I'm a total sucker for this series, having played the very first one on the original 8-bit NES, back when I was still in 8th grade. I played FFIV (originally released in the U.S. as FFII) right before I started college, FFVI (originally released in the U.S. as FFIII) in my (I think) sophomore year. When FFVII came out, I ended up buying myself a Sony Playstation my senior year in college. I played FFVIII during my first year in med school. I skipped FFIX and FFX/FFX-2, and have never played the MMORPG FFXI, but I played FFXII during my 3rd year in residency, while on vacation, right after one of my cousins died and I was feeling decidedly antisocial. It's kind of weird realizing how all these games bring back these memories of things that happened right around the time I played them.

One of the other reasons why playing Final Fantasy XIII has been therapeutic to my mind is that I don't have to be online to play it. I don't have to read the idiocy that is part and parcel of World of Warcraft's Trade Chat, where racism, homophobia, and misogyny are frequent features. I don't feel the need to Command-Tab over to some social media site and read about atheists bashing Christians, Ayn Rand-inspired insanity, and people jumping all over other people who happen to react viscerally to racist terms, even when they realize it's being used ironically, and not in a malicious manner at all. Instead, all I have to do is watch the pretty animation and mash on a limited number of buttons.

I'm still not really in the right frame of mind to write a well-thought out blog post to explicate the thoughts that led me to stop visiting Friendfeed for now.

After reading these suggestions for the improvement of Mac OS X, I can’t help but think of the manager in “Fight Club” who asks “Can I get this icon in cornflower?” Cosmetic changes, while entertaining, do not an OS major revision make, and can sometimes even break it. Now I’m no Cocoa guru, but if the APIs are exposed, maybe what would be more reasonable is for someone who is not necessarily Apple write a viable Dock or Finder replacement (and at least for Finder, I believe there are already a few around, although the best ones are not free, either as in beer, or as in speech.) Why does the OS itself have to contain millions of bits and pieces that are not essential to an OS?