Dragon Age: Inquisition First Impressions

I'm just gonna list this in a convenient bullet-point format for my own sake, so I can go to bed.

-It's super gorgeous.
-The inquisitor is super blank slate and I hate that, but at least s/he's voice acted.
-The combat seems like a nice blend of 1&2, though I keep swinging at nothing when enemies back away.
-Picking new skills as the means of increasing your attributes seems... weird? But I think I like it? There does seem like very few skills (at least for warrior), but I guess I don't have any prestige classes yet.
-I... don't get the story at all thus far. Stuff seems to just happen and the voice acting is a bit bland. But I'm only an hour in.
-Cassandra and Varric are great.
-The "guard system" seems pretty legit.
-You can really feel the Skyrim influence. The much wider maps are really cool without feeling empty. Jumping in a Dragon Age game is still weirding me out.
-I think if this game came out 4 years ago it would've been an MMO. Maybe that'll be the next step. It's not even a bad thing, but just the way it plays and feels, I'm strongly reminded of WoW or something.

Overall, I like it so far. Not immediately blown away but excited for more tomorrow.

The Last of Us Ending

FULL SPOILERS FOR "THE LAST OF US" ENDING AHEAD

The Last of Us' enemies often beg for mercy when they are on the brink of death. You can kill them, and many times in the game you can entirely bypass encounters if you're stealthy enough.

The game also establishes Joel as an open murder. He trades weapons, uses torture, has killed innocents, and admits that he will do whatever it takes to survive.

The narrative structure of the game is so potent, that I often felt myself right in Joel's shoes.

I was a murderer. A sociopath.

My driving emotion was to protect Ellie. At any cost. Even if I knew as a player that she was immune to most threats in the game, I still felt the parental need to protect her.

If I was in a fight, I wanted to make sure nobody would surprise me from behind. I would clear every room I could, picking off stragglers and leaving no survivors. Even those that begged for mercy would die.

In the game's final moments, you break into an operating room to rescue Ellie, where three doctors are prepping her for brain surgery, knowing that they would end her life.

As Joel, I had fought with every bit of my being to get to her. I was out of ammo, health, I had literally used every one of my resources to get to her, where before I had endlessly prepared, taken my time, been cautious and tried to conserve what I had desperately.

I didn't even know that this was the end of the game, though I was certain it was a climax.

Joel broke into the operating room, revolver drawn with what little ammo I had left. The surgeons were surprised, of course, to see this bloodied man. One held up his scalpel, telling me to not come any closer. What they had to do was import-

My revolver thundered, Joel killed him, and he immediately turned and killed a second doctor, who wasn't even armed. The third cowered in the corner, I knew in a moment that she wasn't a threat. I'd saved her. Joel picked up Ellie and I was allowed to sit back and let the cutscene take over.

As Joel collected Ellie into his arms, the surviving surgeon screamed at me, calling me an animal.

I was.

The greatest strength of The Last of Us is it's astounding ability to imbibe the player with desperation just as it's characters are feeling.

Yes, much of this comes from it's limiting of resources and keeping things dangerous. You as the player are contently scrounging for anything you can find to give you that extra edge. But it's so much more than that.

After Ellie escapes from David's clutches, she tries to escape the bandit camp with nothing but her knife and winter clothes, in the middle of a horrendous blizzard. There were men everywhere hunting for her. I had to find a weapon, I had to get out.

My as Ellie's desperation was captured when I ambushed a guard. The animation shows Ellie jumping on the man's back, stabbing him again and again in the neck and throat, until he falls dead.

Again and again I ambushed these men in the snow and cold, who were trying to preserve the peace in the camp and protect their families from someone that had murdered dozens of their comrades in cold blood.

But I was desperate. They had shot at us first. We had to get out, escape, survive. And I couldn't risk any of them coming back to get us again.

In a fight against some Infected, some Runners were starting to overwhelm Joel. One managed to grab him and shove him against the wall. I struggled to get out, tapping the button as fast as I could, only to see Ellie jump onto the zombie, stabbing it in the eye. It fell, allowing me to shoot another that was coming up behind her.

Apparently there were notes in the hospital confirming what I thought was a lie that Joel told Ellie: that there were others that were immune, and the Fireflies had performed tests on them, without any success towards finding a cure. I hadn't found any of them. In fact, in the hospital, I'd never done my almost ritualistic act of scouring every corner of every room, taking my time and finding anything I could use. I didn't think there was time.

