How i learned to stop worrying about reach and make shitty essays instead.

The advent of Halo on pc was heralded as a return to glory days, and well honestly i’ve had a lot of fun with it even if it’s not hugely polished and story mode coop is bork. That’s my review go away. On the eve of an election under the watchful eye of the full moon I slept but fitfully. I awake to a wet world with my head fastened several notches tighter than i like it.

Coming back to something old made me realise that the way we, and by we i mean fucking idiots, talk about media has changed over the last few years, fortunately i have just the format for talking about such things:

You know what’s interesting, the stream of consciousness rant is all but dead on youtube for now at least. (upbeat open source music starts here) This may sound like a hammer blow to my personal style of exposition but what i say is actually highly scripted. No clue to that tho init.
What I mean is that the filtering down of techniques is such that the video essay format has reached the low production shitpost quality dregs. They emulated it’s style without having any real arguments beyond their stream of consciousness rants as before but presenting it in a more legitimate format... (music stops)

But why is that?

(and resumes)

Well last of all they started inserting questions to direct the flow of their arguments like an essay, in random fucking example of shitty source i used to make it seem like i did research “the exact thing i am attempting to bootleg but it’s a quote now so sue me,” if you catch my drift. But what really makes this interesting, is the Emphasis put on random words in a kind of clarkson-esque style to give Weight to otherwise meaningless. Bottom text.


Then it becomes time to relate it to personal experience: something i did in 2016 when i first really got into the nerdwriter and other short form pop essay’s. It’s light structure, and tightly edited format made for, what was at the time, good entertainment. It’s a shame that i’ve been bamboozled more than once by people emulating the title format, then the entire format wholesale. It’s only three minutes in when i realise i’ve been duped.


Is this them actually learning how to present an argument? well here's the graph I made (stole) to obfuscate my point with bullshit.

Fuck no, it’s pure style, stream of consciousness is hardly a default in it’s self. It’s a style that used to be popular, and people got sick of. Now only talentless hacks who can’t do anything other that steal jokes still use it, heyhowareyou? Actually it’s still used for small channel political rebuttals fairly often because set design is outside the conceptual or budgetary scope for them, but when it comes to commentating on media, the pseudo-essay is currently king.

PS: normally there some smug self aware bullshit at the end telling you your at the end and trying to sound rushed for time, so let me slam you with some advertisement instead. PORN? PORN! PAWNS. Need to get off but don’t want to think? Got an erection but nothing to put it in. watch people fuck on the internet. It’s really kind of gross when you’re not aroused but it exists and it is really abundant, so sign up to a lifetime of unfulfilled desires with…

Dark souls 3: The corner stone of any fully realised S&M lifestyle.

As a video game sophist, a sophiticated gamer if you will, my auteur indie game pallet can never truly be quenched. Namely because I lack the attention span for anything remotely challenging or creative; and prefer instead to sink yet more hours into comfortable, yet, unengaging titles that I have long since stopped gaining any unique pleasure from. Like an amphibian this water is my home and all venturings outside it are but transient and in opposed to my nature as a wet cretin.

So when did these beloved games become so meh? Time and time again the fires were lit only to turn the world around it to ash: ash? Speak not in riddles tale weaver for I am but a simple reader. Rule 1: remember your audience, rule 2: they are basic.

Dark souls, is the story of a dude setting himself on fire to stop the end of the world. 2 doesn't matter and three takes the bioshock approach and say’s “yeah what if that, but a bunch of times,”
So many people set themselves on fire that the world is pretty F’n burnt out by this point and everyone has given up on doing it. So what does the world do? Call up one of the people who burnt themselves before and get them to do it again. Only they have date at nando’s or whatever and CBA, so the world summons up the unburnt ash of one who failed to light the flame to go and cock block them.

So what does this have to do with postmodernism? Nothing but bringing it up is part of what I do as an elite sophist. Anyway here is the story of me weebing out over a katana (the most powerful of blades, (that thing which i, a master warrior (sexless imbicile) have studied))

I named the damn thing, forgotten what. Yet to get it was a trial of fire and steel. Well mostly the latter, I say mostly because the furnace never gets hot enough to make true steel… and blah blah blah, wasn't joking when I said I was a weeb.
After beating the first boss I found him, a withered corpse with rags for clothes gripping the (objectively) greatest tool of humankind's candle like existence.

He approached slowly, pacing towards me without fear nor hesitation as though as his mind was taken with the Sakura fall on a languid afternoons stroll in the zen garden, hand on hilt, blade in the sheath... he cut me down in two seconds. Rinse and repeat, only this time i’m prepared, bombs, knives and all manor of dastard subterfuge. I lob, hurl and spit my arsenal as vitriolic in my attack as a rabid dog... He cut me down again. This is the essence of the dark souls experience. Eventually I gave up, played through the game some and came back a touch more buff and several levels senior, and still barely made it out with a drop of blood left in my ninehundred ninety nine cut bearing body.

The dark souls series has a well established reputation as feeling like a swift kick to the bollocks and it’s players are all serial masochists, but this game is very much a kinky safe space. There is no shame or humiliation in death unless...

 

“Yeah sure, whatever? Why i does it need to be a kink?” well most, many, the more popular games are very much empowerment fantasies; to a degree dark souls three is too, not two, nor one though however, if I had to pick one: definitely three. Dark souls is very much a dis-empowerment fantasy, where you are significantly less able that your opponents and overcoming them is by no means inevitable, combine this with your character being a nobody and you’ve turned things on their head. Upon succumbing to that appeal one realises it is somewhat perverse: Kinky eh?

Well Three isn’t so straight forward, you move with a certain brisk elegance now, you no longer move like a clunky undead, but like embers flicking in the flames updraft. Your character is reviled for being ash, a desperate spurt from a dying world; yet there is hope. a knowledge of past mistakes which can be built on and learned from, if dark souls is depression: then dark souls three is rebuilding your life after the fact. There is a sense of importance as the lands converge and timer runs down of a world at the brink of dusk, you play an undeniable role as you gather the bosses’ remains.

The levels while feeling somewhat more linear, do a wonderful job of obfuscating their gaminess in their architecture and landscaping, they don’t feel like levels as you play, but are places you push through, it’s only when you need to flip a switch and open a shortcut that you realise the illusion that game puts you under. The immersiveness of the scene.

I recently, i mean not that recently, maybe 6 months ago. Got ahold of the DLC’s for the game. Asses of arendelle and the cock ring city. If you even got tired of mistress Ds3 shoving things near your taint then the dlc’s are some hardcore scenes that fulfil some of the playerbases most depraved fantasies. The challenge is ramped up - a certain tightening of the nipple clamps, through both level design and enemy toughness though not to the point of being unplayable; it feels more honed than anything.

The former having longer gaps between bonfires, making each encounter more costly, straining the player to sustain themselves through the harsh cold of the painted world.
The ringed city is a series of puzzles woven into combat, the game is excruciating until you clock the solution, at which point it recedes into just being bloody pedantically tough. There are no safe-words in this place, and I never quite finished it.

In summary: dark souls 3 is a game for kinky weebs, no normies allowed REEEEEEEEEEEE

Star wars: faillen to place my order

Star wars fallen order. It’s time I beat the embargo for that lucrative click currency, reviewing the latest jedi’em up from the george lucas’s transplanted teet. Imagine for a moment if you will the akria-like sprawling mass of disney’s corpus made manifest. The faces of significant pop culture icons popping in and out of existence along it’s flesh meshed with circuitry surface. It howls, growing ever larger until the combined fictional creativity of the human race is folded into a single extended universe, finally becoming self sufficient and breaking away from the human psyche leaving us mindless animal husks once more. A world where emma watson’s self coupled bella has to team up with wolverine in order to erase song of the south and other racist projects form the disney multiverse all the while Goofy and Martin Scorsese tries to stop them for reasons…

 This is starting to sound like kingdom hearts 4.

So what have I learnt having not actually played the game? Well quite a lot, surprisingly. This isn’t the first in between the 3rd and 4th films that has ever been made and it’s a real contrast in tone and presentation. I didn’t mean to blunder into this point but i may as well run with it. A while back, who the hell does research these days, force unleashed came out, and it was frickin edgy. Well not really, it was just you playing as the bad guy, about as edgy as the song about bad persons that was popular a few months ago.

The trailer for which is the protag making a star destroyer do a backflip or some such using some kind of energy field that binds that universe… fricken stupid idea. Any way contrast that with the CAMERON MONAGHAN face being front and centre teasing some back and forth adventure that seems more in line in tone with the star wars in general.

Force unleashed was, nothing more sophist than a crazed power fantasy about being the F’ning stronk. Little emphasis on narrative, and more interest in letting carrie (not the fisher) loose on the various planets of the star wars. Fallen order by contrast seems to play it’s power fantasy more in line with the films and even goes as far as to suggest the protag might be on the backfoot in the proceedings.wow much story very doge meme

What happened in the last 11 years that made this shift happen. When did we stop giving a shit about cardboard cutout characters whose sole defining trait is that they are strong? Is this a shift in political orientation? A recognition of the fragility of hero’s or a storytelling technique to get us invested? I mean one could make a case for any of these but think that would be looking at things too broadly.

