Elite dangerous: Noir against deepest night

Elite dangerous: Noir against deepest night

In a gentle star port out beyond the cares of wistful old terra; I watch the ships come and go from a sleepy little lounge. Maybe it’s just me? Sagging down, face pressed into white table cloth. I watch the effervescence flitter away in my Andorran chardonnay. Head heavy from long hours over the inky expanse of night, I pull up at her approach; I’ve seen plenty of stars before, but none that twinkle quite like her.

I try to smile, like the fool that I am, high-G acceleration day after day have done a number to this old mug. The Cybrex interface has left me with a slight tremor in my features. I must look like an old mutt in the pound. I certainly feel like one.

I don’t catch her eye, lucky me, another chance to straighten out at a clinic before picking up where we left off. It doesn’t feel like a lifetime ago, but it does feel like a dream. Even more cliché, but it’s true, I’m not trying to be corny: it’s just the way the implants make me.

A day later, the repairs are done, and I’m back in my shell; hauling cargo across an endless night. I just sit there and let the computer think it all over for me. I twiddle my thumbs and make those few minor adjustment now and again. I watch the stars flicker, I try to make friends with a few; me and proxima hit it off, she’s a riot, a real out there gal. The loneliness is setting in again, nothing like the stars to remind you how small you are.

I’ve been punching this run for the better part of a week, and the money’s good, but the only way to spend it is on a better ship, more features, and bigger engines. Whoop tee doo! Worth the overtime for sure.

We pilots aren’t like other people, and we’re not big on mirrors either. We haul ass, make bank and haul more ass. No time for a family, no time to stop and talk to the fifteen trillion souls of this galaxy, I pay fines, buy fuel and have my virtual therapy all through the same screen. I can’t remember the last time I took a stroll, or smelt flowers. Heck, all the shrink has to do is run down the clock, I’ve got more problems than they’ve got hours in the day.

I overshoot an orbital and come careening around at a 1/10th C, sloppy piloting. It’s faster to let the ship fly itself, but I got to feel something. Pilots need buzz: you hear that a lot. Out amongst the stars there’s nothing but a low thrum on frame shift drive. If you can make your soul feel that; make it buzz, just a little, then it ain’t so bad.

I think there’s some kind of war happening off somewhere deep on the edge of known space. That’s all I’ve got for news. There’s some factions back home got beef with one another, but I can’t tell one from the other, it’s all the same to me. They pay the same, issue the same fine; have the same rules, customs, regulations, demands. I’m not sure what they have to disagree over? How about the font size on a liability waver? Big whoop, thanks for the waste of recycled air. Back to shipping.

My shrink says I need an outlet, so a flash some cash on a combat model and go prowling for blood. It’s alright, certainly up the pace of things a little; though it doesn’t quite sit right with me. As I watch the flashing lights, and trails of shrapnel spill into the void. I feel as though pieces of me are flying off with them. No, I don’t mean my ship, I mean myself; though at this point that’s not a marked distinction. I wanted to visit the stars, and here I am taking out my frustration by ending the lives of two bit crooks. I’m doing the laws job for them, a janitor in space taking out just another form of trash.

I wanted to visit the stars, but there’s a thin layer of glass and million miles of void between me and touching her face. Space however is cold and empty, which is how I know I belong out here.

Marvelling at the scope at my own ignorance: BVGROTI takes on media empires with wanton abandon

 

It’s a tale as old as time (2008) Iron man film movie experience made super hero films kind of mainstream or whatever. People watched them before that, and they were alright, but the momentum of pumping them out became more of a thing at that point. This is the standard opener of a trope that had become tired and worn out, a thing that people are getting more and more sick off.

