Listen guys: Baking is not a science. Cuisine is not a science. Deal w/ it.

Okay I know yer all out there throwin' yer arms in the air screamin' atcher monitors yellin' "GET BACK TO FUCKIN' VIDEO GAMES ALREADY" but I had to overhear a conversation at work today about how "baking is a science because it is precise and requires measurements and precision". This is my blog where I get to vent about things that I am too polite to say in places where I get paid to be civil, but measurements and precision != science. Frankly I don't even think coding is a science (surely if you'd seen some of the code I've seen, you'd agree with me). Music is extremely measured - Beethoven couldn't even fucking hear and he was composing. Painting is measured. There are many recipes to make great film and video games - if you're okay with making the exact same film or video game as someone else. The fact that something can be reproduced does not make it a science. I don't even have to define the term "science" to get us that far.

The main difference between cooking and other arts is that we eat the product of cooking. I've tried to eat "Livin' Lovin' Maid" dozens of times, but unfortunately it comes back up every time. Anyway, cuisine is created and summarily demolished, beautifully transient, so it's important for any idiot to be able to replicate a work. Naturally, the art form has developed around concocting recipes rather than around the crafting of individual pieces (TV pastry chefs in recent years have sorta turned that on its head, not that I would call their work "cuisine"). By comparison, we no longer have to perform a song to listen to it, so we don't think about the details of how it was performed or the distinction between composition and recitation. On an 8-track tape, improv jazz makes the same aural impression as heavily rehearsed orchestral symphonies. Likewise, except in extreme cases like the work of Jackson Pollock or Georges Seurat, the methodology of a painter doesn't overtly occur to us. So it's actually a bit weird that anyone would bother to distinguish baking from regular cooking, especially so far as to call one an art and the other a science, because they're the exact same medium - they both produce food. It's really recipe construction that's the art form, in the same sense that you could say musical composition (including improvisation, you retarded jazz idiots) is the art form. Music just has a much better recording format. 

Science is dedicated to uncovering objective truths. You can argue about objectivity all you want, but I'm not getting into that philosophical debate here. Feel free to look up qualifiers like universal, testable, and reproducible. Next time you discover an objective universal truth of natural law while fixing up a batch of brownies, you phone me up first thing. You could say that you discovered "the best way to make brownies", and even make that a somewhat objective truth by qualifying it as "the best way to make brownies to my tastes", but, uh, how is that any different from art? That's subjectivity, my friend. Unless you're ready to assert that taste is objective (or at the very least, more objective than musical or visual preference), the process of devising a recipe cannot lead to universal truths. It's a subjective process with a subjective result. 

As for executing a recipe... I don't feel like that's really art, or science, or anything. That's just following instructions. That's the equivalent of playing from a songbook or doing a Paint-By-Numbers. Nothing wrong with it, and you're damn right it often takes skill, but of course putting certain ingredients together under certain conditions will always produce the same dish, the same way playing certain notes in the same sequence with the same timing will always produce the same song. That's not science, that's, um... determinism. 

Certainly I realize that yes! indeed! cooking employs scientific principles! Alton Brown told me that sugar molecules break down into lazer beams at temperatures above a million degrees! If that's enough to classify a medium as science for you, cool, everything ever is science. Which is a great mantra - after all, everything is governed by natural law - but I don't think it's a very precise use of the word. It's ignoring the distinction between the culture of art and science, that artists stimulate our creativity, emotion, and humanity, manipulating our existing knowledge in unique ways - they expand how we perceive, while scientists seek to redefine our knowledge and understanding of the world - they expand what we perceive. Perhaps they often use the same experimental methodology, perhaps at some level there is no way to distinguish "objective" and "subjective" results (as everything is inevitably victim to our personal perception - you psychotic solipsists, you!), but for me personally, there is a massive difference in mindset and expected return between inventing cheesecake and writing an AI algorithm to reveal traversal patterns in JRPG dungeons. 

Thing is, I like to bake (and to cook in general, but specifically to bake) and when said tidbit inevitably comes up in conversation the reaction is always "oh that makes perfect sense, you're, like, a science guy!" Well, no, guy. I like cooking because it's a form of artistic expression and I like baking because I'm obsessive compulsive and feel the need to clean up messes as I go, and that's really hard to do when you have to deal with the strict threat of burning that comes with sauteed wok-fu, so baking is a more appropriate outlet for my deficiencies. Think of baking as tactical turn-based role-playing cooking. Plus I like sweets.

