Jake's first Mardi Gras

I hate Mardi Gras. I hate it because it’s something that could be so much more than it ultimately is. I hate it because all of these huge floats roll by, making fun of blatantly corrupt politicians and pundits and awful corporations (BP) and everyone yells for beads and then they go home and they don’t do anything. It’s hollow as hollow gets. The party is about getting drunk and paying too much for things you don’t want, screaming for things you don’t need, meeting people you don’t care about, and ignoring the rest of the world in favor of your own hedonism. It’s a genuinely unique and interesting part of New Orleans culture, but it’s only as popular as it is because people expect it as a part of the New Orleans culture. It’s tourism. It’s about creating a space for tourists to get drunk and spend all their money. Ultimately all of the larger parades are aimed at people that aren’t me, but worse, people I can’t stand. Drunken louts. Boorish thugs whose only real method of relaxing in life is downing poison until their minds can’t inhibit them from relaxing any more. And this is okay. This is the point of the parades and the food stands and the Mardi Gras edition Bud Light. The whole point is to reduce people into screaming children, clamoring and fighting over plastic facsimiles of necklaces. That’s what they’re here for. That’s what they paid their good money for.

That’s not why I live here. I don’t hate parades. One of the first things I did when I got here was go on an underwear march with NoiseCo. It was an absolute blast, and convinced me that there really is a good reason to live here. I went to Petit Rex and saw all of the awesome little floats. I went to Barkus and watched dogs with adorable costumes go by. I saw Chewbacchus and all of the amazing outfits they put together for that. I saw both Krewe du Vieux and DeLusion and loved the way they were both put together. These things are great! I love costuming, and I love parades where people go all-out with a theme and make it look cool. None of these other parades so far have represented that for me. They’re tourist magnets, and little else.

Really, the biggest problem I have with the parades is the same as every problem I have. I hate people. I watched Chewbacchus at its start (because that’s the only parade I planned on seeing today) and then decided to follow it for a bit to see how it worked out. It turned into a clusterfuck almost immediately after the start, with a bunch of fucking retarded drivers trying to go down St. Charles right in the middle of the goddamn parade; tons of idiot spectators either walking into, with, or through the parade, ignoring it entirely and bumping into the more elaborate costumes and then heckling them for not watching where they’re going when the people in costume can only see forward; kids fucking everywhere harassing the costumers for throws and shit and banging on the robots; people squishing them in too far as a parade; just awful shit. And the only police presence was at the beginning and end, just calmly driving through ignoring the unmitigated chaos in the line. It was awful, and it made me angry. It still makes me angry. How dare these people sit there and behave fairly rationally for a big to-do and then turn into complete dickheads for this tiny alternative parade? I can’t handle that shit and I refuse to even remotely support it, so I pretty much walked home after that, wading through crowds and crowds of people I don’t like and wish were dead. I won’t be going to any more big parades. I don’t care how fancy they are, I don’t care that ultimately Chewbacchus should have been a parade in the quarter or the bywater or anywhere that was somewhat quiet, I don’t care what they all dress up in and put up for floats. I refuse to support this bullshit aggregation of a fantasy about New Orleans as a city. If this is really what the city does for its economy and culture, no wonder it’s so goddamned fucked up.

The big parades, the so-called “Super-Krewes” exemplify nearly everything I dislike about America/Humans. There’s the mindless, get-a-buck greed on display by every single idiot with a food stand or a shopping cart full of blinking crap. There’s the careless, pointless, soulless waste of tons and tons of plastic imported from China made by people who couldn’t afford to watch them being thrown, let alone attend a parade. There’s the shallow concept of “relaxing” or “partying” by consuming gallons and gallons of alcohol because the populace is incapable of “having a good time” without a few drinks. It’s just everything that sickens me and depresses me about people. I like the parades anyway because it’s nice to see floats and anything out of the ordinary makes me happy, but I can’t stand anyone at them, from the crowds upon crowds of tourists to the rich white assholes on the floats. I can’t stand that this is what passes for a crazy and happening holiday here. I can’t stand tourism and tourists and anyone who ever says “only in New Orleans.” I want to kick the teeth in of every asshole I hear who says that.

The worst part of it is that I know there’s going to be people who tell me that I’m overreacting or that none of the things I’m saying are true or that I’m being an uptight asshole. Some of these people are even going to be people whose opinions I am very interested in. I know just because I’m not attending doesn’t mean I’ll put even a fractional dent in these parades’ popularity. Hell, they might even make more money because now my spot is being filled with someone who actually buys light-ups and chicken-on-a-stick. But god damn, I don’t have to support any of this, and I won’t. I’m not a vegetarian because I really think it’s going to make a huge difference. I’m a vegetarian because I don’t have to support your crowd-mentality food consumption bullshit. I don’t have to support the crowd-mentality parade bullshit. You can all go to hell; I’ll live how I want.

____________________________

Past the anger. Back to something else. I like symbols (you do too) and I like using symbolism to understand events. The problem I had with the response to the Chewbacchus parade was that the parade conceptually represented something I cherish and value, namely nerds dressing up and wandering around and putting together their own throws made of nerdy things (I got a comic book!). The crowd for the other parade, Bacchus and later Endymion and earlier Thoth, did not respect the parade, or otherwise my joy in seeing the people in the parade. This angers me because I did not, nor did Chewbacchus, go out of my way to disrespect or disrupt their enjoyment of their parade (or tail-gating party or whatever it was for why there were there). It was rude and ultimately unjust. What really affected me was my incapability to rectify the injustice and that the people charged with maintaining order were also incapable (or unwilling) to do so. I could not stand this and can not stand for this and will not willingly support a system (the larger parades) that does/will. I know that I am only one person and incapable of rendering similar injustice to the larger parades (what am I going to do? Slash tractor tires? Bang on floats? Drive a car through the dozens of barricades set up for them? [not for Chewbacchus, though]) so instead I will do the only thing I can. Avoid them like the plague.

That said, I'm looking forward to Zulu. Hopefully that'll be a bit better.

P.S. All that “first Mardi Gras” and “Popping the Mardi Gras cherry” can go fuck itself. It’s people getting drunk and watching a parade, not a legitimate transition between life phases. I’m an angry asshole before attending Mardi Gras, and I’ll be an angry asshole afterward. The creation of the narrative that this is somehow an initiation into a cabal of Mardi Gras knowledge only serves to perpetuate the pointless and insipid waste that it is. It was made by people, not by demigods or spirits or by nature itself. Might as well celebrate “Baby’s first Bris.” Oh wait.

Facebook Games

INTRODUCTION

Well, here we are. As those of you who are friends with me on Facebook (and who haven’t blocked all of the applications that I’ve been using) may have noticed, I am playing several Zynga brand Facebook games. I chose Zynga primarily through its wide exposure, but secondarily because of its prevalence in my consciousness as a gamer as a standard by which all similar offerings can be judged. Zynga is the Jacuzzi of hot tubs, Farmville becoming synonymous with nearly every attempt at creating a profitable enterprise in microtransaction fueled Flash games. Besides the Zynga titles, I played several other games in smaller amounts, including one major competitor of Zynga’s (Digital Chocolate) game “NanoStar Siege.” I have also read a fair amount of literature on the subject of both microtransactions as a business model and the prevalence (and relevance) of Facebook games. I also watched the South Park Facebook episode while pretty drunk, which made the show that much better.

