After getting my Wii last autumn, I played it a fair bit, especially after I got Wii Fit for it. (Like with my dance games, though, I really don't think of Wii Fit as "playing a video game" because for me it's exercise.) As much as I don't like using my Gamecube controller to play Virtual Console games, there's no denying that the downloadable games were one of the main selling points of the system to me. I've bought more than a handful of Virtual Console and WiiWare games, whereas apart from Wii Fit, the only packaged game I've bought for my Wii so far is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Not only are the downloadable games a lot less expensive, but they've been a lot more fun for me as well.
Unfortunately, video gaming just isn't as enjoyable for me as it once was. I hardly played any video games at all from February through April -- this included breaking my use of Wii Fit, much to my chagrin -- and my systems are, quite literally, collecting dust in a corner of my room right now. After ending this past semester, though, I fired my Wii back up and downloaded a few new games, most notable Dr. Mario Online Rx. Dr. Mario wasn't exactly my favourite puzzle game when I was younger, but it was definitely up there. I've really gotten back into it -- I've had some games go close to two hours long -- but at the same time I've tried playing online, and I keep getting slaughtered. (Worse yet, when I am about to win games, quite often my opponents disconnect, rendering the game a draw.) I know that I should expect that my video game performance should degrade as I play games less and less -- I've blogged about this before -- but for some reason there's still a part of me that feels sad, and sometimes gets irritated, over this fact. Even if video games don't matter that much to me any longer, it still bothers me that I'm not that good at them. (Not that I was ever in any contention to be a video game champion in my prime, but at least I was a lot better then.)
What I've found myself doing lately is gravitating towards videos of people playing video games on YouTube. In addition to just watching people play through the games, I've become fascinated by tool-assisted speedruns, or TASes, where players literally slow the game down frame-by-frame and exploit every bug in the game to run through a game at superhuman speed; they're quite astonishing when replayed back at "normal" speed. I've also enjoyed videos where the players add their own commentary, although, like so many other things, Canada seems to have cornered the market on quality in this regard, with Proton Jon and Azura being the two who entertain me the most.
At the same time, though, the fact that I've been watching people play video games more than play them myself makes me wonder about how I've changed these past few years. Although I still play video games, it seems that by focusing more on watching these videos, in a way I'm kind of saying to myself that my video game-playing days are over, and video gaming is something more for "other people" to do now. Granted, I have much more serious things to worry about than video games now, but it wouldn't be that hard for me to make more time for video games if I wanted to. I don't want to, though. I've found many other things I'd rather do than play video games, and while some of them are quite enjoyable (stop snickering), most of them aren't as meaningful to me and my past as video games are. It seems like everywhere I look, I find more evidence of how I'm changing as a person, and although I know that change is a huge part of life, I still want to fight it, especially as I'm watching the trees I played on in my childhood be cut down day by day right now. I guess it's only natural that under these circumstances, I'm pining for other things from my childhood right now.
Labels: internet, videogames
Ohio Christian school tells student to skip prom (AP via Yahoo! News)
Just when I thought this part of the country couldn't get more bad press after dealing with "Joe the Plumber" for the past six months, something like this has to pop up. In all seriousness, this is a news story I would expect to see in a newspaper from forty or fifty years ago, not in 2009. I'm not trying to be disrespectful of religious beliefs here, but at the same time, there is no doubt in my mind that, in this instance, Heritage Christian School is severely overstepping its bounds here by threatening to suspend Tyler Frost for engaging in legal activities on his own time. If the school wants to ban dancing or rock music on its own property, as much as I may disagree with their reasons for doing so, I can respect that as their right. When they threaten to punish a student for things he does off of campus grounds on his own time -- again, this is rock music and dancing we're talking about, not illegal drug use or drunk driving -- and even withhold him from his class' graduation procession, then I get angry and nauseated.
