Fried chicken company is evidently banking on the negative reception to its latest line of Colonels, just glad to be worthy of comment. Subway must heard about it and figured “we can do better.” In other news, Ronald McDonald has just joined Isis.
With that in mind, I retract my remarks from seven years ago regarding Jared Fogle; as a twenty-five year old I was probably too old to be spied on by him.
Likewise, referring to Fogle as a harmless former pornography mogul was erroneous on my part.