I toss and turn, yeah…

I’m nearing my second week of withdrawals, horrible opiate withdrawals.  The worst imaginable.  Suboxone withdrawals.

I never realized my state of mind until I stopped, though.  I’m glad I did, even though the last week of my life has been utter hell.  Sweating, cramps, restlessness, insomnia, fever, lethargy… I’ve slept no more than 2-3 hours a night for the past week straight.  It’s ridiculous.

I’m 1,500 miles away from home, in a low-rent apartment, and all I have is $7.00.  My brother won’t come through for me, as much as he says he “will”.  I always thought people would help support me when I needed it.  I guess I was mostly wrong.  At least I have a roommate who is also in the same state of being….

The Great Splintering Deluge

It’s been a long time since I felt overwhelmed by emotion:  The off-kilter, thumping drum of my heart; the tunnel-vision; the lack of air coming in to my lungs…  fighting to hold myself in.

The rhythms that come with knowing any creature intimately are the only real bond that is worth something to me.  The way I could undulate my hand across her head, the way I knew where and how to comfort her… The closeness that comes with having a pet for 13 years.

She loved my affection as much as a cat can, and I loved her as much as I could ever love an animal.  And even though I regret having her euthanized, even though I regret all the decisions I made that caused her harm, the negligence that took both her hind legs’ functionality; I regret a lot, but I will always remember her fondly.  I feel like I made a deliberate decision to end her life before her time, and yet I feel relieved that she does not have to live any more of what had become a pitiful existence.  She still experienced happiness and contentment, but being covered in her own waste, sleeping alone most of the time, panicking and trying to gnaw at some invisible attacker that was slowly crushing her hips… It was for the best.  It had to be.  But I will always feel like I could have done things differently and she would still be here.  I guess that makes two living things, so far.

It’s been awhile since I even moved all of the stuff in front of my keyboard long enough to type anything, let alone a post.  It’s been awhile since I had nagging thoughts that compelled me to relay them to myself permanently.

The political system is just a sport; evolution has somehow given us characteristics that keep us from moving deeper than evolutionary urges; It’s been a long time since I even felt serious about something.

Choice

A friend of mine (who is ethereal to me now) used to argue with me about whether or not people have free will.  I always said they did, he always said they didn’t.  Because people are amalgamations of probability, not possibility, every action could be construed as having no other choice but to happen.  I largely agree with that, but I want to tell myself that I always have a choice.

I spend an inordinate amount of time doing nothing.  If I spent even a tenth of it doing anything productive, I would have another completed album.  I’d have a written novel.  I’d have my projects completed.  I wouldn’t feel so pointless all the time.

So, resolving to spend at least an hour every day on something constructive, whether it’s writing, composing or programming… if I can at least stick to that, maybe I will have something finished in the next 6 months.

We’ll see…

I think more people are upset that they will never be able to go and see a space shuttle launch than there are people who are upset at the demise of the space program, and its implications for America vs. the rest of the world.  More people talk about Transformers 3 and the new (and last) Harry Potter movie than anything of import.  And when they do talk about something important, they always have an uneducated, idiotic angle given to them by some propaganda machine.

The founding fathers didn’t necessarily believe in a purely democratic institution.  They believed in representative democracy more, because we are supposed to pick the most educated among us to make the important decisions.  But now all they do is pick whoever has the most money to spend convincing them that they are the most educated in whatever bland, bigoted emotional intelligence that is supposed to lead them to the “right” conclusions.  The People elect the representatives they deserve.  Short-sightedness and sociopathic apathy is something that can be hidden with money, buzz-words and political manipulation.

If someone isn’t actively supporting policies that are against their own interests, they are usually supporting policies that are just as immoral for different reasons.  Even if a citizen can think critically about issues and come to a decent conclusion, they usually have to choose between options that are, if not diametrically opposed to what they think, are subtly misleading in ways that render the entire argument void.

If America crumbles in the next hundred years, will there really be another empire to take its place that will be more egalitarian?  I don’t think an empire can exist without being immoral in glaring ways, but even if a moral superpower dominated the world, is that by definition excluding any sense of real Human justice?

The problem with Human thinking isn’t that its fundamentally flawed and corrupt; its problem lies in the fact that it can have bred out of it any kind of real positive flow.

Suffer in Truth

For at least five years, I have been repressing.  And containing.  And forgetting.  And avoiding.  And denying.  Everyone I’ve ever known, I have given a good justification to cut me off.  To hate me.  Some haven’t.  Some have.  Most have.

I don’t feel reality in the same way anymore.  There is always a layer of self-imposed disinterest.  There is always an escape plan, or an emergency evacuation button hidden somewhere.  I have always pressed it just at the right moment to hurt the people involved, and alienate them as much as possible.  But after all this time, It’s as if I don’t really take it seriously anymore.  I feel like I should have moved on long ago.  It’s always there, though.  Waiting for me to acknowledge it.

Every relationship ends with someone casting me in their mold, and me rejecting that idea in the least diplomatic way possible, because almost nothing offends me more, in the larger picture.  I have lived with pain that a lot of people could never imagine, with conceptualizations of the world that most can’t understand.  The majority of people are “The Sheep”, and they symbolize, “The Sheep”, in my thoughts.  That is all that they will ever be to me.

One thing I have always known is that if I could somehow bring myself down to the level of the deimos, I would find that generic, watered-down happiness that most people find at some point.  And I have tried.  But either that happiness doesn’t make me the least bit happy, or I am failing at emulating it.  I only know that empty depth that comes with understanding the very bottom of human nature, or loss and pointlessness.

Just as I am trying to find that one guitar riff that inspires me and carries me through recording another album, so am I waiting to be inspired to find some path towards happiness.  But, I know it’s not there.  It never is.  Somewhere, in the recesses of myself, I know that I will always be alone, and the scariest part of aging is slowly accepting that.

The words I chant when I am at my lowest are slowly becoming reality.

“I am going to die alone.”
”I will die alone.”

I know the highs are lower,
it’s digging into my shoulder;
weight against skin.
It’s nothing to the eye-less frightened.

Grating in a rusted sound,
pierced through to stitch fractures;
rhythm against rhythm.
Flowing water moving sin.

When am I atoned from the things I had to walk into;
the angled stares; the whipping air…
When is it all over?

COLLAPSE.THE.VEINS
CRUSH.THE.HEART
SNAP.THE.TENDONS
DISSOLVE.THE.BONES
FLOOD.THE.BRAIN
BURN.THE.SKIN
PIERCE.THE.LUNGS
COLLAPSE.THE.BODY

STARS.NOW.BENEATH.OUR.FEET
WE’VE.KNOWN.THE.TERROR
AND.STILL.NOT.STOPPED

SWARM.DOWN.AND.FORGIVE.ME
PLEASE
RAIN.DOWN.AND.FORGIVE.US
PLEASE

--all in
all in
all in a day
a day, it changes everything=

Eating at the heart of it all
is the wind pushing me to the door,
and out of the whole.
In the desert sun, I can sweat into myself,
pull the air into myself, without feeling wrong.

The rocks carved out of rocks to sign
to everyone around them
that they were larger, and meaner,
and everything more, once;
heady, but only heady.

But I’ve been carved by water and dust,
and let the former shape the other,
and felled some thoughts with rust.
The desert still calls me.

The Witcher 2

I just finished The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.  What I really like about the series is it’s based on what seems to be a very detailed series of novels.  The story is ridiculously detailed sometimes, and I don’t think it was something added in solely for the games.

Conversations that would normally be a few lines end up being paragraphs, pages even.  It makes you feel like you’re reading parts of the books, and it really sucks that they aren’t translated into English.

But, a strange thing is what I realized about different parts of it – that is, what they seem to be representing.  The Wild Hunt remind me of UFOs, if UFOs were much, much more plausible and came from a parallel universe.  Specters riding ghost-horses appear, ride across the sky and abduct children.  The parallel universe-thing is another cool aspect of it all.

Monsters’ existence in the world is because they were summoned, or drawn from an alternate world that lives in tandem to their own.  An event called “the Conjunction of the Spheres” has all kinds of strange, pseudo-science language about how two or more worlds were merged into one, and therefore gave rise to beings like monsters and wraiths and ghosts and whatnot.  It’s more than the standard, “It’s magic because it’s magic” explanations usually in fantasy stories.  Magic exists because it is a power used to draw on these alternate worlds, and to manifest energies in the “real” world.

I wish I could find more English (or American, for that matter) fantasy stories that were as detailed and as worth reading as The Witcher’s story was worth viewing and paying attention to.  Mature themes, a very realistic political world, and more than the tired tropes of what fantasy books are all about 99% of the time.

Come down on me, my sweet angel
Poison milk from that withering breast
Come down on me, sweet suffocation
Poison milk from that withered breast

Your mask
Is drifting
See what
Writhes beneath

Porcelain grin is cracking, incest to uncoil
Your laugh spreads yawning, black hole formation

Drown and
The first
Real breath
Takes hold
Washed in
A chill
So peaceful
Sink further

Hold
His
Hand
And
Crush
It

The depth of the charm is infinite
Discover bliss and serenity in drowning

--All in a day; a day, it changes everything=

Dead Plane

Sitting in the dead of night, completely bored, always has a specific edge to it.  Nothing reminds me of my mortality more, and nothing reminds me of the endlessness of life more.  It’s weird how a few months can seem like the blink of an eye, but also make me feel like I’ve been transplanted into another life – like I never experienced the churning seas of the past.