Let us taste the porridge i feel to be just right. The raw be strong power fantasy stills exists, just not in the star wars. It’s home is with the also Disney owned marvel form; they’re better at it, it’s what their comics have gotten reasonably competent at conveying it and they sometimes even throw characterisation in for good measure.
Simply i think it’s Disney making sure to keep it’s properties divergent enough so at not to double dip the market too heavily. As such the power level of star wars has been stripped back at least as far as the protagonists are concerned while the marvel films feel no such constraint. The scales of the action is different in each, as well as them sharpening the central hook of the star wars. The dream of you, yourself being a Jedi, a fantasy that isn’t sold on how powerful you’ll be but on it’s accessibility and how people learn to do it. Hence why they ditched the royal lineage business largely and focus on schmucks learning to be heroes. Whereas marvel is about hero’s learning not to be schmucks.

Will fallen jedi be a good game? The hell if i know, i admit i don’t own a copy and have hardly seen the trailers, heck I didn't even have a hot take until I started writing this when I tweeted to my friend about doing so as a joke in less than an hour ago, this is all horrendously un and ill conceived. A foam of the top of the head ramble. Why are you still reading this, go and pine for the fjords, GO AWAY, I’M DONE, RANT OVER. stop reading. I mean it, there’s nothing more to read here. I don’t intend to convey anything else of worth or note. It’s not like i’m just stalling for time before a big reveal because I'm really not. It’s a farce that you’ve kept going this long and it’s really starting to wind me up. I’m not sure epistien killed himself. There I said it now go eat grass!

Elder scrolls four: Video game nostalgia Boogaloo

It’s always better to rehash the old rather than envisage a new way forward. I was born twenty something years ago, I have been king of video game blogger scene for two years, But for all these years I've never been the ruler of my own Memes. I had seen the gates of the Twitter DMs, beyond which no waking eye may see. Behold, in dankness a doom swoops the land. This is the 27th of last seed. The year of Macintosh 420. These are the closing days of the Third era... And the final hours of my life...

The review of oblivion i did two years ago was shit. Do you remember? No of course you don’t, it wasn’t worth remembering consigned to the dustbin of my low effort shitposts, which is most of them; but this one stands out as the epitome of everything wrong with the blogger king. Have i learn anything from it? Of course not, but am i still too emotionally immature to let the matter go? well it feels like you know me, me.

Our (tail) tale begins in the months leading up the release of Skyrimjobs, a good, dear, well loved friend of mine… well he’s alright i suppose, suggested I play oblivion and so in an act of generosity lent me copy. This was about the time my grades started to dip. Going in all I was told was to avoid levelling up if at all possible, a tantalising endorsement of the much loved classic game.

One might expect that in my curiosity I would defy this meta law and instead plummet myself into a miasma of power levelling fever. I however am a chronically incurious sort, hobbitish to a fault. A man whose lineage is longer than his list of deeds. so I played as a khajiit with a proficiency for jumping, or as I called him at the time a bing boing kitty cat. With levelling out of mind i just got stuck into the game running around swing my barbed shortsword at whatever red dot happened to appear on screen.
Or I would have, were i not in prison.

A slight complication; i was innocent, I knew that much but all the other prisoners insisted likewise which didn’t help my case. Eventually patrick stewart turned up and declared me to be the one from his dreams. Not one to question the whims of a clearly unhinged aging despot i followed along as the poor guy was shanked for failing to give his share of cigarettes or some such. In his dying moments he gave me the Amulet of (mcguffin) kings and claimed the world would be overrun by demons if I didn't get it to his illegitimate son.

I know monarchs and other rulers like to project the idea that the world will end without them but this felt a little on the nose, yet I had nothing else pencilled in for my afternoon, other than snorting heinous amounts of moon sugar until my snout looked like the dunes of elsweyr, so i escaped through a sewer fighting enlarged rats, i wonder if i got a bonus against then, given i was a cat?

The land of cyrodiil is a pretty little forest dotted over with patches of arable grassland, it habits are very much those of the classical medieval fantasy, with a fighters, mages and thieves guild all swanning about the place. After starting my way along the main quest line, via a quick chat with Sean bean (the bastard son of the king, therefore: Sean fitzroy) i quickly got immersed into the story... of a Cat who ignored the plight of the people in favour of ducking about. A Dickensian classic.

With a fresh face and battle in my heart I turned up to the doors of the fighters guild and tried to sign up, they said no. on the count of me being a murderer, they didn’t seem to know about my pre-prison crime(s) but I had, since leaving, given a couple of ne'er-do-well (people minding their own business) a rough shake down. This marks the start of my descent into the criminal underworld. I could have used my unhinged violence for the greater good but was deprived of the chance, disenfranchised and impoverished leading my desperate moon sugar craving ass to join the “dark brotherhood”

Unlike skyrim there is some thinking to do when planning a murder, often i would sit back at a distance and stalk my prey, learning their habits and trying to find a place to get them alone for a quick chat, with the tip of my knife. The guards are not easy to escape and provide a real deterrent against outright stabbings, especially when one is trapped at level 3. I soon learnt that one only levels up upon sleeping, hence i became the insomniac bing boing kitty cat: murderer of the accused: seeker of moon sugar: daddy of dragons: breaker of spleens. 

Then the entire plot of scar-face played out.

Enough tales of tails, let's swing over some broad points then go home? The voice acting is incredible, for even at the time it was generic and kind of shoddy. American accents roam the land with all the brazen indifference of the actual Americans. The Npc’s occtionally follow their scripts to do some truly weird shit that leads them to be murdered before your eyes. All the dungeons are copy pasted and weapons are quickly worn down to blunted sticks. A Dickensian classic.

This game however is good in spite of itself, it’s rough in places but that comes with was in 2006 a massively ambitious game, with that roughness comes the solidity of the old school RPG’s that are so hard to get into now: in that sense that game is like a cats barbed penis. Actually no, not that at all, that’s a blooming awful thing to write but I can't bring myself to write anything else in its place. I will end the review here to i can go throw up.

Barbed cat penis/10

Space engineers: When the game works, it’s fun.

Space engineers: When the game works, it’s fun.

Commencing countdown engines on.

Check ignition and may god's love be with you.

I sit staring at a twisting icon set against a pale blue screen, distorted ever so slightly by static. “Waiting for server response,” I've really made the grade.
It’s been about fifteen minutes of worn patience: putting a server up, getting the settings right, making sure we all spawn in the correct place and juggling the head fry of installing mods in such a way as to leave our clients able to connect. It’s not difficult just utterly tedious, all this and I've had to change into my white cotton shirt.

Once through the door we had to contend with slow sim speeds, bad connections and occasional crashes, the servers lagging too and there’s nothing I can do; but it’s worth it. You see there is a deep seated sensual arousal laden deep in the loins of every nerd. Even the harder incel from the darkest pits of the internet will offer a flame of hope if it means getting the gratification of building and flying around in spaceships.

Minecraft in space, is probably the most succinct way of outlining space engineers. But it’s not necessarily fair to compare everything voxel based to the titular behemoth. Minecraft these days is a full realised thing bursting at the seams with content and years of refinement while space engineers is distinctly more bare bones in it’s sandbox. They are of course adding to the game but it’s generally slow and doesn’t ever feel like it might get there.

The physics of the game are distinctly abstract, given the aforementioned voxel structure, which is a nice way of saying they’re horse shit. The way thrust handles especially, with the position of thrusters being totally irrelevant, is an easy point on which to gripe: were I have any investment in the laws of physics. Instead, as I do, favouring the rule of cool: a far more fundamental force in our cosmos, I can let this slide. Especially as it has allowed for my friends invention, the rotating hammers of total calamity (patent pending), to massacre even the most powerful of dreadnoughts with ease.

There’s only a limited set of wacky novelties one can produce in this fashion, unlike something more construction orientated like besiege, and one can never really categorise their usefulness. There’s no state of play as such, just the open, objective-less sandbox. This is freeing in part but also leaving much of the experience hollow and without direction. Mucking about very much is the game play and the endgame all rolled into one.

All the survival mode does lengthen this process with the continual setbacks that come with Trying to drag tonnes of rock down into the atmosphere of the planet safely. A friend of mine very much seems to get his rocks off to just this very thing. The big bertha, is a horrendous poxed lump of scrap that looks like someone built a spaceship out of rubbish bins and old shampoo bottles. Yet as far as industrialism is concerned it is a powerhouse having ventured to strange new worlds in search of more materials to fuel it’s abdominal maturation.

I get my kicks spending too many hours building sci-fi inspired ships, reminiscent of those in the shows i spent my childhood watching instead of being outside, trading one radiation box for another. It’s an itch then when scratch leaves me purring like a cat, a rather disturbing sight i assure you. Digital miniature construction, my sickly battered creations could be put up in the corridors of digital tank museum, a sort of nerdy interstitial between exhibits. But alas that is too high to aspire.

So with a space building game on one hand and a pile of issues on the other where does that leave us. Floating aimlessly through the void of space without fuel watching the gauges on our life support systems slowly tick down. Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles i’m feeling very still….

