Why I'm no longer flying with Delta Airlines

I've not blogged anything in a long time but I very much wanted this to exist on the internet so that anyone could access it and know my pain.

It's been a little over a week since this event occurred where Delta stole a day of my life from me and there has been zero correspondence from them save for an email survey they sent me about a delay I had on a different flight which barely has anything to do with why I was and still am angry with them.  I attacked the comment box:


"I find it very insulting that this survey is in regards to the flight delay I had in Atlanta and not the completely ridiculous mishandling of my travel experience I received beginning the day before on 5/9/2013, but let me elaborate on why I will not be flying ever again and why I'll be telling my friends (and anyone who will listen) not to fly Delta again:

I was originally scheduled to fly home on 5/9 to visit my mother and family on mother's day weekend.  This would be my first trip home in nearly 7 years and my mother had several things planned for me every day of that trip.  On the morning of 5/9 I received a call and email saying my flight would be delayed.  It was delayed again about an hour later which would have made my connection impossible so I called customer service to inquire as to what to do.  I took the option to take an earlier flight leaving the same day putting me at my destination at roughly the same time and rushed to the airport.  I immediately checked in at the first available self check in terminal and received my boarding pass.  I was then ushered into the wrong line (special services) to check my bags. This line happened to be crowed due to issues with your terminals not being able to read passports for international flights, it also contained several travelers who couldn't use their terminal due to an error you had with a flight to Paris, as well as people who were supposed to be on my original flight that had been extremely delayed.  After speaking to an agent I was put in the correct line to check my bag, and later pulled out of that line to check it in outside which should have been quicker.  When I reached the front of the line and gave the person my ID they couldn't pull any information about my flight up in their system.  I explained I already checked in at the self service and had my boarding pass but even after scanning the boarding pass they were unable to retrieve anything and told me to go to special services where I originally started.  The special services line had now doubled in size by this time due to the three situations I mentioned before and I was hounded over and over by your agents trying to pull me out of that line thinking I didn't need to be there leaving my to explain my story over and over again.  When I finally made it to an attendant at the counter my flight had already boarded.  I explained what happened and they apologized and after a little time gave me reservation and booking information for a flight with American Airlines.  I then went and stood in their line for about half an hour and when I got to the counter I was told that the flight was oversold and to go back to Delta, so I strolled all the way back over to that special services line questioning what the word "special" in special services really stood for.  After another twenty minutes or so I got to speak with someone again who again was nice and apologized and this time presented me with two options, to either flight out at 10pm that night or the first flight the next morning.  Both of these options meant I would miss an entire day that my mother had planned for me but I didn't complain and accepted the 10 o'clock flight.  The rep made the reservation for the flight to Atlanta (which was with Alaska Air) and gave me the boarding information.  It was also at this time I learned about the $25 voucher I was supposed to get for the airport as well as some online $50 off coupon I supposedly have on my account which I will not be using.  My entire faith in your company was lost at this point and a one day $25 food voucher and $50 off a flight doesn't begin to make up for what happened to me.  I had to wait at that airport for over eleven hours before I got to fly out of it.  I couldn't even check in my bag and go through security because you're not allowed to check bags until four hours before your flight which severely limited the locations which I could use that food voucher and I was quite hungry because I skipped lunch trying to get to the airport early enough to make that flight.  After hanging out at the entrance for five hours I finally checked my bag and got through security so I could get started on waiting another four hours to actually get on a plane.  I was surprised that flight wasn't delayed at that point.  I landed in Atlanta with no problem and made my way to the gate.  There was a very nice woman working the gate I spoke with who printed my boarding pass.  My original flight was supposed to leave around 9:30am but I fell asleep at the gate and missed it.  I admit, that was my fault, but it was also aided by being forced to wait at Seatac for 11 hours and I had barely gotten any sleep.  Again, my fault - I should have set an alarm.  I explained what happened to the nice woman at the gate and she assured me nothing was wrong and this happens sometimes and instructed me to got to the ticketing office where I met a very unfriendly woman to try to reschedule my flight.  And now we've arrived at the part of my story that actually applies to the condition you sent me this survey for.  The gate for this flight changed about 3 or 4 times and when I heard it was delayed it didn't surprise me at all considering every leg of this trip was screwed up in some way.

