Category: politics

busywork

Shall I continue with my usual blog template (self-aware apology for not writing, general state-of-the-world angst, and then quick rundowns of consumed media)? Do I still want to do this? Does it matter if you (whoever you are) don’t care anymore? Does anything matter? Am I writing this mostly because I need to look busy? (The answer to that last question is a HELL YES.)

I know I’ve been struggling to keep this blog going, and I know this isn’t the first time I’ve said so. It’s just that I’m now more self-conscious about it than I used to be. Back in the LiveJournal days, I was Captain Oversharing, blathering about everything and nothing and filling in the empty spaces with iPod shuffle wars and personality quizzes. But I haven’t felt comfortable doing that in quite some time. Believe me, I’m just as self-absorbed as ever; it’s just that I think I’m embarrassed about it.

Let’s just say this: my default emotional state is no longer anxious or depressed. I’m starting to get… mad. The news everywhere is making me mad. Every hour that passes without impeachment proceedings is an hour that brings me closer to a Network-level meltdown. And the problem is, you can’t really take a pill for anger. And waiting until November 2020 to vote is a looooooong time to hold on.

So, then, let’s get busy with being distracted!

BOOKS: So I’ve noticed that most of what I’ve read this year has been either collections of short stories, or Weird Horror, or collections of Weird Horror. It seems fitting, in these troubled times, to find distractions from the awfulness of the news in the nameless dread of Cthulhu. That being said, you know what else works? Humor!

The Hunger, Alma Katsu. So this is a quasi-supernatural take on the infamous Donner Party. If you’ve read Dan Simmons’ The Terror, you’ll get the idea. It’s an interesting tale, just not particularly memorable. I’d give it a solid B+.

Inspection, Josh Malerman. I didn’t read or watch Birdbox, nor do I recall why I had this on my Kindle (it might’ve been on sale?). In any event, it’s an interesting premise that’s written in a somewhat by-the-numbers prose style, and with one of the most out-of-nowhere, completely batshit insane hyper-violent endings I’ve ever read. B-.

Calypso, David Sedaris. God, I needed this. It’s been a while since I’ve read any Sedaris and this collection absolutely killed me. The “Sorry!” essay in particular is absolutely hilarious, as is the story about shopping in weird Japanese stores with his sisters. (The mental image of Amy Sedaris gently fondling a giant wooden phallus as if it were a pepper grinder in particular is one for the ages.) A.

French Exit, Patrick deWitt. This is the third deWitt novel I’ve read, and certainly it’s the most different; it’s a strange but compelling story of an elderly rich widow and her emotionally inert son, escaping a legal catastrophe in NYC and hiding out in Paris. B+.

To Rouse Leviathan, Matt Cardin. Because I can’t stay amused forever, I finally finished this mostly very impressive Ligotti-meets-Lovecraft collection and if nothing else I’m gonna keep this author on my watch list. A-.

I had started and then put down Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner; I’ve heard great things about it, and there certainly appears to be a really good book here, but some of it hit a little too close to the bone. And I’m now finally reading Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, which I think won the Pulitzer despite being a comedy? I’m about 30 minutes into it and it’s certainly well-written; we’ll see how that pans out.

GAMES: I’m all over the place, again. My Xbox One X has been having some overheating problems lately, so my replay of Red Dead 2 is going to take some time. In the meantime, though, I’ve started playing Control and GODDAMN that game is so very extremely my shit. Absolutely gorgeous, very very weird, satisfying on multiple levels – combat is a blast, but also the environment is just jaw-dropping. Brutalist architecture taken to the extreme. Hard to explain without screenshots; alas, the game didn’t ship with a photo mode, which feels especially egregious because there are images in this game – even early on – that have been permanently seared into my brain. Hopefully that’ll get patched in shortly.

That’s probably it for now; have a good Labor Day weekend, everybody. Sharpen your guillotines.

a few words from the sad guy, plus some new (old) songs

So I’ve been kinda fucked up lately.  With the news.  Like, really kinda fucked up.  As in, I am really needing to go to therapy on Saturday.  I want to clarify:  I’m not in a dangerous place.  But over the last few weeks, with news shit really starting to get, like, absurd, I’ve been aware of my face having the sort of thousand-yard stare that can accompany the late stages of devastated, turn-out-the-lights-and-listen-to-Disintegration-over-headphones teenaged heartache.  There’s really no other word for it than sad.  But in a really deep, really fucked up, please get me offa this thing sort of way.

