Imagine yourself at eleven. Congratulations, you just thought of a better writer than Stan Lee in the 1960s.

Marvel is a company that prides itself on starting the trend of creating realistic characters that shoot lasers from their eyes. Sure, these comicfolk have powers, but they've got lives outside of heroics. Marvel heroes separated themselves from their DC counterparts by having to deal with everyday problems like money and relationships, while also tackling broader social issues like prejudice. While Batman has Gotham and Superman has Metropolis, Spider-man fights in New York City.

So you'd be forgiven for thinking the superhero comics that first opted for more mature themes would be, y'know, written by somebody who didn't think his readers were stone cold idiots. While writers nowadays tend not to make this assumption, the humble beginnings of classics from Spider-man to the Fantastic Four are...well, humble. Really, really humble.

Take, for instance, Daredevil. Matt Murdock, an alliteratively-inclined kid from Hell's Kitchen, goes blind after saving a man crossing the street and getting hit by a truck with radioactive chemicals that enhance his other senses. Very Cold War nuclear kitsch, but take into account his single father is a boxer past his prime who's murdered by thugs after refusing to throw a fight and we've got an pathos beyond relying on people to pity a blind man.

Which leaves plenty of room in our hearts to pity anyone who saw the movie.

Modern comic readers know that Daredevil is basically Marvel's answer to Batman, gritwise. Frank Miller threw plenty of angst his way and he's become a conflicted but determined nighttime avenger.

Which makes reading Stan Lee's earliest depictions of him sort of hilarious. Rather than describe his quirks to you, I've gone ahead and picked out some panels from the second-ever issue of Daredevil, where our hero fights the mighty electricity-powered villain, Electro.

Clever name, I know.

This is Karen Page, Daredevil's secretary during his day job as a lawyer. I wasn't sure whether or not we were supposed to be rooting for the guy, so it's a good thing we've got her to tell us how great he is. Oh also I think she might be into him?

(Fun game: actually read Stan Lee's monologues out loud, complete with inflections.)

Here we have one of many, many, many instances of Daredevil reminding us that yes, even though he's blind, he can use his other senses to maneuver himself. Literally any time he does anything ever, he reminds himself exactly how he's doing it in paragraph form.

This sort of makes sense, considering it's a new comic and Lee wants to drill his powers into our heads, but keep in mind right here that he's seeing the building by feeling the freaking air currents and tell me there's one reason he needs any of his other sense powers to look around.

Call me crazy, but I think Electro can use his powers to launch the rocket by himself. He can generate power with his body to make the rocket launch, too. Furthermore, his electric-based abilities can be harnessed to launch rockets.

Uh oh, looks like somebody's been up late on Wikipedia!

(Fun fact: this panel contains the only known sentence in all of Stan Lee's work that ends in a period.)

Alright, who the hell gave Daredevil a horse?

A: One of the most daring feats ever recorded? Really, Stan?

B: Note to friends/descendants: in my obituary I demand be described as a colorful, well-muscled figure.

C: The readaloud game probably reaches its comedic zenith in that lower panel. Ellipses lead-in, bolded, italicized and TWO exclamation points!

And Daredevil would memorize the exact schedule of a sightseeing tour because...?

Okay, there is no way Daredevil thought that whole thing in less than half a second. Also, Electro, I was only just getting used to the double-exclamations, crank it down.

Yes, Daredevil, that's the only possible outcome when footsteps stop.

Or there's an innocent worker rustling on the catwalk and the girls are screaming at the well-muscled man in a yellow devil suit who just crashed their theater.

Also, really? You can tell which way their heads are tilted by their screams, but you can't just apply that sonar to picking up on Electro's static?

But now I'm just nitpicking.

Take those ten panels, multiply them by a few thousand and you've got yourself the early work of Stan Lee.

Maybe this was all just a product of its time. After all, Lee was writing in the decade of Adam West's Batman, and his constant use of words like 'fella', 'chum' and 'teen-ager' suggest that his early work is simply of a different age. But I can't help but think that a guy whose entire genius revolved around inserting a sense of realism and nuance into standard superhero fare would expect a bit more from his readers. Given his public persona it would be ridiculous to expect this stuff to be too serious, but really? A horse? It only took you two issues to jump the shark, Stan.

Still, sorta gives you hope, knowing that no matter how crappy the details of your work is, if the gist of it's good enough you'll be vindicated by history.

Nuff said.

