Awhile back I changed the name of the site from “The Always Insightful Insights of Trent Hergenrader” (a name I never particularly liked) to “A Propensity for Unstable Realities, ” which is another name I didn’t particularly like. My goal at that time was to create a more professional-looking site and take it away from its origins as a personal site, but I wasn’t satisfied with the result.

This past semester I worked on a project developing WordPress websites for academics and writers (funny, that) and decided to once again revamp the site. Now, trenthergenrader.com has a completely different look than this page, where I plan on keeping my blog and its six-year archive as well as links to my personal photos. That page houses my professional information (i.e. writing credits and academic work) that hopefully will come in handy when I hit the job trail in the next two or three years. It seems like a pretty good solution.

(sigh) One of the benefits of getting older (turned 36 last week, thanks for the well-wishes) is that you tend to develop perspective as well. I started following Spurs during the 1990-91 season on the heels of the Italia ‘90 World Cup, having fallen in love with Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne. Of course, Spurs won the FA Cup that year, looooooong before you could watch any kind of footie on television on these shores, and it’s been more or less a disappointment since then. Two League Cup wins in about twenty years? Yes, I feel like I’ve been long-suffering enough to be a true Spurs fans.

Tottenham missed out on fourth spot in the 2005-06 season on the last day of the season thanks to a bout of food poisoning known as lasagne gate. I knew then that they’d missed a huge opportunity. In subsequent seasons, they’ve lost Michael Carrick, Dimitar Berbatov, and Robbie Keane when those players were at their peak and I’ve never believed that they had the mettle to crack the top four again. So this season when everyone’s been saying “this is Spurs’ year” I have to say, no, no it’s not.

Even though Spurs have been loitering in spots three through six for the entire season, my hopes have never been raised because I never let myself believe they could pull it off. The home loss to Stoke, the away draw to Everton, the home draw to Hull, and today’s draw to Leeds in the FA Cup: these results reveal Spurs for what they are, and that’s a team that doesn’t have the nerve to see out tough matches. My prediction is that Spurs will have a tepid second-half to the season and will end up in sixth. I hope I’m wrong, I’d love to be wrong, but history is on my side.

I splashed some Christmas and birthday cash on some XBox 360 games: FIFA 10, Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed, and Gears of War 2 to be exact. Besides the soccer game, I got those last ones in a “buy two, get one free” deal that was too good to pass up. Gears 2 wasn’t supposed to be part of the promo but some strange wording in the ad (I misread Gears of War 2 Disc Set) worked to my advantage as the cashier at Best Buy wasn’t sure how to do handle returning an online promotional transaction, so she let me swap for Gears 2 instead of voiding the whole purchase. Yay her, yay me.

My initial reaction to FIFA 10 is disappointment. The game play is better in that you have better control with passing and dribbling, but I’m in that unenviable spot where I can beat Barcelona with Lincoln City on the professional setting, but I can lose to Lincoln City with Barcelona on the next level up. Three of my biggest problems with FIFA 09 was defending against high balls (I lose every header), defenders who either sprint past the striker with the ball or who get nutmegged thirty times a game, and keepers who flap at the most innocuous of shots and crosses. All of these still feature prominently in FIFA 10 too. Also, I lament the fact that so many games are geared towards mastering crazy, split-second controller combinations. I have a feeling that my inability to flick the left-joystick in a clockwise motion while dragging the right one back and holding both triggers down means that I can’t dribble past a single opponent. That’s pretty frustrating. I haven’t tried the manager or Be A Pro modes, but if the game still features these major annoyances, they’re going to be there too.

I took a very brief look at Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed last night and both appear to be highly entertaining. I didn’t realize Bioshock was from the same company that made the Half-Life series and I was a little disappointed at first, because I found parts of Half-Life 2 to be really annoying. Bioshock has some cool features where you can genetically enhance your character and the great weapons management system is still in place, so I’m hoping that they took the best from the Half-Life series and added some other interesting features.

Assassin’s Creed is visually stunning, to quote a cliche’, and I think it will be fun to explore the world beyond the first couple levels I got through last night. On the annoying side, the storyline makes little sense whatsoever (does the main character really need to be a genetic descendant of an assassin, traveling back through time to reenact his life because they share the same genetic code… couldn’t the game just be about a medieval assassin already?) and the basics of climbing buildings and fighting guards already seem a little predictable and repetitive. Also, the cut-scenes are painfully long, made worse by the incoherence of the plot-within-a-plot about finding a traitor to the Brotherhood of Assassin’s organization… or something like that.

I also find it troubling that everyone in the game is Middle Eastern except for the protagonist, who has lily-white skin. Everyone speaks with heavy accents except for the protag, who speaks an “unadulterated” English. Also, the protagonist is by nature violent, rash, and stubborn, and who bristles at being brought to heel by white-bearded elder who tells him he needs to listen and follow directions. Let’s just say I won’t be surprised when said elder turns out to be the traitor in their midst, blah, blah, blah…

Of course, this game will predominantly be played by teens and the above paragraph reaffirms a lot of bad messages. In the next couple weeks I’ll be reading James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and Good Video Games + Good Learning and I’ll be interested to see how/if he tackles these kinds of issues. It’s early days, but I can’t help but feeling that’s there’s a definite hierarchy of “right and wrong” in Assassin’s Creed that isn’t reinforced by, say, the Grand Theft Auto series, which seem to be amoral. Or maybe it’s that in those games, both the developers and gamers know that what the characters are doing is wrong, wrong, wrong and that’s what makes it fun. Maybe.

More on this as I read more. And hopefully have time to play more too.

Reading and reading and reading and reading, and not loving much of it. I read a dozen books over break and the only one I loved was Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar, although I enjoyed Ben Okri’s The Famished Road quite a bit. For most of the others, there’s a gap between “intellectually interesting” and “enjoyable to read” that’s wider or narrower from title to title. For instance, The Woman Warrior, House of the Spirits, Kingdoms of the World and The Light People were mostly enjoyable reads, while Bearheart and Love in Two Languages were not.

I’m well on my way to blowing last year’s book total out of the water. That number was a mere 43; by this May I should be around 30 or so as I continue to plow through my preliminary exam reading list.

Classes begin Monday. I am more or less prepared and looking forward to it. More or less.

Current Mood: Numb |
Currently Listening To – Uncle Tupelo – “Uncle Tupelo 89/93: An Anthology”