This was kind of a big issue for me growing up. I began having political leanings around the time I was in my junior high years, and some of my classmates from those years stopped going to the private school I went to after junior high, transfering to the various religious high schools around here. In almost every instance, when I saw the students later, they had become severely withdrawn, and their willpower and self-identity had nearly vanished. (One of the schools some students transfered to, Notre Dame Academy, was the same school Katie Holmes went to, to give you a reference point.) Children's rights became a big issue for me then, as these episodes cemented in my mind that children should have the right to practice their own religions, irrespective of their parents' beliefs. I was lucky enough to live in a household where my parents never pushed religion on me, except to learn about what was out there and make my own determination about what would work best for me. I think that's a right every young person should have, and this news story just reinforces, to me, the reasons for that.
Although I haven't thought too much recently about the episodes from my own youth, this is a topic I definitely deal with as a teacher. I try not to talk about my own beliefs -- religious, political, or otehrwise -- when I teach, and I always make a point to say on the first day of class that I grade based on the strength of an argument, irrespective of its position. I've assigned countless As to papers whose positions I wholeheartedly disagree with, because even though I disagree with the positions, the papers were written very persuasively, and deserved As. I often argue against my own beliefs in class when the need arises, because I want to encourage my students to think through opposing viewpoints, the whole Socratic Method thing. What I've noticed, though, is that for many students who come from these religious schools, who have had religion pounded into their heads from such an early age, when confronted with beliefs that are contrary to their own, not only do they show the same refusal to accept that people can hold different views that so nauseates me about modern conservative discourse, but some of them are even blown away by that fact, and get a glazed-over look in their eyes as I or other students explain the rationales behind the opposing viewpoints.
This just makes me worry all the more about our future as a country, because right now our education system is failing on all levels. No Child Left Behind and the rash of state proficiency exams that started twenty years ago have taken education out of the hands of the teachers, with education's goals and the methods taken to get there being put in the hands of people who have no training in education at all, no concept of how young people learn and what they need to know to function in our society. The financial "race to the bottom" has not only destroyed the arts programmes of countless schools to give students no creative outlets (because, after all, creativity encourages free thinking), but to cut costs students are often evaluated only by Scantron tests; you don't want to know how many students I've had who literally were never expected to write anything in high school. Corporate America has already trampled public schools with its sponsorships, further taking control away from teachers and further indoctrinating young people into consumer culture, and the charter schools that some (including President Obama) promote are about a thousand times worse in that regard.
One of my missions as a teacher is to open my students' minds to the realities and possibilities that are out there in this world. On the secular level, that's already being made painfully difficult by how high schools are turning into places where students are expected to do nothing but rote memorization of rules and nuggets of information deemed important by people who have no connection with the reality of today's youth, and hardly any connection at all with greater reality. Religious schools are even worse, as many students from those schools actively resist being exposed to beliefs and views that are in opposition to those they've been indoctrinated in for all of their lives. If we don't allow young people to vote until they turn eighteen because we don't think they have the capacity to make sound decisions until then, how can we say that they have the ability to choose their own religion? We need to take a serious look at the role religious schools play in this country, because it seems like a strong case could be made to banish those schools. How am I to be expected to open the mind of a young person whose parents, church, and teachers have been welding that mind shut for eighteen years?
Labels: rhetoric, teaching, toledo
Back when I first got a cell phone in September of 2001, I got it mainly for emergency purposes. To that end, my cell phone service has more than paid for itself, based solely on an incident in October of the following year when Dad called to tell me that my car was leaking transmission fluid, and that if I'd tried to drive it I probably would have wrecked the whole transmission. There have been other times over the years when I've had to use it for emergency purposes, although I did use it for social purposes a few times back when I was at UT. More recently I've been using it for work purposes -- although I still prefer to communicate by e-mail whenever possible -- and now I'd like to start using my phone to keep in touch with someone I've been spending a fair amount of time with lately. (Tease me about it and I'll delete your comments.)
