Another beautiful spring day at 75 F (24 C). 

Just renewed my tabs for my car which came to $144. Jesus, I'm totally for a charging by the mile. I use the roads much less than most people (I think the average person drives something like 40 miles per day) yet I have to pay the vehicle registration fee based on the value of my car... the BLUE BOOK value of my car (which is over $3k which I actually paid on top of the fact that its double used...). Hardly a fair system. I can't wait til we get more mass transit. 

 Final Fantasy EX Aye Aye Aye....

After a decent but flawed showing with FF XII (please learn to pronounce Marquis), Sony has released a multi-platform Final Fantasy title aimed to please as many people as possible. The newest installment is a dramatic shift from the older days of Final Fantasy RPGs for both better and worse. I have been with the franchise since Final Fantasy VII which was probably the breakout hit for the US market on the then new Playstation system. From the days of Cloud and his save the world from unsurmountable (yet I guess I did beat that game...) evil whilst breeding chocobos, talking to a variety of random NPCs for hidden gifts, and firing at random objects from a rollercoaster at the Golden Saucer, I have been hooked to the franchise. The massive nature of Final Fantasy VII is what got me into this genre completely, although I was keen on watching others play Chrono Trigger and the likes for few years. Since then I have played most of VII's sequels... cleverly named Final Fantasy 8, 9, 10 and 12. I skipped eleven as its departure from the genre into the MMORPG universe was disturbing and I think financially sound. I throughly enjoyed the story from Final Fantasy 8 but I thought a lot of the technical aspects were a bit... lacking. FF9's cartoonish vibe was a huge turnoff and probably the low for modern Final Fantasy games (excluding FF XI). Final Fantasy 12 was refreshing in both story and gameplay although I was never able to beat it do to my lack of permanent ownership of a PS2 and the workload in college. 

I believe it was three years ago when I first saw the first hints of Final Fantasy XIII and I was both hooked and mystified as what the few little tidbits and cutscenes actually meant. More importantly there was a WOE-MAN in the renders :O. A real authentic female even by Japanese RPG standards that wasn't on the lines of a shrill annoying subordinate like Misa Misa from Death Note. Although it does abide by the brooding loner cliche of most JRPG's (see Crono, Cloud, Squall, and many many many many many many many many others), but hey, I guess I can't argue with a non-male avatar for myself.  I was very pleased to hear that they were porting the game to the 360 (and I'll comment on the comparisons between the two later).

I kinda ended up forgetting about Final Fantasy until shortly before its release date and after looking at a few previews, I decided to give it a whirl.

Boy is Final Fantasy XIII different. I hesitate to even think that this can be called an RPG. Being a Mass Effect 2 loyalist til I die, I'm used to free flowing, non-linear, choice driven, story lines and in the digital age of customization and choice, Final Fantasy XIII throws that all down the drain and says "See this rail? Yea, you're on that for the next 24 hours of gameplay." For the first few hours, I thought the constant fighting with a few intermittent cutscenes was just a dramatic entry for a long awaited Final Fantasy game. But the cool down period NEVER came. Dialogue? Yea it occurred, but not in the "Lets talk to everyone on the street for no reason" format, but in a "watch this clip NOW" format. I realized that this game had totally ripped the soul of most RPG's away. There was no towns, no random NPC's. I hardly felt I was even playing my characters. There were no choices, I had no freedom to choose strategy or anything outside of battles. I was really torn apart by this development. What good is an RPG if there is no Role Playing and exploration. Anyway, let me break it down piece by piece.

