Friday, July 31, 2015

Remembering Big O

Back in May of 2013 I did a post called Remembering IGPX, which was a collection of thoughts about a TV show I watched years ago. I am thinking I might try to make something of an irregular series of that sort of post, and the series would be called “Remembering.” These posts are not intended to be in-depth reviews or analysis of shows that I watched when I was younger, though you will find bits of both in them. Rather, I hope the discussions that follow to mimic what it would be like for us to be sitting down together and me recounting to you the show, as I remember it. When we remember things in the past we don’t always remember everything in chronological order, level or importance, or exact detail, so I won’t cover every facet of the show, but just what stood out to me. Also, I am going to try to write these posts with a minimum usage of the internet for reference material, other than images to use for the posts. Consequently, there may be a few factual errors and I apologize in advance if I get anything wrong. If I’m not entirely sure on something I will try to clearly state so. Theses posts will also contain spoilers for whatever show is being discussed, so consider yourself warned.

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I had seen some anime during my junior high and high school days, but it was in college that I started watching a wider array of anime TV shows, and television in general. Granted, it was still a modest number of shows and I could never claim to be an anime geek, but compared to up to that point it felt like a broad new horizon. One of the animes that I watched in college was a show called Big O, which ran for two seasons.

Paradigm City
Big O takes place in Paradigm City; a city with funny name but an interesting premise. Forty years ago something happened but no one knows what it was and no one has any complete memories of anything that happened prior to forty years ago. Whatever happened was clearly catastrophic, as there seems to be almost no known human civilization beyond the greater area around the city. There are hints of foreigners beyond the wasteland, but it is not until the end of the first season of the show that you get a definitive answer. The metropolis of Paradigm City is itself split into two worlds. The affluent and well connected live within the massive domes that cover a good chunk of the city, while everyone else lives in the urban sprawl that makes up the rest of the city. Interestingly enough, although it is called Paradigm City, there are a number of times where the city is shown from an aerial view and it is clear from those shots that Paradigm City is in fact New York City. There’s even one time in the show where the river next to the city is called the Hudson. No mention is ever made about the city having a different name in the past, so you just have to assume that it’s always been that way for the sake of the story.

Residing within Paradigm City is the show’s cast, led by protagonist Roger Smith. Roger is a professional negotiator who holds substantial wealth and lives in his own private tower, albeit outside the domes. What sets Roger apart from most other people in Paradigm City, however, is that he (secretly) pilots a massive robot called Big O, and now you know where the title of the show comes from. Roger is also unique in that he occasionally experiences flashbacks to Paradigm City prior to forty years ago, indicating that he possesses memory fragments from that time. This is puzzling because Roger is less than forty years old, and I don’t remember if the show’s finale gave a clear explanation or not for how Roger has his memories.

Playing second fiddle to Roger is R. Dorothy Wayneright, referred to simply as Dorothy, a female android. I guess androids are technically gender neutral, but Dorothy has a feminine figure and voice, and something of a feminine personality. Like Roger, she possesses (within her hard drive) memories from prior to forty years ago, though this is not known until later in the show. Dorothy becomes something of Roger’s assistant at the start of Season One after Roger takes on a case involving the man who built Dorothy, and their relationship develops into one of Dorothy sometimes annoying Roger, sometimes providing bits of comic relief, and sometimes saving Roger’s life. The interplay between Roger and Dorothy is one of several relationships between humans and androids that the show explores.

Rounding out the trio of characters that I’ll discuss in any depth is the titular Big O itself. A giant robot in the Big O universe is generally referred to as a “megadeus,” however a small number of giant robots are distinguished from the others by being called a “big.” Roger’s megadues is one such robot and holds the name Big O. When I watched the Big O series, I noted how different Big O’s design was from other anime robots at the time. Big O is neither sleek nor fast, and is lacking many of the “cool” factors of most robots in anime, such as wings, energy swords, and infinite ammunition. Instead of looking futuristic, Big O looks like robot designed during an earlier age with stovepipe limbs and giant rivets/screws throughout its exterior. Its primary means of attack are its seemingly indestructible fists, which are augmented by massive pile drivers that are built directly into its arms. Big O moves around Paradigm City using the city’s abandoned underground subway network, and comes bursting out of the ground at Roger’s command, ready to do battle.

