The Beginning: A New 30 Day Challenge

My best year was the first one in which I wrote a post a day and managed to get in 31 posts for the year, which was 2015. Ever since I've been trying to outdo 31 but I've never really found the motivation or time or energy.

But no more excuses!

This year, I'm doing another 30 Day Blog Challenge!

Some of the posts are more generic, others I've chosen specifically for me. Only I have the list I'm using so each day will be a surprise. I might not be able to do one a day, but if I miss I promise to make it up. The most important thing is that I finish 30 posts, and that I hopefully write them before June 5th 2018.

A word of warning, they're probably not going to be as review-like or essay based. But, here we go, a new chapter, let's start a new 30 day Blogging Challenge!

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Pink Diamond is NOT the villain of Steven Universe.

Okay, okay, so this contains spoilers from s05e18, A Single Pale Rose that will basically reshape how you view the entirety of the show. And I mean, major spoilers, go catch up before you lose your innocence like the rest of us.

So, A Single Pale Rose happened and the entire fanbase is on fire. Some hate it, some love it, but you can't deny that the reveal that Rose Quartz is actually Pink Diamond wasn't a heavy, thought provoking, show-changing reveal.

But the conclusion that Pink Diamond is the villain of the story is frankly just... Wrong.

I get it, Rose is, at least indirectly, responsible for a lot of death. Her decision to fake her death and start a rebellion against Homeworld would inevitably lead to conflict, but Rose did her best under the circumstances. Here's a couple things to keep in mind;

1.) The Diamonds are... Well, genocidal.

Earth wasn't the first colony the Diamonds established and Kindergartens leave planets uninhabitable. If that wasn't bad enough, after Rose and The Crystal Gems won, the Diamonds used their combined strength to "end the fighting, once and for all".

They straight up space lasered the Earth.

Let's not even talk about how Homeworld's society is structured to disenfranchise off-colours and that the Diamonds aren't doing a damn thing to intervene.

Also Blue basically promised to murder Ruby for fusing with Sapphire.

2.) Pink wasn't asking for something trivial; She was asking the Diamonds to spare all life on Earth

A lot of people seem to glance over the fact that Pink wasn't just rebelling for the sake of rebelling. Yes, she was somewhat selfish, and yes, Rose has been known to "do what she wants".

But Rose is also known as a benevolent leader, and in all the stories about her, the one common thread is that she cared deeply for earth and the life on it. It's a belief she instilled into all of her followers.

Hell, it's in the theme song. "I will fight for the place where I'm free to exist together and live as me. I will fight for the place I was made in, the Earth is everything that I've ever know."

3.) While most of Rose's established backstory is now murky, her exploits during the war, especially the ones that The Crystal Gems bore witness to, remain unchanged.

Rose is still the leader of The Crystal Gems. She still fought to protect Earth during and long after the war. She still strove to protect the earth from corrupted gems and she took in any and all, even an Amethyst that came out a little shorter than the others.

But if you need more proof, I still love that line from The Answer:

Garnet: "I don't... Upset you...?"
Rose: "Who cares about how I feel?! How you feel is bound to be much more interesting!"

I think those two lines of dialogue say more about Rose than anything else. She still cared, about her planet and about gems being free on it. She cared about all gems. Even the ones that looked a little different, and the unconventional fusions. Rose loved Earth. And she loved humans.

She even loved one lion so much that she made sure it lived long after she was gone.

4.) She also cared about Steven, even though she knew she'd never meet him

Having a child is... Not an easy thing. Having a child and knowing the his or her birth will be the end of you?

That must be nightmarish.

Rose's love for Steven transcends time. You feel it throughout the story, and when Steven hears his mom's voice for the first time, I remember crying with him. It is real.

Giving birth to Steven may have been the most selfless thing Rose could have done. She's a powerful, immortal being of a high-ranking family and also the leader of a rebellion against a fascist regime. Giving all that up to bring a new life into the world is a heavy personal price to pay. She's leaving her friends and family, and the man she loved.

Rose... Gave up her own life for Steven.





That's just how it is.




