Have you ever had a cat sitting on your knees while you kissed a pregnant woman?
I have, sucker!
Category: year26 (Page 36 of 92)
I posted an entry each day during my 26th year of life.
Before watching Shaq Vs. Ben Roethlisberger in all its majesty, our group was channel surfing and some episode of some show was on. A foolish man had thrown an engagement ring into the front yard in either a fit of rage or an engagement ploy.
The conversation went as follows:
“That was stupid. Why did he throw that ring into the yard?”
“Ben Roethlisberger would never have thrown the ring into the yard.”
Katie: “No, because he would have been sacked before he had the chance!”
And…there was no reaction. Because my wife was the person with the most football knowledge in the room (beside, perhaps, me)! There were three other men in the room! It was a wonderful moment for me. I’ve changed her! Into a true Steelers fan! Her jab at Ben was, of course, in jest. He only gets sacked when he’s playing football.
Shaq Vs.? Both irritatingly stupid and somehow brilliant. Oh, and SPOILER, Shaq loses. Both in football and basketball. And life. He won at being tall, though.
In one play, he came onto the field from the sidelines to intercept a pass. WHO DOES THAT BESIDES CHILDREN WHO DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW THINGS IN LIFE WORK?? Shaq does that. That’s who.
There are video games that take me a long time to finish.
I’m reflecting on this tonight because I’m near the end of my first play-through of Mass Effect, a game which I started over a year ago. It took me just as lengthy a time (if not longer) to finish Twilight Princess. If I ever beat Fallout 3 or Eternal Sonata, it will be in a similar timeframe.
Compare these to those shorter action games that I devour quickly: Mirror’s Edge, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Sure, the genre of game has something to do with it. With books, it can be easy to quickly finish a pulp mystery by Harlen Coben but a hefty John Irving can take quite a while.
Still, though, it’s also the attitude the game (or related media) gives off. Certain games are heavy. They present themselves as epic. And when a game or book or movie sends out those signals, it makes it harder to consume quickly. Movies are slightly different because they’re almost always consumed in one sitting, regardless of genre or length or heaviness.
But I find the same thing: a movie with a heavy moral message or an advertised epicness (like, say, a war/holocaust movie or The Lord of the Rings) tends to sit on the shelf or coffee table longer before it gets put into the player. You really have to be in the mood to indulge your senses, to let yourself be weighed down by the media and experience it.
The end result also varies. Finishing a longer game or book, watching a heavy movie, they all have their own rewards. You feel like you really accomplished something. After slowly making progress for a year, there’s a feeling of the overall journey. Of getting somewhere.
There’s a different feeling I get when I consume something quickly, like with Batman or when I read The Prestige recently. There’s a sense of mourning. Of losing something you love so quickly, of a sadness that there’s no more game to play or no more book to read. It’s harder to capture this in movies, but with some of the shorter Pixar films or certain of my favorite films (like Moulin Rouge! or Juno), there’s the sadness of knowing that I’ll never be able to watch the movie again for the first time, never again experience the surprise and awe of seeing certain scenes or hearing certain lines that I had never seen or heard before.
Anyway, I have to get back to Mass Effect. I do actually want to beat it tonight and go to sleep at a reasonable hour.
We taped the Emmys yesterday and watched them tonight. I’m not sure why, but award shows are all about reinventing themselves these days.
It supposedly worked as this year’s telecast pulled in more viewers, although I’d also wager that NPH had something to do with that as well. The overall shake-up, though, seemed to have to do with the order of presentation, grouping types of awards with each other. It was nice to streamline it, but there was a promise of “a complete transformation of the stage” between genres which was wholly unfulfilled.
Also, I’m not sure about Oscar’s decision to have double the number of nominated films this year. First, it puts a serious damper on the annual tradition of watching all the nominated films the Saturday before the actual awards show. Second, I’m not sure it can deliver on either of its promises: that it will allow popular mainstream movies to be nominated or make the race more exciting.
I’ve always also been a bit unclear on the number of nominees per category. Some categories seem to have a set number (usually 5) and some seem to just have as many good nominees as they have that year. Why not be consistent? Either make every category pick 5 nominees or just open it up to however many make it above a certain nomination threshold. It’s sad to see a nominee that clearly won’t win, but it’s also odd to see a film win when it’s in a category of only two.
Ah, well. Award shows are never really about the best of the best anyway. They’re a big political game, and that’s just the way I like them. it’s like trying to reform the election process: an idealistic thought I have once in a while, but ultimately, too much work and doomed to fail.