Pubic Static Void Man

in which kevin reoccupies wall street, part two

2011-11-14T06:57:25Z

Most of this post was originally written in response to a question by my former housemate on Facebook on what Wall Street actually does. It summarizes what I spent this afternoon telling the protest camp at Zuccotti Park today. He requested that I post it on a blog somewhere, so here goes.

The intended purpose of Wall Street is to democratize investment. Before the 20th century, there were only two feasible ways to raise the capital necessary to start a business: a) start from a lemonade stand and work up until you can afford a factory (which could take generations), or b) get someone who was already rich to lend you some money. That effectively made the rich an invitation-only club which the average Joe would never have a chance of joining. The original idea behind the Wall Street stock market--at least as espoused by the New York Times and many of its other proponents at the dawn of the twentieth century--was that instead of asking your rich uncle for a loan, you'd ask random members of the public, who'd each pitch in a little pocket money, which would add up to enough to buy a factory right away, and once you had that factory going you'd be making enough profit to pay back everyone who lent you money (and then some).

Wall Street was actually really successful in that regard--it's one of the ways America's culture of innovation developed, as it makes it relatively easy for any inventor with a new idea to turn that idea into a business, with relatively little personal risk. Where things went wrong was when Wall Street brokers realized there was more money to be made by buying and selling shares rather than keeping them--thus gambling on the fate of companies rather than investing in their success. Banks, which already had huge amounts of money to lend, quickly joined in, which is one of the ways ordinary folks lost their entire life savings for seemingly no reason when Wall Street crashed during the Great Depression. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was supposed to prevent that from ever happening again by forbidding banks from participating in such activities--until parts of it were repealed in 1980 and 1999, when some lobbyists successfully persuaded Congress that keeping bank capital out of investment was keeping the American economy from growing as fast as it should. (Which was true....but.)

The repeal of most of Glass-Steagall led to an enormous explosion in derivatives trading--gambling on the fate of companies, instead of investment on the companies themselves. It also tied all the currency, commodities, and foreign exchange markets together into one big mess--which made the economy grow really, really fast through the '80s and '90s (since money could move from any market to another at breakneck speed), at the cost of allowing the collapse of one market (housing) to drag down everything with it in 2008. Housing took down investment banks; without investment banks, there wasn't enough capital to lend to new businesses; without new businesses, the economy couldn't grow; without a growing economy, there was less consumer demand; with less consumer demand there came mass unemployment. Post-crash, Wall Street eased up on the risky activity of funding new businesses--which is the entire point of its existence--and decided that dumping their money into gold or Treasury bonds, which tends to grow in value during a crisis (very slowly), was safer. So...factories close and yet Wall Street gets rich.

There comes a point where folks acquire so much money that having more of it is meaningless--it's literally more than they can ever spend on themselves. At that point, the money stops being what we think of money as being--a voucher for goods and services--and starts being an instrument of pure leverage.

Think about most billionaires. Where do they keep most of their money? In the bank, where they can use it? No. They keep it in securities. Not just because those securities will grow in value, but because owning ten million dollars worth of a stock when a company only has eleven million dollars worth of stock means you own that company. Because owning all the companies in a country's chief export means you control that country's government. There is a limit above which money ceases to be the lifeblood of commerce and becomes a measure of raw power. These are the amounts with which governments and investment banks deal with--far beyond the imaginations of even the commodities traders who actually buy and sell shares in companies. That is where the vast majority of American dollars actually go--not into goods and services, or even into gambling on the fate of businesses, but as a weapon to manipulate the fate of entire civilizations.

As an example, why do you think China is converting so much of its national treasury from yuan into dollars? It's still worth about the same (although it will rise a little if the dollar does well or the yuan does poorly). The reason why is that because our money markets are all so closely interlinked, each dollar becomes less significant as the worth of a candy bar as it is as a share in the entire American economy. If they control a large share of American dollars (and they do), they can manipulate the price of the dollar so that it will always be worth more than the yuan. This is an arrangement that keeps their exports to America cheaper than local goods in America, while keeping American imports in China more expensive than local goods in China. Even if our labor markets had the same costs, China would continue to have an edge (and have more money go into China than into the U.S. in their trade with us) as long as they keep doing this.

Banks do this on a smaller but still staggering scale. Do you know that JP Morgan tried to corner the silver market in 2010? That's right, they tried to buy ALL THE SILVER IN THE WORLD. Not all the physical silver, mind you (your heirloom spoons are safe), but all the absurd quantities of silver being kept in other banks specifically for the purpose of controlling the price of silver. Which is worth around 14% of all the actual, physical silver in the world--enough to raise or lower the global price at a whim. China one-upped them by attempting to corner COPPER--so that yes, any time you buy anything with a wire in it, or any time the U.S. mints a penny, if you follow the money upstream far enough, a little of it would go to China. If the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was still in its prime we'd be seeing crazier shit like countries deliberately driving up the price of all the wheat in the world, or all the corn, for the express purpose of causing famine in their political enemies. It sounds farfetched--but that's exactly why we have corn subsidies in America, to prevent Soviet Russia from driving up the prices of our staple crops in order to cause political instability during the Cold War. Try explaining that to an angry mob. :(

All of this money is being sat on. It's sitting in vaults across the world, unspent and unspendable, for the sole purpose of allowing megacorporations, investment banks, and world governments to play power games against each other. It's why trickle-down doesn't work, it's why "job creators" aren't--because a closed fist with a coin inside hits harder than an open palm. Imagine what would happen if Wall Street--or something like it--actually took all that money out and put it into making things. (Or, at the very least, it didn't take money out of making things to fill up those vaults.)

The thing that disheartens me about Occupy Wall Street is that most Americans don't even have an Econ 101 understanding of economics (which totally should be a mandatory high school course, not an elective college course), much less the slightly more advanced understanding necessary to follow what Wall Street actually does and when and how it is neglecting its original purpose. At Zuccotti Park I met lots of intelligent, educated folks who know dozens of clever ways to fight oppression and pass legislation and change attitudes and challenge social constructions, but not a single person who knows how to take on an investment bank. For a movement that organized around anger at Wall Street screwing most of America over, most of these folks don't know half the ways Wall Street screwed them over. By treating wealth inequality as a purely social problem instead of a socioeconomic one, they're bringing a knife to a gunfight. And it seems like everyone with enough knowledge to help them, enough to guide them into a vision of a post-Wall Street future, is playing for the opposing side.

I went to Zuccotti Park today because I'm not nearly well versed enough in the financial markets to make the change I want to see happen. I barely know enough to describe and explain the problem. I was hoping I'd find someone there who understood better than me, who I could talk to and bounce ideas off of for coming up with a way to bring that 99% number down and that 1% number up, but there was no one. Even the former commodities trader I met said, "I just played the game. I'm not qualified to referee."

It frustrates me that Zuccotti Park sits mere blocks away from where some of the greatest macroeconomists in the world work--people intimately familiar with every ebb and heartbeat of the market, experts at navigating the subtle connections between every lost job, every misjudged diplomatic cue, every trader panic, every traded good in relation to every other traded good. Is there not one of them who will come down during a smoke break and say, "Okay, folks, this is what needs to happen if you want there to be jobs for you again..."?

in which kevin reoccupies wall street, part one

2011-11-14T06:31:48Z

So, I caved and finally went down to Zuccotti Park to see what all the fuss was about. I put it off for months because while I agreed with the protesters' sentiments, I didn't see how what they were doing was actually going to address the problems of wealth inequality and high unemployment that incited them to occupy the park to begin with. (If I am going to risk being maced by some trigger-happy cop, I sure as hell want to know what I'm fighting for.) From the movement's own words--not the spin coming from the furiously clacking keyboards of a baffled, narrative-seeking mainstream media--it sounded like the movement was more about raising awareness than finding solutions. And raising awareness is noble and important, but damn it, I was in Zuccotti Park in 2008, sitting on a park bench, quaking with rage, lifting a soggy panini to my mouth, fifteen minutes before even Wall Street knew what happened. (Fifteen minute news embargo, you see. I worked for a 24-hour live financial news wire.) I am done with raising awareness about the greed on Wall Street that led to the implosion of the housing bubble and the ensuing recession. You already know about that, and if you don't, you are employed and live alone in a cave. My then-employer gave you the awareness that needed to be raised in the first place and my role with them is long past over. Goodbye, Wall Street, the world already knows of your treachery; I'll never visit you, not even to protest, and may I never have occasion to speak of you again.

But then I had a lot of conversations with people who had gone to the protests and were genuinely moved by what they saw there, and I read a lot of articles by thinkers I deeply respect (including Slavoj Zizek, Jay Rosen, and my good friend, the technology historian Peter Collopy), who are earnestly optimistic about the future of the movement. My pastor Herb Miller visited the Zuccotti Park camp and described it as "a little slice of the kingdom of God on earth," where people from all walks of life were coming together to build a community around their common conscience. A few friends impressed on me that just showing up, even it accomplishes nothing, is worth something--that all it takes, as I've never believed, for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. That just because I was one of the first to find myself in Zuccotti Park because of the recession, long before there ever was an Occupy Wall Street, doesn't mean that I had to be the first to leave. Considering that I had written thousands of words of furious vitriol about the recession the day the housing market crashed--and that my grandfather, curse his rotting corpse, shot protesters of a similar ilk sixty years ago--I really had no excuse not to be there, friends told me. To show solidarity, if nothing else.

Rhetoric. All just rhetoric. I guarantee you, there is not a single investment bank on Wall (or Pearl, or John, or Pine) that gives half a flying shit what the protesters are saying about them down the street. But I went anyway, to satisfy my nagging conscience, driven by that vague feeling that as someone who was part of the system when the markets imploded I had a moral responsibility to support the people whose lives that system had ruined. (Even if, in the most literal possible way, I was merely the messenger.) Furthermore, as the months went on and the media hype died down, I got the impression that Occupy Wall Street realized it had gotten its message out and was finally starting to talk about stage two--reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, divesting from large banks, and other such things that might actually make a tiny (but encouraging) difference. So I went.

This is the part in every blogpost about Occupy Wall Street where I talk about where the Zuccotti Park occupation totally floored me with their dedication, compassion, and intelligence, and how seeing these bright minds from all walks of life demand a better future, bolstered by the flexibility of not having to know exactly what they're doing, totally changed my perceptions of the movement and its goals. Unfortunately, that didn't happen to me. Because while I did meet bright minds from all walks of life demanding a better future, impressive in their dedication, compassion, and intelligence, bolstered by the flexibility of not having to know exactly what they're doing,

a) I already have faith in these folks and their methods. Once you've seen one non-hierarchical social justice camp, organized by a politically heterogenous group of media-savvy, well-educated social anarchists (a term by which I intend no offense), you've seen them all. And I've read Deleuze too. I know where these ideas come from. (I guess most people haven't?)
b) A few of my friends who have participated in or assisted with Occupy Wall Street protests had already explained to me the more unusual aspects of their ideology, like their refusal to narrow their demands down to a fixed agenda,
c) I've studied the Tiananmen Square protests in excruciating detail, and I followed Tahir Square while it was happening with the kind of fanatical obsession that can only be justified by ancestral guilt. Though I am not a historian, the politics of contemporary large-scale demonstrations are not foreign to me.
d) The threat of coming winter is making Zuccotti seem more like a refugee camp from the kingdom of God rather than its embassy. Also, Valley Forge. (Send blankets, if you have them. Winter coats too--a lot of these folks are from places where it doesn't snow, and didn't come prepared.)
e) For all their resourcefulness, their political momentum, and their noble intentions, without more ideological support from macroeconomists on the academic left, this movement is tragically, absolutely, inevitably doomed to fail.

I will explain why in part two.

26

2011-10-15T02:48:51Z

(Written on the way home from Comic-Con 2011)

Someday, if I sell enough
video games, I'll be rich enough
to afford one
Someday I'll have my own office
at a game company someone's heard of
in a room that doesn't always smell like cat shit
in a building that doesn't always smell like cat shit
and I'll line a bookshelf with souvenirs
from half my life--an old
microchip, a wooden ghost, a handmade owl,
a Sherman tank in the shape of an anime girl--
tastefully arrayed above
the desk where I make
the other half--
instead of taping them shut
in a cardboard box
Someday I'll live in a room bigger than a closet
(no, that's not hyperbole)
and watch enough movies to follow conversations
without consulting Wikipedia
Someday I'll measure the price of a comic book
in something other than days of rent

Someday I'll have a DVD collection
Someday I'll have a bunch of friends I can just call some weekend
and ask if they want to hang out
or talk about William Shatner
or watch Community
or argue about McLuhan or McCain or McGonigal
or play that new video game I bought
while we complain about how our lives are going
Someday I will stop using my chessboard as a coffee table
and my copy of Apples to Apples as a paperweight
Someday I won't be ashamed
of liking My Little Pony

Someday I'll stop obsessing over Charles Schulz's little redhead,
the fujoshi playwrit
the Star Wars animatrix
the steampunk librarienne
the superheroine seamstress
the not your average girl reporters--
the Felicia Days, the Lauren Fausts,
who won't take shit for an answer
and aren't full of no
Someday I'll quote Pride and Prejudice
in my bedroom voice
to a woman who quotes Princess Bride
in her bedroom voice

Someday I'll learn to play "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"
both the Bob Dylan version and the Guns 'n' Roses version
Someday I'll go to a con dressed up like Terry Bogard
and you'll go dressed up as Aradia Megido
and in a roped-off nook of the convention center we'll have
the most flagrantly non-canon makeout
in the history of chainsaws
Someday I'll hum the Chrono Trigger ending song
as you're drifting off to sleep, and you'll hear it in my chest
and surprise me with the OCRemix vocals,
the pixietricks to my zircon
Someday I'll bore you with the parable of
the Atari ST and the cathode ray tube,
how a lifetime has to happen in the instant
between the first scanline and the last
and you'll just laugh
and call me a dork

Someday I'll go dancing and not come back alone
Someday I won't lie in the grass late at night and fall asleep in the quiet
Someday I'll make love in a mosh pit

Someday I'll take for granted
the opinion of an average
woman on the shape of a
bagel relative to the starch
content of the dough as just
another idle observation
and not
the most beautiful thing I've ever heard

Some days I'll shut my laptop
stare into the afterimage it
smolders into the dark
reach out to the
blistering antiviolet and
feel myself
running out
of someday

bronies before honies: fandom is magic

2011-09-26T06:28:00Z

Shit, there's no way to measure it
Not everypony grows up to be a pegasus
You gotta let people be hypocrites
Count your blessin's and mind your business
- Atmosphere, "Like the Rest of Us"

If, twenty years ago, you had told me I would be voluntarily attending a My Little Pony convention, I probably would have run into traffic. Twenty years and two death-defying auto accidents later, here I am, dancing to a techno remix of a song about dressmaking with a bunch of teenagers in homemade unicorn costumes.

This isn't as Lord of the Flies as it sounds. I can explain. Honest.

For those of you who haven't been hanging around the more 4chan-infested corners of cyberspace, the newest incarnation of the '80s-kitch My Little Pony cartoon has sort of become a thing on the Internet recently.

A thing thing, you ask? Like a 4chan meme?

Heavens, no. Advice Dog is a 4chan meme. Rage comics are a 4chan meme. They show up for a while, they produce lulz, they appear on signs at anti-Scientology protests and confuse newscasters and produce even more lulz. In the vicious, anonymous wilds of imageboard culture, memes like those are just language--an attention-grabbing way to quickly make your point to people with attention spans too short to grasp it with words. (And, intentionally or not, a way to repeat that point endlessly to the rest of the internet, transcending barriers of culture, language, and sometimes basic human decency.)

The continued Internet presence of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic on messageboards, imageboards, and IRC is more than a meme. It's more than a fad. It's more than a fandom. It's the mind-virus from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It ate 4chan.

This show has its own supercategory on your Know Your Meme for a reason.

Imagine this: A cartoon for eight-year-old girls, featuring a cast of adorable, sparkly, rainbowy ponies in soft pastel colors, written by an outspoken feminist to make a point about the market for quality cartoons for a female audience, is accidentally unleashed upon a board full of insecure, misogynistic, grimdark-reveling teenage sociopaths. Do you remember the mediocre 1980s cartoons, with their endless tea parties, high pitched voices, and neon-plastic brushable manes? Can you imagine a more perfect antithesis to the violent, testosterone-pumping culture of '90s antihero masculinity that so permeates /b/? What do you think would happen when a thousand Invader Zim and Teen Titans fans from that community, seething with self-righteous anger over the show some industry commentators had prematurely declared the final nail in the coffin for auteurism in animated television, descend upon that show to tear it apart?

You want to know what happened? The impossible happened. Something Hasbro never expected, something the show's producers never expected, something the /b/tards themselves never expected. Something no one who has ever taught, raised, or been an adolescent male would ever have expected.

The show was good. So good that even the /b/tards, with their misconceptions and their biases and their own deep-seated insecurities about their masculinity, admitted they loved it.

So good, in fact, that it turned them. Like so many zombies, back into the earth, before the commanding gaze of a high-level Dungeons and Dragons cleric.

Can you imagine what it must have been like for them? Ridiculing their fellow anons as child molesters, homosexuals, furries, man-children--why else would a grown man watch a show for little girls about fabulous glitter pony friendship--and, upon harvesting episodes as fodder for ridicule, coming to realize that they absolutely fucking love it?

The sheer quality of this show--the graceful animation, the surprisingly complex, likable characters, the clever yet innocently earnest writing--turned out to be a cognitive dissonance bomb of Stephensonian proportions. Anonymous likes to say that it does not forgive, that it does not forget. But almost overnight it learned to love and tolerate.

In a matter of days /b/ had descended into civil war. Half of /b/, inspired by the show's bold, brazen positivity, flooded the board with fanart and image macros related to the show, infuriating the hell out of the other half--a bewildered and unbelieving old guard who could not believe their beloved bullies' playground had been overrun with sparkles and cupcakes. Surely this must be a troll, they said. Surely this must just be ironic hipster postmodernism at work. But no. The fandom was real, and the innocent earnestness of the show had blown away their cynicism. /b/--that Lord of the Flies-like hellhole of perpetual adolescence where pictures of female users are captioned "you gonna get raped" and the word "fag" is so overused it just means "person"--a place singlemindedly devoted to the art of schadenfreude--actually, despite vicious resistance, had transformed into a magical land of friendship and unicorns and rainbows. Literally. It was like the opposite of a riot. One moment, all is well in the Internet Hate Machine, the next, SONIC RAINBOOM. Sharing, love, tolerance, and kindness! By the time the mods managed to lock it down it had already escaped 4chan and spread, like a roaring carpet of Parasprites, to the furthest corners of the Internet.

This, ironically, makes the explosion in MLP:FIM's popularity the greatest troll 4chan has ever pulled. The victim? Itself.

