Neue

Nine Variations on Leigh Holmes

2011-07-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

I'd never felt it before, the pull to touch her and the glow she lit inside me. It was so strange, and recognizing the word that went with the feeling filled me with anxiety. 'Love' is such an easy word to misuse, abuse, and slander. The single English verb with the greatest power to endear and make you look like a fool, often simultaneously. She said it first, but I didn't really hear it because it came in the middle of a conversation; rolling onto the floor, void of pith.

The loveseat in front of my TV is all black leather and nowhere near big enough for me to lie down on comfortably. There was a time when we would sit there tensed, respecting the layer of distance friends need between each other, arms uncomfortably at our sides. We've found a way to make it work somehow, us two big people, her voluptuous legs wrapped around me like ivy, my hands sprawling redwoods growing up through the crook of her arm.

We broke the bed. That's an accomplishment I have never matched in terms of ego-swelling athletic sexual pride. When I was on top of her, I'd have to grab the steel rail of the headboard and push it forward to keep us from collapsing in on ourselves. It was awkward, but the sense of control, of knowing that I'm an integral part of what keeps this assembled and secure . . . well, it's the perfect metaphor.

It's the cutest burp you've ever heard. She turns her head and makes a noise like "pf-huh". Maybe if I wasn't in love with her it'd just be a twee affection, the sign of a woman trying to hard to be a girl. But it triggers something in me when I hear it. Something cliché and vulnerable and forcefully inchoate.

It's not a 'relationship.' That's what she told me. Still living with the man who at some point was her boyfriend, she can't take the mental leap to calling this what it is. Or what it isn't, perhaps. We talk about it, and we reach most of a resolution each time, but some conversations are ever-living. In August she moves out, and she said she'd be fine calling me her boyfriend about a week after she's left his house. I winced and told her it felt like I'd been punched in the gut.

She wanted me to choke her. Inexperienced, it was my first time taking control of someone in that primal way. I kept wondering if I was going to asphyxiate her, but my grip stayed tight. After I did it, she told me I was a natural dom, which conflicted me. There's nothing truer to my current philosophy than the act of taking control. But I wonder how far I've come from who I used to be.

I keep saying sappy things. I love how thick she is, and I never tire of expressing it. Every time I tell her how special she is to me, she bites her lip and looks away. The gesture makes me feel anxious, like I've fucked up, but I keep doing it.

She texts me all the time. Little things: good morning, I miss you, how's work, this creep is staring at me on the bus, fuck Cubs fans. We've been friends long enough that we already have a secret language, but the added intimacy has created bizarre new slang and in-jokes. Despite all the sex and cuddling and professions of love, having someone I always want to talk to is the thing that stays with me throughout the day.

Ending things is hard, whether it's a blog post or a relationship. I wonder when our denouement will come, and then sometimes I wonder if it will come. I can't stop knowing that our shared daydream will probably come to an end at some point, and it kind of tortures me. I want to watch plays and movies and have boring nights with her. I want to deal with the worst parts of her and watch her ugly cry. I want to get to the point where we keep getting annoyed with each other so that we can get to the point of sublime acceptance. I want to do the whole dance. Pondering the possibility isn't the same as envisioning a destiny, but any chance is worth it.

Interruption of Service

2011-06-26T23:33:00.000-07:00

I turned 25 today. Or yesterday. It's hard to tell. I was born on 6/26/86, which I always interpreted as a subtle nod to the number of the beast. So, in celebration, I post here. My mother, she spent most of my birthday trying to convince me of the gravity of 25, how it heralds the end of people giving me slack for my youth. A good point, but one I couldn't take to heart. I know I need to be so much more than I am.

This birthday was not the best. A great project was undertaken to construct chicken and waffles ex nihilo, but the waffles suffered structural breaches in phase 2 of development and the entire work was scrapped. We still ate the fried chicken, and discovered that it's quite delicious with maple syrup. I met up with another friend, but there were insults, innuendos, and misunderstandings. That one left me in a bad mood. But the dinner with family was alright, the company was lively, and I was ultimately reminded whom I could rely on.

So, a decent birthday, not going in the record books. But I realized something: I used to enjoy having everyone make a big fuss about my birthday, but now I kind of want to go unnoticed. It's better as a day of quiet reflection and joking around with bosom friends than a big-tent bombshell event. And, really, it doesn't deserve the pomp and circumstance I usually demand. So maybe the bright side of turning 25 is me giving myself less leeway for needless things.

Pig King God

2011-06-19T00:49:00.000-07:00

Insanity. That’s what I worry about. No family history except for a brother who took Art Bell too seriously. No outward indicators ever diagnosed. But internally, I understand just how thin the wires that hold everything together are. How, if plucked at the wrong time, one could produce a discordant note that would make the mechanism rip itself apart. Drugs made the line go slack, but eventually provided a tension of their own. So I keep an uncomfortable vigil on the individual parts of the machine, waiting for the moment when the wires cross and I fall out of sync with reality.

But see, what I feared was insanity. What I deep-down kinda hoped for was full-blown theatrical madness. If the insane brain is crackling static, the mind of a madman is a symphony being performed by twelve cellists performing in thirteen different time signatures. The insane go to a home and eat jello, while the mad speak prophetic nonsense and command a strength born of crazy. In the point-buy system of life, madness is the preferred idiosyncrasy of the min/maxer, because it elevates while at the same time providing a nobly tragic flaw.

Why not skip the middleman and become a madman? Well, like all other literary diseases, lunacy requires an inciting incident. To truly go mad, I'd need to lose my kingdom, or accidentally kill a loved one. I could discover the incomprehensible truth behind reality's veil and be sucked into a world disconnected from moral and natural law. But that requires the intervention of Fate or a heavy-handed narrator. You can't just go out and take the entrance exam for Stark Raving University; you need to be headhunted. But Chemical Imbalance Community College accepts admissions year-round, and has very affordable in-state tuition.

So, I fear insanity. Because if I keep writing shit like this, it can't be too far off.

I Wish This Was The Last Time I Had To Do This

2011-06-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

The first part is the longest. Incubation. Put it out of your mind. Do anything else. Go for a walk, do some shopping, read a book; anything that you can convince myself is vaguely constructive. Ignore it. It'll still be there when you get around to it. You can get started after dinner.

Hand-wringing: step two. Sit in front of the computer. Commit to getting started. You still have tons of time left. In fact, you have enough time to check your e-mail. And, ooh, don't you want a sandwich while you're doing that? I heard about this great place over on Sheridan that makes this salmon banh mi...

Step three. Okay, this is the point where you just get disgusted with yourself. Because, really? You can't do better than this? Isn't this the hundredth-plus time you've been stuck staring at an empty computer screen? You need to change your approach. Your whole last-minute ethos is clearly not working. Best case, you stumble in tomorrow morning sick from your two hours and fifteen minutes of sleep, toting some sub-literate agglomeration of unrelated thoughts. Next time, you start a week in advance. This time next Sunday you'll be kicking back and enjoying yourself, laughing about how trivially easy it is to get the work done when you spread it evenly throughout the week.

Step four: panic, panic, panic, panic, panic! I mean, what the hell, right? Fuck! Fuck. Okay. Okay. So it took you an hour to get a tenth of the way through it. It's cool. Relax. No, you are not sleepy. Do not do this to me, god damn it. Make some coffee! But real quick-like. Okay, just, um, just try to think real hard. Just try to fill the page with as many words as you can and edit down from there. ...well, okay, good hustle, but it's better if the words are related to the subject at hand. Coffee's ready, go! Go! Yeah! That's good, isn't it? This'll help you think. It's gonna be fine. Just bang it out and it'll be fine. Wonder what's new on Twitter?

Step five: unplug your modem.

What? Oh yeah, step six. Um, okay, this is the part where you just

Step seven: Pray to the God of the Israelites for the strength to finish this without passing out. Trust me, New Testament YHWH doesn't have enough juice to fix this mess. Look, you will never pull this shit again, got it? The walls are buzzing and you're mouth's dry from all the coffee. Maybe you should just call it a day. If you just take a two-hour nap now, you'll wake up all refreshed and full of ideas. Well, if don't just sleep straight through 'til 9am tomorrow. Hm. Maybe nix that nap.

Step Eight. Enlightenment. Clouds open, muse sings, fingers never leave keyboard.

Yes! Yes. Home stretch. You did it, slugger! Okay, think of a punchy way to end it. Waitwaitwait! I got it! How about, "Step nine: get some sleep already."

A Culture of Shitheads

2011-06-06T00:52:00.000-07:00


Each mermaid represents a different venereal disease.

The proliferation of tattoos as casual style is disappointing. In ubiquity, they lose their ability to signify anything other than insufferableness.There was a time (which I am very probably making up) where tattoos were badges earned by sailors upon their first circumnavigation of a whorehouse. If not that, they were shows of yakuza loyalty, ways of counting all the men you'd killed, methods of celebrating romances doomed to end in violence, or mementos of that lazy summer spent in a death camp. The tattoo was a brand, a way of irreversibly committing outlier activities to your flesh. There was a taboo, and it was well-earned.

Nowadays, tattoos are like bumper stickers: a channel for dysfunctional people to express their deeply-held obnoxious beliefs publicly. Hipsters, juggalos, nerds, and Lil Wayne are the main ideological blocs I'm referring to here. If you have twelve tattoos acquired over a period of six months, can any of them be considered special? "This tattoo celebrates that time I bought a churro with NO FILLING. What a wild ride." I'm on board with the body-as-a-canvas metaphor, but owning a paint-able surface doesn't obligate you to scribble dicks all over it.

Tuxedo Mask can't save you from a lifetime of poor decisions.

Once, in a kickboxing class, I saw that the woman in front of me had Pac-Man tattoos all over her arms and legs. I'm pro-Pac-Man, but the moment of recognition was followed by a cringe. Before I'd even talked to her, she had metaphorically screamed out "I LIKE PAC-MAN!" No one likes Pac-Man that much. Not even Toru Iwatani.

Like all modern problems, this can be traced back to Mike Tyson. By popularizing the tribal face tattoo as the new acme of socially unacceptable body modification, he made a great array of slightly less extreme body mods look not quite as insane. Rapist, recluse, trendsetter; truly, Iron Mike was a triple threat.

Read me clearly: I'm not assaulting the right to sculpt your physicality into an avatar of the ever-living Cosmic Jackass. A person's right to tattoos should be as unrestricted as their right to create Herbie the Love Bug flatulence fetish fics or put triple bookshelf spoilers on their Priuses. Monstrous violations of taste are coded into America's red-white-and-blue bedazzled DNA. But Christ, manifest enough self-respect, aesthetic sense, or just plain laziness to refrain from superfluously embellishing your body.

Upon the Burning of our House

2011-05-09T23:44:00.000-07:00

Recently, I read a very interesting article on the Woot.com blog. The inciting incident: because there is some nominal cultural cachet associated with the 'geek' identity, more and more people who wouldn't have claimed it before are doing so now. The message from the author: Cut it out. The sentiment resonates with me in low and sturdy places, and I'm uncomfortable with how much I want to chastise anyone who disagrees.

To begin with, I reject the fundamental idea that geek is cool. It's no more fashionable now than ten years ago to be, say, a person who debates dubs vs. subs in the middle of a Paranoia game on Usenet, all while cosplaying unpopular Star Trek characters in a barely lit basement apartment. It's acceptable to play Call of Duty, watch Battlestar Galactica, or have played D&D in high school. But these are all more things that intersect with nerd culture, if such a thing exists.

Here's the thing: before the modern era of about five years ago, there was not a "nerd culture". Nerds from different spheres often don't get along with each other, or consider others too below them. Consider the classical text, courtesy of the Brunching Shuttlecocks:

Uncomfortable, but true. The Venn diagram of geek is a near-infinite number of spheres, barely intersecting. This loose confederation is united by the accumulated derision of a lifetime of unpopular choices. Some are hardened by it, some are damaged, some take it as a call to rise above, and some barely notice it, but it changes their perceptions. In a world where their pursuits had mainstream acceptance, there wouldn't be a common ground between a Warhammer 40K player and a furry MUD user. Geek culture without rejection isn't a culture.

But is that a bad thing? This is where my argument falls into hesitant hand wringing, because I'm not even a little sure. I can't try to extrapolate who I'd be if geek had been cool when I was small, and the me that would be produced by that experiment would probably have a different outlook anyway. Geek culture would be more like a series of tribes than the current loose alliance bound by a T-shirt-based hanky code. What is the opportunity cost of unpopularity, measured in wedgies?

I know I lack the objectivity necessary to confidently answer to that question. The thought that my culture is being infiltrated by carpetbaggers leaves me queasy. Some actor claims in an interview to be a "huge nerd" because they play Modern Warfare with their friends, and it feels to me like they're wearing some kind of blackface. Our culture, as it is, exists as a shelter against these people, and now they're co-opting it.

The phenomenon fills me with odium, but I don't know if it's a fair response. A lot of hipsters are at the front of this wave, but a decent proportion of them have authentic claims to citizenship in Geek Israel. Maybe it's like gay people coming out of the closet in the 80's and 90's: now that the water's a bit warmer, everyone's willing to take a dip. See, this paragraph is pure rhetoric: I put a positive counterpoint at the end of a series of negative sentiments, trying to make myself appear hopeful. But I'm not. I dislike people taking advantage of the only culture I've ever been able to call my own, and I want them to get the fuck away.

Seriously?

2011-05-05T23:38:00.000-07:00

I don't know whether to feel contempt or pity for the bastard who had to write this copy. Mother's Day is a Hallmark holiday devoted to awkwardly celebrating Mom with brunch and a card. There's an Oedipal brazenness to celebrating by jerking it to the older-than-30 women who make up Silicone Valley's refuse. The artiste who had to jam these sentiments together deserves both a slow clap and a hard slap.

The Unfocused Lawlessness

2011-05-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

I've learned how to make a damn good burger and fries. I got this cast-iron grill pan, which I heat up on high for a few minutes, then I throw the beef on there. Flip it, press it, and after around eight minutes throw burger and pan into the oven at 500 degrees, going about another five minutes. In the middle of all this, I drop the fries into a pan of canola oil at low heat, wait 'til they reach a "pale blonde" (internet's words, not mine), then take them out and re-fry them under high heat. Boom! Hamburger heaven. Reader, this is an instruction manual for how to find your bliss.

Also, playing the new Mortal Kombat game, which is frustratingly dubbed . . . "Mortal Kombat". By all rights, it should be "The Mortal Kombat" or maybe "Mortal Kombat: Origins", just to save me from having to distinguish it from the original specimen or the series as a whole. Great game, play it, etc. But! Shao Kahn is some bullshit. He's a legacy arcade boss, an archetype made from wasted quarters and crushed dreams. Every hit you land on him does half damage, every move he has is about fifty percent over the normal damage curve. Half his specials are unblockable. You can't grab him. His super move takes away over half your life bar. All things I expect from a fighting game boss, and traits I can forgive, to a certain extent. But in addition to giving his moves crazy priority over yours, he will often flash yellow and ignore your attacks.

