It's the Little Things... That, When There are Enough, Explode

There’s this gun in Halo: Reach; it’s called the needler, and I feel very attached to it. I’m not a gamer, really; I don’t sit and play by myself or anything. But I grew up without any gaming systems (not any); we also didn’t have cable. My mother is fundamentally against sitting down, I think, and my dad is against spending money. So no Super Nintendo, no Sega Genesis, no Playstation, and only 2 ½ TV channels received locally over bunny ears. We barely had Gameboys. I read books instead, the one acceptable form of sitting. And anyway, there’s this gun called the needler.

It’s beautiful.

It’s a Covenant gun – which means, in this case, it's made by aliens – that you hold with one hand. It has fuchsia spikes (needles) coming out the top of it, which it shoots. When your reticle is red, these spikes will track on to your enemy, and if you shoot someone with enough spikes they’ll explode. That’s not the best part, though. The best part is how it reloads – you cock your wrist and jerk it downward, snapping more needles up into place. It’s fast and seamless, and I get enormous satisfaction out of it. (It’s unclear to me why this is. I have a vague memory of something, a toy, maybe, that made that same snapping noise. I’d flick my wrist and these things – I can’t remember – would snap into place. Oh! I know – I just now this second remembered. It was one of those camping cups, you know? Those collapsible plastic camping cups. It was yellow. And you’d hold the lip of it and flick your wrist, and it’d be a cup! Then you could press evenly on the ends and it would break down flat into concentric circles. Gosh, making that flicking motion, hearing that sound, and making something fall into place - that combination of things - feels like scratching an itch somewhere deep in my brain.)

I was going to expound upon how I think things like video games and television shows are on their way into becoming something like literature – I do think that. Or at least I think they have that potential. When novels, for example, started becoming easier to access and more widely written, it was believed that reading would rot your brain. Why shouldn’t other media rise up from such beginnings, too?

But instead of that, I want to say that sometimes (maybe most of the time) there are little things that people make that are transcendentally cool, and those things are really nice to come across.