Video Game Music Review (because I mean why the hell not?): Final Fantasy VI

I've recently moved to Flossmoor, Illinois, which is right(?) outside of Chicago. As I can't find a job and I know literally nobody here besides the folks, I've been doing the three things that I do in situations of solitude: writing and listening to music and playing video games.

And no, I'll never call it "gaming". I'm a "gamer" in the way a guy who runs to catch a bus because he's late every morning is a "sprinter".

Long captions aside, I figured last night, as I was trying to sleep, that it might be interesting to, like, combine the three. Y'know, write about video game music. Just like the title says.

At the very least I'd like to write about one of my favorite games, from one of my favorite series. It's not THE favorite game, or THE favorite series, or even THE favorite game in THE favorite series, but I still like it a lot so shut up.

The game is called Final Fantasy VI (originally called Final Fantasy III stateside, because the original Japanese II, III and V in the series weren't exported until long afterward, leaving VI the IIId one to be released over here.) The central theme of Final Fantasy VI is, in all seriousness:

What’s the point of living?

Jeez.

And as if this wasn't cheerful enough, check out the game's title screen and tell me it's not the definition of ominous:

Sweet Christmas.

FF6, the last 2D game in the series, is the closest thing there is to a video game opera. Nobuo Uematsu, the series composer whose brilliance challenges several small stars, went far beyond any of his previous work (and, in my mind at least, any work since) in FF6’s soundtrack: all the main characters, and most situations, have a leitmotif that uses just the right tone and instrumentation to sum up each person/event the moment you hear it. Let's give it a try! Grab those headphones, and remember, there be spoilers in this review!

Terra is the main character of the first half of the game, a chick with Jason Bourne syndrome but with witchcraft instead of espionage. Poor thing has no idea why she (unlike anyone else in the world) can naturally use magic, and gets caught up in various sides of a rebellion that seeks to use her as a weapon. The theme used for her specific scenarios is a fragile, yearning variation of the game's main theme (don't feel the need to listen to the whole tracks for these things, unless of course you have taste and you want to, as the opening bars give the general feel.)

Locke, not to be confused with Locke, is a thief who mixes Indiana Jones's taste for adventure with Don Quixote's Dulcinea problem (while I'm inundating you with links in this sentence, here's a tumblr I just started!) He of course has a tragic past to explain his drive to protect random women he meets, and while his theme song shows us his heroic, swashbuckling side, another variation begins at the end of his theme, slows it down and gives us a downer reprisal.

Celes, the main character of the second half of the game, is a young general from the EVIL EMPIRE who defects after realizing, oh crap, the empire's evil. She loses all her self-confidence after abandoning what was essentially her entire life, and spends the game rebuilding herself. Her theme uses a celesta (go figure) to show us another lost soul who, despite hardship and personal grief, remains pure of heart.

Oh, and here it is as an SNES-quality aria. Wasn't kidding when I said this game was an opera (at the very least it HAS an opera in it, and while this scene is pretty hilariously melodramatic, it's a bit less so when it's reprised in the game's actual plot using her original theme and, instead of throwing flowers off a balcony, she throws herself off a cliff in despair. Don't worry, she gets better.)

Also, for a less ear-burning version of the operatic version, Nobuo went and got an actual opera singer to do it.

He can also rock the lamest of sweaters.

Edgar and Sabin, if you couldn't tell by their theme, have things under control a bit more than poor Celes. Twin brothers from the kingdom of Figaro (sure puts the b in subtle, doesn't it?), their lives take a turn for the worse when their father, who happens to be the king, is assassinated by the

EVIL

EMPIRE.

As you can guess, the fact that they're twins makes the whole line of succession thing a bit hazy. But in a reversal of our expectations, it turns out the conflict is that neither brother wants to be king. Edgar suggests they flip a coin to see which one gets saddled with it, and in the end he becomes king while Sabin is free to run away and become a monk. Like, a Shaolin monk. He's pretty awesome.

While their lives have taken different paths by the time we meet them, Uematsu wisely lets the twins share a theme instead of splitting them up. Edgar's theme is heard in the first half of the track, a roaring fanfare that suits his regal position, while Sabin takes the backburner in a quieter, contemplative section from the second half. By melding the themes together we can clearly see the bond between the brothers.