And there you have it, why I'm not spending any more money on your company.  Throughout my entire trip plenty of your people apologized and some empathized with my situation but none of them actually did anything to try to make it up to me.  Yes I received and used your food voucher but that was something that printed from the check in terminal, not something offered to me by one of your reps - all you did was tell me I had one and reprint it when I realized I accidentally gave it to the first person who helped me in the special services line.  I even spoke to one of your supervisors (who had to be called in to reprint the voucher) who heard my entire story and didn't offer me anything either.  Eleven hours is a very long time to spend in the airport, surly I could have been given an additional voucher, or maybe even upgraded to a first class flight for one of my travel legs or maybe even given a refund for half of my travel expenses since I barely did any traveling that day.  Your company robbed me of an entire day of my life as well as precious time that could have been spent with my family that I hadn't seen in seven years, time that was already earmarked for that very thing.  Apparently to your company my time is only worth $50 to entice me to fly with you again.  That amount of money would only cover the cost of checking my baggage both ways, so since you company is treating me like baggage, I'm treating your company like baggage as well.  The baggage I need to drop.  I also find it very insulting that your company has some sort of system in place to track things like delays and whatever other mistakes that happen to your customers and sends out these surveys, yet I received no survey call or email about the error that completely fouled everything up.

I think you should know that my job is to train customer service.  Every five weeks or so I'm given a class of around thirty individuals to train how to do things properly and how to treat customers.  In the first week of every class we all share stories of both positive and negative experiences we've had in the past and why we continue to do business with some companies and not do business with others.  Have I ever got a story to tell them."

So Delta gave me something to blog about for the first time in about four years.  Yea?

Muramasa: The Demon Blade impressions

So I've actually re-connected my Wii to my TV and turned in on for 3 days in a row now because Muramasa is kind of awesome. And kind of hard. The art style is spectacular. The sprites and backgrounds are all hand drawn and don't look like ass on an HDTV.

The art may look simple at first, but when you see it in motion and realize that there are several layers to each background, you begin to appreciate what the developers did. The combat is pretty simple on the surface too. It's all 1-button combat, and if you hold the A button down you can do special dash attacks. Your character can hold up to three different blades a one time and each blade has a different attack power and special attack. There are several different enemies you will randomly encounter while traversing the Metroid style rooms.

Another thing it has in common with Metroid is that different portions of each area can only be accessed after you get a certain sword that can destroy the barrier. The boss fights are completely old school and feature you learning the pattern of the boss and exploiting it to win. Some of them are downright frustrating, especially when you have a boss that can hover above you and randomly drop high damage attacks down on you. Also, even with over 1/3 of the swords owned and me being at a higher level than what the game is pacing me at, I'm never more than one bad encounter away from dying. This game is hard. If you land somewhere between two enemies at the wrong time they can hit you for a lot of damage fast. It's like Ninja Gaiden in that aspect where even the lowliest of enemies can kill you if you don't watch what your doing.

The story so far (of the one I'm playing apparently there's an alternate story path I have yet to start) is that some super badass samurai guy was dying and used some hidden technique to steal some girl's body to continue his quest to kill someone. It's very Japanese and the original voice language track is in tact with English subtitles all the way through. It's a very pretty game and it's really fun if you can get over the fact that you will die more often than you'd like (there are 2 difficulty settings one where you have to defend yourself and one where you don't and they can be changed on the fly - I'm playing it on the harder one). The death penalty isn't all that bad either. You usually just spawn one or two screens away from where you were at the worst. They also don't make you have to go through the whole "this is why I'm here to kill you..." business if you die and have to restart a boss fight either. Muramasa is definitely a Wii game that's worth it.

The Beatles Rockband review

One year later and here I am again gladly parting with $60 for a new Rockband game. The difference is this time I'm not just buying a new disk to put into my 360, I'm buying an experience. Not only is The Beatles Rockband an evolution of the franchise as a whole, but they were able to do so much more with the entire focus being on just one band who happens to be one of the greatest bands of all time.