Plot
Ignoring my lack of NPC's, towns, and old style role playing, the Plot is actually refreshing. Its not annoyingly convoluted and tiresome like Final Fantasy XII and its not dumbed down like Star Ocean or Blue Dragon. It certainly isn't as depressing as say Lost Odyssey either. The whole premise of this game is that Cocoon, the world that houses humans hovers above a beast infest planet called Gran Pulse and the humans live in constant fear of creatures and near God-like entities of the Fal'cie (get used to apostrophes). The Fal'cie are powerful entities that reside on both worlds and are responsible for things like food, water, sunlight and even gates and are pretty much the provider for humans. Otherwise, they try and stay out of human affairs with the exception of Eden Fal'cie which is kinda the head hauncho of all human society (as an advisory/protector role goes). Gran Pulse also have these entities which the Cocoon folks fear as they are hell bent on bring down the safety of Cocoon and destroying human civilization as they know it with memories from a previous Cocoon/Gran Pulse War driving human fears. The problem comes from the Fal'cie's ability to brand humans to do their bidding where failure leads to zombification of sorts, and success leads to eternity spent as a crystal. This branding makes humans into unfortunate slaves, called L'Cie, to fulfill a goal, called a focus. The story starts with an entire city being "purged" to export all the humans who COULD have been exposed to the Fal'Cie to Gran Pulse to maintain security on Cocoon and all your characters are caught up in this net somehow. In an attempt to save one person's fiance and the resulting Fal'Cie battle ends up with all your characters being branded a L'Cie, doomed to carry out a task which only a brief vision even hints at. As the story progresses, the interconnectivity of your characters and their string of crises of faith, and their struggles with mortality, purpose, and understanding provides a nice story line, if albeit linear. I know my quick synopsis probably doesn't do the story line justice but going through it is rather fun. The characters seem a bit like they were freshly unpacked from the archetype shipment boxes, but as you go further, they are surprisingly deep for even a Final Fantasy game. Unfortunately, a lot of the nuances of character relationships aren't exactly visible unless you read the little chapter synopses which I kinda think takes away from the game a little bit, but I can see there being a translation/cultural values difference that may have made some concepts hard to carry over directly. 

Overall, I give the plot a 9/10. The names really could use a lot of work. Lightning (an alias thankfully), Snow, Fang, Vanille, Hope... come on... Never the less the litany of unnecessarily apostrophied words like Fal'cie, L'Cie, Ci'eth....

Gameplay

I personally believe this is where the game takes the biggest hit overall. The complete overhaul of a tried and true formula is always risky and I personally believe that they have dumbed the game down for casual gamers at the expense of a decent game. Granted, RPG's belong to a niche market and for the amount of content and the costs incurred by developers for RPG's, I imagine its somewhat harder to recoup these costs nowadays. But a game on rails these days that isn't a first person shooter just doesn't seem right any more, especially in the Final Fantasy genre. This is a huge step back in my opinion. The game does awkwardly shift off the the rails for a bit on the 3rd disk and I find the transition to be very weird and nothing more than filler and power leveling. 

The battle system is actually very clean and logical and kinda does away with the complicated systems of the old days and replaces it with a simplified system that WORKS. Thats an important thing Sony... simplification for the sake of simplification is NOT good. But the days of managing 80982034 items are gone and there are far fewer accessories and weapons to equip. This lack of items is balanced by an upgrade system that is easy to understand. 

Additionally, there are paradigms, which are reminiscent of older Final Fantasies as well as FF X-2. Each character specializes in certain areas and each job is critical in how the battle flows. But this time around, the battle is less focused on the actual move a character makes then on the overall strategy. Instead of picking "Fire" or "ice" or "heal" individually, your character works under a given set of overall instructions. For example, there is the Medic "class" where your characters task is to heal and remove status effects on your other characters that could be charged with say... casting attack magic. Again, not going into the details of it, but the overall point is to balance your tasks as the battle moves. You might have to act more defensively with certain enemies or when direct attacks aren't effective you have to use sabotage or distraction as a means of finishing the battle.

Overall, I give this game a 6/10. Sorry Sony, I liked having a breather and goofing around in town. Yea know... having fun?

Graphics/Sound

The Final Fantasy series have always been on the upper end of RPG graphics and this is no exception. The lack of towns and NPCs allows for a more varied and stunningly rendered environment although in most cases I found a lot of the environment rather useless. It was very tiresome to run roughly a kilometer without an enemy, save point, or treasure chest in sight. Like... why even have it? The characters are well rendered in both cinematics and other integrated cut scenes. The PS3's graphics are very noticeably cleaner and more detailed, but anti-aliasing suffered just a little bit giving a kinda blocky edge to everything. Although, it is nice to have only 1 disc for the PS3 version instead of the 360's three discs. The environments are widely variable from urban, to trash heap, to grand wilds thus using the entire color palette that a lot of games refuse to use (Final Fantasy XII was one of them). 

