Black Materia: Final Fantasy 7 by Random and Lost Perception (RandomBeats, 2011)

Over the last month I’ve become convinced that Final Fantasy 7 (FF7) is truly the video game for 2011.

In this classic from SquareEnix (nee Square) you have a group of young people (AVALANCHE) battling a massive corporation, which controls the government and military. This company (SHINRA) is  relegating much the population to criminalized slums along with destroying the economy and, especially, the environment. SHINRA – sort of Johnson & Johnson meets Halliburton – has in many ways spelled out its own, and The Planet’s, coming the apocalypse through its own overreach and excess.  Instead, dooming itself through over-leveraged mortgage derivatives – ala Lehman Brothers – SHINRA’s self-inflicted end comes at the hand of a biologically engineered monstrosity – Sephiroth.

When Occupying Midgar, the giant octopus of corporate greed becomes quite literal.

What bought my ticket on this FF7 nostalgia-train was stumbling across (via Kotaku) a hip-hop tribute (!) to Final Fantasy 7 by Random. Random’s album, Black Materia, is quite good, if a bit top heavy (the second half of the album lacks the emotion or attachment to the source material of the first half). The most impressive track, perhaps, is “Tifa,” which manages to make the powerfully convoluted Cloud/Tifa story into a touching tale of childhood romance.

Black Materia reminded me just how great of a game FF7is  and just how well it has aged over the last fourteen years.

Oh sure, the feeble, super-deformed first attempt at 3D graphics has aged horribly (especially, in context of Square’s other PS1 generation Final Fantasy games), but basic game systems (particularly if one carefully forgets about the snowboarding) are extremely sound. In its straightforward old-fashionedness the “materia systems” seems revolutionary in 2011. Think of the awfulness of the combat and customization of Final Fantasy 13, with its attempt to merge the game play of a real-time MMO with classic turned based JRPGs which ends up only having the frustrations (and none of the virtues) of both paradigms.

What stands out to me most thinking about this game, here at the end of 2011, is the well-characterized nature of Final Fantasy 7′s female protagonists. While Tifa’s out-of-proportion costume and character design seems to argue against this assertion (remember 1997 was the awful days of the original Tomb Raider), if we look a bit below the surface things become more complex and interesting. Both Tifa and (especially) Aeris are fully developed characters with their own story-lines developed beyond simply as foils for Cloud Strife.

No video game moment – much less character death – matches in video game history the scene of Aeris’s death at the hands of Sephiroth. That scene is a huge cultural touchstone for gamers of a certain age (i.e. can remember the 1990s) and remains the most mentioned aspect of this game in any retrospective look at FF7‘s impact. The very centrality of this moment, of Aeris’s brutal murder at the hands of a male villain, makes her an obvious example of the trope known as “Women in Refrigerators.”

There is a lot truth to an association of the Aeris’s famous death with this trope. As Gail Simone classicly puts it, the very femaleness of women characters in popular fiction “inevitably” leads to such characters “being killed, maimed or depowered.” Yet, what makes Aeris stand out from the pack of the countless super heroines and love interests thrown under the bus by innumerable male writer  is that her death is not about making the storyline of a male character more interesting. Aeris’s death is not about Cloud’s story but an fitting end to her own story within Final Fantasy 7‘s plot.

While, of course Aeris’s death does complicate Cloud’s story and make it more interesting but, her death is not primarily about that. Rather, that scene is an out growth of Aeris’s character (her ancestry, her desire to protect the planet, etc.) and a culmination of her story, not his. I am not seeking to argue that the representations of gender in Final Fantasy 7 is perfect -  for the game is a JRPG from 1997. But for being what it is (again, a JRPG from 1997) the representations of female characters within the game and its plot are remarkably progressive.