Fight-wise, this makes things near-impossible on your end unless you resort to spam techniques. Personally, it is an insult. See, there was always that kid. Whenever I played tag or cops and robbers or whatever gotcha-based game, this kid would devise a novel strategy: he would simply ignore it when he got tagged or shot or slimed, claiming it never happened. I hated that kid. You probably hated that kid. If you were that kid, I bet you hate yourself. Adding that layer of uncertainty to the outcome of a game destabilizes it. If the rules stop applying at random points, eventually it stops being a game, and everyone goes home. Shao Kahn is that little "nuh-uuuuh" shithead, and he makes me want to stop playing his damn game.

Part of me just wants to shake Ed Boon and say "THIS IS WHY MIDWAY DIED". The Mortal Kombat is a game that trades heavily on arcade nostalgia, but its greatest asset is the long, involved single-player story mode, an approach unheard of when MK cabinets still roamed the earth hungry for quarters. The unreasonable final boss helped arcade operators make quotas, but it serves no function in a post-Diversions world.

Any Blade Will Do

2011-04-16T02:18:00.000-07:00

As a much younger person, I used to read tons of fantasy/sci-fi novels. They were all thick tomes, the sort of paperback doorstoppers that are read mostly for the accomplishment of getting through 890 pages in a weekend. I cherished them. Where some had Game Boys, I foolishly chose the Game Gear, becoming another of the walking wounded in the First Console War. The damn thing could optimistically make it four hours on six batteries, and had an even more generously estimated six decent games to show for it. My Star Wars novels and Melanie Rawn softcovers were my only escape during a bus ride or lonely recess period.

During my later teenage years, I gave up reading for pleasure. Twofold explanation: 1.) I got a car and my idle time shrank. 2.) It's really hard to focus on a book when you're high. My excommunication ended a couple years ago, and I took the book back up, along with the bell and candle. Only now, there's a wrinkle: I can't read sci-fi or fantasy anymore. I worry that it's because I buck at the unashamed nerdiness necessary to read the genre. Not that I'd be afraid to read them in public, but in private.

The other truth is that I've learned a whole lot more about the craft of writing in the intervening period, and most of the dragon and robot reveries I read as a kid were not so good. Plots that were barely zapped in the microwave long enough to shake off their staleness. Characters with narrative arcs that could be predicted just by reading their names. Plots constituted of implausibilities stitched together by extremely convenient applications of magic/science. While the hackwork is enjoyable in the moment, I can't say that a single damn one of those books has really stayed with me.

So maybe that's the real answer: time. When I was young, I had the time and boredom to kill maybe a book a week. Now it takes me closer to a month to get through a book I really enjoy. As a result, I choose my targets much more carefully. Steak over popcorn. Don't take that statement as a condemnation of nerd lit to the dreaded Trashcan of the Low Arts; but I have a hard enough time finding books that truly excite me without limiting myself to a limited genre.

Concentrated Milk

2011-03-26T00:56:00.000-07:00

This is the sort of thing best never said in the light of day, but, well, I'm sick of having friends. The necessity of interpersonal relations isn't lost on me; it's a grave task to maintain balance or sanity without peers. I've spent months holed up in my house in the past, and I can give detailed testament to how much it sucks and how much it sucks out of me. But all the motions necessary to keep friendships in the green honestly feel like they provide poor return on investment.

See, when presented with the choice of either having fun alone or having the same amount of fun with others, I'd choose the solitary option a solid ninety percent of the time. You have to manage people, make sure you're not going past their boundaries, and think about their happiness. I have enough trouble doing that for myself. I just got back from a night playing cards with a friend, and afterward I had no desire to ever see his ass again. This isn't an uncommon occurrence with any friend of mine, and it really has me questioning my approach. I usually try to soften the blow by calling myself antisocial, but really, I'm a misanthrope, and the mind of a misanthrope isn't hungry for company.

This is too high-school-notebook for what I want this blog to be, but a record of my self needs to include some nerd clichés if it's going to be honest. I want to expand on this idea, make it into a train of thought rather than a bus of sentence fragments, but it may be too unformed for me to grasp fully yet.

Renfield’s Syndrome

2011-02-27T00:09:00.000-08:00

The morgue is pretty boring, except for the little sand dunes of dust on the floor. I'm out of breath. While I stop to fish for excuses about why I got here after all the action, a stake falls out of my duster, rolling into one of the ash piles. Now it's official: I am the worst vampire hunter.

Not like the Van Helsings. They're assholes, and what makes them even bigger assholes is that they're really nice about being assholes. The new one, Wilhelmus - every time we, y'know, team up, and I stake a vampire just to the left of the heart, he gets this weird half-smile and gives me the speech. "Paul, go under the sternum and jab upwards. So you don't have to force your way through the ribcage." I can't stand it.

I stick my finger in the ashes, then smell them. They don't smell like anything but ashes, but I figure it's kind of a cool signature move. You never know who's watching, huh? In this business, you get a lot of mysterious strangers spying on you from the shadows. Which is a terrible thing to find out about at 3am while you're pissing in a storm drain.

It was a stakeout, right? Apparently something was going on in Koreatown by the cannery. I mean, I guess it was. I'd been watching the loading dock for the past 5 hours, but all I'd seen were some teenagers huffing toner or something. So I get out of the car to pee, because, shag carpet in the van, ya know? You aim wrong and you never get that smell out. I go down the big concrete embankment, get things going, and, when the tank's half-full, boom, guy behind me.

"Enjoying the evening air?" He croaks it in like a Tom Waits voice, like piss over dry gravel. I kind of jump, but I don't wanna turn around with my pecker in my hands, so I play it off like I don't need to see his face 'cuz I'm cool too. My damn duster's all wet down the side now. His breath hits my neck, but it's cold. Vampire.

Now, I was on the verge of a panic attack, and my zipper was stuck. That's really the only way to explain why I'd say, to a complete stranger: "Not since you bastards killed my uncle." Look, I know. I know! Doesn't make sense in hindsight.

Okay, so I played the dead relative card too early. There are really only two ways you become a vampire hunter: you train from when you're, like, ten, just like those jackass Van Helsings. Or - someone you know dies, and you kinda fall into the whole cycle of justice and revenge thing. It's so cliché and dumb, but when you're at a funeral and an old lady shuffles up to you, hugs you real close, then whispers in your ear, "I want you to find the bastards that did this and kill them." ... I don't know, how can you refuse? You look like a total shithead if you do.

Thing is, I'm braced to get punched, kicked, or the ol' neckbite, so I do like this quick turn around move without even zipping up. I'm giving the guy my best kung-fu-I-can-kick-your-ass stance, which is really bullshit 'cuz I got kicked out of my dojo after two weeks when my check bounced. This vampire, he's a white guy dressed kinda business-y. Khaki pants, white shirt, cropped hair, and snaggletoothed fangs. The way he's eyeing me, it's hungry, and then he looks down at my junk. "My, aren't you a big boy." he says. I give him the once over, preparing to cock back my best haymaker and all of a sudden I realize he's packing. Plain as day, his dick's hanging out of his pants, too.

My brain starts cranking, and it finally chunks it out. That message board that tipped me off was right: there is some action going on here, but it's fucking gay cruising. I'm so embarrassed that I spout a line of bullshit about how now that I've got his attention, I want to save his soul with the power of Christ and lead him away from the path of sin and anonymous storm drain blowjobs. He gives me this super confused look, and after a beat I turn and just start running away as hard as I can, pecker flopping in the wind.

Swear to god, I'm gonna quit this whole game. Wilhelmus says he can get me a janitor job at his family's bakery, but I'm kinda iffy on it. I have my pride, you know?

World of Ruin

2011-02-14T01:01:00.000-08:00

It only gets colder. I'll reassure myself that there can't be a colder day in this winter, that there's only a gradual rebirth into the golden land of Spring awaiting me after this little rough patch of absolute zero. But I can't even fool myself. The weather has me indoors, and it's doing more than just fever my cabin. It's leeching out the discipline I've been building in myself for the past year - I still work out, but my mind's fuzzy and I find it hard to stare at any problem without blinking and looking away. It's like my brain's wearing a parka made of fiberglass insulation. It took me thirty minutes to think of that simile, and it's not even good.

The dead of winter is the appointed time of my existential crisis. When all the holiday glow has subsided, when my hours at work get cut back, when all I can hear are the silences of my apartment, I turn inward. I've been working out for the past year now, and I've lost 25 lbs., become physically stronger than I've ever been in my life, and have developed a bit of steel deep within myself. But it's both not enough and too much.

I'm worried that I'm taking it too far. The testosterone fucks with my head and feels awful unnatural. It awakens some atavistic urge to callousness deep within me. If I go far enough, the physical changes will make it even harder to pass. But I need more power.

I need more power.

I don't know what sentence to put after that, so by necessity it stands alone. Written in a story, something so declarative would be pithed out after a definitive trauma. My village is razed by mercenaries while I'm out hunting. A drug deal gone bad leaves my girlfriend in a wheelchair. A bully pushes me down into the sand and I make a tearful, determined resolution. Best as I can see it, I'm reacting to feelings of powerlessness by finding a way in which to becoming powerful.

Super Sonic Speech Impediment

2011-02-12T02:36:00.000-08:00

Holy fuck, I used to write some painfully long blog posts.

Sonnet 130, Translated

2011-01-10T22:51:00.000-08:00

My bitch is ugly as shit! It's cool, though.

No Carrier

2010-12-30T19:31:00.000-08:00

I miss my bike. In the warm moments of summer, it became a meditative oasis for me. Pumping through alleys and exploring the unexamined spaces of a huge city, I recaptured some empty part of myself. Without it, I feel a little bit lost. I detest people who profess a self-righteous affinity for biking, and maybe this post ought to inspire a bit of self-hatred. But I miss my bike.

The Fairbairn-Sykes Method

2010-12-25T01:24:00.000-08:00

Some months ago, my sex drive spiked, attempting an asymptotic embrace with the y-axis. It was simple to write it off as an effect of the testosterone surge from muscling up. As someone who's taken hormones on and off, it's awfully easy for me to assign an endocrine origin to my state of mind. Perhaps it was comforting to blame my feelings on some externalized internal source because of exactly how bad it got. I started thinking about fucking at unsexy times. I wasn't mentally disrobing people so much as psychically ripping their clothes off. The volume of my carnal reveries was a familiar relic of teenage boyhood, but their bestial intensity caught me off guard.

Now, my sex drive has fallen down a well. I've gone from onanizing twice/thrice a day to a single half-hearted go-round per diem. That I've even kept up at that is part habit, part addictive personality traits kicking in. Ever miss something that you just spent the last six months willing to leave? It's hypocritical to complain, but there was a vitality in that lusty tinnitus that I've been missing for a while. I don't know how to date, and every so often I lament the absence of romance in my life, soliloquizing in the small hours. Really, though, it's nobody's fault but my own. Princess Charming isn't just gonna ride up in her F-Body one day and take me away. Having a constant desire for sex has motivated me to actually try to get up with somebody.

This post will get published early Christmas morning, though I've been working on it for the past few weeks. I'm on the second year of my new Christmas tradition: watching the ultimate holiday movie, Die Hard. John McClaine is a Yuletide trinity, serving as Jesus (his stocking feet crucified on a glass floor), Santa (“Now I have a machine gun, Ho-ho-ho”), and Krampus (he kills a lot of naughty terrorists). But I'm kinda bummed, because I have no one to watch this Christmas classic with. So, next year, I will have a special someone to watch this damn movie with. Even if I have to hire them.

Live from the Lonely Moments Apartment Complex

2010-11-23T20:19:00.000-08:00

I'm going to quit my kickboxing class. It's expensive, which is bad, but the bigger problem is that it's been leaving me feeling worn out. It's hard to do strength training and an intensive cardio activity at the same time, and I feel like it's been compromising my strength gains. Analysis aside, I'm conflicted about the decision. There's a sense of community unique to the gym, the knowledge that this person might punch you and you wouldn't even mind. That's tempered by the moments of awkward inadequacy, missing a kick over and over until somebody gives you the Check Out This Motherfucker look. I have a relationship with my gym, and now I'm queasy about going for the breakup.

Indeed! This party DOES suck!

2010-10-31T20:34:00.000-07:00

Every time I observe someone slightly younger than me who has all the talent I lack, it's like the pain of flossing for the first time in a month. The ache comes in waves, starting and stopping with a tempo that makes it impossible to concentrate on anything. Gore Vidal said, "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." It would reveal me as petty to agree wholeheartedly, but I think it's a bit late for that.

I'm gonna go ride my bike in commemoration of Halloween. Today's the 31st, so all of the good pre-moving junk is going to be out in the alleys. And, uh, even though I'd rather not admit it, I look forward to potential random encounters in the midnight hour. Not sloppy hookups behind an abandoned elementary school with sirs or madams dressed as Sexy Radiology Technicians (although I wouldn't be mad at that) - but the inexplicable stew that boils out of the pot when a city of costumed fools are let loose, sanctioned by the closest thing American culture has to Carnival. God help me, I'm itching to punch somebody.

The Promise of Roycemore

2010-10-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

I think I have a fever.

Literature is beautiful to me because it exposes all of the paths that you could have taken but didn't, all of the people that you never had a chance to be. Or maybe that's pornography, I'm really not sure.

...

See, when your brain begins to overheat, you feel like it's making all of these brilliant new connections when, really, it's just flailing at buttons, trying to get anything to make sense.

Wall Ring

2010-10-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

I'm writing a paper right now, or at least I should be. It's going poorly. The last few months have seen my life accumulate more responsibilities, and my ass is dragging from the weight. Every time I attempt to complain about my workload, I feel like such a shithead, probably because I am such a shithead. Nine credit hours at community college, around thirty hours a week at my fecal retail job, then another seven or eight at my martial arts class and working out. This is not a lot! And many other people have to endure much more than I do for the bare minimum of survival. I worry every day that I simply lack whatever hardiness is necessary to survive in the wild, and the constant hand-wringing is itself a kind of confirmation. Still, I can't admonish away my discomfort.

The one delight really getting me through right now is my body. After eight months of weightlifting and stretching and punching, I've finally started to become a little bit fearsome. I'm still fat, and I've only lost about ten to twenty pounds, but what lies beneath is as if hewed from stone. Probably the actual product doesn't stand up to the praise I give it, but it's my achievement. I enjoy using my new form, seeing the little ways strength and coordination ease my way through the world. Then there's the vindictive joy of slowly edging onto the cusp of conventional attractiveness. Despite the pain and inconvenience, I delight in the act of lifting the weight. It's such a private thing for me; until last month, I hadn't exercised my routine around anyone else in years. There are moments created when I lift of such austere, perfect, monastic solitude.

I read an essay by Henry Rollins where he kept lovingly referring to weights as "the Iron." He sounded like a serial killer. So I don't want to go too far out on that ledge, lest I fall into a musclebound disdain for all of the puny Micronians. But I guess I kind of understand why he gets downright religious about the topic. Unlike gender or religion or class, strength hasn't served to make me identify with others who share its marks. There's no knowing glance with the brick shithouse on the train. (Honestly, I'm always sizing them up, wondering if I could take them.) It's a private thing, a closed circuit communion with the self. Contextualize it however you want, because it's only your own experience that matters.

Punning Linguist

2010-09-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

Crackdown 2 is on my mind, and because I crave orbs, I've been playing a lot of the mighty progenitor, Crackdown. Going through it with a more critical eye, I've realized that the combat is merely an accessory to the platforming. In the body of Crackdown's gameplay, it is the appendix. There's no end to the appeal of jumping forty feet, landing on a skyscraper, shimmying along a drainpipe, and then falling ten stories into a river. In a way, Crackdown's jumping and scaling resembles parkour. While your avatar's movements lack grace or fluidity, there a shared idea of reducing each obstacle down to its component parts.

