Culture

Beaverton, Oregon will celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Mexico's Independence. Here is an interview by radio host Lars Larson with City Event Coordinator Erin Hickey. This interview is exasperating, but entertaining. No, Beaverton does not have a July 4th celebration. They also celebrate St. Patrick's Day (?) with a "Pooches on the Green" event (???).

UPDATED:

A few more HP series links and debates. I'm not necessarily agreeing with all of the content of all of these links, but all of them have interesting things to say.

R.U.I.N.S. Can't Stand Deathly Hallows thread. An ongoing forum discussion of Deathly Hallows and the other books from several angles. Small but thorough. The link takes you to the 7th topic, you can move back and forth from there.

Daniel Hemmens at Ferretbrain comments on Chapters 1 - 12 of Deathly Hallows. I don't agree with everything Hemmens says, but it's humorous.

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Red Hen Publications essays on the Potterverse. Mostly very long treatises on what was left OUT of the books. Conjecture and implication, not fanfic. Hard site to navigate, check out the sidebar.

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I have been searching, ever since the last book came out, for other Harry Potter fans who disliked Book 7, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I've read the book through a few times, and it gets worse every time. It's garbage. This is not the kind of thing you say on even the most neutral HP fan site. You will get death threats. But surely I could not be the only HP fan on the planet who didn't like the final book and didn't think it was even written very well?

Finally, I found via the Confused Matthew forum a link to a Youtube review of Book 7. These guys pretty much nail my thoughts on Deathly Hallows, except for the section on scenes Rowling left out that they would have liked to see. I don't care about that, whether I agree or not. There's also a section in the second video with one of the reviewers upset that his fanshipping didn't turn out the way he wanted. But the rest of it is right on.

Via Brickmuppet: The Herding, by Baldilocks. Anchor link is messed up and will deposit you in the middle of the article. Don't miss the link to part two at the bottom of the article. Excellent essay for all of us racist white folks.

I mentioned a few posts back that I was reading a fanfic titled "Shinji and Warhammer 40K." This novel-length offering by Charles Bhepin takes the story of Neon Genesis Evangelion and tweaks one "minor" detail in Shinji Ikari's past. Bhepin's purpose appears to be to present the NGE story with a different Shinji, one who is truly a hero and mankind's savior rather than, well, what you get in the story.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT

As presented in the anime, Shinji Ikari was abandoned at a very young age by his father Gendo to an unnamed aunt and uncle after the "death" of Shinji's mother Yui Ikari. This leaves the boy with massive emotional and psychological damage. When the anime starts, Shinji, now eleven, is effectively a hollow shell. He feels unloved, unwanted, useless, and has practically no sense of self at all. From this point, the anime tells the story of man fighting desperately for it's own existence against invading space monsters called angels. In the end, after all of the backstory; the betrayals and secret plots, have been revealed, the future of the human race (maybe) is left in Shinji Ikari's hands (maybe) and he has to fall back on everything that happened to him during the course of the series to make some enormously crucial decisions (maybe). All of the "maybe's" are because the ending of the series (supplemented by rewrites and two movies, and a current retelling via movies) is an ambiguous mess. What I summed up above is one possible (and simple) interpretation of the ending. If you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about.

NGE is one of the more important and influential anime series ever produced. It's not necessarily the best liked; in fact Evangelion would make the top ten hate list of many anime fans. Lauding the merits of Evangelion (as well as taking the opposite tack) is one of the biggest hot-button issues in anime fandom. I personally love the show, while acknowledging that the story is full of holes, the production is a mess, and it's possible that you may wish to commit suicide after a viewing. The bottom line for me is that I can see greatness peaking out from behind many corners in NGE, and I can really glom on to the massive epic taking place behind what is actually shown

One of NGE's biggist faults, it's gaping plot holes, is also it's greatest asset. So much of the series is left unexplained, or is explained by characters who are shown repeatedly to have imperfect information or an agenda that prompts them to lie about the backstory; that the viewers can easily, if they wish, provide the details themselves. It is entirely possible to change almost anything in the given story without actually screwing with established canon. In fact, this appears to be the deus ex machina Charles Bhepin uses to re-tell the first half of the series. You could watch large portions of the series as reference material to Bhepin's work; the changes he has implemented all occur behind the scenes or at the level of subtext. This part of "Shinji and Warhammer 40K" I quite enjoy. In the second part Bhepin strikes off on his own on a quest to provide an entirely different ending to the series, and this part doesn't do very well. Instead of working within the boundaries established in the first part, the author intentionally devolves his epic into a pun-a-minute commentary on anime and fan-fiction tropes. As I said, Bhepin does this intentionally (according to his notes); unfortunately I feel he lost something great when he moved the series in that direction.