Final Fantasy 7 has a lot to offer us in our age of rising inequality, corporate greed, enviromental destruction, political unrest, and global weirding. The themes of the game, perhaps, have more to say to us in the lean year of 2011 than they did in the boom times of 1997. As we approach this seminal game’s fifteenth anniversary we should, perhaps, consider putting our dusty CDs of Final Fantasy 7 back in our PlayStations. Not just because of be the game’s classic status but because the story of Cloud, Aeris, Sephiroth, and Tifa has something to say to us today.

Once Upon a Time is a show that doesn’t know what to do with itself.  It is trying to be several shows at once – a strange combination of Lost and TruBloodby way of Stephen King. The problem is, you can’t do sexy, goofy, over the top camp and a dark fantasy mystery at the same time. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The pilot is a campy, too serious mess. The “real-world” sequences were fine and, over enthusiastic 10-year old aside, often created a good sense of mystery and tension. That feeling wouldn’t stay with you, however, for you could count on it being dissipated by a campy, terrible fantasy sequence with in a few minutes. Those sequences are inexcusably awful – typical, television fantasy trash. For a show with this budget, cast, and creative pedigree such low quality television is unacceptable. Often watching the pilot of Once Upon a Time was like watching an episode of Lost interspersed with sequences from an fairy tale infected episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. The episode could have jettisoned most of those scenes and lost little.

Despite the awfulness of the pilot, this show has some potential. The cast is strong – especially the Wicked Step-Mother and the dude playing Rumpelstiltskin as a serial killer. The Wicket Step-Mother has the right mix of the sinister and the sensitive and “Mr. Gold” was appropriately disturbing. I still like Jennifer Morrison a lot, despite the efforts of the last season of How I Met Your Mother to make me feel otherwise. The 10-year old boy needs to rein it in it, but he is far from the worst child actor on television. The executive producers of this show are, obviously, survivors of the Lost writers room. Which means they know how to write a good science fiction/fantasy tinged mystery and create compelling and interesting characters – even if they don’t know how to make an ending really work.

To make this show work going forward, what’s needed is to make a choice. Do they want to go the love-it-or-leave it campy or love-it-or-leave it fantasy mystery route. These are mutually incompatible creative directions, as the pilot clearly shows. The raw materials of Once Upon a Time are solid. It is in the hands of the writers as to whether this show will succeed or end up on the growing pile of failed shows from the 2011-2012 season.

Today This week marks the release of Dragon Age 2: Mark of the Assassin (likely the final major DLC release for that misbegotten sequel) and the first episode of Dragon Age: Redemption (a Felicia Day vehicle cos-playing as a video game ad). A couple of things stand out on this momentous day of Edmonton based virtual entertainment. First, I am glad to see that internet films have graduated to the production values of early episodes of Hercules the Legendary Journeys. Who says progress is linear? Second, Bioware really is making a play to take over the fantasy imagination of a generation of gamers.

Now, then, is a time as good as any to consider the state of Bioware’s fantasy franchise. Few sequels have driven the internet gaming blogosphere as insane DA2.

Internet opinion on this game varies along a spectrum that goes from “DA2 is the worst Bioware game” to prophecies of the eminent collapse Western RPGs. I am on the record noting that Bioware has been failing to provide quality entertainment for the last 11+ years, yet, at the same time I feel that this seven month old game is not nearly as awful as the average Kotaku commentator would have you believe.

In order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of DA2, we’ve got to dispel a few of the myths that haunt this franchise.

WARNING: The text below drops a lot of TRUTH BOMBS. Also: SPOILERS.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Dragon Age: Origins really isn’t that great of a game: Let’s be clear headed here, folks, and turn down the nostalgia (for a game that is only three years old!). DA:O is sort of a mess. The graphics were a mix bag, at best. Bioware’s a painful attempt at fantasy “realism” was a patent failure with its strange looking faces and giant hands (I mean, ugh, the hands of characters in that game were so awful! It looked like everyone was wearing over-sized gloves.) The story – the most important part any RPG – was all over the place. The game had a compelling human antagonist but he was sidelined more often than not in favor the darkspawn. Oh, the darkspawn; dear, dear, dear, David Gaider: I think you’re one of the best writers in video game industry but combining orcs and zombies into a single archetype isn’t the fantasy mythos revolution of the twenty-first century – sad to say. Such a creative move is actually quite lame. The final boss – the “archdemon” – had no personality and its goal was simply to kill, kill, kill. Dull. The interface was uglier and clunkier (especially on consoles) than that found even in the original Baldur’s Gate. Combat was strategic on the PC, to be sure, but on the console the game could be unplayable at times. Along with that, combat, especially in the visual department, was painfully slow and not in a strategic way – the game played like everyone in the damn thing was weighed down by especially powerful gravity. The inventory system, on the console, is frustrating to the point of near uselessness. All of this led to a less than satisfying experience, especially for a game that was in development for 6+ years.

