Ever have those days when you are suddenly hit by an amazing idea for something to write? Like an amazing incredible idea that just leaves you giddy in anticipation of writing it? One of those ideas that you just KNOW will be soo great that the whole world NEES to read it?

It’ll be smart. It’ll be clever. It’ll be funny. It’ll be amazing. You can just SEE it! You just can’t stop thinking about. Idea after idea cascades through your mind. You are writing it in your head and you can’t STOP. It’s going to be sooo damn GOOD! It’s brilliant. Genius! You know it’s going to be one of the best things you EVER WROTE. You can’t wait to see what people have to say about it. You can’t wait to AWE your audience with your unstoppable writting prowess!  Now all you have to do is write it.

And then! And then! 

Nothing. You can’t find the words after all. You’re a little distracted by some stupid other aspect of life. Like having to do your taxes or some other BS.. So you say to yourself oh I’ll just do it a bit later.

So maybe you do something else. Maybe you take a nap. You’re convinced that when you do do it, it’ll be brilliant. You just need a bit of time.

But then the horror strikes.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

You can’t even REMEMBER it! The whole idea is gone as if it was never there. It’s on the TIP of your tongue. But you can’t come up with it. The idea, the brilliant idea, is missing. All you remember is the sense of how great it was. How great it would have been. You can remember everything about the experience of having the idea. The tone you were going to write it in, the style you were going to use. You can even remember some of the WORDS you were going to use. You just can’t remember the FUCKING IDEA ITSELF! It’s horrifying. You want to bang your head against the wall. And if you’re like me you do just that. But it doesn’t help. It just hurts. Dammit.

You curse your brain. You curse your fate. you curse God, the Universe and all that is Good and Evil! Why oh why did it happen!?!?

I WANT MY IDEA BACK!!!!

But you can’t get it back. You just have to wait and wait and hope that one day something random will trigger the memory so you can write it again.  And a little piece of you knows that even if it does, it’ll never be as good as it would have been had you only been able to write it when it came to you.

Such is the curse of the writer.

“You’re like water. Serene one moment. Turbulent the next.”

My friend said this about me the other day. And it got me to thinking. What is water like? Serene and turbulent? Well yeah but there’s more to it than that.

First off in most states, water is always flowing, always moving. It’s changing shape and form. It’s never quite in the same state as it was. Even when water often seems still, it’s a chaos of motion beneath with a whole world of secrets within. I don’t know if I have any hidden depths, but certainly my mind is always a wash with mutating, shifting thoughts and ideas.

Also if you think about water, when does it become still?  Two conditions might result in that serene state.

The first and most obvious is when the water is undisturbed.  That is when nobody is around and there’s nothing there. There’s nobody to disturb the serentiy. Nothing enters the water to break it’s otherwise still state. And when actions interact with it, they create ripples in the water, a momentary splash of chaos that then slowly dissipate until still again.

That’s certainly like me.  I am most as peace when I am alone and without substantive distraction. And I often work to keep myself so, not taking note of many things around me so as not to allowing those things to impact me. Shielding against ripples in the pond as it were. And when chaos erupts, I force myself to stillness and calm, often, as it were by removing the obstacle or going off to be by myself until the ripples fade away leaving me exactly as I was before.

The other case of stillness is of course when the water becomes frozen. That’s happened to me too from time to time, when powerful emotions threaten, I can become cold and detached. I freeze and become impossible to approach until I work through the chaos. On the surface I might seem normal but that’s only because I’ve frozen all my expression of my inner self. I’m tranquil in those cases only in the sense that I am unmoved and unmovable. This is a protection mechanism of course a way to prevent the turbulence from resuming.

But then after a times of course I thaw and I’m back to moving with the flow.