Or maybe it’s that I am becoming more and more emotionally numbed to my own experiences.  While I still approach most things with the same feelings and thoughts, it feels like I don’t even know how to approach myself.  Like I am estranged with my own brain.

Post-traumatic stress, drawn out over years and years, becomes something wholly different.  It feeds into the kind of separation that is more severe, more fluid and more stagnant.

five or six years ago, I would be coked out of my mind right now, or shooting up somewhere with people I barely knew.  Or, I would be tripping my head off with the same three people that I spent nearly every single day with.  While it was so destructive and pointless in a sense, it was the most meaningful and impactful time of my life.  While it decimated me, it also defined me.

But, you get to a point in your life when drugs only mean addiction, when friends only mean other unknowable people, when love means trying to lie to yourself as long as you possibly can.  When once I felt the waves crash against my body, tearing me apart, there was a certain satisfaction in that.  Now, I sit on a cliff, watching the water slowly eat at the bottom of a precipice I’ll never so much as move from.

Heliocentricity

It’s amazing to me that the new wave of music is moving to the pre-indie style of unfiltered, pre-processed instrumentation, but without any of the poetry.  Instead of four douchebags learning nu-metal riffs and angsty, self-absorbed, embarrassingly immature lyrics, four douchebags get together and learn how to play like The Pixies or Radiohead or The Violent Femmes, with crappy lyricism and the same musical structure.

When music became so institutionalized that schools were created specifically to build the kinds of bands that were popular in the 2000s, I thought that the impending financial disaster of all these huge labels and production companies was going to foster a return to the –real- indie style.  Instead, they shifted to stealing that style, and even making the idiosyncrasies into a mainstream style.  Every song is still about the same subjects, the same gimmicks and the same teenage-esque philosophies.  “Mainstream” will always look to keep its base in a perpetual state of adolescence.

And now, that mainstream base thinks that they are the underground edge of culture.  The long-banged, off-angle camera poses have become iconic of everything wrong with every generation, but even more insidious.  Self-conscious self-absorption.  Because the individual is so worthy of being the center of the universe, even when every other facet of society is crumbling and degenerating into primal violence, The Corporate Individual still ravages creativity on the larger scale.

That’s all I can think of whenever I see some “indie” or “electronica” or “super-cool unknown” band that is obviously just trying to get into the mainstream.  I think that the idea of culture is such a joke, now, that it makes me wonder how small the percentage is of people who genuinely care about creating real humanist art, and not just peering off to the side, far away enough to show that they aren’t interested, but close enough to lock everyone that’s watching them in their periphery.

Ludens Is a Cough Drop.

One of the first things I learned about writing was that if you can’t write, if you feel stilted and blocked, then write about feeling stilted and blocked.  Another is that writing is like a muscle that atrophies five-hundred times more quickly.

I’ve been reading an argument about ‘Ludonarrative Dissonance” in games, and since I had never heard of the term before, it was pretty interesting.  I’m amazed at how much a single game has helped push forward critical thinking about games.  I thought Bioshock was stupid the first time I saw it.  But, that was also in an apartment watching someone on an XBox, completely wigged on coke.

In the first few pages of “Beyond Good and Evil”, Nietzsche taught me the most important lesson of my life.  Everything that has ever been written was written by a person with their own mind, their own thoughts and prejudices, their own opinions.  This colors everything, almost always unintentionally.

This is why I hate people who reject the notion that games can be art.  If they believe this, then games really can’t be art; in their minds, at least.  But to the people who believe otherwise, and who actively develop their skills in making games that art artistic in different levels, they are.  That is the end of the argument.

Then there are the people who try to put a ceiling bracket on discussion, declaring this or that to impose their own boundaries.  This specifically comes into view with the term, ‘ludonarrative dissonance’, because I guess it’s kind of a buzz-word now, and people like to use it to sound smart sometimes.  But this doesn’t mean it isn’t a real term.

But, when someone tries to put a subject in their own box, and decry anyone who says that there is more to it than they think, it makes me think of amateur philosophers who think they understand Nietzsche because they heard he influenced the Nazis and was in love with his sister.  To me, it’s laughable and ironic.

So some idiot says something like, “Gameplay and story are the same thing because games have been around since the dawn of time and have always been used as a means to convey story”.  It was written better than that, but that’s what I got from it.  Therefore, something like ludonarrative dissonance isn’t a real thing, because narrative can’t conceptually go against gameplay, because narrative –is- gameplay.

Well, I’m willing to be that the ancient romans didn’t write plays in which the actors played “throw the rock” while the narrator told a story.  To say that gameplay and narrative are the same thing is like saying that, in a movie, cinematography and narrative are the same.  It’s just not true.  They compliment each other in fundamental ways, but they are not the same.  There is a sense of cinematic narration, as there is a sense of ludonic (gameplay) narration.  But they are not the exact same thing.

The word was kind of pieced together to describe something that someone observed about Bioshock.  And I thought it was a good point.  But even if there weren’t Bioshock, and weren’t ‘ludonarrative’, there would still be a small fissure between narration and gameplay.  They simply are not the same thing.

In a game, I am playing an actor in a story.  While the game’s narrative slowly paces on with me, I am not ‘playing’ the narration.  I am experiencing it through the actions of the actor.  Just as in a book, a story’s narrative and its writing style are two separate things; just because they are inextricably intertwined does not mean they are one.  And, if someone wrote a novel that had a writing style that seemed to contradict the essence or spirit of the narrative, I would say it suffered from… scriptonarrative dissonance?  or something like that.

But it really bothers me when people try to say that you can’t progress further in analyzing something because it isn’t there.  It happens all the time in philosophy, and that is why a lot of people don’t understand philosophy properly.  They think there are right answers and wrong answers, and there is a level where you cannot reach another ‘meta’.  But that is wrong, and only shows the person’s lack of understanding in the depth of a medium.

Piano-hammer

It never takes much to slip past the border that every person holds on to for support, for stability.  I think that most people must have a brain structure formed around keeping it close.  It must be some requisite of developing, something hard-wired into them.  How else could so many people do something so effortlessly, yet so integral to society.  And the defects, their defects are what ends up mattering.

It’s dematurating to be a part of that skewed crop.  it’s demoralizing to try to keep from realizing that that’s just an excuse.

I don’t need to excise, but to exorcise.

The Golden Lamb

Everyone in the media wants to be a part of the Ted Williams thing.  They fought over being able to cover the reunion of he and his mother, to the point of making sure the two didn’t meet until they could cover it on live TV.  It’s a national story where everyone with a talk show can publicly feel happy for some homeless guy who got inundated with publicity and job offers because the media knows that it will get ratings.  That’s all it is.  It hearkens to the desire of American culture to live through fake stories.

You can see it in the way that everyone talks to him.  They love being able to say how happy they are that this guy got a break, because it feeds their own narcissism.  In a way, they are mentally and emotionally masturbating to the way they feel about it all.  That’s what I hate most about these “genuine” human stories.  It’s all bullshit.  Even the genuine feelings that exist are only there because some self-obsessed rich person loves thinking that they are somehow helping out someone less fortunate, when really they are only helping themselves.

Everyone want to give their take on his story, and talk about how happy they are for him, or how his fifteen minutes of fame are going to ruin his life even more.  What everyone misses is that he is just a vehicle for ratings.  Nothing more.  He didn’t get offered a two-year contract because the NFL are generous people.  It’s because they saw a rising cultural story, and wanted to take advantage of it.

It’s another way that the established media reaches into social media, and ends up manipulating it.  I think that it is really a bad development in the larger picture – not because Ted Williams doesn’t deserve a chance to make money or not, but because it just shows how, in the end, everything revolves around what they want it to.  Every hokey feel-good story is really a grotesque example of manipulation.  It feeds into the stereotyped story of winning the lottery, and how everyone in America has a chance to be famous and rich.  It’s all bullshit.

Pat Buchanan is an idiot. (And so is everyone else)

Our modern politics is largely based on the idea that reality is so relative that anything "can" be a possible interpretation.  I have always rejected this because of Nietzsche.  He says that, while there are always many, if not infinite, interpretations to an action or state of reality, there will invariably be moral, immoral and amoral interpretations.  I think that the idea that nothing can ever be "truly true" leads to sophistry and immoral behavior.  I believe that modern Republican ideology is largely based on this kind of sophistry:  that you can say whatever you want as long as it pushes forward your perspective, even if you know that it is factually untrue.

Sophistry (saying anything solely for the sake of its impact, to manipulate the listener) is the most hideous and disturbing thing that I have ever observed in my lifetime.  I wish that people understood the difference between the description of reality being 'untrue', and the idea that everything is in the eye of the beholder, to the point that 'true' and 'untrue' are meaningless qualifiers.

