In case you were longing for some sort of post from me I took it upon myself to make a quick one.

Since we have so much of a huge following here (read no following and probably if I ask you all for something I will get the opposite) I figured I’d tell you all how I have already voted in my lovely swing state of Nevada.

OBAMA!!

Comments Galore!

P.S. I heard Wedge55 voted early in his opposite of a swing state California as well, and so did…your MOM!

I haven’t been wowed by a video game screenshot in a good long while, probably because most games these days are painted in shades of brown and gray and almost always look worse standing still than they do in motion. But when the first shots of Valkyrie of the Battlefield, whose US title may or may not be Valkyria Chronicles, showed up online, I was immediately enamored with the PS3 game, despite having no intention of ever owning a PS3 at any point in my life and no idea what sort of game it was. Based solely on the alternate universe World War II setting, albeit an adorable, watercolored alternate universe World War II setting, I assumed it was just another mediocre WWII shooter with a very pretty coat of paint.

This lovely, seven-minute HD trailer, however, makes clear that the game is actually a strategy RPG with a decidedly action-oriented bent, allowing for real time conflicts divided into more traditional turns. Of course, all the genre stables such as leveling, tech trees, and unnecessary acronyms for game systems (in this case BLiTZ – Battle of Live Tactical Zones) are still present. Plus, the game seems to have completely thrown realism out the window, allowing for ridiculous boss fights against lance-wielding super soldiers. Always a plus in my book. In fact, the game actually looks… fun. Valkyrie of the Battlefield/Valkyria Chronicles may yet turn out to be the only reason to own a PS3 other than Everyday Shooter and Metal Gear Solid 4.

At long last, Atari/Infogrames/Whatever they call themselves these days has pledged their support for Steam. Admittedly, it’s a rather half-hearted opening slavo, featuring half a dozen budget titles that few people will care about and fewer still will have even heard of in the first place. Selections range from the dissappointinly stupid Indigo Prophecy to ArmA: Combat Operations, a first-person shooter made by people who haven’t played an FPS in the last decade. Still, the floodgates have been opened, and hopefully it won’t be too long before we see the library of superior Atrai titles already available through Steam’s offensively named rival service, Direct2Drive, show up on Valve’s own content delivery system. I want to buy Neverwinter Nights 2 and the expansion that supposedly makes it fun, Atari, but I’ll only do so through Steam. Get to work, Phil Harrison. Of course, the chances of this actually saving Atari from its third violent death are slim to an immanent EA buyout.

It turns out the Google ads buried in this site’s dead and forgotten pages have continued to draw clicks over the years, slowly (read: one cent at time) accruing a total sum worth paying out by Google’s standards. In fact, I received a letter from Google just a few days ago, reminding me that I had money waiting to be claimed. After many failed attempts to access my AdSense account and a few e-mails back and forth with tech support, I finally gained entry to find a whopping $13.00 waiting for me. At this rate, the site will break even sometime in the near never. Huzzah, and such.

With access to Ye Olde AdSense Account restored, I’ve decided to go ahead and place ads on a few (read: most) of this site’s pages, just to see how they do. It’s against Google’s policies to encourage you to click the ads in any way, but there’s nothing against persuading you not to click them. So, don’t click the ads down there on the right. Please.

The Metroid series has always been one of my favorite gaming franchises. What can I say? I’m just a sucker for intergalactic spelunking with a side of alien archeology and extra platforming, hold the light/dark world mechanic. Despite my unhealthy love for the games, however, I’ve only ever tracked down all the hidden items in Metroid Prime, in part because the game’s so damn good, but mostly due to the helpful audible hum that secret goodies emit. I’m not much of a completionist, especially when the reward for collecting a hundred different doodads or overcoming impossibly difficult challenges is a new splash screen or a slightly larger high score.

Recently, I’ve found myself completely caught up in the flood of Super Smash Bros. Brawl hype that’s washing over the Internet. Being poor, unemployed (confidential to potential employers: hire me!), and a mostly useless human being, I don’t yet own a Wii, so my lusting will remain unsatisfied for a while yet. Nevertheless, I’ve been playing through Super Smash Bros. Melee for the first time in years to remind myself just how great the series is. I started up a brand new save file and have been frantically unlocking all the characters, stages, and trophies. It’s a lot of fun, really. In fact, I’m finding the unlocking of hidden content more entertaining than the spastic fighting itself.