Who chose who?
You might be wondering why I chose Big O as a character to discuss in the last paragraph. Normally giant robots are just instruments of the people who pilot them, but in this case I think it’s fitting to call Big O a character because it, and all the other megadeuses of the show, is a actually semi-sentient machine. Although Big O does not talk or interact with the other characters in the way a person normally would, Big O is clearly alive in some way. It can move on its own without Roger and at a number of times demonstrates independent thought. Actions like these by Big O and other megadueses lead Schwarzwald, one of the show’s villains, to question whether or not megadeuses even need pilots and if it is really the megadeuses that choose their pilots and not the other way around. In the second season of the show there is an episode where a megadeus actually rejects and kills its pilot. Just how sentient the megadeuses are is unclear, but they more than mere unthinking machines.

Roger's version of the Batmobile
Now, I would be grossly negligent if I failed to mention that there are a number of notable similarities between the Big O series and the Batman series. Both star a wealth guy with an alter ego that defends their respective cities. Both Roger Smith and Bruce Wayne have a faithful butler who is mysteriously just as skilled in combat as in cooking. Both Roger and Bruce drive a large, black, heavily armed car. Both Roger and Bruce are connected to the local police chief. Both Roger and Bruce have an on-and-off romantic relationship with a sometimes friendly, sometimes antagonistic female who has a habit of wearing form-fitting outfits. Both shows even have a white-faced sadistic villain who revels in inflicting pain and chaos. From what I understand, the studio that made Big O also worked on the Batman animated series from the 1990s, which would go a long way to explaining the similarities. I wouldn't go so far as to say Big O ripped off Batman, but the parallels are striking indeed.

There goes another building
For a hero, Roger has a strange disregard for collateral damage. Though not all of Big O’s battles take place within Paradigm City, when they do you can make a safe bet that multiple buildings are about to get destroyed. Dan Datsun, the man with the unenviable job of leading the Paradigm City police force, laments this fact from the very first episode, where Big O throws another giant robot into a nearby building. I can only imagine that construction is the biggest industry in Paradigm City, rebuilding the structures damaged or destroyed whenever giant robots do battle and paving over the massive sinkholes created by Big O emerging out of the ground. On top of this would be the necessary human casualties from every engagement. If we were to try to do an honest estimate, I would suspect that Roger and his megadeus are directly or indirectly responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars of property damage and a few thousand deaths. But Roger is the hero, and Big O is not exactly a realistic show, so let’s not dwell too much on these things.

Venetian blinds - a noir classic
Being an older anime, Big O can look a little rough compared to some of its modern counterparts, but it did have a distinctive film noir look, primarily in the first season. The show made frequent use of low-key lighting and the disorienting camera angles, much like old film noir movies. Roger himself is something of a noir archetype; a disillusioned former cop haunted by the past. This noir style was scaled back somewhat with the animation changes in Season Two, but it is still noticeable. The animation of Season Two was a bit cleaner and crisper, but the animation from Season One was more distinctive.

Big O squares off with Big Fau
It’s fitting to wrap up this memory exercise with how Big O concluded at the end of Season Two. Big O is one of those shows with an ending that befuddled some, disappointed others, and led a number of people to seriously analyze it to try to figure out exactly what happened. As Roger battles it out with the show’s ultimate villain, it appears the apocalypse of forty years ago is about to be repeated. In a crazy twist, it turns out everything that Roger and everyone else has been doing is part of a show. This had been suggested at a number of times during the series, and the confirmation meant all the characters were just actors who had no idea what the script was or who was directing everything. There are even massive stage lights high above the city, though they had never been visible due to Paradigm City’s perpetual cloud cover. The “director” appears in the form of a megadeus and begins erasing everything, and Roger makes a last ditch effort to negotiate with the director. In a TV control room, a separate Roger, Dorothy, and the director (in human form) are watching themselves play out the scene on the monitor. The director and Big O (with Roger and Dorothy inside) walk into each other and in a flash of light the show returns to where it began in episode one.