 

Superhero-fatigue fatigue. People are getting increasingly tired of commentary about superhero fatigue and these online articles are being pumped out at ever faster rate, so that new hot takes don’t feel fresh or as interesting because of their sheer volume and repetitiveness, not to mention repetitive. Every time a super hero film comes out, which is more frequent than the tubes at peak times, it is accompanied by a super hero fatigue commentary. With outlets commenting on whether this is the straw that will break the camel's back in what has become a jenga of mixed metaphors, and forced similes like trying to cut a dead whale open with a spork.

 

I don’t chase trends, I preempt them in order to maximize my clicks and revenue. I’m already tired of superhero-fatigue fatigue and have grown disillusioned with my own review despite it still going fairly strong with a few ups and downs as is to be expected from any medium. I think this will be the end of the genre of metacommentary, any second now, purely because speculation and citing other think pieces is easier than saying something new, and saying nothing simply isn’t an option.

 

The above paragraph isn’t even insightful, it just explains a business that everyone already understands, but in such a snarky way as to count as a take. The genre of superhero-fatigue fatigue-fatigue is as tired and trite as the thing it’s attempting to comment on, mostly because of the media ecosystem it exists in is one in the same. It’s made of the same fundamental incentives, a form of memetic parasitism, unable to actually kill its host but slowly sucking on its vitality. Like how a poorly tacked on simile, can, or quite often will, ruin the pacing of a paragraph and make it harder for the reader to remember what you even on about and re-read the dam thing.

 

The first known depiction of the oroborus is in the 14th century bce or bc for those that don’t feel the extra letter actually does anything to separate the system from its ecclesiastical origin, (like the rest of post enlightenment thought.) found in the tomb of king tutankhamen, aka king tut for those that were often chided by him. In this version its about the union of gods of life and death and the ascendency of aten or whatever and enough exposition. It would make a really cool film, with lots of big budget SFX and a totally forgettable sound track, and then some other schmucks will do an adaption of the mahabharata which will lack any understanding of the SOURCE MATERIAL… I’m not even synthesizing here. This is just a one:one graft.

 

Google news dates the first article about superhero fatigue to 2013. I’m not going to go more in depth because I am intellectually lazy. The next is in 2015, and there's a few every year with a marked absence during covid times (wonder why?). It really kicked off big in late 2022 and has only intensified with each new release since. With 5/7ths of the articles listed coming from this period (there are 7 pages of results for the term, and late 2022 onwards is page 5 to 1, that’s why i used that number, i am very, yes!)

 

A fair number of the articles talk about how a given film overcomes the fatigue, Like The Ol’Superman of freddy Nietzsche triumphing over his own nihilism (would not make for a good adaptation unless they cast Leonardo decaprica sun as fred and he rocked the full brush tash.) that might just be the winning combination to overcome superhero fatigue!  

 

Thing that is popular continues to be popular is perhaps the driest take imaginable, so you need a supposed adversary to generate a story: One with all the same powers as the hero but set on making their life harder. It’s reasonable to assume a genre will have its day and eventually move on, I’m sure no one thought cowboy films would last forever, but was there a continual commentary of how each film overcame cowboy fatigue? I am genuinely asking this, I have not looked it up, but my guess is no?

 

To foresee and preempt the downfall of this narrative is to replicate its structure, to comment on how the superhero fatigue genre continues in spite of its evident tiredness is to become it entirely. It’s an ouroboros, that smacks of the reddit comment section and no amount of self-awareness can excuse it. This article is a waste of your time and mine! Tune it out like white noise and get on with your lives. Who cares about the streams of articles that deserve to be written by chat bots, go read Candide: that sounds pretentious but it’s just a lot of toilet humor and gags, it’s not a hard read either: it’s easier to consume than this and is more fun too.

The Odyssey of Valheim. How does it hold up compared with the masterwork of James Joyce?

 

Telemachus:

It is first thing in the morning and the argument over readiness is in full swing, one player is gathering the last of their gear, debating on what and which to bring; weighing the cost in a purposeful deliberate but slow process. Across a small stretch of grass sits the jetty and the waiting boat. Another player sits by the oars, calling out and making the urgency of their need to depart felt. I myself dither between two positions.