Both the Metroid and Super Smash Bros. series constantly reward you just for playing them. Melee throws coins, new game modes, and trophies at you every time you turn around, rewarding you for doing what you would have done anyway. Similarly, outside of the powerups required for progression, Metroid games are always saturated with hidden treasures – additional missiles, energy tanks, and power bombs – that you often find entirely on accident. And why not? Why shouldn’t you be rewarded just for playing the game? Sure, playing a great game is its own reward, but a heap of bonus prizes thrown on top of the base gameplay adds an extra layer of addiction and allows you to feel like you’re accomplishing something even when you’re not actually any closer to overcoming the next goal.

Many of my favorite series incorporate these hyper-reward systems. The Burnout series, for example, gives you a new car, track, or event every few minutes and manages to hold the attention of people like me who otherwise wouldn’t bother with a racing series. But the real hyper-reward genre, of course, is “loot porn” games such as Diablo, Titan Quest, or Mythos. There’s something extra satisfying about besting some horrific monster, proving the worth of your character and being rewarded with a piñata explosion of potentially awesome loot. The insane number of hours I’ve sunk into Diablo 2 is proof enough of that. It’s like a virtual Skinner box for obsessive-compulsives. We learn to press the big, red button to get a polar bear’s fish biscuit and to kill lightning enchanted skeletons to see “teh phat lootz.”

Look at the people who go out of their way to play Xbox 360 games with easy achievement points, playing simply for an intangible reward. We like being told that we’re doing something useful, and we like being immediately rewarded for our efforts, regardless of whether the reward or the task that earned it were worthwhile at all. Great games can seem incredibly dull without any sort of in-game reward, but they rise to heaven and do Yamauchi proud by constantly throwing marginally useful trinkets at you just for playing them. The choice between a great video game and a decent one with a hyper-reward system is pretty clear in my eyes.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday and I’m busy playing Super Smash Bros. Melee.

You’re probably already aware of Louis Theroux, whose documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church is widely available online. Theroux has hosted several different shows for the BBC over the years, including Weird Weekends, which ran from 1998 to 2000 and followed Louis as he spent time with some of America’s stranger subcultures. Just yesterday, Boing Boing linked to a treasure trove of Weird Weekend movies on Google Video, and I have no misgivings about spending most of Friday afternoon and evening ravenously devouring them.

What makes these documentaries so interesting – aside from their diverse subjects of interesting oddballs ranging from male porn stars and black supremacists to UFO hunters – is Louis Theroux himself. His genuine curiosity for his subjects allows him to insert himself into his documentaries without becoming the star attraction, asking potentially painful or embarrassing questions and surprisingly almost always getting honest answers in return. Michael Apted gets away with asking similarly blunt questions in his Up series because he’s known his subjects – age 49 as of the last installment – since they were seven years old, at one point reminding a London taxi driver that he has failed at every career he has pursued in his life. Theroux doesn’t have the advantage of becoming lifelong friends with the people he’s documenting, and instead penetrates these peoples’ lives so effortlessly because he is open, friendly, and genuinely interested in what they have to say. Even when dealing with his most repelling subjects like Neo-Nazis or the aforementioned Westboro Baptist Church, he humanizes these people by cutting through their personas and rhetoric with his profound curiosity. The show is not just about the subjects themselves, but also about Theroux’s journey to understand them.

So, should you find yourself unusually bored (even moreso given this site’s current involuntary hiatus WAIT, I STILL FUNCTION) and don’t mind spending an hour or two streaming decent enough quality video, you could do worse than randomly clicking a link at the bottom of the Boing Boing post linked to above. Or, if the laws of probability terrify you like they rightfully should, might I suggest a few personal favorites like the episode on white supremacists or maybe the one on gangsta rappers. Of course, for those who haven’t seen it, Theroux’s time spent with the Westboro Baptist Church is immensely interesting, even if it leaves your faith in humanity utterly destroyed.