Anyway, I guess I'm not saying that cooking isn't a science - even though the title does say that, for drama's sake. I'm just saying that none of the arguments listed above "prove" that it's a science, for me it certainly isn't one, and, moreover, I'm illustrating that the scientific movement isn't about numbers and measurements and experiments. It's about discovery. As Indiana Jones once said: whether anything feels like an art or a science, or what art and science are, or whatever, is up to your own special little heart. 

Combat and first impressions in Zelda II: a slight Duologue

Duologue. Diatribe. Dissension. Declamation. Double Talk. Double Talk. It's alllll talk. So is this feature, captured from some of the secret email archives of co-bloggers Greg (Yourself) and Greg (Golem).

I started up Zelda II: The Adventure of Link over the weekend to "cool down" from moving. Though I've never delved particularly deeply into Capcom's handheld games (Oracle of Ages/Seasons and Minish Cap), Zelda II was until Saturday the only (real) game in the series I had never played. After 2-3 hours, I've really been impressed by the challenging but fair and rewarding combat that plays excellently with the character-building RPG element, making for a much more addictive and outright fun experience than any of the other early Zeldas. I'm not sure what kind of legs this gameplay will have, as super-addictive mechanics tend to flag if they don't vary incessantly, but hey - a great opening is a great opening, and there's very little to complain about thus far.

The following is admittedly not much of a Duologue-proper, but I haven't had time to pull together a thesis on the subject and it's more important to me at this point to get back on schedule than to write America's most amazing post. Plus I have a feeling we're going to be seeing many more Zelda II posts in the near future... and probably a lot of Zelda posts in general, what with A Link between Worlds on the horizon.

Yourself: So, Zelda II's lives system that forces you to carefully defend your experience while taking increasing risks to get substantial gains extremely reminds me of Dark Souls. The fact that the games are technically challenging, strictly limit healing, and don't allow the stronger (and more EXP-rewarding) enemies to respawn also draws them closer together. I'd be surprised if no one has noticed this similarity before.

While we're using the backwards lens, the combat reminds me of Black Knight Sword. It's definitely of the proto-action-game variety (in the Legendary Axe and ActRaiser 2 category rather than the school of fighting/brawler influence), and it calls to mind Sword primarily because of the blend of platforming with tight, defensive, reflex-driven combat. There's also that the Black Knight has a probably-intentionally Link-like skill-set - shooting a lazer while at full health counts as a Zelda reference, right?

Because I enjoy the combat (go figure), I enjoy grinding for levels in preparation for dungeons just as much as I enjoy Dark Souls. Do I just suck at the game and normally people don't have this much trouble, or is it normal that you need to hang around in the swamp and Death Mountain a little bit to get your levels up to ~4-5 before being able to survive the second temple? Up to this point at least it's been the good kind of grinding - the more time I spend fighting enemies, the more technically skilled I become at dealing with them and the safer and quicker the grinding becomes. There's enough variety even in the random battles from area to area that I haven't felt bored.

Suffice to say that after an hour or two, I am enjoying this one about a million times better than the original. I can also see why that is not the general consensus and how my opinion might turn around in a heartbeat.

Golem: Zelda II's combat is definitely good times. It's a nice complement to the first one, which had a world worth exploring alongside awful combat.

As a kid, the easy comparison was always with Wonderboy III. They both have fun enemies worth fooling around with, but one of them doesn't reset my progress as much if my performance sucks. That said, Zelda II is also a fair bit more intense with its standing vs. crouching stances. The emphasis on shieldery also makes fights closer to something like a fighter, where timing and space are both tight. I'm not sure how I'd compare it to the early action games you mentioned.

Folks who show off the game on YouTube typically don't grind too much, since I think the stat cap is pretty low. Rather, you're supposed to be abusing the cancel option on the level up screen. It has some relevance to how quickly you get to which level (put off a health upgrade to get a higher attack early), and I think your health might get fully restored when you level up. It's also pro strats to save the end-of-dungeon level up for when you have a particularly high amount of experience to reach the next level (it automatically levels you up no matter how much experience you need).