Despite the wall of text above, DA:O had a lot going for it: As with most modern Bioware games DA:O‘s greatest strength was its supporting cast. Alistar was great in a Joss Whedon sort of way; Morrigan, sweet evil, Morrigan (though I never entirely bought Claudia Black playing a women in her early 20s) was wonderful; sexually aggressive Zevran, I will never forget you; Frenchified Liliana, you really do love shoes.. While orc-zombies are boring, the politics of Ferelden were interesting. Loghain was a compelling – if overshadowed (quite literally) – antagonist. The overall world of Thedas is a pretty great setting for a video game. It is pleasant (and prophetic) that Gaider decided to steal more directly from R.R. Martin over R.R. Tolkien. The partial focus on politics and faction/ethnic/religious conflict was a refreshing change of place from most RPG plots. Most of all, DA:O offered players choices that had legitimate consequences for the story. This was present from the titular origins of your character to the final moments of the game. Bioware took their post-KOTR obsession with “choice” to extreme heights in the first Dragon Age game.

With the problems and successes of the first entry of the franchise fleshed out, let’s talk about its sequel.

Dragon Age 2 takes what’s good about DA:O and makes it better: The supporting cast is, in many ways, even stronger than the one in the original game. I absolutely love Merrill. With Aveline Bioware managed to create compelling and interesting female character is not a love interest. Varric is a great, snarky companion. Anders’ journey is provocatively tragic and important to over all story of Thedas. This is likely to prove one of my more controversial claims but, the story in DA2 was better than in DA:O. While some aspects did not work (see below), the journey of Hawke was much more compelling their our silent Warden from DA:O. While still all over the place, just like its predecessor, DA2′s story felt much more organic than DA:O’s. I bought, for example, the reasons your party stayed together in the sequel much more than in the original. In Dragon Age 2, Bioware really pushes the interesting conflicts of Thedas – between the mages and the templars, between the Chantry & the Qunari – to the foreground and, mostly, backgrounds the zombie orcs.

Dragon Age 2 massively improves on many of terrible things about DA:O: While the new art style is far from perfect (I will never forget Hawke’s strange proportioned bare chest), it is an infinite improvement over the previous art design. Elves actually look different than humans! The new Qunari design is powerful, distinctive, and interesting. The interface, both menus and in combat, is improved to a degree of which human language can not express. Combat is faster and flashier. No more ponderous walking from enemy to enemy in DA2. Bioware continues its strong commitment to diversity in role-playing options by opening each love interest to same-sex romance. (This proved controversial among some commentators since they saw such a move as “lazy” or “insulting” since it denied players specific character reasons for a same-sex romance and provided a homogenized experience. There is some truth to these claims, however, I feel this is a lose/lose debate for Bioware. The hard-core slashers are still upset that they were denied their Alistar romance in DA:O.)

Dragon Age 2 introduced some compelling new features that were lacking in Dragon Age: Origins: I am mostly talking about the dialogue wheel. While far from perfect, the dialogue system is a large advance over the one in DA:O and the Mass Effect series. Gone is the dichotomous paragon/renegade system, what DA2 has is much more textured and allows for something

All that said, Dragon Age 2 had some serious issues.

