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The latest Jedi news . . . . . .

Resilience

May 17th, 2012

Every Jedi will stumble and fall at least once in their lifetime. We have plenty of examples of the movie Jedi, such as Anakin’s fall to the Dark side, Luke’s failure at the cave in The Empire Strikes Back and his attacks on Darth Vader and the Emperor aboard the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi.

Never give up!

The stumbles can be internal, external, or both. But the cause is the same, which is the ego getting in the way of channeling the Force through mindfulness. Fear, anger, hatred, revenge, or physical hostility all come from the same location, the ego.

So what is the solution? Continue to meditate and get used to being mindful so you can carry it over into your everyday activities. When eating, eat. When walking, walk. Don’t cloud the Force with memories of the past or thoughts about the future.

Every Jedi will stumble and fall at least once in their lifetime. The difference between the Jedi and the Sith? The Sith remain fallen while the Jedi pick themselves back up.

My second month in The Old Republic

May 15th, 2012

So here I am, having completed my second month of playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. This will serve as a short continuation of a previous review.

I am still working on developing my Jedi Sentinel, currently at Level 48. I have created four other characters as well that I am looking forward to playing, they are a smuggler, bounty hunter, trooper, and a dark Jedi. I have been to the majority of the planets but I still have to see Corellia, Ilum, Drommund Kaas, and Korriban.

Quickly, my thoughts are still very positive. I love the music and the immersive quality of the game. The worlds are beautifully rendered and I am just enthralled with the developing main story line and all of the accommpanying side stories.

Here is what I am not so positive about. The game play has become a little stale for me. I am used to First Persson Shooters such as Star Wars; Battlefront so I find myself a little bored when it comes to combat. Ironically, I find the Jedi has too much combat to accomplish and it doesn’t follow the concept of violence as a last resort (however, I believe many would be bored if playing a Jedi who rarely fought). It is hard to complete the Flashpoint and Heroic missions as they require a social group and many times I find myself on a planet with a player count in the single digits.

So as I prepare to finish the main story with my Jedi Sentinel I look forward to the stories still waiting to be discovered with my other characters. The positive qualities of the game still heavily outweigh the negative qualities so I look forward to playing this game for many months to come.

Are you playing? What are your thoughts on the game?

Should a Jedi be Vegan?

May 14th, 2012

A few weeks ago I did a review about The Book of Jedi by Dogen Elohim Altieri, and in this review he mentioned that Jedi should be Vegan/Vegetarian. With a daughter who has recently decided to go Vegetarian on moral principles I thought I should look into this a little more.

Most Jedi who follow a Vegan (from this point on Vegan will refer to all forms of Vegetarians, including octo-lacto, etc.) diet do so because of the Jedi Code as re-written by Luke Skywalker that says that Jedi respct all life, in any form. Vegans and I will agree that commercial food lots that hold their livestock in small pens and feed them an alien diet full of drugs are very disrepectful of animals. However, people have spoken with their wallets and livestock raised humanely in large open fields and fed a native diet are now available in grocery stores at a small premium to conventionally raised meat.

So if the animals are being treated with respect while alive and throughout the butchering process I ask the question, is eating an animal a form of disrespect? I say no. It is a biological fact that the human body is designed to be fueled by animal products and my point is that it runs optimally on a diet that imitates the diet of the human race prior to the advent of the agricultural revolution (discussed here and here as the paleo/caveman/evolutionary/primal diet). Like the story of the frog and the scorpion, it is in our nature to eat other animals so there is no disrespect in doing what we are designed to do.

So, what can we do as Jedi to respect the life of all of our food (remember, plants are alive as well!)? The first thing you can do is buy the right food. Buy organic and free range. Buy your beef and bison grass-fed and finished. Let your chicken not eat Vegan and live on a diet of bugs and larvae like they are meant to.

The second thing we can do is recognize the sacrifice the animal (or plant) has given to become our food. Say grace if you are so inclined, or do like the Japanese do and say “Itadakimasu” (literally means “I will receive” but said in thanks prior to eating) or something equivalent. Give thanks again when your meal is complete, to what you just consumed and to whoever created the meal for you (yes, you can thank yourself!).

The third thing we can do is be mindful while we eat. Pay attention to the food as you put it into your mouth, truly taste it as you chew it and swallow it. Do not sit in front of the TV, or the computer, or the iPad, or be on the phone while you eat. Be here and now and enjoy.

You can still be a Vegan Jedi if you so desire. Just be certain to do it smartly and get all of the nutritional components that you need. However, don’t feel pressured to do so to live up to the Jedi Code.

Are you a Vegan Jedi now, thinking about it, or were you one in the past? Let me know what you think!