This self-deception is a product of our times, living in an age where one's own projection of themselves is the most important part of social life.  I saw a picture somewhere on the internet of what I guess I would call a “modern hipster” girl wearing those long, striped socks that go nearly up to your knee.  They are the kind of socks that, somehow, show that she is underground.  What I don’t think any of these kinds of people realize is that those articles that defined the people that didn’t care what others thought of them, thereby making them cool, was that they didn’t go out to a store specifically to buy ‘underground’ clothes.  The kind of people that did were the kind that wanted to emulate them.  But, now, that’s all there is.  Everyone wants to be cool by acting like they are on the flip-side of culture, when they are in fact its demographic.  In every facet of society, people live as sophists.  They only care about the presentation, and think they are enriching themselves.

The political structure is the same.  Every part of life is the same, and that’s what makes it profoundly saddening.  The form that political discourse takes is the epitome of the wrongness of the Human psyche.  Religious fundamentalists almost always win, and this is because they believe that there is nothing wrong with deceiving the public, with lying and misleading, with literally saying –anything- to get elected.  They believe that their most important mission is to benefit the corporation that is American Christianity.  They are usually hypocrites, usually are found out to be immoral (illegally so), usually disgusting examples of humanity.  But, they always win.  And they probably always will.

These things used to make me angry, but now that lead me to believe that the American strain of the Human race isn’t worth fighting for anymore.  In the grand scheme of things, it would probably be for the best of the United States inevitably self-destructs, even if horrible things happen without us shoving our guns down the rest of the world’s throat.  A thousand years into the future, there will be nothing good waiting for anyone if America persists as it is today, and will become if fundamental things don’t change for the better.  I don’t think that they realistically can, though.  I think that dishonest, selfish, religiously zealous people will continue to take advantage of all the idiots that believe in them, and the disparity between rich and poor will get larger and larger, national media will more and more be advertising channels for the powers that be, and religion will never stop dominating everything, to everything’s detriment.

Three-Hundred Sixty-Five Degrees

There –was- a youtube channel I watched regularly called Matt Chat.  It was a 30-something guy who was a huge computer role-playing games nerd, who interviewed actual important people who made genre-defining games like the original Fallout, The Bard’s Tale (the original), Wizardry, and many others.  It was an interesting show, because of the fact that it was only made to show these interviews, and talk about the games themselves.  There was no ego in it, no ridiculous showmanship.  Just interesting computer game history.  It was the kind of show I always learned something new from about a subject I am interested in.  I think he’s a college teacher or something like that, and his lecturing skills are obvious when you watch the show, because it’s concise and easy to follow.  It’s like he was born to make the show, to talk about the subject of classic computer games. 

But, it wasn’t all that popular in the grand scheme of things.  I don’t think he ever reached more than 100,000 members (and probably less than a million total views).  And, he was rejected for the Youtube partnership program, which lets people with popular shows earn ad revenue from their videos (among other things).  So, anyway, him being rejected hit him hard, I guess.  He decided to stop doing the show, which I can understand.  At least, he decided to stop doing more videos for his youtube channel.

So, Matt Chat was taken up by a friend of his (I’m assuming it’s someone he knows).  I watched the first video by this guy, and it made me think a lot.  The video by this guy, Don, was so disappointing that I can’t even fully describe it.  I am a fan of old-school gaming and the history of computer games, RPGs especially.

First, the guy talks about how wasted he got at his New Year’s party.  Then, he spends like 10 minutes talking about Twilight, and why it’s not “gay” to like the Twilight series.  He goes into how straight, mature men can like it, and that Football is kind of gay for all of the ass-slapping.

The entirety of this video is a microcosm of the kind of people I hate on the internet.  It’s all a self-justification for liking something that is made for teenage girls.  I hate people who think they can slap the brand of “If it’s good, then anyone can like it” on anything –they- happen to like, even if it’s the steaming pile of shit that Twilight is.

The game he talks about is… surprise!  “Scene It” Twilight.

So, Matt Chat has gone from being done by a guy who knows a lot about video game history, about video game history, interviewing amazing people who revolutionized the gaming industry, people that directly contributed to my own childhood and adolescence, and adulthood, that inspired me to start programming in the first place.  It goes from that, to some guy first talking about how shitfaced he got at a Twilight New Year’s party, then talking about how it’s not lame to like Twilight, to talking about Twilight itself.  He actually says, “EVERYONE should have a Twilight party once.”

I know enough about psychology to know that this guy is, on some level, ashamed that he likes something that is so stupid and mind-bogglingly lame as Twilight.  I know that he is the kind of ego-centric idiot that always finds time and some way to work in anything that will make himself seem cooler.  I feel like I was watching a lecture by Bertrand Russell, which suddenly changed to a vlog by just about any standard Youtube user.

Twilight and Harry Potter are successful –because- they are sub-par literature.  They appeal to people who are emotionally still teenagers, because the majority of America are stuck in this state.  They never learned enough to grow up properly into a mature psyche.  This is why these two franchises became so popular.  This is why Star Wars became so popular (back in the 70s and today).  This is why the Lord of the Rings movies did so well, regardless of the books.  It’s all about dumb movies that appeal to idiots who think that high romance is being thrust in the adolescent turmoil of a 17 year-old’s love life.  There is nothing sophisticated about any of these things.  And it’s really sad.

But, enough about the pedantic waste of these things.  I think that the part of Youtube that is reserved for people who actually are interested in things – who want to learn about stuff that is fascinating and not just pop-culture bullshit – that part will be diminished to some extent with the loss of channels like Matt Chat.  I wish that he had just closed the channel, instead of turning it over to some moron who is going to ruin it from here on out.  I think a lot of the channel’s fans feel the same way as me.  It has been completely turned around, from being a source of knowledge to a source of dreck.

The most depressing part of it all is that this happens with countless things that I find online.  They always end up devolving into the lowest common denominator.  I think that the people who make truly great things should be proud of that, and pull the plug when it’s time.  They should never feel the need to keep on going when the spirit isn’t there anymore.  And, if they decide to keep on going, even with 10 viewers and non-existent interest, I would think they could still forge on and be proud of what they’re making, even if it only ends up being for themselves.

The inevitable gap between thought and scripture,
like the waves carrying their weight to the stake.
I never remember what I meant to single,
never remember what I meant to say.
I end up drinking a formless feature
to keep some small part of me that’s sane.

Over the Pond

My life has become a series of disconnected moments.  Everything is nebulous, like I am never in myself.  But, I’m always here.  Even as everything in my life is smoldering and crumbling even more, I am still in stasis.

You always think that rude awakenings are supposed to jolt you back into consciousness.  You’re supposed to wake up, and look around, and do something.  But in reality, it disconnects you more.  It is a strange, musical emptiness.  It reminds me of a very dark time; a very empty time.  And, poetically, it draws me back to those moments in the most unpredictably subtle ways.  My life always leads back to this feeling, like a motif.  The strange, icy emptiness, the stoic anguish of solitude.

My time alive has been spent circumventing the feeling that I’m on my way to my own funeral.  The only happiness I ever got out of it was when I was ignorant of the truth, unknowing and blatantly wanton.  The more deliberate I became, the less I had any land around me; I now know that everyone should feel so.  Because it is the only way to see the beauty in life, even if it is chained to the lowest imaginable feelings.  When I was younger, I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t a singular, isolated person by projecting everything I could outward into other people.  Now that I have no inclination or interest to do so, it is all the more apparent that I am unhappy, and apparent that I have no will to correct myself.

In much the same way that paying any attention to politics saddens and outrages you (if you have a real mind), every step I take towards anything leaves me feeling that there is no point in it.  Some of us are so human that it hurts.

The Hell of the Spectator

I guess a lot of people know what it’s like to not make ends meet.  I guess a lot of people know what it’s like to never make ends meet, year after year.  To slowly be piling more and more debt on yourself.  To not have a way to better your situation, even when you genuinely want to.

Citizens, as voters, always are supposed to have a chance to better their surroundings, their society.  Their opportunities.  Yet, so many people are sheep, so many are led and vote against their interest, vote against their own future.  So many are so stupid and misguided that they drag down the genuine and the intelligent; they drag down the hard-working.  I think a lot of people thought that had changed when they elected Obama, but these recent elections show that it’s all bullshit.  The sheep will always outnumber the willing; it’s just that the sheep happened to be led in a positive direction for a split second, two years ago.  That’s all it will ever be.

To say that my hatred for America is stronger than ever is an understatement.  I loathe the people who direct the most powerful and influential country in the world out of their own paranoia, their own selfishness, their own childish views.  They are worth less than nothing, because they actively debase the worth of civilization.  They are a negative factor, not a non-factor.

For every dozen self-aware, compassionate, thoughtful people, there are hundreds of blind, idiotic people who follow whatever the zeitgeist narrative is.  They treat reality like a TV-show, based on political fads and tastes that are engineered by even more narrow-minded, but much more powerful, people.  Because of this, and I mean this with every ounce of its definition… they do not deserve to live.

The sad truth is that their deaths would be positive.  For anyone’s death to be a positive influence is so inane, and so morosely antithetical to life; but, it’s true.

Up the Mountain

The air stills into a crown,
pushing inward, draining distance.
It’s heavy, pulling me down.

Rage bleeds the anger;
faith reaves our anchor.
In empty extemporaneosity,
I left… to be received.

There is no sight
that deceives me;
Now, there is nothing
for me to greet.

Two Posts about Games in Tandem

First:

I've been playing two games that both got lukewarm reviews, and both have surprised me based on said reviews.

