Food Texture

Some foods have a gross texture; that’s just a fact. Once in a while I’ll hear someone deny this fact, usually in condemnation of someone else who doesn’t want to eat a particular dish based on its texture. “It all ends up the same once you swallow it,” the complainer might say. Or at the very least, they point out that it has the same ingredients as some other food. I must say I’m a little surprised about this argument. To anyone who finds himself or herself raising such a complaint, I offer the following challenge: The next time you are about to eat your favorite meal, put it through the blender first. If you enjoy it just as much, you have clearance to complain about others’ pickiness about texture all you want. But if you don’t, or if you can’t bring yourself to do it, then I think you’ll be forced to agree that it is perfectly legitimate to hate food based on how it feels.

Metroid: Other M

I just played Metroid: Other M. I had heard varied opinions on the game – in particular, it has been criticized for being a lot more linear than other Metroid games (in the sense of not giving you many choices of where to go). While this is valid, and while there were a few other things that annoyed me, my final analysis is that it’s an awesome game. It’s arguably the least cool of the Metroid games (or at least the modern ones), but it’s still awesome.

So here’s what I like about it:

• The 3rd-person-but-3D perspective is awesome.
• It has lots of classic enemies, including bosses.
• Like Metroid Fusion, it has a lot of boss battles.
• The scenery and strategy (when you can figure it out) feels Metroid-y.

Here’s what annoyed me:

• Although you can sort of scan your environment, you can’t get much information about what you’re looking at or how to interact with it. I got stuck a lot, and often it wasn’t in a situation that was supposed to be a puzzle. I miss the scan visor.
• The map isn’t always super clear. 3D rooms are projected onto a flat image, and the dots that show item locations are the same color as the icon that shows where you are, so if you’re close to an item it’s easy to miss. The rooms aren’t named (like they are in the Metroid Prime games), so looking up help on a confusing room is really hard too.
• There aren’t any catchy tunes; the music is just atmosphere.
• I don’t mind the plot, but the fact that Samus supposedly has most of her power-ups but is forbidden to use them until Adam decides they are necessary is not believable. I just tell myself that she really found them in some secret room right before the game actually gives them to you. They really need to go back to actually exploring an alien world for the next game.

In the end, the Metroid feel of the game outweighs the implementation issues, and I definitely think it’s worth playing, at least for anyone who likes Metroid games in general.

Video Games for Beginners

I’m not ready to introduce my kids to video games, but I’m pretty sure they’re eventually going to become interested. So I occasionally ponder what games would be good to get little kids started on. It’s not enough that the game itself be “easy”, since beginning players have to get use to the idea of a controller (unless it’s a Kinect game I guess, but you get the point).  And of course there are “edutainment” games for little kids, but those don’t really count as video games. So here are a few games that I think would be relatively unstressful for beginning players:

(Actually, first a side comment: figuring out how to introduce new players to the classics is a different issue, which I deal with here.)

Yoshi’s Story

Yoshi’s Story has a lot going for it as a beginner’s game:

• It’s relatively easy
• Its storybook-themed graphics are “cute”
• It features adorable baby dinosaurs as its protagonists.
• It’s very forgiving. You clear levels by eating fruit, and fruit also refills your life meter.
• It’s very short. Beating the game only requires going through six levels (although which level can vary based on how much you explore).
• There’s a Trial Mode, where you can play individual levels you have visited in Story Mode.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

This game starts out pretty easy – I was able to verbally walk my younger siblings through rescuing Princess Zelda. And then the overworld opens up, and a beginning player can explore without having to worry about making progress.

Super Mario World

Super Mario World is definitely harder to beat than Yoshi’s Story, but it also has more options of where to go, and it has a lot of easy levels up front. It lets you back into them as well, and saving (after the first world) is fairly straightforward. The Game Boy Advance re-release is even easier.

Humbug – but not really

It’s a well-known fact that we commercialize holidays and spend a lot more time thinking about how to celebrate them than what they’re supposed to commemorate. That’s probably a bad thing in most cases, but I have a bit of self-justification that I’d like to offer the world. And I have a proposal for how to deal with this. Read on.

