note: this game came out ten years ago, so I’m going to speak about spoilers freely

I finished Final Fantasy X a few weeks ago. I’d started playing it a long time ago, but the horrible voice acting grated on my nerves and I stopped playing. But, as I was making a list of games I owned but hadn’t completed, I decided to give Final Fantasy X another shot. And I ended up getting sucked into a story that I enjoyed for its uniqueness. Final Fantasy VI and VII are essentially the exact same story. In fact, the reason I have always been mystified about the love for Final Fantasy VII is that Final Fantasy VI did the same thing with a larger cast and more emotion. And Final Fantasy IX was essentially a love letter to Final Fantasy fans full of inside jokes and references. Final Fantasy X is, to borrow a phrase from The Giant Bombcast, a Japanese-ass game.

There was a time when I loved video games.  I subscribed to EGM and EGM2.  I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news.  I read IGN religiously.  The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation.  Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions.  Most of the video games of that time period were still very arcade-y in nature.  Or they were platformers like Mario or Tomb Raider that had the flimsiest excuse for a plot.  Yo, the princess got kidnapped again.  Run through a bunch of levels to get to her.  No exposition or reason for anything going on.  You just needed to complete these tasks to unlock the final boss fight.  Of course, games were starting to have cut scenes between levels to keep the narrative going.  And I remember the great FMV flame wars that caused.  Were you just working to unlock expository videos?  This was better than the Mario case, but there was still just a small correlation between what you were doing to get through the level and what was going on in the story.  The biggest exception was the movie tie-in game, but those tended to have gameplay elements that were full of suck.

It’s been a little over a year, so I wanted to make a new, updated list of the podcasts I’m currently listening to.  For shows I covered before, I’m just going to copy the description over, verbatim.

Science

The Naked Scientists - This has nothing to do with nudity.  It’s a British thing, like The Naked Chef.  This great British radio show covers science topics equivalent to what you’d read in Discover Magazine in the USA.  It’s informative while being entertaining, and I learn a lot every week.  (Approx 1 hour long)

Today’s Top 200 Photo features me again.

photo #118 is:

I wanted to play around with ideas of censorship and division of photos into frames.

Back to Cornell for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #199 is:

This is Cornell’s famous clock tower and the attached Uris Library. The clock tower is called McGraw Hall. I knew that at some point in my freshman year, but pretty much everyone just calls it the clock tower. It houses chimes that are played throughout the day. Every quarter hour it’s the usual chimes that every clock tower plays. About four times a day they play a few songs. At least once a day they’d play our Alma Mater. I loved hearing that when I walked through campus. It almost always brightened my spirits and made me feel happy to be a student there. Also every day (or nearly every day) they played the evening song at 1800. At one chimes concert I attended they cheekily said that it “resembles Oh Christmas Tree”. No, it IS “Oh Christmas Tree”. But they invented these songs back before copyright. For example, I learned that something like four other schools have the exact same Alma Mater song as ours. And I think that it, like The Star Spangled Banner, also was originally a drinking song. According to Wikipedia (caveats about the accuracy of Wikipedia apply), our Alma Mater, “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” is “set to the tune of “Annie Lisle”, a popular 1857 ballad by H. S. Thompson about a heroine dying of tuberculosis.” Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the Alma Mater “theft”:

Cardinalis cardinalis is featured in today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #120 is:

Danielle and I love cardinals. We love how bright red they are, their “masks”, their mohawks, and the way they hop around on the ground. The funniest thing about cardinals is that they try to act tough with the smaller birds, but the cardinals are the first birds to run/fly away whenever something scary happens. And they’re the last birds to come back to eat.

I’m featured in yet another Top 200 Photo.

photo #121 is:

I was just looking for a quick photo when I was trying to make sure to do one photo every day, but I wasn’t yet working on a 365 Project.

It’s time for yet another Top 200 Photo.

photo #122 is:

I created this photo to celebrate my 1000th photo uploaded to flickr. Now I have 7506 photos.

Otakon and video game characters in today’s Top 200 Photo!

photo #123 is:

I’ve mentioned my love of Final Fantasy before. And that was the main reason for photographing the girl on the left. I saw the moogle and had to photograph her. Later I found out she is a character from Final Fantasy X. Every time I see this photo I’m filled with regret that I chose to do it in landscape orientation to include her friend (From Elite Beat Agents) because the bottom half of the costume is very intricate. It was only my second time photographing at Otakon and I was very nervous to ask people to take their photos and then I tended to rush through it. I’ve gotten better with each Otakon, but I’m still working on getting over it completely.

An interesting self portrait in today Top 200 Photo.

photo #124 is:

One of my favorite things about photography is how it can allow us to see what is impossible to see with the naked eye. Nowadays I tend to do that by freezing action or doing macro photography. Back in the early 2000s I mostly did that with Photoshop. Sometimes I just played with painterly effects. But one of my favorite genres at the time involved exploring the dimension of time along with space. So I created a series of photographs like this one were I imagined that the camera could capture time as well as space. (I would later learn how to recreate this with flash and without any aid of Photoshop)