I Have No Dialogue Option, But I Must Scream

Like a great many other game-playing people, I’ve spent a good deal of time playing Dragon Age recently. In fact, like a great many other game-playing people, I’ve played it more than once. With all the different story paths to explore, it seems like a waste to not play Dragon Age more than once, with big, dialectic choices to be made, and tiny little grace note choices, all coming together, though me and my experience, in interesting ways. It’s a kaleidoscope sort of experience—the beads in the tube remain the same, but when I tumble them around, different edges catch on the mirrors and prisms, giving my eye a different experience with just a subtle shift of the hand. Most of those shifts are very obvious, but some, one in particular, actually, hit in unexpected ways. I submit the obligatory spoiler warning….now!

Relevance of Wrath

Star Trek has been on my mind some lately. For no good reason, really. I was never a true Star Trek fan, you see. A viewer, for certain, and appreciator, indeed, but it never spoke to me the way it did to many of my friends. But they quite enjoyed it, so I did too, though my strongest early memory of Next Generation is when Levar Burton devoted an entire Reading Rainbow to its production. I’ve watched reruns and the like, sampled the various spin-offs—they have their charms, I understand the appeal, they just don’t hold appeal for me.

Statement of Purposelessness

So I have found myself here, and it seems like a good idea to justify that fact, and explain what I intend to do here. Here I intend to give an outlet for my critical mind, directed any direction that strikes my fancy, examining whichever works I feel like examining—works which for the sake of convenience, I’m just going to lump into the category of “the arts”. Often that direction might seem unworthy, it might seem that I’m over-thinking things, and perhaps I will be, but I’ll get back to that. Often my tastes will seem insufficiently varied, woefully uninformed, or out-dated, and often I’ll likely be blathering about things only I notice or seem to care about. Often I’ll seem pretentious or very deranged. And I’ll at times show a callous disregard for proper written English and the conventions of sentence structure.

But I have a love, a love of the narrative experience in its myriad of forms. I love to pull them apart, look at the pieces, see how they fit together, and contemplate how they work, or how they don’t, and my hope shall be that this will be a proper outlet for that drive. Here, I intend to pick apart and study the media I enjoy, the films, books, shows, and games in which I partake, perhaps coming to an insight, perhaps not. Either way, I get to share, and hope some of you out there will come and do the same.

Yes, I am likely to write often about The Wire.