Could we maybe pretend I said it right the first time?

That I took the road best traveled

and shouted love, love love -

That I marched to the tune of your drumbeat heart,

stayed cliched at your doorstep with roses and tux

at the ready.

Could we act like even though I didn't know

the steps

that I danced anyways?

That I didn't go slow when you were fast,

didn't crush toes

as you waltzed past?

Indulge me my fantasy of indulging yours

of not watching breathless from the sidelines

There's more of me that meets the eye, I, aye,

but maybe it was you that I denied.

We are subject to the object of our affections
Infected with invective exaltations
united by discordant conversations
Every contradiction, a proclamation:
Love is a knot
We don't untie.

False Truths

Sometimes I worry that words are false truths

spent after the fact – or before

but never during.

We talk ourselves into, through, and out of,

spin the story,

set the stage -

but ignore what's already on the page.

Do words hold power or do people?

If we justify, is it just?

Is the heart an open book, a ticking clock?

Or is it just a heart?

Maybe it's not wrong to say “this is why

I chose to pick up that guitar”

if it keeps you playing.

Maybe it's not wrong to write down words

of courage for when you have none.

Maybe it's not wrong

to say I love you

I love you I love you I love you

because I do.

I do.

I really do.

Brian assists Devon with GDS2 submission.

Brian has gained a level!

Brian attempts new attack: VICTORIOUS MONOLOGUE

---

I'm hanging upside-down from a cliffside by a shoelace-thin piece of rope knotted precariously around my left pant leg, which is on fire, and the only thing that I can think about is how this would be a great place to begin a story. In Medias Res, they call it, which means “into the middle of things”. The point before my certain death by a flaming descent from a massive height should probably be considered a bit more penultimate in the story, or ab iuxta finio, but this does not roll off the tongue quite as well, and when it comes to pillaging dead languages for personal use, sound is the only thing that matters. When human society dies out forever, the great writers of our history will be more or less completely ignored by whatever comes next - but the word “Rofflecopter” might still come up as an expression of amusement in casual conversation.

The pant leg, incidentally, is what is on fire. Not the rope, though that will happen eventually. I can understand how that sentence could be confusing.

The thing about In Medias Res is that it has a lot of punching power. Writers are always looking for that good first sentence, often before they even know what they're writing about, because like all good communicators they know it is best to get to the point first and then marvel at the details later. Questions like Who am I? What's my story? How did I get to this point? are less important than the ones running through my concussed brain at this point, like Will that knot hold?(No), Am I going to die? (Almost certainly), and Doesn't that hurt? (Yes. God, yes).

OK, so here's what we're playing right now:

Mass Effect is a balancing act between the kind of game Bioware wants to make and the kind of game that makes money. This isn't a bad thing; in fact, it's actually a very clever blend of simplicity and complexity, one that allows for a cinematic, once-over and its done experience while smashing at least three times the amount of informational bliss that accompanies any cleverly built world in every nook and cranny of the world.

The wheeled conversation system smartly organizes conversation in a fashion that leads to direct, human interactions, and considering this games age I find it a miracle it hasn't been absorbed into a hundred RPG's. It works, and it works exceptionally well with the realistic facial expressions and postures that each character adapts over the course of a conversation. What every conversation loses to the Paragon - Renegade balance that makes the main character Shepard an iffy balancing act between xenophobically ruthless and mindlessly angelic, it gains in the simple emotional power that talking to people has. I don't find Shepard a good character, as main characters often aren't - but the slight sacrifice of interaction with a difficulty has never stopped me from loving every individual piece.

Mass Effect 2 finds the moral uncertainty that the first game didn't have, and it does it while massively improving the balance and interaction of combat, dialogue, and story. I'm not super keen on the way the game shifts from Alliance two shoes to Renegade flunky - adopted by an agency that I've had clearly unpleasant run-ins with in the past, I am forced by the game to adopt a string of people who each have at least one unpleasant mental defect from a Paragon standpoint. But space, and the plot, are clearly open to me as much as it was before: why I am compelled to follow an openly xenocentrist directive as part of the plot seems a little mystifying.