The Sandman might just be the best comic series ever made. It’s certainly won more praise and critical accolade than any other comic series, and stands as the only comic book to ever hold a place on the New York Times Best Seller List or win a World Fantasy Award. In fact, it may be the only comic to ever win a World Fantasy Award, as the following morning the organization changed its rules so that a lowly comic book could never win the award again.

The series ran from 1989 to 1996, every word of it written by Neil Gaiman, who has since gone on to bigger, though not necessarily better, things. In those seven years, Gaiman crafted a genuine literary comic book, merging history, myth, and fantasy into a dreamscape that included the best elements of the real world and make believe. The series is now collected in ten (actually eleven) books, presenting the monthly issues more or less in the order they originally appeared. While Preludes & Nocturnes, the first book in the series, is far and away the weakest, even in its humble beginnings we can see the masterpiece that The Sandman was destined to become.

This first book introduces us to Dream of the Endless, perhaps better known as The Sandman. Pale, scrawny, and infinitely morose, Dream is the very embodiment of that which all good little goth boys and girls strive to be. In 1916, he is accidentally captured by a British occult society trying to imprison Death, and he remains their prisoner until the chance to escape finally presents itself in 1988. The world suffers in Dream’s absence; many fall under a mysterious sleeping sickness, never waking from their slumber. As Dream reminds the only man left to punish for his 70 years of captivity, all of humanity is lucky they did not succeed in incarcerating his older sister, Death.

Dream returns to find the Dreaming in ruins. He spends the rest of the book tracking down the three powerful artifacts he needs to rebuild his kingdom – his pouch of sand, his mask, and his ruby – that were stolen from him during his imprisonment. During his quest, he earns the ire of Hell and enlists the help of a few DC superheroes, including John Constantine and Martian Manhunter, and battles with JLA villain Doctor Destiny. While they mostly play as temporary sidekicks, the superheroes feel strangely out of place in a world where truly horrific acts are possible. The terror Doctor Destiny unleashes in a small town diner over 24 hours, for example, draws attention to just how impotent most comic book villains’ schemes really are. Thankfully, Gaiman gives up shoehorning The Sandman into the DC Universe after Preludes & Nocturnes, opting to populate his world with his own characters instead.

Gaiman admits in the book’s afterward that Preludes & Nocturnes represents his exploration of various horror subgenres. The dark, ornately framed art certainly matches its subject matter. However, even as Gaiman struggles to find his voice, Preludes & Nocturnes is already laying the groundwork for The Sandman’s future. Dream’s trip to Hell in particular sets up multiple future plot points and hints there’s more to The Sandman than simple horror. Similarly, Dream’s visit with the Hecateae, the three weird sisters from Norse Mythology, Macbeth, and Harry Potter, suggests the series’ more literary aspirations. And as we watch 72 years fly by in the book’s opening chapter, we see Gaiman’s first attempt to merge the narrative of the series with the history of reality.

In many ways, Preludes & Nocturnes also sets up the series’ ending, though realistically, it’s impossible to realize this through a first reading. Looking back, however, it’s easy to see the seeds for the series’ eventual conclusion, and even easier to respect Gaiman for beginning the series with a clear indication of where he wanted to take it, even if he wasn’t quite sure how he’d get there. At several points during the book, Dream comments on how much the world has changed during his incarceration. The Dreaming, obviously, lies in ruins, but other places have changed in Dream’s absence too. The Wood of Suicides in Hell, once a tiny grove, is now an endless forest, and Hell itself is now ruled by a triumvirate, with Beelzebub and Azazel sharing equal power with Lucifer. In the mortal realm, two world wars and rapid technological advances have left their mark on the world. Even the Justice League of America is now the Justice League International, with embassies throughout the world. The fact that the world could change so much without him wounds Dream’s pride, and there’s a sense, even now, that Dream must change with the changing world.

But immortals tend to get stuck in their routine; billions of years of life would do the same to you. The book ends with Dream accompanying Death on her daily duties, but Gaiman’s Death is like no other personification of the grim reaper. With no sickle or shroud, Dream’s sister is a bubbly, down-to-earth goth girl who stands in seemingly stack contradiction with her assigned task. But then again, shouldn’t Death herself cherish life more than all others? Here, the book finally comes into its own in its last 23 pages. Dream confides in his sister that a part of him doesn’t want to return to his duties, and that his quest to escape his captives and retrieve his tools instilled in him a sense of purpose he had never before experienced. Death reminds her gloomy brother that they are Endless; they don’t need to be worshiped like gods to survive and they will exist long after life has left the world. As such, they have a task to do, and nobody else is going to do it for them.