We all have different coping mechanisms.  I’ve been too frazzled to play video games lately, which is frustrating.  I’ve been reading very escapist fiction, but only a chapter or two at a time – and I’m also reading two collections of short stories, and alternating between all three or four at any given time.  I can’t focus, is what I’m saying.  I get home, I put Henry to bed, I kiss my wife, and then I get just sad and also perhaps a little or a lot very stoned in my basement while I listen to music or try to think about maybe one day writing lyrics to songs that I haven’t finished recording from three years ago.

SUDDEN TANGENT:  You know what, fuck it.  It’s killing me that I haven’t finished this album after all this time, and so I need to do something about it.  All these tracks have been slowly burning tiny holes in my iPhone since 2015.   So rather than release a B-side of a B-side, I’m gonna throw on one of the stuff that I actually really like and still intend to finish.

So this thing right here is a loop I recorded on a 4-track through my looping pedal in, like, 2001.

 

So that’s a thing I’ve always kinda liked.  I later reworked into a bridge section for a latter-day Good Evening song in 2006-7, and then I kinda just kept it in the back of my mind; when I signed up for the RPM challenge in 2015, and for lack of any better ideas, I decided to revisit it and see if I could fit it into something new.  I never did find a definitive beginning and/or end to it, but the section itself still sounds quite lovely to me:

 

And then this other thing, which is just a fun doodle of an idea that is perhaps too-obviously informed by The Forms, also happens to be the most recent substantial thing I’ve recorded here in Maplewood, (but again, that only means November 2015):

 

OK.  You are now the first people in the world (aside from 3-4 beta listeners from three years ago) to have heard that.  Thank you for indulging me.  I HAVE PLENTY MORE AND WILL PUT THEM UP, PERHAPS LATER IN THIS VERY POST THAT I AM PROCRASTINATING FROM FINISHING.

[END TANGENT]

So I’ve been sad, is the thing, and it’s frustrating as all hell, because it’s a sadness that exists beyond me; it’s not a sadness that I can control.  It is a sadness of the very reality that we are currently living in, more specifically the cruel feeling of hopelessness about it all, and that even with the amazing and surprising and good-heart-feeling election victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s immediately driven back by the 1-2 punch of the SCOTUS mess and the mass shooting at a Maryland newspaper (which, I want to make clear, I’m writing this at 9:23 while very stoned and don’t yet know if a motive has been uncovered – the more important issue is that, in the words of @igorvolsky, “any motive + easy access to firearms = death & horror.”

And so anyway, about half an hour ago or so I went upstairs to pee and get some ice cream because I’m sad and binge-eating and munched out and I was looking at Facebook and saw this video.

Now, look.  I think Donald Trump is, perhaps, the most dangerous man in American history.  He is vile and repellant and morally unfit and profoundly unethical and we all know it.  There isn’t a day that goes by lately where I don’t spend my day within a deep and disturbing dread that something truly awful is about to happen.

But the thing I find most loathsome about him – despite his endless blustering and bravado and chest-bumping – is that he’s a fucking coward.  This shooting in Maryland is tragic and horrible and he is so scared about having to deal with a real crisis that he just keeps on walking.  He’s the President of the United States, don’t tell me he didn’t yet know.   He absolutely knew.  And he was too scared to speak to the press to offer any words of condolences.  He has no empathy for other human beings in pain, and so there is nothing for him to gain out of offering solace to the grieving.  So he just walks away.

I was going to get into a whole big rant about it.  I was gonna just vent and spew and vomit all over the internet.  This is a very small and insignificant part of the internet, the whole of which you’d never call pristine, but whatever – now I’ve just covered my little tiny part of it in venom.

Then I decided to not do that.  Maybe I’d write about not writing.  Because even though I’m hurting, I don’t know that throwing my hurt onto you is the right thing.  I’m not saying I should be keeping this to myself – like I said above, I’m really looking forward to Saturday morning’s therapy session.  And so I worry about having my only contribution to this shrieking nightmare to simply be another lonely howl at the moon.

I think what I really needed to do is just tell you guys that I love you.  Times are fucking terrible right now, man, and it fucking sucks.  But you’re not alone.  I’m not alone.  We’re not alone.  I love you guys.  I need to remember to love you guys more.  I need to remember to keep love in my heart.

(And then, after some cleansing breaths, I say:  if they go low, continue to kick them in the face.)