So, what exactly happened? I’m not one of those people who seriously analyzed the ending so I can’t give you a definitive answer. My best guess is that Roger managed to talk the director out of completely erasing the world, and even though it appears that the world was reset back to what it was in the first episode, there are a few small differences so it must not have been a complete reset. Maybe Roger is now the “director” and will change the fate of Paradigm City. I don’t know. Big O’s ending is one of those ones those divisive ones. Personally, I’m ok with ambiguous endings so it didn’t bother me too much. I think I remember reading somewhere that Big O was intended to have a third season but it was cancelled and so the writers had to pack everything into the last few episodes of Season Two. Whether this is true or not, I do not know, so I consider this a questionable explanation for the ambiguity of Big O’s ending.

And that’s how I remember Big O. It wasn’t the best anime, but it was an interesting one, and I think it’s fitting for this first (well, actually second) post in this series about remembering to be about a show where memories play an important part of the story. It also had plenty of moments like the gif on the right. Giant robots fighting each other never gets old.

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Gamefly


If you’ve spent any amount of time in the world of video games, you’ve probably heard of the game rental service Gamefly. Even if you’re not a gamer, you may have at some point seen a commercial on TV or online for it. Gamefly is a service that operates like the DVD service for Netflix. You set up an account, create a list of games that you’d like to play and then games are mailed to you as they become available. When you’re done with a game, you put it in the return envelope and send it back to Gamefly for the next game on your list. I’ve used Gamefly off and on for a number of years now, and thought I’d share a few thoughts on it.



Is a Gamefly subscription worth your money? That depends. If you’re looking to rent the latest and most popular games you might be disappointed. Understandably, the games that have the highest demand are the hardest ones to get and you’re more or less just hoping to get lucky with those. However, if you’re like me and you’re always several months to a year behind on game releases, then Gamefly works well because after a number of months most people have moved on to other games and the availability of games that have been out for awhile is usually high.



As a service overall, Gamefly is fairly good. So far I’ve only had two times where I got a game disc with issues, and those were both years ago during the earlier days of Gamefly. In fact, as I was thinking over this post it occurred to me that nearly all the issues I’ve had with Gamefly were back in the first year or two that I was a subscriber, so there’s been improvement as time passed. The only ongoing issue I have with Gamefly, which is honestly a minor one, is that there’s no distribution center here in Colorado, so it takes an extra day or two for my games to be received on either end.



Is there an ideal way to use Gamefly? I think there is, but it’s not possible for everyone. Although you can hold a game you’ve rented for as long as you like, it doesn’t make financial sense to hold games for more than a few weeks. At that point you may be better off just buying it and then trying to resell it on Craigslist. Rather, the best way to use Gamefly, in my opinion, is to have a rental plan where you have two or more games out at a time and rapidly work through them. By this I mean that you would burn through a game quickly, mail it back to Gamefly, and while that game is out you should work on the other game so that you’re finished or close to finished by the time the next one arrives. This requires a serious time commitment, which not everyone can make, but if you can it will allow you to experience a large number of games within a relatively short period of time and for minimal expense.


If you’re thinking about opening a Gamefly account, take into consideration what types of games you want to play and what time commitment you can make for playing them. Hopefully this brief commentary provided some useful insight into how well Gamefly works. For further information you should check out Gamefly’s website and then search out other peoples’ opinions to balance against mine. For me Gamefly is worthwhile, but it might not be for you.