But uh, I don't know how normal people play.

Yourself: Well Wonderboy III and Faxanadu are certainly the first real points of comparison that come to mind when I'm not trying to make a point about modern games. I actually picked up Zelda II last week not because of the impending release of LttP2, but because I started to restart Faxanadu... then said "fuck it". 

It seems like Zelda II combat is oriented around larger scale conflicts than either of those games - that is to say, more interesting rooms. That follows naturally from the first game where of course each screen was full of enemies. Wonderboy III and Faxanadu tend to give you one enemy at a time, or at worst a marching column. Zelda II will throw Swoopers in the same room as Stalfos and Flea Men (why are there Flea Men though come on), or two kinds of spiders together with Moblins. That's what makes me compare it to the definitively situation-based combat of the Legendary Axe-style action games, while I think WB, Faxanadu, and Wizards and Warriors play it pretty straight 1-on-1. True, the pitched mano-a-mano battles against Iron Knuckles or one of those guys that looks like Astyanax draw heavily on fighting game sensibilities, but more often I feel encouraged to keep aware of my overall position and environment - where are projectiles coming from, where are safe areas, how can I draw enemies to where I want them, etc. In that sense Zelda II actually executes two separate modes of combat - both the head-to-head duels and mobile group-management. Who designed this game? Hideki Kamiya? Anyway, as this is based on only the first two dungeons, I don't know if the game will start to hone in on one style or the other (the limitless laments I've heard about Iron Knuckles led me to expect the whole game was going to be a litany of ducking and blocking, but I'm guessing at least the field battles aren't going in that direction).

I'm not totally sure how to "abuse" the Cancel, unless you mean just ignoring Magic. I tried that at first but then realized it was actually pretty helpful to lower the cost of Shield. Once it only costs one bar of magic, you can pretty much afford to use it in every room (since one pot restores one bar and it's pretty common to see at least one pot per room) - though I'm sure pro-runners don't need it at all. But since Magic is way quicker to level than Life Up, it's not a bad trade-off to abuse Shield/Heal rather than spending experience on Life Up. Letting me choose which stat to upgrade definitely makes me more inclined to grind, that's a nice touch. 

Btw, it's funny that the one thing you called out as hard to find was Bagu's house, because I walked into it completely on accident without even knowing I was looking for it. That's what I get for grinding too much.

Golem: uhhhhhh totally blanking on Zelda II.

It's that special day: Hallowed Ween

Why not everyday?
Are you so afraid?
What will people say?

Why don't you take your social regulations and shove 'em up. your. ass.

Well, Flowers for Charlie was the worst episode ever

Come on. That was terrible. Please, if there was a single joke in that episode, I beg of you to post it here. Sunny wouldn't be Sunny if it wasn't a roller coaster ride of quality, but "Flowers for Charlie" plunges miles below this season's former nadir, "Mac and Dennis Buy a Timeshare", into the ranks of the absolute worst slop the series has ever produced. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that "Flowers" is going into the dumpster of episodes I will never watch again, along with "The Gang Cracks the Liberty Bell", "Frank's Brother", and "Pop-Pop: The Final Solution" - and consider that this is a series I've watched from beginning to end at least three times now. What the hell happened here? I'll tell you what happened: guest writers. But I don't really want to talk about that, because I don't know shit about Dave Benioff and DB Weiss of Game of Thrones fame, except that I pray to god they never touch another comedy series I belove. 

What really went wrong is a Flowers for Algernon parody. Seriously guys? A Flowers for Algernon parody? Boy, what an original idea! Why hasn't anyone thought of that one before? You'd think The Simpsons, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Futurama, Family Guy, Next Generation, Angel, or thousands of other shows would've already come up with that one... oh wait. They did. But hey, it's such a common trope that we could consider it a sort of rite of passage for a show, like the episode where one of the characters gets herpes and has to get a sex change operation to forget. That'd be an okay excuse if this episode involved any semblance of Sunny flavor or any original spin on the Algernon parable. But it didn't - Charlie was busy getting super-arrogant (his arc was word-for-word identical to Meatwad's from ATHF's "Dumber Days", except Sunny tried too hard to make Charlie's brain-growth believable, robbing us of any comic absurdity), Frank was busy getting jealous (played extremely straight and kind of just sad) and the rest of the gang was mostly sidelined, spending a few moments getting high and stupid for the second fucking time this season and the way too manyth time in the show's history. 