Here’s another aspect of water that fits me. Water when flowing is constrained. It can only move along the shapes of whatever container it is confided to. A river musts flow along its designated course and no matter how much the music struggles it can’t break out of that pattern. It may be able to erode the edges of the river but in the end it will always end up in the same place. Certainly my life seems like that at times. I might rage and swell but in the end the patterns of my existence are beyond my control and I’ll end up whereever I was going to end up, no matter my will be otherwise.

Water is an interesting analogy for life. It makes me think.

Characteristic similarities in entities who spend inordinate amounts of time with one another never seem to lead to dynamic equilibrium. Rather, they always seem to progress to one of two unstable states.

In one case the entities resembling one another manifest their characteristics *more*. They feed off each other becoming more and more whatever until something gives. Usually an external force is forced to step in to force a behavioral re-balancing.

In the other case one of the pair finds the other’s characteristic to be a dark mirror of themselves and they don’t like what they see. So they become less and less of characteristic X even as the other becomes more characteristic X in response. Over time the two annoy one another more and more each wondering why the other can’t be more or less X respectively.  Eventually they drive each other mad unless a divisive act separates them.

Simple example. One person starts to spend time with another person. Both are prone to use dirty language and curses on occasion. 

In scenario one both entities start cursing more and more the more time they spend with each other. Their language grows fouler by the moment as long as they are near each other until finally some random outsider remarks to one or both of them that they have gone out of control forcing them to re-examine their speaking habits. They then re-balance, either by spending less time with one another or by both making conscious efforts to watch their language.

In scenario two, one entity starts cursing less, while the other’s language gets steadily worse. The more bad the one entity’s language gets the more that encourages the other to clean up his or her language. The more the one entity cleans up his or her language the more that instills in the other the resolve to not modify his or her language. Sometimes one or the other might perceive the other person as looking down on them or mocking them by their behavioral change and this creates a tension that ultimate leads to feuds, cold wars, and other battles. In the end, most likely they separate.

These seem to be the most likely possibilities I have observed.

This is sort of a story segment that might find its way into a longer work some day: 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * ** *

A broad expanse of blue punctuated regularly by huge dominating white clouds. Enough of them to provide a cover so that the bright sun could not blind but not enough to darken the sky to shadows. Jolin loved skies like these. No matter how cold or hot the day, skies like these always made the day feel warm to him.

When he was a kid the monstrous clouds used to frighten him. He could not help but think of how small he was in comparison to their enormity and then he would feel even smaller when he thought of how impossibly far away they were and how much more incomprehensibly huge they must be up close.

As he grew older the sky became a comfort to him. He would lie out on days like this his back on the cool grass in the most secluded area he could find and just stare up at them letting his mind wander in their warmth. He could see airship battles happening behind the clouds, or giant spaceships coming in for a landing. Or better yet, dragons! Not the little dragons of most stories that had riders and whatnot, but huge monstrous beasts whose wingspan could blot out the sun and whose eyes were so large a human would look like an ant in comaprison to their mere pupils.  He could see them nesting in the clouds and taking flight with a mighty roar that would shake the heavens! He smiled.

Something ruined it. Something always did. A cloud passed over his face blocking the warmth that had been soaking his eyes behind his pupils. It wasn’t a cloud. Nor any fantastic beast or dream worthy creature. It was only a *human*. Jolin sighed. Well at least it wasn’t just *any* human.

She stood there with hands on her hips, staring down at him, her curly black waves and the dress of her bright blue school uniform blowing slightly in the wing. Through the half open slit of his one eye Jolin could just make out the decidedly annoyed expression that fit so perfectly on her small round face.

“We were supposed to meet at lunch a half hour ago. Where were you?” She asked petulantly.

That wasn’t exactly right, thought Jolin. He hadn’t promised to be anywhere at all. It’s just that recently he’d been hanging out with them at their table during lunches and she’d come to expect him to be there. Leara was just the kind of person who once she came to expect something didn’t like to see anything disrupting the proper pattern of things.

Jolin remained silent trying to catch a glimpse of particularly beautiful squarish cloud behind Leara’s head. She continued her rant, oblivious to his obvious lack of interest.