I broke into the operating room after I'd struggled and fought and shot my way past dozens of soldiers. The surgeons were surprised at Joel. I gave them a moment to step away from Ellie, gun drawn. As the surgeon told Joel to back away, I shot him twice in the chest. The third surgeon screamed as I immediately turned and shot the second once in the head. I then looked to whom I'd been fighting for, trying to protect, that I had possibly doomed the survival of humanity for, all for a little chance at real happiness. The third surgeon screamed at me, calling me an animal.

I was.

Batgirl #35 Review

I'm not really a comics guy. I've tried my hardest, to be sure. I've always loved Spider-Man, and my first time buying comics regularly was right at the beginning of one of the most frustrating and offensive Spider-Man story lines: Brand New Day. So I quit reading them. Every successive time I would try to pick up a comic book again, it was always right in the middle of some nonsense story that read like it was completely idiotic. I gave up on comic books, content to only read about what was going on through a third party every now and again, so I could laugh at how ridiculous it all sounded.

When I heard about what I was going on with the new Batgirl series, I let myself get excited one more time.

Comics have had a major problem with women for decades. Big-boobed bimbos have somehow become the dominant species in the universes of Marvel and DC, extending even to female superheroes, somehow managing to cram a 46-22-46 body into a skintight suit. Women have been actively discouraged from reading comics (whether it has been an intentional design decision on the part of the publishers or not). There have been a few fixes, but very few have caught on in any permanent sense.

Perhaps, with Batgirl #35, we'll start to see a reversal.

With this new run, DC has brought on Babs Tarr as the artist. Though she is apparently new to the comics industry, Tarr has already hit it out of the park with her fantastic redesign of Batgirl. Her characters look actually realistic, like real human beings, with actual proportions, while still maintaining a cute cartoonish charm to it all. In a certain way, her art is oddly reminiscent of Bryan Lee O'Malley's method, at least in facial expressions and character poses. Her characters are fun and exciting, especially for someone who's been desperately aching for some appealing redesigns in comics. I also find her new costume (which is explained in a slightly handwavy manner, but I think it'll be developed further) to just be a lot of fun. It's basically a custom members-only jacket and utility belt! How great is that?

Cameron Stewart's cover (Babs Tarr did the limited edition variant cover) is especially excellent and made me interested in the comic to begin with. Batgirl taking a selfie in a bathroom mirror with her new costume is just awesome and actually sets the tone for the story. However, Kevin Nowland's variant “monster” cover is just weird and kind of offensive. It's done in a more traditional style and doesn't fit the story at all. In fact, when I went to pick up the comic, my friend saw the variant cover and was incredibly annoyed at first and didn't warm up to the redesign at first. She did read the comic and loved it afterward, but I do think that the variant cover could discourage female readers, that I think this issue is supposed to draw in.

If it was just a fantastic art redesign, I think Batgirl #35 would be a slam dunk, but there's more to it than that. Writers Cameron Stewart and Brenden Fletcher have written a story that just fits perfectly to the character of Batgirl, appeals to the college-age demographic (especially to the female part!), and is just excellent. Not to spoil too much, but Batgirl quite literally beats up the forces of male entitlement and misogyny in a story that is incredibly relevant to recent events of Snapchat hacks and celebrity nude leaks. It also uses technology and current media platforms excellently, with Instagram and Tinder playing key story roles. These also serve to make Batgirl/Barbara Gordon feel even more human, along with her college struggles (not going to quite the same absurd levels that harrowed Peter Parker) and love of partying it up.

All of this comes together to make one of the first comic series that I've been excited about in years. Batgirl #35 is just fantastic, probably one of the best superhero comics I've read in ages. At the end of the day, it is still a superhero comic and can be predisposed to lots of silliness, of which there is some here. But it feels good, it works. Stewart and Fletcher aren't trying to be serious and edgy with this, something that's plagued DC's other New 52 comics since the beginning of the relaunch. Babs Tarr's art is so enjoyable, I often found myself just looking and taking in the art. I would absolutely recommend that you pick up Batgirl #35 and keep an eye on it in the future.

