dev_chieftain (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dev_chieftain) wrote2012-03-05 08:56 am
dev_chieftain) wrote2012-03-05 08:56 am
Crap news, Rising Sun, a diatribe about Qunari, and games
1. So I took my car to the mechanic for an oil change and because it was stalling a little whenever I started it as of the night before said oil change. Saturday morning, I woke up to get the dreaded call from the mechanic: "Your engine needs to be replaced."
To which I said, "No. Thank you very much for finding out what's wrong with my car. I'm going to get a new one, I'm not going to fix this one."
I was very, very angry at first, because the guy they put on the phone was bad at customer service. He tried to ex-car-salesman it up at me and claim that I should have done something sooner to have them look at the car, and then gosh, maybe it wouldn't have been so bad, but I a) was getting regular oil changes and b) had brought it in to be inspected less than three months ago. So gosh, they didn't notice three months ago when I suppose it would have been possible to fix? They still charged me 900$ to fix what they DID fix. The guy's bad attitude made me livid.
But, well, the prospect of having to get a new car just made me depressed. I don't really look forward to having a new-car payment, so part of me still wants to get another used one. Trouble is, if I save up for a used car, I still have to worry about unexpected maintenance costs. It'd be better, probably, to be paying off a loan for five years than to be screwed constantly because it costs so much to try to fix my damn car. The added expense is not something I'm confident about. It makes having a new job of the same or greater value to my current one an absolute necessity, where before I felt somewhat confident that things would work out even if I couldn't find a job that was paying at least as much as this one. A lot of the jobs I'm interested in are probably going to pay less than this one, too. I don't know. Anyway, I've applied for a loan with my bank because it's not like I really have a choice there-- I certainly couldn't even afford a used car without a loan-- and I'm twiddling my thumbs and trying not to think about it too much in the meantime.
The third alternative is, I could definitely bus it and walk and bike again. But with my current workplace, that'd increase my daily commute from 1-1.5 hours to 3-4 hours, (1.5 hours each way, minimum). I don't know if, in the modern day, I'm willing to do that. It does make me sad all over again that we won't be able to move to a nicer city at the immediate moment, because I'd like to move someplace where walking and biking might be a little safer and more viable. I love doing both. A place that's a little less sprawling might be nice, too. It's hard to get anywhere in this town without a car. And ironically, even though it makes jobhunting more dire, it also makes it more feasible, because having a nice car is better than having a shitty car is better than having no car at all. You'd think it wouldn't matter, but I've been cast aside for jobs I applied to in the past simply because I didn't have a car at the time; jobs that didn't require driving as a part of their function, but for which they thought a certain image was necessary. 'Fresh out of college and barely makin' it' was not the image they wanted, I guess.
Anyway. I have gone on long enough about my whiny problems. The short version is, my car is a hair from broken and I'm going to try to take out a bank loan to buy an actually new car. This is not my first choice, but anythin's better than crawlin'.
2. So last night, we watched the movie Rising Sun.
Pros:
-Sean Connery playing a character named John Connor is hilarious for at least two reasons I can think of.
-Wesley Snipes is fantastic as the lead, and gets to be Audience Self-Insert, rolling his eyes at all the weeaboo but also suspiciously adept at correctly pronouncing Japanese words-- much more so than Connery
-MAKO was in this! Yes yes yes! He is so wonderful. And also Harvey Cartel and Steve Buschemi.
-Unintentionally hilarious
Cons:
-Well, did you want to watch a woman get strangled to death? Oh, I'm sorry: seven more times? Hey, and while we're at it, did you want her death to be justified by the investigators as likely her own fault because she was into erotic asphyxiation?
-How about racism? Did you want a healthy dose of racism? Less, apparently, than was present in Crichton's book, but still: sweeping generalizations about how evil, scary, and weird the Japanese culture is. Did you want those? They're all over the place in here.
-The usual: It's a Crichton book! almost every character is a straw man.
