Needless to say that I will be going into the story a bit to explain why, though I will be doing my best to be as vauge as possible.
But obviously, Spoiler Warning!!!

If you want to go into the game fresh, which I would very much reccomend, then stop reading right now.

I mean it.


SCRAM!!!












They gone?

Good.



Recently, my partner and I picked up the latest in Nintendo's Paper Mario series, The Origami King. We just finished a play through. This game needs a warning in front of it saying "Parental Guidance STRONGLY suggested". Don't get me wrong. The game is incredible. The story is wonderful, and bitter-sweet, the writing on point, much of it frankly hilarious, and witty. The combat system is a bit lacking, but the rest of the package is more than entertaining enough to hold your attention. It's just some of the mature themes within.

And no, I'm not talking about THOSE kind of themes, you pervs.

I mean things like Death, Loss, Atrocity, Suffering, Hatred, and Self Sacrifice.

I know. Stuff that feels more like it belongs in a Final Fantasy game, rather than a Mario one. It's all handled well, and with taste, but the result is, frankly, alot more emotionally wrenching, than I was prepared for in a Mario game. The story is an epic tragedy of nearly operatic proportions. We have kingdoms collapsing under invasion. We have a bad-guy that is mutilating people, to achieve what he considers to be perfection. We have vendettas. And we have heroes that make the ultimate sacrifice for their friends.

I honestly never expected, going in, that I would be brought to near tears, on more than one occasion.

Mario, being the viewpoint character, has no real arc in terms of story, or personality. He's there to save the day, of course. The four new people we are introduced to, through the course of the game, on the other hand, have the most fleshed out stories and personality as well as the most detailed character arcs. They are also the ones that meet the darkest fates...

The inner lives of some of the Mario Universe's diverse population are fleshed out in often rather amusing ways, while others... Let's just say you'll never look at a Bob'Bomb the same way ever again. Some of it was a little hard for me to deal with, given that I had been lulled into having my shields down, by the general mario-ness. I can only imagine what kind of impact that this would have on your average 9 year old. Again, don't get me wrong, I'm not the kind for censorship of any kind, and I do feel that alot of the subject matter is important to be exposed to early, to get kids thinking and reasoning. But it's definitely stuff I would think a parent would want to help their son or daughter come to grips with.

Despite the cutesy exterior, much of the game seems to be aimed at the older Nintendo fan. I definitely got that impression, when, at one point, Bowser expresses how difficult it can be to be a single father, even if Jr. has a devoted nanny, in the likes of Kamek. The fleshing out of the toad civilization, also gave me a laugh or two, as they exhibit an almost comical obsession with profit, like certain Star Trek baddies I could name. None of this is too over the top, though, and frankly is the source of alot of the humor. I do wonder how Bowser deals with the koopa troopa's veneration of the Earth Velumental, though. Isn't he the least bit jealous, that they have a god, who isn't him?


The character of Olivia is quite endearing, with a child-like sense of innocence, and wonder. Watching her grow through the course of the game, is a joy. Other sidekicks, that come into and out of the story, also have their charms, especially the amnesiac bob'bomb, Bobby, always so eager to help, if a little on the cowardly side. He finds his courage in the end, though. And the character for which the game is named, Olly, is, for a Mario game, quite a complex and ultimately tragic villain.

All in all, I would recommend this game, but with a warning that you might very well get more than you bargained for in the feels department. Just a warning. Emotionally, it's a wild ride...

I was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1974, to a middle class couple. They were well meaning. But they weren't a particularly happy one. They would split up when I was 5. My father would ask me if I was happy he was leaving. I answered honestly. I said yes, because I knew the shouting matches that they would get into every few nights would stop...

My early years, at least according my mother, and some dim memories that I still hold from those times, apart from the friction between my parents, were reasonably happy. My mother has recounted that I was relatively easy going as a hatchling. Never complained unless there was something truly wrong. I was apparently very outgoing. Very focused on people. I seemed to be always trying to get them to smile. When we prepared to move to Alexandria, Virginia a year later, many of our neighbors, some who had acted as my sitters when my parents were working, made a point of saying goodbye to me specifically. I was apparently rather popular as hatchlings go...