The Five Colors of Magic

When someone begins playing Magic: the Gathering for the first time, they often find a color they like and latch onto it. A developing mage finds a play style they like and sticks with it. While this can help a newer player create a strategy that they like and cultivate it over time. This also makes them rigid and inflexible, unable to adapt to a new way of playing. New cards are constantly released and decks always able to be improved. The greatest step a new Magic player can take is to step outside of their comfort zone and experiment with new colors and strategy. In this essay, I will be exploring some of the advantages that can be learned though experimenting with each color of Magic and what they have to offer to a new player.

White

White is possibly one of the more common colors chosen by a learning player. It's relatively simple and straightforward, and can teach players most of the basics relatively easily: how creatures work, the importance of evasion, and combat tricks. However, someone who hasn't started with white might not recognize just how useful a horde of tokens can be. White is the color of tokens and large armies of small creatures. With enough soldiers, White's armies can simply overwhelm the blockers of their opposition. White also uses the most combat tricks and anthems, surprising blockers and enhancing their strength to overwhelm. White has a lot to offer a new player.

As some recent examples of what White could offer to a developing player, Soul of Theros offered White a lot of advantage in M15 drafts this year, offering a massive power boost and a number of tricks to it's controllers team. Triplicate Spirits was the format-defining card of M15 limited, creating a strong army, even if they were only three 1/1 spirits.

Blue

Blue can teach a player that they can win simply though card advantage. Of course, there are lot of other tricks Blue possesses: bouncing creatures and permanents, countering spells, and possessing lots of evasion, but it's greatest trick sheer card advantage. That is to say, being able to draw more cards than their opponent, pulling more answers out of their deck and into their hand than their opponent. If their opponent has three cards in hand, two of which are creatures, and Blue has seven cards; two lands, two counterspells, Unsummon, and two creatures; blue is at an advantage over their opponent. They have more answers and more ability to progress.

Some recent examples Blue could offer to a newer player include Divination and Opportunity. Divination has been a format staple to almost every set, as a simple way to gain a few cards at relatively low cost. Opportunity was a format-defining card in M14 draft, allowing Blue players to gain massive card advantage over their opponent at Instant speed.

Black

Black can teach a new player one of the most important lessons they can learn: that life is a resource, not a score. The game ends when one player reaches 0 life, however much life the winner has left by the end of the game doesn't matter, and sacrificing life for powerful plays can be extremely important. Newer players can often be suspicious of cards that cost them life, not realizing how advantageous spending life for cards or killing creatures can be. The perfect example would be the legendary card Necropotence, a card that completely warped the format around itself in it's time. The card advantage it generated was so staggering that the life spent hardly mattered. As newer players experiment with Black, they are often continually tempted by the great power at any cost it offers.

Some recent examples of Black's advantage generated through life include Sign in Blood, which allow the player to draw cards at a very cheap cost, allowing players to then cast those cards quickly. Plus, it's targeting clause can finish off an opponent. Ulcerate is also very strong removal at a low cost, making it a strong early, though not first, pick for M15 draft.

Red

Anyone that has played Red understands how much it values burn cards, that is to say cards that do direct damage to a creature or player. What a newer player can learn though playing Red more often is how those are best used, whether to use it as removal against creatures or to throw it against the opponent's face to kill them. Cards like Lava Axe are fairly simple: it only targets the opponent. A card like Lightning Strike is a bit more complicated. It can remove a creature to clear the way for Red's own beaters, or it can be thrown against the opponent to bring their life down ever-closer to 0. Many players, even veteran Magic players, might see Red-focused decks as being rather simple, when in actuality there is a lot of math involved: Red must calculate whether they can afford to clear out a creature and if they will have enough cards and time to do so. Learning this math and being able to calculate removal versus simply killing their opponent is an important step for a new player.

Some recent examples of powerful Red cards include Lightning Strike, a useful removal or killing card in M15 and Theros, and can be used for the purposes described above. Even more useful is M15's Cone of Flame, possibly one of the best cards available in it's draft format. The ability to remove up to three creatures or turn that against the opponent makes it an extremely powerful tool available to Red.