The nuts and bolts of the game are all there. You play guitar, bass, drums, or sing in the same manor with notes or words scrolling across the screen and you are judged based on your performance. If you play drums you will notice that there are no longer any places for drum fills. Instead once you have enough overdrive the green column will glow and you can activate overdrive by hitting the glowing green note when it appears. I welcome this change as it keeps you in the song and doesn't allow you to limp your way through a hard song by not activating the overdrive. You will also notice that before and after the song you can't play around hitting random drum pads. I thin maybe The Beatles had some say in making sure no notes get played that aren't theirs.

What shows that Harmonix has grown are the changes they've made to the guts for this game. Difficulty is no longer an issue when trying to clear story mode. As long as you pass all the songs you can continue through to the end. Songs do not need to be unlocked. No fail mode is activated upon anyone choosing easy difficulty. There is an achievement menu that is accessible from several places in the game which tells you how far along you are toward getting certain ones and what you need to do to get others. Quite frankly, this is the most user friendly Rockband game ever.

As I stated, this game is The Beatles experience. The story mode is executed wonderfully starting you off in Liverpool in '61 playing the groups early hits all the way to the rooftop of the Apple Corp. building in '69 with all the haircuts and wardrobe changes in between. Every song in the game has its own background performance and for every one of the eight chapters the band gets a new look. Once you reach the three Abbey Road, the game really begins to shine as the music becomes more psychedelic so do the performances. For Yellow Submarine and Octopus' Garden, the band becomes submerged under water, Within You Without You has them floating through tie-dyed space, I Wan You (She's So Heavy) has them literally pulsing and vibrating toward the end of the song before the classic cutoff. You can get lost in the backgrounds and forget what notes you're supposed to be hitting sometimes.

Going a steap beyond making some cool backgrounds, you also unlock some cool photos of the band from throughout their career. Each one comes with a caption about what was going on with the particular song it unlocked with or that time in their career. After unlocking a certain amount of photos you get prizes in the form of videos of the band. One is an outtake from their first US tour, another a rehearsal for their 2nd appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. There are six in all and well worth it. Finally after clearing ever chapter in story mode, you unlock a challenge where you play a continuous set of music which will also unlock band photos if you recieve the full amount of stars.

This game is loaded with fun. There are 45 songs on the disk and if you have a 360 connected to the internet you can purchase the exclusive DLC track All You Need Is Love (all proceeds are donated to charity). There is also more DLC on the way in the coming months. I was a little upset at the fact you can't import the songs into Rockband 2 and vice versa, but in retrospect having this be a standalone game makes more sense especially after the Kurt Kobain fiasco that the Guitar Hero people are having. The people at Harmonix say that all future DLC songs will have their own unique backgrounds as well with $2 still being the price which is quite a deal considering what they're giving us. So yes I've bought three Rockband games in three years time, but every single one has been absolutely worth it.

Grade A-

Meta Grade 90

Criminal

For the past week I've been reading a series of comics entitled Criminal by Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Sean Phillips. I picked up the first 4 volumes after Amazon recommended the series to me for my interest in Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets), and I have to say these are some of the best stories in comics I've ever read. It's very reminiscent of Frank Miller's Sin City (Miller even writes him an introduction in the 2nd volume) in that all the action takes place in the same geographic area in that hard boiled detective writing style.

Stories are either narrated by the author or the protagonist of the story line and each text box fills in all the minute details making every page more succulent than the last. There's the war vet who returns home after his brother turned up dead that can't seem to shake his daddy issues, the expert thief who's always been able to keep off the police's radar who gets sucked into a heist he can't make a clean escape from, and the son of a mobster's advisor who just wants to make his own way and live a crime free life. There are femme fatals, bullets, guns, American muscle cars making Bullet style getaways, and plot twists that you will never see coming - I guarantee you. There are no full page splash panels here.

The art in these books is there to serve the story only. Ever page is divided into thirds and the most real estate on piece of art will get is 1/3 of the page. That's not to say the art isn't great, in fact every panel captures the beat of what's going on in the story better than the best directed, best acted films of today. Aside from a fictional city, these stories take place in the real world and real things happen. There are no deus ex machina elements to complain about. No one is invincible, everyone is vulnerable and I have yet to finish a story without uttering "wow." Every volume is a self contained story so you can guilt free read an issue without worrying what will happen to so and so next month. The series is still ongoing though so you will be waiting on edge for the next volume to drop just like I'm waiting to get my hands on Mass Effect II this winter. Give this series a shot. You will not regret it.

