An Orphan

What once manifests itself as judgment and desires,
Placates the mind in its ever search for congruency.
When reality is gained, retribution befalls it,
And displacement is the coveted acceptance.

If the mind is a prison, then who else to rely better on?
An obsession with survival clouds the ability to trust.
Inheritance does not fall short of a name, or a past,
But looking for answers yields only flat conclusions.

The aging face hardens when reflecting on its image,
The ponder is no longer of who made it.
In actuality it never crossed the mind-
Nothing is what made me this way.

The nothing is a beautiful emptiness, though,
A small spark can become an uninterrupted explosion.
The freedom to create anew, design with a concrete plan,
To start a legacy bold enough to outlive the lost.

I am thankful that I was told to be polite,
When I am served hardship, I finish my plate.
But I’m not a damned fool to ask for seconds,
… I just have to pretend I’m not that hungry…

Big Mac Lebowski

Hot Dogma

Fight Wendy’s Chicken Club

Murder Burger by Death

Resevoir Chili Cheese Dogs

The Green Burrito Hornet

The French Toast Sticks Connection

I feel myself rotting
My emotions buried within mold
And decomposing into physical hurt
My reluctance to tell
And reveal my thoughts to the world
Result in this agony
I writhe with my lack of outlet
And constant force of more in the bottle
And suffer eternally until I explode
And release my thoughts into the world

The void we call home
Where no one is honest
Everyone is hiding something
Nothing changes out minds
Everything controls us, but we

Nobody really thinks outside the box
Because we are all trapped inside
By intangibles: morals, love, and others
The forces that make life flow
Around us in a case, not easily broken
If and when we break this cage
By violating a thread: morals, loves, or life itself
Is when we escape into the void
Where spirits roam, and devils and angels sing

Dandy

When it comes time to dream, or even relax so deeply that the image in your mind defines your existence instead of vice-versa, I often think of big fields with waist-high weeds.

Not the kind of field with bugs or anything.  The sun lingers in the air while the sky steadily turns a dusty pink.
And you whisper in my ears with the light brush of the weeds in the wind.
Cattails mock your stride as you pass them.  Waving you brief farewells that fade before you turn to see.  The grass welcomes me in its embrace as I lie there, tickling my cheek and whispering youthful adventures to me.
A hill with a lone dandelion stands ahead.  You stoop to smell it and it kisses your cheek goodbye before you roll yourself down the other side.

And in the voice you hear how two become one.

The young philosopher pondered on the significance of oneness and realized it isn’t important.  He instead envisioned the wholeness of being, but realized he is only one.

What is the purpose of us all?  he’d ask.  If I can only listen to and believe that the world didn’t blink into existence at my very birth, then I’ve already been asked for faith.  What tools can I use to prove against this unless I use a tool that was already at my disposal?  How can I invent something to measure that life is indeed older than I am if I cannot trust I didn’t steal the idea from something I had already seen?  Faith answers these questions for him.  It turns out he didn’t know what these questions were until he pretended his faith didn’t exist.

Time appears to be an invention of man.  Its function is to prevent all of history from happening all at once, and is a mere bookmark between the covers of all of the universe.  Somewhere along the spine of it all, the present is wedged and the slightest touch bends the pages slightly further apart.  So those times where we sit and stare at each other’s eyes, something outside of the whole story book pushes down on the bookmark.  In that moment, five seconds becomes an eternity.  The distance between the pages is immeasurably close, and the fear of it all is calmed by faith again.  I don’t want this moment to end, I finger for a future just out of reach, but only because I know I can’t stay here forever.  Is this love?

The book is immensely huge and I am but a speck of ink that changes from page to page and eventually will be gone.  My story, even if most crucial, is insignificant in the tale this universe tells.  I am weak and narrow-minded.  I have tunnel vision.  I see life as a funnel of events, culminating in my existence.  I pretend that my actions have an impact on the rest of history.  I pretend that I am the sand that is always in the center of the hourglass.  The magic of life itself creates this lie for me… not my arrogance.  We feel this independently of calculated thought.  From the outside looking in, an eye would see a cylinder with tiny grains falling down.  Light would catch and reflect in this eye from a specific point. As it stares, the whole process seems to slow down, yet gravity here is immutable.  Is it rational to believe that a series of specific coincidences yielded my birth but none of my actions change the course of the future?