It's weird for me to think that people want to try put things into terms as simple as one person being the villain and the cause of all the problems ever. Put an inexperienced child in a seat of power and ask her to take all the resources of a planet at the cost of the lives living there, only for her to find out that she actually can't kill anyone there because of her love for that planet? That makes for some moral grey areas.

Then ask yourself why we're not chastising Blue and Yellow more for trying to force that child to end all those lives for the sake of expanding their empire.

Rose isn't the villain. She was a kid, in over her head that did the best that she could. She won fair and square, and even did her best to make sure she didn't cause any casualties.

Then her sisters murdered everyone anyway.

Imagine being called the villain after all that.

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A Short Series Overlook: Lucifer

So Lucifer is one of those things you hear about and you're like, "Holy crap, this actually exists?"

And yeah, holy crap, this actually exists.

You know the type, those shows with a premise so nonsensical that you kind of have to watch it. Satan himself going to Los Angeles to help solve crimes? It's the kind of weird that's right up my alley, right along iZombie's premise of a doctor turned zombie who works in a morgue and gets visions from eating brains which she uses to solve crimes. I also have got to talk about Liv's cooking at some point because, goddamn, her brain dishes look tasty. Also maybe I just like weird crime/detective shows.

Anyway, so charming ass Tom Ellis stars as Lucifer Morningstar, the actual devil, who decides, hey, this running hell thing? I'm goddamn sick of this. So he pops up to Earth, gets himself a night club, starts drives a convertible, becomes rich and influential by offering people favours. Except then he meets detective Chloe Decker, a no-nonsense by the book lawful good type who makes him weak. Like, romantically but also her presence makes him mortal.

It's a fun little show that uses the case of the week formula these shows are so well known for, but it has a fair amount of service to the overarching plot in each episode. The show is made for a week by week airing schedule but the stories aren't so self-contained that any one is skippable but the actual cases are interesting enough that you get invested in the individual ones. Nothing ever feels like filler. Lucifer's struggles to balance being the detective's civilian tag-along while also trying to deal with God's influence, other supernatural beings and the most biblical family drama is a fun time.

Lucifer is at it's best when you have all these biblical figures thrown into relatively mundane situations. I can't say that it's 100% accurate to Christian mythology but I don't think it's supposed to be. It's a bit of a crazy premise but it puts characters into a bunch of fun situations but it can also lead to some genuinely heartfelt moments.The soundtrack can be some genuine fun and Tom Ellis singing blues and playing piano is always a joy.

The weakest parts of the show are when Lucifer is unaware of how insane his "my dad is the actual God" thing sounds and just rambles on while people sort of ignore him. It's cringey but I guess it makes sense in the context of the story, but still. I get that Lucifer isn't exactly hiding who he is but at some point you kind of wish he'd play along already.

Lucifer is the kind of show that doesn't come along very often. It's fun and can be funny without repeatedly spitting one liners. It's more like a CSI than a fantasy show but the blend of Crime Drama with Fantasy Adventure works, and you get a show that has more heart than your local overly concerned Christian mom would have you believe. Is it a little blasphemous? Kind of but that's also what's fun about it. And the show never outright mocks or belittles Christianity, after all, this is the kind of universe where the Christians would be right. And it also never preaches because it's not really a Christian show, it uses Christian mythology for world building in order to service the narratives of its characters. In fact, most people live pretty secularly, aside from Ella, the resident catholic forensic specialist. She's also my favourite, like, how are you supposed to hate someone so bubbly? Either way, the show is more like Thor than Passion of The Christ, for whatever that analogy is worth.

So it's not going to convert your kids to satanism, it's not going to preach to you and it's not going to be the overly edgy grime-fest that a more cynical and jaded showrunner might have moved the show into. It's a light-hearted buddy cop show that has more to tell you about inheriting your parent's trauma, the complexities of falling in love, the darkness of the human spirit and how Hell as a place of eternal torment isn't about fire and brimstone; it's about your trauma, your regrets and the mistakes you've made.I particularly love how Hell is a place you can physically just leave, if only you could overcome your own trauma. That's a surprisingly insightful message.

