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missmentelle · 3 years

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Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

If you’ve been paying attention for the last couple of years, you might have noticed that the world has a bit of a misinformation problem.

The problem isn’t just with the recent election conspiracies, either. The last couple of years has brought us the rise (and occasionally fall) of misinformation-based movements like:

Sandy Hook conspiracies

Gamergate

Pizzagate

The MRA/incel/MGTOW movements

anti-vaxxers

flat-earthers

the birther movement

the Illuminati

climate change denial

Spygate

Holocaust denial

COVID-19 denial

5G panic

QAnon

But why do people believe this stuff?

It would be easy - too easy - to say that people fall for this stuff because they’re stupid. We all want to believe that smart people like us are immune from being taken in by deranged conspiracies. But it’s just not that simple. People from all walks of life are going down these rabbit holes - people with degrees and professional careers and rich lives have fallen for these theories, leaving their loved ones baffled. Decades-long relationships have splintered this year, as the number of people flocking to these conspiracies out of nowhere reaches a fever pitch.

So why do smart people start believing some incredibly stupid things? It’s because:

Our brains are built to identify patterns.

Our brains fucking love puzzles and patterns. This is a well-known phenomenon called apophenia, and at one point, it was probably helpful for our survival - the prehistoric human who noticed patterns in things like animal migration, plant life cycles and the movement of the stars was probably a lot more likely to survive than the human who couldn’t figure out how to use natural clues to navigate or find food.

The problem, though, is that we can’t really turn this off. Even when we’re presented with completely random data, we’ll see patterns. We see patterns in everything, even when there’s no pattern there. This is why people see Jesus in a burnt piece of toast or get superstitious about hockey playoffs or insist on always playing at a certain slot machine - our brains look for patterns in the constant barrage of random information in our daily lives, and insist that those patterns are really there, even when they’re completely imagined.

A lot of conspiracy theories have their roots in people making connections between things that aren’t really connected. The belief that “vaccines cause autism” was bolstered by the fact that the first recognizable symptoms of autism happen to appear at roughly the same time that children receive one of their rounds of childhood immunizations - the two things are completely unconnected, but our brains have a hard time letting go of the pattern they see there. Likewise, many people were quick to latch on to the fact that early maps of COVID infections were extremely similar to maps of 5G coverage - the fact that there’s a reasonable explanation for this (major cities are more likely to have both high COVID cases AND 5G networks) doesn’t change the fact that our brains just really, really want to see a connection there.

Our brains love proportionality.

Specifically, our brains like effects to be directly proportional to their causes - in other words, we like it when big events have big causes, and small causes only lead to small events. It’s uncomfortable for us when the reverse is true. And so anytime we feel like a “big” event (celebrity death, global pandemic, your precious child is diagnosed with autism) has a small or unsatisfying cause (car accident, pandemics just sort of happen every few decades, people just get autism sometimes), we sometimes feel the need to start looking around for the bigger, more sinister, “true” cause of that event.

Consider, for instance, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. In 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times by a Turkish member of a known Italian paramilitary secret society who’d recently escaped from prison - on the surface, it seems like the sort of thing conspiracy theorists salivate over, seeing how it was an actual multinational conspiracy. But they never had much interest in the assassination attempt. Why? Because the Pope didn’t die. He recovered from his injuries and went right back to Pope-ing. The event didn’t have a serious outcome, and so people are content with the idea that one extremist carried it out. The death of Princess Diana, however, has been fertile ground for conspiracy theories; even though a woman dying in a car accident is less weird than a man being shot four times by a paid political assassin, her death has attracted more conspiracy theories because it had a bigger outcome. A princess dying in a car accident doesn’t feel big enough. It’s unsatisfying. We want such a monumentous moment in history to have a bigger, more interesting cause.

These theories prey on pre-existing fear and anger.

Are you a terrified new parent who wants the best for their child and feels anxious about having them injected with a substance you don’t totally understand? Congrats, you’re a prime target for the anti-vaccine movement. Are you a young white male who doesn’t like seeing more and more games aimed at women and minorities, and is worried that “your” gaming culture is being stolen from you? You might have been very interested in something called Gamergate. Are you a right-wing white person who worries that “your” country and way of life is being stolen by immigrants, non-Christians and coastal liberals? You’re going to love the “all left-wingers are Satantic pedo baby-eaters” messaging of QAnon.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories are often aimed strategically at the anxieties and fears that people are already experiencing. No one likes being told that their fears are insane or irrational; it’s not hard to see why people gravitate towards communities that say “yes, you were right all along, and everyone who told you that you were nuts to be worried about this is just a dumb sheep. We believe you, and we have evidence that you were right along, right here.” Fear is a powerful motivator, and you can make people believe and do some pretty extreme things if you just keep telling them “yes, that thing you’re afraid of is true, but also it’s way worse than you could have ever imagined.”

Real information is often complicated, hard to understand, and inherently unsatisfying.

The information that comes from the scientific community is often very frustrating for a layperson; we want science to have hard-and-fast answers, but it doesn’t. The closest you get to a straight answer is often “it depends” or “we don’t know, but we think X might be likely”. Understanding the results of a scientific study with any confidence requires knowing about sampling practices, error types, effect sizes, confidence intervals and publishing biases. Even asking a simple question like “is X bad for my child” will usually get you a complicated, uncertain answer - in most cases, it really just depends. Not understanding complex topics makes people afraid - it makes it hard to trust that they’re being given the right information, and that they’re making the right choices.

Conspiracy theories and misinformation, on the other hand, are often simple, and they are certain. Vaccines bad. Natural things good. 5G bad. Organic food good. The reason girls won’t date you isn’t a complex combination of your social skills, hygiene, appearance, projected values, personal circumstances, degree of extroversion, luck and life phase - girls won’t date you because feminism is bad, and if we got rid of feminism you’d have a girlfriend. The reason Donald Trump was an unpopular president wasn’t a complex combination of his public bigotry, lack of decorum, lack of qualifications, open incompetence, nepotism, corruption, loss of soft power, refusal to uphold the basic responsibilities of his position or his constant lying - they hated him because he was fighting a secret sex cult and they’re all in it.

Instead of making you feel stupid because you’re overwhelmed with complex information, expert opinions and uncertain advice, conspiracy theories make you feel smart - smarter, in fact, than everyone who doesn’t believe in them. And that’s a powerful thing for people living in a credential-heavy world.

Many conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.

It is very difficult to prove a negative. If I tell you, for instance, that there’s no such thing as a purple swan, it would be very difficult for me to actually prove that to you - I could spend the rest of my life photographing swans and looking for swans and talking to people who know a lot about swans, and yet the slim possibility would still exist that there was a purple swan out there somewhere that I just hadn’t found yet. That’s why, in most circumstances, the burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim - if you tell me that purple swans exist, we should continue to assume that they don’t until you actually produce a purple swan.

Conspiracy theories, however, are built so that it’s nearly impossible to “prove” them wrong. Is there any proof that the world’s top-ranking politicians and celebrities are all in a giant child sex trafficking cult? No. But can you prove that they aren’t in a child sex-trafficking cult? No, not really. Even if I, again, spent the rest of my life investigating celebrities and following celebrities and talking to people who know celebrities, I still couldn’t definitely prove that this cult doesn’t exist - there’s always a chance that the specific celebrities I’ve investigated just aren’t in the cult (but other ones are!) or that they’re hiding evidence of the cult even better than we think. Lack of evidence for a conspiracy theory is always treated as more evidence for the theory - we can’t find anything because this goes even higher up than we think! They’re even more sophisticated at hiding this than we thought! People deeply entrenched in these theories don’t even realize that they are stuck in a circular loop where everything seems to prove their theory right - they just see a mountain of “evidence” for their side.

Our brains are very attached to information that we “learned” by ourselves.

Learning accurate information is not a particularly interactive or exciting experience. An expert or reliable source just presents the information to you in its entirety, you read or watch the information, and that’s the end of it. You can look for more information or look for clarification of something, but it’s a one-way street - the information is just laid out for you, you take what you need, end of story.

Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost never show their hand all at once. They drop little breadcrumbs of information that slowly lead you where they want you to go. This is why conspiracy theorists are forever telling you to “do your research” - they know that if they tell you everything at once, you won’t believe them. Instead, they want you to indoctrinate yourself slowly over time, by taking the little hints they give you and running off to find or invent evidence that matches that clue. If I tell you that celebrities often wear symbols that identify them as part of a cult and that you should “do your research” about it, you can absolutely find evidence that substantiates my claim - there are literally millions of photos of celebrities out there, and anyone who looks hard enough is guaranteed to find common shapes, poses and themes that might just mean something (they don’t - eyes and triangles are incredibly common design elements, and if I took enough pictures of you, I could also “prove” that you also clearly display symbols that signal you’re in the cult).

The fact that you “found” the evidence on your own, however, makes it more meaningful to you. We trust ourselves, and we trust that the patterns we uncover by ourselves are true. It doesn’t feel like you’re being fed misinformation - it feels like you’ve discovered an important truth that “they” didn’t want you to find, and you’ll hang onto that for dear life.

Older people have not learned to be media-literate in a digital world.

Fifty years ago, not just anyone could access popular media. All of this stuff had a huge barrier to entry - if you wanted to be on TV or be in the papers or have a radio show, you had to be a professional affiliated with a major media brand. Consumers didn’t have easy access to niche communities or alternative information - your sources of information were basically your local paper, the nightly news, and your morning radio show, and they all more or less agreed on the same set of facts. For decades, if it looked official and it appeared in print, you could probably trust that it was true.

Of course, we live in a very different world today - today, any asshole can accumulate an audience of millions, even if they have no credentials and nothing they say is actually true (like “The Food Babe”, a blogger with no credentials in medicine, nutrition, health sciences, biology or chemistry who peddles health misinformation to the 3 million people who visit her blog every month). It’s very tough for older people (and some younger people) to get their heads around the fact that it’s very easy to create an “official-looking” news source, and that they can’t necessarily trust everything they find on the internet. When you combine that with a tendency toward “clickbait headlines” that often misrepresent the information in the article, you have a generation struggling to determine who they can trust in a media landscape that doesn’t at all resemble the media landscape they once knew.

These beliefs become a part of someone’s identity.

A person doesn’t tell you that they believe in anti-vaxx information - they tell you that they ARE an anti-vaxxer. Likewise, people will tell you that they ARE a flat-earther, a birther, or a Gamergater. By design, these beliefs are not meant to be something you have a casual relationship with, like your opinion of pizza toppings or how much you trust local weather forecasts - they are meant to form a core part of your identity.

And once something becomes a core part of your identity, trying to make you stop believing it becomes almost impossible. Once we’ve formed an initial impression of something, facts just don’t change our minds. If you identify as an antivaxxer and I present evidence that disproves your beliefs, in your mind, I’m not correcting inaccurate information - I am launching a very personal attack against a core part of who you are. In fact, the more evidence I present, the more you will burrow down into your antivaxx beliefs, more confident than ever that you are right. Admitting that you are wrong about something that is important to you is painful, and your brain would prefer to simply deflect conflicting information rather than subject you to that pain.

We can see this at work with something called the confirmation bias. Simply put, once we believe something, our brains hold on to all evidence that that belief is true, and ignore evidence that it’s false. If I show you 100 articles that disprove your pet theory and 3 articles that confirm it, you’ll cling to those 3 articles and forget about the rest. Even if I show you nothing but articles that disprove your theory, you’ll likely go through them and pick out any ambiguous or conflicting information as evidence for “your side”, even if the conclusion of the article shows that you are wrong - our brains simply care about feeling right more than they care about what is actually true.

There is a strong community aspect to these theories.

There is no one quite as supportive or as understanding as a conspiracy theorist - provided, of course, that you believe in the same conspiracy theories that they do. People who start looking into these conspiracy theories are told that they aren’t crazy, and that their fears are totally valid. They’re told that the people in their lives who doubted them were just brainwashed sheep, but that they’ve finally found a community of people who get where they’re coming from. Whenever they report back to the group with the “evidence” they’ve found or the new elaborations on the conspiracy theory that they’ve been thinking of (“what if it’s even worse than we thought??”), they are given praise for their valuable contributions. These conspiracy groups often become important parts of people’s social networks - they can spend hours every day talking with like-minded people from these communities and sharing their ideas.

Of course, the flipside of this is that anyone who starts to doubt or move away from the conspiracy immediately loses that community and social support. People who have broken away from antivaxx and QAnon often say that the hardest part of leaving was losing the community and friendships they’d built - not necessarily giving up on the theory itself. Many people are rejected by their real-life friends and family once they start to get entrenched in conspiracy theories; the friendships they build online in the course of researching these theories often become the only social supports they have left, and losing those supports means having no one to turn to at all. This is by design - the threat of losing your community has kept people trapped in abusive religious sects and cults for as long as those things have existed.

#missmentelle #askmissmentelle #conspiracy theories #cults #psychology #science #neuroscience

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pseudofaux · 3 years

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even an injured hand grasps at grace

A lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng time ago I did a follower celebration with short fictions and promised a longer story to the winner. That (incredibly patient) winner was @fieryanmitsu, who asked for a story set after Mitsuhide’s Act II. Holidays, family stuff, a global pandemic, more family stuff, a crisis of creative drive, MORE holidays and MORE time later... Here, at last, it is. Anmitsu, thank you so much for participating in that follower celebration, for being so kind about the mortifying amount of time this has taken, and for being a fellow Cat Daddy fangirl. I am very, very grateful for your grace! M, 6000 words, SLBP Mitsuhide. CWs: obvious but unnamed depression, brief discussion of death by weapons. (But mostly it is happy-thinky-poetic wife worship and baby fever.)

Sometimes when she is exhausted she speaks in this silly way. His love for her makes him warm to his toes. Adorable, his wife is adorable. He will never again allow any other duty to shove her out of the place she deserves in the center of his heart.

He will never hold a sword again. The discovery that there is still any strength in the arm once so mighty, enough that he can use it to work: a cause for gratitude and relief. A gift. He can attend to the responsibilities of his new life. He has a new life. Master Tenkai knows better than most men what death looks like when it bears down in a flash of metal. Sword death is the smooth silver of steel, spear death is the sluggish brown of mud that will cradle a dying man, and death by bullet is the black of blood that comes out so thick it is purple before it is red. Weapon deaths are cold, as though to compensate for the heat of their forging. There is a depth of balance in this that he cannot yet name, a mystery of the heavens like the others he spends so much time thinking about and helping the mountain villagers understand.

This new life is mostly keeping up their modest home (half residence, half tiny temple), and sharing knowledge with the villagers and their children. Of course he still thinks of Sakamoto when he sees the children growing... but his entire life he has been too much in his own head, and since they came to the mountain he has gotten better at leaving memories alone. He does not forget, and he hopes this makes him a decent man. Like any decent monk, he allows the thoughts of Sakamoto their due, which is to rest and flow over him as water flows over every side of a fish. It is right that it surrounds him. He could not and cannot do anything for Sakamoto, or address the irreparable harm he caused. He can consider it, meditate on it, and live with what he has done. And he will. Because he can live.

Swordwork’s precision and steadiness are forever gone from him, he believes. But he still has his arm and still has his life, even after he made peace with losing much more before Hideyoshi’s sword came down. He can pet the cats that congregate around the little temple, and he can twirl bits of string and stalks of grass for them. He can still write, his characters more calligraphic than they were before. He has to work hard to make clear strokes when he teaches the village children, and he feels that is a just requirement. When the house needs repairs, he can make them, and he can draw air into his lungs and live with his failures and successes both, or at least live with his failures and the grace he has been given. He has the brush, and he has the strong walking stick that his wife has helped him cut to the right height. The staff is smooth in his hand after only a few months’ use, a little extra oil applied when they have it. He wonders if he is allowed this easy comfort, but will not allow a walking stick to be a thing that trips his thoughts. His watchword now is moderation, not abnegation. If a fallen tree limb comes to him he will be grateful, and if the wood breaks he will let it go. He is willing, now, to let so much go.