However, the first half of "Shinji and Warhammer 40K" provides not only a funny but fascinating "what if"; it actually tells the NGE story in a much more appealing way. All of this, initially, is accomplished simply by providing a Shinji Ikari who is not *the Shinji*.

I didn't really include many spoilers, I guess. Bhepin's work is incomplete, but he has apparently spent the last few years editing the earlier parts of the story. I do in fact want to know how he ends the series, as the current stopping point feels very much like the end of the second act in a three part epic. I definitely recommend a reading, especially if you want to dig a little deeper into the original story or if you would just like to see Shinji Ikari as a true, intentional hero.

Forgot to link this earlier, via Kaedrin: God of War, the movie. Sort of. Not exactly what you had in mind.

I've been sitting on writing a summary of my experience playing San Andreas for a couple of days, mainly in the hopes that I could come up with something really significant to write. But I got nothing, really. So here goes.

One of the few real debates amongst the Grand Theft Auto faithful is whether Vice City or San Andreas is the best game Rockstar has made. Having played both now, I've really been going back and forth on the question myself. The bottom line, I think, is that I would have liked a lot of the game mechanics, the somewhat refined graphics, and the HUGE size of the gameworld in San Andreas to have been available in Vice City. I would have liked San Andreas to have been as fun and irreverent as Vice City was. San Andreas is clearly, technically the better game, but I had a lot more fun playing Vice City.

Ultimately my enjoyment, or lack thereof, is rooted in the story and characterization. And it should be fairly noted that GTA III, Vice City, and the two Stories games don't really have much of either. GTA III features the silent protagonist Claude Speed obediently following a chain of missions that are linked by arbitrary but not necessarily nonsensical plot points. Vice City added a ton of characterization to the main character, Tommy Vercetti, and his many minions and compatriots; but the missions that form the story didn't always fit together as nicely as they seemed to in GTA III. The two Stories games cut back a bit on the story and characterization, to the point where the games were even more just a list of activities to be checked off.

San Andreas tries very hard to bring a good story into the game and fit everything together into a cohesive whole, but after the first third of the game the plot just seems to get stretched too thinly. The final act seemed especially silly to me. Maybe it's a cultural thing, I don't know. I'm the right age, but I am neither of the proper geographical or racial demographic to truly identify with 1992 Los Angeles (as presented in the game). Of course I don't have the proper background to identify with a New York Italian mafioso taking over the underworld of 1986 Miami, but I didn't really get the feeling I was supposed to. Rockstar seemed to try very hard to get the player to identify with Carl Johnson and internalize the story of San Andreas, and it worked for a little while. I was really into the game through the first major story arc, but everything just seemed to collapse after that. Although I really liked Wu Zi. I would play the game again at least through the Wu Zi missions in San Fierro. But after that the game just doesn't seem to have much to offer.

The single biggest problem, though is that San Andreas isn't nearly as over-the-top as Vice City and GTA III. There's still a lot of comedy, and one of the real joys of the game is hearing the dialogue that occurs during missions, mainly when driving. Generally, though; the game is much more serious in tone and style. This appears to have been Rockstar's intention; from what I've heard San Andreas is a laugh-a-minute madcap adventure compared to GTA IV.

Which is why I am now trying Saints Row 2. Getting scored for how well I fling myself into oncoming traffic sounds like just the thing.

I posted a couple of years ago that I didn't even start playing the GTA III games until, well a couple of years ago. I've finished III, Vice City and Liberty City Stories. I tried Vice City Stories and didn't like it very much, and I tried San Andreas right after I finished Vice City. I didn't really like San Andreas much either, but I put that down at the time to being so much larger and a bit more realistic.

Thanks to one of the many Steam sales, I picked of San Andreas for PC and decided to try it again. After spending a day and a half trying to come up with a decent control scheme (I ended up using my PS3 controller), I'm now several hours into the game and can give a few thoughts. I'm trying to play the game a bit more naturally than I did GTA III, Vice City or Liberty City Stories. I haven't gone out of my way to do collection games or mini-games until they're introduced in the story or I stumble on them. Of course, I still looked up the Graffiti Tag locations online, and even then I missed one (ONE! out of one hundred) and had to cross check with another guide to find the exact one I missed. I found the burglary mini-game by accident (got in the truck) which was really handy; finishing the burglary game is one way to get unlimited stamina. I have tried but not completed the standard Paramedic, Vigilante and Firefighter games. The Firefighter game in particular seems to be much harder in this iteration.

I visited the gym after it was brought up in the story and got my muscles maxed out. Either something has bugged, I completed some unknown achievement, or I've just managed to keep things really balanced lately because sometime in the last few missions I stopped periodically losing muscle tone (normally, it seems to lose it slowly and have to keep working out to keep it up, which makes sense).