Let's take a moment to consider the implications of this. 4chan has shrugged off hacker attacks, lawsuits, Church of Scientology cease-and-desists, ISP censorship, and even the occasional FBI investigation. /b/ (and /co/, and various other parts of 4chan) crumpled like a wet sock under My Little Pony's message of love and tolerance. This, notes an anonymous YouTube brony, makes My Little Pony more powerful than the FBI.

But it didn't end with 4chan. Soon ponies were everywhere, the way ALF was in the late eighties. Handles like "RainbowDash20" and "PinkiePie" started appearing on servers for violent video games like Team Fortress 2 and Modern Warfare 3, their avatars decked out in bright pink ballistic armor and sparkly purple bandoliers. YouTube videos popped up of particularly daring young high schoolers using MLP:FIM to give physics and history presentations to their classmates. Colleges started My Little Pony clubs, in which frat boys, nerds, and preppies would get together on a couch in a dorm lounge, forties in hand, and watch the Cutie Mark Crusaders have sleepovers at Fluttershy's house. Even Stephen Colbert got in on the hype, opening an episode with a shoutout to all the My Little Pony fans. (Ha ha, Colbert! That was a joke, right?....Right? OMG BRONIES ARE REAL WTF)

The existing, venerable MLP fandom on the Internet--mostly women who grew up with the '80s toys, and had turned their childhood pastime into a serious hobby by collecting and modifying the plastic dolls--was mobbed with a huge surge of male fans, many of them the very same males who had teased them for their love of ponies decades ago. Fathers found a new way to bond with their daughters (and sometimes with their sons!), husbands creeped out their wives ("is this your way of telling me you're gay?" asked one disbelieving ladyspouse), brothers raided their little sisters' toy chests. Never in the history of fan culture, I imagine, has a fandom had its gender ratio upset so dramatically in so short a time. And that, my friends, was how the brony ("bro" + "pony") was made.

If I were an advertising executive, I'd be throwing myself out of a twentieth story window right now. 16-to-34 single adult males are one of the most coveted demographics in advertising, and one of the best understood--there's the perception that we are the age group most willing to part with our money. Entire brands, entire careers, have been built around marketing to us. Look at all the shameless bullshit that American TV has pushed onto this demographic for the last twenty years--the Lingerie Bowl, AXE deodorant, six-bladed Gillette razors, Two and a Half Men--all the millions of dollars spent on giving us all the gruff antiheroes, tailgate partying, fart jokes, and sexy cheerleaders our insecure, testosterone-crazed little lizard brains could want--and we show up at the little girls' section at Target, asking the staff when the Twilight Sparkle Twinkling Balloon Playset will be back in stock. Not for our little sisters' birthdays, mind you. Not for our frat brothers as a gag gift. For ourselves.

Why? Because ponies.

Somewhere out there, I imagine at least one feminist / transgender issues activist, who has been fighting for years for the degenderization of children's toys, is lifting a hand to hir mouth in speechless discombobulation. Better late than never, right?

And they're not the only ones feeling discombobulated! Even the bronies themselves are surprised. There's so much hand-wringing and soul-searching in the YouTube comments to the first season pilot that it reads like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or (perhaps more accurately) like a bizarre pastiche of coming out of the closet. Paraphrased from comments to MenloMarseilles's upload of S1E1, before it was taken down: "I am a 19-year-old US Marine, and I like ponies." "I am a 21-year-old male electrical engineering student, and I like ponies." "I am a 27-year-old straight male auto mechanic, and I like ponies." "I am 14 years old and I never knew--I'll never make fun of gay kids for liking rainbows anymore. Rainbows are AWESOME."

My friend dwh, who owned the plastic toys as a kid and has been watching since the first MLP cartoon, introduced me to Friendship is Magic. I discovered the Kanye West parody featured at the top of this article, and I snarked--like every proto-brony does. The Internet is so weird, right? Furries, boyband shippers, grimdark Pokemon fanficcers, and now men who like the girliest, most effete thing ever made--there's no end to how creepy and sad fandom nostalgia gets. And then I saw the pilot episode. And then omgomgomgomg

Now the question on everypony's--er, everybody's lips, from The Oregonian to NPR to CNN to Wired to Jezebel to the video game zine ScrewAttack to British auto-racing show Top Gear, is why? Why would so many seemingly normal, straight, masculine males endure ridicule and challenge decades of painstakingly built gender identity to declare their love for a show made for little girls? (Fox News, of course, already has its own theory. Fox doesn't ask questions, it only makes up answers.) What on earth do all these manly dudes see in this show they could not possibly relate to?

The most common answer--one posited by KnowYourMeme and generally accepted on faith by much of the rest of the mainstream press--is Faust.

Lauren Faust, that is, creator of Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, two other popular children's shows that have developed a cult following among adults. Faust has developed a well-earned professional reputation for creating smart, well-written shows that appeal to parents as well as kids, with strong, likeable characters and good role models.

She's also an outspoken advocate of quality animation for young girls. All the discussions that come up in third-wave feminist fandom communities about cartoons being seen as a boys' pastime, despite their cross-gender appeal--all the issues with "guy" cartoons being for both genders but "girl" cartoons being ghettoized, with the absence of intelligent female leads with believable personalities and character flaws, with all the emphasis on teaching honor and loyalty and other grown-up values to boys but nothing of the sort to girls--she's familiar with and privy to. MLP:FIM, she has stated in virtually every interview she's done, is an experiment--an attempt to take a step away from the obvious endless-tea-party-and-frilly-things toy commercial approach, and try to show the world that the kind of show third-wave feminist mothers have clamored for for decades is something little girls would actually watch.

She was allowed to do this because Hasbro would have been happy with virtually anything she delivered them--given the franchise's mediocre track record in animated cartoons, it had been well established that even the laziest, shoddiest garbage would sell toys. Faust's name recognition was enough. I shit you not, they hired her because they were pleased with the publicity Michael Bay had garnered from rebooting Transformers. (Which is incredibly ironic, given that Bay's reboot of that franchise could not possibly have pandered more to the young adult male demographic. And it wasn't the franchise that ended up setting that demographic on fire.)

Remember this Onion AV Club article from 2007? No one ever expected that one to join the list of Onion articles that turned out to be prophetic.

I mean, six-year-olds, right? The show might be their first experience with animated cartoons. They don't have any context. They haven't watched enough to recognize (or be tired of) trope and cliche, or be disappointed by bad writing, or be upset by lazy production values. If all they take away from the show is "ooh, cute princess ponies, I want one," it's a net win for Hasbro. Kids are in no position to complain.

So Faust used her creative control to go absolutely nuts with the quality of this show--the bar being set so low for her that she could move it as high as she wanted. Her pony self-portrait for the postmortem interview she did for fansite Equestria Daily is revealing--she depicts herself as a stressed out, overstretched pony space deity, furiously scribbling dozens of scripts and drawing dozens of art samples at once against the pressure of a colossal, rapidly emptying hourglass. She and a handpicked, highly capable team of artists, musicians, and animators toiled over tens of episodes at once, braving a tiny budget and nightmarish time constraints to make the best cartoon they could.

Perhaps it was because there was so little on the line that they cared so much. The show was virtually guaranteed to be off the radar to anyone outside the industry, due to associations with the franchise (does anyone even remember the 2007 miniseries?), so this was going to be the showroom piece for the cartoon Faust and her team really wanted to do. It was the canary in the mine--the first test of the model for a new generation of television programming for girls. It was designed to weather inevitable criticism and resistance from a male-dominated industry already predisposed to write off the new show as a frivolous, girly, overlong toy commercial. Nobody--least of all Faust--expected the canary to come back singing, an army of fanboys in tow.

That's a nice story--and one that gets told a lot--but it's not even half of it. Dudes do like Powerpuff Girls and a lot of Faust's other prior work, and she's very well respected in the animation industry--but none of those shows ever became a cultural phenomenon on the scale of MLP. From comments I see in the fandom, most of us had never even heard of her before MLP took the Internet by storm. She's a great showrunner and she has an excellent writing team, but this isn't the first show she and Studio B have done together. Why this show? Why this one in particular, one even less accessible to men than Powerpuff or Foster's? Why, of all the cartoons this particular group of very talented people have worked on together, is the one about cupcakes and best friends and magic prancing unicorns the milkshake to bring all the boys to the yard?

Given the flabbergasted responses they've given in interviews, it's unlikely even the MLP:FIM creative team knows the answer to that question. But it's something every brony, with every thump of his eight-pound stallion heart, deeply understands.

Around the time the first MLP cartoon aired, there was a raging public debate, spurred by Neil Postman's withering criticism of television culture "Amusing Ourselves to Death," on the role of television in the upbringing of American children. Anti-consumerists shrilly predicted that vapid toy commercial cartoons like MLP, Transformers, and GI Joe (and also MTV and CNN and whatever other scapegoat was convenient at the time), would shorten attention spans, bankrupt moral values, and demolish literacy rates. Pundits on A Current Affair and a nascent Fox News warned that kids left in front of the TV while parents went to work would end up being raised by the boob tube, steeped in a culture of endless pop culture garbage, their young minds powerless to its consumerist agenda--a generation doomed to be overweight, unthinking, easily distracted, brainwashed credit-slaves, endlessly fixated on instant gratification. Lauren Faust was a member of that generation, and she--as all of us did--grew up determined to prove the alarmists of our parents' generation wrong. We'd reconcile the terrible quality and shameless advertising of the cartoons of our youth with an overdeveloped sense of irony, both celebrate and demolish the '80s explosion in consumerism by inventing remix culture, and eventually abandon television entirely in favor of the much more participatory, brand-agnostic internet. We would grow up knowing we were raised on shit, and create a renaissance of transformative postmodern culture not despite it, but because of it. The ability to love what was terrible, to embrace our inner hipster, saved our souls.

But it came at a terrible price. We abandoned the awful Hanna-Barbara cartoons we grew up with only to get hooked on deliberately awful Adult Swim recuts of them. We ironically transformed terrible pop songs like Britney Spears's "Hit Me Baby One More Time" into indie cover standards. We deliberately swamped college campuses and coffeeshops with neon hose and tourniquet-tight jeans and striped dresses, because ugly is the new beautiful. We accused earnest new artists of "selling out" the moment they achieved success, filmed entire movies about other movies, raised local prices for the cheapest, most watered down beer on the market to six dollars a can. We criticized Hollywood films and went home and watched reruns of Mystery Science Theater. We made Austin Powers as the James Bond franchise crashed, we made cartoons that snarked at the character flaws of politicians and legendary '70s folk singers, we created a market for seven Friedman and Seltzer films. We created an entire subculture around not liking things. All things. Most of all itself.

We are a generation to whom raising an eyebrow and saying "You're a dork" is a legitimate way to say you like someone. We are a generation who loves Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" precisely because, ironically, it isn't ironic. We are a generation who built M16 bras and dresses made of light bulbs and grew up to be Lady Gaga.

We, as a generation, have forgotten what it means to sincerely love something.

Lauren Faust belongs to our generation. And she didn't forget.

MLP set out to fill a space in television--conspicuous in its persistent absence--where great cartoons for girls should go. It set out to be the ideation of the cartoon a young Lauren Faust always wanted from the little pony toys she cherished, the show that existed in her little girl's imagination, rather than the squealy, psychedelic Cronenbergian nightmare the first MLP cartoon turned out to be. Full of heart, with believable, lovable characters, earnest and complex in its exploration of the complex web of friendship drama and social intrigue little girls are just starting to navigate, it would be less a puppet show to distract children with short attention spans than an introductory primer for little girls in how to be adult women.

This day and age, any other show with the subtitle "Friendship is Magic" would offer it with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. But MLP means it. It shows young girls, just beginning to discover what will be their first friendships--some of which will last a lifetime--what they can expect from the rest of their lives. It explores the politics of sleepovers, competition, jealousy, professional achievement, personal development, self-discovery--even a vaguely unsettling allegory for female puberty--and what it means to be friends with someone very different from yourself. What it doesn't do is offer friendship as the answer to all your problems,* nor handwave it away as a mystical force that shoots magic monster-destroying beams* or the solution to some extraordinarily contrived fantasy problem that can be easily vanquished with a platitude*.

These characters, despite being ponies, are more human than any other characters I've seen on children's television. They banter, they clique, they gossip, they confide in one another, they betray each others' confidence, they grow and change and run into seemingly irreconcilable differences--and in their end, it's their friendship, enduring tests many real-world adults would fail, that lets them carry on. It's like a sillier, much less depressing junior version of Cheers, with sprinkles and donuts instead of alcohol.

In the space of a twenty-two minute episode you don't always see jealous rivals become an unstoppable team or conflicting personalities discover something they share in common. You have genuine conflicts that resolve poorly, or come unresolved; you have fights (sometimes acrimonious ones) between close friends; you have jealously guarded secrets; you have flaws in one character that bring everypony down which cannot be banished through simple acceptance.

What none of these change--as is untrue of many friendships in real life--is that the ponies all share an incredible faith in their friendship and work tirelessly to reconcile their differences. They are best friends, and they are always there for each other, and for all their petty disputes, they will ultimately always love and accept each other, no matter how they change and grow apart. They are not "friends." They are friends.

These ponies are BFFs for life--and they mean it.

*At least not after the pilot episode, which does all of that. But it does it in style.

This is the sincerest show on television today. There is nothing like it on kids' TV or on grown-up TV. For real. There is not a speck of cynicism, not an iota of wryness or non-reflexive irony, not a bit of fearful, preemptive deconstruction of its own message. There are pop culture references, but they are sparse and usually subtle. There are dark moments, and they are really dark, and there are light moments, and they are really light, and there's many different flavors of grey. And it doesn't fall flat on its face with its own earnestness, or blind itself with its own naivete, as so many cartoons from the '70s and '80s do. This show believes in itself. It truly, bravely believes in the value of friendship, even against the very real threat of hurt and betrayal. And it believes you will too--with all its candy-coated, adorable little heart.

Friendship. It's is an important part of adult female life MLP's writers want little girls to learn. It's also something that cartoons made for boys--so heavily focused on Second World War values of honor, sacrifice, martial brotherhood, and loyalty--never bothered to teach men.

Here's my theory: Conventional wisdom (which may or may not be correct?) says bullies are cowards--that it's not their belligerence that isolates them as much as their isolation makes them belligerent. Why do you think the typical /b/tard is always trying to get a rise out of people, making fun of suicides, accusing the emotionally open of being "faggots" or having Aspergers, going on Internet Tough Guy tirades? Why do you think so many tough, lonely basement dwellers cling to '90s comic book antihero archetypes? For a guy who's used to being ostracized, shunned, left out, unloved, the aloof badass who choses to live apart from normal people because he has unresolved issues that can only be dealt with through tactlessness, a disdain for society, and a wellspring of stoic impassivity is a compelling role model. These are people who pretend they're not well liked because they're rough around the edges, but a lot of them are really rough around the edges because they're not well liked.

Let a guy like that watch a show like this, full of earnest hope and compassion and likable best friends--and he gets a taste of what he's never had. To a little girl the show is a look forward--a sneak peek for those who, as the theme song goes, used to wonder what friendship could be. But for a grown adult--male or female--the show is a look back at what your friendships could have been. At the dude from middle school who you called a fag because he tried to give you a hug. At the girl you stopped hanging out with because she started dating the guy you had a crush on. At all the people you never got to know because they were rich and full of it, or poor and abrasive, or had bad manners, or made fun of your limp when you broke your leg, or had an annoying laugh, or ruined your prom.

I used to wonder, everypony thinks, what friendship could be. But who was it who shared their friendship with me?

Everypony is flawed, but no pony is broken.

Male gender roles in American society are notoriously hostile to homosocial intimacy--in part because widespread homophobic attitudes conflate it with homosexual intimacy. Most dudes don't know how to say, "I love you, man," or "You are really important to me," without making it sound like they're coming on to each other. Nor do they know how to say, "I feel bad for what you're going through," "I'm going to support you through this," or even "You're a great friend and I appreciate you." My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic teaches exactly that. As a bonus, since it's written from a female perspective, it also gives straight and bisexual men invaluable lessons on what behavior is appropriate in female company. (No TV show, I imagine, has simultaneously destroyed and saved so many dating prospects.) They are magical ponies showing little girls how to be women--but they're more than that. They're magical ponies teaching people how to be human--all the little lessons that are too easy to miss over the course of a lifetime, except in hindsight.

Scanning through comments on Equestria Daily, I see this sentiment a lot. I think this, above else, is why the show is not just enormously popular with dudes on the Internet, but why it has inspired such profound changes in behavior among some of them.

Perhaps this is why, true to its name, bronydom has such a strikingly high number of frat boys among the more typical cartoon-watching otaku. Is not deep and abiding friendship what the concept of fraternity is all about? There's an odd social acceptability in that it takes a group of women, the society-proclaimed experts on feelings, to show stereotypical men what it means to be a true friend. Even if those women happen to be ponies. BROS! BROS! BROS!

There's lots of other things that contribute to the show's wide appeal, of course. The animation, for example, manages to be of superb quality despite the show's low production budget and tight deadlines. It is well understood among cartoonists that horses are hard to draw (there's a blog devoted entirely to horses with hands riding bikes because of the inherent challenge of drawing those things), so a lot of them take shortcuts--the ponies in earlier MLP cartoons recycle a lot of poses, many of which resemble pigs or cats. Lots of other cartoons, noting that animal poses lack a certain human expressiveness, will go as far as to give their characters human bodies. Daffy Duck has arms instead of wings. Garfield is bipedal. Thundercats have abs, fingers, and underpants.

But Studio B never forgets that its characters, for all their human qualities, are ponies. They eat hay. They fold all four legs underneath them when they sit down. They make clopping noises when they walk, and break into a flawless Muybridge gallop when they run. They bend their front legs in rodeo poses when they're feeling vain, stamp the ground and snort when they're feeling aggressive, and rear up their legs in a rampant pose when they're spooked. This is, to put it bluntly, gorram adorable.

But they're anthropomorphic ponies--role models in Faust's vision of a feminist utopia. They have short, nose-like snouts, and big wide smiles, and laugh and cry like humans, which dispels a lot of what made the '80s cartoons so unintentionally creepy. And there's a certain reverse irony to the way they subvert grown-up expectations of power relationships in ways that are certain to go over the heads of the show's target audience. The first episode, for instance, has protagonist unicorn Twilight Sparkle delivering plot exposition inside a chariot. Pulled by horses. A horse riding in a chariot pulled by horses. (Wait, what?) It's not until the camera zooms out a bit that it is revealed that the horses have wings and the chariot is flying through the air, and all becomes clear when the chariot lands and she tips the kind gentlehorses with a coin from her purse. Oh! Unicorns can't fly. It's not a chariot, it's a pegasus rickshaw! Of course!

There's also a Wild West sequence later on featuring a horse-drawn carriage, in which the carriage suddenly stops, the pony pulling the carriage shouts, "Gee whiz, I'm exhausted. Your turn!" and he passes his bit to his passenger (also a pony), who obligingly trades places with him. (Because, you know, letting that one pony pull the carriage for the other pony for the entire journey would be unfair.) It's funny--but only if you've already internalized the master-slave relationship between driver and horse. The show is full of subversive little moments like this, and it's amazing.