There is only one exception, and she sleeps easy these days, when the cold of night on the mountain curls them together as though they are rabbits in a burrow. They wake slowly to this dream life. The part of him that is a decent monk cannot help but wonder how different their lives might be if it had been this for them all along. He did not want to rule; he had only ever wanted to spare others the hardships of ruling, and allow all good people the comfort of safety, from most divine ruler to most helpless child. These thoughts are in his head. Here in their tiny room in the building that is their home and the village’s temple, she is in his arms. In his heart and his bones, he knows that fact is grander than any man’s attempt at divinity.

He never has to force smiles at the children who come to the temple to learn. They are rowdy, eager, and completely charming. He is comfortably grinning at a group of them when he catches sight of her at the bend in the path that leads to their home. She is smiling, too, and there are tall leafy greens sticking out of the pack behind her shoulders that remind him of the folded wings of a fine hawk, the kind favored by samurai and nature alike. What would they do, if not for her hawklike competence and gentle ferocity?

Likely starve, he tells himself, on both melancholy days and happy ones. It is only the truth. He has learned a few things, but cannot match her, and while he is always available to the villagers, he stays near the temple unless he is asked for in the town. She does their shopping, she is their face. No one of quality can resist being won over by the warmth of her smile.

The children are thrilled to see her, and it reminds him of a dream he has had several times now, something he has kept to himself because it is so precious and he still does not want to ask anything of her. He is not sure if the slips of dream come from the peace of their life or the torment they left behind them, whether the dream is reward or recompense. But the cheers of the children take hold of his heart and make a tapestry of the scraps of his happiest dreams, weaving them tightly with what he is truly seeing. His thoughts nearly take him to his knees-- or perhaps that is an insistent little person, tugging at the edge of his sleeve.

“Master Tenkai!” chirps the village child. “Hana is home, so it is time for our lesson!”

They teach the children together in the afternoon’s warm, clean light, and only send them home when it is time for her to prepare their evening meal and him to complete the evening sweeping of the temple floor. Later that night, she seems relaxed and sleepy next to him, full of food, full of love. She asks, “Do you remember when I asked you to bring me a stone, so I could make you pickles?”

That is a pleasant memory from their life before, a luminescent pearl floating through silt that suffocated so much happiness. But the memory itself is light. So his smile is easy and does not feel like punishment, and he nods and strokes the space between her shoulders.

“On this mountain I have all the stones I need,” she declares, pressing her cheek to his chest. The smoothness of her face is finer to him than any pearl, a marvel of sensation that settles him, instantly and completely. “And I will make you pickles every week, if you want them,” she adds.

“Only whenever you are inclined,” he says, drumming his fingertips to tickle her.

Her giggle is sleepy. “There’s not time to make them every day,” she quips, snuggling closer and sliding an ankle between his calves. He has only the one dream that is sweeter than his actual life, and he is keeping it close to his chest for now. But he will not keep anything closer to his chest than she is. They squeeze one another, and he expects they do not fully relax their arms until they fall asleep.

A winter has passed, and a spring. This is their first summer on the mountain, so they are learning the cycle of invigorating mornings, sweltering afternoons, and unpredictable nights. They have already learned from kind villagers how to best coax food from the pebbly soil of their garden, and their efforts in the summer are devoted to this every day until the air grows too hot and they retreat to the shade of the temple to fan themselves with their hands and drink water that (they hope) has managed to hold some of the chill of the night before.

Every morning he braids her hair, and in these summer days a few strands always escape and stick to the back of her neck, temptations that coax him to bare her shoulders and murmur along the skin he worships. She often swats him away, because even after tending the garden there is plenty of work to do. But sometimes she does not swat him away at all, and some days she draws closer with a magnificent, confident need. He cannot determine if it is need for him or need to show him something, but each time, their bodies become hotter still, sweat running like streams and stinging their eyes even as it makes moving together easier.

There is a day at midsummer when they cannot help themselves, resting on the step to their home. They are covered from the relentless sun by the good new roof of the temple. He is vulnerable to melancholy in the heavy air that precedes a storm. She knows this. By the time the thunder and rain seem to be on every side of them, heaven’s own veil around the little holy place where they live, their hands are in each other’s hair, she is straddling him, and he is kissing her so deeply he can taste their midmorning snack. The last time she went to town she came back with karashi seeds, and their food this week has been bright in their mouths, cleansing and flavorful. He is hungry for it.

“Mitsuhide,” she pants quietly. The rain around them is so dense no one would hear her, but that name is never spoken above the softest whisper. Her other sounds are louder, even louder than the roar of the rain, and he loosens his hold on himself to match her. He groans as he tilts his hips up toward hers, everything that he is straining for her. They are so warm that even though the air is cooling around them, the rain may as well be steam. One of her hands slides from his hair to his neck and then down his chest, between their bodies, until she palms his insistence and he gasps for her until she squeezes. They moan together, unbearably hot in the sweet agony before they join.

“Now? Here?” he asks. They’re alone, but he craves her comfort as much as her indulgence. There is always a point where he stops asking, but before that he needs permission. She gives it in a nod and shuffles off his lap onto the floor, still stroking him through his clothing. Her clothes are already loose from their embrace, and she puts her other hand inside her collar and tugs down until she is cupping her breast. His blood in his ears is louder than rain or crashing waves or the war chorus of a hundred desperate men. He lunges at her, one hand in her hair and another at the back of her neck to soften her landing. When he is over her, he snarls at her temple before kissing the space with the beastliness that is revealed by these stormy days. It is a wet kiss, and because his tongue cannot taste enough of her he ends up licking from her cheek to her hairline. He savors her, salt and spice and earth and somehow his, as he pushes into her hand. She does not let go of him. He never wants to let go of her.

His hand slips from her neck into the heaven of her opened collar, and his thumb finds her nipple between her fingers. She lets go, gives herself to him, and he pants adoration into her ear as he rolls the peak, beautifully strong, until she moans. He knows this is right, that nothing else in the world is anything next to the truth of how right it feels to cage her in, make her tremble, and soothe her, serve her.

So he doesn’t hold back. He tells her she is the most wonderful, beautiful, desirable, beloved. His mind makes poetry for her and he licks the words onto skin he pinches delicately between his teeth. You are rainfall to a dying man, you are here, you feel better than breezes, you are mine. After all he has done, he remains a man, and a man is an animal, as any man who has gone to war can say with certainty.

The thin clothes he wears for gardening are sticking to his body, and he swears he can feel the drag of each thread against his skin as he moves with her, friction enough to spark a fire through their sweat. Her hand on him is maddening kindling.

“You are flames,” he declares as he ruts down into her hand. “You are burning me.” A man is an animal, a gasping creature not sophisticated enough to express all she makes him feel.

She slows her hand and hums, pleased by they way he gives himself over. That is the way they play. “It is too wet for flames,” she murmurs, as though she is consoling him instead of throwing tinder on the fire she has made. “Drown in me instead of burning, my love.”

The affection in her words soothes his amorous madness and spreads the familiar, comfortable warmth to all the tips of his body as the power shifts between them again. He loves her so much. Could any man convey so much feeling? To be an animal is not bad, but it is base, and she is made of heaven and still chooses to be with him. He smiles at her in wonder of all her beauty and bravery. He will focus on giving her anything that he can.

“Gladly,” he whispers, smiling wider. He takes her wrist and pulls her away from her work. When she complies and settles her hand against the floor by her head, he unties the rope of faded jute braids that hold her kosode closed at her hips. She is worthy of finery but dressed in these threadbare rags with him instead, and still her eyes say she has what she desires. As he drops the thick cord beside their bodies, he thinks he will try to find her a pretty bead, or even a nice smooth stone from the stream, something to adorn her middle and give her pleasure when she sees it. She gives him so much pleasure.

Their clothes as temple keepers are very humble, but they are much easier to remove than their daily wear of only a year ago. Sacrilegious but sincere, he mutters his gratitude at the simplicity of baring her body to his eyes. Her slopes are gorgeous, winding like the gentlest river against the air. She reminds him of a war map he saw years ago, illustrated with hills and pools so lovely he mourned as war was planned against the unarmed ground.

He shakes away that memory to construct another of the way she looks right now, sensual and receptive, womanly in the way she came to be when they started their lives here. Back in control of herself, of both of them, she parts her lips and breathes his new name. He undoes the scrap of old kimono that serves for his sash, and peels away his own sweaty robe. When he comes back down to her, she has freed her arms from her sleeves and their hands find each other, fingers dancing warm and worn as they wrap together.

Now it is still raining, but the roar of it has quieted to a loving hiss. The light is gray and blue, so she looks like nighttime. She pulls him to her with the power of dusk closing flowers, and their kiss is moon-soft, full of promise instead of frenzy. Her lip is a marvel between his and he loves pressing it with his own lips and teeth and sucking gently to make it swell. He wants to touch it with his thumb while he’s inside her and then kiss her again, maybe kiss her while he touches her with his thumb.

The chill at his back cannot last when there is so much heat between them, no matter what she says of drowning instead of burning. A man can drown in the bubbles of a hot spring as well as he can in winter’s water. He sucks in a breath and breathes it out into her mouth, and when she does the same with more force he shudders. His hands slide to her hips, where her curves fit into his palms as though he were a farmer and she were a ripe stalk of rice. She is at least as crucial and nourishing.

He is so hard he doesn’t need to take himself in hand. The head of his cock slides (with a sureness he would never claim aloud) between her folds, against the spot that makes her thighs flex. The movement is easy, a slip if not for his control. They are always so eager for one another.

“How?” he asks, and kisses the chin she is offering as her head is thrown back. “Here? This? Just outside the reach of the rain?” A demon is in him, to tease her like this, but the demon wants her pleasure as surely as he does because this is what she wants, for everything to be drawn out until their tension snaps. “Do you want the air on all your skin?” he continues. “I will give you anything. Just tell me.”

She hums the thoughtful sound that means she’s thought of some way to drive him insane. Thunder cracks with an ominous sharpness in the distance, and when she tilts her head and looks at him there is lightning and mischief in her eyes. He squeezes her but still she wriggles out from beneath him... and she goes to one of the beams that holds up the roof, safe from the rain thanks to the overhang. She moves her feet back and bends at her waist and he can do nothing but feel blessed and aroused, so aroused he is stupid. The warmth she put in him turns to tingles, like she has displaced the lightning from her gaze and made his skin the sky and his bones the bare, vulnerable earth. Within himself he feels a frighteningly intense buzzing.

“This first,” she declares. “Just watch for now, darling. Stay where you are.” Her thighs and calves are so defined from the ways she has to toil in this new life that he feels a shadow of guilt for enjoying the sight of her so much. It vanishes when he sees her fingertips between her legs, right at his eye level. She is pulling his mind apart, but her method for that is giving him this gift, and in this life he takes what he is given.

“Yes,” he rasps, and swallows before the dryness in his though makes him cough. “Yes, of course.”

The movement of her arm slides her loosened braid along a shoulder like a brushstroke. Her touches are sure-- she told him months ago that she learned to do this when he made her sleep alone for nights on end. He curses his foolishness even as he is grateful for it. She is always turning the most miserable ingredients into feasts, his wife.

Her sure fingers make circles and dip into her folds to smear her arousal. She likes it a little messy sometimes, another thing she has revealed in the safety of their seclusion. He loves what she loves, and he wants to put his mouth on her, put his cock in her, so badly that he fears his voice will scar his throat in a mad escape if he has to stay apart from her much longer. But he will die of idiocy alone if he interrupts. So he watches, the cool air of isolation doing nothing to keep his belly from tightening when she coos. Her hips begin to drop forward to meet her hand and he bites the flesh of his palm to stave off insanity as long as he may. She is a cat, he realizes, playing with all his many frayed ends. When she glances back, whatever she sees on his face-- he must be flushed, he feels terribly hot-- makes her laugh, dark and sweet. She keeps going and keeps her eyes on him. There is that gentle command so uniquely her in the way she looks at him. It makes him feel like he is blooming frantically, too fast, a blossom pummeled by rain and completely out of control... and she keeps looking, keeps smiling, draws the moment into moments until he thinks he might sob.

And then she curls her fingers against herself to beckon him and says “Come here.” The way her voice puts the words somewhere between request and demand is flattering, but he has no time to be flattered. Rain-cooled air yields against his arms and legs as he rushes to her. Immediately, he is there behind her legs, positioning himself, and the heat of her backside would burn him were he not already so ruined. Against her at last, he can appreciate the way the weak light on her sweat-slicked back is more beautiful than the finest inkwash, the ways she smells competent and domestic and alluring, like the precious sweet scent of soil that hides between mountain pebbles. She is all these things, and she is so calm as his mind whirls in its delirium of adoration and arousal.

He doesn’t mean to tremble, but his hold on himself has been too tight, and the spaces where his teeth dug into his hand throb. Like the mongrel pet to a noble lady, he has little other purpose but to love her. He sees that she can sense it. There is a grace to her certainty when he grits his teeth, even though she is wound so tightly that when the head of his cock finally presses inside her, he must push. Slick, soft, smooth, she feels, somehow, despite the pressure. As he pushes fully inside, their groans are wanton to the point of inhumanity, more like the sound of creatures in the night than of a man and his wife. His wife, his wife. He pulls back and groans again at the way her body fights to keep him. He swipes the braid off her back and kisses her shoulder, pushing back in slowly as her soft, strong body welcomes him.

“More,” she cries, her first sound of vulnerability, and he is eager to take care of her. He knows to move steady and powerfully but keep it slow at first. She comes better around him, but needs to be allowed to focus, so he is quiet as he focuses on her and the way the muscles of his back stretch and roll to please her. He is still a fit man, and he hopes his body thrills her as hers thrills him.

She makes a needy noise between her teeth and moves faster, shaking just a little. She hisses “keep going,” and of course he does. The tension he felt a moment ago is so unimportant now he is not sure if it was real. In the time when things shift between them he no longer needs permission, and he feels the magic calm settling over him-- it is his turn. All he needs to do is what she needs from him, it’s so simple. And he would do anything she asked, for the chance to be so near her when she finds bliss. It is already rising up his legs, like a snake squeezing and sliding, like ripples... and her sighs are like waves. Maybe she is too wet to be flames because she is water itself. The way into her is blissful enough, a slick heavy pressure around him where she is swollen from all their kisses and touching. The challenge of it makes him grin with a ferality he usually keeps well out of sight, and he presses on, pulls back, kisses her shoulder again and calls her his beloved. His voice doesn’t shake.

Hers does. “Again,” she pleads, grasping back for his hand. “I want it again.” She guides his fingers in circles until he knows where she is and what she needs, and then she lets him give it to her. Trust is such a sacred thing.

When he touches her she laughs, and he laughs too, and fucks her with a great deal of joy. They find their pattern: her hips push back to meet his thrusts, so when he presses in, deeply, they fit as cleanly as a carpenter’s masterwork. The storm has truly cooled the air but all it does is chill the fresh sweat on their skin as they move. It invigorates him, makes his spirit shout with a freedom he cannot contemplate at the time. His wife is using the beam that holds up their roof to push back against him, allowing the tender space between her breasts to be abraded by the wood. There is room for nothing but happiness here, nothing to do but honor her sacrifice and make her feel more pleasure.

“Yes,” she rewards him with her voice for a particular thrust, dragging out the sound at a pitch that registers inside him while he is inside her. So he moves himself even faster to try and repeat it, then relishes the sweetness of her soft whine. It makes him feel like he is surprising her with his love for once, instead of the constant way she graces him with her own.

He leans over her a little more. “I want nothing as much as I want your happiness,” he tells her, the croon of his voice broken by the intense way their bodies are connecting. Her hand comes back over his, keeping him in place. Magnificent. “Go on,” he tells her. “Again, love. Just like you want. Just like I want. Again.”

She shudders and stops moving her hips (she clings adorably to the support beam, her arm as tense as her hand on his). He keeps going, because he knows that is what she expects. At the end, what she needs is to be filled, to be given something to clench around, and he needs to be that for her. He is so driven, from inside and out, to fuck her, that he cannot do anything else until he feels it, not think or breathe, only move into her as though he can shove bliss into her body. So he tries, until he feels the shaking of her legs as perfection alights, and then he takes one great breath before it hits them both as she squeezes tighter still. They gasp together again as her clenching and soft sounds pull his warmth to fill her. Abundantly. Deeply. The air comes out of his lungs onto her shoulders, then touches his cheeks with the softness of a cloud.

