Mother of God

I don't....I don't even know where to put this.
This is so fucking good.
It's every single overplayed fucking song mixed together perfectly.
Every. Single. SHITTY. OVERPLAYED. SONG.
SO BAD SO GOOD I CANT STOP LAUGHING

(Nah I actually love DJ Ravine and you should too, that guy is tits)

Jam Tomorrow

shit. lets be pandas
Lets talk about the World of Warcraft. NO NO LOOK FUCK stick around, assholes.
I'm sure it will be rewarding.

They called me back, you know. Desperate for people to play again, they gave out some pretty fly rewards. A free few days, a free upgrade up till the last xpac available, and a free boost to 80 and transfer for a single character. That's a fairly phenomenal amount of free shit, all because they know there's a significant issue with this latest expansion:

The Mists of Pandaria. Exciting! Except.
What the fuck is Pandaria. Show me on the map where Pandaria has been this whole time. Whatever.

To be fair, the Pandaren race has existed before this point. To use WoWWiki's respectable prose, they've long been "a race regarded by fans - and used by Blizzard - as a 'joke race' but still with legitimacy within the lore."
See, the concept of the Pandarens can be traced back to one single dude at Blizzard - Sam 'Samwise' Didier, the current art director - who just liked drawing pandas so much that he put pictures of them in-game in little easter eggs going back all the way to 199-fucking-4 when Warcraft: Orcs and Humans came out.

I'm going to shed light on a dirty secret that we sort of gloss over now that we're firmly indoctrinated into the day-glo world of WoW, with all its fucking...worgen and gnomes and Thrall not being Warchief anymore and deciding to go hug trees the elements instead of ruling the New Horde omg liek dis if u cry everytim.

See, it turns out in 1994 most of the art concept was done by two guys - Chris Metzen and Sam Didier, who both look exactly like you expect people who draw the following pictures to look like. There are beards. Didier draws deathmetal album covers. Metzen very obviously slams the Dew.
 Back then, it was these two hairy dudes on the cusp of the RTS revolution drawing generic fantasy art in ballpoint pen like it belonged on their fucking Social Studies notebook.
The 'plot' for the first two Warcraft games was pretty sketchy compared to the elaborate, swollen lorebags of today that we accept as the new standard.
Basically, there was this sweet world all fantasy and shit with knights and clerics and dwarves, called Azeroth, and then some dark portals opened up and Orcs and Ogres came pouring out and they fought.
And so Blizzard found some dudes who drew some sweet orcs, and hired them.
Look.

Look at Chris Metzen's Nerzhul.

Tell me that isn't the sweetest fucking orc warchief you've ever seen.
He is literally sitting on skulls and scrolls. He's got a WWF belt with the Horde symbol on it. The rest of his outfit is apparently entirely composed of that 90's trademark of this style of art, pouches.
And then Sam Didier was like "bro thats rad as fuck check out my orc blademaster because it's goddamn 1999 and samurais are cool and shit but also orcs?"

And they looked, and it was good, and Warcrafts 1 through 3 were officially sweet as fuck.
(Honestly, Zul'jin being a wiry axe hurling deathmonster in WCII contributed significantly to my initial affinity to the trolls as like, my generic race in WoW. Look at this shit and tell me that, if you were in 5th grade, you wouldn't later make your first character a troll hunter)

And Warcraft 3 had a little joke of a panda included, because they could afford to dick around at this point.

Chen Stormstout, Brewmaster extraordinaire. He ran around and was a tremendously silly thing, all asian stereotypes and drunken boxing and who cares, he was a neutral hero who was explained by like "he came from a foreign land lol drunken boxing panda lol" and that was IT.

And in Vanilla WoW we could visit the area where he was encountered, him and whatshisname (Rexxar, ugh), and you could see his keg leftover and it gave you a moment of "aww yeeeaaah, treading in the footsteps of the previous generation of giants, how integrating and neat" that really made WoW so goddamn good in the beginning.

AND THEN WE DIDN'T HEAR FUCKING SHIT ABOUT PANDAS FOR EIGHT YEARS UNTIL NOW.
That's right. Pandas - sorry, Pandarens - are a fucking joke. They've always been a joke, they've never been srs, and now they're a playable race and the entire future of WoW for the next 1.5-2 years is going to be Panda focused.
WHY?

