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….