My perspective on these games is a complicated one. I do not agree with criticism that attempts to describe these applications as “not games” because I have yet to hear a sufficient argument in that direction. The most common argument I’ve heard is that they are not games because all you do is click on some things and watch bars fill up, leading to an experience that is barely comparable to a modern video game, with their vast worlds and intense graphics and complicated systems. The problem with this argument lies with a fundamental misunderstanding of what a video game is. Video games are devices that measure input by the player and judge whether or not that input is valid enough to advance them to the next level/score them points/defeat the enemies. The reason that games are so good at increasing hand-eye coordination is simply because that is all they are. They output visual information and receive appropriate or inappropriate input via the controller or a motion of the body. They create a feedback loop whereby players eventually emulate the machine by (or vice versa) through interaction. This is the essence of all video games and in a greater sense the essence of all games. I find one of the best analogies is to consider untying a knot. No matter how crazy and complicated the knot ultimately is, it still comes apart the same way as every other knot, by finding the right strand to pull. Every other aspect of video games is fluff added on top. Multiplayer videogames are simply a contest of who can push the right button first. RPGs are simply games where the button has a percentage chance of being the right button or not. Rhythm games are fairly pure representations of video games, relying solely on fairly obvious audio and visual cues for your input. So, yes, Facebook games are video games. They may not be particularly complicated in execution and their processes toward eating up people’s time are fairly lucid, but they satisfy every requirement that a game would have. Depending on your opinion, they may not be good games, but they are without a doubt, games.

Being a portion of Facebook, many, if not all of these games are billed as “social” games, supposedly inspiring social interaction among your friends on Facebook. This is somewhat problematic for me, as I am not a “social” person. When I play major MMORPGs, I tend to avoid groups as often as I can, eager to avoid the internal anxiety processes that prevent me from having a decent conversation with people for a fair portion of time. I play solo, which for many seems adverse to the very concept of anything labeled “Massively Multiplayer.” The reasons I have for playing MMOs are more concerned with an appreciation of the world constructed and the systems driving the thing rather than a desire to meet and talk to people. I don’t always feel this way, but I am unable to consistently maintain relationships over any calculable amount of distance, so rarely does joining a guild or clan last for me. Something generally ticks within me while reading a guild discussion or going on a disastrous raid or some other portion of interaction and I realize that I really honestly don’t want to associate with any of these people because I hate them all. It’s complicated. That being said, none of the Facebook games I’ve played have had even remotely the same concept of “social” as I would consider from other larger production MMO’s that I’ve played. The “social” component is simply the constant and obnoxious system insisting that you share free gifts, share coins, share xp, do a small amount of tasks for your neighbors, send a train towards your neighbor, occasionally challenge them to a simple contest, and endless other little quibbles of time and energy that do not belie any real interaction. It’s still a system of expected altruism, where the game eagerly suggests that you pay everyone who helps you back through another simple response click. There are a number of events in these games where you are flat-out told to ask for items from your friends or pay cash to complete their requirements. As a staunch individualist (really, I just don’t like asking people for things) this is another obstacle preventing me from playing these games.

Knowing this facet of my personality, I wondered how I would approach these games. Would I eventually cave and learn to be an irascible mooch or would I find myself running up against a wall and unable to advance any further in the game (it inevitably entails the collection of more stuff within the game, rather than any approach to an end goal. Such is the nature of an MMO, as they are designed not have endings, but to keep people playing for as long as they can.). And so my journey began with CityVille, the latest and greatest Zynga creation.

CITYVILLE

Released last October, CityVille is the latest game from zynga, riding a wave of city building Facebook games and skyrocketing to the top of the charts with over 97 million monthly users. The game is pretty similar to Farmville, except that you plant buildings instead of crops and collect rent. In the game is also a system whereby you farm various fruits and vegetables in exchange for goods which you use to supply businesses that generate a lot more “city coins” than rent. Progression through the game is marked by increasing the total population of the city by building both housing and community buildings, such as police and fire stations. The community buildings cannot be completed without being staffed by your CityVille neighbors. Players can spend “city cash” to circumvent this requirement, and players can purchase additional city cash for real world money.

FRONTIERVILLE

FrontierVille is essentially Farmville 2.0 with a western twist. You perform essentially every major farming component from Farmville, but with the added pressures of things like “varmints,” randomly generated little annoyances that expound the amount of effort in running the farm by a bit, but reward you well for “clobbering” them. Your avatar is forced to contend with a never-ending tide of brush and overgrowth that threatens to overrun your homestead. Apparently there’s some dealio with spouses and the inevitable children, but I haven’t reached that point as of Jan. 31. The quests granted are a bit more stringent on requiring your friends to help you collect or do something, and every major building you construct requires materials that can only be gained through free gifts from friends. CityVille features some of this further down the line, but for the first four or so community buildings, only your friends’ participation is required. Overall, FrontierVille feels a lot like what it is, a more advanced Farmville, featuring all of the minor enhancements that Zynga and other developers have implemented between Farmville’s release and the release of FrontierVille.

TREASURE ISLE

Treasure Isle is a diversion from the typical Zynga formula, at least in execution of the treasure hunting aspect. You’re still clicking things and watching bars fill up, but this time you’re not forced to tend any particular crop or house (there is, however, some farm plots on your base island for you to do just that). The treasure-hunting most heavily leans on another aspect of Zynga and other Facebook games: finding items as parts of “collections” and later trading them in for rewards. Every island has only so much treasure, so a player is bound to inevitably need something they do not have. They can request it from other players. Also included is a system of construction that mirrors FrontierVille’s, demonstrating the iterative development of Zynga products.

CAFÉWORLD

I initially decided not to play CaféWorld because almost immediately off the bat, it asked me to hire a friend in the game to be my waiter. I didn’t have any friends and didn’t care to do this and was already suffering Zynga fatigue that day, having begun three other games. I was later drawn back into it at the behest of a very good friend of mine, who also suggested that his current flame add me for CaféWorld friends. So far, it’s been a pretty bland experience, even by the aggravatingly similar standard for other Facebook games. You cook things that take portions of time and are expected to return when that time has passed and serve things to your customers. That seems to be the extent of it. You can also (like every other game) collect things and get enhanced cooking utensils that allow you to cook other things. It doesn’t particularly matter, though. It’s all the same thing.

NANOSTAR SIEGE

I started playing this game because I wanted to broaden the scope of this article outside of simply Zynga, but I wasn’t sure where to start. So I googled “best Facebook games” and found a top ten list of games for 2010; this was on the list. Of the games, it seemed the most interesting, as it promised a legitimate tactical experience as opposed to the usual “click and wait” style of other Facebook games. The promise followed through, with the game featuring little tactical battles between some ridiculously large armies (for the genre) that are largely determined by the placement of three main units. The tactics would seem to take on a rock-paper-scissors design, featuring “Slayers” with high damage and speed, but low armor, “Soldiers” with high armor and reasonable attack but very slow, and “Archers” with no armor and awful melee but a powerful ranged attack. The appearance of balance gives way to the numerous “Hero Cards” that both you and your opponent possess. These cards have a variety of effects, and as you would expect, you’re going to have to pay through the nose to get some. (Though a few are available through leveling up and spending gold) These cards are a watermark feature for Digital Chocolate, who have decided the best way to compete was to mock Pokémon (seriously, there’s 151 of these) and create a collectible brand of digital creatures with an ill-conceived (and terribly written) back story for their existence and a pentagonal faction system (like Magic: the Gathering cards). The cards are not little monsters (not all of them, anyway) but little people or representations of various internet/cultural phrases or stereotypes. There’s a good amount of them that are chicks, and a fair amount of anthropomorphic chicks. They feature both Venus and Godiva nude, albeit covered with their hair in all the right places. It’s not hard to guess what sort of audience DC is aiming at. These characters are supposed to be universal for all of the “Nanostar” branded games, of which there are only three so far.