My Perspective

First, about Christmas. The point of Christmas is very important, probably second only to Easter. But consider something you always hear at Christmas time: “We should keep the spirit of Christmas all year.” And what spirit is that? The Spirit of Christ, of course. Putting it that way makes it easy to see how to commemorate the birth, life, and mission of the Savior all year. Pray. Study the scriptures. Attend church. Be good to people, and be willing to sacrifice to help them once in a while. That won’t preserve the festive feeling, but then again, does the festiveness of Christmas come from the religious origin? Not really. It comes from traditions – traditions that people made up.

So here’s my self-justification: I claim that as long as you are doing the stuff that God has asked us to do to remember Him on a daily and weekly basis, it’s not the end of the world if you also spend time with non-religious traditions, even if they happen to coincide with a holiday. (After all, the only “holiday” that God has actually asked us to observe [following the Resurrection of course] is the Sabbath.)

To take that a step further, consider what happens when Christmas traditions come into conflict with divinely-appointed traditions. Say Christmas falls on a Sunday. Do you cut short religious activity so you can observe mortal-made traditions? This applies to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as well, which brings us to…

My Proposal

I say we should reschedule our holidays to be more convenient, and to clearly separate the meaning of the day (if any) from the traditions around it. Specifically, here are the changes I propose:

• Christmas

It is well-known that the date of December 25th has no particular meaning in Christianity. The Romans decided to celebrate Christmas on that day because it helped pagans blend the message of Christ with their current beliefs. Does this make Christmas a pagan holiday? Of course not. Nobody goes out and worships Roman deities on Christmas (or at all, for that matter). I mention this merely to point out that the date is flexible.

The other thing I want to point out is that, for a student, any time between the start of winter break and Christmas Day is essentially wasted, because you can’t play with the stuff you get. I think we could solve both this and the commercialization issues by making Christmas the Monday of the last full week of December. That way, Christmas Eve would always be on a Sunday and would therefore get extra religious focus. Also, if you believe in avoiding shopping on the Sabbath, you’d get the stress of mall work out of the way in advance. Then you’d open presents and stuff on Monday and have at least a full week to enjoy them before the year ends and you have to worry about school. You’d be embracing the commercial traditions on Monday, but only after spending what I think would be extra time remembering the real meaning of the holiday the day before.

• Mother’s Day / Father’s Day

So this one won’t apply if you don’t choose to restrict what you do on Sunday, but I think it’s pretty inconvenient that these holidays fall on Sunday. You’re trying to celebrate motherhood, but meanwhile you’re trying to get the kids to church, you can’t go out to eat, etc. There’s not much time left to focus on the mom. These holidays should be on Saturdays instead.

• Halloween

If there’s anyone who attaches any religious meaning to Halloween, I haven’t met them. If anything, it seems to have turned into a worship of evil in a lot of contexts. But as far as the fun, cute side of it goes, why would you ever want to have it on on a week night? If it always fell on a Friday night, you wouldn’t have to worry about getting to bed on time and stuff like that.

Of course, it has been pointed out to me that you might have fewer trouble makers if it were always on a week night. But it should be a fixed day of the week. (Again, Halloween on Sunday is lame.)

Being -ist

I get the impression that a lot of people today want to feel persecuted. They draw comparisons between themselves and groups of people historically who really were killed, enslaved, or otherwise mistreated because of various differences – race, religion, etc. And I’m not saying that people aren’t persecuted today, but, in this country, there’s really nothing that compares to what you would have seen even fifty years ago. That is to say, you don’t see widespread prejudice that is socially or politically acceptable. People who want to persecute other people tend to have to keep it within a closed group, or hide it altogether. So the country isn’t where it should be, but it’s a lot farther along than a lot of people make it out to be.

One bit of evidence of this is the fact that “racist” (or any other kind if “-ist”) is one of the worst things you can call someone. I think most of us are properly ashamed of what has gone on in the country’s past, and we won’t stand for people trying to make that our present as well. But if that’s the case, then why are the -isms such a big deal in the media?

I think that one reason is a blurring of the definition. People don’t see as much genuine racism as they used to, so they go and apply it to the next-worst thing, and the next-worst after that. After all, being able to call yourself persecuted lets you elevate yourself to the status of… actually I can’t finish the thought, even sarcastically. As Pinky once said, “no no, it’s too stupid.”

