#automica

[eltripol]

Seattle's monthly drawing night Dune has returned, and with it, more comics. (From Dune #85)

[thereareeyesinsidethetrees]

gildedstory stories in order of our favorites so maybe we can convince more folks to check em out (note: the story playlist has them in actual chronological order)

-gildedguy and the dragon of mar

-gildedguy vs bog

-gildedguy vs the rock hard gladiator

-gildedguy gets up!

-gildedguy vs oxob

-gildedguy vs jade

-gildedguy vs the green-eyed cowboy

-gildedguy and the basement busk

-gildedguy vs fry

^ the ones towards the bottom aren’t bad by any means, we love them all dearly (yes, even you vs fry). it’s just in order of what we go back to and replay the most often basically

[rainarity]

made nova cant wait to try her out, also grinded out the valentine color palette, I appreciate so much the people who carried me because I was doing no damage lmao I may try to grind for the wings tonight of the events still up

[karanseraph]

Where are Cybertron's 'hot spots'?

The hot spot/sparkfield phenomenon is pretty much just IDW1 continuity. But I like it, because it's kinda cabbage patch and those toys were there with Transformers making parents crazy to find holiday gifts.

But where are they?

The 12 named spots are NOT including those on the Moons or within any Titans, but are across Cybertron's surface. they are, apparently:

Rivet's Field

Vespertine Blue

Port Residua

Pious Pools

Vauvaire

Sansaw Sanserre

Automica

Warrior's Gate

Eugenesis

Alyon

Mesmerica

Nova Point

If Nova Point = Nova Peak then that means RIvet's Field, Vespertine Blue, Port Residua AND Nova Point are all in some proximity to Iacon.

In a fic, I added a thirteenth spot/field called Quadrivia Quaaltagh which was associated with the Quintesson occupation AND Quantum Drive development and near Unitrex. That's headcanon, of course.

But did we get any notes about where they might be?

I'm at the point where I need to headcanon it, similar to how I headcanoned the map of Cybertron, so that my fic can be internally consistent when bots give each other directions or say where they are from.

Rivet's Field - sounds like Ebbets Field, so it must be the Brooklyn of Cybertron, which is also, apparently, near Iacon. They play some sport in that area.

Vespertine Blue - Dusky, evening Blue. I'm guessing north-east-ish or maybe east of Iacon where the first stars could be seen in a darkling sky. On my map it would also be near Uraya.

Port Residua - Remaining Port? Left Residue? Does Port imply a sea or the left? Our left looking at the map or like stage left? On my Cybertron, this would put it south-east-is of Iacon, north of Nyon (space Paris), on coast of the gaseous Argon Sea. Probably the coastal area has some kind of deposits or residue or withstands something over time.

Pious Pools - near some pools, presumably, as well as canals, apparently, but I don't know where.

Vauvaire - I feel like this is space Riviera, like Vauvert maybe and thus must be near Vos, which is also, basically, space French Riviera and that it is located in a place of wells, like the brecciated terrain of Cybertron's southern hemisphere.

Sansaw Sanserre - I suspect this is near Stanix. Though Stanix is probably the Stanwix of Cybertron (from the ancient terms for strong walls, with Fort Scyk nearby) it also came to be a region for energon wine according to (Ask) Vector Prime, and since Sancerre is a French wine region, Sansaw Sanserre must by near a Cybertronian wine region like Stanix. (My notes also say Shrewsbury for some reason?)

Automica - I'm not sure about this one.

Warrior's Gate - I put this near Tarn because I imagine it references Tarn-Hauser Gate, which itself references Tannhäuser Gate.

Eugenesis - Not sure about this one. Probably very fertile, though.

Alyon - mountains are seen in the distance when it is illustrated, so it could be in Cybertron's Eastern hemisphere situated between manganese mountains and Sonic Canyons, OR it might be in the Western Hemisphere the other side of those mountains, which on my map would put it either near Crystal City or an uninhabited part of the vast Acid Wastes. I'm guessing latter?

Mesmerica - I see that 'Merica, but I also have to think this related to mesmerizing, and that Mesmerica is near a location known for dark science and wizardry where Mindwipe or someone might be and so I suspect this could be near Kalis, but also potentially near Crystal City if Science went wrong. On my Cybertron, Kalis is within the Mithril Sea, though, so maybe Mesmerica is mes- in the intermediate location between Crystal City and Kalis on the Mithril Sea coast.

Nova Point - If Nova Point and Nova Peak are related locations, then this hot spot is ALSO near Iacon, probably west of Iacon, near Nova Cronum as well, like maybe there's a bridge or highway in the area that has views of this sparkfield as one drives into Iacon.

Ideas?

[crying-fantasies]

Rodimus wasn't ready to be a creator P10

Masterlist

Part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10: Sparkling pictures

Little pedes struggle a bit to move around without using his wheels, bit his servos stay strong while gripping your hands, both moving slowly to reach what you want to show at the end of the way, the protoform is still an infant in it's processor and physical appearance, practically a baby boy of short age while he is already way too big to carry around like before at least for you, too heavy to even try and lift him in your arms, sometimes he cries about it, something that protoforms don't really do as regular as him, but yet again your bundle of you is more human in that aspect, even the time he needs to learn how to walk properly and the help that you can offer with more ease than your poor husband trying to reach you baby's hand with his big body almost folded, he tried several times but Rodimus would feel his back killing him later every single one, so your baby has you, holding to his tiny hands to guide him while he looks up to you with a smile.

It's a sweet memory, one of the few that he has a sense of recollection when looking at this place, which is familiar, from a very long time ago.

"To see you here in this exact time, well, that's what I call a surprise"

Blacksun hears a loud voice behind, authority dripping from it in every word, there is a femme, big and strong, even more than him, in every aspect, blue and white, with way too soft facial features that don't exactly look cybertronian, few were the individuals that shared a genetic bond with a human and showed this kind of physical traits.

"Individuals" was how they were called by others, "playmates" by their creators.

"Code~" without a real necessity to drag along her name while opening his arms he does it anyway, gaining such sweet giggles from the femme before been embraced in a warm hug after finally throwing away the big and scary bot charade.

"Sunset, it's been so long" as large as she is and with outstanding force is natural the little effort it takes her to put him a few meters away from the surface of the planet, "I haven't heard from you since ages, what brings a traveler to Cybertron?"

"Well, you now, to see old friends and give presents" while he talks his servos display numerous packages full of colors, on looks more flashy than the last, "that is, if madam Eminen wants one" he almost wants to laugh, bright blue optics look at him, well, the candies, with adoration, "The pop tarts are quite good to be honest"

"I shouldn't..." There is hesitance, dentae in her lower lip, before finally giving up and reaching for one, opening it with her dentae before eating it in one take, "human food, it's so good, energon can't be compared" he just laughs, as big and strong she may look now, Eminence Prime, previously Codexia Pax, is still the same food lovin' protoform from old times.

His laugh dies slowly while looking at the main reason why he is here, remembering being as little as his mother at that time, her hand gently guiding him to see the hot spot in Automica, the place where he emerged as a spark, much to his father's grimace.

That very same hot spot is still producing, and there are many other bots in there, waiting for their opportunity to raise a protoform even if it just for a few cycles, a whole rotation at best, seeing with interest the only bot and human pair that gets near the hot spot and, together, they bring a piece of sentio metallico to the surface with the help of many other humans that come with special gloves to prevent any DNA mixture.

That's how he came to be, that's how Eminence came to existence, all 37 of them, plus this one too, a new one to add to the list to call during Christmas and tell Sari about when he returns to earth.

His forging was... unexpected, as his father said, after an hour and multiple heart failures due to pain, his mother gave him a form and he scanned them.

"There are more humans than before"

"They make a great help for our blacksmith", she has opened another package, eating with abandon, they can't get bigger or better and the little fuel they get from organic food is almost a bad joke, but they don't have the necessity to excrete or gain weight, they only do it because it tastes good, quite the reason business is blooming with other things apart from energon that comes from earth.

Apparently, in the time Rodimus (and by sub product, he as his spawn) and all his crew were away searching for some kind of new lost cybertronian colony or whatever (they only found death corpses by the way), more humans appeared in Cybertron, living in there! Walking along some human sized corridors and using exo packs to breath, even Iacon had an artificial atmosphere to provide what's necessary for its new fleshy habitants that live around and work in little shops, commerce is new after billions of years of war, ironically humans are good to guide others in many ways.

But now this was another thing.

"A human blacksmith" he looks at the man, at least it looks like one, he was never good at differentiating, he only recognized his mother, it's moving the sentio metallico around, it's like a game for him, little hands and fingers mean a more versatile way to put it together, and that one human looks like he knows what he is doing, "color me surprised"

"The council is more open this days, after what happened with Eukaris, humans are seen in a better way"

He doesn't say anything, just looking around, he knows what happened then, he meet a human that died there, and he looks here, where life is formed again by this cybertronian and human, seeing the tiny human with open arms accepting a little bundle of birth metal just forged by the human blacksmith, a blanket ready in their arms to embrace the little bitlet, he is focused on it but he can feel Eminence looking at him, searching for something.

"Where is your memento?"

Oh, right, Eminence doesn't know, in reality, not even Blacksun himself knows at the moment where that thing is, maybe it shows, because Emi stops eating for a moment and looks at him worried.

"What happened?"

"I've it in a security place, don't worry about it" He tries to put little importance to it, as little as possible, the light optics of his friend show him otherwise.

"Hum, I would love to do so, it's just..." looks like she is ready to tear up, cry like humans call it, "I couldn't let it go..."

"No no, nothing like that!" He stops her from more tears of coolant falling from her optics, tries to, it's so obvious that he can't reach her face plate with facility.

"Then what?" She searchers at her side where a compartment opens and she takes a little pendant, it's golden in color and the fiber of the cord around it is organic, Eminence hold it delicately to the point one may think the little trinket will fade away if too much pressure is put into it, her way too expressive optics showing such sadness that he tries to look away "our mementos are all, it's literally all we have of them apart from our given names" she puts it practically in his face plate, showing him every detail, every impressed information in it, "Sari told us since we were protoforms to keep this close and never ever lose it, never!" She is on crying again, a lot, those drops aren't coolant anymore, those are water and salt drops dissolved with many chemicals that present the variance of the emotion, real organic tears.

"I know" Blacksun does what he can, hearing her hiccuping, really, Codexia hasn't changed, she is still the overly sensitive and emotional protoform that cried for her mother to carry her if something was scary, but now she is Eminence, a promise of brighter future and expansion, a hard exterior to such a soft, sweet young femme.

"How are you strong enough to leave it?" Emi finally asks, servos gently holding the golden disk with adoration, "I can't leave it, what if a lose it by some silly mistake?"

Lose it by mistake, yeah, Blacksun still had those moments, when he was given the golden disk for the first time he didn't want it, throwing it away in middle of a tantrum while crying for his mother and calling his father a lier, Rodimus quickly going to check if the disk wasn't broken and ex-venting with relief at seen that it was indeed whole, holding it near to his chassis.

When he returns to the Lost Light after Eminence stops her crying and he left her with her father (he really feels so little when seeing the great Optimus), he searchers in a secret pocket just between the space in his ark replicas (those were here before him, he didn't had the spark to eliminate them so those are his now) and takes out the golden disk.

It would take time, but Rodimus finally let Blacksun have the disk back, the disk of his mother, which he puts carefully in the receptor to see another film on it.

"Entry number 1" there she is, his mother, you, looking well, rested, the area around you looks new, many people, humans, are moving around with little things used to give more comfort.

The very first time that humans boarded a cybertronian spaceship, in an official way at least.

How did you ended up there, in space, walking among big aliens, is something that he wished to ask you if you were still there, his father only says that it was destiny, Ultra Magnus says it was because earth would change drastically soon and humanity was in ways of mass extinction, it still is, the Lost Light wasn't transporting energon from earth that day, it was transporting humans.

"We are transporting something like energon, I guess, I don't know why I'm here really, but I can try to help, try to do my best as I can" it's like you are talking to yourself, most likely because this was supposed to be just your entries, totally personal.

You look healthy, nervous, your hands don't have the same burn scars that you gained when you had him.

"I'll miss the earth" you smile, sadly, looking around to the other humans, "I'll miss the sunset view in my parents house"

This time he does hear the sounds of his father's pedes and the door opening but he doesn't bulge even when he takes a seat next to him, holding him near to his side when tears started to fall.

"Many bots are gentle, sometimes they like to poke around but they know boundaries too" you laugh and Rodimus does the same, remembering how he couldn't keep his servos from picking you up and even running a digit over your head when he was feeling that everything was just so much.

"Everything is going to be alright" Rodimus is hugging his son when the entry ends and then continues to the next, all recordings of your voice and things that you took photos of, all your life reduced to a disk, so little in comparison to the normal sized ones.

You, his dear conjunx, who didn't have a spark, only what you called a heart and maybe a soul, not knowing what would happen when you died, only knowing for a fact that you would die before him, Rodimus even joked that he might get blasted before that and you gave him the angriest look that he ever saw on you while he promised that he'll be careful and never be too overconfident, at least for you.

His devastation when he lost you by the doings of others almost made him want to follow you, something that apparently was common when a bot lost a conjunx, but he couldn't, he wouldn't.

The pictures show right at that moment are proof, first there is only pictures of places, things, those change to photos of your friends, the ones that you made and come with you from earth, the ones you make in space, Rodimus and you, you with a little bottle with energon on it and Rodimus holding a bracelet, the most likely thing that you found that could represent the rings that humans always gave in wedding ceremonies, finally settling to many pictures of a little white and blue body, forming a face, limbs, a whole body and smile back at you with optics that have a color way too similar to yours.

Your voice can still be heard, every detail and every curiosity that you found, every sound of your voice brought them real comfort when you called them by their names, one that you learned to love and one that you created with that same love Rodimus showed you, one that he can't still let go of, maybe he will never be able to.

Rodimus didn't know if you could be there for him when his spark finally gave up but he wanted to believe so, that you would welcome him in the allspark, let him hold you again and, as cheesy as it may be, get to hug you and kiss you.

"Dad"

"Yeah, Sunny?"

"I think- I want to take my name back, the one mom gave me"

And that was enough.

[automica]

[listoriented]

Burnout: Paradise

1. Burnout. Spinning wheels without moving. Antipodean slang. The smell of burned rubber.

The blank word document is another rounded bend. A few cars here and there loaded in. Driving these virtual streets is seeing ideas, tangents, discourse, thoughts spill off. In front is always nothingness. An inability to grasp on to anything coherent. Yes this is synecdoche, yes this is consumerism, a shiny shell of petromodernity – an actual critical theory term that I now take seriously - yes this is me, my life, my phd in miniature, the imperfect totalising open-world game, or yes this is a microcosm of the entirety of trying to play through the letter “B” of my steam library, stop-start, hopeful then despairing, takes longer than it should, yes this game is a magnum opus and I wish so hard to fill my lungs and release until my fingers are pinching some inflated balloon perfectly full of a graspable idea, or yes this game is fundamentally empty, a comment on a comment; at the bottom of all searches for purpose we find searches for purpose, etc. 

So I start and I start and I start again. I drive I drive I drive. Event after event ticks down, my license goes from learner to D to B to A and then I hit my goal, “Burnout license”, and still I don’t know what I’ll write. Something about driving, in general; driving as notionally relaxing, driving while thinking about other things. How do people write? Write things? My PhD is in pieces on the floor and in the computer and in my head. I drive around Paradise City and terrible emo from the mid-noughties plays, interspersed with long bouts of classical. Days pass, and in the game the day turns into night and back again, and I adjust the clock to make this happen slower, and the weather changes in Paradise City, a little – cycles of rain and cloud and sun - and here in Melbourne the weather changes too. It was the tail end of summer when I started, and we’ve been through the surprising highs and lows of autumn, now settling into winter, doing it all again. There are no roads leading in or out of Paradise City, and it’s a long drive back from the hills.

2.      Burnout. A series of arcade-style racers made for various platforms by Criterion Games [official site] between 2001 and 2011.

It’s a little uncanny, this pocket of 2008. It just looks real good to my rusty, unfussy eyes, like in visual terms it hasn’t aged in ways other games from that year age (though my friend James vehemently disagreed). It does the trick. It does lots of tricks. And it seems rare too, to say of a 2008 game that it’s a masterpiece, that it’s the best of its class, though of Paradise this is surely true, if all reports are to be believed with regards to all other open-world arcade driving games that have come since, including everything else made by Criterion.

Any doubts about its age are firmly put to bed by the soundtrack, though, which despite prominently featuring that Guns N’ Roses song from 1987 just screams mid-2000s at me, abundant “rock” guitars, masc whine and all, very of its time, salvaged by one timeless Avril Lavigne banger, a chunk of classical, and (to a certain extent) personal nostalgia for a time when this sort of soundtrack just seemed vaguely synonymous with “driving game”. There’s also the dated blemish of inane unmutable advice-slider DJ A(u)tomica, who at least has the good grace to (somehow) avoid repeating himself, even after seventeen hours of driving, at a clip of one quip every few minutes or so. There’s also the very 2008 nod to renewable energy via Paradise’s wind farm, harking back to that post- An Inconvenient Truth moment of progressive euphoria when we really all believed we could build towards a sustainable future that would also accommodate our oily desires, before another decade of resource-industry funded filibustering hadn’t proven this, again, impossible.

And yet Paradise stands up in ways that surpass the non-ironic soundtrack of fragile masculinity and the very 00’s DJ Atomica, despite or because of the people-less world, the flat and drab urban interior, the hardly even tokenistic ways of engaging with the city as function rather than form. I particularly like how B:P has not even the faintest hint of story, how even in terms of progression it purely becomes a game of exploration, winning events, checking boxes. It melds (excuse me for a second) form and function and manages not to get in the way of itself – the story is what the player does in the game, where the player goes. It’s kind of breathtaking, rare for any game before or since. (Hopefully it’s clear that I’m not advocating for the dissolution of narrative in games, only that the lack of narrative pretence here is very suited to this particular game, and very preferable to the kinds of irrelevant and bloated narratives that are thrown over e.g. other driving games).

Ah, 2008. It was just there! And yet so far. I played Burnout Paradise for a running total of seventeen hours over nearly three months. During this time, I also played forty-two hours of Tetris99. Everything in its place. Criterion recently announced they’ll shut down the Burnout Paradise’s online servers in August, though Paradise lives on in Remastered (2018) glory, Origin only. 