-Conspiracy plots are still incredibly lazy
Basically, the movie was all right-- funny, though clearly not on purpose-- but had some sexual violence in it that was really uncomfortable (magnified exponentially every time we had to watch the guys unflinchingly rewatching the strangulation footage). The racism was also really uncomfortable, but kind of funny because it was so blown out of proportion. I did enjoy the scenes of Wesley Snipes rolling his eyes in frustration over how weeaboo Sean Connery was, and I really enjoyed the subplot about Snipes' character taking a bribe once because he needed the money to support his family. Apparently, the movie had made that subplot way better, as in the book, it was just yet another part of the stupid conspiracy.
What I can take away from this movie is that Michael Crichton was absolutely terrified of the Japanese "plundering our natural resources". It was somewhat interesting to discover after watching that he apparently was very sour about the book because everyone called him on his racism, to which he responded predictably, "It isn't racist against Japan! It's racist against the US for lettingthose yellow devils the Japanese buy out all of our business!"
The thing that probably bothered me the most was that, since it was a conspiracy plot, Wesley Snipes had no power at all in the entire situation. The non-sequential storytelling was ineffective at best (distracting, actually, when it finally "caught up" with itself and then kept going), and everything got muddied up by the "layers" of the plot.
Essentially, a woman was killed, and someone decided that it was okay for her to be killed because she wasn't important. This is the plot point around which the movie should have revolved, and I certainly do feel that for Wesley Snipes's character (the one we feel most attuned to, and the one who feels most like a real person) it did.
However, for everyone else, since it was a conspiracy plot, it just became a game of 'how many people do we have to kill to satisfy Wesley Snipes's character that justice has been done? How much money do we have to spend to magically win this fight?' Since they were strawmen, they were absolutely without conflict over the fact that they were allowing people to be cast aside and murdered. Indeed, Crichton's writing went out of its way to affirm to us as viewers that the Japanese were not like people at all; "maintain eye contact, and make no sudden movements; they will feel threatened" was the advice Connery kept giving Snipes, as if the Japanese businessmen he was talking to were skittish horses about to step on him.
Snipes' character didn't consider it justice to just kill more people along the way, which was nice to see, but still meant very little, since he was incapable of protecting anyone caught in the crossfire. The whole movie revolved around blackmail and some silly concept that Japan shadow-owned every single player in the situation, so his continued efforts to see justice done for the woman who'd been killed just led to a string of murders. I'd like to note that real police of ANY nation would have wanted to investigate that, not just let it get swept aside; but realistic fallout was not part of this film. There were also numerous scenes of Snipes and Connery touching things all over crime scenes without full investigative teams or even gloves on. "Gee! I sure hope those Japanese guys don't find some way to implicate me in the crime! I'm leaving fingerprints everywhere!" "Don't worry, that would make more sense than the plot of this movie."
The list of "events that probably deserved a little more weight than they were given" included the suicide of a blackmailed senator. Fallout from that? Totally ignored by the film, which ended shortly thereafter with a hazy, "fake-out" sort of finish. At no point did the murdered woman's family step in to wonder what had happened to her or why she'd been murdered.
Amusingly, the ending did seem to imply that The Girl and Sean Connery were inviting Wesley Snipes's character to join their open relationship.
My favorite, terrible sequence was probably:
Sean Connery: I am very, very okotte!
Japanese Lady: Pissed off.
Sean Connery: Yes, pissed off!
Danny: *laughing* He's not a native speaker, what the hell!
Edited to add: I don't feel like I got to the heart of what bothers me the most about the movie. There was no adequate explanation for why people decided to kill the woman in the first place, since they could still have blackmailed the senator even if he'd just been cheating on his wife, which was clearly what he was most anguished about. They had the footage of him cheating on her! They needed nothing more; so why kill her? The only explanation I can think of is that Crichton couldn't think of a good reason for the police to be brought in to investigate (thus introducing the main character) unless there was a homicide.
3. Qunari! So Danny and I were discussing how the new Lorax movie came out recently, and it's weird that only a specific four Dr. Seuss books have ever been made into movies. That led to us talking about how the Dr. Seuss book about the sneeches and the star-bellied sneeches was a pretty good way to teach kids that really, you're not different enough from other people to expect to be privileged above them-- racism, sexism, classism, it's all kind of silly because we're essentially the same in the end. (This all also tied back into us further discussing Rising Sun, naturally.)