Do I recommend this show? Depends who you are. This very much could offend very fragile Christian sensibilities, and it's not for someone looking for a show divorced from religion. It is a fun show, it is worth your time and it never stops being charming.

Give it a go if you have a good time watching Brooklyn 99 but also enjoy Supernatural. In fact, Supernatural even engaged in some good-natured ribbing, with Mark Pellegrino's Lucifer taking a jab at Tom Ellis' version, and when senpai notices you, then you've made it.

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In Service To Allegory versus Allegory In Service

Buffy The Vampire Slayer is great.

Bet you didn't think that was how this was going to start out.

But yeah, Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a show that first aired two decades ago and somewhere in 2017 is where I finished watching it. It's aged as all things do, but after the credits rolled on the final episode, it was like this click. Like, man, I've actually seen this show before. But it was called The Vampire Diaries when I watched it.

Okay, you got me, I'm just being snarky. Buffy The Vampire Slayer and The Vampire Diaries are two different shows made far apart from one another with different demographics, themes and center-points but they're also two shows that have a lot in common. The Vampire Diaries treads a lot of the same ground but it's wearing a different pair of boots. Yes, there's a healthy amount of teen romance, both show the protagonist going from highschool to graduation as the audience matures with the show, both have a good guy/bad boy dichotomy in their love interests, both get remarkably better after the first season and both shows even had darker and more adult spin-offs starring a lovable cast member. There are articles detailing the similarities far more comprehensively than I have time for but I will say that Julie Plec is definitely a Buffy fan.

The most interesting difference to me is this; Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a show drenched in allegory. Some being more on the nose than others, but the monster of the week often represents something, whether it's fratboy culture, overwhelming grief, the patriarchy and so on. Buffy's friends are allegorical of her spirit, heart and mind (Willow, Xander and Giles respectively). Often story arcs are set up specifically with the intent of paralleling some aspect of society and to use the situation to make a statement. The TL;DR of it is that Buffy The Vampire Slayer often creates stories in favour of the specific allegory.

And The Vampire Diaries is almost the exact anti-thesis to that. Tolkien himself said it better than I'm able to so here's how that goes; "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history - whether true or feighned - with its variable applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but one resides in the freedom of the reader and the other in the domination of the author."

I'm not saying that there isn't coding, symbolism or applicability in The Vampire Diaries. I'm saying that The Vampire Diaries has its story first, and the allegory serve the narrative. It often tackles the themes it wants to tackle directly. A younger sibling with a drug problem isn't a hamfisted metaphor about using too much magic, the younger sibling is seen on screen, taking the drug, and the real consequences thereof. You could argue that the main metaphor comes in the "humanity switch" but it is also directly called "the humanity switch". Vampires have the literal ability to turn off their humanity, which is a scathing critique of what it's like when you choose total apathy and indifference over empathy and dealing with negative emotions. But you could also argue that it's a plot device and a metaphor so thin that blowing air would tear a hole in it. Obfuscating meaning for a clever delivery is not the goal here.

The meaning is in the moments.

A while back a friend criticized me for my attempts in aggressively seeking out the real world parallels in the text. I couldn't come up with much of a definitive answer other than saying that we compare anything we watch or read to everything else we've watched and read. We form connections between these experience. You're going to get the most out of anything if you understand the hidden meaning.

But I guess now I understand that there isn't always a hidden meaning to unearth. There is a joke I remember floating around a while back about how an english teacher might interpret blue curtains as symbolism for depression and grief, while the author may have just liked the colour. Interpreting text is a wonderful and necessary practice, and as someone who enjoyed their highschool AP english class more than they're willing to admit, you can and should try what the author is trying to say.

But I think it's equally valid to search for when the story is written in service to the allegory, and to recognize when the allegory is in service to the story. It's okay to just tune out, because escapism isn't wrong. And I think while some enjoy the act of analyzing and pondering, it's important to recognize that analysis isn't the only method of enjoying storytelling.

Sometimes, it's perfectly acceptable for the curtains to just be blue. The meaning is perhaps what one does behind those curtains.