Nestor:

Let me explain to the class, we’re playing Valheim, a Viking styled survival game it’s got a smattering of other games features, with some of its own charm. A flawed game, for sure, but a useful vehicle for this review: this is my third play through.

I strut along the pier to the waiting ship; the pier was as Stephen Daedalus puts it, ‘a disappointing bridge.’

Proteus:

We set off crawling against the wind and turn off to go up a river, there sits my own equally disappointing bridge, shoddy around the edges, and well…at once we realise the mast is too tall, and so the midsection of the bridge is unceremoniously brought down, and hastily altered.

I consider it the antithesis of London Bridge. This is where the book first really lost me, somewhere in the endless milling of thoughts, I lost the thread of what Joyce was really writing about, but I feel that was somewhat the point. The seemingly chaotic jumble of thoughts, yes thoughts, warts and all. Strangely punctuated? Did in-fact present themselves, very convincingly. My own attempt to invoke confusion here is far less clever: a disappointing abridge, though one without pier, for that was left behind by this point. Adieu.

 Calypso

It’s at this point the book brings us round to our protagonist. Takes it a fair ol’while tho.

Valheim is structured into a series of regions, with bosses for each, in an open world. Each region has its own tiers of mobs and environmental hazards, going up in layers that require by design the previous to be completed before real progress can be sought in the next.

This is less based on grinding personal stats and more around grinding food, armour and weapon types; which means you essentially are what you eat, and are only as big as the stick you carry. When cooking it perfectly possible to burn ones food and get coal. Much like Leopold bloom in this chapter of the book, where he burns his breakfast kidneys, while bring his adulterous wife: Molly, breakfast in bed. I had a similar arrangement with a smelter.

Lotus eaters

Back on the boat we take a different course to our previous, avoiding the grave markers from our previous expedition. Before I can tab out and look for some relaxing music to slap on during what is likely to be a lengthy trip, we instead reminisced about that prior adventure and decide that this voyage will be hopefully be different.

It is in this chapter we learn bloom has an erotic penpal, and uses a pseudonym to avoid getting caught. My own character in Valheim is named sten ormlegger meaning stone-snake-leg or as I like to think of it, rock hard big cock. There are three other infrequent players on our server not participating on the voyage, one using my real name, another using my screen name, and the third simply titled, “better than you,” an attitude I find I have an affinity for.

Hades.

The prior voyage was one of suffering; we build a low tier raft and sailed down the coast into the second tier area called the black forest. The boat was painfully slow, and so we pulled in at a set of ruins that we mistook for a cave and were set upon by a horde of angry forest creatures. Three died as we ran it back to the boat, the creatures followed into the water, pelting us with rock until the raft was smashed, and we drowned.

Aeolus

Out on the waves, with the winds at our backs, we started chatting about the day’s news and the general politicking of Westminster. There is very little else for us to do in game at the point other than hope the winds stay favourable, which they won’t.

In this chapter Leopold bloom narrowly misses running into Stephen Daedalus at a newspaper office, they’ll be of much importance to one another later in the story however, at this stage I can’t see what the two threads of analogous discourse are in the review, perhaps we will never know.

Lestrygonians

In the black forest lurks the trolls, they are blue, wear loincloths and are tall as trees. One must use the forest as a shield between you and them, or else one will find themselves quite dead. The only issue is they are strong enough to topple trees and smash rocks with their fists. In a reversal of fortunes of dear Odysseus, we have only lost a single craft to the man eating giants, during an ill-fated voyage by one of our players up a river. They can in fact toss rocks.

Scylla and Charybdis

The game has a fairly low level of graphical splendour; it’s nice enough to look at sometimes, just not in that perfectly rendered horse plop kind of way. Think ps1 graphics with shaders and better lighting. The debate on this issue, during our voyages, has been considerable and repetitive. One player asserts, “it looks like arse,” the other counters saying it’s stylised, and really good actually”

This misses the point entirely. The game is really quite small: Only a few gigs. I don’t much care to bloat my hard-drive with 4k textures that I wouldn’t give two shits about even if I could load them.