Then we got to discussing Dragon Age, which was an odd game because of its lack of racism in a lot of senses. While the racism against elves was definitely there-- present in the "you're no better than dogs!" attitude from the humans, but also in the "ohh, you're an elf and I have a fetish for that" attitude-- it was about the only case where racism was tackled in the games as something that is bad and should probably be avoided. Oddly, there simply wasn't any racism to dwarves; dwarves might have been thought of as weird and eccentric by the other races, but they overall didn't get much thought other than 'yeah, they're kinda wacky, and some of them only live underground'. And then there's the Qunari, who are one big ball of 'man, this probably could have been handled better'.
First, there's the fact that the name is an anagram of "Qur'an" with an i added to it. Just in case we were curious if there was a real-life religion that theirs was based on. In the first game, Sten represents their culture; while most of us loved him, he was still ostracized and looked on as frightening and weird by the characters in the game. He's the darkest skinned character of the default party, and he's notably also got different cultural values than everyone else. Still, this isn't necessarily a bad choice because Sten neither rejects his culture nor stabs you in the back. You can be Sten's buddy and he will follow you because he thinks you're pretty all right. He's a positive symbol, basically.
Then, there's Dragon Age 2. How do we go about making sure that we're not demonizing other people's societal values? Hmm, how about-- making the Qunari red, horned, demon-people! That won't send any mixed signals!
I liked the Qunari in Dragon Age 2, and felt like the game would have been way better if they'd given me options to befriend the Qunari. But the Qunari were so unbudging and the game so wrapped up in pitting me against the Arishok that there was no choice, and I felt like that was lame. I felt it was extra lame since I still liked the Arishok battle better than the last act of the game.
4. So, on to tabletop RPGs: I ended up deciding to play Aigua, the monk, because she seems likely to fit well with Derek's Inquisitor (Brandtford Waynewright, but he probably is going to go by a nickname?), as well as Melissa's magus, maybe. The current plan is that we might have met before on a previous adventure or in a tavern once or twice, since all three of us have reason to have been through The Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy that the setting for the game boasts.
Edit:Okay, apparently only Christian's character, Ninja Girl The Nameless, matters. I've been set straight. ;) EDIT EDIT: I mean, Christian's character Merys! Double-set-straight! Oh, snap!
To which I said, "No. Thank you very much for finding out what's wrong with my car. I'm going to get a new one, I'm not going to fix this one."
I was very, very angry at first, because the guy they put on the phone was bad at customer service. He tried to ex-car-salesman it up at me and claim that I should have done something sooner to have them look at the car, and then gosh, maybe it wouldn't have been so bad, but I a) was getting regular oil changes and b) had brought it in to be inspected less than three months ago. So gosh, they didn't notice three months ago when I suppose it would have been possible to fix? They still charged me 900$ to fix what they DID fix. The guy's bad attitude made me livid.
But, well, the prospect of having to get a new car just made me depressed. I don't really look forward to having a new-car payment, so part of me still wants to get another used one. Trouble is, if I save up for a used car, I still have to worry about unexpected maintenance costs. It'd be better, probably, to be paying off a loan for five years than to be screwed constantly because it costs so much to try to fix my damn car. The added expense is not something I'm confident about. It makes having a new job of the same or greater value to my current one an absolute necessity, where before I felt somewhat confident that things would work out even if I couldn't find a job that was paying at least as much as this one. A lot of the jobs I'm interested in are probably going to pay less than this one, too. I don't know. Anyway, I've applied for a loan with my bank because it's not like I really have a choice there-- I certainly couldn't even afford a used car without a loan-- and I'm twiddling my thumbs and trying not to think about it too much in the meantime.