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Another Post About Failure and Contrived Urn Metaphors.

Famous quotes about failure include how failure is the first step towards success, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and he who has not failed has not tried.

They're vague abstracts so divorced from reality that I think I grind my teeth when I hear them.

From a professional failure and someone who has internalized failure, here's the thing; Failure can often be a waste of time. Failure can weaken you. He who has tried can fail repeatedly and may never succeed.

That's just life.

The truth of the matter is that you often don't have unlimited attempts. You have a finite life and you can actually die after 60+ years of throwing yourself at a brick wall in the hopes that it caves. Now, I'm not saying anything you'll do in this life will take 60+ years but the attempt isn't always worth it. Sometimes you have failed.

And I don't mean just mean failed.

I mean irreparably, remarkably, permanently failed.

Imagine you're a kid, and you're tasked with one job; make sure the construction doesn't knock over the urn with grandpa's ashes off the counter. You sit there, diligently watching, but then you get distracted, just for a moment. It's not long, but in that one instance, you took your attention away and then when you look back, the ashes are now on the floor, the urn is broken into a hundred pieces and you cannot separate your grandpa's remains from the dust on the floor.

You have irrevocably fucked up.

You then have to deal with the aftermath of it. The permanent consequences. You chose wrong, and you will never get another chance at that task. You can't bring that urn back, you can't even tell if what you have in your hands is your grandfather's remains and now you're in trouble and you have no made life objectively worse for someone else.

Failure.

There's a sort of beauty in the finality of it, isn't there?

But here's the thing.

You're going to get a new urn to watch. You're going to get a five-year maximum with three attempts per subject to finish a college degree or you get kicked out. You're going to get a relationship where if you get into the wrong argument at the wrong time, you're going to mess it up forever. You have one body and you have to take really good care of it, because if you don't, you shorten your lifespan. You're going to have financial responsibility and if you're careless and mess up, you might not be able to make rent this month and get kicked out and be homeless. If you don't make a project succeed, you might get 30 people laid off.

That's unimaginable pressure to put on a singular being. No wonder we're such anxious fucking messes, entire destinies hinge upon our actions, much less our own. And if you're anything like me, you might drop that fucking urn repeatedly and never learn anything.

That's okay though.

Sometimes the urn has to drop to make room on the shelf for something better. Sure, it sucked and you ruined everyone's day, but now there's room for something better. And then you put something better there and it turns out alright in the end. Or maybe it's something slightly worse. It's not the same, but you don't have to watch it for so long. Maybe it can survive multiple falls. So you drop it once, but you dust it off and you put it back, and look at that! Instead of having this nightmarish responsibility, the stress thereof being something that very well might kill you, you instead have a much more manageable centerpiece that while it may not be as good as the thing you wanted there, might actually be better for you to have.

If you fail at reaching for a goal, or dream, or aspiration, that's okay. But that doesn't mean you'll fail at everything.

One day, you won't drop the urn.

Maybe it will mean a little. Maybe it will mean a lot. Maybe it will make no difference. Maybe it'll make a huge difference. But the important thing is that one failure, one irrevocable failure, doesn't mean the end of everything. Don't mistake permanent and life-changing consequences with dire and unendingly awful consequences.

You have to hold onto the hope that things will get better, because they do. And you have to hld onto the hope that you will do better next time, and if you don't, then the time after that, and if you fail again, the time after that until you succeed or die. And you're statistically more likely to succceed at least once before you die, so don't lose out hope just yet.

People say not to internalise and make failure a part of your identity and I guess I have failed at even that. I can't tell you the path to success and sometimes I don't think anyone really knows. I think some people rolled the dice and the ones who got lucky are really vocal about it, and the people who drew short never tell you their cautionary tales. There aren't any famous failures. You don't want to hear about people who did it wrong, you already know. You want to know about the people who did it right. You want to learn from them and understand how they did it and replicate their success but you might just never do that.

And that's okay.