Fallout of bed and hit your head on the bin 4: you'll never believe what happens next?

I like to play the waiting game, with games. All things tend towards disorder; the only meaningful mark on a cosmic scale between today and yesterday is that today the universe is just a little bit less together than it was the day before. All things die, from stars in the sky to that i love you too lie.
This seems on the surface to be a fundamentally nihilistic proposition, that is until one remembers steam and humble therein games generally go on sale from lower and lower prices the longer one waits. Like the price drop tv of it’s time, steam tempts the plebs with it’s discounts only to reward the high IQ, (mental elo) buff that know to hold out for that sweet nectar: the 75% discount.

So what happened? Where is this going? And why are you saying all this? Well if you’d stop asking questions I'd very much like to get to that but it’s kinda hard when I have to defend myself from an onslaught of gun jumping.

Fallout four, not the fourth one but whatever, recently slipped below a tenner for the game + da DLC’s. This boy, full of greedy mirth, brought it and then spent the next three days downloading the girthy 30 gigs of effluent straight unto the hard drive. So in short, I have the game; suppose I could have just said that from the off but I'm not one to ever edit my/shaun’s ‘work’ (full stop here)

So the game itself, well to start with I was lukewarm, which isn’t typical for a nuclear firestorm but alas. My feeling on new vegas are that of any hand cranking fanboy and naturally like any true gamer i’ve never managed to get into the original two but hear they are very good. I know that at the beginning of the game, the bombs are due to drop any minute and with this meta-fictional knowledge in mind i wanted to avert their entire timeline by getting caught in the blast.

First off no matter how hard I tried the vault tec salesman wouldn’t leave me be, i wanted to die dammit. Eventually my spouse filled in the forms for me by exercising his patriarchal privilege to veto my autonomy, seconds later i was forced to march my way up to the vaults despite trying to catch a wave of thermonuclear scorching hate to practice my body boarding.

I don't like being railroaded and forced to play nice so when I emerged from the vault a some time later I began my journey dropping steamy hot sass on anyone dim enough to try and engage me in conversation. Showed the minutemen how sassy i was by putting a 10mm round in one of their guts via misclick. Truly, an epic gamer moment.

After that I slid into the game proper or rather the side quests, which are rather fun and vaguely retro camp in tone. I spent an hour mucking about on a robot crewed pirate ship only for it to launch itself into an adjacent building; where the jet fuel didn’t melt the beams and the first responders were a horde of feral ghouls. I ran around pretending to be a hard boiled super hero talking like i straight out of a 1950’s comic strip and it was wonderful.

I found this to be where the game was strongest, it’s not laugh out loud funny but manages to be humorous without crossing over into the classic video game pitfall of trying too hard. I think the word i’m looking for here is “fun” but you can’t call something fun and be a serious hard hitting video games journalist, an eight year old can call something fun and get away with it but after that everyone just assumes you’re mental if you can summarise a ‘text’ as fun.

The main quest-line by contrast is deadly serious and oh so emotional! I really don’t care for it. I much prefer laughing away my thermonuclear sorrows in a series of wacky yet cathartic adventures. That is somewhat the joy of sandbox game, i have though my own choice of when and where to interact managed to create my own narrative aside from that of the main games, one I find far more compelling.

So i there anything to be said for gameplay? NO. next.
Just kidding, gunplay yes. Base Building if you like. crafting, yeah it’s kind of alright.

Overall the game quickly became of haze of roaming around and questing, it’s a big game and an even bigger time sink, the hands of the clock turn awful fast while playing. This might be a sign that the game is “fun” or has “engaged me” but to that I say poppycock. I cannot be drawn in by the lure of video games that aren't mind bendingly complex. I mean it’s just drivel, pure and simple it’s the dumbing down of mass media and the corruption of the once ideal state of gaming and… oh god it’s getting to me? I can’t be trusted. I may yet be an unknown harbinger of their mad ideals, Or not, can’t be sure.

Not sure where I was going with that but oh well. So have i managed to go over the game without mentioning any significant plot details other than the nukes? Am i just expecting people to know via cultural osmosis or wikipedia? I mean given how long the game had been out and the widespread exposure the franchise has gotten, I'm going to go ahead a slap a firm yes on those questions.

In summary I give the game Fallout 4/ however many games there have been in the franchise.

my second anniversary of posting nonsense

I’ve not written without caffeine for a very long time. Honestly i’m not sure how well my style will fare without the super charged effluent of pulsing impulses (nice one) running through my system. It was something closer to demonic possession than an actual process. As king says, he is the vessel through which his writing, and cocaine habit flows. In my case the source of that flow is likely a monkey with a pair of symbols.

Okay, so last year, yesterday, was the second anniversary. yes i forgot it was my anniversary of writing this shit heel blog. I mean now i have my silver play button and a cosplayer girlfriend who will corroborate the stories of my abusive and morally reprehensible ways when it comes time for my fall from grace; or that was the plan at least. Not gonna lie i started at nothing and now I am several steps backwards from there.

Maybe that’s too harsh, it’s not the destination but the friends we make along the way. As such I have decided to do a Q+A session on my subreddit. Only I don't have one, hey that itself could bare examination. Okay new idea, i am going to ask myself questions and then you’re going to read the answers and think about how charismatic and off the cuff i sound. Ready? Go:

Q: When did you decide to start soiling the internet with your filth?
A: Honestly that’s kind of a hostile question right from the off, I'd like to keep things a little friendlier ....

Oh shit i’m stealing the SOPHITICATED GAMER's format he used for the guest post he wrote the other day. He’ll probably notice but for the sake of originality I need to… keep going.

Q: when did you stop referencing whatever music you were listening to while writing when you started to run out of ideas?
A: hey don’t call me, by blondie, out on my bullshit you’re meant to be my fans, god you’re a hostile lot that’s for sure. good call back.

Q: is this really the best you have to offer after two years of biweekly blog posts.
A: well biweekly is a fairly ambiguous term so on that basis I don't think the question is valid m’kay. Not really sure what you mean by that, like twice a week or one every two weeks?

Q: do you think the pretence of accosting yourself has any inherent comedic value?
A: look who’s finally getting meta.

Q: you are?
A: indeed I am. Good question!

Q: well maybe you should address the whole garbelled English thing. Is that intentional or…
A: i’d rather not talk about it. I’m not sure if I'm dyslexic or brain damaged and at this point I don't want to know.

Q: Did you just get distracted by tinder?
A: yes, one person’s bio read “i’m the most complicated person you will ever meet,” I laughed so hard I wanted to include it in my blogpost.

Q: Are you getting to a postable length blog now?
A: yeah, time to rap it up.

Well that’s all we have time for. I am a very busy man with all those things that need doing and happening when you run a media empire like my own. All I can perhaps say is: thanks for reading, it means a lot. Aus!

The SOPHITICATED GAMER's agony aunt on the subject of... i didn't read it

Urghhh. i told my friend, and inspiration, the sophit, wait i'll just copy paste, the SOPHITICATED gamer he could do like a guest post or whatever and now he wants me to post and it.... my life is so hard i just want to sit here and guzzle cheese puffs until my hands are raw from the amount of cheese soot sucking the moisture from my skin. yet hey here we are i make scarifies for your entertainment/ mental pollution. i haven't figured out a way to monetize this yet but like if you've got some food in the fridge that you don't think you'll eat before it goes off please send it to my PObox.  

without further waffle, he's the...monetize, nope. SOPHITICATED, there we go, gamer. 

DEAR AGONY AUNT / WISEST AND MOST EXPERIENCED SOPHITICATED GAMER – HOW DO I BECOME A YOUTUBER?

PROBLEM:

I HAVE A FRIEND THAT WANTS TO EARN SOME OF HIS MONEY FROM YOUTUBE BUT CAN’T MAKE HIS FIRST VIDEO. WHAT ADVICE CAN I GIVE THIS FRIEND?

ANSWER:

So there we are logging into league of legends, going through the title screen, seeing a light in the summer art’s eyes, being winked at by their butthole. The queue to champion select starts: great I’m AP SHACO.

For those that don’t play league of legends, shaco is a clown that can summon jack in the boxes. When enemy champions walk into range of these invisible jack in the boxes, they make their champion scared for a few seconds while melting their flesh from the PEW PEWdiepie. Sorry Freudian slip and we’re back on topic.

That that brings us to rule 1 from my 12 rules to lives.

RULE 1: STUDY THE MASTERS. Pewdiepie is a master youtuber. You want to avoid jealousy of your masters. This will let you have admiration, so you can contact your masters and learn from them. You can learn what they are doing that you aren’t.

And in the words of Arianna Grande, talking about her masters:

One taught me love
One taught me patience
And one taught me pain

RULE 2: DON’T play league of legends. It is so fun and frustrating and addictive it will swallow your time like having a baby

ROYAL BABY 3: But realistically your friend is a cloud headed piece of @£$! that needs to get a real job because that’s how we do it around here. My father had a job hitting milk bottles with spoons and then I took over the family business and used my engineering and business degrees to streamline the business. Now we have mechanised milk bottle and spoon hitting so that we get 150 dings a minute as opposed to the dinging by hand which you’d probably expected thirty loud ones or sixty quiet ones. Of course this depends on how good and capable your employees are, because sometimes people join with fancy degrees that simply don’t have the intelligence for milk bottle dinging. We had one person that had 14 cups of tea in one morning so I kept him behind to have a go at him, and that lazy piece of !$@£ was only dinging about twenty a minute.