Getting characters high is always playing with fire, but "Mac Day" just barely pulled it off for me because High Frank and Dennis were so exactly what High Frank and Dennis should've been ("yes"). But why are Gassed-Up Mac, Gassed-Up Dennis, and Gassed-Up Dee all the exact same character? I get that they're turning into Charlie/retards or something, but shouldn't they retain some aspect of their original dynamic or represent different aspects of Charlie? (I'm not even going to get into the fact that characters have 'turned into' Charlie before in much funnier ways). WHY PUT THREE CHARACTERS IN A SCENE IF THEY ARE ALL GOING TO BE THE SAME CHARACTER? Jesus fucking christ, that's not how you write comedy. Ever heard of this thing called interplay? But Dave Benioff and Dave Benioff Weiss aren't comedy writers, so the only people to blame are the creators for letting this episode happen. How could they have thought this was funny? That gas-huffing scene wouldn't have passed for a joke even on The Big Banger Theory. 

Anyway, that was merely a minute minute-long montage. The biggest problem (did I already say something was the biggest problem with this episode? It was so terrible I can't even keep track of all the things wrong with it) was that the hackneyed "Dumber Days" ripoff was the entire plot. Sunny has successfully spoofed specific books and movies before, but it was always as a side bit, a kind of nod for those paying attention. Perhaps the most memorable example is Frank's trip through One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in "Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack". It wasn't jammed in our faces, it was just a silly absurdist aside, as if Frank had somehow stumbled through the rabbit-hole into the fictional world of the novel. The rise and fall of Charlie's faux-intelligence (and don't act like that's a spoiler, because if you actually believed Charlie became smart... maybe you would prefer jingle keys to reading) wasn't fun to watch because it wasn't Charlie, nor was it a unique spin on Algernon, nor was it outrageous in a Sunny way, nor was it at all unpredictable. "Let's take the funniest character on the show and write him as a totally different, completely humorless character!" Brilliant work, DB and DB Weiss. It's like you mathematically calculated the most uninteresting, unpleasant plot imaginable, and then decided that it was so stupefyingly pointless that you wouldn't even supplement it with subplots for the other four main characters on the show. 

And what the fuck was that scene with the Waitress? That went nowhere. I can't even imagine how bad the entire take was that that's what made the edit - what was I supposed to gather from that? What did she walk away thinking, what did Charlie walk away thinking? Goddamnit Smart Charlie was just so obscenely unfunny.

Wait, are Dave Benioff Weiss and DB actually what became of the protagonist of the classic short story after his intelligence began to plummet and he decided to vanish so as not to force his friends to witness his demise? That may actually explain all of this. Their inability to write humor, their obsession with inane plots, their complete lack of consciousness of the comedic timestream. All I can say is that if you think this episode is even remotely close to Sunny's standards (for the (excellent) ninth season or at all), then I assure you that a whole lot of jokes are going over your head every week (see last week, when I felt compelled to write my own review because not a single critic picked up on the fact that "The Gang Gets Quarantined" was a blaringly obvious Walking Dead parody).

Ah well. I realize I'm kinda being a huge arrogant prick here (not unlike Charlie in this episode), but it really makes me cringe to look around and see people eating this shit up after lambasting the layered brilliance of episodes like "The...Desperately...Award", "...Gang Saves...Day", and "...Quarantined". It's almost as if Sunny fans are as oblivious to the show's intelligence as are its critics, which is probably why - despite its middling popularity - no real following/advocacy has congealed around it in the same way as has around Arrested Development, Community, or Louie. 

Dead week

Heads up to all new-found fans and follicles: the blog and I are not dead, but the coming week probably will be. I'm moving house and working on a beta release candidate at work, so the odds of me finding time between twelve hour days and twelve hour nights to crank out a post are slight. We've been "hot to trot" thanks to five-posts-a-week for the month of October, and the streak will resume come November, but right now I need a break to lift some boxes and yell at some bugs. If you want to come help me move, that's cool too.