Din's Curse is probably a bad game, but has amazing concepts that drive what some people might call emergent gameplay. Essentially it plays like a heavily complex Diablo clone with shittier graphics than the original, where dungeons actually threaten the town landscape. After taking a quest to kill the boss on level 3, one will find that the boss will, after about two or three minutes, spawn a bunch of skeletons on level 2 (starting a whole new questline), and, after five, send a hero skeleton assassin to start killing random people inside the town. We quickly had to run up and dispatch him, but not before we lost a few civilians in the process.

Logan was AFK for the five minute that the game was fun unfortunately: After depriving the major boss of his lichly burden of unlife, I went back up to level 2 to kill another boss who had already created two uprisings of hellhounds, just after I received a quick text that he had declared war on a rival clan of orcs. Finding the hallway I had missed to the room I had ignored, I entered upon a bloodbath - demon dogs and orc hounds running every which way, archers and mages and sorcerers spraying each other with projectiles. By the time I cleared the room I'd completed all the quests, though I couldn't tell you how or why, only that in the blood-soaked ruin of copper coins and damaged support beams, I, and I alone, had saved the town from true destruction.

Well, that was like good writing. We shall have to do this again sometime.

"Let there be light", he said,

and the light

(feeling conciliatory)

turned on.

"Shit," he said,

"It's fucking magic."

E: Alright, we'll align forces on two conditions.

C: Name 'em.

E: Region C. We want you out of it. Full sovereignty.

C: Psh, like I care about some shit municipality that doesn't border any nation of threat? You can have it. Name it Freestanisburg, I don't care.

E: Second, we need our leader back.

C: Your who?

E: Q. Tall guy, red hair?

Cut to: C and Q. Q is mounted on the wall. C is twirling knives.

C: Con-STAB-ulations! You have been erected to participate in a fabulous game of skill with a prize so fabulous you'll be begging for it at the end. Please keep your hands and legs inside the target zone until such time as they are removed from your body. Direct all questions and complaints upwards in a timely and audible fashion.

Cut to: C and E.

C: Yeah, he may have been shot trying to escape.

CONT.

And then an ultralisk was all like, I'ma eat you, but Case shot it with a canister rifle because he was secretly a ghost. Ghosts are sneaky like that.

The ultralisk still ate them both though.

THE END?!?!

The Greed Stone

The protoss had fallen. Ten meter thick holes blackened with the smooth marks of concentrated nuclear fire had been bored through every point of structural consequence. The last gate sputtered to a halt, the scream of some poor soul lost in transit echoing as it crumbled and broke, pieces thudding softly into the rich jungle soil. The land bore the scars of every missile, every plasma bolt. Over the ashes, large shadows passed, the waiting assortium of mining and training facilities moving into position over the broken ruins.

Sometimes Azorius couldn't help but think of them as vultures.

As his marines took up perimeter positions, Azorius softly kicked at the leg of a gauss-spike-ridden protoss machine, leaking some sort of preservative fluid from a huge central core as it whirred weakly to a halt. Immortals, they were called. Sometimes he thought the Protoss had developed a cruel sense of irony after Aiur. Other times, watching these machines soak the fire of a dozen Crucio Tanks as they advanced on a fortified position, never stopping, never relenting - those times, he had truly believed.

"Sir." The voice came from behind him, rich and warm like hundred-year-old scotch, marred only by the low whirr of a power drill and the clank of machinery. Case was manning an SCV again. A hundred times Azorius had told him not to do it, but he had insisted that it put the troops at ease, knowing that the things were safe enough for even his trusted lieutenant to operate. They weren't safe: they were cheap and expendable, that was the whole point. But Case didn't care. One of these days the damn thing was going to go up in flames and leave Azorius without a lieutenant, but he didn't care. The man drove Azorius half-mad, sometimes.

"They fought hard." He said, still pushing the robotic leg around with a soft-toed boot. Whatever Case had to say, it could wait. His lieutenant knew better than to interrupt. "Harder than usual. They fought like they had to stand their ground. You know, they always used to fight like that. Had to admire them for it. Had to hate them for it. Now, they don't fight like that so much anymore."

"What changed?" Case said, bored indulgence in his voice.

"They lost." Azorius smiled. "They fought like idiots, brave, honorable idiots, and they lost. Now they know better, know how to come at you sideways, when to retreat, when to come out of the shadows like ghosts and when disappear right back into the dark. Now they fight smart - they fight more like us, even. Brave, still. Honorable, yes. But like us.

