#466

Damn, people. Last post was longer than propriety would dictate, probably. I mean fuck's sake.

 

Today's, well, today's is probably gonna be too long as well, since I locked myself into the breakdown of what happened by posting about the damn thing in media res. Really I'm only interested in talking about video games, but whatever. Shouldn't really take that long.

I guess here is the problem: that great ability I have which I discussed last post, with the plates and the spinning and the keeping things real, well, it gets a lot more complicated if the torches and pitchforks are already out. And plus, we don't live in a world where like, you're ever alone anymore. Everywhere you step, physically and digitally, the hot beams emitted by a million palantíri pierce your entire self and every shadow you have ever cast, the clicking insect brains nested at their root transmitting vital data to the pulsing, bevatted brains ranged in a great circle round the Black Pillar. 

What kind of data? It doesn't mater anymore. Stuff you wouldn't even think a person could use to fuck you up, but believe me--regimes like the one whose installation we are facing do not in any way need a legitimate reason or avenue for fucking people up. They will write the forms that say they give themselves permission to execute you in the street because you posted, oh, say, the wrong opinion on your blog one time, or purchased a product from a blacklisted company, or turned the wrong dude down for a date, or because a large language model made a profile of you and gave that profile a number and that number was either too high or too low, no one knows what makes the numbers be what they are but the numbers do not, cannot lie.

Yet the reality of it all is so much worse than that because they just don't need excuses or reasons anymore, which is great for them because it will be increasingly about venting naked id upon their surroundings at all times. The question of what happens when a government declares that you do not, legally speaking, exist, your phemonelogical insistence to the contrary, mute and and incontrovertible, becomes a crime. When existing is a crime, what is your defense? What about when no defense is acceptable once criminality is determined, and criminality can be determined on sight or through the use of an algorithm which is unerring simply because it will always be obeyed?

Some of us live with the prospect of this thought experiment breathing down our necks. I have mentioned this recently. One does not, though, sit any more comfortable when the breathing gets hot and heavy and one can only too easily imagine strong, brutal hands quickly grasping.

Well, here we are. I say it for fun a lot, and now I say it once more, quietly, in deadly earnest, before we move on to other things: strap in.

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And hey! Like I said yesterday. Things may collapse and transform so quickly and radically these fuckers may not have time, wherewithal, or opportunity to do a damn thing. As only one example, if climate change doesn't get paid attention to like fucking crazy here pretty soon, well, Atlantis stopped having political problems of any kind in one fell swoop! Starting to sound pretty good, huh?

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An embarassing confession: sometimes I fantasize about what the world might be like if more people read this blog and were able to intelligently catalyze the hidden (theoretical) wisdom from my cavalcade of tongue-in-cheek bullshit. 

Maybe they would spread my memes in a way that made better sense. Maybe the aggregate effect would be powerful enough that we would chill out a bit, collectively. I guess all writers wish this somewhere deep inside, unless of course they have a similar fantasy, except instead of stargazing and meditating on rocks stacked in little piles, which is the outcome that makes me smile, their readers busy themselves setting the world on fire, which is the outcome that makes them smile. The world is always happy to provide your diametric reverse, in the interest of a balanced universe. And I am not even mad about this, for it is meet that the universe should be in balance. All piles of rock, no matter how perfectly stacked, must at some point come tumbling down.

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Ok, VIDEO GAMES

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Finishing Unicorn Overlord was a great battle, but it only whetted my appetite for the hardest mode the game has to offer. I chose to begin on Tactical Mode, the third difficulty level out of four, the better to move through the story at an even pace. It was precisely what the doctor ordered, but I suppose I thought the last level would punsih me a bit more--it pierced my guard a time or two and I had to make one major strategic adjustment, but I essentially guillotined it.

Well, I mean, this type of game has gotten harder, more hardcore. Gotta admit it. Fire Emblem had to make itself much harder as it went along in order to prevent the "serious" player (in this rare case, I count myself among them) from straying, outraged by the inclusion of things like dating sims (written in to appease a different, but just as hardcore, demographic of the games--here I am situated more in a middle camp). The interlinked pair for the DS, as I recall, were particularly merciless, and they had not yet even graduated to having actual hi-res tea parties in-game, for which I think they put in like a sixth difficulty level and the ability to have like a hundred and fifty people under your purview. I replayed the first Fire Emblem game I ever played, the U.S. version of Blazing Blade, as released on the Switch Online service--a game, incidentally, with very few such frills and stuffed to the gills with great combat--and the sheer violence that I did to that game, and the time in which I did it frankly surprised me. I had no idea the level to which I had taken its education as a young person, nor the extent to which my abilities had surpassed its demands. 