Why, oh why, do games ship with high end textures as bloat ware, this shouldn’t be necessary on a PC. How hard would modularity be to implement, given some games have additional optional textures packs in excess of 30gb, not super hard I’d gather.

Wandering rocks

In the book this chapter consists of a bunch of short views from a whole host of characters, if you think I have a way of alluding to that is the scope of this review you are sorely mistaken. It took me a while for conceive a debate on hamlet as being close enough to a rönt on graphics bloat.

Sirens

It’s fast approaching 4pm (3.39pm) as I write this and I need to throw my pizza dough together for my supper. So to save on chatter I’ll talk of that thing that so often tempted us off course. The open ocean in Valheim is populated with sea monsters that stalk any so misfortunate to enter. Island hoping is safer but far slower. The voyage we undertake after this one would take a full hour and a half, on the way out and a mere twenty minutes on the return, after a player joined the server and said travel on the open sea is far safer than we had assumed. This is the voyage I will write about from now on.

Cyclops

During our circumnavigation of the coastlines, we came close to third and fifth stage biomes, so that as we rowed slowly over choppy seas, leaches from the swamp swam after us in a meagre attempt to pester. We largely ignored them, and hoped in turn they would ignore us. Yet they kept probing in an attempt to unsettle, mindlessly blind and hostile, unthinking things.

Bloom is this chapter is confronted with a set of Anti-semitic remarks directed at his person while in the pub. Not bothering to hang around long after that, he first politely ignores, then corrects them, and leaves. In so doing he displays a degree of wit, in his use of deflection and decorum, that could never be expected of his monstrous detractors. The rules here are inherently unfair because where bigotry is normalised they are held to an entirely different standard. They are blind to this privilege of course, bigots being narrow sighted Cyclops.

The chapter stuck with me, it’s a very accurate depiction of interacting with a bigot; which in truth has little to do with Valheim, thankfully.

Nausicaa

One need not romanticise this game, turning around to see it wondering the shores: it is as dishevelled as our Leopold bloom, but mistake not: like him, it has charm in abundance. There are simple flat textures when using portals. The sounds in caves are looped in a very predictable pattern, and graphics are very simplistic, as is the games structure and progression (yes, unlike Ulysses)

The open ended nature of it, and the capacity for a situation to go from fine to fuck very quickly makes it really quiet engaging on occasions; while at other times it’s relaxed and laid back. it’s a nice mix and it feels good enough to play, at least early on that none of these are really deal breakers. The same cannot always be said of Ulysses, see the next chapter.

Oxen and the sun

I don’t know if this review will be at all amusing, alea iacta est, In Ulysses this chapter is a progression of writing styles culminating in the present of 1920, consequently it becomes more comprehensible as it goes on, simply because Iċ ne sprece Englisċ. Perhaps the same can be said for this review? For it is debatable after reading if i can really speak English.

 

Circe

We find our Promised Land, where the second boss was located, we set up a little portal home, ran back to get some much needed food for the voyage; then off again to bring the boat to home. We waited a little time for our other player to join us, but didn’t really want to hang about, so left promptly.

Eumaeus

Back at the village one of the players was defending it from a mob attack, luring them away from the settlement before they can smash it all to bits. These happen periodically and generally set about ruining’s one’s day. The game has a fair few “fuck you,” aspects and this is one of them. Combat is largely about managing stamina, and stunning one’s opponents, it’s definitely in the same vein as dark souls but less tight in its execution. I’ve still yet to decide what the point is in the special attacks.

Ithaca

The building system is a lot of fun. There a need to properly support structures, and allow smoke to leave closed rooms; mistakes are easily rectified. These limitations are little challenges to seed creativity, just to get the ball rolling. Everything snaps together nicely and it still looks fine when it doesn’t so it’s quite visually forgiving too.