The show's unabashedly feminist perspective is also immensely fascinating to anyone who's grown up with cartoons produced in a male-dominated animation industry; Faust and her writing team break so many tropes we so take for granted that it's easy to forget they're there.

It's interesting how the population of Ponyville is overwhelmingly female, with all positions of power filled by mares, and stallions only present as token spouses, family members, or sidekicks.

Or how the only time stallions appear, it's to make an awkward pass at a mare, say something bullheadedly foolish, tell a mare she can't do something, or help pull a cart.

Or how marriage, dating, and sexuality play virtually no part whatsoever in most of the characters' lives, given how a) this is a show for pre-pubescent girls, to whom romance is a foreign concept and b) the role of woman as lover is largely dictated by the male gaze, which barely exists in a world that is like 80% female. (Take that, Cinderella.)

Or how the series protagonist is, as far as I can tell, the only positively portrayed bureaucrat on television right now. Who is calm, rational, levelheaded, reasonable, and female. And occasionally wrong, nevertheless.

Or how it second-guesses which characters you are going to identify as the prissy stuck-up one, the butch lesbian, the ditz, the nerd, the jock, and the outcast, and then crushes those archetypes under its hoof, screaming, "Ponies are more complicated than that!"

And then there's the music--name one other show on TV right now besides Glee that openly embraces song-and-dance numbers! Complete with Sondheim references! And the D&D monster manual's worth of guest characters from the same depths of Greek and Roman mythology from which unicorns and pegasi were plumbed, including such relatively lesser-known creatures as manticores, diamond dogs, gryphons, and hydrae. And, of course, a season one finale that both pastiches and shits upon every Disney movie ever to feature a princess. Coupled with Daniel Ingram's excellent soundtrack and some exceptionally talented voice actresses, you have a show that sounds considerably higher-budget than it is.

But, of course, what really makes the show is the characters. It's telling that the question "What's your favorite pony" is an injoke in the fandom, as any answer is implied to end in violence. Unlike most children's shows, which are about the adventures of Cool Protagonist and his Slightly Less Cool Friends, this show features an ensemble cast. That's pretty ballsy in itself--there's this long-standing perception that young children appreciate neither complex characters nor ambiguity as to who the "main good guy" is supposed to be. Yet Twilight Sparkle, the ostensible protagonist, gets so little screen time in the middle of the first season that she might as well be a supporting character herself.

All the characters struggle against personal conflicts, all of them have both charismatic qualities and serious character flaws--some of the former of which are identical to the latter--and each of them gets her own chance to shine. Even the minor characters are well-loved by the brony community, notably a nameless extra fans call "Derpy Hooves," who appeared cross-eyed in one shot due to an animation error and instantly became a fan favorite.

This is very much a character-driven show. There are episodes that feature high adventure, and there are occasional villains to spice things up a bit (the actor for Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation plays, in the Season 2 premiere, a character who is essentially Q), but every conflict is driven by the relationships between the characters. Class differences, racial differences, personality differences--every conceivable social factor at work on the group dynamics of the fourth grade playground is addressed. There are grown-up problems, like overwork, dashed expectations, and excessive self-reliance--and little kid problems, like dealing with bullies and figuring out what kind of adult you're going to be.

To Hasbro, the economic purpose of this cartoon is to convince kids to buy toys that will let them pick up their adventures with Twilight, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Fluttershy where TV left them off--and in this aspect it succeeds tremendously. The show is a sandbox, a creative playspace for practicing complex roles and social conventions in a safe, imaginary world--a proto-fandom, if you will. Its similarity to the real world--or an idealized version of the world its creators want to see--lets it serve as both a model for the experience of adulthood, and a context for disappointment from where the model is designed to fail. (As in: What do you mean, girls don't have the nerve to be fighter pilots? Rainbow Dash is a girl, and she can clear the entire sky in ten seconds flat. Screw "realistic," I want to be Rainbow Dash.)

That kind of exploration and experimentation is, among other things, the very reason children play. And what more could a children's cartoon produced by a toy company ever hope to offer?

As for the bronies, fandom is our playpen. Bronies, at the brink of professional careers and eager to prove their talent to the world, count among their ranks professional musicians, DJs, videographers, game developers, writers, artists, and animators. They've impressed even the production crew (who sometimes show up to conventions in T-shirts designed by fans). There's nearly enough talent in this fandom to make Season 1 again once over.

For us, the show also acts as a lens for looking back upon our childhoods. All those familiar experiences, all these characters who remind me ever so subtly of people we've met, friends we've known--people we should have treated better, decisions we should have reconsidered. It's a wonderful opportunity for mothers to reflect, over 20 years of My Little Pony, on the kind of world they want to make for their daughters. It's an equally wonderful opportunity for young dudes like me to think about what our own place in that world would be--certainly not anything close to the adulthood the cartoons of our own youth prepared us for, rife with scowling, power games, heroic sacrifice, and man tears.

Thank you, Lauren Faust, producer Jayson Thiessen, Studio B, and all the rest of the MLP:FIM staff who worked way harder (like, at least 20% harder) than you absolutely needed to, for making this show so fantastic. And brohoofs and pony hugs for reminding me, and a whole generation of men raised to be X-Men and Power Rangers, that there is nothing more precious in life than spending time with all your very best friends.

Every episode is on YouTube. Go watch some before they get taken down.

shakespeare had his sonnets. i have love letters to okcupid

2011-09-25T11:16:58Z

Excerpts from actual messages I have sent to unfamiliar women on OKCupid since January.

(to a sweet lady whose "most embarrassing thing to admit in public" was that she cries at the end of Armageddon every time)

Ahem.

You know, for some reason, I don't want to close my eyes. I don't want to fall asleep. You know why?

::trollface::

(....)

So. You say you like writing, saving people, baked goods, and knifing things. These are all things I like as well.

Perhaps you are secretly a superhero. Perhaps I am too.

I don't know if I could date someone who has a picture of Mao on her wall...but I'm willing to find out.

Dinner and absurdist historical conversation? My treat.

(to an adventurous spirit who studied abroad in China, listed 250 favorites, loves Princess Bride, and ended her profile with "a little bit of geek, please")

Ni hao, [REDACTED]! I've been meaning to message you forever, but I'm kind of shy about this sort of thing. (Conversations, easy. Breaking the ice, hard!)

(....)

So. Most curious thing first: How little is "a little bit of geek"? Like, reads Wired, has a jailbroken iPhone, can recite hundreds of movie quotes off the top of his head sort of geek? Or Deep Geek, full of years of comics mythology, writing Firefly fanfic in C++, and hiding a massive labor-of-love Comic-Con costume in his closet?

I'll let you guess which one I am. (Hint: Your first guess will be wrong. And now that I've told you that, so will your second. It's the old iocaine powder trick. :] )

(to a stonerette who began her profile with "Just call me Soul Train.")

Hello, Soul Train! You have one of the chillest profiles I've ever read, and not just because you're an ice cream lady and your profile pic has you leaning out of a Mr. Softee truck. (....)

(to a gentle poetess who grew up in the rural Midwest, promises brownie points to anyone who knows what HTML and CSS stand for, loves folk and hip-hop, desires a boyfriend with a sense of humor, and "misses her roots")

Our lives may be driven by similar objects:

A rolling tide of corn leaves.
The trembling, solemn yawp of a single plucked chord.
The warm, syrup-sticky bite of spilled beer on mahogany.

I went to college in Ohio. These things are well known to me.
Are these the roots you speak of? Or do they run deeper?

HyperText Markup Language.
Cascading Style Sheets.

Web designer, I'm guessing?
I used to be a web programmer.
Never again, if I can help it.

Oh dear. This message is far too serious.
Is P. Diddy a man dreaming he's Ke$ha,
or Ke$ha a woman dreaming she's P. Diddy?
Shizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Hello, fellow literary nerd Internet anthropologist who loves The Moth! Either OKCupid is really good at helping people find themselves, or this mirror is unusually clean.

Are you going to the Moth at Southpaw next Monday? Perhaps we could meet for drinks and stories. Heavy on the stories and light on the drinks, if you prefer.

(to a she-troll who answered "I spend a lot of time thinking about...." with "Karl Rove," "Favorite food, TV, movies" with "Which one is Trapped in the Closet?" and "You should message me if...." with "You like my uncle. You can write a good haiku. And you're not ashamed about collecting female body parts.")

Hey, you. Nice uncle.
This is a complete sentence.
See what I did there?

You had me until
"collect female body parts"
Reverse psych creep bait?

You're a clever one.
Maybe we would get along.
Hooray Internet?

Taxonomic note:
Trapped in the Closet is food.
Obviously. (Duh.)

No plans this weekend.
Want to grab some Pad Thai and
talk about Karl Rove?

"Art," she says.

It takes an admirable humility to for an artist to describe her work in quotation marks. :] I wish I could call what I make art, but I'm not sure it even qualifies as "[(*Art?)]"...

Speaking of. Funny story: I was at a party at the Silent Barn in Queens a few months back, and a bunch of guys from Copenhagen were playtesting this new card game they'd come up with called "Fuck You, It's Art." At the beginning of the game players wrote ideas for art games on index cards, which the dealer shuffled into a deck. The dealer then drew cards one at a time, reading each card aloud, and players had to respond by shouting "It's art!" "It's not art!" or "Fuck you, it's art!" Any players whose opinion was in the minority had to take a shot of aquavit. No one ever wins at "Fuck You, It's Art."

That's pretty much how I feel about that kind of thing. (....)

It will never be practical for you to own a dog. That doesn't mean you shouldn't get one.

Hullo. I am the marriage counselor between art and mathematics (they don't always get along). I hate Marshall McLuhan and disagree with everything he's ever written. I love people-watching and I like bagels with cream cheese and lox almost as much as you do.

Perhaps we'd get along. :]

(to a current-generation hipsterette who adores Beat Generation hipster poetry)

"dropping knowledge bombs" oh hell yes

Bad horror, bats, and Faulkner, eh? If you like SARS Wars, attic bats, and Flannery O' Connor (ballsiest lady author of the 1950s!), then heyyyyy you.

(Also you're very pretty. But I imagine you hear that a lot.)

Hooray for people not afraid that other people will think they're crazy. Jack K had the right idea.

And I guess the nice thing about coming full circle to the Beat Generation, the angel-headed hipsters of our own generation starving hysterical naked listening to antifolk in the coffeehouses where Ginsberg used to hang out, is that this time we have the privilege of knowing how this same story ended the first time around.

Anyway. Hello!

"What's for dinner? Outer space."
You, ma'am, are an excellent accidental poet.

And though I can't say I share your love of Marshall McLuhan, Fruity Pebbles, or screaming, I find your passion for such things intriguing, and familiar in spirit if not in substance. And daydreaming, stock footage (and Eisenstein-like montages thereof?), funeral dirges--all underrated. If such things make it into your films, I'd love to see them sometime.

Mediums. Messages. Exciting.

Number of responses: 0

in case anyone is wondering why lj keeps going down

2011-07-30T10:09:28Z

Politics, basically.

Selling LJ to a Russian security contractor turned out to be a bad idea on Six Apart's part. One, no real competition in Russia, so it keeps fading further into irrelevance in the Western market as the dev team continues to roll out features only Russian users care about. Two,
it exposes LJ to the Russian hacker community's particularly Chekovian sense of irony.

Pass me the vodka, SUP, this infant isn't going to shoot itself. What's that you say? The infant has been eaten by bears? Preved! A toast to Comrade Bear for sparing us from such an unpleasant task! Perhaps now we can go back to trying to buy wives.

voices of chinese democracy

2011-06-28T11:29:53Z

Reading chinaSMACK makes me lose faith in the Chinese Internet. Reading the China Digital Times helps me regain it.

Neither voice is truly representative of Chinese public opinion--both are run by foreigners with agendas. (Pot, kettle, black, I know.) But oh, how good it feels that someone over there is able to look through the gilded lens of China's unsustainable economic growth, and say, on their own merits, without any of the Western influence China is all too willing to blame every time it faces dissent, "This is really fucked up. Something's got to give."

Li Chengpeng, a blogger and well-known political writer, has the audacity to challenge the Chinese Communist Party as an independent candidate for congressperson of Chengdu Province. He's not going to win--it's an open secret that the elections are rigged by the CCP. He knows this. It won't stop him from running anyway:

Some claim that Chinese do not deserve a democratic election. It reminds me of the fact that I used to consider myself an elite and liked to say things like they have been kneeling down for so long that they don’t remember the benefits of standing up. I thought what I said made me look cool and profound. But now I start to realize that they kneel down because the ceiling is too low; they have no choice. On the other hand, we kneel down as well–we just do that and pretend to be high-end. The reality is that if one has never tasted an apple, how can he/she have the knowledge of how good an apple can be? Once a person experiences the good taste of an apple, he/she will look forward to the sweet taste of all apples.

[....]Some of my close friends have been skeptical of what we can achieve by participating in this election considering the current situation in China. My response to that is as least we can let many people see what a real ballot looks like for the first time. I’ve often heard people claiming they are Chinese citizens–but how can you prove it? A national identity card can only prove that the cooking knife belongs to you so it’ll be easier for the police to track you down for murder. A real estate title can only prove that you’ve rented the world’s most expensive but fragile housing. A birth certificate can only prove that you’ve been abandoned by the world’s largest human resource organization and need to pay high educational expenses, medical bills, and gas prices till the day you die. What? A death certificate? Sorry, but you can only rest (peacefully) underground for 20 years. You cannot prove you belong to this country for the 70 years you live above the ground, and you cannot even be a ghost of this country for 20 years of resting underground.

[....]An anonymous Internet user has a very good point here: If you really perceive ballots as decorations, then they will be.

A dialogue between Cao Tian, independent Guangzhou mayoral candidate, who is running under the same pretenses, and a friend who is a CCP official:

For the nation’s progress, [I] am willing to pay any price, including my life. The future of China’s reforms is uncertain and filled with challenges. If there are [figurative] land mines, then let those of us [born] after the 60s should go forward first and set an example for the post 80s and 90s [generations][...]there is one thing that I still want. It’s what the Mafei county chief said in the movie “ Let the Bullets Fly.” He said that his government was there in Echeng to ensure three things: fairness, fairness and f**king fairness....

If I die before accomplishing my objective, then I will tell my young daughter: after I am dead, burn a ballot on my grave.

From Han Han, China's most popular blogger and legendary smartass, on CCP propaganda shills:

Every government has a mechanism for propagating their perspective, [so] that is excusable. But the Fifty Cent Party is the government’s mistake, before I thought they existed to guide public opinion, but it seems I was wrong, because you wouldn’t, upon seeing a crowd of people eating shit, squeeze your way in to have a bite yourself.

Actually pretty much anything Han Han writes is golden. In a splendid interview with an unnamed Canadian news source:

Question: Do you miss Google? Why?

Answer: Actually, I don’t miss Google at all. Google is just like a young girl. One day she runs up to you and says: “I want to leave you.” I say, “Don’t be like that, sweetheart.” The most hurtful thing is, at the end she still leaves you. But I realized that, actually, when I think of her, I can still always get on her whenever I want.

The only difference is that before, when I got on her, I could get a few carrots out of her. Now when I ask, “What about the carrots?”– she will just disappear instantly.

And, on the detrimental effect of press censorship on Chinese culture, during a speech at Xiamen University:

We can’t forever keep talking about the Four Classics or Confucius’ Analects during exchanges with people from other nations. It’s like when your date asks you about your financial situation, and you say your ancestors several generations ago were really rich. Pretty useless....

Only when we fight against cultural censorship, when we liberate phrases and words from the “sensitive words database“, with the exception of inhumane words, only then will China stand a chance to become a cultural power. Even if your and my name go into that database for a while, I believe there is a ceiling to the number of words the database can contain. Every time a new one goes in, it pushes the whole thing closer to its ceiling until one day, it comes crashing down.

And let's not forget this gorgeous (anonymous) poem about the Great Divide. The events described are modern but the sentiment is timeless.

kevin, why don't you date asian women anymore

2011-06-22T20:19:49Z

What do you see in the face of a local white American woman?

I see swaying maples. I see hazel in her irises, and hair the color of warm earth, and gentle, soft skin. I see memories of Saturday morning cartoons, of the prick of rocks and shells in the sand along a hot July beach, of the sweet tang of varnished libraries and ancient drywall. I see hands sticky with toast crumbs. I see the coppery sting of combination locks and patent-aluminum lockers, and the grassy bite of wild grapes, and the one spot on the fingerboard of an old steel-string acoustic guitar where your finger sticks to the grain.

I see a quiet moment in a convenience store parking lot, engine thrumming, stars out--a pebble of oranges and cream snow, wet on a plastic straw. I see a long, quilted scarf flapping against the bite of an ice-bright October morning. I see Robert Frost branches spidering upwards into an Annie Dillard sky. I see a single autumn leaf, woody and defiant, green with life.

I see nothing exotic. I see home.

What do you see in the face of a Taiwanese woman?

I see plaster of Paris. I see a windowless room in her cold, hollow pupils, its brutal concrete dry and cracked, searing with the spiritless glow of a white xenon tube. I see a piano with muted hammers. I see the sharp, tintinnitic bark of a furious parent over a gurgle of pink noise. I see sheets of shipping-grade corrugated steel, rusted brown and seawater grey, plated over every surface. I see Hello Kitty douche rags. I see meat sludge over hard, day-old rice, laid over sweetly with a slice of neon ginger and a veneer of raw, runny egg.

I see an involuntary twitch in her right eyelid. I see a thin paper tape of black glyphs vomiting endlessly out of a cast iron typewriter, silently churning ribbons upon echolalic ribbons onto a polished bamboo floor. I see an imagined, omnipresent bamboo switch (there's the twitch, again). I see sweat boiling in a cauldron under a canopy of rotting palm leaves. I see the sensation of falling, of forever slipping off the edge of a sand-blasted cliff. I see a piece of another woman's small intestine, clenched tightly and desperately between her teeth.

I see, caught in her lips, the pent-up squawk of a voice unused to speaking above a whisper.

I see a horrific spiked phallus, its filamented, garrote-like needles dripping with viscera. I see a schoolgirl uniform cut for a thirty-year-old woman. I see a thirteen-year-old slathered in makeup. I see an opera sung entirely in shrieking, high-pitched sobs. I see a cracked stone altar at the shrine of innocence, slick and acrid with steaming virginal blood. I see pink--pink pencil cases, pink notebooks, pink earrings, pink elephants, pink eye, pink pockets. I see a trembling, androgynous overgrown fetus.

I see thick lines, delicately painted, in black and white. I see a tall, cool cup of green tea, sweet with mint and crushed ice, sealed with plastic film, on an endless cobblestone square. I see a flock of transparent kites over the harbor, soaring quietly in place over lush, verdant hills. I see a lump of crushed sesame dough on a glass table in front of a blaring television. I see a shattered glass table. I see the long, crying trails of raindrops down a double plate window. I see a fine bone teacup filled with water. I see a red-eyed ogre in a greasy wifebeater shoveling a mouthful of boiled fish into his toothless maw with a pair of steel chopsticks.

I see, in the reflection of my eyes in hers, a dragon. Not a shimmering golden dragon, but a reptilian one, its horns migraine-hot, breathing smoke from its nostrils and drooling semen from its lips. I see a foot bent halfway to the ankle, bent so far the ligaments rip apart and the bone snaps. I see fear. I see anger. I see endless surrender, over generations and generations and generations. I see resignation.

I see a long, terrible silence in a lightless dream.

那美國女人呢？看到她們的臉，會想到什麼東西？

I see swaying maples. I see hazel in her irises, and hair the color of warm earth, and gentle, soft skin. I see memories of Saturday morning cartoons, of the prick of rocks and shells in the sand along a hot July beach, of the sweet tang of varnished libraries and ancient drywall. I see hands sticky with toast crumbs. I see the coppery sting of combination locks and patent-aluminum lockers, and the grassy bite of wild grapes, and the one spot on the fingerboard of an old steel-string acoustic guitar where your finger sticks to the grain.

I see a quiet moment in a convenience store parking lot, engine thrumming, stars out--a pebble of oranges and cream snow, wet on a plastic straw. I see a long, quilted scarf flapping against the bite of an ice-bright October morning. I see Robert Frost branches spidering upwards into an Annie Dillard sky. I see a single autumn leaf, woody and defiant, green with life.

in which kevin waxes zarathustran

2011-06-16T23:27:15Z

In the month following the end of my last contract I've done a lot of recentering. Specifically, I've been trying to rediscover what it is I love about video games so much that I'll gladly work an engineer's hours in an artist's living conditions just for another shot at doing it for a living.

When you're bogged down in interface nitpicking and deadlines and cost-benefit compromises and project management issues, while under constant pressure to come up with a brilliant design on the spot, it's easy to find yourself thinking of games as nothing more than the sum of their parts. You don't see the rapture you felt when you first discovered the zen loop in Pac-Man, or the giddy look-at-me-now thrill of running World 4-1 of Super Mario Bros. in a dead sprint. You see messaging issues in the color of the "HI-SCORE" text. You see meters, gauges, ratios between player resource expenditure and strategic gain. You see points where the scaling risk-reward mechanics from Galaxian can intersect with the scaling risk-reward mechanics of unit specialization in Starcraft. You see pipes. Lego pieces. Playmobils. Prefabricated pieces to be combined, smoothed out, streamlined, made efficient, according to well-understood rules. You know vanilla tastes great and why it tastes great; you know chocolate tastes great and why it tastes great. Your job is to make a better chocolate, a better vanilla, and find new ways to make them swirl.

If you get to this point, the magic is gone. The process of game design has ceased to be a creative endeavor and has become a mere feat of engineering. When you catch yourself building games like this--and I'm sure even the best among us do--you're not making games anymore. You're just making software. You're architecting your game the same way you're building a web platform. And of course no one cares if the newest version of a web platform is exactly like the one that came before it, except easier to use and with some interesting new features--in fact, users prefer it that way. But you know what? Web platforms don't require novelty. They generally aren't designed to be fun.

And this--more than the improbable deadlines, rapidly shifting goals, and grossly underestimated technical challenges, or the fact that I wasn't even officially working on a game--is what led to the deepest feeling of existential dread I felt during my last contract. Even when I was enjoying it. Even when I was having the time of my life, moving toy soldiers on hex grids with my co-workers, tossing around ideas in bull sessions, arguing over diagrams of AI behavior, I couldn't help but feel like something wasn't right. My biggest contribution to the team, design-wise, was that I was the guy who had played virtually everything--that I could pluck one of my co-workers' suggestions out of the air, liken it to the mechanics from five obscure arcade titles from the early 1990s, describe what made it fun in those games and give an opinion on whether it would work in ours--and I wasn't comfortable with that.

Don't get me wrong, any creative endeavor builds heavily on its influences--but we were supposed to be the indies, the risk-takers, who were willing to do all the crazy stuff the triple-As wouldn't touch with a ten-foot-pole, and with the pressures of one-month deadlines and a team of four people, most of them incredibly smart designers who really understood games, the best we could come up with was "hey, let's make a game like X, except," or "let's do Y done right." (Much as we hate to admit it, this is the way with most indies. It's the reason why we have so many reinventions or slight variations on Space Invaders, Tetris, Bust-A-Move, and Arkanoid clogging up the bargain bins, across the aisle from all the top-selling first-person shooters. I mean, Angry Birds has held the #1 spot in the iPhone/iPad App Store for ages now, and it's merely the contemporary iteration of a heritage of very similar games beginning with Artillery, a game first written in 1976. It's distressing.) I imagine the everything-has-been-done-before breadth of my knowledge contributed to this line of thinking, unfortunately, and I will admit it was a problem. What kind of game do you make if the most fun game you can imagine, the kind of game that got you wanting to make games in the first place, is a game that has already been made?

Look at the most anticipated triple-A games announced at E3 this year, the ones that are virtually guaranteed to be top sellers. It doesn't take an insider to recognize that the industry has hit a state of everything-has-been-tried creative apoplexy. Two of them are the same gritty, post-9/11 first person shooter--each of them merely the newest iteration, version n+1.0, of the same game that has been winning awards for the past ten years--itself Tribes 2 with Quake Team Fortress-inspired classes, Deus Ex skills, Gears of War cover, and maybe six or seven hours of flashy cutscenes. One of them is a not-much-different sequel to a game exactly like Grand Theft Auto 3, except with AI followers and better shooting and driving controls. The remaining two are a driving game and a soccer game. Even the indies are disappointing, for all their visual marvel and attempts at deeper meaning--I mean, I love existential tug-of-war games and beautiful, immersive, gimmicky platformers as much as the next guy, but come on. Enough reinventing the wheel! Is this what I have to look forward to, career-wise?

Fuck that shit. I want to be a composer, not a DJ. I'm going back to basics.

After all, look at Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of some of the best-loved and most frequently imitated video games ever. What did he draw upon for inspiration in the thousands of mostly terrible, industry-ending Atari and Colecovision titles that preceded his work at the beginning of his career? Platform jumping mechanics from Pitfall, maybe. Silly hats. A score counter at the top. That's it. All the other crazy amazing stuff he came up with was built out of a deep, very fundamental understanding of play, fun, and imagination. Donkey Kong was inspired by an iconic photo of New York construction workers eating lunch on an I-beam of a half-constructed Empire State Building. The bad guys in Super Mario Bros. were inspired on the movements of creatures he saw while walking in the woods near his home. The jumping-on-bad-guys-to-kill-them mechanic was based on wheeeeeeeee. And one of the main reasons why these games succeeded even as the Western game industry crashed was because Miyamoto, like many of his Japanese successors, built his games purely around the joy of play. He didn't try to squeeze meticulously balanced board game mechanics, hyper-specialized for an experience involving four people sitting around a table scheming to turn those mechanics against each other, into a game for one person sitting in front of a television. He didn't fall in love with the complexity of his own simulations, like Will Wright would, or confuse detail with depth, as the early flight sim folks did. He didn't see a video game as a vehicle for narrative power fantasies like being a millionaire or an action hero or the biggest kid on the block, knowing that such details would get lost in the representational abstraction of early game graphics, nor did he build his games around clumsy abstractions of single moments that sound awesome but play terrible, like punching a minotaur in the crotch.

What Miyamoto made were games. Not board games. Not tabletop games. Not sports games. Not toys. A category of games in their own right, in the same way a game show is a game, in the same way politics is a game, in the same way an obstacle course is a game. He didn't have an agenda in the social construction of games to be something they weren't. Go play Super Mario Bros. again, in its original NES/Famicom incarnation--note how opaque the messaging is, how inscrutable the rules of the game often are (I can never remember how to get fireworks at the end-of-stage flagpole), how the game actively encourages game-breaking exploits like the ability to trap a shell between two blocks and hop on it repeatedly for infinite lives, or how you can be an avid player for twenty years without knowing that Bowser is vulnerable to fireballs. Note the little engineering compromises the programmers had to make--the bushes being a palette swap of the clouds, the graphical glitching that occurs if you earn more than 128 lives, the inability to scroll the screen to the left. As a piece of software, it's a beautiful mess. As a game, it's simply beautiful. Every moment of development time that should have gone into making the game less technically embarrassing, more smooth, more elegant, more understandable, more balanced, more fair--it went into the wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

And what did we learn from him, we Americans? We learned that jumping on things is fun. That tight controls are important. That players like whimsical characters. And then we went on flooding our games with unnecessary complexity, because we've learned from board games that complexity is depth, and it was only a matter of time before we had variations on Super Mario Bros. gameplay with hit points, elemental resistances, guns, dice rolls, dozens of special abilities, twenty powerups that do the same thing...

This is what American developers are infamous for doing wrong (don't think Japan doesn't satirize us mercilessly for it). Not that it's always wrong, of course. For genres for which complexity does indeed make play deeper and more interesting--real-time strategy, for example, or sim games, or roguelikes, or any multiplayer game intended to have a tournament scene--this leads to expertly balanced, repeatedly astonishing, Swiss watch-like masterpieces. But does a first-person shooter really need fifty slightly different guns? Is a shmup with eight powerups all that different from a shmup with nine? Why create both an archer class and a mage class for a dungeon crawl if they play exactly the same tactically, aside from that one uses arrows as ammo and the other uses MP? (Don't give me "flavor" as an answer; that's nonsense. Flavor only differentiates those two classes for the five minutes of play, before you get used to the different sound and graphics sets and realize you are doing exactly the same thing.)

I am an American developer. My understanding of games is rooted in chess, Monopoly, Magic: The Gathering, and Dungeons and Dragons; I understand depth by way of complexity. I grew up playing video games, and, of course, all my childhood video game fantasies were built on the games of my youth done better. Sonic with rocket jumping! Platformers with robot protagonists with destroyable limbs, which could be replaced by defeating monsters and grafting them onto your body! RPGs that were part Zelda, part Final Fantasy, part X-Wing Alliance and part Chip's Challenge! Puzzle games with elaborate branching narratives based on your choice of solution! And it took me twenty years to realize this, but while all of these made great daydreams, they would have made terrible games. For one, the sole purpose of those games was to find creative ways to relive gameplay experiences I had already had. For another, they were designed around my playstyle and my experience as a player--not the curious thumbs of a gamer who had wandered in, curious, determined to figure things out for herself and wanting to play her own way. Depth through interesting permutations of mechanics is only interesting to players already familiar with them.

Don't get me wrong, the lessons we as an industry have learned about gameplay mechanics from the early NES days are important. But gameplay mechanics alone are not gameplay. A video game isn't Parchesi, it isn't a novel, it isn't a bunch of guys in wizard hats rolling dice on a table screaming for a 20. It is a thing in which you press buttons and stuff happens on the screen, and yes, we do understand why that is fun. We don't have to speculate and say, no, we don't know why that's fun, but here's some stuff that is, so we'll streamline it and make it part of our game. We need to put down our Warhammer figs for a while, enjoyable as that is, and ride a roller coaster. We need to put away our baseball bats and rock climbing gear for a weekend and watch an ant struggle up a leaf. We need to sit at a desk during a boring meeting with nothing to entertain us but a rubber eraser, and watch what our fingers do with it. We need to get back in touch with the wheeeeeeee.

(Epic has the right idea with Bulletstorm. It's not a game about shooting things. It's a game about bouncing stuff around, with guns merely being the instrument by which that is accomplished.)

This alone is where new, innovative game mechanics arise. Not by playing Super Mario Bros. for the millionth time searching for an as-of-yet-unresolved imperfection or unmined tidbit of genius, not dicking around with variables in the physics engine of a first person shooter until something fun happens, not sitting on a couch with the rest of your team trying to wring out one brilliant idea on the spot as you watch the budget dry up. We have to stop trying to come up with a truly original video game idea just by playing video games.

Come. The weather's great, the sun's shining, and the park is open. Let's go where no gamer before us has dared.

Outside.

in which kevin gets over being fired

2011-05-29T08:36:46Z

(Written on a long Amtrak ride to Oberlin on Thursday, not long after the previous entry. Note effects of sleep deprivation.)

So, what happened next? Less than you might expect, actually. For once, there was no avalanche to follow the mudslide, no downward spiral into depression. I'd started this whole journey into madness from nothing--isolated from all my close friends; stuck in a conscience-eroding, dead-end job; unable to do as much as smile at a woman lest she respond with utter revulsion. But, curiously, the more frothing-at-the-mouth insane I got, the better things got for me, and the less sense my "nerd with nothing to lose" schtick made. You'd think people would look down on someone with a Beautiful Mind-like obsession with modern civilization's most frivolous craft--I mean, what other trade makes all other industry less productive?--but if there's one thing America respects, it's a lunatic with a dream.

I remember a Far Side comic from ages ago--eons--with a kid playing an NES in the background, and a lady with funny hair in the foreground looking at a newspaper. The newspaper is open to the Classifieds section, and there's a spot that says, "WANTED: Expert in the highly competitive field of Super Mario Bros. playing. Must have beaten World 8. $20/hr."

The ability of video games to take away time from other activities was well understood then, even before the NES era, when Nintendo made the first home games worth playing for more than thirty minutes at a time. It is common among workaholics to lament the amount of progress they've lost to video games--novels never finished, hobby projects never built, and so on. Video games are, in public perception, what you do instead of living. The sad (and, I must argue, exceptionally rare) cases of severe MUD, MOO, and later MMO addicts that human-interest news programs have been pouncing on for three years are a testament to the power of a compelling game to simulate achievement, community, and purpose in lives devoid of all three.

Indeed, someone who has spent his or her entire life doing nothing but play video games has missed out on a lot. But what the alarmists of A Current Affair and Fox News in the 1980s could never have foretold was the rise of real-world subcultures around video games, instead of inside of or about them. I'm not just talking first-person shooter clans or MMO guilds. Nor am I merely talking about the pizza parlor arcade machines where a young John Carmack sought refuge from his abusive father, or the newly homeless guys who used to be at the Tekken 5 machine every day at Chinatown Fair, or even the forums where an unlikely mix of closet-atheist Midwesterners, jaded undergrad socialists, and twelve-year-old Marilyn Manson fans pretended to be Final Fantasy IV characters together, forging real-life friendships that would last well into adulthood. I'm talking about 1-UP shirts at Hot Topic. I'm talking about Penny Arcade, and subsequently the PAX Prime and PAX East conventions. I'm talking about the demoscene, about chiptune, about pixel art, about interactive fiction--all movements that have established such an independent existence outside of video games that the artists within them cringe if you ask them where games fit in to their work. Media scholars before us, the Neil Postmans and Marshall McLuhans, warned us of the importance of leaving behind childish things, of the dangers of clinging to the warm light of our television screens when we needed the cold leaves of a book to truly bring us into the human experience--but we didn't. We simply let our toys grow up with us.

To deliberately misparaphrase Jay, of Jay and Silent Bob: "You know what's even better than video games? Talking about video games."

Career prospects be damned, video games have given me something I'd up to this point thought they could only take away: a life. I'm not even talking mainstream gamer culture, from which I've grown so apart that it is scarcely recognizable to me now. I'm talking about all the things outside video games that video games have inspired people to do.

You know what I did the day after I was fired? (After playing a shitload of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, of course.) I went to a Babycastles opening. The one immediately following the Nintendo DS exhibit I'd curated the previous month (in which, pyrrhically, I got to achieve a lifelong dream of seeing strangers play one of my games in an arcade cabinet--way to die, arcade era!). Folks I never would have met otherwise, familiar faces, greeted me as I came in, and we bobbed our heads to indie rock and headbanged to insane thrash metal as we repaired a handmade cabinet featuring a game about God and Darwin fighting each other with Tetris blocks.

Do you have any idea how jarring it is, one night after you get fired for being a scary frothing obsessive lunatic whose skills do not meet industry expectations, to be told by some random college girl, "Hey, I know you! You're one of those video game guys, doing all those cabinets and stuff." And then, after answering in the negative, being pulled aside to have a conversation about HTML5 Unicode font rendering that I'd thought I'd be too incompetent to have?

I talked to a keyboardist who was playing that night, a woman I'd asked out a couple months before--someone I'd gotten to know because she, like me, had given up everything she knew to follow her dream--and when I told her I'd been fired she hugged me and said, "We all fuck up our first big break." In a corner I found a teddy bear with a paper heart on it--scrawled on the front were the words "Curator: KEVIN CHEN." Next to it was a music stand with the words "CURATOR BIO," and underneath that, a stapled printout of the livejournal entry I wrote about Babycastles last year. And then later the dude who had texted me the following morning telling me to take that entry down, because I had name-dropped him and he was worried it'd affect his professional reputation--he gave me a high-five and invited me to an upcoming 24-hour game jam. It was hilariously baffling.

If I had been at the NYC game industry meetup, or GDC, or any other industry-focused event, I wouldn't have been able to make eye contact with anyone. But no one here, not even the industry folks, cared two shits that I had just bombed out of my first make-or-break industry job. At least, not tonight. We were just there to have a good time. And to them, I wasn't Kevin, disgraced hedge-wizard technomancer, but Kevin that guy who's here every opening, hey dude what's up, have a beer. I don't think I'd really internalized how much I'd become part of the organization--if you can call it that--until Kunal's housemate, who collects door tickets, refused my money. "Pay if you want to, man," she said, "but you don't have to. You're part of Kunal's crew, right?"

This was kind of a !!! moment for me. I have never been part of anything. Ever.

A couple days later, I went to a show my friends Jesse Jacobsen and Eve Blackwater were playing, in a terrible bar way out on the outskirts of Greenpoint. It was 9 PM on a Tuesday night, so the crowd consisted of pretty much the handful of friends Eve brought and the occasional curious, sullen alcoholic. The following band had moments in which the number of people on stage outnumbered the number of people in the audience. It was just one of those nights. And yet, all the musicians played their best--if a tree falls in a forest, it sounds just as sweet--and afterwards they congregated outside for a smoke and a chat. Good musicians have bad days at the office, too, I guess, but they don't get paid as much.

Then the following weekend I went to Blip Festival, NYC's biggest annual chiptune concert, at which I attended an afternoon workshop on making homebrew for the NES, which got me genuinely excited about programming for the first time in months. (Never would I ever have imagined I'd have so much fun learning 6502 assembler. GOTO considered harmful?) Following that was the most motherfucking apeshit chiptune show ever, in which throngs of audience members were diving off the stage like crowdsurfing lemmings, and groupies were getting up on stage and flashing their tits, and half the chip community was up on stage chanting and clapping and cheering on a dude fiddling with a Game Boy. Not a DS, mind you. The very same unit, apparently, he played with as a kid in 1985. If the original sound engineers for the Game Boy, hired to be corner-cutters rather than artisans, heard the kind of music he was wresting out of that thing, they'd be shitting their pants.