TECHNICAL/DESIGN ISSUES

Of all the major market games I’ve played in the last few years or so, these have got to be some of the buggiest and poorly managed. Almost universally across these games, there is a relatively impressive loading time, one that activates every single time you browse to their pages. It wouldn’t be an issue, but every time you attempt to send a free gift to your friends, the game sends you to a second page to do so and you have to wait yet again to load the game. The hotlinks for Zynga games that are above the games themselves are set to open the new game in another tab automatically, leaving the previous game still running. This would be fine, except each of these games is a ridiculous memory hog. I accidentally overheated my computer one evening by opening three of them at once without noticing. Why this is even remotely a possibility for games that are basically glorified Flash applications astounds me. Clearly the management at Zynga cares more about getting more people to play than plugging memory leaks. Even when I was only running one such application, bugs happened all the time, from minor graphical glitches to the game failing to sync with the server, losing me whatever progress I had just made. The Zynga browser that overlays itself over the game and lets you accept notifications was constantly out of whack with what I had already accepted through individual applications.

EXPERIENCE

I started with CityVille, mostly because I heard relatively good things about it from Kotaku some time ago, and I was curious as to what made it particularly better than Farmville and their ilk. It wasn’t too bad, and I was happy to see that I didn’t particularly need other people involved early on. Using the in-game “city cash,” players can circumvent requirements for a lot of goals and buildings. Actually, had I gone nuts with the money, I could have rocketed straight to the end game of CityVille, buying early unlocks for all of the buildings and decorations in the game, purchasing city coins and goods so that I had little reason to wait. I wasn’t surprised, as this business model (more on it later) is pretty popular in the gaming sphere. Though some content is literally cash-only, the majority of the game is free-to-play as a standard for the model, as developers are afraid of scaring potential customers off by telling them they need to pay to play altogether. It’s endemic in the announcement of free-to-play games, an ardent reassurance that the games content would actually be free to most players, with only “cosmetic” or “minor” enhancements available for purchase. Zynga makes no jones about their cash-only items being decorative, but at the same time they rarely offer a super item that totally breaks the game. Being the author of this article, I chose not to spend any money (mostly because I don’t have any) and try to succeed or simply enjoy the game as a free game.

After I finally spent all of the tutorial missions and stopped leveling up to have my energy replenished (basically when I had to wait for a period of time) I moved on to the next game, FrontierVille. FrontierVille was already not particularly my cup of tea, as I am not a huge fan of western-themed products, but the game managed to stay somewhat interesting with the sheer variety of things to do. As sad as it sounds, I enjoyed clearing my land more than building things or tending to the animals. After I spent all of the energy in FrontierVille, I moved on yet again to Treasure Isle. I had heard about Treasure Isle on Kotaku as well, also hearing that it was a different beast than Farmville. Playing the game confirmed this, as it satisfied my OCD streak by allowing me to dig up entire islands in search of virtual tchotkes. Not content to leave well enough alone, this game also features a farming component, with little farms that you can plant energy granting fruit for later use. Clearly Zynga is aiming for a theme with these. After that I started up CaféWorld, just because it was all that was left on the list that wasn’t poker or Mafia Wars. CaféWorld, for some reason, features some butt-ugly 3D graphics and a really bland looking restaurant and asked me almost immediately to pick a neighbor to be my waiter. As my goal was to avoid having to force any of these games on other people, I immediately decided not to play it and clicked out of it. That was the end of my first day of playing these games, and so far I had had a stimulating experience collecting coins, gems, stars, little lightning bolts, logs, and slices of cherry pie. These games are nothing if not pretty snazzy, high-res graphics all over the place.

Day two was less eventful, though after playing all of these games and being bombarded with all of the suggestions that I share my playing experience with someone else, I finally caved and registered for a secondary Facebook account solely for the purpose of playing these games with myself (the account is registered as “John Boner” which I will likely later make into a parody “John Boehner” account). As sad as it sounds, I enjoyed going through the introduction for the games over again while the experience of playing them was still fresh in my mind. I spent much of that day doing a complicated log-in log-out dance between accounts, sending myself things and opening franchises in places. I soon realized, though, that one extra person would not be enough to advance in most of these games, so I finally caved and at least asked a friend I had made through playing Mafia Wars to neighbor me. This, over the next few days, lead to a slippery slope of me eventually adding everyone I knew who did play the games to my games. Enter the sort of shock when you realize that a person you’ve known for a while actually has a ridiculously high level and has amassed a collection of items that literally slows down your computer just to look at.

With friends came items, and soon I was handling a dozen requests a day, mostly friends sharing a free daily item, occasionally friends asking for help with some minor task in their city or island or homestead. I dutifully responded to every request that I got, sending out daily items for each of my games. With real friends, though, the impetus for using my fake Facebook account to play disappeared and John Boner languished in disuse. Despite the sudden flurry of activity, my various games had started to lose some of their luster and I logged in somewhat less day by day. I picked up Nanostar Siege based on a top-ten list on some website, partly to try something a bit different than a Zynga game, partly to attempt to rekindle some interest in the project. The game wasn’t bad and doesn’t really require friends to play, but it had its own problems, largely being the unbalanced sort of play between people who had found better and more useful Hero Cards to play than I had. I came to a stop in the single-player campaign because the computer is an outright cheater who behaves as though it is three people playing three cards at once and gets to reload the cards three times as fast as I can. Near the end of my Zynga experience, Gavin asked me to join him in CaféWorld, which I grudgingly did. He even went as far as suggesting his lady-friend be added to my friends to help her in CaféWorld. I played CaféWorld a total of one times, really not that interested, and maybe a day or two later I looked at my game requests and saw 32 of them waiting for me, and I decided that I was done. I blocked everything except CityVille and I haven’t played that since either, only assisting the few people who ask me for things.

Ultimately, I avoided making any new friends. With the sole exception of getting an internet friend into “Gun Bros” inadvertently I managed to avoid forcing any new players to join me. I limited what few times I posted an achievement on my wall to being only viewable by John Boner. I was, in short, a really poor customer. This is acceptable to me. I do not enjoy being a cog in the machine or a link in the chain or any of these things. I enjoyed playing them, but they lack the sort of substance necessary to keep me playing for more than the week and a half or so that I did. I know that these games are specifically modified to target dopamine receptors and the specific parts of the brain that govern motivation and goal-orientation, but these were all minimally impacted in me. I really do wonder whether or not this indicates anything about me. I do/can focus on certain things, I do have at least some of the self-discipline required to self-motivate myself to self-actualization, but whenever I play games that are supposed to be enormously addictive, I find myself reaching a limit after a period of time no greater than a few months. I was enormously addicted to Pokémon at the end of last year and for a portion of January, but now I’ve totally lost that spark. I’d have to force myself to play it now. I was enormously addicted to Minecraft again for a few days, but now I’ve found my attention entirely elsewhere. I don’t really know what that says about me as a person. I tend to simply label it as inconsistency and put it at that, but the fact remains that I simply cannot become fixated on any one thing nearly to the extent that I feel I should/I feel that others do. Ah well, even if indescribable, I can at least understand this portion of my being and incorporate it into a greater understanding of who I am.