See, I'm never going to own a jetpack, hoverboard, or flight ring. It sounds defeatist and anti-futurist, I suppose, but this is the harsh lesson life has taught me. There is a level of human mobility that can only really be expressed through video games. Fuck, even in Ninja Gaiden, Ryu Hayabusa can make an off-the-cuff 15ft jump and, at its apogee, change his momentum 180º. As a player, I take it for granted, but it's amazing. Crackdown lets you climb a building's exterior barehanded. Samus Aran has super speed. Mario can straight up fly. I love platformers above all other genres because they encourage new methods of breaking the rules of physics.

Variations on My Summer Vacation

2010-08-11T21:37:00.000-07:00

Summer's long. I've spent this whole time working out, lifting weights, trying to learn a little bit of martial arts. My body has become more pliant, and as its capacities expand I can work it harder and harder. Exercise has replaced videogames as my summer leisure activity, and I feel a little smug about it. But I need to remain focused on performance-related goals rather than trying to improve my appearance. That way lies a certain flavor of madness, plus a host of body-image issues I don't think I'm ready to tackle on my own. I've made it as far as I have by staring at my feet and concentrating on the ground in front me. I worry that looking to the horizon will just make me trip and fall.

Summer's long. The few games that interested at its outset have withered in this fucking heat. Crackdown 2 was an exquisite disappointment, true royalty among phoned-in cash-ins. It sucked. Played a little of Prince of Persia: Fuck The Reboot. It was okay, but the sort of okay where you think about playing it once every two weeks, then become bored halfway through that thought and take a nap. Tried the newly translated Tales game for the DS, but my shoulder buttons are busted, so that's out. I've been playing a whole lot of Ancient Domains of Mystery, my favorite roguelike and my ultimate fallback game. Right now, I'm playing a dark elven archer. Yeah!

The internet is a catalyst for subcultures, lowering the amount of energy needed to give something an audience. I know it's better for me to ignore it, but straight up: I'm sick of anything that calls itself 8-bit, unless it's RushJet1. I think of 8-bit anything like I think of steampunk: visually interesting in small doses, but a little goes a long-ass way. Seems more like a catch-all cash-in for late 80s nostalgia brewing in the mid-20s demographic than an actual interesting movement. Also, it gets my goat when a sprite that's clearly in an SNES/Genesis/TG16 resolution is dubbed "8-bit." Come on, do the math! 16 bits, not 8! Genesis does what Nintendon't.

Perhaps the deeper truth is that I don't like the sophisticate branch of game culture. Y'know, art platformers with a statement, zines about how Nintendo taught you what real disappointment was, and endless ruminations on the sin of reviewing a game when you could critique it. It is a fecal Ourobouros, endlessly chasing its tail down the drain.

Summer's long. The hours stretch on even longer when the oven's at 500º. There's nowhere in my apartment I can escape that hateful heat, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for delicious pizzas. I've been endlessly refining my technique, iterating on my sauce, and trying for the love of God to get the pizza onto the stone without fucking it up royal. My kitchen is the forge, my pizza stone is the anvil, and I am aiming to create a culinary Masamune. I'm not there yet, and I don't want to talk up my product more than it can handle, but I'm proud that I've created something tasty on my own.

Summer's looooooooong. I've been on a quest to get in a pool since June. I've been so sweaty, and every time I sweat I think about being underwater. Next Thursday ... WATER PARK. I'm fucking psyched.

*I was gonna format this as a numbered list, but I was worried it would be pretentious. Then I read a post on someone else's blog that did the same thing, and I hated it. I guess I'll just have to display my pretension in other ways!

Cherry Trees Blossoming in Profusion

2010-06-13T20:56:00.000-07:00

Last week, I took a slice out of my paycheck for my new job and bought myself a Fleshlight. My god, it is the unparalleled opus of onanism! Makes me feel a bit crass to discuss it in any space, even one as discrete as this. Kevin Smith praised a high holy hymn to the fleshy implement's virtues on his podcast. While I may like to consider myself above the persuasive power of advertising, it stuck. I'd always worried that it would end up another useless implement at the back of the sex toy drawer, next to the too-pointy buttplug and the inexplicable 14" dildo. Really, all I needed was a vote of confidence that it wasn't a waste of ~$70.

And it isn't; it's the best sex I've ever had. Which isn't as much of a statement as it sounds, as I've only had two sex partners, neither of whom I successfully topped. Part of me feels creepy for enjoying it to the extent that I do. I guess I kind of worry that it's a step or two removed from knitting scarves for my RealDoll. Hell, as a transwoman I feel guilty for taking so much pleasure from sticking my dick in something. But these are reservations that enter my mind long after the deed has done, and they tend to not linger long.

Legend of the Street

2010-05-31T23:38:00.000-07:00

When I was 14, my dad died. Each member of my family dealt with it by crumbling in his or her own special way. Mine was pot, and the dispassionate lifestyle it brings. Gravity brought me to orbit around other potheads, which is where I met Max. I was maybe 16 when I met him, having just obtained my driver's license and a clean little '89 Honda Accord that I proceeded to befoul. Max, as a 14 year old, should have been in a completely different social stratum from the burnouts I hung out with.

His equalizer was that he stole cars. He'd tap a window with a spark plug, hotwire the damn thing, and joyride. The group we were a part of was car-obsessed, and Max had not only the natural social allure of the thrillseeker but the driving skills of a god damned legend. He had this black '90 Prelude. Whenever someone spoke of their experiences in it they got a little catch in their voice and a sudden verve their eyes.

Some people cultivate tall tales, and some people slowly and quietly build a legend. Max didn't boast, at least not relative to the other teenage boys in his company. But I'm willing to do it for him. Here's the prototypical Max tale: after a long night of looting cars, he was offered a trade - his stack of purloined stereos for a mid-80's box Crown Vic with a Mustang engine. Max enthusiastically agreed, drifting around the city until the cops started chasing him. He lost them in a display of reckless skill, ditched the car, and called it a night. I wasn't there to see it, yet I believe it unquestioningly, because I myself witnessed a number of Max stories unfold. Like the time he took us drifting in an E-350 cargo van with no front brakes. In the rain. The he got his Ford Ranger, a fairly tame looking light passenger truck. He could burn the tires through any corner in that thing and make it look good. Then there was the incident with the Latin Kings ... I should stop.

All this adoration is a bit much. Whenever I tell the tales to someone, they ask if I had a crush on this kid, but that's not it. Max was an inspiring figure. As a child, I played far too many RPGs, and was crushed when I discovered my dreams of being a lone, unconquerable hero were hopelessly out of touch with reality. There were no legendary swords for me to claim, there was no final boss for me to conquer. Knowing someone like Max gave me a bit of hope that I could be at least a little special, and that there were exceptional people lurking everywhere.

To get to a point, Max is kind of a big part of the reason I write. I want to communicate to someone else how in awe of him I was and am. There is no more exciting place I can think of being than in the passenger seat next to him. I can't immortalize him in fiction, because I'd just turn him into a Mary Sue, so this little blog post will have to do. A monument to Max, the tallest 5'8" a man could ever be.

The Castle Sengir

2010-05-30T20:56:00.000-07:00

There was a time, in the late 90s, when I played a lot of Starcraft. If that statement called to mind build orders and Zerg rushes, please revise your expectations. I played single-player nearly exclusively, and I played with cheats on. There was an official expansion, Brood Wars, which added new units and a new campaign. Beside it on Best Buy's shelves, there were numerous other Starcraft products, making grand boasts of "900 NEW MAPS!" in generic fonts. These map packs didn't have the novelty of new units for me to click on ad nauseum or new single-player missions to play for ten minutes and then skip with a code. They just couldn't satisfy me.

Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening is an expansion pack for Dragon Age, but perhaps that's giving it a bit too much credit. It behaves more like a map pack than a Brood Wars. There are more things to kill and more XP to get and more levels to gain, but there's not truly more meat to be had here.

For the record, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening is a confoundingly mouthy title. "Dragon Age: Origins" alone gets me with its presumptuousness - it suggests not merely a predestined trilogy, but a trilogy of trilogies. It's not so much a title as a marketing plan.

Dragon Age's setting was quite often described by Bioware as "low fantasy," which seemed to be an awfully nice way of saying "generic Ren Faire." Its plot wouldn't seem out of place in a relatively unambitious NES game. But that was redeemed when you talked to your party. See, when it comes to my party members in RPGs, I always roleplay as an opportunistic schmooze. It's kind of a min/max feedback loop: I tell them what they want to hear, and the game often rewards me for it. In Dragon Age, I found myself saying kind words to these people-simulacra because I liked them and wanted them to be happy. Well, all of them except Oghren, that horrible little thug.

Awakening does away with the bulk of your interactions with party members. They have their little quests and snippets of dialog here and there, but the presence of the characters is thin. Without getting down and dirty with some dialogue trees, I didn't feel any connection to my party members, removing the part of the game I most enjoyed. All it had left was the combat, which remains satisfactory. I felt over-leveled for most of the expansion, so most fights had all the suspense of Hot Knife Vs. Butter.

The game is more than a bit glitchy. I spent a sizable amount of cash on a backpack which failed to expand my inventory. The auras projected by your character's passive abilities can kill the frame rate (I should note that I played the game on the 360,) and often make the talking-head conversation scenes unwatchable. There was a city guard mysteriously appeared next to herself when I talked to her. Perhaps this mute doppelganger held secrets to the Darkspawn invasion? She was not forthcoming on the subject.

When I started Awakening, I was surprised to find that Leliana, the woman I had fallen in love with and pledged myself to during Dragon Age, had disappeared completely, with no explanation. Maybe it's better this way; I can remember her fondly, instead of through the prism of this hatchet job.

A Lonely Place of Dying

2010-05-22T20:45:00.000-07:00

Ah, hell. I've got a ton of things to write about, even a couple of half-finished posts, but I'm not in the mood to complete anything. I hate filler posts, but it's worth it to use that title. Fuck Jason Todd.

Graceful Reprieve

2010-04-26T21:44:00.000-07:00

The standardized unit of measurement for nakedness is the nude (abbreviated as ñ.) The scale is measured as follows:

0ñ: a winter jacket, snow pants, and an unattractive scarf
0.25ñ:   taking your shoes off in someone else's house
2ñ:   taking a shirt off in public and your belly kinda flops out for a second
5ñ:   wearing a bathing suit
10ñ: plumber's crack
30ñ: wearing one of those paper smocks while sitting in a doctor's office
45ñ:   being pantsed in front of a boy/girl you previously thought you had a shot with
100ñ:   sharking
3000ñ:   naked open casket funeral

Hopefully this has given you a greater understanding how to measure your nudity and that of others.

That Terrible Strength

2010-04-24T22:54:00.000-07:00

There used to be this website, Dammit.com. It was some guy's dream journal, mostly. Not just the usual chronicle of non sequitirs and places that are someplace but also someplace else, it gave an outline of the writer's life until that point. A cycle of regrets and fears and people who he'd never meet again but still existed as shades on the shores of his subconscious. Am I projecting?

6 jul... Long, sad dream about pam. Laying in bed together, talking. Catching up. "do you still smoke? Do you run? Oh you get cramps and have to poop? Hahahahaha. Do you still drink? Oh I stopped two months ago." Just knowing that I love her, and that nothing feels any different than it did years ago. She gets out of bed and goes in another room. My sister comes in and climbs into bed with me, and asks me if I am upset. "what do you think?"

Going back through his archived website, I found out this guy's name. Which is awful. It spoils the spell cast by his words. Once he has a name, he's just another person I'll never know. Some things need to remain ineffable.

4 Jun... A girl is reading a newspaper, seated with long legs crossed. The headline is something like, "2ND CHANCE STILL TO COME!"

In 2000 or so, when I was reading this for the first time, I was rushing into the bigger part of teenagehood. It felt like my third eye was opening wider every day, like there was this world beneath the world that I was sinking into. I'd watch episodes of Saved by the Bell and cry because of the weird 80's-ness I'd missed out on. The cliché is that it's like you're experiencing all these new, strange feelings, right? They're still new and strange to me. I still don't understand them.

30 May... A long coversation with pam. She has left her boyfriend and says she regrets leaving me. She loves me, she says. I am tortured by her. As we kiss she asks me, "did you really think I was pretty?" and I tell her that in my eyes she was truly beautiful. I am happy to be in bed with her, but I am ambivalent as well. I don't want to be hurt by her again. And even as we are going at it, I remember that sex was never the biggest thing in our relationship. In fact, this whole thing is kind of grossing me out. I pull back from her embrace, and she gets up and begins compulsively cleaning. She is on some new anti-depressant and it is making her manic.

I tried keeping a dream journal once, but it didn't take. The only thing I remember is: Bruce Willis and I are in bed, and I love him deeply. We're playing a biographical version of Street Fighter based on my life, and something in it hurts his feelings. I try to explain it away, but he turns into a priest. See? Dreams are terrible. I'd like to tie this all together by weaving some message about the universality of the unwaking realm, but that's just sweet-smelling shit. I like sad stories, and something about Dammit.com just makes me feel so sad.

A Speck in a Sphere

2010-04-14T01:55:00.000-07:00

Some kind of illness is creeping up on me. A generic coldfluspiratoryinfection, probably; nothing heavy-duty enough to merit a doctor's visit, but just enough of a nuisance to slow a week down to a crawl. It's not a good time for a leukocytic showdown. I picked up another job doing short-term government work. It pays well, but it's grinding me down pretty awful. It coexists in my schedule along with my sadly extant retail job and a single college class. By the numbers, it's really not that much of a commitment, so I don't understand why it's kicking my ass so unequivocally.

Whenever I get a new job, there's always a period of panicked scrambling to get into some sort of equilibrium. I'm flailing wildly to catch my balance at the moment, and it's stressing me out mentally and physically. Thus, the illness. I wonder sometimes if I'm made of the proper stuff to do the 40-hours-a-week life, if I can hack the basic requirements of anything beyond a marginal existence. What confidence I had that self-reliance was within my abilities is eroding. Things would be easier if I had some overriding goal that propelled me or some gift that I could rely on, but if it's there, I haven't identified it. I don't write out of passion, but because I need to.

I suppose it troubles me that this blog has become a bit of a Livejournal, but I suppose it's a bit more acceptable considering that no one really reads it anyway. In high school, I'd check the Diaryland and Livejournal accounts of my classmates more often than necessary, searching for mentions of myself. Some proof that I was central to somebody else's life. I think maybe only one person ever mentioned me. (Thanks, Magda!) It's good, though, to have a secret public journal. I try to discuss what I'm feeling with my friends, but I never really feel like I'm getting through. There's a catharsis to this sort of confession, I think. It's a prayer addressed to the void; whether it gets answered is immaterial.

Mucho Dollar Care a Junk CIA

2010-03-30T17:20:00.000-07:00

I want to write something, and I've got a couple topics lined up, but my heart's just not in it right now. Consider this an IOU.

An Eternity in an Eternal Place

2010-03-22T22:01:00.000-07:00

I was playing cards at a friend's house when I got a call from work. They offered an extra shift tomorrow morning, and I said yes. Now, I've gotta finish baking a cake for another friend's birthday, take a shower, and get some mediocre sleep before I go to work and start the cycle anew. I get all pissy when I feel I haven't enough time to myself in a day, such as this one. I don't necessarily want to relax, I just don't want to be around other people.