So once again I think it’s important to settle on some reasonable definitions:

• -ism: hatred or outright disrespect. Using race as an example, firing someone from a job or insulting someone because of their race is racist.
• insensitivity: not making the effort to think about how your words or actions will affect other people. Pointing out someone’s race in a context where it’s not relevant may be racially insensitive, as would be using terms with an obvious negative connotation just because they are part of culture. (What kind a “giver?” What kind of a fire drill?) In this situation, you’re not thinking something negative about someone; you’re not thinking about them at all.
• ignorance: saying or doing something that is unflattering to a group of people because you’re honestly unaware of the effect. A lot of stereotypes stem from ignorance. I saw this painting of a teepee in a forest, apparently in the Pacific Northwest. Really? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure (and Wikipedia confirms this) that teepees are more of Great Plains thing. I’m sure the artist wasn’t trying to be insulting. (After all, what insult could possibly be meant?) But a little research may have shown a bit more respect for the culture being depicted – whichever one that was. So that would seem to be an example of racial ignorance. Or cultural ignorance. Or something.

It’s dramatic to call something a more severe term than it deserves. But that drama comes at the cost of communication. For instance, if you start calling people who punch other people “murderers,” then pretty soon calling someone a murderer won’t sound quite so bad. And if the word doesn’t sound so bad, there are people out there who will decide the act isn’t so bad either. Likewise, if you tell every person you date that you love them, what do you say to the person you decide you want to marry? Similarly, it doesn’t do anyone any good to throw the label “-ism” around so freely that people lose track of how bad the real thing really is.

The other problem with the way people label things as -ist comes when they apply the term to inanimate things, like grammatical constructs. You can say that people should say “firefighter” instead of “fireman”, or “remotely piloted” instead of “unmanned”, but you can’t call the language sexist; a language can’t hate anyone. And you can’t say that people who use those terms are sexist, unless you seriously think that people walk around thinking of ways to exclude women from their word choice. And if you think English is “hateful,” then what about Spanish, where adjectives have a masculine suffix when applied to mixed groups, and where inanimate objects have gender attached? Do you think that all Spanish speakers are sexist? Because that would clearly be some kind of -ist. (Not exactly racist, since not all Spanish speakers are the same race. Languageist?)

Party in the CIA and other glorious music

I love it when songs manage to take a topic that’s mundane or petty or otherwise unworthy of song and make it feel like something epic. What is this feeling? and Popular in Wicked do a glorious job of this. And so, of course, does Weird Al. Unfortunately there’s a ton of his stuff that’s hilarious except for “that one thing” that’s offensive and messes up the rest of the song. But it’s not always like that, and Party in the CIA is a glorious victory in that area. It’s a parody of Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA, which I guess is itself a fairly petty discourse about being stressed about partying in California. But taking its catchy tune and applying it to something serious like espionage, while preserving the ditzy feel… okay, I don’t want to make it not funny by talking about it too much.

You can listen to it free on Bing Music:

http://www.bing.com/music/albums/detail?q=Weird%20Al%20Yankovic%20Alpocalypse&albumID=83B5CF06-0100-11DB-89CA-0019B92A3933&artistID=B4230200-0600-11DB-89CA-0019B92A3933

How not to justify your actions without looking stupid

I heard this song yesterday that had a message that I’ve heard people use to justify their own choices, and it drives me crazy. The message is something along the lines of “The commandments / church standards / etc. say I should <some standard>. I don’t because <reason>, and I think God understands.”

He understands? And that means what you’re doing is okay? Of course he understands your motive. He knows everything. He understands why Hitler did what he did; that doesn’t mean that Hitler was justified.

If you break down that attitude, what these people are really saying is this: “Anyone who understood my motives would say I’m justified. And God understands my motives, therefore he must consider me justified.” That’s pretty backward. It’s essentially setting yourself up as the arbiter of morality and implying that God is just going along with your opinion.

Now, I realize that not everyone who uses that phrase means what I just derived above. Hopefully, what at least some of them mean is that they felt their circumstances were exceptional, and they asked God sincerely if they were right, and they felt a confirmation from the Holy Ghost, so they have a clear conscience about their choice. Of course there are plenty of people who have done bad things with a “numbed” conscience and confused that with divine approval. But at least that seems more like an honest mistake than implying that God will just overlook conscious sins just because he knows why you commit them.