56) Dots Of Light

Video games continue to break digital expectations. In a current world where moments of shock and awe are rarely associated with optimism, these mere distractions serve to give us some internal smiles.

The government could learn a thing or two from current video game marketing. In an America where competition is fueled by capitalism, companies have to be creative in selling their products. It's all about advertisement and building a brand. Except these days, it's gone online.

The best example I stumbled across today was the the Halo Reach Remembrance Memorial.

Allow me to explain.

Microsoft and Bungie are finally ending their multimillion dollar Halo franchise with a final game: Halo: Reach. Due on Sept. 14, the pre-orders pile up in the thousands, if not millions.

Reach is a prequel to the series, focusing on one of the most pivotal battles in the Halo universe and canon, aboard the planet, you guessed it: Reach.

The marketing campaign follows a slew of live action trailers, broadcast vigorously where the fanbase is the densest. This follows a legacy of ARG's left behind by the previous Halo games, most notably I Love Bees used for hyping up Halo 2.

For this new Halo: Reach, they've put up a memorial website. In the canon, The Battle of Reach has already occurred before all the other Halo titles, so it can be assumed that the protagonists of this game do not survive.

Even though the story takes place more than 500 years from now, it's a good tactic by Microsoft to put you as an observer of history, to witness these events as if you were a veteran of these battles. It makes sense, seeing as how any true Halo fan has played and witnessed all the other games and their depictions of war. This prologue is a fitting beginning to the end. (See what I did there?)

My excitement centers around the pre-release website for this game: Remember Reach.

The site is a simple view of a memorial of outlined figures, dedicated to the protagonists of the game. But here's the catch: the image is "built" by thousands of dots of light. In order to complete the memorial, fans and visitors to the website have to log onto their Facebook account, choose a unoccupied spot, and the huge robotic arm in the background moves to fill in the blank.

That's not all: the website takes your profile name and picture and puts it onto a sliding bar at the bottom. Proof that you helped build this marvel.

The website is updated live, with all chosen spots on a queue to wait for their moment of robotic arm glory. It's all recorded on camera, and you can see other names and their dots filled live. This behind the scenes video proves that there is an actual studio devoted to this 24/7 task. There's actually a real robotic arm that moves in front of a green screen.

These are the advances that draw your emotional obligation into a product. To feel that you can actually contribute to the canon directly provides a deeper and personal interpretation of the game and its universe. It's not just a simple: "See that memorial? I helped build that!" It's a deeper and subconscious link that makes it easier to lose yourself in the fiction.

With a story like humanity struggling to survive, it's not hard to sell Halo. In many aspects, it can even be interpreted as a metaphor for the United States and its war. Those deeply familiar with the Halo universe can tell you that the enemies are the same, alien and brutal, hell bent on fighting a religious crusade. The human defenders are a disillusioned group barely held together by a fractured government. Some are bent on peace, others vie for revenge. Human casualties become staggering.

There are stories of courage and valor, betrayal and heartbreak. Ethics are tested. People are killed. Heroes are born. Planets are glassed. Enemies are forced to team up. There's a paragraph from the book Halo: Ghosts of Onyx, that summarizes a major theme of the series, applicable to any modern war:

"It will give us time to think, plan, and come up with a better way to fight."

Parangosky whispered, "You want to trade lives for time."

Ackerson paused, carefully weighing his response, then said, "Yes ma'am. Isn't that the job of a soldier?" (47)

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. In the end, you don't have to be a fanboy of Halo or have to know the first thing about the canon to marvel at a Internet innovation via memorial. If for nothing else, participate for the sake of art. There is a story present everywhere, if you are willing to listen.

So go to the website and pick your own dot of light. My dot is tagged under my name, Derek Wong, on 8/31/2010, at 8:01 PM on coordinates x: 185.94 y: 68.23 z: -61.86.

Take a look at the thousands of other names and I dare you to tell me that video games can't be taken seriously. Because ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

A glimpse of the future.

55) Bleeding Out

After a first hard day of my senior year, I lost more respect and patience for myself than I ever thought I would. It's a new record.

It was to be expected, the sudden moment of identity shock coming to me as I transitioned from a carefree lazy ass that couldn't be bothered to give a damn back into a slave of the system. The fleeting moments of summer are officially gone, and a part of me would give up my dignity to go back.

The inevitability of the situation did not help. After three years of seeing the same red tile hallways, I knew the teachers and the rooms. I knew where to go and what to do. Regardless, the seniority that I now claim is a bit of a misnomer. We're still just students, and after a summer of fun we barely remember how the system feels.

