I haven’t written for a while.

It’s been hard for me to get into the swing of writing something new every day. I guess it’s mostly because I feel like I’m stuck on neutral, without motion or need to move one way or the other. Overall, things are good. Social life outside of the intarweb feels a spark of life. School is going well, I am thoroughly enjoying most of my classes so far. I’ve plunged head first back into the D&D fold with all of the planning and writing for the new campaign. I got season one of Battlestar Galactica on DVD.

So, good times.

I just don’t have a terrible amount to write about, really. It’s the calm before the storm. Or after the storm. I’m not sure. There is or will be a storm, but right now I am not in it. We shall see.

The MySpace/predator dilemma (as seen on TV!) continues to give me a headache. Since when is MySpace the insurer of a child’s wellfare? In fact, since when is any social forum an insurer for the children’s welfare? Some of you might be quick to point out that schools are liable for the safety and health of a child while they are in school property.

Well, you’re technically not wrong. But a school is not a social forum: It’s a state agency designed to care for children. MySpace is far more like the mall arcade (do kids even go to arcades any more? Those were some of my best times, man,) than it is a school. Do we really expect the arcade manager to make up for our parental negligence?

I only bring this up again because a mom has sued MySpace for a ridiculous amount of money* because her daughter was assaulted by an older man she went on a date with.

Now, NewsCorp (the folk who own MySpace; they also own Fox News Corp. if you ever had any doubt that we’re headed towards an era of an Integrated Media Megaconglomerate controlling all information access) has the dosh to simply settle the matter off court. Honestly, that’s what’s going to happen. Why? Because the lawyer on the mom’s side wants a settlement (30% of even $1,000,000 is quite a bit of cash for just a few hours’ work. And I can guarantee this guy’s working off contingency.) He doesn’t want to have to go to trial, because I’m pretty sure he sees the same causation problems I see. (To succesfully prove damages, he has to link their negligence [failing to properly secure the age of their members] to the damages [the sexual assault], and that means proving that the age verification fault is somehow a “but-for” cause [meaning that "but for the lack of age verification, there would have been no sexual assault"] and the proximate cause [meaning there were no other likely causes for the sexual assault]; this is a bit of a simplification, mind, but I’m tired, and it’s close enough for government work.)

Does the mother want justice?

Not fucking likely.

If you want justice, you go after the asshole you raped your daughter. If you want $30,000,000 in cash, you sue Rupert Murdoch. So she wants to settle.

And MySpace will want to settle to take the media off their asses.

The real irony is nothing is really satisfyingly solved with this type of system. And this is really a flaw of the legal system. The only thing I would consider a “Victory” in this case is if the case goes to trial, either party loses, it is appealed, goes up to the Supreme Court, and then the SC gives MySpace the win. Because that’s the way you make policy, and it ensures that no other idiotic suits like this crop up for a good long while.

*Not to imply that there COULD be a price for the sexual dignity of your daughters. You just have to wonder, though, your daughter was sexually assaulted, what the fuck is $30 million gonna do for you except pad your sorrow in shallow material comfort? Or perhaps you wish to spend all that money to pay for years and years of therapy, further reinforcing the fact that you don’t care about your daughter and would rather have a stranger help her deal with issues than simply supporting her.**

**No, I don’t really believe in any type of psychotherapy short of pharmacology or neuroscience. I find psychology as a study fascinating, I just don’t think psychoanalysis or psychotherapy actually does anything that can’t be accomplished without professional assistance.

Game: Hitman: Blood Money
Platform: PS2 (Also available for the PC, XBox 360, others)

The fourth installment of the Hitman series, Blood Money continues to build upon a great premise: A man, a garrote, a target, and a mission. Once again, you step into the shoes of Agent 47, a genetically engineered assassin working for the mysterious Agency (although now we learn it is actually the International Contracts Agency.) Alongside your Moneypennyesque contact Diana, you reign unholy vengeance upon a string of lowlifes, porn kings, drug lords and murderers.

Insofar as controls and gameplay goes, little has changed. You still control 47 from the typical sneaker camera angles, with an option to go first person for the First Person Shooter experience. You sneak, climb and run across the maps of your various missions in order to get to and eliminate your target, using a variety of weapons and tools to help you on your way. Graphics have gotten slightly better, but (at least on my machine) not by a terrible amount. There does seem to be a decided increase in the amount of skin shown (no actual nudity, despite some suggestive sexual content, but some costumes might as well be totally nude – then again, I also say this about certain items of real world clothing, so there you have your bias.)

One new change that has come to play is that you can now buy local intelligence which serves as hints towards accomplishing your mission, usually pointing out important clues that you would otherwise not think of (your target’s habits, for example, or ways you can access particular parts of the map.) The hints aren’t terribly expensive, which is good because more often than not they won’t be as useful as you’d like them to be.

The game also features a new notoriety system: basically, the more witnesses you leave behind, or if you’re caught on camera (at any time) the easier you will be to recognize in later missions. This is reflected in your Notoriety score, which ranges from 0 – 100. (Mine went as far as the 40s after I particularly bungled a mission in New Orleans by accidentally pulling out a remote mine in the middle of a dance club. I was still getting used to the PS2 controls, having only played the previous titles only on the PC. At that point, I had already finished the mission, more or less Boondock Saints style [read: lots of bodies, no witnesses], and I wasn’t going to restart the mission, so I ran to the extraction point while being fired upon by the coppers. Considering my score before that mission was, I think, 7, you can see how seriously you can flub up the rest of the game with a careless deed.) Luckily, you also get paid for each mission you do, and can use that money to pay off witnesses, bribe the local police, and even buy yourself a new identity (if you really messed up a mission.) These bribes can get expensive, and you can only buy them once per mission, so some amount of discretion is still necessary.