My experiences at kindergarten were mostly positive. It was run by the Episcopal church my mother went to, after we moved into the DC area. I was diagnosed early with learning disabilities. Therapists that worked with the kindergarten, worked with me, explaining to me as best they could how I was different, and taught me ways to cope. They started physical therapy to help my brain learn to control the body it had a scrambled connection to. They taught me to make sense of the wall of noise, presented to me by my senses. My brain, having to do the hard work of processing the data that normally would have been handled by my malfunctioning brain-stem, became quite burley, as a neurologist would explain to me decades later.

I had an inquisitive mind. I was curious about everything, wanting to know how they worked. I was able to grasp complex concepts that often one needed to be much older to understand. At three years old, as my mother once recounted, I would exclaim the revelation that numbers could go on forever, without end. When I was in second grade, after my mother, at my insistence, read me a high school level book about how nuclear reactors worked, as a bedtime story, would start drawing up and then refining, schematics for a nuclear powered rocket, complete with two reactor cores, radiation shield, and RCS thrusters to spin the vessel to simulate gravity for it's occupants. My IQ would later be measured around 150.

I was understood in kindergarten. I had teachers well versed in learning disabilities, and patient and kind. And I had a mother who had once been an educator herself, who advocated for me passionately. I was happy.

My school career would be less happy.

I was still quite awkward. I would be receiving physical therapy for a further 5 years. When my mother took me to see what would be my first elementary school, I went running across the playground, and before she could catch me, would run straight into a metal link chain that would catch me at neck level, and throw me to the ground. I was unable to stop myself in time.

My first grade teacher would be a Ms. Stein who was every bit as unwilling to understand about my condition as the kindergarten teachers were kind to me. She would help make my first year of schooling an absolute hell.

This was the early years of understanding about learning disabilities. Many teachers, too set in their ways, were unwilling to make accommodation. The Americans With Disabilities Act, that would reserve the right of the federal government, to deny funding to a school that didn't make proper accommodations for disabled students, was still a decade away. Learning disabled students were picked up by smaller buses, on special routes. Some schools housed them in homerooms with students with a variety of disabilities, keeping them out of the general populations as much as possible.

I would have a spelling teacher in fourth grade, who would keep me after class every day, because I couldn't finish my work in time, largely due to the motor coordination issues I had with writing. While my classmates got to watch a mid day movie during the break before lunch, I would be forced to struggle through the rest of it, with the teacher breathing down my neck. I still remember her scowl. Her telling me that learning disabilities didn't exist. That I was just slacking.

The stigma was heavy, and the students noticed. For years I would spend nights cuddled up next to my mother wailing about how I had no friends. How everyone was mean to me. And I didn't understand why...

I began to withdraw. To dread school. To me it was all struggle. All judgment. All punishment for me being different.

It would not be the only horrible thing to happen to me.

When I was 7 I was sexually abused by a neighbor down the road. A mentally challenged teenager. He was 14 but with the mind of a 6 year old, and had no idea what he was doing. But the damage lives with me to this day.

My father had mental problems. He was violent towards me, when he had problems controlling his anger. While I would say that later on we got along well enough, he never really held the place a father would in my life. He tried, but he was too haunted by his own abusive past.

I developed severe OCD when I was 13. My early teen years was spent seeing psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists. I was put on a veritable cornucopia of various SSRIs and other medications, searching for the right medication or combination, to turn down the volume on the screaming thoughts in my head. The ones about how I was dirty, and needed to clean myself endlessly. It would get bad enough that, I would eventually spend 13 hours a day in the bathroom, doing horrible things to myself, trying to get clean. My hair turn blond, from all the hydrogen peroxide I was spraying everywhere, trying to sanitize my home around me. My mother would threaten to get me hospitalized, if I didn't seek help. Thankfully, I was eventually able to find a medication that turns that scream down to a dull roar.

When I was 17, I came to understand that I was Gay. My mother was extremely understanding. While she feared that I would experience further prejudice, she made clear that the only issue she had with it (and she made it clear this was HER issue, and NOT mine),was that she probably could expect no biological grandchildren. She was right about that, alas.

I also developed clinical depression. At one point I was sleeping 14 hours a day, and eating myself into oblivion, because I felt like I had no real future that wasn't filled with just more suffering.