Because there's nothing left.
Oh, we learned so fucking much about the intricate lore of Azeroth and Kalimdor. We've killed Ragnaros. We've killed the Qiraji. We killed Ragnaros AGAIN. We've killed so many guys who were just made the fuck up within WoW.
And we had to kill them, because we had already killed all of the people from the entire Warcraft universe up to that point.
Illidan is dead. The Lich King is dead.
Kil'jaeden is dead. Hell, we went back in time and made sure Archimonde died too.
Malygos is dead.
DEATHWING IS DEAD.

Literally the only threat remaining against the world of Azeroth is the Titan Sargeras himself.
(Get me drunk sometime and ask me about the Aesir and Vanir titans.)

WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE GOING TO DO IN PANDARIA AND WHY SHOULD I CARE?

The problem, of course, is that I do care. For the same reason that I will play every single Pokemon game, until I'm in a retirement home, demented and calling people to brag about my Rattata.
It's in the top percentage of Rattata, you see.
I'm legitimately curious, nay, fascinated by the new mechanics being introduced.
A new class? The last time that happened was years ago!

It's the promise, the illusion of fun and progress, starting the cycle up again.

Whatever I end up doing, the only guarantee is that I'm going to continually shout about it until you're all sick.

Extended Hiatus

Like endospores, but with music. (my god, it's like chiptunes without chiptunes. it's what happens when you up the audio resolution of 8 bit tracks)

Hiatus

running dark

Oh man remember these

Behold.
Four straight, unedited minutes of what I do nightly.
This isn't really a production so much as an actual slice of me dicking around obviously?
Who cares also you should probably put some music on because I sure as hell had headphones on under all that Russia.


Man my face looks fat as fuck I promise I'm not actually a fat faced asshole. It's the hair I swear.

Here Have This Mint We Cleaned Your Room

Guys. Guys I'm way too anime to drive right now. Somebody has to make sure I get home and don't turn into a magical girl. If I start using "kun" and "chan" and "pyon" and shit at the end of my words please just turn me onto the recovery position and check in on me every half hour or so but whatever you do don't play any music.

Especially not you, Towa Tei. God damn it this song sounds exactly like the slightly-jarring english language song at the credit roll of every anime ever ever ever.
Maybe there'd be like, a chibi version of the cast dancing past the scrolling names on the bottom. With abstract, tiled two or three frames of animated objects in the background bouncing along.

I can't stop listening to it.

Edit - I don't know where to put this but I think everyone should have to watch this.

MMUh huh 2 of 2

I said something once about splitting the aspects of storytelling into the story and the telling, and the importance of being proficient in both if you want a successful tale.

This applies to MMOs as well.

There. That's my figurative language opener for this chat. Why am I being brief?
BECAUSE THIS IS SERIOUS SHIT, MOTHER FUCKER. LETS TALK ABOUT SOME GOD DAMNED VIDYAGAMES AND HOW THEY WORK.
Buckle your fucking gamerhat on and lets talk some shop.

Specifically, lets talk MMORPGs, or "muh-morp-guhs", as they're known in the gritty back alleys of Glasgow, where they were invented.

We had a chat about The Secret World, after I spent a day playing it.
I only had a day, see. The trial was for a full 24 hour period and no further, which meant if I wanted to actually analyze the gameplay I had to go straight China in my endeavors.

This took some planning on my part, and some early research so I didn't spend A) a full hour staring in paralyzed indecision at the character creation screen, and B) another hour learning how to mine for fish.
So I actually entered the game knowing full well that I was Dragon4Lyfe, givemeagunletsgo.

It felt strange to flex my MMO muscles (mmuscles?). Strange but ultimately familiar.

See, that's the unpleasant current state of affairs in the MMO world. There are certain unavoidable tropes that you just have to deal with in order to build yourself a functioning game system that has a chance to compete with WoW.

That is exactly what it boils down to. WoW has been chugging along for eight years now. It is king.
It is, for better or worse, the metric that all new MMOs are going to be compared against.

Take TOR, for example. I was able to participate in an Old Republic beta test, actually, because why the fuck not. We all love Bioware, we all love lightsabers, how could this not be delicious?

...It was pretty delicious. But it was undeniably WoW. It was WoW with lightsabers.
Oh, it's got a pretty LucasArts sheen on its universe, and Bioware made a few excellent updates considering its main competition was eight years old and rickety, but if you take off the hood and look at the guts you will find that they belong to Blizzard.