Cyan is the token samurai, which is a thing in Japanese games because the Japanese are weird. A middle-aged warrior past his prime with traces of Othello in his blood, he joins the squad after the empire (which, by the way, is EVIL) poisons his homeland's drinking supply, killing his liege and his family. His theme uses a bamboo flute to telegraph that yes, he's the Japanese guy who stumbled into this otherwise feudal/industrial European setting, but its slow, methodical nature also evokes his stubborn keeping with chivalry (excuse me excuse me, "bushido") in a world that poisons your family if they can't beat you by force.

Gau is Tarzan, if we met Tarzan as a ten-year-old. He's barely more than a wild child there to speak in the third person and have problems with syntax. Most of his lines are literally "Gau gau gau gau" or "Gau hungry" or just "Hungry", so of course his theme is going to be all jungle-like and primitive, like this.

Wait, what? Is that...is that a cello? As it turns out, Gau's story deconstructs the whole "raised by wolves" scenario with a simple question: what sort of godawful things have to happen to make a parent abandon their kid to the elements? The answer? Well, let's just say it deserves a cello.

Oh, Setzer. Setzer, Setzer, Setzer. Could you ask for a more rollicking theme?

Setzer is a gamblin' man, owner of the only airship in the world (this raises so many questions, including how nobody else has thought to repeat his success at zeppelinry for any reason, how nobody has just stolen it from him, etc. etc. etc.), and an all-around freebird. And by golly does his theme show it.

Of course there's also a sad piano version for when we learn that he has, get this, a tragic past. But that's okay, because there's also a fan version that sounds like it was done by Vince Guaraldi of Peanuts fame that makes everything chipper again.

Shadow’s theme consists of a Jew's harp, acoustic guitar strums and a whistler, the foundations of any good Western soundtrack, to invoke the archetype of a redemption-seeking loner who, in his own words, has killed his emotions. Not only is he a ninja, he's a ninja with a doberman. So pretty much the best thing that's ever happened.

Strago Magus is a pretty awesome name that I definitely envy, but Strago himself is just sort of a kook. And you'll never believe it, but Nobuo Uematsu does a perfect job composing the music of a kook. I'm starting to think I might like this guy!

Shockingly his past is squeaky clean. I mean, his people have gone through some crap (his people being a lost society of magi, if you couldn't tell by his last name or the hints of woodwind mystery sprinkling his theme) and this one time he couldn't kill a monster he was hunting, but no big deal. Now he's cool chilling with his granddaughter (who may or may not be adopted and whose father may or may not be Shadow before his descent into emotionless ninjahood) and joining crews of rebels.

You know what sounds like nothing you've ever heard before, including bagpipes? Bagpipes on an SNES. Shockingly, the deterioration of sound quality does wonders for this soothing theme of a bored, lonely little girl who lives with her grandfather (Strago, remember him?) and pretty much just gets caught up in the storm. Like Gau, Relm's theme belies her character's outward appearance; in this case, we see a snarky kid who backtalks grampa every chance she gets, but as we delve deeper we see the tender side that contributes to her song.

That covers all the playable characters that join your quest, except for three optional ones that have no relevance to the plot whatsoever. Still, Uematsu somehow manages to make themes that fit these characterless characters perfectly, playing off their appearances and the limited information we get about them.

This is Mog. Mog is adorable. Mog fights by dancing and wields spears four times his size. Mog's got a bit of a mouth on him. This is what Mog sounds like. Baw baw bwah.

Gogo the mime literally has no personality, only the personalities of the people he mimics. He's a blank slate who can use combinations of abilities of any other character you use, just worse. And just like his jack-of-all-trades nature, his theme is all over the place, switching instrumentation at the drop of a hat while maintaining a bouncy nature throughout.

And, of course, Umaro’s banging percussion dominating a soft woodwind melody is exactly what a mindless berserker yeti would sound like. What a guy.


So there you have it: thirteen themes for fourteen characters, each playing during vital scenes of their hosts and exemplifying the traits of the people (or animals) they embody. Now, if you couldn't tell by the brief character descriptions, and the whole "the theme of this game is 'What's the point of living'" thing, Final Fantasy VI takes itself a bit seriously. Which is why its villain, Kefka, is the best in the series.

Named for a master of dark absurdity, Kefka is a flunkie to the big bad evil emperor, but clearly has other things in mind. His nihilist tendencies are only barely hidden by his clownlike visage and constant cackling, and his theme of course evokes every bit of it: it begins with carnival music, but as the song goes on we begin to hear war drums undercut the melody. The ostensibly lighthearted fife melody that follows plays once, then is repeated using a chaotic blend of said drums, piano and brass to let us in on the fact that, while he may look like a harmless jester at first, he might be kind of a genocidal lunatic.