Throughout my life, I would struggle. Find myself the strange one. The one looking in from the outside, not allowed to have a normal life. To be subjected to horrors that my mother could not completely shield me from. And worse, I was smart. I became increasingly aware of how dysfunctional the world was. How arbitrary.

Things have thankfully changed for the better, for me, lately.

I have friends that I have made over the years since I left school. I now have a bit of a social network. After two extremely dysfunctional relationships (after taking a break from such things), I found a partner that I am truly compatible with. Our interests compliment each other wonderfully. He is my best friend, my partner, and my collaborator in geeky projects aplenty. Even with the world ironically seeming to fall off a cliff, just as I'm finally finding my own equilibrium, I have new friends that helped me grow a community, that we found ourselves inheriting. It's a social circle that we all can lean on, for which I am very grateful. It took nearly 4 decades of life, but I feel like I finally have a future. Something to do. Something to look forward to.

I found that I am very unusual combination.

I am a nerd, with interests that until very recently, were considered fringe, and were generally derided in most cases. Not considered dangerous, but definitely childish and unmanly. Videogames, science fiction, fantasy, and being a science and tech geek, were all things that would get you looked at oddly, or dismissed as a dreamer, as if being a dreamer was a bad thing. My experiences have formed what I believe is probably either a unique or at least uncommon viewpoint on the world. I'm not a part of the rat race. I have no career due to my conditions. I have no children, and no plans to have any. I feel that I am too unstable. It would not be good for me to be having to take care of another life, that was entirely dependent on me, when I am not able to really look after myself on more than a very basic level physically. But I'm incredibly bright, which is both a blessing and a curse. I'm good with technology and science, and can grasp the concepts, if not consciously the math. I can make inferences that have proven to be reasonably accurate. And I have time to think. Time to wonder, and to learn. And I have what I hope is a decent writing ability.

And I've stumbled. Alot. I've made some doozies of mistakes in my life, that have humbled me, and hopefully given me some measure of understanding, if only simply "Okay, better not to do THAT again..."

So here I am. I may not be female, or a person of color, but I am still a minority in my own way. I'm gay, an abuse survivor both sexual and physical, a sufferer of mental illness, a person with disabilities, and a person with interests that for the majority of my life were looked down upon, and to this day still carry some stigma. A minority, of a minority, of a minority, of a minority, of a minority.

And I'm getting older. I'm thinking about mortality. About what I will leave behind when I pass off this mortal coil. There will be friends to remember me, but no children to carry on in my stead. Robin Williams once said the wonderful thing about having children is that they are both you, and not you. But that in some way, it's a ticket towards, if not immortality, towards having something of you live on, after you for at least a time. I don't have that...

I want to leave something behind. Something that hopefully can endure after I am gone.

As I said before, I have some decent writing ability, or at least I'm told that I do. It's not the first time I've considered doing this, but lately, with everything that's going on, I figured, what the hell. Best to just get on with it...

They say that nothing really ever disappears on the Internet. That it may become harder to find, but it's always still out there somewhere...

So, after much procrastination, I have decided to start writing. To create essays that give my point of view on what hopefully will be a variety of topics. Some will be on politics, some on philosophy, some on science and physics, some on more geeky topics like fandom and science fiction, videogames, etc.

I will try to post at least 1 thing a week on Facebook, Tumblr, and Furaffinity (yeah, I'm also one of them furries). Hopefully someone will read these and take away something of value. That maybe it will change an opinion, or give an insight or inspiration. Something that can survive me, even if my name and who I was is forgotten. Here's hoping.

And here goes nothing...

(TLDR: Owlboy is an incredible game spoiled by a truly shitty last act and ending.)

So my Bird and I have been playing Owlboy together. This is a game that my Birdy has been waiting for, for a very long time, and I admit sparked my own interest a few years back, when he made me aware of it. It's absolutely every bit as incredible as you have heard.

It's clear that this is a labor of love. The animation is painstaking, and reminds me of the kind of work seen in the Metal Slug series, or even some of Vanillawear's work. It's so smooth, with so many frames. The main character of Otus is immediately loveable and sympathetic, and you feel for his plight all the way through the game. And the soundtrack... My gods, the soundtrack! It's awe inspiring, and achingly beautiful. The kind of music that puts a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye at times.