I found it a little bit funny that my comrade veterans in this education endeavor were still asking questions pertaining to when we got out, or where some of the rooms were. I couldn't blame them for their weary red eyes, but even if I didn't know the answer, I had to act with a bit of professionalism.

And that's when it all came flowing back. The American educational system as a method to turn us into little hopeful workers, striving for CEO. We get close to each other, only for self-interest in advancement. When we get a better grade, we smile devilishly on the inside as we stroke our egos in front of the low-scorers. We don't earn wages. We earn grades.

Along the way, we might even earn a little respect.

But when my respect sours for others on the first day, it's apparent that something is very wrong. I'm very fair and tolerant when it comes to emotional auras, but the disruptive presence of the laughing peer behind me kills my ability to concentrate.

I don't blame him for my first-day dilemmas. There are more important things to consider, like the homework I got from my three advanced placement classes on the first day.

Which is all fine and dandy when parents don't understand why we isolate ourselves from them when we come back home. They seem to have very little empathy when we tell them we can do it later, that our work will get done eventually. We need a few minutes to prevent some emotional suicide after being fed to the hawks for eight hours.

Some people can handle this pressure. Just hope I can. ODST's drop into hell and back in one piece. Here's to hope.

But for God's sake, it's only the first day.

54) Fire Against Fire

Everybody has some sense of what the calm before the storm is. Whether it be a stop in the wind, or a anxious wait before going on stage, everybody knows the feeling.

Some people love it. A nervous and fleeting second where your body trembles in anticipation, waiting for the event to come. Depending on the situation, you might be smiling, you might be praying, or even crying.

It's the feeling you get as your heart races before stepping on stage to the welcoming applause. It's the steady anticipation of running from cover to the rain because you have no umbrella. It's the tilt of your eyes as you stare intently at the screen for the opening kick off at the Super Bowl.

This time tested moment is experienced by every person at least once in their lifetime, a trial of nerves that can leave a person speechless and unable to move.

The calm before the storm, as it were.

Sometimes it lasts for seconds, minutes, or even days. The prior knowledge of what is to happen next is either embroiled with cheery excitement or dreadful pessimism. Some are crushed by the weight of the moment, dissolving into a mess of tears and hyperventilation.

Others step up to the challenge, hiding their fear away from their otherwise careful observers. They know peers will look upon them, judging them at every step. Inside, they scream as they charge into the fray.

It's in our blood. Our humanity demands that we experience nervousness and anxiety. Our parents and their fathers have felt the same, whether it be before speaking on a podium, or banging their swords against shields as the battle line forms.

It is this immense anxiety that grips the young as they dive into school every year. As my educational journey takes another progressive step, I am beginning to feel the calm.

It's hard to pin it down. Humanity aside, I have no reason to feel this way. Along with my peers, we've all done this multiple times before. More times than can be mentioned. We know there is nothing to be worried about. We know exactly where to go and what to do.

But for a young sire like me, it all becomes subjunctive.

I learned how to deal with it in my own way a long time ago. Even as a young child, I would play it in my head over and over again as an act of inevitability. It was like pieces on a chessboard, waiting to be moved for the game ahead. My mind knew exactly how to metaphorize the journey ahead.

For me, school became war.

In third grade, I was a knight against dragons.

In fifth grade, I became Norman Cavalry at Hastings.

In eighth grade, I was an American GI on D-Day.

In eleventh grade, I became a fighter pilot for the Invictan Response Force Air Force.

Through this, alot of people are often cautious, even scared by the military vibe I give off. I don't care to try and explain to them that I don't see school the way they do.

I see a large battlefield of swords when I walk out into the hallway at the lunch bell. When a teacher gives out instructions, I see a mission briefing. When the class falls silent under the stress of work, I see a command center of people screaming into their mikes as soldiers fall not more than a few miles away.

Don't get me wrong, I still know how to separate myself from this delusional fantasy I indulge in. If anything, this makes my school days much more bearable and interesting. It makes me actually want to be in a classroom. Assignments become a serious matter of life and death. It's a justification to stay in hell.

Because, well, you fight hell with hell. Fire with fire.

You can laugh at me, pity me all you want. But the truth is that we all need our coping mechanisms. When someone dies, we cry. When somebody is born, we cry.

When somebody goes into hell, they fight.

So waiting for another school year that's about to come doesn't seem so bad. Sure, I can feel the anxiety and the shakes, but it's all the calm before the storm. I'm just waiting for another year-long war to fight. This is how I survive.