She is breathing heavily, and slowly she puts her weight against the wood and becomes still. There’s a gentle press against his hand before she drops her arm. He’s tempted to catch it and kiss her knuckles, but he does not want to move from being curled around her back. He does move his hand away and puts the arm around her belly instead, holding her that much closer. She feels exactly as warm and soft as a cat who has fallen asleep in the sun.

There is a slick, sticky feeling all around his cock, but there’s nothing unpleasant about it-- something in him actually relishes it, loves the thought of mixing, loves the thought of there being too much, it makes him want to take her to the floor and have her again-- and she does not ask him to move, so he stays until he softens. “Darling,” he whispers then. “I’m going to get us a cloth.” He has desires, but he has mastered himself.

But she mumbles “No. Hold me.”

So when he pulls out as not to slip from her, he simply sits down and pulls her with him, right down into his messy lap. There’s not a breath between the time they land and her turning so she can snuggle his chest. He strokes her hair and kisses her cheeks and nose and tells her what a marvel she is. She is all pliant affection, touching his arms, kissing his jaw, raising a love welt on his shoulder... reaching to stroke him gently, experimentally, just like she did when they were on the steps.

He has mastered himself, but not as well or fully as she has.

He pulls over their clothes and lays her out on top of them on the temple floor so he can join their bodies yet again, unhurried. They have the time for slow lovemaking in this life, and the grace. Her knees frame him as he moves and he cannot help but kiss one and then the other, reveling in her laughter (when he tickles her ribs, she tightens deliciously around him) as much as in her love. They lay together for a long time after that, cool and lazy in the quiet. When the rain is replaced by the first note of tentative birdsong, they know they should move in case someone comes to the temple. Despite the afternoon, they are a cautious couple by nature.

He attempts to clean her with their clothes, and carries her to their room to rest more comfortably. Her hair clings to the idea of a braid, but much of it is loose and floats about his arms in the sodden air. There is a satisfied tilt to her mouth when he helps her sit, and as he moves behind her the last he sees of her face is her smile curving deeper. He settles his robe over her shoulders and combs his fingers through her hair to ward off tangles. When he is finished, he replaits her hair and kisses the ribbon, then her mouth. She shakes her head, hiding her mouth and making him chase it. His rewards are sleepy giggles, enchantingly low, every time he catches her.

Several kisses later, he redresses and leaves for the kitchen to make them a simple meal. He delights in feeding her by hand as soon as he returns, because their closeness makes him feel whole and doting on her feels right. They stay near as they bathe, and then they go back to bed. It is early, but they will need to start early tomorrow to make up for the time they spent not working this afternoon. They have earned their sleep. He wonders if he will have the dream again.

Tucked into their bedding, she is in his arms, not yet dreaming herself. “Darling,” he says quietly into her hair, and murmurs love until she turns to kiss him sweetly and tells him to go to sleep.

He does have the dream. It is the most wonderful dream yet.

“Chichi-ue!” The voice is high and happy. It is coming from behind him, so he must turn away from the sight of his wife with a baby at her breast. Before he can see the little one who called him-- called him chichi-ue, his child-- the dream shifts and his wife is with an older child, tasting broth and listening patiently as the child recites ingredients. Then his wife is with two children, each holding one of her hands as they turn on the bend of the path to their home, and the smallest lets go of her to run to him. Their faces are all obscured by a sudden cloud of mountain dandelion seeds borne on the wind... all he can see are healthy little legs and feet in clean sandals, slapping against the ground as fast as they possibly can. The movement becomes a child’s hand with a brush, marvelously steady and precise. The same hand around a cluster of flower stems. Scraped knees and palms and little puffs of breath between shrieks and giggles as tears are soothed away. Two voices laughing over the plunking sound of skipped river stones ending their flights, and he recognizes the stream where they stand. The face and voice of the herbalist in the village, kindly telling them to be patient and then whispering something they might try. Four simple bowls, mismatched but meant to be together, set around a table. He can see this scene over his own shoulder, hears those same two voices dutifully expressing gratitude for their meal. The sounds change as his dream gives him the voices at different pitches through time, thankful for their rice, fish, vegetables; the bowls stay on the table, the food in them changing in dizzying whirls of color until he wakes.

“Good morning,” says his wife, in the voice she can only use for the first words of the day. Quiet and deep as a hidden pool. “I love you.”

He reaches to stroke her cheek, and tells her about the dream at last. She tells him her dreams, too.

Exhausted but awake, awed and unsure, he holds his son for the first time in the crook of his better arm. All of him shakes, because he is weeping at the perfect newness of this child. The baby, so unhappy with the village woman who came to help with the birth, settles into his father like poetry, and closes sweet dark eyes, and yawns flawlessly. They way the baby’s tongue trembles reminds him of a stretching cat. Master Tenkai of the mountain cannot look away. There is so much to see, and there is something about gazing at this tiny face, shifting magically from pinched to peaceful, that shows him the virtue of disregarding time completely. He should know it for what it is: another effort by man to control what he cannot. Everything that marks time in a human way can be broken. The sun rises no matter what people do in the night.

One of the temple cats senses a fellow creature and leans up to sniff at the baby. The baby’s father is happy to share the sight. The cat noses at the baby’s plumpness and then slinks off, but Tenkai stays where he sits, holding his son beside the bedding where the baby’s mother is gazing at them both with a tired, happy expression on her beautiful face. Her hair has all come loose from its ribbon. The woman from the village said it was an easy birth, but it certainly took its time. At the end, they have their perfect son, and she is alright. Everything is alright. The greatest challenge facing them at the moment is that he will have to learn to braid one-handed. He chuckles to himself and the baby blinks, then settles.

He will never hold a sword again. Whatever time may be, it feels like he made his peace with a more important truth a very long time ago, perhaps in another life entirely, and had only to relearn it. To hold his woman, and child, and the other he believes will join then... that is more than enough for the warrior who was once Mitsuhide, who became Master Tenkai of the mountain. All else may come and go. He will treat everything with respect, and allow all that is temporary to leave his hand like water. His family, permanent and indescribably precious, is the only thing that he will never, ever give up.

#slbp mitsuhide #slbp fanfic #slbp fanfiction #samurai love ballad party #fieryanmitsu

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demonslayedher · 3 years

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what important messages or meanings did demon slayer leave you? it left me a lot, i interpreted the "messages" and the "teachings" in my own way, i don't know if they correspond to the real messages given indirectly by the author in the manga but i'm objective in evaluating, i hope i succeeded. in the meantime i ask questions also because it's interesting to know the point of view of others 🦋

This has been such a pleasant thing to ponder all day, Anon. I feel like I had good ideas hours ago, but I’ll try to keep my answers succinct.

When I feel like I need to explain myself to people in real life for why I’m so obsessed with Kimetsu no Yaiba, besides it encompassing lore that very, very, very easily aligns with many of my long term interests, I often say it’s the simple shounen power fantasy I need in my life right now. A lot of analysts paying attention to the phenomenon in Japan have said its success is partly due to the pandemic, and how demon slaying is a basic, timeless story, and how many of Japan’s legends of demon slaying throughout the centuries have been about struggling against diseases. There is something straightforwardly comforting about the Demon Slayer Corp .vs. Kibutsuji Muzan and his hoard.

That’s not what I think Gotouge had in mind, though, as no one could had predicted how KnY’s success would skyrocket in time with the pandemic’s development. But there’s something to be a said for a good-vs-evil story, a never-give-up story, a friends-we-made-along-the-way story. Those are all good messages in and of themselves.

If I had to boil the main message I get from KnY down to one thing, it’s “you’re special, just like everyone else”, though I hate to boil it down to that sarcastic wording because Gotouge has always come across so sincere about this.

With such a varied cast full of characters who each have their own struggles, it’s really nice to see how people find themselves relating to different characters for different reasons (or looking to characters they admire because they see something they want to relate to in them), be it for circumstances or personality flaws or for their motivations. It’s also nice how I can enjoy a character for who they are and root for them even if I don’t particularly relate. Personality wise I see myself in some characters more than others, but there’s other things too. For example, as someone with a lot of younger siblings and someone who practices martial arts without being especially good at them, there are a number of little things that hit me on a deeply relatable level. Like, “ouch” levels.

But if I had to come back to that “you’re special, so is everyone else” thing, I have three general things to say about it: 1. Gotouge is in a very, very strange position, catapulted into being an extremely influential, special person. But Wani-sensei practically bleeds humility; and the insistence of looking for what’s wonderful and worth appreciating in other people has felt stronger and stronger the more popular KnY has gotten. The extra pages at the end of volume 23 really feel like they hammer this in.

2. Something a lot of people have pointed out about what makes KnY special is how much you see of the demons’ tragedies, and how Tanjiro is like Emphathy Incarnate. He’s not the first sympathetic hero out there and this isn’t the first shounen series with sad back stories for its villains. But what drives this home is that anyone has potential to become a demon who commits unforgivable crimes, no one is special.

3. Now for the message that probably hit me the hardest, driven home especially clearly in the Rengoku Vol. 0 extra: Is there any value in trying if you don’t have talent?

Obviously we all know we’re supposed to say “yes, there is, work hard, do your best” but I don’t think most of us really believe that. It is extremely easy to fall into patterns of “I’ve worked so hard but I can’t get ahead, I didn’t win this competition, my classmate is so much better than me, my work will always be second-rate, what is the point? Have I wasted all my effort because I can’t be the best? Because I can’t be noticed and praised? Will this hard work never amount to anything because other people are more talented than me?”

At least for me, it’s a lesson I need to learn over and over. Throughout KnY, it comes in many different forms: Kokushibo driven to throw away his life on two different occasions because he feels so inadequate compared to Yoriichi’s talent, Tanjiro feeling like he’ll never amount to anything no matter how hard he works because the rest of the world is still just so much more powerful than he is, Shinobu seeing only her own physical weakness when comparing herself to Kanae, Kaigaku feeling threatened when he’s not recognized as superior, and Giyuu, freaking Giyuu, so on and so forth.

But Shinjuro’s burn-out (not meant to be a pun), and young Kyojuro’s efforts to understand his change in demeanor, recognizing he cannot claim to know his father’s heart, but also coming dangerously close to falling into the same self-doubt, that hurt. Why even cheer on someone who you can tell is just going to fail anyway? What could that boy’s efforts even be worth?

But even though that boy was untalented and soon died, the strength of character he had was what left a profound impact on Kyojuro. It’s because of people like him that Kyojuro, who did later become an extremely powerful person worthy of Akaza’s attention, could overcome the tempting moments of wondering, “what’s the point of anyone who isn’t talented even trying at all?” Most of the characters are talented. Extremely talented, or extremely hard working. But none of them will ever be Yoriichi.

And Yoriichi never saw anything good in himself anyway.

This is where we all can benefit from having Tanjiro in our lives, to reread those last extra pages of volume 23, and to have someone remind us, we are special, we are precious, we are worthy of so much respect, and all of our efforts are important.

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hotmess-exe · 2 years

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I'm asking you about your favourite OC😌 anything you wanna say!

thank you 😔 my tummy has healed

his name is Eric and he's like genuinely, actually my oldest original character. i luv him very much

he was originally the older brother of my very first OC but that girl was scrapped for being boring af many years ago. i never let go of Eric, though, and he quickly became my absolute favorite

he is very kind, very compassionate, and among the sweetest characters i'll ever make. he's stupid pretty and wicked smart. he's the sort to make friends out of enemies without even trying.

he struggles with depression and will do so, so much for others in his quest to not let people down, to the point of self-neglect. ...i think i've always known that this is a manifestation of my own personal baggage 😂😂

i plan to make him a love interest in my second interactive fiction project! very excited to finally write him in full again. and like, properly fleshed out for the first time. so much nuance and depth to him 😭 i can't wait

i share a stupid number of coincidental, retrospective parallels with him. i realized this during the pandemic lol. i foisted a lot of concepts and things teen!me did not understand onto this character when i first wrote him... just to eventually look back at my own life and be like, 'holy shit, that's me' or 'holy shit, wait. i've done that.' i was 13 when i created him, so this still trips me out:

he is and has always been gay, even though i didn't have any grasp of what being LGBTQ+ is like outside of the facts that gay men and lesbians exist and people hate them for no good reason. that 'them' now very much includes me 😂 and all my friends lol

he is and has always been a sex worker, even though i did not have a proper understanding of sex work and how/when it differs from trafficking at ALL at that age. i wish i could say i barely understood sex either, but i'm p sure i had a porn addiction in hs, so no Fast forward to me at Eric's original age (19/early 20s) and I was, you guessed it, doing sex work.

i had a deeply problematic and frankly embarrassing portrayal of an abusive relationship with his older boyfriend/pimp as an integral part of his story. and... it turns out the ""friendship"" i had with the old guy who was finding me clients at one point was a lot less of a "friendship" and way more of an exploitative, possessive pimping situ sold to me as a partnership. like, honestly--i can't even begin to compare these dudes, the fictional bf and this real-life mf i knew, because the parallels between them, and even me and Eric during that time, are so many. you'd think i could have taken a step back and been like, 'oh shit. this is actually really similar to some of the more toxic elements of the abusive relationship i've been writing for literal years now' but. y'know what they about hindsight

i play every single interactive fiction game i touch as Eric, first and foremost. every. one.

consequently, i (and everyone else once that second project starts) have the choice of games title Drag Star to thank for the epiphany that Eric obviously had to be a drag queen. it just fit. I could picture him in every scene with such vividness that i just knew it was right. like a missing puzzle piece. ..........and hilariously enough, this was about 2 years after i got really, REALLY into make-up and drag. so that was like... the opposite of what usually happens with those parallels lol

i've been playing dress-up games since there was only ONE website for it 😂 so now i'm very, very happy that i get to rediscover my love for those silly things with the perfect excuse: drag looks for my favorite precious baby OC, Eric 🥰

i think that's prob more than enough, thank you so much for indulging me, anons!

#look an anon #er stuff #hotmess #just me gushing about a fictional man nothin to see here move along #ask me

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vanilla-blessing · 3 years

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Stray; or, The Paradise and The Palisades

A personal essay about Wolf’s Rain by Karin Malady (@SweetNAwful)

Rewatching a series has always spoken to my sense of time. Most of the time it seemed pointless - why watch something again when I could experience something new. To me, it was more exciting that way than going through the same emotional loop. Repeating a series over and over was the same as being trapped in the past. But, over time, I lightened up on that. I watched some of my favorite series a second time, often with a friend who hadn’t seen it before. Not only did having a fresh pair of eyes expand my view of the work but so did my accumulated experiences. After years had gone by, I’d realized I was a different person than when I first saw it. I had more of a grounding point for my experiences and knowledge. So, I was getting to see something I loved in new ways, which was important to me in itself. Last year, one of my girlfriends and I were trying to think of things to do to spend time together, as we were separated from each other by distance and a pandemic. This led to a weekly anime night of ours where we started by making our way through some of the Adult Swim sci-fi and cyberpunk shows. We started with Ghost in the Shell and moved on from there. A lot of these shows I only remembered in flashes - glimpses of random episodes fluttering through my childhood memories. I didn’t really understand how much of a connection I had with Wolf’s Rain until we got to it.

There was always something mysterious about the Adult Swim anime block. The promotion of these shows often involved cryptic phrases and stylish clips. When I was around ten, I would watch random episodes of things with my dad. I would see bits of Fooly Cooly, Inuyasha, Wolf’s Rain, Cowboy Bebop, and so many others out of context. I was deeply drawn in by the style of it all. The sense of space and action. The skeletal remains of Toga, Inuyasha’s father, loomed over the landscape much like mine did over me - giant. He was very important to me at that time in my life, even though he was someone who often scared me. My mom had just been in an accident and came back different. Something - maybe the result of an injury - changed and she didn’t seem like the same person anymore. It scared me, I felt like I lost her. So my dad got a lot of my attention - he was a jolly, funny, talkative. But he could also take things seriously and talk about deeper subjects. Not that it was all good times with him but he was more familiar. It didn’t make me sad in the same way. When my brother and I were allowed to stay up late, we watched Wolf’s Rain with him.

This is basically my father.

There was something about Wolf’s Rain that drew my dad into it. His eyes lit up so much more when he was explaining the story compared to Inuyasha or other anime. A pack of wolves wandering a desolate future, searching for Paradise - a place foretold in myth where all wolves will be free. I honestly don’t know why that idea appealed to him so much. Was he also a wounded wolf looking for Paradise? His life was told to me through a series of bar fights and near arrests. His actual arrest, his childhood, these are huge blanks in the story he told about himself. All I can really be certain is that he hurt a lot and that he never learned what to do with it. When Wolf’s Rain ended, he was disappointed with it. I don’t think he wanted the finality of death from the show. It could be because that hurt he carried was a threat to his life. I can never really know at this point in time. As I got older, our relationship got worse and recognized his abuse. I stopped talking to him after my parents got divorced and long before I started transitioning. Sometimes, however, I think back on the strange and mysterious feeling of watching Wolf’s Rain with him. There was something about the glow of the screen late at night, my dad sitting in his La-Z-Boy as a giant, lit by the blue of the TV screen.

Naturally, this means that revisiting something you’ve already seen is a form of time travel. Just thinking about the first time I experienced this anime has pulled me back into the past. But it also creates a bridge to the present as well. On my second watch, I was struck by the ways the anime could also relate to queerness. The way they form a pack and have to pass as humans to survive gave me a sense of found family and transness. And obviously Tsume is a leather daddy. We don’t see this directly in the story, of course. But, there is a possibility space where I can allow these characters to become queer. The way they are rejected can become my rejection and the way their search for safety, for a world that accepts them, can become my very same search.

Nothing will ever convince me he is straight.

Quent Yaiden stumbles around a broken world drunk and hateful. He is a bastard carried by sentimentality alone. This is a man who hunts wolves for revenge, after he believed a pack of wolves set his home town on fire and killed his family. A fire that was actually caused by the Noble’s soldiers. He spends his days wallowing in his pain, ignorant to the truth. However, he isn’t entirely alone as his trusty pet dog, Blue, guides him. It is because of him, people like him, that even brief visitations to the past become scary. If I linger here too long, I might become him. Of course, most people don’t want to become their parents. I see through Quent the ways my father had been swallowed by the world and how he could be a person who hurt me as much as he did. The truth of Quent’s tragedy isn’t the only thing obscured from him - Blue herself is half wolf. She gets scared he might find out and hid a precious part of herself from someone she cared deeply for, out of the fear that he would reject her if discovered. And he does - but this rejection is replaced by acceptance on his deathbed. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to forgive my father. Again and again, we’re told Paradise is for wolves. And Quent isn’t a wolf.

He is much better at drinking than he is hunting.

What does Paradise mean for me? Would it be a happy family, to correct my past? Or would it be something I built for myself? What Paradise was my father looking for? I’m glad that I can acknowledge his pain better, and see who he was a little clearer, even if I don’t like that person. Yet, at the same time, I don’t feel any closer to any answers. Maybe if I replayed the events again and again I could come to some new conclusion? Perhaps - and I say this treading the fear of revelation - perhaps he has already been trapped in his past, behind a palisade, and inventing a Paradise was simply the way he could escape from that. I’m not sure I will ever know. The most I can do is try to imagine a world in which people can heal and in which I can heal, and then hope to find my True Paradise.

#Wolf's Rain #Essay

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kkenvs3000 · 3 years

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My Ethics as a Nature Interpreter

Picture originally posted by Earth Eclipse

When writing this final post, I can appreciate that I learned a lot about nature and different interpretation methods throughout this course. I have done a lot of self-reflection and realize some of my personal beliefs and morals when it comes to nature interpretation. I realized that specific interpretation methods are not for me, and I think that's ok because at least I can say that I have tried them. I feel that trying different audiences on different audiences was part of helping us understand what does and doesn't work based on our personalities. In my understanding, ethics are my moral principles that direct my behavior or the actions I take. I believe that my ethics rely a lot on leaving nature alone and not causing much disturbance. I firmly believe that I must support the survival of life on earth. It means when we observe nature, we don't disturb the ongoing processes in each ecosystem. This is essential in terms of a lot of ecosystems being destroyed on earth and soon leaving behind a residue of what once was. The necessity to protect nature and its ecosystem is apparent nowadays with all the waste of energy and resources, growth of garbage, and ecological damage by industrialization. In an ecosystem, each organism has its role to play. Consider a small puddle at the back of your home. In it, you may find all sorts of living things, from microorganisms to insects and plants. These may depend on non-living things like water, sunlight, turbulence in the puddle, temperature, atmospheric pressure, and even nutrients in the water for life.

I believe that nature is beautiful and very mentally refreshing. Nature has kept me sane through this pandemic, as I'm sure it has for a lot of others. This makes me wonder why nature has this effect on us. Thinking back to my nature walks this week, I noted the sounds you hear, the wind, the birds, the leaves on the trees. They all embrace you with open arms. I love feeling all five of my senses being heightened when I walk. I feel the wind, and I smell the fresh air; I hear the birds' sweet sounds. I love thinking of nature as a way of medicating the soul. I can almost feel it slowly healing me and bringing me to a happier place mentally. With all that nature is providing us, it is essential to give gratitude towards nature. Have you ever asked yourself if what you believe in is true? It is essential to understand your life depends on your beliefs, so make sure you only choose the best.

The picture took by my sister at Sylvan lake.

Time has come now to realize that the beauty of nature is very precious. Nature's natural state of love, joy, and pride is the essence of life. With that being said, thinking about the responsibilities, I feel as though we should all be responsible for taking care of our surroundings. For example, A walk in the park is highly relaxing and peaceful and offers numerous health benefits. While it's great to take the time to stop and smell the roses, it's not a good idea to stop and pick them! Every park has a unique and complex ecosystem. Taking flowers or native plants changes the park's ecosystem and prevents them from generating new seeds for future plants. Another responsibility is to spread awareness about the existing issues and promote their effect on our mental well-being. Letting others know the benefits of nature and making them more aware of the disturbances they might be causing. The best approach to the issues is to talk about the new concepts with my friends and share them with my family. From writing blogs, and making podcasts, I got the chance to explore my comfort level and bring out the nature interpreter in me. I believe that knowing your audience is an important task that everyone faces. It is vital to understand your audience's values, attitudes, and beliefs as it will allow you to anticipate and plan your message accordingly to connect with your audience deeply. I also take part in various clubs where I can promote these ideas. I love sharing new ways to improve mental health because it's such a stigmatized issue, and it should be taken seriously. Most people have done well in this pandemic, but many have suffered detrimental damage from being indoors all the time. This is why I will continue to promote nature walks and take care of the nature of this planet.

The picture was originally posted on Unsplash.

I want to incorporate some approaches into my responsibilities as a nature interpreter are using different learning styles. This includes making a poster for visual learners or making a podcast for auditory learners. Even encouraging people to go on nature walks with me for people who prefer kinesthetic learning activities. This would allow me to educate a wider group of people. Another approach that most suitable for me is to combine humor with knowledge about the environment, highlight the issue, create a lasting impression, and grab attention from a wide range of people. According to research done by Stephan Schmidt's article, humorous sentences were better remembered than non-humorous sentences. It is essential to keep these approaches in mind when spreading knowledge to others in the future.

All in all, spending time in nature is a great way to get out and explore nature. As long as we remember not to disturb the natural surroundings, the nature parks will be around for future generations to enjoy. Without nature, I'm not sure we would survive.

Thank you for reading my post! I hope you all have a great rest of the semester.

References

Beck, L., Cable, T.T., & Knudson, D.M. (2018). Chapter 6: How people learn. Interpreting cultural and natural heritage for a better world. (pp.105-111). Sagamore Venture.

Hooykaas, A. (2021). Unit 2: Teaching Learners [Course Website]. University of Guelph Course link. https://courselink.uoguelph.ca/d2l/le/content/666945/viewContent/2583079/View

Schmidt, S. R. (1994). Effects of humor on sentence memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(4), 953–967. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.20.4.953

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chiefgiverstrawberry · 3 years

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I can’t sleep. Once again. Woke up at 3:30 thinking about this man who played kind games with me. I was so excited in fact so enthusiastic too enthusiastic in fact to have finally talked to him on the phone and I got a very short and salty feedback that he was tired from his trip and needed to rest and by the way his phone was almost dying and would call me the next day. That was the same guy that sent me those flowers and in the past month sent me literally sweet nothings that had actually made me believe there was something good between us. I told myself heck yeah warned myself to never EVER believe men like these. But he was a little off from the start when I first talked to him. However I let time show his true face and yet again my gut feel was right all this time. He wasn’t his true self and I don’t know exactly why he would say “I would do anything for you” and “I adore you”. Why say those sweetest words when you don’t really mean them? I don’t understand why some people like him can be really mean and play with other people’s feelings? I met so many like him in a span of two freaking years. One would lie about his pictures to me, making excuses about not having a strong enough WiFi to have a video call somewhere in Nigeria! He posted a hunk of a man as himself and I image search the man on the photos and googled his name and voila! I found him on Instagram as a gay man in San Francisco! That man I was talking to was a fake! That was in January 2020. February 2020 I met the biggest con man of all- a master manipulator whose identity I am still trying to figure out as he cannot be found on the internet. An Italian British claiming to have a business as a renovation contractor, this man borrowed money from for up to $25,000 in a span of more than a year during a horrible pandemic. He took advantage of my loneliness and went ahead to say something that he was deeply in love with me . Yeah right- he should be because I sent him those monies that should have been used for myself. I filed for bankruptcy due to my failed second marriage (that’s the second part of my autobiography later to be written for everyone to be forewarned). But despite this financial problem, I still was able to help this man financially as he promised to pay me back. I haven’t met him and of course there were so many warning signs about online scammers out there and he was one of them! I felt flat on my face once again. I subscribed to a dating app called Match. It was a waste of my time and money because of that pesky subscription. I practically met the worse men - I expected them to be mature and committed to looking for a serious long term relationship. However, all they wanted was sex and that was it! Maybe momentary entertainment. I did sleep with three out of how many men I online. And they just turned out to be just a blob an amoeba so to speak that just occupied my precious space and time but they did not matter because they just did not care, they just wanted to sleep with me and go to the next woman they meet. They’re like man-whores! And finally this man I am talking about at that beginning of this blog was I thought a little special. He wasn’t. Little red flags here and there and I should know better now not believe what I read and hear and see. I wish I could find that man who would genuinely adore me and keep me in his arms everyday who would never want to let go because he literally wants to be with me for the rest of his sweet life! Alas! I don’t know if I can find that man. Now I have to stop looking. I’m exhausted and more jaded than ever before! I booked a flight to LA just to get a away from Chicago. I need time to regroup, to refresh and to re-energize my wounded body. I should say my prayers that once I stop looking, may God give me an oasis with an almost perfect partner in the horizon. Thank you in advance. But if I don’t find anyone out there that it’s okay to be just me and my furry friend and stay happy and grounded! As always.

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destiny-smasher · 4 years

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“But I can't walk on the path of the right, because I'm wrong.”

So, The Last of Us Part 2 is out. It’s about 25 hours long. I’ve played it. I loved it, but it’s got its flaws. I think the hype buildup was overblown, and I think the zealous hate from the leaks was also overblown. This is a beautifully produced game that is trying to do much more than the typical AAA game tries to do, and in so trying, it’s messier, muddier, and more complicated than its predecessor. I love it for that, despite my issues with how the game ultimately resolves things.

I think Naughty Dog was either intentionally misleading audiences (which, given the marketing, is possible) or perhaps Neil himself has a different concept of the game he directed than what was actually delivered. Despite how it was advertised, The Last of Us Part 2 is not inherently about ‘hate’ or ‘revenge.’ It’s not just a revenge story.

It's a story about empathy, about how human beings and their interactions have layers, and how we are better when we extend blind empathy to others instead of blind hatred. I gotta talk about this. SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE GAME to follow.

Seriously, final warning for SPOILERS.

This game is simply too big, too complex, and has too much going on for me to write a single piece going over everything there is to talk about, but there are some things I need to say that inherently rely on discussing the entire game in a spoiler-filled way.

Let’s start with the most noticeable thing that has hit me over this game’s reception: people like Joel way more than I would’ve expected. SO much of this game’s negative reception seems to be over Joel’s character and the circumstances around his death. I was not at all surprised that he died - I was a bit surprised at when and how he died, in the moment, but even by the end of the next scene, it had washed over me how much sense it made. He died in the same way everyone else dies in this series. He had it coming in the same way anyone else in this world has it coming. He was never a hero. If you truly look at Joel as a ‘hero’ figure but don’t extend that same logic to Ellie and Abby, you do not make sense to me.

I’ve seen a LOT of hate getting thrown at Abby, and frankly, I do not understand it, and if you hate her but do NOT hate Joel or Ellie similarly, then I inherently don’t respect your opinion? You’re being blatantly biased and unreasonable in exactly the way this game is arguing you should not be. Straight up. Get your transphobic jokes the fuck outta here. Get your homophobic takes on Ellie and Dina the fuck outta here. Get your xenophobic complaints about the MUCH more diverse cast of characters in this sequel the fuck outta here. The ONE case where I could see a reasonable thing to be conflicted about is Lev’s character, because they are a transgender kid who gets deadnamed by some NPCs. As a transgender person, I personally found this to just...make sense and feel organic to the world, and none of the actual characters in the narrative with names or roles in the story ever deadname Lev. Lev is fucking precious and I love him, and I think his inclusion adds inherently more to this game than otherwise, despite the understandable conflict some might feel about his backstory. To ME, the fact that all of what Lev goes through and how Yara and Abby do what they can to look for him, that says to me, “protect trans rights” and I am glad it is there. Trans people have to deal with that shit sometimes, I think it’s fine having it be PART of a wider narrative. It doesn’t define Lev’s story, it doesn’t dictate the plot of the game, it’s a spark that sets some events off and I think that adds more than it could potentially take away, as does the overall representation in the game.

Getting back to this element of bias, though, I get that you “went on a journey” with Joel and Ellie in the first game. I get that. But you spend about as much time with Abby in this game as you did with Joel in the first game. And I see a lot of people are SOMEHOW totally fine and chill and cool with Joel going on a murder rampage in the first game, specifically killing at least one man who was specifically trying to save humanity - they cite that Joel is a morally gray person who has done bad things and is trying to become a better person. Sure, cool, OK. And Ellie, sure, ya’ll will think her going on a bloodthristy revenge quest is cool, fine, A-OK, because Joel was murdered. But somehow they are physically incapable of extending that same empathy to Abby, even after the game bends OVER BACKWARD in every reasonable way it could. Why is this? One person tweeted at me the simplistic, reductive idea,

“ I know the sensible thing that naughty dog was aiming at was that we'd feel sorry for abby and eventually grow to like her, but for me I just don't. I loved Joel and I love Ellie. They didn't kill anyone who I loved as a character. Abby did. “

At least they’re being honest with themselves in that they literally missed the entire point of the game. You having personal bias you cannot remove yourself from does not make for “A DEEPLY FLAWED STORY” or whatever the fuck people have been tossing around.

I personally don’t buy any of that bullshit until we get into the final hours of the game during the epilogue, but we’ll get to that.

Everything in the first 20-ish hours of this game felt organic and believable and completely in line with the first game to me, and the fact that ALL OF IT happens as a direct after-effect of Joel’s selfish act at the end of the first game really contextualizes how/why it was called ‘Part 2.’ So honestly, all of this nonsense about this sequel being ‘badly written’ is just...bonkers. I will agree it’s not some master class in writing - neither was the original game. But both games are very similar in writing style, tone, and the world presented is consistent, while character motivations are realistically complicated. Naughty Dog has never been great at plot, but the real quality of their work comes through in how much effort they go to in order to present realistic feeling worlds and characters, and from the environments to the actors to the extra animations on top, I think the details and the context they create are where they shine.