The story is deeply emotional, and deals with grand themes, alongside personal ones. The wish to belong. To fit in. To find your place. To do the right thing. This is made even more poignant by the main character's put upon state when we first meet him. You get to watch and help this young owl rise to fulfill his potential.

If only it wasn't for that ending. That Damn ending...

Okay, clearly I'm going to be going into spoiler territory here, so you've been warned. MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW!!!

Still with me?

Okay.

Here's my problem.

The last 10 minutes of the game effectively renders the rest of the game moot. You don't fight the pirate captain. You DO fight a person who turns out to have been right all along, and if you had just left things alone, things would have turned out for the better. That's right. Your not even the real hero of the story. The owlboy that the game's title refers to is not you. It's Solus. You see, it's he that started the whole mess in the first place, but with the goal of trying to save the entire world. And he has the right idea.

One can argue about his methods, clearly. He should have come to Otus about what he'd found, not risked a gambit with the pirates, and then double crossed them, which resulted in so much death and destruction.

He also shouldn't have kept what he found such a huge secret, especially when Otus and friends would have made sure that the right people heard what needed to be heard, and if they didn't take it seriously, Otus and Geddy would most likely have taken up the burden themselves.

Regardless, though, it's Solus in the end that has the right idea. Gather the three relics, and perform the Antihex to save the world.
I understand the operatic tragedy that's going on here. Otus and friends are mistaken due to Solus' past deeds, about his ultimate intentions. It results in a confrontation that buys enough time for the pirate captain to arrive, and create the circumstances in which Otus must more or less sacrifice himself, not just once, but twice, to see that the world is saved.

It results in everyone but Otus surviving. But our poor put upon protagonist, who's fought so hard to make things right in the face of so much initial derision? He gets to fall to his death, all alone, separated from his friends.

Or least that seems to be what happens. The very end is rather ambiguous. Which is another issue in itself. But I'll get into that in just a moment.

Otus deserved so much more than this. Throughout the game, despite the derision of many, including his own teacher, he has struggled, not for himself, but for others. For the entire world. And not only does he get dead for his troubles, but it can be argued that he's not even the real protagonist.

And all of this happens in that last 10 minutes of game-time.
Now it IS true that there's some additional information that is gleaned when you travel to the Sanctuary, that might give you some solace (no pun intended) as to what exactly is happening in the end, as well as hope that maybe Otus will survive after all.

But to do this, you need three special coins that act as keys... And one of those coins is in the floating tower where you confront Solus for the last time. To visit the Sanctuary, you must travel through a sparkle in the wall just before entering the room where Solus is casting the Antihex, and travel back in time.

This is rather like playing Bioshock, but to access the audio logs, you must wait until near the end of the game, and then break all the dramatic tension leading up to the final boss to turn left just before you meet him, so that you can spend the next hour or two going through an expository info-dump, to clue you in on what really is going on. Oh and they're only available if you went out of your way to pick up these special collectables.

To say this is clumsily handled is a huge understatement...

I understand that maybe they wanted to be ambiguous about whether or not The Loop had been broken, and therefore whether or not Otus survives to the end of all this. But the rest of this game with the exception of this optional side quest to the Sanctuary, is not ambiguous at all.

It's a curve ball thrown right at the end. After spending the whole game making you deeply identify with the protagonist, they put into question the whole purpose of his quest, and then leave the game on a cliffhanger, with you wondering whether poor Otus is alive or dead... Dick move, D-Pad. Dick move...

All I can hope for, is that maybe this is dealt with in a sequel, or failing that, at least D-Pad will eventually let us know what happened to him, because as it is, that ending really put a bad taste in my muzzle...

Okay. BTTF2 checklist:

What we DO have:

1. We have hoverboards...sorta. They use decades old supercooled superconductor tech, so you need a goodly supply of liquid nitrogen and a metal-surfaced skate park. The tech is more accurately described as maglev, but you know, potato...

2. We DO have drones with cameras that have been used to take pictures for "news" organizations. These drones are quite different from what's depicted in the film, in that they are usually not autonomous, are propeller driven, and currently have some serious limitations as to how they can legally be used. Also, the reason I have put quotation marks around the "news" in "news organizations" is that, so far, the first to use them have mostly been paparazzi...