The third alternative is, I could definitely bus it and walk and bike again. But with my current workplace, that'd increase my daily commute from 1-1.5 hours to 3-4 hours, (1.5 hours each way, minimum). I don't know if, in the modern day, I'm willing to do that. It does make me sad all over again that we won't be able to move to a nicer city at the immediate moment, because I'd like to move someplace where walking and biking might be a little safer and more viable. I love doing both. A place that's a little less sprawling might be nice, too. It's hard to get anywhere in this town without a car. And ironically, even though it makes jobhunting more dire, it also makes it more feasible, because having a nice car is better than having a shitty car is better than having no car at all. You'd think it wouldn't matter, but I've been cast aside for jobs I applied to in the past simply because I didn't have a car at the time; jobs that didn't require driving as a part of their function, but for which they thought a certain image was necessary. 'Fresh out of college and barely makin' it' was not the image they wanted, I guess.
Anyway. I have gone on long enough about my whiny problems. The short version is, my car is a hair from broken and I'm going to try to take out a bank loan to buy an actually new car. This is not my first choice, but anythin's better than crawlin'.
2. So last night, we watched the movie Rising Sun.
Pros:
-Sean Connery playing a character named John Connor is hilarious for at least two reasons I can think of.
-Wesley Snipes is fantastic as the lead, and gets to be Audience Self-Insert, rolling his eyes at all the weeaboo but also suspiciously adept at correctly pronouncing Japanese words-- much more so than Connery
-MAKO was in this! Yes yes yes! He is so wonderful. And also Harvey Cartel and Steve Buschemi.
-Unintentionally hilarious
Cons:
-Well, did you want to watch a woman get strangled to death? Oh, I'm sorry: seven more times? Hey, and while we're at it, did you want her death to be justified by the investigators as likely her own fault because she was into erotic asphyxiation?
-How about racism? Did you want a healthy dose of racism? Less, apparently, than was present in Crichton's book, but still: sweeping generalizations about how evil, scary, and weird the Japanese culture is. Did you want those? They're all over the place in here.
-The usual: It's a Crichton book! almost every character is a straw man.
-Conspiracy plots are still incredibly lazy
Basically, the movie was all right-- funny, though clearly not on purpose-- but had some sexual violence in it that was really uncomfortable (magnified exponentially every time we had to watch the guys unflinchingly rewatching the strangulation footage). The racism was also really uncomfortable, but kind of funny because it was so blown out of proportion. I did enjoy the scenes of Wesley Snipes rolling his eyes in frustration over how weeaboo Sean Connery was, and I really enjoyed the subplot about Snipes' character taking a bribe once because he needed the money to support his family. Apparently, the movie had made that subplot way better, as in the book, it was just yet another part of the stupid conspiracy.
What I can take away from this movie is that Michael Crichton was absolutely terrified of the Japanese "plundering our natural resources". It was somewhat interesting to discover after watching that he apparently was very sour about the book because everyone called him on his racism, to which he responded predictably, "It isn't racist against Japan! It's racist against the US for letting
The thing that probably bothered me the most was that, since it was a conspiracy plot, Wesley Snipes had no power at all in the entire situation. The non-sequential storytelling was ineffective at best (distracting, actually, when it finally "caught up" with itself and then kept going), and everything got muddied up by the "layers" of the plot.
Essentially, a woman was killed, and someone decided that it was okay for her to be killed because she wasn't important. This is the plot point around which the movie should have revolved, and I certainly do feel that for Wesley Snipes's character (the one we feel most attuned to, and the one who feels most like a real person) it did.
However, for everyone else, since it was a conspiracy plot, it just became a game of 'how many people do we have to kill to satisfy Wesley Snipes's character that justice has been done? How much money do we have to spend to magically win this fight?' Since they were strawmen, they were absolutely without conflict over the fact that they were allowing people to be cast aside and murdered. Indeed, Crichton's writing went out of its way to affirm to us as viewers that the Japanese were not like people at all; "maintain eye contact, and make no sudden movements; they will feel threatened" was the advice Connery kept giving Snipes, as if the Japanese businessmen he was talking to were skittish horses about to step on him.