Happy Star Wars Day!

May 4th, 2012

The Book of Jedi by Dogen Elohim Altieri

April 23rd, 2012

One of our readers had posted a link to a Jedi training manual on our Facebook page a while back and I finally got around to reading it in its completion. The Book of Jedi by Dogen Elohim Altieri is available as a free download, you can get it by clicking here.

So, what are my thoughts? When I first started reading The Book of Jedi I was uninspired. The content was just short little quips and quotes and I didn’t feel like I was learning anything from it that I didn’t already know . At 78 pages in length I was worried that I would quickly finish the book and emerge none the wiser.

However, somewhere about half-way through the book the content definitely changed. The PDF book actually started providing instruction, giving direction on real ways to harness the power of the Force instead of giving short, cryptic movie quotes. The lessons are insightful and will definitely help you in your journey while the appendix takes up too much of the book to be an appendix, instead it should be its own chapter.

My final thoughts? The book is available as a free download so you are only out an hour of your time to read it. Even if it was horrible your investment wouldn’t be too large. But I think you will get something out of reading the book. The book offers unique insights into Jedi training and I believe you will emerge from your reading a better Jedi. Go to the website and give it a download.

Have you already read The Book of Jedi? What did you think?

Another sites take on mindfulness

April 17th, 2012

Image courtesy of zenhabits.net

Mindfulness. This is something that I have been saying over and over again. It is a very integral part of being a Jedi, especially in this frenzied time. I ran across another post over at Zenhabits.net and instead of writing the same thing he does I thought I would just share it with you and let you take a look at it.

Introducing 1N-4M, Human/Holonet relations droid

April 16th, 2012

1N-4M, image courtesy of Quantic Dream

I haven’t been posting lately because I have been having trouble getting my Facebook app, the Holocron Transfer Tool, to work properly and I like having a way to get a post written on Monday to automatically post on Friday and share across the Modern Jedi Knight social media pages on Facebook and Twitter. Be sure to join them to receive notification that a post has been written or you can also join our email list at the bottom of the page to receive notifications via email. Don’t worry, I don’t even have access to the list so it can’t be sold or distributed, it is all done through Google and they won’t do that to the list either.

So I made a little side trip to Coruscant and, in the shadow of the Jedi Temple, I found this Chadra-Fan with a prototype protocol droid named 1N-4M that looked to be the salvation to my Holocron Transfer Tool with a faulty motivator. This is serving as a test message to calibrate 1N-4M’s settings and also serve as notification that I haven’t fallen victim to any nefarious bounty hunters in the region.

If you find the photo of 1N-4M interesting you can watch a short video clip that is showing the current potential of motion-capture technology in regards to gaming. The results are eerily amazing and also could provide quite the conundrum for the Jedi of the future. Watch it and let me know what you think.

Did you figure out the droids pronounced name yet? As a small hint, don’t think of the first character as a number but as a letter. Pretty clever, huh?

My month in The Old Republic

April 5th, 2012

Image courtesy of SWTOR

It was simply an opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. My wife’s computer was getting ready to convert to the dark side as it was having difficulty turning on and remaining powered up. Because of that, we headed out to get her another computer, something more up to the times. So low and behold we were getting ready to check out with a new quad-core processor tower a 23″ LED monitor and I kept glancing over to the software titles when my wife asked why. I quickly ran over and came back with Star Wars: The Old Republic in my hands. She agreed and I soon had the galaxies newest Jedi Knight on my screen, a male Miraluka named Jetsi. That was a month ago and since then I now have a Level 38 Jedi Sentinel on the Vrook Lamar server, look me up if you are in the neighborhood.

I have been dabbling in the Star Wars Combine, a browser-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) economic simulation for more time than I care to admit but I had no experience with a graphics based MMORPG with open terrain, battle, etc. SWTOR is looking to take on World of Warcraft by offering a fully voiced MMORPG, where every character you meet talks to you and you interact with them by choosing your response where WoW only offers text. I made many rookie (newbie) mistakes and had to ask a lot of questions to those who I was playing with about many aspects of the games operation. So, with the background out of the way, you are probably wondering what my thoughts are about the game. Here they are in no particular order:

The game is a time stealer! I know my posting here over the last few weeks suffered but that wasn’t due to SWTOR as I usually make my posts on layovers (yesterday was Cleveland and today is Indianapolis) while at work and the last few weeks has been very hectic with international layovers with spotty internet and some vacation time. While at home, however, there is a different story. My wife and I compete for the computer some times since it is “her” station but it is the only computer that I can play on. I also feel compelled to put every spare moment I have into it because of the $15 monthly subscription, therefore I feel I am missing out if I am paying and not playing. Perhaps as the newness wears off the allure will lower some as well. This was a concern of mine early on, I posted about it earlier when the game’s release date was finally announced. It looks like I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain but I felt it was an opportunity not to be wasted. It might also cause a hard choice to be made later should I feel a separation is necessary.
The game is incredibly immersive. You get to see and explore worlds that you have only glimpsed, like Alderaan from the last seconds of Revenge of the Sith, along with worlds that are very familiar to you, such as Tatooine and Coruscant. One thing I didn’t know about MMORPGs before this is that there is a lot of travel between your tasks. Normally this would bother me as it would be boring, but by listening to the background music which has soundtracks from the movies and original works that were definitely influenced by John Williams while looking around at the beauty of the landscape makes it quite enjoyable. More than once I have simply set off in a certain direction just to see what I could see, whether it be the binary suns of Tatooine or the temple ruins of Tython. Accompanying the concept of sound is the fully-voiced Non-Player Character (NPC) interaction which contains over 4,000 spoken lines, something unheard of until SWTOR came out, which draws you in and helps you develop a connection with the characters.
The Jedi Knight class can teach you something. You are constantly given choices in the game and these games influence your alignment with the Force. Make too many bad choices and your Jedi Knight can turn to the Dark side of the Force, but a switch can also be made between the Sith to the Light side. Throughout all of these conversations with the NPCs you have to make some hard choices. Do you save the lives of some Imperial prisoners or do you abandon them to Colicoids to prevent a risk to your own skin is just one example of a choice that I recently had to make? Not all of them are black and white, easy choices to make. And sometimes I have made the wrong one myself. However, if you listen to that your Jedi Knight has to say, along with the other Jedi in the game, they impart some great wisdom.
There is definitely the concept of replay value within the game. Right now your character tops out at Level 50 while WoW goes to at least Level 80. Even if they don’t make downloadable content (DLC) such as new races, classes, map expansion packs, new quests, legacy content, etc. available there will still be plenty of the game left to play once your first character tops out. Like I mentioned earlier you can take your character and change their alignment throughout the game, either from bad to good or good to bad. I also have seven other classes, different sub-classes, and eight other playable species to try out and certain areas of the map are restricted to certain classes (I don’t know if there are any race/map restrictions). Put all together that offers 144 different variations that can be done throughout one game if my math is correct.

Those are my initial thoughts after one month of playing The Old Republic. If you are a Star Wars fan this is an experience that you must have. You can buy the game for $39.99 on Amazon or download the game directly from the Star Wars: The Old Republic website. If you want to give the game a try they are offering many opportunities to play the game for free, this weekend is one of them and you can find more information by clicking here. I am certain you will enjoy the game as much as I do.

Pull back your focus

April 4th, 2012

Have you ever noticed that all day long we spend an inordinate amount of time focused on one small spot? The monitor you are reading this on, the screen of your smartphone or tablet computer, the television and game console all demand our attention to be brought on to one small area. How can you be mindful when all of your focus is on a 3.5 inch digital screen that is held in your hand? How can you be receptive to the Force when you don’t even notice the significantly-less-than-subtle things that surround you? Could Attention Deficit Disorder actually be a symptom of our overattentive technological environment, a result of our inability to see “the big picture” and a lack of time with our natural environment (the Force, Mother Nature)?

Is this having any ill effects on us and the human race? It sure is. So what is a Modern Jedi to do? I have been thinking about this for the past month or so and have tried to incorporate measures to remove my screen and focus fixation.

While going on walks, for example, I will find something on my walk that fits comfortably in the palm of my hand and won’t cause any problems if dropped, such as a small rock or pine cone. Then, while walking and keeping my focus on the horizon in front of me, I gently throw the rock up in the air with one hand and catch it with the other hand. The rock enters my field of vision but I don’t actively track it and I let my peripheral vision do the work. When talking to someone I look directly into their eyes but I try to keep up with everything else I am seeing as well. While watching television I also look through the window and the patio door that flank both sides of the screen and I do something similar while on my computer as well.

I just had a martial arts belt test earlier this week where I was surrounded by four assailants at the cardinal points and had to defend myself with a distancing kick as they came in. Even though I successfully passed the test I can see that I still have work to do in expanding my focal area from a small point to my entire surrounding environment.

Have you noticed this fixation? Have you done anything to try to correct it? Do you have any ideas for other exercises that can be performed? Let me know in the comments if you have anything to add as I believe this is an important problem that needs to be addressed and corrected as soon as possible.

More from Vader’s Fist

March 17th, 2012

Image courtesy of Jeremy Naylor DZ-2638