"I don't know how much value I have in this universe. But I do know that I made a few people happier than they would have been without me. As long as I know that, I'm as rich as I need to be." A line said by Robin Williams in the show Mork and Mindy

You're not as bad as you think you are. I'm not as bad as I think I am. I'm trying. I hope you continue to try. I'm a klutz and I will likely drop more urns. But I usually clean up, and drop more urns and sometimes I put something nice in the place of the thing I lost. I hope you can too. I hope I can continue to. I hope I have a shelf full of nice things, even if I have a floor full of urns.

Hope you're doing okay.

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LGBTQ Characters in Videogames

I'll give Overwatch some props, you know you're doing something right if your character is so gay that their tie-in comic gets banned in Russia. Please, please, tell me that there's going to be Prohibition-era style shebeens where illegal gay Overwatch art is traded while sexy jazz plays.

But that got me thinking, where are all the queer videogame icons? You can probably name more queer film and TV characters than Avengers, and queer music icons tend to be just all round important music icons (think David Bowie and Freddie Mercury).

But the more I think about it, the more I struggle to name queer videogame characters. And I think that's because for all the gaming industry's progress, it's still struggling to find spaces to put queer bodies in. Which is strange because those are just regular places. Like offices or schools or parks, where regular people hang out, because it turns out the LGBTQ folk like to do pretty normal things when we get off the unicorns and finish drinking soy milk by the truck. Initially we were delegated to roles as villains, and queer coded characters were often antagonists. But it's gotten better, right?

In my research I've found couple queer characters and it actually surprised me how many there were, notably Max and Chloe from Life Is Strange, a game I've actually covered on the blog before. But then again, the queer identities of the characters in that game are overshadowed in my mind by the sheer piss taking that was the fucking bottle hunt mission. I got stuck there for like two hours searching for the last one. Demote whoever the level designer was, please.

But then the other memory of that game poked up, the one of actively being a queer person. I remember when the "kiss Chloe" prompt showed up and it blew the little socks right off my little feet and I was like, oh holy shitniblits, we're going 100% turbo boosted gay right here. I'm going to click that prompt so hard that the pressure will turn it into fuel to be used by future generations eons from now.

And that was a great experience.

The other one was, funny enough, romancing every member of my crew in Saints Row IV (except Keith Davis, the prude). I get that it was supposed to parody Mass Effect but the fact that I could just engage and acknowledge the sexuality of my version of The President was always just a really compelling feature. The superpowers that let me roam around the city while listening to In Flames more so, but the romance too. The issue is that in those kinds of "choose your own adventure" games, people might never even experience the queer side of the game. I know not everyone is a fan of having the sexuality of their character pre-destined but welcome to the world of every queer person being forced to play straight characters in videogames ever.

The other issue is that we often bury the lead with our queer characters. The original NieR for PS3 and Xbox 360 comes to mind, as Yoko Taro deliberately decided not to explicitly address the intersex and gay characters he wrote (although he did address more of it in the sequel, NieR Automata). JK Rowling recently caught fire because director David Yates decided not to explicitly address Dumbledore's sexuality in the upcoming Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them sequel. And don't give me that second movie of five load of wank, it's been seven books, nine movies, one stage play, seven mainline videogames as well as a quidditch spinoff game later. You're telling me that in all that not once in all that, not even a singular time, no one thought to bring up that Dumbledore is actually into the Dumbledick? You're better than that, Jo.

So we live in a world where representation could be used as justification for banning in foreign markets, China and Russia specifically, but on the other hand, queer media is so hard to come by and the enormous amount of good you do by being part of the history of representation in media can't be overstated. And in videogames specifically, we don't actually have a lot of queer experiences, at least, not a lot of mainstream ones. The political climate is so precarious that it's hard to know if it'll ever happen, but hopefully some devs step up to bat for the other team.

But here's to hoping for more Tracers, Gay Tonys, Ellie, Max-es, Kanji Tatsumis, and Poisons. Here's to hoping for more Dream Daddies and Strange Flesh-es. We can do better. So let's not bury the lead anymore. Let's not keep our characters closeted for the sake of subtlety.

And let's have more LGBTQ characters in games.

