Spirited Away!

I must say, it is without a doubt one of the strangest movies I have ever seen. It's not overly confusing; what's happening is usually discernible, but the twists and turns are bewilderingly odd and unexpected, it's absolutely impossible to determine ahead of time how things will unfold.

However, it's still a very good one. Just like the other movies from Studio Ghibli it tugs all the heartstrings at the right places, and confuzzled joy regularly follows.

All in all, this has been a fairly active day; we've gone shopping in the city, about 20 minutes walk from here, bought something to convert into a dinner and scouted out some restaurants for our rapidly approaching anniversery in three weeks.

Our attempts at finding a couple of training shoes for me were entirely unsuccesful; I merely had to say the words "Size 49" and they instantly told me "You're screwed!". We had much better luck at finding some jeans, as far as getting one whole pair that actually fit me properly. Though, the point of getting the shoes in the first place is to enable me to exercise properly so that I may lose some weight and a few inches off the waist, with any luck allowing me to squeeze into some other jeans I own.

Embarassingly enough, I had to resort to a walkthrough to get past a particularly tricky puzzle in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, because I was quite simply stuck; nothing I tried seemed to work! But now I'm past that little bump in the road, and I'll be dedicating most of my journey home tomorrow to the venture of finding another place to get stuck!

A camel through the eye of a needle?

Today I would like to take the opportunity to yet again rant on the subject of religion. My specific gripe this time is heaven.

Heaven has come to be viewed as the most blissful of places, "heavenly" being an adjective describing beauty and delight. But what is heaven really supposed to be like?

If we read Revelations, it is described as a place where the only actions humans really take is to praise god at all times.

This offends me greatly! The thought of me, being a man raised with the ideals and goals of a free citizen, willingly giving all those freedoms up in favour of groveling in the dirt at the feet of a moody, willful and quite clearly maleficient deity is to me absolutely preposterous. We are, after all, talking about the same god that thought it would be the hallmark of a beneficent and sympathetic entity to stone to death disobedient children, homosexuals, witches and to smite with holy wrath a guy who accidentally touched the Ark of the Covenant to stop it from sliding off its carriage into the mud.

I wish I was making this shit up!

Even worse, it's not like this supposed god is giving us much of a choice. Either we spend the rest of eternity in slavery with no free will, or we will be cast down to eternal suffering in a sea of molten sulphur. Thank you very much, oh benevolent one!

All that apologetic bullshit about "Oh, god wants us to make our own choice!" rather rings false, doesn't it, when the options are either slavery or eternal damnation.

Good thing I do not believe in god, because I can't stand the idea of worshipping him in the first place. A good god doesn't let infant children die in an earthquake!

Friday night, dressed to kill...

Had a rather rude awakening today, thanks to my awesome autonomous nerve system! At 12:26, I awoke with my mobile phone in my left hand, having turned off the alarm in my sleep without hesitation.

Add to that, it spoiled a rather fascinating dream I had about suffering from radiation poisoning after a string of nuclear attacks against the city I was in. No, it didn't make much sense to me either.

I'm starting to miss the terrific feeling of dread that only Silent Hill 2 gives me. Oh, and Penumbra! Penumbra: Black Plague, to be precise.

As I might have mentioned before, a good horror game is one where the monsters in closets are kept at a minimum, where the terror of something you can't see is greater than the monsters you do happen to actually come across.

Black Plague also has the added factor of complete and utter lack of any means of defending yourself. All you can do if you're spotted by some faceless monstrosity is to run away, hide in a corner and try not to panic. Dammit, I've gotta pick that game up again. As always, the feeling of dread is lessened quite considerably when you are armed with a double-barelled shotgun and blasting holes in everything that moves, something that any good horror game avoids like the plague, the Black Plague in this case. This is why Doom 3 never actually qualified as a horror game. Sure, monsters popped out of closets here and there, but all you had to do was put a few slugs in their head and they literally dissolved.

Good riddance to that, we need more Penumbra!

The story of Rapture continues...

So far, I must say I'm rather impressed by Bioshock 2. While it doesn't improve dramatically on the graphics of the first game, the story is, as always, quite fleshed out, and exposition is provided in the form of audio logs littering the hallways here and there.

Like before, the feeling of isolation is rather strong, and the idea that you can't really trust anyone seems to be impossible to shake.

Also, I have purchased Monkey Island 1&2, both in Special Edition, from STEAM. What that means is the two first games in the series have been remade with new graphics, all new voice acting and smoother controls. At the press of a button, you can even switch back to the old graphics, if you want an injection of nostalgia straight into your spinal column.

Furthermore, I have returned to Mass Effect 2 to try out a couple new bits of downloadable content (DLC). The game, as ever, strikes me as being very heavy on the story, even if the general gameplay is more combat oriented. I feel this is how an interactive movie should be; dialogue and cinematic flair in which you are always in control of what the main character says and how he acts. Not to mention the parts where you are allowed to interrupt the events unfolding in a brilliantly awesome way, like punching an annoying reporter in the jaw!

All for now, time for bed!

Trains!

Guess what, my train was late earlier today, and consequently I missed my bus, causing me to be 15 minutes late for my class.

Now, I supposed one could understand the difficulties of managing numerous different trains and getting them all to work in sync.

I don't.

The train managers are quite possibly the most incompetent lot of morons in the history of transportation. They are in charge of one thing, and one thing only; to make the trains run on time. It's not exactly rocket science, and it's something those numbnuts should have been able to master during the last 150 or so years since the invention of the train.