Magna Carta 2 reminds me of Secret of Mana a little bit.  And while the story is kind of hackneyed and obviously geared towards 15 year-olds, the gameplay is much more satisfying than I thought it would be.  The JRPG aspects of it are tangible, and just leveling up feels fulfilling in a way that many RPGs fail to achieve.

Nier actually blew me away.  The story is amazing and deep, the gameplay is frantic, and I'm convinced that all of the reviews saying the controls are awkward and inneffectual were written by people who didn't play the game long enough to actually get a hang of it.  It takes time and effort to put enough work into the game for it to feel natural to play (the fishing minigame, particularly), but it's a solid game, and hearkens back to the older JRPGs.

And both games just look amazing.  Maybe I'm not up to date with the common idea of what graphics should be, though.  I love any stylized, professional-looking 3d graphics.  Especially anime-inspired.

Second (about a week later):

I've played through most of Magna Carta 2 (I'm stuck at the end farming, because I'm always obsessed with game completion, and the exp system scales based on your level, which makes earning level 99 a real bitch).

But the game mechanics are really enjoyable, and even though the story is really immaturish and hackneyed (as I said earlier), the visuals and artistic themes of the game are superb and satisfying.  The combat is also pretty satisfying, even when farming for hours on end just for the sake of levelling.

I put Nier on the backburner so I could get through Magna Carta 2 first, but now that I'm at the endgame and a little bored, I am starting Final Fantasy XIII.  The old Final Fantasy games are what defined my youth, and while the system is very odd from an RPG standpoint, it seems pretty satisfying, so far.  What really got me playing beyond the first few minutes is the story.  While I heard from a lot of people that the story was kind of gay and childish, so far it seems very realistic in a theatrical sense.  But I'm barely a few hours in, so I guess I could be hugely disappointed the further I get.

--

These are two posts I wrote, but never posted.  My writing was supposed to increase in both effectiveness and quantity.  I got a new app that was supposed to be the bee’s middle leg-joints; this was untrue.  Nothing spurs me to write like a barebones app like KeyNote (which is like 10 years old, and the company went under, I believe?  Some random guy picked up the code for it).  Although, I do have to say that Windows Live Writer has helped a lot with my blogging.

Resonance

I bought Resonance of Fate today, and fired up my old Xbox 360.  I had seen a few videos about it a few months ago, and thought it looked pretty cool.

Then I start playing and watch the intro cutscene, and start playing.

Then I find out just how much customization and RPG elements there are in this game.

And the nerd in me rejoices.

Dramatica

In an effort to get my writing muscle working again, I got a piece of software called Dramatica.  It’s supposedly something like a long, exhaustive exam designed to flesh out your writing ideas for a story.  I’ve read a bunch of reviews, and some actually make me think that it will help me get started writing the story I’ve been trying to start.

So, here goes….

Life as writer’s block…

I’ve been reading a few random things that have really piqued my interest.  The first is an e-book called, “Permanent Death”, and it’s about a guy’s experiment playing through FarCry 2 (or 1, but I’m pretty sure it’s 2) on normal difficulty, but only having one life; that is, once he dies once, it’s over.  The thesis statement of this book is something I really find fascinating.  It’s about how the introduction to “multiple lives”, or even checkpoints or other forms of error-correction in playing a game serves to decouple the player from his representation (ie., his avatar).  While it’s virtually impossible to create a game that has absolutely no reliance on multiple lives in some way (even if dying to a game-over screen, and then loading the most recent save), the roguelikes are the only games that I can think of that religiously adhere to a one-life character play-model.

The second thing is a blog by a guy who is playing Minecraft, but in a very unconventional way.  He isn’t crafting, or building, or mining.  He gets up every morning, walks east as far as he can, while taking note of the landscape and whatever else he runs into, and then, at sundown, takes refuge in a makeshift shelter, creating and using only the resources absolutely necessary for survival.  He writes each day as a post, and it’s interesting, even if only for its strangeness.

I like things like this, because it highlights something I really enjoy about games.  Also, it makes a distinction between a facet of myself and something I don’t see in any of the people I know who play games.  Most of the people I know, if they don’t exclusively play only multiplayer, competitive games, play single-player games in a much different way than I do.  I play with a faint hearkening back to my childhood days of pretend.  I play with the theory of “creative play” in the back of my mind, and through this form of indulgence, I am fulfilled on an artistic level, in a way.  Also, it seems to help me focus my own artistic endeavors.  But I think it’s largely overlooked when people think of games; especially single-player games.  Games are mainly seen as ways to be competitive, ways to win, ways to accumulate and dominate, to perfect a strategy, to “hone your micro”.  I despise these forms of game-playing, because I believe it is indicative of an undeveloped mind, and indicative of a mind that is imbalanced in that social sense.

So, I like these kinds of strange, idiosyncratic experiments, and sometimes wish I were truly original enough to think of something like it on my own, or at least, to attempt something like it.

Graphic Neurosis

I have been looking at two different possibilities for creating artwork for a small, 2d game.  And, while I have gone back and forth, I have thought about what it means to use each method, and why I have chosen the one that I think is more plausible.

The first is a pixel-based approach.  Since each asset is small (usually 32x32), it is not impossibly hard to create something at least feasible to look at.  I don’t have the assumption that my graphics will look professional, or even good.  I just want them to be decent enough so as not to induce visual vomiting.

The second is a 3d-based approach; creating 3d models with basic materials, rendering them, and then cropping and scaling them down so that they fit the dimensions I need.  I thought that this would be a better method at first, because I am much more inclined toward mathematical thinking than I am the kind of spontaneous spatial reasoning that is required to compose drawings on the fly.  And, I was wrong.

For some reason, I have always thought of modeling as being a primarily mathematic activity.  You use basic shapes, think of their ratios and relationships, and develop accordingly.  But this doesn’t work without an even deeper understanding of all of the things that makes an artist an artist.  And I am definitely not a graphic artist.

So, I have decided to lower my head and power through my graphic assets on a pixel-by-pixel basis.  I don’t know if it will even be possible, but I am trying, and so far making decent progress.  I now fully understand why they call it “programmer art”.  But, in all of the things I never really thought I could accomplish (programming itself, music composition, et cetera), I am eking out my existence step by painfully slow step.

Sometimes, I just want to draw every object and character as a black square box, and just write the damned engine, and wait for the rest to be divinely manifested.

Principle.

Richard Dawkins butt-slams the pope.

I have a very deeply-rooted hatred for organized religion because of its hypocrisy and bigotry, and the way it stunts the Human soul.  It is hard to articulate just how much I despise it all.  Most people do not think such distaste is healthy, or that it is unfounded because, after all, religion is our founding basis.

And I think those people just don’t realize the true evil that beliefs can have inside of them.

The grating fear of unearthed furor…

A moment in my life that should be the epitome of relaxation, of rest and contemplation, is instead punctuated by fear and panic.

I am filled with stress.  Even though every hour is one that I can direct in any way, even though I have absolutely no obligations, no schedule, I am constantly freaking out.  My mind is always racing, and I feel as though I’m plummeting down, towards some anti-finale that threatens to disassemble any sense of sanity that I have ever been able to keep.

It doesn’t help that I’m reminded every day of the piercing obnoxiousness that is personified in my family.  Living with an annoying, retarded brother and his annoying, retarded wife (and their annoying, retarded children) grates more and more on my composure.  Every day for the last three weeks, I have woken up to a two year old screaming.  Every day I have to listen to what sounds like the lobby of an inner city McDonald’s or Wal-Mart in the background noise, while I try to keep a steady stream of audial distractions.  There is no silence, anymore; the one thing I need to maintain some semblance of calm is gone.

I am neurotic enough to be disturbed by their mere presence.  I have no solitude, anymore.  All I have is obnoxious distraction.  All I have are days when I am disturbed because someone needs a favor, or days when I cannot think to myself because of the loud white trash staying here, or days filled with anxious deliberation that leads nowhere, and is usually suffocated through a mindless activity.  It’s all I can do to keep from having a nervous breakdown.

When I decided to quit my job, I had visions of a quiet time of repose.  Of not worrying about money for a few months, for I could chip away at a sizeable nest-egg.  Of sitting in peace and working on my projects, thinking about their construction and planning their future.  All I have now is a drill, slowly splitting apart each layer of my brain, until it unearths the frustrated, panic-ridden core of my being; the thing that I have tried to sedate for so long, and was so far reasonably successful.

All I want is some peace and quiet, for a change….

Bioshock

I just finished Bioshock 1.  The series never entered my mind because I didn’t know they were ported to the PC, and hearing that they were the “spiritual successor” to the System Shock games, I was really hoping for an immersive environment, disturbing story elements and a solid ending.  For the most part, I got what I expected.

The levels are very immersive and well-detailed.  It really feels like you’re rummaging through the ruins of a large complex, and you almost always are hurting for ammo enough to appreciate finding a few rounds in a trash can or cabinet.  But, by the endgame, it' all gets kind of meaningless.  I never got completely bored playing, but by the last two levels I was hoping for something different, instead of increasingly redundant level design, with “go here, then go here, then go here” objectives.  All in all, though, it was a rewarding and interesting experience.

The ending, though, disappointed me somewhat.  I only played through the “good” ending (saving all Little Sisters), and while it made sense and everything, it was very short, with a detached narrative.  The last battle is ridiculously easy, which lent even more to the feeling of being short-changed.