Friday, July 24, 2015

The Oxford Comma

I love the Oxford Comma, (aka the Serial Comma) though I’m woefully inconsistent in using it. As a child it always seemed wrong to me that you would not continue using commas all the way to the end of a list, and it wasn’t until after college that I learned that what my younger self desired to do was in fact grammatically acceptable. I strive to use the Oxford Comma whenever I remember it, but many years of education in which the Oxford Comma was frowned upon have formed habits in my writing that are hard to break. Looking over my past writings, I find myself using the Oxford Comma from time to time, and I like to think of these instances as brief moments where my indignant younger self came bursting out in a little fit of grammatical self-righteousness. One day I’ll finally break free from those writing habits and use the Oxford Comma consistently, and when that day comes my younger self will finally be vindicated.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

The Office


Recently I paid a visit to “The Office.” Not the one at the job I quit a few weeks ago, but a different sort of office. Actually, it’s not an office at all. What I call The Office is a particular Starbucks that I regularly visited a number of years ago. I don’t drink coffee, but at the time I had accumulated a large supply of Starbucks gift cards, so I would go to this particular Starbucks, order something other than a coffee, and then spend an hour or so writing. I managed to grind out some good material during those days, but inevitably my supply of gift cards ran out and once I started having to pay for stuff, my will to keep going to Starbucks started to falter.



Coming back to The Office, I immediately noted how much it had changed since my last visit. The whole place has been remodeled and there is now a pair of long, large tables in the center, a bar-style table along one wall and fewer individual tables. There used to be a lot of square individual tables, big enough to sit four people, but now there is just one square table and a few scattered round ones. The individual tables are also smaller, which makes it harder for you to put lots of stuff on them. For me this is a nonissue, since I normally would just have a laptop with me, but I remember there used to be this group of homeless/transient persons who would normally be in the Starbucks and one of them was always hauling around a desktop computer, which he would set up at one of the tables. These new tables are too small for that, and that guy is nowhere to be seen. The artwork and lots of other small details have also changed, but the new table layout is the most striking alteration of this Starbucks.



One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is something potentially sinister. I must confess that sitting in a Starbucks, drinking overpriced beverages while typing away on a MacBook Pro still makes me feel strangely elitist, like I suddenly have the authority (and indeed the mandate) to start ordering around the other patrons to do my bidding. At this point I am starting to suspect that this is actually intentional and part of a grand scheme by Starbucks to keep you coming back by making you feel better than other people.


I don’t see myself coming back to The Office regularly in the future, baring the acquisition of more Starbucks gift cards, but I might come back on occasion. Its time may be largely passed, but it still holds a place in the history of my writings.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Dubchestral


I’m guessing most people reading this are familiar with the musical genre called dubstep. For those who don’t know, dubstep might could be described as part of the larger electronica family of musical genres. According to Wikipedia, it originated in the late 1990s, but I first became familiar with it a few years ago when there was a period where it seemed most video game commercials and/or trailers were using dubstep for their musical accompaniment. Like all fads, it passed with time, though you can still hear it on occasion in games media. Personally, I’m not a fan of most dubstep, and I tend to agree with critics that a lot of it sounds like a computer having an epileptic seizure. There is, however, a variant of dubstep that I have enjoyed, and it is called dubchestral. As you can probably guess, dubchestral is a fusion of dubstep with orchestral music. Like with any other genre, some songs are better than others, but there’s a group (or maybe it’s an individual person, I really don’t know) called Instumental Core that has produced a number of dubchestral songs that I really like (along with other songs that combine traditional orchestral music with other styles). I was listening to their music recently, and thought I’d share some of their work.







If you liked any of these, I’d suggest checking out their Youtube channel for more of their work.
 

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Blog Graveyard


Inevitably, some blog posts just don’t make the cut. On my desktop I keep a folder called the Blog Graveyard where I keep the files of the various blog posts that I started, but for whatever reason decided not to finish. Some of them are ideas that never fully came together into a coherent piece of writing, some are victims of a writer’s block that I’ve been unable to overcome and some are ones that I abandoned after I realized that what I was writing somehow didn’t work or was in some way incorrect.



To be sentenced to the Blog Graveyard usually means a piece of writing is never going to be finished/published, but not always. It is possible for blog posts to be resurrected out of the graveyard and come stumbling back to the world of in-progress or finished writing pieces. My previous post (found here) on new game developers is one such post to find its way out of the Blog Graveyard. While these instances are the exception rather than the rule, I’m glad whenever I can salvage a previously failed piece of writing.