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Ending My Loyalty To Steam

Over the years I've undergone numerous phases in where I buy my games. As with everyone who grew up in the early 2000s, there was just something scary about the idea of buying things online, so brick and mortar stores were the way to go. Add to the fact that download speeds weren't as fast and hard drive space was limited, it was an extra pain in the ass to switch to digital only gaming. Not to mention that consoles like the PS2 didn't have a digital storefront, and as ahead of its time as Steam was, it used to be a goddamn nightmare to work with, sometimes requiring a full restart just so you could open it up.

As I gradually moved from console to PC and finally got the ability to use my debit card for purchasing games online, I made the reluctant move to steam. A couple friends in Uni actually got me into it, because there were just really great multiplayer experiences like Don't Starve (at least multiplayer with people I actually knew) that I wasn't going to get on console. I'm a sucker for a good LAN play, four people screaming at each other in a room all wired up to a router while the most powerful computer hosts is an experience I hope everyone in the world gets to have. And after my first Steam sale, oh boy. I didn't think I could ever go back.

Time goes by, and between humble, freebie giveaways, Steam sales, Bundlestars/Fanatical and G2A, and here I am sitting with a gigantic library and I now know the true meaning of hundreds of games but nothing to play. As crazy as it is, there comes a point where you have to heartbreakingly choose between which games you keep installed and which you leave in the cloud, and the first time a game went from light grey to dark grey was like a coming of age. A right of passage that meant I was now playing with the big boys, even if our tastes were all different.

But something that hadn't occurred to me was the cycle I had now fallen back into. See, while I was now entirely aboard the Steam train and my money was somehow moving from my wallet into Valve's, I still wasn't aboard other services. GOG, UPlay, Origin, Itch.io, etc. all mean installing another client which meant another thing to boot at startup and another program to keep running in the background. All for the 3 or 4 games I couldn't get on Steam. Plus, PSN remains inexcusably expensive without sales half as frequently as Steam. Digital Games should cost less since bandwidth is cheaper than mass producing disks, plus retro games are somehow more expensive than more ambitious indie titles. Symphony Of The Night is turning 21 this year and it sells for R120 or $10 on the PSN. That's the same price as The Last Of Us.

So I ended up putting all my chips into Steam. Sure, I did begrudgingly buy the occasional PSN title or nab a GOG/Uplay freebie, but it's not like they had much staying power. But in hindsight, that was the wrong move. Because you're not going to get the most bang for your buck by giving Valve the monopoly. Noticing the GOG sale and how many titles I want there makes me realize that I've been missing out. I don't have the best rig but my laptop often surprises me with the number of titles it can play. Which means the most mileage I'm going to get is by having the widest selection of games available to me. Which, begrudgingly, means installing those two or three extra game clients, but I'll caveat that with not setting them to open on boot and not having them constantly in the background. And multiplayer games I'll leave to Steam for the time being because there isn't enough widespread adoption, at least in my friend circle, to justify buying them elsewhere, although ones like Don't Starve that don't rely on a friend list from Steam are fair game.

And with that I end my loyalty to Steam. I'm not saying that I won't be buying from Steam anymore but I am saying that I will no longer be buying for and from Steam exclusively. Because while I may be slow, I also realize that this is one of the only ways to stay ahead as a consumer. While any money I might save will probably go right back into games, at least that means I have more games for less money which means more free time I can fill up with new experiences.

And I guess I urge you to do the same. If pre-order culture and brand loyalty are poor consumer practices, then storefront loyalty is a different flavour of the same problem. They're making money off your loyalty, money you don't need to spend. Competition also means that each service has to improve itself in order for you to maintain your patronage. And as much as I like having all my games in one central hub, I also like having games. And unlike a streaming service subscription, installing and making accounts with these are free. Plus you eventually wreck your own recommendations so it's always nice to have a clean slate to see what it is that one algorithm is burying under the titles it thinks you're interested in.

If nothing else, give GOG and Itch.io a try. GOG's games are DRM free and Itch.io has plenty of indie titles you might never see hit the Steam storefront because they're either too niche or in a market too saturated.

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