3. 80s nostalgia IS a thing, and HOW. Witness how the media over the last 10 years has been strip mining that decade's pop culture for "reboots" of everything from Transformers, to GI Joe, to 21 Jump Street. Shows set in the era are all the rage (Halt and Catch Fire, The Goldbergs, The Americans, and the upcoming Wicked City).

There are even barcades that are essentially the same as the establishment in the film, complete with 80s music and authentic era arcade machines. No semi-sentient robots, with the digitized personalities of former world leaders, trying to take your order though, sadly...

4. We DO have video conferencing and video calls as a semi-normal occurrence, either via Skype on webcams, or Skype/Facetime on cell phones. We also DO multitask multiple channels of information, but it's not multiple TV stations at once. It's on the internet. Oh, and in many cases your boss CAN monitor your work communications (work email).

5. We have holograms...sorta. The technology is rather limited currently, and is really a bit of an optical illusion, not fitting the dictionary definition of "hologram", at least not the one demonstrated in the movie.

As anyone who's seen Hologram Tupac or Hologram Michael Jackson can attest, the illusion is somewhat convincing, but has a limited field of view (usually straight in front of the projection). In fact it's not a real hologram at all.

The image is two dimensional but is projected onto a milar screen at a 45% angle to give the impression of depth. This one is really sort of a cheat, to be honest. In point of fact we haven't really cracked true projected holography just yet...

What we DON'T have:

1. No self lacing shoes. No auto-drying jackets either.

2. NO FLYING CARS! Now this is either a positive or a negative, depending on your point of view. There is much to be said for the concept. Traffic as we experience it now is mainly an issue owing to the two dimensional nature of most land travel by car. Three dimensions, with cars travelling at different altitudes, opens up a whole new level of possibilities. If you were to take all the traffic currently on the ground and put it up in the air, you could conceivably have as much as half a mile to a mile between every car on the planet. Traffic jams would essentially be a thing of the past.

Of course you've got the obvious issue of "People are idiots on the ground, do we really want them flying into each other in the air?" Most air car solutions that are being worked on are push-button or touchscreen affairs, where the passenger does none of the actual flying. That job is instead handled by a complex autopilot, an extension of technology that already exists in modern aircraft. Many commercial aircraft in point of fact are already completely capable of takeoff, flight, and landing, all via autopilot systems with little or no input from a pilot.

The reason we keep a pilot there still is multifaceted, partly to deal with situations created by human error by say an air traffic controller on the ground, that an auto pilot system would not be able to anticipate, and also due to the fact that most of us have the inaccurate belief that we are more reliable than automation. Statistics do not bare this out. Rather the opposite.

There IS however the concern about vehicle fitness. If our cars are going up in the air, that safety sticker we get is probably going to have to be gotten a bit more often than once every couple of years or so, and the standards for what state of disrepair is allowable would also be a bit more stringent. The last thing we'd want is for someone's car to come falling down on somebody's house because they broke down...

Conclusion:
Surprisingly, the movie got more right than it got wrong. At least more than it would seem at first glance on the surface. The gritty details are a little different, but with just a slight re-write to change some of the details, you could conceivably have Marty and Old Doc Brown show up in our 2015 and go through all the motions of the major plot points of that film, and still have it all be reasonably believable...

So, tonight ends another Gaming Night here at the house. Another fun afternoon and evening with the guys and gals in the group. A little Battle Toads, a little Towerfall, Killer Instinct, Soul Calibur 4 and 5 on the other screen. Then dinner at one of our usual local mom and pop pizza places, while we traded gossip about E3 and played our usual guessing game about obscure (and sometimes not so obscure) games through opening clues and and yes and no answers. Then home again for some Jack Box Games and Fortune Street. We did have a little of a scare when all our phones went off with tornado warnings, which had us retreat to the basement, where we watched the Nintendo E3 Direct while waiting for things to blow over. Then back to gaming for a couple of hours, before calling it a night...

This time was little different. No Birdy to help me get things ready and to help run the event. He’s out at Anime Mid Atlantic this weekend. In his absence I’ve stumbled a bit, but I’ve managed to work things out just the same. Things may have been a tad more scattered than usual, but not so much that our guests seemed to mind, which is heartening...

Just the same, I think I’m looking forward to spending most of tomorrow in nest, snuggled in with my cat and the plush members of my family (more on that in later entries, I’m sure).