Green

Green, along with White, is probably one of the most common colors that new Magic players learn though. On it's face, Green is relatively simple, and it is in many ways. Green plays big creatures, ramps into them with mana generating creatures and land-fetching spells, and uses the occasional combat trick. Newer players usually learn these things, but someone who was not taught on Green might not understand it's importance. Sometimes simplicity is what you need to win games, and Green's raw power can often win on it's own. While other colors are playing small creatures or drawing cards, Green is playing much stronger creatures for the same mana cost, or playing equivalently-powered cards much earlier.

Some recent examples of Green's powerful cards are relatively simple, fitting it's color. Elvish Mystic can often be a first pick in pack one in M15 draft, short of a particularly excellent rare or Triplicate Spirits. Briarpack Alpha was also an excellent card in M14 draft, and could be used as both a combat trick on it's own, and a useful creature for early on.

It's important for a new player to experiment with colors, to learn new methods of play. Learning what cards do and how to determine good cards is what boosts a beginner Magic player into an good player, but to learn how to do that at all, players must learn what makes the colors good on their own. If you've never tried a color of Magic, learn it! Combine colors and learn how they interact. I can guarantee it will make you a better player almost instantly.

*All images taken from www.magiccards.info*

Apocalyptic Fantasies

Is it weird to find a video game touching?

Everyone has their special song, a piece of art, a poem or story, that they find especially touching or moving to them. Nowaways it's common to have a movie or maybe even a television show that just touches the heartstrings like that. But with video games, there's something different. It's less common, I think. Sure, there'll be the occasional person that talks about how much Portal affected them, or maybe even some story-based game. Gone Home or To the Moon are the games de jure of this category.

For me, it's Final Fantasy X.

This isn't a “are games art?” discussion. I've never really felt that I have anything to add to the discussion. It is such a subjective debate over a medium that is completely subjective to begin with.

Final Fantasy X probably influenced my cultural affinities since I very first played it when it was first released for the Playstation 2. When my young eyes first witnessed the sight of Tidus climbing the cliffs in front of Zanarkand, laying his eyes with us over an ancient, dead, and completely alien city, with the haunting piano music behind, I knew that I had come upon something truly amazing. Playing through the game for the very first time, I enjoyed the characters, the heroic and ultimately-tragic story, and the exciting spells I could cast and skills I could perform. But what stunned me most of all were the incredible sights, vistas, and landscapes around the game itself. Nearly everywhere you went in the game, you would find massive ruins and crumbling towers and buildings: relics of the world that had long since passed.

This fascinated me to no end. A major theme of the story is the gradual discovery of Tidus' hometown. You begin the game in Zanarkand, immediately before it's destruction, but with enough time to explore a little while and familiarize yourself with what it looked like. When you finally return, journeying across the continent of Spira, there is nothing but ruins, and no inhabitants, save monsters, for presumably miles around. It's apocalyptic. You revisit places that you started your journey at, Tidus' old home and a bridge he traveled to a voiceover about him and his father. Finally, you arrive to Zanarkand's sports arena, where the city's total destruction first began. When you make your return, you discover that it has become a temple dedicated to the whole destructive cycle that plagues Spira, in an utterly grim irony.

Something about this sparked an apocalyptic interest in me. This isn't exactly uncommon among our culture. Movies, books, and art for the past century have explored this concept in grim detail. Initially sparked by the horrors of the first World War, the interest in apocalypse only intensified over the course of the twentieth century, as nuclear weapons technology developed and total annihilation seemed to become closer and closer. Nowadays, the threat seems perhaps less real, but we continue to explore it, though we are perhaps more interested in the cause rather than the aftereffects (see: Zombie movies or the new Planet of the Apes series, for instance).

And this is something I often take into the outside world as well. Honestly, when I'm walking around Seattle or some other city, I simply cannot help but to picture it in some sort of ruin, just to see what it would be like. It triggers the explorer in me; I would love the opportunity to be able to tour all the abandoned buildings, to see what was inside places I ordinarily wouldn't be able to go to and see what people there were like and how they lived. Urban exploration might be one of my biggest passions that is often impossible to do. Not to mention the beauty of seeing nature reclaim places that man has left behind. Seeing vines or grass creep out of brick and stone walls, trees growing in places surrounded by sidewalks, or moss retaking a musty well or shaft is fascinating.