“Tylek says you weren’t in Theory of Knowledge class this morning either. Or Macroeconomics yesterday evening.”

Jolin thought about shrugging but shifting would have disrupted the comfortable place he had made for himself in soft grassy Earth. So he finally spoke instead.

“Endless arguments about whether it is possible to know anything and a constant stream of magic formulas meant to divine our future. Really? Do any of them have any idea how absurd they all sound.”

It was the kind of argument, Leara could at least identify with. She had always been the one ranting about Professors who she felt weren’t doing their job of educating the students properly. But of course she wasn’t going to be swayed that easily.

“If you don’t like your Major then *change* it already. Study political science or law. At least then you can put that mind of yours to good use.”

“You’re the crusader Leara. I’m not the person who is going to change the world and make it a better place.”

“Well at this rate the only thing you’ll change is to get yourself on a short trip home. A minimum amount of effort is expected of you. It’s not like we don’t all know you can do the work. But you’re always lazing about. What are you doing way out here anyway?”

“I’m… educating myself.” Jolin waved a hand at the sky forcing Leara to look up and take in the sights.

“Oh really? I don’t see any textbooks? Or do your clouds hold some special secrets to getting straight A’s?”

“Grades are nothing but a symbol. A very inexact meatric for flawed understanding. Real knowledge is right there!” Jolin pointed straight up at an indeterminate point in the sky. Leara looked up straining to see what it was he was pointing at. When she couldn’t discern anything she turned down and glared at him her mouth tightening further. Jolin continued as if nothing had happened.

“Don’t you see it? Think about it! In a single solitary point how much data must there be? An infinite number of ones and zeros are needed to make up but a single focus of our eyes. And that just as far as we can see! Follow it back and back through the heavens, through space and backwards through time all the way through the galaxy. So much knowledge! Real knowledge! Not pondering pontifications of long dead scholars. It’s all right here! Just close your eyes and lose yourself in the vision and the wonder. And *learn*.”

For a moment it looked like Leara would get caught up in the majesty of his speech but then she stamped her feet and made a little growl of disgust as if dismissing his words as the nonsense they both knew they were.  

As if that disgusted noise has been a secret signal between them, Tylek sauntered up beside Leara and put his arm around her casually instantly calming her previously annoyed state. He too wore a crisp, clean, deep blue uniform that contrasted strikingly with Jolin’s tattered brown shorts, sandals, and plain white t-shirt.

Jolin was not surprised to see him. He should have known. It had probably been Tylek who had found him out here and sicced Leara on him in the first place. Having been roommates for a year and a half he knew Jolin better than anyone at school, which is to say hardly at all, thought Jolin wryly.

“Come on you two. Professor Yimmis’s talk starts in fifteen minutes. We should head over there if we don’t want to be late.”

Tylek always seemed to have one of those calm un-phased tones of voice. And his strong stead features matched his words. Short brown hair accentuated the kind of steady blue eyes that you could only earn if you had learned the hard way exactly what you were capable of. Hence the absolute lack of concern in his voice upon finding his girlfriend with a sporting a scowl that had been known to make men twice her small size shrink and stammer unthinking apologies.

“This…” Leara paused, then evidently unable to find a word deplorable enough to describe him in her extensive vocabulary, she continued without elaborating. “… has been lazing about all day! All week! Maybe you can talk some sense into the lout!”

Tylek stroked Leara’s hair affectionately and smiled down at her willing her to relative calm before speaking. The pairt of them staring affectionately into each others eyes looked like something out of a cheesy movie. Jolin didn’t know which was stronger, his urge to smile or gag. He turnded his head away from them staring at the distant sky.

“We both know how he is. He’ll find his footing soon enough. Let’s all go to the talk like we planned and discuss it further over coffee afterward.” 

It was an entirely sensible suggestion and for some reason that just annoyed Jolin all the more. Tylek was acting so carefully unconcerned that to Jolin’s ears it sounded like he was virtually gushing with concern.

