I've relocated and I rap about Six Days in Fallujah

I've moved my main blogging space here to Blogger. I felt like it was time for a fresh start after 4.5 years of posting over @ 1up.com. I loved posting there, kinda enjoyed interacting with the community, but decided today that it's time to revamp my writing, and with that comes a new approach to my online-published writing.

I'm hoping that the tiny handful of people that followed me over @ 1up will still follow me here, but we'll see. I am going to be reposting my blogspot posts over @ my 1up page for a while. I'll still be following a few folks via RSS (and, yes, logging in to comment on their blogs), and I'll still be following the site via RSS. It's just not my online "home" anymore.

I know that this kind of a 1-2 punch with me stopping the podcast and then now announcing my desire to move my blog off 1up.

I really like 1up, and I think that they are doing some great things right now. I also feel the need to not tie my blog to any one recognized media outlet. I wanna strike out on my own, and start building my own identity a little more.

I also wanna stop writing like shit. If you comb through my 600+ blog posts here on 1up, you'll find some good writing, a few great entries, and a ton of crap. I think that my writing has really declined in quality over the last few years, and I think that starting a new blog is the best way to get myself in the right mindset.

Thus, I present to you the Filthy Writer blog.

It's still under construction, as I learn how the hell to work all the various doodads and shit associated with maintaining one of these here "fancy" blogs.

With this, I wanna get a little more personal and a lot more analytical. I wanna be able to talk about everything from the latest and greatest in gaming to something interesting I've discovered in the open-source community. I wanna talk about parenting, as well as what the fuck is going on in the Heroes writing room.

Over @ 1up, I felt like, over the last four and a half years, that a lotta blogs went from focusing on the craft of writing to seeing who could suck Photoshop's cock the best. I mean, I would wander over to some motherfucker's blog, expecting to ya know, read. Instead, I get a generic magazine layout where there's some random photoshopped pics with something resembling words wrapped around them. What the "author" had offered as writing was something that was supposed to have been a 4-month late analysis of Gears of War 2, their opinions copied and pasted from message boards and gaming blogs, and nearly every other word butchered in its spelling.

There have been some good ones, as well. I submit that Cody, Laurance, bombtrak, Iris, Cat, and a few others that I'm too bad of a person to remember are great examples of good game blogs here at 1up. Check 'em out, and you'll see what I mean.

This isn't goodbye to 1up, by any means. As I said, I'll still be following a few folks on RSS, commenting in their blogs, and I'll still be following the site, as well as a couple of the podcasts.

Let's Get This Party Started
I can't help but feel disappointed in Konami over their decision to bow to censorship and pull the plug on Six Days in Fallujah.

I understand that everyone's got feelings about the war that we shouldn't even be fighting and will seemingly never end and that War Criminal Dubya and Friends have profited from, but I'm puzzled as to why anyone would be upset about a video game, or perhaps even a work of art that portrays the experience of being a soldier in this particular war, in a particular battle.

Perhaps this is a case of modern gaming being misunderstood by ignorant, generic people. I don't imagine that there would be nearly the same outcry over a film about these events, or a book, or an HBO miniseries.

Maybe they think Six Days in Fallujah = Doom? Or Super Mario Bros. Or some other outdated, world-recognized game. I think that it's possible that they see a video game expression of a historic event as a mockery of that event, since games are for fat, teenage, basement-dwelling sociopaths that will surely bring the endtimes.

I think that, if we accept what I've posited as true, Konami totally dropped the ball on educating folks about this game, as it would've been an excellent opportunity to educate people about games in general.

I mean, if most people's grasp of games is an abominative hybrid of old shit and Wii games, it's no wonder they're horrified by the notion of a game about the events that killed their loved one. These people don't live in a world in which they go out of their way to understand things. If it's not on MSN when they open their Internet Explorer, it must not be worth knowing. Things like PS360 and Firefox and Obama and Twitter are terrifying to them. It's hard to contextualize the advantages of these things to people who can't grasp even the basis of comparison one would require to grasp the notion of "context."

It would be like trying to explain why torture is bad to an ardent Faux News viewer, someone who nearly ejaculates at the sound of Bill O'Reilly spouting hate speech.

Ultimately, what Konami has done is establish a precedent in which an artist's vision is allowed to be destroyed by a vocal minority of ignorant people. They've said, "when an artist's vision challenges people, that's bad and should not happen. All art needs to be safe and palatable to everyone."

What think you?

Also, the comment settings on the blogspot version of this post are such that anyone can comment, with or without registering, so if I could pester you into directing your comments there, that would be totally rad.

-Blaine