Dragon Age 2 is rushed: There is really no other way about it, DA2 is extremely rushed. This game has so many rough edges I was afraid a couple of times that I would poke my eye out. While DA:O has more than a few moments where it lacks polish (especially for a game that was in development from c. 2003 to 2008) it is nothing like DA2, which had only 18 months (or so) of development time. I tend to be impressed that Bioware was able to throw together a game as good as DA2 in such a short period of time but the extremely rushed nature of this game can not be argued away.

Dragon Age 2 has too much content: This many seem counter-intuitive but DA2 has too much content for it’s own good. This is tied in with the game’s rushed nature. It is clear that David Gaider and his writers created way too many plot hooks and story content and there simply wasn’t enough resources with in the game to support it. This is what leads to the central complain that people have with DA2: the constant reuse of the same visual settings (the same cave, the same building, etc. etc.). Half-complete content and content that should have been cut has always been a problem with Bioware games but it is especially prevalent in DA2. Bioware would have been better off just cutting most of this chafe in the end.

Dragon Age 2‘s “framed narrative” does not entirely work: While I found Hawke’s story compelling (as above) Bioware’s way of telling it didn’t always work. Varric is a fun character but the increasingly over the course of the narrative the whole “framed” thing becomes increasingly forced and let’s not even rehash the strange and incomplete “ending.” Perhaps this whole “framed narrative” thing was an experiment worth having but, in the end, it was a failure.

Dragon Age 2 makes some things that were awful in Dragon Age: Origins even worse: I am mostly talking about the inventory system here which was nigh unusable in DA2. Worst part of the game, hands down. Especially considering how improved the overall interface was.

And now a couple of brief (joke) words on the DA2 DLC.

Mark of the Assassin and Legacy show that David Gaider’s staff of writers are, whatever you want to say about them, still very good scenario writers: Both of these pieces of downloadable content are excellent and should be examples for other game developers to follow. Each of these were meaty experiences that expanded both the scope of DA2 and the world of Thedas.  This is especially true of Mark of the Assassin, which is a great balance between combat, puzzles, role-playing, and even non-traditional game play (the stealth moments). Whatever the weaknesses of DA2 these DLCs should show even the haters (ha) that the core competences of the Dragon Age team remain strong. This should pour a lot of cold water on the those unleashing a jermaid about eminent collapse of the western RPG. Although I was disturbed out by the offensive transsexual joke in MotA.

It is great to see Felicia Day pushing herself a bit: It is good to see Day playing a character that is about 50 or 75 percent out of her comfort zone. In fact when her dialogue fell back on Day’s strengths (quirky awkwardness) the character of Tallis failed to work. When Gaider and crew pushed Day out side of that comfort zone, as a voice actress, she really got to shine. I am neither one of the kind-of-oddly-slavish male gamer fans of Day nor am I part of her growing number of haters. I think Day is a talented and driven actress but she too often plays the same character over and over again (she her recent turn on Eureka, which I want to return to soon). I was glad to see her doing something somewhat different with her turn as Tallis. I hope Bioware brings her back.

All ramblings above are meant to make (or suggest) one straight forward argument: Dragon Age 2 is not the worst game ever. It may not even be the worst Bioware RPG (that dubious honor goes, perhaps, to Jade Empire but it is arguable). DA2 does not mark the coming DOOM of American/Canadian RPGs. DA2, in the end, is a mediocre (if rushed) sequel to a mediocre original game. It makes some improvements on the original, it makes some things worse. The sky is not falling, things are not falling apart.

If you like Bioware games I’d recommend both DA:O and DA2. It is worth renting or picking up used (or the inevitable gold/game of the year edition). In fact, I plan on replaying the full game of DA2 over the winter break. I’m mildly interested in what direction they will take Dragon Age 3.

So, internets: let’s talk about this game in a reasonable way. The successes and failures of this game are not really a crystal orb into what is going to happen with The Old Republic or Mass Effect 3. There is no need to scream about DA2 in the comments of every post on any Bioware game.

After all of the virtual ink spilled over this game, let’s move on. I mean, Diablo III is using real money in the auction house!!!!!!