“I’m not going.” Jolin tried to keep his voice utterly emotionless but he still thought he probably sounded childish.

Leara’s scowl returned as quickly as it had vanished a moment ago and she made another disgusted sound looking pointedly at Tylek. Tylek sighed.

“Oh come on! Aren’t you the one who said Professor Yimmis’s ideas on Moral Responsibility represented ‘a reasonably ok start at least’” Tylek even mimicked Jolin’s deadpan tone perfectly. It didn’t inspire Jolin to turn back toward them.

“You’re the one who suggested it for Christ sake!”

“Yeah. You two should go. You might learn something.”

“Ugh! It’s like talking to a brick wall!”

There was a period of silence where Tylek and Leara just stood there staring at him as if waiting for him to say something in his defense. But Jolin was silent. As the moments dragged on his mind even started to wander off away from the current threat of the conversation. He started thinking about these two celestial being standing over him. He didn’t have to look at them to picture them, arms wrapped around each other, too concerned looks on their familiar faces.  They were quite a pair these two, Jolin thought. Leara was like the sun, brightly burning liable to blind anyone who stood too long within her path. And Tylek… he was more like one of those huge clouds, passive and peaceful but able to blunt the bright light of the Sun so that you could only see her shine without the harshness and himself growing brighter and clearer in the illumination of her rays.  They complimented each other perfectly. They completed each other.

It was a strange thought. And Jolin himself was exactly as he was, so small as to be less than a speck of dust compared to their towering stature. The only odd thing was that these two had ever bothered to pay him the slightest bit of attention. And that felt… well just wrong to him. Why was he doing this? Playacting at having normal friends. At being normal.  It wasn’t right at all. He was way too small compared to them. Too incomplete.

“I can’t stay here any longer.” Jolin stated with finality, turning now to look calmly into both of their eyes.

Tylek too it for victory, thinking that Jolin meant that he was finally going to get up from his comfortable repose. 

“Well alright then! If we hurry we can make it to the shuttle and get there before all the seats are taken!”

When Jolin didn’t budge, it was Leara who realized that something was up.

“That isn’t what he means.”

“What?”

“You’re leaving aren’t you? You’re dropping out.”  There was genuine fear in her eyes as she searched Jolins for an answer.

“WHAT!?!?!?”

Jolin’s trademarked silence must have been all the confirmation they needed.

“You can’t be serious!”  said Tylek for the first time moved to passion. Not to be outdone Leara was livid with rage.

“You IDIOT! You’re just going to waste two years of education just like that?! And what about all the money your parents put up to send you to this school? How can you just throw away their investment like that!

“I’ve lingered here for far too long already.” That was all Jolin said in his defense but Tylek and Leara weren’t done with him, not by a long shot. For the next ten minutes they alternated turns berating him, coming up with every reason imaginable why he should stay and complete his education. For Tylek, it seemed as if Jolin was giving up so he alternated in attempting to bolster his confidence or shame him for his cowardice. For Leara it was all about Jolin’s obligation and responsibility to himself and to his parents to grow to his potential and the debts he owed. Neither argument was particularly persuasive to Jolin. Especially since he knew that deep down their real concern was primarily selfish, though not in a particularly bad way. Both of them didn’t want to lose their friend.

They’ll get over it, thought Jolin.  In less than a year he figured they’d have little more than a passing fond memory of the quirky little student they’d know for a year and a half.  In two years it would be a wonder if his name ever came up in conversation again let alone have anyone remember anything important about him specifically.  This was just the way these things tended to go. Jolin was resigned to these eventualities.

Eventually they wore themselves out of arguments. Leara looked like she was about to kick Jolin in the head by the end of it. He wondered how she held herself back.  Finally Tylek took Leara by the hand and shook his head one last time in sadness at the still silent Jolin.