Dream takes Death’s words to heart, and the series only improves from here. The Sandman quickly sheds the strictly linear, MacGuffin-driven plot of Preludes & Nocturnes in favor of more interesting possibilities. Often times, Dream plays but a minor role in his own series or doesn’t show up at all. Instead, dreams themselves become the leading protagonist, as the series shifts between reality and fantasy, history and legend, and manages to build a cohesive narrative out of seemingly unrelated stories. Superheroes are replaced with Greek myths, Egyptian gods, and historical figures – who are far more interesting than musclebound men in spandex anyway – as The Sandman rises above the juvenile trappings of its medium. Gaiman describes the first book in his series as “awkward and ungainly,” but even in its rough beginning it’s easy to see the first hints of The Sandman’s inevitable greatness.

I’ve never liked comic books. In fact, I mostly despise the entire medium. Super hero comics, the industry’s bread and butter, are little more than juvenile fantasy fulfillment featuring characters with backstories tangled up in decades worth of convoluted continuity. Feel free to quote this right back at me after my next epic Transformers update. Individual issues are too short and too expensive, taking months, if not years, to resolve their cross-promoted, soap opera-esque story arcs that leave no lasting effect on characters or their world. Good is good; evil is evil; and despite publishers’ hype, nothing ever changes. In short, comic books are dull.

At one point in 2002, I think, Toastyfrog.com was decked out in a Watchmen theme, even if Archive.org has no record of it, the site’s title character asking, “Who toasts the toastyfrog?” Only vaguely aware of Wikipedia, I turned to Jeremy Parish to find out just what Watchmen was. After all, he had just revealed himself to be more of an expert on the subject than anyone else I knew. Amazon had informed me Watchmen was a 12-issue super hero comic book series that had been collected as a single novel. I had heard about the book before, briefly mentioned in blogs and forums, but always assumed it was just another super hero comic series among many, no different from X-Men or Spider-Man. Its title certainly did little to dissuade this perception. Parish quickly put my fears to rest in an e-mail, assuring me that Watchmen was entirely self-contained with a beginning, middle, and end – not part of a larger comic book continuity – and though it involved super heroes, was tightly scripted and generally excellent. Around this time of year while home from college for winter break, I bought the book to help kill time during the holidays. What I found beneath its bright yellow cover completely changed my reading habits and perception of the medium. I just finished my fifth yearly reading of Watchmen and still managed to uncover plenty of new discoveries hidden between its pages.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is that it can only exist as a comic book (which makes the fact that it’s finally being filmed after so many failed attempts by Zack “300” Snyder all the more troubling). Its pages are littered with a tremendous number of tiny details that foreshadow future developments or outright reveal major plot points long before they enter the narrative proper. Newspaper headlines, graffiti on distant walls, and seemingly insignificant characters shuffling through the background all enrich and flesh out the world, providing hints of what’s to come and filling in what’s already happened. Because you can spend as much time as you want studying a single frame or rip through the pages reading dialogue bubbles and avoiding all else, Watchmen effectively rewards you in direct proportion to the energy you invest in it. It’s a surprisingly interactive experience and a book that takes full advantage of its medium.

It also manages to translate many cinematic techniques, including montage and slow motion, to its paneled pages of still images. The panels are treated like shots from a camera, and only things a camera could record – images, sound – show up on the page. There are no thought bubbles or internal monologues. The book is actually a multimedia experience, despite being limited to images on a page. Besides its blatantly filmic techniques, Watchmen also features excerpts from a character’s autobiography, police reports, internal company memos, and Tales of the Black Freighter, a lengthy comic-within-a-comic that recounts a pirate tale with themes and events that echo those of Watchmen itself. Pirate comic books are very popular in the world of Watchmen.