Right now, I’m just a tired dragon. Took my evening meds and my melatonin. Hope to be nice and drowsy in an hour...

I just recently got back from a family trip. To be honest, it was mainly for my mother’s benefit, so she could see her uncle and cousins in Georgia. I know them, but I can’t say as that I’m awfully close to them. Most of the family I was close to has long since passed on...

But the trip crystalized some things that have been eating at me for the last few years. I’m 40 years old, disabled, no career, no real traditional future in front of me. Out of choice I have decided that I should not consider being a parent. I’m not nearly stable enough, financially, emotionally, psychologically, to even consider taking on that kind of responsibility.

In the last 20 years, I’ve watched as my cohorts from High School, the last real social institution that I shared with others in a regular day to day manner, grow up, find mates, have children, build families and careers, find a place in the world to be, find friends to commiserate, and move on with their lives. Meanwhile I stumble along alone trying to find a place where I fit, trying to find a place where I can be happy, a nitch I can fill, as I watch them from outside the glass... And envy the shit out of them...

I was an only child. The uncle and cousins in GA are my Grandmother’s ilk. Of my Grandfather’s side of the family, only two siblings had children, both only children and both of us never had and were never fit to have offspring...

This means that my family line ends with the two of us.

And when I’m gone... What will have I left behind? What will my grandfather and grandmother and mother have left behind?

This reality hit home, seeing my Uncle seeming so old, bent over from a bad back, his frame slighter than I’ve ever seen him be. In cousins that I remember being somewhat youthful, both with their hair drained of color, gone solid gray...

I’m not getting any younger either...

When I was young, I was told over and over about my potential. About the 140 to 160 IQ I possessed (the variable due to the fact that IQ tests tend to notoriously under report a learning disabled person’s IQ by as many as 20 points), my ability to see things that others couldn’t. To understand intrinsically things that other’s had difficulty grasping.

These gifts came with a cost, of course. Maintaining concentration is remarkably difficultr and physically draining. One teacher likened teaching me to walking a labyrinth. You walk down one path, only to find that it dead ends, and you have to back track, and come at the problem from a completely different angle..

I have severe generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, PTSD... One does not visit the realm of genius without also being visited by the very broken edge of insanity...

Anyway, I want to start putting out a regular record of my thoughts, my ideas in a way that might be successful in reaching other people. At the very least, it will be out there, for someone to read. Proof that I existed. That I had thoughts. That maybe even some of them were good ones, worth listening to...

Some of them will be ideas with a the capital I. World changing stuff, maybe? No clue. One could hope that maybe it might contribute positively, at least.

Other times, I’m just going to just plain geek out on the most trivial. On my hobbies. On my life. My friends.

And sometimes it may be something completely different from either of these things, delving into the emotional, as I try to work stuff out. Sometimes it helps to see how someone else went through something and worked out some sort of solution? At least that’s been my experience when I learn of others, mental illness, or maybe just life matters...

Anyway, I hope some of you find what I post to be of some use in the future...

Apologies, as this is going to be a LONG post, but it’s something that’s been forming in my head for a while...

So, I’ve been thinking about nostalgia, and the reasons behind it.

I’m a videogame enthusiast, and over the last few years, there’s been an incredible up-tick in demand for older games. There’s a growing retro-gaming movement, primarily made up of Gen X and Y members it seems, that have a strong attraction to the past, when games were harder, more creative, and less cookie cutter (and to some, before the “scourge of 3D”). Some of these arguments seem legitimate, others...

In the mainstream media, in the last 5-10 years, we’ve seen a lot of old franchises suddenly being rebooted. Wether it’s Transformers, My Little Pony, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or even Star Trek, all have seen a new lease on life, much to the delight/dismay of the public at large.

This summer, the top box office hit movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, features as one of it’s centerpieces, a mix tape of old 1970s pop-rock songs, which, due to consumer demand, has been released as an album, which has promptly been burning up what passes for the charts these days.

Everybody seems to be reaching for the past, especially people of a certain age...

I myself just turned 40.

