Many fewer people would carry cell phones if we hadn’t banned cigarettes in public places to busy their nervous fingers. Decide for yourself whether this was good or bad; it seems to me a lateral move at best. It used to be that only young boys would walk about with their eyes fixed on some object in their hands. Nowadays pulchritudinous ladies go about in public with faces downcast, more demure than any veiled daughter of Fatima. And so we lose yet another of the few remaining reasons ever to step outside.
December 10, 2009
September 19, 2009
Killing Time, Monsters
At the moment I’m hacking my way through Castlevania 2 (NES). It’s a bit embarrassing to discover how slow my reflexes are; my younger self would laugh. I wonder why they stopped making console games that balanced puzzle-solving with fighting. Perhaps the programmers realized that they were mainly making games for the other half of the Bell Curve and lost interest in all but the technical aspects of design.
One of many disappointing things about Zelda: Twilight Princess was the ease of combat; killing a room full of slavering monsters was more chore than challenge. I wonder if games like Castlevania 2 and Zelda 2 hadn’t been so poorly received whether design might have gone into more fruitful directions; rather than embracing open-ended exploration and new modes of combat, buyers demanded re-treads of the originals (and got them). Sure it sells well, but it means I have to content myself with WiiFit.
September 5, 2008
A pyramid of wastrels
Working, as I do, for lawyers, I have a unique and exciting daily opportunity to encounter both those existing at the apex of the societal totem pole, as well as those who grub about in the muck at the base of it, and I am here to tell you, there is little to choose betwixt the two. Both parties are venal, arrogant, and rude, and being something close to the platonic ideal of those dubious qualities myself, I know whereof I speak. While Friedrich Engel’s prolonged exposure to the monied classes produced in him the seeds of communism (speak the name in hushed tones!) and G. K. Chesterton’s friendships with noted sybarites turned him into a fierce defender of Catholicism, my sustained experience with both sides of the coin, as it were, has left me wishing primarily that they would just shut up for one minute.