My own home morphs and expands as required but others are more purposeful. Some building tree houses, elaborate in detail. While others build interlocking struts that are angled in a way that make the entire structure feel precarious. There is fun to be had if one wants it, but building something just good enough is done easily enough, if it’s not your bag.

The nice feature of this is that a well-furnished the home improves the rested buff, meaning that having a nice home does actually confer a gameplay advantage.  

Penelope

In summery Valheim is definitely a game, and one best played with friends. If you’re wondering who is Penelope/Molly Bloom in this review, it is you dear reader, faithful or not, I wait until the very end to consider your perspective and do so in the custom of sailors, fleetingly.

Cloudpunk: lost like tears in rain

 

…loading //:: Ice_breaker.Mc

 

The genre of cyberpunk has an unspoken rule. Wikipedia defines the genre as lowlife and hightech, which functionally speaking is fine. The bvgroti has his own stipulations. The bvgroti is a fanatic. He reads gibson like it’s scripture. Adhering to it harder than a computer does a line of code. Bvgroti knows that cyberpunk is when tech breaks society, and consequently society becomes incomprehensible and incohesive. A cyberpunk protagonist who has any idea of what’s going on? Yeah? Nice oxymoron, you Wilson.

 

I was given Cloudpunk by a friend; they didn’t say why, but they said it was up my alley: they were right.

 

Access-grant: #error%353* message: please report to admin

 

You play as a delivery driver, just arrived in the city, working their first night on the job for an illegal delivery company: cloud punk. The city is falling apart. Systems fail at random and the city engineers have no idea what’s going on. If you smell social allegory, I have some good news for you cupcake, your brain isn’t totally fried yet. Lets stick some trodes.

 

The gameplay isn’t complicated, you have a hover car, you fly it about the city, picking up and dropping off packages while heavy synth music and rain hammers down from on high. You meet characters along the way, they all have a lot of personality squeezed into a few fleeting lines. You get out your car and walk around sets of interconnected platforms, where you can buy noodles and watch the ceiling of clouds pulsate in swirling mauve tinted patterns

 

Days later I'm talking to a friend pointing out how so many of the characters in this game are very obvious sci-fi references, he hadn't noticed. The hardboiled android detective Huxley is my favorite character, when i tell him he goes quiet for a moment, at the time I didn't really notice.

 

The game is pretty even though it’s rendered in chunky pixel form. The character models don’t really line up to their head art, but none of that bothered me, it uses its style to go for scale, having large busy environments that won’t melt your gpu because their pixels are the size of your fist. What it does with the environment is smother you with ambience, it’s very immersive, better than any stimsim.

 

The emphasis on the game is not the challenge, the way it keeps you engaged with the story is the decisions the player is given; i don’t think the decision affect the story in any meaningful way, but they clearly affect other characters, and i can’t help but care a bit about them; asking the player to make judgment calls about individuals with limited information and with questions that often exist in gray scale. It shouldn’t work, but the questions are often actually interesting and with no clear answer.

 

My favorite was the quarantine block. There is a gas leak in a city block, you have room for three people in your car, there are six people to choose from, the company wants to make sure the job pays for itself. Some of the people are horrible, there is a CEO who doesn’t know what company he runs, a rude scientist, a haunty posh woman (Mrs Octavia Butler). Then there are the nice but poor people, a retired army sarg, an android fresh out the box, and a kind doctor.

 

To my shame I left the new android behind and took the posh woman. I had dropped her off at an apartment earlier in the game. I had met her husband, an android; they had both been so privileged that they barely saw me as a person, but they were happy together and that meant something to me. If i hadn’t known them, would i have picked differently? I didn’t know the others; they could have had family too… fuck.