ROYAL BABY 4: Remember you are dumb – stay humble. And I quote Gronk:

“GRONK IS BOSS HE IS SMARTEST. THEN PARDU WHO HAS BEEN AT COMPANY FOR SEVEN YEARS IS NEXT SMARTEST. THEN DORP WHO HAS BEEN AT COMPANY FOR THREE YEARS IS NEXT SMARTEST. YOU NEW HERE, YOU ARE DUMB”

Thank you for reading. C u next Tuesday.

https://scontent.fbrs1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.15752-9/69158110_375705636479440_1917693401491308544_n.jpg?_nc_cat=109&_nc_eui2=AeG_p43zgCd4_O6qosWzIykT0CYCmdvC5-OaEK772uj2YcJh5wdLQp2PT5hLXHf-tVAnFQTXDgkCxOFtD1KhrZXBqqMhpCJuDLcibnwzTPQOjw&_nc_oc=AQkLaxbc5_QcXZuAUkEYpSC7eMIHTeH5Hpi0x6csNcJIMiBrtbC4M9JazRaNLVEKCD4&_nc_ht=scontent.fbrs1-1.fna&oh=f25bd8bb33b8ee11ac5728737f0ab2a8&oe=5E0D671E

Video games turned my sweet child into a rabid dog

Why suggest video games cause people to act violently? It’s a serious topic given recent mass shootings in the United states and the discussion around it, and I feel myself straining against the format when I started musing over a discussion on it. There’s a good Wikipedia article that has collated the studies on video games and violence that lends itself to a firm rebuttal of the accusations that video-games are to blame. A polygon article (CBA to link it), published in march of 2018 talks about how effective rating systems are for limiting purchases by underage children, generally stating them to be more effective than movie ratings in preventing underage purchase.

So, then… well. Why is this still a thing? He asks suggesting by implication he yet has a theory to explain the trend. I do not, be assured, but if i muddle on long enough that might not matter.

“Video games are the most oppressed group of modern times” this is at least undeniably true. It’s harder to come as a gamer than it is as gay. Rightly so. After having been through controversies around: (deep breath) sexual themes, portrayal of gender, lgbt characters, race and countries; along with issues of addiction, online harassment, alt right associations and one game that featured “the killing of Sikhs at their most holy site” it is hard not to see video games and their players as a bunch degenerate cretins.

Video games don’t make people violent but the people who play them are bloody awful. Lets refine that statement a little, not much because I don't want people to think I'm letting up on my scorn. I’m fairly sure most people won’t defend that kind of bullshit. Let’s chance tack.

Film controversies are not listed as being of the medium in general but are organised by title which makes comparison hard (I'd actually have to do some research and that’s simply unacceptable), and some of these include minor aspects like the kingsman sequel being banned in Cambodia but misses out on some fairly major ones like the ‘triumph of the wills’ being made by Nazis, which you’know outside of gamer circles is a pretty edgy thing. The total given is 55 for films, 56 including triumph.

You know when i said that bit about games not being done by title, that was a lie or rather i hadn’t get googled it. The games industry, not including the hardware which isn’t inherently problematic, was worth 35 million, no, billion dollar $$$ in 2018. Conversely the film industry, including home entertainment is worth 136 billion. Proportionally to scale we would expect 0.257 times the controversies given the scale. 112. So where do you think games measure up? Drum roll please…. Oh, i already said it, 112 which doing some quick maths, 55*0.25 (carry the 1) 7 is 112. So it’s exactly as you’d expect. Where an industry a quarter of the size putting out double the controversy….

So where do we find an explanation for the data? A reporting bias? My method being bad? Well i don’t care really. I only set out to show why people are willing to saddle and already controversial hive of scum and villainy with yet more scorn. I feel very comfortable doing so myself and i have no gain from doing so. Simply my theory which i came up as I write this, is that there are terms of plausibility that make the idea of gamer, via their association to the medium, of being violent mass shooters a palatable idea even with evidence to the contrary. It is the 99 heinous acts that make the 100th assumed, of which you might be innocent. Not that it really matters as your reflex response to the accusation will simply be the posting of memes and another round of circle-jerking.

I have a massive boner for data and having just showered i decided to wedge in a rolling frequency chart of video game controversies. Each point is the sum of the prior five years, so the first point 1977 is the sum of 1973-1977, 1978 is 1972-1978 ect ect.

Clearly this shit show was at peak in the second half of the 2000’s and has since somewhat abated, CBA to claim statistical significance. My plan from here was to plot something entirely unrelated against the dependent variable in a scatter graph and claim causality but I have things to do with my day, a lie, so I think I'll just wrap it up here.

VR headsets ruined my sex life

Concerto for a rainy day softly plays. The gentle light of an overcast August day seeps in through breaks in the curtains as i chew a length of plastic, my imitation cigarette: itself an imitation of poverty for the 19th century artist attempting to clad their purple gowns in the washed out colours of proletariat authenticity. Nowhere in video games is the line between authenticity and the simulated more prevalent than in video games.

I’ve had the honour, no, the blessing, no… I’ve used. I like that one. I’ve used Vr headsets just a handful of times in my life: assuming that a hand can hold more than three and less than five Vr’s. I mean, I could have met a handful of elephants and had it only be the one, fetal, elephant. They gestate for 22 months, and now you’ve learned something, so this isn’t a total waste of time. How many elephant facts constitutes a handful?

Vr’s biggest limitation at the moment is that it’s hella expensive and does to hardware what a really intensive graphically complex 3-d image does to a GPU. Now if that sounds a bit too technical for you we can go back to elephant facts: Did you know that an African bush elephant weighs more than twice as much as a jungle elephant, and they weigh (a colossal) 2,700 KG. no i didn’t slip an extra Zero in there, they are just really heavy.

I punched my friends kneecaps repeatedly while playing super hot. The issue with having one move around a 3-D Space, is that if the audience’s knee caps enter the physical space that overlaps with the digital realm just where the enemies head is; there is a keen likelihood that i won’t see it the first time and won’t stop from the second to eighth due to the mind breaking immersion. Their trunks are a fusion of the nose and upper lip, if you pinch the two together you might get some impression of what being an elephant is like, but probably not.

Holy cow on a satsuma, I know this is the man draw of VR, other than people spoiling at the chance to look like a prat, but it’s dam immersive. One often forgets the fiction of the place, not in the overarching experience but in singular panicked moments that startle the reptile brain into getting it’s freak out on. Speaking of brains ours have 86 millions fibres which is good until you remember elephants have 257 million, then again elephants don’t have Vr headsets so who is really winning the evolution?

The issue with this whole piece is i have only experienced VR briefly as a guest, and as such can’t claim any specific insight. I’m not sure what actually living with the technology is like. Now just to be clear, I could have asked any of the people I know who do have VR and have chosen not to because I am lazy and not interested in the topic outside attempting use is as a vessel to discuss a species that eats specifics plants as a means to induce labour, a form of self medication that is indicative of their highly developed brains.

In summary elephants never forget but i forgot to… what did i forget again? I don’t seem to remember.

Grand theft auto 4: is doing crime worth it in the end?

If you gather a group of XXX rated hardcore videogame freaks in a room, but why would you; it might take a minute, it might take an hour, it might take all night but someone is going to blur out a racial slur.

...now loading...

...now loading…

Jesus christ, this is taking a while. I’ll go make a cup of tea.

...loading…

Oh it’s bugged out, back to the start then. Grand theft auto five warrants a full, luscious and silky review. Horns, trumpets and maybe a bass guitar for that swing slam hit. Shame i’m not doing it today, the loading times are too long and i’m not skipping steps. I’ve not reviewed a gta game since the edge of 2017 but that will by no means break my stride.

So now i need to do a check notes jokes to *checks notes* maintain a facade of spontaneity. Right.

Have you ever been driving along a busy highway only for your car to, without warning, spin out, roll, catch fire and then explode… ruining your no claims bonus and forcing you to drive a fucking micra that smells like cigarette buts and an acrid vanilla haze. This is the Grand theft auto four experience. I used to think it was just my club hands awkwardly smashing the controller as my voice broke and I realised boobies were a form of high art but have since found it to be a universal motif.

I played a lot of this game during my formative years, so take it from me when I say the cars handle like hot ass. Not that i’ve had much occasion to handle hot ass, but well, you’know.

The game is grey and dreary. Is the name of the prompt I was using to outline this paragraph, i thought it succinct enough to use as an opener. In terms of design it peak 2008 gritty washed out dreariness.. Which means none of the game’s scenery really stands out for me in any meaningful way, despite me knowing my way around town even now. It’s like learning your way around a bog, a very relatable experience for all my readers I'm sure, you crettins.