In a day, I'm sure I'll be in a completely different place, but that's no reason to deny what I'm feeling right now. It's all sour in my mouth.

Alodia Gosiengfiao

2010-03-14T00:04:00.000-08:00

I ride public transit here in Chicago. Often enough, I get in confrontations with people who have some sort of problem with me. One time, some random, crazy-eyed guy screamed "DONUTS!" and punched me in the face. I responded by telling him to get off the train until the security guy hustled him out. Still, for months afterward, I'd replay the scene in my head, my reaction growing more and more violent. At the apogee of my fantasies, bits of the guy's skull were in my hair. My brother is the sort of person who will take brutal umbrage at an insult, and when I told him the story, his first response was, "Why didn't you punch his ass out?" It was a difficult question to answer. The best I could come up with was a partial truth: I didn't feel it was worth getting kicked off the train, and possibly crossing paths with the police. And the truth is, getting punched in the face by an amateur doesn't hurt.

But there's more to it than that. I'm a big person, and rather strong for it. Should I truly need to, I'm well convinced that I could disassemble anyone below the 90th percentile of ass-kicking ability. If I uncorked my violence on someone, I'm not sure I'd stop before they were meat on the floor. Beyond that, I'm a calm person nearly full-time. Not quite a pacifist, but I try. It'd feel like I was betraying that aspect of myself if I allowed some fool to make me lose my cool.

I don't want to paint my dilemma as anything high-minded. It's the classic struggle of Id vs. Ego, with Superego throwing in a few words every so often. The primal reaction I feel precludes all of this reasoning (and, perhaps, rationalization.) Today on the bus, some teenagers were talking shit about my attire. Homo/transphobic stuff, enough to get me riled. My fists clenched, my heart raced, and I couldn't decide what to do. Looking back, I feel I should've cussed their asses out, but at the time I couldn't see that ending in anything but blood. Which wouldn't have proven anything . . . but maybe made me feel better.

I always feel diminished after getting into a confrontation with somebody. My father tried to instill in me a sort of manly martial pride, and chastised me when I didn't return measure for measure. It didn't really land for me, but sometimes the teachings we reject stay with us. He died when I was 14, far before the revelation of my ladyness. And now his voice is the one I hear chastising whenever I find myself lacking in some masculine virtue. Most of the time it doesn't bug me, but there's always a pressure. To, y'know, Be A Man.

Power is not evil, but it tempts one to use it. That temptation scares me as much as it elates me.

Horrid Tropical Paradise

2010-02-24T22:04:00.000-08:00

Many weightlifting techniques sound like sex acts, specifically the sort of imagined deeds contrived by eleven-year-olds at the tail end of a slumber party. Bent-Knee Good Morning? One Arm Pushdown? The Seated Underhand Row? It goes the other way, too. Tell me true, can't you imagine a personal trainer recommending five sets of Donkey Punches to energize your core?

Gespenst

2010-02-24T00:59:00.000-08:00

I've got a vague sick thing going on right now, some sort of sneezing sore throat fevery thing. It's not super terrible, but the weird thing is I've started to zone out completely. I'll kind of stare at the computer screen, and then ten seconds have passed without my recognition or consent. It's kind of disconcerting, but I also appreciate that it skips over some of the boredom produced by convalescence. Really, I want this to be over so I can get back to my exercise regimen, which had kinda gotten on a roll. Soon enough, I suppose.

I've got that overheated-brain feeling right now, the notion that any idea that hits my mind is a fragment of cosmic genius. Drugs are usually my source for such imagined grandeur, so it's strange to experience that elevated self-estimation from a simple fever.

Dead Man's Notes

2010-02-14T18:37:00.000-08:00

This Valentine's Day, I'm going to be at home, with my cat, baking a cheesecake. I guess my life is a Cathy strip now.

Recently, my capacity to play games increased dramatically. Before, I would rarely be able to keep up with the larger ongoing conversation about games. The gaming media predominantly focuses on the most recent thing, which is lost on the value-conscious/broke. Maybe I'd rent a new release the week it came out, but most games crossed my palm once they'd hit the twenty dollar sweet spot.

Now, I'm trampling my way through Mass Effect 2 along with the rest of the gaming biosphere. It's a curious feeling, to be on the cutting edge. Without financial limitations, I don't feel any desire to play games that don't land completely true on my mesolimbic pathway. If a game doesn't demand my attention, I let it slide. Assassin's Creed 2 is on the shelf right now, barely played - good, but not quite good enough. It's no tragic alteration to my pattern of play, but it's awfully strange to switch from quiet serial monogamist to globetrotting, lackadaisical Lothario.

I've been trying to work out a bit. There is an awesome, narcotic feeling that comes with the mastery of one's body, and I want that feeling back. From the cradle, I was a pudgy little fuck. Everyone looks at you differently for it, though I'd hesitate to say that fat's among life's greater burdens. When I was a senior in high school, I took a weightlifting class, catapulting me to the best shape I had and have ever been in my life. Before, I had been three hundred thirty pounds of bubbling disdain. After the class was over, I was a smug two hundred twenty pounds. Everyone outside of my inner circle seemed to treat me differently, and it made me happy, because now I had a chance to spurn them.

Valentine's makes me reflect on these things. I'm alone and still a bit afraid to admit that I'm lonely. Right now, I carry three hundred pounds of undead fury. But if I lost the weight, if I passed properly, if I got my stuff in order, would I like my choices any better? Would I just use it as an excuse to revel in the power of rejecting others? God, I really want to draw a parallel between this and my mostly-virgin copy of Assassin's Creed 2, but I'm drawing a blank. That really would finished this post off spectacularly. Well, at least I got something out of Valentine's Day.

Horseshoe Crab Blood Purity Test

2010-01-18T05:23:00.000-08:00

I get sick a lot in the winter. This year, I didn't. Four months into the season and still going strong! But now I'm paranoid that I'll get sick, and so I see every sniffle as an indisputable diagnosis of some new animal flu. Winter gets under my skin.

Be the Beat

2010-01-18T05:17:00.000-08:00

I just spent a little under an hour obtaining and fiddling with an erotic text adventure from my youth. It's called A Night With Troi, and you cannot fathom how embarrassed I am for admitting this. I put up a good facade of solidarity with my fellow nerds, but I have a threshold where my racial memory of swirlies and anti-proms kicks in and I start backpedaling so as not to be one of them. A pornographic (text!) game based on Star Trek (:TNG!) is far beyond that gentle Rubicon.

And it's not even good! Imagine: your partner disrobes, pecs/breasts almost glowing in the soft light. You embrace, the only thing separating the two of you a layer of glistening sweat. You whisper in his/her ear: "I love you." S/he stiffens, and says, monotone, "I don't understand the word 'love' as a noun." A tin-eared text parser sucks all the sexy out of the room. Getting the game to recognize your words is an awkward struggle, and even then it may deny you for reasons that aren't clear.

But because it's so clumsy and frustrating, there's an inestimable feeling of reward when you finally consummate your keyboard-clacking coitus. Around ten or twelve, when I was reaching the age of sexual immaturity, a I'd play strip poker games on my 133Mhz Compaq. No matter what Microsoft does, there is no Achievement that can truly capture the accomplishment of spending two hours at bad video poker just to see a boob.

A Night with Troi is some tedious smut, but its antique presentation and straight-up oddness really endear it to me.

Addendum: Actual gameplay footage!
>replicate lube_
The harmonics of the replicator play briefly, and the tube of lubricant you asked for appears. You pick it up and nod in approval.

The Ballad of Winston Zeddemore

2009-12-28T05:47:00.000-08:00

I'm caught in a temporary dark age right now. Christmas' whirlwind of baking, buying, and consuming are gone, and the mess needs to be cleaned up. But my kitchen goes uncleaned and cookies uneaten, because I'm stuck doing late shifts so I can put some money together before I go back to school. Everyone's going back to school, now; recessions teach people just how bad their current jobs are.

Winston was the most unnecessary Ghostbuster. He inspired me to feel the unutterable pity one feels for the perpetually unloved. According to his Wikipedia article, "Winston Zeddemore was intended to be the smartest and most capable of the Ghostbusters, a former Marine with multiple degrees and a Ph.D., making him more suited for the job than the founding three Ghostbusters." Amazing! I say this from the perspective of a six-year-old mulatto kid with self-esteem issues, but I always thought they'd hired him to carry their stuff. The die of history has been cast, and it did not land in Winston's favor. You can't change that. But read his (wiki) biography, and maybe then you can give him the remembrance he deserves.

But I Never Saw the Good Side of the City Until I Hitched a Ride on a Riverboat Queen

2009-12-24T03:18:00.000-08:00

As a kid, a lot of presents were given to me that I had no use for. There was this retrospectively awesome book of weird paper airplanes, given to me by my friend Andrew (I think he's an astronaut now or something.) Sadly, most of the designs were too complicated for me by half, and I could never get them to fly. I had useless little hands, really not even good for playing videogames - that's why I mostly played RPGs.

God, I always feel guilty for never using a present given to me in good faith. Like I'm letting the person who gave it down. They lie awake at night, it's 3am, and they're squirming in their bed, tortured by the disappointment that I'm not listening to their CD of ambient Native American spiritual rhythms. Sorry, mom!

Legacy Weapon

2009-12-17T23:00:00.000-08:00

Heroes of Might and Magic 2 was a big game for me; the demo was on a PC Gamer disc, and it allowed for a lot of playtime without requiring a purchase. If you typed in 8675309, you got black dragons, which eliminated any of the strategy elements from the battles. It warmed my cheaty little heart. Point, click, kill, win. The game was a bit of RPG (collect artifacts, learn spells) and strategy (create units at your base, then use them to fight your enemies in hex-based combat). It was like a PC RPG interpreted through the lens of a board game. Settlers of Wizardry, maybe, or Pool of Carcassone.

In the present tense, Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes is a retool of the Heroes of Might and Magic series for the DS. It's largest deviation from the formula is the combat. Hexagonal turn-based strategy has been replaced by something far more novel: the puzzle gaming. Match three rows of units, send them flying through your enemy's ranks, deplete their HP, win. It's a bit more complicated than that, but I can't exposit on the ins and outs of the gameplay here without boring you and myself. Instead, I'll say that it's really pretty great.

The single player campaign cycles you through the game's five different factions. Knights, demons, wizards, elves and the undead - the starting lineup of the RPG cliché All-Star team. Every faction has different units and magical attacks. Amazingly, each one plays differently and is fun in its own way. (Except the knights. I hate the knights.) Most battles are of a simple "smack them in the HP till it hurts" persuasion, but there are enough variations to keep Random Battle Exhaustion from setting in. In these unique, puzzley fights you must hit two switches simultaneously or smack a demon who throws exploding cocktails at you from behind a bar, etc.

The game requires you buy your larger units on the world map, each at one specific location which sells one specific type of unit. It feels like an unnecessary holdover from Heroes of Might and Magic, a useless bit thrown in to show a continuity of design between the two games. The champion units were never so overpowered that I ran roughshod over my opponents, and trudging from one end of the map to another to restock my army felt pointless. It didn't severely impact my enjoyment of the game, but why not allow the player to buy units anywhere? Or, better yet, take out unit-buying altogether?

The game also isn't as portable-friendly as a DS game should be. There's no option to save during battles, which made me have to repeat a few battles when my DS died in my pocket. Also, the game will often allow you to start fights you can't win without warning. If you encounter an enemy far over your level, you can retreat, but you'll lose a portion of the resources you use to purchase units. However, if you die during the battle, you'll restart from immediately beforehand with no ill effects. It led me to waste a lot of time trying to die as quickly as possible against an overwhelming force.

None of this matters, though, because this is a game that is both boss and the bee's knees. I would say that it's too short, but I probably only think that because I played it for about twenty hours in the span of three days. Play it. Hell, pay money to play it. Coming from a cheapass like me, there is little higher recommendation.

Non-Compete

2009-12-14T02:19:00.000-08:00

I find it half funny/half sad whenever someone puts, say, a three out of four star review on the poster for their movie. Grade scaling notwithstanding, it's like a schoolchild proudly displaying the C+ she got on a test. Yes, very well, you got a passing grade, no one's going to fault you for it, but it falls a bit short of the threshold for public shows of pride.

Cymothoa Exigua

2009-12-10T18:06:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the structure of videogames. Iriquois Pliskin or someone made a comment that's been smoldering in my mind for a week now: referring to the traditional End Boss as a final exam of sorts. A game will present you with a new mechanic, let you loose to experiment with it, and then, perhaps, give you a boss as pop quiz, separating those in the class who've mastered the material from those who need to stay after class. Then, at the end of the game, the final boss is a recapitulation of all the bosses beforehand, a last test to see if you've truly mastered the concepts that came before.

In school, I liked math. A lot. My memory has a bit of a nostalgia halo, but I derived a pure satisfaction from learning new rules, solving problems, and acing tests. I think that the specific challenges I seek in games are a substitute for that kind of pursuit. That same spot gets scratched when I play Sudoku or do crosswords or what have you, but they lose their flavor after a too long. Sudoku is unsatisfactory to me because it lacks the protean ruleset present in games and algebra. n will always equal n, but in the process of learning new rules are introduced that build on one another. You learn the quadratic equation, and you use it for awhile until you get a new, shinier weapon, but when you're fighting Calculus you find that you need to pull it out again to win.

Braid disappointed me for multiple reasons. Despite all of Jonathan Blow's talk of melding gameplay with story, he chose to segregate the two in a pretty artificial way. There's no sense of progression in the puzzles; what you learn in one world doesn't really apply to the next. But its mortal sin, in my eyes, is not including a final exam. I can understand using anticlimax as a device to shape the experience of a game, but Braid didn't do anything with it. Near the end of each world, there's a very large boss-guy, who is basically Bowser, from Super Mario Brothers 1. It walks around and shoots fireballs in a fixed pattern at every encounter. You must use your time powers, in a fairly rote manner, to drop chandeliers on it. It is to the traditional boss what a sheet of busy-work math problems is to a well thought out test.

Often, games get criticized for being all work and no play. But the play that games offer us is no more than novel work. We want work that will change, or, failing that, work that will challenge us in different ways as we progress. The type of games that earn the most love resemble a waltz, rather than a march: escalation and descent, rather than step by step by step. Even games like Tetris, which only ever presents the player with a single set of problems and a single toolset, adheres to this cycle of tension and catharsis.

When asked what my favorite games are, I run through a mental checklist of my favorite final bosses. The ending is not the point of a game, but it's what I remember best. I'll play horrid games to their completion in hopes they'll pull a Vader and be redeemed by their final act.

I've got no conclusion to this post. The irony is eating me up inside.

If...

2009-12-07T16:42:00.000-08:00

So I've finally figured out why I keep playing games that I hate, long after the point where I know I don't want to play them anymore. I need to understand why I dislike them. If a friend asks me, "Should I play X?" I want to be able to tell them that it's a ten-day open-air crapfest without having to resort to a wishy-washy, "But that's just my opinion." My viewpoint doesn't solidify into law after that magic ten-hour point, but I feel that savaging a product requires a greater burden of proof than deeming it Pretty Good. Dan Hsu's policy at EGM was to play a game until he felt like he could give it a review score in good faith, then keep playing it until he'd doubled that playtime.