I do the same when I read about real life mass disasters in history. For instance, after the first wave of bubonic plague struck the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century, Constantinople lost around 40% of it's population, while nearly a third of all people in the entire Eastern Mediterranean died. They are terrible and tragic figures, indeed. Picture entire quarters and districts of Europe's biggest and greatest city left behind, it's people dead or gone. A truly apocalyptic scene, one that must have been terrifying to behold. What would that have even been like to see? There is simply no way for almost anyone alive today to be able to contextualize that mentally in this age.

It was this sort of haunting message I took away from Final Fantasy X. It is a grim one, pessimistic, tragic. They're sensations people don't like thinking about, but sometimes it can be rather fascinating, at least to me.

At the end of the game, after the cause of the great destruction has been defeated, the people of Spira gather together with the game's heroes and talk about their future together, starting out in a new life free of terror and fear of death. Despite the apocalypse, they still have hope with them, that they can rebuild and move on, and hopefully, prevent what happened from coming again. It's an uplifting message. Even should the worst happen, I think we'll be okay.

Lost at Kent

I wrote this story recently as an exploration of my time at work. I won't give my place of employment. The events in this story are mostly true, though time in Kent, Washington has a way of shifting the mind, of shifting reality. Enjoy.

Kent, Washington: May 27^th, 2014.

I came here for a simple enough task: pick up some paper from some place, deliver some other paper to another, take whatever I have at the end of the day back to the warehouse that I'm stationed at. I'll admit that I wasn't exactly enthusiastic about the prospect of a long day in the Seattle area; it seems like every time that I come out this way on my deliveries I end up spending the better part of an entire day here. Once, the traffic outside of Everett on my return trip was so bad that I didn't get back to Bellingham until around 8pm. A twelve hour work day is hellish, but at least I was close enough to nature.

I'm not exactly the most outdoorsy type of guy. I mean, I can appreciate a good tree or hike or camping trip, but I don't exactly spend all of my time out of doors. Still, I enjoy at least seeing them nearby. The leaves piled up in the fall, the warmth of spring, the budding trees as prelude to summer. These are comforting reminders of nature, but they're not enough to be dangerous or overwhelming. Growing up in Alaska, I had to be vigilant often against bears, moose, or wolves, even within the vast city limits of Anchorage. In Bellingham, the most you'll see is the wayward deer, loping over a fence in an impressive bound. It's comfortable, it's safe, it's almost homely and interesting the way nature and civilization interact in that small town.

Which is why Kent—and similar suburban or commercial regions—distort me so greatly. There is a decent amount of grass, trees, air, but it is all so artificial; transplanted and cultivated as an afterthought, as beautification. As a way to try and make the resident forget where they are: in a vast sea, an seemingly endless flatland desert of corrugated metal.

I drive down 108^th Street. At least, I think that's what it is. Even the numbering of streets defies ordinary logic. 108^th Street shouldn't cross 58^th Street. At least make one an Avenue or a Boulevard or something to differentiate this absurd naming scheme. Instead of a means of tracking, a way to orientate yourself north/south or east/west or in any sort of reasonable direction, this has the effect of circulacity (is that a word??). You feel yourself being pulled deeper, deeper into this chasm of middle-industry.

Near the end of this road is my destination. Some bindery or envelope manufacturer or any number of similar commercial factories that have similar names and seem to serve similar purposes but are very very different I can assure you of that. It's miles down this street, maybe about 10 miles, on a street that has a 40 mph speed limit and a weird amount of traffic for 3:15pm and turn lanes that come out of nowhere and two left turn lanes into two different Taco Bells within seemingly minutes of each other. I've listened to at least three or four different songs and I couldn't even tell you how far I've gone in that time. The trees are all the same transplanted maples with the same green foliage and green fertilized grass surrounding it. They try to obfuscate the apparently more organic growth behind their green leaves: Taco Bells, Starbucks, Amcos and AM/PMs, the occasional McDonalds or Wendy's or Wal-Mart (all of which are surprisingly less common than the Taco Bells, at least in my memory), and the even more sparse small service business: an acupuncturist, tax assessor, or independent coffee shop to help you feel better about not supporting a massive coffee conglomerate.

All these service businesses have popped up to support the true resident of this wasteland: the commercial businesses. The Starbucks and the Taco Bell are like palm trees or cacti, they might help guide your way for a time and they are friendly reminders of other places, that there might be a way out after all, though you might offer them little regard, or even mild disdain, in any other setting outside of the vast desert of the commercial industry.