As for future recoveries, there is one project that comes to mind. Within the Blog Graveyard there’s actually a decent sized post on a game called Enslaved: Odyssey to the West that I started back in 2013. The post is just a bit over half way done and although it’s not anything special, I still hope to one day finish it. The main thing holding it up is the fact that at this point it’s been so long that I don’t entirely remember where I was going with the post and I will either need to replay the game or consult Youtube to make sure I’m remembering it correctly. If that post ever sees the light of day, it will be the biggest reclamation of writing that I’ve done so far.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

New developers


Sometimes I start a blog post but then either forget about it or put it to the side for an extended period. Back in March of this year I started a gaming related post but never got far with it, however my post on completion in gaming (found here) reminded me that I still had this incomplete post sitting around. I didn’t get to work on finishing it right away, but I moved the Word file onto my desktop as a reminder, and today I am pleased to finally publish it. Hopefully it was worth the wait.


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It’s an interesting thought experiment to ponder what certain things would be like if they were made by someone other than their original creator. In terms of video games, from time to time I’ve thought over which developer studios could be qualified to take a stab at making a sequel or reboot to games series that haven’t had a new entry in a few years. Below are the results of some of my brain storming, with four games series and my suggestions for a successor studio.



Game Series: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Suggested Studio: Sony Santa Monica (God of War team)


The Force Unleashed games were largely fun, but could have used a little work in the gameplay department. Both games in the series feel God of War-esque, (to the point of them sometimes being called “Jedi of War”) so I think a perfect team to take a crack at either a sequel or a reboot to The Force Unleashed series would be Sony Santa Monica’s God of War team. Sony Santa Monica has proven through the mainline God of War games that they know how to create fantastic gameplay and I’m confident they could translate their talents into the Star Wars universe. Any game they make would also be incredibly good looking, as it seems they set a new bar for visual excellence each time they release a game. Granted, I might opt for someone outside the team to write the story for the new The Force Unleashed game, as the storylines in the God of War games have been hit-and-miss, but the actual game itself would be great.




Game Series: X-Men Legends
Suggested Studio: Blizzard Entertainment


The two X-Men Legends games on PS2 were some of the most fun I had in my college years, as I and three other friends would join up as our favorite X-Men and save the world from the forces of evil. The X-Men Legends games were succeeded by the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, which were also fun, but for whatever reason I didn’t enjoy them quite as much. Given the choice, would rather a sequel or reboot to the X-Men Legends games, and when I think of cooperative multiplayer games, one of the studios that comes to mind is Blizzard Entertainment with their work on the World of Warcraft and Diablo series of games. While it is true that you could have played the X-Men Legends games by yourself, they were truly meant for four people the join up and put the beat down on the bad guys. Blizzard Entertainment clearly knows exactly how to make fun games like this, so I think they would be a natural fit for creating a new X-Men Legends game. My only request would be that they keep couch coop, an increasingly rare feature in today’s multiplayer games.





Game Series: Prince of Persia
Suggested Studio: Ninja Theory


To be clear, I am specifically referring to the 2008 Prince of Persia game, which is my personal favorite. It’s important that I state this because there are enough differences between the various games in the Prince of Persia series that the suggestion for a new developer could vary dramatically, depending on which one you’re talking about. For a sequel to the 2009 Prince of Persia, my personal pick is the studio Ninja Theory. The reason for this is that when I think about bright, colorful worlds, like the one in 2008’s Prince of Persia, some of the first games that come to mind are the ones that Ninja Theory has put out. 2008’s Prince of Persia had a unique aesthetic and Ninja Theory is a developer that I think could match it, or maybe even make it better. There’s nothing overly complex about the gameplay from 2008’s Prince of Persia, so in that sense there’s a wide range of developers who could make a sequel to it, but Ninja Theory is one of the few that can nail the look of the game. Oh, and hopefully they could make the prince less of jerk towards Elika.