3. Burnout. The act of refuelling the boost capacity of an engine by running out of boost.

Despite the time I’ve spent with it, the fact that I managed to complete its main in-game objective, and the running thoughts on time and place and representation of cultural norms, I feel I’m struggling to say much of definition about Paradise that fits easily into the scrapbook nature of this blog. Perhaps in some ways it's too close to life; a series of arbitrary checklists through which feeling happens (nebulously) around. I "liked" it but do not feel moved to thought, and I'm aware that that is the point – it’s a game that allows you to drive, endlessly, if you want to, think and do whatever. It won’t get in the way (barring DJ Automica butting in every couple of minutes – he literally cannot be switched off).

I do not drive much these days. Last year when Lauren and I moved to Canberra, we drove nearly 4000 kilometres across the country. The landscapes wound by, at the time fleetingly, but they piled on and left deep rivulets in my head, and though it was just five days and nothing really happened – we leant on the accelerator, stopped every hour, listened to music, stayed in nothing-motels quite literally hundreds of kms from anywhere else and ate forgettable takeaway - it feels immense, now. Driving is funny like that - you are never quite in a place, separated from it by machine noise and windows and infrastructure, the one activity you can do to facilitate thinking about something else. Still, impressions, motion, the sense of having moved, of having journeyed. Here in Australia, the fossil fuel lobby has won its third straight election in a row. Hope is eroding into nothing.

Probably my favourite hour or two in Paradise City was spent mucking around in the online section with Roy and James, trying to check off a few of the game's multiplayer challenges. These involved such serious exercises as trying to do barrel a series of barrel rolls, or try and land on top of each other, or smash into each in mid-air, or drive on top of a parking lot to jump a ramp onto a shopping centre. It was very good, if a little eerie and dystopic, strewn with outdated real-and-paid-for advertising billboards, branded vehicles, quaint echoes of paused time and uncanny dilapidation.

The mill of the game I could never quite settle on - I “liked” it, I think, but it wasn’t without problems. I found the single-player events to be mindlessly enjoyable, ploughing other cars into crash barriers, or effortlessly holding down "boost" to accelerate down a straight and into a finish line, celebratory cutaway shot ensuing. Sometimes I crashed into too many grey girders that my eyes hadn't picked out and got frustrated, or sometimes I missed a critical turnoff and got frustrated. Sometimes they just felt like chores, and it was certainly sometimes annoying to not be able to restart events that I had botched, and it took me ten hours to learn you could opt out of races, stunt runs etc just by letting the car idle for a few seconds. And knowing this probably would have saved me a lot of time in the early game, because like I said it’s a long way back from the hills, where like three out of eight events end up at, and committing to staying in a race which after a couple of botched turns and unseen barriers you’re definitely not going to win, whose distant finish line is going to land you a long way from the nearest event (once you finally get there) can feel pretty dire, really, though there was also part of me that admired how Burnout refused to let you jump around the map, forced you to drive, take your time, see the city, see the sights.

I did appreciate the cracky coloured collectms of Paradise City, how they brought the city to life, sort of, or gave it the impression of being a well designed and thought-through playground, though I never got too completionist about them, the core exercise of the whole thing. Both John Walker of RPS and Chris Donlan of Eurogamer have written about Paradise’s fluoro crash gates, the impulse to reinstall the game every year and knock them all down from scratch. Along the way to getting my “Burnout license” I unlocked 36 of the 75 vehicles, jumped 35 of the 50 super jumps, broke 79 of 120 neon red billboards, and smashed through 353 of 400 aforementioned glowing yellow crash barriers. The game puts me at 55% completed. No steam achievements (woulda been nice, perhaps, given that Burnout Paradise is fundamentally a collectmup; nothing but metres and percentages). I’ve driven a little over 1000 miles, supposedly, which is certainly more than I’ve IRL driven over the past few months.

4.  Burnout. noun Physical and emotional exhaustion; breakdown caused by overwork. Commonly associated with “crunch”, “the video game industry”.

But here there is also pure hesitation. Procrastination. The fear of moving on, even at the end of this little step of what has ballooned into an impossible project. I can see the next letter waiting there, a new chapter, a chance for renewal. The one disappearing behind us has drawn out so far, encompassed a few years and a fair bit of change, and now almost petered into nothing at the final gate. I want to hit the ground running but I'm not sure I'm ready, and in the meantime various other deadlines swirl around, make it difficult to see the clear path ahead that I crave. And so it is that the temptation has been there to keep driving the streets of Paradise, its anonymous suburbs and abstract goals, continue delaying the inevitable, or the nearly inevitable, or the not-inevitable-at-all of writing this post and moving on to the next chapter, because it turns out this is a project I once made a choice to begin, and could at one point choose to stop.