(Which dude? Oh, just a passing acquaintance of mine. Just the drummer from some band you've probably never heard of.)

Yes. This is real. It exists.

If I could go back in time and tell my eight-year-old self that this is how he'd spend his weekends eighteen years later, I think he'd more than forgive me for being such a fuckup with his career ambitions.

Draw a line through this scatter plot of experiences. What do you see? Is it a man who, the spell of nostalgia broken over his childhood obsession, stands helpless as he watches everything he's built on it tumble down? Is it an Emperor Norton who, bereft of everything else that lends meaning to his existence, chooses to devote himself to the most frivolous goal imaginable, building a genuine sense of community and belonging around the illusion of something he knows he'll never have?

Naw. You think too little of me, if you do. Because, you see, my life is not built on video games. It's built on all this stuff built on top of video games. Which, after you take out the video games, stands pretty well on its own. It's going to be there, as a part of me--even if, God forbid, I pull a John Romero and fuck up so badly I'll never find work in the industry again, it's always going to be a part of me.

To phrase it in the most awkward, nonsensically '80s way possible: The kamikaze career ambition was just a ruse! THE VIDEO GAMES WERE IN YOU ALL ALONG.

If and when I lose everything, I will let this failure discourage me. But I haven't lost everything yet.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have an iPhone game to design.

in which kevin is fired for working too hard

2011-05-27T21:57:56Z

(Written on the Amtrak to Oberlin on Thursday.)

Hey dames 'n' fellas. Been a while. I imagine you're wondering where I've been.

Long story short, I got fired from my job three weeks ago, a month before my evaluation period was up. Went home and slept for a week; emails piled up, phone calls went unanswered. Fell into some sad times.

Short story long? Here goes.

So. First established game industry job, right? Wasn't working on a game. The market for small-budget games in NYC is unreliable at best, so my employers sometimes did interactive iPad apps for healthcare industry ad agencies--"PowerPoints on steroids," my boss called them--in order to secure funding for their own game projects. They put me on one of those. Seemed like a pretty good deal at the time--they'd hire me as an independent contractor to do a dull, easy project, and if they liked what I've did after three months we'd have a meeting and talk about whether I'd be a good fit for permanent staff.

They showed me some PDF mockups the ad agency had sent--about twenty slides, eight of which had bar graphs, maybe five or six which had unique features like videos and animated content, with a note saying that more slides were coming soon. The higher-ups at the ad agency hadn't approved the art yet, but they had sent us some placeholder graphics so I could get started before then. According to the impenetrably marketingspeak-dense timetable document the project deadline was May 31. Definitely looked doable to me.

So I hit the ground running and churned out a pretty little tech demo by the end of the first week, with skeletal implementations of all the major unique features, and even some minor miracles like a clever solution for iPad 1 support for external monitor mirroring (a task far more difficult and complicated than Steve Jobs's presentations make it seem), and everything was good for a while. I made brisk enough progress that my boss and co-worker let me take a little time out each day to join their design brainstorming sessions for future game projects, in which I had the time of my life coming up with new gameplay elements and modeling tactical situations with toy soldiers and coming up with player decision trees and systems for balancing risk-reward and all the other things real designers do. I was doing both my job and the job I wanted to do; I was making up for lost time in a hurry. And I don't know what my boss thought of my abilities, but he was certainly impressed by my enthusiasm and my extraordinarily broad knowledge of game mechanics--not a day went by, it seemed, when I didn't astonish him. By the end of the first month, he'd already picked out the game project I'd be working on after my evaluation period was up. It looked like I had more than already proved my worth.

And then the final art came in, a month and a half before deadline. Along with thirty new slides. Some of which showed different images and bar graphs depending on choices the user would make in an interactive segment in the middle of the presentation.

Okay, I thought. I can still do this. I'll have to redo my bar graph class, and do a lot of the bar graph slides individually by hand (I have no idea why some artists insist on making very subtle aesthetic changes to each of two dozen bar graphs, so that no two are alike--it means the difference between two hours of work and two weeks), and tear out each of the slides I've done already and redo them according to the new designs, but if I put in some extra hours it should still be doable in the 90 or so days I have left. So I started working longer hours, coming in at nine in the morning(everyone else began their workday at like noon) and leaving at nine at night, copying and pasting placeholder graphics from the Photoshop for the bits I hadn't gotten to animate right yet. There was a lot more to do than I had originally scheduled for--more than double, in fact, as the ad agency had decided to make a lot of the slides I had already finished much more complicated--but I was still working quickly and none of the slides were technically challenging. I was making good progress. It would be tight, but with a bit of a sprint at the end I was still going to make it. It was hardly impossible.

And then, at the beginning of the seventh week, my boss said, "So, you're basically done, right? We can send them an alpha by next Monday?"

Uh, what?

No. Of course I wasn't "basically done." I was about 60% done, since we were just barely less than two thirds of the way through a three month project. But, of course, I didn't tell him that in so many words. I showed him what I had, and what I expected to be finished by the end of the week, and he seemed pretty satisfied with my answer.

I worked over seventy hours that week.

It started off pretty reasonable. Monday I stayed until eight, which is no big deal since most of the stuff I like to do in my off time starts around then anyway. Tuesday I realized this wasn't going to be enough, and I stayed until ten. Wednesday I stayed until midnight, Thursday I stayed until 2 in the morning. Friday, figuring I didn't need to get up for work the next day, I worked until the sun rose at 5. And then I kept working until 8, just to make it an even 23.

When most people work those hours they are slacking off. Nuh-uh. The commit log does not lie. I've never been so focused in my life--and I will never, ever think of myself as a lazy, all-talk-no-action slacker again.

By next Monday we had a second tech demo. I'd made progress, in leaps and bounds, but it wasn't alpha. Not even close. I was stuck on some of the bugs in the bar graph class--remember, I'd only started programming for iOS in earnest several months prior; I had to pick up subtleties like function arguments in local versus global coordinate systems and the relationship between bounds and frame rectangles during the project--and my boss had expressed dissatisfaction with the fidelity of some of the visuals in previous slides to the mockups the ad agency had sent, so much of the time I'd planned for fixing bugs went into tweaking color values and adding drop shadows. My boss was slightly displeased, but far more alarmed by my behavior--he noticed that I was really nervous and high-strung, and asked me to chill out. I explained that I was nervous and high strung because I had worked 23 consecutive hours Friday-Saturday getting this done and it still wasn't finished to my satisfaction.

His reaction: "Jesus Christ, Kevin! Don't ever do that to yourself again."

My other co-worker, the marketing / amateur genius lead coder, raised en eyebrow, less nonplussed but still somewhat disturbed. "It's just work," he told me. "You're not even working on a game."

I smiled. It's good to unexpectedly see your hard work appreciated. But the simple truth was that there was no way this project was going to completed in twenty eight-hour days--even if I worked my fastest, there were far too many slides left to implement even if all the technology behind it was complete and problem-free (which it wasn't). At my current rate, with the overtime, I could finish maybe two or three easy slides a day. Of the fifty slides we had to do, we had maybe a dozen, all of which needed to be redone--and a few of the ones we hadn't even started yet had animated content that would take about a workday each to finish.

I told my boss this at lunch, and he nodded gravely and said, "I believe in you, Kevin. You can get this done."

Of course, confidence had nothing to do with it. But how was I supposed to tell him that? I racked my brain for ways to automate the process, improve my efficiency, cut technical corners without affecting the aesthetics--computer science is, after all, the science of saving work--but I could come up with nothing. The designers of each slide had been careful to make each slide totally unique in some way, preventing any sort of template or factory class from being useful. (Even the colors and font sizes varied subtly from slide to slide, and, well, we weren't being paid to make something almost like what they gave us.) Worse, as this was a traditional print media agency with little understanding of technology, they had paid meticulous attention to the layout and formatting of all the text in every slide--despite my boss's assurance, for some reason, that we'd read in all the text from XML so they could localize it. (Any experienced web designer will tell you that XML and the art of layout are two things that just do not mix. Not to mention that things like superscripts and copyright characters in XML, which our mockups were riddled with, turn out to be things iOS handles very, very clumsily.) Copying and pasting text from labels in the Photoshop files the ad agency had given us yielded lots of unprintable characters, meaning we had to either run every bar graph label, every disclaimer, every header and subtitle and bullet through a script to strip them out--or retype all the text in 50 slides by hand. (The latter, ultimately, was what my poor co-worker ended up doing. But I'll get to that later.)

This was a mountain pretending to be a molehill. We'd been door-in-the-faced at the halfway mark. I had misjudged the size of this project. My boss had misjudged the size of this project. My co-worker had misjudged the size of this project. We all did. But, at this point, it seemed like I was the only one who understood by just how much we had misjudged.

And I couldn't help but think, given my inexperience, that maybe my boss hadn't misjudged at all. Maybe this is how big their usual projects were, and I was just pussying out because I'd never worked on a project on this scale under this deadline. Maybe this was not an unreasonable task for an experienced, capable worker. Maybe this was a test to see whether I could handle it. And maybe I was falling behind not because the project was too big, but because I wasn't good enough--I wasn't fast enough, smart enough, experienced enough. Maybe it was not the time to throw up my hands and say "fuck this," but buckle down and tattoo "OR DIE TRYING" across my forehead.

Sure, this situation was a bit of a clusterfuck. But maybe that's just what software engineering of any stripe is--one big clusterfuck. And if I couldn't handle a clusterfuck in a three-month pimped-out PowerPoint presentation, how could I expect to handle a clusterfuck in a two-year triple-A title?

I already know I'm not the world's best programmer. Not the world's worst, either; not by a long shot. But I don't have the ego, the mathematical ability, the coolness under pressure, or the sheer genius resourcefulness that typically drives programmers to greatness. What I do have--my sole natural talent--is stubborn, bullheaded perseverance.

Might as well play to my strengths.

So I cancelled my commitments for the week, stocked the office minifridge with caffeinated soda and TV dinners, and redoubled my efforts. I let the emails pile up in my inbox; I left 30 Facebook notifications unread. I stopped reading webcomics, abandoned all my monsters on Castle Age, cancelled all my pending dates on OKCupid. Anything that could serve as a distraction was put aside. I left the office at 9 that night, 11 the next, 4 in the morning the next. I was like the Minecraft guy in his Global Game Jam video. I ate, slept, breathed Objective-C; my dreams were arranged in confusing, exploding view hierarchies that never quite seemed to be where their X and Y coordinates said they should be.

In the middle of the week my boss and co-worker pulled me aside to perform an intervention. "You're freaking us out," they said. "You're no good to us dead."

I wanted to tell them, "Look. I was unemployed for two years before I started working with you. I've been rejected by all 34 game companies in New York. Yours is the only one to give me a second chance. In the past four weeks I've been rejected by two grad schools, one MFA program, one summer workshop, three literary journals, the GDC volunteer program, and four women. Showing myself I can do this is all I have left." But what came out was, "I guess I have a lot to prove, huh?"

The next week--first week of the final month--an email from the ad agency arrived in our inbox. Paraphrased: "We have decided to push forward the deadline to May 21 in order to give the presentation time to clear health approvals in Europe. Please send the completed presentation to us by Wednesday for our final internal review."

My boss was livid. "Final internal review?" he bellowed. "It clearly says on the timetable, 'Development phase concludes on May 31!"

"And before that, it says, 'Internal review and approvals,'" said our marketing guy irritably. "If you had actually read the timetable, you would have known that 'development' means something very different in marketing than it does in engineering. They want the final month for us to make final changes as approved by the regulatory agencies, not rush the first draft out the door."

I was, by this point, far too tired to be upset. After all, I'd crunched through all of the previous two weeks under the expectation of an early May alpha. This news changed nothing for me except for the stakes.

"How much do we have left," said the boss to me. I told him.

He threw up his hands. "Let's just get this done," he exclaimed boldly. "Tonight. All three of us. Let's power through this entire thing and get it done and over with tonight."

I wanted to say, "You've got to be fucking kidding me," but I knew better than that. I knew if I said that, he'd think I was saying it because it meant we'd have to work through a grueling crunch. I didn't care about that--I was already in the middle of a grueling crunch. I knew there was no way to explain to him that there were literally not enough hours between that day and the next to deliver a finished copy to the agency. Not even close. So I said, "Fine."

Then I excused myself, went out to the emergency stairwell, and threw a furious, screaming fit. And then I came back, struggling to preserve a cool, professional calm, and we worked on the blasted thing together until two in the morning.

Did we get it done? Of course not. Not even close. When we went down to the agency's offices on Wednesday to show them what we had they were quite disappointed. In part, of course, because they had no idea how it is that we did what we did. I have a feeling they thought we had some kind of machine that magically changed Photoshop PSDs into interactive animation, and that we had been sitting on our asses for three months playing video games instead of remembering to put their mockups in the paper tray. "Why don't you add a Gaussian blur over the text layer, maybe a color filter," one of them suggested. "Why did you make this text Helvetica Neue plain instead of Helvetica Neue Condensed? In our mockups it's Helvetica Neue Condensed. Can you change the kerning on this paragraph here?"

I held my tongue the entire time, letting the other guys speak unless it was a grunt of approval or an explanation how a certain feature was implemented, because otherwise I would have answered every complaint with, "Look, you're not paying us nearly enough, or giving us nearly enough time, to implement Microsoft Word on top of Photoshop in iOS from scratch. This isn't print. You can't just pull down a menu and have all that happen magically. iOS doesn't do any of those things. It'd take a week apiece for us to fake each of those features ourselves, and a month to do them properly."

(iOS doesn't even let you have bold and italic text in the same label--you have to create separate rectangles for each part of the text that has different formatting. Don't even ask how we ended up faking the superscripts for the presentation's many footnote citations.)

After the meeting, our liaison talked to our boss about future projects, and said, "I keep telling my superiors to put you guys on our interactive stuff, but they won't listen. This is why we need a game company like yours. We're not paying to train contractors. We need veterans. We need people who already have experience doing interactive, who know exactly what they're doing and can just sit down and get it done. Fast. We can't afford to let people learn on the job."

"Well," said the boss, smiling embarrassedly.

"Well what?"

"Well," he repeated.

We went back to the office and worked 28 hours straight. Then we all went home, slept a bit, came back, and did it again.

By this point I was beyond burned out. Not to the point where just looking at a computer monitor causes your stomach to tie up in knots. Not to the point where you freak out in the middle of an empty office and make weird sobbing noises and then start laughing uncontrollably. Not to the point where you wake up, your face sore from the pockmarks the keyboard has made from you inadvertently using it as a pillow, in the wee hours of the morning, babbling a nonsense proposed algorithm for an impossible problem in an imaginary programming language. Wusses. That's undergrad stuff, the kind of thing would-be CS major dropouts experience after pulling two or three all-nighters to finish a three-week term project they put off until the final weekend. No. This was the point where I had to squint at the monitor to even read the words on the screen because my vision had gone so blurry, the point where I had to look at an eighty-character plaintext text string four times to transcribe it from memory. This was the point where when I finally staggered home I'd vomit nothing into the toilet bowl, long dry heaves, despite not having had a drop of alcohol for weeks.

And yet, I'd still play with the toy soldiers before I left work. I'd position them on the hex grid in the visitor's lounge, imagining tactical situations, flanking mechanics, mentally drawing up relative attack and defense charts, dreaming up grand battles between exotic, never-seen-before unit types…

Naturally, the hours just got longer and longer, and my productivity got worse and worse. It took me a full eight hours to do what at the beginning of the project I could have done in twenty minutes. My boss and co-worker, now finally appreciating the sheer scope of this workload, nonetheless grew immensely resentful of me. Neither of them were programmers by training (though they were both quite skilled by experience), and I don't think they'd ever seen that degree of burnout before--I doubt they even knew what it was. I imagine they must have thought, "So this is what Kevin's been doing, working late all these hours? Staring at his screen like an idiot, whining about how tired he is, getting nothing done? God, no wonder we're so far behind. What an incompetent jackass." Their words were polite, but their tones grew snappier, more irritable. They'd jump in their seats at the sound of my voice, no matter how much I sieved the stress out of it. And I didn't take it out on them, and they didn't take it out on me, but something was clearly very, very wrong.

This is a team that, by their telling, had seen and fired a fair number of programmers who didn't work hard enough--stoners, lazies, complainers, suicidal folks whose heart wasn't in it anymore. I don't think they knew how to deal with a new hire who was literally prepared to work to the death. Maybe they didn't have the legal resources to deal with a karoshi. Maybe that was it. Who knows?

At around 9 PM on the Friday night before client review--the biggest of a series of big deadlines, as this was when, in their quaint print-media way, the client was going to put our app on an iPad and mail it--in an envelope--to their guy in Switzerland, I ordered a sandwich from the local pizza place and stayed late, struggling to work in corrections the agency had given us a few days before. It was a task that should have taken me five minutes, but in my current state it had taken me three hours. My boss asked me what I was doing, and I told him, and he told me to finish up what I was doing and send it to him. I did, and he handed me a little slip of paper. It was my last paycheck.

There was a long pause, his face stretched in a mix of furious anger, regret, disappointment, bitterness, and resentment, and finally, he said forcefully, "This isn't working out. Give me your keys."

I was too tired to protest. "I'm sorry I let you down," I said weakly, and gathered up my stuff and left.

I liked that job, despite what I put myself through to keep it. I liked my boss and my co-worker. I was so close, so close, to what I've wanted to do my entire life. And here I was, walking out the door after two months, not even at the end of my evaluation period, with a black mark on my professional reputation and not even a spot of relevant game development experience to put on my resume.

No one had asked me to put myself through all that. It was all my doing, my choice, to work those ridiculous hours, to bite off more than I could chew and then attempt the impossible in a vain attempt to save face. And even then, in the end, after having done my best, it wasn't enough. I could point fingers all I wanted, claim the project was impossible, blame my boss (it wasn't his fault), blame my co-worker (it definitely wasn't his fault), blame the agency (they didn't even know what they were doing), but ultimately what it boils down to is that I told them I could do something they thought I could do, something not totally unreasonable, and I couldn't do it. So the blame, no matter how you frame it, rests with me. I was the weakest link. Goodbye.

I spent a good part of that night on a bench in a park five blocks from the office, feeling pretty much exactly like the Bulletball guy. Enthusiasm and hard work are one thing, but, well, if I just don't have what it takes, I just don't have what it takes. I'd always had to work my ass off to accomplish what other programmers seem to be able to do effortlessly. Maybe, like the proverbial surgeon with the wobbly hands, I'm just not cut out for this kind of work.

I called Lisa, who struggled through the Oberlin CS program with me and now works at Sony ImageWorks, bought myself a bottle of Red Stripe, and went home, lying awake in bed, wondering if this was the end of my game development career. What an anticlimactic finish, if it was.

Guess what? It isn't. I haven't lost everything yet. Not by a long shot.

But I did lose something very important--my biggest career motivator up to this point, which has time and time again brought me to the brink of annihilation. My deathwish.

I have decided that, if I can help it, unless someone else's very life depends on it, I am not going to die at a desk.

God willing.

in which kevin remains the ayn rand of video games (damn it)

2011-03-22T02:29:53Z

I got three letters in the mail yesterday. One was from MIT, one was from Georgia Tech, and one was from Clarion West.

All three rejected me.

I think I liked it better when I wasn't getting mail.

the pleasure of the text

2011-03-20T17:55:24Z

Saw Sleep No More with aesvir last night. For those of you not familiar with the play, it's a loose adaptation of Macbeth that draws heavily from the imagery and thematic associations of Hitchcock's films and substitutes out most of the dialogue with interpretive dance. For the most part, neither the audience nor the cast are allowed to speak. That would be interesting enough if Sleep No More was a typical stage play. But this show is anything but.

The main draw of Sleep No More is that it is immersive drama. The show is not performed on a stage, but inside the rooms of an actual abandoned 1920s-era hotel that has been refurbished to look like it would have in its heyday--as remembered by a delusional schizophrenic. Actors get dressed, make and serve tea, use rotary phones, and bang out real letters on real typewriters as hordes of curious audience members, clad in creepy white bird-ghost masks, follow them through the hotel's sprawling maze of bedrooms, antechambers, and surreal nightmare fantasies. A patient audience member can skip the narrative entirely for an hour or so, if he or she chooses, and simply explore the hotel, learning about the story's background by examining destroyed teddy bears and labeled jars of preserved birds and such scattered about the play's magnificently, obsessively detailed sets. It feels a bit like real-life Silent Hill.

So, Shakespeare in the Dark, then? Hardly. This is a performance with no curtain, where Exeunt means nothing. When a scene completes actors will simply walk off in different directions and go about their business, and audience members individually make their own choices as to which characters to follow. So much happens at once that no individual audience member can see everything from every character's perspective the first time through (even though every scene eventually repeats, like a post-traumatic memory). Do you follow Macbeth, and watch him plan his hand-wringing treachery? Do you follow a witch, and observe the intrigue and personal anguish that motivates her manipulation of his fate? Do you follow Macduff and piece the events of the story together as he does? Or do you simply park yourself on one of the couches in the hotel lobby and watch everything that happens in there, Rear Window style? Every audience member chooses her own perspective. If you chat with fellow audience members after the show you may be surprised at how different your experience was from theirs.

LOOK AT FOUNTAIN PEN. FOLLOW BANQUO. Return to a location 30 minutes later to watch a wandering character repeat a scene you missed. Why does this experience feel so familiar?

The hordes of other audience members do have a very real presence in the space, and they lend a weird narrative distance to the scenes unfolding mere inches away. Since audience members are not permitted to speak during the performance, their importance in the story is limited almost exclusively for letting other audience members know there is something interesting to see (since people naturally form crowds around moments of spectacle). Together they form a Greek chorus of imaginary friends. Characters appear to be aware of your existence as a spectator--they may smile at you or gently push you out of their way--but you are like a mere hallucination to them, a troubling figment of their imaginations. The end result is striking, and perversely fascinating. You are an acknowledged voyeur. And yet, since there are dozens of other voyeurs all around you, there is none of the intimacy of actual voyeurism. The tale you observe belongs to neither you nor the actors, but to something in between.

Well, at least that's what I was thinking before one of the witches seduced me.

(SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT)

So, one of the witches is a fox. A stunningly gorgeous femme fatale, whose body-fitting green dress has a neckline that dives almost down to her navel. She uses her lady-wiles to lead Banquo to his doom as part of an elaborate, totally non-Shakespearean film-noir subplot that I believe is lifted from Hitchcock's Rebecca (I wouldn't know, I haven't seen it). For the most of the first act she's a stock seductress character--sexy, mysterious, and just a little bit sinister. Second act turns that depiction on its head. But in the first act, at least, you get a pretty strong first impression of who she is.

There is a brief early scene in which a group of characters greet each other in a street area, and during this scene Banquo and the witch slip out. If you follow them instead of watching the rest of the scene, you will see them wander into a little candy shop, where they have a surreptitious acrobatic, full-contact interpretive dance makeout on the countertop. Banquo exits the candy shop and rejoins the scene, while the witch stands by a little side door and watches. I was very surprised when she caught me ogling her, and looked right into my eyes, through my ghost-bird mask, and smiled, and offered me her hand.

Was she gesturing to a character behind me? No--the other characters were busy having a little dance-fight in the middle of the street. I decided to play along, and took her hand. She led me through the door into the next room--a bedroom--and shut the door behind her. She leaned back, slowly lifting one slim, toned leg in the air like Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate, and locked the door. I was alone in the room with her.

what

Okay, I figured, this must be like one of those boudoir scenes in those interactive laserdisc films from the '90s. There's going to be an implied seduction, and then she's going to stage-murder me, I don't know, maybe drive an invisible knife into my chest in an artful contact-improv way, and the lights are going to go out, and then she's probably just going to lead me through a secret door or something. Like any dutiful IF player I began to EXAMINE ROOM for plot cues. Oh, hey, look. A mirror. A photograph. A pile of frilly vintage lingerie--

She traced her fingers up my forearm, and looked up at me expectantly. I gently closed my fingers around her hand, staring into her deep latte eyes. She tilted her head, slowly, meaningfully. Never breaking eye contact, she opened the door to an armoire, climbed inside, and pulled me in with her. As the door swung shut I could see the blue-masked steward--one of the guys who stand around everywhere making sure no one does anything inappropriate with the actors--disappear from view. Her grin grew into a dirty smirk just as everything went entirely dark.

With the palm of one hand she shoved me up against the wall of the armoire. She traced her fingers up my chest. I could hear her breathing.

At this point I had no idea whether or not this was still part of the act.

With practiced, rehearsed ease, she walked her fingers up my forearms, across my shoulders, up my neck. My muscles seized up, then slowly loosed from the gentle intimacy of her touch. Wasn't one of the safety rules of this kind of theater--in haunted houses and such--that the audience wasn't allowed to touch the actors, and vice versa? Instinct told me to answer her gesture, to take the next step in the dance, but I was unsure. Would it be inappropriate if I touched her? Was it inappropriate that she was touching me? Was this far enough from the script that it didn't matter? I thought about my housemate's friend, the cute redheaded girl whose phone number I had gotten at a party the night before, and felt a sobering twinge of guilt. Should I break the rules and speak, and ask her to stop? Could I bring myself to do that, if I had the opportunity?

I felt the witch's fingers brush across my chin, under the mask, and put something into my mouth. It was soft and rough, like a tongue. A gentle press on my chin clamped the object between my teeth. There was a blinding glare of light as a door in the back of the armoire opened, revealing a bloodied room with a stone slab in the center--the kind used by morticians to examine corpses. She lay down on the slab and shut her eyes, her lithe body slack and lifeless. It appeared that, narratively speaking, our little indiscretion had killed her.

A heartbeat later, perfectly on cue, Banquo burst through the door at the far side of the room, with a procession of ghost-masked observers in tow, and began inspecting the body in an artful contact-dance duet. Midway through the inspection turned into an abstract dance-representation of wild, acrobatic sex. (Or at least, I think it did? A lot of interpretive dance looks like sex to me.) I reached under my mask and removed the object from my mouth. It was a piece of soft orange candy. A reward for the voyeur.

I followed her through the next few scenes, but she made no further acknowledgement of my presence. Just another voice in the cacophony, another hallucination in the sea of imaginary faces.

The feeling I took away from that experience was one of profound strangeness. Like randomly receiving a kiss from an attractive stranger on the subway. I had, as people do for most media, seen my role within the space as an invisible observer, kept outside the story by suspension of disbelief. But she had singled me out and pulled me in. Into the wardrobe--into the Narnia where fantasy is real. She had given me a role, however minor, for however brief, pushing me through the fourth wall, transforming me from an audience member to an actor. Unbeknownst to me, I had played my own role in the story--as a ghost. A symbolic representative of the men her character had seduced, or as a memory, or something of that ilk. And it was literally my own subjective experience, as there was no one to see that bit of the performance except her and me. She had let me be the story.

About an hour later, I returned to the morgue to see the scene repeat, and she walked through the side door alone.

It looks like I was not the only audience member to receive such special treatment. Later on that night I saw Banquo's ghost pull a masked old man off to the side, his face grim--perhaps to share a terrible secret? And at another point I saw a guilt-stricken Lady Macbeth embrace a bewildered plaid-shirted hipster.

Three things came to mind once the testosterone haze cleared from my brain.

First off, this is exactly the kind of experience Janet Murray anticipated from Hamlet on the Holodeck. To the letter. Murray even cites a Voyager episode in which Captain Janeway lives out more or less exactly this scene, except with the genders reversed, and set in a Regency novel instead of Prohibition-era New York. Media theorists can stop looking for the Grail; it has been found. Sleep No More IS Murray's Holodeck. The characters are human instead of AI and the play is Macbeth instead of Hamlet, but otherwise this is exactly the kind of experience Murray wanted--immersive, interactive, with selective agency, each audience member's experience being unique and subjective. (You know how they say a great actor can make you feel like he is performing for you and you alone? In this production it is sometimes literally true.) Punchdrunk Productions has done in theater what Murray and her successors believed could only be done with computers.

This is a game changer. I may have to seriously rethink my research goals.

Second, this answer by user apeloverage for an old b3ta Question of the Week, summarizing other answers to "Have you ever paid for sex?":

So you don't have to read the entire board -

i) Group of rugby oafs/hooting fratboys have sex with prostitute while shouting. Hilarity is asserted to have ensued.

ii) Amusing reference to dysfunctional relationships as a form of 'paying for sex'.

iii) Man has sex with prostitute who really liked him. Much like that time I saw that guy at the theatre who turned out to be Macbeth, King of Scotland, and not someone playing a role in order to receive payment from me.

Yeesh.

How much did aesvir pay for these tickets, again?

(aesvir, for the record, only ran into the Rebecca-witch once or twice, choosing instead to focus her attention on the beefcakey and occasionally naked Macduff.)

Third, all seduction is performance. After all, this isn't the first time a beautiful woman in a vintage '50s dress has pushed me against a--ahem. Moving right along.

This little episode bears some uncomfortable similarities to another form of private performance with no fourth wall--the lap dance. One participant is a real, actual human being who is using her real, actual body to pretend to be a fake human being. And not just any fake human being, but a character crafted specifically to suit the expectations and desires of the other participant. The other participant, while not always entirely passive, is playing himself.* He generally does not have the privilege of creating a character behind which he can mask his actions, but he is also spared the responsibility of entertaining the other participant. And so there are boundaries. Touching, for one, is generally not allowed--he is, after all, not touching the character's body, but the lapdancer's. The performance is an intimate but carefully preserved illusion.

In short: The actress was playing Rebecca, but I was actually seduced.

*Gendered pronouns here, since I am not sure lap dances for women actually exist. Or are the same experience, for that matter.

This is, on a personal level, extremely troubling. Mary Sue fantasies aside, one of the unspoken assumptions of fiction is that you cannot actually have any sort of intimate interaction with the characters, within the story or no. (Maybe I'd feel differently if I were one of those creeps who owns an anime girl body pillow?)

But the armoire scene is different in a lot of fundamental ways. Lap dances are degrading because they commoditize the female body--the man pays for the illusion of sexuality, and the woman receives only money in return. The woman is not consenting to have an intimate encounter with the man, she is consenting to give him the illusion of an intimate encounter. The woman does it because it's her job, and because she is obligated to do what the man says. The man has the privilege of believing the illusion.

In this case, though, the actress chose to initiate the armoire scene with me. She didn't have to--note that in a repeat of the scene she did not. I'm not going to flatter myself by claiming there was anything particularly attractive about me that led her to single me out; even if I were unusually handsome, she would have no way of seeing my face underneath my mask. I imagine I was picked because I was a young guy wandering through the set alone (aesvir had insisted we each take our own paths), who had clearly taken an interest in her performance, and she took pleasure in shattering my male gaze (and the distance the male gaze assumes). Or maybe she just thought I was cute. Doesn't matter, really. In a lap dance, the male is in control--he contractually binds the female to his expectations. But in this, she was totally in control. I didn't even have any idea what the fuck was going on.

It is startling, too, that she'd take such an exceptional risk by working that scene into her act. You'd think that part of the show would have an excess of safety precautions, with multiple wardens watching from afar to make sure everything was okay and maybe a window for other observers to look in and preserve the suspension of disbelief. (Would fit in neatly with the voyeurism theme!) It also seems against the entire idea of a mass audience to single out one audience member and do a little side performance just for him.

But, the more I think about it, the cleverer I realize it was. The erotic quality of the scene was entirely in my head--the product of her masterful acting. She wasn't just pushing me against the armoire wall to turn me on, she was keeping me at arm's length to keep some distance between her Rear Window and my throbbing Hitchcock. The gentle caresses were an in-character way of finding my mouth in the dark, so she could put the candy in. And should I be a jerk and actually try anything, the scene was short enough that if it took even a second too long the actor playing Macduff could pull open the secret door from the other side and cue the next scene. From her perspective, all she was doing was standing at arm's length from me in the dark, walking her fingers up my chest, and putting a piece of candy in my mouth, while pretending to be much closer. Not much more risque than what a circus clown or stage magician does.

And yet. The silent intimacy of the moment, the living of the fantasy, of having that hot minor character smile at you and pull you aside to wordlessly ravish you, was intense. I wanted it to be real.

I can't help but think that if the genders were reversed--with a dashing rake pulling a lone female audience member into a closet--that this scene would be construed as totally inappropriate. Even in a show that has Lady Macbeth trying in vain to wash the blood off her nude husband in a bathtub, and an interpretation of the witch's dance with a man dressed in nothing but an antelope's head fondling a topless Hecate under a strobe light. Would I have enjoyed the armoire scene nearly as much if I were gay?

Of course...she wouldn't have caught me ogling her, if I was. And I consented by taking her hand.

The narrative I constructed, in there, was my own.

Say, its only a paper moon
sailing over a cardboard sea.
But it wouldn't be make-believe
if you believed in me.

流浪到士林

2011-03-08T17:47:01Z

Caught up with high school friend Mike Hong today. Despite (or because of?) a litany of troubles he's grown up to be quite a mature, responsible adult, which is honestly far more than our teachers ever expected of him. He's currently teaching English at a cram school in Taipei to make ends meet so he can return to his other job as a freelance translator--both jobs to which NEHS alumni like him are exceptionally well suited.

Me: So, Mike. What are you doing to end the Taiwanese underpopulation crisis?
Mike: You should ask my brother. He's out with some girl again.
Me: Your brother's DNA is the future.
Mike: Yes. He will be the Adam who saves our race.

It's been pretty cool finding out that Mike, way out here on the far side of the world, has been living a lifestyle pretty similar to mine. He's been looking for work where he can get it, eating one meal a day when he can't, learning to be happy with what he's got. He shares a comfortably sized apartment with three college students and his brother, its various furnished surfaces cluttered with open textbooks and crates of instant ramen, and he keeps a bottle of Hennessy by his desk. We watched YouTube videos of local bands while killing time before his next shift at the cram school.

The food's cheaper in Taipei and live music is better in New York, but I guess being broke and underemployed in your twenties is more or less the same deal in any big city anywhere.

We spent some time puttering around Taipei a bit on his 150cc motorbike (Mike was nice enough to buy me a cheap helmet so we wouldn't run afoul of the law), a very Taiwanese experience I hadn't had the privilege of enjoying in maybe twelve years. I'd forgotten how disconcertingly fast those things go. Think a bicycle that goes almost as fast as a car, but with no pedal stirrups. Now imagine driving that down a busy road, with cars zipping past at 30-40mph in the opposite direction mere inches from your legs. Now imagine sitting behind the driver, on the same seat, holding the driver's shoulders, with your legs dangling in the air. How did these death traps become Taiwan's primary form of transport for like 50 years?

I've noticed that both Mike and I code-switch more slowly now that we're adults. We don't do it any less than when we were kids, we just do it a lot more awkwardly. Perhaps it's just that my Chinese is a little rusty or that Mike's been locked into bushiban-level English for too long, or perhaps it's that adult speech, being more deliberate, sounds jarringly unnatural when code-switched (as opposed to the rambling babble of children, for which leaps between rhythms are common even in monolingual speech), but for whatever reason it's clear that neither of us can speak two languages in a continuous flow anymore. You know how when people hit a break in thought in mid-speech, and say a pause word--"ahh" or "uhhh" or "well..." in English, "那“ in Mandarin, "ano...." in Japanese? Imagine that your brain automatically switches languages whenever you do that, like gears on a bike--the chain hops off the gear for a split second, and then just keeps on going instead of stopping. That's what it feels like to speak Chinglish again after so long--there's a noticeable stutter during the hop. Like playing chess and checkers on the same chessboard at the same time, when before it just felt like one game. Fellow NEHS alumni, those of you who have been better at keeping in touch with each other and still speak Chinglish on a regular basis--has this happened to you?

Tea. Tea is eternal. I am a coffee drinker at heart but I will never give up tea. I have discovered that what makes Taiwan's bubble milk tea taste so special, even when it uses cheap black tea leaves instead of that fancy jasmine or pu-erh stuff they use in America, is evaporated milk. I will guard this secret jealously until I blab about it to my livejournal. Wait, I'm blogging this right now, aren't I? Shit.

It is different being here as a visitor, knowing that there is nothing to keep me here. Comforting, even. I could get used to being a tourist in the country where I grew up.

why games are important

2011-03-02T13:07:20Z

As most of you who are New Yorkers are probably already well aware, Chinatown Fair, the last traditional arcade in NYC, shut its doors for the last time last week. Anecdotal reports say gamers congregated in the arcade to the very end, playing against each other until the last cabinet was hoisted into the street.

This comment on Kotaku, by "Adam," sums up perfectly what this place meant to six generations of gamers. I couldn't have said it better:

For those who do not know what it is to be in this city, I will say that the grit and filth in the streets may seem unwelcoming and even foreboding to many; but to people like me, who call this broken and bizarrely unified yet segregated city home, Chinatown Fair was for many what churches, synagogues, temples and mosques should be, but often fail to become.

It was a home for those of us who felt we couldn’t find comfort in our own homes. It was a church for those of us who wanted to congregate together and revel in the bliss of gaming. It was a watering hole for those looking to relax after a long day and meet up with friends both old and new for old times sake. But perhaps most importantly of all, for all the joy it bought, it provided something so few things in the city can truly do: it gave us a means to forget.

Rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight, and everyone in between, it didn’t matter what you were: Chinatown Fair was important to us all because it was an escape for us all.