This, psychologically, has hit me a lot harder than when I turned 30. I keep asking myself. “Do I seem 40? Am I old? To a certain generation, I probably am, in their estimation. My 29 year old mate reassures me I’m not, and I appreciate his reassurance, though I’m also pretty certain he’s a bit biased. He probably doesn’t like the idea of me getting old any more than I do.

Meanwhile, my age-cohorts have for the most part, followed to usual passage through life of job, wife, kids, etc. I myself am dealing with a mother who over the last 5 to 10 years has developed Alzheimer’s disease, and is therefore needing me to look after her, which I’m doing the best I can to accomplish.

All our lives are more complex now. Our relationships fraught with new dynamics that we have to struggle through. For many of us, the feeling of simpleness, and secureness, is merely a dream that we subconsciously remember having, and then lost somewhere. Some of this is legitimate, and some of it rose-colored glasses...

It’s true that the world is going through a rough period right now. There seems to be more wars going on than we can name, rampant crime, corruption, racism, a down economy that seems to not be lifting all boats on it’s return upswing.

At the same time we are at least on some level, haunted by our past mistakes. I at least, look back at a lot of my choices in the past with some measure of wincing embarrassment. Was I really that clueless at times? People have hurt us, betrayed us. We all have stories of the nightmare boyfriend/girlfriend, or that friend that just took advantage of us, or the asshole boss.

We’ve also experienced the humanizing of our parents. Far from the omnipotent protectors they seemed to be when we were young, we learned that they are in fact flawed, fallible beings, much like ourselves. These encounters and events have left scars on our psyches. Things we felt were simple, straight forward and reassuring, turn out to be nothing of the kind.

Our world is a very trying place for an adult. One that can leave a person emotionally beaten down and exhausted. To quote from the movie Dave,“We’ve got so many problems that we don’t even want to look at them anymore. They just blend together into this great big noise, and pretty soon we can’t even hear ourselves think.”

All this makes us numb our emotions in self defense. Nothing seems to reach us as powerfully as they did when we were young. We’ve built too much emotional armor, and have too much wreckage in the way to allow for that.

The past seems a very tempting place to escape to though. Our memories are of a time when we weren’t sullied and world weary, when accomplishment in a game could really reach us. Where we could be entertained more easily. Where a song could move us emotionally.

When things were easier, more simple. When we all felt more secure, safe and happy. When the world was a better, saner place. When people seemed competent. When we still had that image of our parents as omnipotent protectors, and we knew that everything was going to be alright...

Except that that past never really existed. Not really.

An objective view of history shows that the 70s and 80s were not that different from today. In many ways they were much much worse. The 70s suffered an economic malaise, that, while not as deep as our near miss with another great depression in the last 5 years was, was still a drag on the economy and on people’s job prospects.

This was the era of the fallout from Vietnam, and Watergate, when our blissful American spirit was broken on the shoals of Cynicism. This was also the era of a number of terrorist and international incidents, hostage taking, and bombs, the most notable being events like the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the first Afghanistan war, and the Lockerby Bombing, in which a suitcase bomb, planted by libyan terrorists, brought down a passenger liner over Scotland.

And while none of these events were on American soil, or at the scale of 9/11, they all paled next to the Cold War, in which the entire world was held in an almost perpetual hostage crisis, where a runaway arms race infested the planet with almost 50,000 nuclear weapons. On multiple occasions we came very close to literally the end of the world..

I distinctly remember the subconscious (and almost conscious) fear of the world coming to an end in a conflagration of nuclear fire. The problems we face today seem pitiful in comparison.

Meanwhile the media in the 70s and early 80s was much like the media now, with movies warning of environmental collapse and the depletion of fossil fuels, like Soylent Green (it’s made of people!) and The Road Warrior, and nuclear horror, like Damnation Alley, A Boy and his Dog, and Defcon 4.
Televison had The Day After, Threads, and Testament. Even popular music got in on the act with songs like Sting’s Russians in which he sang “I hope the Russians love their children too”. Meanwhile a German pop band called Nena, performed “99 Red Balloons”, in which a mad general starts World War 3, due to malfunctioning software confusing the aforementioned balloons for a Nuclear First Strike.

Of course as kids we were largely unaware of these developments, or at least, only partially aware. It’s not like we followed the news on a regular basis, and really only heard about these things occasionally when the adults would talk to each other about them. They never really registered with us the way current events do now.

