Pancake · Angst

Hollywood, to me, is the root of all that is evil. They are a self-serving community of people who have no talent other than looking pretty, looking uninterested, and looking at others in disgust as if they are better than everyone.
I used to be secure in the notion that I would never go to California and since it will never affect my universe, it can fall into the ocean and no one would notice. I think I overestimated our society once again.
It seems that no matter where you are, whether it’s the lung-destroying city of Los Angeles or the rural towns that still look like it’s trapped in 1952, self-absorbed teenyboppers walk the streets like the living dead. They share the same diminutive brain, dress in the same designer band T-shirts and studded white belts, and follow the same trends as to not be left out of the inner circle when they retire to the bathroom for a cocaine holiday.
What year is this anyway? 1976? 1984? 1967? What are these people trying to emulate by stealing the fashion of yesteryear and stripping it of meaning? Could it be that the musicians who so desperately try to sound like music that was created a quarter of a decade ago have no talent and no ability to create anything new or at least emotionally charged? Is that why they shit out sterile, non-threatening garbage covered up with a punk/metal Tiger Beat makeover?
These graphic artists, who are a dime a dozen now, steal others images and slightly alter them in some retro propaganda style and pretend that there is some sort of sociopolitical irony stapled to it. They should all be pushed off the top of skyscrapers. Is there really a skill in taking a picture of Johnny Rotten, loading it into Photoshop and then clicking on a Posterize filter? If there is, then I should have been a famous ‘designer’ back in junior high because I did that long ago. It’s almost a spit in the face of every kid who spends hours with an Xacto knife and a glue stick making posters and zines the old fashion way. You’re not allowed to be creative unless you have the creative ‘look’
Marketing has taken proprietary driver’s wheel. It’s a sickening fact. I’ve always been fascinated by marketing. It’s the religion that everyone worships and no one realizes. When a girl likes this band or that band, how much do you want to bet that she only cares about the band because they “have a really cute singer”? When a poor kid spends money on a T-shirt that costs $80 just because there is some rich wanker’s name on it, how much do you want to bet that it’s because a girl expressed to him an interest in that clothing designer?
This is the power of marketing. It’s why dumb motherfuckers think that if they drive a shiny car with chrome rims, they’ll get laid. This is also why they feed off each other, because there will be some other dumb teenybopper who, because of marketing, thinks that guys who drive shiny cars with chrome rims are worth blowing.
You could suggest that I’m only saying this out of bitterness because I can’t afford all the things that would make people look past my personality and automatically want me. But you’d be wrong. I spent so long being conditioned that I was on my own and that no one understands me, and to this day, I have been given little proof of otherwise. I know that there were other people who might have gone through hardships through their lives, but those people are rare and most of them are already my friends, the rest just manufactured a tough childhood in their heads to give them the feeling that they are geek-chic radicals which is a bit like a guy getting off a plane for the first time at LaGuardia and deciding that he’s a true New Yorker.
Fashion is fashion and has no relationship to culture, personality and intellect. Why do people mistakenly think that it does? The same reason why I have trouble relating to girls because they insist they are ‘nerds’ so they can feel stylish in their Mary Janes and horned rim glasses. Yet, anything that I like that is truly nerdy, (video games, comic books, cartoons, etc.) they can’t stand and find it childish that I still enjoy them. I have never given people the impression of me that I didn’t want them to have. Maybe some people think I’m an asshole. That’s fine, I want them to think that, so that’s the image I put forward. However, no one can say that I’m something I’m not. This is simplicity of character, yet it is so overlooked by people who’d much rather look hip than be themselves. I often think that if they were given the ultimatum, they wouldn’t even know what being themselves means.
Now don’t think that I’m trying to be self-righteous because I think that I know who I am. I used to try so hard to fit in when I was young because I didn’t have any friends for such a long period of my life. Only after realizing that I can enjoy myself all alone, and hanging out with people who made it clear to me that I don’t have to be like them to be their friends, only then did I really start feeling that I was my own person.
Ever since the nineties, America has been shrouded in a cloud of self-absorption. Everyone believes that they will be rich directors/rockstars/actors/artists/whatevers so they float through life thinking that they are culturally and socially superior to everyone around them, yet they follow the leads of whatever that came before them because originality is too challenging, so they just use the blueprints of revolutions that happened generations ago.
The problem with that is that those revolutions have been bought out over the years. All the hippies that use to protest Vietnam and wanted to get in touch with nature are all driving SUV’s and are fighting for pension benefits in a management job. Why should the punks/thugs/goths/freaks be any different?
After the catastrophe of 9-11 and again with Katrina, you’d think that people would band together in the face of tragedy. That’s what the Nazis made up do in WWII. But just like a spoiled child, we know no discipline, so when we are disciplined we react with a month or two of real concern followed by a egotistical introspective pat on the back. It’s almost like a guy who knows someone who dies. If they were close then he will no doubt be affected, but if they were just casual friends, chances are it won’t affect him, but he’ll talk about it often so that people will think he’s somber and profound and will pay attention to him.
All that happened after such huge calamities is that the world dug itself deeper into its own pit of self-interest. No one wants to look at the rest of the world as real people, just as extras in the sitcom of their lives. No one actually talks to people, they just ask the obligatory questions to start a conversation, and then they wait for their cue to talk about themselves. I’ve caught myself doing this too. I hate it.
If we really want the Cultural Revolution that we have been begging for, it is going to come out of a desire to get away from the gimmicks of the past, not from emulating them because they were once associated with rebellion. It’s going to come from a sense of community and not from a desire to be famous. It’s going to come not from people who are repeating the same things that someone else once said or did, but from people who have something of substance to say and will find fresh ways to say it. There are new mediums out there, especially thanks to technology, but if people are still limited in what they think or care about, then it doesn’t matter how much they use the phrase “think outside the box” because they will never ever think outside the box.