The Soundtrack is alright. I feel like the used the character theme songs a bit too much, especially Serah's theme which is the one with the high pitched angelic voice/choir which sounds nice but is used in SOOO many cutscenes that its pretty much the only one I know. Otherwise, most of the music is rather forgetful which is unfortunate for a game that has a history of great music. I gather that most of the music is geared towards cinematics as each level only has one song that is played ad infinitium, although this is not unique to this game. Sound effects are what they are expected to be with the exception of the walking sounds. They are particularly loud and distracting that even people in the room your playing the game in will notice them over the actual soundtrack.

Graphics and sound get an 8/10

The game overall gets a score of 7.67/10. Now this score has a caveat that you are a Final Fantasy fan that is used to the older titles and likes them. The reason why I docked the score may be a result of Sony trying to encourage new gamers to join in and perhaps they might like this version that is simpler and less cumbersome than those of yesteryear. Lets call this ... the Simcity Societies syndrome. Dumbed down to open new markets at the expense of die-hard fans. I think you all can appreciate this final analogy. 



While we are at it. PotD #3




So called "Australian Fried Potatoes". I have my doubts on its authenticity but not its taste. They can come with ranch dressing or melted cheese. I prefer it as is. This can be found at the Minnesota State Fair and perhaps my kitchen some day.

 Hey, just dropping a line to let you all know I'm still here.

I'm trying to figure out a direction for this blog because I can only post so many pictures of the area before even I get sick of it. I'm thinking of going through all my pictures and posting a random pic a day. I know thats pretty ambitious for someone who posts once or twice a month. I still have a bunch of pics to post from my last outing in Saint Paul as well as the recent flooding that occurred in my area. 

If people have any helpful suggestions as what to post or whatever, feel free to add. 

Anyway. All the pics I post are mine unless otherwise noted.


Here's pic post #1 back from May 2005



I took this pic on a cruise to Alaska back in my sophomore year in college. This was up a specific arm of a bay that had a glacier at its terminus. Unfortunately, the rapid melting and calving of the glacier made it impossible for the ship to reach the glacier safely but the views were none the less spectacular. For being May, the weather was fantastic and I believe we hit several records while we were there. It was funny when the local tour guide to the Salmon bake described the local weather as "cold" with a record low of -22 F. I laughed :P Those Fairbanks folks must really think fairly low of their Juneau counterparts. 

 Been a pretty busy time recently so I haven't gotten around to taking pictures of things like I wanted to and with weather not being particularly welcoming, I have resigned myself to waiting until the final thaw. Currently we have something around 18-24 inches of snow on the ground which isn't particularly bad, just annoying knowing full well that its here to stay for quite a long period of time. 

Unlike the East coast, storms rarely dump snow and start melting right away. Yes, the East Coast storms were massive this past winter and as an upper Midwesterner, we give them props for going through this. As much as we are proud of our winter heritage, we also realize that 30 inches of snow in a 24 hour period is nothing to scoff at. Minnesotan's for once were not envious of the East Coast. But despite the massive snow totals, I'm sure that we will have snow longer than the East Coast cities (I'm sure some of the higher elevations may beat us out). My parents had 11", 20", and 8" within a very short time frame burying theircity which usually experiences relatively mild winter. 

Our winter in Minneapolis has been stunningly average. October was colder than average and November was far above average temperature wise. December came in slightly below average and our very volatile January ended up balanced to be near average. Snowfall wise, we are just a couple inches up. Somewhere near 40". Although the airport had some anomalous totals this winter falling well below the rest of the metro on several occasions, but... statistically speaking, it should balance out (maybe not this year but in others). So while the East Coast digs out... Minneapolis lies relatively content with our easy average winter. Our forays into the negative territories were relatively minor and bearable. The only downside to this winter is the lack of an extended thaw that has led to a deep icy snow pack and particularly rough potholes. Minneapolis recently banned parking on one side of the non-snow emergency routes eliminating an estimated 80,000 on-street parking spots until April 1st or the snow melts significantly. The roads were getting so narrow that emergency vehicles were struggling to get to their destinations with some calls being forced to park a block or more away and hauling their gear to the scene.

Here's a few quick pics from the last week that I took...


After shoveling my Uncle's driveway for the umpteenth time, I took this pic. Sadly there was yet another snowfall after this storm bringing some piles in his area to the 4 to 5 foot area. 


I edited my iPod Touch's theme to be super cool :D.


More Snow pics


A look towards the Cathedral during one of our moderate snow events.
Crossing 50,000 miles on mmy car.


The Pupster at the computer :D



My first half-ass'd attempt at combining Minneapolis' and Saint Paul's skylines. Nearly height proportional. 