Which brings us back to the central theme of the game. Like any good opera, FF6 is not a happy story. It fools us every now and then by throwing in lighthearted asides throughout, but what makes this game unique comes when our party ventures to a floating continent to contend with the evil emperor and, of course, Kefka at his side. Already our team has gone through quite a bit, and from the amazing new dungeon music to scenes with music that echoes the opening theme we can confidently say that we've reached the end of our quest. Hurray!

But then Kefka kills the emperor. And then he wipes out your party. And then he releases the fantasy equivalent of a nuclear holocaust on the planet, killing off most of its population and tearing the very geography of the world apart.

This is why I said that Terra is the main character of the first half of the game and Celes is the main character of the second half. Halfway through the game, the bad guy wins.

Celes wakes up after a yearlong coma and must venture in this new world, searching for all the allies you gained in the first half. From then on, the point of the game isn't just to kill Kefka to save the remaining world from his new godlike position, but to figure out why they want to do it. Through individual, personal trials, they discover the reason behind their will to live, even when the world has already been destroyed. They must face a man whose entire goal is to rid the world of, well, everything, and in doing so find out why his view of life as being meaningless is wrong.

Some want to keep living for love, be it romantic, brotherly or parental/filial. Others go on out of loyalty to the group, or unkept promises to fallen friends. A few are driven, unfortunately but realistically, by revenge, even after all their character development is done with. But in the end, after a battle with a man who's essentially become the devil set to the backdrop of a seventeen-minute long chipstick masterpiece (and no, I don't expect you to listen to the whole thing), we are given our reward: our heroes escape victorious from a crumbling monument to Kefka's power, all while we get a reprise of every character theme in their moment of triumph.

Operas don't tend to have happy endings, but we'll go with bittersweet.

Things Jay has learned in the past week.

-There is no such word as "faluting." One also cannot falute lowly. The term high-falutin' is in the dictionary, all dictionaries that have it at least, with the apostrophe.

-Meal plans at William and Mary do in fact begin on Wednesdays. Running out of meals on Tuesday night is not a fun way to learn this.

-Non-computer electronic devices with wifi DO work on campus, but must be registered. Now I can trade Pokémon with people in France. And have, extensively. It's a brave new world.

This is Scrafty, the Hoodlum Pokémon. It's a lizard based off a street thug, with shed skin for baggy pants and a hood, and a frill shaped like a mohawk. Yes.

-Donald Glover can backflip on command.

-"Backflip" is correctly spelled as "back-flip" according to Firefox spellcheck. But also "spellcheck" isn't a word either. Firefox is sort of stupid like that.

-Chinese apparently has different words for different kinds of love instead of a blanket "love." My Chinese roommate thought the cousins on Hawaii Five-O were in an incestuous relationship when they said "love ya."

-Milk can go bad even if you haven't left it out, even if it's a week before the expiration date. Related: when thirsty enough from dry waffles, one can drink two gulps of bad milk before realizing/caring it's bad.


-There are people my age who are new to the whole "euthanasia sounds like youth in Asia" thing. And they are sitting right across from me while I'm writing this.

-Shaka Smart is black. Definitely thought he was Middle-Eastern.

-My doodles can be educational. For instance, this one teaches about the components of the front half of a truck:

Omitted: mudflaps, ramp for cargo, exhaust (and pipe), front half of the word "TRUCK".

-Camera phones do not make good scanners.

That's about it.

My New Lost

Let's talk about time.

Ellipses... they evoke such depth...

Considering it's been exactly a year since my first of what are now eleven posts, and a year is a unit of time, I guess now's good a...time as any to talk about the subject. Obviously many things have happened in the past year, but what comes to mind first and foremost to me is that Lost ended.

I'm a very cool person.

But seriously, for six years, or nearly a third of my life, I had a subject over which I could theorize and postulate and ponder. The feeling of being consumed by such a vast work of fiction, with all its hints and flashbacks and revelations and arc words and red herrings and Michael Giacchino music, is inseparable from my memories of high school and the first two years of college. Was it the most important thing in my life? No, not really. But it was always in the backburner.

"Walt, I've kept this from you long enough...we're both Jacob."

While I loved the ending, it obviously left a bit of a void for me in the prediction department. I can't exactly think about what could happen next on a finished show.