After all, there’s no need for super hero comics in Watchmen’s alternate version of 1985 where super heroes are real. Or rather, a super hero is real. The only vaguely human collection of energy now called Dr. Manhattan is all that remains of a research scientist accidentally bombarded by an unhealthy dose of radiation in the New Mexico desert. Dr. Manhattan has become the US government’s own personal demi-god, leading to radical advances in technology – electric cars and airships, for starters – and acting as a nuclear deterrent against the Russians. In fact, the good doctor single handily won the Vietnam War for the United States. America loved then-president Nixon so much, that even in 1985 he remains the nation’s commander-in-chief, the 20th amendment repealed.

Other super heroes exist, although there’s little super about them. They existed a full generation before Dr. Manhattan’s accidental creation, in fact. This first order of heroes has long since stepped aside – the lucky ones retired, the not-so-lucky ones are dead or insane – so that a second generation could follow in their footsteps until their vigilantism was made illegal following a 1977 police strike. Nite Owl, a sort of Batman equivalent – wealthy and with a secret basement full of gadgets – has found himself impotent, quite literally, in fact, since giving up costumed adventuring. His former partner, Rorschach, is a hard-boiled detective with a penchant for violence, the inkblots on his mask shifting into a new position in every panel. He continues fighting for justice for a world that no longer wants him, hunted by the police for the two murders they can pin on him. He would be a villain in any other comic. When The Comedian – think Captain America crossed with The Punisher and The Joker – is thrown from his highrise apartment window to the street below, old friends and enemies that haven’t spoken in eight years suddenly find themselves back in each other’s lives as they search for answers and try to solve the murder of their fellow hero, even if he was never quite their friend. Someone’s killing masks, and Dr. Manhattan has fled the planet, leaving the Russians free to invade Afghanistan and heat up the Cold War.

While it deals with global conflicts, Watchmen’s plot primarily uses the escalating Cold War as a backdrop to the ever-deepening mystery behind The Comedian’s murder. This is a complicated book that hops between characters and subplots as often as it leaps through time. Alan Moore wanted to write the Moby Dick of comic books and with Watchmen he succeeds, both in its sheer complexity and in its literary value. The book seriously considers the kind of person that puts on a mask to fight crime in the dead of night and concludes that this is probably the last sort of person in the world you would want protecting you. It takes a psychopath to jump between rooftops at 3:00 AM dressed as an owl, and a special sort of sickness to think it’s doing any good. In fact, Watchmen challenges many of the assumptions of the super hero comic book, which is partly why I’m so captivated by it. It takes a cold, hard look at extraordinary men in spandex as protectors of society and suggests that perhaps society should be thinking of protecting itself from them. Without getting into the finer details of the plot or spoiling any of its most affecting scenes, Watchmen challenges your moral beliefs and your very definition of a hero.

Like Moore’s earlier work (V for Vendetta, Miracleman), Watchmen is a book about personal beliefs taken to their extreme. It doesn’t necessarily provide us with any heroes or any villains either. This is a complex work that deserves a place on any respectable bookshelf, even on one owned by someone with complete contempt for its medium and genre. This book made me appreciate the potential of comic books, which should be called comic books and not “graphic novels” or “sequential art” or any other made-up name to justify the fact that adults read them too. Like video games, comics books are a medium that was first designed as simple pulp entertainment mostly targeted at children, but has since evolved into something more.

I’m glad I sent that e-mail five years ago about a few jpegs on a version of a website that Archive.org assures me never existed. After Watchmen, I read nearly all of Alan Moore’s other books and moved on to discover Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Art Speilelman, among others. As an introduction to the medium, it’s hard to ask for a better candidate than a book that breaks all the rules, points out how ridiculous they were in the first place, and continues fullsteam ahead to tell a story that stands on equal footing with the best from any other art form. Having finished my fifth reading of the book several hours ago, smiling with each new discovery and revelation, I look forward to next year’s reading and the new insight it will bring. Everyone should read Watchmen now, before Snyder’s movie, regardless of its final quality, colors their perceptions of the book. Even if you’ve already read it once, twice, or a dozen times, dust off your copy and read it. This is a work that single-handedly endeared me to its very medium and each year it seems just as fresh, exciting, and poignant as the last.

