Same Symbolism, Different Day

I am overcome with a sudden urge to point a Brute Shot at someone's feet and say “Dance, Spartan! Dance!”. I think this means I've been playing too much Halo 3 (or reading too much on Halopedia).


So, I managed to do that thing again where I come up with a topic, write about it for a while, look at the clock, realise I'm not going to do it justice and then decide to do something else instead.

And I just did that thing again where I massively and unnecessarily extend a list of my actions.

Anyway, it's a good topic and one that covers video games and my love of them, so you can imagine that it'll be pretty long. Fortunately, I predicted its length early and have plenty of time to come up with something else, like the backup topic I was going to use. Which I'll just get to.... now.


I mentioned I was reading Halopedia before. Almost every page there (maybe I'm exaggerating, but it is very common) points out what relevance the page's topic has to the number 7. For those who don't know, and I suspect that will be many, Bungie, Halo's developer, loves the number 7. It crops up in all kinds of places in their games, often in very sly little hints and neat little maths tricks.

For example, the monitors of the two Halo installations encountered in the game are 343 Gulity Spark and 2401 Penitent Tangent. 343 and 2401 are, respectively, 7^3 and 7^4. That much makes sense.

Then you come across stuff like there being (at the time of Halo 2) seven Covenant vehicles. And some of those vehicles having names with seven letters. And the game being released in September, the 7th month of the Roman calendar. And this glorious little nugget “UNSC Frigate Forward Unto Dawn is FFG-201. 20+1=21, 2+0+1=3, 21÷3=7”.

Fans, once they get started, will see symbolism in more or less anything. And it's funny how often symbolism will unintentionally turn up. Take my own piece of fiction, The Grey Line. Which I am contractually obliged to link to in every blog post. I struggled for ages to come up with a name for it, once it had grown beyond what I had originally planned. I settled on the “The Grey Line” for a few plot related and reasons and then decided to check to make sure that it wasn't taken by anything else.

Turns out it's also a term for the terminator, the line that divides night and day on a planet. Which is some awesome symbolism about something or other. And then Sam, ever the student of English, pointed out the contrast between “grey”, generally implying some middle ground or a blurred area, and “line”, implying a clear and stark division.

There's no real reason for me to be thinking about this. I just wonder sometimes if we read too much into things. I know I certainly do. I practically make a hobby out of it.


In other news, this is a really interesting article about the fall of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. I'll probably write more about it some other time.

I'll try to get some stuff up at Corbett's Fiction for tomorrow. I think I've recovered from the whole “crashing at the start of the holidays” thing, so I should be able to do something.

Of course, I still have other stuff to deal with, such as getting all my homework out of the way before Phantom Hourglass and Half Life 2: Episode 2 come in on Friday. Man, have I ever got my priorities straight.