But then, this may all just be equivocation. Maybe I enjoy hating games. (Actually, I'm sure I do.) Maybe I play bad games so long so that my dislike can congeal into bleeding odium.

Bell, Book, and Candle

2009-11-25T02:56:00.000-08:00

Today, I had an odd moment of regret. Now that I'm 23, I'm past the age were I can dress like a goth without feeling immature. As a sullen teenager, I was drawn to the complicated, ornamental, fantasy-esque vestments. Not the culture; Clove cigarettes taste like incense, The Cure puts me to sleep, and my disillusionment doesn't dramatize well. But all the black and the layering and the jewelry and the opportunity to wear fingerless arm warmers ... it hits every one of my buttons at once, like a ten year old jerk kid in an elevator. There's something about the ritual, the fetishism of the clothing that appeals to me. I wear a tacky little necklace that I jokingly refer to as my phylactery, but if I went goth I could have an actual phylactery! It's like LARPing every day and getting away with it.

Thing is, when I was an appropriate age to go goth, I was fat. And still, you know, in confused boy mode. Goth is not a look that translates well across the gender divide. You go from looking like this:

to looking like this:

For me, a kid with low self-esteem and body issues, sticking with the T-shirt and jeans was an easier choice, though so much less rewarding. If I could go back now ... well, who cares? I don't want to be a teenager again. Steampunk is the socially acceptable goth-analogue for adult nerds, but I don't really dig it. Maybe, if I lose some weight, I'll go gothic lolita. While writing this, I've started browsing Hot Topic's website.

This blog is eight years old. Dear lord!

Heaven's My Destination

2009-11-10T02:34:00.000-08:00

Dream. Goal. Crystal. Wild rose. Puppet. Persevere. Friends.

After playing Dissidia: Final Fantasy, I never want to hear any of these words again. Story in games is a constant struggle. The quality is pretty consistently bad, even for the action-movie milieu most games judge themselves by. If you were hungry, would you rather have a teaspoon of gruel or a bucketful? A line of misspelled conglaturations or hours of voice actors droning out tech-fantasy Mad Libs? Post-Dissidia, I'm leaning toward the Mad Libs.

Luckily, there's a game underneath all that plot. A 3D fighting game made from disparate ingredients. A bit of Power Stone's chases through large arenas (and mad dashes for super move granting baubles.) A taste of Squaresoft's own Bushido Blade (the same attack can do no damage or be an instant kill, depending on the timing.) Maybe a dash of Smash Brothers (an intramural fight where strikes send foes flying.) I spent most of any given fight in the air, dashing around the arena. It's very Dragon Ball Z. The game's broken up into chapters, any order you want, blah blah blah. Fanservice is the game's chief bullet point, so it's prudent to let the player determine which chapters to skip.

It's all fun enough. But. After I started skipping every cutscene, I realized the game was pretty thin. The fighting isn't complex enough that I'm driven to master it, and I have no one to play with via wi-fi (there is, of course, no online multiplayer.) I ended up deleting the game from my PSP when I was 2/3s of the way through. That's unusual for completionist me, but coming away I feel satisfied.

Whenever I read a game review, the primary question I need answered is: Is it worth my money? Not sure if I have an answer for this one. I think it'll be a good game to pick up every other month, play hard for a few days, and put down. It's a cop-out, but your love of the source material is really going to determine how much slack you give Dissidia. Final Fantasy and I fell out around 1996, but I still enjoyed all the parts where nobody was talking.

My Judgement: Temporarily Smashing

An Ape Will Die On Every Page!

2009-11-05T00:07:00.000-08:00

I've been playing Torchlight. It's good! But it doesn't really need a review or whatever, because it's Diablo. Really good Diablo. I'm really surprised my computer can run it, actually; the old beast is Frankensteined together from a former techie friend's pile of scraps. Said friend would always give me guff for the flaccidity of my machine, dear Lamiroir, but it suits my needs as someone uninterested in the PC's historic genres. First-persons shooters leave me dry, and real-time strategy games give me a rash. Pre-Torchlight, the last game I played on my PC was Theme Hospital, an apparently forgotten artifact from 1997. That's not a grab for retro-elitist cred - I'm really out of the loop on PC games, so having an old machine reinforces my policy of ignoring most new PC games, and vice-versa.

Perplexing Nightmare of Flesh

2009-10-27T18:39:00.000-07:00

A recent Google search just yielded unexpected gold. The string in question: "just because a guy likes to".

"It seems just because a guy likes to listen to songs by Utada Hikaru, Ayumi Hamasaki, and some other songs which are kind of girly SUDDENLY I'm gay? WTF?"
"Remember though just because a guy likes to go south, it doesn't necessarily mean he likes to 'go south'."
"Just because a guy likes to wear kitchen gloves and is obsessed with dolphins doesn't mean he's a friend of Judy, Damon Beres! GOD! Can't we just respect the porpoise's majesty while simultaneously waging war on dishpan hands?"

"Just because a guy likes to collect presidential memorabilia doesn't mean can't appreciate a lap dance"
"Just because some of us enjoy different things does not mean we're less responsible or mature than you."
"Just because a guy likes to wear wife beaters doesn't mean he's a jerk that beats his wife...does it???"

Actually, after looking at that haul, I kind of bummed myself out. Most results were gay jokes ... and I was searching for this specific phrase so I could construct a Twitter post like: "Just because a guy enters a committed, loving romantic relationship with another man doesn't make him a queer."

Rumbling Crescendo

2009-10-15T02:23:00.000-07:00

Guh. Winter's here in Chicago. I guess it's technically fall, winter's timid little toady. Whenever the weather gets below fifty degrees my mind goes a little grungy. Perhaps I'm a bit more cold-blooded than I give myself credit for. It gets dark so early. It's hypocritical for me, a night person, to complain about the lack of sunlight, but it gets me rotten. The monotony of twilight and the sterility of cold. They remind me of hours spent waiting for buses or trains, swaddled to near-suffocation and still freezing my ass off.

Sorry, I'll probably be like this for the next four months. Let's bear it together.

The Time to Grow and Be It

2009-09-26T21:02:00.000-07:00

What the hell. I was just browsing Giant Bomb, and I discovered a listing for Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star for the PSP, another remake of Lunar: The Silver Star.

L:TSS compelled me to buy a Sega CD, idiot child that I was. It had the cheesiest intro song, to which I would sing along:

After that, Game Arts made a Saturn version, which never hit U.S. shores. Which is lucky, because I probably would've bought a Saturn if it had. The next re-release was on the Playstation, and it came to America courtesy of Working Designs. Awesome remake, lots of fun, and it had for-the-time magnificent voice acting. Even though its intro lacked the disco cheesiness of the original, I still downloaded it (in the days of dialup!) and watched it a good fiftysomething times.

Alright, so Lunar got re-remade on the GBA as Lunar Legend. Maybe it was good, maybe bad, but Working Designs was out of the picture, so I didn't play it.

All told, the PSP port of Lunar will be the 4th remake of L:TSS. Enough. Game Arts hasn't produced an original Lunar game since 2005's Lunar: Dragon Song, which by all accounts was slightly horrid. Before that, the freshest Lunar game is 1995's Lunar: Walking School for the Game Gear. Has Game Arts simply conceded that they can't make a Lunar game anymore, and resigned the series to endless remakes devoid of reinvention?

It's pointless to take offense at the actions of corporations who have in no way wronged me. I'm no stockholder. While Lunar isn't the best game I've ever played, it's definitely my favorite. It was my first RPG love, and it feels weird to see it reappear over and over, Dark Force style.

Messages From PAX

2009-09-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

While in Seattle, I sent a ton of text messages to my friend. These are reproduced here to give a mostly accurate account of my time at PAX. Plus, it's the only really interesting thing I've done recently, so I want to wring as much out of it as possible.

Day Zero:

9/3/09 4:22pm:
I just had the greatest idea for a soft drink: Dr. Ribs! Available in Hickory and Dry Rub.

9/3/09 7:45pm:
I just ate probably the best steak I've ever had, served to me by a woman who looked like an angry Tina Fey.

Day One:

9/4/09 11:19am:
It's like a million bespectacled salmon swimming upstream to breed.

9/4/09 11:32am:
Don't know if that was a Jedi or just a guy in a bathrobe.

9/4/09 11:41am:
Okay, THAT was a Jedi.

9/4/09 12:45pm:
I just got my copy of Sneak King signed by Toastyfrog! I called him Mr. Parish. I feel dirty now.

9/4/09 2:42pm:
There's No More Heroes 2 toilet paper in the bathroom.

9/4/09 4:43pm:
Some guy started walking next to me on the street. Not sure if he was hitting on me or trying to scam me. Either way, KA-REEPY.

9/4/09 5:10pm:
I regret not cosplaying. This seems like the perfect place to dress up as some obscure game character. Like, the shopkeeper from Might and Magic 2 or something.

Day Two: Judgment Day

9/5/09 1:48pm:
I thought I saw a drug deal going down, but they were just exchanging a copy of Odin Sphere.

9/5/09 3:19pm:
Jeez, this place is full of Korean MMOs.

9/5/09 7:37pm:
Just saw a lady dressed as the player character from Persona 4 ... with a golf club. Respect.

9/5/09 9:36pm:
I just got whupped at a Magic tournament, but I enjoyed it heartily. And I was sitting next to a cut-rate Seanbaby.

9/5/09 9:48pm:
I'm about to take a shot of this godawful NOS energy drink. Pray for me.

9/5/09 9:51pm:
Oh god, it's like someone peed in rancid cough syrup.

9/5/09 10:44pm:
Rick Astley singalong!

9/5/09 11:45pm:
OMG FREEZEPOP

9/5/09 11:51pm:
WTF KEYTAR YES

9/6/09 1:16am:
This burrito kinda tastes like soap.

9/6/09 2:05am:
God, why did Freddie Mercury have to die?

Day Three: Rise of the Machines

9/6/09 12:54pm:
I live!

9/6/09 1:53pm:
Jonathan Coulton was kinda meh. He just didn't seem that into it. I liked his opening act, Paul and Storm, better.

9/6/09 3:55pm:
Sitting on a beanbag in the handheld lounge - this is my moment of Zen.

9/6/09 4:24pm:

There are these awesome aprons at the Diner Dash booth... but to get one I'd have to stand in line for ten minutes and play Diner Dash. No deal.

9/6/09 6:38pm:
PAX is a solemn reminder for all nerds: no matter what you walk of life, race, creed, or fandom, we're all the same under our ironic video game t-shirts.

Jason Andrew Relva

2009-09-16T22:39:00.001-07:00

So, my friend's leaving town, and I'm totally bummed out about it. Back in third grade, my friend Josh moved away. Usually, I'll keep a couple friends around, but Josh was my lone confidant when he left for Wisconsin. I remember sitting in the dining room, eating terrible apple pie ice cream, listening to "J.A.R." by Green Day, and trying not to cry. Unsuccessfully. So I kind of feel like that.

I promised to give her the keys to this, my secret blog, and now I feel a bit agitated. There's an emptiness to writing on this unseen wall, but once I have a confirmed audience of one, it feels exhibitionistic.

Well, it won't be the first time I give someone directions here, but it may be the last. I'm still trying to decide what to do with Neue. Y'know, the name feels kind of pretentious, but I can't bring myself to change it. Maybe I'll write up its origin story.

My Notes from PAX

2009-09-16T21:43:00.000-07:00

Post-N'Gai, Post EGM Video Games Journalism

"If this shirt doesn't stink, I'm not gaming hard enough."
- That guy's shirt? Drenched in sweat.
Gus Mastrapa looks like a flattened Alan Moore.

Inexplicable Lil' Jon Noises
Chris Kohler: "Games journalism needs an old guard"
Mastrapa: How can journalistic outlets find a non ad-supported product to sell?
Pat Klepek looks like that one kid from Freaks and Geeks.
Klepek: "Clicks is juice, fool"
Karen Chu: "Think more"
-Web 2.0: now that all this user-created info has been generated, what to do with it? How can you analyze it or make it more useful?

Q&A

This guy majored in 'Informatics?'
KChu: "It's easy to write a one-star review and be an asshole"
Kohler: "You don't have to be the one definitive review."
Sweaty shirt guy has finally dried out.
Creepy British Asian guy just announced that he's started a magazine. I kind of hate him, but I admire his shameless self-promotion.
Really, why should you care about games journalism being taken seriously?

Draw Go

2009-09-13T22:42:00.000-07:00

Starting later this month, I plan on making this a better blog. Neue has been like my bicycle for most of its life: it gets taken out of the basement once a month, I try it out, then my ass hurts and I forget about it. So there's going to be a regular update schedule (which I haven't figured out yet) as well as some cosmetic and functional changes. I may spin the Diaryland half of this off from the IGN half. I want to use my writing here as a portfolio, but I worry that leaving in the exhausting descriptions of my neuroses will make it hard for me to point at this and say, "Hire me!"

2009-08-31T01:29:00.000-07:00

I'm heading to Seattle on Tuesday for the Penny Arcade Expo. I worry I'll feel a bit isolated hitting the nerd prom without a date.

Know The You More

2009-08-17T00:52:00.000-07:00

Important lesson! If you're dressing a leg wound with electrical tape, you need to shave first. Otherwise, it won't stick.

The New Monster

2009-08-14T06:57:00.000-07:00

My nocturnal agenda's in disarray. I've been getting sleep at long, sloppy intervals, then holding onto my dormancy like a drowning person their last few mouthfuls of oxygen. The work schedule has necessitated far too many 24-hour days, due to shifts stacked too closely for my finicky sleeping habits. As a consequence, I've become unstuck from time. Now, I'm floating from days to nights, and occasionally into that hateful little margin in between.

All the Neutral Mornings

2009-07-29T20:25:00.000-07:00

So I've kinda stopped playing the video games. This has become mostly a gaming blog over the past year, a trend that I regret. I still would like to end up a games writer some day, but ... part of me thinks that I'm just pouring more waste into the lake by writing yet another game review.

Jenn Frank and her blog, Infinite Lives - well, I have an uncomfortable affection towards both. She wrote a post, "Dementia, video games, and the end of the beginning." Reading it wasn't really an epiphany, but it evoked something for me.

I used to sit in my basement, for more hours than I can describe without ending up in Hyperbole Heights, playing emulated SNES games on my Pentium 133. In the summer, it was nice and cool in the basement, my refuge from heat, people, and whatever housework I'd get snared into wandering the visible spectrum of my home. Thinking about it now, I get uneasy. There's an instinct in all of us to defend our hobby, but it doesn't seem like it was an awfully healthy way to spend the time.

One day while in my basement, I caught the amalgamated scent of summer in the air, and I felt the foolishness of playing Earthbound for the third time while all these beautiful smells passed me by. So I decided to renounce video games. My memory's pretty vague, but I don't think I lasted a week. It wasn't a noble effort; my end goal was normalcy. I wanted to wash that geek right out of my hair, and I didn't realize how difficult it is to abjure one's identity.

So I've kinda stopped playing the video games. I feel hypocritical for rejoicing.

The White Way

2009-07-26T22:51:00.000-07:00

Prototype today. It's become a bit more hassle than its worth, so I'm rushing through it to get its achievement sweetmeats and return it to my local rental outlet.