The game was kind of a pain in the ass too. It was a lot of driving, go figure, well no let me take that from the top, no? Well i will anyway, driving at triple digits along some kind of lakeshore drive while swerving in an out of traffic, such things are the prize opale of the experience but what gta4 had was traffic, more jams than a lonely grandma’s pantry and toll booths to boot. They hit the realism cue right on the nail’s head and drove it through the sternum to rupture the heart of the fun, killing it, fairly dead, not to be revived.

Well that’s if you don’t want to be shot at by pigs, which lets face it, we’re all kind of hoping for at this point. I had an officer of the law waltz into my work 5 minutes before closing.

“We caught you just in time” he said.
“Am I being detained?”
“Well you don’t close until 10 right?,”
“Don’t try and mindfuck me pig, i know my rights,”

When you do a crime in the game, any crime the popo come around and try to bust you up. This was the days before Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so the law was generally armed with low calibre weapons that gave the criminal a fighting chance rather than the modern drone strikes that level a block in baltimore twice a week. Don’t ask me to cite a source for that i made it up.

This is when the game is at its peak, the thrill of the chase, the eternal dogged pursuit that pits man against man in the game of the deadliest… game. The more you do a crime the more they send black vans and helicopters to swat you in a section what would make news editors pants pop up like a teepee. All of which is entirely freeform as set you your choice of soundtrack via the radio. The game even has the option to switch to a cinematic camera that swaps between low angle shots of the cars wheels and top down views that will almost certainly lead one to crash.

The story mission were frustrating. Yeah, that point makes itself, a lot of it was fun; but it’s the dog turds in the punch that ruins the party for all the guests, who now have roundworm: the larvae of which can cause blindness.
That being said missions and the story of the game were entirely secondary to its appeal. Weirdly enough a game called grand theft auto makes is mark with… bowling.

That’s right, you can go bowling, you can take your friends bowling and they will try and out bowl you, it’s a striking minigame that’s real show stealer, I'm split as to whether it’s revolutionary or just utterly outstanding. Niko, the umm.. Player character, can be down and out having just had the ass kicking of his life, then in a fit of pure impulse, spend the next three days bowling his life out until he plays the perfect game.

This review is getting a bit girthy so let's wrap it up with the next paragraph.

The end.

Steamy sales and Burgess shales. When it's cold, it hails and out comes the snails.

As I nibble on a pan au chocolat, piping hot and fresh from the oven, I become concerned with, another nibble, the dread baron of gaming events that has begun today, or possibly yesterday while I was out. In 1909, Burgess shale was discovered. It contained fossilised creatures from a time early in earth’s history, the Burgess shale contains many unique and bizarre specimens which science, in the intervening century and a decade, has failed to turn into a living Lazarus theme park. Representing the largest failure of frog DNA to date. This however pales in comparison to the real shale, the steam sale and it’s ongoing circus of spending memes.

Okay, so in my talking about this i am in fact drawing attention to it’s happening and benefiting gabe by doing so. Most people, and use the term loosely because I am referring to journalists, which is also fairly loose because i am referring to videogames… let’s start over. Troglodytes can content themselves with knowing the foot traffic they get from their topicality if what keeps the lights on in their subterranean swamps.

That itself is an oversimplification, but one I am willing to use because the written word with all it’s infinite combinations of corncob whiskery was not designed for nuance. Oh god i’ve invoked my mystic word of total smug. I guess we have to go deeper.

The meta discussion about that is and isn’t news, in relation to riding popular events and dwelling on community staples, like the steam sales, has been a wing of self aware troglodytes corncob whiskery since some point, i’m not really sure when, i’m not going to do any research for this paragraph so just take my word for it if you like. Or don’t, it doesn’t matter. I might be “Writing to persuade,” but like a gcse student in an english exam really i’m just trying to get through this without farting too loudly.

Right so as I was saying, the steam sales, yeah nothing really jumped out at me this year. When I was a child, I thought as a child thinks and brought things in much the same way a child does. Impulse buying is now something I consciously try and avoid, though not always successfully, I recently splurged on a reduced 9p carton of yogurt. The guilt for which is still haunting my dreams.

You see the issue is, and this is my gripe with the whole reporting on open events, that the reporting replaces having your own dumb thoughts with another tossers dumb thoughts, or worse having two sets of inane thoughts about the same thing. It doesn’t matter how many sets of babble you’ve read about the latest episode of whatever. Not in the sense of there is no intrinsic value, or that there is more meaningful things one could be doing, but that doing so isn’t additive to the experience. That’s not my opinion that’s a fact!

That being said, not all topical content is inane, there are some really good bits of media analysis out there. None of which start with “top 5 hidden gnomes in the new spiderman trailer”
I am currently refusing to look up any reviews or articles pertaining to the show I am currently watching, instead i just think about it a bunch because i am really sad, but also because I think I'm better than everyone else and have a general disdain for modern media trends.

Deep down i’d rather have spent the last page splurging out about how into this show i am, well not even that deep really because i am explicitly fucking telling you that.

Social media buzz implies we are all bees, honey bees or bumble bees it doesn’t matter. we all do our complex honey dance pointing each other towards perspective sources of nourishment. In this analogy I am a fumigator whose equipment doesn’t work and hence has had to resort to spitting phlegm and bile on the hive.

Destination E3: phantom plain

9:16am, i’ve been up for about twenty minutes. Hopefully the today’s topic will come to me as i void my bowels. It’s left me whole but broken. The curry from last night, won’t. stop. hurting. It’s been nearly at least 9 months since i finished playing metal gear 5: the phantom pain, i had planned on doing a review sooner, then again, i planned on having a readership and we both know how that turned out.

Let’s jump back in time to the 1984, big brother is everywhere, well no not really but they do have a 1984 reference…. FUCK, boring, boring review boring thing. we need a resolution not a another pissuptripewalk of cesspit effluent, such a thing is not affluence it’s tired and desperate cry of the mind yet to gorge itself on the mindfuel on morning coffee… it’s 10:05am and the goose is loose.

I want to talk about graphical comparisons on games. With E3 bearing down out neck like some demented swan snapping at our tongues. it’s time to stop taking names and start drop silky hot waxy facts. THIS IS NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE



A picture is worth a thousand words and not adding a figure for images brings back memories of my supervisors shouting at me. Here we see the greatest electronics expo had to offers. Simply : graphics are a lie and i’m here to prove it. Sure okay, that might be a fluke, one dev decided to take the weekend off or came in lit Thursday afternoon and tried to hand out his phone number to the company cat, but what matters is this is systemic.

Above we see the ground pounding action rock’em out shooter and microtransaction slagfest Player’s unknown’s battle’s ground’s. The only difference here is the white balance which i could have fixed on gimp if it wouldn’t have broken my writers flow, like a turd, in more ways the one, the goal is one long unbroken chain of grammerless mass that coils around the edge of the porcelain white and refuses to go down when flushed.

Flushed is what these graphical updates look like and therefore should be, i mean they speak for themselves or they will if you have text to speech enabled but that would be a bit too much like pivoting to video for a journalist of my integrity (my voice is annoying, i think we all knew that already.)



Look at this, all they did was make the lighting lighter, that isn’t graphics, i mean they both look pretty bad to honest but i don’t see how this is a remaster. It leaves me with a shrug. I may sound outraged, well it’s because i am. For year i’ve argued, quite rightly, that graphics don’t really matter and technical innovation is only useful in how it can be used to deliver a better experience, it ain’t a goal in itself.

Okay fine, i got got kind of excited about making shots of graphical updates look worse by lowering the resolution to shit therefor making the image redundant. The prior 513 words were a loose justification of having done so, i am blatantly willing to lie to your face in order to push some made up images to you that’ll have no bearing on the product that will be shat out in crunch and because of that this is the real E3 right here. (what is subtext?)

My intuitive guide to going pro

I was at a gathering of friends the other week; quiet in keeping with my persona, it look place under a bridge. That’s not a bad opening line, shame i ruined it with this needless comment immediately after.

So, at said gathering we were, as one imagines, sitting in total morose silence while the spiders ate our legs, or maybe we were having a chat, not exactly groundbreaking. Someone, not to name names but they were a plebeian, decided that video games weren’t a valid hobby. Well not exactly they said: “Being very skilled at a video game is nothing to be proud of and shouldn’t be sought,” which got me wondering. What about video games, is being very skilled at a video game nothing to be proud of and something that shouldn’t be sought? If only i had a format with which to express thoughts on the top.

Back, whenever; some kids, science kids decided to take this here mouse and jam a bunch of electrodes into its skull. Sounds funky right? But it gets weirder: they gave the mouse a button, two in fact; one gave the mouse a snack the other gave the mouse a F’ed up mind blowing orgasm by directly stimulating the region of the brain that dealt with it , thereby dispelling any notion of extraphysical existence, I.E the soul, and killing god like a stoned bird in midflight. All the while leaving the mouse's face twisted up and tongue out like some deprived hentai.

Well, scientists being scientists, the way they rigged it up every hour the mouse had to choose which one to press, the mouse died, never once choosing food over a good long hard hentai face; but that’s not the point here. There’s a find of moral intuition about artificial pleasure being wrong or less worthwhile, when asked if you’d prefer to be hooked up with the pleasure electrodes or just go on living most choose the latter. I’ve seen the look on those little white mouse faces and knew what i’d choose.