We tended to focus on what amused us, our problems, though they seemed huge at the time (and some of them were), dwarfed by what we confront as adults. The “kid gloves” were on for most of us, and so our impressions of that time tend to be light and ambient.

By the same token though, we tend to see the world today through dark lenses, the light filtered out or at least dimmed, the darks far more prominent than they actually are. This is not to say that there aren’t any real concerns. There are some truly big ones in our time. But history tells us that they aren’t as big as we sometimes make them out to be. We’ve been through far worse.

And this attitude we have now as scarred adults, make us as blind, or as dismissive, to great things sometimes, as much as we remember our parents being towards things that mattered to us. Forgive me if I seem to be going from end of the world to inconsequential, but I think you’ll see my point by the end...

One example is modern video games. We live in what I truly believe is the coming of a second golden age of the medium. The indie sector of games has become a powerful force in the industry, introducing some really wonderful new ideas, and is starting to fill the vacuum of middle range games, vacated by the large publishers, as they chase primarily AAA titles. Now small one to five man indie teams work alongside titans like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, and Activison. There’s a long list of excellent games that show how successful such titles can be, like Dust: An Elysian Tail, Bastion, Towerfall, Super Meatboy, Shovel Knight, Transistor, and No Man’s Sky, to name just a few.

Meanwhile in science fiction and fantasy movies, we’ve had an embarrassment of riches. When I grew up in the 80s, you were lucky if you got maybe 2 (comparatively) major releases in a year. Now we regularly get 5 or more. And just like a man in a desert being given a drink of water and a cracker, who will claim to high heaven that it’s the freshest water he ever drank, and the most incredible saltine he ever ate, we look at those older films with reverence partly because of our rose colored glasses, but also because of the comparative scarcity in which those films arrived. If we were honest with ourselves, we’d admit that a lot of those old films were truly corny creations, especially compared to some of the things that have come out of the box office lately.

And television. Don’t even get me started. True we have the scourge that is reality TV, but then we also have been given treasures like the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, A Game of Thrones, Fringe, The Newsroom, Defiance, Marvel’s Agents of Shield, etc. And to top it all off we get to watch it all when and where we want, thanks to streaming and DVRs.

Now I’m not saying that each of these fields don’t have their problems. They do. And I’m not saying that there isn’t anything that wasn’t better in the past, there is and has been. But to say everything has gone to hell in a handbasket is not really a fair assessment. On a whole, things have gotten better.

Moving to more serious topics to illustrate my point, let’s take a look at global statistics. Did you know for instance that the actual violent crime rate has been declining since the 1990s? Current crime rates are holding at about the same rate as they were in 1960. Also death from war is on the decline globally. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart.....950237/?no-ist

I know I sound like I’m meandering, but the point is this. Even though things are objectively getting better, for a number of reasons, a large number of us subjectively perceive things as getting worse. And many of us are using nostalgia for the old days as a balm against our fear and pessimism about the future. In this we’re not alone. The statement “Why, when I was a kid...” is something so often used by every generation, that it’s become a cliche. The problem with this type of thinking is that you get left behind. Think of your average nursing home patron, or that stereotypical old man that tells the kids to “get off my lawn!” Every neighborhood has at least one.

Do these people seem happy to you? Or do they seem miserable, having let time pass them by? Having let their wounds eat them up inside until only the bitterness is left...

I personally can understand how someone could end up there. I’ve had a lot happen to me in my 40 years on the planet. I’ve had my first mate die in my arms. Lost two brothers to suicide. I was molested, raped. I’ve had people cheat me and my mother both to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

By all rights, I should be crazy, or extremely cynical and suspicious of everyone.

But if I do that... If I give up on hope... Then what’s the point? Why go on living, if life is only assured to be one big painful ordeal? And don’t get me wrong. My childhood was better than many. I had and have a mother that loves me and would move heaven and earth for me, and for at least some of the time, I had some truly good friends and an excellent family. But if I spend all my time looking backwards, I’m going to miss all the great stuff that’s happening all around me right now.

If I did that. I wouldn’t have my wonderful birdy mate ( I love you, Avian). I wouldn’t have the friends I have now. I wouldn’t have the gaming group. I wouldn’t have anything. But slowly fading memories. Their great things to visit. But you shouldn’t live there...