All shall love me and despair!

Watched The Fellowship of the Ring recently with my six-year-old daughter. Some thoughts:

– Uneven film overall. I feel about the first hour and a half or so (up until the Hobbits arrive at Rivendale) in 2018 the same way I felt when I saw it in theaters: some of the best filmaking I’ve ever seen (and by the way, you can tell a lot about a person based on how they describe movies they like: One of the best movies I’ve ever seen or Some of the best filmaking I’ve ever seen or Some of the finest cinema ever made).

Seeing it in the theater was an amazing experience. I didn’t read the books before I saw the movie, and I found out about it in the old way, in the days before spoiler websites were clamoring for everyone’s traffic: in a magazine.

Yahoo Magazine, if I remember correctly, bought from the old WalMart in Springfield. They had a nice feature on the film, I thought it looked nice, and I later saw a trailer.

Seeing the movie in theaters allowed me back then to overlook its faults. My daughter and I watched the original edition. I’ve only seen the Extended Editions of Fellowship and Towers. To this day, I’ve never been able to sit through Return of the King’s half-day epic.

– Galadriel doesn’t work. The performance is over-the-top. Read this, sounding as intimidating as you can:

“In place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!”

A campy performance mixed with a special effects failure, but reading that, you get the impression that Laurence Olivier himself couldn’t make that work.

– Someone on a forum described the Gandalf-Saruman fight as two lightsaber-less Darth Vaders fighting each other. I can’t view this scene without thinking about his description. Thanks, random forum user from 2001.

– Gandalf’s death. This hit my daughter hard. She didn’t cry, but she kept asking me why Gandalf had to die. I explained it to her and she was very quiet afterwards. The emotional impact Gandalf’s sacrifice has on the story, not the mention the stakes it builds…to see how this effects someone who doesn’t know he comes back, I agree with George R.R. Martin: Gandalf should have stayed dead.

– Boromir’s death. “I would have followed you, my brother. My captain…my King.” Gets me every time.

– and Viggo Mortensen is Danish. Why did I think he was Australian this whole time?

Watching the movies has another effect, same as it did in 2001: I want to read the books. Say what you will about how slow the first book is, it provides wonderful escapism. The world Tolkien constructed is unlike any before or since, and calling GRRM the “American Tolkien” could be interpreted more than one way. For as rich and engaging as the Game of Thrones world is, it can’t rival Middle Earth.

Il y a 10 ans

I was a French major in college, and people often asked me What are you going to do with that?, a question that’s rhetorical for Humanities majors and one we ignore for as long as possible.

I sometimes answered with “Speak French”, but that didn’t apply to everyone. If the lack of any meaningful French-speaking environment didn’t pose enough of a challenge, there was always someone willing to make you feel like shit because you didn’t speak like a native after a few years of study. I knew a lecturer who was notorious for doing this; he made fun of his students’ French. He considered himself above teaching introductory classes, destined for great things, and eventually he could no longer reconcile his infantile narcissism with the struggling life of an adjunct lecturer. He applied to business school at the last minute and works for a company in France today. In the States, he’d just be another worker bee, but of course in France he’s somehow a “special” worker bee, living not the life of yet another wage slave, but une aventure formidable.

But even without those people, every French major knows the following experience: studying French for several years, and then going to France, and realizing you can’t follow a fucking word. Simply put, it takes balls to bring your foreign language out of the classroom laboratory, and if someone does that, don’t they deserve encouragement rather than ridicule?

Of course, buried under all this were some legitimate complaints. Take my senior capstone class for instance, full of French majors who couldn’t speak a word of French. They read the English translations of the assigned readings and on the whole we just sat there with our professor, whose enthusiasm diminished and frustration built to the point where she played The Beatles’ All You Need is Love for the class in an attempt to get us talking, at least in English. But no one took the bait. Everyone sat there quietly and her passion for teaching breathed its last.

Another, equally rhetorical question comes after you graduate: why did you major in French? People often ask that question with a kind of incredulity. Out of all the majors you could pick, you chose…that one?