It is easy to get lost here. The real irony is that my saving grace: SIRI and the GPS on my phone, I would never escape this unnavigable plains, yet they are made in vast factory complexes much like these. Perhaps a comparison of a rocky hillock to the commercial steppe: both different sorts of inhospitable wastelands. Perhaps one has a little bit more flavor, however.

Somehow, I manage to make my way to a place called Seattle Envelope. The oddity that Seattle Envelope is located in what is officially a different place is not lost on me. I have envelopes for them, of course. It was made clear by my superiors that it is of the utmost urgency that three boxes, each containing different sorts of envelopes needs to get there with all due haste, so that they might receive their proper headings and be bound and folded in the proper ways. The thought that we might have the capital to do this in our own facilities does not even enter my head; something about these asphalt and concrete monuments to man's hubris has a way of browbeating such inane questions from one's mind. I have thought about offering my own contributions to the company: maybe I could give a fresh perspective, maybe I could try and offer improvements, learn from my superiors, try and get invested in my workplace and help nurture it, develop it, foster it into a company where we can coexist with one another and support one another and create a happy and long lasting relationship?

After all, isn't that what we're supposed to be all about here in America?

But fretfully, life isn't exactly that way. I know that I'm not the first to uncover this and I certainly won't be the other part of this cliché, so it's not exactly surprising. It doesn't really matter anyways. The company doesn't care about me, I don't really care about it, we both know that we're in it for the short term and only want what the other will be willing to relinquish. There is a certain comfort in this mutual animosity. You know what to expect.

I don't exactly know what to expect with Seattle Envelope. Well, okay, that's a lie. Every delivery is more or less the same, just with mild variations on the theme, a little spice to make sure I don't become a complete automaton. I show up, awkwardly wander around like some idiot who doesn't know what he's doing (this is only partially accurate. Most of the time I don't, but sometimes there is a certain safety in playing the fool in an unfamiliar situation. I learn the most about others by taking a step back and trying to see if they will take my hand in guidance or let me go in my faux-drift into the roil), eventually find someone to offer my delivery to, help unload it for them, get their signature (a process that requires their presence or effort not at all. Indeed, it would be much easier were I to simply forge it, leave the package, and move on with my life. It is well known that any pretenses about it getting to who it belongs to and employees knowing what belongs where is quantifiably and certifiably false. I suppose I'm only in it for the satisfying ritual of the tearing of the two pages from their staple, the punctuation that notes the end of our transaction.), and then proceed onto my next stop. Here and there a forklift has to be involved, as it will on my next stop when I must pick up some paper I had dropped at some other commercial sand grain earlier this very week. In any case, I give Seattle Envelope their boxes. I note that they are located directly down the hill from a federal detention center. There is a certain irony to this that I find particularly juicy, a little nugget of cactus fruit I extract a morsel of water from, to give me a half-smile of nourishment before I continue my expedition.

At around 4 o' clock I arrive to some other place to keep doing this same crap I've been doing all day. It's supposed to be my final stop before I battle the rush hour commute along I-405 and the exodus from Boeing and Microsoft along I-5 and make my long journey back to the office so I can offload all this junk and go home, fall into bed (possibly literally) and eat pizza and generally feel sorry for myself.¹ Well, it still is my final stop but I discover something else: They have another Thing that was originally scheduled to be picked up tomorrow, but it'll be ready in about a half hour if I don't mind waiting. I call my boss to confirm that this is cool, I mean of course I want to go home but hell what am I supposed to say? With my new orders, I ready myself for the long wait. The man I'm dealing with is friendly, at least. He says he's regretful that they don't really have anything to help me pass the time, but I'll make my own way. I go take a shit and use a bit of my phone's incredibly precious battery power.

I've found that my phone is probably the only thing that has kept me from quitting or driving off a bridge throughout my time working my current job. It's also possibly my most precious and watched resource during my work day. I have to have the music while I drive (seemingly every radio is broken in our vehicles) and I would be utterly lost without the GPS anyways. These are the precious droplets of water that keep me alive while in this desert. On the other hand, there are foes that steal my water away from me while I work: namely, the all-too-frequently calls from my boss qualifying some inane thing or another. Don't ask me why I need an update about how things have been getting out of the shipping department when I'm not even in the city; I couldn't explain you his logic even if I tried.

