our eyes are closed, america
there are souls in the boots of the soldiers, america
fuck your yellow ribbon; you want to support our troops,
you bring them home, and you hold them tight
when they get here.

- Andrea Gibson, For Eli

PS: Click the link, it’s an MP3 and it will blow your fucking mind

Instead of trying to write things as elegant as others have written, I’ll instead post this. Listen to it at least twice:

“Damn you Obama, for turning this cynic into a believer in the ideal of the audacity of Hope.”

- Damn you Barack Obama, you pretty motherfucker – Darian Dauchan

Like everyone else who plays video games, I picked up a copy of Bioshock when it came out – this game has been pretty popular, and for good reason because it’s amazing – it’s a first-person shooter with crazy graphics, good gameplay, yadda yadda yadda (and if you get the PC version, you had better have a PC that kicks ass because otherwise you’re gonna be in the hurt locker)

The part of the game that is really interesting though, is the story – while it’s shamelessly ripped from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, they take the themes of objectivism and morality and combine it with a spot-on dark, brooding Steampunk aesthetic. It reminds me of how Quentin Tarantino directs – while almost all of his ideas are rip-offs of other movies, the seamless way that he combines all of these different pieces into a meaningful experience is the beauty of the movie. They both seem to be able to take a genre or a style and extract the underlying emotion and why people find it motivating, and combine it in a new and cool way.

Anyways, it’s cool to see the authors take their exploration further than the typical morality of “good guy / bad guy” and see the effects of taking a philosophy to its eventual end-result.