Why’d I do it? Because it challenged me. My high school didn’t prepare you for college. Like any good public school, it prepared you for life in the working world. I was raised to see going to college as something prestigious, but while colleges pretend to have standards, the truth is they’ll admit just about anyone who applies, only to have them weeded out later.

As a general rule, if they tell you upfront that an endeavor is “what you make of it”, run for your fucking life. You’re better off going to a vocational school and learning some tangible skills than taking on mounds of debt for a degree that (supposedly) qualifies you to speak a foreign language no one outside campus can understand.

High school replenishes the servant class. None of us were prepared for college-level work, and I made a D on my first college French test. My high school French teacher wasn’t much help. The woman didn’t really speak French so much as she spoke of French: it’s much harder than Spanish, it’s the most difficult Romance language to learn. A bully who openly played favorites with her students, she spent the twilight of her career teaching only English Lit, French removed as an elective due to lack of interest.

I took the “D” as a challenge to get better, and five years later, the first question forced me to give an answer. So I did.

I was going to France to teach English.

The Assistant d’anglais program was not only going to save me from the working world, but several other French majors too. We prepared our applications, all our documents, gathered our reference letters and sent everything to the French Embassy in DC, with the assurance from our professors that everyone gets in.

I was certainly confident. March, 2008, I told friends in family that I was going to France. I had Lille at the top of my list, followed by Caen and Rouen. My plan became clear: I was going to spend two years teaching English in France. After that, I was going to do my Master’s and PhD in French Linguistics at a university in France, before returning to the States to seek a tenure-track position. I would have finished my Doctorate before my current age (32), and would spend the rest of my life climbing the academic ranks in a cushy job doing what I loved.

About a month after sending in my application, I realized I’d forgotten to include a passport photo. I emailed the woman at the embassy about it, asking if I could send my photo separately. Here’s a highlight of her encouraging response:

First of all, you needed to include THREE passport-sized photographs… the instructions on page 1 of the application explicitly say to staple a passport-sized photo to each application…

No, you cannot send the pictures serarately, there are simply too many applications coming in, it would be an impossible task to attempt to find your application and match it up with the missing photos.

She did show mercy, and emailed me the next day, telling me to send in the photos. I rushed them out and waited, assured by people who’d done the program in the past that everyone gets accepted.

Then May came. Two girls in my capstone class received their acceptances via email. I remember checking the teaching program forums and receiving a heap of conflicting information. Either…

a) All acceptances have already gone out

or

b) Some acceptances now, some later, so if you haven’t received yours yet, don’t panic.

I chose b, panicking more, and I eventually emailed the woman at the French Embassy, who informed me in an unsigned email that all acceptances had been sent out. The email a few days later confirmed it: France was out. And here I was, a week from graduating, no plan.

Not getting accepted to the Assistant d’anglais program was a pivotal moment in my life. How pivotal?

It’s possible that if I had simply included passport photos with my application, my daughter would not exist. A strange thought, but who’s to say for sure? Our professors assured us that everyone gets accepted, but what none of us understand was that there were too many people, and not enough openings. Someone was going home disappointed, and I was one of them.

Do I regret not getting picked? For years I did, and I think some small part of me always will. I enjoyed learning French, and although I can follow French podcasts fairly easily, I know that I will always lack the finer idioms and slang and natural speech that only comes from living in-country for an extended period of time. Me listening to Europe 1’s Libre Antenne is my attempt to justify all the time I spent studying French. It can’t all be a waste, can it?

On the other hand, there were the people. When I panicked and applied to grad school afterwards (asking one of my profs for a big favor), the lecturer I mentioned earlier tried to torpedo my application. A pathological liar, he referred to himself as a “faculty member” and a “Professor of French”, and I love the plausible deniability “Professor of French” gives you. Lecturers who only hold a Master’s degree are not professors, even in the longest stretch of the word, but referring to yourself as a “Professor of French” rather than a “French Professor” gives you just enough plausible deniability so that if someone calls you out on your bullshit, you can claim that you weren’t committing professional fraud, you meant professor in the sense of teacher, and that you taught French.