To better understand where I am coming from with this game, let me lay this on you.

During the scene in that basement, when Abby shot Joel in the leg, and Ellie shows up...I realized what was about to happen. Ironically, it was exactly what I had originally predicted was the thing going on WAY back when the game’s reveal trailer was dropped -- that Joel was dead, and was motivating Ellie’s revenge quest. If you’ve read what I have written of Arcadian Rhythms, you will have some idea of my feelings on Joel and Ellie’s relationship -- in short, I think it is complicated, and just as damaging as it is good. That’s real life. That’s how reality is for many relationships, especially ones between parents and their kids, especially in my experience. When I realized Joel was about to be murdered, my feelings and thoughts were not jumping to ‘oh fuck what an asshole I wanna kill these people’ or ‘oh no not Joel’ but rather, my immediate gut thoughts were ‘yupppp Joel kinda deserves this, he literally did this to who knows how many other people, but why are THESE people, specifically, out to get him?’

When Ellie later cites to Dina that there’s ‘no point’ in speculating as to why these people murdered Joel, because it could be for one of many possible reasons, I found that to be interesting -- Ellie herself acknowledging that Joel had fucked over many other people, while still pursuing revenge herself.

I do think the theme of ‘the cycle of violence’ is very core to this game and arguably is its strongest central theme, specifically because violence in wholly integrated into its gameplay. But narratively and structurally, empathy is, I would argue, even more paramount. This game spends about 12 hours of its runtime (so about half of the entire game) actively trying to encourage you to understand, relate with, and empathize with Abby. The developers COULD have had you swapping back and forth between both characters, which might have resulted in better pacing, but I think it would’v taken away from what they were going for. It’s that long, slow burn that makes Abby’s side of the story work, in much the same way the long, slow burn of the first game does what it does, and the way the long, slow burn of Ellie’s revenge quest helps us see just how far gone she is.

But “arghh I hated Ellie she kept making bad decisions that made no sense” some of you say, “they did her DIRTY” some of you say.

No.

Joel did her dirty.

The Fireflies did her dirty.

And it’s this exact concept -- that our actions and choices have consequences and ripple outward beyond what we can initially imagine - that is at the heart of why I think I love this game so much. Most video games depict a pool of water that is either a constant whirlpool, a raging clash of waves, or stone dropped in the middle and the ripples spreading out. The Last of Us Part 2 is more like a series of ripples all happening simultaneously, and not all of them are as apparent or even important, but it’s just...a bunch of ripples all happening all over the place.

And it breaks my heart, during 2020, a year when human rights, systemic racism, a worldwide pandemic, late capitalism, and entire countries submerged in protests because their government is fucking them over...has people shutting off or refusing to turn on their empathy to anyone outside of their bubble. In 2020, when the world needs empathy more than any other year I’ve experienced in my life thus far, a game like this goes SO FAR above and beyond what most games try to do, in a very risky and controversial way, to actively invite its players to fucking STOP AND CONSIDER for a damn moment that there’s more to the world than JUST YOU and what you care about. That your actions have consequences beyond your singular perspective.

Ellie is fueled by rage for a number of reasons, and we don’t even understand all of them until literally the final moments of the game, which I found to be appropriate as it ends on a note of reminding us that there is ALWAYS something we don’t know, something we don’t understand, motivating someone else’s decisions.

Ellie was robbed of agency, of purpose, by both Joel and the Fireflies. Joel robbed both Ellie and the Fireflies of their purpose. And the Fireflies robbed Ellie and Joel of theirs. In return, Ellie is left without purpose, and all she’s really left with is a broken man who desperately wants to be a dad again, to the point that he will murder and lie to hold on to that. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t necessarily hold it against Joel that he murdered people to save Ellie. I will always defend the idea that it was a fucking selfish decision that would realistically lead to consequences. But in the same way Marlene points out to Abby’s dad, ‘What if it was your kid?’ ie ‘What if it was someone you loved?’ I get that, that’s the beauty of how the first game ended. It presents a zero sum game where there is no ‘correct’ choice that everyone can agree on, but in the back of our heads -- and Part 2 actually states this as a point of fact -- we all know Ellie would have CHOSEN to sacrifice herself, had she been asked.

So it was deliciously realistic to me to see Ellie grappling with the frustration, distrust, and anger of Joel having not only robbed that purpose from her, but having lied to her about it. And in the end, it was also wonderfully realistic that part of why she hated Abby so much was that Abby inadvertently robbed her of her chance to try and rebuild and repair that broken relationship.

But here’s the thing, though - the thing I see fucking NO ONE talking about, and I can’t decide if it’s because no one is picking up on it or what.

Both Ellie and Abby are haunted and driven by broken men making selfish choices. Their selfishness keeps both characters kind of locked in to desperately grasping at violent acts to justify a purpose.

Some will play the flashbacks with Joel and will feel warmth and nostalgia and admiration. Some will play the flashbacks with Owen and feel disinterest or disgust because ‘why should I care about these people?’

For me, I couldn’t help bu draw parallels to how both Owen and Joel were men trying to be good, you know, not being specifically evil people, but men who were a bad influence on the women around them, who were great and good and charming and all that until things didn’t go the way they wanted, pushing and prodding with passive digs and pressure to reaffirm their own hopes that despite their mistakes, they’re ‘good men.’ Owen is admittedly much less well developed in this regard, partly because his arc just isn’t as deep or interesting, partly because he didn’t exist in the previous game. But I still could not quite shake it. I grew up with men like Joel and Owen as my father figures, so there’s personal bias there.

I literally had an actual nightmare that woke me up in the middle of the night partway through playing through this game because Joel was in it and I said or did a thing he did not like, and his reaction spooked me awake, in part because I LIVED that growing up. (not murder, but violence, passive aggressive manipulation) I absolutely adore the depth given to Joel’s character, that he has LAYERS to him, and I loved seeing Tommy similarly expanded upon. (him passively prodding at Ellie to try and make good with Joel felt a little manipulative, given that he KNOWS what Joel did; and even his wife’s prodding at Ellie at the game’s outside to ‘make good’ with some old jerk who seems all expectant about being rewarded for basic apologizing, ech)

Last of Us is a horror game, Part 2 even moreso, but it was the feeling of men like Joel who do bad things and then try to justify them after the fact that actually creeped me out more -- all the more creepy because I KNOW Ellie and Abby will give up on better choices to try and ‘do right by them’. I was relieved when Abby began to break free from these old, poor choices, even shortly after making more fo them during her half of the story. This brings me to another fascinating aspect of this game: how Abby’s story is a combination of both Joel’s and Ellie’s.

Dunkey (of all people!) recently praised this game and compared Ellie’s and Abby’s narratives to TLOU1 and Uncharted 4, and I agree with him in a lot of regards, there, but I think what the team was more going for was for Abby’s story to feel like a combination of Joel’s and Ellie’s while simultaneously being directly impacted by Joel and Ellie’s story.

Abby grew up in a military community, even though she expressed an interest in science -- just like Ellie. The death of her father drives her on a quest for revenge -- just like Ellie. She does some horrible shit to people all in the service of trying to protect a kid as some desperate attempt to feel better about all of the bad shit she’s done -- just like Joel. She starts to let herself be empathetic to other people and tries to become a better person because of the kid she takes under her wing -- just like Joel.

In a way, you could argue Part 2′s overall story is kind of repetitious. Ellie’s quest for revenge is a bit too narrow-minded and blind in her rage, and Abby’s story kind of recycles many components we have already seen up until that point. I think what’s there still generally accomplishes what it set out to do: get us to question and try to understand why people do what they do, and consider our own place in that cycle, in those ripples.

I think many aspects of this game that look circumstantial on the surface are not accidents.

I think the recurring imagery of water is an allegory for how we can let rage, anger, and hate drown us. The game’s title starts with a boat drifting in water, and the title changes after the ending to a boat that is beached. The Seattle arc shows a gradually increasing focus on water flooding the environments, culminating in a big rainstorm with crazy waves. The final fight sequence (which tbh I hated but we’ll get to that) takes place literally IN water, involves Ellie trying to drown Abby, and ends with the two of them going separate ways in their boats.

I think it’s no accident that Abby and Ellie’s desire for vengeance is ultimately caused by the same specific moment, and I think it’s interesting that many people seem to skip RIGHT OVER the idea that Ellie feels such a deep sense of rage at Abby killing Joel only because Joel made the decision that caused Abby to kill him in the first place -- and the good and bad that came from that. It’s just a brilliantly complicated web, I think, and that further highlights that none of these characters are inherently good or evil, which is pretty much the entire point of this world in the first place.

I think it’s interesting that both Ellie and Abby grumble insults all of the time over the people they’re killing, and both try to justify their violence with thoughts like “well we’re better then that, we don’t do THOSE kinds of things,” which is, ya know, literally the kinds of mental hoops actual real human beings jump through to justify doing bad shit to each other.

I liked the idea of the trading cards until fairly early on when I found the ‘Dr. Uckmann’ card, which...made me roll my eyes a little at first, until I read the description, which then made me feel more actively uncomfortable than maybe anything else in the entire game, to be quite honest. Partly because it rang of entitled self-importance, but partly because of the reports of Naughty Dog crunch culture.

And on that note, let’s talk about how this game arguably crunched its employees way more than it needed to while simultaneously making its story more bloated than it needed to be.

Don’t get me wrong, I love indulging in more STUFF than it required. I can totally see the appeal of writing extra stuff to a story like because you can, because it’s interesting, because it’s fun to MAKE shit. But when you are a AAA game development studio who is potentially crunching your employees into burnout, maybe a fairly pointless epilogue on top of a game that is already arguably a bit too long in the tooth is...maybe not the best way to go?

On the upside, I enjoyed playing the Santa Barbara location, I loved getting some more Abby/Lev time, I liked seeing Ellie a bit older, I LOVED the scene at the farm with her, Dina, and JJ. I loved the gameplay challenge that was the Rattler’s base. I loved that this game had noticeably larger environments to explore.

But tbh a LOT of content could’ve been cut from this game to make a smoother, better paced experience while simultaneously putting less strain on the developers. I do think the extended flashback sequences focused on non-violent gameplay is important enough to justify itself, but I think a lot of the more violent or unnecessary parts of the game (like the entire sequence on the Seraphite’s island and the Santa Barbara sequence) all feel like...EXTRA? Which on the one hand is great because hot DAMN more beautifully rendered locations, content, etc. but on the other hand I’m not sure it adds as much to justify the real life pain and misery I’m sure some developers went through to create it all, and in a way, it doesn’t quite justify its own existence if we’re being critical.

I get what they were going for with the Seraphites and the WLF but neither group is developed enough to really accomplish the goals of empathy. I think focusing on specific members OF those groups is better, because that is ultimately how real life people break down their walls of bias, -isms, etc. -- they just interact with and befriend people from these groups and realize organically “oh hey we’re all...people, huh.” The game’s attempts at naming NPCs and dogs don’t do much when the game actively rewards you for killing them (speaking of which, I played on Normal and there were way too many items imo, we’ll see how that is on higher difficulties). We could get into the role of violence and gameplay but that’s a WHOLE other can of worms.

But the Rattlers in the final act are even worse. After this entire game of being actively encouraged to empathize with other people from other groups and let yourself consider they aren’t evil, the game just...shoves an objectively worse group of people at you, asks you to murder them, and then...discards the whole thing without a second thought. I found this to be fun from a gameplay perspective (sorry Neil, playing your game actually IS FUN when you put so much work into making the violence fun to engage with) but I found it weird and frustrating from a storytelling perspective, as if the whole thing was an undercooked, unfinished final act that they cobbled together because they just...wanted enemies with helmets and an environment depicting southern California. Hell, tbh I don’t even get why Ellie had to be there other than the developers didn’t think players would be OK just...letting Ellie live a life in peace on a farm or that players would be OK NOT playing as Ellie at the end and letting her beat the shit out of Abby.

I actually LOVED the farm sequence, it felt so...weird for a while. Like you’re just waiting for the hat to drop. And when it does...it’s just PTSD. And that felt right. That felt good, that even though Ellie was spared, after all the shit she did, because she let go and spared Abby in return, she got to live this peaceful life...except life’s not that simple and old scars can still hurt.

I loved when Tommy showed up and we got to see that darker side to him we KNOW has been there this entire time, but Ellie maybe hasn’t been forced to see it. All the way up until this point, I felt I could understand where the characters were coming from and what motivated their decisions.

And then Ellie decided “no, actually, maybe if I throw all of this away I can maybe get rid of this PTSD I got from throwing everything away before.” And then it got worse when after she breaks into this fucking slave house to free people, after she saves Abby and Lev from dying on posts, she STILL wants to fight. ANd Abby’s where I’m at -- that ‘fucking REALLY?’ feeling. I utterly disliked the fight scene in the water. It was the one time in the whole game that actually felt like misery porn to me. I was honestly going into it expecting that maybe Ellie’s stab wound from the trap would cause her to be too weak to fight, and she’d literally drown from bleeding out because of her own unrelenting pursuit of revenge. But nah, we’re put through a pointless, brutal fist/knife fight that...doesn’t really have purpose imo. WHatever you wanted to accomplish here, you could’ve done back in the theater in Seattle. (on that note I LOVED the Ellie boss fight, what a fun gameplay thing and also just tense all around since you really couldn’t tell what was going to happen, but I LOVE that Lev stopped Abby from killing Dina, even though she had every reason to)

I can imagine different versions of the Santa Barbara sequence that offer a more edifying conclusion while still working in the environmental and gameplay components they seemed insistent on working in. It’s the one major portion of the game that, now that I’ve had time to process, I feel the most conflicted about.

Neither Ellie nor Abby “deserve” a happy ending in much the same way Joel didn’t “deserve” a happy ending. This game has no true protagonists or villains (anyone who is presented as a ‘villain’ is minor, and we don’t find out much about them anyway). I think Joel was lucky to get the time he got to live in community once again, to rediscover his humanity (look at all of those flowers they left at his house, this man who fucked over humanity and murdered countless people had a chance to live a few years of peaceful life again), I think Ellie was lucky she got time to even live what she did on that farm with Dina and JJ, and was lucky to still be alive at the end of the story. I think Abby was lucky to have been able to break free from a life of militaristic bullshit and rediscover some of her own lost humanity.

I think a lot of people admire Joel as a hero when it’s clear he was never one.

I think a lot of people admire Ellie and try to idolize her as the smarmy kid she could never permanently exist as.

I think a lot of people hate on Abby for EXISTING (and being a woman -gasp- WITH MUSCLES) and I’m pretty pleased with Laura Bailey getting to play this role (and Ashly Burch getting a supporting role in this game, too, for that matter).

I think The Last of Us is not ‘about Ellie and Joel.’ I think The Last of Us is about humanity, and exploring it through different angle. Sometimes needlessly gritty and dark ones, but Part 2 gave us even more light-hearted, pelasant moments than I could have expected. I think people who look so reductively at this game -- now officially a ‘series’ -- as ‘Joel and Ellie 100x forever’ and literally anything outside of that being bad and a waste of time fundamentally missed the entire purpose of this game, ironically ignoring what it is trying to passionately to convey. I think Naughty Dog’s marketing of the game actively misled people in ways that are rare for the industry, and I do think that is a bit shady - but on the other hand, being misled actively improved my experience with the end product (which is arguably why they did it). I think the way Sony has latched on Joel and Ellie as ‘Playstation Icons’ and encouraged people to buy up TLOU merch depite there not being much TO turn into merchandise says something.

Also? Frankly?

I am SO FUCKING TIRED of “angry sad dad” games.

Like. I loved TLOU 1, I loved the new God of War, etc. etc.

But God of War took basically NO RISKS and had NOTHING TO SAY that countless other pieces of media have said to death. That’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that, I really enjoyed it and look forward to the next. But this game actually has challenging thoughts, complicated things, it is trying to get players to consider, and most everyone I see shitting on the game either hasn’t played it or doesn’t seem interested in games that exist for something beyond making them feel good about themselves? I dunno.