Before

After carwash!

Finally... 
I've been reading this book called... and don't laugh... Cop Book, which despite its rather poor title, has been a fascinating look into the life of a cop in the Twin Citie's suburb of Bloomington. Its been quite the emotional rollercoaster as he recounts his life and stories with such vivid details and a sometimes macabre sense of humor. I personally recommend this book to people who enjoy memoirs and have a decent stomach. Here's a selection of the book that I absolutely loved. He recalls his story as the first K-9 cop in his city and the rather funny situations his dog got him into. 

I just wanted to say thank you all for the nominations and Trixie awards. I really do appreciate this great honor. First and foremost, I wanted to thank all the staff, especially those who had their hands directly in the process of making this entire cookie sheet of Trixies. These awards take a lot of work from the page design, to reading the nominations and actually creating the awards, never the less the $5,000 prize that goes with it.... :P (just kidding folks). Anywho, I'm just glad that I can use this blog space to talk about random things and the place where I live. I enjoy having this blog and I hope you all enjoy reading it. On that note, I would like to announce I got even MORE books on my area from its lost architecture to its history so hopefully I'll have more random things to post about my area. 

Currently I'm in the middle of a large snow storm thats looking to dumpe 16 to 22 inches of snow in this area. Thankfully I got to put my car in my grandmothers garage so I don't have to deal with digging my car out once the storm is done. Unfortunately this same storm has cancelled both my Christmas Eve and Christmas Day plans (in conjunction with family illness). So my holidays are being spent with just my grandmother and brother. Its going to be a low key affair, but thats okay. So far we have about 8 inches on the ground with 10 to 14 more to go. Hopefully I get to go out on Sunday and take pictures of the nice newly fallen snow. 

On that note, I wanna wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. This is a nice time to reflect on the year and to enjoy the company of your family, even if this is the only day you can stand to be around them at all. Its hard to imagine that the "00s" are already done and a whole new decade is about to begin. So Happy New Years to everyone as well and don't party too hard.

On a blog related note, I'm thinking of creating a blog ring page to link to other people's blogs. This blog ring will be mostly "casual" so I prefer to add blogs that DO NOT talk about SC4 (predominately). But if you're interested in adding your page to mine, feel free to message me or post in the comments. I'll take a look, even if your page is exclusively SC4 related, I'll at the very least take a look. But my goal is to increase blog usage and posting (even for me) and I find that if more people are posting, the more likely I am to post as well. I'd like to specifically add blogs that use PERSONAL photos of where you live (anyone can google for crying out loud). Other casual blogs are welcome as well.  

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Thank You all once again! PEACE!

 Yes... I'm not proud that I ate a frozen dinner, but at just $1 and being out of town with practically no cooking utensils other than a microwave and a pizza pan, this was the most... reasonable of options. TV dinners are nothing more than nutritional... "carry me to the next meal" kinda things.  Now, I must say before I get to my review that this is not a normal part of my diet so ridicule is rather pointless. Ridicule of any expectation of decency is also not generally welcome. But paraphrasing a cooking reality TV show, just because its for the common man, simple, cheap, or convenient, taste does not need to be sacrificed and should not be. Cheap things can be good and healthy and convenient. Out of this post I hope you all get one thing... a good joke. On to the review.

Banquet Fishsticks Meal

Oh where do we start with this gem of a "TV" dinner. I put the TV in quotation marks for a good reason. If you intend on watching anything more than a commercial with this meal, I suggest including the box in this meal. This is for 2 reasons. As you can see in the picture, the net weight is a meager 7.3 oz. Thats it... 7.3 oz isn't even half a pound! I'm sorry, maybe I have a ferocious appetite, but I can eat 3 of these in a single sitting, not that its advisable for digestive reasons. You can literally inhale this meal and become quite disappointed when you realize that its gone... well, not after you read my "taste" portion of the review. After quickly finishing this meal, you'd have to go get something to ... cover the taste in your mouth forcing you to leave your couch or chair and abandoning CSI.  The second reason for why this isn't a good "TV" dinner is that if you intend on watching anything for a decent, the taste will make you cry, blurring your vision and decreasing visual accuracy of your programming. The box would actually be best consumed to elongate this meal as well as to improve taste.

