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!