Still, life somehow went on. It was summer, so I guess I got a job? Yeah, that happened, I'm sure of it. I tried to fill the island-shaped hole in the speculatory section of my brain with Scott Pilgrim, but there was only one unpublished volume left when I read it so there wasn't much to theorize. School began and I continued to struggle through a world without little Chekov's Guns scattered all over the place like a room full of Horcruxes.

That is, until my friend Joe showed me this:



This is Homestuck. It is my new Lost.

Homestuck is a webcomic made by a single, strange man named Andrew Hussie. This is not an alias. It has been updated virtually every day since April 13th, 2009, and contains thousands of pages without any sign of slowing. It's about a boy named John Egbert who plays a version of The Sims that dooms mankind, and it's just about the funniest, cleverest and smartest thing I've ever read.

"But wait," you say, "I could've sworn you said we were going to talk about time, and here you are shilling a stupid comic." Well quiet the heck down, because first off Homestuck is awesome (daunting, but awesome) and second off, it deals with time in a manner that makes Lost looks amateurish. Anyone who's watched any episode from the last three seasons of Lost knows that this is quite a freaking thing.

Andrew Hussie knows his time travel. While Lost has plenty of awesome quirks in that department, Hussie takes it to the next level and plays with it in ways that boggle the mind. One character, for instance, trolls our hero John from the future. Backwards. That is, with every conversation John has with him, John knows more and more (because he's obviously going into the future) whereas the troll knows less and less. The troll references things as happening in his recent past, only to have them happen to John in the near future. Inside jokes form that only one half gets at any given time.

The timeline of Homestuck is complicated, but like Lost it uses clear-cut rules and expert writing to keep it from getting convoluted. Like Lost, there are characters stuck in different points in the timeline from each other (one group is from the present and another from the future, for instance) but unlike Lost they communicate with each other. Insanity ensues.

The brilliant characterization, hilarious dialogue and ingenious wordplay only add to Homestuck's mastery of timeplot. And considering it's an ongoing serial rife with mysteries and possible twists, it has proudly taken the mantle of Lost in my life.

Like Lost, though, it takes some commitment to get into (and it takes a good while before the plot's deep lore comes to the forefront, even though it's always there.) While catching up several seasons of Lost takes a set amount of time, catching up with Homestuck depends only on your reading rate and the occasional animation. Oh, did I forget to mention that 99% of the panels in this comic are animated, some to music, all of which is amazingly composed? Pretty swell indeed.

Freaking tangents. Shows/comics like this tends to send me off on all sorts of them. What I was getting at is that it'll take a good weekend to get caught up with Homestuck, but trust me, it is completely and utterly worth it and you are not a complete person unless you have read it.

Now go and do it, it'll keep you busy until my next post.

Third Floor Follies

I've never studied on the third floor of Swem because it scares me. I took off my flops when I first came up here to look for a book two years ago, which sounded like overkill until I looked around and saw that I was not alone in doing so.

Oh Moses, you trendsetting fiend.

For non-Wilma students (yes I am very hip with my slang) you may recall Swem as that place where I procrastinated half the day studying for Physics last semester, aka like two posts ago. I'd say I need to start updating this thing more but you and I both know I'm not going to, so enjoy this entry while it lasts. Reread it, perhaps. Savor the text. Remember that Moses joke? That was pretty nutty. There was a picture and everything.

So anyway I'm not actually studying here, considering my professors aren't mean and assigning things for the last week of classes. I could be studying ahead of time for some finals but considering I'm barely capable of doing this the day before a test I have my doubts.

No, the reason I'm here is because I was invited by a bored studyer...studier...student, largely because of my irresistible charm even in silence. She even brought me a cookie, so I brought the milk.

My dessert in media res.

As you can see, the cookie-providing friend brought me this wonderful gift in a package of foil. This seems practical enough until of course you realize that on the third floor of Swem people are liable to give you I-will-flay-the-skin-off-your-shins glares for breathing too loud.

My methodology at first was to ignore the cookie, but I'd already bought the milk and I didn't want it to go bad. Granted, rotten milk is very quiet, but I doubted it would've gone over too well. So I searched for a proper opening and struck.