“We will talk about this later.” Jolin declared, sounding for all he was worth like the stern father lecturing a particularly wayward child. Leara nodded in fierce agreement still glaring down at the little passive figure beneathe them.

“Let’s go Lee”, Tylek took her by the hand and guided her away from the grassy atoll back toward the walking path.  As they walked away Jolin felt a profound sense of sadness and loss welling up within him. This was necessary, he knew, and he felt no regrets, but he felt saddened by what he had just witnessed. And at the same time… gladdened. For these two celestial figures had someone in someway taken note of this little spec of dust beneath them. He didn’t understand it, but he was ever so grateful for having had the chance to know them even if it wouldn’t last and wouldn’t be remembered.

“Thanks” Jolin whispered thinking they had gone too far away to hear, but not so for Leara’s keen ears.

Leara spun on her heels in an instant her eyes still full of barely suppressed rage.  “Thanks for what?” she sad with venom, her eyes demanding Jolin give a response.  So he did as softly as he had stated the former.

“For caring.”

*    *    *    *

As it turns out Jolin’s thoughts were both right and wrong. Tylek and LEara did not see Jolin again that evening or that day or even that week. Jolin simply disappeared mysteriously without a word to anyone about where he was going. Within six months Jolin’s name was just a fading memory in the eyes of most of the students, a subject of at best just passing lunch table gossip even at the table that Leara and Tylek frequented.  It surely seemed as if Jolin’s presence there had been but an odd anomaly marring the otherwise normal and expected flow of the school’s business. No announcement was even made about his departure or disappearance. Apparently, nobody knew anything about their now missing classmate.

But even so neither Tylek nor Leara fully forgot their chance final meeting with Jolin underneath the cloudy clear blue skies. And as it turns out it would be less than a year when Tylek, Leara, and all the students and faculty of Lorswister Academy would have good reason to remember that a student named Jolin once attended there.

I’ve been playing Lost Odyssey lately. It’s a bit of an old game now but it’s the style of game I love. It’s a classic RPG, non of that weird real-time stuff messing up the play. It’s a simple story telling game with brilliant music and lots of level building to keep you busy.

The game was developed by Mistwalker studios, a company lead by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy franchise and which employs Nobuo Uematsu who composed the music for most of those same games. If that isn’t a dynamic duo in the world of RPGs I can’t imagine what would be? Mistwalker is also responsible for other RPGs, most notably Blue Dragon which I’ve also played but not beaten.

In addition, clearly a lot of effort was placed into making Lost Odyssey have a good story.  Sakaguchi himself wrote the main story for the game and the substory of “1000 Years of Dreaming”  which builds the back story of Kaim, the main character of the story, were written by the award winning Japanese story writer Kiyoshi Shigematsu.

Even with all this effort though so far the game still has a lot of flaws. I’m only just starting the third disc but already there’s enough annoying problems for me to give voice to. The game is good. So far. But with a little bit of playtesting and extra work it could have been soooo much better. The games fails to deliver on the little details that provide for a smooth playing experience. The result leaves most players feeling a little annoyed by the game without even necessarily being able to put their finger on what is the problem. Some end up blaming slow load times, others so called “outdated” gameplay but neither is quite right.

Slow loading speeds were a problem but a more engaging game could have made you forget about the load speeds or not notice them. They weren’t intolerably slow in my copy and once I could install to my hard drive on my xbox360 the slow loading times disappeared but that didn’t really *fix* my game.

“Outdated” gameplay isn’t it either. Certainly the RPG industry survived through eleven versions of Final Fantasy with so called “outdated” game play. The reality is MOST RPGs have always had this type of gameplay. Most still do. That’s an excuse, not an explanation.

The real problems lie in the little details. Tiny bity annoyances that make the game go slower and be more annoying.