SOCIAL GAMES

The buzzword for these games is “social” because since they are on a social network they are ostensibly “social” as well, especially since you add people as friends in the game and they can do things for you in most of these games. You share items with other people and essentially cannot succeed in the game without interacting with at least one other person. The problem with this concept of “social” is that it doesn’t really define anything particularly unique and isn’t strictly social. So you enlist people to help you complete a task, but so does an employer, and he isn’t necessarily social. Your workplace isn’t a “social” workplace.

The problem really lies in the tacit assumption that other video games are not social. This is a popular stereotype that, like the flamboyant queer, has yet to dissipate in the public mindset. Gamers are horrible little nerdy people who never talk to anyone, but by playing a “social’ game, you sidestep all of the pitfalls that a “regular” or “core” gamer is normally trapped in. This sort of thinking is backwards and industry-defeating, but so thoroughly prevalent that gamers themselves begin to argue that certain games are “casual” and thus inferior to their “hardcore” games, despite the distinction being fuzzy at best. One of the most telling things about the status of these “social” games is that none of them feature dedicated chat systems. They do reside on a platform (Facebook) that features a chat application, but this is largely ignored, and legitimate co-ordination between people to play these games is pretty much limited to putting certain items on your “wish list” and hoping that someone you know is feeling generous.

World of Warcraft is a vastly more social game than anything Zynga offers. World of Warcraft allows for a number of levels of interaction with your fellow players, from hiring people to craft objects, to purchasing and placing items on the auction house to running raids (short dungeons designed for multiple people to work together to complete) to joining guilds to earn bonuses and organize meetings to a robust community of people who role-play characters in the world. You can meet new people in WoW. You can’t meet anyone in CityVille.

THE BUSINESS MODEL

Zynga operates on the concept of being able to sell anything as long as the market is large enough. With millions of players per month, they can capitalize on the .1% of players that spend money for enhancements and turn that into real, appreciable profit. Between this and the low cost of producing their product (which is essentially free), there is such an absurdly large margin that it would blow the mind of anyone pre-internet-commerce age. That’s the entire reason for the “social” component of these games. They need a large market, and the best way to develop that market is to encourage people to encourage their friends to begin also playing the game. It’s like a pyramid scheme, except no money is passing hands among anyone other than the developer. The model depends on a platform like Facebook, because Facebook has an absurdly large install base and everyone already knows everyone on Facebook. Suggesting to a friend that they come and help you farm is as easy as clicking a button and sending them a pre-recorded message on Facebook. And the darndest thing is that it works. As P. T. Barnum said, there’s a sucker born every minute, and through Facebook, Zynga can find and market virtual goods to those suckers. Because it works for Zynga, and because business is largely trend-driven, dozens (Actually, hundreds. Not even kidding) of alternatives sprung up almost overnight. Everyone wants a piece of this boom.

Why? Why is this even conceptually possible? Zynga isn’t selling real products. They’re literally selling bits of art assets and the lines of code necessary to place them in your declared personal internet space on their servers. You’re paying actual money for an image to appear on the screen or perhaps a minor boost in your ability to collect other items. These things have even less than inherent worth. They don’t even exist. It’s like buying indulgences. And there is your answer. Why do people buy indulgences? Because the Catholic Church has told them that they’ll go to hell if they don’t. Hell is a conceptual place that doesn’t exist either, and all of the concepts involved don’t exist, but the Catholic Church is a great enough authority that they did roaring business selling bits of bones and rocks that supposedly belong to churches far away. The churches employed efficient and effective marketing techniques to sell otherwise worthless objects. That said, Zynga is no church and doesn’t have the kind of authority needed to simply tell people to buy city cash and avoid hell. What Zynga does have, however, is a better marketing campaign.

That’s not the only reason, though. The other reason has a lot to do with the sort of world we find ourselves in today. Music is free. Movies are free. Video games are free. Not just conceptually free, but free as in every person who copies and downloads a song does not decrease the total number of songs available. Music is infinitely replicable, as are movies and video games and books and any other form of digitized media. This is the kind of thing that changes the world. Now that these things are free to create, how can we put legitimate prices on them? Price becomes an arbitrary standard based not on what an object is worth but what the “producer” thinks it will sell for. In the face of these things losing their inherent value in the plastic/paper/tape they’re recorded on or creators losing the exclusivity of being the only person capable of recreating them, the industry will do anything it can to convince people that they should pay for the virtual items. It is in this way that all the “instant view” films on Netflix, all the songs on iTunes, all the e-books on Amazon are just as real as the garden planter that you just paid five bucks for in Farmville. It’s going to be a long haul for the industries, though, and they’re going to have to keep trying alternatives to draw profit. For music it’s a greater emphasis on concerts and flashy artists that draw crowds. For video games, it’s using Digital Rights Management to a greater degree and offering incentives for people to purchase the games at retail like EA is doing with the Madden franchise among others. For film it’s subscription based models like Netflix and 3D and HD technologies that aren’t as easily copied and run on a home computer. If you’re wondering why everything has been 3D lately, it’s literally because 3D movies are difficult at best to bootleg, because cameras only catch an awful blurry version of the film. For the publishing industry, at least textbook publishers, it’s constantly updating editions and offering codes for online “study help” programs with new editions of textbooks and suggesting that instructors use these online programs for legitimately graded quizzes and various assignments. None of these will work in the long run, because physical medium is a dying breed. The future is going to be convincing you to buy things that don’t really exist. The future will be marketing.

CONCLUSIONS

1. Zynga can’t addict me.

For one reason or another, I just don’t buy into the hype. I can’t care enough about collecting crap and watching bars fill. Maybe it lacks substance, maybe it just doesn’t quite understand what motivates me, but it’s not working.

2. Social games are not really social

These games are only social in that they draw other people into playing them by capitalizing on the social links players have with other people. As a definition, that’s pretty broad, and under it, you could consider Left 4 Dead a social game, as I only bought it because all my friends were playing it and insisted that I join them in.

3. Virtual items are the future

They are incredibly cheap to manufacture and with the right sort of wheedling, can sell like hotcakes to certain people. No good reason not to sell them.

FURTHER READING & MISCELLENEA

http://www.appdata.com/leaderboard/apps

A board ranking facebook applications by users

http://www.insidesocialgames.com/

An industry-run blog entirely about this sort of games

http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html

Insightful, if ridiculous sounding

http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/our-world-3-0-can-we-evolve-beyond-money/

Also interesting. Note the section on intellectually demanding tasks having motivation beyond money

Interesting fact, one of these games, called “Social City,” was based on an engine by Pushbutton Labs, which is a company comprised of former employees for Dynamix, the developer of various Sierra titles, including “The Incredible Machine” and “Starsiege: Tribes.”

I had originally planned to put in a paragraph about altruism and how these games hinge upon the use of it, but I figure that sort of thing has already been done to death.