Game Series: Resistance
Suggested Studio: Treyarch

For a number of years Treyarch was viewed as the poor cousin of the studios that made the Call of Duty games. Treyarch, however, with the previous two Black Ops games, have shown that they can create shooters just as well as anyone else, and I think they could make a great sequel or reboot to the Resistance series. In Black Ops 2, Treyarch made an outstanding shooter with futuristic technology, so I don’t think it would be that big of a jump for them to create a Resistance game with Resistance’s alien-based weapons. Though the Resistance games have been more focused on the singleplayer campaign with multiplayer as a secondary feature, whereas with Call of Duty it has normally been the reverse, I’m confident, based on Treyarch’s previous games, that they would be able to make a very strong singleplayer campaign, and while they’re at it they could bring their multiplayer talents to give Resistance a much more robust multiplayer offering. I know many Resistance fans would recoil at the thought of anything Call of Duty touching the Resistance games, but Treyarch is one of the studios that I think could do a sequel or reboot right.

Friday, July 17, 2015

First Accommodations

I don’t know why, but for some reason the first accommodations to be booked on extended overseas travel are always the hardest for me to decide on. After that it’s usually a straightforward process of selecting future places to stay, but the first one has a habit of paralyzing me with indecision. A few days ago I spent several hours looking over listings for Paris, the city that I will be landing in. Granted, Paris has a lot of options, but the last time I went to Paris I only needed a fraction of that time to figure out where I was going to stay. On my previous trip the starting city was London, and on that occasion I also spent an unnecessarily long amount of time picking out where I was going to stay. After the first city the process gets easier, for whatever reason I don’t know. I look online, I narrow the choices down to just a few and then I make a decision, all in a single session and in about 15 to 20 minutes. It doesn’t make sense to me why the first one is the hardest, especially since this isn’t my first time traveling to Europe, but it’s finally done and now I have moved on to booking other accommodations.
 

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Light Beer


I don’t drink. Not so much for moral reasons, though there certainly are moral arguments for limiting one’s consumption, but simply because I can’t stand the taste of alcohol. Even though I don’t drink, I have noticed a phenomenon in beer consumption that I find very interesting and indeed, somewhat amusing.


I live in Boulder, Colorado, a town known for being home to a large assortment of craft and micro brew beers and for generally having very good taste in beer. As you can imagine, having such high standards in beer means there’s also a lot of open disdain for mass-produced light beers. They are oftentimes mocked as the drink of poor college students, people who are ignorant of what good beer is and those who like the taste of flavored dishwater. And yet, even with all the snide commenting, if you put a cold 24-pack of Coors Light down in a room of people and come back in a little bit you’ll find it strangely all consumed. I guess beer is beer, even if it’s considered bad beer. People love to hate on those big-label light beers, but they drink them anyway.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Marriage and Man


As an unmarried man, I tread very carefully in talking about marriage. While I have many married friends and learned a lot from observing and interacting with them, I will not pretend to fully understand what marriage is like or be an expert on it. Yet in being an observer, I have noticed that marriage has certain effects on men, and there’s one in particular that I am focusing on for this post.

Generally speaking, marriage seems to smooth out some of a man’s rough edges and, for lack of a better description, grow him up real fast. What I mean by this is that marriage seems to make men less (outwardly) belligerent and much more responsible and less selfish. Of course, one can always find exceptions and I can’t cite any statistical data in making this claim, but I’ve seen it enough that I think that my general statement has at least some merit. Understand that I am not saying that single men cannot be mature or well-behaved members of society, but I am saying that marriage seems to help many men get on that path.

Could there be other factors at work here? Of course. Jobs, environment, health, education, the influence of friends, and just the passage of time all play a part in the molding of an adult man. But when I think of marriage, that covenantal bonding of husband and wife in sacred matrimony, I can’t think of too many other influences that are as strong in shaping a man’s life. Again, this is just an ignorant single male speaking on this, and I know that many people like to argue about the respective merits of marriage, but it seems to me that, at least in this one area, marriage is a positive benefit for men.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Re: Rick Steves


In my last post I stated that although I use Rick Steves material as one of my primary sources of Europe-related travel information, I don’t use it for everything. In the interest of full disclosure, I thought I’d briefly mention the two main areas that I don’t use Rick Steves for.