I instinctively knew the keybindings. They were unchanged. The same hotkeys opened your bags, your map, your character sheet, your spell book, in both games.
The item ranking system was the goddamn same! I knew I got a better item because it followed greenbluepurple value system!
Shit was eerily familiar, except I was a twi'lek with a lightsaber.
And honestly, that was almost enough for me. Don't ever underestimate how satisfying it is to have the draw weapons button (and yes, it was the same as in WoW) let you whip out a double bladed lightsaber.

Now, TOR had one big thing it hung its hat on - the Bioware specialty, the voice acting and the decision wheel. This was pretty neat because it let you build a little more actual character disposition in-game, as opposed to in-head.
Even your own character had a voice actor! This is a big fucking deal! Giving each MMO character a voice? Being able to hear your character actually act out the script you give them? Very interesting.
Also very damning, because it effectively pigeonholes you into the number of available dialogue options. And even Bioware couldn't really save the hackneyed LIGHTSIDEDARKSIDE personality aspect, because....well, because it's a retarded system in the first place. You pretty much either save the wounded and heal them, or electrocute the shit out of them. A bit bivalent for my tastes.

But I didn't just play TOR. I just played TSW. That's actually the first time I've legitimized The Secret World as an MMO - the graduation ceremony is when people start using an acronym instead of the actual name. The word "wow" in conversation has had two meanings for eight goddamn years.

How is it as a game?

Well, for a start, it's quite pretty. And it ought to be, at this point. Some of the graphics were a bit cheap in the sense that "oh hey you bastards that's just a 2D skin!" but overall it carries itself well in that department.

More importantly, the UI and game mechanic system were newish enough to be less than reflexively familiar to me. I liked that! I didn't know what buttons did what, or how to take my pants off and dance on the nearest mailbox. (I later learned that this game has a Phantasy-Star-Online level compendium of physical emotes you can do, which I fucking love. You can make your character do a cartwheel, or actually perform a rude gesture, or do jazzhands. Things like this, while small, are incredibly effective in increasing the immersion level. During my short stint in Diablo 3, I found that dungeon crawls with friends were infinitely more enjoyable when you got used to using the voice-emotes to talk to each other. It didn't hurt that I was Princess Fucking Azula at the time.)

The initial quest line for new Dragons was interesting while being basic and lets face it, its a fucking MMO, it's going to have to walk you through the paces of THIS is your INVENTORY, THIS is your CHATBOX. But it managed to do it in its own special way and I thank them for it.

You don't have a delineated class in The Secret World. And, like EVE, you can presumably - given enough time - train every single skill in the goddamn game.
This is fucking huge. A mutable character allows for much longer per-character satisfaction and joy. It ensures that a greater percent of the playerbase is going to have a fluid game experience, and a broader slice of the game itself.
You basically just pick which areas you want to invest points in, and attempt to build a functional role for yourself. The basic MMO roles exist, but more along the lines of conceded necessary afterthoughts. You don't go "tank", you go "damage-taking-capable threat-generator".

"Classes" are more determined by weapon specialization. You generally pick two, since you can equip two, and the base questline basically tells you "hey, fuck, pick one of these and run with it".
It's three groups of three - three gun weapons, three melee weapons, three schools of magic.
Then, each one of those specializations contains two "trees", but they aren't really trees in the given (again, archetypal) WoW fashion. It's more like a...food web? It's actually a giant, shifting, tiered monstrosity called the "Ability Wheel", comprised of chambers of 7 or 12 active/passive skills grouped by flavor. It's complex and I'm totally okay with that.
I'm a firm believer in the concept that everyone should be able to do anything in an MMO, given enough skill and knowledge. They allow this. Pretty much every role is capable of laying down solid damage while performing either support buffs or healing functions.
I mean fuck, I took Pistols and I eventually got the ability to heal-over-time thanks to my little technomagic drone hovering over my shoulder. Or heal everyone in my group if I still had combat resources left over.

The combat resource system is the....entire combat system, in TSW.
Basically it's the rogue combo point system from WoW, split into two different things.
If you're melee/magic, you build them on yourself using certain resource-generating skills. Then, you spend them on other resource-consuming skills that scale based on the amount you've got.
....It is exactly like the rouge combo point system. There are builders and finishers and that's all you goddamn do.
If you're ranged, the combo points build on individual targets, meaning you can have 5 on one and 3 on the other simultaneously, but if they die you're shit out of combo points now. It does allow for a certain amount of combat flexibility but overall it was disappointingly simple compared to the mad wizardry Blizzard got up to in their later years. During my time as a Paladin I saw a pretty wild amount of combat-mechanic change, so maybe I'm spoiled. Give me some more resources to manage, is what I'm saying!
The stat allocation system is pretty dang simplified as well - you've basically got health, "attack rating" which affects all abilities, and hit and crit stats. That's about it. Weapon/gear rankings are from 1-10 and you have to have allocated certain level-tiered points into specific specializations to equip them. So you are shoehorned into a weapon spec, at least to a certain point. You can't just suddenly switch to shtoguns because you found a fucking badass shotgun inside of a ghostbear or something, unless you've been simultaneously building your shotgun skills. And that is a dramatic amount of resources required.

The only thing stopping you from eventually becoming a dark, all powerful god, and ensuring permanent imbalance based on disproportionate distribution of power stemming from a direct translation of skills-amassed and time-put-in (I'm looking at you, EVE Online) is the fact that you can only ever have 7 active skills (read: hotbar) and 7 passive skills at any given time.

Out of 525 skills.

HOW GREAT IS THAT.

Sure, they provide a dozen templates to choose from, essentially telling you which skills to take in order to achieve various "builds" (i.e. "go blood magic/pistols if you want to fuck shit up from mid-range and heal your friends at the same time!), but I have no doubt at all that end-gamers will start to alchemize some seriously insane combinations.

What I'm saying is, there is a potential here for theorycrafting that far exceeds the generic class spec/spell rotation found in classic MMOs. Whether it has the actual guts/depth to accomplish it is another story and fuck, I only played for a day.

Oh, and the crafting is Minecraft.

You fucking heard me. You want an assault rifle? Put metal into a roughly assault-rifle-shaped configuration on the crafting grid.
So it's innovative, but simultaneously overly simplified for my tastes. In a game where gear isn't as fanatically tiered and valued as classic MMOs, crafting as a legit game mechanic/reason to play loses some value. I was never a crafting maniac to begin with, though, so don't take my word as law in that regard.

All in all, it was fun. It was refreshingly innovative in enough ways that I was sucked right in for a day, and hitting basic Pistol Mastery felt like an accomplishment.
The story is engaging, the telling is a bit simple in places but still deeply satisfying.

Like I said, pity it's an MMO. Because no matter how deep you are in the bowels of a demon-infested decommissioned Soviet submarine off the coast of Norway, there's always going to be some fucker incessantly jumping around your character in a circle asking you to "gibe money plz? lolol I report you".
Admittedly, since the game was relatively fresh, adult, and cerebral, I didn't encounter anything so repellant as the generic MMO playerbase but rest assured. They will come. And they will come as a horde, as an unstoppable infestation.
Because they are the people who play these games.

Oh, also, it costs real people money per month!

NEW THINGS NEW THINGS NEW THINGS

MMOhno, uh oh. 1 of 2.

So.

Vacillate.
Spin the chamber, revolve, move to the next topic.
We've covered Raving, Insults, and Music.

The only thing left is Videogames before the cycle completes itself.

With that in mind, look! Look at this thing.
Who is this mysterious woman?

Well.
Let me tell you about The Secret World, by which I mean that will be my topic starter and we will get horribly sidetracked into grander, more grossly cerebral vidyagame concepts while I gesture wildly and shred napkins while muttering to myself.
But first, ambiance. Play this while I talk to you about this videogame world, because it is literally the most perfectly fitting backdrop I can find.

It's okay, load it up. She can wait.
Okay. Okay. The Secret World is a full on, very recent MMORPG. A friend of mine bought it on a whim, because apparently that's something you do when you're jobsearching and you have disposable income. I can't imagine dropping 50 bucks on a potential source of entertainment, much less a goddamn MMO you have to pay monthly subscription fees to.

However, I trust this persons judgement in the field of videogames. I have strong faith in this man, as a connoisseur. So when he told me how much actual fun he was having playing a new, underground MMO (of which there are many - many, and shitty, and poorly fleshed out, and they are in general the bane of the vidya game world. Here be neckbeards) I had to listen unbelievingly and do some furious research.

So.


The Secret World is set in a contemporary universe, and it is an unabashed plunder and pillage of every single aspect of any mythology you think would make for a fun game experience. In the words of the games creators, "every myth is true".
Everything.
And, unlike the FFXI guys who just raped ancient myth and named everything Tiamat and Aspidochelone (that'd be the giant island-turtle. why, what did you do as a kid?), The Secret World puts a greater emphasis on more modern conspiracy theories and fringe belief systems.