The biggest little annoyance, besides loading speeds, is the way the game integrates the 1000 Years of Dreaming sequences. These are little short stories inserted into the game to reveal Kaim and other character’s backstories. The problem is…. the stories are shown to you in JUST text. There’s a few little text effects but that’s it. The problem with this approach is that it breaks up the action of the game and slows the game down by an immense amount if you choose to stop and read them every time you get one. The stories take a LONG time to read and even though they are pretty good stories in and of themselves, it can be BORING to read them when you are in the middle of the main story of the game. While it’s true you CAN skip them, the problem with that is that you end up having a hard time finding a good time TO read them.  And if you don’t you might come to a point of the story where an event that happens in a dream has relevance. At tht point you will be bewildered and confused if you didn’t read the dreams. That’s bad.

It would have been better if the Dreams were shorter or more interactive. If you could play and control the characters invovled in the dreams and see things as they unfold visually you’d be more engaged in the story.  a single dream need not all be revealed at one point but different parts of a dream could insert themselves into your game play at several points in a dungeon or area as you reach different areas that have relevance to the dream, like flashbacks.

Dreams that have important thematic and plot relevance should have been incorporated that way. Other dreams should have been clearly separated out into another section so you can read them at your leisure and know that by not doing so you aren’t missing anything particularly important to the story.  You’ll understand the characters a bit better for reading them, but the core character development you would not be missing.

That’s the big one. The other problems are numerous so let me just list a few here:

1. you have a button to run AND a button to walk creating 3 different speeds. Why?
2. there are some areas where save points are hard to come by and you can’t autosave
3. your experience gain decreases radically the longer you stay in an area making grinding nearly impossible and mostly useless
4. the game makes you too dependent on magic to defeat most major random encounters making your melee users nothing more than meat shields most of the time, and mana point management the most important aspect of the game
5. rings are too essential in order to get your melee user’s damage up, meaning if you suck at hitting perfects or end up equipping the wrong rings your melee damage with be *particularly* bad.
6. Magic user weapons don’t effect their ability to do magic, or any of their stats but physical attacks, amking it basically pointless to ever upgrade a magic user’s weapons.
7. most melee weapons don’t add anything but additional attack power again making upgrading a rather uninteresting process.
8. the menu system is counterintuitive at times. I found myself looking at the wrong part of the screen when trying to cast a healing spell for my player’s hp, or looking for the enemy’s stats when using an item that reveals their stats.
9. you can’t sort items by “unlearned” which is the most important, instead you have to notice the three stars on items that tells you you’ve already learned it (i only just recently figured this out).
10. the filter abilities and the remove items commands are counterintuitive and hard to see. I only recently realized how to do both.
11. you can’t rearrange your spells or abilities to make them easier to use
12. there are “hidden” advantages that are never described in game, like the fact that your immortals will get up automatically after two turns and you don’t have to waste items on them.
13. most status ailements are devastating to you but utterly useless to even bother trying on the enemy in classic RPG style making you wonder why you bother getting all those spells and items
14. a lot of the boss battles can be frustrating, sometimes because they pop up in unexpected circumstances (like when you are exploring a peaceful seeming city), and because often there’s a specific trick to defeat the boss that if you don’t use the faq you won’t know how to use.
15. you have a weird partial camera control that is unnecessary. either full rotational camera control or no camera control would have been better.
16. you can’t change the character you walk around as, nor can you bring up full character portraits in game in ANY way.
17. during loading panels it displays relative character stats scored from S through F. But if the game loads too fast you can’t read these and there’s no other way to bring them up in game.
18. if you don’t know the significance of seeds you’ll wonder for a longtime why you are finding them all over the place and miss out on a lot of really good items
19. in disc one the weapon shops are all hidden. why?
20. slow spells and metamagic are very often far too slow to effect the outcome of battle. these need to be rebalanced to have bigger effects or go faster, or else battles need to be slowed down

That’s just 20. There are probably many more. The thing is all of these are little things that could easily be revealed with just a little pre-release playtesting and asking the players hard questions about what bothers them about the game and what might be improved and what they might liek to see. I’m not saying the game makers need to have imporved ALL of these things, but just making a number of the easier changes would radically enhance gameplay and make the game feel less generally “annoying” all the way through.