Vacuous Mumbling

For myself and a few others I know (for them and I), originality is a pursuit above all others, a goal to be reached, a success beyond measure. Synthesizing, creating, weaving together new ideas is our craving. It is, ultimately, our downfall, as we analyze ourselves and analyze our work and realize that everything we do is ultimately derivative of something, leading to a personal dissatisfaction and an unnecessary negative self-esteem feedback loop. "Why?" we ask ourselves, why can't we write like Melville, paint like Van Gogh, play music like Barry Manilow? Why can't we develop entirely new things, like they did? Why can't we revolutionize our field of creativity like them? Ultimately the secret, the things we forget to tell ourselves, the part of life that we ignore is that none of these artists were original themselves. No artist is. No person is. We are the sum of our experience, the output of our own lives. We are kaleidoscopes, twisting and repurposing everything we take in as our creative source. The concept of "the starving artist" or the "tortured soul" of an artist stem from an understanding of our kaleidoscopean natures. If we as people experience suffering or loss in an emotionally profound way, our art reflects the profundity of our emotions likewise. If we as people do not suffer, if we do not have any real depth of emotion to draw upon, our art demonstrates a lack of depth. It's not to say that tragedy (or bliss) is a necessary component of a good artist. What is to say is that emotions are a necessary component of good art. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the art.

Culture, specifically modern American culture, creates the drive for originality that plagues us, and to a larger extent plagues my entire generation. Originality is a marketing hook, a way to sell a product. Buy these shoes and express your individuality. Wear this hat, you'll be the most original on the block. Dang. I'm having trouble focusing on writing this, so It's about to get a bit looser.

Despite this common perception, however, culture (at least, pop culture, the culture sold on television) is a reflection of society and the individuals in that society. No one would try to sell originality if no one wanted originality. While there is certainly a large streak of people who want originality because they're told that people should want originality, the source (the egg) of the problem ultimately comes from people (rather, artists) themselves. Why would we become so driven by this concept? What changed between now and say, 100 years ago? Technology did. More people are yet again exposed to more art in more places than ever before. We preserve art in such vast quantities that it becomes impossible to honestly say "I've never heard of that" of anything in any field. The sheer amount of data is overwhelming and intimidating and ultimately the source of this anxiety. A thousand, even hundred years ago, the only music you heard was music made in the few places you could afford to travel. The only books you read (assuming you could read) were the ones that your local rich man or clergy or (if you were very lucky and lived near one) place of learning happened to possess. Ideas that were inimical to any of those sources were often kept hidden and relatively inaccessible. The only paintings you saw were again the ones in wealthy hands or in church. It was entirely possible to be original because every existing idea in the world wasn't more or less available to you for whatever purpose. As human beings are constantly driven towards novelty and invention, being shackled with the knowledge of every idea and being unable to develop anything new is a legitimate psychic fear. Who are we as people if we are simply re-iterating previous paths? How do we reconcile ourselves as having worth if all that we create is obsolete upon creation. It's no mistake that we're driven towards "consumerism" and defining ourselves by what we buy, because what we buy is one of the few things we have left to ourselves as expression. At least I can buy different things from everyone else, if I can't draw something different than all of them.

Have you ever visited tvtropes? Odds are, yes. It's a website with a reputation for addicting explorations in the categorization of "tropes" or themes represented in fiction. It's a great read, because it inspires a lot of the sort of knowing "aha!" that comes from making connections between works. Ultimately, though, it is damaging to our collective artistic psyches, because it emphasizes the salient point that nothing you come up with will ever have its own individual tv trope. Your creative output will be measured and analyzed and slotted into the website as an amalgam of all that has come before. Here, too, are the tools to unnecessarily analyze your own work even as you attempt to create it. May you never live free from your own insecurity. This is the reality we live in today; an endless spiral of feelings of inadequacy inspired by nothing larger or more significant than our own brains.

The only way artists will escape the whirlpool is through a tacit ability to ignore your self when creating art. To escape the need to innovate by escaping one's own mind. It's an attitude, ultimately. It's a state of mind that is wholly focused upon the creation and not even partially on the creator. The state of mind is often referred to as "being inspired" or "inspiration." Some people never feel this a single moment of their lives. Others are so frequently inspired that they're locked up in a facility for fear of them doing harm to themselves or others. It is yet another component of creating art, and one that has become all the more vital with the conscious brain achieving such greater heights in insecurity. Other than that, the only option is to either become so sheltered that every idea becomes innovative to you, or to be intellectually uncurious, so that the exploration of other's ideas becomes uninteresting and ultimately is avoided. There are other options, but none that escape the insecurity entirely. Some artists embrace the insecurity and self-deprecate to the point of absurdity, essentially becoming depressing vacuums of depression that are suspicious in that they've yet to simply kill themselves because they are clearly not happy and in the attitude they're in, they only promulgate further unhappiness by continuing to exist. It is to the point where you wonder whether or not they're sincere in their self-deprecation and why they continue to put themselves forth before the public if they really have that bad an attitude of themselves. Never believe and actor who claims they can't stand themselves, because there they are, in the limelight, on the big screen, pretending to be other people only so they can be seen. Certainly, they are other people, but in reality, it's still them, and so much them that they are recording them and showing them to everyone they can. Even further, don't listen to the people who claim to be honest and that their honesty somehow makes them that much better than those other guys who don't tell you that they're just selling a product. They're still selling a product, they're just smiling sweetly and informing you that their dick is in your ass while they screw you.

Well, ultimately I've come to the point in this essay where my internal voice insists that I balance it out by saying "I could be wrong. Maybe no one cares about originality but me. Maybe originality is actually sold by marketers and is not particularly prevalent in the populace. Maybe I'm just obsessive about this and the "human drive for novelty" is something that I and other obsessives created to feel good about ourselves. Maybe people in the past had just as much access to ideas, either through simple neighbors or just word of mouth proliferation. Maybe inspiration doesn't exist, and maybe art doesn't need emotions of particular depth to express something. I don't know. And ultimately it's because I don't know that I write. I'm trying to describe what I feel like a situation is. I'm trying to express a point of view. Ultimately, every part of my point of view could be wrong, but it still exists. Arguing against it does not destroy the viewpoint and will probably not change the viewpoint.

That is my method of evading my constant internal stream of argument. That is the only way I evade the stings of realizing that nothing I believe is founded in reality. I believe in the inherent worth and existence of every viewpoint, and I disregard claims of their disfactuality by emphasizing the inherent worth of every viewpoint as being interesting and relevant to the environment the viewpoint came from.

I can't really think of where to go from here, and I just read my last sentence and it seems pretty incoherent, so I'm going to stop. Baring the internal processes of my writing has more to do with me attempting to give my writing relevance by hoping that they help you, the reader, relate to me, the author, or at least me, the author at the present time I'm writing this. Hopefully that makes the work readable and relatable on some scale beyond the simple (extraneous, multisyllabic, imaginary) words in it.

The Dao of Jake

I'm feeling restless tonight, so I'm going to write up some self-affirming, biased "aphorisms" or possibly "moral standards" or maybe a "coda." To emulate the rather annoying trend of people using the word Dao literally (see: The Daos of Wu and Pooh), I'll call it the Dao of Jake, incidentally my name on twitter. (thetaoofjake)

These are things that I try and often fail to live by, and not necessarily things that have worked or will always work or will work for you. Ultimately it's yet another of my ongoing attempts at self-description, of understanding how and why I function while still functioning.

1. The first step in being able to do anything is to believe that you can do anything. The moment you tell yourself "I cannot do this" is the moment you are not able to do this. This is not to say that you can actually do anything. That would be impossible. But you can do nothing if you do not believe you can. Do not listen to those who would tell you that you cannot do something because until you try, you don't know and neither do they. Remember, until you prove otherwise, I can fly and shoot lasers from my eyes.
   
