I kind of did it on purpose.

I **** hate how these forums are ran now, and i have for a while.

It's why I don't really post anymore.

I've been on these forums way too long.

Yeah, I don't get on hardly ever anymore, but still, I'd say the time amounted on these forums over the course of my more than 5 years here (I've been here longer than my member since says) has wasted literally a month or so of my life. That's ridiculous.

Then again, I think the forums have done good. They helped develop my social skills when dealing with large groups of people on the internet, and vastly contributed to my writing skill.

I have no point in this blog, except to go off topic and be reminded of Jordan Elekzor complaining about the word blog.

Blawg. Blaaahhhhwwwg. It's such a heavy word. Unlike pip. Which is the only word my slow mind could come up with that was a "light" word.

I'll personally send anyone a cookie who replies to this, I doubt I'm even noticed on here anymore.

The Once and Future King is my summer reading this year. I cringed at the thought of having to read a teacher-assigned book over the summer, as I don't usually like what they choose. This book, however, is fantastic. It has a great story, and some amazing insight into the human psyche. I'm only a little past half-way, though I expect to be finishing it in a week or so. I'll let you guys read two excerpts from it. The first is an example of what I think to be the great story in it. It's one of Lancelot's many adventures, which he is doing to try to get his mind off of Guenever. (King Arthur's wife, whom he is in love with)

While Lancelot was riding along a straight road which seemed to lead nowhere, he saw two people galloping towards him from the other end. They turned out to be a knight and his lady. The lady was in front, going like mad, and the knight was after her. His sword flashed against the dull sky.

"Here! Here!" cried Lancelot, riding at them.
"Help!" Screamed the lady, "Oh save me! He is trying to cut my head off."

"Leave her alone! Get out!" shouted the knight. "She is my wife, and she has been committing adultery!"
"I never did," wailed the lady. "Oh sir, save me from him. He is a cruel, beastly brute. Just because I am fond of my cousin german, he is jealous. Why should I not be fond of my cousin german?"

"Scarlet woman!" exclaimed the knight, and he tried to get at her.

Lancelot rode between them and said: "Really, you must not go for a woman like that. I don't care whose fault it is, but you can't kill women."

"Since when?"
"Since King Arthur was king."
"She is my wife," said the knight. "She is nothing to do with you. Get out! And she is an adulteress, whatever she says."

"Oh no, I am not," said the lady. "But you are a bully. And you drink."
"Who made me drink, then? And, besides, it is no worse to drink than to be an adulteress."

"Be quiet," said Lancelot, "both of you. This is a nuisance. I shall have to ride between you until you cool off. I suppose you would not care to have a fight with me, sir, instead of killing this lady?"

"Certainly not," said the knight. "I know by your argent, a bend gules, that you are Lancelot; and I would not be such a fool as to fight you, especially for a **** like this. What the devil has it got to do with you?"

"I will go," said Lancelot, "as soon as you promise on your knighthood not to kill women."

"Well, I won't promise."

"You wouldn't," said the lady," Anyway, you would not keep your promise, if you did."

"There are some marsh soldiers," said the knight, "cantering after us. Look behind. They are armed cap-a-pie."

Lancelot reined his horse and looked over his shoulder. At the same moment the knight leaned over to his near side and swapped off the lady's head. When Lancelot looked back again, without seeing any soldiers, he found the lady sitting beside him with no head on. She slowly began to sag to the left, throbbing horribly, and fell into the dust. There was blood all over his horse.

Lancelot grew white about the nostrils.
He said, "I shall kill you for that."
The knight immediately jumped off his horse and lay on the ground.

"Don't kill me!" he said, "Mercy! She was an adulteress."
Lancelot dismounted also and drew his sword.

"Get up," he said. "Get up and fight, you, you-----"

The knight scrambled along the ground toward him, and threw his arms round his thighs. By being close to the avenger, he made it difficult from him to swing the sword.

"Mercy!" His abjection made Lancelot feel horrible.

"Get up," he said. "Get up and fight. Look, I will take my armour off and fight you with my sword only."

But "Mercy! Mercy!" was all the knight would say.

Lancelot began to shudder, not at the knight, but at the cruelty in himself. He held the sword loathingly, and pushed the knight away. "Look at the blood," he said.
"Don't kill me," said the knight. "I yield. I yield. You can't kill a man at mercy."

Lancelot put up his sword and went back from the knight, as if he were going back from his own soul. He felt in his hear cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.

"Get up," he said. "I won't hurt you. Get up, go."

The knight looked at him, on all fours like a dog, and stood up, crouching uncertainly.