Here's how weird I am with these types of game on the real: I will probably play through Unicorn Overlord at the same difficulty I started with (tactical, not expert) to get really dialed in on my optimization, then jump straight to the True Zenoiran difficulty, which will murder my units and limit my item uses to ten per battle even as it throttles my honors and valor points (not something that will make battles easier). In this way, I become more acclimated to the game, but the shock of the jump in difficulty develops for the experience a unique gestalt. I like it. It simulates being dunked into cold water in your own bedroom, and having to defend yourself from the attacker in the nude. Bracing. 

All told, bearing all this in mind, realizing now that I will have to resist the urge to play Unicorn Overlord as much as I have been. I will try. One ought not just play a game three times in a row. There is too much other stuff to play! Plus one must make an intimation towards sanity, at least, and crack a book on occasion. Balanced universe.

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Anyway, still early to call it, but Factually Game of the Fucking Year 2024. I guess it would be really fun to make a retroactive list of Factual Games of the Fucking Year--I shall think on this.

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Aw SHIT gotta cram some food and take a shower and go to work. Insane that I have to go to work today, but as we have said since time immemorial, the show must go on.

--JL

#465

Ah, election day. And what an election!

This year I really think I did pretty well not mentioning politics in like the sense of naming specific names at least too much. On occasion, the general picture has risen to a temperature which, for me personally, cannot be borne without some type of outcry--usually about the imposition of money and the theft of time and ease--but I believe I have grasped the handle of restraint's cooling mechanism, been served thereby, and passed those savings onto you, dear reader.

But today is after all the day of election, and one might even be called remiss in their duties if one were to let it pass entirely without comment. 

As is classically done in linear time, let us first look back.

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The vitriol Joseph Biden was able to summon in the national rhetorics was inspiring on both sides. I understand that many on the left carried a great deal of trauma from posting classic Joe Biden as Vice President memes during the Obama years, extremely fucking cringe affairs which they absolutely delighted in--he was their ancient, fun uncle, and his new teeth were a vision back then, it is true. 

For me, the Obama presidency ran as a stupid bullshit tokenization party that I wished would stop but which I now see as an idyllic time; wheras the former revelers live suspended in such shame that the pretend they voted for a mysterious, invisible, morally superior candidate--a 2008 write-in for Bernie Sanders, perhaps; a piece of shit who has miraculously, despite all outstanding evidence, retained his place in the Noble House of Acceptable Compromises with Neoliberal Values. Anyway, fuckers act like Obama was Pol Pot the whole time and not Politi-Jay Z Mk. II, and they always hated Biden, he was always a Bad Old White Guy and I Personally Have Never Liked a White Guy Ever. 

Fucking bullshit. 

As for the right, well, I really had no idea that white dudes were even capable of hating one of their own like that. Though I suppose when one is vehemently enthusiastic regarding the daily sessions of Two Minute's Hate directed at that withered Goldstein, one's capacities and ordnances find themselves naturally expanded. Perhaps they also feel shame for tolerating him in their minds when Obama sat the big chair. I guess it is also easier, as is time-honored and expected, when you assert that your opponent is a homosexual, so as to bring ready, ample, and easily mobilized reserved of baseless, misdirected hatred to bear.

The beauty of it all is that he is of course only a man, and has nothing to do with the incredible caricatures that have been painted of him on the national stage by miscreant and supporter alike, nor anything to do with how the world is and acts out. 

It must be stridently evangelized: all of these ghoulish people, whose faces are masks because they have no true expression, are a cross for us to bear, and not messianic representatives of our human progress. I vote with that attitude, and that attitude alone---that of a grim and barely willing relinquishment of my temporary and performance-based tolerance. Everyone is automatically fired as soon as I vote for them. Any given organism is only beginning the challenge, as keeping the job is where the job begins. As it is for me, it should be for them, eh?

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This year's particularly contorted and absurd machinations mean that as usual, I could not in good conscience vote for the intellect I would actually prefer at the helm of the office. Sorry, Cornel West. Be assured I stared at your name, and the blank little box next to it, with a true and actually passionate longing. Next time, I pray.

It is honestly a stone bitch that I felt unable to vote for, in my opinion, the most iconic and acceptable third-party candidate in living memory. Very sad.

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Let us indulge in a look even further back as a matter of brief review even on my own blog, as in this truly benighted and paralyzingly headlong age, even things I said three years ago seem like an archeologist has to blow dust off them and consult dense notes in order to truly grasp the fruit of my prior revelations.