Composition wise, I've never seen a more bizarrely constructed meal in my life. Fishtsicks (or fish fingers as my friends in York called them) are already a very odd food to begin with but lets forgive the processed fish, I wouldn't want their little fish lives to be lost in vane. But normal fish meals through the globe usually pair fish with a potato, olive oil/butter based sauce or scampi, or rice. Asians usually couple their fish meals with rice while fish and chips have become the norm in commonwealth nations. Whoever thought that macaroni and cheese was a viable partner for FISH sticks is an idiot. Cheese and fish don't belong together very often and for good reason... its disgusting. But thats not even the worst part... the 3rd component of the meal is... chocolate pudding. Yes, thats right, PUDDING. Now pudding by itself can almost never be screwed up, but can you imagine the taste of dry fish, cheap Velveeta like cheese and THEN pudding or any other order for that matter!?! The meal itself is just planned poorly, never the less the execution. But perhaps you may have missed the big problem with this composition of this meal.... but remember this is all MICROWAVED. So yes, the pudding comes out nice and gooey, bubbling hot and dried on the edges, and thats if your lucky the cheese didn't get mixed in during the packaging process. 

Taste wise.... the box is absolutely fantastic. Its waxy coating and consistent texture make it the crowning achievement for this meal. Too bad its not marketed as actually being a part of it, they would have gotten another 2 ounces to make it a slightly larger meal. The food inside the box is dismal. Absolutely horrific. Lets start with the fish sticks. Their mushy breading as a result of being STEAMED in the plastic wrapping does not even attempt to resemble what they are emulating... FRIED fish sticks. Can some one show me the last time they had breaded fish that was steamed? The fish was some generic cloned fish from some Japanese science experiment with GFP (green fluorescent protein) except without the exciting glow. Tasteless and boring with no application to the field of genetics. Very disappointing. Macaroni and cheese is supposed to be simple and pleasing to practically anybody, this was not. The soupiness of the cheese actually hid the macaroni. These small elbow noodles shouldn't be FLOATING in cheese, they are supposed to be the predominate part of the two word side dish. Its macaroni and cheese... not cheese with macaroni. But the cream of the failure was for sure the bubbling oozing mess that was the chocolate pudding. The hot sticky mess that was the brown mass in the corner is plainly deceptive. Yes its chocolate, but its also evil. Its consistency was exactly not that.... completely and utterly inconsistent. The top layer became dry and anything lining the side became particularly hot or encrusted while the center was somewhat pudding like. Mixing it was a mistake. The only visual analogy I can think of would only be reminiscent of the visit to the bathroom afterwords. 

This meal made the McDonald's $1 that much better. Overall, this meal made convenience inconvenient and my tastebuds scream for inedible household items. Between the composition, taste and size, this meal failed on all levels. I mean... the box art even sucks. Sorry.... this meal wasn't worth it and I STILL had to eat something else anyway. 

 After years of dabbling in the area of World War 2, a couple years ago the Call of Duty Franchise departed from the tired genre and did something that most games fail to grasp.... imagine something new. The story, albeit simple and playing to the fears of western society with a nuclear armed Islamist society, was compelling and the graphics put us all in awe. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare put us in the reigns of multiple characters and allowed us to see this dynamic story that was decades in the making. The game culminated in a nuclear attack on American forces in what I can only describe as "Muslim-abad", a generic Middle Eastern city. The next scene was one of my favorites in video game history showing the last few moments of a soldiers life as he crawled from the wreckage to see a mushroom cloud and a collapsing city only for himself to fall victim to the attack. 

Now a couple years later after this very popular game, its sequel came out. The two sides of me instantly became locked in an internal debate about sequels. Are sequels necessary sometimes... YES, of course. I'm not debating that.... but what does bother me about modern sequels is that they are often completely unnecessary and only tangentially even related. These days, sequels are coming out for the sake of making sequels and milking the cash cow. I'm looking at you Sims 3, Devil May Cry 4, Burnout whatever, ANY Madden game.... it gets old when you get a repacking of the same game. "Yay... I can swim in this edition" doesn't qualify as groundbreaking or super awesome so when I heard there was a sequel coming out, I was a bit weary. 