Lancelot went away and was sick.

That is my favorite part so far in the book, just because it shows the war going on inside of Lancelot--the one between his cruel nature and his want to have his honor. (in the book it talks about how Lancelot is by nature a cruel person)

Second example: some of the insight the book has.

There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can't teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically--she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of her years. And then, when she is begining to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living--not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth--if women ever do hope this--but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one--knowledge of the world.

The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy--this discovery is not a matter for triumph. The baby, perhaps, cries out trumphantly: I have balance! But the seventh sense is recognized without a cry. We only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do.

And at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. We begin to forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens our minds.

But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.

Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.

All these problems and feeling fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The seventh sense, indeed, slowly kills all the other ones, so that at last there is no trouble about the commandments. We cannot see anymore, or feel, or hear about them. THe bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave, under the protection of our last sense.

Okay, I hope you read that, because I didn't quite enjoy typing it all out.

Anyway, that's all. I really am enjoying this book.

Microsoft's giant black box is going to have it's successor come out at the end of this year. How absolutely crazy is that? The Xbox hasn't been out but 4 years--and is just now starting to show it's real power.

Nonetheless, people will buy the Xbox360.

Gaming went very mainstream this generation, to the point where games were now considered "cool" to play. It used to be a nerdy pasttime, but more and more people are getting game systems and playing them. These people are what is considered as "Casual Gamers". (I hate the term casual and hardcore) Most people ages 10-25 have a gaming console in their homes. This wasn't the case earlier, remember the E3 when the PS and N64 were coming out? Sony didn't hold an MTV bash, they showed it where the majority of those who supported the industry would see it--E3.

Microsoft, however, did hold an MTV bash. I've talked to those who are not very interested in video games [see: casual] and they thought that this MTV show was amazing. Those of us on the message boards talked amongst ourselves about how corny and awful the special was and thinking that Microsoft was stupid for having such a sham of a revealing.

The MTV special wasn't targeted at those of us who discuss video games online daily. It was targeted at those who will be buying Halo 3 and maybe nothing else. Microsoft, as well as Sony, are making a new system solely for better graphics. That's about it. Nintendo is making a new console to innovate, and that's it.

Do we need better graphics? I don't think so. But the market eats it up. Do we need innovation? No, but it seems at least better than updated graphics. The market also eats up innovation. Go to your local arcade that has something with a visor or some other sort of game that's different than your normal arcade games. These games will cost more to pay, and there will be more people playing them. Innovation makes money, and so does updated graphics, but we don't need them.

Most of you would be happy to continue to play games on whatever console you own. I don't believe our systems are being pushed to their maximum limits, and now they won't get a chance to. Most NES games looked graphically the same throughout the entire generation. Most SNES games did too, though there was some small differences between the newer and older games. The PS made a good enough leap, and so did the N64, but it still wasn't astounding. The GC, Ps2, Xbox,--the've all made amazing leaps in graphics from the beginning of their lives to what is now the end.

Before games needed to have new hardware in order to look better. I think that we can still get better graphics out of our systems now. We won't ever know though, because their lives are being cut short. Are we being forced into the next generation?

RPG. The word is an acronym and most know it's meaning.

Role

Playing

Game

That's it. Role Playing Game. An RPG is supposed to put you in the role of somebody to play out their life. Thus you should feel really attached to your character--you should feel like you are your character.

This was true in the early RPGs. When games like Dungeons and Dragons came out it was a almost literal cult hit. People played this game religiously. These people became the character they were put in the role of. Sure, it was quite un-healthy, but it accomplished what it set out to do. To get you as close as you could to being in the shoes of an epic character; this was the goal.

Electronic RPG's couldn't be further from this though. One feels really detached from his or her character as they play through an RPG. As you play through an RPG you mainly do the same things--collect items, solve dungeon puzzles, level up, et cetera. Yet you don't feel like you are this character. You don't feel like you are playing the role you are supposed to be in this game.

RPG's now are very story focused. It's not a fault--it's usually a strength. Still, when a game is story-focused it takes the focus away from playing the game and being the character. I feel much more like I am Link when I play a Zelda game than I feel like I am a character in Final Fantasy. The games play through and you watch what happens, you don't develop it. You don't get a choice to think about how your character interacts with others and it seems to feel more and more like an interactive book.

I don't know if I'm the minority or majority here, but I feel like an outsider watching a story unravel when playing through an RPG. This shouldn't be so just by looking at the meaning of RPG. I'm supposed to assume the role of this character, but I don't feel like I am.