Even worse, autumn is approaching rapidly, and soon the tracks will be covered by fallen leaves. Naturally, this will cause trains to be late and alot of them to be canceled altogether.

What the flying fish have they been doing every single year for these last 150 years, sat there twiddling their thumbs when they should have been trying to solve this problem. Every single bloody year those responsible for maintaining the tracks are always caught completely off guard by the arrival of the autumn.

Guess what, you idiots, it happens every year! Same with snow, it's an annual feature! Don't act so bleedin' surprised when it happens! Do something to fix this, or you should all be sacked you worthless pieces of garbage!

And no, I'm not being overly harsh. Compared to what they deserve to have said of them, what I just said would come across as a generous tribute!

A new start!

Seeing as how I've gotten complaints, all from the same person, about my lacking tendency to update this here blog, I hereby declare I will be updating it every single day from now on.

Naturally, this will result in the quality of content dropping and me just posting useless nonsense of no intellectual value that will probably qualify as gossip.

In other words, nothing will change!

Last week I had something of an uncomfortable experience in class. We were being taught the incredibly complicated and ludicrously roundabout art of academic writing. To this end, we were first told to make a mind-map on the subject of football.

There are two problems with this; the first is the fact that I hate mind-maps. They confuse me and give me no incentive whatsoever to be productive in any way, form or fashion. The second is the fact that I have no relationship whatsoever with football. I don't hate it, I don't love it, it just completely falls off my radar. This exercise went poorly.

Our second exercise was to make a list of things that sprung into our mind regarding the subject of Paris. I performed slightly better at this.

Lastly, we were asked to write in a free flowing manner on the subject of parks in cities. Sadly, it was marred by the fact that both the teacher and the rest of the class regarded this method as some kind of unknown monstrosity, never before seen in this part of the world. They all seemed to act as if I was expected to think this was the hardest way of getting off to a start with writing an essay.

Just to clarify, I'm doing it now for christ's sake!

At this point, I had to ask whether or not any of them had ever read a single blog entry in their entire lives. In response to this, they all looked at me as if I had just asked them whether or not they were in the habit of forcefeeding a hamster C4 while jerking off!

Idiots...

An issue of some importance...

This is not something that is very easy to write about, so you will have to be patient. In all honesty, it is not only something very close to my heart, but something very far removed from what, and who, I really am. I do not ask that you understand, I only ask that you listen.

These last few months, I have had dreams of a particular kind. Rather than being the kind of which I have written several times before, these are of a whole nother kind. I may, at times, have mentioned the concept on which they are based; false nostalgia, but lately they have gone from being a source of amusement and fascination to being a horror all of its own.

They are not, as one might think, visions of the way one's own supposed past would look like through the eyes of who one is now. I do not enter them with the mindset of one who has seen many things come and go since the events transpired, and matured in more ways than one. Were you to, at any point, go back and observe key moments of your childhood, you would not find the same awe and grandeur today that you did as a child. The world was a larger and much more impressive place back then.

No! Instead I step into them feeling every bit of the same awe and inspiration as I, supposedly, did when I first experienced them. Joys are as joyful, and enjoyment is just as enjoyable. When I wake up, I do so with a great sorrow in my heart, the kind of sinking feeling one can only get from watching the things one had loved fade away slowly, you being completely unable to do anything about it.

It would not bother me nearly as much were it not for the fact that the visions are not real. They are lies! Deception! But at the time, they felt so vivid, so real. The emotions I felt were not lies, the happiness was genuine, as was the despair that followed.

As I am writing this, the words themselves are fading. How do I describe what I saw?

There was a beach, or rather an entire campground. I was a boy, who's to say how old? My parents were both there, I remember my father particularly fondly. Maybe he had to pay some fee, I don't know. We were all bathing; me, my siblings, even one of my uncles was there.

But there was more to it than that. I made mistakes. There was an elevator that was supposedly out of order, and I feared it. For some reason it descended with a particular type of small figurine set of toys that I loved so when I was a young boy, but I wasn't supposed to have them, and the elevator was not supposed to move.

We all played in the water for a long time. My father, or maybe my uncle, made such a huge splash jumping from a little height that all the water temporarily receded from the lake, but slowly crept back again.

Truth be told, it was our house that lay on the beach of that small lake. It was ours alone, it belonged to no one else. It was my sanctuary, I could go back there and it would belong to us forever.

There were also some kind of camp meetings, and I reminisced about them to one of my cousins, who was also there.

From there, things went wrong. My brother, or perhaps it was my sister, got stuck on the boardwalk outside of the house, then all faded in a particularly strange way. It was not as if an image faded from a paper, it was more like a room of imagination you were in was being gradually razed to reveal reality outside of it's walls.

I cried. I walked from room to room in our house, and it was bigger than I had previously thought. I could not find where my parents slept, and I had done something very wrong. I cried, through it all. All was lost, it was just a fantasy. The scene I had enjoyed so was just part of a dead past that would never ever come back. Our front door no longer was there, because it was no longer our house, it belonged to someone else. I had no sanctuary anymore. I cried.

There was a kite, that I got to fly, and some kind of mechanical plane. They were the last vestiges of the past that I clung to in the hopes of spending just a few more moments in that blessed realm.

When I awoke, it was all gone, it had faded into a strange story of danger and action, but none of that mattered. My childhood was dead forever, and the dream had only afforded me a brief joy just to shatter me with the sorrow that it was all gone.

The dream was not real, but the feelings it left me with were.

Please, I want to go back there...please...