I’m about to start Bioshock 2.  From 1’s ending, I doubt the stories will be continuous in any way, save for the general lore of the world in which it takes place.

Taking all of these negative comments, though… they are based on an ideal.  Compared to the stagnant, unimaginative stories of games nowadays, I guess it’s an exceptional game, and a testament to the fact that games don’t need to be “safe” or “PC” at all.  They don’t need to take on the same old archetypes.

So, all in all, I was very satisfied with the experience of Bioshock 1.  For the most part, it reminds me of the good aspects of System Shock 2.  The only downside is that the story is a little too linear, and the narrative a little too forced.  after the 3rd level or so, the element of free exploration was completely lost, and it felt as though I was just going through level by level.  And the creepiness-aspect of it all was very satisfying.  Maybe I just have too high a standard for the way stories are delivered throughout the game.

Morality in Game Storylines

I have always wished the stories in games dealt with the differences between ethical views.  It seems that most games, instead of focusing on ethical problems of any kind, merely try to end at a culturally positive moral result.  When the player helps an "evil" character, there is always a retraction; a justification for doing so.  When a player is given the option of being "evil", it is always "pure evil", without any justification beyond self-interest or greed.

Where are the games that are murky and grey in their dealings with morality and ethics?  Or at least interesting in some way?  I completely lost interest in Fallout 3 because of its ridiculously bland story.  Even the impact of detonating a nuclear warhead, leveling an entire city loses its punch when you play through it.  It’s all stupid, all laughably “evil”.

In writing for my game, I am using morals and ethics in a very personalized way.  The world is fucked up, and people do fucked up things.  Some societies are virtuous, some are empty.  Some worship greed to an alarming degree.

The people who write game storylines must be afraid to do anything really edgy, or they are just so unimaginative that they don’t know how to be.  But that is what I would like as a player.  Not the predictable good and evil, and not the 180-degree twist that ends up being ridiculously planned.  These things need to be more realistic.

The Paranoia of Gaming Corporatism

While looking at different game torrents (looking, not downloading of course), I found this except of a description from a Prince of Persia ISO:

Release Notes:
A little statement about the work involved:
To clear the minds of the individuals who think: "Game x was
done fast and this one taking ages" etc. The way the Ubisoft
DRM works, makes it so that every game is like a brand new
challenge. What it does do, is offload certain parts of the
game to a server, game then requests those things at runtime.
These parts can be anything that the developer wants. In the
case with Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, those things
were:
- Levers logic
- Door timing
- Upgrades
- Abilities
- XP & Levels
- Area codes
Every time you step on a button "in game", it sends a request
to server asking what to do. Server then sends the door code
to open, including how much time it stays open. Levers work
similarly, every time you press the "TAB" button to display
skills, game asks again server: "What skills do player have",
and so on and on.
All that stuff takes a lot of time to implement right and we
do implement it like the original do. All our doors open and
close with exact same time factors as the retail do. We just
wanted to clarify a little how the Ubisoft DRM really does
work, because a lot of those individuals we mentioned in the
beginning of this statement didn't seem to understand, yet
what kind of monster this is. It's not some simply "Values"
going around like it were with Assassin's Creed II.

The only thing more amazing to me than the painstaking efforts that pirate groups go through to deliver an authentic game to the thieving public is the ridiculous amount of effort UBISoft went through to “ensure” copy-protection of their game.  Of course, the end result is that it was pointless, and all it really did was help a bunch of game-rippers display their incredible hacking skills.

But is any of that really necessary?  As an old-school PC gamer, needing a live internet connection while playing a single-player game is ridiculous and far too intrusive.  I understand the desperation in their efforts, but when it comes to such ludicrous means, doesn’t that really just show that the financial models of computer games is archaic and ineffective?

Personally, I abhor any game company that manipulates the consumer so much, just to secure their profit.  In my mind, the problem isn’t that people pirate games.  A lot of game piracy comes from experienced gamers knowing that most games released are buggy, have major compatibility issues, or is only done by people who couldn’t/wouldn’t buy the game anyway.  Quality games that are made with passion are usually bought, regardless of how easy it is to pirate, because consumers actually enjoy supporting the developer.  All of the paranoia here comes from the publisher, not the developer.  In my opinion, game publishers are obsolete and unnecessary, just like recording labels.  They aren’t needed to market products like they once were, and the means of marketing a game or CD is much different (and much easier) with the internet.  Also, it is due to the exponential inflation of the costs that go into creating a game that make companies so obsessed with protecting their profits – after all, they spent millions of dollars creating the game.

Hopefully, the trend with games will be that they will become cheaper and easier to create, market, and distribute.  All of this is already possible, but because of the entrenched monopolies involved, it hasn’t really caught on in full force.  When publishers are knocked down a few pegs, and developers have more freedom and power, then maybe games will be created for the art and joy of it – instead of the possible profits of selling a “product”.

My Grand Writing Project…

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach my next project – even though I never formally finished my prior on (short story, “The Steel River”).  I am planning on returning to finish that in the near future, though.

The writing project I am undertaking is writing the script for a game.  Since I am working on a programming project as well (a 2D Role-Playing Game), I have been wondering on how to approach the writing for it.  While I would like to do an ultimately open-ended dungeon-crawler, I gravitated toward something else.

I grew up on the Japanese RPGs, like Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana and Xenogears.  While these were all RPGs at their core, they were different than western RPGs on a very key detail.  The storyline in most western RPGs (of course, there are exceptions)  is just a placeholder; not that it’s insignificant, but it is not the main vessel of the game.  The primary function is a means to allow exploration, and open-endedness.  Japanese RPGs are much different, because they are much more cinematic, and large portions of games are very limiting in the player’s freedom, so that a story can be told.  While this can be bad if you want an open-ended game, I really love that aspect of J-RPGs.

So, the writing for my game will basically be a script, a screenplay that will serve as my writing project.  It will be a novel, set to a game.  But more than that, it will also allow me to write extensive lore and descriptions of different characters, factions and locations in the game.  Basically, I want to create an entire world through writing, and implement it in a game.

It sounds very heady and over-ambitious, and I am somewhat remiss to lay my plans all out here, because I read something that confirmed a suspicion of mine.  People who tell others of their grand plans for the future are less likely to carry those plans out to fruition, because of a quirky aspect of the social mind. (look it up)

I have a different blog that I am keeping for this purpose, to slowly shape the fiction of this world and its characters.  I have a lot of ideas swimming around in my head, and am very anxious to get into the meat of it.  But, for some reason, I have not yet found the necessary catalyst to jump into working on it in a serious way.  I just let the ideas percolate, and to my surprise, they get better and more detailed every day.

What Fallout 3 should have been…

Randomly wandering the internet, I found a tech demo of an old engine made by the original creators of Fallouts 1 & 2.  I believe that in some parallel existence, this engine was used for Fallout 3, and the rights were never sold away.  This is why I hate the game industry:  Things that should be works of art are treated like any other product, and intellectual property trumps everything.  If only all kinds of designers had the freedom to use their resources to make the games that really should have been made….

Open-mindedness is hypocritical

I got into an argument with my mom about Obama, and whether or not he is to blame for any of the ailings of society’s latest problems.  Her defense is always the same.  When I start to berate the right-wingers, or greedy people, or stupid people, she always tells me that I should learn to see things from every side.  And my response is usually that there is no ‘other side’.  There are the greedy, stupid people, and that’s it.

I think that people who always bow in deference to fake open-mindedness are misguided.  They think that accepting all points of view raises them above everyone else.  They think that as long as we can all give room for everyone’s idiosyncratic point of view, it levels the field for everyone.  But, in reality, it invites destruction and feeble-mindedness.

For example, to give any credence to the view that deregulation is a good and vital thing for the economy, and therefore allow self-interest to be weighed more heavily than social responsibility, immediately puts selfishness first.  And, it does not add into context the way that self-interest, and more specifically deregulation, is abused by people to subvert and avoid the governmental faculties that are supposed to keep consumers safe.  So, even though all of the problems with salmonella and disgusting conditions at food processing plants are obviously a symptom of ineffective regulation, people still think that deregulation is viable because there are greedy, uneducated, short-sighted people that want it.  Because there are people who want to cripple the government, make it ineffective and therefore give themselves power to cut every corner and cost that they can… since those people exist, obviously we should take their views with just as much seriousness as responsible people who want to protect the people buying those products, right?  It’s all fucking ridiculous.

Creationism is taught in public schools alongside evolution, insulting science and scientific thought with quaint, stupid religious beliefs; gay and lesbian people can’t even get married because of xenophobic and discriminatory practices; minorities are subjugated by narrow-minded white people; poor people are forever trampled on by the rich; America endlessly pours its resources into immoral, criminal wars being waged with no clear plan or reason, which is also a factor on fueling anti-American sentiment and action; the People are turned into cattle-like slaves by the few people who want to rule over them by monetizing their daily lives, and by creating systems that literally turn the less fortunate into economic slaves; the planet heads toward cataclysmic destruction because of greedy industrialists who want to suck every last bit of commercial energy from the earth and make money off of it, and control the world through it.  All of these are obvious reasons that you can’t just accept all points of view as valid.  There are right ways of thinking about problems, and there are wrong ways.  The anger I feel towards contemporary American behavior and thought is so visceral that I don’t even have the ability to feel any sense of hope for the people anymore.  They are lost to me, because they are so ridiculously misguided.