Snipes' character didn't consider it justice to just kill more people along the way, which was nice to see, but still meant very little, since he was incapable of protecting anyone caught in the crossfire. The whole movie revolved around blackmail and some silly concept that Japan shadow-owned every single player in the situation, so his continued efforts to see justice done for the woman who'd been killed just led to a string of murders. I'd like to note that real police of ANY nation would have wanted to investigate that, not just let it get swept aside; but realistic fallout was not part of this film. There were also numerous scenes of Snipes and Connery touching things all over crime scenes without full investigative teams or even gloves on. "Gee! I sure hope those Japanese guys don't find some way to implicate me in the crime! I'm leaving fingerprints everywhere!" "Don't worry, that would make more sense than the plot of this movie."
The list of "events that probably deserved a little more weight than they were given" included the suicide of a blackmailed senator. Fallout from that? Totally ignored by the film, which ended shortly thereafter with a hazy, "fake-out" sort of finish. At no point did the murdered woman's family step in to wonder what had happened to her or why she'd been murdered.
Amusingly, the ending did seem to imply that The Girl and Sean Connery were inviting Wesley Snipes's character to join their open relationship.
My favorite, terrible sequence was probably:
Sean Connery: I am very, very okotte!
Japanese Lady: Pissed off.
Sean Connery: Yes, pissed off!
Danny: *laughing* He's not a native speaker, what the hell!
Edited to add: I don't feel like I got to the heart of what bothers me the most about the movie. There was no adequate explanation for why people decided to kill the woman in the first place, since they could still have blackmailed the senator even if he'd just been cheating on his wife, which was clearly what he was most anguished about. They had the footage of him cheating on her! They needed nothing more; so why kill her? The only explanation I can think of is that Crichton couldn't think of a good reason for the police to be brought in to investigate (thus introducing the main character) unless there was a homicide.
3. Qunari! So Danny and I were discussing how the new Lorax movie came out recently, and it's weird that only a specific four Dr. Seuss books have ever been made into movies. That led to us talking about how the Dr. Seuss book about the sneeches and the star-bellied sneeches was a pretty good way to teach kids that really, you're not different enough from other people to expect to be privileged above them-- racism, sexism, classism, it's all kind of silly because we're essentially the same in the end. (This all also tied back into us further discussing Rising Sun, naturally.)
Then we got to discussing Dragon Age, which was an odd game because of its lack of racism in a lot of senses. While the racism against elves was definitely there-- present in the "you're no better than dogs!" attitude from the humans, but also in the "ohh, you're an elf and I have a fetish for that" attitude-- it was about the only case where racism was tackled in the games as something that is bad and should probably be avoided. Oddly, there simply wasn't any racism to dwarves; dwarves might have been thought of as weird and eccentric by the other races, but they overall didn't get much thought other than 'yeah, they're kinda wacky, and some of them only live underground'. And then there's the Qunari, who are one big ball of 'man, this probably could have been handled better'.
First, there's the fact that the name is an anagram of "Qur'an" with an i added to it. Just in case we were curious if there was a real-life religion that theirs was based on. In the first game, Sten represents their culture; while most of us loved him, he was still ostracized and looked on as frightening and weird by the characters in the game. He's the darkest skinned character of the default party, and he's notably also got different cultural values than everyone else. Still, this isn't necessarily a bad choice because Sten neither rejects his culture nor stabs you in the back. You can be Sten's buddy and he will follow you because he thinks you're pretty all right. He's a positive symbol, basically.
Then, there's Dragon Age 2. How do we go about making sure that we're not demonizing other people's societal values? Hmm, how about-- making the Qunari red, horned, demon-people! That won't send any mixed signals!
I liked the Qunari in Dragon Age 2, and felt like the game would have been way better if they'd given me options to befriend the Qunari. But the Qunari were so unbudging and the game so wrapped up in pitting me against the Arishok that there was no choice, and I felt like that was lame. I felt it was extra lame since I still liked the Arishok battle better than the last act of the game.
4. So, on to tabletop RPGs: I ended up deciding to play Aigua, the monk, because she seems likely to fit well with Derek's Inquisitor (Brandtford Waynewright, but he probably is going to go by a nickname?), as well as Melissa's magus, maybe. The current plan is that we might have met before on a previous adventure or in a tavern once or twice, since all three of us have reason to have been through The Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy that the setting for the game boasts.
Edit: