#and was all futile because it was a false prophecy the whole time

[zeb-z]

jrwi riptide 110

I would just re quote the entirety of the last ten minutes since the actual prophecy drop if I could but god just. “what if it’s nothing?” “well, was it fun?” “yeah” “then that’s all that matters” and “even if it’s already written I’m glad to share a story with you” bro. “We all have burdens that we did not ask to bear” or something along those lines.

just. a chosen one who’s told to find who he is, not just what the world tells him to be. no longer comforted by the idea of destiny, because the burden is so much and he wants to be more than destiny. but he’s so worried he’s nothing without it. he never measured up, and now the destiny he’s learned his entire life is false, and he just wants to seize his own life and make his own choices and carve his own path, but who is he if he doesn’t serve this purpose? if his destiny has been proven to be based off false prophecies, if he isn’t his titles, if he isn’t predestined and already written, then who is he? what do they see?

and the fact that his friends and crew all reassure him with the little things. the blue of his eyes, his courage, his kindness. someone who smokes weed to disastrous results, who throws gold into the ocean even though they’re meant to be pirates. someone who faces danger at their side and doesn’t back down, but laughs. someone who tries to be good.

not a hero of prophecy. not the chosen one. but their captain. their friend. their family. and even if all of that was all predestined and written and free will is an illusion, then fuck it. they’re written chasing freedom and fun, they’re written doing some good in the world, and above all else they’re written together - and that means that it isn’t nothing.

[liberty1776]

Troubling Worldview of the 'Rapture-Ready' Christian by Bill Barnwell

Well, actually, it does matter. I will submit that the popular doctrines of the Left Behind series When the subject of the "end-times" comes up, many Christians and non-Christians don’t want to talk about it. Some Christians, annoyed with all the competing theories and terminology just say, "What difference does it make? Jesus is coming back and I just need to be ready." Non-Christians just assume that since Christianity isn’t true, then the whole issue doesn’t matter.pose very real threats not only to Christianity, but also to the wider culture.

Probably most conservative Protestants (though not all of us) believe that humanity is certainly in the final generation of life on earth as we currently know it. Not that we "could be," but that "we must be." That’s a big distinction. They believe this because of their views on a couple key Biblical texts. The first is the Olivet Discourse. This discourse by Jesus about the "end of the age" can be found in Mark 13, Matthew 24, and Luke 21. Dispensationalists – a group that believes God has two separate prophetic programs for Israel and the Church and generally believes that Christians will be removed from the earth before a final tribulation – see all of the events or signs spoken of by Jesus as referring to events that are happening now or going to happen very soon. Never mind that Jesus was first and foremost referring to events that would occur within his own disciples’ lifetime (Matthew 24:34). They believe that nothing past chapter 3 in the book of Revelation has occurred yet. It is all in the future, and all relates to the tribulation period, which true Christians will avoid.

But the New Testament says nothing about a seven-year tribulation. The book of Revelation refers to a 3.5–year period – five different times. They are most likely referring to the same time period. Dispensationalists believe by prophetic necessity a number of things. First, they assume that the world must get worse in just about all ways. Second, they assume that Daniel 9:27 calls for the rebuilding of a Third Jewish Temple at the site of the Dome of tAnother key text is Daniel 9:27. It is from this verse alone that we get the idea of a "seven-year tribulation" during the end times.he Rock. Therefore, prophetic necessity demands that the current Islamic al-Aqsa mosque must be torn down to build this new Jewish Temple. Halfway through the tribulation period, the antichrist will come and exalt himself in the new Jewish Temple, stop sacrifices in the Temple, break a peace treaty he had earlier made with Israel, and proclaim himself to be God. They get all this from cutting and pasting Daniel 9:27, Matthew 24:15, 2 Thessalonians 2:4 together and then associating those passages with everything that will be going on in Revelation 4–19.

There are all sorts of problems with these interpretations. First of all, the New Testament says nothing about a "pretribulational rapture." To see how bankrupt that position is,  The evidence for a "pre-trib" rapture is not just weak, it is non-existent. Regarread my offering on the subject here.ding the key verse of Daniel 9:27, see my refutation of the dispensationalist position here. Read those, especially if you are a dispensationalist who already presupposes that I’m wrong.

Once you begin thinking of the implications involved, you begin to see why this doctrine is so dangerous to everybody. Dispensationalists seem to have a preoccupation with war. In fact, right now, dispensationalist mega-church pastor John Hagee is preaching that a war with Iran is not only the right thing to do, but is prophetically inevitable. Apparently, Bible prophecy demands a showdown with Iran. You see, if you aren’t on the side of war, then you aren’t on the side of God. Talk of peace now becomes irrelevant. It’s God’s will that we be militarists. In fairness, not all dispensationalists are militarists. Our own Laurence Vance is an example. But they are in a definite minority. The prevailing worldview of dispensationalism glorifies war, militarism, and the State.

The dispensationalist view of Daniel 9:27 provides some troubling implications as well. They don’t care that tearing down the al-Aqsa mosque would result in a regional war and cause all sorts of global distress. This would not be a bad thing in their minds. They believe that it was all foreordained and is a sign that the end of the world would be soon upon us.

And who will be the one bringing peace to the Middle East in this popular end-time paradigm? Not Jesus, but the Antichrist. Therefore, talk of Middle East peace during this current "dispensation" is not from Jesus, but the Antichrist. WhenAlso, if you buy into these interpretations, talks of peace in the Middle East are futile. Jews and Muslims must continue killing each other at high rates. dispensationalists hear talk of peace summits or treaties in the Middle East, they assume it must have evil origins and be antichristic. If that’s the cause, why bother trying to make the world a better place? All we need to do is be good Christians and wait for our ticket out of this earth and make way for the Antichrist.

Dispensationalists are numerous and popular. Well-connected preachers like Hagee have political connections. Dispensational preachers and lobbyists have the ear of the White House and are directly trying to influence foreign policy based on their very questionable theological views, which, by the way, are less than 200 years old. This is more than just a quirky theology that doesn’t affect those who do not hold it. Dispensationalists want to bring about world events that would have catastrophic implications for other Christians and for non-Christians.

If they are correct, why should any of us bother trying to make the world a better place? Dispensationalists get very annoyed at this question. They say, "Final peace on earth will only come through Christ!" They basically insist Christians trying to do good in the world should only focus on "spiritual things." Trying to change social institutions for the better is futile and presumptuous. Apparently the only two options are handing the world over to Satan or believing that humans can do everything in their own strength. Not much room for nuance here.

Ironically, many dispensationalists are involved in the Religious Right movement and want to stem abortions, ban gay marriage and make America more Christian. But at the same time they believe in a theology that says the world can only get worse, that there’s nothing any of us can do about it, and that it’s about to get so bad Christians are going to be taken off of the earth. If the ship is irreversibly sinking, why try and patch up the leaks?

If you need more proof that many dispensationalists hold troubling worldviews, just take a visit over to the Rapture Ready message board. The main site is one of the bigger dispensationalist/pretribulational sites on the web. You can read for yourselves how they view the world, how they can’t wait to escape it, and their obsession with war.

One angry pre-tribber wrote me a few weeks back. He had this to say:

When the RAPTURE of the CHURCH takes place, and mark my words it will, maybe them you will see the light!  After you have been left behind you are going to look back on all the people that you deceived, who will probably be in your face at that time, and hopefully repent of the false gospel that you were teaching!  It's not to late to be saved during the 7 year tribulation period but it will be harder when you hear that Christians, who become Christians after the Rapture of the Church, are being beheaded for the witness of Jesus!  Hopefully you and those who partake of your beliefs will see the light before Christ comes for the Church!

Notice in his mind I’m not even a real Christian. The reason? Because I happen to have a different position than he does on the issue of the "rapture." I’ll also apparently be too much of a coward to "convert" during the "7 year tribulation" because other people who become Christians after the pre-tribulational rapture are being beheaded. Ever notice with people who so strongly believe this doctrine that they assume everyone who will be "left behind" is going to be absolutely clueless? Maybe I too will just assume aliens came and abducted the "true Christians." Apparently I’d be too scared to be beheaded, even though I’d find myself instantly in heaven along with all the real Christians who were taken up in the rapture.

Finally notice the great confidence of this guy. He is so convinced of his position that only an idiot or heretic would disagree. Well, I challenge people like this, and the crew over at Rapture Ready to actually put their interpretations up against the Scriptures and think about the logic and implications of their beliefs.

The logic and implications are clear. Society is going to hades in a handbasket. There’s little we can do to stem the tide of evil. The Middle East must further deteriorate. Anyone who disagrees with Israel’s foreign policy is opposing God. The third most important site to Muslims must be crushed to make way for a new Jewish Temple. Good Christians should support the building of a new temple with new animal sacrifices taking place inside of it (compare Hebrews 10 to the theology of Darby and Hal Lindsey). And in a strange sense, war is kinda good and peace is kinda bad – since war is a sign that the end

[theholycovenantrpg]

CONGRATULATIONS, ALI! YOU’VE BEEN ACCEPTED FOR THE ROLE OF ORIAS.

Admin Cas: Ugh, there’s so much I loved about your application, Ali. Orias is a tricky nut to crack, I think, because it would be easy to mistake their desire for worship as a desire for power, or their want of a legacy for sovereignty, but you didn’t. Their magic and incantations are such an important part of who they are — in fact, it’s the very essence of them — and you didn’t shy away from that. I think what particularly impressed me was the way that you weaved together all their separate motivations and related them to their status as the Vice of Greed: you said it best yourself, although Orias takes and takes and takes, they are also always building. I genuinely can’t wait to see what you do with our self-proclaimed False Prophet! Please create and send in your account, review the information on our CHECKLIST, and follow everyone on the FOLLOW LIST. Welcome to the Holy Land!

OUT OF CHARACTER

Alias | Ali.

Age | 23. 

Personal Pronouns | She/her.

Activity Level | 5/10. I’m finishing up my last year of nursing school so there’s certainly days where I need to buckle down and focus. My lectures and clinical hours also happen to be quite long, so I’ll most likely pop up around the nighttime.  

Timezone | EST. 

Triggers | REMOVED.

How did you find the group?  | It was whispered to me in my sleep (Rosey gave me a lil’ rec). 

Current/Past RP Accounts | Insert ‘it’s been 84 years’ meme here.  

IN CHARACTER

Character | Orias. 

What future plots do you have in mind for the character? | 

I.                             THOU CHOSE TO FEED THY DEMONS. 

Greed, as fitting as it is, has made Orias insatiable above all else. Their heedful, yet steady rise to conquer a sense of blood-curdling worship, succession, and power is absolutely inevitable. Whether it’s by a cunning, violent force of hand or simply mere influence among distant, anguished wanderers, Orias has lived enough lives to know where they stand among a world full of futile creatures – or so they believe. I love the idea of Orias acknowledging the strength and power they hold between bared teeth and nimble fingertips. The idea of them feeding into that thought, turning a slight nose up at the inconsequentiality of their fellow demons, angels, and gifted mortals. In their own sense of the word, they are some sort of God and they’ll be gaped at as if they were one – whether you condemn the thought of their depraved divinity or not. I’m interested to explore how far their greed pushes them into believing they can modestly oversee all factions with the intent of enforcing the certainty of their future, heredity, dark sorcery, and lineage onto all beings. What will they give up in return for bleeding, unwavering worship? Will they ever be fully satiated? How callously will they tip toe the line of thunderous, earth-shattering power? Who will they decide to turn away from in the process – especially when no one is keeping a close eye on their every waking gesture? Will they succeed? Or will they fall just like Lucifer once had? Only time will tell.    

II.                         THOU CHOSE INSATIABLE GREED ABOVE ALL ELSE. 

When Lucifer had fallen from his own grace, Orias knew what they must do in order to continue their destiny, their succession, and everything in between. It took nearly little to no thought when they began to pry pieces of themself from the flesh of his skin – from the very carved bones of his ribs. You must carry on, as you were always meant to do, they thought. And that is exactly what they did, as they carried their invocations and prophecies under granite-grey feathers and silver veils. Now, don’t be so foolish. If Orias was able to look at the fall of Lucifer as a mere inconvenience to their overall plan, why would it not be the same for Damien? 

I want to explore and test the idea of Orias’ loyalty to Damien (as well as the other Vices) for the sole fact that he is the Leader of the Vices. A title they do not believe he should be able to harness for as long as he lives – a title they believe could belong to them. To Judas. It is an idea that could potentially further ensure their destiny – a position that would bleed into the pages of their legacy, along with all of their ink-stained balms and primordial secrets. If woven correctly (and approved by Judas’ and Damien’s mun, as well as the admins), this could potentially be a piece to the puzzle of their character arc. In this, I would want to explore the probability of Orias gradually turning their back on Damien and the Vices as a whole. The manipulativeness behind their biting, eloquent syllables as they speak cunningly ill of his leadership to others. Perhaps Orias even convinces Judas that the two of them could rule in equal measure – that they could promise to take the Realm of Infernum to beautiful, earth-shattering heights and smother the idea of Damien’s iron-clad God complex (and maybe – just maybe Orias fucks over Judas in the process). And all but bone-achingly slow, Orias sinks Damien’s stature a little further. To get to this point, Orias knows that they must be weary of Abaddon, Judas, and Azazel – that they must study Damien and play the part of an abiding, loyal Vice, whether they’re able to execute the will of their leader or not. But alas, Orias awaits the vision that depicts his downfall – whether it is by their force of hand or not.

Overall, I want to ensure and promise adaptability on my end when plotting with other muns. I’m wholeheartedly open to changing/altering anything mentioned – I’m even more open to Orias failing miserably, considering how tightly woven Abaddon, Judas, Azazel, and Damien are. I’m very much just interested in developing and exploring their subtle ruthlessness, gilded serpent-like ways, and sheer manipulativeness behind all covetous actions – no matter the outcome. 

III.                        THOU CHOSE WAVERING COMPANIONSHIP. 

As much as they wield their witchcraft and gape at unexpecting, anguished wanderers for some sort of promised lineage in return, it rings true that Orias has never expected anything from Azazel. I would love to explore the overall theme of this dynamic considering that Orias has never really seemed to love anything at all – nor have they granted another being without a heavy price. To have a creature of Orias’ extent love you so deeply, so openly, so raw – it’s dangerous. I so badly want to tap into that side of them, even if it’s just for a quiet moment in time. You see all of the greed, the give-and-take, the tug-and-pull – but you never see the honest grit and rose-tinted tears that go into protecting someone so fiercely. For someone that is so used to taking without caution, how does this meld into everything they’ve ever known? Will their loyalty to each other face as a haunting barrier (I would love to explore the extent of their loyalty – perhaps even test how far they would be willing to go for each other considering Orias has never quite remained loyal to anything)? Would Orias’ biting love for Azazel take precedence over their desire for heredity? For a legacy? For worship and a nearly promised destiny? And if something ever happened to Azazel, would Orias burn everything to the ground? Or would they pry the shattered pieces of themself from her ribcage just like they had once done with Lucifer? And in retrospect, would they guard Azazel the same way if they knew she may not even be able to burn her very own kingdom for them? 

I’m really so interested to see how Orias molds to this connection. The initial rise as they climb over clambered skeletons to reach a state of absolute influence and raw worship – will they bring Azazel along and respect her own vocations? Will they clutch onto the first creature that has made them feel full and so devoutly satiated? Or will they forget where their loyalties lie and extinguish the splintering fire that Azazel has pitted in their core? 

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | If it was detrimental to the flow of the plot then absolutely.  

IN DEPTH

Driving Character Motivation | What motivates your character’s actions? How does it define them? Where does this motivation stem from?

It starts with Lucifer, clutches to Judas, sinks its bared teeth into the flesh of the Vices – but always ends with them. At large, there are a multitude of staples that contribute to Orias’ actions. As beautiful and as wickedly raw as they are, nothing that comes from their steady hand is sincere – and everything they offer the Holy Land is all but a mockery. Each passing conversation, each calculating glance, each faux notion – it’s all woven from the extenuating pillars they have built upon.

The entirety of their driving motivation seems to inhabit the notions of sacrilegious “greed”, divine “worship”, a bleeding sense of “power”, and a promised “lineage”. Whispered at the sky, the moon, and the stars, it is believed that this is all but what truly keeps the feathers of their wings stirring across the holiest of lands. Never their fellow creatures, never the Realm of Infernum, never any external force – but the outwardly prominent self-factors that dare to devour them whole.

Interestingly enough, I also believe that Orias is motivated by their abilities (the power they harness, the ability to receive something promising in exchange for it, etc.) – prognostications, incantations, the subtle but forceful touch of a wicked alchemist. They’re very much aware of their potential as the Original Witch and in turn, I think somewhat of a God complex, as well as festering greed, became a main driving force for them. It’s also no secret that Orias is convinced they’re meant to leave a blistering mark on everything they touch – and for a heavy price. Because if they weren’t, why would they be granted such heady capabilities?       

To sum this absolute mess up, Orias was never brought into this world to want or need anything besides things that contributed to their own personal gain – worship (whether it’s honest or not), a molded destiny, and a warm body to carry all of their new rites and tomes (a very one-track mind if you will). So, these outright motivations, goals, desires – it all derived from their wants, their needs, their abilities and I truly believe that’s what makes them such an unwavering force (as well as extremely selfish). 

Character Traits | OPTIONAL. Please list 3 positive traits and 3 negative traits that you identify in the character you’re applying for. 

Positive – Calculating, Influential, Authoritative, Meticulous, Entrancing.  

Negative – Insatiable, Patronizing, Egocentric, Despotic, Duplicitous. 

In-Character Para Sample | There is no minimum or maximum word count to this para sample, but we do encourage that you highlight your character’s VOICE and MANNERISMS within it.

Macerating chaos. Outlying, starving howls that would bleed onto canvases for eons to come. The unrestrained syllables of Judas advising the rise. The uproar – the new age. But Orias heard nothing of it. Not even the unbridled rage that flooded past Lucifer’s lips, as the pillars he built upon began to deteriorate underneath his unsparing touch. 

And despite the utter destruction that threatened to swallow them whole, Orias almost looked angelic against the ruins – because not all carnivores came in teeth and claws. Nor did the loss of such features extinguish their want for blood – for starving glory. There are carnivores that hunt in stillness, in elegance, and in false prophecies. They come in heavenly entities, spines exposed to the moon’s bridal-white burn in webs of elaborate lace, throats armored in a rib of emeralds gleaming wet with starlight, the moon cut down and born as moonstones, and strangling silk ties that pooled like opaque salt water. 

There is distraction in their decadence and they are apart of the living breeds of predators that mask themselves in the distraction that innocuous beauty and debauchery allows – the drip of bleeding meat on the mouth dies out to rose-tinted lips, granite-grey wings and silver veils devouring all suspicion in its extravagant darkness. 

Good. Let that be a warning. 

Orias, whose frame was snug in translucent silk and drooping pearls, drifted over and neared the entirety of his putrescent stature. Their last encounter felt almost sincere but it was anything but. He gaped at them expectedly – as if they were meant to go to war for him. How foolish, they thought. But they’ll allow the sentiment to die with him and his kingdom. 

Fingertips reached out to nimbly splay over the crescents of his jaw, their wings nearly caging them in – almost as if to protect the disingenuous moment from prying eyes. “Oh Lucifer.” Bared teeth. A hollowed coo. “You must have known this was your fate all along, no?” An unholy smile that did not quite reach the sable of their eyes. “It is best if you accept it.”

He clutched onto them. They recoiled in revulsion. 

“Oh but you see, I cannot stay.” I am taking every piece with me. 

Aching silence – accompanied by a tight-lipped plea and a knowing stare. But Orias did not flinch.

Instead, they removed themself from his demoralized hold, granite feathers spanning behind them in the process – as if they were mirroring the image of an eclipsed halo. 

“May you find harmony with all you encounter.” A desolate hiss. A depraved leer. A vacant heart. And then they were gone.   

And darkness followed soon after. 

[blessuswithblogs]

The Best Games of the Decade, By My Estimations

With only a good month (ACTUALLY LIKE A GOOD 24 HOURS HA HA I WROTE THIS BACK IN NOVEMBER) or so left of the 2010s (we are regrettably not quite far along enough to really start giving them jaunty names like "the Roaring Twenties" yet, but soon we will be free of this chronological no man's land) I find my thoughts turning to my enduring hobby slash interest slash everlasting shame: video games. While a decade is ultimately a fairly arbitrary point of reference, in the business of video gamesdom, ten years is a small eternity and some very significant games have graced us since the clock struck midnight on January 1st, 2010.

 I might still be too young for this kind of nostalgia, granted, but I can't help but think about the game experiences I've had in the last ten years that have been altogether Important to Me. I am less interested in ranking these titles than I am in exploring why they made such an impact on me, and why, if we were to borrow the esteemed verbiage of one Sid Meyer, they stood the test of time. ...or less so, if they came out more recently. Sometimes on these lists I sort of scrimp and scrabble to actually fill it up with enough games and I have to sort of cheat and put things on there I haven't really played, but fortunately I am not so destitute that I have only been able to play one new game a year since this decade began. To that end, this is more of a personal list than usual, that will have less to do with "well the game was kind of a Big Deal........" and more to do with "well the game was kind of a Big Deal to ME."

Dark Souls The First:

This game will likely find its way onto many such lists in the coming days, because it is such a singular thing. Honestly, I would put Demon's Souls on here too, but that was actually like. 2009ish? At any rate, its spiritual successor was a marked improvement in most ways, expanding upon the core design tenets that made the unassuming FROM software ps3 title such an unexpected success: deliberate gameplay that demanded players go slow and respect both enemies and environment until they were sufficiently skilled and experienced, boss fights against extremely memorable monsters and also sometimes trees, strange asynchronous multiplayer that worked in spite of itself, and a meticulously designed world filled with oddities, grotesqueries, mysteries, and tragedies. Dark Souls was a phenomenon. "The Dark Souls of _____" is dig at gormless games journalists that endures and is relevant to this day. It created a whole subgenre that remains fairly untapped because of how much of a gamble it is to really go in on what made Dark Souls good in a game without that kind of name recognition and marketing blitz, and it changed the way the zeitgeist thought about video games in a lot of ways.

Inscrutability is an incredibly important part of the Souls experience. Abandon all hope of transparency, ye who enter here, because you're not getting it. The games were designed with the intent of being a sort of collaborative community puzzle, where players who stumbled on secrets and treasures in the game could leave down messages for others to alert them to hidden prizes - or just try to bait somebody to jump down a bottomless pit. Patches does that. A lot. It's kind of this thing. There is a very specific mood and atmosphere that Miyazaki and company were going for with these games that creates a sort of artistic catch-all for complaints I would level at basically anything else. "These weapons are poorly balanced." Yep. It's not really trying to be balanced. "Half of these systems are unexplained and nonsensical." Oh boy are they ever. "A giant man-sized baby just invaded my world and tried to kill me with a ladle." Yes, yes he did. The bizarre, fever dream ambiance of Dark Souls is enhanced by all of this. It will put a lot of people off and I can't really say "oh you just don't get it." because like no in any other game this would be bullshit nonsense for idiots. Souls just kind of makes it work by being compellingly baffling.

This murkiness also serves to highlight one of the core conceits of the game: the simple joy of greater mastery. Dark Souls starts you out with very little. You have nothing, know nothing, are nothing, and all the npcs you meet are pretty sure you're going to fuck off and die pretty much as soon as you break line of sight. On your first time through, that's probably true, too. The skeletons in the graveyard are infamous. As you claw your way through the game, as you learn more about it, you start to see measurable progress getting made. What was once a bunch of very tired men in armor giving you unsettlingly sinister laughs is now the outline of a story, vague but extant, with more waiting to be discovered. Where you used to flail around and die to random hollows in the undead burg, now you dance circles around them and paste them in one or two hits with your fancy weapons (or enormous wooden club, depending). A world that was once borderline impossible to actually traverse gradually opens up and becomes more familiar. In Dark Souls, death serves a purpose, and that purpose is not actually to block your progress. Its purpose is to get you to learn the game and get better at it. It's actually very player empowering in a way a lot of 'press F to pay respects' theme park rides are not. I'm probably treading a very thin line between thoughtful analysis (ha) and "you cheated not only the game, but yourself." here, but I'm going to stand firm in my belief that the way Souls games endeavor to make you improve yourself over time is a legitimate and meritorious way to design a game.

Of course, Dark Souls the First is very rough around the edges in spots. The second half of the game is somewhat infamous for being unpolished and kind of slapdash. The online was questionable, the PC port was laughable until the community went in and fixed it, Lost Izalith is a whole fucking thing, the works. The fact that it's so good in spite of the rough spots is, I think, what made it such a singular game. I'm one of those hopelessly sentimental idiot bitches who thinks that things that are imperfect are kind of charming and compelling in ways that very cookie cutter, by the book, technically competent but aesthetically bankrupt things are not. Miyazaki had a vision when he made this game, and that vision created an enduring legacy. That's worthy of respect in a way not many games are. It's messy and flawed but those flaws are just kind of endearing because they're proof that the developers were trying to push boundaries and be ambitious and make something new and interesting.

Dark Souls The Second:

Dark Souls 2 has a kind of weird reputation in the online net-o-sphere. There are as many opinions about this game as there are people who have played it. Sometimes more, honestly. I spent a lot of time kind of convinced it wasn't that good until some things clicked and I realized it was HELLA good. That you kind of need the DLC to get the whole picture is... unfortunate, but such is the age we live in. Going into this game, I thought that a second Dark Souls was unnecessary. The first had ended satisfactorily, and I had no desire to see FROM get tied down to the world of Lordran. The quote B Team unquote that developed 2 seemed to agree with me, and created what is one of the most metacognitive games I have ever played. Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. When I say metacognitive, I do not mean it in the usual facile sense of, say, whatever Jonathan Blow has churned out recently that beats you over the head with the fact that you're playing a video game and you should probably feel bad about it or the way Doki Doki Literature Club does the Epic Subversions! of visual novels by trying to convince you that the game knows it is a game, but failing because it cannot overcome the limitations that it has as a static, unchanging lump of code. Dark Souls 2 aims higher. And you know me - I always try to aim high.

Dark Souls 2 deals with cycles. Most notably, cycles of futility. Cycles that are so enduring and perpetual that it matters not how you choose to resolve it, it will simply keep going no matter what you do. Drangleic is a hollow simulacrum of Lordran - and that is exactly the point. The familiarity and design consistencies between the two games is intentional. The curse of life is the curse of want. It took me a long time to really understand what Dark Souls 2 meant by that. The World of Dark Souls 2 is a sort of unending purgatory. Thousands upon thousands of undead have made the journey, linked the fire, perhaps chose to become the Dark Lord instead, only for some other undying fool to go and light it anyway. Each time, a new order is built upon the bones of the old, and in time, joins its forebears in the ashes of history. When I beat the game the first time and felt that the ending was unsatisfying, I failed to realize that was, again, the point. If the game had shipped with all endings in it, I think I would have been less miffed, but, well, the curse of life is the curse of downloadable content. If you choose to take the throne, link the fire, you have essentially accomplished nothing. Another age of Fire will begin, and then end, and so on and on into the ages, an unending litany of suffering and violence, because people cannot let go of what once was. They seek and scrabble to claim scraps of glory in a systemic nightmare of self-fulfilling prophecies and false dichotomies. When Aldia eventually arrives with the DLC packs, things really start to take shape.

Dark Souls 2 is a commentary on itself. An admission of the futility of trying to recapture the unique spark of the first game, and the necessity of doing something -different-. The playerbase hated it on release. It was both not enough like the first game and too much like the first game. It wasn't like, reviewbombing on metacritic hate, but the consensus rapidly became that 2 was just worse than the first game and kind of a bummer, a half-hearted cashgrab by a "B Team" while the really talented developers worked on Bloodborne. So, basically, they proved 2's central thesis completely correct. A hollow cycle of just repeating and iterating on what has come before serves nobody. In the words of Straid of Olaphis, "it is all a curse." That is the true curse in Dark Souls 2. An undead might link the fire to try and preserve their fading sense of self and memory, but it is but a temporary measure, a prolonging of greater suffering by bowing to an order designed to oppress. Before the Ringed City was ever a thing, Agdyne and Vendrick were here telling us about how Gwyn was so covetous of his own perceived right to rule that he cursed all of humankind into a twisted state of mutually exclusive ideas. Die as a mortal in the flame, or endure as an undead husk in the darkness, bereft of heart and soul. Or... does it even matter? All of this has happened before. It will all happen again.

Those who slave away eternally under this paradigm are doomed to never find peace or fulfillment, because it was not designed that way. Gwyn's fear was so great that he got entangled in his own karmic vortex, reincarnating over and over again with his other lord friends in slightly different forms and circumstances that would continue, eternally, to make the same mistakes in the pursuit of the same misguided goals. Aldia, the Scholar of the First Sin, is presented as one of the few beings in this entire misbegotten affair with an inkling of what is really going on. Both he and Vendrick knew that Drangleic was destined for the same dreg heap as every other civilization built upon the power of the soul, but all of their efforts to prevent this fall were for naught, because they were all confined by the same twisted system in which there can be no change or joy. It is only after Vendrick loses his nerve entirely and fades away into a mindless hollow and Aldia loses everything in his increasingly unhinged and ethically questionable experiments that he realizes that they were doing it all wrong.

I think I've probably gone on too long at this point so I'll try to be brief: the "true" ending of the game, made available after all 3 DLCs were released, involves gathering the power of truly mighty souls in a crown and using them as a sort of... loophole. The empowered crown does not cure the curse of undeath. What it does is prevent -hollowing-. The degradation of heart and mind. And after the final battle, you leave the throne behind. But there is a very important difference here from the Dark Lord ending of the first game. By finding this loophole, and rejecting Gwyn's order entirely, you and you alone have broken free from the endless cycle of suffering, and by doing so, perhaps gained the knowledge necessary to take the first steps into forging a new path entirely. Beyond the reach of Light, beyond the scope of Dark.

So yeah basically it's like Dark Souls the First, with some improvements and changes and what have you, so it's got the same fun to play deliberate explorey dark holey kind of thing going on, it just takes the concepts and runs with it to places I never would have expected a game to ever go. It is legitimately one of the only metanarratively aware games I have played (that I can remember, anyway) that sticks the landing, because it is not obnoxiously explicit about it. Undertale was fun and a worthwhile game by any reasonable metric, but it falls into the same trap as all the others: when you are acknowledged as the player of a game in anything more than a briefly comedic bit of 4th wall breaking, any hope of cleverness or thoughtfulness goes out the window, because it brings to light an ironclad truth of the medium: you, the player, are just as constrained in what you can do as the NPCs in the game, who are also fake. When they start haranguing you about about brotherkilling or being a cheating visual novel boyfriend or possibly girlfriend or what have you, it's just. Meaningless. It is a contrivance of the developer, specifically included in the game as a programmed possibility designed to be experienced.

Dark Souls 2 gets around this by not engaging with the player on that level of metanarrative. It deals much more in metaphor and allegory. It's not, like, especially subtle, but it is subtle enough to let your mind draw parallels without immediately blaring at you in comic sans "THIS IS A VIDEO GAME, KID" and taking you out of it entirely. It's a fine line to walk. A barrier between worlds has to be maintained for these stories to work. I'm the kind of player who will never do a renegade run of Mass Effect because I hate being mean and nasty for no reason, even to bits of code in a game, because I try to engage with it all in good faith and do my best to let myself buy into the illusion that these bits of code are characters with thoughts and feelings. When an angry flower man pops up and says "OOHOOHOO LOOKS LIKE YOU JUST RELOADED THE GAME BECAUSE YOU KILLED SOMEBODY" my first thought isn't "wow fucked up..." it's "oh well there goes my suspension of disbelief" because like. If you're going to call me out on that then fuck I can just go into the code and make you say "there is a frightful hobgoblin haunting europe, and its name is ligma" and like. Yep. Bow before my mastery. I guess. I don't want to get into a slapfight like that with Toby Fox. He seems like a nice person.

I don't know maybe this is just something unique to me, and other people can deal with these stories without immediately becoming depressed by the deeply artificial nature of it all. It's complicated. I will say that I like Undertale a lot, but the reasons that I like it come very much from the character interactions, spritework, and music, and not the time Flowey closed my game. It's just the same pony island bullshit as its always been. "OooOOoOOoh uninstall the game or you're actually just going back and messing with events for your own perverse satisfactionNNNnNNnN" fuck off dipshit it's all fake garbage for idiot children and I am not causing a cartoon skeleton existential agony by considering that maybe I could play this fun game that I liked and payed cash dollars for again. Now, all this considered, my next game on the list might be surprising...

Nier: Automata

Okay so let's just get this out of the way. Nier does a very famous thing at the end when you get the true ending where you are given the choice to forfeit your saved data in order to help another player get past the final boss, which is... the credits. So how is this different? Well, for one thing, it's not like the central narrative conceit of the game. The sexy android psychodrama functions perfectly well without it. It's kind of its own thing. It's... an expression of hope, kind of. An admission that you -care- about the fates of these characters, in spite of being bits of code, because their personalities and their world and the way they interact are all compelling and endearing, and you would give up something of tangible worth and importance to maybe give them a chance for a better outcome in somebody else's game, too. It's a very strange thing that I can think of no real equivalent for. You even get to put a little personalized message on the extra shmup ship you send over to help some other player get through to the end. It's an act that... kind of exists outside of the story, but also kind of in it. I think the important thing here is that the conceit is that you are making this sacrifice to help somebody else, not because a small goat child said something Foreboding. It's a confirmation that if a game makes you feel things, makes you think, maybe it wasn't just a waste of time.

So enough about that. What about like the other 99% of the game? A lot of people in my peer group are super sweet on the original Nier: Gestalt game. I played through it. It was... okay. Like it absolutely had very charming characters and story and all of that but it was just kind of a slog to play through and I kind of wished the entire game was just that segment where you're playing a text adventure. Automata continues to have very charming characters and story and all of that, but it also actually like. It's fun? To hit the buttons? Like, that Platinum pedigree isn't just for show. It's not the most technical game they've ever made, but it's fun and varied (shmups! shmups!) and there's some fun character customization and you even have a self-destruct switch which is always hilarious. The real attraction is the narrative, visuals, and gorgeous music, but it's also just a solid swordswingy dodgy robot smashy time irrespective of that. So like. Yeah.

The story and characters are very interesting and well done and goes to some very dark and uncomfortable places sometimes about the nature of memory, artificial intelligence, the often arbitrary labels we give ourselves, and the implications of sexy robot men with no junk. The nice thing about Nier Automata is that the events in game are fairly straightforward and relayed in a way that people who don't compulsively watch lore videos can understand without too much difficulty, so I don't really need to go into a detailed summary of why it's genius because of tHe AlLeGoRy. It kind of speaks for itself, for the most part. Does 9S want to fuck 2B or destroy 2B? Maybe some other verb entirely! We may never know. Well, I do know. He wants to fuck her. That is obvious. But it does not preclude the other, which is a salient and disconcerting point the game tries to make with that whole sequence. 9S has really had a rough time of it, you know? All that stuff in his own game and then he pops up on the First only to get his face caved in by the Warrior of Darkness. Rotten luck.

Basically, Yoko Taro sets out to say some things with his strange brainchild about androids with very big butts, but when you think about it, the attractiveness of the YorHa androids is also kind of a statement, too. If you're building something in your image, wouldn't you want to make it as sexy as possible? I would. Like, if you could make your machine children smoking hot, why wouldn't you? It's only polite. Nobody wants to be an ugly robot. Maybe the machine lifeforms would be having a better time of it all if they weren't put in categories like "short stubby." Anyway. Saying things. He says things. The game is thought provoking and evocative and at times very very sad. I love to cry. More on that later. I feel like I'm coming up a little short on this after my small dissertation on Dark Souls 2, but sometimes you need to fuckin. Get that kind of thing off your chest. Automata is challenging, but not Souls 2 challenging, where you kind of have to look in all the nooks and crannies and paid DLC packs to really get what it's trying to say. Though I think you fight the president of Square Enix in one of the Nier DLCs. That's pretty intellectually formidable.

Bloodborne:

It is no secret that I love the Bloodborne. It's very fun, very tight, usually works right most of the time, blood vials are shit but what can you do, and is one of the most visually arresting games like, ever. Ever ever. Behold! A Paleblood Sky! indeed. It's got the Souls pedigree to make combat fun and challenging, but its also very squishy and visceral and kind of grody in a good way because it ties in heavily to the themes of what really separates people from "beasts" and how more often than not we're just fooling ourselves. We're all rancid beasts. Hunger makes monsters of us all. It is this thematic strength, and the uncommon aplomb with which the game takes a hard left turn into "wait what the fuck???" town, that I regard it so highly. It's a game with a lot to say, especially about our narrow view of "intelligence" and the imagined "right" it grants us to subjugate and victimize those we deem inferior. The Victorian setting is no accident - a lot of the horror in the game draws heavily from classic colonialist sentiment and the erroneous conviction that all things are there for the benefit of Mankind (Glory to them, see previous) that commonly defines that era. Also that architecture is some spooky shit I tell you what. Even when there isn't a large spider man with a brain for a head hanging off of it. There are those, in this game, by the way. You thought you were gonna deal with werewolves? Bitch your eyes have yet to open, strap the fuck in.

Bloodborne is the coveted "what a twist!" game I so laboriously search for. A game that expertly leads you to believe some things, then gradually shows you that you are a fucking wrong idiot baby and now there are mushroom men from mars running around casting magic missile at you. It gets this right in part because the clues were there all along, if you bothered to search for them. The first part of the game is fairly expected of what the promo material was all about, save for some weirdness with dreams and cryptic mutterings of "Paleblood." Then, you know, some shit starts getting wacky. You start running into giantass monster men clad in the trappings of the church. The NPCs you talk to start becoming more and more unhinged. Sometimes you will be randomly lifted bodily into the air and die and it is fucking alarming the first time I tell you what. Strange men with bags start appearing in random spots, and if they kill you, they don't actually kill you - they put you in the bag and kidnap you, the only way to reach a certain area of the game early. This hidden area is filled with more bagmen and some very angry giant pigs, because those are in this game too. Then you finally enter the big cathedral at the center of town and its lined with really odd looking statues of aliens and you touch a weird skull and you get a vision from the Mothercrystal about how to progress, and you tell the password to the gatekeeper, and he's like "ok cool get in here" but actually he is a fucking dessicated corpse and this isn't Dark Souls there ain't no undead here. Maybe. Are there?

Then you get into the Forbidden Woods and there are like, the weird mushroom men, if you go looking for them, and snakes, and really BIG snakes, and men who are made out of snakes and kind of give you weird nostalgic memories of Resident Evil 4 and the las plagas sphagetti heads. And there are more statues and giant fucking gravestones? That are really unnerving? And also if you went poking around you might have also met Patches again, who is back, but also a spider, and he'll show you how to get into college, except the college is in a nightmare and full of slime people, which is actually pretty normal now that I think about it, and then you can go out into ANOTHER nightmare, which is just another obnoxious poison swamp but the winter lanterns live there and those things are a fucking trip. Anyway you get to Bergynwerth eventually and there are weird insect guys and weird disheveled looking fellas that literally eat your brains if they get close and this awful npc hunter (the real horror of the night i tell you what) who casts fucking megaflare and you FINALLY get to the center of it all and jump into the lake except it's not the lake, it's actually like a fucking pocket dimension and there's just a big spider chilling out. You have to kill it to progress. And then when you do things just REALLY go to hell. And this is to say nothing of the Old Hunters DLC. This game is a fucking nightmare and it's great. Easily one of the scariest games ever made, genuinely frightening and weird and it doesn't just lose its edge when you realize the monster is a big goofy man with a flappy jaw. You are the monster, and that monster is a tiny squid baby. You're a squid now! Because you ate umbilical cords! Why!? I DON'T KNOW! INSIGHT, MOTHERFUCKER!

So what I just described is probably sounding completely absurd, random, and borderline early 2000s era monkeycheese style humor, but you gotta believe me, it is only absurd. It's actually very deliberately absurd. A lot of people will say that Bloodborne is one of the only games to get Lovecraft right, but I have actually read some of that dreck and I will say Bloodborne really only shares some aesthetic DNA and nomenclature with the racist tentacle man who ate nothing but canned beans. The themes are actually very different. Lovecraft wrote of a paradoxical contradictory world where Unspeakable Elder Things lurked behind every shadow, ready to emerge and destroy everything, but they were also very apathetic and noncommital about the whole thing. They didn't actually care that much either way, but they were still Bad, because they were weird and alien and inimicable to human life because of that foreign aspect. Like Nyarlathotep was originally envisioned as a travelling black guy who would go from town to town and show people some awesome inventions and shit and that was supposed to be evil. The dude's neuroses about race permeated -everything- he wrote.

On the other hand, Bloodborne takes a different tack. One of the central theses of the game is that the Great Ones are -not- evil. In fact, they're rather sympathetic by nature and will do what they can to help, if asked. The horror of the game comes not from the actions of the alien monstrosities who are actually nicer than most of the humans, but from what the human characters do in the pursuit of knowledge and power. Atrocities are committed by the dozen in some vague pursuit of higher understanding, against both the citizens of Yharnam and the supposed cosmic horrors themselves. This point is driven home by the fact that a number of the more alien entities you encounter in the game aren't actually hostile at all. Rom, the Vacuous Spider, will just chill out with you indefinitely at the Moonside Lake if you don't strike the first blow, and doesn't even really begin to actively defend herself until you prove yourself to be a determined murder machine. Ebrietas, the Daughter of the Cosmos, is found minding her own business in an out of the way corner of the Upper Cathedral Ward, mourning Rom after you, you know, killed her in cold blood. Again, she is completely non-hostile until you start shit. In the Old Hunters, Kos (or some say Kosm) is actually benevolent sort of mother goddess to the people of a small fishing hamlet. ...until the "scholars" of Bergynwerth murder her in the name of science, too.

All of the evil and horror and stomach-turning cruelty in Bloodborne comes from corrupt systems of power run rampant, not something as facile as the supposedly intrinsic malice of beings different from us. The terrors of the cosmos are nothing before the vile, willful depravity of mankind itself. That's the idea at the heart of it all. The Great Ones, who exist on a higher plane of existence, seem to have largely left this cruelty behind. Even the Moon Presence, the principle cause of the Hunter's Dream, is trying to help Laurence and Gherman - it's just that it's so different from humans, its idea of helping is a bit. Strange. It's this really fresh and unique take on the genre, this byzantine tragedy of miscommunication, good intentions, and mortal greed, that creates one of the vanishingly few games at are actually frightening. It doesn't even have to sacrifice being a good game to do it! No hiding in closets from the scourge of screen blur and heavy breathing here. In terms of gameplay, it's probably the most refined of quintet. I'm unsure if I should count Sekiro with them or not. It's a much different thing. Trick weapons and hunter's garb are iconic, extremely stylish, original, and honestly just fucking dope as hell. You've got a hammer that explodes when it hits things, a giant pizza cutter, a katana you coat with your own blood to empower, a gunrapier and a gunspear, a giant... wagon wheel... because Miyazaki just really likes those I guess, a bow that is also a sword, a giant fucking ship's cannon you just carry around with you, a portable flamethrower, an... eyeball, that shoots space rocks, for some reason. Like the weapon design and selection alone is worthy of considerable accolade. Bloodborne is fantastic, play it if you can.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I was a little bit kinda wishy washy on putting this on here, but I think overall that it deserves a spot. In terms of story and themes, it's honestly a bit whatever. It's Zelda. Don't be an asshole to your genius daughter who knows like ten times as much as you do about everything I guess. Prince Sidon is a nice fishman. Link is like, distressingly, "this is a kids game!!" hot when you put him in certain outfits. I'm pretty sure every configuration of sexuality interested in the act of boning probably at least went "hoo boy" when Link put on the gerudo outfit. That is, of course, not really enough to qualify for such a prestigious position as one of the best games of the decade. Where Breath of the Wild shines is its world design, music, and the masterful layer of melancholy it drapes everything in. The ruined land of Hyrule is beautiful and sad in equal measure, the vistas enhanced by a fantastic soundtrack with an incredibly rich personal voice. It takes a very certain kind of design philosophy, in my opinion, to create an open world that is actually meritorious and worthwhile and not just an excuse to spend a lot of time hoofing it through vast expanses of nothing interesting. There is enough raw Stuff in the land of Hyrule, from enemy encounters to happening upon NPCs to just finding something really weird and inexplicable that you feel compelled to check out, to justify the massive open world.

I think the enemy design in particular is worthy of some praise. The game gives you a whole lot of tools to tackle any given fight. Sometimes you can just whack something with your sword until either the enemy or the sword breaks and that will work fine. Other times, you can literally do the Tao Pai Pai thing from Dragonball and launch a treetrunk into the air, surf on it, and land it squarely in the face of some unsuspecting moblin. This is a very popular speedrun strat. The sheer amount of Weird Stuff you can do in the service of ultimately saving Hyrule is a lot of lot of LOT of fun, things not many other games would let you do. There's also something to be said for the moments where you're exploring, minding your own business, and find yourself face to face with something fearsome and big and dangerous, like a Lynel in the frozen north or one of the big cyclops guys. It's heartpounding and exciting and really hits that "oh hell yeah let's fuckin FIGHT" button. And fighting in Breath of the Wild is a hell of a lot of fun! Probably the most its been in any Zelda game. Skyward Sword please go away you're drunk this was never a good idea. To me, Breath of the Wild is kind of the platonic ideal of an open world fantasy fuck around game. That used to be Skyrim, but BotW sort of made me realize you can actually have a functional game on top of all the aforementioned Fucking Around, too, and that sort of enhances the experience.

This might be a little weird and personal and I apologize, but I think the one thing that really sealed this game as something very special and significant to me was the moment I entered the Rito village for the first time. I was greeted with an utterly gorgeous piano melody that gradually unfolded into a soulful, excruciatingly bittersweet arrangement of the Dragon Roost Isle theme from the Windwaker. I admit that I was not in a good place in my life when I was playing Breath of the Wild. I was still reeling from some bad brain stuff. Be that as it may, Breath of the Wild is the only game I have ever played - hell, the only piece of art I have experienced - that has brought me to tears with nothing more than a song. When I realized what I was listening to, when the memories of a time when I was still a child with hope and trust and innocence and any faith that life would ever be something more than cruelty and suffering came flooding back, I had to put down my switch, go lay down, and just ugly cry for a while. It's honestly making me a little misty-eyed just thinking about. It was such a personal, intimate, keening feeling of... I don't really know. Nostalgia? Longing? Melancholy? Now, believe me, I love to cry. I am a crybaby. Things make me cry all the time. But not like this. This was something else. Something I still don't really understand, or can explain. All I know is that if a game can do that to me with just a few notes, it deserves to be here.

Salt and Sanctuary:

This is probably the most niche game for me. Even people who share some of my more eclectic tastes and sensibilities didn't like this game that much, but there was just something about this Metroidvania mashed with a Soulslike that hit some very primal notes in my soul. The art style, a weird mix of cartoony and utterly deranged, the enemy design, the bizarre way the world is put together, some extremely creative boss battles, and above all, some masterfully done atmosphere dripping with poorly understood dread and a sense of complete disorientation combined to create an experience that seemed to be made for me, and possibly me alone. It's not a flawless game. The music is fine, but somewhat lacking in variety. The character progression system is a good deal more complicated than it needs to be by any stretch of the imagination, as is the weapon upgrade system. The difficulty curve is uneven, and the raw inscrutability of the whole enterprise can make progression difficult in ways that it never really was in Dark Souls and Demon's Souls, which at least had the courtesy to point you in the right direction from time to time. The ending is a bit on the weak side.

Even now it feels difficult to really like. Elucidate on why I like this game so much. Maybe it's because it was the heartfelt effort of an extremely small team with more passion than experience? Because it's so unique and bold in ways other games are not, even while being a self-admitted derivative of Souls games? I just don't know. It's just such a fun and plucky thing, even if parts of it are kind of bad. It's not like, Deadly Premonition or anything where the badness is also the primary attraction. It's like, overall a good game? I believe? It's just that if it wasn't also kind of weirdly flawed and broken in some ways I don't think I would like it as much. God, I don't know. Just. Play it if you get a chance and see if any of this makes sense. One of the weapons you can use is a giant ass ship anchor, which is just fantastic, and you can start out as a chef, complete with a goofy hat and an extra helping of salt. Salt is important. Gotta keep those electrolytes up. You can also put a pumpkin on your head, and there's a boss called the Tree of Men which is just this giant torture machine that hates you and everyone else. It's so weird! The lighting is so moody and unsettling! The Queen of Smiles doesn't have a jaw! You have to brand your ass with a metal iron to double jump! ...hand, not ass, to be fair. But ass would be pretty funny. And horrifying. If you join the Iron Ones religion your healing item is just bread. And that is a fucking mood.

Super Mario Galaxy 2:

This one barely makes the temporal cut, but it was 2010 when it came out, I'm pretty sure. As a Mario game that doesn't have paper in its name, it's also going to be a bit fluffier and lighter on actual substance than pretty much every other game here, and I don't have that much to say. It's just this gorgeously realized and scored platforming adventure that's so tightly tuned you could play Smoke on the Water on it. It is the still the best traditional jumpy wahoo boing boing Mario game I have ever played. It just makes you feel good about space, and going to space, and seeing all the wonderful things in space. Though there most likely are not charming little obstacle courses themed around bees and and toy trains in space, the various cosmic phenonmenon on display on the map screen and in the background of some galaxies are close enough to what you might expect to inspire a sense of wonder and awe. SMG2 is like the purest expression of Let's Just have a Good Time design in games I have ever seen. It induces good feelings. Not everything has to be deep and troubling and thought provoking. Like, I tend to prefer it when they are, but there's always rooms for exceptions like this. Just fantastic. And the music though holy shit. Honestly I think the only game on this list that doesn't have a fantastic OST is Salt and Sanctuary, but it's still like. Serviceable.

Darkest Dungeon:

Let me start off by saying that Darkest Dungeon doesn't always hit the mark with its central conceit of stress management and the importance of mental health in your small army of adventurers. Nobody is going to start screaming abuse at their comrades or start stabbing them to death in a fit of paranoia because a skeleton spilled some cheap champagne on them. That said, I think that it -tries- to address these things is admirable, even if it is fairly easily boiled down into a simple matter of resource management and cost/benefit analysis. The reason I like Darkest Dungeon so much is that it is a game that excels at emergent storytelling. In terms of actual plot progression and character development, there is very little. You can have a party of four Occultists, each with the exact same backstory and with the exact same pact to the exact same eldritch entity, killing the exact same boss several different times. If you want. The dungeon crawling primarily serves as a vehicle for two things: the first and most obvious, the primary gameplay experience where you command your brave or at least foolhardy group of heroes to engage the ancient horrors of Grandpa's Party House. By itself, this is compelling and demanding. A bit like Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeon is a game that is fairly exacting in what it expects out of you, and it will not let you make mistakes without slapping you on the wrist and saying "no, bad." Similarly, it is a game where mastery is rewarded, but both in somewhat lesser degrees because DD is much more random and capricious in nature. The difference between a new player and an old hand is obvious, but sometimes even veterans can get completely dicked over by things out of their control.

That leads us into the second purpose: having the Ancestor narrate your constant struggle against Murphy's Law while completely hilarious bullshit conspires to send all of your highly trained and well equipped adventurers to the grave. Let me tell you a tale. I was fighting the Countess, the extremely powerful and dangerous final boss of the Crimson Court DLC. Everybody was afflicted with some manner of madness, and things were looking grim. She had shuffled my party around into a formation wherein some of them couldn't act without switching places. I ordered my vestal to switch places with Dismas, my highwayman. Dismas, however, was currently under either "selfish" or "abusive" status and simply refused to move. This meant that my vestal could not actually act that turn, and simply doing nothing incurs a penalty of stress damage. This stress damage was enough to put her gauge to the maximum, give her a heart attack, and kill her. Dismas literally murdered the healer by being too much of an asshole. I was beside myself at the time, but make no mistake - it was fucking hysterical. I later fed him to the final boss as penance for his crimes.

Darkest Dungeon is a grindy game that takes time and effort to complete. This is one of the biggest complaints leveled at it, and it's a fair one. On normal mode, though, you are more than capable of going at it inch by bloody inch, throwing corpse after corpse at the eldritch monstrosities until they at last drown in the blood and give up. No matter how grievous the setback, you can come back from it, unless you're playing on stygian/blood moon mode, which adds a fairly strict time limit and a hard cap on how many hapless adventurers you can send into the meatgrinder before the Nameless Thing That Ends The World wakes up and gives you an auto-game over. It's designed to be a long, bloody slog where shit goes wrong. Hopefully, in the upcoming sequel which I am very much anticipating not being able to play because I am poor, Red Hook can perhaps find a better balance with this. I am, for my part, fairly forgiving of grindy games, and at times even enjoy them. They were going for something with the way they designed DD, and I respect that. If you have the proper mindset of "whatever will be, will be" and learn to embrace the senselessness of death, your adventures in the Darkplace Estate will be both rewarding and oftentimes absurdly funny because your Arbalest was too depressed to eat anything, took more stress damage from starving, and then died of a heart attack, which then further stressed out the rest of the party. If that sounds more "oh my god that's awful" than "hahahaha you fucking dipshits" to you, DD might not be up your alley. But if it is, it -really- is. It's sort of the Dwarf Fortress principle, though Darkest Dungeon is far more user friendly and nice to look at. ...you know if you payed him enough the narrator voice actor would probably do a dramatic reading of Boatmurdered. Just saying.

Stellaris:

Stellaris is kind of the odd spaceman out on this list for a variety of reasons, but it shares the same kind of compelling emergent storytelling that Darkest Dungeon has. It's just less likely to be about how your alcoholic bounty hunter missed every hit against a fishman and went insane, and more likely to be about how you found this really cool Orb in space but it was in another empire's territory so you basically fabricated Space World War 1 to take it for yourself. Maybe that was just me. Much like the many habitable planets in any given Stellaris game, Paradox's grand strategy space game falls in the Goldilocks Zone of "accessible for mortal minds" and "satisfyingly complex." I'm not a huge fan of most Paradox stuff because I don't really give much of a fuck about kings and their crusaders one way or the other, but I respect them for what they are. Stellaris was kind of a proof of concept for me for that - given subject matter I actually liked (space!!!!), the various nitty gritty systems of planetary management and fleet organization and robo-modding and gene templates became compelling rather than overwhelming. They were, granted, still pretty overwhelming at first. The game still receives robust free updates and DLC even as of this writing, sometimes drastically changing the way the game is played (alloys! consumer goods! aarrrggh!) and making my 500ish hours of playtime seem a little less nonsensical. Look, a lot of that time was idling on the galaxy map while I did something else.

It's just really polished and technically competent and -enormous- and there's space dragons and sometimes you get to fuck a black hole. Stellaris doesn't really have a narrative, per se, save what you ascribe to any given game, but that doesn't mean the game doesn't have writing. A lot of very interesting, well written, and sometimes really funny flavor text can be found in the various anomalies and in-game events your science vessels will encounter as they uncover more of the galaxy, or sometimes a planet will have a mysterious portal to Hell on it, or maybe it's actually just a huge egg for a terrifying voidspawn. The game also navigates the usual 4X/strategy game dilemma of securing an early lead and just kind of chilling for the rest of the game by introducing midgame and lategames crises. It's not a perfect fix, but the ever-looming threat of a khanate space uprising, an AI uprising either from your empire or another, or ravenous space bugs from beyond the cosmos ensures that you have to keep at least a little bit on your toes. The presence of spaceborne aliens that range from "a nuisance" to "well gosh that thing is actually eating that sun this could be problematic" also ensures that you need to pay attention to both military and domestic aspects of governing. Stellaris happens in real time (though you can thank god pause whenever you want to issue orders) so there isn't really a Civilization equivalent of "oh the tiny pissant nations are declaring war, time to buy seven tanks with my enormous hoard of gold and run over their medieval knights" in Stellaris. Stuff always takes time to make, and it takes time to get in position, too. Space being exceedingly vast, and all that.

The lategame can get simultaneously get very overwhelming and very boring, but there are systems put in place to help automate the process of ruling a huge interstellar empire and one of the nice things about Stellaris is that you can kind of just. Stop whenever you want. There are technically win conditions, if you're into that sort of thing, but a lot of the time I will just play it through until I'm like "hmm okay im good" and then just either start a new game as an extremely different kind of empire or play something else for a while. It's kind of nice. The idea of "winning" in these games is always so weird to me anyway. I kind of like the framework where it's just kind of like. You tell a story, rather than try to win a game. Recent changes have made it much easier to actually achieve victory, however. Part of the thing that kind of encouraged my "eh i'll stop when i wanna" approach in the first place was how unreasonable some of the old victory requirements were. Occupy sixty percent of the galaxy? Excuse me???? Fuck off. Also, it's not like. A really salient part of the game like it is for most other games on the list, but Stellaris actually does have a pretty nice soundtrack. It's much more ambient in nature and there's not really enough of it for the amount of Game there is, but what's there is nice, even if you will probably end up turning it off and listening to your own music instead eventually.

============================= =Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers= =============================

Alright so if you've like actually looked at my twitter or talked to me or to someone about me for more than two minutes, it's probably pretty obvious that I really like FFXIV. An unhealthy amount.  I will cop to that. FFXIV is an MMORPG. Let's start with the basics. I enjoy the game's gameplay a lot. I would not have put 6 years of my life into playing it if I did not, I'm not a Dota 2 player, for Christ's sake. I like to raid, and have actively done it in every wing except for the Sigmascape. I even managed to beat the final encounter of the current Edengate raids! I'm currently sort of gathering my courage to try the latest Ultimate Raid, the Epic of Alexander. Ultimate Raids are fights that are absurdly difficult by any reasonable standard and further winnow the playerbase from "hit level 80->does endgame stuff->does savage raiding->clears savage raid tiers->does Ultimate Raids->.00000001% of the player base that clears ultimate raids". Ultimates are for a very specific kind of player. I'm just sort of mentioning it for context purposes, it doesn't really factor in to my overall evaluation.

Now, despite the fact that I personally enjoy the gameplay a great deal, it is not actually why I think this game is so good. This might puzzle you. What else is there to an MMO? Is the sense of community especially great? Well, I would say that I really enjoy the community of people I play with, but on the whole, XIV's community is about. Standard, really. Which is to say "a fucking dumpsterfire" by any human metric, but just par for the course for online video games. What keeps me coming back to the game is that in between all the endgame stuff and grinding and crafting and going to die in Eureka, there is a bafflingly compelling and superlative singleplayer experience. The game is actually like unironically the best mainline FF title since at least XII. I would personally say it's on par with IX as a narrative experience, which is no faint praise because i fuckin luv me some ffix. But how can an MMO have such a compelling story? It's kind of complicated.

History lesson for the ten people who still don't know: FFXIV actually launched way back in like. 2011 or some shit and it was -arrestingly- bad. "Embarrassment to the franchise name" bad. So bad that they decided to literally drop a meteor on the game world, bring in a new director, shut the whole thing down for a year or so, and then relaunch the game as A Realm Reborn in mid 2013. People really liked this version. It was nothing short of a miracle. It also layed the groundwork for something important: a real and genuine dedication to worldbuilding (and worldending, too). The destruction and rebirth of the realm of Eorzea is metanarratively (theres my favorite non-word word again) baked into the very DNA of the game as it is now. Learning about the people who lived after the Calamity and how they survived is a direct parallel to how the dev team had to survive and adapt to make this complete boondoggle of a game into something presentable. A lot of heart and soul went into the bones of the world the game takes place in, because it's an expression of that dogged determination to make it work. Yoshida and his team probably crunched like hell to get it all done, and that makes me really sad, but what's done is done. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but it is, and all I can do at this point is praise the team's hard work and vision and try to support them as best I can.

So there's this really weighty sense of reality to the game world, and all of 2.0 is basically spent just establishing Eorzea and how it works. If you were an early adopter of ARR, like I was (2.1 is early right. it's gotta be.) then you grew to genuinely care about the place you spent so much time in and looked so pretty and was kind of obnoxiously laid out but don't worry there will be flying in the expansion. The longrunning nature of the game sort of necessitated a sort of serialized story. It had much more in common with an episodic TV Show than a usual Final Fantasy story, which for better or for worse are usually self-contained little things until somebody decides its fuckin Nova Crystalis time. It created a really unique sense of anticipation and participation in an ongoing story and evolving world. I think this is where a lot of people find their attachments to MMO style games, why people are still faithfully playing World of Warcraft 15 years on.

So FFXIV gets two expansions, Heavensward and Stormblood, and they were very Good, and added lots of neat things to the game and advanced the story and introduced new and beloved characters and also Zenos yae Galvus I guess and the long-running nature of it all started forging a kind of personal narrative of necessity, if that makes sense? Like, your own protagonist, who is mostly silent, who you created and customized and further customized and maybe turned into a lalafell once just to see what it was like to be so short, has been an important part of this world for so long your brain kind of just fills in the gaps in spite of itself. What would my character think about this? What would she do? Why would she do it? That kind of thing. The Warrior of Light, as one is called, has had a leading role in the game's story since pretty much day one, but one of the things that compels me about the character is how much work it took to get where she is today. Like, it's not a Diablo 3 style "hmm well you killed those zombies really good so i guess you're basically stronger than god and also satan put together" affair. You start out as a newbie adventurer, you do newbie adventurer things, like helping orange pickers keep the orchard clear of bees or deliver packages for guilds or whatever sufficiently adventuresome task needs doing. You gain notoriety for doing things that are, well, worthy of notoriety. You really get noticed when you defeat the primal Ifrit in a pitched battle, get recruited by some organizations, and you keep steadily working your way up from there.

As of Shadowbringers, the warrior of Darkness is kind of stronger than god and satan combined, but it took a fucking -lot- to get there. One base game and two expansions worth of life or death battles against utterly intractable foes and also Zenos yae Galvus I guess. It is beyond the scope of this piece to just give you a full plot summary of six years worth of storytelling, so I will just cut to the chase and try to explain what I'm taking five million words to say. Shadowbringers did something I thought heretofore impossible: it made me care about my tabula rasa cipher avatar as a character in a story and not just as an expression of digital self that I had grown fond of. Don't get me wrong - Dazzlyn Reed the adventurer is absolutely an expression of digital self that I have grown -disproportionately- fond of. I figure I'm a few more patch cycles from becoming that girl in the Jack Chick tract about Dungeons and Dragons who had a psychotic break because her DnD character died. However, for the most part, that affection was more of... kind of taking pride in her appearance and the outfits I put together and the achievements I had accomplished with her and stuff like that. Shadowbringers made me care about her as a character in her own right, which seems borderline miraculous to me.

It's sort of hard to explain without totally spoiling everything. And even with spoiling everything. In vague terms, I'll try to express it this way: the game put Dazzlyn in a situation where she had failed. Like, spectacularly. Everything she had done in the course of the expansion had gone up in smoke, and her own life was in real and severe danger. When you play these kinds of games, your first instinct when things go wrong in the story is pretty much always to just flippantly say to yourself "okay okay just calm down and let me fix it i'm like level a billion it's fiiiiine". Shadowbringers turns that on its head. You went to fix things... and you couldn't. Despite good intentions, it's arguable that you only made things worse. Everything you worked for since arriving on the First was just utterly undone, and the game lets you see the toll that has taken on your character. It's weirdly heartwrenching in a really uncommon and compelling way. Dazzlyn had been on the outside looking in at this kind of situation plenty of times before, and she had always had a nice and encouraging thing to say as she helped shoulder the burden and get things back on track for Alphinaud or Lyse or Cid or whoever. The game has, since antiquity, given you much appreciated little dialogue choices that don't really matter much in the scheme of things but let you kind of carve out your own characterization, and the way Dazzlyn turned out was somebody who just really cared way too much about all of her dumb stupid impossible friends who kept fucking up.

One thing that longtime players of the game have complained about quite a bit over the years is that your NPC friends never seemed very. Like. Personally close to you, with a couple of exceptions like Alisae. Shadowbringers both fixes that by introducing the Trust system, which lets you take your Scion buddies into dungeons with you instead of other players, if you are so inclined, and sort of turns it back around to be a kind of poignant narrative point. After everything she had done for them, unconditionally and with a smile, none of the Scions could actually find a way to help Dazzlyn when she finally ended up being the one who needed it. And this -fucks them up-, emotionally. Like, bad. Alisae nearly has a crying fit over it in one of Shadowbringer's more affecting scenes. And just watching the whole thing unfold fucked me up, too. Like, I hadn't signed up for this. I was (relatively) safe in the knowledge that they would not have the gall to actually kill off the player character in an ongoing MMO, but it wasn't necessarily the fear of something happening to her that was getting to me. It was more just this feeling of "god, she deserves better. this isn't fair." The emotional pain that, well, everybody involved is going through is extremely real, even if the threat of genuine death is not. I know (mostly) (please god) that Dazzlyn is going to be okay, but she doesn't. Her friends certainly don't. And even when she does miraculously pull through, it's not like all of this grief and fear and anxiety is going to just vanish like it never happened.

I really have to stress how completely and catastrophically wrong this could have gone if the writers responsible weren't sufficiently skilled. I'm pretty sure if I idly suggested a BFA era World of Warcraft storyline like this to somebody who still plays they would have an apoplectic fit. It would have been so easy for this kind of exercise to ascribe character traits and emotions to a very personal interpretation of the Warrior of Light that they would never have, for any one person's vision of them. The FFXIV writing team avoided this issue entirely, probably because they knew if they didn't people would go ape, by focusing the brunt of the expressed distress on your friends and just leaving you yourself some time to take in the enormity of how badly things have gone wrong in customary silence. A subdued facial expression here, a dialogue option there. No more than strictly necessary. The game encourages you to draw your own conclusions about what your Warrior is feeling, how they're coping, if they even have any hope left, but it does not overstep its bounds and do it for you. It's just... really masterfully done. The overall arc of Shadowbringers can be described as "intriguing, well realized, and competently done." The overarching ideas presented aren't like, groundbreaking or anything. What is groundbreaking, at least to me, is this miraculous giving of life to a character that was originally intended as as simple player avatar.

At the end of the day, everybody rallies around you, as they usually do, but it is markedly different this time. It isn't some facile repetition of the idea that the Warrior of Light/Darkness/Pants-theft is this focal point of hope given form and life to everyone. Instead, it's this... oddly touching expression of friendship. Commitment. It's all probably going to end in tragedy. There's nothing anybody can really do. But they're going to stay with you until the bitter end anyway, because they care about you. If nothing else, they can't bear to think of you dying alone and in agony. Even the citizens of the Crystarium, with whom you do not share a bond that goes back literal years, show up to give you some words of encouragement. They show up to tell you that it's okay that you failed. It's okay that you got hurt, it's okay that you're in pain, that you're scared, that you're vulnerable, that you don't know what to do. After spending such a long time in the game's lore as being kind of invincible and infallible except for the occasional matter of pesky Imperial Viceroys and Old Kung-fu Men, it's just... affecting. It's not often done in games, at least that I have played and seen.

Does this one story moment justify making Shadowbringers the game of the decade? Honestly? Kind of. To me, art has always been about emotional reaction. This kind of reaction is something special, even for a crybaby idiot bitch like me. Moments like these are what make or break truly fantastic experiences. Finally finding Vendrick in the Tomb as that haunting, off-key melody starts playing. Realizing the true nature of the Upper Cathedral Ward. Hearing a beautiful piece of music in Rito Village and thinking about what that song means to you. Admitting that you care about your Warrior of Darkness more than you thought. They're all quite different, running the gamut from existential despair, stomach turning fear, a deep and abiding nostalgia and longing for what used to be, to a sincere, melancholy affection for a game world I've been a part of for almost six years. There's one unbroken thread: a cascade of genuine emotion. Something that goes beyond the simple pressing of buttons and jolts of serotonin as the numbers go up or the bad guys die.

Fortunately for my general credibility, Shadowbringers is also just really good in general. Soken's soundtrack is, as always, kind of spooky in how high quality it is. The presentation is top notch as usual. Encounter design is probably the best its ever been in terms of balancing accessibility and challenge and having mechanics that actually Work As Intended and not nightmarish garbage like Digititis and Black Hole Walking. Royal Pentacle! Server ticks! Server ticks! Uh. Sorry. Going slightly feral there. Anyway. Overall, I think Shadowbringers is the most polished expansion so far, in all respects, and its narrative quality in particular is kind of transcendent because of what it accomplishes in regards to how players see themselves in relation to an unfolding story. Also, it has an unfair advantage, because it's also a continuation of Nier Automata now! That's two games of the decade in one! Now, due to the serial nature of it all, I will allow that if something goes... like, inconceivably, catastrophically wrong with 5.2 - 5.5 I might be a little premature in my assessment. That said, 5.1 was just as fantastic as 5.0 and I don't see a reason to assume that the quality will so drastically drop in the coming months.

If you're somebody who really likes Rankings, here is a pretty noncommital list of them going from least good to best good but they're all special damn it.

10. Super Mario Galaxy 2 9. Breath of the Wild 8. Stellaris 7. Darkest Dungeon 6. Salt and Sanctuary 5. Dark Souls 4. Nier Automata 3. Bloodborne 2. Dark Souls II 1. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

And here's a couple of Honorable Mentions just because!

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

To be honest, this easily could have taken the place of like. Breath of the Wild or SMG2 if I was just a little bit more into Sekiro's aesthetic. It's easily the most technical and best-playing game that Miyazaki's team has put out so far, with a very simple to learn, difficult to master system of fighting based more around swordfighting than "shove large axe into monster butt" its predcessors liked so much. It also has a well-told story about a fairly down to earth conflict between an independent fiefdom and Japan's internal ministry trying to conquer it, with a splash of supernatural weirdness to give it some spice. There are monkeys with guns. Sekiro is just fantastically put together, and I really did end up loving Wolf as a main character, despite my initial misgivings about one of these games without a character creator. Wolf is kind of a lovable chuuni dipshit who tries his best in completely unreasonable circumstances and having him as an anchor lets Sekiro's story be more personal and self-contained in nature than the heady cosmological epics of the Souls games, which was a nice change of pace. Ultimately, though, I just find ineffably weird nature of the earlier titles to be a bit more interesting than shinobi and samurai, which is why Sekiro gets an honorable menchie and not a top spot. Don't get me wrong though shinobi and samurai are dope and Sekiro is not a -worse- game for their inclusion. It's just a matter of personal preference, and I could easily see this game taking a top spot on somebody else's list.

Pokemon X and Y

I am a Pokemon bitch. I play all of them, except for black/white 2 and ultra sun/moon, which seemed too similar to their predecessors to really justify spending my precious, jealously guarded money on them. I feel that in general, X and Y has overall, the best mix of available pokemon, world design, music, Fun Little Things, and general game flow of all of them. Sword and Shield excepted I am still in the middle of that one. Pokemon is absolutely kind of video game comfort food, and its kind of just. There's not a lot to it emotionally, though it does have some fairly in depth mechanics and shit if you want to look into it. I don't know I just really liked X and Y. I felt like it deserved mentioning.

Blade and Soul

This game is awful I'm pretty sure but I have so many fond memories of playing it with people I love and creating a ridiculous titty oil monster and having adventures with her sorry i'm trash

So there you have it. A very personal (sometimes maybe probably too personal) look at the ten games that I found to be the best that came out in the last ten years. Now, I usually consider my opinions on these things to be fairly well reasoned, but in this case, I did rely a lot more on the touchy feely qualitative things that are really important to me over the necessary but lamentable "yes i suppose this game is technically competent and plays extremely well" considerations a more objective list of this kind would entail. So you're free to disagree and think I'm stupid and wrong. I would prefer it if you did not think I was stupid, though, but the fact of the matter is I cannot stop you. Here's to another ten years of wonderful games that make us feel things.

[shaelstormchild]

Old Habits

Shael couldn’t sleep.

It was the third time she had angrily turned over in her bedroll. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t used to sleeping outdoors; plenty of past smuggling jobs had her bunking down in the oddest of places. It wasn’t for thoughts of any impending dangers either; she had learned in her time in the Resistance that rest was essential to staying sharp, and worrying over the next Garlean bombing or raid would only result in dulled senses the next morning. And that would lead to carelessness and eventually a mistake that could cost someone’s life.

And even that didn’t keep her up most nights. Once a fellow Resistance fighter noted with some measure of disgust that she always found a way to sleep even after participating in a mission that resulted in numerous deaths, Imperials and Ala Mhigans alike. Little did he know that she always had something to resort to, drugs or alcohol, to ease her mind just enough to push her into a dreamless stupor.

But there was a time that even those measures proved futile, despite all the substances she could get her hands on. It was after Shooey died. That’s when the visions and the memories of him replayed over and over behind closed lids. The moments leading to her final view of him always returning with crystal clarity. He flashed her his quirky but reassuring smile as he gave her a thumbs up, when he wired up the last of the explosives. Then an instant later, she bore witness to all of him becoming enveloped in a fiery explosion of fire. Then he was no more. Those visions came to her every night, and even in her waking bells, whenever she closed her eyes for any length of time. There he was, smiling at her, then his flesh was burning off, exposing the bare skull beneath as it cracked and exploded into a thousand pieces. It always woke her in a cold sweat. Shael ran as fast as she could, away from the Resistance, sailing away from Eorzea, fled all the way to Othard and Kugane in trying to escape those memories. Even still, she found no respite until Nabi concocted a special brew for her, and finally she was able to find solace in the dark. Looking back, Shael wasn’t sure when the dreams truly stopped. Was it because the drugs? No… because Nabi withheld them after a while, warning her of possible addictive properties. But without the drugs, how had those visions finally gone away? The soft shuffle of fabric drew Shael’s attention to Nabi’s sleeping form within the same tent. And from the soft whimpers that escaped the auri lips now and then, she could tell that the Xaela’s dreams were not of the restful kind. Shael sat up with a scowl, idly scratching her head as she recalled the exchange that had happened during that sun. Tales of rituals and destinies buzzed annoyingly in her head. Who soddin’ believed in all that shite? Nabi’s long-lost cousin, Arasen, that’s who. And from the look of things, so did some seer and the rest of his tribe. Did they mark Nabi at birth with some magical tattoo that would consume her otherwise if she didn’t return to them?

All for some impossible dream of peace? Shael nearly snorted out loud. She’d known the ugly touch war for as long as she could remember. The taint of it ran through every Spoken’s blood. It seeped into every possible corners of the world, like spilled ink bleeding onto parchment. What insanity made these Xaelas think that one girl could end it? Her mother must have been some deranged fanatic to scheme up a birth of a child to fulfill some enigmatic prophecy -- false promises that were likely the results of a drug induced hallucination rather than a gift from gods who never gave half a shite in the first place. Shael knew all about visions, how they could plague the mind. How they could make someone either want to desperately flee from it or accept it wholly and blindly. She took all of Elam’s drugs after all, as he snuck it into her drinks. Not only did they temporarily turn the burning inside into a distant simmer, but in some rare instances, it brought forth the face of a ghost that wasn’t being immolated. The smuggler glanced down to her hand that had started to tremble, and she clenched tight to still its twitching. She didn’t have time for that. She reached into her pack and drew out a vial, uncorking it with a thumb and tossing her head back as she swallowed the contents whole. She grimaced as the bitter taste stung the back of her throat, but eventually she eased into a breathy sigh as she felt the drug quickly working its way into her system. She flicked another glance to the sleeping Xaela, almost guiltily. After all, Nabi worked hard to get all the drugs out of her system the first time. She worked patiently with her through the withdrawals, easing what she can with her own herbs and medicines. And now, Shael was right back to her old habits again. The smuggler knew that the Xaela would not approve. But it was for Nabi’s sake, at least at first. Shael had to let Elam believe that he had her under his thumb. But as the charade went on and she discovered the true perks of those drugs, she couldn’t stop the cravings. They were like a familiar old friend, just like the glimpses of her former first-mate. Shooey wouldn’t have approved either. Sod it, Shael groaned to herself as she began to slide her boots back on. Who cared who approved of what? Shooey was dead and Nabi was… Even as she glanced to the sleeping Xaela, her earlier nearly tearful words echoed in the Highlander’s mind. “If I fulfill whatever it is that my mother intended? Or if I don't? Does... does some horrible death await me??" The girl was shaking with fear and dread. That sight made Shael want to break something. Arasen warned of some ill fate if that mysterious mark on Nabi was left to grow on its own. It was quickly followed by promises of help and guidance if she returned with him to her mother’s tribe. Where he and some old crone could perform another bloody ritual that he could only vaguely speak about. Well, they can rot in all the hells with that. Shael reached for her gun, suddenly hungry for some cold air. She was starting to crawl out to relieve Saltborn early of his watch, when she heard quiet murmurs filtering in. She leaned forward, just barely parting the fabric of the tent to gain a glimpse. Speak of the devil...

Saltborn was talking to that Xaela, Arasen.

Shael nearly brought her gun forward. Mayhap a single bullet between the Xaela’s eyes would solve the problem and end this entire dilemma.

But Shael knew better. That would still leave the mark on Nabi with no leads to follow. She didn’t quite hear all the words that were exchanged between the hyur and the au ra, but soon Nabi’s kin rose and left, leaving Saltborn alone by the fire.

She watched his back awhile longer, before she rolled to the other side of the tent.  Undoing a few ties, she slid out the end. She holstered her gun on her back and moved away as quietly as she could, as to not draw Saltborn’s attention.

She would have her own words with this Kharlu.

[smichael67-blog]

Beauty is Everywhere

As I look out into the world, I see so much to be grateful for. Surrounded by beauty, I am left in no doubt that we live in a spirit filled world that is becoming more authentic in the beauty that it is able to appreciate. For so long we have come to define beauty on a superficial level, but as we grow, so will our ability to appreciate beauty grow within us.

With this, understand that only can we recognize and appreciate what is truly beautiful when we have unified with the essence of our own beauty within ourselves. So many struggle to find the beauty in the world when they look outside. Fearful of what they will encounter, they see a world filled with anger, hostility and ugliness, and because this is what they see, this is what becomes real for them, and they continue to live as their self fulfilling prophecy would have it be.

Neglecting their own beauty, they have swallowed a nightmare pill which alters dramatically the world in which they see. Turning away from the spirit, they have chosen to embrace the ego, which sees things always in a distorted light. With power and strength to gain for itself, the ego is devoted not to searching for beauty, but to finding that which can build it up in the eyes of the world. Concerned with the physical world and pleasing those within it, it is not at all interested in the wisdom of the spirit.

Not wanting to be the protagonist in its own demise, the ego has a vested interest in keeping the true source of beauty from your eyes. Not wanting you to experience the awe that beauty inspires, it seeks to keep you in a state of boredom where you ask no questions of life. Asking no questions, you cease to interact with life, and you deprive yourself of the answers that God wants to give to you. This is what it means to be reactive to life, and to suffer in the process.

Called to be proactive, we do not grow in our experience of life, if we have closed ourselves off to what it seeks to teach us. Wanting to show us the beauty in the world and in ourselves, it is a willing teacher, but a teacher has no role to occupy without a student in attendance. This is why we must be open-minded in beauty's presence. With much to give, there is much to learn about the beauty of God which manifests itself in all things.

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What this means to me is that each of us has the capacity to find beauty in different things. What some label beautiful, others might label ugly, and vice versa. But does it really matter what verdict is passed on whether something is pleasing to the eye or not? What matters absolutely is the seed of beauty to be found in all things that God has created. With the beauty of the creator pervading each of his creations, that beauty is definitely there to see. The question then becomes what is the quality of the vision of the observer?

Many are capable of seeing the beauty in all that surrounds them, but even more are not. Selective in what they ascribe the label 'beautiful' to, these people have chosen to honour the mind above the heart, which is all to discriminating. Seeing more than the mind is capable of seeing, the heart knows that it is futile to judge, because it realizes that judgment passed on that which appears in a diminished light is falsely condemned. Seeing only a portion of the whole, much is misunderstood; and embracing only a part, much is rejected as irrelevant. See in this, the dangerous game that we play when we choose to have the ego's eyes be the filter with which we view the world.

Seeing only fragments of beauty that it has contaminated through its own judgment, much is discarded, and even less honoured, for God cannot be seen by that which despises his presence. Wanting you not to see him, the ego will lead you to label as ugly, much that is beautiful in appearance and substance.

Intense in its loathing, the ego is not always rational in its judgment, and even in its certainty, it misses much to be appreciated. See in this how the ego's arrogance often leads it to abandon that which could otherwise serve it. Cursed in its blindness, it makes not for wise counsel to the one who searches for a deeper experience of life skin care products in malaysia.

Wanting to experience love, one must consult the heart, being the centre of beauty inside the self. Being not separate from God, it is the gift that God has given us to enjoy the world. Blessed with much, we can find much joy when we look upon the world with spiritual eyes. Hindered not by that which are the ego's shortcomings, we can see the love behind the barriers, and the distinctions which make the miraculous commonplace.

Blessed in spirit, we must not take for granted that which is capable of teaching us who we truly are. Endowed with wisdom, all of God's creations are capable teachers, and assuming not a separate identity from him, they are models to be emulated. With this, learn that beauty is distorted as the separation is affected. So as you travel far from him, so will your ability to experience beauty diminish in strength.

Concerned primarily with attaching labels in the moment, what eludes you is the beauty inherent in entering the moment. To enter the moment, is to join with God in your heart, and see what he sees in the physical world. With all that he created being good, you are then able to see the love that pervades everything in the light of the spirit. Appreciating everything just as it is, you understand that it is enough and that the ego does not have to be invited to enhance what is complete in itself.

Complete, the gifts of God are holy in what they hold and what they deliver. Endowed with beauty, they bring to the lost man, much that is invaluable. Longing for God, those who are lost, suffer in their desperation. Convinced of their own ugliness, the memories of their eternal beauty slip into the past. But the past is not lost forever, for every illusion stands to be corrected, and as a partner with eternity, it will not fail to reveal itself in a touch that the moment has in store, for the child who sees clearly now, not yearning for more.

One of the most memorable times that I recall beauty touching me deeply was in Florence when I went to see Michelangelo's David. I had heard from many people how wonderful this classical piece of sculpture was, but hearing a second hand account doesn't really prepare you for the effect that it has on the soul, when you see it in person. To say that I was taken aback by its beauty would be an understatement. I was left absolutely speechless! To think that one man saw this masterpiece in that block of marble and saw it as his purpose to bring it to life for all to enjoy is awe inspiring to me.

But as I was standing there, just gazing up at the masterwork, I knew not the distraction of thought that attempted to persuade my mind to intellectualize how the work was brought to life. This allowed me to centre myself and let the profound beauty that emanated from the shiny white surface, move my spirit powerfully in the moment. And as I just allowed the moment to touch me, I felt for a moment just how Michelangelo must have felt with the chisel in his hand and the spirit in his heart, for as I am not alone with my pen, he was not alone with his tools, for with every incision had God's hand revealed itself so gently and lovingly.

[geniuszone-blog]

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Beauty is Everywhere

As I look out into the world, I see so much to be thankful for. Surrounded by using beauty, I am left in no question that we stay in a spirit crammed the world that is turning into greater real in the splendor that it could admire. For see you later we’ve got come to outline splendor on a superficial level, but as we grow, so will our capability to comprehend beauty grow inside us.

  With this, remember the fact that simplest are we able to recognize and appreciate what is honestly lovely when we have unified with the essence of our own splendor inside ourselves. So many wars to locate the beauty within the global when they look outside. Fearful of what they’ll come across, they see a world packed with anger, hostility and ugliness, and due to the fact that is what they see, this is what turns into actual for them, and they preserve to stay as their self-pleasant prophecy might have or not it’s.

  Neglecting their own splendor, they have swallowed a nightmare tablet which alters dramatically the world wherein they see. Turning far from the spirit, they have got chosen to embrace the ego, which sees matters always in a distorted mild. With strength and electricity to benefit for itself, the ego is devoted not to searching for splendor, but to find that that can construct it up inside the eyes of the arena. Concerned with the bodily international and pleasing those within it, it is not at all interested by the wisdom of the spirit.

  Not wanting to be the protagonist in its personal loss of life, the ego has a vested interest in retaining the actual source of beauty out of your eyes. Not trying you to revel in the awe that beauty conjures up, it seeks to hold you in a nation of boredom in which you ask no questions of life. Asking no questions, you cease to interact with life, and you deprive your self of the solutions that God wants to provide to you. This is what it means to be reactive to the existence and to suffer inside the process.

  Called to be proactive, we do now not grow in our experience of existence, if we have closed ourselves off to what it seeks to educate us. Wanting to expose us the splendor in the global and in ourselves, it is a willing instructor, but a trainer has no function to occupy with out a student in attendance. This is why we have to be open-minded in splendor’s presence. With a whole lot to give, there’s a whole lot to study the splendor of God which manifests itself in all matters.

  It is said that splendor is in the eye of the beholder. What this indicates to me is that every folk has the capacity to locate beauty in various things. What a few label beautiful, others would possibly label unsightly, and vice versa. But does it absolutely rely what verdict is handed on whether or not something is alluring to the eye or now not? What subjects honestly is the seed of splendor to be observed in all things that God has created. With the splendor of the author pervading every of his creations, that splendor is surely there to see. The query then will become what is the nice of the imaginative and prescient of the observer?

beauty

Many are capable of seeing the splendor in all that surrounds them, however even extra aren’t. Selective in what they ascribe the label ‘stunning’ to, these people have selected to honor the mind above the coronary heart, that is all to discriminate. Seeing more than the mind is capable of seeing, the coronary heart is aware of that it is futile to judge because it realizes that judgment surpassed on that which appears in a dwindled mild is falsely condemned. Seeing only a part of the whole, plenty is misunderstood; and embracing simplest an element, tons is rejected as beside the point. See in this, the damaging sport that we play whilst we choose to have the ego’s eyes be the filter out with which we view the sector.

  Seeing most effective fragments of beauty that it has infected thru its personal judgment, an awful lot is discarded, and even less honored, for God cannot be seen by way of that which despises his presence. Wanting you not to look him, the ego will lead you to label as ugly, a lot this is lovely in appearance and substance.

  Intense in its loathing, the ego isn’t always constantly rational in its judgment, or even in its certainty, it misses a whole lot to be appreciated. See in this how the ego’s arrogance frequently leads it to desert that that may in any other case serve it. Cursed in its blindness, it makes not for sensible counsel to the one who searches for a deeper experience of life.

  Wanting to experience love, one need to seek advice from the coronary heart, being the center of beauty in the self. Being now not cut loose God, it’s miles the gift that God has given us to enjoy the world. Blessed with a good deal, we are able to find a good deal pleasure when we look at the sector with nonsecular eyes. Hindered now not by means of that that are the ego’s shortcomings, we will see the affection behind the limitations, and the distinctions which make the remarkable not unusual.

  Blessed in spirit, we must not take as a right that that is able to teach us who we certainly are. Endowed with wisdom, all of God’s creations are capable teachers, and assuming not a separate identification from him, they’re models to be emulated. With this, analyze that beauty is distorted because the separation is affected. So as you journey some distance from him, so will your capability to enjoy beauty lessen in strength.

  Concerned often with attaching labels in the moment, what eludes you is the beauty inherent in entering the moment. To enter the moment is to sign up for with God for your heart, and spot what he sees within the bodily world. With all that he created being right, you’re then capable of seeing the love that pervades the whole lot within the mild of the spirit. Appreciating the entirety simply as it is, you understand that it’s miles enough and that the ego does not have to be invited to enhance what is entire in itself.

  Complete, the items of God are holy in what they hold and what they deliver. Endowed with beauty, they convey to the lost guy, much that is beneficial. Longing for God, people who are lost, suffer in their desperation. Convinced in their personal ugliness, the memories in their everlasting splendor slip into the beyond. But the beyond isn’t always misplaced all the time, for each phantasm stands to be corrected, and as a companion with eternity, it will not fail to reveal itself in a touch that the instant has in store, for the kid who sees absolutely now, not craving for more.

everywhere

One of the maximum memorable times that I bear in mind beauty touching me deeply was in Florence when I went to see Michelangelo’s, David. I had heard from many humans how terrific this classical piece of sculpture changed into, but hearing a 2d hand account would not honestly put together you for the effect that it has on the soul, whilst you see it in man or woman. To say that I changed into stunned by way of its splendor could be an irony. I changed into left really speechless! To suppose that one man saw this masterpiece in that block of marble and saw it as his motive to convey it to lifestyles for all to enjoy is awe inspiring to me.

But as I become standing there, just looking at up on the masterwork, I knew no longer the distraction of idea that tried to influence my thoughts to intellectualize how the work become introduced to existence. This allowed me to center myself and permit the profound beauty that emanated from the bright white floor, move my spirit powerfully within the moment. And as I just allowed the moment to touch me, I felt for a second just how Michelangelo have to have felt with the chisel in his hand and the spirit in his coronary heart, for as I am now not alone with my pen, he changed into no longer on my own together with his tools, for with each incision had God’s hand discovered itself so gently and lovingly.

  All in all, I spent about an hour in the enterprise of David, listening only to the silence which changed into my trainer. And as I contemplated on what had greeted my senses, I felt a deep feel of appreciation start to emerge, and as my eyes started out to properly up with tears, my consistent partner placated my fears that I might leave out some thing, a moment, which taught me who I am, no longer alone in struggle, but lovely and honest.

  To recognize Michelangelo have to were to be inside the business enterprise of a great lover. Here became a person who made it his lifestyles’ cause to serve the arena by making happen in physical shape, the love that he carried internally. How else can you explain it? To inspect the eyes of David is to know with out a shadow of a doubt that he become conceived in love, and as it becomes this love that crammed Michelangelo’s coronary heart, the concept was inevitable.

  With this, understand that love by no means leaves splendor unexpressed, for that isn’t love’s manner. And within the identical manner that love will by no means leave beauty unexpressed, so will it never depart the witnesses to that splendor untouched, for the coronary heart that become stimulated to bring the beauty to existence, is in no way become independent from the coronary heart of the witness who has visible in that beauty a clean photograph of themselves revealed.

splendor

See on this, how all embodiments of beauty convey a mirrored image that is not one dimensional. If you were to observe a rose, you would be moved with the aid of the beauty of that rose, but what has moved you is not restricted to the petals, stem, and thorns which make up that rose. What you acquire from that rose is an revel in of the splendor of nature which is in no way separate from all that the rose is, due to the fact nature is the essence of its being. And as it’s miles with the rose, so it’s miles with you, due to the fact nature is the very essence of who you’re. As God has breathed existence into the rose, so has God breathed lifestyles into you, and in it, you get a glimpse of not best its glory, but your glory as nicely, that is a stranger now not to the dignity of God.

  Endowed with all that is lovely, do not doubt what’s yours to give, and as you awake out of your shut-eye, so will your brothers and sisters enjoy an extra peaceful relaxation. Not affected by their hideous nightmares, a new pleasure will emerge in the shape of a dream that isn’t isolated in how it comes to bless them. As beauty multiplies, so does its visions, inside the thoughts that have unified itself with the coronary heart.

  Filled with this love, joy replaces sorrow and gratitude replaces judgment, for because the Lord has spoken, you need now not open your mouth to speak. Speaking in superb tongues, you are left with absolute confidence that what he has to mention is actual. Beautiful in its composition, it’s miles undeniably powerful in its resonance. Teaching your heart, the mind finds relaxation, subsumed by the grace that has cradled it, and whilst it awakes, colossal beauty awaits it, in both its relationship to the physical and the infinite which know no divide. Being what beauty has conquered, love has done its paintings, through the eye of the spirit that cannot be blinded to the world’s really worth.

[ukhupacha]

All along the watchtower

There are some novels, some trilogies, in fact, with less actual content that Bob Dylan’s All along the watchtower. It is really astonishing what Dylan achieves in twelve lines, 130 words and 2 and a half minutes. I don’t think I can explain the song definitely, I don’t think anyone could do that with Dylan, because there is a lot here to explore.

The first thing to know is exactly when and where All along the watchtower fits in Dylan’s career. The song is the 4th on his 1967′s album John Wesley Harding, coming after two of his most famous and most celebrated records, Highway 61 revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Dylan had already gone electric, already repudiated all the political significance he had in his first years and alienated all of his folk music in the process. His lyrics in those albums were lyrics about a man possessed, shut thew with some magic spirits, singing gorgeously beautiful epics in a stream of illusions and vignettes. For this reason, John Wesley Harding can only come as a shock, its totally spare instrumentation, mostly guitar base and drums under vocals and harmonica, largely a two-three minutes song, a bold contrasts not only to his previous albums but to the maximalist psychedelic feeling of 1967, the same year that The Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band which Dylan called “Very indulgent.” 

Despite everything, Dylan’s eight album was generally praised. and rightly so, it is among the tightest work he has ever released in both conceptually in the themes found in the twelve song cycle and lyrically. “There’s no line you can stick your finger through. There’s no hole in any of the stanzas. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.”

In All along the watchtower, there are exactly twelve lines, a parable frame as a conversation between two archetypes, a Joker and a Thief. The Joker speaks first “There must be some way out of here,” though we don’t quite know where here is, then complaining about “Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth” while neither of them know what those things are worth “None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.” 

"There must be some way out of here" Said the joker to the thief "There's too much confusion I can't get no relief Businessmen, they drink my wine Plowmen dig my earth None of them along the line Know what any of it is worth"

The Thief responds that there is “No reason to get excited,” those people may feel that like is a joke but we know better because we’ve been through that already.

"No reason to get excited" The thief, he kindly spoke "There are many here among us Who feel that life is but a joke But you and I, we've been through that And this is not our fate So let us not talk falsely, now The hour is getting late" 

The story then pulls back to a watchtower, where there is some kind of commotion as watchmen notice two riders approaching.in the cold distance.

All along the watchtower Princes kept the view While all the women came and went Barefoot servants, too Outside, in the distance A wildcat did growl Two riders were approaching The wind began to howl

The final quatrain is a little bit weird, almost as if it is misplaced in time, It has been suggested than the last lines are actually, chronologically, the first in the story. By doing this, Dylan gives the song a kind of endless, circular feel. The story always wrapping around to the start again emphasizing how futile the Joker’s first commend is “There must be some way out of here.”