2. Don't be afraid of what other people think of you. People are always going to dislike you no matter what you do. Literally. There is no legitimate way to get everyone to like you if they actually know anything about you. There are simply too many people to reasonably manage an entirely successful public image. So many politicians and celebrities have tried, but all it takes is one person who can't stand either to ruin it for them. So accept it. Embrace it, and do whatever you feel is best without the fear of what other people might think is best. Inhibition is just society's way of trying to control you, but you know the secret, society is just a perception of reality independent of actual people. Remember: the people who think you're an asshole or a weirdo or a nut are not the sort of people you would want to hang out with anyway and if you meet enough people, you're certain to find plenty that support you in every aspect simply because you're you.
   
3. Everything is transitory. This is the "this too shall pass" line. Nothing is permanent. It's not a reason for concern, but a cause for celebration! All sorrow, all hurt, all wounds do heal over time. Or they don't because people nurse them and feed them and turn them into purposes for existence. Letting go (see: detachment) is the most important part of transcending pain or sadness. It really is no coincidence that the "wise holy words" of nearly every popular religion happen to mention this. It's the point and focus of Buddhism, which takes it to a bit of an extreme. It's mentioned a few times in the Judeo-Christian bible. It's sort of mentioned in a somewhat indirect way (the direct way follows) in the Dao De Jing. I tend to summarize it in "sooner or later we're all going to be dead. There's no point in wasting time on that sort of thing anyway."
   
4. Don't take anything personally. Nothing is really personal anyway, because no one else can really understand you (cue linkin park) because their perceptual reality is entirely different than yours. Ten times out of ten, when someone insults you or insults something you cherish, it's more out of a reaction to something that bothered them than an actual assessment of your character. To take it to an absurdist extent, when someone calls you a motherfucker, they really don't mean that you go out and fuck mothers. They're just using terms that the disembodied "society" point of view labels as "vulgar" and "crude" in an attempt to irk your societal appreciation portion of your brain. (no, I refuse to mention Freud) If they're yelling it at you, then they're also trying to irk the threat elimination portion of your brain and cause you to back down and flee or escalate into a conflict which they hope they'll win. Again, they don't actually think you're a motherfucker. And this applies to everything, even stuff that sounds like legitimate criticism. The key to this entire section is detachment. In order to successfully avoid falling into the trap of reacting on instinct, you need to approach a situation from a non-emotional level. Emotions are great and fantastic and a big portion of being human, but in many cases they cripple people's ability to work together effectively and harmoniously. Detaching in these situations is the difference between, for example, thinking of an entire population of people versus a few people. Morally, or specifically socio-morally, detachment occupies a weird oscillating viewpoint of either being bad or good depending on the event, the time of day, the economic climate, whatever. Often detachment is viewed as a negative approach to life and considered being essentially inhuman. Robots are often presented in movies and novels as being essentially monsters for lacking compassion or remorse or a sense of horror that society tends to assume would strike the average person. Characters in fiction are rather often presented with a choice between who lives or dies; a loved one and, say, an entire planet. The heroes always (e-mail me with exceptions, I'll read/view them) choose the particular survival of the few or the one over the greater whole or the many. It's an essentially selfish choice based primarily on emotions, but the hero is always lauded for his strong moral compass and his ability to choose what's most important (themselves) and incidentally they manage to save everyone else too. A detached, rational analysis would posit that given the choice of the two with no likely alternative and no guarantee that you're living a Hollywood movie, the logical answer (and honestly, the legitimately moral answer) would be to sacrifice that which is important to you so that others can live and have things that are important to them. Sometimes, the opposite is presented, as a character can prove his/her moral triumph through sacrificing themselves so that others may succeed, but never are the characters asked to sacrifice someone they love or, say, their family. (again, exceptions emailed to thejakeman16ATgmailDOTcom) So overall, it's a fuzzy space to be in. It's really one of those things that will make people either love you or hate you, which ties back in with the not caring what other people think of you. Personally, I don't think that detachment necessarily entails a lack of compassion. I just think it means that at the moment in time when you are detached, you are letting your (brain) pre-frontal lobe think things through rather than letting your (heart) hypothalamus think things through. If you are truly compassionate, your brain will consider that first, without having to go through the emotional turmoil where you feel sorrow and remorse and anger and fear wracking your brain and insisting on a choice that may not actually be compassionate or at least considerate. Of course if you're already a dick, your brain will be working out how to benefit from a situation with or without emotions. It really depends on where your loyalties lie and not on whether you're detaching from your emotions.
   
5. Love everyone. Everyone else is a living being, something that is so rare and so extraordinary that somehow we ended up with a staggering number of us and it's now considered mundane. Some crazy underwear-on-the-outside stuff when you think about it. Each of these living people has their own perspective, too. They're all out there, experiencing a version of the world that you will never experience yourself because you are too busy experiencing your own version of reality that no one else can share. Sometimes this concept is considered tragic and ultimately dividing and separating us all in our own little words so that no one can truly understand us (cue: linkin park and heavy doses of neon genesis evangelion), but that ignores the reality of the situation and places reality in a WIIFM ("what's in it for me?" thank you Ms. Merlin and DECA marketing) situation. What's really important here is that there are this many other people and they do have entirely different experiences and worldviews and this is amazing and you should love them all merely because they exist and are so different and are unable to understand us. Marvel at the concept of culture and the idea that despite ostensibly the same language being spoken between you and another English speaker, each word means something different to them. It's a crazy and poorly-understood-and-often-overlooked facet of life. Wasting your time hating or disregarding or ignoring these other points of view is the real tragedy here.
   
6. No one is wrong. Factually, someone can be wrong. A person can be demonstrated to be wrong about certain things, like the claim "the earth is flat" by being sailed around the world going more or less one direction and shown that the earth is in fact a globe. However, most people don't have that point of reference because they've never experienced for themselves whether or not the earth is a globe. All they know is that a lot of people say that the earth is a globe, so they take it on faith that the earth is a globe. Even having sailed around the world does not grant a person the knowledge that the earth will always be a globe. Because reality is entirely unpredictable, perhaps the earth becomes flat for a fraction of a fraction of a smaller fraction of a second every year without anyone noticing. Perhaps the earth is physically a globe, but behaves in two-dimensional space as a cube for some inexplicable reason. There really is no logical way to disprove these claims. In fact, there is no logical way to disprove anything. All people really go on is faith, either in their own experiences, or in other people's assertions of reality. And that's everything. Even the concept of the words I'm supposedly typing on a computer is entirely subjective to my own assumption that I'm experiencing this and not, in fact, dreaming it or imagining it or simply a mindless automaton trained to believe that I'm expressing myself but I'm actually slaving away for Big Government/Corporation/Boss. I cannot say for certain any of these experiences are real. There's a popular Phil 101 concept wherein the universe was created last Thursday, with everyone suddenly having all of the memories and ideas and belongings that they assume they always had and there's no way to disprove it, which should also prove that it's pretty much pointless to take any further philosophy classes. I'm a practical man and the practical application of this isn't to despair at the entire uncertainty of existence, but to apply it to the appreciation of differences in existence from one person to the next. It is entirely true, for example, for a devout man in Kabul that Allah is the lord and the only lord and he insists upon the rules that he gave to his prophet Mohammed, just as much as it is true for me to believe that all of us are a part (specifically, tiny reflections) of a greater being that is comprised of the entire universe and the source of all things. There is no real way to logically disprove either of us, and our views are entirely contradictory, but neither of us is wrong, because our perceptions, our very versions of reality are different. Extend this to every other belief (which is everything) and you should understand.
   