This year, I think I'll be an ODST.

53) To Expect With Confidence

It never gets any easier the older you grow up. It's a fact of life the new generation hates to accept, with all their free time invested in socializing and gaming. Who can blame them? School ain't what it used to be.

On a blistering Monday, nearly ninety degrees in a sun baked courtyard, I waited in line for my books. For my schedule. For my one last refugee of fun and hope to disappear as the summer drew to a close. The heat mocks me.

I took comfort in knowing I'm not alone. We all share the inner instinct to hate the inevitable. By default, that makes you alright with everyone else in line. If you're going to hell, don't do it alone.

Then came the regrets. The things you could've done but never got around too. You try not to blame yourself, but time is merciless in its path. And here, time seems to fall slower, just to torture you into pessimism.

There's something else though. Some inner feelings of...excitement?

That's what the schooling system has done to so many. An obsession to compete against your classmates, an addiction to "learn".

Many before me have tried to fight it, and have matured and moved on. Perhaps one day they might look at their kids and say: "Ha. I can't believe I used to do that. Good luck on your test!".

Sometimes I wonder how many teachers actually believe in the sham of an education system they work in. How often they devote their emotional mindset into genuinely caring for their students. How often they say to themselves: "This isn't right. I have to teach them not to think this way."

So when I see my friends and their smiles, exchanging stories of summer events, I detach myself enough to get lost in a moment of laughter. We all agree on a us vs. them mentality, staring at the teachers. We don't go into hell alone, because we are always there to help each other out on assignments and tests. We know favors count for alot.

Even as I horribly refuse a free drink from my friend because I forgot my wallet, I give in, because we both know I can help him someday, when he really needs that one homework.

I don't believe school can teach me anything worthwhile academically, but I do know it teaches you how to make friends.

Isn't a crap education system worth that much?

Interlude: Past Echoes

The story that I wrote for my creative writing class. Anyone who's bored and has time to kill, don't hesitate to slander me for this. Alternate link.

For familiar friends: Take a closer look at the movie poster. :)
Crimson Toy

Book Review: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue In the Land of the Free

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, is a rant conceived by Charles P. Pierce against the declining intelligence of America and its tendency to veer towards ignorance over experience. At the very least, it is a rant against the Republican right of United States politics.

This book is what you would get if you had to write down what a drunken Holden Caulfield and Bill O' Reilly had to say about American truth. It is a rant on the existence of fact smeared by the American tendency to ignore empirical truth and sell ideas, no matter how crazy and unbelievable.

That said, Pierce lays out the three main points of his theory:

1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.

2) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

3) Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

These three mantras pervade the book in a serious of examples from modern history, jumping from the crazy rantings of Ignatius Donnelly, the conspiracy of Templars, Terri Shiavo, and finally, the ineptitude surrounding 9/11 and its subsequent war.

All these examples are present to showcase the American twisting of truth and lies to destroy the facts along with any sensibilities that came with them. Most of the blame falls on the Republicans and their ineptitude surrounding many situations.

This is all presented in a series of nonlinear summaries of events introduced and ended by descriptive narratives to pull sympathy for Pierce's point of view. It jumps chapter to chapter with a different approach, sometimes going back to an original allegory of Madison and his vision of future America.

Some will find this format jarring, but Pierce's style forces you to focus on his points both independently and joined in the context of Idiot America. His endless capacity for references and wry cynicism also serves to bring a smile to your face, provided you know what he's talking about.

Perhaps I'm too young to understand the political motivations behind this book, but it seems to me that this rant does not serve its purpose well. The book jabs conservative rights with insult, as if Pierce is on some personal vendetta rather than just criticizing what he doesn't like.

Some people will undoubtedly find this book altogether unreadable as a whole, but I have to stress that any Republican with enough self esteem can put the book down and walk away as if this piece of literature were a insane hobo on steroids. It has a penchant for merciless opinion that forces the reader to challenge everything they've ever seen on the news or read in a newspaper. The pessimistic truth spells out that our search for actual truth is a waste of time.

That being said, I can't help but revel in the irony set by Pierce's three points. With his book being a national bestseller, wouldn't that make his theory irrefutable, even if it was utter bullshit? After wrapping my head around this, I couldn't stop smiling for a whole hour.

The fact of the matter is, the real "truth" is dependent of existentialist perspective. Pierce gives us his perspective and argues that the American standard for truth is deluded with misinformation that comes with popularity. Fine, we can pack that up in a box and put it in the theory storage warehouse.