There are nagging questions, of course. Who blogs, anymore? Who reads blogs anymore? How does one find a blog they like and then continue to follow it for the span of its natural life? Does anyone use “bookmarks”? What’s an RSS feed? I'm not even sure, in a broader sense, that I know where to find the kinds of writing about games that I want to read at the moment, at least not reliably, outside of say the occasional check-through of Critical Distance or Unwinnable. I look at the slate of games coming out and find it hard to be excited by anything much, the hype and the saturation. It is bountiful until it is not. The guilt element of playing games – something inherited from childhood that I’ve never been entirely able to dissociate - has become more and more prominent. I've increasingly used games as a tool for procrastination and a coping mechanism, a distraction from various (work/study and other) anxieties. I've also been aware of myself doing this, and in turn the kinds of gaming experiences I've relied on have been more focused on short term, low-investment distraction (hence the sudden unyielding devotion to Tetris, which really was just filling the hole left by an earlier act of self-discipline AKA uninstalling Rocket League; more recently, as I’ve managed to put the Switch away for longer periods, I’ve turned back to another simple but deceptive time-filler in Mini Metro. Choose your poison, basically). For a while it seemed Burnout would not only fill this role but do it responsibly: it seemed great for dropping into in short bursts - win a race or two, unlock a new car maybe – without quite the same dangerously addictive pull for me as those other games. But then I heard the GnR song "Paradise City" one too many times (it's mandatory with startup), or got sick of the menu loading times, and it lost this specific part of its appeal.

And then there's the subjective nature of this particular Sisyphean project - the knowledge that here I am pushing a rock up a mountain of my own making, one that exists only for me, entirely built out of and defined by the games and bundles I chose and continue to choose to buy, the rules I chose to set. Life is short, this task is absurd, and at the moment it's not even a joke I feel particularly happy about sharing. Sometimes I get to play great games here, games I may never have gotten around to; at other times I am playing shit games for this blog, and in the process there are inevitably other things I'm not doing. One choice erases another. Increasingly it feels like an isolated pursuit - playing games in general, not just the writing and making of this here blog. It seems like I know fewer people who play games these days, between falling out of touch with friends, seeing lots of other old friends give up games in one way or another, and playing games less frequently with those who I still know. I’ve accidentally become something of a game hermit. For years I've loved the camaraderie and easy familiarity of social gaming experiences even when I haven't loved the games that conduct them - the feeling of being connected to people even in a transient, shallow, goal-oriented sense, but even these I'm not sure I believe in anymore, or I find myself less and less willing to invest in the "right" titles to facilitate it.

I’m into my thirties now, and maybe this is just a feeling of age, life, I dunno, priorities finally shifting to where people told me they should’ve years ago. One of my oldest friends is about to have a baby, though he more or less quit video games over a year ago now. I'm extremely happy for him. Two of my younger cousins just had children, several hours away by plane – my uncle, a new grandfather to two babies, makes posts on facebook claiming climate change is a socialist hoax, and I can’t help but think of the kind of world his grandchildren are going to inherit. I'm mulling over a missed deadline that's been a thorn in my brain now for months, the single-largest hitherto unsaid reason why this post has taken so long to dig its way to the surface. This month marks the five year anniversary of another cousin’s sudden/unexpected passing; he was five years older than me, and though I’ll never be able to make sense of it, I feel like I get that there’s something sort of vulnerable about this age, when the things you want don’t quite work out, or when you’re a bit aimless and stuck in your patterns and feel like things aren’t going to change. He was so kind and gentle, a beautiful soul and a terrible Zerg, and I miss him so much. And one year ago I drove from Canberra to Melbourne and slept on the floor of this house I now call home while I waited for a truck with rest of my stuff to arrive. I’m very aware of the calendar, of change and inertia, of patterns and decay, of newness sprouting underfoot, but I don’t know how games fit at the moment, or I’ve lost the thread of feeling like they’re actually important, or why, amongst all the noise.

Burnout: Paradise is at the start, in the middle, and right at the end of all these things. It's a great game, part of me feels, or wants to say I feel. Playful, irreverent, childishly violent, simultaneously full of stuff and empty of matter. I'm happy I've played it, happy I can say that I've played it, happy to understand on an experiential level most of what it offers, happy I'll be able to remember it later, nod in some hypothetical conversation where someone brings up Burnout: Paradise and say I know what they mean, yeah. I get it. When we were playing it online together briefly, a couple of months back now, Roy told me that Burnout Paradise is the only game he ever one hundred percented twice - once on 360, once on PC - and that it was almost three times, because the first time he was almost done with it, someone broke into his house and stole his Xbox and all his games, and that Paradise was the only game that he re-bought with the insurance money, so determined he was to tick every box the game left open to tick, even if it meant doing it all again.

