Kentucky Route Zero TV Edition, Part Two

There are things I really like about this game, and there are things I really don't like about this game.

I'm afraid that the things I dislike about it are the things a lot of other people seem to enjoy, so I'm conflicted.

To give an example, I dislike the fan-favorite character Junebug immensely. This surprised me, because "an industrial robot who became sapient, escaped her servitude, and is now a traveling musician who is habitually late to everything" should be right up my alley. It's not so much the character that bothers me, however, but rather the ways the character is shaped by how the game works (and doesn't work).

I guess it's fair to say that Kentucky Route Zero takes some big swings. When it hits, it hits hard, but there are a lot of misses.

I think maybe it's worth finishing the game first and waiting to write about it only once I start over from the beginning.

When the semester settles down a bit, I'd like to do the same thing with Gris. There were a lot of things about the game that annoyed me when I first played it, but I appreciated it more after I stopped sucking at it everything started to fit together toward the end.

"Other Cultures"

I had a bizarre experience in my "Introduction to Japanese Culture" class on Tuesday.

I teach at George Mason University, which is a large public school that mainly serves the children of the communities of people in northern and coastal Virginia who were resettled there after being displaced because of various American military conflicts, as well as the children of foreign venture capitalists who own tech companies in the area. The school also has one of the strongest black student alliances in the country, so it attracts a lot of politically engaged young people from up and down the East Coast who are either interested in the university's Media Studies program or its close ties to the military.

In other words, the students are very diverse.

So, on Tuesday, the study abroad office sent a representative to my "Introduction to Japanese Culture" class to talk about study abroad opportunities. The person who showed up was a very professional, attractive, and confident Anglo white woman who told us about how spending a semester in Dublin helped her understand other cultures. She then said that the university is offering a special summer program for which students can pay $3000 to basically go to the Smithsonian.

When she was done, we all clapped politely and took her flyers. I then turned to my students, all of whom are multicultural and multilingual, and said, "You all know the Smithsonian is free, right?"

I hold a strong belief in the value of higher education, but wow college sure can seem a lot like a scam sometimes.

Burn Your Textbook

I'm having a lot of trouble with the cultural politics of my "Introduction to Japanese Culture" class.

On Tuesday I tried to give a nice and pleasant lecture on Zen Buddhism in the Muromachi period and ended up channeling the unquiet ghost of Karl Marx during a discussion of how the cultural production of the elite is glorified as a means of social and political control.

It's been really difficult for me not to do this. I feel the same way about Zen that I feel about eugenics, which is that we need to apply the same level of critical thinking to the concept of "restful meditation" that we do to the concept of "healthy babies," especially given that the ideological systems connected to these concepts were used to justify and facilitate two of the worst genocides of the twentieth century.

I'm going to try to do better in today's class, but I still feel weird about it, like, Hello children, let me sell you lies.