But when you try to answer the question of what is true and what is not, you delve into a philosophical cluster bomb that undoubtedly differs from person to person. If you follow Pierce's pessimistic view to heart, you begin to realize that nothing you've been taught is true. You can only question the truth behind the truth, and so on. It becomes an infinite circle of existential crises.

If you decide to read this book, take it for face value. The very least it can give you is some perspective on American politics and media and their respective shortcomings. If it isn't your cup of tea twenty pages in, no one's forcing you to keep reading.

52) Losing Steam

With my recent readings in Newsweek, I came across an article that was so vitally important to the existence of this blog. Your blog. Wikipedia. Twitter.

So begs the question: is social networking a fad waiting to die out?

Many other elements of the user-generated revolution, meanwhile, are beginning to look sluggish. The practice of crowd sourcing, in particular, worked because the early Web inspired a kind of collective fever, one that made the slog of writing encyclopedia entries feel new, cool, fun. But with three out of four American households online, contributions to the hive mind can seem a bit passé, and Web participation, well, boring—kind of like writing encyclopedia entries for free.

The article goes on to state that Wikipedia is down on edits, Blogging has withered as a past time, and that 90% of tweets come from only 10% of users.

The possibility is that many people are simply being worn out by all this online sharing and exploring. Inherently, they only go on because other people do it, not because they actually want to contribute. Like any other fad, it grips based on peer pressure.

Or maybe it's because Americans naturally hate responsibilities. This blog started out as a school assignment, and only continues to live because I actually WANT to contribute. For only my own benefit? Perhaps. But none of the classmates whose blogs I follow continue to spew the perspective I crave. They've all gone down.

Then again, it is summer, so maybe we'll see a spark back up when the school year starts. Laziness seems to settle in as a huge factor here. Or as the article so states:

Even the internet is no match for the sloth.

So now, it turns out that many of these sites are turning to bait tactics:

And comment-driven news and aggregation sites like Gawker and The Huffington Post, where part of the fun is reading what the peanut gallery has to say, have decided to show the peanut gallery more love: mostly in the form of badges, stars, and special privileges. Even YouTube has added inducements, giving users the chance to play at Carnegie Hall—with a music contest—and partnering with the Guggenheim Museum to help them show off their art.

So far it seems to be working. After Gawker introduced its Star system, which gave preference to the work of “Starred” commentators, participation on the comment boards rose to a new high. The Huffington Post, which offers its best users digital merit badges and special rights (like the ability to delete other people’s posts), boasts the most active commenters of any news site. And Yelp says it has maintained a pace of a million new reviews every three months.

Such reward programs are only likely to grow more important, especially as the Web reaches into corners of the world where it never benefited from the frisson of a social movement. Last year, in parts of eastern Africa, Google launched the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge, an effort to grow the number of Swahili-language Wikipedia entries by tying them to the chance to win modems, cell phones, and a laptop. It worked. This wouldn’t surprise Jeff Howe, the author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Back in 2006, he predicted that the winners in the social-media world would be “those that figure out a formula for making their users feel amply compensated.” Prizes are a start. Can cash be far behind? Oh, right, then it would just be a job.

Are we really that lazy to keep fads running? Well, I guess they're called fads for a reason. Take a look at the internet trend map and tell me how much you recognize.

Live and let die.

51) Electronic Cocaine

When you grow up surrounded by labels of peer pressure, social norms, and signs of how to act, it's hard to deviate from a preset course of action. It takes control of what you wear, how you act, how you speak, and in the most general of descriptions, how to live your life.

One of these decisive factors for the current young is video games. You've heard of it, so it must be true. Capitalist America has groomed their electronic cow to produce the most milk out of the young, forcing them to convene on common grounds of "fun".

So it's a whole other argument when it come to video games that concerns me. Are teens playing games because they want to? Or because they're forced to?

'Forced' is a bit misleading here, but I'm referring to societal peer pressure. The internal instinct of capitalist America has triggered a subconscious desire to purchase. Not because the product is practical, but because it's the 'best' thing to do. There is a fine line between buying a game because you want to play it, and just because someone else has it.

This ties into the American education system, which, through no fault of its own, has encouraged kids to compete with each other. First it was grades, then it was material possessions, and now it's social lives. The system has played on our primal need to compete, turning it all into a covert war of buying and owning.

It's an addiction to compete. It's deadly in America, where whoever has the most, wins. Now that it's taken hold in the electronic world, kids are being exposed to the perils at infancy. It's a drug.