That’s an extreme case but the shades of it colour our discussion around games. Because the conditions are arbitrary it feels less real. Give me a standard football any day, along with a regulation size pitch, with clearly designated markers, roles, timers, movement rules, technicalities, restrictions… leagues, preconditions, referees and equipment and i’ll show you how to have fun.

I know this sounds like a lot of thought just to justify being a fucking cretin who would have continued being a cretin regardless but you’know. You’re right, that is a perfectly valid criticism. There was no substantive outcome for the task i set myself which i took to be a challenge of learnt skills and decision making ability from which i might derive a sense of validation from, just as you will have by forming any opinion on the above text.

That is how you deal with criticism: Bullshittery.

So should i hook myself up to the pseudo orgasm hole of becoming a pro gamer? Is there anything to be said for its emerging role as an entertainer like on twitch? Well i’ve not looked at twitch hardly, character flaw i know, but i might have some musing on becoming pro.

LOL YOUR SHIT M8: most people (me) aren't very good at games, of those that are only fraction of which are suited to competitive play. We all like a good kick around but just because you’re a pretty good kicker of balls doesn’t mean you should go pro or let it take up time from your otherwise pitiful mess of a life. I don’t need to make your hobby less valid to make you less of a cretin, you’re a cretin regardless. I hate your dreams, everything you do will turn to ash, achievements will spoil like rotting fruit in your mouth as you savour your feeble pyrrhic victories over a vast uncaring world… i baked a cherry crumble.

From all this you might think i’m fairly content with people gaming and feeling fairly good about it, but if the tone of the above paragraph is any indication then y’all know that ain’t hapn’in. Valid, yes; practice, less so. The mouse died after all, in a monotone existence. You’re more than just a joystick smasher, doing a variety of different things, that engage different sense and styles of thought… is something i’d recommend if i was a self help book, i’m not; clearly i’m a cretin so let me scream into the cosmos while clapping my hands “WHERE’S MY DEADLY BRAIN ORGASMS”

Alan wake me up inside.

There is a pigeon singing gutturally outside my window, the loud fucker isn’t getting their bread handout for a week, to the squirrels go my toasty crusts.

Horror, it takes many forms, like when you misjudged the gaseous quality a fart, forget someone's name or come face to face the entities whose existence renders your own meaningless and more fragile that the flame of a candle as the last droplets of wax flow away. I myself am trapped in the horror of my own fickle memories, i could have sworn i’ve done a review of Alan wake before but apparently not, it could have just been that i intently focused on doing so, maybe one afternoon during a thought shower, i’m not adopting modern terminology there, quite literally showers are great places to mull things over because nowhere else i am free to cup my lathered scrotum in peace, it’s a kind of freedom that promotes free thinking.

The Game: could you make a game out of a stephen king book? Is the premise of this game, not the narrative premise but the actual intent. For those struggling with the difference, the narrative premise would be me going to the shower to think, while the intent would be to cup my lathered scrotum in peace: a sentence one ought never have to read twice.

Set in a sleepy new england town with a terrible monster living in the lake, a writer; with writer's block and presumably a twitter account that see’s the lion share of their typing efforts, goes to get their mojo back, by living in a cabin on the lake side; so they can get over their twitter addiction and actually write something... but WHOOPS, he accidentally writes the creature in the lake into existence and the pages of his new book starts playing out around him. Can he spoiler himself by finding the pages in order to stop what is going down… Maybe.

In terms of metafiction mindfuck the game is fun enough to float through the narrative beats of a pulp novel, which is aware that it’s a pulp novel, also a game; and takes some measure of glee in being a touch on the cheesy side while retaining that capacity to drive genuine fear into the player. Like when someone knocks on the door of the bathroom to ask about your thought shower when really…

The monster is your evil shadow eldritch kind of thingey and so you can only kill an enemy after shining a torch at then, naturally the game plays up the contrast between light and dark more heavily than a silhouette portrait. Upon rereading this i realise silhouette portraits are really out of favour in a world when you can snap chat your lathered scrotum to just about anyone, using a glass of wine and flew clicks. Fortunately i don’t phone.

On top of that the enemies are just townsfolk that have been possessed by the shadow which makes you real monster? Both ammo and batteries are sparse, the classic trick to making everything all the tenser and on top of that the safe points, under street lamps, occasionally cut out just to stop you recovering too much from the intensity of the shadow shit show floating around you.

If memory serves there are some pretty good bits of storytelling going on here and the action is never truly overwhelming if not a touch repetitive, if anything one gets a bit worn out from being so tense all the time.

I didn’t finish the game, not because it was bad or anything just didn’t manage to find the time when i played it a few year ago, which is maybe why i held of on a review for so long but if they’re truly aping stephen king, in the true and time honoured fashion, then the ending wouldn’t have been that good anyway. It would just sort of peter out, tired, kind of predictable. Limping on to a, belated, slow… finish.

Alice: madness returned? or just another dose of Ritalin required?

At some point we all find ourselves through the looking the looking glass. The original Alice in wonderland, the story by Lewis Carroll, who else, has become a staple of popular tropes. The Alice allusion crops up just about anywhere that things might get the slightest bit surreal. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination then to expect that it was remade in the last decade by Tim Burton. That film was about as good as the red queen would be as a hairdresser or as a flamingo is as a croquet mallet.

But we don’t talk about films here, because the we is me and i’ve no time to deviate from my strict schedule of video games, hattery and tea parties. At the centre of all three lies a Alice: madness returns, a 2011 release that took the whimsy and childlike awe of the original and sanded it down to a grit laden grim ‘psychological’ edgy...thing. This is not an uncommon occurrence for many works of fiction, least of all for Alice in wonderland whose tvtropes pages lists this as a “frequent target of grimmification” the page then reminds readers of the all the dark jokes the text has, pointing out this is hardly surprising.

The game itself is mostly a bit of platforming, light puzzling and some ‘use the weapon that thing is weak against’ combat thrown in for good measure. It’s not really the thing we’re here to discuss and that’s by design, the game never really wanted to be more that a vehicle for this aesthetics of an edgy alice in wonderland; hence it didn’t really try. It wears black rim glasses with no lenses in them. It has suspenders that hold nothing up because it’s wearing a belt. It has a personality about as interesting as porridge and has tried to hide this by stating ‘controversial views’ it’s a teenager’s alice in wonderland.

Exactly what one would expect from alice in wonderland for teens. Now at this point one might rightly expect that i don’t like this game, but i do. Not massively, but i had a good time with it, just not a good enough time to make me forget my criticisms after 5 years. Teenagers with personality like porridge aren't the worst. They’re boring and vexing at times but otherwise one can see the quality in them, knowing this is just a phase for them and the making of something good is within.

So in this version of events, taking place after the book. Alice’s house burns down, and she is now living in an orphanage with some therapist who is trying to cure her of the madness. Meanwhile in wonderland there is a giant cathedral train bringing ruin by ummm… ruining everything with muck and oil. Making all the characters from the book go more loopy than usual. This all culminated in peak ‘psychological’ edginess when at the end we discover the TheRapist is actually The Rapist who burnt Alice's house how and is now trying to erase her memories to make her a into a child prostitute… lets take a breather for a minute to let that sink in.

Even in ludicrous abstract i find mental fuckery disturbing so it actually hit a note for me. The edginess of it if anything was a detractor to the gold that lay within. Madness, you see, has two sides to it in popular imagination: Psychotic behaviour and creativity. In reality the relation is non existent. Alice in wonderland is read both ways, hence a gritty sequel naming itself madness returns, but a remake by burton emphasising the power of imagination and creativity. HA, there was a reason i brought that film up earlier, not that i planned this it just worked out neatly. For a moment i could almost convince myself that the game knew the difference and was exploring it, then it went on to talk about creating child prostitutes using hypnosis and it kind of lost me, along with all sense of credibility towards being self aware.

The game went for it’s teen edginess over any true sense of horror, which it inadvertently stumbled into nonetheless. The porridge boys and girls have an amazing capacity to blunder into good things while aiming for something not very interesting. The history of treating things thought to be mental illness is full of true and skin crawling nightmare fuel. The use of mass lobotomies, electroconvulsive therapy to ‘cure’ homosexuality and the treatment of the female orgasm as a defect were all hallmarks of the time in which the story was set.

Children experiencing auditory hallucinations often report their voices being of a kind and positive nature. This changes in adolescence when the voices become altogether more sinister and grim. I don’t mean to imply too strong a linkage but one can see the analogue here. That alone is the basis for a compelling aged up Alice. Instead they went for the most tweedledum version they conceive, urggghhh.

Post scriptum: the deadly mind trap at the heart of it all.

After words have failed, there will be only blood shed. I’ve been drafted...ing this review for a while now, that’s a lie but so is the glory of war. So who’s the real monster here? Still me? Okay fine. Let’s hear from someone else for a change:

“Hands down best WW2 on the market at the moment. Very immersive with some of the best sound and visual effects of any game. There have been frequent content updates and optimisation improvements and I have never had trouble finding a full server (UK based)”

This was a friends summary of post scriptum. I told them i would feature it and well, i’m true to my word, rarely. I could describe PS as squad set in ww2 but then i’d have to explain what squad is and give a run down of world war two and only one of those things will bring me any joy and it’s the unnecessary one that will bloat the word count.