I think at the end of the day, TLOU as an entire series, and specifically the sequel, isn’t about Joel and Ellie, that was just the more focused lens the original game had. For its messier, muddier experience, Part 2 strives for nothing more than many pieces of media have but for something that is still rare in the space of AAA video games.

It takes some risks, it makes some missteps in getting where it goes, for sure, and it’s by no means some holy gift to mankid, but it passionately goes to GREAT lengths to explore and express a fairly simple idea:

empathy is a choice, understanding others is a choice,

and we are all inherently better off when we choose to blindly accept understanding than when we blindly choose hate and violence.

Just because we can’t walk ‘the path of the right,’ and just because ‘we’re wrong’ doesn’t mean we should let the phantoms in our lives continue to keep a hold on our future. Just because someone does some good things doesn’t erase the consequences and ripples of the bad they have done, and just because we do bad things doesn’t mean we can’t do good.

The way to end the cycle of violence is empathy.

It’s simplistic in concept, but if you look around at not just the reception to this game even before people could play it, but just the STATE OF THE WORLD IN 2020, you will see that maybe we still need such basic, simplistic concepts to continue to be explored in big budget media.

#tlou part 2 #tlou #The Last of Us #The Last of Us Part 2

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lyricayed-moved · 4 years

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Thank you for tagging me. @midnightsvoid <3

Top 3 Ships:

1. Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes (Captain America Movie Trilogy)

I can say I never loved a ship as much as I love this ship. I don't think I'll ever encounter a story that touched my heart and soul like theirs did. They are just so precious and special to me that I cannot provide any logical reason or explanation. They make me feel these different kinds of emotions deeply that I cannot help but be attached.

I don't think this ship will ever be knocked off this spot in the near future or decade. I'll never stop thinking how the mcu wasted the potential of bringing their story to greater heights, but I look forward to reading the fics that took advantage of the missed opportunities and then some.

2. Yoite & Miharu Rokujo (Nabari no Ou)

It's been more than a decade, but Nabari no Ou remains as my most favorite manga ever and one of the main factors is their relationship. What they have is something different and special that, as a spectator, it's something that I can understand but cannot really put into words.

Their impact towards each other and their growth together drove the story forward to painful yet beautiful places, which helped me get through some of the darkest moments of my life. They'll forever have a special place in my heart.

3. N/A

I have loads of other ships, but none of them really stand out enough that I can place one of them in this spot. They all make me happy but not as sentimental and emotional as the 2 ships above.

Last Movie:

The Lord of the Rings.Trilogy. I’ve re-watched it for more than a dozen times in my 25 years of living. Simply a timeless masterpiece.When will we have movies like these again, I wonder...

Currently Reading:

Fanfics. I swear, if my books were alive, they’d throw themselves at me as punishment for not reading them instead...

Food I’m Craving:

I don’t even wanna think about cravings. The pandemic leaves me paranoid over everything that I can’t trust food not prepared at home. But, oh, how I want some pizza...

Tagging: @mademoisellebianx @koryuoftheriverflow @trans-fanboy @catwstrio @winterofthedarkestlight @stevebuckythyla

#about me #tag game

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rewritingtrauma · 4 years

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Permaculture Design Course

We dialled in from living rooms, bedrooms, caravans and gardens across 11 different time zones, from Abu Dhabi to California (with Brazil and Berlin somewhere in between). Our reasons for being here were all unique and yet all similar; concerns for the future; for the mass extinction event and loss of natural habitats; hoping to learn how to live sustainably; how to grow food naturally; how to produce more than we consume; how to change career; how to live without doing harm; and how to co-create a better world for our children and future generations to grow up in. In the context of one of the biggest worldwide pandemics in living history, this group of strangers met in the timeless hinterland of the online meeting room to explore, share, and learn about positive solutions both now and for our futures...

I stumbled across The Permaculture Design Course quite by accident (as I was looking for ways to make my struggling garden thrive rather than merely survive) but, over the course of a month, this unexpected experience changed my life completely... For the first time in 35 years I feel that I have been given access to a toolkit for living - a set of frameworks, processes and principles which speak entirely to what I feel and know to be real and right - for how to be and live in the world in deeply connected, holistic and sustainable ways... At a moment when I was feeling incredibly helpless and overwhelmed by global and personal circumstances, the PDC and this group of wonderful, disparate strangers, appeared “as if by magic” and turned around the whole way I understand myself, my power, and my place in the world. On my ‘rewriting trauma’ journey the PDC has been an invaluable turning point and has provided me with the maps and materials I most need (though may not have been looking for) for going forwards...

Since finishing the course I have been asked numerous times by friends, family and neighbours “What IS Permaculture, exactly...?” And I have responded with numerous answers (according to who was asking, their reasons for asking and the context in which the question was asked) but I would like to take this opportunity to address that question, in the best way I know how, through the precious and manifold ideas and conversations which came up throughout the course. I want to respond to the question “What is Permaculture?” in this way (rather than offer a singular narrative) because I believe this embodies and reflects much more of the essence of what Permaculture is : a set of principles, processes and frameworks for living which can be tailored to the particular and specific answers and solutions each one of us seeks in our own, unique context.

Word bubble formed from the PDC reactions to the question “How do you define Permaculture?” 2nd June 2020

“You can’t have sustainable food production without sustainable everything else.”

Graham Bell, Online PDC, June 2020

June 2020 was an astonishing and deeply challenging month in so many ways… Personally, I was forced to face the vulnerability of my own situation; my reliance on shop bought food and uncertain income streams when, at the very outset of lockdown, literally all of my work dried up, my partner was made redundant and access to food was scarce and difficult. Then there was worse to come. In the late hours of the 16th of June, my cousin Beth died. The news arrived during one of our PDC sessions. She had been battling secondary and primary breast cancer. This is a heartbreak and a loss I am still trying to understand and process (but one which, had I not been held by this group and this experience, would have been so much harder to deal with).

Meanwhile, on the international stage, people were facing so many additional threats and challenges posed by the Coronavirus Pandemic. The death statistics highlighted the social and economic inequalities, both at home and abroad, particularly along lines of race - with a disproportionate number of deaths and redundancies in people from BBIPOC (Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Colour) backgrounds. We saw deaths in refugee camps sky rocketing. These statistics were a bitter salt in the wounds of exhaustive and institutional racism which we saw enacted again and again from the refugee crisis in Syria and Yemen to the police murders of George Floyd in Texas, Israel Berry in Oregon, Tracy Downe in Florida and many more besides… Some of us white folx, in waking up to the scale and pervasiveness of institutional and embedded violence towards our African, Asian and South East Asian Diaspora friends, that we (I) started to understand our (my) own white fragility and the systems of dis/advantage which many of us have been complicit in. And it was amidst this context of great uncertainty and upheaval that the PDC took place...

Over the course of the month of June, with three day-long zoom meetings a week and a handful of break out/additional sessions in between, we explored (amongst many things); the ideas and inspirations behind Permaculture; the centrality of Observation; Non Violent Communication; Patterns; Input & Output Analysis; Wild Design; Trees and Soil; Guilds - what they are, how they work, making our own; Arts and Culture(s); Landscape; Climate; Planning for the future; Alternative Exchange Economies; Food and Water; Six Coloured Thinking Hats; Plant Families and Nomenclature; Sociocracy; Healing; Cooperation vs Competition; Zones and Sectors; Needs, Wants and Offers… And many more things besides and between.

Though I was not aware of it at the time (though I might have been, had I read the curriculum and course handbook in advance!) almost the entire first half of the PDC was taken up with the co-creation of a safe and productive learning space and culture.

One of the first questions posed to the participants was from Kate Everett who asked “What makes learning work for you?”

I struggled to identify what had worked for me in the past but could instantly conjure what made learning not work: I thought of GCSE revision, 20 cups of tea a day, desperately cramming information into my head… I thought back to how long it had taken me to learn how to tie shoe laces or to put up a tent because of how much heat and anger there was from my father and his father that I couldn’t just do it… I thought of those feelings of shame, humiliation, stress and of shutting down when I was told I was an idiot and a failure… But then, interestingly, so many others in the group articulated similar experiences - “stress, school, competition”…Some people described themselves as lone wolves, others learnt better in groups, some benefited from working together over a problem or by sharing what they were learning… But what all of us agreed upon was the inhibiting effects of stress on learning and the need to enfold experimentation, play, overview and failure in order to make our learning journeys productive and engaging...

“Learning is love”

Graham Bell

Little did we know it at the time but all this information about our individual learning experiences was being observed, gathered and harvested… as we learnt about ourselves and one another we were also learning how to create the best learning (and hence growing) conditions for us as individuals and as a collective. Though we may not have fully realised it as it was happening, we are all in the “inverted classroom” : we had all become the teachers, as well as the students and would learn more from the collective than any single teacher or pedagogy could ever bestow...

Quotes and prompts I collected throughout the course

“A person who doesn’t make a mistake probably doesn’t make anything”

Graham Bell

Mark Shiperlee introduced us to the concept of the Culture Board and we begin brain storming what factors are important to measure our course culture against. The factors we decided were of most importance to integrate into, and develop throughout, the course were;

Positive Solutions

Long & Short Breaks

Gift Economy

Time Keeping

Mutual Respect

Fun

Creativity

Task Setting & Reporting

Inclusion

Group Work

Connect With Nature

Throughout the course we would check in on the Culture Board regularly to determine what stage these various factors were at i.e. Seed; Sprout; Leaf; Flower; or Fruit. For me this was a valuable tool in understanding where the group felt our learning journey was at - which areas were working and which were not. It made this an easy, fluid and almost anonymised process and helped to address both the successes and the failures as we went along, understanding where energy needed focusing. This was one of many visual tools, along with The Life Ethics venn diagram, Six Thinking Hats, OBREDIMET, Looby’s Design Web, Input & Output Analysis, PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting) Analysis, Importance/Urgency Matrix, and Relative Location which I have continued to use in my own Permaculture Life/Design Processes…

My LIfe Ethics Venn Diagram - i.e. the three main ethics of permaculture”Earth Care”, “People Care” and “Fair Shares” Where they all intersect is the core of Life Ethics

During the course we were also given our own break out Guild groups with whom we had to develop ad present a Permaculture Design Project with (below is ‘an artist’s impression’ of our Guild The Four Acorns - Lynn, Siobhan, Lucy and myself.

“Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple”

Bill Mollison

By the third week of the course, with each one of our guild feeling exhausted by various life stresses (illness, work, family, bereavement, etc) we decided the best and most effective design we could work on was one for supporting each other as a guild whilst we embarked upon our permaculture journeys (the one thing which united all of us was that we wished to continue beyond the course).

We started applying some of the tools and processes we acquired throughout the course to our own visions for the future. We started off with Holmgren’s Permaculture Design Principles;

Principle 1. Observe & Interact

We began our guild process by gradually getting to know one another, developing & discussing project ideas that would tap into all of our needs & aspirations.

Principle 2.Catch & Store Energy

As we were all feeling a bit burnout we realised we needed to do something that would hold space and energy for us as individuals and a collective i.e. catch and store energy by making and holding space for one another. We wanted to encourage each other to feel safe enough to start exploring with new eyes and to assist each other’s courage in the face of major life changes.

Principle 3.Obtain a yield

We all wanted to carry on our development beyond the course and to share permaculture with others - so we asked the questions “How could we support one another in this?” But, in addition “What renewable resources and services did we have that we could use, share and apply?” and “What could we create - the main yield - within this guild?” We decided that the yield we could create in the present, but carrying into the future, was a space full of loving-support, inspiration, challenge and abundance.

Principle 4. Apply Self-regulation & accept feedback & Principle 5. Use & Value Renewable Resources and Services

As we began using permaculture tools to explore our individual designs, these processes enabled us to support and affirm one another; to share wisdom; tell stories; hear, value and integrate one another as individuals in a guild; become energised and strengthened by our diverse experiences, perspectives, knowledge(s), points of view; and to be challenged and strengthened by processes and making compassionate space for learning through failure too... And believe me, we did fail...

Mind Map at the outset of my own Permaculture Life Design exploring my assets, helps/opportunities, limitations, needs, aims and potential tools & processes to employ

“It takes shit... literal shit... but then you get humus”

Siobhan

On the last day of the course all of the individual guilds presented their design projects and it was amazing to see the wealth, depth and diversity of those ideas and the tools and processes (which we had been given throughout the course) put into action. There were design solutions that addressed; food scarcity; social isolation; mental health issues; segregation; alienation; loss of habitat and species; water shortages; poor health; access to education; job losses; seed sharing; community spaces; and so many more big issues. It was staggering.

In such a short space of time this small group of strangers had come together and, with the support of our guides and course leaders, co-created a network of support from across the world, positively enriching one another and the larger ecosystems each of us are a part of. It was a little island of paradise which cultivated an abundance of new perspectives, hope and courage. By showing us what might be possible and - rather than getting too mired in the negative/things we cannot control - looking to appreciate what we have, what we can be and what we can create together, the PDC taught us how diversity and collaboration can help us, both as individuals and a society, develop resilience in the face of the overwhelming challenges of our times.

It was an experience I will never forget and which I hope to keep alive as I go into the future (remembering to regularly use, sharpen and adapt those valuable tools)...

#permaculture #design #PDC #trauma #rewriting #collaboration #culture #diversity #solutions #growth #tools #futreproof #sustainability #food #growyourown #IrisPriest

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tori111 · 4 years

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It's funny how when you stop putting effort towards relationship where it was mostly you who was giving and sacrificing, how you suddenly become a a promiscuous, untrustworthy partner. How anyone you spend time with must be someone you're cheating on.

How when you finally give up on your partner, being a partner in your relationship, it's all your fault the relationship fell apart.

All I wanted was for you to put effort towards building our relationship, instead of feeling like I was alone all the time. Like I had to constantly fight for your time and affection and trust. When I finally decided I couldn't do it anymore, because it was clear no matter how much transparency I gave you and communication via phone and messages, you'd always think in the back of your mind that I was lying or hiding something.

It came to the point I was doing self harm everytime you would make me feel like I was doing something wrong like spending time with friends and family and alone time for some rest and relaxation, decompression and self bettering. That when we finally got to spend time together, it was never enough, and ended up doing more damage than good, that I decided I really couldn't do it anymore.

When I tried explaining to you the way I was feeling you shut me down and said that a little is better than nothing and that I should be grateful, but what you didn't understand was that, it was actually worse. It was like teasing a starving homeless person with food and water, and then eating it in front of them, and making them feel foolish for having the idea that you might give them enough time to have a bite and maybe feel better.

You'd leave, and I'd feel emptier for it. Because I had to pretend to be grateful that you ate in front of me, while I gave you the last of my energy pretending to be grateful, like you said I should be.

I stopped eating, I stopped drinking, and I fell into very dark thoughts. I turned to my friends for help, when you said you didn't have time for me. And you made me feel worse for it.

I went to the hospital a couple times ( I never told you, I didn't want you to feel bad or waste your precious time). This pandemic was probably one of the best things to happen, as I'm now trying to do better for myself, as I once again, had to spend the night in the hospital.

So despite what conclusions you may have drawn, from trying to seperate me from my closest friends, and villafying them to isolate me, to stalking my house to make sure I was where I said I was, or who was at my house without your knowledge etc... I always cared for you deeply, I've never lied to you. I just decided, for my own health mentally, emotionally and physically, it was better for us to be apart.

Sorry if it hurt you, but I decided to end all communication with you because you immediately jumped to the idea that my best friend and I were colluding against you, and that, id never leave you unless it was for someone else. But that's just wrong. I made the decision on my own. I contacted the police after you came after me, my family my friends and their families. I ended our friendship after your first reaction to us breaking up, was to spread rumors all over social media that I cheated on you. No friend would have done what you did, never mind a best friend or soul mate. I get that you're hurt and angry. But it was no excuse for the way you acted.

We're no longer friends because I can't trust you. In any way. I could never really trust you. To be there if I needed you or to not say stuff to other people behind my back. To not make me feel guilty for the way you treated me, and how I reacted to the way you were treating me and neglecting me.

