Paulo Seabra

What do Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Attack on Titan and The Office all have in common? Well, in my opinion of course, they are all sagas, as opposed to one-off stories that is, with a brilliant initial idea that hooked millions of people but that, sadly, their narrative thread was sorta lost along the way, leading to some perhaps sub-optimal plot developments and, subsequently, lame endings. Now, if you're a fan of any of those stories hear me out, because my point isn't that I dislike them or that they became absolute trash near the end, well, except perhaps the last two seasons of GOT, but still... My point is that, because all of those stories were building up to an epic finale, or they simply kept trying to outdo themselves, they more or less lost what was it that made them special to begin with. This is an idea I've come to entertain recently and that, the more I look into, the more I believe it to be true. In essence, for long-form storytelling to work, there c...

This is a term that's thrown around a lot nowadays, and I suppose its usage is fairly warranted. With readily available information on pretty much any given subject, with constant media coverage or lack thereof, and with instant communication at hand, we find ourselves gathering around in little communities based on shared interests or worldviews, and we also find ourselves observing other perhaps rival communities from the outside. I think that creates a strange psychological phenomenon whereby when looking at a lot of people who are believing in the same thing or acting in a certain way, we irrationally believe within ourselves that the world is filled with people just like that. Statistically it's no way near the case, but we seemingly fall into that perception regardless of the issue at hand. That's a strange psychological phenomenon I've been thinking about lately and that I might have to look into some more, but the reason I bring it up now is because, according t...

Ye have heard it said, time is money. But verily, verily I say unto you, that if ye were given all the money in the world, ye would still hunger for time. For what shall it profit a man if he gains a whole lotta cash, and loses his Casio F-91W? I'm not so sure what I'm saying, and to be honest, the title is what it is mostly for the pun, which isn't even that great. I suppose I've just been thinking a lot about time and about how we value it, more so than in that famous saying. And that saying's meaning would be that, appealing to basic common sense, idleness is a total waste because you could have otherwise spent that time productively, and thus you would have gotten something out of it. In a way it's not so much about the very real and pragmatic stoppage of a factory due to some problem, it's also about the truth that everyday you spend without working is a day that will inevitably decrease your productivity in bulk, or it will cause you to complete the fi...

I wasn't really planning on writing this one now, but I figured hey, why not... The idea has been on my mind a lot lately, though it never really leaves it. And when that's the case, as with most ideas, the best is to just write them down and get it over with. I don't think you have to be a big fan of video games to understand my point with this argument, which I actually believe to be quite simple... What is a video game? A video game is essentially a closed system that contains an alternate reality governed by its own rules and values, which make perfect sense within the system itself but lack any meaning outside of it. If you know quite a bit about coding you might consider that definition to be atrocious, I dunno, but as far as I can tell, it's an accurate and simple definition for our purposes here. Let's take Fallout: New Vegas for example. It's a massive sprawling game with a vast map to explore, various ways to develop your character, countless characte...

For a strange psychological or, in my view, philosophical reason, human beings of most walks of life have a generalized tendency to become deeply upset at the sight of animal suffering. I don't know if that pity makes any sense from an evolutionary point of view, but the simple truth is that, in our day and age, we don't like to witness the suffering of any animal. Still, we do, even if only subconsciously, create a stark distinction between animal suffering and animal cruelty. The latter is wholly contained in the former by sheer logical necessity, since cruelty, by definition, would involve some kind of suffering. However, we can immediately distinguish the source of the suffering. If we deem the animal's pain to be natural or necessary, we consider it to be an instance of animal suffering. If we deem the animal's pain to be unnatural or unnecessary, we consider it to be an instance of animal cruelty. So we don't particularly appreciate it when teenagers burn dog...

In recent days, somewhat less recent lately though, Crime and Punishment has been resurfaced due to the lectures of a man who at this point needs no introduction – Jordan Peterson. Now, while I had already read some of Dostoyevsky's books before discovering Peterson's lectures, I decided to give the mad russian a second chance because I realized some of the finer philosophical points of his stories had escaped me. So I dusted off Crime and Punishment as well as The Brothers Karamazov from my bookshelf and I read them with new eyes. And though my enjoyment of both books greatly improved compared to the first time around, I still can't quite grasp the point of the former, or if I do, I can't quite say I agree with it. And that is because, to surmise my argument before I even attempt to explain it, I think the only thing Dostoyevsky managed to prove was that Raskolnikov was, all things considered, a good guy all along. “The Student” by Nikolai Yaroshenko As far as Jord...

In episode [616] of The Sopranos, Tony describes his gambling vices in the following way – Well, you start chasin' it... And every time you get your hands around it, you fall further backwards... And at some point in my multiple viewings of that brilliant show, I happened to interiorize that description, that feeling, this idea that an addiction, almost more than the sensory pleasure itself, is actually all about the chase. In a way, it's not about what we gain from it, not really, it's about chasing that feeling. And in doing so, we realize the addiction becomes a reward in and of itself. Indeed, addictions seem to get us to a point where we don't particularly enjoy the coveted thing itself, we instead enjoy pretty much everything else about it, that is to say, the addiction isn't or isn't merely the object of our desire, the addiction becomes the whole ritual we built around that golden calf. I suppose the pleasure can be nice, but it's at times ironical...

All things considered, this might be my favorite game of all time. Collectively, I must have played it close to a billion hours or so. As a kid I had an older cousin loan me his Sapphire version, I played it just a tiny bit, and before I even got to Rustboro, I fell in love with the game. So I returned it to him and, since my birthday was coming up, I asked my parents for a Ruby version, which I got and played non-stop, always taking my sweet time to discover Hoenn. But then another cousin of mine got Emerald and, though I initially acted like it sucked, I was just jealous. When I realized my love for Ruby could easily be upgraded, I asked my grandma to buy me an Emerald copy, which I then played on and off until I had close to four hundred hours on it. And I played with two of my cousins all the time, building nice memories that I won't bore you with. And though my trajectory with this third generation of Pokémon games zigzagooned a bit there, it was with this one that it end...