#trying to post more even though the internet is truly a hellscape

[moojjul]

mob i probably won’t ever finish😔

[xodiumdotnet]

I'm just gonna vent for a bit because I'm absolutely tired.

Putting it behind a break because I may go kinda unhinged in this. It's a mental health thing. Scroll on by if you don't want to read it. I won't be offended. Promise.

I am just so tired of the internet feeling like it's just getting ever shittier and there's just nowhere to run anymore. I mean, there's here, now that here is owned by a company that actually gives a damn. But I'm just tired of these dumb billionaires just buying their way into relevance and then absolutely tanking the thing they've been charged with running.

Hell, one of my favorite artists released a new album very recently, and the chorus of one of the songs on said album resonate hard with how I'm feeling right now:

Passions rise and a voice cries out inside When what I know and love is gone Where should I go, where should I run? The flag I carried, I held high… …over earth and under sky When what I know and love is gone Where should I go, where should I run?

First, it was Twitter. You can feel however you want about Twitter, but what I really liked about it was that it was really the melting pot of the internet. It was also where everyone played. Friends? Yeah. Companies? Yeah. Twitter was just as useful for posting random stuff as it was for hailing companies to get through customer service hell when you really didn't want to place a phone call.

Sure, there were some shitty people on there, all platforms have that. But for my time there? I didn't really run into anyone truly shitty.

Twitter was just a dumb site up until 2022, when I started getting deeper into retro tech and actually built up a really healthy following. The momentum was awesome, and it was nice to just throw some random crap out there and have someone actually like it.

Then Musk happened. I had hopes that he would have actually pulled out of buying Twitter, but nope. Twitter's shareholders all wanted their payday so they pursued Musk and made him hold up his promise (because he wanted to overpay grossly for it, so shareholders got a nice payday for it, fuck the long term health of the platform am I right?!) and now Twitter is circling the toilet.

This meant trying to find refuge on another twitter-alike site, of which there were a few. I tried to settle on Mastodon at first, but the instance I joined didn't really fit me as well as I thought it would, and I got discouraged. Tried another and fared much better off, though rebuilding my following has been slow progress.

As much as this all sucked, at least it was only Twitter, right? Nahhhh.

Not sure how you could see what Musk is doing to Twitter and think "golly gee, that sounds like a good idea", but that's exactly what reddit is doing as we speak, and that just...launched me down a depressive hate spiral that I'm currently stuck in.

It's playing out almost exactly like Twitter is. Some rich asshole (or set of assholes) is mad that they're not making enough money even though they have enough money in the bank to arguably be set for life, so to make even MORE money they're going to go run off and tank a service that they're in charge of.

Or--because we live in this capitalist hellscape--it's considered a bad thing when you're making just enough money to pay your bills, pay your employees, and just exist, comfortably, as a company. No, you must always be growing, or you're a failure. Approaching saturation? We don't care, fuck over your current customers to extract more dollars from them, too!

sigh.

Because Twitter making sudden changes at the snap of Musk's fingers is working out so well for them, reddit's CEO decided he was going to wake up, choose violence, and do the same thing. Despite reddit telling developers of 3rd party apps that hey, everything's cool, we're not charging for our API within the next year...one day they did a complete 180 on that and are now saying "pay up".

Which in and of itself is not the problem: Developers are more than happy to pay into this! But reddit is asking far, far too much, on a way too aggressive timeline. You could say this is intended to just outright kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying so, and you'd very likely be right.

Reddit's mobile presence was built on these apps. Hell, reddit themselves bought out Alien Blue to use as a base for their own app, so spez's charge that "reddit was never intended for 3rd party apps" is an outright lie.

(Isn't even the worst lie he's spouted. When Christian Selig--the dev behind Apollo--brought out receipts to call out reddit's admins claiming he was blackmailing them, he doubled down and tried to play the victim and continue to say that he was extorted.)

We're now at the point where reddit's many communities protested this, and reddit went union-busting to break up said protest. The whole thing is absolutely wack. They're actually threatening to replace mod teams to force subreddits that went dark back open.

Given how vehemently they're burning their bridges, I don't anticipate they're going to back off and reddit is in the same state that twitter is in: It may live on despite billionaires and venture capitalists trying to kill it, but the soul is gone. There's no joy in using it anymore.

And all of this started because spez saw what Musk did and thought "damn, that's a good idea!" As if that wasn't bad enough, we have some small side things happening, too. Like the Apple Card launching a cruise missile right at me (and people like me). If you want to finance an iPhone (which is really--sadly--the way to go these days, phones are NOT cheap) you have to do it via the Apple Card if you're not on the big 3 carriers.

Not anymore! Apple's removing the financing option for Apple Card users on MVNOs, so you have to be on one of the big 3 carriers with a postpaid plan to finance an iPhone via the Apple Card.

Yes. The Apple Card. A line of credit that I qualified for outside of any kind of carrier bullshit.

This almost feels like Apple feeding into this trope that MVNO users are all broke and don't deserve nice things, but the fact is that if you're a single person who only wants a single line plan, MVNOs are really the way to go. You're getting absolutely ripped off for a single-line plan on postpaid carriers. It's ridiculous.

(But yes, I know, this is likely the carriers themselves pushing Apple to make this change. Still. Sigh.)

I'm sure there are other things going shitty too (like uh, Discord's username changes) but in interest of keeping this post somewhat shorter I won't launch into those. I'm just tired because it feels like we're in that period where like, everyone knows we're headed for a recession and they're trying to squeeze as hard as they possibly can before we physically can't give anymore.

Probably a majority of the reason why I suffer with executive dysfunction as of late and just don't want to get out of bed. Why do so when everything outside your door sucks ass?

[thefirsttree]

A personal update + my next game

OK, time to do this. I’ve been meaning to do a big DAVID WEHLE™ update for a while now and explain why I haven’t released a new game yet, but you know how life gets in the way. Especially when life is a quarantine hellscape, you have three beautiful, amazing, exhausting kids to raise, a spouse’s job you support, a viral YouTube channel that turns your brain to mush, a thousand emails waiting in your inbox since your game is free on the Epic Games Store (with an impressive number of redemptions too! … meaning lots of emails and customer support issues), etc., etc. What also contributes to my lack of updates is because… I just don’t really like posting online. Fascinating correlation, I know!