7. Rules are made by people. This one is a tad less philosophical and much more practical. We live in a world full of rules. We actually live in a world full of exponentially increasing rules, because rules have become pretty popular these days. I saw a news report on some new device that will allow parents who purchase a new Ford set limits not only on the speed their teens can drive the car, but on the specific Sirius radio stations they can listen to. Honestly, horrifying, but followed by a report on new rules for teens to earn a full license, which is literally a license to follow more rules. Also I keep misspelling license "liscense" because I can't spell. (Secretly I'm not literate either. I just read magazines and porn novels.) Rules are actually important, though, because they define reality and give it a sense of legitimate predictability. Rules are enforced upon children in hopes of instilling some sense of discipline or moral values on them by granting the universe a sense of legitimate consequence for being a little jerkface. It doesn't matter that the consequences are totally unrelated (take candy from your brother and you'll be made to stand in the corner for five minutes), what matters is instilling the vague sense that reality itself (id est: your parents) will punish your transgression. All of this is an amazing sort of abstraction created by people to obscure the ultimate truth that people are making the rules. Ignore the man behind the green curtain, focus only on the razzle-dazzle of applied karma. It doesn't matter that the consequences are usually out of whack with the actual actions (Anyone feel like rolling on E for 30 years of imprisonment? Maybe you can get caught three times and be put away for life in California), what matters is that reality is defined and controlled. The practical application of this knowledge is (surprise) not anarchy, but understanding that talking to the right person and not being afraid of the rules goes a lot farther towards getting you through "the system." A lot of the time, it won't work. There are probably a thousand people who are totally bought into "the system" for every one reasonable person. What's important, though, is that you don't give up on something just because the rules say you can't do it, which hopefully ties back to my first point and wraps this damn thing up.
   

I'm not perfect (though I believe the first step towards being perfect is believing that you can be) and these might not be the best things to do for you (though in my version of reality, they totally are). I don't always follow them and they don't always work for me, but I think just defining and describing them says something more about me (I'm pretty egocentric) than before, and I hope they way you react or interpret what I said helps you understand a little more about yourself.

Happy New Year.

Damn. I should write a self-help book. Watch the fuck out, The Power.

War on the Internet

Earlier this year, I wrote an essay (more a press release, really) on the Wikileaks release of documents concerning the Afghanistan war. I was (and am) elated that the leak occurred, as it demonstrates to me the part and parcel purpose of the internet, the free dissemination of information to all those with access. As I'd hoped, Wikileaks has only grown in notoriety since. The timing of the arrest of Wikileak's founder Julian Assange coming shortly after his organization's release of embarrassing diplomatic cables is not a coincidence, especially when the circumstances surrounding his arrest are so suspect. How does it happen that a man who is called to be executed by a former U.S. presidential candidate is arrested mere days after such a release.

How does it come to be that he is charged with sexual assault that may or may not constitute rape by two women who admit that the sex was consensual and in fact bragged about it on Twitter and Facebook? Two women who had not actually accused him of anything, instead following a Swedish procedure of asking for "police advice," which does not constitute an accusation in case the accusation itself is wrongful. Why is he in prison when the actual case against him was charged, then dropped, then charged again be three separate prosecutors. Why is he in an Interpol warrant for this situation, where Swedish authorities only want to question him about the allegations? Why did Swedish authorities refuse to use any of the proposed alternate methods of communication to achieve such questioning? Most importantly, why was he imprisoned and denied bail in Britain despite turning himself in and not being formally charged with a crime? I'm really not claiming there's any sort of conspiracy here. This IS the authority, and this IS what they do. There's no cover-up of motive here, it's bald and plain for anyone to see.

The man is a political target, and he's made enemies with some surprising people. Sarah Palin wants him dead. Despite being a popular media figure and the host of an absurd pseudo-reality TV series about how to backpack with a lot of money and people with you, she's willing to call for this man's blood, in a move that would seem politically expedient for the entire "right" spectrum of politics. This is disregarding the fact that there really is no U.S. law this man is breaking, nor has anyone actually come to harm because of his organization. It is, of course, points in a political game. The right wants to convince people that Obama is incapable of defeating Julian Assange for one reason or another, and that by voting Republican, you can elect someone who can/will. Palin for president; She always gets her man. No one has yet pointed out that this is the same organization that exposed her own corruption through her e-mails.

The scope of this conflict, however, is much larger than the petty partisanship of politics in P'america (Couldn't break the combo). This is truly a war about democracy and what role the people have in shaping their own government. The concept of democracy does not include the concept of the government keeping secrets from its populace, as the populace is indeed the government, as per the intent of the founding fathers. By claiming security interests in keeping secrets, the government has managed to divorce itself from the people and become an entity unto its own. Here at last, the capability of the people to share information with one another instantly and for such little cost demonstrates the ultimate folly of attempting to keep state secrets. What was once a matter of determined investigative reporters is now a matter of simply finding a hole in the system, an inevitable hole because no system comprised of people can truly be completely secure. The government failed to keep these documents secret for the same reason that conspiracies are almost universally unlikely: Humans are the weakest link. Giving anyone the authority to view this information is a risk. What if they disagree with your findings? What if they have a moral change of heart? There will always be leaks, whether or not there's someone there to report them. And here, now, with Wikileaks, not only is there someone to report them, but someone with the capability of disseminating these leaks instantaneously to everyone with access to the web. The same system that has everyone worried about their privacy and well being through outlets like Facebook has also inevitably destroyed the privacy of the U. S. Government.

The problem here is that the government should never have had that privacy in the first place. The word "private" connotes "separate, confidential, personal," adjectives that should have nothing to do with a public institution. If the government is truly made of the people, why don't the people know what the government is doing?

This is the internet at its best. This is ultimately what it was made for, the dissolution of borders and nations and governments. This is an entity that is too large for the nations to simply shut it off. This is an entity without state borders, except its own. This is, at last, an entity who has no political agenda but its own agenda of sharing everything with everyone at all times. It heartens me to see the usually nebulous and poorly aimed Anonymous banding together to defend what is ultimately going to be the first war on the internet through attacks on the corporations that have decided that their allegiance to the systems in place are more important than the services they provide. It heartens me that in response to the shutdown of the main Wikileaks website, not one or two, but hundreds of mirror sites sprang up overnight in defiance. Go internet. I'm right behind them. And if you care at all for our freedom, not as citizens of the United States, but our freedoms as people, so are you.

Analyzing Your Surroundings

I need to put together a list of things a person should never study if they want to ever view the world in anything like a normal fashion ever again. The color wheel, for one. Studying the way color relationships work gives you a pretty thorough ability to understand why certain things are certain colors (at least when it comes to human-created objects). You pretty go from thinking "oh, that looks nice," to thinking "Aha, what an interesting use of a vibrant triadic relationship in that purple and green bus logo with the yellow highlights," like the total pretentious douchebag you are.