But maybe – counterpoint - I don’t get it. I’m finding it harder and harder to make good sense of this kind of experience, or feel like this kind of thing is (in some arbitrary way) a net positive, or that it’s okay to keep glossing over the emulation of destruction that games of so many different kinds fundamentally rely on. Outside there is so much suffering, so much to be upset about, and I no longer feel like there is time enough to sink into mindless (rather than meaningful, perhaps?) distraction. Or I’m finding it harder to get beyond the thought that this is an extension of the distraction/avoidance behaviour that I realised might actually be a problem in my life.

“Burnout” is, you’ll know, here in the great mess of the year 2019, a buzz word, particularly in the games industry. Games company employees have perpetually been expected to work unsustainable hours out of some sort of devotion to the industry, creating a cycle of talent depletion and toxic work cultures. But as is often the case with games, it’s a tip-off of what happens elsewhere, across the board. The mass casualisation of careers across all industries, the gig economy, pressures caused by un- and under- employment, the dissipation of viable faith, social-media and political stresses: all of these are leading to burnout, everyone has burnout, we are inundated with burnout. There is something ripe about the words or the idea of Burnout: Paradise, the very conceptual juxtaposition that seems to be two sides of the same coin, that feels very reflective of this moment, what we are all experiencing versus what we were promised. But what does this have to do with Burnout: Paradise, the game in which you pretend drive fake person-less cars around a virtual city, have horrific, visceral crashes from which you immediately respawn and “beat” by achieving a long series of arbitrary victories, collecting all there is to collect? Something, nothing, I don’t know.

“Burnout” means a lot of things, and the meaning of “burnout” the game adopts isn’t the other ones I’d associate with cars – a burnt out engine, or the smell of burning rubber - but one that exists only for the series, so far as I can tell: getting to keep using your boost because you’ve been continually using your boost. Keep going at all cylinders or bust, basically – except not, because the consequences for interrupting the boost are slim even on the relative scale of things that can go right or wrong, in this game where there is never really all that much on the line for the player anyway.

Paradise. n. Heaven. A place to await judgement. An enclosed park. Eden.

In Paradise City the grass is trim; the girls (all humans actually) are non-existent, unless you happen to be riding a motorcycle, presumably because a motorcycle without a rider would look very weird.

In Paradise City the cars are peopleless and drive themselves, so maybe it is an early vision of the tech bro version of Paradise. Or maybe the cars are driven by people who can only exist on the outside of the world of Paradise City, looking in across the matrix. Or maybe in Paradise City the people are the cars. This is Cars, the movie, sans dialogue.

In Paradise City all the cars emulate brands and models that exist in "the real world" but are called by names that exist only in the Burnout franchise.

In Paradise City all the cars ostensibly run on petrol, which is infinite but unnecessary, because going through a petrol station merely refills the car's boost capacity, whatever that is, rather than imply that your car would stop running if you at some point failed to “fill up”. It's very important that you know, though, that the cars run on petrol, because otherwise it wouldn't be a realistic representation of cars. Even in Paradise.

In Paradise City cars exist and then don't exist.

In Paradise City a lot more cars suddenly exists if someone decides they want to flip their car over and see how much monetary damage they can cause.

In Paradise City cars crash and crumple in a hyper-realistic way, but it's okay because the cars have no drivers and anyway all cars are all miraculously fine again after a few moments.

In Paradise City the railway has been shut down to give cars more places to hang out. 

In Paradise City the whole city runs on wind energy, because it's important to care about the environment too, because you can have both, promises the radio, though seeing as there's nobody there in all of Paradise's buildings it's unclear, anyway, what such energy would actually be running.

onward to Caesar 3

[werebatz]

im glad my legacy has gone from "fmk anon" to "leaf anon"... what a glo up honestly. how about the hit by twrp ft. nsp? ooh and smooth criminal by alien ant farm is an alt classic. beating heart baby by head automica? 🍃

the hit: a solid bop tbh!! i think i’ve heard this play on my friend’s music before..

smooth criminal: im not totally sure how i feel about this? its an interesting cover but i think i need to listen to it when my brain is fully functional to make up my mind

beating heart baby: the beat is good, the key change kinda snuck up on me and i sat there for a sec like “was that actually a key change or did i hit my head”

[bicaramusik]