As I consider reenlisting for another tour, I’ve thought about what might’ve happened if I’d gone to France. Maybe my French would have hit that C1 level, and maybe I’d be on the tenure-track today, living the life of the mind. Maybe.

Or maybe I’d have to refer to myself as a “Professor of French”.

In the meantime, I’ll listen to Libre Antenne and keep my tools sharp. Why? Because of what I know.

I know I’m doing twenty years in the Navy in the same way that I “knew” I was going to France after graduation. In the same way the people kicked out by the Enlisted Review Board knew they’d get a pension after twenty.

When you get down to it, you don’t know a fucking thing.

Christmas 1995: a review of Donkey Kong Country 2

Christmas as an adult, the same routine:

Mom: What do you want for Christmas?

Me: (long silence) I don’t know.

Why is this question so hard to answer now? Used to, it was easy. As a child my parents didn’t have to ask and at some point a transition happened, from telling them what I wanted for Christmas to being asked. From the primary concern in my life to an afterthought. From Super Nintendo games to…money?

Clothes?

I used to feel sorry for those kids who woke up to blue jeans under the tree. Last Christmas I thanked my sister for my new flannel shirt. It’s red and black.

It matches the one she bought my wife.


You can’t rank the best Christmases by looking too far past your childhood. Whenever the transition happens (and for me I suspect it happened after college, not counting the two years I spent in China. Those were special circumstances), it changes something fundamental in your life. It marks the drop, from childhood to adulthood, from playing SNES all day to “adulting”, the current phrase for people my generation pulled kicking and screaming from their long-term adolescence to the pleasures of paying bills, fighting traffic and raising kids.

My daughter’s five. Her wants are simple, and with each approaching Christmas I think back to my own Christmases. I want to make them as special for her as they were for me, and out of all the great Christmases, Christmas 1995 stands apart.

It came at the right time, in the heyday of 16-bit gaming. Gamepro was still publishing. The Nintendo 64 was still the Ultra 64, not delayed yet, and the PlayStation and Saturn had just come out. There was a particular window when Nintendo hadn’t abandoned the SNES and developers were still pushing the system to its limits while Resident Evil only existed in beta form. In other words, there were good Christmases to come, but 95 won in the presents department.

I had Killer InstinctYoshi’s Island and Donkey Kong Country 2 under the tree.

Rare had torched the gaming world the year before with Donkey Kong Country, billed as the first video game rendered with computer graphics. They had the hype machine going: DKC graced the cover of the December 1994 issue of Gamepro (the first issue my parents bought me), Nintendo Power subscribers received a promotional video hosted by a comedian who’s probably panhandling today. Nintendo pulled out all the stops to make sure the first Donkey Kong Country was the hot seller for Christmas 94.

Donkey Kong Country 2 had no video, but it graced the cover of Gamepro’s December 1995 issue. I’d hoped that would be the start of the trend, but 1996 brought us the Nintendo 64 and the SNES’s death tolls. Christmas 1995 did come at the right time.

Donkey Kong Country 2 earned rave reviews across the board, and on this occasion the reviewers are correct. Good sequels don’t repeat what the first ones did. They examine what the first one did, fill in the gaps, making improvements where needed while leaving what isn’t broken alone.

In Donkey Kong Country 2, Kaptain K. Rool has kidnapped Donkey Kong, locking him away in a castle at the top of Crocodile Isle. Your long climb up Crocodile Isle takes you through a variety of levels and locales. The first Donkey Kong Country had pirate ships and snow levels; Donkey Kong Country 2 ditches the snow levels for swamps, beehives and bramble.

With the success of the first game and Nintendo’s backing, Rare felt free to experiment. Donkey Kong Country 2 takes chances, not just in level design but in extras and sidequests. The bonus levels, a much-hyped feature that Gamepro swore would take players 80 hours to complete makes a return here. The difference is that in Donkey Kong Country 2 they mean something. Completing a bonus level nets you a Kremcoin. 15 Kremcoins gives you access to a Lost World level while all 75 lets you in the Lost World’s volcano, where the final boss, Kaptain K. Rool, is pissed and ready for a rematch.