Another thing not to study: how gender is performed and presented. Twisted pixel literally just announced a sequel to their "'Splosion Man" game, titled "Ms. 'Splosion Man" as a homage to Ms. Pac-Man. The picture announcing the release is this:

So, take a look at that. This is a female version of a male character (more or less) and despite being a freakish being of non-organic origin and thus without any meaningful physical markers of sex (as a creature whose sole purpose is to create violent explosions, it's probably wise to leave out a function for it to reproduce by), here we have a very clearly female character. Take a look (you probably already did) at dat ass. It literally bulges. You can also catch a glimpse of side cleavage. Clearly all of the scientists are madly in love with her/it (note little hearts) with the exception of the evil looking characters up top, who seem indifferent. Note the female evil character in the upper right (as marked by the pronounced lips and longer hair) appears to be angry. Jealous? Upset? Who knows.

Besides the very obvious assets of the character, notice a few other details marking her/its femininity. The bow on it/her head, the eyelashes long and curved, and her pink color. All additional and non-physiological symbols of femininity. More importantly, notice the fingers and the way her/its hands are splayed. That's a very feminine pose to put a figure in. When I was a kid in elementary school, I was subject to a somewhat absurd assertion that there was a "right" and "wrong" way for a guy to look at his fingernails. The correct way was to look at them with fingers folded over an upright palm, halfway to a fist. The wrong way was to view them extended from the back of the hand. Viewing your fingernails from this position meant you were gay, just as much as a limp wrist or a tongue in your cheek. I'm sure there are a bunch of interesting psychological reasons that having your fingers out and strangely arrayed is considered weaker. I think the simple fact hat it is not a fist probably suffices.

The teaser image isn't the only expression of femaleness, either. Check out the logo for the new game.

Notice how again, the character has her/it's fingers splayed in a strange and feminine manner. Also notice that her feet are, besides being more shapely than regular 'splosion man's, positioned like a ballerina doing a leap. Also note the cleavage and protruding butt. For proper comparison, here's the first game's logo:

Notice that unlike Ms. 'Splosion Man, regular 'Splosion Man's hands are balled into fists and his gait clearly denotes running in a fairly masculine manner. Even the angle at which he is viewed is different, as he's/it's demonstrated from a profile angle, while Ms. 'Splosion Man is viewed from a quarter angle, which according to this website with too many ads on it, is a more intimate and emotionally charged angle to view things by. Bonus thing to note, the shade of fuchsia or lavender or whatever that Ms. 'Splosion Man is is complementary to the shade of yellow that her bow is. Same with the logo.

Ultimately the result is otherwise perfectly enjoyable things becoming exercises in analysis where the struggle to understand a work supersedes the actual consumption and enjoyment of the work. I sometimes worry that if I learn too much about the world and its processes, I'll become completely unable to appreciate anything and only capable of recreating the exact creative steps that went in to building an expression. Eventually I will become so wrapped in referential icons and indices that I'll somehow morph into a postmodernist writer who can't write a damn word without referring to half a dozen other things within or without his own work.

Eye Smasher

I hate being busy almost as much as I hate not being so. I am still here in New Orleans, and one way or another I'm still alive. All this really guarantees is that I'm still here being opinionated and irascible. For one reason or another, my apartment I live in has been home to one person or another nearly nonstop for the last 3ish weeks or so. This coincides with a great deal of activity for me, searching out a job lead or meeting people or just in general doing things. It's been stressful, at the least. It's not been the fault of the guests themselves, but rather the situation as a whole. Compound that with an intense 50 hour work week for April and an intense series of events for myself (12 hour days at conventions, volunteering, babysitting) and you have something of a difficult period of time. I don't know how to properly express it. It's just been exasperating and exhausting.

Our first houseguest was a friend of a friend who is currently in flux at this point of her life. She's a single mom (well, she's in a relationship, but they're not married and he's not the father, so I'm not sure what that falls under) who got evicted with her boyfriend after he lost his job. She's a pretty nice person, and we agreed to have her for a while before she moved on to another friend of hers.

Next we had (for one night) a co-worker of April's who lives out in Metarie and was going to volunteer at the superdome but didn't want to take the eight buses (well, four) necessary to get there in the morning. She's pretty cool. We took her to a party. Then we totally served some nachos for like 8 hours.

Then we got Ina who is pretty bad-azz and not a problem guest at all. We've been doing this and that with her all while she's been here. She's super cool. Along with her, we got an artist who she is a big fan of and another artist who is tagging along? Driving? Zoe Boekbinder and Rita Burkholder, actually. They're both reasonable, though Zoe seems pretty distant. Rita is a darling who reminds me of my cousin and has been fantastic on their entire stay. Totally look up Helen Kellers Ukulele and buy like a zillion albums. It's ukulele music and very cool. Zoe goes by Zoe, so look up Zoe Boekbinder too; she's got a great voice.

So again, really it's nothing to do with the actual people we have over, it's just that we have people over combined with the fact that I've been all over the place, running from interviews to conventions to covering voodoo to April covering voodoo to deciding to dress like a woman on Halloween to changing my mind, to changing it back again but finding out that I would be literally too busy to do so, to volunteering at Prime-Time to volunteering with Charles and United for Peace to running to a Ceasefire meeting and so on and so forth. I really haven]'t had any time to vegetate. It's a good thing and a bad thing, really. I am happy that I'm not vegetating that much because it used to be pretty much all I did, but on the other hand, I really need to vegetate every so often, or I pretty quickly go insane. It all still pretty much falls under the category of competitive flailing, and damn am I flailing to my best.

Point point point. Everybody's got to have a point. My point is that I can't find the time to write, much less keep in touch or whatever. I haven't stopped, so I can't appreciate anything. Nothing has sunk in just yet. Here I am attempting to squeeze out a bit of writing, mostly by stealing time from myself. It's 2 in the morning, later than I want or can afford for it to be, but here I am writing. I hope this really isn't keeping April up, but I feel like I have to do this to retain any legitimacy as a writer. What is my point? What can I talk about?

Why don't I talk about drugs? So far everything I've drank or smoked has had more or less the same effect on me. They all make me very tired and unable to focus. Which might be interesting from a writing point of view (let's see what I write drunk! Whoo!) but I am rarely near a writing receptacle when this happens. I don't really converse better with people or anything, I don't suddenly magically lose all of my insecurities; I just become too tired to care. In some ways that's similar to when I do write, simply because I am also too tired and too detached from my readers to care what they think. So maybe that's what the goal is?

Judging by TV ads and what I hear from people all the time, getting intoxicated should be some gateway into a magical experience of social lubrication and joy. Introverts suddenly open up, Awkwardness is replaced by hilarity, and all are equal under the watchful eyes of inebriety. It's quite an expectation, and rather disappointing that it's not even remotely as cool as I'd been lead to believe. It is in fact so underwhelming that I wonder if I'm doing it wrong and I feel like I'm just around the corner from the "right" amount/combination of alcohol or the "perfect" toke. I don't really care that much though, and I feel bad for not caring. How do you turn down a beer or a hit by saying "yeah, this shit doesn't really do anything for me?" I'd almost rather be a teetotaler than a big jerk who just doesn't like the feeling all that much. It's a strange experience, to be sure.

So what is my point? Drugs are stupid? Don't do 'em fool? Not really. I think drugs just fall under yet another one of those categories of things that simply work out better for some people more than others. It's like a hobby. Some people are interested in it and derive legitimate value from it, but others are not interested or do not derive value from it. That label is probably only strange in light of the way that society tends to treat all of these things as being universally effective (and often universally harmful). It's just another culturally driven mindset. A stereotype, probably.

I guess I'll stop here because I really am eye-smashingly tired. I hope I can get some more writing done soon. Thanks for reading.