Here’s some Lady Cloud Strife cosplay. Here it is. I got nothing else. Do I ever have anything else? Is life an empty void, save for brief respites in the form of attractive cosplay? Am I really here? Why do I have no pants on — again? Hey! What’s going on? Pass the punch.

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Can you imagine that shit? If somehow I pierced time, space, and the Multiverse? Got Aeris to be the flower girl at my wedding? And then like WHOOSH down comes Sephiroth and fucking kills her again? Best wedding ever.

Oh here’s some cosplay.

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I’d be lying if I said the first thing I wanted to do after being gone from home for fourteen hours was pen a column for you swine. But the Space-Ship demands its supplication. I must adhere to the scriptures. Lest the ones in the belly of the Ship awaken. Claw their way to the cockpit. Eat our souls, our mothers’ hearts, the organs of our unborn Space-Babies. We don’t want that, right? What’s a little fatigue-drunk groveling in the form of a column, if it saves the Omega-Ship? It’s nothing! Nothing god dammit!

—Oh, you don’t know what I’m rambling about? This is Monday Morning Commute. The column where we share the various things we’re anticipating, currently enjoying, or day-dreaming about on a given week. It serves as a meeting place, a virtual comic shop floor, the bathroom at a rock concert. It also keeps the Dark Lords from awakening. Fair trade.

Share your shit! What are you digging this week? (Oh, and if the comments aren’t working please clear your Chrome plug-in data.)

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Been a hot minute since we had some cosplay up in here. (Been a hot minute since we had much of anything up in here, but hey what the fuck whatever.) Here is a glorious Lady Cloud. Not to be confused with regular Cloud, who my mother confused for a woman back in the day more than once.

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I say sweet goddamn! Here is a pretty stunning rendition of Final Fantasy VII‘s train graveyard. Ain’t nothing in this world quite like cyberpunk rot of the game’s Sector 7.

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To smash the face of your enemies is the most grand of human experiences. To drink their blood from the crystal chalice of your superiority is to achieve the pinnacle of Darwinian success. It is with this irrefutable notion in mind that I postulate the following: every fucking video game should have New Game+. Every digi-polygon experience should allow those of us who have rose up through the darkness of a Level 1, Devoid of Equipment birth to return to those who felled us at the beginning of our journey with fury. We deserve to smash their teeth with our litany of new abilities. We deserve it, god fucking dammit. We earned it.

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[WEEKEND OPEN BAR: The one-stop ramble-about-anything weekend post at OL. Comment on the topic at hand. Tell us how drunk you are. Describe a comic you bought. This is your chance to bring the party.]

I want you to consider the following premises, keepin’ an eye peeled for similarities.

When a West Philadelphia-born prince ascended his Californian throne, he sang a little ditty. That time when the boxer prepared to avenge his friend’s death and defend America’s honor? You bet your ass he was jammin’ to some butt-rock. And when the world was ushered into the era of Y2J, it was greeted by the dulcet tones of a computerized countdown and processed vocals.

The conclusion: theme songs kick ass.

Hell, if you think about your favorite movie, TV show, or video game, chances are that it features some sort of soundtrack. Moreover, it’s also a solid bet that there’re clear-as-day, identifiable-as-hell themes woven throughout said soundtrack. While you’re experiencing this bit of entertainment, themes amplify the emotion at hand, whether it happens to be jubilation or intrigue or suspense. So affective, in fact, are theme songs that hearing them out of context can still teleport our consciousnesses to the space-time junctions of entertainment-inebriation.

Fighting Sephiroth.
Being devoured by a Great White.
Swoonin’ over a man with a license to kill.

If you count yourself amongst the OL faithful, then some of your life’s most consequential moments have probably been accompanied by a soundtrack. As such, I encourage you to respond to one or both of this weekend’s OPEN BAR prompts:

[What is a theme song you dig?][What would you choose for your own theme song?]

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Tifa’s huge rack and Cloud’s huge sword. It isn’t science (or maybe it is?) why I got behind Final Fantasy VII back in the day. There was flowing breasts and enormous bladed phallic weapons to swing at objects of my desire destruction. My adolescent brain was careening on raw hormone. You see, I regularly destroyed compact discs for no apparent reason. More often than not, I’d crank open my Mortal Kombat II strategy guide and awkwardly rub my groin all over my carpet with odd feelings and gooey groin. This game brought together these two absurd occurrences, and wrapped it up with the emergent teenage sense of wonderment. As Cloud and his rag tag of condemnable terrorists rolled the fuck out of Midgar, the world opened up to them. I couldn’t help but feel the same fucking feeling, with friends getting their licenses and our own world map unfolding before our eyes. Granted, Cloud was saving the world (when not being some sort of eco-Jihadist piece of shit). I was getting fat off of Wendy’s chicken nuggets and cajoling friends into trying to buy porn for me. Cloud and me? Mutually assured bildungsroman.

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Final Fantasy VII ain’t getting remade in HD any time soon. That would make too much sense, and if there’s anything Square has demonstrated over the last decade, it is that they lack that. For now, sate your Cloudian hunger on some glorious 2D paper figures of the cast by George Alexopoulos.

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Feeling a little bit old-person here when I admit this, but I’m not really certain what Minercraft is all about. Yeah, I’m sorry. I find it a bit confusing. I know it’s an indie wonder, and you like…build stuff. Or something. Even without a direct grasp on what’s going on (a common situation for me), I can still respect this. It’s Midgar from Final Fantasy VII  recreated in the game in staggering, staggering, staggering fucking detail.

Hit the jump to check it out.

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