 

Each delivery is its own little story, and they often link back and reference one another. There’s a lot of emphasis on android and automata as second class citizens, it’s used mostly as a race allegory, and the story is very quick to stress the wealth divide and how exploitative the system is. It leaves one with a lot to think about, and while cruising around the city; that’s what I was doing, quietly mulling over the things i’d been seeing, the lite challenge supports the story by giving it room to breathe, it’s good game design.

 

This all culminates in the driver meeting the city's emergent Ai consciousness and being asked to sort the mess out. How? Delivery and choice making, of course. Needless to say the story is loaded with the feels, I was surprised at how moving it was, that each character with so little dialogue manages to connect so easily with me. It’s a lovely short little game. Best experienced and not taken secondhand.

 

 

 

 

 

Eu4: the true essence of an untamed opium addiction

 

Listen, in my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some lousy advice and I hadn't really thought about it until now. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember you’re a fuck-up and will never amount to anything. 

It all came to a head about a week ago, slumped in bed at about four in the morning when my pet woke me from a reverie, most serene, about the declaration of the Islamic catboy-republic. It was then that the lurking shadow that had stalked me for weeks was unmasked. I had a problem, I was getting too into Europa universalis 4 (Eu4) and would have to take drastic measures. 

It started with a sale two years ago, the game was going for something petty, under a quid, though the real cost would be far higher. I played some of the tutorial and it didn’t really click, so like the one ring it was lost to time, until a hobbit, or hard drive clean up, found it. I was making space for trashy third tier video-games when I realized it was still installed, just sitting there, waiting patiently for my return. 

I have to explain something if we’re to proceed. I love strategy games, I love them too much. It's an open ended brain sink, and my thoughts will churn through hypotheticals and tactics whether I choose to or not. I am only ever a miss-click away from falling back into a hole and losing thirty hours to the game itself and a month of productive thinking spent strategizing. 

So, when I start up a simulation of the medieval world, with grand strategic objectives and considerable mechanical depths, I may as well have been smoking opium. 

It took three false starts before I got the hang of things, and even then I was an ass-clown. The game is not forgiving and has a learning curve like the white cliffs of Dover. 

I was playing as the ottomans, as the game informs you they are easy enough to start out with, and I’m quite fond of Islamic history. So anyway, I bungle the seizing of Albania, Greece, and Constantinople along with a number of territories out east. My economy is in shambles, my armies are few and without manpower, and I am without allies. I was unaware of half of those issues at the time though, because I was too busy diving through a sea of menus and screens trying to figure out what corruption is, and why and if I should care about the privileges of the merchant class. 

Things go from bad to worse, when Hungry seized most of the Balkans, including Wallachia and I only got scraps by joining in on their unfettered conquest of rage. It’s easy enough though, say’s I; I’ll just fight them for it. 

Six glorious years later a thing called Poland/Lithuania is kicking my teeth in like the casual I am, I reload a save rather than allow the diplomatic wedgy to continue. This is the first of seven attempts to topple that alliance over the course of two hundred years. I would reload after each attempted war, and come to think of them as the imagined war of ottoman humiliation. They account for half my playtime, roughly. 

I got better at managing the economy, it's easy when you're not a person-of-different-ideological-stance, I built larger armies that were bigger and more huge militarily, along with some heftier horde and sizable soldieries, and I picked off smaller isolated nations at moments of weakness, slowly growing into a regional power. 

Despite this, the other thing the ottomans were good at was melting Mamluks, which ruled over Egypt and the Levant, historically they fell in three years, in my game they only ever lost a single province to me, during a protracted multi-lane war between, myself, Persia, Russia and the polish commonwealth and them (which we technically lost) I had gotten good enough to levee large number instead of using those filthy stupid tactics. I could trade bodies until only my troops were left but this was slow and costly. Thought it allowed me to gobble up Persia and Georgia and oh god do you see the problem?

This is barely a third of the wars fought, I still haven’t gotten around to talking about how the game is even played, what any of the menus do, how things like tech and ideas work. The game even in its simplified based form is a sprawling mess of menus and sliders to juggle. 