Say it often, but not enough, it has to be repeated: the pus and bile of the Old Web became too much for the Carnis Digitalia and burst into an abcess, the vile and stinking flood flowing into meatspace, which was markedly, one might say intensely unimproved by the infusion, and the open cavity a ripe promised land for external infections. And what infections have taken hold! The sins and curses of that wretched phsyical realm pulse hideously, thrumming in place to the beat of an army of dark hearts. Even now I can see them, in my mind, their stink and wetness anathema to the cool and polished marbles of my dead, romanticized Olympus.

Thus, the problems written into the code developed organically by the social memetic organism we belong to (alas) were hacked by its most internal, most productive, most abstract processes--only for every fractal that every iterated to simply iterate again, in a process that operated in tandem with itself--think of a zipper unzipping, and then the jacket unthreading itself violently in spasms--destabilizedby feedback loops, kicked off the edge of chaos. Out of control fast, out of control big.

Collapse is imminent, and from that collapse, its detritus, shall rise many fresh collectives. A process not unlike the division of one cell into two. But that moment of bicellularity is just that. A fleeting, breathless second. The rate of division is exponential. You might see four for a partial moment before you realize there's a hundred and forty-four probably and from there the mind hitches, unable to usefully process. What I mean is collapse is another word for beginning.

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All this by way of saying that the outcome of this election is, while of importance in the short term, not terribly important news in the aggregate. Things are going to change so fundamentally and at such speed that the outcomes themselves will hold little import simply because the context will change so radically the very sense of the information will change--and still we will be plunging onwards.

Again: the outcome does matter. Just not with same heft that these things usually matter, as things are so unstable that anything could happen at any time.

Or, y'know, everything's the same. From one's own little speck of perspective, if one is as objectively honest as one can bring oneself to be, one may acknowledge, perhaps even aloud, that one knows absolutely nothing, and every day is a mystery with no solution; you just get through it till it's time to go to bed.

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Well, it makes sense. Societies are just like organisms, as I have also said in the past. The story of two single cells producing a third, which in a remarkably short time can consider what to wear every fucking morning, and just as quickly finds itself breaking down practically right away into individual cells and even the substrates and wastes that are the byproducts of all cell clusters over time. Before you know it, the process has resulted in a whole new collection of cells living through and adding onto a culture established by cell colonies long past. 

A cell culture. Cell culture. Cell culture. 

Do you get it.

This basic situation has not changed and transposes across many scales of size and granularity.

The multiverse: infinite bits coalescing and disintegrating, forever. 

Infinity infnitely iterating infinitely.

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The pleasure I take in bringing the post to the prior plateau--I am very aware I have done it several times before--is enormous, but it is also an important task, its repetition an essential part of that task. We cannot forget what we are and where we live. We mustn't.

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Of course there is no sense minimizing my own feelings, either: I am dismayed at the stark choice this election presented, and how far outside of my prerogative the script has forced me to situate myself. I included who I wanted to vote for as a sort of indication of who I did vote for, wholly against my inclination, the alternative being to me unacceptable to such a degree that my hand felt forced. 

You all know me: I fucking HATE that.

Less, clearly, than I hate certain prospects, but the act being completed, its discomfort stings the more.

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However it must be said that I do not hold any special ill will for the adherents of either wretched camp. People, as people, which is to say, my fellow citizens--a group which I personally suspend in a wholly different net than I do the elected officials that are supposed to represent them (no official could possibly represent me, and I hardly expect any to)--will tend to congregate, it is their way--the way of all cells, all molecules. Having done so, particular physics and processes take hold, with inevitable outcomes and natural results. I have described them earlier in this post, and the analogy holds. This also works with churches, newspapers; any collective effort, really. 

The bits are innocent, and I can bit around with my fellow bits presumably infinitely without our loyalty to strawmen and colors getting in my way, because I have extremely low faith in and zero loyalty towards collectives of almost any description, but I do like people. I am skilled at manging this tension. For example, I can and have worked productively with people who would probably want me dead if I did not, like a vaudeville performer, keep no less than eight plates spinning on broomsticks during every interaction involving these terribly loaded yet wholly imaginary differences. It is a matter of keeping the both of us grounded in fully human terms and experiences, and steering with a determination unto obstinacy way from the inhuman, chittering, doubletalking drivel our demonic overlords would have us torture each other with while they laugh and pour wine into their already-full mouths.

Simple rule: only talk about real things. Things we can both touch and see, things that materially matter and have to be dealt with and bring that joy and satisfaction that actual, vital concepts and categories bring to an existence being actively experienced at the scale it is appropriate for that life to be lived.