Imagine the perspective of a grain of sand in an hourglass.  This is the way I see it:
Without explanation I fall slowly down.  I see the choke far ahead and spin backwards to see my origin.  It extends limitlessly in all directions with a ceiling growing ever distant.  I crash into the center abruptly.  I twist and turn back forward to see the world ahead of me.  It extends limitlessly in every direction and gets smaller with every moment.

I miss the center.  This is where we were all forced together and tumble over one another.  Sometimes we lose a friend in the mix, and they roll along another time.  I give an envious pity to those that fall down the exact center; barely hesitating as they land in the funnel and spill out the other side before they can even identify their surroundings.  One dimension I cannot understand is that of all the wall flowers;  those who are stuck in a perilous journey with their faces pressed against the glass that looks out into a world of nothingness.  Their pace gruels along the edge until an abrupt propulsion launches them out the other end.  To them, this isn’t an hourglass at all… just a crowded slide with a bump at the end.

The greatest gift of life is that we are given everything.  When we ask “what happens when we die?” we think about the sight of darkness, or the sensation of cold nothingness.  That’s the point.  Our entire perception of life and living does not prepare us to comprehend death.  Life is everything we lose at the moment of death, there is no sight, no sensation, no thought.  Just a world without that last breathing soul that was you.  Life is everything you do to alter the rate of its passage.  If you stop to smell the roses, then you will actually cheat yourself into a longer life.  Because you stop for life, life will stop for you.  (E.D. – Because I could not stop for death…).

So the young philosopher thought, because he wanted to find a meaning for it all.  He discovered that life is made of a series of moments, that happen one after another.  Sometimes when we’re having fun time passes too readily, and even in tragedy time seems to stop.  Life isn’t for an eternal sunshine.  In my life, I want to pay back tenfold every happy moment life has given me where there was an hour between my heartbeats, or an inch between two.  I fight for tolerance and against destruction.  I long for equality and loathe empty discrimination.  I am a humanist and have to face a lie every day…

Where do the warriors go when the wars have all but ended?

Lufia 2

Released to America in Summer of 96 (Japan early 95, almost immediately before Chrono Trigger by Squaresoft).

This Neverland epic probably lost thousands of gamer hours because Chrono Trigger is on so many “Top (X)” lists around the globe.  The Lufia prequel (see Mother vs. Earthbound) is somewhere between 25-90 hours on a play through. There are many elements to the game, sidequests essentially, which can be completed without too much detouring or retracing (with one huge, deliberate exception).  Let’s break down this RPG and get the word out for why it is so awesome.  Classic games still stack up with releases a decade later because they pushed their limits and reached the boundaries within their simplicity.  Modern developers are constantly restricted by deadlines, technical requirements, and supporting the flash-media genre where every second of the game is interactive.

I.  The leveling system.

Metal Slime

Red Core

First and most importantly the game tells you exactly how much experience you need to your next level after every battle.  There was no running back to the first castle or using Gwaelin’s Love (which you earned 70% of the way through Dragon Warrior). The monsters give a good amount of experience for their difficulty throughout the game.  If you want to grind, you are always able to do so right outside your next destination. Lufia II has its share of metal slimes (high XP, low GP) called Cores.  Their run away is set to about 80%, and award thousands of XP (55,555 for an empty core).  Clearly there was a programmer with an affinity for numerology behind the scenes here.  There is also the classic “Monster Island” (Breath of Fire II Winter 94) where you can get some pretty unique items, hard battles, and tons of controlled XP.  In addition to your basic commands like Fight and Run, there is the IP system.  I can only guess that they are “item points” or something.  As you take damage your loadout can use the IP you gain to cast special abilities for no MP cost.  This means a clutch warrior with no magic can still throw out the occasional heal or your back row caster can wail for huge numbers too.  I don’t know the origin, but other games have also had items that could be cast in battle, but this is its own intricate system.