Point the first, “the best world war 2” this quote is key to our understanding of subjectivity. The second world war has happened precisely once, multiverse and other plothax not withstanding. So to say this is the best one is to hit on some key, he misspoke. No it’s all about simulacrum! The event has been transcribed and repeated many times over in it’s various depictions none of which themselves are the war but which give us a lense with which to view it... He probably just misspoke. Misspoke? Mistyped, mistress bonbons candy cane rod? Sorry i got distracted for, reasons.

Head count up in this female dog, how many world war two’s are the? Post in the comments below #engagement, don’t clog up my pristine comments with your tripe.

So with that question laid to rest we can move on the point in question, immersion. A topic that makes me want to drown myself because i am overly literal, edgy and suggestible. The game has no narrative to speak of, so what are we being immersed in? Immersion is really just bypassing that critical aspect of mind that reminds one they are staring at screen smashing a keyboard when there is washing up to be done. Easy enough for someone suggestible like me or you, but gets harder (sorry) for a normal person.

The graphical potato of the game is certainly quality, so it can’t be that giving me the immersions, sorry anyone who likes graphics, DING DONG you are wrong. What's in the game that’s so immersive then? Well i’m getting to that if you’ll stop pestering me but i didn’t want to say it straight out or without context because that wouldn’t build up a set of expectations and experiences around the text that can be played off for dramatic effect.

So when you load into the game, you join a squad, like in squad, each player having equipment suited to their role, in the case of standard infantry, you don’t get anything special so nothing is lost when you’re moan down by a 42 from the next bush over, or flattened by a coax of a panzer, or mortared, or friendly fired by a misplaced grenade. Then you may lie on the ground waiting for your medic, who is also dead for one of the above reasons, so unable to revive you. Then you can walk for ten minutes because the logistic team parked the respawn truck on a landmine.

The game's diversity of roles and need for cohesion is the difference between this and a normal FPS. You can’t do achieve on your own by design and victory always goes to the better organised team rather that who is the best at 360 no scoping, which are both things i am terrible at and your tongue doesn’t fit in your mouth anymore, why is that?

Which brings me onto tank crews, you seen fury? Yeah i liked it to. It’s essentially that but much less flashy. You drive looking through a letter box, your turret turns slower than a clock face and the only way to spot anything is for the commander to poke his head out and risk eating an 7.92×57mm Mauser general-purpose buffet. It’s rude crude and the most novel fun i’ve had in a video game in some time. All the clunkiness and awkward shouting over the microphones builds up a tension that makes every encounter terrifying. As you rush to spot the enemy before they can blow you up. you miss a shot, and some truck gets away? Now the German army know where you’re at son. So high tail it out at 25 mph while bullets rain on down.

The team sizes too, are just large enough to give a sense of chaos to the cohesion, like the cold sensation now running up your legs. One speaker can’t direct all so command chains form, this is made more messy by the need for radiomen to keep up the broadcast and to call in mortars or planes. Respawns and extra defences can be set up by an already mentioned logistics crew, which isn’t just for show. Put supplies and sandbags in the right configuration and you can take a turn being the lawnmower of infantry for a change.

Because of how feeble each person is, it takes on a horror-like quality. One man in csgo can take out a whole team but one man can’t win this war. So at once you are vulnerable and need to trust your team to win, this is a recipe to get someone invested.

Realism in many games is putting about putting obstacles in your way to reflect real life considerations, in post scriptum they reproduce the war in your own psychology with the simple mechanical operant conditioning of teamwork good, rambo bad. Never has being a rat been so appealing in order to experience the favour of a time that will live in infamy.

CTRL ALT BREXIT

Straight up punch, big question opener: why are there no Brexit video games? I mean there’s a film in “the works” and i have no idea what the plot might be but at this point i don’t think anyone else quite does either. Probably because it’s real life and hence everything has the murky semi implied edge to it that leaves one's ability to experience something like a spoon up to the person’s willingness to trust their senses. Scaled up to something this big and it becomes a huge miasma of pulsating postulates.

The main thrust of the idea behind a video game Brexit is that all the trailers could be misleading, the devs could tell outright lies about the content, it could be a barely functional wreck and all that would do is cement it as one of the most realistic games to date.

That felt too close to being an actual joke for this format so here’s some overly long deluge of words: A friend, not a very good one, well i mean i know them well enough it’s just they’re not that good overall, pointed out the ease of satire Brexit provides and while not a profound observation, is was useful to the point where i’d acknowledge it, while also distancing myself by saying a friend said it, and not me.

Now i’ve arrived at a perfectly good place to vent my frustrations around the whole process and have a good old satirical moan. Unfortunately for my narrative structure i have a profound need to be edgy and subversive and so today we will buck the trend of using video games to vent about my political views in order to show up all those shoddy half-caked journalist stooges that there is a better way forwards. Will i be A-political? NO! Better, i will use politics to talk about my frustrations around video games.

What’s with the constant updating to Brexit AMIRIGHT, why can’t they just realise a stable version (i.e. one with horses) and leave it alone for a while. I don’t like the idea of a massive upfront bill and then having to pay more to maintain public services because our economy isn’t generating enough taxable revenue due to decreased trade. Here i term the lack of economic transactions taking place as being: micro-transactions (is this enough subtext for you, you wile ponce). Things like good education and infrastructure maintenance may seem cosmetic but the have huge impact on the experience and should be taken more seriously.

What’s with flood of political commentators, the over analysis of every move exhausts out ability to focus on what’s happening and form our own views. This is made worse by their crackly microphone and the fact they keep calling me a nazi because i wanted to remain in spawn and save the good equipment i already have for the next round. Not to mention the fact that a team leader called a break, then left when people voted for it. Shit i’ve slipped back into games and a cover for politics and not politics as a cover for video games. Just goes to show that Brexit satire is too easy to resist. The low hanging fruit that it is serves as an easy segway into a sexual harassment analogue that is both tasteless and crass.

The ease with which i wrote this is unbelievable, most the notes were scrawled on the back of a napkin in line at a coffee shop at peak rush while i had a full tonic-clonic seizure, which goes a long way to explain much of the prose herein. While not seeming like a massive deviation from my prior method this was i can assure you this took considerably less effort on my part.

I rate the hypothetical brexit video game a massive waste of time that’ll drop out of popularity super quickly once something more polished comes along like people getting fed up of using food banks or something…

PS: brexit auto corrects to brevity on my computer, if only IRL had this feature.

Going mainstream, abandoning integrity and buying a yacht.

I feel an amassing of good will around the name BVGROTI, my critique has been poignant yet fair. My claims bold, yet tempered. I am relatable, friendly and even approachable. I can sing my own praises, but that’s nothing new. What is new is my inability to capitalise on that fact. Let’s face it hoe, Friendly faces don’t pay bills. If you want to survive in the jungle you’ve gotta be mean, and i’m not talking about statistical averages. Thing is i can’t help who i am, changing my persona to be more degrading to my swine (audience) can only do so much. I need a better audience.

Kids. i don’t like them and they don’t like me. them, on the count of being able to smell fear; and me, on the count that they can smell my fear. Is that the correct use of a semi colon? Yeah, why not, i have no idea. Kids don’t know either. literacy rates among kids have dropped to i don’t know i’m making this up but that never stopped the daily mail. My point is that i need a pliable audience that both lacks critical thinking and has access to currency. An overlap that can be found in young children; though it’s normally V-bucks and i can’t feed my children with those because i don’t have any (leaving that ambiguous FYI).

My supreme ability to think rationally has left me penniless, and the implication of that joke makes my sound like a libertarian, hence swaying them into my demographic. Weirdly enough they fit into the Goldilocks zone too, welcome on board my fountainhead mules: the compulsory donations to truth and liberty to end taxation is in a buck to your left.

Advertisement. As far as i can tell ever since the financial crash of 2008, everything has been bad and only people with money spend it anymore. Hence why everything is done via advertisements. Companies pay us, the shitposters, to be vehicles for your indoctrination into stunning website design at the click of a mouse that you can listen to anywhere on the move and even… i got distracted shitposting a chat. Where was i?

Oh yes, patreon. Honestly i kind of like the idea. Free money has always appealed to me hence why i always try for a dump at work, even if i went before hand. It’s matter of principle. I mean i am technically getting shit done. It’s just a matter of where, and we don’t shit where we eat, which is why no one eats in the manager's office. This would be true if i had a spine but i’m as much a shill there as i am here. Say anything, do anything, reject meaning. Accept currency acquire females or males, or anyone else for that matter… money doesn’t judge you, so why should i?

Am i a shill yet? well my revenue stream is about where it started minus potential earning i’ll lose for drafting this in my own blood. Time to sell some Merch! It doesn’t even have to be tasteful, i think the tastelessness might even help a little. People with taste often have some degree of critical thinking and we, like a stunted giraffe are aiming for the pale meek leaves at the bottom of the tree. Merch! makes you stand out and nothing highlights a person more than a T-shirt with the words “KILL YOUR FAMILY” printed in big capital letters.