Here's our protagonist, Carl Johnson; or C.J. to his friends and tormentors:

Here's how he looks when he wants to show off:


The last mission I did brought in one of the things the GTA games have always done that really bug me: Changing the rules for a specific mission. After rescuing someone from a shootout, you have to get them home safely. Right as you take off, a rival gang shows up in a couple of cars. They don't shoot, they just try to ram you. You can't shoot them, they're bulletproof. Your car is somehow limited to about 40 mph, so the rival gang can easily slam into you over and over, spinning you around and eventually doing enough damage to cause your car to catch on fire. BS like that drives me nuts. It would be a hard enough mission with two normal cars full of gun-toting, vengeance-seeking rivals to dog you all the way home; the handicapping is a bit silly to me.

The only other thing that really bugs me in this game is that there's no reason in the world to keep a car for personal use. Every time I take my favorite daily driver out to do a mission, it will disappear after the mission starts or after it ends. Additionally, if you leave your car for an extended period of time, it will almost always disappear. At first I thought they were just being stolen a lot, but after I while I confirmed that the car would be there one minute, then I could literally turn my back on the car then turn around again and it would be gone.

One neat addition to the game is bicycles. They're a bit weird, in that if you're in good shape you can outrun almost anything, plus you can go just about anywhere. Of course, you're completely unprotected and everything else on or around the road can knock you off and send you flying...which is bad when your doing 80 mph in downtown LA on your Huffy.

Generally, the controls are better than the last GTA game I played; the story as well. There hasn't been a cut scene yet that felt out of place, and the only really silly mission arc so far has been C.J.'s attempts to help a friend (who was a prison bitch, apparently) become a rapper. Or hip hop artist; or something. This missions include dancing well enough to get invited into the D.J.'s van (so you can steal her equipment); and stealing famous rapper "Madd Dogg"'s Rhyme Book, because your friend can't rhyme or write worth anything.

There is the general silliness of C.J., the budding crime lord, rescuing a girl from a fire he started (this is after slitting the throats of "Madd Dogg"'s guards in order to facilitate the theft of his rhymes for a former prison bitch (apparently) who can't rap worth spit.) Oh, and after winning the pimping mini-game, stealing guns, and killing crack dealers for dealing crack while killing rival crack dealers so your buddies and make a buck.

On the plus side, C.J. bet all his money on the long shot at the horse races to win twice in a row and made 1.4 million dollars.

You'd think he would smile more.

350 episodes into the Naruto series. I've actually really enjoyed it, as I mentioned previously. After some early problems, the second series has been even better than the first. Shippuden gets into a lot of the history and politics of the setting. The viewer is also finally starting to find out exactly what's going on. I tweeted earlier today that one of the key points is that the country behind all of the funny business is apparently Belgium. I mean that in jest; however, as Dave Barry once said, Belgium is "...the screen door of Europe..." constantly being slammed as surrounding countries go to war with each other.

Of course, Naruto is about Japan, too...and only a few episodes later we get to see one of Japan's favorite plot points. It just seems a bit out of place in a show about ninjas, however magical they happen to be. To wit:



Jutsu = Ninja Technique, more or less. What's the ultimate forbidden Ninja Technique? I'm sure anime fans can guess:



Japan has a...unique...relationship with the atomic bomb, and the concept shows up in Japanese culture quite a bit. But, as Little Kuriboh said, "This is a show about Ninjas! Apparently!"

Hat tip to The Unwanted Blog

From Sankaku Complex (site is NSFW, link is ok):

You know how when you start typing in a search term in Google, the search engine will pop up suggestions? Generally along the line of, for example:

I type "hobbit" Google will suggest such phrases as "hobbit house", "hobbit name generator", "hobbit travel" and so on. If I type in "how can I" I get suggestions such as "how can I keep from singing lyrics", "how can I lose 10 pounds in a week", "how can I tell if i am pregnant" and such like.

If I type in "Christianity is" Google suggests some fairly insulting search phrases, although to be fair most of those suggestions are repeated for Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and so on.

But not for Islam. If you type in "Islam is"...you will get nothing.

Apparently Google has been made aware of the problem, and they deny any type of "favoritism". The suggestion feature has a bug that for some reason the Google programmers can not discover, won't make suggestions on the phrase "Islam is". Weird, but possible. In fact, If you search on "Islam" plus any other preposition, you get suggestions. You even get some negative suggestions...but not many. E.g. search for "Islam should" will prompt you with "Islam should be banned."

If there is any story here, I think it's much more telling that suggestions for all other major and minor religions include predominantly negative phrases, while Islam includes mostly positive statements.