...after what will now be referred to as "the foil incident" I was determined to eat as silently as possible. I could've tried to just drink the milk without eating the cookie, but I've never been able to drink milk by itself. Ever. I love milk to death but it's gotta be with some food first or I'll get nauseous. I also probably could've just left and eaten it, but if I already opened the foil I might as well have started to eat.*

I'm reminded of an incident last year when I came to this very floor. It was in fact almost exactly a year ago, the night before Blowout, the beloved tradition wherein half the school gets plastered during the last day of class and the rest of us try to ignore the smell. The doors of rooms in William and Mary dorms occasionally lock for reasons beyond anyone's understanding (although I think it has to do with the little one-way-lock-button getting pushed in by that semisphere rubber doorstopper that protects the walls if you swing the door wide open); in any case, I managed to lock myself out that fateful night while wearing my Batman pajama pants and a comical tee shirt. The batpants had no pockets for which to hold my phone, so I went on a quest to find a spare key. The RA was gone because, well, I have no idea, I'm still kind of confused as to why the RA would be off-duty on the most obvious night of the year to be on duty. Not wanting to dwell on misfortune I decided to search for my roommate and his key.

Barefoot, I traveled to the apartment next door that contained my roommate's fraternity. I tried calling him with their phones, but he of course assumed these were drunk dials given the celebration and didn't answer. Crestfallen, I walked to my friends' off-campus cottage, which wasn't too far away but required dodging broken glass with feet that were still bare (oh and it was like ten degrees.)

Nobody was home. I trekked to Swem.

Figuring my roommate was studying like he said he was (and he was) I reasoned that he might be in Swem (and he wasn't.) Being unaware of the latter sidenote in the previous sentence I pored through the library like a metaphor through a simile. Barefoot. In batpants. As people studied. At least I didn't have to take off my shoes when I got to the third floor.

All ended well, of course, but whenever I'm up here, which as you may remember from my first sentence is pretty much never, I get the feeling that they know. Everyone here looks familiar and they know I'm the one with the batpants. It bothers me, especially because I have an awesome hat that is so much better for clothing identification purposes.

It even includes a handy chin clip!

Not to say I don't love my batpants, but yeah. I feel like I'm always being watched up here. Why am I even here? The cookie was delicious but the price is too high. It's like the Old Navy closest to my house that I'm sure is built over an Indian burial ground** and fills me with inexplicable dread. No, it's not the mannequins, those don't scare me one bit. And it's not the chain. It's just that one store, guys. Something horrible happened there, I just know it.

I doubt anyone would be rude enough to commit a horrible act up here but I still don't dig it one bit. Oh well, guess it's time to play Fire Emblem and smack my friend upside the head whenever I catch her facebooking instead of working. Quietly of course.

(Now enjoy my petty grammar footnotes and get back to mourning my lack of updates like I know you want to.)

*Subjunctive past tense is so freaking awkward sometimes.

**I feel like it should be "indian burial ground" or "Indian Burial Ground" but one doesn't capitalize 'Indian' and the other looks like there's only one IBG.

Board and Conquer

When people think of beach vacations, the subject of global war is usually far from their minds. Minor Stratego skirmishes aside, I once tended to lean with the masses on this one. But not this year.

This year, the annual meeting of the four Edmiston children (of which my mother is the eldest) had a remarkable shortage of board games. The cards were all in order, not just the basic ones of four suits but the Uno and Apples to Apples variations. The tile-based adventures of Scrabble and the aforementioned Stratego also made appearances. But Monopoly, a game which I’ve only completed three times in earnest but is a stalwart contender for the entertainment of the thirteen cousins, was nowhere to be found. While considering the absence of this tradition, I realized that another game could be used as a substitute. A game that could take up an entire afternoon, nay, an entire day of our week.

Boy howdy.

Tragically this was also gone; however, a message was given to latecomer Alex, who managed to procure the war game and bring it to us this very morning.

Few were willing to commit to the task, but two brave souls beyond myself decided to take up the challenge. We went over the rulebook, picked our colors, rolled our dice and began.

The Players

Name: Jay
Edmiston Connection: Mother, Jan
Age: 20
Color: Red
Dream Job circa 1995: "Twain Conductor"

Name: Carson
Edmiston Connection: Father, Mike
Age: 18
Color: Green
Dream Job circa 1995: "T-Rex"

Name: Robbie
Edmiston Connection: Father, Cham
Age: 16
Color: Black
Dream Job circa 1995: "A mommy or a daddy"

The War
I was allowed the first position, and placed a red block on Western Australia. Carson, ever the defensive player, placed his green alternative on Eastern Australia. Robbie went with Argentina. Some people just don't get Risk.