The First Many Hours: God of War

Current status:  Any and all synonyms for exhausted.  Mentally, physically.  Resources depleted.  Running purely on caffeine vapors and anxiety.  Trying to keep it together.  In desperate need of a mental health day, while knowing that such a day probably can’t happen until at least next week at the earliest.

Look: I’ve read and watched my fair share of dystopian fiction, and the thing that never gets mentioned in those works is the unceasing exhaustion and overwhelming despair that comes of perpetual outrage.  Or the near-constant stress-eating and resultant GI distress.

This latest fallout from the WHCD this past weekend is just the icing on the cake.  I cannot come up with a witty retort, so I’m gonna let Burneko handle it:

…As you’ve surely read by now, Wolf joked that [Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee] Sanders’s makeup—her “perfect smoky eye”—is made of the ashes of the facts she burns.

That’s about as gentle a way as anyone could come up with to lampoon the single most relevant fact about Sanders and what brought her to a station in life that would make her a reasonable subject of lines in a White House Correspondents’ Dinner monologue in the first place. A frank and honest description of who she is and what she does would be much more harsh: Every day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders plants herself, by choice, between the public and the facts of what’s being done at the very highest levels of American executive power, and does her damnedest to break and delegitimize the means by which the two are brought together. She is one of the most visible and powerful people in American civic life, and she uses her visibility and power—she chooses to use her visibility and power—to confuse the public and degrade its grasp on the truth, rather than to inform or empower or serve it. Her willingness to do this on behalf of Donald Trump, day after day, and the unmistakable teeth-gnashing relish with which she does it, are the substance of her power, and the reason why anybody knows who the fuck she is at all. What history will remember about Sanders is that she is the scum of the fucking earth, and not the jokey means by which one comedian pointed out this inarguable fact—and that’s only if the senile rageaholic pissbaby moron on whose behalf she shames herself on television every day doesn’t annihilate the human race, first.

I take solace where I can, folks, and right now it’s listening to good music, snuggling with my family*, and, after my family has gone to bed, obsessively playing God of War.

Speaking of which.  I’m at least 30 hours into it.  Currently doing a tricky side quest in Niflheim, newly unlocked.  Can’t stop thinking about it.

Let me back up a second.  I’ve recently been doing a thought experiment at work; I keep a Google Doc in a tab and any time a game pops into my head, for whatever reason, I’ll write it down.  I’ve been doing this for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it happens quite a lot, and I’m wondering what triggers it.  As a weird example:  for the longest time, any time I gave my son a bath, I’d start thinking about a certain sequence (the dockyard shootout)  in Max Payne 3.  (I have no idea why, and I don’t know if I want to know why.)   More to the point, I’ve been trying this out because sometimes I’ll be in my basement, utterly paralyzed by my backlog and not knowing what I’d want to play first; the log reminds me what I’ve been thinking about, and perhaps the paralysis can end.

I’m in no such paralysis at the moment, of course, because every free waking moment I have is spent being thoroughly absorbed by the aforementioned God of War, which is, thus far, probably one of the best games I’ve ever played in my life.  It’s probably fair to say that part of my above-mentioned exhaustion is that I spent the bulk of this weekend’s evenings playing far past my usual bedtime.  Like, 3-4 hours past my usual bedtime.

Because this is not a traditional review, I’m not particularly compelled to tell you about mechanics, though they are wonderful – like a lot of actual, professional critics, I found myself spending a lot of the early hours just throwing my axe into things and then summoning it back, and even 30 hours later it never gets old.  It is, indeed, one of the most satisfying weapons I’ve ever used in a game.

Nor am I technologically savvy enough to describe the graphics in any sort of meaningful way.  Let me simply say that, while I don’t know if it’s the best looking game I’ve ever seen, it’s certainly among the very top.  I can’t give it full marks if only because this is the first game I’ve really spent any time playing on my PS4 Pro / 4K HDR TV setup, and having seen what the X can do in that setup, I can see that the Pro isn’t quite as powerful.  (If I’m splitting hairs, I’d say that the X port of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is better-looking than the PS4’s version, and is also probably better-looking than God of War on a pixel-by-pixel basis, though it’s fair to acknowledge that each game is doing wildly different things.)

And I don’t want to discuss the story, because it should be experienced first-hand.  I accidentally spoiled myself on a mid-game plot point and almost immediately regretted it.  What I can say, though, is that the relationship between Kratos and his son, Atreus, is far better written than I’d ever give this franchise credit for.  There’s a thoughtfulness behind every line of dialogue, and the voice acting is marvelous.