Why do we (I) come to this point? Once the pretense of entertainment is gone, the pitiful cycle of the videogame hatefuck sets in. If Prototype was, say, a movie on television? I'd change the channel, no remorse.Instead I throw a mini-tantrum, yelling and squirming about, every time the game seems to thwart me. All my worst traits emerge, and I become a part of the inarticulate, angry biomass that clogs the internet.

Mad as a Box of Frogs

2009-07-16T01:56:00.000-07:00

Right now, I'm all into Giana Sisters DS, a remake of The Great Giana Sisters. The similarities to Super Mario Bros., and by extension every other platformer from 1986-1995, definitely stand out - and it's all good. The controls are moment-to-moment spot-on, the graphics are beautiful yet crude, and the music is forgettablly catchy, with a little bit of SID twang dropped in. It's utterly disposable, but I love it and I want to marry it in that middle school way that's devoid of any lifetime commitment.

It could be nostalgia. When I play a familiar game and marvel at it, the N-word is always partially formed in my throat. It makes me think of the lazy summer days (like today) spent before I knew the ticking of the clock. Christ, it makes me think of Skunny, Jazz Jackrabbit, and Duke Nukem before he went all sunglasses. Not innocent, not better, but an era where a platformer didn't need to have RPG elements or come from Nintendo.

I'm rambling by now, because I'm talking up a game which I don't like all that much. I've gotta write more, get that voice down.

Sanguine Eden

2009-07-03T23:43:00.000-07:00

I went to the county fair today. Saw lots of 4-H exhibits, experienced a pig race, and ate deep-fried Oreos. I tried to stay out of Judgmental City Prick as Observer mode, and mostly did okay. Still, to enter this world where livestock is commonplace - while abiding in an apartment where I can't even have a dog - is weird.

I live in Chicago, and sometimes you can walk two blocks in a direction and feel like you've entered a different city. Today, I went ~75 miles and felt like I was in a different country and decade.

Word of Command

2009-06-16T01:47:00.000-07:00

I spent the last week playing Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Single-player, it's an open-world GTA-style game. Since the original Red Faction, the series' gimmick was that you could blow up the environment - only, in earlier games, the destruction you could cause was awful limited. It was less "Blow up everything!" and more "Shoot the red boxes and they disappear!" So I was pretty happy that Guerrilla is more liberal with the wrecking. You can break apart anything except rocks and the ground; any building is ready to be destroyed, either by rockets, explosive charges, or your trusty sledgehammer.

The campaign revolves around a forgettable story about some sort of liberation from a vague evil bureaucracy. Honestly, I didn't need the fiction to be better, but I really wanted less of it. You play missions to advance the story, going through a small variety of side-missions to unlock further story missions. The formula is awfully familiar, and would be more successful if there were more to do in the world. There are buildings that you're encouraged to blow up, and you can get in skirmishes with the enemy, but I felt that the sandbox only existed so that you wouldn't merely select missions from a menu. The vehicle controls aren't objectionable, but driving around the world just isn't fun.

The multiplayer is Guerilla's ultimate redemption. I really don't play shooters online, but this one is a god damned blast. You're given a choice of power-ups with a variety of uses: cloaking, flying, earthquakes on command, wallhacking, and the positively delightful Rhino pack, which allows you to charge through walls, mowing down any other players in your path. The different gametypes work, your murder methods are plentiful, and the matchmaking is smooth like silk (on the 360, at least.) The single-player game is worth a rental, but I was late to work multiple times because I couldn't resist the lure of One More Game of deathmatch. The argot of online shooters is beyond me, so I'll put it simply: Play this game.

My Judgement: Idle Magic

Hideous Laughter

2009-06-09T02:54:00.000-07:00

The character-shaped Macaroni and Cheese always tasted terrible. The shapes weren't right- all the junctions of the little noodles were just uncooked enough to be hard and gummy.

Oh How Happy We'll Be

2009-06-02T16:56:00.000-07:00

My new favorite snap is "See, this is why nobody likes you." It's really only effective against a person with a certain range of insecurities, but I recently used it on a former friend, and it was pretty good. Best used on a loner or the socially awkward; I know I'd wilt if someone aimed it at me.

Maybe I'm in love with it too much. I was wondering if there was a more direct form of schadenfreude, but I guess that's just sadism, hey?

A Community of One

2009-05-28T01:10:00.000-07:00

I'm reading this Star Wars comic right now, Knights of the Old Republic, and it's really good. Most people, if they want to write, they want to write something revelatory, but this makes me feel like I'd rather write entertaining schlock. If I could learn how to start a story, I'd be half on my way, but I haven't written even a small bit of fiction in a while.

This comic is really good though. I love the games it's based on, as they represent a sector of the Star Wars universe not fitted with the cement shoes of 30 years' baffling, sprawling, and often boring continuity. Hm ... I'm a huge superhero comic reader, so that statement feels hypocritical.

Devouring Greed

2009-05-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

Have you ever thrown up and just felt 150% better? I just did. I'd made a late dinner of mediocre tempura (my first time making it,) and two hours later I was thrashing in my bed like I was going to die. After regurgitating a good deal of the meal, I feel even-keeled.

Life is goooooood.

Lost Love Evocation

2009-04-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

Right now, I'm on my day off, and I'm still itching to be back at work. When I come home, I feel alone, even after spending the day with buddies. I have a couple good pals right now, but no real friends. No shoulder to lean on.

Something's lacking, but it's something new, some hole I don't quite understand and don't know how to fill. I'm pleased that I've finally started to get over my childish aversion to work, but it feels more like a symptom - an escape, an abjuration of the 5 to 9 portion of my life.

Epikairekakia

2009-04-15T01:26:00.000-07:00

My web browsing experience would be improved threefold if I could find a way to stop myself from reading comments. I devour an article and, unsated, go to the comments so that I may have my dessert. My gluttony deserves punishment, but no crime is worth the dip into molten ignorance that the average (and even the above-average) comments page represents. I try not to be one of those "God, the ninety-five percent of people who aren't like me sure are stupid" people - who, invariably, show up halfway into most comment threads - but it's hard. The vitriol, the solipsism, the misspelled racial/sexual epithets, and then the people who correct said spelling, adding a bitchy aside about "their" vs. "they're", reclining triumphantly in their office chairs as if to exclaim "King Me!"

Afterwards, I can't help but feel diminished. Like I'm less of a person for making this trek into the collective subconscious' Thanatos.

I allow comments on here to see if anyone reads this. A counter at the bottom of the page would do the same job, but I hypocritically believe them to be a sign of vanity.

Eight Brothers' Coined Horns

2009-03-16T00:07:00.000-07:00

I think, if I was to go crazy, it'd be a bold new direction for my brand. Like, seething, bubbling, tics and outbursts crazy. Bad-theater-student-playing-crazy crazy. Muppet-slowly-electrocuted-by-a-car-battery crazy.

Yeah.

Exquisite Replica

2009-03-08T21:27:00.001-07:00

I've been playing Harvest Moon this weekend. I can only play the SNES version; it's buggy, low-budget, and sparsely simplistic, but it's original. Every game after that feels like a copy, and then a copy of the previous copy, slowly in its atavism regressing past its own origin - the ur-shovelware.

Most games cloak their grind with monster-slaying, or car racing, or other unusual activities that one would assume to be innately fun. Thing is, Harvest Moon is labor, in the most elemental sense of the word. To get money out of a harvest, you must:

Clear the field of rocks and stumps
Till the land
Buy seeds
Plant the seeds
Water the crops for 7-10 days
Throw each potato/ear of corn/turnip/etc. into the delivery box

Which, all told, takes at least a couple hours. In Harvest Moon, you work the crops so you can start raising livestock, which lets you make money in the winter so you can enlarge your house and get married to one of the townie girls and have a kid.

Honest to god, after three days straight with the game, I can't figure what the carrot on the end of its stick is. Marriage, maybe? The dialogue is all sub-English, so achieving wedded bliss is about as satisfying as beating an NES game to glean a hearty "CONGLATURATION!!" and a pixelated portrait of a misshapen princess.

I don't think I've ever played a game of Harvest Moon to its completion. Maybe it's because of the motivation problem, but it's one of those games I enjoy taking a run at without feeling a need for completion.

2009-02-24T21:16:00.000-08:00

I can no longer tell Red Bull ads from condom ads.

2008-12-20T23:57:00.000-08:00

Today, on the train, some random guy punched me in the face, and my first thought afterwards was "I should blog this shit."

Man, I don't know.

Dr. Social

2008-12-11T04:14:00.000-08:00

So, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon.I've been playing it for the past few days, and it is a Fire Emblem game. It's a remake in the most regressive possible sense: imagine the plot and gameplay of an NES game, now on your DS! The graphics are ugly, and the game has large holes where modern innovations have been excised for nostalgia's sake.

Worst part is, I see myself beating FE:SD in advance of better, more deserving games. Fire Emblem is such a lazy game. It's in perfect rhythm to play while watching TV or riding the train. Each turn takes a couple minutes, and any sense of urgency dies when I inevitably need to repeat a level.

Fuck. I feel really bad about playing this game now that I've put all of this effort into trashing it. I did the same thing with Fallout 3, playing it for ten more hours after I realized I hated it. Bad Game Stockholm Syndrome?

I really want to write a story, like, actual fiction. Gotta get to it, figure out where to start, maybe hide my DS from myself.

Create

2008-12-03T01:00:00.000-08:00

This night finds me agitating in my computer chair, still fuming about my lack of motion or direction. I've decided to do one of those things, the daily affirmation deal. You repeat your goal over and over until it becomes a mantra, and then until it becomes a reality. Scott Adams wrote about the power of affirmations in one of his books, and I've always been intrigued by how they represent a midpoint between the power of suggestion and the mystical spell.

A few years ago, my highest ambition in life was to own a 1988-91 Honda Prelude, just like my idol, Max the Car Thief. I employed a simple affirmation, many times a day: "I will get a 3rd-gen Prelude." So here, I'm going to do the same thing, partially for the gains outlined above, and partly as a mission statement. There's really no one I'll bore with this shit, since I'm pretty sure no one reads this anyway.

I am going enroll in a 4-year college, and graduate.
I'm going to get a decent job that pays well.
And I'm going to own a 3rd-gen Prelude 2.0Si, with 4-wheel steering, that's in Good condition.

The Triforce of Disdain

2008-11-21T16:13:00.000-08:00

After finally tracking down a rental copy yesterday, I'm ass-in-the-middle of Mirror's Edge. Now, my greatest challenge: I am going to write my impression of this game without using the word "frustrating."

I constantly face situations where I'm stuck in a room full of people (who shoot me) and need to detect the exit before they're done shooting me. The game directs the player, early in the first chapter, to always avoid enemies. This is good advice, because Faith (the protagonist) can take about two hits before she goes down. Whenever I try to use the limited combat arsenal against more than two enemies, I die. But when I'm stuck in an enclosed space, being continually perforated by stormtroopers, it's often simply more expedient to kill them all so I can have enough breathing room to complete my jumping puzzle.

The jumping, sliding, and climbing are the best part of the game, but they're muddied by control choices and unresponsive environmental objects. Common scene: I'm running across the skyline, getting up to an exhilarating speed. I take a gigantic leap from one rooftop to another, aiming to catch a drainpipe and shimmy my way down to street level ... but, even though it looks like I've hit the pipe dead center, my character doesn't grab it, and I get to experience the very pretty death sequence yet again. I try the jump six more times before I finally get it right, but I throw the controller down and storm off ten minutes later when the whole situation repeats itself. It's really frustrating.

Whole Cloth

2008-11-20T23:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I write just because I need to write. I see people in my extended peer group doing things that I'd love to, pursuing good jobs or schooling or relationships, and I get mad at myself. Anger turned inward can be a great motivator or it can wear you away. I feel very worn away. I don't know if it's serotonin, laziness, or a fierce desire to maintain homeostasis that keeps me from taking the minute steps necessary to improving my life. Left alone, I'd wait for a thousand tomorrows to come in hope that they'd bring me into a better situation and make me more of a person.

Well, I still need to write longer and more often. Then, expose that writing to more criticism than this little blog can draw.

Cataclysmic Pink

2008-11-10T13:10:00.000-08:00

Covert videogame T-Shirts are my new obsession. You can buy a Mario shirt at any department store nowadays; apparel that says "I like games" has become devalued in its ubiquity. It's partially the snob in me, snarling at the thought that my niche pastime has become socially acceptable to espouse. Esoteric nerd merchandise acts as a hanky code for the high-functioning geek: a way to subtly communicate your interests without being the guy at the party who talks about his WoW character like new, starry-eyed parents talk about their children.

The T-Shirt itself has become this weird language of fabric semaphore, primarily for young men. Pants, jackets, skirts, and other items of clothing imply the traits of the wearer. Socioeconomic class, sexuality, gender, or political attitudes can be inferred from an outfit. But the T-Shirt is a Rorschach test emblazoned upon the chest: like the bumper sticker, it reveals a person's hidden tendencies, prejudices, convictions, and quirks.

In Just Seven Days, I Can Make You A Man

2008-11-01T00:14:00.001-07:00

Burritos al pastor taste like Mexican sloppy joes.

A Million New Colors

2008-10-25T03:07:00.001-07:00

My expectations have gotten the better of me lately.

The translation patch for Mother 3 dropped last week. Earthbound (a.k.a. Mother 2, its prequel) shaped my aesthetic sense in my formative teenage years, so I'd been thirsty for new content in the series. The translation project's feed was a constant presence in my newsreader, reminding me of Mother 3's absence.

All of that is moot now. Having played it, I hate this fucking game, which is incredibly surprising to me. I find the characters uninteresting, the plot poorly paced and overly melodramatic. After forcing myself to trudge through a few hours of the game, I just gave up in frustration, exhausted from trying so hard to like it. Earthbound did what it did so well by front-loading the game with humor, and then introducing drama slowly once the player was drawn in to the experience. Mother 3 starts with an overblown tragedy, centered around the death of a character who'd spoken about five lines before s/he kicked off. In Earthbound, a similar situation (Buzz-Buzz dying) is played for laughs, but in Mother 3, you're meant to find a hoary RPG cliche heart-wrenching.

When I talked to a friend (who'd never really liked Earthbound) about the experience of Mother 3, he brought up a good point: Earthbound, fire of my loins it may be, was essentially a boring little dungeon crawl game if you weren't charmed by its quirky setting and tone. Essentially, it was a bare-bones Dragon Quest. That's my problem with Mother 3: once my attention is drawn away from its polished veneer, I'm compelled to stare at its mediocre guts.

Next in Thwarted Expectations Week, I take a look at Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.

Loving Daisies

2008-10-18T23:10:00.000-07:00

Lord. On a whim, I rented Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. It earned mostly poor reviews, which warded me off from buying it. Maybe that was for the best.

No, it was definitely for the best. Lucasarts was executing murderous cuts in its development staff while TFU was being made, and after playing it, I think I understand the exact chronology of this game's genesis:

Developer #1: ... and then you can electrify your lightsaber!
Developer #2: And throw it at a wookiee!
Developer #3: I gotta say, guys, sounds like this is gonna be pret-ty awesome. Let's get started on it right-
[Executive bursts through the door, smelling strongly of cough syrup, his mouth flanked by 6 inches of Fruit By The Foot and an unlit cigar.]
Executive: Due to changing market blah blah, Developer 1, Developer 2? You're so fired. Alright, Developer 3, time to bang this one out. Chop chop!
Developer 3: *whimper*

This is a game that was laid out by people who were in love with the concept they had fashioned, and put together by a very spent, very unhappy group, trying to take their last revenge on a monolithic employer by phoning it in. The final, muttered curse of the short-timer. A shame that it sold over a million copies in its first month (just counting the 360, PS3, and Wii versions.)