However, the other side of me argued that the story line was probably going to be great and that first person shooter games are rarely going to be any different anyway. I mean realistically, a first person shooter is kinda confined in what it can actually do differently and STILL be called a first person shooter. I also knew that multiplayer would naturally be fun so that wasn't going to be an issue. But there was that big gorilla in the room surrounding this game which is brought to your attention with a little warning box the first time you play this game. One scene "may" be offensive to some people and the game prompts you to decide to skip it or not. Really, its an M-rated game, you should be able to look past it.  Yes, its a mass shooting of civilians but its an unfortunate part of reality. It is a sobering scene but its a very short level and I'm not even sure if you HAVE to shoot until people are shooting at you. 

So on to the review of the sequel!

Story:
 The story as expected was phenomenal. From beginning to end, you were grabbed in. Without spoiling too much of the game, the "invasion" was a very interesting scene and I really enjoyed going through "familiar" settings through the lense of war. There were a couple of things that I didn't really care for. One being that they kill your character off.... twice... Sorry, you did that once in the first game and you didn't really attach me to this character. I played like... ONE mission with this dude, don't really care he's dead that and its a repetitive use of that story device.... "Simpsons did it!" comes to mind, except it was MW 1.  Sometimes throughout the game I felt like they were trying to push a "complex" story line and really it wasn't. Keep it simple and don't pretend its complex. Other than it being really short, the story was great.

Gameplay: 
Well, like every first person shooter it operated as it should have. It had a gun... you were looking through a pair of eyes... and that gun shot. Check. Much really hasn't changed from the first game in terms of gameplay. Other than a "heart beat monitor" and a ice-pick scene near the beginning, its pretty much unchanged. And thats FINE! Why mess with something that worked. Sometimes the maps were a bit confusing, especially when you were time crunched, which albeit realistic, can be rather annoying. Another problem, which they kept from the first game, is the IDIOCY of your team. Its kind of annoying when your team doesn't advance at all. I'm not sure if there were bugs in this release or not but a number of times I'd hit multiple checkpoints without a team member in sight. Or if I'd die they would suddenly start following me when I respawned.  Like... why weren't you there the first time!!!! I'd even go back to see what they were doing and they were just sitting there kneeling down doing nothing. 

The cool thing they added this game was the breach charges that would blow a hole in the wall or splint a door allowing you a surprise attack into an enemy held room. The game would go into slow-mo allowing you to pick of multiple enemies before they can even lift their rifle to eye level. This was pretty neat. There were a couple of other things like this that were neat, but otherwise gameplay mechanics were roughly the same. Ammo was a bit more scarce this game and god forbid that two enemies next to each other carried the same ammo... there were several times where I was picking up a gun with 20 bullets left or the other gun with 18 bullets left and no ammo in sight cause the other guns either sucked or had similarly depleted magazines. It made the game fun. 

Multiplayer:
I don't know.... didn't play it yet. I'm sure its fun and for the most part unchanged. I saw that you got to pick your symbols and titles and they still gave you the opportunity for custom classes. Otherwise its pretty much the same I presume. 

Overall: 
This game was good. Not much different than the first by why screw with a good game. I give the game a 9 out of 10. I strongly recommend buying this game.

 So its the first Tuesday of November... the day we hold our annual elections (although for completely different offices, unless its only for a one year term). After the undoubtedly historic election of 2008 and the turmoil that occurred concurrently and since, this election appeared to have snuck up on many of us, some even asking "What election?" Yes there is one and there are a number of races that were highly watched as they were labelled a "barometer" of Obama's presidency as Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota put it. There were interesting races across the country from governorships to numerous municipal elections. I'll start with the big ones...

Virginia and New Jersey Governorships:
Before I get to each individual race, lets just analyze the current state of American politics, briefly of course. The big question is... Are these races in any way a referendum on Obama's Presidency. The answer, in my opinion is a simple no. Americans are GREAT at separating Federal and State Elections. Now I'm not discounting the existence of coattails... but thats usually a bigger phenomenon when the person pulling the coattails is ACTUALLY on the ballot. Obama is NOT on the ballot. Additionally... there are unique conditions in both Virginia and New Jersey that even I concede I don't have a clue about. Wins in the Republican column in no way mean anything in terms of Obama's Presidency. Lets put this in a simple caricature....

Lets leave the President and his current agenda and issues as is. Health Care Reform, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Climate Change bills being his main concerns. But say a state is choosing their governor.... do national issues ALWAYS trump local issues in elections? Of COURSE not. A state may be more concerned about slot machines, sales tax, budget crises and other things. There's a reason why we have a federal structure of government... issues are handled at different levels. So what may be the focus of the federal government it does not necessarily match state governments and I think most people realize that.  The election of a particular candidate at the state level does not mean that the approval or disapproval of the president has any bearing (especially since the powers of these two offices almost never overlap). 