Biography Aida Automica

Biografi Band – Aida Atomicaadalah band asal Jakarta yang terbentuk pada 2014 oleh dua pria dan satu wanita berusia 17 tahun yang berasal dari SMA yang sama, yaitu, Adil Akbar (vokal dan gitar), Felula Desfealucy (drum dan synthesizer), dan Adiguna Palinrungi (gitar dan vokal). Berawal sebagai band ekstrakurikuler, akhirnya mereka terlanjur jatuh cinta pada proses bermusik bersama, dan juga…

[attravesiamo]

Eso de ponerse a gritar en una conversaón me parece lo mas inutil que una persona puede hacer. Cuando alguien me grita lo primero que hago es ponerle mute a sus palabras, es que ya ni siquiera lo pienso si no que es como una reacción automica. En el momentoque alguien quiere forzar su punto de mi vista en mi a punta de gritos es el momento en el que me doy cuenta de que no tiene ni idea de lo que habla. El grito es la estrategia del ignorante.

[karanseraph]

I just needed a throw-away line

But I guess I gotta world-build Polyhex now, even though no one goes there for chapters. I need the unnamed stronghold to be named and to know what the closest place to recreate after installing hardware there would be.

Some of this will be headcanon for me to use in a fic, but it's mostly based on various canon (thanks @tfwiki ) which I blend and simmer into continuity soup.

Polyhex is a Province. It has a Governor. It also has a number of Barons. They aren't really land-owners, but more like captains of industry, who coincidentally lord over certain cities within Polyhex Province according to where their industry is based. The Province, along with Tagan Heights to its west, forms the northeastern quadrant of Cybertron, and it is north of the Sea of Rust.

(It does not, in this soup continuity, include Darkmount, which is its own separate and quaint, touristy The Village at Darkmount now, south of the Sea of Rust)

Some of the cities associated with Polyhex are:

Kaon - Doing its own autonomous enclave thing at the southwest edge of the Province. The Governor does not approve.

New Polyhex City

Polyhex Minor

Dodecahex

Upper Petrohex

Lower Petrohex

The Dead End (in the north, near neighboring Rodion)

Geological features may include:

a canyon

a cliff (some Baron probably has a house on it)

pits

energon crystal fields (farmed)

Sea of Rust coastal sulfur bogs (probably threatened by industry)

Automica sparkfield

The Province, apparently, enjoys sports and/or someone wants to distract the populace:

cube

mecha-soccer

wrestling

gladiatorial combat (of various levels of repute)

Other features and structures:

transport complex Ohm (rail, in this case)

Dodecahex Arena (for all the sports, or future State Games)

a stronghold (above, purple) possibly "The Polydrome"?

fancy offices (above, white) possibly "Whitemount"? At various points in history this has been a temple and/or occult event space and/or nightclub.

fuel/energon refineries

fuel/energon stores

a toll plaza on the Titanium Turnpike

(at some point) time travel?

At least one oil house with a "hex" wordplay name (The Hex & Decimal, The Hex Nut, The Hoary Hexflake?)

(Polyhex does not have a space bridge in this continuity, because we already established it is in neighboring Hydrax to the southeast. And "we don't talk about Spanner".)

Some types of residents:

a Governor

Barons

turbofoxes (more prevalent since mechanimal-rights bots stopped practice of hunting for trophies)

Maximals who just happen to have tall, pointy audio receptors and are tired of getting shot at

"mudflaps" who shoot at anything vaguely turbofox-shaped near their energon farm

big-city bots who call farmers "mudflaps"

in the north, cryo-condors

in the south, rust-foxes/ferrics

in the cities and coast area, retrorats

in country homes, glitch-mice

somewhere, cog-crickets

bats, probably

There's also about 18-ish named characters who may be associated with Polyhex if not definitely from there. I'm wondering how many "Disappeared" names can work as Baron names or if I will need to search for other fancy, named characters to play the roles of Barons. (Not to be confused with any named Senators, who are making a mess of things over in rival region Iacon.)

[eltripol]

My comic for the last Dune at Cafe Racer. We’ll all miss that place. Until next time Dune!

[eltripol]

I need more to keep it together.

[eltripol]

Tomorrow is Exterminator City!!! I’m excited to table at one of my favorite shows with a lot of awesome people! I’m going to have 2 new books, Cartographer and Automica: Ravager available!

Cartographer is a collection of comics I’ve done over the last few years with a new 12 page stand-alone I’m very proud of.

Automica: Ravager is all my dune mini-comic night comics collected into one volume! 22 months worth of comics! I’ve always enjoyed telling a semi-continual story in Dune and now people can see them easily collected.

I’ll also have all my old books including Me and the Muad’dib, Codex Creatura, Pepperidge Farm Remembers and more!

Come say hi!  It should be a great event full of great people! 11AM to 5PM!! https://www.facebook.com/events/256724574745839/

[automica]

[automica]