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a venting/ranting blog post (well, maybe a bit), because my life is seriously AMAZING and INSANELY BLESSED and LUCKY. I can’t believe how many dreams keep coming true, so much so that I feel I don’t deserve it and I really pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes… but I did want to at least be honest, because I owe that to myself.

Wow, where do I even begin? Well, how about we start with the reason I’m even a full-time indie game dev now: The First Tree. This small hobby project I worked on at night morphed into this gargantuan beast (or fox) that took over my life the past 5 years. Which is great! I’m living the dream! And yet, I really didn’t expect it to do as well as it did. At its core, my game is a slow-paced, sad walking simulator (ahem, I prefer the term “exploration game,” but you know what I mean) that somehow seemed to launch at the right time to the right audience. It resonated deeply with some of you, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I still get emails almost daily how my game changed their lives in some formative way. I’m beyond honored.

However, with that spotlight came criticism and demands from the ever-present, insatiable internet. I would randomly be surfing the gamedev subreddit trying to decompress, and I would see a comment by some rando saying how much I didn’t deserve my success, and how it was all one huge lucky fluke. And I believed them!

And to add to it, some devs considered me an indie marketing “guru”, which I was uncomfortable with. I worked hard to market my game every week, and after my GDC talk, people assumed marketing was my passion; the reason I got up every morning. Just to clarify… NO, I don’t like marketing, and I hate being the center of attention. I don’t like asking people for money and wishlists. But I did what was necessary because I was passionate about telling stories, and I wanted to give my story a fighting chance to be seen on the crowded pages of Steam.

So now, you’re probably wondering “well then David, why did you make fancy YouTube videos showing off your success? Not very modest if you ask me.” This honestly could be a long blog post all on its own, because my experience of putting myself in the spotlight and becoming a “content creator” is… complicated. It was an unusual step for me, especially since I never even showed my face online (as a game developer) until my GDC talk.

First off, I always wanted to teach and start a YouTube channel. I love video editing, especially since I’ve been doing it longer than making games! It’s a huge passion of mine. And teaching people who didn’t know they could make and finish games was a huge motivator (and it’s been so rewarding already). But the second reason is, I was scared. I was self-employed, and I was riding the success of a “huge lucky fluke” that would probably not happen again. I wanted to make sure I could provide for my amazing family, and give them food and health insurance and security in these tumultuous times. I was turning my lifelong passions and hobbies into a business, and it wasn’t as simple of a mental transition as I thought.

So, I went all in on YouTube and the accompanying online course called Game Dev Unlocked. I spent years editing the scripts and videos, and polishing them to a shine. At first, no one watched my videos, no one was buying… and in the blink of an eye, the YouTube algorithm picked up my main autobiographical video (“How Making Indie Games Changed My Life”), and I started getting 5,000 subscribers a day. Right now, I’m at 150,000 subs, which is still hard for me to believe. I always had a dream of earning 100k subs on YouTube, so I was pretty happy with the whole thing. Sales were OK, but mostly people didn’t want to buy the course. Then the emails came in…

Something you should know about me: I am a textbook “people pleaser,” and if someone asks for my help, I take it very seriously. If someone is mad at me, even if I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s all I can think about, and it ruins my day. So, taking an onslaught of people begging for help and multiplying that by an impossible amount of people for my brain to truly comprehend thanks to the internet… and let’s just say it wasn’t a healthy mix.

I received thousands of emails from people who were begging me for some kind of reassurance that everything would be OK. That their dreams would come true too. And I wanted to help every single one of them. I went from a nobody working on a game for fun to becoming a spokesperson for the indie game dream. I couldn’t even get a shake from the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru without someone recognizing me and asking for game dev advice. And it didn’t stop there… I would get emails from suicidal kids asking for help, teenagers from Afghanistan asking me to get them out of their country, and on one occasion I received an email from a hopeful game developer in a war-torn country who had just experienced a bomb blowing up their neighboring village. His friends were dead, and he was hoping he could finish a game before he died too, and he needed my help. How do you say no to something like that? Didn’t I owe it to everyone because I was lucky with my hit game and I needed to “pay it forward”? (Something people constantly reminded me of)

And then to top it off, after you’ve given everything you’ve got to other people in need… you get hate mail in your inbox. You spend the whole day serving your children and strangers on the internet, then when the kids are finally asleep, you hit the bed to relax and take a look at your phone to decompress, and you randomly come across an angry gamer in your Twitter mentions telling you your game they got for free sucks, and that you took away a potentially great game from them and that your apology isn’t good enough.

Long story short, I went to a mental therapist for the first time in my life. I was broken trying to care for two toddlers and a new baby in a pandemic (which is very, very hard), taking care of my course students who gave me their hard-earned money and demanded results, and the countless people begging for help on the internet. I was this introverted, internet-lurker trying to take on the weight of the world. I was so tired and hurt that no one cared about me and my needs… only what I could do for them.

Quitting my day job and making this hobby my full-time job has stirred up… mixed emotions. This statement may disturb some of you, but I was definitely 100% happier when I had a full-time job and I was working on my game at night. I missed working with the amazing team at The VOID, working on Star Wars… back when the success of my game was this abstract thing I could only daydream about. Mostly, I was making my game for me with no outside expectations to pay the bills or satisfy the ever-demanding internet, and that brought me a lot of joy.

It’s not all doom and gloom though! I’m actually very happy now and in the best shape I’ve been since the pandemic started. I’ve had to confront my weaknesses and personality quirks, but I’m a better person for it (and I’m sure these issues would’ve come out eventually). I hired an awesome community manager for Game Dev Unlocked who is helping SO MUCH with the emails, I can’t even tell you the mental burden it alleviates. I even leased a co-working office to help separate work from my home, and that’s been a huge help too. I’ve decided to work with my old friends from The VOID on a cool, new VR experience. It will take me away from my projects a bit, but I’m ecstatic to work with a great team again (and not manage anything, whew).