I know you'll always tell yourself and everyone that you did nothing wrong in our relationship and It was all me. And that's okay. I'm done fighting. Tell whoever, whatever you want. You always did anyways.

Truth is, you weren't ready for a relationship, and your past relationships damaged you too much before I got to meet you. And I think that's the saddest thing I've ever realized. No matter how much love and affection I gave you, you'd never fully trust me, and you'd never give me all of you, like I gave you all of me. I don't even think you realized what you had when I was yours.

And that's okay, because everything happens for a reason.

I sincerely hope you find happiness in someone who has more to give than me. Or in life and your goals. But I sincerely hope you learn from our relationship that you can't treat someone the way you treated me and think that Love conquers all, when you couldn't take one day off and plan it with your "soulmate", in the three years we were together, because you had too much to pay for and too much work to do.

If you don't water the garden you hope to grow, don't think that earth alone will sustain your plants. Love starts with a seed and requires attention, sunshine and more love and patience.

I hope in the next life that we meet, I'll have the chance to meet you before anyone else gets the chance to ruin you.

With this last message, I burry all the dead plants I grew on my own, in a garden I called ours and wish you a long, happy, and healthy life.

Until next time.

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robin-smith · 4 years

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The year everyone lost.

For a lot of people 2020 has been a curious, disruptive and challenging year already. It has ripped away from many the very thing many people feel is the most precious thing we have and yet the one thing we take most for granted, TIME.

For me 202 has felt like the culmination of the developing situations of the wester world. Our society reaping what we sow from years of ignorance and social disparity. It has also felt somewhat like every other year I’ve lived through for the last two decades prior.

That is not to say I’m not understanding and sympathetic towards those who have been badly affected by the monumental disruptions to modern society as the bulk of us in the capitalist west know it, I just feel that to an extent I could see many of the events coming from a mile off and I had lived though many similar events in my own personal life numerous times over that when the world suddenly stopped for everyone I saw little personal change.

For a great many years I had felt like one of a group from a lost generation, discarded from the desired mass of humanity left to muddle though in the background. This came from years of abuse growing up in my pre-teen, teen, and even post teen years. This came from a standing in modern British society that saw the bulk of my years in poverty or at the very lowest levels of earning. My place in society gave me odd personality traits, which made few people interested in knowing me and in tern just made my personality traits all the odder. This was not aided by probable, as yet undiagnosed despite my best efforts, mental health problems. As such I grew up with few, then less, friends and as such quite separate from much of humanity.

This separation from modern society and culture is equal blessing and curse. I may not have as many connections or relationships as others may, but those I do have are extremely close and loyal on my part. It also allowed me to be more adaptive and hardy when universally disruptive events do take place.

When a pandemic rolled around and whole cities, eventual countries, were put under lockdown I was more than prepared and not too challenged. When you barely see anyone outside your house most days anyway, having that happen to everyone isn’t such a problem.

Yet now it’s been several months and while many places are not under the same type of lockdowns as they were at the early hights of this year of pandemic (even though the cases are currently far worse in this country than they had been during that time?) time even for me is becoming hard to judge. I had, ironically, signed up to a gym a month before the pandemic in order to force myself to get healthy. This sounds a bit first world problems at first until I explain that my mental health conditions, body issues, and severe shyness has prevented me from taking what had been such a monumental step until the age of 38. Now due to lockdown my confidence is back to near zero, my gym membership is closed and my weight is at its worst in my whole life. Worse still since I had been diagnosed with sleep apnoea and need to lose weight to, you know, live.

I feel back at many stage ones for my mental and physical health, and I was ready for this to an extent. Primed for another bad thing to take place and ready to ride it out as best I could with my wife and cats to keep me company.

For everyone else though, this disruption came as much worse than they could have feared, or worse, as a nightmare out of the blue.

For my day job I work in social housing for a local authority, and I have been given the unfortunate opportunity to see the effects on people in local communities up close. I was involved in the early stages of communication with the vulnerable and elderly required to shield from the worst life-threatening effect of the virus. I have had to see the death notifications roll in and listen to my colleagues talk about having to call next of kin, seeing a mental toll mount on people as we and those around us survive.

It has struck me that you would have to be completely devoid of empathy so not be stuck by the effects this last year must have had on so many, no matter the background, status, or mental health of those surviving. It is true that a virus like COVID-19 has no care who you are, where you’re from or how fit and healthy you are. Everyone has lost something during this, not just money or their health, but a period of time. When you break down everything you can own or have, time is the only thing you can truly feel loss over. Regrets come from time wasted, things not done or said, shared experiences lost.

I also fear for those with even less opportunity and value to the modern western society than even I had growing up. Even when with next to nothing, sleeping on a cold concrete floor I had more privilege than many others will ever be fortunate enough to see. Now I fear deeply for those reliant on the help of others and their governing bodies to help them stay alive and part of their communities. It is also an odd irony that I would move into the public sector work space, only to see most developed western governments willing to openly cause a social genocide via deliberate inaction and ineptitude and learn to hate government in general more than I had when I started.

I believe people are suffering physically and mentally in all sorts of areas of society and I hope we all get though this time now to see better days to come. Even after a terrible and challenging five years, things can be better.

If you ever feel alone or lost, reach out to someone, a friend, a family member on the phone, or even a charitable organization like the Samaritans. You don’t have to be part of a new lost society, you don’t have to struggle or suffer alone.

https://www.samaritans.org/ – 116 123 (UK)

If you know of any mental health or suicide prevention services in your area please feel free to share below in comments the details and country it’s for. Thank you.

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theaspiescribe · 4 years

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Trans Pride (content warning)

The 28th of December marked the 5th anniversary of Leelah Alcorn’s death.

Since it’s pride month I wanted to write a few words for Leelah, who if not for a transphobic world would still be here and living as she was always meant to be. When Leelah died, I wrote about her and how things needed to change.

If you’re unfamiliar, Leelah was a trans girl who lived with parents that harboured transphobic and regressive views. Her parents wouldn’t allow her to transition and instead sent her through the excruciating ordeal of conversion therapy. They made her life a living hell, merely because they couldn’t accept her true gender. Leelah felt desperately alone and struggled to see that things could get better for her. She knew exactly who she was and did find some love from her friends when she expressed to them who she was and when they respected her pronouns, but the rejection and hate from her family was so overwhelming that it no doubt would have been a tortuous existence to live every day.

Leelah would often post on trans subreddits on Reddit. The internet was like a sanctuary for her at a time when it must have felt there was no escape from her transphobic parents, but it wasn’t enough, she needed this love in her real life and it was sorely lacking. It could have been different if she was given the love she deserved.

Leelah had a tremendous talent and she loved to sketch. Her potential was plain to see in the detailed drawings she posted on Reddit. I am convinced that if we lived in a world full of love she would now be a successful artist.

Some of Leelah’s work:

I was deeply affected by Leelah’s story because I myself felt closeted and reading of how painful her life was, even after she embraced who she was, it was extremely demoralising. The sense of fear I had about being true to who I am had always been acute, but reading of how much Leelah suffered, it convinced me that it would be safer to keep how I felt private.

Leelah’s death sent me into a deep depression for the first few months of 2015. I became obsessed about trans issues, the scourge of prejudice we face and so angry about the injustice of being trans and living in a world where at best you were shown a few crumbs of acceptance and at worst you were abused, ignored, bullied and even killed. I felt so helpless and of course there was a part of me that doubted it would get better. When it’s dark, you desperately cling onto the hope that it can get better, but when you’re surrounded by the darkness each and every day, that voice gets a little weaker and weaker.

I will always feel a close connection to Leelah, because it was through remembering her that I found my first internet friend, who was at a vigil in London. We have remained very close since and she is super supportive of trans people. I love her so very much and wouldn’t have made it to this point without her.

source

I want to pay tribute to the two black trans women, Riah Milton and Dominique Rem'mie Fells who were killed in the last two weeks. Riah was a home health aide and studied at the university of Cincinnati, she loved her family and the photos she shared of them. She had a love of traveling and wanted to see so many more places in the world. Dominique was very close to her mother and her close friend said of her ““She lived her truth so loud that you could hear her a mile away.” She had dreams of becoming a fashion designer and she loved to dance.

The black trans community have suffered to an extent few of us will ever know of. They need our love not tomorrow, but today. The LGBTQ movement needs to ensure that trans people of colour are being recognised and listened to.

My favourite trans author is Janet Mock, her impactful book Redefining Realness was incredibly meaningful to me during a time in my life when I was struggling to see many signs of hope. I read her book a few months after Leelah’s death and it was very therapeutic to read from an incredibly powerful trans woman who was telling her story to the world. It gave me cause to nurse the dream that things could be different.

Words and actions matter. Transphobia like any prejudice is sustained by silence, I have faith that most cis people will stand up to love trans people and non-binary people but there’s always been a tendency for people to avoid standing up for marginalised communities because for a lot of people, they’re just not a priority and other things often take precedence.

Anytime that I see a cis person show their vehement passion for trans rights it makes me warm, because it helps me to see a world where trans people are valued and cared for, and where any hate is drowned out by the stronger force of love. When you have people so open in their love for trans and non-binary people it makes you believe that you will be loved for who you are.

Since today, the 18th of June is autistic pride day I want to talk about my gender too. Over the last few months I have been working as hard as ever on my self-esteem in the hope that I can finally live as who I want to be. I have made mistakes, and there have been setbacks, but I have tried as hard as I can to get a little stronger every day. I have found the strength to write about my trauma, my mental illness and my pain and through that I feel as if I’ve emerged a much tougher and loving person.

When I was in school I got called names like “f**”, “bender”, “girly” and a “wimp”. I wouldn’t describe it as bullying because it was never persistent but anytime I was true to myself it would inevitably invite scrutiny and hurtful remarks. I have always been quite feminine but I became so ashamed of that side of me that I would conceal it.

I now feel enough love to say proudly that I am trans. I’ve known for a long time that I’m not a man. Part of the reason adolescence was so rough for me was because I was developing physical features that I didn’t want. I hated the powerlessness of it and being so lonely to have no one to tell. My BDD made me believe that I could never be my true self because how could I do makeup/hair and develop my own style if I hated to look at myself in the mirror. For a long time I became resigned to the idea that this would be life.

But in the last two years, something within in me has changed. I have found my love for life again and the love for myself, I’m starting to really believe in a way that I haven’t before. This pandemic has been a time of intense worry for me because it feels as if the three rocks in my life, my Mam, Dad & dog Jack are all running out of time. Mam & Dad are in the at risk group and Jack’s age is starting to show. I have used this time to try and make something positive come from something incredibly scary and I’m starting to really believe that I can make it happen.

I am a strong person but I am afraid and I also am extremely fragile. My trauma has made me feel like I’m broken at the worst of times. But I don’t want to be trapped by it anymore. I want to be true to who I am, so, so badly. What I have discovered is that trying to get my life back on track will not work unless I embrace every aspect of myself. I don’t know when quarantine will end, but when it does, I will be ready; there is no turning back now.

This was a big step for me, but I couldn’t have made it this far without the help of some very special people. I need to say a few words because I’m so thankful:

To Aisling: We have become so very close in the last year. You have helped me become more open and hopeful. Few things bring me more joy than seeing you and your bros together and happy.

To Ellie: You always know what to say. I am one hundred percent sure that I couldn’t have gotten this far without your kindness and compassion. You know how things were so you’ll understand why our friendship means everything. Could talk about anything anytime.

To Jordanne: Having an autistic friend that I can confide in about my worries and challenges means a lot. You are strong and your friendship makes me feel stronger. I will always be rooting for you.

To the precious two that have a splendid and ascendant radio show, thank you for making me see that I can be who I want to be. Love your style, sense of justice and how you’re both so strong & soft. Everything feels right when you’re together every Monday.

Somewhere out there, I hope Leelah is proud of me today. I hope someday we can make the world the place she wanted it to be. For trans people and non-binary everywhere.

https://marshap.org/about-mpji/

https://www.theokraproject.com/

#trans

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straydogstory · 4 years

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Divest From the Video Games Industry! by Marina Kittaka

https://medium.com/@even_kei/divest-from-the-video-games-industry-814a1381092d

This piece seeks to contextualize the problems of the video games industry within its own mythology, and from there, to imagine and celebrate new directions through a lens of anti-capitalist and embodied compassion.

My name is Marina Ayano Kittaka (she/her), I’m a 4th gen Japanese American trans woman from middle class background. I work in a variety of different art forms but my bread and butter are the video games I make with my friend Melos Han-Tani, e.g. the Anodyne series.

I am not an authority on any of these topics, and it’s not my intention to speak over anyone else or offer comprehensive solutions, only to be one small piece of a larger conversation and movement. I use declarative and imperative sentences for clarity, not certainty.

I seek to follow the leadership of BIPOC abolitionist thinkers such as Ejeris Dixon, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, adrienne maree brown and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, along with the work of local (to me) groups like Black Visions Collective and MPD150. I welcome feedback, especially if you believe that something I’ve said is harmful.

This piece is inspired by the latest wave of survivors bravely sharing their stories (it is June 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic and global uprising against anti-Black racism and the unjust institution of police). I believe and stand with survivors.

The Problems

The video games industry has many deep, tragic, and intertwining problems. It’s beyond the scope of this piece to examine the entirety of games culture (I will focus on development and, to a lesser degree, distribution). It’s also beyond the scope of this piece to convince anyone that these problems exist, but I’ll be moving forward with the assumption that we agree that they do. Here is an incomplete list:

Pervasive sexual abuse

Workplace abuse, bullying, crunch, burnout, generally exploitative labor conditions

Sexism, racism, and other bigotry — the above abuses are accentuated along these intersections (e.g. the sexual abuse of marginalized genders or the exclusion of racial minorities).

Supply chain problems including conflict minerals and exploitative factory conditions

Heavy environmental impacts

Non-Judgement

This conversation may spark hurt or defensive feelings. I want to address this directly. Many people love video games, and not only that, but are deeply invested in the world of games. I’m particularly sensitive to marginalized creators who have fought hard to find a foothold in the games industry and deserve to follow their dreams. I exist more on the periphery of the games industry and my goal is not to center my personal anger or disdain — but instead to push toward a world with better games, played by happier audiences, made by creators who feel safe and appreciated.

Additionally, this conversation is not about the merits of any individual AAA (large studio) game. It’s not about creating strict rules about media consumption. It’s not about shaming people into certain beliefs or behaviors. When we try to act like our personal tastes must align with our most high-minded ideals, we encourage shame or denial — things that distance us from others.

Nor is this exclusively about AAA. This is about any situation where the power becomes the point. There can be gradations of industrial complexes and power complexes existing from the smallest micro-communities to the largest corporations. We can divest on all levels.

The Industry Promise

I believe that many of us as game creators and audiences have (consciously or not) bought into the idea that happiness and wonder are scarce and fragile commodities — precious gems mined via arcane and costly processes. Life can often be isolating, alienating, and traumatic, and many of us cope by numbing some parts of ourselves¹. The poignance and pleasure of simply feeling becomes rare.

In answer to this perceived scarcity, The Industry swoops in with a promise that technological and design mastery can “make” people feel. It does this not only blatantly in marketing copy or developer interviews, but also in unwieldy assertions that games can make you empathic, or through the widespread notion that games are an exceptionally “immersive” art form due to “interactivity”. Embedded in this promise is the ever-alluring assumption that technological progress is linear: games overall must be getting better, more beautiful, more moving, because that is simply how technology works! Or perhaps it is the progress itself that is beautiful — each impressive jump towards photorealism delivering the elusive sense of wonder that we crave.

At this point, I could argue that the benefits are not worth the cost, that the aforementioned Problems outweigh even this idealized vision of what games provide. But I’m guessing many of you might find that unsatisfying, right? Why don’t we simply reform the system? Spread awareness and training about sexism and racism, create more art that engenders empathy, encourage diversity? Isn’t it throwing the baby out with the bathwater to “halt” technological progress in order to fix some issues of bad leadership here or abusive superstar there?