It sort of bothers me that I am always writing mean things on the internet about How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM). What rubs me the wrong way about all of the negative things I’ve said about this show is that, at the end of the day, I really do love it. I own all of the seasons on DVD. The girlfriend and I have a subscription via Zune for the newest season on my X-Box. Who doesn’t want a weekly dose of Jason Segal and Neil Patrick Harris? I really do love HIMYM.

But…

My enjoyment – my love – of this show has always been contingent. There is much awfulness at the core of this show – often open misogyny, the jock-humor, the CBS sitcom related awfulness, the shallowness of the female characters, the more often than not “too cool for school” attitude, off-hand homophobia, the misogyny. All of that does even account for the sometimes awful writing – the Barney/Robin debacle still grates.

The double whammy season premiere brought all this to the front and center by having Barney recount so many of his racist and misogynistic pick up attempts (did they really need to bring up the lesbian one again? Ack!). But even worse, the hour long season starter suggests that the show has begun to cannibalize itself.

Call-backs have always been a standard comedic trope on this show. HIMYM’s “framed narrative” makes possible and Carter & Bays often use such call-backs to great effect (in fact the season premiere as a good set up for a couple of Marshal related ones). But the return of – SPOILER ALERT – Victoria at the end of the season opener and the recent pumpkin related announcement portents that Carter & Bays have moved beyond the call-back and begun to cannibalize their show’s own past.

The return of Victoria goes beyond the occasional return of Ted’s exes because of her place in the show’s history. Besides Robin (who shouldn’t count because she’s a main character and Cobie Smulders is awesome), Victoria is the best and most likable of Ted’s girlfriends (in fact Carter & Bays planned for her to be THE MOTHER if they didn’t get a second season). Bringing her back should mean something, it should mean that the overall story of this show is moving forward. But, I remain doubtful. Carter & Bays have promised such movement before and little has come of it (fool me once shame on me, fool me twice…).

Since, at least, the third season Carter & Bays have been promising forward movement on Ted’s character arc – that he finally will get his shit together – but again and again these promises have amounted to nothing. Instead, the show has stagnated and gradually Ted has gotten gradually more and more unlikable. Think about it; in the four seasons since Ted and Robin broke up where has his character gone? Pretty much nowhere.

Now Carter & Bays have been talking about how they are entering the “end game” of the show and the character himself has once again promised he’s going to get his shit together and move forward but it seems that the show is going to go backwards yet again. Like an abused spouse I am willing to give Carter & Bays another chance to push their show forward but, after a season where they managed to make Jennifer Morrison (who I like a lot) unbearable, I remain skeptical.

The above should not be read to mean that I hated the season premiere. I’m glad they are taking Barney out of his played-out Lothario role. The two Marshall B-plots in these episodes were hilarious. Marshall and Lily as parents promises to be both hilarious and touching. Carter & Bays have repeatedly promised good story-lines for Robin this time out.

In the end, this season has a lot of promise but sadly, because of all of the wasted potential of recent seasons, I remain skeptical.

The New Girl (Fox, 2011)

The New Girl is a deeply disturbing show.

Zooey Deschanel plays a character born out of a sort of nightmarish romantic comedy netherworld – a strange elixir of the most homogenized image of hipsterdom (the glasses!), a B sex-romantic comedy heroine, the worst sort of Manic Pixie Dream Girl that Zach Braff could dream up, and a sort of half-baked parody of third wave feminism. She delivers each line with a forced quirkiness that slowly chips away at one’s ability to take human language seriously. Deschanel is always strongest as an actress (of sorts) when she silently plays the wispy sort of MPDG that many a sensitive man in his twenties could fall obsessively in love with (see the best scenes of 500 Days of Summer). But here, in The New Girl,  - a show driven entirely but its dialogue and supposed cleverness – she is forced to relie on her ability to deliver a line like a human being. And she fails to the point in which by the end I felt sorry for her – and myself.