Unfortunately, I'm once again at the point where I need to buy a new phone. I first bought a real brick of a phone from Verizon, but a couple of years later the battery contacts on the phone went out, and it kept powering down out of nowhere. I switched to Virgin Mobile after that -- they cost less to keep active -- and my first phone from them served me well, until I broke the pin in the phone where the AC adaptor hooked up, and Virgin Mobile told me that it would cost less to buy a new phone than to repair the old one. My current phone is one of their flip camera phones -- I figure having the camera feature qualifies as an "emergency" application since, for example, I could use it to snap photos if I get in a driving accident -- but now the battery just won't hold a charge, and it doesn't always detect when I plug in the AC adaptor. I've had the phone go out on me suddenly during non-emergency use, and the last thing I need is for it to die when I really need to use it.
I'm probably going to stick with Virgin Mobile for now, if for no other reason than because I have a huge bank of rollover minutes built up, and it still only costs me eighty dollars a year to maintain. However, I can't deny feeling a bit of tech envy when it comes to the phones that other carriers provide. All throughout the year I've been hearing that phones that don't have full keyboards are "so three years ago" or what have you, and I still text more than I place calls on the phone, so a full keyboard would be nice. However, Virgin Mobile only offers two phones with keyboards, and both of them only hold fifty text messages. If I'm going to get more active with texting here, then I probably need something with more storage. At the very least, though, I'd want to use up my accumulated minutes on that phone before switching to a new carrier, which makes me wonder if I shouldn't just get one of the ten-dollar phones Virgin offers to use before switching providers.
Realistically speaking, I shouldn't get one of the new super-phones, as they cost so much more to maintain, and I'd have limited use of the extended features. Still, I've been looking at T-Mobile's Android phones and experiencing a good bit of tech envy. I've seen them in use more lately, and as much as I don't necessarily all the cool features they have, I've seen them in use enough to know that they wouldn't just be toys for me; some of the applications have very useful purposes that mesh in well with my needs. Still, I would be looking at $75 a month at least for my service, when I'm not even spending a tenth of that right now on my current plan. My brain tells me that I should just stick with Virgin Mobile for now, put up with the relatively small inconveniences of having a phone that doesn't bake bread and trim my fingernails, and wait until the prices and plans for the super-phones go down. Paying my student loans off and finding a full-time teaching position in the meantime would be nice as well. Still, I can't deny there's a part of my heart that's eager to get something new and shiny and all whiz-bangy. I thought I'd moved past this phase of my life. I guess I'm feeling like a kid again in more ways than one right now.
Labels: personal
When the first trailers of the new Star Trek movie came out, I noted to myself that I wanted to say something about them. I guess that I was kind of nonplussed by the trailers themselves, except for at the end when it began to play the four-note sequence that started the classic Trek theme songs, played over a modern reenvisioning of the logo of the original television series. For a long time, that part of the trailer sent a chill down my spine. Watching episodes of the oriignal television series with Mom is something I recall quite vividly from childhood, and my parents took me to the openings of the second, third, and fourth movies. I suppose I identify more with Next Generation since it was one of the few good series I could get back before I had cable in my bedroom, but I guess I was a bit of a "trekkie" back in the day. (I use trekkie as opposed to the more "serious" term "trekker" because I wasn't that into Star Trek.) I remember the audio/visual lounge at Antioch being filled for the premiere of Voyager, which was around when my love for all things Trek began to decline. I was in college, I had cable in my bedroom at home, and there was this new thing called the Internet that was giving me access to all sorts of new worlds that I could explore on my own.
Anyway, I did my best to remain cautiously optimistic that the new movie was going to be something that I could be happy about, and perhaps something that Mom and I could bond over. As we've drawn closer to the release date, though, and as I've seen more of the movie and its promotion, I've already reached a deep level of disappointment. I've read all the news stories about how trekkies and trekkers feel about how closely the movie will follow Trek canon, but to me, looking at what I've seen so far, there really isn't anything Star Trek about Star Trek. It feels to me like you could take out the names of Kirk and Spock, and the names of the various races and planets and organizations, and no one would be the wiser for it. It feels like the generic, prototypical 21st-century science fiction blockbuster movie, just with a few names added to give it a false sense of historicity.