These are all things I would’ve never guessed I needed, because I thought I knew myself pretty well… turns out I didn’t.

The reality is: running a business is HARD. Running it solo is even harder. You have to remember, I was burnt out on The First Tree well into the Steam release in 2017, but I kept working on it for 4 more years due to my fears of failing again and not earning enough money for my family.

So, I was wrestling with the age-old concept of commercialism and art. There was this dichotomy of doing whatever I wanted and being true to my vision (what most people assume the indie dev dream is like), and doing only what customers wanted to buy. This is something that has killed me with YouTube… in one specific instance, I was super excited to make the exact video I wanted to make. I loved every part of its creation, and I thought it had a message that would inspire everyone. I lovingly edited it over several weeks, posted it, and excitedly waited for the stats… and it was by far my worst performing video.

This is not a new problem. Even the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo was a commission forced upon him by the very violent Pope Julius II. My wife and I regularly talk about the fine balance between artistic integrity and commercialism, a problem she is very familiar with as an artist who constantly needs to balance what she wants to make with what the customer wants to hang up in their home.

For The First Tree, I was lucky. It was pretty much what I wanted to make (I had to compromise a lot of things of course), and it turned out millions of people wanted it too. Recently, I thought the safe business decision would be to do it all over again, so I started work on a spiritual successor to The First Tree (an idea that I may revisit one day since I do love the story idea). But that isn’t happening anytime soon. Trust me when I say I am now currently burnt out on animal exploration games.

So that realization left me with a question: what do I do next?

I’ve decided I need to make a game that I want to make, for me. It will be a bit different and I’m almost certain most fans of The First Tree will not love it… but it’s an idea that gets me super excited. It’s an idea that could help me fall in love with game development again.

A few more details: this game will be story-driven, first-person, and will use the Unreal Engine. That means development is gonna be slow going, because I have to learn a whole new tool. The “smart business” decision would be to make something quickly in Unity which I’m already familiar with… but I want to do this for me, and UE5 looks like a lot of fun. I’m also shooting for an early-ish release date so I avoid burn out and I keep the game short: I want to release it in Fall 2022, but knowing game development, it will probably take longer.

With the help of my therapist, I’ve also concluded that I’ve been too accessible on the internet and that my self-worth isn’t determined by the amount of people I try to help online. Of course, I love helping people and seeing them succeed, but I need to step back and focus on my family and myself. I will delete my social media apps on my phone (I will still post big updates occasionally) and stop responding to most emails, tweets, DMs, etc. It’s not that I’m ungrateful… in fact, if I don’t say thank you or at least acknowledge the incredibly nice people who share a sweet message about my game or want to tell me how I inspire them (still hard for me to believe, lol), I feel a ton of guilt… but I need to let that go. Please know I’m extremely grateful to all the fans who follow my work, so even if I don’t thank you directly, I truly mean it: thank you.

I will still post and stream occasionally on YouTube when I want to (and I still do live Q&A’s for my GDU students). The online course sales will help support my family as I work on a potentially risky game idea (and my new job will help alleviate the risk too). I’m gonna try one more marketing experiment and sell a mini-course soon (and add an Unreal section), and after that I’m done working on it. A gigantic thank you to the people who bought my course and are part of the amazing community, it has helped me and my family tremendously, and it’s inspiring seeing the games you make!

I’m a bit worried about the whole thing since this new game idea could flop, which could definitely affect my family. But a sappy, high-school yearbook quote is coming to mind…  I think it applies here: “A ship in harbor is safe—but that is not what ships are built for.”

Thanks for reading,

David

[magictheblathering]

A brief introduction

Hello there.

You’re venturing into a blog that exists half as a venting device and half as a proper repository for a lot of miscellaneous content I’ve rambled out across the internet.  For the last few years I’ve had what could charitably be called Strong Opinions about Magic the Gathering’s story, settings, mechanics, and generally everything, and I’ve realized that instead of posting a 40-tweet ramble over on the bird site, I should just return back to my roots and write a 40 *page* ramble instead. 

So here we are. Back into Tumblr. Back in to hell.

Oh, the Desolation (VIS 58/167, Uncommon)! 

I kid, but honestly this site is a hellscape. It’s my hellscape, and like an opossum perched atop a trash can screaming at the world, I return to my hoard of garbage and defend it from all trespassers. 

It’s good to be home.

Back on topic however, this blog exists as a place to talk about Magic the Gathering, a card game and associated setting that I have been more or less married to since 2001. Now, this has not been a perfect coupling, with varying ups and downs, a divorce and reconciliation, and the current state of detached ex-somethings living across town from each other, looking wistfully through the window at some sign of what could have been but still too bitter to truly reconcile. But regardless of that, I do love Magic. It’s a setting that’s kept me invested for decades at this point, and I don’t doubt that even into my distant geriatrics, I’ll still fondly think of the Colors of Magic or reread a my old stapled together paperback of Champions of Kamigawa thinking of years gone by.

Hell, I literally met my significant other through bitching about MtG on a dreaded hellsite that I shall not name. I’m already in too deep.

Suffice it to say however, I have a lot to talk about when it comes to Magic, especially lately. And so that’s what this whole blog is here for. A place to sit back and speak a while, on settings and characters, thoughts and musings, critique and creative exercise. And maybe a little memery, if the mood strikes.

Will this blog be super serious? Gods no, if the tone wasn’t already apparent from this meandering mess, I’m going to be all over the place on here. I’d like to think I’m at least somewhat funny, perhaps in the same way a particularly weird looking, clumsy dog is. He keeps falling over and looks like a tiny fuzzy goblin, but watching him try is adorable at the least. However, I do like to think that I’ll at least be trying to cover some serious points. To bring up some veneer of professionalism into my late night ramblings about a card game where I make dragons fight mushrooms.