II. The dungeon system.

In every dungeon you can expect some puzzles that will really bend your mind if you don’t run away to the nearest gamefaq.  The dungeons use a variety of different tilesets and have interactive parts that keep the player in the game.  You can use bombs, arrows, a hookshot, and even an hourglass (if you get stuck) to blow up, switch, or fly across gaps in each labyrinth.  In the dungeons all enemies have animated sprites and there is no random battle system.  This said, almost every battle can be avoided and the player’s leisure.  This means healing when you have to heal, and running when your MP is low. You can stun enemies with your dungeon items to sneak by them in corridors, or to engage them from the rear to get first strike (much like Earthbound of Summer 94).  Conversely, if you are caught from behind you can expect some punishment from a monster first strike.  Maybe at the time, or even in the modern era you may come to a puzzle and think “What kind of maniacal baddy put this weird checkers puzzle in the middle of this dungeon,” but they are neither too simple nor too hard.  The solutions even reset once you leave the zone, which means you should either memorize the solution or write it down for later.  Most bombable walls stick out, but there is nothing more badass than a dungeon that recognizes the third dimension.  Can’t get across part of the map?  Easy.  Go downstairs and bomb some columns to bring the floor above down.  Stay classy, SNES.

III. The towns and townsfolk.

World Map

World Map

People in the towns are helpful.  Their dialogue changes depending on your progression in the game (minimally, but changes so).  If you can’t remember where you are supposed to go, you can ask everyone in town.  The game has the Warp spell, and tells how and when to use it, instead of expecting you to figure it out.  You can always warp to the bottommost town and check the meager number of houses for some information.  This is a really important aspect for me in RPG towns.  There are NOT 100 houses with NO signage that have NO purpose at all.  The houses in Lufia II are all either shops or quest/sidequest related.  Furthermore, the castles and bigger towns are bigger on the world map.  The smaller villages have fewer homes within.  Simplistic, yet realistic.

IV.  The story and the main quest.

This isn’t meant to be a spoiler guide, so I can’t reveal all of the plot twists and tragedies.  Towns get destroyed (like in Final Fantasy 2 (FF IV in Japan) Summer 91).  In Chrono Trigger there is a court trial, in Lufia II there is a wedding.  Party members die and get replaced.  The principal evil is constantly unnamed and changing.  There is a character arc.  Your characters actually change and develop over time.  The main character speaks (unlike Chrono) and as a third person omniscient, we see peoples’ thoughts.  (I had to included the plural of people because their are rival kingdoms and elves in the game.)  You need to build a boat, convert it into a submarine and explore at will.  Once again this adds a third dimension to an otherwise 2d game.  The game also has a cutesy/playful way of addressing the gender double-standard and sexuality.  You actually conceive the main character of Lufia I along your travels.  Weird.  Abandoned girlfriends start to miss you, and characters resurface as if they are actually experiencing emotions.

V. The world map.

Pieces of the world map are either passable by foot, impassable, passable by boat, passable by submarine, or passable by foot and submarine (a bridge between continents).  They really pushed the limits here, and the map grid is larger than average, but realistically sea-covered.  The later towns are creatively blocked by kingdoms controlling local shrines, or the mere lack of a ship.  Despite the hugeness of the map, the developers thought of everything that might come up.  Using the Warp spell takes your latest mode of transportation with you and you find it right outside the town.  Towns are listed in chronological order on your warp list.  You find that the overall construction of the game is pretty sensible because castles have warriors who are actually able to travel from place to place, while townspeople are too weak to battle the monsters.  The soldiers are too weak to face the greater evils so you actually liberate each country as you move across the world, tracking down the source of all the evil.  For the most part, people are willing to deal with it, but your party members’ excitement to continue the quest really motivates you to keep going.  Though, there is no harm in putting the controller down, or venturing off on some other task…