Still, it’s a testament to how incredibly GOOD the music, characters, and story is in this game that I am sticking to it in spite of all these things. And it’s not just loyalty to the Final Fantasy or RPG genre’s that keeps me with it. I consider this game to be far better than what I consider to be the wrongly acclaimed Final Fantasy XII. No. Lost Odyssey holds its own by having an engrossing story and fascinating characters and basically decent gameplay.

I have to withhold final judgment on this game until I’ve completely but so far it gets my strong recommendation with only the smallest reservations. Just keep in mind that there will be little things that annoy you throughout the game, but if you’re like me you’ll love the game anyway.

First of all I learned from elvesdoitbetter’s xanga that this month is blog-every-day April or something like that. I might try and do that this month too. I won’t make any profound oaths or anything so no promises. If I give up in the middle feel free to strangle me in my sleep or whatever the proper punishment is for my disappointing  my poor beloved readership.

Anyways, I went with Meryl Stryfe and Milly Thompson to see the movie Knowing today.  It was… quite odd.  It was a good well made story objectively speaking but it had a ton of logical disconnects in it. Things that were glossed over just to make the story move along. It also had lots of gratuitous special effects that probably cost a ton of money to make but served no purpose. But still it was enjoyable on a basic level for me.

But the more I think about it, thematically the story utterly pisses me off. I don’t want to give too many spoilers but the main idea of the story is the question of whether life is Determined or if it is Random. Determined is used as a synonym for having “meaning” or “purpose” or even “mattering” which right then and there makes it a false dichotomy that makes me want to pull my hair out just from hearing it. I could go on for hours about how determination has almost NOTHING to do with significance but I won’t bore you.

Still I could suspend my disbelief for that. It’s not like I haven’t seen and enjoyed tons of movies with which I disagreed with the fundamental premise. But this movie went too far. By the end of it, it is almost a condemnation of the idea of randomness which it equates quite strongly with Science.  That’s absurd. The story even has undertones of suggesting a kind of intelligent design argument or at least a sort of purposeful distancing from evolution. That pisses me off.

The one line that sort of personifies the problems I had with the movie is this one scene where  the main characters partially has deciphered the code and then his friend, also a scientist, says something like this: “My Scientific mind is telling me to stay as far away from this as I can and yours should be too”.  WTF!!!! That line almost made me want to walk out. I’m no Scientists but wtf is up with portraying Scientists as closeminded cowards. The suggestion that being a Scientist makes you want to run AWAY from an unknown just because it suggests predetermination, is total BS. I can tell you quite honestly that most scientists I know would have been all over those numbers trying to decipher them, trying to extrapolate additional information, wanting to study the children t figure out the transmission mechanism. Most would think it was fascinating that aliens were speaking to them and when  faced with evidence that proves their existence would not shirk away. Rather they’d be the ones on the front lines most excited about finding out what’s going on!

This Scientist bashing in movies is a horror. How can lay people have come so  far from understanding what it means to have a scientific outlook on life? What is it with this thinking that Scientists have to reject extraordinary phenomena out of hand and unthinkinly. They *don’t*.  They just reject believing in something without sufficient evidence and complete understanding.

Skepticism is not the same as stupidity.

about posting a April Fools Day post is that when someone comments in agreement with you, you don’t know if they are simply duped by your ruse or pranking you.  And if someone comments in disagreement with you, you don’t know if they have been duped and are taking you too seriously or just playing along with you prank…

(Posted 04/01/2009)

It has come to my attention that there is a grave unaddressed problem facing our nation. On one day a year, specifically the first day of the month of April, troublemakers come out of the wood works intent on creating disorder and chaos in the society. They engage in so called “pranks” against their fellow human beings in the name of “good fun” and “entertainment”.  These pranks are basically nothing more than completely unethical lies designed to dupe the poor unsuspecting targets. It’s a kind of cruelty engaged in under the guise of “humor”.