The whole thing feels like it was programmed in Java and then ported to BASIC. Targeting is a nightmare. The camera is sluggish and inattentive, except in boss battles, where you're forced into viewing the battle from a disorienting fixed perspective. There are instant-death pits littering stages. You will be knocked into them by enemy fire. You will misstep and fall to your death. You will use a lightsaber combo on an enemy that will carry you over the edge and into a loading screen, so you can repeat the cycle. I died constantly, for various reasons, and rarely did I feel that I had died because of my own failure. It's not often that I yell at a game, but it's even rarer that I plead with a game. "Why?" I asked, in my most imploring tone available.

There are loading screens everywhere. Between sections of a stage, the game loads. When you go to the pause menu, you get a good 5 second load. In between the submenus of said screen, you will load. After a while, the load screens morphed from a sneering annoyance to a graceful respite from the vile taste of that Unleashing the Force leaves.

I've only played the first stage and a bit of the second, so I'm unwilling to classify this as anything like a review. However, I will say without reservation that this game deserves scorn. I have no reason to continue playing it, other than the masochistic pursuit of Achievements.

My Judgement: Unfortunately Unpleasant

Now, look: I don't want to become Tim Rogers. I am going to try my best, in the future, not to conform to his standard of alternating between repetetively damning prose and overly embellished praise. This post resembles my review of Mercenaries 2 a bit too much, but horrible games inspire me to write more than passable ones do. I'll try to vary my tone here, hopefully with a long-delayed review of Tales of Vesperia.

2008-10-12T23:12:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to write something right now, and I'm so stuck. It's fiction, and I feel I've lost what talent I had for spinning a world, or even modifying an existing one. I can't decide where to start. A character, a situation, an idea? Am I going into the whole thing with failure in mind if I'm writing just to write? I like this little blog because honesty requires so little inspiration.

I'm coming up on my one year anniversary with sobriety. It's weird. I want to celebrate, to commemorate it in some way, but at the same time I feel like it would invite disaster. It's not a thing to trumpet, but one to solemnly remember: the time when I was a little less human.

More than my attempt at modesty, I feel fake. I hit maybe one Anonymous meeting per season and I have no sponsor. I've done well enough so far, I guess, but I still eat a lot to compensate for the loss of my other vices. It's a better spot, but I'm definitely still in the woods.

The whole thing can be encapsulated by an encounter I had a couple hours ago. While riding my bike, I met up with one of my old buddies, a former and current user. I didn't give him my whole In Recovery spiel when he offered me a blunt, and I gave him my phone number. My rationalization is that I was in an awkward situation and wanted to get out of it quickly and with minimum fuss, but I fear leaving that back door open for myself. There are phone numbers from that period of my life that I want to forget, just so I won't be able to call them in a moment of weakness.

I'm posting this without editing, in an attempt to prevent redacting uncomfortable truths. I'll give it the ol' readability sweep in a couple days, I guess.

You'll Never Be Alone Again

2008-10-01T22:47:00.000-07:00

I re-met an old grammar school friend today. She recognized me, yelled my name, and I had a moment of minor panic. For five seconds, I had the distinct unease of being recognized without recognizing. I'm happy; I've been thinking about her on and off since we last met ~5 years back. She was my second crush, and the first who'd reciprocated some element of my feelings. She's with someone, and I can't say that I'm still into her, but I guess it stirred up some weird feelings. Otherwise I wouldn't be writing this right now.

I want to see her, but I'm crowded by a slowly inflating anxiety. I don't know what it is, but just the memory of her, sparing her presence, makes me feel uncomfortable. We've got a history I don't want to go into here, and I don't even know if that's it. I'm just tied up in knots over it and I don't have a damn person with which to talk about it. Internet Diary, today you are my best friend.

All of my friends (including this lady) have significant others, so now I'm actually feeling pressured to find one myself. Not out of loneliness or desire, but peer pressure and social lubrication. Three's a crowd and all that. It's kind of fucked up, because I don't yearn for physical intimacy anymore. What I need is a good friend, hopefully a best friend. I'm not sure if I'll try to work on that.

Simple Pageant

2008-09-26T19:37:00.000-07:00

The El took me down to Belmont and Clark, a border zone in which an uneasy truce exists between hipsters, the homeless, queer folks, and yuppies. I had to leave my house. A copy of Alicia E. Goranson's Supervillainz came in the mail from Amazon today, and I needed a good reading spot for it; therefore, a ride on the Red Line.

But that was also pretext. I spent today avoiding a prescheduled meeting with my cousin. He's living here in Chicago now, having fled the open-air prison that is Iowa. He borrowed a game from me and, while I'd like it back, I just don't want to see him. I'm convinced that we'd exhaust our subjects of conversation in 5 minutes, after which there would be the awkward 5 minutes of attempted small talk, followed by a third 5 minute period during which I'd muster up the courage to give a lame pretext for leaving. So I just stood him up.

I feel bad about that, but not bad enough to actually get in contact with him. I can't think of a good excuse, and I lack the appropriate gall to give him my actual reason. It's the same way I fall out of contact with most friends: we set up play-dates, I cancel and give a lame excuse, repeat until communication peters out. Surprisingly effective.

I don't know what to say. I have a long mental list of topics to write about, but I can only commit a single full thought to page before I'm spent.

Sterile Paradise

2008-09-25T00:23:00.000-07:00

I've decided to hate my body.

Mostly as a pragmatic choice. I'm way fat. Not, like, "I feel so fat today." At 5'10", tipping the scales at 320 lbs., my ass is big enough to have its own LaGrange points. Where before I accepted my body, if grudgingly, I am now declaring total war. Really, mostly it's the trans thing: it's hard for those with a male phenotype to fit into most women's clothing, but once you get into the 4X territory, the sales clerk just hands you a tarp, some scissors, and a bit of velcro. I shop at Torrid when not thrifting, but they charge boutique prices for department store clothes.

Combine sartorial difficulties with the swarm of body issues that come with being a transwoman, and my odium strategy makes a certain kind of sense. While the object of my scorn is quite corporeal, the hatred part is a bit of an abstraction. I don't hate myself, I hate my body. Now, I have an enemy to work against, a narrative instead of a tally. I guess I'll see how it works.

The Power of Gold

2008-09-23T14:39:00.000-07:00

I've been itching to hit Penny Arcade Expo next year. I went there in 2007, and it was a fine adventure; the sense of community made me feel warm and snuggly. Finding a space for people who share my identity is important enough for it to be a recurring theme here. The city of Seattle has a hold on me. It's beautiful, the weather's just right for this Chicago girl, and it reminds me of Canada. If I could find a Tim Horton's, I'd be forced to join the many homeless living on its clean, poorly-lit streets.

Serendipity, then, that I found out about the Gender Odyssey Conference, located in the same city, happening in the same convention center, occurring over the same 3 days. Splendor! What a coup, should I be able to fit both into a weekend. The perfect fit for the weird mish-mash of personal transgender diary and vague videogame rant that this has become.

Now, the trick is to secure the funds for transportation and lodging. Maybe I'll stay in a hostel this time!

Tender Rondo

2008-09-15T01:28:00.000-07:00

I was fast-forwarding through an interview with Peter Molyneux when I heard him say something that I had to chew for a while. I'm not going to go back and quote him (there's a reason I was skipping it,) but it was to the effect of "I don't want to give [the antagonist] any clear motivation because I want the player to wonder why he's doing [all this shit.]"

So, part of me wanted to rail against this viewpoint for being regressive. Most games in the late 80's/early 90's had an unexplained antagonist who only existed to give you a kickin' final boss to waste quarters/hours on. But then I thought about the game I'm playing right now (still Tales of Vesperia, wow is that game long.) The villain wants to wield ultimate power so he can bring happiness to the world, even if it means hurting countless people in the process. I don't give a damn about the conflict, because it is a Xerox of an archetype.

I think that a well-motivated, unique antagonist is an agreed-upon ideal. Which means I don't care if you disagree, for the sake of my point. I find myself asking, is it better to have a villain that is a blank slate, or an outline, made to quickly and unerringly be recognized? I feel like my writing is slanting towards Mr. Molyneux's bent, but I'm honestly not sure. Does it change depending on the type of game? Do people who play bullet hell shooters really care if their villains have a reason to exist? Does it matter more in RPGs or adventure games? Or is it simply a function of the player and her preferences?

Discontinuity

2008-09-12T17:04:00.000-07:00

I just walked a good five miles or so in the rain. I was out of sorts at the beginning, trying to get away. It always amazes me how inspired I feel by the landscape of Chicago's residential streets. The part of my brain that perceives beauty feels fully stimulated when I take a post-midnight walk through an unfamiliar area. I'll stare through a window and construct a life for the person who lives inside. I want to put that into words.

Anyway, I was in a funk. I'd seen a video of this girl, now doing porn. She's 19. Those earlier feelings of inadequacy, they were there a little bit, but what got to me and really got me down was seeing her vulnerability, tinged with that awkward optimism endemic to teenagers. I've seen all of these pictures of her just doing things, hanging out with her friends, and sort of being young, and now I see her doing porn.

To see what I perceived as innocence ruined in a very public way freaked me out. Which isn't fair, because I'm pro-porn and I'm judging the hell out of the whole affair: her, for throwing away her modesty, and the pornsmiths for taking advantage of her. Both of which are bullshit. If someone offered me decent money to do porn, I'd do it in a heartbeat, and it wouldn't be exploitation. Would it? I don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know.

I guess a lot of it is seeing the arc of a transperson from before transition, to after, to porn. It bums me out. I can't bear to look for a job as myself, and here's more validation that sex work is the most viable career for a tranny. This girl kind of formed the standard against which I measure myself, for better or worse, and the comparison depresses me for reasons I can't fully talk out. I want to make progress in my life, so if, god forbid, some guy or girl out there uses me as a yardstick, I'll point them in a positive direction.

I want to keep writing. I want to make money from writing, because I can't think of anything else I can do. I want people to read this, or whatever it becomes.

I'm going to start an experiment: if you read this sentence, go down to the bottom of the post, click my name, and send me an email. Tell me something, anything you want, about your world.

Brick Road

2008-09-06T02:27:00.000-07:00

I'm ass-end of an odd staycation right now. My basic aim was to sit and play video games the entire time, but I don't think I was able to really enjoy it. First, I spent a good chunk of it with Mercenaries 2, a game with toxic properties. But after it was out of my home (if not my conflicted psyche,) I still lacked the ability to fully enjoy the fruits of my sloth. The bit of Calvinist guilt I get from my father, compounded by the knowledge that I'm not really doing anything with my life, has slowed my roll.

I come back here to write because it feels like I'm accomplishing something, even if I know I'll never show this blog to anyone I know or make any money from it. My sister's the only person with any success in my immediate family, and she writes, so I'm at least somewhat doing this because I want to be like her. From the other side, I ... can't communicate as well face-to-face as I can through text. Even if I'm functionally writing to no one here, I can more accurately relay my feelings to the void. I'm spending a lot more time in IRC, as a result of this. I don't believe that real companionship develop between people over the internet, so I don't necessarily know what I use it for.

Sleep fails me. I'm going to go play more Tales of Vesperia. I want review more games, just to stretch those muscles, but I can't do this one. I have no distance whatsoever.

2008-09-03T23:44:00.000-07:00

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is the sort of game that drives miserable people to do desperate things.

I rented it, played it for three days, then returned it, unfinished, before it was due. I did this because it ruined my self-esteem. In the realm of abusive relationships, Mercenaries 2 is the one where the other person professes his unending love, but doesn't want to be seen in public with you. This is a game that will sometimes reward you and more often subtly undermine your belief that you have a right to exist.

Beyond my hyperbole, it's a third-person shooter, like its progenitor (2005's Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.) It's in a sandbox, much closer to Crackdown than the GTA series. You do missions for different factions, managing their moods toward you by doing jobs for them and not blowing their shit up. You get little side missions where you capture guys and blow up buildings, the latter being made way easier by to the fact that you can call in airstrikes and watch buildings and structures shatter with impressive graphical flourish.

Before I explain why this game resembles an uneven middle school romance, I've got to come clean about my baggage. I loved Mercenaries 1. Super loved it. My relationship to Mercenaries 2 is that of a widower with his second wife: I make her wear her predecessor's jewelry, style her hair the same, and generally spend the bulk of the marriage pining for a lost love. The viability of True Objectivity is part of an interesting discussion that I will do nothing to further here, because Mercenaries 2 has hurt me in a far too personal way.

The thing is, I was willing to give Mercs 2 a pass if it had just been a good-lookin' expansion pack for Mercs 1. But no. Mercs 2 is buggy and uneven. It's a rough-cut piece of lumber, unsanded and splintery, that your host expects you to sit on bare-assed. I played the 360 version, and had issues with:

Achievements being locked after I'd fulfilled their conditions
Missions failing abruptly for unclear reasons
Getting stuck in invincible bushes of death
Having my support operative tell me, every five minutes, well beyond the point where a deaf 5-year-old would've gotten the hint, that I could go back to home base to find out what to do next
The worst AI

There were two updates available for the game in the first few days since it had come out, and none of these problems had been rectified. Still, were this game a person, I would argue vociferously that it wasn't, in its heart, fundamentally bad, even as it was pissing in my bushes.

Mercenaries 2 feels unoriginal, even for a sequel. Specifically, this game is Just Cause. Just Cause is a ... fuck it, Just Cause is this. And Mercenaries 2 wants to be Just Cause so bad. It has the same grapple gun, used to hitch a ride on enemy helicopters. They're both set in the same generic South American countryside, populated by citizens who speak poorly-accented English (Mercenaries is technically set in Venezuela, but the only difference I could find was that Just Cause had more water.) It even has the same first couple missions: bust this guy out of jail. Now drive this truck full of weapons somewhere while being pursued! Be careful, don't get hit too much, or your cargo will fly out and you'll get paid less!

I'm not ragging on Mercs 2 for being derivative, but for being derivative of Just Cause, a game that was not good. Not bad, just not good.

For some reason, you need to pre-buy your airstrikes in Mercs 2, whereas you could use them indefinitely (cash permitting) in Mercs 1. It's a solution to a problem that didn't exist, and can leave you in a situation without the airstrikes or item drops to solve the problem at hand. To add challenge when hijacking bigger vehicles (tanks, APCs, helicopters,) you're required to complete a little button pressing minigame every time you dismount the driver. Which would be okay, but the buttons are always the same for each vehicle type, making it more a matter of memorization than skill. In addition, it makes what used to be a seven second interlude in the mayhem now take upwards of twenty seconds.

I really want to go on. There are a lot of little things that irk me about this damn game, but it really doesn't deserve my vitriol. While it was limited, I did have fun playing Mercenaries 2. The core gameplay of blowing shit up remains enjoyable here, if muddled. Buy Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. Y'know, the first one. It's a fantastic, well-crafted game, and you can get if for ~$12 used. Mercs 2 is a rental at best, and you may find yourself breaking up with it before the return date, just as I did.