Oh and the dialogue. The dialogue. At the ten minute mark I found myself wondering if there was a sort of rom-com Necronomicon from which the writers – and I use that term here provisionally – drew their terrible dialouge and plot from. The core of this show is a sort of examination of the supposed gender differences between men and women (girls are flighty! men want to get laid). But there taken on this feels stale even if this was 1983. In the end the show feels like a sort half-baked version of Three’s Company + 1.

I blame How I Met Your Mother, which showed that domesticated sex comedy could work on national television. But HIMYM’s many wannabes have failed to acknowledge two key facts about that show (a show which I enjoy a great deal). First, that it is constantly teetering on the edge of collapsing under the weight of its own gender troubles, high CBS sit-com cheese, and misogyny. Second, HIMYM’s cast was always stronger than the material the writers gave them. Neil Patrick Harris, Jason Segal, and Cobie Smulders are legitimately funny people, which always comes through no matter what awfulness Carter & Bays make them spout.

And, yet…

And yet, when you stare long into the darkness the darkness begins to stare back into you. There were moments of true humor in The New Girl and, perhaps, a few truly relatable moments. The sort of things that make a sit-com work. A few times Deschanel’s strained line readings are over come by the humor, and not the other way around.  The show makes good, if painfully quirky, use of her excellent singing voice.

In the end, The New Girl is not likely to be the worst new show in 2011 (that honor is likely to go to some cop show with pornographic murders of pretty girls). I am glad that this season the networks have decided to come out with several shows driven by young female leads. But that does not make The New Girl a good show. Just a disturbing one.

Baldur’s Gate 2 by Bioware (Interplay, 2000)

The original Baldur’s Gate is one of my favorite games of all time. Open-ended and challenging, the game reenergized the hard-core American CRPG. Masterfully adapting the sometimes cumbersome (THACO, anyone?) second edition AD&D rules for real-time gameplay, Bioware really showed the world how to make a great, nigh-perfect role-playing game.

Needless to say, I was extremely excited to play Bioware’s follow-up. Sadly enough, I could not have been more disappointed in how this game turned out! So much so that it is difficult to for me to put my rage into words.

Perhaps it is best to just take the flaws in this game point by point.

My choices in BG1 have no consequence in BG2: In my playthrough of the first game in this series, I killed Xzar and his annoying halfling friend. But look here! There alive in & well in the sequel! What’s up with that Bioware? There are virtually no consequences for anything I did in your original game! Quayle as a kindly uncle figure to a whiny unwinged elf? What the hell? And, come on, what’s up with me starting the game with Minsc, Jaheria, and Imoen in my party? I never traveled with any of them in the original game! And who gives a shit about Imoen?

My choices within BG2 have no consequences: There are so-called “turning points” within the “plot” of this “game” that seemingly are supposed to have consequences but they really do not. Choosing between the vampires and the Shadow Thieves? No real difference between them! Oh, sure you might have a few different quests in Chapter 3 but in the whole the game turns out the same! You still end up in Spellhold. And deciding to try to sail back to Amn instead of going straight to the Underdark? All that gets you is 30 minutes in fish-city and no real consequences! Come on, Bioware! What real RPG gamers want is real choices not the illusion of choice.

Reused textures and tile-sets: Bioware artists are you really that lazy? There so many reused tile-sets in this game that it is extremely pathetic. There are only like three different layout for houses in this game and they are all recycled from BG1! There are only two tile-sets for random encounters in this so-called “game” and the in-Amn random encounter’s art is just recycled from the Bridge District! One of the major dunegons in this game is used twice (Bodhi’s graveyard hideout). Did you really think that we wouldn’t notice your laziness, Bioware? It often just felt like I was on a visual treadmill as a slogged through this “game.” Speaking of treadmills…

Limited exploration options: More often than not while playing Baldur’s Gate 2, I felt like I was playing a “game” set on rails. So much of this “game” is completely linear! While in the original game you can pretty much explore the entire world while ignoring the core plot, BG2 basically sets you on a clearly fixed direction. Besides that there are so few quests in this game. I mean there are like three quests in all of Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 has like one long dungeon! The great sense of exploration, epic scope, and the ability to stumble in danger is largely gone from this “game.”

