You might notice that the background of my blog right now is an image from the indie game Bastion (sorry if it is not the background at the time of your reading, you will just have to imagine it). I didn't just choose this picture because I think it looks cool, although it totally does. I picked this picture because I liked this game WAY to much.
If you haven't played the game, skip this post, because the spoilers are a commin. At the end of the game, you are given a choice between two futures. The first choice is to use the power of the Bastion to reset the world to a few weeks ago, thus undoing the calamity that has destroyed everything. The second choice is to use the power to launch the Bastion and use it to sail around the world.
If you ever ask someone who played this game which choice they picked their first time, they will tell you. But then if you ask them WHY they picked that choice they will also tell you, and it won't be arbitrary. Everybody I met who played this game made their decision with thought. If you played this game and choose your ending arbitrarily, please leave a note in the comment box letting me know that I'm full of it.
I can't really think of other games that have that same choice characteristic, anybody who has played moral choice games chooses good because they want the rewards or evil so the can shoot people in the face. There is something about Bastion that made people care about what happened next.
I choose the option to eject. The reason I choose this is because of the "Death Ship" episode of the Twilight Zone. The premise of the episode is that the characters of the ship are stuck in a time loop that will only end if they choose to end it, by acknowledging their own death. This always scared me more than any of the other episodes, something about the endless fate of the characters stuck with me. In Bastion, the narrator of the story can't guarantee that the events that lead to the calamity would not happen again if time was restarted, he only knows that the characters alive now will not remember anything, and therefore not be able to influence the decision. So it looked to me that had I choose to restart the world, it would very likely lead to and endless cycle, so I nipped it in the bud.
"But Woodrow", you ask, "what does this have to do with your travel blog?" Well I will tell you convenient question asker. When I was first deciding to start this trip, I realized that my fear of living a boring small life, and my desire to break away, was parallel to the decision of the game. I was done with college, and short on prospects, so I could either start pluggin away at a job, a career, and do the same thing over and over again for as long as I lived, or I could push in all my chips and launch. I choose to make my life a product of my decisions, to avoid an endless repetition, and to see where the wind takes me. That is why I put the picture on my blog, and that is why I got the city crest from the game tattooed on my chest (something I would never have dreamed of doing a year ago).
Because I'm going sailing
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