How successful will I be in that endeavor? Well, we’ll see. At the very least, you’re going to have to see my rant about story structure, narrative foibles, and the symbolic effect of shirtless pirate men.

We will have an entire essay about Jace becoming a romance novel protagonist, mark my words.

What you can expect here? Some posts like this, rambling discussions with a vague point that I have to circumnavigate my way back to. Some breakdowns of story and plot ideas, often with at least one helpful dose of theoretical editorializing. Discussions on characters and settings, from the beloved and interesting to the trite and flaccid. Probably some dick jokes. 

Maybe sometimes a bit of discussion about playing the game, though that’s probably not as common. I’ve always been a Vorthos, not a Spike, and besides most formats give me Venser’s unexplained terminal disease (The one that was meth shakes, depending on your interpretations of book canon).

Oh, and sometimes some discussion on how to play Magic without playing Magic. Roleplaying games, solo games, weird little formats I made up when I was a kid. A little sprinkling of eccentricity onto this ramshackle mess.

So without further ado, welcome. If you’ve stuck around this long, you’ll probably enjoy reading what’s going to be on here. If you haven’t, I don’t exactly blame you. Also, since you wouldn’t have read this far, I’m making a rude gesture in your general direction. You can’t see it, but it’s there.

So, here’s to Magic. Let’s see exactly what we can dig our teeth into.

[obscuniverse]

Obscu comments: Ready Player One, Part 1.

This is @derinthemadscientist‘s fault. Chapter 0

“I was sitting in my hideout watching cartoons“ Okay you’re either a grizzled old veteran with an actual hideout who watches cartoons because they can, or an awkward child who calls their room a ‘hideout’.

“globally networked“ unlike all other MMOS, apparently.

“At first, I couldn’t understand why the media was making such a big deal of the billionaire’s death.“ Awkward child it is.

“so the unwashed masses“ Could you maybe try harder to sound aloof and superior? I’m just not getting your disdainful sneering coming through as clear as I’d like.

I’m all of three paragraphs in and here and I can feel the neckbeard.

“But that was the rub. James Halliday had no heirs.“ And if this was set in a feudal monarchy, that would be an issue.

You’re gonna make this an issue, aren’t you Ernest?

“He’d spent the last fifteen years of his life in self-imposed isolation, during which time—if the rumors were to be believed —he’d gone completely insane.“ So the board of directors voted to remove him as CEO of the company like 14 years ago, right? Because massive global corporate juggernauts that have somehow established a telecommunications monopoly are not run by one person pedalling a bike to power a single computer in their own locked room.

You do know that, right?

Right, Ernest?

That’s okay though, I mean Halliday is probably having fun willing away his personal fortune.

“had everyone from Toronto to Tokyo crapping in their cornflakes” is this entire book going to read like a forum post? It is, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Ernest?

“His video message was actually a meticulously constructed short film titled Anorak’s Invitation“ A quick google tells me that, aside from being a kind of jacket, ‘Anorak’ is British slang for a person with obsessive niche interests. The global billionaire’s Final Message is basically entitled ‘Letter from a huge fuckin weeb’.

Also, how else would it be constructed? What purpose does ‘meticulous’ serve here? Is that unusual for a global tech billionaire? Was it especially meticulous? What is this description contrasting with, Ernest? Your own writing?

I’m going to sail right past the part where he had global admin rights to what’s literally the internet despite being AWOL for 15 years and this didn’t concern anybody at all. Let’s just say he ‘built a backdoor’ into it that has somehow gone unnoticed for several decades in a system that would be continually maintained and updated by thousands of sysadmins. Okay, it’s fine, he’s the creator of the core system. I’ll suspend my disbelief that his personal backdoor didn’t end up in the bin every time they upgraded something in the core build. Maybe it did and he rebuilt it, stealthily, all over again. Fine, but I’ve got my eye on you, Ernest.

“surpassing even the Zapruder film“ Just call it the Kennedy Assassination tape so nobody has to google it, Ernest.

Ernest, buddy, why am I seeing an ast-- oh, it’s a footnote. You’ve written your prologue chapter with fucking footnotes. Could you not figure out how to write more words with the rest of the words, Ernest?

My. God. There are seven footnotes. Of them, six say some version of “this was photoshopped in from an 80′s movie to confirm that this was, in fact from the 80′s. Did I mention the 80′s?” and the seventh is “this is a photo of the Rich Man of the Internet from the 80′s”. I really feel like Ernest has set up a much more interesting story and then elected to ignore it in favour of writing the gamergate manifesto of a 16-year-old boy. There’s apparently a nuclear war going on in the background, and one nerd somehow became the God-King of the Internet despite the fact that literally any first-world government would immediately try to seize this kind of centralised infrastructure away from him. Does this mean governments are a thing of the past? Is this entire story taking place in some kind of children’s creche in the Shadowrun continuity? I have so many questions, and none of them are about this book.

So God-King Jimmy is a 40-something-old man dancing in a re-edited scene of an 80′s highschool movie dance. I don’t know why it takes six sentences to say this, except to say that he danced flawlessly, and also:

“But Halliday has no dance partner. He is, as the saying goes, dancing with himself.” Is he now, Ernest? Is he really? To be fair to Ernest, I also wrote like this. In highschool. While desperately trying to inflate an essay to reach the wordcount.

“A few lines of text appear briefly at the lower left-hand corner of the screen, listing the name of the band, the song’s title, the record label, and the year of release, as if this were an old music video airing on MTV: Oingo Boingo, “Dead Man’s Party,” MCA Records, 1985.” We know how music videos work, Ernest.

“He breaks the fourth wall, addressing the viewer, and begins to read“. Is that what he’s doing by addressing the viewer, Ernest?  I’m so glad that you clarified that for me, Ernest, that when a character is breaking that fourth wall that they are explicitly breaking the fourth wall. What would we do without your propensity for re-describing your own descriptions, Ernest?