Whether it be from bullies, abusive family members, an unfair job, an overbearing school schedule, the inane cycle of our daily lives, shattered dreams, broken promises or even from ourselves, Chinatown Fair allowed us to forget, for the cost of a quarter, that which hurt us most, and made us feel good about ourselves, even if only for a little while.

When I was forced to leave college due to financial constraints, Chinatown Fair helped me forget how painful that it was for me to be reminded of my family’s lack of wealth.

When I was looking for a job and couldn’t luck out with any of the applications or interviews, Chinatown Fair was there to help me clear my head.

When I was feeling suicidal, and my family was on the verge of facing homelessness, Chinatown Fair provided me with entertainment, solace and a sense of home.

When I was feeling alone, Chinatown Fair, and the people there, reminded me that no matter who you were, there was always someone there for you that would be there to hold you close, make you smile, or just remind you that you’re not alone by challenging you to a round of MvC2, talking anime and comics with you, or getting together to head down the street to Mcdonalds or Ten Ren for a snack and some company.

I can’t believe Chinatown Fair is gone. And while we all have to grow up, this one part of my life, and the lives of many others across numerous generations, that I think many of us would have never thought would go away.

I miss Chinatown Fair. I’ll never forget everything you meant to me. Thank you, old friend.

I wonder if the end of the last Internet cafe in Asia will garner this kind of sentimentality? I'm trying to imagine what it'd be like to see two aging Korean Starcraft champions going at it one last time on a pair of yellowing Alienware boxes, just for old time's sake, but all I can see is a pair of world-weary veterans playing chess in the park.

Play. It's not just for children, isn't it. Never has been.

kevin why are you dancing quietly

2011-03-01T03:10:45Z

Kevin, why are you dancing?

I GOT THE JOB.

Starting the 15th, I am going to be working three months for Tiny Mantis Entertainment as a general contractor, with the opportunity to negotiate for a full time position at the end of that period. I'm still technically a freelancer, so no health insurance. But I'll be working on site, for real money, for an established (if obscure) developer.

Also, they're offering me twice what I asked for. (In all fairness, the amount I asked for was a pittance--just barely enough to cover living expenses.)

This will be my first rent-paying, five-day-a-week office job in two years.

It will also be my first industry job not paid for in food, rent, or a token sum from a college grant. :]

Then why are you dancing quietly?

I am in my parents' apartment and I don't want to wake the neighbors.

Also I am not wearing shoes.

in which the two largest organs in kevin's body share a beer

2011-02-20T07:12:27Z

Two months ago, after one of his friends' shows, Kevin sticks around and chats with the band. He has a particularly pleasant conversation with the pianist, a petite, friendly gal with tulip tattoos on each arm and a red feather in her hair. She giggles and smiles whenever she looks at him, though she seems to do that for everybody--Kevin can't really tell if she favors him in particular. When the next few bands come up she and Kevin sit by each other, whispering to each other, and Kevin discovers that underneath her bubbly exterior is a deep weariness--the flip side of the adventurousness that comes with choosing to dedicate oneself to music full time, after years of trying to fit it in between shitty day jobs. She's talented, brave, and penniless. "I'm twenty-seven," she explains, "and I'm not getting any younger. It's now or never." Kevin relates.

When happier music takes the stage, they get up and dance. There are six people in the audience and the two of them are the only ones dancing.

At the end of the night Kevin helps his friend's band pack up their instruments and carry them to the subway station. The scene is somewhat reminiscent of the iconic album art for the Beatles' Abbey Road, with the four band members lugging their instruments over a crosswalk. It differs from Abbey Road in that there is a fifth person trailing behind them, ferrying an amp. Kevin sets down the amp, thanks the band for a great performance, high-fives his friend, hugs the pianist, and walks away.

He then goes to a bodega and buys a beer, which he brings back to his apartment and drinks by himself.

Scene.

DICK. What the hell.
BRAIN. Fuck off, dick. It was an awesome night.
DICK. You always do this to me. Always. You go and get to know women and have thoughtful, meaningful conversations while I, you let me starve.
BRAIN. Look, just because you're literally an insufferable prick--
DICK. You didn't even get her number, didn't you.
BRAIN. No. Why? I wasn't even sure she was interested.
DICK. It wouldn't have hurt to have taken the chance.
BRAIN. Yeah it would. It would have been rude, presumptuous, and embarrassing, and it would make things awkward the next time we met.
DICK. So stop being the poster child for the Taiwanese underpopulation crisis and be rude, presumptuous, and embarrassed. How fucking often do you meet a woman like her? It would have been worth the risk. And how could you possibly just assume that she would have been offended by something as innocent as asking for her number. I mean, realistically, yeah, you probably wouldn't be banging her right now, even if she liked you. You're not that kind of guy and I know you just met her. But is it really out of the question that she might be interested in, say, dinner and drinks? Or going with you to a jazz show in the Lower East Side sometime? Which might eventually lead to you and her brain matching rhythms to John Coltrane while I caress the inside of her love canal? It's not like she doesn't have a piece of equipment analogous to me, you know, which maybe might guide her actions too sometimes. Why do YOU always get to meet YOUR analogue when I--
BRAIN. You're a pretty big loudmouth for a dick.
DICK. I try.
BRAIN. And you of all people should know how cynical I am when it comes to my chances with women.
DICK. Maybe your chances wouldn't be so dismal if you'd actually go take some.
BRAIN. I take only calculated risks because I know better than to listen to you. And I don't like talking to you. Hey liver, howyadoin.
LIVER. FAKOVVVVVVVVVH (Gargles.)
DICK. Well, maybe you should. Maybe you wouldn't be so goddamned lonely if you listened to me instead of always doing the prudent, rational thing.
BRAIN. Don't you fucking go there.
DICK. I just did. Yeah? You going to do something about it?
(Kevin downs half the bottle.)
DICK. (Throbs.) Auuugh! Fuck!
LIVER. BLEAAAAAAAAAAAGH
BRAIN. Hahaha. Oh man.
DICK. Seriously, brain. I don't know what's with you. You're supposed to be the rational one here. She's cute. You like her. I like her. You've got music and life experiences and some personality traits in common. She's the first stranger you've developed a genuine emotional connection to in over a year. And now that you've gone on a few dates it's not like you get the heebie-jeebies trying to ask a lady out anymore, so I know you're not just wimping out. You're not asking her to marry you or anything; you just want an opportunity to get to know her and see if she's as nice as she seems. I mean, it didn't take half as much for you to ask out Molly.
BRAIN. Molly was a lesbian!
DICK. Well, you didn't know that! And neither did I! And it turned out well in the end, right? New friend. With great tits. We both won that round.
BRAIN. That's all you can think about, isn't it.
DICK. Of course. I'm a dick. You're the thinky bit.
BRAIN. Right.
DICK. And stop changing the subject. You. Cute pianist. No contact information, no hope of seeing again. Why.
BRAIN. She's a musician, all right? It's because she's a musician. Now leave me alone.
DICK. No I will not. That doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, and even if it did it wouldn't be true.
BRAIN. Yes it is. Go away.
DICK. You're shitting me. You love lady musicians. You relate to them. You want to fuck them. You forgive their neuroses. You want to marry them and live with them and make more of them. You've liked musicians for as long as I've liked women.
BRAIN. And that's exactly the problem.
DICK. Explain.
BRAIN. (Now clearly soused.) They're too perfect.
DICK. The fuck. For crying out loud, they eat, shit, and make mistakes like any other human--
BRAIN. Shut up, dick. Shut up. They're so intense about what they do, you know, and they're so expressive. They're not content with living lives of banal mediocrity. They're...in tune. With who they are.
DICK. Ugh. Let me handle the pillow talk, 'kay, and maybe you'll have an excuse to use it.
BRAIN. Shut up! Fuck....you. No. See, it's not that there's anything wrong with them. You know that. Certain women in our life...you, in particular, know how you get around them.
DICK. Fuck yeah.
BRAIN. Yup. And, see, we go to shows and stuff, and they let it all out. They wear it on their sleeve. That intense passion we have, that scares boring women away--they have it too. Society thinks it's psycho, but to them it's just being honest. They play when the music's theirs and dance when it's not. They improvise songs, poems; they form impromptu barbershop quartets on the subway. Even when it's shit--even if you wrote down what they sang, and it was shit--for the moment, it's magic. They live in the moment, shape the moment, harness the energy of the moment. They are the sound of a dozen hands clapping.
DICK. ...Like you write. Or, at least, like you write when you're not trashed out of your mind.
BRAIN. No. No, it's not like that. I can't say, "Wait here half an hour while I write a love poem for you." What good is it if they fall in love with erf_ if it means they get stuck with Kevin? Sure, there's the whole rehearsal and practice practice practice bit. But there's a natural aptitude to music. A spontaneously exercised skill. The capability of producing an improvised product, as well as an architected one. Music, to you and me, it's a big part of who we are...but them, they ARE music. They live it. They are made of it. It's part of everything they do.
DICK. You are making less sense by the phoneme.
BRAIN. I know. I know! And I don't care. You remember, a couple weeks ago, two of your friends were freestyling drunk after Puppet Playlist--and that other time they had this great a capella thing going on--
DICK. Yeah, as if it's my fault you haven't been practicing guitar lately. I don't see the point of this.
BRAIN. You're a point. No--it's not just about the ability to sing, or play an instrument. It's about making it a way of life. A way of life I did not choose.
DICK. So choose it. It's obviously important to you.
BRAIN. Not like this. I could pick up the guitar today, forego all this programming shit, become decently good at it in five, ten years--but I wouldn't be like these people. These people, they've been practicing their entire lives. It is their lives. Their hobby, their job, their lifestyle. They majored in it, while I was banging myself against a computer desk; they work two shitty jobs forty hours a week so they can work more doing it with the rest of their time.
DICK. So?
BRAIN. So, like, to me, they're endless sources of beauty and magic. Regular human beings, too, who eat and shit and have flaws and all that, but who every now and then have the power to create something that resonates with you. Something that resonates with me. Something more important than all the algorithms and video games and fusion reactors in the world.
DICK. But to them....
BRAIN. What could I possibly offer a musician lady in a relationship.
DICK. Me!
BRAIN. You flatter yourself.
DICK. Now don't sell yourself short.
BRAIN. Zing?
DICK. You're pretty good with a turn of phrase when you're functioning properly. For all your idiot stubbornness, you're at least getting better at getting the ladies to notice you.
BRAIN. Well...scenario. Suppose this pianist woman does like me. Suppose I managed to persuade her, with this first impression, that I'm someone who makes her feel special. Someone she'd like to spend a Saturday night cuddling with.
DICK. Cuddling?
BRAIN. For the sake of argument! Anyway. So. Relationship. What happens then? My relationship to the Brooklyn music scene is strictly as an audience member. And a well-liked one, apparently. But. Think of all the things the female musicians who have rejected you, the countless dozens, went on to do with their boyfriends. In front of you.
DICK. Serenades.
BRAIN. Duets.
DICK. Swing dancing.
BRAIN. Contra dancing.
DICK. Blues dancing.
BRAIN. Picking up on the accompaniment when her boyfriend hums a tune.
DICK. Joining a bunch of theater friends in a chorus of Les Miserables.
BRAIN. Writing each other songs.
DICK. Teaching each other their respective instruments in their bedroom voices.
BRAIN. Making up songs on the spot.
DICK. Ballroom dancing to songs that aren't meant to be ballroom danced to.
BRAIN. And all we can do is curl up like a stone and listen.
DICK. The magic only goes in one direction.
BRAIN. Like Echo to her Narcissus.
DICK. Like Echo to her Narcissus.

(Beat.)

BRAIN. You're not really Kevin's dick, are you.
DICK. How could you tell.
BRAIN. You're throbbing.
DICK. Kevin's dick throbs.
BRAIN. Dicks don't talk.
(DICK curls, revealing itself to be Kevin's HEART.)
HEART. Goodness, you have no idea how uncomfortable hiding like that feels.
BRAIN. How did you get to be such a selfish, desperate, inconsiderate jerk, heart.
HEART. I'm broken.
BRAIN. Long time now?
HEART. Yeah.

(Beat.)

BRAIN. All those examples.
HEART. Yeah?
BRAIN. This doesn't happen to be all about one woman, does it.
HEART. No. But it's what my time with that woman taught you you'd never be.
BRAIN. I guess.

(The bottle is empty. LIVER screams.)

BRAIN. What the hell.
HEART. Yeah?
BRAIN. Pianist gal. Next show she plays, I'm going to try again.
HEART. She's going to think you're a creep.
BRAIN. I'd like to think I know better than to give her that impression.
HEART. You know better than to give her that impression because you've gotten enough women upset with you for being stupidly persistent.
BRAIN. She's twenty-seven, remember, and not getting any younger. And you're twenty-five.
(KEVIN picks up the bottle and drops it in the recycle bin.)
HEART. You're a dick.

Two months later, Kevin goes to a show her new band is opening for. She remembers him, smiles at him, sits down next to him after her set is over. She dances with him when the last band plays its final song. Moment the curtain falls, she says, "Shit! My keyboard! Gotta jet!" and runs off backstage. The rest of her new band shrugs, and trundles after her. Last Kevin sees of her is her clambering into a taxi, worriedly coaxing an enormous synthesizer into the backseat.

HEART. Musicians.
BRAIN. Yeahp.
HEART. You know what they say: Best you'll ever be is their second love.
BRAIN. Let's go get a beer.

(LIVER weeps.)

who is the best

2011-02-18T08:39:48Z

Ukraine.

Ukraine is the best.

(edit) Okay, the Netherlands can be the best too. But only because the Netherlands has Caro Emerald.

massively multiplayer macbeth

2011-02-17T00:05:41Z

As promised, my ludic narrative paper "Massively Multiplayer Macbeth: Hamlet After the Holodeck." It's a bit rough in places because of the 8,000 word limit, and the bibliography is garbage because I banged that part out at the last minute, but the general ideas are all there.

Next time I'll plan my writing and editing schedule better. If there is a next time.

(Filtered HTML and no norobots...I give it maybe two days before SEO spambots start harvesting snippets of it to put in fake blogs. Markov chains, hurrah?)

exceptionalism mad libs

2011-02-07T22:27:28Z

Virtually every country in an emerging position of power has produced a document to this template at some point:

Dear rest of world,

It has come to our attention that you do not take us seriously enough. We are the number one supplier of [CHIEF EXPORT] and the number [NUMBER BETWEEN ONE AND TWENTY] producer of [LIST OF SECONDARY EXPORTS]. We have a GDP of [NUMBER WITH MANY TRAILING ZEROES]. International businesses the world over have headquarters in our cities, since every businessman worth his salt knows that in the current economic climate, a business simply cannot survive without our market. Foreign economists have tried to imitate our policies and our business culture, but to no success. Our economy is the envy of the world.

Culturally, too, we are a dominant force. Where in [FOREIGN CITY] or in [FOREIGN CITY] can you go a day without seeing your children enjoy [INDIGENOUS CULTURAL COMMODITY]? Where in [FOREIGN CITY], [FOREIGN CITY], or [FOREIGN CITY] can you walk fifty [LOCAL UNIT OF DISTANCE] without the opportunity to dine on [LOCAL CUISINE]? Can you walk a hundred [LOCAL UNIT OF DISTANCE] without hearing the people speak our beloved mother tongue, or the dulcet sounds of [LOCAL MUSICAL INSTRUMENT]? In the past, it was you who came to us. Now, it is we who come to you.

And yet. The old guard still condescends to us as a second-class nation. Your political leaders trivialize our influence, while making deals with each other against us; your business leaders lobby for tariffs and protectionist policies to hurt our exports, while they themselves flock in droves to capitalize on the opportunities offered by our markets; your dishonest media (which, let's face it, is nothing more than your mouthpiece) slanders us with lies and false rumors in order to damage our national reputation. It could not be more clear, rest of world. You're jealous. No, worse than that. You're scared.

[CURRENT SUPERPOWER], in particular, has been unwilling to give us the respect we deserve. Why, we cannot say. Perhaps they have held on to power so long that they have grown soft. Perhaps they have enjoyed their dominance of the world's markets to the point where they think it belongs exclusively to them. Perhaps they have grown so used to lording it over us that they are appalled, appalled, when someone dares go their own way, against their agenda. Who can tell? We can only speculate. But actions speak louder than words, and the military forces they have stationed near [CONTESTED MINOR OUTLYING TERRITORIES] say volumes about their intent.

All these are empty threats, of course. We barely deign to respond to them. For, you see, these are the words of an empire in decline, clinging on to its last shred of relevance in the modern world. I have lived and worked among [CURRENT SUPERPOWER]'s people for [NUMBER LESS THAN TEN] years. I know what they are like. They are plagued by [CURRENT SUPERPOWER DOMESTIC ISSUES], forces that are slowly dissolving them from the inside; their workers struggle in vain to match the quality of our goods. Their people, fettered by [QUALITIES ASSOCIATED WITH RACIST STEREOTYPE OF CURRENT SUPERPOWER], can only cry out in impotent rage when they see our [POSITIVE QUALITIES ASSOCIATED WITH RACIST STEREOTYPE OF COUNTRY]. They are mired in [IMPERIAL FOREIGN CONFLICT]. Their troubles have blinded them to their own decline. And yet, their hubris is so deep they cannot see that the world has passed them by. Sure, they might have a bigger military than us, a bigger economy than us, and more territory and political influence than us--for now. But not for long.

[CURRENT SUPERPOWER] is trapped in a [RECENT WORLD CONFLICT] mentality. It's time for [CURRENT SUPERPOWER] to move on. If it accepts its fading relevance gracefully, perhaps history will regard it kindly. Anyone who has been following the events of the past ten years knows that the era of [CURRENT SUPERPOWER] has passed. The era of [NAME OF COUNTRY] is here.

And yet, they do not realize this. How can their leaders be so foolish, so selfish, so tainted with pride, that they cannot realize that without us, [CURRENT SUPERPOWER] has no future? Has their racism towards our people, reflected in a history of persecution, conquest, and imperialist violence, starting with [REVISIONIST HISTORICAL ACCUSATION] and ending with [RECENT CONFLICT UNRELATED TO RACISM], polluted their judgement?

For [YEARS SINCE CURRENT SUPERPOWER'S RISE TO SUPERPOWERDOM], [CURRENT SUPERPOWER] has been telling us what to do. But no more! We have earned the right to say no. It's about time someone stood up to your arrogance. It's about time the rest of the world stopped bowing down to their demands, and who better to lead the rest of the world than us?

"Oh, they're just a flash in the pan," foreign academics lie. "Their economic growth is a bubble. Their political influence owes itself to a fluke. Their military growth is dependent on weapons sales from other countries. Their success is not sustainable."

Silly foreigners. You mean well, but you are simply ignorant of the truth. We have studied the same models, the same theories, the same historical trends. If our academics were to come up with similar conclusions for your country, we would agree.

But you forget one thing: We're not you. We are, in fact, unique. And it is because of something we have, something that you could learn from us, that we will grow more powerful forever.

That thing, of course, is our cultural values.