Donkey Kong Country 2 also introduces DK Coins. They are hidden in the regular levels and are prizes for finishing bonus levels in the Lost World. Just as there is an incentive for collecting Kremcoins, your reward for collecting every DK Coin is the coveted 102% completion…and Cranky Kong’s approval as Diddy stands in 1st place in the video game hall of heroes, ahead of Link and Mario.

Diddy returns, this time as the hero. His partner is a female Kong named Dixie, prompting many an under the radar joke in mid-nineties gaming mags, Diddy has the same abilities as the last game while Dixie can use her ponytail to helicopter across pits and dangerous enemies. Together, the two monkeys can throw one another to access out-of-the-way areas, bonus levels and DK coins. Both of them are fairly weak, unable to destroy larger enemies.

The soundtrack is as imaginative as the levels. Each track complements the level, where it’s the Hothead Bop for the lava levels, the Bayou Boogie as you jump from tadpole to tadpole or Stickerbrush Symphony for the bramble levels. In the final Lost World level, you transform into Squawks the parrot, fighting against the wind. Stickerbrush Symphony roars in the background, sweeping you from your real life concerns into the life-or-death world of platform gaming.

1995 in video games. Changes we haven’t seen the likes of since. Think about it: Donkey Kong Country 2 came out the same year the 32-bit PlayStation and Saturn with the Nintendo 64 on the horizon. The last time “next-gen” meant a real change.

Rare understood this, and they could have made Donkey Kong Country 1.5 and called it a day. They didn’t. They pushed themselves, and their hard work and good timing made Christmas 1995 the best, enriching the lives of millions lucky enough to be kids in the heyday of 16-bit gaming.


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Siblings Day & Best Friends Day

It bothers me that more and more people are posting about Siblings and Best Friends Day on social media. Seems like a small thing, but that’s how it starts: a few posts, some messages and one day you’re an asshole because you didn’t send a card and buy a gift.

They’re bogus holidays, like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Days to honor your parents…instead of spending money one day a year, why not honor your parents in other ways? Lead a good life. Treat people well. Don’t lock them away when they’re old, take care of them.

Of course, you can’t take care of them if they’re a threat to themselves and others. If Dad’s brandishing the kitchen knife, then you’d better send him to a home.

Unless it’s time to cut the cake.

Never Heard of It

Today is my birthday, and last night my division had a farewell dinner for someone who’s going to Forecaster School. Nobody wants to hang out with their co-workers outside of work. For me it’s right at the bottom alongside Mandatory Fun with things I want to spend my limited free time doing.

And I mean limited free time. One can be forgiven for thinking that shore duty means you have more time to yourself and what you want to do, but our schedule nixes that idea. Right now we work six days in a row, off three days, on three nights, and off three more days before the cycle starts anew. We went from twelve hour days to six, but the trade-off is that we are there more days a month, and if there is something going on that requires all hands (uniform inspection, for instance), then that’s another day you won’t have. Combine that with any collateral duties (extra duties you aren’t compensated for) that take place on your off-days, the extra work and less manpower, and it’s no wonder some people are dropping chits to return to sea duty six months early.

The dinners themselves can be awkward affairs. Sometimes it depends on the choice of venue. In the Navy, we call the dinner a Hail and Farewell: you hail the new people aboard and say farewell to the people who are leaving. The trouble starts when not everyone shows up — the first three I went two, one guy just didn’t come — and it gets no better when you’re sitting around the table, wishing you were elsewhere. Nothing to talk about except work.

I’ve been to four so far in San Diego, and I’m happy to report this is the least awkward division I’ve ever worked with. For instance, we actually talk to each other. Isn’t it great how sometimes the smallest things can make the biggest difference?

Last night I skipped beer and stuck with water, and I ended up chatting with my co-worker’s son, who is 12.

Co-Worker’s Son: Do you like to play any online games?

Me: Not in a long time. When I was your age, I played this game called Starcraft.

Co-Worker’s Son: Never heard of it.

Oh man. I can’t think of a more appropriate way to ring in my 32nd birthday.

One benefit of joining the Navy: working with kids fresh out of high school means I have to stop bullshitting myself about my youth.