A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sunday, June 19, 2011

On Portal 2 and my nearly non-existent gaming cred

It's been a while now, but Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers recently finished Portal 2 on his gaming channel. I highly recommend watching Hank play both Portal and Portal 2; both are brilliant.

Side note: I actually prefer Hank's gaming channel to the main Vlogbrothers channel because it's more...spontaneous, maybe? I feel like the Vlogbrothers try a little too hard to be profound sometimes. (Maybe that's projection on my part. :D)



I've never really been much of a gamer. My eye-hand coordination leaves a lot to be desired, and I've never really had the time (or, for that matter, the spare cash) necessary to really get into gaming. Mostly, though, I just like watching people play games than actually playing them. That possibly says something profound about me, about me being a spectator who narrates life as a story rather than living it like Andrew on Buffy (speaking of, I just finished S7! :D), but that's probably a subject for another blog post.

And wow. I was so...well, touched by the end of Portal 2. The turret opera was so beautiful and appropriate, and tears were literally streaming down my cheeks, about as much as I bawled at the end of Toy Story 3. That's saying something. And SPAAAAACE. So epic.

Is that weird? Is it weird that a game could be so profound? It must be, to you. Let me give an example.

Cave Johnson: When life gives you lemons? Don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's going to burn your house down! With the lemons! I'm going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!

GLaDOS: Burning people! He says what we're all thinking!

That is life. Life is filled with pain and suffering. Hell, life is pain--well, most of the time, anyway. I've realized that recently. Nihilism suggests that the only way to not feel that pain anymore is to die. But then why do we live? Why do we keep going despite that?

Cave Johnson has the answer, a semi-existentialist answer: the point to life is to take all that pain and give it the middle finger, to derive satisfaction from the rejection of pain.

AND I'm being way too pretentiously profound again. I could probably think of more ponderings along those lines, but for now, that's all I've got.
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