Megami Tensei Online: IMAGINE is a strangely subtitled Japanese MMORPG set in the Megami Tensei universe. Tokyo is once again at the heart of Armageddon and it’s up to you (and thousands of other players just like you) to “save” the world. For the uninitiated (which I assume is everyone reading this site) Megaten, as fans abbreviate it, is a long-running Japanese RPG series that focuses heavily on demon summoning, character customization, and player choice. Think of it as Pokemon for grown ups. The games are distinctly Japanese, always set in Tokyo (as far as I know), and deal with mature religious themes. It’s no surprise then that the series never made it outside of Japan under Nintendo’s watchful eyes. In fact, the series really didn’t make a name for itself in the West until the last days of the PS2… Well, lastish days. At this rate, the PS2 will never die. If you care enough, and I’m sure you don’t, check out Hardcore Gaming 101’s ridiculously in-depth series retrospective. The Megaten series itself is divided into multiple, subtly different sub-series, including the Persona series and Digital Devil Saga. Various FAQs assure me IMAGINE is set between Shin Megami Tensei and its sequel, but the game’s opening cinematic ends with the title of “Digital Devil Story: IMAGINE,” so exactly where the MMO falls in this Adventure Island/Wonder Boy-esque nomenclatural nightmare is anybody’s guess.

The game’s been in beta for a while now, and is freely available to download and play, so I’ll assume none of the Japanese text in the registration process referred to an NDA. IMAGINE is actually entirely in Japanese, what with it being a Japanese game and all. Still, this hasn’t stopped me from slowly fumbling my way through the game with the help of a few online resources. I eventually managed to create a character named 肉サラダ, which Babel Fish assures me means “meat salad.” I chose the arm computer that best suited my ugly avatar and set forth on my fabulous adventure.

The game begins with a tutorial in what I assume is some kind of VR simulation. The green walls comprised of moving code sort of gives it away. An old man doing his best Big Boss impression walks you through the basic gameplay and sends you to violently murder some unsuspecting slime monsters. Several more tutorials follow, teaching you how to loot fallen enemies and use the game’s menus. Thankfully, besides the old man’s Japanese rambling, each tutorial is also illustrated with large, clearly labeled pictures for those of us unfortunate enough to not understand the game’s moon language.

Eventually, after completing some parts of the tutorial and failing horribly at others, I left the virtual world behind in favor of post-apocalyptic Tokyo. The game begins in a town populated with friendly demons from other Megaten games (which may or may not use models ripped from PS2 entries in the series) as well as other human characters. More tutorials and helpful tips are present here, but I’d had enough dealing with NPCs and my questlog was already full of missions with objectives I couldn’t read or understand. It was time to do some killing.

Despite the language barrier, it’s obvious that IMAGINE is an excellent game that does a remarkable job of translating Megaten’s single player mechanics to an online space. Combat is fast and requires well-timed blocks to avoid being steamrolled by even the weakest enemies. Moves and abilities take time to use, and there’s a great deal of strategy involved in timing attacks and blocks to maximize damage output and minimize damage taken. The game’s skill system is also incredibly deep, with dozens of different skill paths to choose from in order to mix and match your way to a fully customizable class. The game’s a bit grind-heavy, especially when you don’t understand the language and therefore can’t do any of the quests, but combat and customization are both incredibly rich and fun. Atlus, bring this game to the US; I will buy it. Seriously. Just market it as the closest thing we’ll ever get to a Pokemon MMO and everyone else will buy it too.

Like other Megaten games, demon summoning plays a major role in the game. Regardless of your class and skillset, you can initiate conversations with enemy demons to coax them to join your ranks. Succeed, and you gain the ability to summon and level that particular demon. You can only have a single demon out at a time, but you can carry up to six with you and store an additional 50 with the correct NPC. Of course, demon fusing also returns in IMAGINE, allowing you to fuse multiple demons into a single, potentially more powerful creature. Wandering around town and inspecting high level players, it looks like nearly all of the the series’ massive roster of demons has returned. Leveling, customizing, and fusing demons is incredibly rewarding and adds an extra layer of character customization to an already deep game. It’s easy to imagine myself spending hours raising and fusing demons in order to create the perfect companion.