They are faults of the most basic sense.  They are mistakes in logic, because the anti-logical thinking is supplied by those who want control.  And yet, still people believe they are valid for some reason.  I can’t even find the proper words to describe just how disappointing it is to be an American.  It’s like you found out that we are going to nuke half of the planet because God will cause it to rain gold from the skies on the surviving half.

Sometimes I get believing I'm moving past the feeling again...

It breaks my head: The rift between people. The culture of being an island turns everyone into cloned razors; it's all the same and full of aggression. And it's all ridiculous.

No one uses their mind. Even when they do, it's ridiculous. It's too conceited to really think that I'm smarter than everyone else. But I do believe that it's sad, because everyone is so much more idiotic than me. Only at the basics, that's all I care about. Everything else is periphery; tertiary. But their cores are stupid, and bland, and banal, and basic. The innermost definition of their souls are ridiculous, stupid and I can't even take it seriously. It's a bad joke. People are laughable, but depressing at the same time. Because that's how most people are, and that means that there is such a small majority of people who think like me that I will probably never meet them.

That's the most abhorred sense of loneliness. But it's the truth. I am not great in many respects; in most, actually. But I have a real mind, which is something that nearly everyone lacks. And even if I were the lowest loser in the world, I would still have that over others, which just makes it all that much worse.

Living is its own massacre...

There are two pieces of information that I have been recurrently stumbling into online:

1)Super Columbine Massacre RPG

2)An interview with Jeff Vogel about his disdain and loathing of RPGs

What these two things have in common (besides ending both with "RPGs") is somewhat idiosyncratic on my part, but I think it is telling of an aspect of video gaming culture.

Concerning #1, it's more about the reaction to it than the game itself. For some reason, I peruse the same archived comments about the game once every blue moon, and I always think of the same thing: that people do not understand what games are ideally supposed to be. #2 drives me to this very same conclusion.

It's ironic to me that an interview with someone who created (I think) the first independent PC-RPGs of decent production value, and yet does not appreciate the medium in a poetic sense. His words seem to always come down to the fiscality of creating RPGs; hence the irony.

Indie game development has always seemed to me to be like indie music. It's not a commercialized endeavor, and it isn't a focus-group alchemy project. That is, I have never associated independent games with being about trying to be catchy or kitsch. They were always about the joy of creating a game, or the personality that can be infused into sometimes very simple engines. And the idealist in me thinks that indie games should be about nothing more than artistic expression in that way.

But back to the Columbine game. 90% or more of the comments berate the maker, and talk about how it's a horrible capitalizing on violence, how it is exploiting a violent event. But these are all from people who don't know anything about the game or its creator, because it's blatantly obvious if anyone took a second to look into it that it is not about that at all. The guy made the game as a personal study of the event, to put it into some kind of context, and to delve into the motivations and horror of it all. It was an exploitation of Columbine as much as American History X was an exploitation of racism. It's just a completely ignorant and retarded point of view.

So, on the one hand is a game that was made soulfully (albeit crappily) to raise consciousness about a school shooting, and on the other is the disappointingly pragmatic view of someone who views the indie game industry in the same light as corporate game makers. It's all about the violence, and it's all about the money.

No matter how erudite people try to be, the mass majority of them are, at their base, so pathetic in their ignorance.

The funniest parts of these two different examples sparks the same kind of disappointment in me. While people always think they are so fully versed in the ways of the world, and in the ways of gaming, they always fail to see what games are really about. But it's more than that. It isn't that people don't respect or fully understand games; they do not fully understand or appreciate the value of expression. People are just stupid, plain and simple. They lack the instruments to think about subjects in an artistic way.

So, I guess it all comes down to the masses being mindless wastes of humanity.

Ache

I want to move with the labyrinthine waves
snaking through our last days...
But I feel the ocean pulling hard
the vision through a cracking shape.
My voice is underneath the rain;
my heart is low in chains.

Pessimism.

I am not a cynic because I enjoy the empty half, or because I enjoy putting the optimistic down. But, I tend to be a realist when it comes to a subject I know enough about to be confident in making my own appraisal. And, in general, this makes me a pessimist toward those things.

I am a pessimist when it comes to the environment for the same reason that I am when it comes to sweeping political change. It's not that there is evil more powerful than any good. It's not because I choose not to see the positive aspects of Human existence, either. But, I see them as definitively Human. And, while people usually like to revel in their support for huge changes, modern culture prohibits them. We are too languid and sedentary to make huge changes. And, intellectually, we are forever paralyzed.

I put fixing the environment in the same category as something like prosecuting Bush for the many crimes he was directly and indirectly responsible for being committed during his eight years. Even if 99.99% of the public wants either of these things done, they simply will not -get- done. And they won't because of the power structure of America, and her real contemporary interests. They aren't with doling out justice or trying to re-right the harmony of our modern existence. All they exist to do is to accumulate power and money for whoever happens to temporarily be in charge of it at the time. It is an unthinking monolith with no memory whatsoever, and anyone who thinks different is deluding themselves.

Moreso, this speaks to Mankind's tendency to act the same way: without logic or memory. Western society is geared towards finding subtle ways of appealing to our basest instincts to sell products or services, or to push ideologies. Because of this, and because of how pernicious this type of appeal is, real logic does not have any power. Even after eight years of such a horrible presidency, when right-wing extremists ruled with an iron fist and did oh-so many things to undermine the rule of law and all of the ideals the country was founded on, logic never had enough power to correct any of the problems. The most that ever happened was what happened recently with the huge oil spill: there was an obligatory concession -- a purely symbolic one -- and then they moved on in a different direction, suffering no real penalties or judgment for things that were blatantly illegal. They are symbolic, half-assed gestures, meant to appease the public. And they do, because the public has become the very definition of an unthinking herd.

So, I honestly believe that, minutes before the world collapses, as volcanoes all over the planet simultaneously erupt, as the oceans turn into boiling acid, as the moon crashes into the earth and obliterates half of the globe, there will still never be more than the same half-hearted kind of concessions given. Those in the power structure are not accustomed to real guilt and real change anymore. They only know how to use different forms of public relations, or how to put their own ass-covering on the official record, even when it is a glaring lie. Then, they will duck out of view, and the few people who care on a serious level will probably -still- wonder how societies could be so blind. But, it is the essence of Human nature.

Russian Circles - Enter

This album inspires me in a very specific way. It makes me feel as if I were run down by a stampede of angry, violent, psychotic horses. And once they are upon me, they rip me to shreds.

Commerciality kills everything, it seems.

I've been reading a lot of random interviews online for the past few weeks, when I'm bored and happen to find really interesting articles. The band, Filter, Random topics by comedy writers (but with sufficient nerdiness to be idiosyncratic and educational), and all kinds of others. I was reading an interview with a game developer on IGN when my brain started to bleed.

One of the methods of the most stereotypical, standard, amateurish article writing is to enlarge a paragraph that is eye-grabbing, and putting it in the middle of the article, I suppose to pique interest for people who like to skim.

But, what it does to someone like me, someone who reads every word when interested, is something different.

Like this.

What is horrible about it is that they always use a paragraph, and put it before where it originally is in the article (like the page above). So, you're reading, you read this eye-grabber paragraph, and then you keep reading on, thinking that it was, in essence, part of your reading. Then you come across the same paragraph a few more paragraphs down.

This is really bad because it displaces the reader. But, it also basically nullifies the effect of that paragraph, because reading it in the second context (its original context) somehow undermines any meaning in it.

It's like, when you see a phrase often, and then see it where someone is genuinely using the words, and they happen to fall in the same place. The statement itself becomes a symbol of expression, of some kind of abstract marketing, and my brain doesn't absorb it as it should.

It's just another small, subtle way in which Human commerciality undermines Human nature. It's a hard thing to explain properly, but there are so many examples like this, in many different ways, that turn anything worthwhile into something that has been made part of a 'product'.

Proclamation

There are points when you meet the dual faces of honesty, and see the truer one; the dirtier one.

It is time for me to embark. And, that has never been good news.

Stop the season
Stop the sting
A plastic mic
Broken string, yeah
Infected wound from a rusted ring
So what?

Soon, you'll be there too
Soon, you'll be there too

And kissing families can recall
A program to derail us all
Forgotten prison, it's been safe 'til now
It's no wonder that we did it this way
Kept looking forward on paths sideways
It's everything that is connected and beautiful
And now I know just where I stand
Move on
Roll along
Not today
It's everything that is connected and beautiful
And now I know just where I stand
Thank God your heart is too close

This can't be the bitter end
I know it won't

Well, someone said I made a mistake
Kept looking forward on paths sideways
It's everything that is connected and beautiful
And now I know just where I stand
Seasons always shift too late
Spent too much time, now on paths sideways
Everything that is connected and beautiful
And now I know just where I stand
Thank God
It's over

Where do I turn when all hope is lost?
Where do I find forgiveness?

A pain-reflex...

I'm old enough to understand the cycles, the ephemeral aspects to my life. I approach each beginning the same, and perform the same through the duration. Somehow.

What's needed is between stomping and creeping. Floating and sinking; swimming.

Especially when you have a semblance of stability to protect.