The first is food. I’m a notoriously picky eater, so food recommendations from Rick Steves guidebooks are usually irrelevant to me. The last time I was in Europe my diet consisted almost entirely of bread, bananas, yogurt, apples, cereal and occasionally eggs and/or meat. No doubt this horrifies any foodies reading this, but I’m not a “culinary traveler.” The other thing I normally don’t use Rick Steves for is accommodations, as his guidebooks are mostly focused on middle tier places like bed and breakfasts. I’m just looking for a half decent bed with a bathroom and safe place to store my backpack during the day, so on my last trip I did most of my bookings through Hostelworld (though, in their defense, Rick Steves guidebooks usually have a hostel or two listed in them for major cities).

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Rick Steves


Rick Steves. Some people love him. Others say that he’s ruined Europe. I personally think he’s done much more good than harm, but I can understand some of the criticisms. The point of this post, however, is not a discussion of Rick Steves as a person or the business he has built, but how he became one of my primary sources of travel information.



Prior to my 2012 trip to Europe, I was scouring the internet, television and book stores for information to help plan the trip. Different websites, shows and books have different audiences, and over time I weeded out those that didn’t appeal to me or weren’t helpful to what I was planning on doing. Rick Steves travel material, however, distinguished itself from the others. His television show was informative and enjoyable to watch and his books were very thorough. Certainly there were other sources of information that I used, but Rick Steves did the best job of detailing the sorts of places I wanted to go to and things I wanted to see. His work thus strongly influenced my planning.



When the time finally came and I left for Europe, I took one of Rick Steves’ guidebooks, along with another one from Let’s Go, and several pages of notes I had gathered over the preceding months. Over the course of my three and a half month trip, Rick Steves material solidified its dominant position in my mind by being effectively never wrong. I think there was only one time where the information in his guidebook was off, but I believe it was a fairly trivial matter. As a person who values thoroughness and consistency, Rick Steves won me over by giving me exactly what I wanted. When I got back from my trip, I knew I would be consulting Rick Steves material again if I ever went back to Europe.


With my next trip to Europe on the horizon, I am once again in research mode, gathering information and making plans. Rick Steves material is front and center of my readings, and I’ve purchased a few of his guidebooks for this particular trip. I don’t use Rick Steves for everything on my Europe travels, but he has my trust.

Saturday, July 11, 2015

A Promise Fulfilled

Earlier this morning it struck me that today is the three-year anniversary of my return from my 2012 trip to Europe. Like most people who have done that sort of thing, I made the promise to myself to return, and in about a month and a half, I am scheduled to fulfill that promise. I’ll be leaving on August 25 and returning November 18, making this journey approximately two and a half months in length. It’s not as ambitious as the last journey, but then again it would be hard to top that trip in terms of ambition and scope. When I get back from this journey I’ll no doubt renew the travel pledge, and, God willing, I’ll one day in the future fulfill that promise too.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Life Happens


Anyone who has done extended overseas trips knows that even the best of plans are subject to unforeseen developments. On the my last trip to Europe I had changing train schedules, a holiday I didn’t know about, museum closures, historic sights sealed off for restoration and several instances where I decided to redirect my path and go somewhere other than where I had originally planned. There were also a few things that I brought on myself by failing to properly research ahead of time or by just being stupid. In those times all you can do is try to roll with whatever comes your way. It’s not easy, but you have to decide if you’re going to let this new development hold you back, or if you’re going to keep moving forward and make the most of it.



Let me give a few examples from my last trip. When I was in Paris I had originally planned to leave on a certain day but found out that the trains to my destination were already booked up for that day. I was discouraged, but the two-day delay allowed me to take a day trip out to the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy. In Madrid I didn’t realize that May 1 is the Spanish equivalent of Labor Day. With the major historic sights closed, I spent the day walking around Madrid and getting to know the city while also visiting places that are always open, like Retiro Park. Lastly, in Croatia I injured my foot while swimming in the Adriatic Sea. While this greatly reduced my mobility for a day, it also resulted in my having a long, sit-down lunch right next to the sea and eating what might be the best burger I’ve ever had.