Unfortunately, this game has no chance of every coming out in the United States or any other English-speaking part of the world. It’s a shame too, as even strongarming my way through the experience with only a basic understanding of what’s going on, it’s abundantly clear that IMAGINE is a clever title with more depth and creativity on display than any other MMO in recent memory. It looks like 肉サラダ is stuck on Japanese servers with players he can’t understand for the duration of the beta.

Instructions on how to download the game and register an account can be found in this handy NeoGAF thread by MedievalManIII, who was my questing buddy and fellow ignorant American during my stay in the ruined Tokyo of 202X.

Ulillillia assures us his name is easy to pronounce. And for him, it is. This is not a man that exists in the same reality as the rest of us; he is obsessed with video games and mathematics, afraid of chairs and mirrors, and endlessly captivated by an imaginary game only he can play – The Mind Game. He writes with a devout enthusiasm for his subject matter because his subject matter is his life – his neuroses and hang-ups, his successes and failings. All of it is categorized with a meticulous precision that comes off as absurd to the rest of us, every paragraph and thought clearly labeled and quantified.

The Internet assures me that Ulillillia is actually fairly well known, as far as things that are fairly well known on the Internet go. Until just a few days ago, I had never heard of the man. Now, I find myself unable to get him out of my head. His obsessions have become my own, and I long to see him overcome them.

Ulillillia blames his problems on video games, but it’s difficult to imagine that’s the case. He certainly plays games in a way that is wholly his own, however. He has transformed the linearity of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 into an open-ended puzzle with infinite solutions. In his mind, drowning Tails or triggering a bug are no different from finishing the game. In fact, Ulillillia has spent so much time so completely obsessed with certain games – having spent 500 hours in the second level of Bubsy 3D, for example – that he has long since deconstructed them. He now plays to find what he calls “secrets,” but what the rest of us realize are simply bugs or obvious, unsaid exceptions to gameplay rules. In one video, he shows off 50 “oddities” in Spyro 2. Why is he not working as a video game tester?

His many social hang-ups, for one. Though he has overcome his fear of blue water, he is still so afraid of the words “people” and “person” that he writes them as “peo___” and “per___” instead, and then only if he truly must. Ulillillia is also afraid of chairs, forcing him to update his site and edit the many videos that fill his YouTube account from the floor. These are but a few of his unusual selection of “issues,” as he calls them. Metroid is the reason he can’t stand red ketchup. He rarely showers.

He also seems to be a mathematical genius of sorts, despite only having a high school diploma. Math dictates the very way he thinks, every thought and statement numbered, filed, and organized. His site is a massive, sprawling beast, held together by a strictly rigid system of numbered categories and subcategories. Its pages are filled with charts and graphs detailing his ideas and trains of thought or the specifics of one of his animated GIFs. He offers up several helpful math tips and dabbles in C++, having written a program he uses when editing his YouTube videos. There’s a sense that Ulillillia doesn’t think in the same way you or I do, that his thoughts form a carefully constructed matrix of ideas, and that organizing these ideas is just as important as having them in the first place.

The Internet has decided to figure out what’s wrong with Ulillillia, in the collective, Wikipedia copy-pasting way only the Internet can figure things out. Maybe he has OCD, suggests one Blogspot post. A Something Awful forum thread suggests it may be autism or Asperser’s Syndrome. Maybe he’s just so genuinely different, so unlike anybody else and yet so able to express his differentness with such clarity and poise, that a large group of strangers have grown to care so much about him.

Whether something is “wrong” with Ulillillia or not, his site, his videos, and his life are infinitely fascinating. The Internet is good for very little; this site and the million like it are proof enough of that. But occasionally, someone produces something truly worthwhile, something that could not have existed in any other form. I wrote once, in a post that may or may not still exist somewhere in this site’s archives, that a blog’s real strength is its ability to exist and be updated over time, an autobiography that is written as a per___ lives. A blog left unviolated becomes a record of a per___’s thoughts, ideas, and opinions, recorded forever on a server in a well-cooled basement and available online for an entire world to see. It becomes, in a way, a record of the per___ themselves, or at least as much of them as they were willing to share. Ulillillia shares everything – his exhaustive dream journal, detailed descriptions of his most intimate psychological hang-ups, and a couple dozen videos of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – and we are thankful for it.