I take a bit of extra time to wash my hands and have a sip of water. That was about ten or fifteen minutes down, now what? I head back to the van and climb into the back. There's already one pallet we've loaded inside, but it's still a good fifteen minutes until the other, new one will be ready. I take a seat on the bed, sitting on some cardboard, and square myself into the doorframe. It's surprisingly comfortable, though perhaps it's just the notion that I'm getting paid my paltry wage for doing nothing at all in this moment. It wasn't as satisfying as when I was in the can, however.

There is a funny notion in the workplace of taking satisfaction out of doing nothing and getting paid for it. There are only a few variances on this that I understand, but for the most part it makes no sense to me. For example, using the bathroom on company time, especially if you're gonna be in there a while, is pretty awesome (aside from shitty toilet paper but whatever). It's something that's gotta be done, fuck them if they complain about it, and they usually won't. However, as in the above case, where I'm just stuck in some foreign city being idle, I'm effectively a prisoner. Sure, I get paid to sit and doze in the company van instead of doing real work, but sitting around and half-sleeping out in goddamn Kent isn't exactly what I would normally be doing at 5pm on a Thursday, so I don't see the appeal. I'd rather get my work done faster so I can come home and do the goofing off that I'd rather be doing, or at least be away from the concrete jungle and into the realm of electronic viewscreens of my own home.

After a while the guy comes out and tells me that this other paper is ready and we load it up into the truck and I finally take off for home. It feels like it's been an eternity since I left for Seattle when in actuality it's been a paltry six or seven hours. I turn on the newest episode of my favorite podcast, since it's Friday, and take the fight to the I-405 commuter traffic. This is the other trait about these commercial deserts that fascinates me. Even the most poor workers—namely, those at the Taco Tree and StarOasis—here must commute into the wasteland, and most drive their own vehicles into it; they are nomads riding their Buicks and Kias across the steppe to where their corrugated flock has been driven to. The hunting grounds. The commercial pastures.

Maybe my delay at that one place was a secret blessing: the traffic on the way back isn't terribly bad. I cruise out of Lynwood, Mill Creek, Everett at a decent 50mph until I'm finally able to reach lower traffic and go to 75mph. I make it back just about when the podcast is over. On my way back, I think about how I was very nearly trapped there, lost in the waves, the sand, the metal. Even SIRI is not infallible in that place. Once, she led me on a wild ride through several different streets after I accidentally turned too soon. Instead of telling me to turn my dumb ass around and make the correct turn, I got led for blocks and blocks to a whole separate complex, right next to my original destination. Of course, they were divided by a long out of use railroad track without road to connect them, so I was led to a parking lot where I could see my target, just out of my desperate reach. Of course, I didn't realize my folly until I was far too late, otherwise I would have told the machine to shut up and figured it out on my own. I have not quite been totally Enveloped by the layers of cogs and machines in that god-forsaken place.

I unload the stuff I picked up, I go home, I get a pizza, I lay in bed and watch Netflix and go to bed early. The process begins again the next day, though thankfully I'm not sent out to Seattle. These excursions into Kent are mercifully infrequent. Heaven forbid what my life were to become if I had to spend every day there.

That all being said, I would imagine that there is a special kind of person that might be able to navigate and chart the Kent Wastelands, much as the Bedouin Nomads in the Egyptian deserts. Brave men and women have successfully survived, even thrived, in the shifting sands. It is likely that it is much the same in this case as well. Tens of thousands of people live and work in that region, perhaps some even happily. There is an appreciable challenge to be found that life, of finding the hidden paths and discovering how best to move and survive in that realm, to the secret treasures that lay buried there.

I am planning on moving to Seattle this fall and need a job very badly. I'm hoping to try out new careers and explore new opportunities and options. Perhaps I will try my hand at the Kent Wasteland. Perhaps it will be my only option. Or perhaps there is actually a wealth of opportunity there that I have not fully considered.

I'd rather work in Fremont, though.

1If ever there was a purgatory manifest in real-life, it would be I-405 on a Friday afternoon. Should the reader ever consider an excursion to the concrete wasteland, consider a firearm or poison of some kind. Whether it should be used on either yourself or your fellow drivers, I leave that to your own interpretation.