“I, James Donovan Halliday, being of sound mind and disposing memory, do hereby make, publish, and declare this instrument to be my last will and testament, hereby revoking any and all wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.…” *record scratch* I’m not sure this is legally binding. I mean you’ve gone through a truly painstaking amount of effort to describe how heavily-edited this video is. Maybe Emperor Jimmy is fraudulently edited in? Maybe that’s not a binding legal will? Maybe if he’s been a missing person for 15 years then he can’t be assumed to be of sound mind just because he suddenly shows up and says he is? Okay, maybe it’s just seemed like he’s been gone to the general public rather than the C-level of his company, who are somehow okay with the stock crash this is going to cause. “My entire estate, including a controlling share of stock in my company“ Hold up, buttercup. I have exhausted my supply of willing suspension of disbelief, Ernest.

There is just so much wrong with this entire premise. The awol hermit somehow retains control of The Internet. An entire corporate conglomerate and every country that may or may not exist is either okay with this or has no recourse to do anything about it somehow. Not a single one of the thousands of people who maintain the backend bothers to comb through the code to find where this ‘easter egg’ has been slipped in. You know about code, right Ernest? I mean I take it you’ve at least seen The Matrix, yeah? Remember how people sitting outside the matrix can scan through the code, even in that hellscape where they’re not even the ones that control it? Sure, OASIS probably isn’t open-source... but how many people do you think have actual backend access? Spoiler: It’s not “Just Emperor Jimmy”, Ernest. Nobody at that company needs to play through what I can only imagine is a painstakingly convoluted puzzle quest that you’re about to explain to me in several levels of unnecessary detail.

Look, this entire premise reminds me of Breaking Bad. Not any of the good bits, mind you but the bit where the entire plot could only take place in the USA because in the rest of the developed world Walter White just goes to a fucking doctor and gets treatment for his cancer because healthcare actually exists.

That’s what this is like. The number of arbitrarily nonsensical things that must be true for this premise to work is... Incredibly distracting. Nothing about this is a reasonable situation. Nothing that you’ve established about this world suggests that anything about this makes even a little bit of sense. Now I’m aware that ‘eccentric millionaire leaves money in some kind of convoluted contest’ is a trope and I remember some very silly 90′s movies based on this premise but come on Ernest. There’s a much more interesting novel hiding between the lines of the premise you’ve ham-fistedly implied just so you can list for me the brands of 1980′s televisions. Out of curiousity, I googled every person who wrote the advance praise comments inside the cover. I had a sneaking suspicion about the demographics of people who enjoy this book. Here’s a brief summary (since Ernest loves lists so much) 1. White American Male, Age 48

2. White American Male, Age 47

3. White American Male, Age 52

4. White American Male, Age 68

5. White American Male, Age 49

6. White American Male, Age 40

7. White American Male, Age 41

I then googled Ernest, an action I deeply regret. Demographically speaking, let’s have a look: White American Male, Age 46.

I’m detecting a pattern is what I’m saying here. I’m only halfway through the prologue, mind you, and perhaps this really picks up but I feel like I absolutely did not need to be told the brand of the television that Young God-Emperor Jimmy had his Atari 2600 into. Nor did I need to be told that his Atari 2600 was, indeed, an Atari 2600 about 10 words before God-Emperor Jimmy then actually says that it’s an Atari 2600. Maybe this book is for people who get a real kick out of seeing the words ‘Atari 2600′. People who are (and I’m just throwing wild, unsubstantiated theories out here) about 40+, white, male, and American?

I’m going to stop now because I’ve started writing my thesis just to procrastinate from having to read the second half of the prologue to this book.

[regrettablewritings]

Dios Meme-o! (Rafael Barba Mini-Series, Pt. 7)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 8

Or perhaps that was the slight paranoia speaking. Honestly, it was very unlikely that anybody had been paying attention to him at all beyond the usual need to avoid bumping into him. But this did very little to ease Rafael’s nerves. After all, that was how people got their meme-worthy pictures: Catching people with their guards down. Didn’t that Buzzfeed article say that the Internet had only so many photos to work with? It’d be just his luck if he opened the gate for them by not keeping on his toes. Just like . . . Rafael bit the inside of his lip at the memory.

There was a whole world of watercolor Hello Kitty phone case girls, and there would be no way for him to truly know of their presence until it was too late. Not in this crowd. The thought seemed to enhance the presence of the people around him. The tired-looking, busy people. People not paying any mind to him, people with places to go, so many with their phones out.

Phones. Phones for calling? No, it’s a rouse. As soon as he looked away, they were going to snap photos. Texting? Of course not. Little amateur paparazzi. Probably telling their little friends about his hair. Or his stomach. Did his hair look alright? Wait, why did he care? That’d just be more fodder. Should he suck in his gut? Too obvious? Maybe he should present as though nothing is wrong . . .

But then they’d mistaken his expression for being cool. They’d take any opportunity to call him –

           “Papi!” a gushing voice cried.

Knock it off, Rafael mind groused.

           “Daddy!” it exclaimed.

I’m not like that, Rafael insisted. He tried to keep it calm but on the outside, his steps had become slightly more aggressive.

           “Choke me!” it begged. This took a noticeable toll on Rafael, his expression souring.

Exhaling heavily through his nose, he began to detach from the crowd on the sidewalk, instead making a brisk if distracted beeline to a slightly clearer plaza.

But that’s not –

           “Pound me, prosecutor!”

Take me seriously! Why is this all a game to you –

“ADA Barba?”

The voice did not belong to any of the ones Rafael had imagined squealing in his head. Most significantly was the fact that it was an actual title and not some nickname with crude implications.

Rafael had to blink a couple of times in rapid succession but it was true: The young lady before him was, indeed, quite real. Real, and not foaming at the mouth. Or drooling. Even her slightly widened eyes appeared to have less malicious intention in them; more like . . . admiration?

For a long enough moment, nothing was said. This surprised Rafael just enough to contribute to the shared wordlessness. After all, this girl looked to be about the demographic he most often saw sharing his memes: Young (befitting of a possible Tumblr user); maybe about her early 20s; probably Caucasian or Latinx. From the way she was dressed, it was apparent that she wasn’t intentionally trying to appear before him when she’d woken up that day. After all, all the posts about him and his fashion would’ve suggested to many that a red flannel, jeans, and a beanie cap weren’t exactly the first way to his heart. From that, it was more obvious that this meeting had been sheer happenstance.