My Judgement: Prodigal Son

2008-07-22T02:01:00.000-07:00

I'd live without any friends, if I could do it without bottoming out my Sanity Meter.

That's one of those weird and revealing things to put out there, but so it is.

2008-07-19T00:07:00.000-07:00

I write mainly to put names to the ineffable feelings I have. I'm an introverted person, and I always find myself at a loss for the words or phrases that describe how and why I feel separate. It's like I was born exactly on the border of five countries, and I'm trying to determine my citizenship. It kind of doesn't matter where I hail from, so long as I'm able to say "Oh, I'm from A," or "I was born in C." Part of me just doesn't want to be from somewhere. Some isolated part of myself says that, being born at the intersection of all five countries, I'm from nowhere.

So, as nationality affects association, I gravitate towards other people who seem to come from nowhere. And I lose interest in them when they expatriate somewhere concrete.

I don't know if I'm being oblique or just immature, so humor me here. You, mysterious reader, are my greatest friend. We've not met, and probably never will, but there's something insignificant that I enjoy immensely about our non-relationship. I am Erwin Schrödinger and you are or are not my cat.

2008-05-23T19:01:00.000-07:00

I want a drug that supercharges my virtual proprioception so I can go to a national Street Fighter competition and demolish the competition, no skillz necessary. I guess it would be unfair, but I imagine a pluckier me doing this, with some sort of hard-luck story wherein I need the prize money to help my dying sister get her operation. Then, at the end, when I run out of the somatosensory cocktail, I realize the true Zen of all video games, the unified principle of victory, and Dragon Punch my opponent so hard s/he goes blind in one eye.

If a compound so potent in game-enhancing properties existed (setting aside caffeine,) I know I'd become addicted pretty quickly. The power to overwhelm, to trounce effortlessly is so alluring. I wonder when gaming tournaments will start testing for performance-enhancing drugs. My mental image of juiced gamers is disturbingly fascinating: their hair constantly dripping with sweat, eyes attached tightly to some point on the horizon, fingers reflexively fighting imagined hordes when not engaged with a controller, wrists clad in padded braces so they don't snap their bones with the sheer force of their playing.

Murder Music

2008-03-21T00:35:00.000-07:00

The forces that animate my body are so irritable during this slice of night, after all the network TV worth watching has gone off and everyone I can talk to is asleep. It's not that I can't sleep. I just can't stop. The little man in the engine room keeps shoveling the coal in. I just took 3mg of melatonin, near guaranteed to make even someone my size fall out. Its effects are apparent, but I can't keep myself from typing, reading, watching the odd advertisement for cheap auto loans and colon flushes. Some directive from my mesolimbic system, the deep well of desire, means I can't stop until I collapse.

My noisy computer puts out a whine that no doubt will contribute to hearing loss someday. The Faculty plays on the TV adjacent to my monitor. I'm spending an inordinate amount of energy scrying whether I'm more attracted to Josh Hartnett or Jordana Brewster. The exanimate separation that marks my lifelong tenancy in the twilight hours is powerful, and it bleeds into the rest of my days. On a day off, I can go from waking to sleeping without talking to another human. It feels right, but in that messed-up way that beating, ravaging, destroying someone feels right. It's justified by the same apparatus which reasons a journal as a working substitute for a shrink.

I want love, but I don't need romance. I want someone to play videogames with, to sit on the couch and burp with, to enjoy the dismal in-between moments that are building up, unused, in my timeline. The wonderful tactile motions of my body pressed against another keep flitting through my mind, the savory tang of lust ever on my taste buds. I don't know how to get to a point where I feel capable of dating someone else, leaving the question of my own desirability unanswered without being asked. I suppose I always held out for the day when I found someone broken in the same way that I am, and questions of gender, sex, and attraction would be thrown out the window, in favor of the knowledge that our identical fears of being alone would no longer have merit.

I'm not a good writer, but I wish I could speak as well as I do write. Caught in the moment, all of my well-prepared phrases and beats fail me, and I'm just so often stuck. I'm done tonight. There's nothing else to do.

2008-03-16T00:29:00.000-07:00

For the past two months, I've been attempting to broaden my vocabulary. Every time I see a word I don't know or fully comprehend, I look it up online. It's what I did when I was a kid, and its result then, as now, was that I learned a whole lot of new words. I finally know how to abseil and abjure. I grasp (fugaciously) the distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal. Yay, words.

To my surprise, my evolving ability to construct a lethally precise sentence has left me, as always, unable to express my real feelings. The emotions that form my words leave them without their spirit. I write with an increasingly studied structure, but to no benefit. This diary away from the rest of the world is where I can write in private, get over the ugly adolescence of style without ridicule. That doesn't work, does it? I don't know if I just need someone to tell me my writing is shit, or keep writing until I find a louder voice and then have someone tell me my writing is shit. Like, I want to be this cool artist person who writes and makes music and games and stuff on the side and somehow finds a way to pay the rent, too. But that's just a variation of the dream I had due to the exhaust leak in my '89 Accord, a triumphant don't-need-to-take-this-shit reverie that made missing first period soooo worth it.

I'm reading this kind of weird manga about a queer-les-trans love quadrilateral. It's very much a standard romantic serial, but there's something weird, off - even un-Japanese - about it. My heart understands it and resonates with it, and I want to write about the feeling I have while reading it. Forlorn recognition. I don't know. I'm crying now. Maybe that's enough.

2008-02-21T22:26:00.000-08:00

I found a dollar on the sidewalk as I was coming home today. Good times!

I have an idea for a soccer hooligan MMO called Redcards and Blackguards. I see a lot of possibilities, and none of them involve it becoming an online GTA clone.

I'm learning how to compose chiptunes and program so I can finally wring a game out of the mildewed bar rag that is my mind.

I'm crazy depressed.

I've gotten sick of starting all of my sentences with 'I' statements.

I should probably go to sleep.

2008-02-12T07:36:00.000-08:00

How do we order our identities?

The question came to me when I read this article, about experiences of racism changing for transpeople as they cross from one experience of gender to another. Louis Mitchell, a black transman, says in the article, “More than I’m a trans man, I’m a Black man ... Many of the things that I see in the world and many of the things that I respond to in the world have more to do with how I am treated as a Black man rather than how I am treated as a trans man."

It led me to question how I view my own set of identifiers, the cloud of adjectives that I feel qualified to apply to myself. In my view, before anything else, I'm an outsider. To everything. All of the things that I use to identify myself put outside of some type of norm. And most of those categories are not positively correlated. When I'm in a group of people, I can only seem to see whatever differences exist between myself and the plurality because without exception there are so many.

The thing is, I don't think it's the right viewpoint to take, but I can't particularly say it's wrong, either. There's this quest to find where you belong after you've found your identity. You just spent ten minutes rummaging in the couch for the piece of this beautiful, pastoral puzzle, and now you've got to figure where to stick it. I just don't trust where I stick it, I guess, because it never quite seems to fit perfectly. Maybe perfection's a bit of a booby prize when you could be finishing the puzzle, but I've dragged this metaphor to its death.

Even though it's an oppositional definition, I do find my space with other outsiders; people whose differences, though not the same as mine, place them in the flat part of the Bell curve. I always wanted to gather what I felt are my people somewhere. When I envision 'my people,' however, they're not nerds, they're not trannies, they're not mulattoes. At least, not particularly. They're just the people who don't belong anywhere else. It's kind of something I got from reading old X-Men comics (specifically X-Men 2099 if you're into that kind of thing) and has stayed with me, achingly distant, for years. It feels good, but I don't know if it's a good thing.

I don't know if I'm satisfied with this post, honestly, but I'm going to put it here anyway. The beauty of having a clandestine place to write: not to conceal the movements of my mind, but rather to do bad writing under the cover of night.

Tickle the Heavens

2007-12-25T18:39:00.000-08:00

A dream:
I was talking to a rabbi about something while playing Street Fighter 2. He seemed unimpressed by the level of intellect I was displaying, and seemed to scorn me. My pride wounded and desperate to appeal for his favor, I proposed a contest of sorts: we would fight each other in Street Fighter, and then quiz each other. At the end, I had tender sex with Bruce Willis.

Wall of Sound

2007-10-31T01:31:00.000-07:00

It's eating away at me, the blank page. I've been depressed and not doing schoolwork. When I imagine the blank page before me, I freeze up. My mother says I see too many possibilities and I freeze, and she's absolutely right. I'm waiting for my estrogen to arrive from New Zealand (I think) and it's maddening. My supply of premarin is limited, so I've had to cut back to a quarter of my normal dose until I get that package in the mail. As a result, I'm kind of PMSing 24/7.

But that's not the reason I'm subsisting in misery. I've been missing my Marijuana Anonymous meetings. I haven't quite become a recidivist, but my disease, unchecked, finds a way to compensate, and I've been eating myself to death for that period. I don't know what's keeping me from taking two hours out of my Thursday to do what I know I must do. An older, wiser person has even given me the gracious offer to sponsor me in the intervening time, but I just couldn't do it. I'm afraid of fucking it up, and that leads me to fuck it up. I want to walk the bright path. I don't know why I feel I can't.

In the meantime, I played "I Wanna Be the Guy." Hardest platforming game I've every cursed at. It seems that the designer had a deep, personal hate for whoever would be fool enough to download his shit. It's enough to inspire me to my calling: making games of little to no marketable worth. If this paragraph makes no sense, sorry.

It's so weird having this public diary whose audience's existence is in superposition. I have no guidelines for what or how to write, whether something is expected of me or my expectations are simply in my own head. It frees me, but it makes things difficult, too; I firmly believe that constraints are sources of inspiration. Without them, I often feel lost, especially when writing fiction. I'll be trying more fiction soon, god willing, because I feel or want it to be a certain kind of salvation. Maybe I'll find my voice again.

2007-10-16T00:43:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, I made a date to meet a coworker for coffee. Since it's a female coworker and I still present as male at work, I tried to express that it was a purely platonic engagement. She canceled at the last minute and the subject has been taking possession of my mind fairly frequently since. I was going to give her the big reveal about being TG, and part of me was relieved when she didn't show up, freeing me from a possible Awkward Moment. But other feelings crept in, and later that night I felt torn up over it. It's a weird, muddled feeling: the sting of rejection (that's largely my own self-esteem issues and social anxiety talking) and the (temporarily?) lost opportunity to be honest and vulnerable with another human being. I had hoped to create a larger slice of the universe to explore as a transperson (as a woman? As someone apart from the gender binary? I don't know.)

I just feel rotten about it, which I can't really hide from her, which I feel hurts my chances of seeing her outside of work. The flavor of despair is something I think a woman is well-attuned to smell on a man. Despite my incongruity with the genders involved, my radar would be up if I were her and approached in a similar fashion, and it drives me nuts. I've never come out to someone over the phone, so I'm just not sure if I can break through whatever barriers separate us in addition to the brick wall that is gender. I suppose it's my calling to learn to scale that wall as a person who exists on the outskirts of the gender bell curve, but it's really hard and I'm feeling kind of delicate.

I like this woman because she is seemingly straightforward and may actually be in my intellectual league. The fucked-up part of my brain smells some damage on her, and I'm worried about how that factors into me fancying her. My common associates are fucked up enough, and I don't want to buy any more drama, especially with a work acquaintance. Despite it all, it took me no tiny amount of courage to get to the point where I could try to make a new friend relatively cold. I'm kind of short on the courage, to which my extended transition will attest. Although I've started to change my schema of courage and fear from the monolithic, boys-don't-cry stuff I learned from my father, I still can't help but view myself as a coward. Ironically, I construe that as a feminine quality and look down on myself for it.

I hate that as a transwoman, I have a really weird set of gender biases, but I'm kidding myself if I say that I'd be any better off were I cisgendered. Also, I hate that sometimes gender is all that I can talk about. I need to be around other trannies and transfolk, but I think I fear being read as unworthy if I'm to enter any circle of my people. Susan Moses on her Talking Tranny podcast did a great piece on hierarchical bias recently, basically stating how the trappings and status of subculture that we take on influence how those groups view us and the validity of our membership and opinions (I probably could have phrased that better, but just Google her shit because she's intensely intelligent.) I fear that moment of walking into a group of transfolk and being deemed unworthy due to my low passability and the mix of whatever else my subconscious can pit against me. It's not a rational fear, but few are, and realizing its irrationality won't do anything to dispel it.

2007-10-14T23:18:00.000-07:00

I have a lot that I want to unload via writing right now, but it's never easy for me to order my thoughts. I'm feeling distraught, and a little big of that vertigo I feel when I consider how big the totality of existence is relative to how small my own experience is. Still, I just experienced a moment: the conviction that I must work on my opus, the unexpressed dream whose beauty drives me forward. My dream is a video game that summarizes everything I love about video games. I lack the literary and programming ability to bring it to fruition right now, but learning in submission to something greater than myself is breathtaking. It lets me understand the essence of art a little more: that which I see unrealized is truly brilliant, and it is me who will fail it if whatever I produce is garbage, not the other way around.

2007-10-06T01:18:00.000-07:00

Fiction

I'm sick of writing this. I need to write fiction. Whatever talent I have in stringing words together feels like it means nothing when I'm sending it into the void like this. It's kind of freeing writing for an audience with an uncollapsed waveform, but this is masturbatory, and I'm currently trying to abstain from onanism. Not out of any puritanical prejudice, but because it feeds my disease and spins the wheel of my addiction. Maybe I'm afraid that I'll get addicted to confessing to no one. But I can't stop writing, and I'm not at a place where I can create fiction again.

I really don't want to say this, but I may have to become a writer. Making games is well and good, but I haven't programmed a line since I declared my intent, electing instead to write the pamphlet of woe and deconstruction presented here. Fiction is my chosen medium, I feel, and even though this ain't that, I can hear it calling me. Even though my stories seem personally unsatisfactory.

Whenever I'm in a rut in my prolonged transition, as I feel to be right now, I end up consuming a lot of writing, fiction or non, by other TG people (mostly women.) I love it because, through the cypher of a somewhat familiar character, I don't feel as alone and my experience not as weird. And yet I cringe when reading most all TG-penned fiction concerning our plight, because the freshness of the scars always leaves an imprint of our pain visible from the moon. Half of it is blatant wish-fulfillment, most prominently any story featuring magical/technological transformation from sex to sex. A third of it, the not-so blatant wish fulfillment, the straw men masquerading as nemeses, the constant self-pity, the cliché characters.

And so much centered on high school, the unforgotten battleground of myself and my people, the place where many of us nearly died (myself included.) That I can understand all too well, as even at a small remove from my adolescence, I find that I would move heaven and earth to reenter prepuberty with the knowledge I have now.

The remaining sixth is what I keep coming back for. I'm overly critical, even with the knowledge that anything I wrote now would by necessity deal with transition, and assuredly suffer from the same laundry list of problems that plague everything I have read (save for, I should note, a single work penned by a XX woman.) There's a problem of selection here, as my range is limited to include a couple books and a crapload of webcomics, most of which suffer the aforementioned flaws anyway.

I feel that I just need a strategy for writing a story, a single one, and it will ... do what? I don't know. I'm really quick to seek peace in methods that don't involve doing scary things and altering my life. I distrust my impulse to write, but I can't stop writing. Even if it's sloppy and sounds bad and makes little sense to anyone but me, the sense of achievement earned by creating something of permanence is irresistable.