Additionally... we are dealing with ACTUAL candidates in state elections. Its not "Obama's Party" v. "Not Obama's Party" (although after last years thwomping, it may seem that way). There are names and faces, debates and ads. State elections are inherently separate animals then their federal counterparts. ESPECIALLY when its an off year election as it is now. Off year elections almost ALWAYS favor the party NOT in power.

So specific to this year... What should we have expected before today... Voter turnout will be abysmal. I'm talking 20% in most places. This has very astounding effects. 
A) Federal elections get a lot more media attention and will attract more voters due to perceived "importance". What does this mean in terms of results. Biased sampling will be far more prevalent. Since people are not generally passionate about the off year elections, the people who DO turnout will not be representative of the population as a whole (sampling bias). The people who are more passionate will show up in greater numbers (and its usually the people who are not in power). The Republicans SHOULD do better in this election. 
B) Minority and Youth turnout is expected to be low. With 2008 numbers for both youths and minorities at record levels, it is only natural to see them collapse. But off years even more so. Older generations tend to vote with more regularity (only somewhat more). The enthusiasm gap that plagued Republicans last November is now reversed. Youths and minorities are not going to match the numbers they put up last year and never have come out in force on off years. Older white rural voters tend to have a greater share of the vote in off years. Again a plus for Republicans

So does this translate into wins in New Jersey and Virginia....

New Jersey:
Given Corzines approval ratings flirting with the freezing mark, yes, Christopher Christi should have one. Really, had Republicans put up a more qualified candidate who could articulate his thoughts (and apparently was skinnier), they would have solidly won this (easily by double digits). Corzines abysmal approval rating should have marked a tidal wave of votes for the Republicans and given the conditions of 2009, Christi's sub-50% win is actually disappointing. But, a W by a Republican in a blue state is still a good W. Besides, in non-Wave years, flips like this are rather pointless. Great, the GOP have a governor in New Jersey. Too bad he doesn't control the legislative agenda and his party is the minority in New Jersey. A pretty hollow victory.

Virginia:
Despite the rather large victory by Obama in 2008, Virgina is still a fairly red state. But as I pointed out earlier, this is not an Obama Referendum. The candidate the VA Democratic Party put up for governor was a poor candidate and may have lost for NOT being liberal ENOUGH and resulted in a piss poor enthusiasm in the Democratic base. When polls earlier this summer suggested a close race for tonight, instead of trying to enthuse his base and getting the Youth and Minority demographics out in force, he tried moving left of center suggesting he'd opt out of the public option being among his most controversial things. As McCain struggled with alienating his base (his TRUE moderate base), Deeds has repeated that problem. This and the off year election factors that favor the Republicans in 09, there is no surprise that Republicans won. 

Here's how it should be looked it... the Two Governorships falling into Republican hands SHOULD have occurred. If they didn't, that would have been a very large upset and would have spelled huge troubles for the Republican Party. So tonights victories, although still good, isn't stellar. 

The GOP should be worried about losing NY-23, a district that normally favors Republicans. But the confusing split in the Republican ranks may have just handed the election to the Democrats. A big loss indicative of the moderates becoming disillusioned with the Republican party and following Dede Scozzafava's advice of backing the Democratic just shows that the ideological split in the GOP can and will still spell trouble in 2010. This is a race that the Republicans should have held on to, but the Teabagging wing of the Republican Party has turned off many moderate Republicans. 

My local races:
Nothing terribly exciting in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. The mayors of Minneapolis and Saint Paul cruised to re-election by garnering nearly 70% of the vote in their respective cities. The big news of the day is that Minneapolis used Ranked Choice voting (instant runoff voting) and ran very smoothing and across the Mississippi, Saint Paul's voters voted to use this same system for future elections. The vote won with around 53% of the vote. 

Other major races include... 
Atlanta (First white female?)
Houston (First Openly gay mayor?)
The Gay Marriage referendum in Maine

As of the writing of this post, Atlanta and Houston were poised to make history. The Gay Marriage referendum may overturn the legislature's efforts to legalize gay marriage although a recount is possible in Maine. If there are any races anyone else wants to comment on ... go for it.