VI. Sidequesting – Casinos and Capsule Monsters.

Markou

CM

The in-game casino is pretty simple.  The machines are set to benefit the player over time (hurray!) but can take all of your coins.  You can buy coins and you can gamble with them.  You can play Blackjack, Slots, Action Bingo, and 5-card Stud.  This is almost as fun as Vegas Stakes (Summer 93) where you can play Roulette and Craps as well.  However, in Lufia II your winnings can be traded for rare/unique items.  Either way you handle your acquisitions, you’re looking at a grind.  Either get the gold to buy the coins, or gamble your fortune up by hitting “777″ on a 100-coin slot… about a dozen times.  Capsule Monsters are NPCs that act as your 5th man in battle.  They don’t ever need to be resurrected, and cannot be intentionally healed.  They are either elemental or physical and you can swap them out whenever you aren’t in a battle.  They level like a member of the party, but they evolve by eating your items, old weapons, or magical fruit.  The gear that benefits them is divided into 3 tiers, each with a complex craving system.  The monsters have insatiable hunger for 96 bars of yumminess.  They can reach their final form if you give them their special fruit at the right time.  The fire monster does not want the fire fruit… weird.  Note: Pokémon Red and Blue (Gameboy 1996) Monster Rancher (Playstation 1997).

VII.  New Game Plus – The new game minus

Ancient Dungeon

New Game +

While this game predates Chrono Trigger by about a month, there is a fantastic feature that adds to your replay value.  There is the Ancient Dungeon which can be accessed midgame for tons of high-end loot, and also appears as a “mini”game after you complete the story.  Most people recognize New Game+ from Chrono Trigger, where the story resets, but you keep your weapons and levels.  Lufia II does the opposite.  The game gives you your four characters, 10 potions, and level 1.  That’s it.  You get thrown into a 99 floor randomly generated dungeon labyrinth with about 5 treasure chests and 8 monsters per level.  The chests contain all of the weapons, armor, items, and spells the game decides it is going to give you.  You cannot go upstairs.  Did I mention there are 99 floors?  This is no simple task.  It’s the rudiments of an RPG, a debug room fit for casual play, an all-nighter for the hardcorest of them all.  This game needs to come to next gen and have a leaderboard with clear times on it.

Needless to say, the game is huge.  But, the game is balanced, and not even buggy.  There are about six known bugs, but you aren’t going to overflow the memory with huge amounts of gold and experience (Sega Genesis RPGs).  The game is not overwhelming, not too engaging to where people are going to give up months of their life.  This would have been the ideal 40 dollar purchase on a shelf, or a sweet 3 dollar weekend rental to happen upon.  So what should I be looking for from a modern game if this game was such a huge hit for me two decades in a row?  This seems to be the ideal mixture of all of the best games on the market, with some individual advancement and a story that actually blends it all together.  There is an NPC in the casino (on Forfeit Island of all names) that is the ideal client for the 1-800-GAMBLER hotline, telling the player that he’s going to sell his boat so he can gamble some more.  The game was real… for a fantasy.  It’s almost a satire of other RPGs, trying to make up for their shortcomings across the years.  Games of this time, and all games after this used different graphic engines, and became more complex looking, but very limited to the player.  Shadows, shaders, collisions, and colors all improved vastly over the years and maybe we’ll be blessed again with a game once we hit the peak of profits on the current hardwares….

When what you want
Is to be truly happy
And how you feel
Is like you’re wandering
It Is utterly dependent
On your own self
To make the best for you
How can two
Totally different bodies
Come together as one
In a world so torn
Without united desires
To make together what can be
Achieved Independently

<3

Level Up!

#3 Level Up!

Basic – A level is a number representing the overall experience and abilities of a character, usually from 1 to 99.  The character’s attributes ether go up randomly or the user can choose which strengths are enhanced.

Masculinity – You might want to consider leveling up before asking her out.

Accidental – I would have a better shot from one level up.  LEVEL UP!

Confidence – Grind all you want, not even a level 99 can fuck with me.

Irony – In FFVII it becomes harder to Morph a high HP unit without first accidentally killing it.

Age old – If at first you don’t succeed, level up and try again.

Applied – Ten tough battles yields more than one hundred easy battles.

Wisdom – The greater struggle prepares you faster for the task at hand.

Unconventional Wisdom – The over-prepared misses all the trials of life.

