I'm a big fan of: The 2014 Rocksmith video game

Here's the long and the short of it -- Rocksmith, in this and in the earlier edition, makes its easy to practice your instrument. I bought a guitar and I was working my way through chords from a book, but it was taking forever. I also had no confidence. I bought the previous edition of this game, and everything picked up. I was on chords and arpeggios and was rocking.

I liked it so much, I bought a bass, and I have been playing that along with my guitar (don't let anyone steer you otherwise, the bass is the instrument of the Gods). The old version worked, and made me want to play, but this one is even better. The songs are different, the interface is better, and it learns along with you. It is both a game and the ultimate teaching tool. If it weren't for this game, I wouldn't be looking for another guitar to replace my cheap beginner axe, nor would I ever have bought my bass.

Rocksmith is the ultimate game. Not only is it entertaining, but you learn while using it. I am old enough to remember the early computer games that tried to make typing or math fun. They didn't really work because the endeavor at the base was not inherently fun. That's the difference here. Rocksmith quantifies your abilities, and pushes you, and you get better every time you play. My wife earlier today said that she was thankful that this was the game that I wanted to play (as opposed to popular war sims etc). I'm thankful that Rocksmith exists for me to play.

Hard to read for interesting reasons: Reading Barthes's "Mythologies"

I found these kind of hard to read.  Not hard in the way that a lot of philosophical texts are in that they drop a lot of jargon on you that the author created to define terms that other authors have already defined but that you are unaware of because you had not gone through your first round of reading the whole of philosophy yet; more like hard to read because of boredom.  I couldn’t figure out why.  They are short little texts, no more than ten pages.  The premise is sound, basically pulling apart the mythos behind everyday objects.

Doing some thinking led me to think of a couple of major reasons.  First off, the essays in the book are a touchtone for some very mid-century French objects and ideas.  If I was familiar with most of what Barthes writes on, it is only in passing and some of my favorite writers are his countrymen from this period.  It felt disconcerting, but it is what I image it will be like to read a Chuck Klostermann book fifty years hence – familiar but uncanny.  Basically, my only context for what he is writing about is what I am reading at the moment.  That fact does not allow me to see anything from a new angle; it is only from Barthes’s angle that I see it.  By not being able to create my own interpretation of the validity of Barthes’s ideas, I am left alone to trust that he knows what he is talking about.

And I’m pretty sure he does, because in the texts that are unmediated solely by a Barthes’s eyes, he does have some unique insight that I have not thought about on everyday objects.  There is an essay on cleaners that is rightly noted, and I think my explanation earlier serves a reason that it is noted.  There is a later essay on cars that rings the same bell.

The other reason that this felt hard to read is that what he is doing is no longer new, if it ever was.  The edition I had ends with a long theoretical essay on “Myth Today” that explains his approach, which is adding another layer to Sausseaurain semiotics.  The problem with reading such an essay and the derivative works is that now Barthes’s influence is such that it doesn’t feel new at all, and is part of the discourse.  Overall, I’m glad I read it, and I am happy that I read it now instead of back in graduate school as an assigned text.

Over the Top: Paging through "Punk Rock Jesus"

So.

In the future, there’s this all-around gifted scientist.  She’s already won the Nobel Prize, and there is some research she’s working on that will create plants that use many times more the CO2 than regular plants.

Somehow, the only person who will fund her research is a meglomanical super-rich guy who wants to clone Jesus and show him growing up as part of a reality show.

There’s also the young woman who was chosen to carry the Jesus clone who is in over her head, and there’s an ex-IRA assassin who has promised to never kill again.

The Jesus character grows up isolated, and rebels, and gets really into punk rock, and tries to start a revolution.

It’s all over the top, and it feel like it’s trying too hard.  The art’s good, but the storytelling is lacking. I say this as someone who randomly found the title on a shelf who loves punk rock and mocking the Christian savoir. 

The premise goes too far, and that’s assuming that there is a historical Jesus (something dealt with, but may be a spoiler situation.)  Murphy still has some good work in him, so I look forward to what he may do next, but not this.

And I’ll digress, my biggest complaint here, as with some other sci-fi influenced stuff is that if you are creating a world that is based off of the current one that we live in, the reader has to be able to recognize the world as a logical historical extension of the current world.  The one in Punk Rock Jesus just doesn’t work for me, though others may like it.  It is a very subjective thing, but one that I have no answer for.