Here’s what I can say, and I know this is going to sound weird – this game feels like it was built for me, specifically; the 40-something tired father with not a lot of free time.   It is paced exactly the way I’d want it to be paced – much like Uncharted 4, the combat is exciting and dynamic but is also spaced out evenly, and there’s just as much emphasis on exploration and puzzle solving as there is on beating the hell out of demons.   The game is beautiful, and it knows it, and it knows you’ll want to explore every nook and cranny, and more often than not there’s a useful treasure hidden away in those places, and so you’re encouraged to go off the beaten paths.  Indeed, sometimes those paths go to rather unexpected places, and the rewards are generally always worth it.

More interestingly, I feel like the game understands how I’m interacting with it and responds accordingly.  The interstitial dialogue as you’re travelling from place to place does a wonderful, effortless job of world-building and character development, and it does it through subtlety (inasmuch as a character like Kratos can be subtle).  If I need a break from killing things, there are always tons of non-violent things to do.  Hell, even just pausing before a combat section so that I can re-outfit my weapons is satisfying; there’s a hint of puzzle-solving that goes along with each encounter, and you can see the results of your decision-making immediately.  It’s wonderful.

As much as I was enjoying Yakuza 6 and Ni No Kuni 2, and also kinda diddling around in Far Cry 5, this is the game that I’m gonna want to keep coming back to.  The new Tomb Raider and Red Dead Redemption games don’t come out until the fall; this will more than suffice in the meantime.

* I just wanted to mention that my current favorite thing is the way my son plays with the back of my hair when I’m carrying him downstairs in the morning.  He is half-awake, floppy-limbed, and can barely keep his eyes open; but when I pick him up, he puts his arms around me and runs his fingers gently through the very short hair on the back of my neck.  It is the sweetest thing – I have no idea if he even knows that he does it – and it makes my day.

Turning Anxiety into Anger

1. What a difference a year makes, or, rather, the arbitrary decision that, beginning January 1, things will be different than they were on December 31.  In the grand scheme of things, the Earth still continues to revolve around the Sun, and the solar system continues to revolve around the Milky Way, and we are all just tiny creatures on a tiny ball hurtling through space.  BUT!  I find that I am no longer anxious about the world the way I was last year.  I am, instead, angry.  Pissed off.  Done.  No tolerance for bullshit anymore.  And it would appear that the rest of the country is with me.  I just watched Don Lemon (!) say the word “shithole” on CNN, and imply (without actually saying it) that Trump supporters and apologists should go fuck themselves.

I can’t remember if I offered up my final review of “Fire and Fury” – it wouldn’t differ that much with my earlier impression, that it’s a scathing and trashy read and while it may be impossible to prove that everything quoted in the book actually happened, nothing about it is surprising.  But I do agree with Drew Magary’s analysis:

I am utterly sick to death of hearing anonymous reports about people inside the White House “concerned” about the madman currently in charge of everything. These people don’t deserve the courtesy of discretion. They don’t deserve to dictate the terms of coverage to people. They deserve to be torched.

Trump ascended into power in part because he relied on other people being too nice. It’s fun to rampage through the china shop when the china shop owner is standing over there being like, “SIR, that is not how we do things here!” If Trump refuses to abide by the standard (and now useless) “norms” of the presidency—shit, if he doesn’t even KNOW them—why should ANYONE in the press adhere to needless norms of their own? They shouldn’t, and it appears that Michael Wolff was one of the few people to instinctively grasp that, and I hope more White House insiders follow his lead. Sometimes you need a rat to catch a rat.

I don’t know what it’s going to take to bring this asshole down – whether it’s Mueller, or whether it’s Trump himself just blurting out the “n-word” during a State of the Union address, or whatever – but I can feel that something is gonna happen, and soon.  This nonsense has gone on long enough.  I’m sick and tired of being anxious; nonstop anxiety attacks are exhausting and draining and I’m done with it.

2. Well, now that that’s out of the way:  is there a word for the feeling when one of your favorite authors comes out with a new book, and it’s even better than you’d hoped it would be?  All I’ll say is that I’m a little over halfway through Nick Harkaway’s “Gnomon” and it is kicking all sorts of ass.  It is scratching the same itch that David Mitchell novels do, especially as it has several layers of narratives all nestled within each other, creating a puzzle to be solved within a plot that is forever unfurling.

Hmm.  I thought I’d have more to say – and I probably do – but today’s actually kinda busy and I’ve lost my train of thought.  Happy weekend, everyone.