I catch the rain that turns me to rust, I stand in the flame that turns me to dust...

When I think that I am a void, I find a wall, and space around me. When I think that I am burning, I feel the cool air of peace. When I think that I am fading, I feel the edges of my own outline.

And in these moments, I feel the hope of someone who, at the back of his mind, thinks that it is only temporary.

Legend of the Seeker Sucks Ass

What really bothers me about Legend of the Seeker is that its relationship with the Sword of Truth books is a microcosm of American culture in general.

One of the reasons the books were amazing is the style in which they were written. Every scene is laid out like a screenplay. The general information given is basic when needed, but every aspect that is integral to the story is described in a very basic, Human way. You understand each event in a linear fashion, but at the same time you understand the deeper implications alongside the aesthetic representation. It feels as if you are watching events unfold, but in a way that is as exhaustive as is possible without being boring. The war that goes on throughout the books; each character's personality and relationship with other characters; the feelings conveyed through simple dialogue and actions; these things educate the reader on Human nature in the context of the story. You learn a lot from each story arc.

The main theme of the books is very complex, but at the same time very basic. It's a story about all of the negative aspects of civilization and contemporary society, and how they are overcome. The problems that aren't overcome, though, serve to describe the sorrow and frustration of being a part of Human culture. The main protagonist is someone whose being is grounded in logic, and who has a very analytical mind. Through him, you learn what irrationality and immoral fervor do to people, and the love that grows between Richard and Kahlan is a very realistic one, but still has elements of a purity that exist only rarely in life.

While there is a main villain, the story is never really about good vs. evil. It's about the Human struggle and triumph over itself, and how deeply ingrained beliefs and destructive qualities can be defeated in a moral framework. It is as much a novel as it is a basic philosophical work.

The TV show is nothing more than a sub-par situational drama. It has the same banal humor, the overly dramatic conflicts, all of the annoying qualities of a poorly written TV show. It uses sex as a selling point instead of how it is portrayed in the books, by using as many opportunities as it can find to show the same pseudo-sexual softcore porn that most TV dramas have. All of these parts are put in because they appeal to the general viewerbase, like everything else in the show.

This is why the story is completely different. In the books, every facet of the storyline was interwoven with the main theme and the rest of the story, whereas in the show, it is an episodic, climax-based, ridiculously undeveloped story. The kind of people who watch shows like Xena, Hercules, and all of the terrible dramas on TV like this kind of story progression, with just enough development to make the viewers feel sophisticated, when all they are watching is trash from a pre-formulated mold.

It is a travesty to someone like me, someone who has an intellect and who appreciated the books on a very deep and personal level. I've seen a lot of people who have read the books and who still like the show, and these people must be too stupid to realize just how pointless the comparison is. Or, they dismiss the comparison alltogether, insisting that they are two different things, and should be appreciated separately. Regardless of this, I can never appreciate the show in any way because of how badly it has forsaken all of the attractive qualities of the books. And, even if I took the show on its merits alone, I would still be disappointed because it's a shitty show with a shitty, TV-grade cast, with a plot so idiotic that it defies logic as to why Terry Goodkind would have any part in it.

What really makes me angry about it, though, is that it seems like most people don't realize things like this. They don't realize just how dumbed-down TV is, and how all aspects of cultural media in America are so abhorrently reductive and bland that it insults the intelligence of anyone who sits through it. Unless, of course, they don't have an intelligence to insult.

The saddest part of watching enough of the show to analyze is understanding the formulae that is used to make American TV shows. It's all so basic that it should only appeal to slow children, and yet adults are just as entranced, if not moreso. There isn't any real depth to literature and media anymore, if there ever was. All of the things that are great are underappreciated and unknown, and when they do become mainstream, they either have to be dumbed down so much that they become worthless, or they are appreciated for the wrong reasons.

I've seen at least two or three episodes that involve Richard and Kahlan almost having sex. The way that these scenes are done is one of the things that -really- pisses me off about the show. They both paw at each other like horny teenagers, with nothing but lust and hormones in their eyes, and the scene is done in a way that is supposed to exude these things: Hormones, lust and not really 'sex'... but 'fucking'.

The characters from the books did not have the kind of personality that they were horny adolescents who wanted to get it on so badly when given the opportunity. They were adults, with sophisticated emotions and lusts. When they did have sex, it was not just... bad porn. They made love, in the corniest sense of the term, but it was special because of that, because they connected on a deeper level. But, since American sexuality is perpetually frozen in the late teenage years, and because that primal kind of lust is what is easy to sell in media, that is how it is done on the show. It seems like there is almost nothing in American culture anymore that suggests we have any sophisticated emotions, or sense of self, or sexuality. Apparently, we are all just adolescent children, slavishly guided by immature, pseudo-emotional desires. This is probably why the show is successful with a short, prepubescent-looking, brainless protagonist and why his love interest is the kind of girl you want to fuck in high school. She's not beautiful, she's 'hot'. Somehow, everyone eats it up.

All of the other parts of the story that they get wrong and change to the point of not being recognizeable at all just show how that isn't their aim; they have no interest in telling a story. They just want to reiterate the formula that will make them money. And since people are so undeveloped and mindless, they'll like the show, they'll think it has a great story and great characters, great humor, great action and great climaxes. In the end, the real problem isn't the people making the show; it's all of the idiots that genuinely like it.

Providence

My brain has become bogged down by all of the negative aspects of shallow existence. I have to become better at passing off all of those things and focusing at what I grow within myself, especially because it forsakes the shallow, even if only to myself.

I'm just getting back into all of the things that move me, and while it's not necessarily a positive move, it's more organic and feels more real when I am inside those things, when I ignore all of the pedantic things. But after so long in and out of delusion, it's hard to keep an outlook that isn't blindingly fatalistic.

A fracture line; I eat from another world,
for no reason but to cover this one.
I breathe in suffocated bursts,
a ritual to break the routine lurch.
The irony in a poisoned fang
and its filling sense of change;
a memory in my valves.

Still, her eyes are staring at me
Empty as the sky
In this moment of tranquility
I realize that this is goodbye.

In terms of my writing, I have reached a place where I only write when I somewhat force myself to. And, in that mode, I try too hard to exhaustively explain my points, I focus too much on the structure and grammatical prose of it all. What comes out later seems kind of contrived.

I've realized recently that I really need to just write and not think about the rest of it. The reason that I like my style of writing back when I was a teenager so much is because I did exactly that. I didn't think, I just expelled. And now, when I want to impose the things I've learned into the method of writing, I start to ruin it. It doesn't really matter if it's not perfect or if there are flaws. I just need to write. Period.

And beyond the method and structure, the substance also suffers. I end up spiraling into an Ouroboros of explaining explanations, defining definitions. And I lose my main point. I become aimless. This is also something I miss about my older writing: No matter how insane and scattered it ever got, there was always a point when it would all be wound together in a gestalt moment, exploding with my own vitriolic deconstructions.

It's pretty obvious in the post before this one. That is what made me realize that I need to reevaluate my own motivation (well, writing motivations, at least)...

The Problem of the Contemporary Mind

Part of our culture is based on irrationality. But it's selective; science can be derided all day, but people still believe in science when it comes to the practical things in life like technology and medical services.

The reason is that irrationality has been falsely linked to spirituality. Just like ghosts, aliens and bigfoot, people think that the ability to believe in things that have no real evidence shows that you are more open-minded, and therefore more intelligent (ironically). having the 'strength' to believe in things purely on faith is a sign of a stronger soul. And since the entertainment industry makes a lot of money capitalizing on these ideas, turning The History Channel into UFO story marathons, turning Sci Fi into the same kind of bullshit, they market to Americans' vanity in their sense of pseudo-spirituality.

Another large influence is the amalgamation of the different religious movements. They believe that logical thinking, critical thinking, and understanding of things like evolution and the debunking of religious dogma, all of these are antithetical and threatening to the existence of religion, and religious power. Part of the social control in America is based on keeping irrational thought and trust in faith alive by falsely discrediting any kind of scientific thought, at least when it is on a subject that opposes religious practice.

It is all manifest in the brain through the dichotomy of the emotional and intellectual minds. When we think based on our emotions, we block out the logical parts of thought, and vice versa. Both can not effectively coexist. But, if we have been trained at anything, it's compartmentalizing our thought and behavior. That is why people can believe that the Earth is less than 6,000 years old, and not be completely idiotic. They do not see the relatedness of things like the origin of the planet and the nature of the cosmos and things like fossil fuels. They can think that evolution is a lie, but still understand how dogs have been domesticated, or how plants are bred over time.

And, in cases like evolution, elements of social control deal with these on a case-by-case basis. Nobody in their right mind thought up the macro- vs micro-evolutionary difference. It was something created by religious thinkers who wanted a believable way to justify their dislike of Darwin and the anti-creationist sections of science.

It has degraded music also. The music industry has become a factory of overgeneralized formulae. Most popular music is based on a hip-hop beat and lyrics that have to do with basic mass-social gatherings, and emphasizes sexuality, condescension and the idea that the subject of the song is uniquely special. I think that these things, while they may seem strangely specific in that I picked them out, show the atrophy of poetic thinking in art. I believe that there is a reason that most popular music focuses on these kinds of fairy-tale story lines, or on possessing the opposite sex, or being better than 'the rest' of society, or about how life is a grander mystery that no one can ever understand. These are the most basic aspects of art, the most banal, amplified and used over and over until they become so prevalent in the way we think that it feeds on itself in a circular motion.