So why did she choose to approach him instead of sneaking a photo like so many others would? Furthermore, why wasn’t she saying anything?

For a split second, Rafael’s eyes caught a glimpse of the young woman’s hands. They were somewhat balled into fists, her fingertips pressing against her palms as if the heels of her hands served as stress balls. Nerves?

“Uh . . . Do I know you?” Rafael asked. He mentally scolded himself; of course he didn’t know her! And even with all of the cases he’d taken on in the last five years alone, he really couldn’t place her face to any clients he’d had no matter how hard he tried. But somebody had to say something, so . . .

The young lady’s cheeks seemed to pinken at his question. “Uhh . . . I mean, no, but . . .” Her fingers pressed even harder into her hands’ heels. She sighed with self-frustration before offering a weak, short chuckle. “Sorry, it’s just – I saw you and I just wanted to see if it was really you.” She offered a hint of a smile, of which Rafael felt obligated to awkwardly attempt to return.

“Well, you know,” Rafael muttered. “Memes and all.” He probably shouldn’t have said the word “memes” with the underlying sense of distaste that he had, especially as the girl’s smile fell.

“O-oh! I mean –” She searched for the right words in her increasing frazzled state. “I mean – I’m not – it’s not about memes.” She paused. “I mean, it’s mostly not about the memes. I mean it is in a way but I, uh . . .” Her voice trailed, as did the movement of her hands as they realized that there was no metaphorical puzzle to be created with their movements.

Neither party was sure who was feeling more awkward at the moment.

“Look,” the young lady sighed. “My name is Lauren Carradine and I’ve kinda been going through a blank space in my life. You know, what all with - ” she waved a hand half-heartedly, “ – being in my twenties. Means nothing’s really making sense right now but –? And I know this is gonna sound weird but . . . Seeing that press conference from a couple of weeks ago? I know it’s strange but seeing it kinda felt – I dunno, right?”

While Rafael did not quite follow Lauren’s suggestion. However, he found himself more concerned with the penultimate sentence.

He raised his brow, rippling his forehead. “You watched the press conference?” he inquired.

At this, Lauren’s expression somehow managed to become more sheepish.

“Well, not when it was actually on,” she admitted. “I, uh . . . I saw it linked to a post on Tumblr. Right below a . . . moodboard . . .” Her voice lowered into a mumble at that last part, but Rafael could hear it perfectly. To his own surprise, he didn’t physically expression revulsion. However, he also realized that he wasn’t exactly feeling revulsion either. Before he could determine exactly what it was he felt, Lauren carried on.

“But, like, I watched it and something about it just sat with me. Y’know? I mean, there was just a passion in the way you spoke and it resonated within me.” At this point, Lauren’s previous skittishness seemed to disappear from her speech. Even her stance seemed to strengthen, her previous fidgeting slowly but surely alleviating. “It was just really neat to see someone – and a guy, no less – speak so . . . devotedly about such a dark subject. So I got curious and began to look into your past cases more – I know it sounds creepy, but I couldn’t help it and? You’ve just really helped a lot of people. In so many ways.” Lauren bit her lip. Rafael said nothing; he wasn’t sure what to say.

“I just wanted to thank you,” Lauren said. “For everything. Even the cases you didn’t win; the fact that you fought them was great enough. In my opinion,” she quickly threw in. She began to tug on the sleeve of her flannel.

“Men . . . Men don’t exactly come to mind as big defenders of women or even guys when it comes to sex cases. At least, not the way you do it. You actually seem to care about who you’re working with. And . . . And I just wanted to thank you. For all that you’ve done.” The smile she gave was nervous but trying to be strong.

The hug that Rafael gave her upon her shy request was awkward and somewhat stiff. Even five minutes after they’d parted ways, the ADA found himself in a daze.

Had . . . Had someone taken his position seriously? And thanked him for it no less? Even the squad in SVU didn’t really invest much in the way of spoken appreciation towards his efforts. But better yet, had someone withstood the meme-riddled hellscape of the Internet and still treated him as a human being and not a piece of memetic meat?

[protectors-of-shim]

PART 1, FUCKERS

Part 1.

Sorry for being rude

and that everyone is looking over your shoulder now and are like

why are they reading this garbage put out by an overworked/underpaid beardo?

I mean--that must be awkward.

The Thorns are one of the best things about my life and because of them I’ve made some honest to goodness friends, and we’ve spent sleepless nights virtually hanging out because we shared a deep, primal need to scream at the internet. 

When I was writing those autospies of those games because the Thorns had to find the most convoluted ways possible to succeed and inventing entirely bizarre ways of failing, I had just recently quit school, because grad school was located in a dystopic hellscape and filled with people who were redefining “self-destructive”. I was part of it too. Though I really learned how to cook while in school I also really learn how to get fucked up and hate everyone around me, and how to alienate people that were once important to me. Even the best people from that time I can’t really talk to anymore because talking to them just reminds me of a hundred other things that I just want to forget. 

Anyway, I left and moved back home into my old room and somehow no one ever wrote a thinkpiece about me. In the days where I wasn’t feeling catatonic I was working on cooking skills. On the bad days I had soccer. For two years I had a lot of bad days. 

Many people around me were graduating or were getting married--bouts on deranged optimism I could only digest if my favorite soccer club was holding a cup of some kind. During my kid brother’s graduation I was simply a spectator as I saw my dear undergrad profs sit with the new grads, but with the Thorns I was there 100% percent and when they celebrated their win a couple of days later in Portland I could walk onto the field and get their autographs. 

Of course, this is the illusion of the marketing of women’s soccer, that somehow they are yours and that they somehow owe you something that other teams don’t. However next year I opted for something more ridiculous: trying to understand just what the fuck was happening. That was the year when I began making friends through here and twitter with other Thorn fans and we would try to make sense of the truly demented things that fans would post. Sinead Farrelly once laughed at a joke that Vero made during a loss and you thought the apocalypse was nigh. It also didn’t help that the previous year SHittle were shite and that year they were ascendent, going months without before losing, so fairweather fans quickly swung with this tepid breeze and tried to recruit all the other fans to their shitty blue team which are shit.