You hear stories and cases of people falling into internet and video game addiction, but you dissociate from them because you believe you believe their cases are extreme and unfathomable to you. But what if it's because you're just denying it from yourself? If it could happen to them, it could happen to you, right?

What I'm ultimately getting at here is that addictions cause you to lose personal integrity. This is virtual cocaine, which affects the mind and the body. The more you're connected to electronics, the harder it is to step away. You might think that this is obvious, but many people continue to set their measures of e-addiction higher and higher.

Who can blame them? In this modern America, it's no longer practical to be disconnected. Peoples' jobs are spent in front of a computer. Teenagers have to use a computer to do their assignments. More and more, it seems that our society is becoming more enslaved to machines rather than the other way around.

It may turn out in the long run that resisting electronic cocaine is a futile endeavor. After all, society is measured in change by infinite unpredictable factors that become increasingly unrecognizable as time passes.

I refuse to believe that we very few can change the flow of history. Yielding to society is much easier than resisting it, because everyday the fight for the little guy becomes harder. It forces us to do the next hardest thing: change ourselves.

Next time you come upon the choice between electronics and a walk in the park, decide what part of you holds more brevity. Are you willing to yield to society, or are you willing to change yourself?

These are the questions I continue to ask myself. The more I grow up in this electronic world, the more I realize the futility of resistance. My search for something more becomes increasingly futile in a society I refuse to accept. The vices of humanity call, and we must all submit.

Am I supposed to feel this way? Is it the new societal standard to feel pessimism? Or am I just growing up?

However:

Just because I take electronic cocaine doesn't mean I have to like it.

And so we merry few continue to fight the 'good' fight. We search for the truth. More importantly, we search for ourselves.

50) Technological Logistics

The Wikileaks leak of classified war documents has already drew harsh fire from American military commanders, who stress that this new slew of information is actively endangering lives. The other side claims it's a matter of principle: to use the first amendment to give Americans a new perspective on a war that they no longer want.

But at what price? Is this new perspective really worth the potential risk in human lives?

This is easily turning into the biggest leak of government documents only because social media has changed the fabric of what information is. It is no longer feasible to keep documents locked up in a safe under your desk when you could just scan them and put them on a computer.

Nevertheless, this has turned into another PR fiasco for the United States government. If you can leak documents that could kill lives overseas, then you can also endanger the public here at home. What other secrets are waiting to be leaked? Nuclear missiles under our houses? Terrorist cells operating everywhere? Leave it to Wikileaks to lead the way.

Paranoid speculation aside, this all brings up the clash of Young vs. the Old when it comes to technology. The Old white Caucasian leaders of our government (with the racially hypersensitive exception of Obama) are struggling to integrate themselves and understand a technology driven society that they have no control over. It seems that they have no inking of just how powerful the internet really is.

The Young, however, know exactly what to do and how to do it. They know how to navigate the information highway in ways most people can't even explain. They have a sixth sense that propels them to use technology to no end, immersing themselves into a world of shorthand grammar and internet memes.

The two sides love to clash, like the recent and developing fight between the Oregon Tea Party and the internet group Anonymous. The Tea Party used the Anonymous slogan, casting off a fight that can easily be won by the internet savvy side. Perhaps my words can't help you understand the gravity of this situation, so let me fill you in on some backstory.

Anonymous started on numerous websites, a group of internet vigilantes most highly associated with 4chan, the largest English picture board website devoted to images of every caliber imaginable: food, anime, Pokemon, porn, gore, anime porn, and finally, the legendary random board /b/.

People post pictures one after another in a series of topic threads, an internet subculture that utilizes words and methods newcomers will NEVER understand. The societal conversation that takes place is completely foreign to internet virgins, and it takes years to master the language and the motivations behind it.

Anonymous is a lose group of hackers and Guy Fawkes mask wearers that have a track record of bringing down Hal Turner, nearly destroying the Church of Scientology, and was responsible for Youtube Porn day. Nobody knows how many they number in, but if you are online, they WILL bring you down, for reasons you might never understand.

Computer literacy is the newest terror tactic of this era. You either know it or you don't, and it will drive you in this decade to the next. Regardless of age, you can either become a Young or an Old, each bringing its own benefits and drawbacks.

Which is why its very feasible to assume that the Oregon Tea Party is jealous of the terror tactics of Anonymous, and their subsequent success in instilling fear upon its victims.

I prefer to be on the Young side, because if Anonymous takes this blog down, I'll at least have the satisfaction of knowing why.

That's worth something in this brave new world.