It’s immensely satisfying to balance a country's budget, to go from being thousands of ducats in debt to becoming an economic powerhouse over the course of a few decades of good management. It tickles my dopamine receptors to the point where my day to day drudgery is merely a vehicle to fantasize about my next fix. 

It even invaded my inner sanctum of dreams where there is normally a baseline of deranged rambles (I'm not joking), then my sleep consisted of pouring over menus and tweaking sliders as I angled for my next shot at those Shitlords the Hungarians. 

It was becoming mentally exhausting, and I was denied any satisfaction in simpler things. So I did what I had to. I deleted my save files, not just the current one, but every backup and what if. Then, I uninstalled the game, and got ready to sweat it out.

For another two nights the dreams kept up, but without the hope of the save files to come back to, the fever broke and I became myself once again. A third night passed and I awoke feeling less like a caliph and more like the smuck I am. It wasn’t good, but it was necessary. 

I am just taking every day as it comes now, trying to stay clean. It’s been a week since I got my life back and I’ve not looked back. Choose life! Choose to not play Eu4. I kind of want to go again but maybe this time I’ll play someone else? The need is still there burning through me. But for now, just for today i’m clean, and hopefully tomorrow too, and every tomorrow after that. 

 

World of warships: mid-way for anime discourse?

 

World of boats? World of warships? Worship warships. Descent into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe describes boats or something, and that big old swirly boi in Norway: before this year AD 2022 I'd never heard of this story, but now the first two books of the year I’ve read have both referenced it. Not only does this confirm the Mandela effect as real but that it specifically targets Norway! Gothic themes! And liminality! as its textual mediums.

Last night I got back from fetching a rich and succulent slice of my brownie to find two friends engaged in the debate that had defined my understanding of modernity: anime ye or nay? Silently I press my face to the door of this conversation and peer in. one argues it’s good init, and that they like it; the other argues that it’s kind of got some awful tropes and is generally problematic, so they avoid it.

Corithians 13:11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

I was once a weeb, a long time in a galaxy far far away. This debate was one I had found myself pondering from time to time. It is my Descent into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe. I sit on the swirling edge of an infinite abyss that reaches far down into the underland. I must throw myself from my heavy boat and cling to a barrel to survive.

 

As a woke cuckold with weebish tendencies I am in the perfect position to spear this debate. But I find myself unkeen to pick apart this we(e)b in all its intricacies. So I hold my silences and boot up the world of warships.

 

The game is about boats and bots in boat and they do shooty at each other and you grind for new boats to shoot at each other with. The phrase “lead your shots” has been said to me in excess of fifty times.

 

What is problematic? It’s generally raised as a synonym for questionable, more specifically, the question is one of moral integrity and the discomfort a piece of media causes in its representations.

 

I fired a salvo at a boat, and some of the shots hit. The aiming was fairly intuitive, it made sense to me; I realize I am unsatisfied with any experience that is too convenient. I consider driving nails into my hands to increase the challenge.

 

When they spoke of anime, I’m not sure they meant all of the animated media japan produces; maybe they did? But if i was willing to whittle down to a more streamlined interpretation: the epicentre of the problematic weeb shit is in the shounen genre. It is here in that matrix of adolescence that the world holy trifecta of violence, lust and emotional immaturity comes to hang its hats.

 

The boat I'm in is hit by a string of shots, she’s on fire and taking on water. I press R and now that’s not a thing apparently, cool.

The seinen genre is the next age bracket up from shounen. It’s still fairly fightly fighty, but tends to have less horny and more complex themes: don’t get me wrong it’s still probably problematic.  Berserk is the stand out of the genre and it’s got some pretty nasty allusions to sexual assault; as to whether it’s just for shock value or if it adds to development of the text is largely up to the readers judgment… it is a question, and causes discomfort and… fuck it’s problematic

My positioning is piss poor, a pair of cruisers flank me on either side, as I chase one the other fires a volley of torpedoes into my stern. A third ship is peppering with me and my health is whittled down fast. I go full send on the throttle and prepare for a desperate ramming manoeuvre.

 

It occurs to me that only a hardened weeb bothers to dissect the shifting attitudes in weeb sub-genres, only someone who had immersed themselves into the genre could split hairs as such, and that only someone who acknowledges the flaws in the genre could then give an appraisal of their impacts. To bring up berserk’s shittyiness is almost sacrilege. I am not in a perfect position at all. I am alien to both parties here. I am too critical of the genre to relate to the causal enjoyer, but too steeped in my crusty weebism to relate my understanding to an outsider.

I feel my ship pulled into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe. it’s slick oily abyss coats the surface of my person and I sink down, and down. Pulled under into the crushing pressure, alone and isolated. In Disco Elysium there is an empty land in the world, called the pale yonder; it is a stretch of white abyss and coats much of the surface of the world.

 It occurs to me that whether a blackened sea or white desert, anything so unbroken and absolute is a void which threatens to consume all. The interplay of voids now are like the pages in a manga, but is there a true synthesis going on? Or does each void only serve to bring the other into sharper relief: the Maelström by Edgar A Poe?

 

 

Shogun 2: The path of the samurai/ how I got my life back

 

I reached a stolid impasse in my review. My grasp on the medium of both text and gaming was become unbearably powerful, causing lesser minded peons, those less texturally adjusted to languid and baboonish prose, to scoff and say such daft things as:

“I'm glad you were able to determine that he doesn't, in fact, ever get to an actual point. I had to stop halfway through, I was getting a headache from the deafening sound of him patting himself on the back for being the smartest person ever.”

Yeah mate (u/IfIMayBeKobold), well if you’re struggling that much maybe go limber up with some James Joyce.

Well despite vowing never to give into their remarks, I felt very much that i’d been cancelled. Not in the sense that I had said something to cause offense, but that there was now a general disinterested by the Plebeian masses in my enriching their days with the first thing that sprang forth from my tea-addled brain like Zeus producing Athena.

But no habit can be kicked forever, and I'm due for a relapse: So without further ado, shogun 2!

Total war and I have an abusive relationship, she alienates me from friends and family, controls where I go and who I see, then blames me for everything that goes wrong. Despite, or maybe because of this, I love her.

When we went to Japan, I put together an elite force of gun-wielding samurai, horse archers, cannon, ninjas and just all that good stuff. She slapped it all out of my hand, total defeat. She took my bus pass and made us walk home in the middle of a rain storm. Soaked through, and crying I shuffled inside where she set her arms around me, and told me I was doing it all wrong. I was acting according to my interests, when really I should have been paying more attention to hers.

Peasants, hundreds of them, an endless horde of rice cultivating blokes wearing those hats, i CBA to look up the name, and wielding the mightiest little pokey things, (spears?) In all the world. These are what my girl wanted, and by god I didn't want her to escalate things. So I went along with it and won a string of battles, knowing that by doing this there was less chance she’d take my things without asking.

We stayed in together, used the forts to shelter our fragile relationship from the scrutiny of the other high ranking Ronin. When the peasants got angry, I appeased them by giving them money, or temples, anything to stop them smashing my favourite mug in the sink out of spite.

I marched and marched and marched. Hours went by, and I was an unstoppable force, unwavering and unwilling to move out my lane. It became too much, I couldn’t spend my every waking second longing for her approval so I left and joined a Tibetan monastery... airways economy class flight back home, I rushed home, packed my things and decided to move back into my parents where I could let my broken self-esteem fester… but before I left i knelt down, then fell on all fours, i knew what had to be done; I made a huge shit on her favourite plant pot. I’m not ashamed of myself. It needed to happen

.

The power was mine again, and with it I uninstalled the game and got back to my life of salt laden Csgo matches, and shooting up league of legends in some run down garage behind a papa johns.