Grade A-

Meta Grade 91

(While I love the series, I still haven't come accross any super awesome quoatable lines like Frank Miller's Sin City is full of. I guess "Worth Dyin' for, worth killin' for, worth goin' to Hell for, amen" and "It's time to prove to your friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes that means killin' a lot of people" are hard to compete with.)

Asterios Ployp

Another comic I just completed is Asterios Polyp, written and illustrated by David Mazzucchelli. Feel free to read into the name, the author wants you to as there are several interestingly named characters throughout the book you'll run into. The book, named for its main character, is all about Asterios, his life, what shapes him, and what shapes us all. Asterios is a very successful "paper architect," meaning none of his designs have actually been built. We're introduced to him at his absolute lowest point when his apartment building is struck by lightning and he makes it out with only the clothes on his back and three items he couldn't leave without: an old watch, a Swiss Army knife, and a Zippo that's out of fluid. Asterios has a twin brother that dies in child birth who helps narrate from time to time and fill in pieces of his surviving brother's story.

The events of the book take place out of order and cover three periods of his life. It reads like a Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) movie elegantly weaving between time, plots, concepts and emotions and the art while appearing simple on the surface, is the absolute correct choice to tell the story. Characters are broken down into geometric shapes, colors, outlines, and are even between worlds at times all relative to what is going on. The story is one that presents and challenges concepts and ideas. Aside from Asterios' "I'm always right" self obsessed attitude, you'll get to know his artist wife on some level, you'll meet a bombastic theater director, a meat-and-potatoes car mechanic, a self proclaimed goddess, a revolutionary, and several other characters, each with something to say. To say the story is a beautiful mess is to disgrace it as every word and illustration is there for a reason. Not one of them feels as if it doesn't belong or only exists to fill the page, and I wouldn't change a pencil stroke.

Mazzucchelli's artwork also managed to surprise me in that he knows how to use white space as good as any advertising copyrighter. Characters are pushed to the side to create a sense of chlostrophobia or anxiety, they are isolated on the page, they are larger than life and as small as an ant all at once. There is a section of this book where Asterios is thinking about his wife that can bring tears to your eyes. There are portions that will make you laugh out loud such as Asterios' opinion of why men don't make noise during sex and things that will seriously make you think like how Mazzucchelli was not only able to suggest that memories are a recreation of an event, but illustrate the concept in such a way that the entire presentation brings perfect understanding of what he is trying to express. No, this book is not a beautiful mess. It is simply beautiful. I've not come across anything else like it. This is probably one of the beast works of art that I will ever read.

Grade A+

Meta Grade 100

Back in action

So I've been gone for a bit which I apologize for. Having too much free time every day is actually quite worse than have little time to spare in a lot of ways. I haven't been wasting all my time and energy though and I will be retroactively reviewing the content I've been consuming. In fact two new articles about some graphic novels are going up minutes after this post is finished. I'll be at PAX this weekend in Seattle and I'll try to live blog it if I can get a decent connection. At the very least I'll post the messages I'll be sending to my e-mail stream on this site and my examiner page. Please do read my review of Asterios Polyp and buy it. You will not regret it. Other than that, please read on, and keep checking back.

GI Joe thoughts

The script for the GI Joe movie would have been awesome if they had removed GI Joe from it. Yeah it's cliched to death, but what big summer movie isn't these days? The whole Duke & Baroness story line needed to be dropped. The actual plan to take over the world doesn't come from Cobra commander, the soldiers who are supposed to feel no fear show that they're afraid, the special effects look bad like they belong in a high budget video game not a summer blockbuster the acting is as dry as a desert... on Mars, and not a single thing that happened in the movie didn't seem forced. You may question my statement about the script having the potential to be awesome. Well a movie about some terrorists that hijacked a bunch of warheads and a small outfit of commandos sent in to stop them could have been a cool action movie if done right. But this is the GI Joe movie so they had to find a way to explain people's backstories, and have pulse weapons and accelerator suits, crossbows with programmable arrows, nano machines, invisible camouflage, and people in weird costumes thought be be dead but not, and all races represented because even though they're real American heroes, they're not. Go see The Hurt Locker for some real hero shit. Stay away from this thing.

Grade D
Meta Grade 40