March 2008 Archives

I was doing some ego surfing just now and I stumbled across this old forum thread about poetry by yours truly.  The real discussion continues for about 3 pages after my inital post (as linked).  It's a very old thread, so don't register on that site & post replies or anything.  But I am proud of the nuanced conversation we had about what poetry is, what kind of standards it needs to maintain, and how subjective the whole process should be.

Planescape: Torment is probably the best role-playing game ever made.  Don't let the word "torment" throw you off – at its core, this a bittersweet game about regret and forgiveness.

Platter was a guy who hacked Planescape: Torment (in a good way).  He fixed bugs, stabilized the gameplay, and so on.  Unfortunately, he dropped off the Internet in 2007, and his Web site was lost.  As I was going through an old backup, I found a copy of his entire Web site, which I recently put back online.  Now that I've gone through it, I want to share with you the 5 coolest things I've found.

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For roughly two months, I have kept a tab open in my Firefox Web browser.  It contains one of the saddest Web pages I have ever seen.  I do not mean that the code or design or CSS is wonky.  I mean that it displays a heartbreaking image from a photo journalism contest.  The photo breaks me down into tears every time I glance at it.  I haven't been able to close the tab.  I shut down Firefox, but when it starts back up the next day, it reloads the tabs.  Every time, this image of this boy is there.  This broken, six year-old boy who looks so much like my own six year-old boy.  And every time I see it, I cannot stop thinking of the cruelty of this life, the fact that we have been robbed of life that never had a chance to flourish.

I need to make peace with the photograph.  I need to find some way to resolve my feelings about it.  The only thing I can think to do is to link to the photograph, to make this the funeral for everything wrong with the image that I cannot get out of my head.  And after I make this post, I will close the tab, and then I will go and kiss my son as he sleeps, and I will thank God that he is still with me.