Time to buy war bonds, kiddies.
How many World War II first person shoot-em-ups have there been? Too many. I don’t even think any of them allow you to actually kill Hitler, not since Wolfenstein 3D anyway.
You may be saying to yourself, “Why would I want to play another stinkin’ WWII FPS?” And the first thing I’d say to you is: “What do all those letters stand for?”
Listen up, Private Joker. I’m only going to tell you this once: This is Call of Duty 2. The first game was one of the best of the WWII shooters and if you don’t agree with me, you at least have to concede the fact that they certainly streamlined the genre.
Call of Duty 2 was going to be a very hard title for Infinity Ward to develop. Do you want to keep playing the same game over and over again with renovated graphics? Trigger fingers rejoice. This is Call of Duty 2.
You play three campaigns: Russian, British, and American. Nicely enough, you don’t have to complete the missions in order. If you are frustrated with one area, you can move to a different mission and come back later to the other.
The levels look good. They’re a bit grittier, which I suppose translates to realism. They’re drearier, which makes for a much more distinct bleakness. The gray smog is nicely rendered through the air. All the farmlands and towns are pretty much free roaming. This means you can wander about in places that you’ve cleared and have more freedom of tactics when dealing with oncoming enemies.
The enemy AI is much improved. The Nazis don’t just pop up and shoot, they come after you in droves and they’re better at hiding. I got beaten to death several times early in my game because I walked into a building that I thought I cleared with grenades. These guys have the basic instincts of survival and will run and hide until you think it’s safe. They will attack you when you least expect it and they will hide in the dark to pop out and kill you before you realize who’s shooting at you. Your teammates however, still walk right into the view of a machine gunner.
All of this, the darker visuals, the higher body count, the sheer scale of the level design; it really does make for more of a feeling of hopelessness. You begin to feel a sense of agoraphobia when you are separated from your teammates in the ruins of an abandoned town.
Now, I gave the impression that your teammates’ AI is shitty. In truth, it’s a lot better too. When you’re being blasted at from every angle they actually serve a purpose other than as human shields. They yell out directions or hours of the clock to direct you to enemies that you might not see. That gives you a much better sense of teamwork than just the useless chatter of the previous game.
I really have only one negative. To me it seems that they borrowed a bit too much from Halo 2 with the removal of the health indicator and the leveling out of weapons. The health meter, I can live with because there are constant checkpoints so it’s not as if the health was that necessary to begin with. The guns however, are a different matter.
With all the guns having pretty much the same muscle, the realism of shooting is seriously affected. I found that using pretty much any rifle works with the same accuracy, so just pick up the one that holds the most. The kickback is more realistic looking. But that just makes the machine guns almost useless. I’m not a run & gun type of player to begin with, but I couldn’t help but notice how little I picked them up this time around.
Still, I don’t want to nitpick. After all, Call of Duty 2 is still frantic and fast paced. It’s a great way to realize, just a little bit, how truly heroic the man who fought back then were. And they didn’t have save points.

I suppose that now-a-days there is a huge difficulty in trying to convey the scope of how Police Quest or even any of Sierra’s text games affected gaming history, but seeing as how I played these series of games since I was still having trouble shitting my pants, I sort of have more perspective. Police Quest 2 was the sequel to one of the most true-to-life adventure games, ever. It was so thorough that real police stations would have copies of the game on their computers to give rookies a feeling of what kind of mindset real police officers needed to have. This is the element of the game that made me feel uneasy playing it.
This game puts you in the shoes of Sonny Bonds, Vice cop for the Lytton Police Department in Lytton, California. The murderous drug dealer, Jessie Baines, who we caught in the prequel to this game, has escaped and you must hunt him down. You don’t hunt him down like a criminal mastermind in a buddy cop film. You have to take leads that you get from witnesses, you have to track him down like a real detective.
Truthfully…This game was not very much fun. It was very official. It’s a bit slow, but very in depth. Every little nuance affected whether or not you could make it through to certain parts, so many times you found yourself reloading saved games just to inch a tiny bit further. One part comes to mind where you have to SCUBA dive to recover a corpse. I died so many times just getting caught up in the water’s current. Sonny Bonds is a good character that you grow to love, so when he dies you feel a sense of shame for your carelessness in letting him die. It’s not like Leisure Suit Larry where his failure or death seems more satirical. There is something more human about Sonny Bonds and his life splayed out in game format makes you connected to him as if he were a real person.
I’m gonna open up to you a little bit here…When I was a child I had a terminal heart condition and I spent a huge chuck of childhood in the hospital befriending children who would later go on to die before they reached their teens. This gives you a fucked up sense of life and death. Police Quest 2 helped me get through this truly very painful time in my life, so it has a special place in my heart. Playing this game on PS1(not Playstation, but the IBM PS1) with three game disks was probably the best fun I could have ever had in a time where the few friends I had are dead now. Maybe this makes me morbid, but this also makes me know that if not for the physical requirements of police work, I’d make a damn fine detective.