When all was said and done, Robbie had a decent foothold in South America (which I constantly accidentally called "South Africa" throughout our ordeal) and Africa. Carson held Eurasian territory, while I was based in Australia and Southeast Asia. North America was divided amongst us all, most regions only being occupied by a single block.

After solidifying our territories, I swept through Eastern Asia to reinforce my Alaskan troops. Carson moved west to conquer Europe completely, and Robbie made a wall of soldiers across Northern Africa. Through a series of lucky rolls I managed to take Asia, while Robbie made inroads into the Southern United States.

Things went back and forth for a good while, but eventually we corked Carson up into three European regions (my siege of Ukraine was quite a sight to see), limiting him to a paltry three reinforcements every turn. Robbie struck occasionally, but I decided I would make a blitz through Alaska to South America to halt his flow of reinforcements.

It was here that I learned that the God of Dice hates me.

Second only to the Slots Genie in the Casino Pantheon

I lost twenty brigades that turn. Robbie lost four. I whined.

Things started to look grim. Robbie was gaining strength, and soon enough he made his way into the Middle East to keep me from my Asian bonus of seven blocks per turn. And what's worse, he managed to eke his way through my admittedly underwhelming Siam defenses and invaded Australia. The nerve!

But Carson was not to be forgotten. Having saved up his three extra blocks every turn, he finally erupted from Europe with enough force to take chunks out of Africa, Asia and North America. Using the distraction to my favor, I crept back through North America, reclaimed my original territory and held a whopping 23 countries at my peak. I even returned the favor and nabbed Venezuela right from under

Okay, no, I'm not going to do a play-by-play of the whole match. We spent a good three hours at the dinner table, and after being forced to move for a feast of hamburgers, corn on the cob and baked beans we spent another hour or so finishing up. In the end, Carson weakened Robbie to a standstill in Central America, while I used card bonuses and a resurgence of luck (thank you, Dice God) to solidify Asia, Australia and Canada. A final blitz of 36 reinforcements in a single turn helped me wrest all of Europe and Africa from Carson's grip in one move, leaving only Carson in South America and Robbie in the southern half of North America.

But alas! I had left Iceland undefended. Carson valiantly threw his remaining forces at Central America, but Robbie eliminated him and proceeded to use a 20-reinforcement card bonus of his own to invade my army through Scandinavia. He eventually spread too thin, knowing defeat was imminent, but took over half the world from my grasp. But Africa was there for me, and I used the remainder of my de-Carsoning forces to wipe through South America from Western Africa's inexplicable link to Brazil, attack Robbie from the same places he began his final assault and let my beloved Western Australians join the victory march through Asia, ending our assault in a second, final siege of Ukraine.

Achievement Unlocked: Completed a game of Risk
Achievement Unlocked: Victorious in a game of Risk

The Aftermath
I did a little dance.

Last full day as a sophomore.

Today is May 10th, 2010. I've got a physics final and a linguistics final tomorrow, the former at nine in the morning and the latter at two in the afternoon, and then I'm a junior. As I plan on devoting tomorrow after my first exam studying linguistics, today will be spent boning up on my physics.

Will this mission be accomplished? Let's find out.

Hello, lovely.

9:03 AM- I arrive in Swem. On the second floor I take off my flops, bring a chair over as a footrest and sit. The seats across from the windows are already taken. A girl is sleeping on the floor.

9:08 AM- After drowzily glancing at me several times, one of the window-sitters compliments my Power Rangers shirt. I open my physics book, then close it.

9:15 AM- Exhausting my usual internet procrastination techniques, I decide to start this log, estimating the previous two timespans. I really ought to get cracking, but I have hours upon hours to kill.

9:16 AM- I open up my German version of Pokemon and defeat Gary's Schiggy with my Glutexo's Kratzer attack.

9:44 AM- After reaching Vermilion City (or Orania City auf Deutsch) I open my physics book again, look at the equations of the latest chapter, and close it.

10:16 AM- Ep, turns out Swem has a copy of Redwall. I'm already on a nostalgia run, so why not?

11:03 AM- BROTHER METHUSELAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

11:04 AM- Alright, now I mean it. I open Blackboard and copy all the problems on the three previous tests that I couldn't immediately answer, putting them all into a word file. I also download the equation sheet for good measure.