Finally, an empire needs a culture, unless you’re Rome. Rome fell and it’s pretty clear this was the case because they didn’t have a good sense of cultivated identity and were pillaged by barbarians after their military costs spiralled out of control, the emphasis there is for scholars to debate. People stick around longer if you give them a community, or better yet a designation used to mask the fact there is no group there at all, just people who supply you with money. Divide people on an arbitrary basis colour code each and whoops you’ve created a group identity. People aren't just fooled because you lie to them, they have underlying biases that will aid you in your efforts.

This is what people who know stuff have termed “psychology”.

Marketing is therefore applied psychology, the one true science with total empirical control over the universe due to its ability to subvert what empirical means and how we observe things. This entire piece (piss) being the culmination of its effect, a haze of psycho-distortionary effects to weaken the mind and induce a pliable state of buy my merch.

In blade runner the idea of dystopia was married to skyscraper billboards, more recently and in slightly riffing of the idea the point was made that the persona can be co-opted to be used as an advertisement, by south park of all things…

Bizarre synth noise plays with overlong distortion and fade out to create ominous overture
“You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, an ice cold can of pepsi is crawling towards you.”
“What desert?”
“The desert of the real. Anyway. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help, but you're not helping.”
“What do you mean i’m not helping?”
“You haven’t donated to their patreon.” 

Have i stoked enough fear yet to be wealthy? 2/7 no horses this time.

New year, New me! How i took hold of my future and shaped up in January... while playing total war

A dark and stuffy cabin on the fringe of the civilised world. Four steadback riders faun their attention over the fickle and inane. Stuffing their face with wine and brie, until one man cries,
“This new government of the our people, the nation of France is nothing but a sham!” stoked to action a young artillery officers rises to his feet Notpoleon No-Bonaparte, handsome and devilishly charming, sure to never succumb to male pattern baldness, he puts the vile dog in his place with an impromptu speech and then he beds two red head maidens…

I’ve never been to Corsica and i’ve never written self insert fanfiction about myself, one of those is true for me but neither for our dear emperor circa. 1804-1814. He is the subject of much discussion by historians, which is code for: he killed lots of people. Also they made a total war game about him and you can do all his battles and stuff and that’s worth talking about maybe?

Do i need to explain a total war game to anyone in the room? No? Thank frog, i honestly struggle to sleep when i have a strategy game like that installed on my pc as i suffer from chronic over-musing syndrome, an affliction i discovered after thinking about it too much. Feverish fitful nights were spent in tight white cotton leggings screaming
“je m'appelle BVGROTI,” while directing brutal cavalry charges against fleeing Austrian soldiers.
When i started playing, i confess, i knew little of strategies of the day. My last total war game was rome and while i will spend some time discussing it at a later date for now imagine a toga wearing latin spitter thrust into to the advent of the new pedagogical age. Turns out the melee-mash phalanx was the strategic equivalent of duct taping to leg to your enemies and thrusting it into a woodchipper.

Innovation was required!
“If you want a thing done well, do it yourself. you lazy sausage,”
I was commanding as napoleon, napoleon was an artillery officer before he became emperor. so maybe, i reasoned, cannons might be pretty useful. My first attempt was a failure, the dirt directly ahead of the embankment i placed the cannons in was utterly smashed beyond all recognition in a somme like hail of death. Unfortunately the enemy army were behind the dirt i was pounding and so i got overrun and lost the battle.

Step two, the second! I needed a real enemy, so i hopped on with a friend to play a quick match. My cannons, numbered twice the standard complement were poised to smash his line before he got in range, unfortunately he charged them mid reposition with his cavalry leaving me anchor-less… then his internet broke and so i won by default, progress had been made.

Next i actually learnt how a firing arc worked and took account of terrain when positioning my guns. You know, like an artillery officer would do. This was the turning point, but it came at a steep price, an hour of watch history videos on youtube. A boot camp in war, death, slaughter and pain all narrated by the acoustic voices of the digital domains finest. Still didn’t quite get the whole friendly fire thing but hey if you kill as many friends as enemies you’re getting double points right?
“An army marches on its stomach, pass me that croissant mon philip,”

Battles were won, close cut things. Carried to me by the grace of fate.
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake or eggs Lorraine.”
But with each slaughter my tactics evolved and with it came stronger victories and fewer team kills. A major step forward was taken when i began using “stinger” forces, yes i am obsessed enough to name my strats. Two infantry and a cavalry group. AKA two in the pink one in the brown. The cavalry are used to bait the enemy units into switching to a cav-square, horses don’t understand squares making this a strong counter. At which point the infantry charge the enemy having reduced their effective fighting action power (E-FAP) in half, with the subsequent application of the Lanchester's square law. One sees why they are then wrecked.

A refinement of design took place until i struck upon my master stroke, the MAW. (Makes enemy Army get Wrecked) with cannons in the centre of my line overlooking a topographic depression, i know the feeling. I had on their flanks units of line infantry backed up with cavalry, and ahead in the depression a tiny morsel of bait. The plan was simple, lure the enemy into the MAW and rain canister shot on them with my flanks holding them tight and engaged at range.

I don’t want to say the tactic trivialised most encounters, but it actually did.
“Numbers count for nothing when funnelled into the rotating knives.”
occasionally, just the once actually i blundered and marched a nearly depleted army into enemy territory, outnumbered 2:1 my MAW’s left flank was ground down and over run but not before we had whittled two thousand men down to about three hundred. A pyrrhic loss for austria that spelled their end. Not one to seek challenge, especially in a strategy game, i rinse-repeated until total conquest was mine.
“Ability is nothing without opportunity, and a ratatouille.”

At this point i’d lost enough sleep to my war fever, so i uninstalled the game and got back to living as an exile on some butt-frog island in the middle of nowhere. The game has horses, some of will pull your cannons, colour me french.

Was 2018 the worst year of video games since 1967?

I promised a 2018 rundown but honestly i don’t much feel like it. That being said one doesn’t put out a gaming blog out of some intrinsic interest in the media, it’s all about big bucks and flashy ad-revenue. Mind you the only audible i’ve heard from is the audible dulcet moans of Mr. and Mrs. Graham banging next door. Everyone has their ideal work conditions and mine involve having ambient fornication to really get into the mindset of video game fuckery.

Oh yeah, just like that, I've been a naughty plummer; the Nintendo switch is a thing, i guess, and was pretty big last year, is that still the case? I’m not really sure to be honest I've been far less attuned to the discourse around gaming where i’m not directly concerned. This is a deliberate thing i don’t want to spend my time reading about petty trivialities, when there are big things happening in the world; leaves me with more time to check the president's twitter and roll my eyes accordingly.

Memes continue to be a thing in 2018, the less said about the better.

There is only one game I've bought that was release this year and that would be post scriptum, more on that at one point. I could use my personal anecdotal experience to extrapolate a trend in the market and then blame it on whatever thing I've decided is the problem in society but if i did so my conclusion would be so profound and all encompassingly accurate that it would undermine the hundreds of journalists that have done so already, and make them look and sound like a bunch of angsty bedroom dwelling hacks. Not going to kick that hornets nest, sorry.

With all the out the way i’d like to cash in my cheque for my predictions regarding fallout 76, where i boldly stated (let me just check a second) “Todd howard, who will use the revenue from said collector’s edition to fuel his industrial scale psychic hive-mind of kidnapped children to driver us ever closer to an actual nuclear apocalypse.” goodness me, i’m not sure i could get enough from this to ride the bus, which in my rural backwater is actually fairly steep, and i’m not talking topographical impositions, which there most certainly are. Remember when i used to be funny? Me neither, Anyway here wonder-wall.

Mr Graham has climaxed early, again. The fact he shouts “geronimo” through a set of ill-fitting dentures as he expels materials, that he often confuses with his cataracts, is all the stimulation i need to finish expelling my own material. Sorry, i think we were talking about something, oh yes, 2018. To be honest a year now feels like a massively indistinct haze of experience, it’s hard enough to tell one week from the other. Looking back on it, it feels like the springs on a worn out bed creaking back and forth as two winkled old…. I’m not sure where i was going with that or why it came to mind.

Okay, i’ll actually talk about fallout 76 a bit. I’ve not played, no surprise there. But my friend, who i thought would love it regardless of whether it was critically received well, did. One man disagrees with the critics, guess the whole profession is useless. Well, no. i mean it is useless but not because of that. Some people act like real pinheads when a piece of media is bad. A lot of games are really quite disposable in the sense they they only fuel an ongoing discourse that is predicated on having strong opinions about them. They’re like story-lines in a soap opera, and any media used to push hygiene on people is objective satanic in nature and needs to be wrestled down into a blubbery pit of greasy mud and discarded honey, where it can be beaten within an inch of its life while nearly suffocating.

Games journalism could stand to be better, i will be the one to bring the honey!

Side note: the term pinhead did not appear on a list of List of disability-related terms with negative connotations on Wikipedia. Not a defence of my use of the term, just thought it was interesting.