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hmmm

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Dragon Ball (1986)

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RIOT IN MY HEART FUCK YEAH

A riot in my heart, a dream of doors. I am a mad king, confetti flitting around my head, foam lining my gums. We played mad king of the foul forest, when we were kids, when we knew what was what. There is a path, and at its end a door. A fight. I fill a satchel for the road, handfuls of stuff vital to killing and fucking, cherry blossoms, handwritten love-notes, a pair of earbuds and an iPhone, a packet of hot chocolate, tupperware with a sip of milk and dry oatmeal, a ziplock of abalone, a scimitar, a vial of earwax—tools of a mad king. Play the path. Sleep beneath sticker stars. Ahead, a party, or death, or love, or anyway, a ruckus—

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I walk the old neighborhood. Barefoot, awash in dog-stink and fern-stink, twenty-three. Summer is aghast. A bruise spreads from my elbow to my wrist. I was born here, and I played here. Played king of the forest, girls-only, broken sticks and fairy wands required. Different now. Prettier. Cleaner. Fewer folk. If a tree is old and beautiful, it is obliterated by the city. My parents ponder leaving. In my back pocket, a crumpled old picture of me, one year old, a baby in a sunbeam, a god-ray. Filthy diaper strapped to my ass. Crying my throat raw. Is that not a miracle? Hunger, pain, appetite, majesty, and filth, slush in a diaper. I hope my parents decide to stay. I was born here, and here my heart’s beat sparked, whizzed with love.

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Everyday the same—absurd, monstrous, alien, enormous, slow—everyday, a swell of love. The sky a kaleidoscope, the world a loop, or a world-calculation, or a—

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HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER: WORLD SICKNESS

A new day. You gather your things. The sickness broils in your throat. Old dreams fizz in the back of your head. You press on. The world rolls out before you, an emblem of decay and ruin, a winding path, circuitous—all that remains, maybe. You’re a drifter, you drift. Everywhere the same. Monsters. Foliage, sparse some places, dense elsewhere, entwined with ruins. Other drifters, scribbling hints on paper. A village. Libraries, the haunts of animals and rusty machines, huts, temples. Old technology in the pockets of the dead. Somewhere, a cure. Day slides into dusk. A storm rages overhead, a blister in the sky, eking blood, puss, radiation on the ground. You camp for the night on a cliffside, you cough, you dream of something wretched.

In Hyper Light Drifter, this is your moment to moment. You’re a drifter, you drift. You seek a cure to your disease. Combat is slick, by the skin of your teeth, hack and slash. Exploration feels good, vital, demanding—some reviewers were frustrated by how hidden the bunkers and secret areas were, but I managed to get along okay. I never would have thought to bomb a wall to find a secret in The Legend of Zelda, for context. Hyper Light Drifter belongs to a similar tradition, both in the foundations of its gameplay and in its storytelling. That is, there is very little telling, and what is there is fairly obtuse. There is no written language in the game at all, only images, the swing of your sword and the thrumming of your noggin, as you dash and thrash through new areas and comb over old ones, seeking out their secrets. The atmosphere of the game, borne out in breathtaking pixel art and an eerie Disasterpeace score, aids in its obtuse nature, pulling you into a strange world and helping you feel befuddled. I have not finished the game, so perhaps there is more of a plot than I think. I don’t think it matters much—what matters is that the world is a hard place, and you are sick, ill fit to survive in this hard place, yet you manage to slip through the thinnest of cracks every day, persevering. Its perceived obtuseness is really a throwback to an old kind of experience, the kind that allowed its players to insert themselves into circumstances all at once beautiful, mysterious, strange, redeeming and relatable.

For me, there is the heart of the game. Perseverance, despite disease and physical weakness. The combat is fun, no doubt, but it is also stacked with significance. You persevere. Every encounter you beat, you also beat your sickness, sometimes only by an inch, a split second, a hair. If an act of artistic expression is also an act of naming, then Hyper Light Drifter names the harsh place in which you live, the harsh place that made you sick, and asks you to refute its logic, time and again, with every swing of your neat laser blade.

From BUTTONBOMBS, a small blog with small essays.

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Hyper Light Drifter (March 31, Steam) 

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Dressed the waifu up for Halloween

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there she goes

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Mako laying down the sass.

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So I drew some gay babs last night..

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The future of archaeology starts with No Man’s Sky

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the dead boy is poured back into his body i try to leave home but the ocean bares its teeth & where i’m from is where i’m from & not where i was put       it’s morning & my grandmother pins hot colors to the clothesline          i’m still on a date & the words say something to me in arabic fall backwards down his throat

Safia Elhillo, alternate ending (via mythaelogy)

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In my dream I apologize to everyone I meet. Instead of introducing myself, I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. In real life, oddly enough, when I am fully awake and out and about, if I catch someone’s eye, I quickly look away. Perhaps this too is a form of apology.

Claudia Rankine, from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (via bostonpoetryslam)

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