Another factor that didn’t help was Paul Riley’s coaching. Riley is legitimately the best coach in North America at building a squad. FC Kansas City was a relocated version of the team he built in Philadelphia during the WSL years. Once those players started retiring the team has been clueless in replacing them. Also, look at what he’s done with the Flash/Courage, taking unfancied, uncapped players and turning them in annual contenders. But he was a mismatch for Portland. Portland’s approach to teambuilding has been that from Space Jam, which means the manager isn’t simply dealing with a single cohesive team but eleven egos. Aside from the glorious exception that is Vero, the players he brought in were folks like Betos, Farrelly and McDonald. They were players far from the national team conversation but gave the more famous players a run for their money. In McDonald’s case she far outperformed Sinclair (worst year of her professional career) and Morgan (frail sparklepony in danger of being put down) but didn’t get shit for the work she put in. 

He was trying to build a tank whereas the management wanted a Porsche, so the team failed to click, and so he left. Parsons came in and gave what people wanted, and it’s worked, too. It probably helped that the first thing he did was ditching that soused Minnie Mouse in exchange for a raft of genuine talent. 

[aion-rsa]

George R.R. Martin May Never Finish Game of Thrones… and That’s OK

http://bit.ly/2CZ06SY

With The Winds of Winter still pending, we imagine the unexpected advantages of a world without a literary Game of Thrones ending.

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Feature

TV

Alec Bojalad

Game of Thrones

Apr 6, 2019

George R.R. Martin

HBO

A Song of Ice and Fire

Editor's Note: This article does not contain Game of Thrones spoilers past season 3.

Can God make a boulder so big he can’t lift it?

That was a question once posed to me by a pastor at a catechism class as a teen. He asked it with fake exasperation, as though it was all anyone was talking about in hushed tones in the kitchen in-between masses at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church.

My peers and I had never actually heard of it, but apparently it was a popular “what if” amongst the heathenry to pull a “Gotcha!” moment on God and prove there was one thing the infallible deity could actually fail at. Either he failed to make a boulder so big he couldn’t lift it or he just failed at lifting said boulder. Checkmate, theists.

“Don’t worry about it,” Pastor Woods said. “It’s a paradox beyond our understanding but yes, God can build that boulder and yes, he can also lift it somehow.”

George R.R. Martin, writer of “A Song of Ice and Fire” and mastermind of the literary basis for Game of Thrones, enjoys a saint-like appearance. After all, he crafts entire worlds out of nothing and may as well be God’s second cousin. The “boulder” test is therefore an apt one. And it’s clear that George R.R. Martin may have created a boulder so big that he cannot lift it.

One of the internet's favorite pastimes is being angry. And a frequent target of that anger is Martin and the increasingly lengthy wait-times between volumes of his magnum opus. The fifth book in ASOIAF, A Dance With Dragons, came out on July 12, 2011. That represented an almost unheard of wait-time from the previous book for the series. The fourth book, A Feast for Crows, had been published on Oct. 17, 2005. The internet was, as always, angry. This entire Goodreads thread is devoted just to users pondering why this 1,300-ish page book took so long to write.

read more: Game of Thrones Season 8 - Everything We Know

Granted, Martin did himself little favors—continuously offering new potential release year targets on his charmingly dated (and still active) LiveJournal blog. Still, A Dance with Dragons eventually saw the light of day and all was forgiven. Martin even offered up a compelling reason for the perceived delay. He was dealing with what he called a “Mereeneese Knot.” The Meereeneese Knot refers to the issue Martin had with the plot simply growing too large and the characters becoming too geographically disparate, and his struggle to begin the process of bringing them all together.

It was taken for granted by fans that the Meereeneese Knot dilemma had been solved with the release of A Dance With Dragons and that the sixth book, The Winds of Winter, was just around the corner. Now here we stand, a full eight years later and still no release date for The Winds of Winter in sight.

Every new Martin LiveJournal blog post is met with a fury of speculation and renewed fervor. Just this summer, Martin posted a blog entry that seemed to fully suggest Winter was finally coming. “Alas, Valyria” it was titled, and the text simply read “Alas, alas, that great city Valyria, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.” Surely, this was it! This was the hour that the book would finally be announced—and it made sense so close to the timing of the Game of Thrones season 7 premiere. Nope. No book. By all accounts, it seems to be referring to the introduction of the language High Valyrian into the Duolingo language app.

Despite the internet’s repeating assertions to the contrary, George R.R. Martin is not a troll. He’s presumably out there, typing away on his ancient word processor, trying to finish The Winds of Winter. What we fail to realize, however, is that this is a series that just might not be possible to finish.

The Meereeneese Knot is Martin’s self-created boulder, and he’s having trouble lifting it. When it’s all said and done, he may never be able to do so. Think about the sheer size of these books for a moment. The “A Song of Ice and Fire” series to date is approximately, 4,500 pages. That’s just counting the number of pages of the published work—it doesn’t even factor in the number of manuscript pages that were produced and then eventually cut.

Beyond that, page-length alone doesn’t even come close to telling the story of how massive the world George R.R. Martin has created is. A Wiki of Ice and Fire currently has 7,297 pages devoted to basically every proper noun that has ever appeared in the books. That includes details of the sprawling geography and every single branch on hundreds of family’s trees.

Sometimes, as a thought experiment to conceive of how truly massive this “boulder” is, imagine how many characters you would be realistically satisfied with receiving the very last scene of in a seventh book. Think of Tyrion gazing out at the encroaching spring over the top of the Wall. Or Sandor burying his brother Gregor and saying a silent prayer to all the victims lost in their cycle of family violence. Or even a pack of wolves, traversing a snowy hellscape—no humanity in sight.

