I, Daniel Burton Silver, am a space nerd, and I’m perfectly comfortable with this fact. See, I’ve been a space nerd for as long as I can remember. Hell, my mom used to shower me with all toys Star Wars in nature. I wanted to be a Jedi as soon as I could pronounce the word. Growing up, I could pretty much recite all three movies from the Holy Trilogy, and later on never missed an episode of Next Generation. At about age ten, I went to the Smithsonian Air and
As the teen years came, I included headier stuff in my obsession. It started by seeing 2001… then 2010. Accordingly, I had to read the books by Arthur C. Clarke. Then I had to read Stephen Hawking’s first book to try and figure out what the hell this cold, infinite void actually was and where it came from. My interest in science fiction novels piqued thereafter. I digested probably about twenty Star Wars books during classes in high school rather than pay attention to the teachers. I owned every Alien movie on a VHS box set. I dreamed of having a giant telescope.
To date, I’ve spent countless hours of my life gazing up at the stars on clear nights. I’ve toured the world’s premier observatory complex. I regularly read news stories about space, read novels about space, scour the Internet for scientific advances about space, buy comics set in space, watch television shows and movies set in space, and play video games in which I get to shoot, you guessed it, things in space.
This brings us to the Halo games. I love them. I have loved every one of them since the first one was released on the first Xbox. In late September, Halo: Reach was released, and if any of you had been wondering where the hell I was and when the hell I was going to update my website, you can blame the good people at Bungie for making such a highly-entertaining time-sucker. I have been busy blasting the Covenant from here to kingdom come.
The Halo games genuinely make me feel like I have accomplished something. I recognize how supremely pathetic this is, and how little vagina I will probably see from this moment forward after saying this, but I cannot help it. Playing a Halo game makes the gamer feel like a badass, like what he or she is doing matters and isn’t just some mindless pursuit or sport.
Granted, and I want this to be clear, I am talking about the various games’ campaigns only. I speak solely of the one-player story modes. Halo has a dark side: the online multiplayer side. Just like in any other multiplayer online shooting game, the young and old virginal stoners, jackoffs and buttwipes of the world have complete domain and control over the online atmosphere, thereby making it only enjoyable if one is really, really drunk or really, really in the mood to be called by a twelve year old boy who is probably a Mormon living in Salt Lake City a “faggot cocksucker.”
Unfortunately, there is no likely end in sight to the online douchebaggery I speak of. Weed is probably going to be legal soon in my home state, which means video game sales in
But I digress, as I usually do. Back on topic: I love space. Accordingly, and like Dr. Hawking theorizes, I believe in extra-terrestrial life. I think it’s rather obvious that mathematically it makes no sense at all to think that humanity is the only intelligent life in the universe. One need only read about a paragraph or so of relevant scientific literature to realize that the universe is so colossally gigantic that there’s no chance in hell we, rampant fans of the
So one would accordingly believe, as space is such a vast frontier of exploration and discovery, and considering the multi-media popularity of aliens and space, the recent news story about the retired Air Force personnel who held the press conference about the fact that our world’s governments are keeping secret documented encounters with UFOs would be pretty hot news. I mean, surely the X-Files ran for like ten seasons, so there have to be at least some people out there who care, right? Wouldn’t such a revelation have implications intrinsic in it that would make the human race question why we kill one another over our religious prophets, and slightly less focused on the percentage of income tax we pay or if gay people can get married? Wouldn’t the idea of extraterrestrial visitors cause a ripple effect and force us to ponder what our response is going to be when they show up if they aren’t too keen on us, if keeping toenail clippers off international flights really is the best we can do safety wise, and make us realize that things could either go really well or really, really badly at first contact?
No.
That story came and went. These old men were immediately dismissed. The truth is out there, and sorry grandpa, we don’t give two farts. I mean, look at how serious this news broadcast took you fools! We don’t have time for your conspiracy theories. We have Glen Beck to follow, Lindsay Lohan to laugh at, and Halo: Reach to play to make us feel empowered in the little caves of sand that we shove our heads into.
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