The conservative movement gained its power through the demonization of the elite, and the 'empowerment' of the common man. However, there was never any real empowerment, just the mirage of it; the interests that were always served gained their power through subjugating the lower classes of society, and it is in filling their minds with illusions of being greater that they did so.

The different ways that those with money exert their influence is as evil as Humans can be in society. The real problem isn't that they do it, but that Americans have learned to be so passive that they do nothing to think for themselves. All they do is zone out on their entertainment, their empty carnival-like entertainment, while they wait for the mass media to feed them the news that they are conditioned to hear, and then they form opinions on it based on what they're told to feel. Their opinions, their views and their thought processes themselves are conditioned and grown over time. It is not a conspiracy or some grand evil like the Illuminati. It's simple Human behavior, and because Americans are so complacent, even on a dying planet, even with crumbling and fracturing societies. They no longer know how to do anything other than be complacent slaves. Everything is separated to be either Progressive or Conservative, R or D, 'Liberal' or 'Responsible'.

And now, with all of these anti-government factions taking shape, with all of the protest movements and ideological lines being drawn... as much as it seems that we are empowering ourselves, we are still the same sheep. the movements themselves are being built by people who want power, and even when the pitchforks come, they will be supplied by the same people. That is the biggest deception in our society: Not that we do not have opposition, but that the opposition itself is just another side of the same control.

In my view, this is all caused by our 'open-mindedness'. We are pliable because we let ourselves to be dominated by an irrational culture, because we are dominated now by religious and spirtual leaders. Our society becomes more and more ridiculously violent, for stupid reasons. Irrationality becomes more dominant, and it causes children to be raised with less and less of a mind. We become more and more primal, more idiotic. We become more worthless with every inch that we give to religion, to irrational belief, with partisan feuds.

American values are dead, not because of the reasons Conservatives give. They are not dead because we have grown away from God, not because we have lost respect for our government. They are not dead because of the effects of terrorism or anti-American movements. They are dead because we, as a people, have forsaken intellectual and emotional education. We do not raise children with common sense. We do not respect anything other than what we are told to. We use excuses and justifications to deal with our problems, rather than face them. We have become pathetic, because we are pathetic.

Feed the gods a strychnine soul...

The never-ending journey in atrophy. Time and time again, I am discouraged by it. I don't look forward in a progressive fashion, but a regressive one. Everything, no matter how slowly, crumbles.

All of the people who have a rosy perspective, who think that everything will always be wonderful and hope is its own fertilizer, these people are the ignorant ones. Cynicism is coupled with pessimism because the cynics are the realists, and the world is a decrepit place. They don't see how deeply corrupt our government is, and they don't see how they are a part of it. They don't see that they are sheep.

And even when they think they are actively taking part in the system, trying to change politics and society, they are still sheep. They are being led. There is an entire movement that is built on the same control as the rest of it, but it is disguised as being anti-authority and pro-democratic.

People think we have a democracy, and that is why there are such problems in America. But we have only fascism and social control. We have only lazy ignorance, represented by people who are too selfish and stupid to be anything but apathetic or vapidly interested. People only care about themselves and how they are viewed. This is why it all works: They use their political views as a metaphorical bumper sticker, to show the rest of society how they feel. Sometimes, I don't think there are many people left who really see it all for what it is.

They do such wildly anti-American things as pushing religion so deeply into politics that our history books are being changed, our sense of values only go as far as our religious beliefs, and the act of discrimination is widely accepted as long as there is a religious justification to it. At the root of all of America's corruption and immorality, lies religion and religious thought. Because, religious thought is just another appendage of selfish ignorance.

But, in the grander scheme of things, none of it really matters. The rest of the world is still progressing, and will move beyond even America, which was once the beacon of all progress in the world. We will fall behind and crumble, and cease to exist, or fix things and start to make real progress. It doesn't really matter. The end result will be that the Human race will eradicate ignorance, outgrow it, or fall prey to it once and for all.

I will fall in the shattering thunder of dying stars,
with one thing keeping me bound throughout it all:
the breadth of a deathly pall....

Born in the USA...

The indicative point, the most revealing characteristic of Christianity, and all monotheistic religions (and other forms of authoritarianism) is its blatant self-contradiction and hypocrisy. But, somehow, it is in these contradictions that its power lies. Something in the Human condition allows such reverse-thinking. Just as Bush's "Clear Skies Initiative" completely fucked up the environment where it was applied, just as the "Patriot Act" is a completely un-American farce, there is an entire kind of strategy-making devoted to this kind of reversed logic.

And since the public is so intellectually lazy, they believe the false presentation of things simply because they are shown as being fact. Things that take only a minimal effort in critical thinking to prove false are believed, not only because they appeal to their sensibilities (as they are designed to), but they play off of the fears that come inherent with being ignorant and xenophobic. Most of the people I know believe that minorities taking advantage of welfare is one of the largest problems in the country; that's how ridiculous public thought is.

But even when they try to think critically about something and try to form an educated opinion, they do not have the facilities to adequately do so. They have no experience in picking apart things sufficiently. They have grown too stupid to suddenly be as smart as is required to stop the country's sinking into the abyss. Nothing pisses me off more than watching idiots debate about issues that they really don't know anything about, because all they do is battle diametrically opposed emotional responses, held up by half-truths and cherry-picked data.

As long as large corporations pay to have their information spread out among the public, as long as intelligence is demonized, as long as the cattle never outgrow the killing floor, nothing will ever change.

Let me burn you down...

I'm getting too old to be paralyzed. But, I am not young enough to revile the slow movement that mental paralysis allows.

I used to be too anxious to ever sit still. The older I've gotten, the more I respect meditation-like thought; that is, thought that moves at its own pace and is not hurried along. I have grown an immeasurable amount inside, but I still balk and fluster when I talk to my father. I still hide when I talk to my mother. I still tell people whatever they want to hear. I am still the epitome of misanthropy.

I feel like my writing was more profound back then, though. I don't know why. Perhaps my ego has regrown as it was before I broke down any walls and was the self-imposed imposition. The clueless megaphone of antithetical advice. The destroyer of worlds.

But I still have the same person inside of me. It's just become much harder to find him, because I have become a ruin on the outside.

--

There's no returning
There's no returning
There is no action
No way to divide

Silence is growing
Silence is growing
Out of refraction
And way out of sight
No clear recalling
No, no clear recalling
There's no reaction
No way back to light

Turn 'round and over
Over and over
Turn 'round and over
My liquid time
My liquid time
Back to the place where you are
A new void

No more returning
No more returning
Feeling no others
But we may be blind
So long a waiting
So long a watching
There must be something moving there in the dark
No fear inside you
No, no fear inside you
No, there's no reaction
No way back to light

Turn 'round and over
Over and over
Turn 'round and over

There's no returning
See, there's no returning
There is no action
No way to divide
Something's approaching
Something's approaching
Ready to strike with every beat of your heart

Turn 'round and over
Over and over
Turn 'round and over

A new void....
=

Now that I'm out of the nut house and on my own
Having worn out my welcome in every home
I'm to blame for all of the things that went wrong
I'm just a case away from losing it all
I slip to fall

I live two minutes from where I bought medicine
Escape as the guy on my way to sober friends
I'm to blame for all of the things that I've done
I'm just a case away from losing it all
I slip to fall

Time creeps by when I'm in reality
Sometimes, my feet start walking unconsciously
I've got some time, but I've got my life to go
I wish the best for us all, but I don't know...

And with her came the birds....

I am profoundly disappointed in myself. Even though I have clear goals that I am pursuing, regardless of how pointless they may seem to be to everyone else, even though I have grown, I am still the same train wreck that I've always been. Only, now, it's much worse because I keep heading slowly, gradually downward. I'm always lower than I was before.

I don't really care about the prospects that I will or won't have when it comes to meeting people, because I have completely adopted misanthropy to such a staggering degree. I don't even think of myself as part of that species anymore, because of my own mental illnesses. This has always been the point in my life when I've started taking medication again. But this time, I won't. And that kind of frightens me, as it does even when I do end up taking something for it. I feel as though I'm on the final track, which is so different than any time before now.

I am not heading down with reckless abandon, but with careful, languid deliberation. That is what's completely terrifying about it all. I feel as though I really am rotting from the inside out, now. And while I don't think I'll ever be quite as psychotic as I have been in my life, everything feels different, now. What was once chaotic fury is now psychopathy. What was once distress and desperation is now a cold, chilling contract.

What was once hope buried under mountains of fear and pain is now... pain, masked by numbness and sadness. The kind of sadness that never truly shows itself until it's much too late.

And within this melancholy, I remember my psychic roots. It isn't sorrow for the sake of sorrow. This is my real expression. I've never been able to adequately explain that, I feel. In our culture, this kind of presentation is usually used for self-reinforcement; it's all to exercise the ego in that destructive, pointless way that only shallow people can. But that is not me. I have to write things like this for my own sanity, even when it never really feels like it helps all that much. Whenever I go back through my writing, though, I find that this is the only real beauty I've ever known: The solemn, broken structures erected out of necessity.