11:09 AM- Frat guy decides there's just no good reason not to answer his phone and carry a ten minute conversation at a substantial volume on the second floor of Swem in the middle of finals. On a related note, if the past month is anything to go by, I've been the victim of a possibly divine Pavlovian experiment, substituting myself for the dog and drunk bros screaming on Wednesday nights for the bell. After this year in the Units, it's hard for me to see someone wear a polo shirt and a baseball cap simultaneously without getting upset and kind of tired.

11:35 AM- I run out of gum. I brought two packs. I hope all those things they say about aspartame aren't true.

12:08 PM- I realize I've been sitting staring into space since my last post.

12:11 PM- Finished justifying and organizing my word document containing those physics questions. Haven't begun answering them yet. My excuse to myself is that I want to be sure that I've forgotten the reddened answers shown in the original documents I took the questions from.

12:43 PM-
1:15 PM- I decide to ship off to Sadler for lunch. I whistle on the way, and only realize once I press the handicapped button that the song is 'Party in the USA.' Curse you, Kylee Ponder.

1:18 PM- I look for a free table near a socket for my laptop so I can continue to "study." I see my birthday buddy Briana on the way. We discuss Power Rangers. I need to get back to the 21st century if I want to pass this exam.

1:21 PM- A table near a socket opens up, but the socket is under a table in use. I attempt to ask the patron of said second table if I can use the socket, but as I haven't spoken very much all day barring the Brianversation the sentence that comes out is along the lines of "Can I steal your power?" She understands instantly. This school is weird.

1:23 PM- Mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms. Only non-mushroom items to eat are staling ham and cheese sandwiches, and the guy gives me three. I take a bite out of one and regret it. Sadler during finals is just awful.

1:40 PM- Rereading the Lost article in my Entertainment. I only have seven more weeks on my subscription. Everything is ending.

1:43 PM- Hey, guess I can eat an apple!

1:43 PM- This apple has the consistency of pudding. Sadler during finals is just awful.

1:49 PM- I lift my cup to see a heavy ring of milk. Obviously I would pick the leaking cup. And the table without napkins.

1:52 PM- Briana comes by my table and I show her sections of what I'm currently writing. In fact I'm typing this as we speak.

2:27 PM- Man, Sadler sure does die out after two. The silence is nice, I've actually started to do some of the problems, but I think it's time to head back to the Units. Swem did me no good.

2:34 PM- Nap time!

3:55 PM- Yawwwwwwwn...welp, time to go back to sleep.

5:00 PM- I really don't know why I love Around the Horn so much, but hey, I actually did ten minutes or so of work, I think I deserve a break. Unlike my Psych and Philosophy classes, Physics was actually fairly easy to understand, so it really is more of a reminder session than a learning one, especially with the equation sheet in tow.

If physics classes were in this format I'd be hovering between an high Blackistone and an low Paige right now.

5:30 PM- Back to work. Switching between Adobe Reader and Microsoft Word was pretty annoying until I remembered that Windows Seven commercial with the double-screen dealie. Beautiful.

5:24 PM- Oh wait, still haven't read Cracked today.

6:13 PM- Cracked's eternal archives strike again. News is on soon, may as well Solitaire until then.

6:30 PM- Brian Williams > CNN.com.

6:33 PM- Rehnquist wasn't a judge, either, and I'm sure McConnell was a fan. Just say you don't like liberals and stop pretending to be against Kagan for any other reason, opposition based solely in different ideology is a perfectly reasonable position. Rabble rabble rabble rabble.

6:51 PM- Multitasking ahoy. Skimming over notes while listening to a Symbicort commercial.

7:00 PM- Time to go on my last Wawalk of the year. Someday I'll look over these notes for more than ten minutes at a time.

7:19 PM- Ben Franklin was onto something with turkeys. Meat of kings, I tell you.

8:52 PM- All the semi-easy problems are done, amidst a bout of Jeopardy and FreeCell. Time to watch last week's Lost in preparation for tomorrow. Cue tissues.

9:26 PM- Guh, what does Locke have against submarines, anyway? Two for two in the C4 department.

9:43 PM- Halfway through the tough ones. Getting to the point where I'm happy to risk it not being on the test/guessing when I get there if it is. It's multiple choice, and even when I don't know the stuff I'm pretty good at multiple choice.

9:47 PM- Time to call it quits and rest up so I'm not dying at two in the afternoon tomorrow, as per usual. Lord, talk about ending in a whimper.

Hey, guess what the roommate's watching? Good synergy.