Life happens. You can’t predict or control everything that comes your way, but if you have the right attitude and the resolve, you can bounce back and still have a memorable experience on your travels.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Travel Research

It occurred to me after publishing the previous post on overseas travel organization that I didn’t really say much about planning prior to departure. While there are many things that could be said on this, I just wanted to briefly highlight the value of research. One hour of research prior to departure will save you at least ten hours of trouble on arrival, if not more. Likewise, a good $25.00 guidebook is worth several hundred dollars in terms of the money you’ll save thanks to its advice. Before you buy airline tickets, book any rooms or make any museum reservations you’ll need to put in time to learn as much as you can about where you’re going and what you’re doing. However annoying and time consuming this may be now, it will be worth every last second and cent you spend on it. Consider that five minutes reading up on the Academia in Florence could save you over two hours of standing in line by your learning how to make proper reservations. Or, consider that you can save a lot of money by planning out a blitz of major sights covered by a two-day Paris Museum Pass. When you add up all the savings of time and money, it’s clear that you’re only hurting yourself by not doing proper research prior to departure. True, you can’t know everything, but the more you know the better your experience will be.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Travel Organization


When planning and organizing a major overseas trip, you normally find yourself between two extremes. One is to have every hour of every day mapped out and the other is to show up with no itinerary at all and go wherever the wind takes you. Personally, I fall more towards the organized side of the spectrum, however I try to have a little flexibility built into my travels.



On arrival overseas, I have an itinerary of places I want to go and things I want to do, but I don’t hold myself strictly to it. I normally book my accommodations/reservations one to two weeks at a time, which gives me some wiggle room to adjust things further out in the trip, even though most of the time I do stick with the itinerary I mapped out prior to the trip. When I arrive in a city I normally have a list of things to see/do, however I try to give myself a bit of leeway on how and what order they are done. This is my personal balance between order and chaos, but I've known some people that decided the next city on the fly and booked as they went, which gave the maximum amount of flexibility, but at the cost of normally higher prices for accommodations and a higher risk of not getting into certain sights or finding an ideal place to stay. Some people can travel like that and have a great experience, but for me this would prove very challenging. I like to have a bit of chaos for seasoning and dessert, but I'll stick with order for the main meal.

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Blessed to be here

Today, July 4, is Independence Day here in the United States. In addition to all the food and festivities that happen every year on this day, it’s fitting for us to think about our country and what it means to be an American. For me, this year what’s been on my mind is just how blessed I was to be born and raised here. I could have been born anywhere in the world, but was among the fortunate to be born in America and enjoy the privileges of modern western society. My family wasn’t rich, but growing up in a lower middle-class household in America put me above the vast majority of children around the world in terms of standards of living and opportunities in life. Even now as an adult with a modest income I am still doing very well compared to most of the world. I am blessed to have the life that I have, and I don’t want to ever be unthankful for it. So on this July 4 I join my countrymen in commemorating the anniversary of the birth of our nation. We are all blessed to be here.

Friday, July 3, 2015

Completion

When I think about how my gaming habits have changed over the years, one thing that strikes me is that I no longer complete all the games I play. It used to be that I would almost always finish a game (that is, a game with a definitive end) but now I only finish a majority of them. I think the main reason for this is that I have more time constraints now than when I was younger. With less free time, I am now much more willing to stop playing a game that either doesn’t hold my interest or that I judge to be lacking. I also do not complete games as much in the sense that I no longer try to do everything. It used to be that I would complete every side quest and find every secret or collectible. These days I still complete most secondary tasks but I no longer feel bad for not doing every one of them. My younger self would probably mock and bemoan this change in my gaming life, but my younger self also didn’t have nearly as many commitments and responsibilities as my older self now does.