"But these ones... these ones fought like they did back in the old days. Like fanatics. Like they still had something to protect."

"I think I know what." Case said.

Azorius turned, then, saw the tousled young man leaning casually on the SCV, his left hand upraised in a clenched fist around a control, the machines giant clamp delicately mimicking the motion. Case lowered the clamp, twisted it sideways, and dropped the small round stone into Azorius' hand, where it landed softly and immediately bobbed up into the air like a cork in a dish of water.

It was blue, shockingly blue, with gold inscriptions in an alien language and indecipherable pictographs. Like so many Protoss devices it glowed, and spun slowly in the air, and made Azorius feel small and inconsequential and uncomprehendingly young, for all the streaks of grey in his hair, for all the small scars he bore from years of doing business in a time of war. It was old, too old, older than the Protoss, even.

But those colors... Azorius had spent too long in the Combine to not know those colors, the soft blue transitioning into the rich, vibrant gold, the same gold that surrounded them in veined crystalline structures everywhere, the same gold they had come here for, killed for.

It was the color of minerals, of wealth, of want take have. In the warmth of his hand it thrummed gently.

"So, sir, since you're apparently the resident expert on the Protoss now - maybe you can tell me what that it is?" Case said. Case hadn't touched it, hadn't felt it. He didn't know. Briefly, Azorius considered not telling him.

Briefly.

"It is, as you so often like to refer to it," Azorius said, "our meal ticket."

StarCraft II: Writing and Flavor (spoilers abound)

Now that I've reached the end of my sleep-deprived romp through the story of Wings of Liberty, it's about time to look back and wonder exactly where those wings were and what liberty they procured. Certainly not the Hyperion, which hung uselessly in space save for one half-cinematic interlude. The rest of the Terran air force seems an unsafe bet as well, especially since most of it was dedicated almost exclusively to the late game, during which no liberations of any kind occured whatsoever save that of one Sarah Kerrigan, mass murderer and apparently slave of xenobiology.

StarCraft calls out its primary flaw wonderfully in the late game, when everyone gets drunk and has a fit for no reason. But their objections, given a voice, do seem fairly reasonable. Why free Sarah Kerrigan, they ask. What about Mengsk? Are you really fit to command anyone, Mr. Marshal?

And with a fancy speech, a stunningly obvious electrical wire, and a blatantly plagiarized rendition of Greg Edmonson's "Big Bar Fight" from the soundtrack of Firefly, Raynor sweeps it all under the table.

The problem of an unfinished storyline is not really much to gripe about yet, not with two more games on the march, but at the same time the division of StarCraft II's labor seems to have accomplished far too little in the space of one game. Questions like "What about Mengsk?" ride heavy on my mind, especially since the man seems to be a phantom now, his physical presence in a room a virtual impossibility, his influence on events sadly impotent. All of his operatives seem capable of getting along without him. Nobody in their right minds would ever listen to him. And while that brief taste of genuine revolution certainly seems to be what the storyline revolves around, it's true that the new Dominion is the old Confederacy, and what problems it has are hardly fixable by another seat of the pants ousting.

But by all means, let's have Jim and his buddies pick up the Firefly line. The country twang of the music, the small but homey ship against every planet in the galaxy, the roguish antihero, uptight straight man, vicious and clearly traitorous muscle -they've a right to all of it, as far older roguish convict space cowboys than Mal and his cancelled crew. All of this homage merely strengthens the race's identity. But some of its characters don't ascend beyond the rank of cliche, which is why nobody particularly cares what happens to Tychus Findlay, nor have any reason to remember Matt Horners name in a few months time. And Valerian, Valerian Mengsk! There was a story there, and hopefully one that we will be privy to in the years to come. I think perhaps the spread of StarCraft literature has stretched this narrative too far, bringing in too many old familiar faces that are familiar to no one and bothering not one whit to explain or justify their presence.

Wings' strength is in its gameplay, its writing designed to expose a maximum variety of interesting situations and fun engagements. But at the end we're left wanting, and with Raynor now a side character to the new Zerg show, what we are wanting may never come about in the way we want it.