For example, a fancy sports team's outcomes: strawmen and colors. Competing brands: strawmen and colors. Politicians: strawmen and colors in a big way. Improving our own lots, the lots of our fellow man, and our own work and leisure hours to the greatest and most joyful extent we can intelligently manage: actual life. 

Actual life? Please? Can we prioritize actual life every day, instead of this excruciating, neverending round with the fucking goddamn loyalty colors and chattering heads?

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Ten million unwelcome text messages from grifters and charlatans. That's last week. On just my phone. The background noise from this election season probably registered on alien instruments fifty parsecs from here.

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How much money do people have, I mean how bad can the economy actually be, if people give money to these brazen fucks? I mean I'm not a person who doesn't spend money on crap and things not everybody understands. I love blowing cash, hate having money. Ice cream, books, and video games, baby. Way more fun than money. And so look, I can take the shit I get for this philosophy in life from fuckers who love to punish people for no reason with equanimity, but it is total bullshit that you can bitch that the economy is bad and the economy is someone's fault and then give any fucker wearing nice clothes with their hand out--a state of affairs which insults my intellect to a degree that it feels pierced, as though by a dagger--I mean, I don't know about you, but I have cats, and bills, and a mortgage, and I like to have fun. I have to work really hard to keep all that going and I barely fucking scrape by. This, in a country which is supposedly the richest and the greatest in all the lands of this poor globe. But the idea that I can spare even a dime for a political party? Let alone the political party of a different state in this union? This is just how I feel, and maybe I am wrong, but no. No.

Bitch, they have money--and they flush it down the toilet in a way that should make everyone who thinks of it blush. We act like there's no money--look at how these fuckers live their lives, and what they spend just to suck each other's dicks! They are the dragons of legend, the reality described by the symbol, and we pile gold on their glittering hordes in obeisance. 

Pathetic. The word is travesty. 

I mean, fucking honestly. What do you think it costs to fill the balloons at something like a national convention? Fucking. Balloons. Travesty. What do you think it takes to fill closets with "appropriate" clothing, pantsuits and ascots and shit? Do you think they can be seen in clothing that has seen wear and tear to any degree, in their hideously glittering society of excess? Why do these so-called representatives all seem to have more houses than I have people in my one household? Correct jewelry, correct makeup, correct private aviation, correct chauffeur services, correct price tags on all that shit and just imagine the colognes, the perfumes, the private schools for the kids, the leasing of a different car every year per driver per property--driven or not driven. 

Shoes.

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God, and the chatter around it all, media personalities and PR folks. They use military and sports analogies unflinchingly and interchangeably as they discuss how public "servants", whom they are fond of referring to in the most glowing terms, rob the public and spend the stolen money to steal more money, and they say that this process is very important because it is a process, and it is attached inextricably to the process that describes the process (read: money), so with that being how it is, everything will work as long as you keep yourself informed (daily) and participate actively in the system (through approved channels, only during specified periods in the fiscal year).

Damn. Incontrovertible. Except it is the death of reason and the funeral march of what it has ever meant to be human in this world. 

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Anyway. Election day at least means they should stop texting me for money. Right? For a little while?

Shuddering, beginning to sweat as I see it in my mind: waking up to a text message tomorrow--right above the one that says "one last push"--marked "the fight's not over" or some goddamn equivalent. 

Pretty soon I'm gonna have to destroy the bedeviled thing and start again with a new stupid glaring rectangle. At least these empty, cackling bastards will have to take the time--or their large language scripts will, anyway--to place a new number on their wicked lists, so as to mortar it with unceasing, insulting horseshit.

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To try and put a good vibe on the day, I went ahead and finished the main campaign in Unicorn Overlord. May this act tip the scales of this day however humbly towards peace, justice, and wise rule.

Man, that would be something to get. Indeed, the game's eneding represented a dream so wholly ensconced in the pipe that you would need a pair of plumbers, brothers maybe, to brave the depths and fetch that thing into the light. It was very, very beautiful. Loved every moment of that game.

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As a final note: when I voted today, I got not the typical sticker proclaiming that I had done so. You know, the basic statement, the variations on font, the three colors, and Old Glory. No, today I got a sticker with a bitchin werewolf ripping out of his clothes. Not "I Voted"--this sticker screams that "I VOTED", or, perhaps, it would be better, more true, to say that it howls.

Let me say that I endorse this in the strongest possible terms, and, as a voter and a citizen, would work extremely diligently to collect all the stickers of this caliber, made for this purpose, that I possibly could.

--JL