It’s funny. Sometimes I have a million ideas for blog topics running through my head but when I actually try to put them down on ‘paper’ I get writer’s block. I suppose it’s not all that strange; writing, according to Stephen King in his book On Writing, is mostly about practice. He says that in order to become an author you should be reading 4 hours and writing 4 hours every day. That doesn’t help me much for writing these entries based on my time limitations, but I think that my inability to write my blog is an indicator that I’m still not experienced enough. Like I mentioned in some of my initial posts, I created digitalKI not because I’m interested in sharing my ideas with the world but because I like writing. This is one of the best ways for me to practice and I find that the casual tone of most blog posts to be perfect practice for creating actual dialog in the short stories I write. I definitely think I’ve been making some progress but there is still a lot of work to be done. Living in Japan has been a wonderful experience, but at the same time it has also done tremendous damage to my ability to communicate normally using English. At least by maintaining this blog I’m able to get in some much needed practice. With that said, I think I’ll mention two things today and try to keep it light. There are a fair number of disturbing political stories going around right now and I’d rather not focus on those for now.
First of all, I finally checked out that movie Pan’s Labyrinth by director Guillermo Del Toro. If you haven’t seen this movie yet you need to drop whatever you are doing and rent it. The movie is a very dark fairy tale for adults that takes place during the end of World War 2 in fascist Spain. I won’t lie to you – the movie does contain a lot of violence. It’s not gratuitous in my opinion considering the context of the story, but for those of you looking for a light movie, you won’t find it with this title. Without getting into too much detail concerning the story, it follows a small girl named Ofelia who is supposedly the reincarnation of a princess who fled her kingdom. Ofelia stumbles upon the location of the old kingdom and is told how she might return to rule along side the king and queen. At the same time, her stepfather is the fascist captain trying to destroy the resistance in the surrounding hills. The two stories play off of each other and create a tremendous sense of suspense and anguish as you see the fate of each of the characters unfold. I cannot recommend this movie enough, and if this movie sounds interesting to you based on the description, you really owe it to yourself to get it. On a side note, the movie is all in Spanish with English subtitles – but we know this kind of thing doesn’t bother you, right?
Second, I finally got the game Guitar Hero 3 this past weekend. I suppose it’s not that big of a deal to all of the American players who have been enjoying the series for a while now, but my experience with this genre goes a lot farther back. I used to be a big fan of the Guitar Freaks series here in Japan, and I was one of “losers” who had the guitar controller for the original PS. Guitar Freaks was one of many music-related games made by Konami (this list includes DrumMania, Dance Dance Revolution and BeatMania) and although it was a lot of fun, it mostly only appealed to a niche market of gamers who liked music. The guitar only had 3 keys, and despite what you might think, the songs were really, really hard on the most difficult setting. Eventually I moved on from Guitar Freaks to BeatMania, but I always enjoyed the game. This is why I was a little skeptical that a game like Guitar Hero might catch on in the US. To my surprise, Guitar Hero is not only fun, but it’s a million times better than its Japanese counterpart. The biggest reason for this is the choice of music. Guitar Freaks used mainly a set of generic rock music generated by synthesizers, and Guitar Hero uses real honest-to-goodness music including the Rolling Stones, Santana and the Dead Kennedys. The second benefit of playing Guitar Hero is the actual game controller. The guitar for Guitar Freaks was a very small, hard to hold, light piece of plastic whereas the one I have for Guitar Hero is much heavier, made from higher-quality materials and has a really nice whammy bar. The game is not really anything new, but it is the small touches that really push it over the top. I was definitely surprised when I found out that Guitar Freaks was coming to the US, but now that I’ve actually tried it, I’m quite impressed. If Rock Band improves on the drum controller that was released here as well, then it should be a very cool game.
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