That’s the thing about the sheer enormity of “A Song of Ice and Fire”—it’s not filled with just mentioned yet never seen characters, or hard to pronounce foreign cities the plot will never advance to; it’s filled with characters whose stories are rich enough to form the backbone of an entire other fantasy series.

read more: Game of Thrones Season 8 Predictions and Theories

Think of Beric Dondarrion is a knight tasked with tracking down and defeating a monstrous eight-foot murderer. In the process, he is killed and brought back to life by a combination of blood magic and friendship. This is done seven times until he finds his ultimate purpose in life and passes the gift of life on to a slain mother. That’s…. aweseome. And Beric is only like 30th on the “Song of Ice and Fire” call sheet.

Perhaps, this world of Ice and Fire is too big, too detailed, too richly-realized to ever be finished. In hindsight, maybe it’s more surprising that we ever expected it could be finished than it is that Martin is currently struggling with it.

And that leads me to another achingly saccharine and likely boring childhood anecdote. The first time I heard the phrase “making lemons out of lemonade” was many years before I heard the paradox “can God make a boulder so big he can’t lift it?” I was around five-years-old and had just broken my collarbone by falling off the side of a couch, at a hilariously low-height, and onto some plastic Power Ranger toys. I had been fitted with a cast that covered my entire chest to keep my smashed collarbone into place.

This was annoying, I announced to my mother.

“Oh well, you’ll just have to make lemonade out of lemons,” she told me. After she explained to me what that meant, I decided that my bulky cast kind of resembled the White Ranger’s breastplate armor (yes, the Power Ranger toys had got me in this mess, but I weren’t going to let them take everything else away, damn it).

What do we do now that every passing day makes a conclusion to “A Song of Ice and Fire” less likely? We turn that cast into the White Ranger’s armor, damn it.

For starters, “A Song of Ice and Fire” is going to get an ending of sorts in the form of Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones has diverged fairly extremely from its source material at this point. Season 8 will be the final season of Game of Thrones, and the story will have an ending. Martin even shared some information about the overall ending of the series with showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff. How much of that ending resembles what would have been the ending to “A Song of Ice and Fire” may never be known, but at least it’s something.

Those in desperate need of a conclusion can choose to treat the Thrones ending as canon. Those who don’t enjoy the Thrones ending can just choose to ignore it. It’s like Schrodinger’s ending for fantasy books. It will simultaneously exist and not exist.

Wouldn’t everyone opt to accept the show’s ending regardless of how perfect or imperfect it may be? Not necessarily. As a culture, our perception of endings seems to be evolving. Think back to 2010 when Lost was about to air its final episode. There was an ongoing cultural discourse over how it needed to “stick the landing.” Most seem to agree that the show did not do so, and in the process it ruined our cheerful memories of the entire series (for my thoughts on the matter, you can click here).

Then in 2017, Lost creator Damon Lindelof ended another sci-fi-adjacent show in HBO’s The Leftovers, and the discourse was much different before the episode aired.  Many previews tried to predict how the series might ultimately end, but very few if any of them adopted a “they’d better not fuck this up” tone. There was almost no conceivable ending that could have sullied our fond memories of many, many hours of TV.

“A Song of Ice and Fire” is of course much different from The Leftovers and really any other mainstream entertainment than we currently have. “A Song of Ice and Fire” is as much the World of Ice and Fire as it is the story. Planetos, as fans often call the planet made up by the continents Westeros, Essos and Sothoryos, is a huge fictional entity with an almost literally infinite amount of possible stories to be told. There are thousands and thousands of years of Planetosi history to imagine and thousands and thousands of theoretical miles to be covered. The World of Ice and Fire is so massive and is filled with so much potential that it may as well be the World of… well, just the world. As in planet Earth.

In some aspects it seems silly to impose an ending on “A Song of Ice and Fire,” because it (probably) wouldn’t constitute the ending of Westeros. As fellow HBO classic The Sopranos taught us, endings are relative. (UPCOMING SPOILERS FOR THE SOPRANOS FINALE). The Sopranos rather brilliantly just… ends. It ends as the screen jarringly and abruptly cuts to black when Tony Soprano looks up in a diner to see who has walked through the door. Is it his daughter Meadow coming through the door? Or an assassin? A giraffe? It doesn’t matter because the story is over. It ends, right there at the diner. Stories are little more than windows. Sometimes you find a frame big enough to fit one character’s entire life story. But you’ll never find a frame big enough to encompass the entire entire world.

There are already many endings in “A Song of Ice and Fire.” Those endings come on the battlefield as nameless Stark and Lannister soldiers die on a forested Westerland battlefield. They come at The Twins in the form of a dagger slashing across a mother’s throat. They even come in the form of an unexpected crossbow bolt on the toilet. It would come as a surprise to the literal hundreds of dead Ice and Fire characters that there is another “ending” to this “story.” As far as they're concerned, it already happened.

Maybe Martin will one day be able to lift this unliftable boulder and finish this series. Whether he does or not—it won’t mean the end of the Game of Thrones franchise. There are more books to come (not canon ASOIAF books, but presumably at the very least some unauthorized guides or essay texts), more shows to come, and countless other avenues the IP will reach into.

read more: Game of Thrones: Ranking All the Villains

When you play the A Game of Thrones card game, presumably you won’t care whether the series has an ending or not. You’ll get to make your own as you play. When you play Game of Thrones Risk, you get to decide the fates of Westeros and Essos for yourself anyway, book endings be damned. And when you play one of the many Game of Thrones video games in existence and those still yet to come, you’ll have many more endings to contend with.

Whether Winter and then Spring ever come or not for “A Song of Ice and Fire” is irrelevant. The series already features its fair share of endings. All signs point to this series standing the test of time so that there can be many more fan-generated endings to come. Martin created the unliftable boulder and now we can all decide for ourselves if we want to try to lift it for him.

A version of this article ran in July 2017.

Alec Bojalad is TV Editor at Den of Geek and TCA member. Read more of his stuff here. Follow him at his creatively-named Twitter handle @alecbojalad

from Books http://bit.ly/2I1pGuB