This has to stop.

I can’t begin to describe to you the depths of the harm caused to society by this April Fools Day nonsense. First of all when businesses go about their regular business on this day, any actions they engage in are often mistaken for “April Fools” jokes. This can have devastating implications for a company’s economic plans. What if you planned the release of your next great project on April 1st? Suddenly you lose a whole day of marketing and selling because nobody believes in your product. And you have to waste time and money trying to undue that false perception.

Secondly, businesses often lose enormous amounts of productivity because their employees are often distracted the entire day long by reviewing pranks posted on the internet, talking about pranks they’ve done and pranks that have been done to them. What a waste! It can even get worse than that too as employees often waste days and days of time preoccupied with planning for April Fools Day pranks and/or working out strategies to avoid being pranked. I wonder how many employees have even taken the first of April off sheerly out of fear of being victimized by some horrifying prank perpetrated against them at work!

Thirdly for individual bloggers such as ourselves, April Fools can be devastating! You can’t really post anything serious or interesting on that day now can you? Even if you are dying to post something meaningful and relevant you don’t dare post it on the 1st for fear it will be taken as a prank! Indeed as a result the 1st of April can be an enormously boring day for the blogosphere, devoid of all meaningful content. And who knows if your readers will even come back when you miss a day of posting? I mean what if you’re too boring to come up with a good April Fools Day post? Basically you are doomed to be a blogging obscurity and you might as well give up. That’s what April Fools does to us.

And it could get FAR worse. Can you imagine if there was some sort of disastrous world event that took place on the 1st of April? Nobody would believe it! A despicable person could easily use the 1st of April as an ideal opportunity to engage in a horrific crime against humanity safely smug in his assurance that the news media would not dare report it and even if they did everyone would assume that it was a fake.

These are just a small smattering of the problems wrought by the existence of this dark disastrous holiday farce! And even if it weren’t for all these problems, April Fools is just fundamentally wrong in absolute principle. I mean it encourages cruelty, villainy, deception! It’s against God’s precepts and probably rejected by whatever other forms of heathen heretical worship you might happen to abide by.  Basically, it’s a fundamental human wrong that transcends race or creed.  It’s destroying our planet! Our very way of life is in Jeopardy!

This Ends TODAY.

I propose that we eliminate April Fools Day. Now, we have to be cautious. Simply telling people to no longer recognize April Fools Day will not work. The deviants and disrupters of society would continue to act against the common good by pulling pranks on the First of April.

So the solution is obvious. We simply have to get rid of the 1st of April.  The Calendar should be officially changed by an act of Congress to go from March 31st directly to April 2nd.  To minimize disruption the 24 hours of April 1st should be distributed equally to the rest of the work days of the year. Nobody will notice the approximately 5-6 minutes added to their work day every day. And between the money saved for the lack of April Fools Day disruptions and the additional productivity those 5-6 minutes would give us we could probably solve the entire Financial Crises and put America back on the right track!

Now this alone might not work. Devious anarchists beyond redemption might try to celebrate April Fools Day on the 2nd of April. In that case radical measures may be necessary. These may include but not be limited to the following:

1. Deleting every reference to April Fools Day on the Internet (or shutting the internet down if that becomes difficult)
2. Burning all books and calendars including or acknowledging the existence of the first of April
3. Shutting down any institution that engages in April Fools activities or allows their employees or members to engage in April Fools Day activities. Google this means you!
4. Making engaging  in or encouraging April Fools Day pranking a criminal offense equivalent to Treason against the United States of America.
5. Eliminating the entire month of April.

Let us all band together and DEMAND the elimination of this god forsaken terror of a day. Lobby your Congressmen. Call your representatives. Take to the streets! With pitchforks and torches! This can be done! Now is the moment. This is the time! Together we can make it so that nobody ever has to suffer through the atrocities of another April Fools Day ever again!!