Thou shall not erase

What I mean to say is that no matter how many Cs you bubble in in a row, the testmaker could just be simply messing with your mind.  It’s not that love is unpredictable or even multiple choice… it just sometimes seems to be an easier explanation.  The truth is always whatever you want it to be.  Life is giving meaning by the decisions we make.  The same advice can be worded a million different ways, but the meaning is still sound:

It is easier to make a decision now than it is to change your mind in the past.

If I could go back to before you died and tell you I love you, and I really mean it, would it make it easier to sleep tonight?  Chances are no.  Call me a mystic, but I believe that somehow you know I love you even when I don’t say it.  Maybe you don’t know exactly how much, but I think it’s precisely as much as you guess I do.  The trouble is why is it so damn hard to say these things?

I just want to remind you how beautiful you are, and how much I love you, before we forget.

To accommodate the optimist, as well as prove myself with the inverse, our level of joy may increase when something changes for the better.  The truth here is that there is no bearing on the good or bad of life, simply the transformation.  Changes can be good or bad… but change is bad (at least immediately).

I consider it to be similar to an allergic reaction.  When an allergen is discovered by our body, it sends out the best defense it has, a confused entity that attacks the body itself.  We sneeze, break out, throw up… anything.  Allergies are aggressive because they convince the body to attack itself.  When we confront changes, the subconscious picks up on it first and sends the message out.  There might even be a good delay from the tears to the moment in the mirror when you ask yourself “Why am I crying?”  And it is not because you disagree… it’s because you don’t know.  You figure it out, and until you make an evaluation of the change, the emotion may persist.

This thought backs up the idea that we shoot Denial from the hip.  That one is tricky because it is possible to lie to yourself, and to others, because it is your truth.  Acceptance / Hope is the final stage of this confrontation, but no one explained to me what Hope was.  It seems like an afterthought some hippie threw in to give everyone warm fuzzies.  However, they were in denial, so we should clear it up.  Just because you accept reality, it does not mean it is any better (or any worse).  What you do need to do is take your acknowledgment and see what changes you can instigate and benefit from.  Changes have butterfly effects.  We are in the middle of them constantly, and starting new ones at the same time.

When we evaluate decisions, it is not some chain reaction that forces our answer.  We may, however, decide the best course of action by recognizing events in the past.  Until we make a series of good decisions, we cannot benefit the world.  While we cannot recognize a new change in our life as good or bad, we do know that there are good and bad decisions.  It is my hope that you consider non-immediate impacts of your decisions before you take the easy road out.  With a little hard work, reward will follow.

Final Fantasy 2 (IV Japan) 1991

I’m not running around in the streets yelling my thoughts or professing hate in any way.  I’m not even ecstatic that the federal government recognizes partnership between two people independent of gender.

I am, however, disappointed that this was pushed back to 2010.  I guess it could have gone on longer, but if this is the pacing for all humanist issues, I guess we’re all fucked.  Sure, various topics should encourage debate amongst the powers that be, but when it comes to a moral dilemma, perhaps a little reinforcement of the “Separation of Church & State” is in order.  I can’t believe I’m going to say this: The religious wackos do not reflect the core beliefs of any of the mainstream religions.

So instead of listening to your false gods (or imaginary friend) look into your heart and determine if your moral dilemma is actually an excuse for you to get away with hatred.  The segregation of a group based on ideology, country of origin, citizenship status, or gender is unconstitutional.  <Cough cough Arizona SB 1070>.  The fundamental freedoms of man (and woman, obviously.  I’m using the non-gendered grouping here) shall not have a governing body condone their inhibition.  <Cough cough Patriot Act>.  Civil liberties will always be cause for civil unrest and eventual civil upheaval.

Nineteen years after the release of Final Fantasy II, a joke that programmers (translators?) put in to one bit of dialog is more immortalized as a reminder that one time, long ago someone thought that men were more important than women.  What I want is someone to read that and not understand it.  I’ll be dead before that happens.

The same sentiment goes along with this Prop 8 media storm.  I don’t want to hear people invent travesties and have important  thinkers waste valuable time providing counter arguments to this issue for the next 6 months.  I want people to look around and realize that gaiety is not going to hurt anyone.  I want everyone to look at each other, shrug, and get back to work on the flying cars.  It’s 2010 for Christ’s sake.