You can also use the money you earn from missions to upgrade your equipment, from your customized signature Silverballers, to your trusty sniper rifle, to a silent and deadly MP5.

Mission difficulty seems to actually have quite the range in this game. I actually found the missions got easier as I went along (except for the final mission, which I had to redo seven or eight times.) I’m not sure if this is because I was getting better at infiltrating and assassinating (which I was – by this point I was using only the standard mission equipment, not bothering to pack even my trusty silenced twin Silverballers) or if the missions were just, in and of themselves, getting easier. Meanwhile, some of the earlier missions were just baffling in their complexity – I remember almost tossing the controller at the TV in frustration during the second and third missions. Perhaps this was because I wasn’t used to the controllers, which at times can be a tad counterintuitive.

The story is also pretty well crafted. 47 is back to working with the Agency after his retirement in Italy (Hitman 2: Silent Assassin), taking on fairly high profile cases. This catches the eye of… well, a guy in a wheelchair whom I never went back to find out what he was publically. The story unfolds a bit like it did in Hitman: Contracts, with a present day story and several “flash backs” to some prominent missions (which is where you take over.) The present day storyline revolves around the dude in the wheelchair being interviewed by a reporter. The president, apparently, is pro-cloning (a heated political issue,) and the wheelchair dude is convinced cloning is… well, to put it in his words “a terrorist’s wet dream.” Moreover, he seems to know too much about 47, specifically that he’s a clone, and that he’s the pinnacle of a cloning project to create the perfect assassin (see Hitman: Codename 47.) With each passing mission, a conspiracy begins to unfold: moles within the Agency, everything falling apart, betrayal, all that good spy stuff.

At first, trying to figure out precisely what was going on was kind of interesting. My original belief was that someone, Mr. Wheelchair probably but not necessarily, had gained access to some of 47’s bretheren clones and was using them to set up 47 to take the fall. This was largely backed up by Mr. Wheelchair’s repeated assertions to the reporter that he had, indeed, killed 47. (He also kept saying “we have evidence” or “we have video tape”, which stretches the game’s sense of reality especially since in any mission where I was caught on cameras I specifically made it a point to recover all evidence of my presence.)

It turns out I was quite wrong.

But I won’t spoil it, because the moment I realized what was going on was one of those “Holy Shit, That’s Awesome!” moments that are so incredibly rare in video games these days. Let me just say the final mission is you, locked in a church, with your dual Silverballers, and the bastards who set you up for a fall. I’d say it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, except it was much more like shooting barracuda/piranha cross-hybrids in a barrel while you’re in the barrel, naked, with them. The analogy is similar, but it’s not as easy as it would appear. (More enjoyable, however.)

The missions themselves are all more or less standard assassination plots. Disappointingly, you only get to use the sniper rifle, once, during the training mission. (It’s possible to use it in other missions, but I didn’t find a single one where it was actually useful.) The other missions can be accomplished with either your garrote, a poisoned syringe, or your remote controlled undetectable mines. (They’re about the size of a hockey puck.) You do now have the ability to push people off railings and windows, which is fairly viscerally appealing. If none of these options are available, you can typically arrange accidents.

At the end of the mission you can review how you did by reading about the incident in the newspaper. If witnesses saw you, or if the police have clues as to your identity, you can read about it in the headlines. There’s also some information on the overall plot of the game, hidden among the various side stories if you want to sit through and read all of them.

So, overall, far less gunplay than the previous titles in the series. The game’s also fairly short: at only 12 missions, the game is only as long as Hitman: Contracts was (Codename 47 was a little longer, and Silent Assassin was the longest of the series, with well over 15 missions.) Still, replayability is pretty high, with at least two “acceptable” ways to kill each target in every mission (Two things: first, by acceptable I mean perfectly and silently, without mess or too many witnesses; second, each mission offers at least two targets, so that’s at least four different times you can replay a mission, not to mention increased difficulty ratings.) And if you get bored of being a silent assassin, there’s always Boondocks Style.

All in all, I say Hitman: Blood Money is a great time. It’s quite accurately rated M, for pretty much the obvious, and it shouldn’t be played by children below a certain age of maturity. Highly recommended 4 out of 5.

Is anyone else anywhere near as happy as I am that the previous post was entirely written in my patented cryptospeek?

I have hit the point of divergence.

I can recognize the point of divergence from, say, any other point in my path, because when I look forward I don’t see much of anything. I see a choice, however, as the term divergence would indicate a type of split. Ergo now I find myself facing a decision. It’s a decision I am, historically speaking, poor at making.

But I can no longer go forward. I have to take a step – either left, or right. Forward is no longer an option. Should I try to go forward, I’m afraid I’d end up slipping into the path I don’t want.

Aha, there is the rub. There is a want and an… unwant. So, everyone asks (in unison, I can almost hear the collective voices of the… six… readers remaining) “Where’s the choice? If you want, then take.” And, well, you’re not wrong. In fact, you’re quite right. The choice here is really something of a non-choice. There’s nothing but fear that would drive me down the other path. (Fear of what? What, indeed.)

And that, that there. That’s scary. It’s a conviction I… well. Let’s simply say I never had it before. There’s a certain… confidence now. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve always been perhaps a tad overconfident – in certain areas only. I guess that, now, I’ve just learned to extend that confidence in directions I never knew possible.

So. We step. Left. Right.

Like a dance.