Here we come to my main purpose in writing this piece: to expand the imaginative space around video games by tearing out The Industry Promise at its roots. If wonder is not scarce and progress is not linear, then the world that rises from the ashes of the Video Games Industry can be more exciting and more technologically vibrant than ever before.

Precious Gems

Take a deep breath and picture some of the happy moments of your life. Maybe some of them look like this:

Staying up late and getting slaphappy with a friend; looking out over a beautiful landscape; a passionate kiss; collaborating with friends in a session of DnD or Minecraft; a thoughtful gift from someone you admire; a cool drink on a hot summer day; making a new friend who feels like they really see you; singing a song; a hug from someone who smells nice; getting junk food late at night and feeling naughty about it; the vivid colors and sounds of a rainy city evening; drifting to sleep in the cottony silence of a smalltown homestead; getting a crew together to see a new movie; the scent of the air at sunrise; having a meaningful conversation with a nonverbal baby.

Picture the games you loved most as a child, the games that felt full of possibility and mystery and fun. Were they all the most technologically advanced? The most critically revered?

Maybe your happy moments look nothing like this. Or maybe you can’t recall feeling happy and that’s the whole problem. But my point is that happiness, joy, fun… these things are at their core fluid, social, narrative, contextual, chemical. In both its best and most common incarnations, happiness is not shoved into your passive body by the objective “high quality” of an experience. Both recent psychological research and traditions from around the world (e.g. Buddhist monks) suggest that happiness and well-being are growable skills rooted in compassion.

Think of all the billions of people who have ever lived, across time, across cultures, with video games and without, living nomadically or settling in cities or jungles. In every moment there are infinite reasons to suffer and infinite reasons to be happy². Giant industry’s monopolistic claims to “art” or “entertainment” have always been a capitalist lie, nonsensical yet inescapable.

The Narrative of Technology and Progress

Is this an anti-technology screed? Am I suggesting we must all go outside like in the good old days and play “hoop and stick” until the end of time? Let’s start by unpacking what we mean when we say “technology”. Here’s one definition:

Technology is the sum of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives. — Wikipedia

Honestly, technology is such a vague and broad concept that nearly anything anyone ever does could be considered technological! As such, how we use the term in practice is very revealing of our cultural values. Computing power, massive scale, photorealistic graphics, complex AI, VR experiences that attempt to recreate the visual and aural components of a real or imagined situation… certainly these are all technologies that can and have grown in sophistication over time. But what The Industry considers technological progress actually consists of fairly niche goals that have been artificially inflated because capitalists have figured out they can make money this way. Notably, I don’t use “niche” here as an insult — aren’t many of the most fascinating things intrinsically niche? But when one restrictive narrative sucks all the air out of the room and leaves a swath of emotional and physical devastation in its wake… isn’t it time to question it?

What if humans having basic needs met is “technological progress”? What if indigenous models of sustainable living are “hi-tech”? What if creating a more accessible world where people have freedom of movement opens up numerous high-fidelity multisensory experiences? These questions go far beyond the scope of the video games industry, sure, but in the words of adrienne maree brown, “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system”³.

What We Hope to Gain

The kneejerk reaction to dismantling an existing structure tends to be a subtractive vision. Here we are, living in the exact same world, but all blockbuster video games have been magically snapped out of existence… only hipster indie games remain! Missing from this vision is the understanding that our current existence is itself subtractive — what we cling to now comes at the expense of so much good. The loss of maturing vision and skill when people leave the industry due to burnout, sexual assault, and racist belittlement. Corporate IP laws and progress narratives that disincentivize preservation and rob us of our rich and fertile history. The ad-centric, sanitized, and consolidated internet that chokes out democratized community spaces. The fighting-for-scraps mentality that the larger industry places on small creators with its sparing and self-interested investment. Our current value system limits not only what AAA games are but also what everything else has the capacity to be.

Utopia does not have an aesthetic. We don’t need to prescribe the correct “alt” taste. Games can be high and low, sacred and profane, cute and ugly, left brain and right. Destroying the games industry does not mean picking an alternate niche to replace it. Instead, we seek to open the floodgates to a world in which countless decentralized, intimate, and overlapping niches might thrive.

When we decentralize power, we not only create the conditions for more and better games, we also diminish the conditions under which abuse can flourish. Many of the stories of abuse hinge on the abuser wielding the power to dramatically help or harm the careers of others. The consolidation of this power is enhanced by our collective investment in The Industry Promise (not forgetting the wider cultural intersections of oppression). Mythologized figures ascend along a linear axis of greatness, shielded by the horrifying notion that they are less replaceable than others because their ranking in The Industry evidences their mystical importance.

What’s Next?

Here is a fundamental truth: we do not need video games. Paradoxically, this truth opens up the world of video games to be as full and varied and strange and contradictory as life itself.

So. Say you agree with all or part of my assertions that collectively we may proceed to end the video games industry by divesting our attention, time, and money, and building something new with each other. But what does that look like in practice? I don’t have all the answers. I find community very difficult due to my own trauma. Nonetheless, I’ll do some brainstorming. Skim this and read what speaks to you personally, or do your own brainstorming!

Center BIPOC/queer leadership

I.e. people who have been often forcibly divested from the majority culture and have experience in creating alternatives. Draw on influences outside of media e.g. transformative justice, police abolition, and prison abolition. Books like Beyond Survival and Emergent Strategy are based in far deeper understanding of organizing than anything written here, and are much more relevant to the direct and immediate issues of things like responding to sexual assault in our communities.

Divest from celebrity/authority

Many people will tell you that their most rewarding artistic relationships are with peers, not mentors and certainly not idols. Disengage from social media-as-spectator sport where larger-than-life personalities duke it out via hot take. Question genius narratives wherever they arise. Cultivate your own power and the power of those adjacent to you. If you feel yourself becoming a celebrity: take a step back, recognize the power that you wield over others, redirect opportunities to marginalized creators whose work you respect, invest in completely unrelated areas of your life, go to therapy.

Divest from video games exceptionalism

Academics have delved into video games’ inferiority complex and the topic of “video games exceptionalism”, which is tied into what I frame as The Industry Promise above — the idea that video games as a technological vanguard are brimming with inherent value due to all the things they can do that other forms of media cannot. This ensures that gobs of money get thrown around, but it’s an ahistorical and isolating notion that does nothing to actually advance our understanding of games as a form (Interesting discussion on this here, which reminds me of Richard Terrell’s work regarding vocabulary).

Reimagine scale

Rigorously question the notion that “bigger is better” at every turn. With regards to projects, studios, events, continually ask “why?” in the face of any pressure to make something bigger, and then try to determine what might be lost as well as what might be gained. Compromising on values tends to be inevitable at scale, workplace abuse or deals with questionable entities. For me this calls to mind the research led by psychologist Daniel Kahneman suggesting that the happiness benefits of wealth taper off dramatically once a comfortable standard of living is reached. Anyone who’s ever had a tweet go viral can tell you that it’s fun at first and then it just becomes annoying. Living in a conglomerated, global world, we regularly have to face and process social metrics that are completely incomprehensible to the way our social brains are programmed, and the results are messy. Are there ever legitimate uses for a huge team working on a project for many years? Sure, probably, but the idea that this is some sort of ideal normal situation that everyone should strive for is based on nothing but propaganda.

Redefine niche

Above I suggest that AAA is niche. I believe it’s true broadly, but that it’s definitely true relative to their budgets. What do I mean by this? AAA marketing budgets are reported to be an additional 75–100% relative to development costs (possibly even higher in some cases). Isn’t this mindblowing? If a game naturally appealed to proportionately mass numbers of people by virtue of its High Quality or Advanced Technology, then would we really need to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars just to convince people to play it? For contrast, Melos estimates that our marketing budget for Anodyne 2 was an added 10% of development costs and it was a modest commercial success. Certainly marketing is a complex field that can be ethical, but to me, there is something deeply unhealthy about the capacity of large studios to straight up purchase their own relevance (according to some research, marketing influences game revenue three times more than high review scores).

On a separate but related note, I don’t buy that all the perceived benefits of AAA such as advancements in photorealism will vanish without the machine of The Industry to back them. People are astonishing and passionate! It won’t always necessarily look like a 60 hour adventure world, but it will be a niche that we can support like any other.

Ground yourself in your body

Self-compassion, mindfulness, meditation, exercise, breathing, nature, inter-being. There are many ways to build your capacity to experience joy, wonder, and happiness. One of the difficult things about this process though is that if you approach these topics head on, you’ll often be overwhelmed with Extremely Specific Aesthetics that might not fit you (e.g. New Agey or culturally appropriative). My advice is to 1) be open to learning from practices that don’t fit your brand while also 2) being able to adapt the spirit of advice into something that actually works for you. The benefit of locating our capacity for joy internally is that it reveals that The Industry is fundamentally superfluous and so we are free to take what we want and throw the rest in the compost pile.

As a side note, some artists (who otherwise have structural access to things like mental health services) fear becoming healthy, because they’re worried that they will lose the spark and no longer make good art. Speaking as an artist whose creative capacity has consistently increased with my mental health, there are multiple reasons why I don’t think people should worry about this.

You carry your past selves within you, even as you change. “Our bodies are neural and physiological reservoirs of all our significant experiences starting in our prenatal past to the present.”⁴

You can lose a spark and gain another. You can gain 6 sparks in place of the one you lost.

What is it that you ultimately seek from being “good at art”? Ego satisfaction? Human connection? Self-respect? All of these things would be easier to come by in the feared scenario in which you are so happy and healthy that you can no longer make art. Cut out the middleman! Art is for nerds!

Invest outside of games

Games culture often encourages a total identification with video games. This pressures developers into working and audiences into buying, conveniently benefitting executives and shareholders to everyone else’s detriment. Investing in interests wholly unrelated to video games is beneficial in many ways and there’s something for everyone! Personally, I love books. A novel is “low-tech” in nearly every way that a AAA game is “high-tech”, and yet books are affordable, data-light, easy-to-preserve, stimulating, challenging, immersive, and entertaining. What is technology, again?

Another pertinent thought: while there’s nothing inherently wrong with dating a fellow game developer, you should not enter industry/work spaces or events looking for romantic connection. Particularly if you have any sort of institutional power, you will inevitably put others in uncomfortable situations and prime yourself to commit abuse. If you want sex, relationships, etc, find other outlets, shared interests, and dating pools.

Work towards a more accessible world

In the context of an often systemically ableist world, video games can — at their best — be fun, valuable, and accessible experiences for disabled audiences. Consequently, when I say “divest from the video games industry”, I don’t want to gloss over the fact that divestment comes with a different cost for different people. Certainly accessibility within video games continues to be as important as ever, but if I’m asking, e.g., for people to “invest outside of games”, then a commitment to a more accessible out-of-game world is also extremely vital. For instance, non-disabled people can be attuned during this particular moment to the unique perspectives and leadership of disabled people regarding Covid lockdowns and widespread work-from-home, and be wary as we gradually lift restrictions of reverting to a selective and hypocritical approach to accommodations.

Invest in alternative technological advancements

What might we have the resources, attention, and energy to grow if our industry weren’t so laser focused on a constricted definition of technological advancement? For example, audio-only games appear to me an incredibly fertile area for technological advancement that has been under-resourced. How about further advancements towards biodegradable/recyclable microchips and batteries? A fundamental rethinking of the “home console” model in which each successive generation strives to obsolete the last and sell tens of millions new hardware units? Something like an arcade or those gaming lounges (but do they all have to have the same aggressive aesthetics?). The success of Pokemon GO seems to gesture at potential for social, non-remote video game experiences with broader demographic/aesthetic appeal. At the Portland (Maine) Public Library, there’s a console setup in the teen section where local kids would play and they also had a selection of console games for checkout — that was really cool! Local game dev organizations like GLITCH creating events where local devs show and playtest games with the public…

Look to small tools

Small tools such as hobbyist-centered game engines very naturally and successfully act as springboards to community. Look at ZZT, early Game Maker (e.g. gamemakergames), OHRRPGCE. Look at bitsy, PuzzleScript, Pico-8! Look at Electric Zine Maker by Nathalie Lawhead as well as this post they wrote on small tools. Small tools, by virtue of their limitations, tend to lend themselves to particular aesthetics and goals. Whether you’re ultimately playing to or against the core gravitational pull of a small tool, I think it grounds you within a certain design conversation that is conducive to community. Participating in these communities as a child (even though I rarely interacted directly) fundamentally instilled in me ideas like: people make their own fun; wonder is uncorrelated with budget; being strangely specific has value. Can other structures learn from small tools? Events, meetings, parties… what happens if we think of these as communal “engines” — structures built around a conversational core that people can use to create things or express themselves…?

Something that crosses my mind often is that it may be fundamentally healthy for us all to be “big fish in small ponds” in one way or another. The idea that there exists One True Big Pond that reflects all of our collective values simultaneously is a harmful myth that serves to direct all admiration and energy towards corporate interests and robs the rest of us of our accomplishments.

Sucking as praxis

“Professional artistry” as the capacity to maintain the shared illusion that there are indisputable measures of beauty and worth. When you allow the illusion to fail — often against your will — 1) capitalist powers will be disappointed in their inability to wield you with proper efficiency and 2) fellow small creators will be heartened because you bypassed the illusion and still offered something worthy. Failure in a backwards system can be strength. Growing as an artist can be a gloriously paradoxical affair.

Fight for history

We miss out on so much when history is lost to us, and video games are extraordinarily susceptible due to their technical dependencies on ever-shifting hardware. The Industry’s current incarnation goes beyond history-apathy to a downright historical hostility. Sustaining the narrative of linear technological progress inevitably involves shitting on the past (there are a chosen few old games that are kept accessible, but they feel like exceptions proving the rule). Emulation is a vital resource, ever on the verge of outlaw (See Nintendo’s legal actions), Internet Archive is under attack, and Disney warps copyright laws to keep their stranglehold on media intact. Overviews and longplays of difficult-to-play older games are incredibly valuable and I’m truly grateful for people who do this vital work. Off the top of my head, I’ve enjoyed Nitro Rad’s comprehensive work in 3D platformers, and Cannot Be Tamed’s retro reviews. See also: the Video Game History Foundation.

Public libraries could be a vital ally in this cause. What if libraries had access to legacy tech or specialized emulation software that made playing, researching, or recording from old video games more feasible? What if small creators or defunct small studios could get grants or support in preserving their own old work? Would disappointing institutional responses to Gamergate have played out differently if knowledge of and respect for the ongoing historic contributions of BIPOC, female, and/or queer developers were built into the core fabric of video games spaces? Would it be so easy to accept the AAA model as the pinnacle of technology if we contextualized the astounding complexity of past games like Dwarf Fortress, or the Wizardry or Ultima series — technological complexity that would not have been possible had the games been beholden to modern AAA priorities? (Talking out of my ass here, as I have never played these games. See also: modern work on Dwarf Fortress). See also: The Spriter’s Resource and it’s affiliate sites.

Expand government arts funding

I don’t know a lot about this, but… there should be more of it! I see it happening more in other countries besides the US.

Labor organizing

We can look into studio structures like co-ops. We can join unions. Those unions must be intersectional to the core (see recent events regarding GWU international). How about dual power? Many small studios could combine in overlapping networks of varying formality. They could integrate their audiences, cross-promote, build collective power so as to not be totally beholden to the will of corporations. I’m not an expert on labor though, look to others who know more.

Collaborative / open source resources

E.g. The Open Source Afro Hair Library, Open Game Art, Rrrrrose Azerty’s prolific CC0 music and the broader Free Music Archive community.

Give money

Normalize mutual aid. Normalize buying small games. Contribute to things like Galaxy Fund.

Just Play!

Play something totally random on itch.io (or another community-oriented site) with no outside recommendation. Compliment and/or pay the developer if you like something about it!

Conclusion

Thank you for engaging with these thoughts! I hope that they spark thoughts for you, and that we can all learn from each other. Feel free to reach out to me on twitter or via email: [email protected]

[Edit: at 11:20PM CDT, 6/25/20, I changed the audio games link from a wikipedia article to the more relevant-seeming: https://audiogames.net/]

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