This game is idiot proof: What is up with “pins” on the world map that clearly mark quest givers and stores? Half the fun of the original Baldur’s Gate was wandering around trying to find the right house out of the sea of identical looking housing. What is the point of a so-called RPG if you don’t have to take detailed notes just to keep track of where the quest givers are? Clearly Bioware is now designing their games for the lowest common denominator – shooter fans and console gamers.

Romance over plot: BG2 contains “romances” between your player character and a few non-player characters in your party. It is clear from this development that Bioware has now moved away from making each NPC an interesting character to focusing on a small sub-set of fanservice character “romances.” These gross virtual sexpots have little do with the “game’s” plot and never push the story forward. It is clear that Bioware is now putting development resources towards fan service things like “romances” instead of more valuable things like art resources and real content.

If Bioware, formerly the king of the American CRPG, can produce a real piece of crap game like this we are, clearly, reaching a crisis point in the RPG market. If once-great companies, like Bioware, continue to produce quick cash-in games like BG2, real RPG fans will be begin abandoning the genre in droves.

It makes me sad to type this but, the terribleness that is Baldur’s Gate 2 could mark the beginning of the end of the American CRPG.

I’ve been writing and, later, blogging through Blurred Productions since I was fourteen. It began as an instrument for distributing my (terrible) fiction to my friends and acquaintances, then became a blogging platform and as a way for me to keep up with my friends from high school (even later, undergraduate) as we scattered to the four winds. Over the last two years or so, as my life got increasily busy I allowed Blurred Productions to die a slow, painful death. The site went from having a small place in the comics blogosphere to being another half-death (these days, mostly dead) blog.

While my life did get busier, my love of blogging and sharing my opinions needlessly on the internet did not go away. I’ve tried periodically to restart BP but these attempts have universally fizzled. Many posts have been half-written in the “draft” folder of WordPress but I often ended up just deleting them. The weight of the history of Blurred Productions was just weighing me down. I always felt like a sort of failure from what I’d let that small (tiny and insignificant, really) part of the internet become.

Thus I have decided it is best to just start fresh with a new blog where I can (finally) blog under my real name. Smith Michaels was a great alias when I could get kicked out of school for bad-mouthing the administration but those days passed nearly a decade ago.

Over the next few weeks I will be gradually closing the doors of Blurred Productions. Luckily, I can do this (mostly) guilt free as the key contributors to BP have moved on to bigger and better things. I am very proud of them and am glad to have shared the same internet space with them for so long. In general, I am proud of and stand by most of what I wrote on Blurred Productions - especially about comics. Writing and blogging for that site was important to my intellectual development. For that reason, despite retiring the site, I will leaving the archives up and fully available. Despite my embarrassment at spelling & grammar mistakes and typos that plague my writing on BP, I am (generally speaking) opposed to removing things from the internet just because you’ve moved on. And, of course, a lot of those same kind of affronts to the English language will be present in this blog.

With that prologue out of the way, what can you expect from this blog?

This blog, generally speaking, will be dedicated to discussions of my various cultural interests – gaming, comics, television, and film. I will try and keep my day job as an insecure PhD student in history out of this online space (you can find my professional work here if it would interest you) but sometimes that will prove impossible. While I learned long ago that my political opinions matter little on the internet where such things are plentiful and there are infinitely better advocates for my politics, I can not entirely promise that this space will be completely free of political blogging. Usually, though, it will be about the intersection of politics and my cultural interests. I may even blog about veganism or, even, what is likely to live in this awesome/terible city that I have found myself in.

I am looking, generally, to have one or two pieces up here a week. Sometimes this will be more (likely during breaks or when I am attempting to escape work) and sometimes much less (during crunch time).

So, welcome to the brand new world of “Adulthood Pending.” We’ll just have to see how my return to blogging goes.