I realize that new generations reinvent series like Star Trek, and that Star Trek itself has gone through a good deal of this; no one can deny the gulf of difference between the original television series and the films, let alone the later television series. At least with those early films and Next Generation, though, Gene Roddenberry was at the helm, and you had the feeling that Roddenberry still conveyed that Trek essence in the newer material. (Roddenberry came from a time when an artist's vision still meant something in big commercial productions.) It seemed like the later series, like Voyager and Enterprise, not to mention the later films featuring the Next Generation cast, seemed to stray away from that vision, and now it feels like the only vision J.J. Abrams had in this new movie is the vision of his bank account increasing by tens of millions of dollars.
What gets me is that I'm beginning to have more and more of an emotional response to this, when I haven't really cared that much for anything Trek for over a decade or so. (I'd like to get some of the Next Generation DVD sets eventually, but I've been horrible lately when it comes to buying DVDs and then never watching them.) I suppose that because this touches on what to me was a touchstone of family bonding, and it's coming not that long after Dad's death, that it's provoking a very emotional and irrational response from me. I mean, yes, wincing at a car chase in a Star Trek movie makes sense, but I shouldn't be jumping to the conclusions I am based solely on the trailers I've watched and stories I've read about the movie. I really should watch the movie all the way through before I have this kind of visceral hatred of it. The thing is, I've never been one to watch films in the theatre (the last time I did that was eight years ago when the Final Fantasy movie came out), and, well, it doesn't feel like there's much of a point in getting the DVD when it comes out, given how many other DVDs I need to watch here.
Labels: family, television
We have finally gotten to that point in this part of the country where we are seeing a substantial amount of green outside. I always seem to misremember just when to expect the leaves to start growing on the trees; I think that starts earlier than it does. Now, finally, trees are beginning to grow leaves, and the grass is turning a healthy shade of green, at least where it's being maintained. The paradox of Michigan's highways -- that the grass beside them can look so vibrant while the roads themselves are scarcely maintained at all -- never hits me harder than it does at this time of year. I'm teaching an online course this coming term, though, and I won't have classes up in Monroe until 2010 at the earliest, so if I want to ponder that paradox in person, I'll have to make a special trip to do so. With gas prices climbing back up, I doubt that's going to happen.
Right now, though, I'm kind of struck at how the trees in my backyard are blooming. In my bedroom I basically have two stations: Here at my computer, where I work, do recreational Internet stuff, and eat most of my meals; and my bed, where I sleep, write in my longhand journal, read, and play video games. From my computer here I'm looking to the northwest, and most of the trees in this direction have either not started budding leaves yet, or are doing so very slowly. From my bed I'm looking to the northeast, and there all of the trees are very much in bloom. I've noticed over the past few days that my mood seems to improve if I'm doing stuff on my bed as opposed to here at my computer workstation; I suppose that could just be because winter term is over and I finally have more "bed time" available, but I don't doubt that seeing more fresh leaves on the northeast of our property probably plays a good part in that as well.
Earlier this week, Mom brought someone over to estimate how much it would cost to remove some trees from the north of our property. We have this one huge tree in our backyard that has been dead for several years, and Mom is worried about the tree either being hit by lightning and coming down on us, or falling down on its own accord. If that were to happen, anyone on the second floor at the time would likely be crushed to death, and the tree might generate enough force to crash down into the ground floor as well. I guess I don't feel too strong of an attachment to the tree because I grew up in a room with windows facing the north and west, so I didn't see the tree that much from my room, and the tree is also very far back in the backyard, farther than I used to play when I was younger. I think Mom's also going to have smaller trees, also dead, removed from the property at the same time as the big tree is removed. As much as I know that this will make us safer, I still can't help but wish that we could keep the tree. It's the only tree I can see from both of my stations up here, and as scarily big and high as it is, I can't help but feel like the tree, in its way, watches over us. Its presence reassures me in its own way, and I don't like to think about what the view from my room will be like when it's gone.
Labels: personal