Foreigners the world over marvel at our [LIST OF CULTURAL VALUES]. Did you think it was an accident that we invented [LIST OF ANCIENT INVENTIONS]? Our [CULTURAL VALUE] made us what it was today. We started in a weak social, military, and economic position, but through the hard work and effort of our people, inspired to genius by their love of [CULTURAL VALUE], we were able to overcome those shortcomings and become a global power. Our [CULTURAL VALUE] makes us build better goods, better weapons, and better policies than you can ever dream of. Our children are raised to appreciate [CULTURAL VALUE], making them poised to become the leaders of the world, whereas your children grow fat and lazy since you teach them [OPPOSITE OF CULTURAL VALUE] from the day they are born. It is because you cannot understand [CULTURAL VALUE] that you cannot understand our success. Because of [CULTURAL VALUE], we are, put simply, better people than you. I know your jealousy and your racism makes it hard to understand this, but try.

Sure, some theorists may identify [SYSTEMIC WEAKNESS] as a systemic weakness in our model. But they forget that [CULTURAL VALUE] makes us immune to this weakness. Through [CULTURAL VALUE], [CULTURAL VALUE], and [OTHER CULTURAL VALUE], we will rise up to the challenge. We will not slowly collapse from forces from within, or be whittled down by forces from without, like every other empire in history. [PREVIOUS EMPIRE], [PREVIOUS EMPIRE], and [CURRENT SUPERPOWER] may have all been great in their own time, but they fell because they lacked one thing: [CULTURAL VALUE].

We will not make the same mistake. We know [CULTURAL VALUE], and if you desire, we can teach you. We will avoid your inevitable fate, and we can help you to avoid it too. Your people are sick and wrong, and they need help. If you let us guide you in the ways of [CULTURAL VALUE], you shall reap the benefits of basking in our glory, which will last through the ages.

You are bound to the law of nations, and protest when we violate it. But we are not bound to the law of nations. We serve a higher power. We serve [CULTURAL VALUE].

We can prove it. We're still growing, aren't we? Look at all the international businesses that work with us--they're growing too. You foreigners said we would collapse twenty years ago, forty years ago. We haven't yet, have we? In fact, we are still going strong. Isn't it time we dismissed the naysayers as who they are: naysayers?

The problem isn't that we haven't learned from the mistakes of history. The problem is that we simply understand history better than you.

Join us, or fade away. But never say we didn't make the offer.

[NAME OF COUNTRY]! [NAME OF COUNTRY]!!

[SNIPPET FROM NATIONAL ANTHEM].

In the name of [CULTURAL VALUE],

[Ancient Rome / the Ottoman Empire / Spain / the British Empire / the United States / France / Nazi Germany / the USSR / Japan / Republic of China / People's Republic of China / NAME OF COUNTRY]

the cup menaces with spikes of steel

2011-02-04T22:02:24Z

Not finished yet--but was too amused by this output from my currently-in-development narrative environment generator not to share:

Alice has a handheld crucifix, bloodied.
Bob has a handheld crucifix, bloodied.

Before them is the last remnant of a cherished childhood memory.

hey buddy, welcome back! so how was your flight?

2011-01-19T12:03:07Z

Cannot sucking fleep.

I've been reading reviews of airline food on Airlinemeals.net. I have no particular love of airline food, as a childhood punctuated by grueling, 20-hour economy-class flights has sort of turned me off air travel forever. But what's most fascinating about the site is not the enormous variety of microwaved frozen pastiches of ethnic fare, it's the tendency of reviewers to leave stories about their flight experiences in their reviews and the details in their photos. Especially the difficult, nausea-inducing, engine-rattling long-haul trans-continental/trans-oceanic flights--possibly the only remaining form of consumer transportation that feels more like a journey, as our ancestors understood it, than a mere commute.

By design, airlinemeals.net doesn't let you link to specific reviews, so alas. Search "pilot," "turbulence," "miserable," "delightful," "tired," and "red-eye" and you'll see what I mean. Also advanced search username "crew member" for commentary from the long-suffering flight attendants who have to live off this stuff.

ON JANUARY 21, 2009, FLIGHT UNITED AIRLINES 869 DEPARTED FROM LA GUARDIA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT FOR ITS FATEFUL MAIDEN VOYAGE. LITTLE DID THE 200 PASSENGERS AND CREW ABOARD KNOW THAT THE GALLEY WAS OUT OF SALTED PEANUTS. NO STARS

While it's well understood that the quality of economy class meals has fluctuated violently since the 1960s (most recently taking a nosedive after 9/11), holy shit first class meals were so much better when no one could afford to fly first class. Not that the TGI Fridays-style first class meals served on long-hauls by American carriers today don't look pretty good already (not that I know firsthand; I've never had one), but damn. These are meals I used to think were impractical to serve on anything smaller than a train. Real silverware? Little bottles of champagne, poured in logo-emblazoned glasses weighted to defeat turbulence? Authentic Swiss Emmantaler cheese? Pate? Caviar? Lobster? Made-to-order chateaubriand, served on real silver, carved by your seat by the flight attendant? Fuck you, terrorism.

why engineers make poor autocrats

2011-01-15T03:16:25Z

I need to prime the pump for my Georgia Tech writing sample. Let's talk Magnasanti. Behold:

I first saw this unprecedentedly huge SimCity 3000 megacity as part of the Credit Due installation at Babycastles, where it was surrounded by a fan of notes--dozens of pages of optimizing equations and geometric diagrams in efficient, impeccable handwriting. It's impossible to see this city, and the notes, and the blurb on the four years of research that led to its creation, and not feel threatened by its sinister, A Beautiful Mind-like genius. Population stable at six million (more than Hong Kong), at optimal population density! No roads! All housing and places of work within walking distance! A subway system with near-optimal transit time from any point to any other point! A library system of Alexandrian proportions! An astoundingly productive economy, a million-dollar budget surplus, extremely low crime, no derelict buildings, no traffic--and a thriving entertainment district of stadiums, casinos, and amusement parks at each corner, to boot. The city is so flawlessly designed that it has remained stable for fifty thousand in-game years--an order of magnitude longer than any real-world civilization.

On paper, this hyper-megapolis is the perfect city. It's every urban planner's wet dream. And that's precisely what makes it every citizen's worst nightmare.

Make no mistake, Magnasanti is possibly the most economically efficient (and resource-efficient?) city ever devised in simulation. It is perhaps mathematically impossible to make a more population-dense, stable city within the bounds of SimCity 3000's simulation constraints. But the goal of maximizing population density comes at a price. Average life expectancy is about 45; 10% of the population is unemployed; air pollution is high; there are no fire stations or hospitals; there are no schools (all Magnasantians are homeschooled with the aid of an "extracurricular reading program" provided by the city's library system); there are no public parks. Since all buildings are standardized to the optimal configuration, most of the city at street level is a smothering, tessellated dystopian hellscape of the same block over and over and over--in the words of the artist himself, "wherever they go, it’s like going to the same place." Even more ominously, the city government's high approval rating and extremely low incidence of complaints (I think there are under a half dozen per year?) are attributable to the city's lackluster education system and its hyper-efficient, extremely well-funded police department, effectively turning the city into a brainwashed police state. Revolt is impossible because the bread-and-circus of the city's entertainment district, coupled with state control of information, keeps the citizenry too complacent to understand they could do better. Squint hard enough into the a window in any of the city's identical skyscrapers and you can almost see Huxley's noble savage suffocating, unheard, under the sensory cacophony of six million feelies.

Ask most people to picture hell, and they think of burning lakes of sulfur, medieval torture devices, undead war criminals, endless television reruns. Ask me to picture hell, and I think of Magnasanti.

What Magnasanti's designer Vincent Ocasla has created is far more than just an optimal SimCity 3000 playthrough. It's an exploration of SimCity 3000's pro-business design principles taken to their horrifying end result. Taking the primary activities of most contemporary urban citizens--eating, sleeping, working, and consumer recreation--and optimizing them so they can be performed at maximum efficiency, Ocasla has produced both a superpower city-state unsurpassed in stability and wealth and an individual experience, endlessly repetitive in both time and space, that is completely devoid of thought, beauty, or meaning. As Ocasla notes in a Viceland interview last year, the grand irony of this city is that even though it is the largest civilization that can be built in SimCity 3000, there is never any reason for any citizen to leave their block. Each day, in endless Groundhog Day-like repetition, they eat, work, play, fuck, and sleep, and eventually die, without a thought to any of the distractions that would prevent them from doing those things well. (One could blame the necessary oversimplifications of the simulation for allowing this to happen, but if you've played SC3000 and understand how eager Sims are to complain, keeping them this complacent is no small feat!) Ocasla says that this is why he chose the motif of the Buddhist wheel of life and death as the city's defining visual element--his citizens are trapped in an eternal cycle of banal mediocrity, with not the slightest thought to escape.

Aside from the obvious commentary on authoritarian urban planning it's not hard to see in Magnasanti a satire of Arcosanti, its namesake and Will Wright's inspiration for the Sim City series itself, through which architect Paolo Soleri proposed reducing the ecological effects of human overpopulation through massive, meticulously designed structures designed to house a maximum number of people while minimizing space and ecological impact. One must only look as far as Maoist China, Soviet Russia, or the ambitions of contemporary North Korea to understand that Magnasanti is not a mere product of SC3000's simulation constraints--this same hyper-utilitarian design methodology has been and continues to be applied in planned cities in the real world, to the point where it is instantly visually recognizable, and to similar effect on citizens' quality of life. But in his interview with Viceland Ocasla implies that Magnasanti has a more specific, less obvious message. He draws attention to free market societies--what most Westerners would identify as as the opposite of a Magnasanti-like totalitarian state--and warns that, if there's any lesson to be taken away from Magnasanti, it's that optimizing for one variable inevitably comes at the expense of others. For free market societies, he names profit as that variable. That, to me, is a far more thought-provoking conclusion to take away from Ocasla's project than the well-tread point that totalitarianism is scary.

The traditional Adam Smith view of capitalism, with the invisible hand of the marketplace working its magic, is that all sorts of social good naturally occurs in an optimal free market--fair prices, meritocracy, equity, incentives to produce, and so on. All of those things are based on the idea of choice--that as individual consumers and producers repeatedly make the best of many possible choices, there will be an optimizing effect on many social and economic variables across the board. But does this choice really matter if, given the interests of all actors to optimize the same variable (profit), one choice is always best? In a free market, producers and consumers optimize their own economic benefit--consumers through low prices, producers through high profit.

If you let all other concerns--sustainability, ecological impact, public health, education, the arts, individual happiness, social justice, ethics, and so on--fall by the wayside, you end up with the exact same society that an omnipotent totalitarian dictator maximizing for total economic growth would choose. The repetitive, organic nature of Magnasanti's design implies that even though it was constructed by a single authoritarian dictator, something much like it could have easily emerged via the evolutionary effect of the same optimizing market choices being applied over and over. Even if you take into account that SC3000 is deliberately oversimplified as a civilization sim, it's not hard to see that a Magnasanti-like dystopia, regardless of how you get there, is the logical endpoint of a society that values efficient industry above all else. It's what the ideal of a society in which people only care about their jobs looks like.

This, I believe, makes the motif of the Buddhist death-wheel even more striking: Both the pinnacle of big government, in which a central authority meticulously shapes every facet of life to maximize industry, and the pinnacle of small government, in which the direction of civilization is guided entirely by private corporations whose sole aim is to maximize industry, end up in the same place. And that place is an ant farm. An ant farm where people work, play, sleep, and do little else, forever reliving the same experiences, forever trapped in the same place, in a prison of their own choosing--a lifestyle already too familiar to anyone who has ever been part of the daily grind in a big city anywhere in the world.

Ocasla claims he was heavily inspired by the imagery of the art film Koyaaniqatsi. I see it. I can believe it. In a world so focused on things like daily commutes, bank statements, and policy statistics it's easy to forget that our humanity itself is a resource--one not to be traded away at any price.

entire republic of china attempts to get laid, fails

2011-01-14T00:04:40Z

Friends. I am very, very tired. Long story short, both MIT and Georgia Tech grad school deadlines are coming up soon, and Murphy's Law of Recommendation Letters has been kicking my ass.

Somehow I've been able to find the energy to get involved in that whole Amy Chua debacle, in which a second generation Chinese-American professor of law at Yale managed to piss off the entire Chinese diaspora (and then some) with a Wall Street Journal article about the superiority of an authoritarian, abusive, high-expectations, stereotypically Asian parenting style over the self-esteem obsessed, basic-human-rights mollycoddling that supposedly turns other American kids into underperforming idiots. Cue screaming from thousands of second-generation Asian-Americans raised this way, many of them now grown up, who note the ruinous effect this parenting style had on their lives. We didn't get our higher suicide rate, our negative stereotypes, and our spate of bizarre cultural neuroses from having warm, loving parents who didn't lock us in our rooms if we didn't get straight As. But at least we're all lawyers and doctors now, right? Mama knows best. We should be thankful.

I've responded to the article at length on Facebook and on other people's journals, and I don't have the time or the energy to continue the discussion further. If you really want to know what I think, follow the comments on that original article, this Quora discussion, this blog post, this old but relevant video from the Onion (the WSJ seems to endorse her position!), and this Phillip Larkin poem; through that scatter plot is where the curve of my opinion lies. Don't miss Jeff Yang's followup article on SFGate, in which Chua either exonerates herself or tricks you into buying her book, depending on how cynical you are of her motivations.

But let's not talk about that right now. You know what worries Taiwanese people even more than raising kids? Making them. Population growth in Taiwan has fallen by a whopping 12% since 2009, lowering the average number of children born per woman to 1.15. That's something like the third lowest population growth in the world, and, needless to say, not at all sustainable. Economically or ecologically.

The infamous Taiwanese tabloid animators at NMA chime in, as this is a subject near and dear to their, uh, hearts:

A slogan contest? Oh, Taiwan. This is exactly the kind of thing that you do.

President Ma's war on celibacy is even more hilarious when you consider how most Taiwanese people are less than seven generations removed from mainland Chinese, who are the undisputed world champions in getting knocked up. How did we lose our way? Perhaps a little soul-searching is in order. The mainland has outproduced, outconsumed, outgunned and outfucked Taiwan for long enough! It's time for a change.

I reiterate my old pickup line. Save an endangered species: Have sex with me.

anko anko pai: the cult of asherah

2011-01-08T13:32:09Z

Just woke from a nightmare in which my high school friend Isaac had joined a Japanese nihilism cult called Anko Anko Pai. (cougarfang, too, who had joined when her boyfriend had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. And a bunch of my other younger Japanophile friends.) It was an apostate splinter of Shinto Buddhism. It spread its message exclusively via short anime clips on the Internet, featuring a cast of ominous minor "gods" who were the characters. The core ideal was to literally want nothing.

Members met in convention centers in an experience that was the precise intersection between evangelical conferences and anime conventions. It was horrifying. You'd walk into a screening room and there'd be a crowd of people watching anime projected against the wall. But the anime being shown was a 3-second repeating clip of Osaka from Azumanga Daioh waving her hands back and forth to a loud droning noise like an excited clothes dryer. And the audience would be lying in their seats (or in the ground) with 3D glasses on, all wearing the same neon-on-black "MIND OVER DREAM" t-shirt, heads limp against their shoulders, as if they were dead, chanting "CHU CHU CHU. NOTHING REALLY MATTERS. CHU CHU CHU. MIND OVER DREAM."

If you took the 3D glasses off any of the worshippers you'd see a glassy-eyed expression of shock. Like a person who had died having a heart attack. Except her mouth would still be moving.

There were also shorts consisting mostly of shots of empty rooms, with an unseen narrator--a giggly, flirty female voiceover (with English subs)--talking casually about changing her name so she could have a funny death certificate when she committed suicide. The stoned-looking convention volunteers, most of them college-age, would smile at you and tell you how liberating it was to finally know the truth that nothing mattered, and would wax poetic on how they wanted to die.

Anko Anko Pai was Emo: The Religion.

The cult's chanted mantras were spread as Internet memes (image macros and copypastas). They began on 2ch and spread to Nico Nico, and from there propagated to YouTube and 4chan, soon assimilating Anonymous's agenda. The wave of suicides (to which all members ultimately aspired) did little to stem its growth. By the time the New York Times, NBC, and Fox could do the obligatory panic piece it was already unstoppable, with the death toll in the tens of thousands and growing exponentially. No virus spreads faster than an Internet virus--especially one that grants instant identity and community to disillusioned young people in a weak job market who have been raised to obsess over their uncertain futures. It was weaponized otaku culture.

I was sent by Isaac's older sister Michelle to infiltrate an Anko Anko Pai convention and rescue him--my qualifications being that as a former convention volunteer and Former High School Anime Club President (lol) I knew how to social-engineer my way into restricted areas, and that as a former role model I may have been able to talk some sense into him.

The whole time I kept track of Twitter messages from cougarfang about how everything made SO MUCH SENSE NOW omg because MIND OVER DREAM had finally given her life some semblance of warmth, community, and purpose by encouraging her to simply give up on all three. A Facebook quiz app had given her a choice of 20 shikigamis to guide her into the neverlife and she was having trouble picking which one. This train of thought was occasionally interrupted by updates on an actual anko pie she was baking. There was not a single mention of her missing boyfriend.

Eventually even I was corrupted by the Lovecraftian horror that was the Anko Anko Pai movement. I don't know how it happened, but in the midst of my investigation I started seeing single frames of animated characters--the Major from Ghost in the Shell frowning disapprovedly, a little Totoro ghost, a cartoon version of the 4chan Anonymous mask--briefly superimpose the corners of my vision. A rictus-smiling Taiwanese teenager grabbed my wrist and reality bled out into a two-dimensional, minimalist hand-drawn version of itself. As my body slipped into a coma and all I could perceive was the smiling, crudely imitated hand-drawn face of my father staring at me sunlike in the distance I finally came to realize what MIND OVER DREAM meant:

Reality was but an illusion to these cultists. They were going to dispel it, through meditation and denial and ultimately suicide. They were going to trap themselves in a world in which there was no uncertainty. It was for the same reason a generation of geeks turned to model railroads, video gamesm and computer programming: They knew the parameters, they were not powerless, they were experts in the tropes that governed the universe. They were lucid dreamers, asleep. That is, until the moment they got up from their chairs and returned to waking lives full of insurmountable loneliness and powerlessness and futility. And now Anko Anko Pai was giving them the option to never return to their waking lives, even if it meant giving up their earthly ambitions and leaving their mortal bodies behind. It was the reverse act of looking away from the television screen to face your broken marriage. And in my unconsciousness I was trapped in my own mind, never to wake.

Do you have any idea how terrifying it is to be dreaming this? Especially if you are convinced you will never wake up?

Why am I telling you all this at seven in the morning? Because it's plausible enough to almost actually happen.

I guess there are two things to take away from this experience:

1) Nothing scares me more than institutionalized apathy, and
2) Never read Internet media essays before going to bed.