Of course, it is unclear if the two riders spotted from the watchtower are the Joker and the Thief or whether the Joker and the Thief spotted them or any other configuration. For that matter is worth questioning who those figures are. Some think that the Joker is Dylan while the Thief is Elvis who stole african american musci for pop culture. Other see two figures as two sides of Dylan’s own personality, before and after horrible motorcycle accident. Others see the Joker as Jesus in a conversation with one of the thieves that was crucified alongside him. Making biblical connection isn’t that far fetched, there are 60 biblical allusions in Wesley Harding and those close to Dylan remember consulting a Bible.

Several people have noted the similarity between this song and the passage of Isaiah, Chapter 21 to be exact.

5Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield.

6For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.

7And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed:

8And he cried, A lion: My lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, and I am set in my ward whole nights:

9And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.

It is a passage that prophecies the fall of Babylon and the Jews return from exile to Jerusalem, Dylan spent much of his early carer fighting up the labor of profit. It is a responsibility he felt was trusted on him illegitimately but here he seems to accept the role. Laying down an apprehensive, apocalyptic scenario, as if to say, you want prophecy? I’ll give you prophecy but it will come with a cost. The price is mystery and entrapment, a prophecy the meaning of which is forever out of reach. He cast himself on the role of Joker, Thief, Narrator, Jesus and Prophet while simultaneously removing any the anchoring personal presence that you may find in any of his previous work. By the end, the audience is left in as much fearful anticipation of what’s to come as the reader of Yeats’ The Second Coming as a great beast impossible to battle. 

The sonnet quality of Dylan’s original fits perfectly with his narrative, at the heart of song is a driving guitar and base cord progression which once it is repeated a few dozen times, locks you into a hypnotic momentum. Onto this is added Dylan’s cold and response lyrics with each line comprising two parts that swing back and forth in his singing never varying outside of a narrow lane of pitch, more overtones of being trapped. The high pitch relentlessness of the harmonica dilutes the nerves added to the sense of apprehension that the song is trying to evoke.

Dylan is conversing here with two of his favorite music genres, the song is technically a folk ballad, is a story told as a conversation that aims to convey a message but the fingerprints of the blues are everywhere on this song. Namely one of Dylan’s hero, Robert Johnson who, the legend has it, sold his sold for musical genius. 

All along the watchtower delivers its prophecy and impending doom onto a steady and unfaltering foundation, something that points backward to both his roots in folk and to the black roots of rock and roll, it was Bod Dylan’s great gift that he could take something that orients itself toward the past and pushed himself and his music forward. It is the music that makes itself All along the watchtower a cryptic prophecy that you can’t escape, something that teases you in and always at the end begins, maybe that is the reason why he got the Nobel Prize....

https://open.spotify.com/track/0Fnb2pfBfu0ka33d6Yki17

[helpfulaspirations1]

Stormie Omartian} The Prayer of Praise

The Prayer of Praise Brings Healing and Transformation The more time we spend praising the Lord, the more we will see ourselves and our circumstances grow in wholeness. That’s because praise softens our hearts and makes them pliable. It also covers us protectively. The more the pliability and covering are maintained, the more quickly our hearts can be molded and healed. Praise and worship of God are always acts of will. We have to will to praise God even when we don’t feel like it. Sometimes our problems or the burdens we carry choke out our good intentions, so we have to make the effort to establish praise as a way of life. And it becomes a way of life when we make it our first reaction to what we face and not a last resort. Now is the time to lift up a prayer of praise to God for everything in your life. Thank Him for His Word, His faithfulness, His love, His grace, His healing. Thank Him for what He has done for you personally. Keep in mind that whatever you thank the Lord for — peace, financial blessing, health, a new job, an end to depression — will start the process of its being released to you at that time. In the Old Testament, the people who carried the Ark of the Covenant stopped every six steps to worship. We also have to remind ourselves not to go very far without stopping to praise and worship. For emotional healing and restoration, we have to be six-step persons and continually invite the presence of the Lord to rule in our situations. The Prayer of Praise Aligns Us with God’s Purposes Without praise we experience an eroding that leads to bondage and death. The Bible says, Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. — Romans 1:21 With praise, you and your circumstances can be changed, because it gives God entrance into every area of your life and allows Him to be enthroned there. So any time you struggle with negative emotions — such as anger, unforgiveness, fear, hurt, oppression, depression, self-hatred, or worthlessness — thank God that He is bigger than all that. Thank Him that His plans and purposes for you are good. Thank Him that in any weak area of your life, He will be strong. Thank Him that He came to restore you. Remember the names of the Lord, and use them in your prayer. “I praise You, Lord, because You are my Deliverer and Redeemer.” “Thank You, God, that You are my Healer and Provider.” Once you align yourself with God’s purposes through praise, you can claim things that you can’t see yet in your life as though they were there. “Lord, I have absolutely no way to make my healing come about, but You are all- powerful and can make it happen. I thank You and praise You for Your healing power in my life.” Doing this is your greatest weapon against the feelings of inadequacy, purposelessness, and futility that can undermine all God has made you to be. Remember: Praise lifts us powerfully into God’s presence and aligns us with His purposes. The Prayer of Praise Defeats Criticism There is another reason why the prayer of praise and thanksgiving is so vital to our walk with God. It crowds out criticism, which I discovered many years ago not only limits what God can do in my life but invites judgment back upon myself. Let me explain. Those of us who have been abused as children often grow up to be judgmental and critical. Being torn down when we were young makes tearing someone else down to build ourselves up very appealing. We become unmerciful because we were not shown mercy. Criticizing others quickly becomes a bad habit that can backfire. Constantly criticizing, even only in the mind, invites a critical spirit. When you have a spirit of criticism, your every thought and word is colored by it. You eventually become cynical and then completely unable to experience joy. You can be reading the Word, praying, and obeying and still not have peace and joy in your life because you are critical. Being critical of circumstances or conditions can be as detrimental as criticizing people, because it turns you into a grumbler and complainer — the type of person people generally like to avoid. It’s difficult to find the love and support you need when no one wants to be around you. Mercy triumphs over judgment. — James 2:13 Criticism crowds love out of our hearts. Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. — 1 Corinthians 13:2 Without love in our hearts we cannot grow emotionally, and we will always be at a standstill in our healing and development. But we can overcome a critical attitude by being constantly filled with the love of the Lord through prayerful praise and thanksgiving toward Him. The Prayer of Praise Defeats Depression The prayer of praise and thanksgiving can also lift you out of hopeless feelings of depression. One of the healthiest steps to take is to focus outwardly on God through praise. Stop everything you’re doing and say, “Lord, I praise You. I worship You. I give thanks to You. I glorify You. I love You.” Thanking Him for everything you can think of is the best way to stop the stream of self-abuse that goes through your head. It says in God’s Word that “anxiety in the heart of man causes depression, but a good word makes it glad” (Proverbs 12:25). The good word that will truly make your heart glad comes from the Lord through His Word. When you pray the prayer of praise and thanksgiving, pray God’s Word. Find verses of Scripture that speak praise and say them out loud. When you find a promise or word from God that speaks to your situation, continually speak it aloud with thanksgiving; eventually your spirit and soul will respond to the hope and truth of God’s Word. The Prayer of Praise Defeats Fear Before I received Jesus, fear was the controlling factor of my life: fear of failure, of bodily harm, of being emotionally hurt, of getting old, of being a nobody. An aching, paralyzing, all-engulfing spirit of fear had overtaken me, bringing with it companion spirits of suicide, despair, anxiety, and hopelessness. As I fought to keep from drowning in my fears, I ran out of strength. Gradually my fear of life overrode my fear of death, and suicide seemed as if it would be a pleasant relief. I have heard it said that F-E-A-R stands for: False Evidence Appearing Real The devil presents false evidence and makes it seem real. We can choose to listen to his falsehoods or believe God. The prayer of praise is your greatest weapon against fear, so use it with great force. Clap your hands, sing, and speak praises to God. Thank Him for His great love. The more you do, the more you’ll open up to receive it. God’s love and fear cannot reside in the same heart! There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. — 1 John 4:18 No matter what has happened to you in the past or what’s happening in the world around you, God promises to protect you as you walk with Him now. In fact, He is committed to protecting you all the time. We don’t understand how much evil the Lord protects us from every day, but I’m sure it’s far more than we imagine. He is more powerful than any adversary we face, and He promises that no matter what the enemy brings into our lives, we will triumph in it. The only fear you are to have is the fear of God, a respect for God’s authority and power. Fearing God means fearing what life without Him would be and thanking Him continually that, because of His love, you’ll never have to experience it. Excerpted with permission from Seven Prayers That Will Change Your Life Forever by Stormie Omartian, copyright Stormie Omartian.

[jthelmsdeep]

A DYSTOPIAN OR HOPEFUL WORLD VIEW? YOU BE THE JUDGE

As a Christ follower I’ve often wondered, was Jesus’ discourse in Matthew 24—where He explains to His disciples that the end of the age would be ushered in by wars, famines, earthquakes, violence, persecution and death—establishing a dystopian view of the world or giving us hope and purpose for an imagined future?

My dilemma?

If it’s true, according to the Christian world view, that the world will end in a state of unabated tragedy, pestilence, and violence, why try at all to live right and do the right thing? Why not simply let life pull us headlong towards inevitability?

But then I realized something even more powerful.

While it’s true that these signs will portend the coming of the end of the age, the key to fully understanding what the response of the Christ follower should be to all of this is found in the following verses:

At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. ~ Matthew 24:10-14

Pay particular attention to the emboldened statements as they speak volumes in regard to what we see happening around us today. From the abuses of power in the hallowed, esoteric corridors of political power, to the licentious living of religious leaders preferring political influence over holiness, it would appear that many are unwittingly turning away from the faith established by the Scriptures, and the love of many—what love they have left—has become inwardly focused.

Of course, how you interpret this prophecy of Jesus’ will have everything to do with how you respond to it. If you interpret this as a doomsday prophecy that suggests the need to protect yourself and your children from the “enemy” as you perceive it to be, then a run-for-the-hills, every-man-for-himself attitude will be the resultant effect. However, if, like Jesus, you recognize that we’re not fighting against flesh and blood, then Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, and other terrorist groups will not be your enemy, the spirit operating through them will. This realization will change your approach or response to the global refugee crisis brought on by the war for power (a war in some ways largely influenced and controlled by the West).

Of this one thing I am certain, for the things that Jesus spoke of to come to pass, there will be pain, suffering, hardship and death. For the Christ follower it is an exercise in futility to think that we can change the outcome of His prophecy simply by shutting out the immigrant and building a wall on our southern border with Mexico. Fear, hate, and anger will be the result of those actions, not peace and safety. According to the Scriptures, “where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.”

This overreaction towards self preservation is brought on by fear, and I worry that President Trump and too many Americans have developed a dystopian view of the world, and too many Christ followers are buying into that rhetoric. The uniform chant among proponents of these measures has become, “we’re tired of all the political correctness and pacifist rhetoric, and we want someone who will be honest, firm, and do what’s in the best interest of America and her citizens.” Unfortunately that position misses the mark by a mile. Jesus died for the world not just for America and her citizens, and our greater call as Christ followers isn’t toward nationalism. This extreme shift away from the globalism ostensibly promoted by the political insiders, has swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.

The reactionary leaning towards populism and nationalism will simply serve as a distraction for the Christ follower from the real task at hand, which is to share the Good News of the love of Jesus Christ. It’s impossible to convince those you label as the enemy, or those you build walls  against to try and keep out of your comfortable and safe life, that you love them and so does the God you purport to follow. Like someone once said to me, “If the choice is between safely living in America, or being a stronger witness for the cause of Christ by risking my life to save those of the innocent, I choose Christ every time.”

A young writer I follow on social media put it like this:

And it came to pass that some Pharisees came forward and said: "Donaldius of the House of Trumpas is he that the Lord has sent to make Merikas great again. Behold he shall conquer from sea to sea, and from river to river, and make a fool of his enemies”

And some fishermen, when they heard about these lofty declarations, came forward:

"We are not as learned in the book of the law as ye, but the Teacher from Nazareth has taught us about love, about redemption. He even once said that the weightier matters of the law are those of justice and mercy. Now, we hear that Donaldius, him of whom you speak so highly, is planning to build a wall to keep away our neighbours from the other side of the country”

And the Pharisees, hearing this, answereth the fishermen thus: “you spake thus because you knoweth not the scriptures. Donaldius of the House of Trumpas shall build a wall to separate the pure and great people of Merikas from the bad people of Mezikus. For the people of Mezikus know nothing more than to trade in weed and hard drugs. The land is infested with their filth. They have corrupted the righteous people of Merikas, and they must be kept away”

And the fishermen went away sad, knowing that it is not right, the things of which the Pharisees spoke. And many other things weighed heavily on their minds. They feared that there will be increasing division and hatred among the people of Merikas while Donaldius sits on the throne, and much injustice and conflicts in the years of Donaldius of the house of Trumpas.”

— The Book Of Seun Kolade, Chapter 1

Look, I’m not suggesting that we don’t owe our families a responsibility to protect them to the best of our ability. But when fear becomes the motivating factor for why we do what we do, then we’ve lost the plot. Ultimately, it is love that covers a multitude of sins and gives us the ability to recognize the real enemy. There is no fear in love because perfect love casts out fear, and fear breeds torment. And even as I contemplate my response to those who seek to kill me without cause, all in the name of some misconceived holy war, it is with fear and trembling that I remember that when Jesus went to the Cross to pay the ransom for our sin-sick souls, He was thinking about the terrorists too. Just my dos centavos!