After a day of playing, we found a single sentence to sum the world up: "It's basically the Hellboy universe. No, like, the comic book version. If it would make for a killer dungeon, Hitler's lizardmen-filled hollow Earth secret base would totally exist.......Okay, it probably exists. That's probably a thing that we'll have to go see. Now let's go join up with the Wandering Jew and fight some psionic mutants in Argentina."

It is modern day, and magic is real, and werewolves live in the alleyways of Ealdswick, London. The Hollow Earth theory is true, the Kraken is real, and laughably misguided Wiccan practices might actually work if you cut yourself with the right knife under the right moon.
That crazy bag lady out on the street might be a high-energy physicist cum amateur street shaman who found out how to travel dimensions using nothing but a piece of chalk and a blank wall.

In The Secret World, the Illuminati are real. The Templars are real. You can shoot lightning if you channel the spirit of electronics through a totem built out of an old iPod usb cable. Then again, you could just shoot your target in the head with a fucking shotgun because, as it turns out, righteous swords of fire are in short supply against the forces of darkness. (Not that you couldn't get your hands on one, eventually. For the right price, information, or favor.)
Everything is real, and it's probably trying to kill you, eat your soul energy, and assume your form so it can go unnoticed until it eats your neighbors too.
The real life, the real world, is in a constant state of chaotic upheaval and conflict, and the grand majority has absolutely no clue what's going on.
I'm waxing poetic, aren't I. I'm droning.
Fine, fine.
I can tell when I'm boring someone.
Stop being so theatrical.

The point is, story-wise, the game is neat enough that I was dragged in. Willingly.
So after a night spend tearing a 10gb-sized hole in internet-space (also known as downloading), I activated my 24-hour trial account and immediately spent an hour staring at the character creation screen.

Character creation....mother of god. One of my many only weaknesses.
In the end, I had to accept that I had no idea what direction I was taking this character, and my complete lack of understanding of the universe I was about to descend into gave me no concepts to armor myself against or shape myself around.

HA HA Just kidding, I googled the fuck out of my options and did some research.

Was I willing to be Illuminati? Did I care about wealth, power, information control, being the hand that guides events? Based in America? Wearing immaculate suits, kevlar vests and gas masks? Subterfuge, bribery, control control control?

Was I going to be Templar? Would I stand as one of many as a bastion against the forces of destruction? Would I forge my willpower like a rod of steel, and smith it into a mighty weapon in this eternal war? Would I embody justice, as I defined it? London based? Sacerdotal in doctrine (yeah, google that one, fuckers), with clean lines and no small hint of decidedly "Inquisition" fashion? Ornate weaponry? Shiny, shiny guns? Strength and honor?

Neither, of course.



I was immediately drawn to the smallest, least overtly influential, most secretive of the triad.
Dragon.
Not the Dragon, not the Order of the Dragon. Just Dragon.
Based in Seoul....currently.
Amorphous. Subtle. Vacillatory.
Pairing Asian philosophy with bleeding edge analytical research. Finding purpose, finding reason behind everything, Tracing the roots of the storm all the way back to the wings of the butterfly, then finding out what caused that butterfly to flap in the first place.
Chaos theory? Why stop at theory?
Dragon conducts empirical research into the nature of dynamic interaction, treating the entire multiverse as a connected system.

Fuck power, fuck control. I want to know how the universe works, and then I want to shake the shit out of it.

I want to be a butterfly.

I want to be the butterfly.






So I made my character and all the headstory and fictional background history just fell fell fell into place because stories, man, that's what drives an MMO at least half the way.

The other half, of course, is gameplay mechanics. We'll be discussing that aspect in the second half.
But for now, Raven "Haraam" Seldon is going to go strap her dual antique pistols up, shrug on her chaos magic focus, and wear suspenders and a duster coat like the fucking gunslinging lunatic mathematical physics grad student who's recently had a (third)eye opening experience with the inchoate that she is.

Pity it's an MMO.

Just Kidding

I Hate It Here

I live within spitting distance of the bars, here in Arcata.
I know this because dozens journey nightly, from the bars to my apartment, just to spit.

The bars here are an interesting phenomenon - every shop is so desperate to be cloistered within our one public square, our "plaza", that we've ended up with all four bars and a liquor store all lined up in a row like criminal suspects.
You could roll out one bar directly into the other, if you were so inclined. Apparently it's a popular past time. I cannot confirm - I've been in precisely one of these bars once.
Apparently the bars have different cliques, attract different regulars. We have a "sports bar" and a "lumberjack bar" and a "we also serve food here bar" and what I can only assume is a "we all live here bar".

It doesn't make much of a difference to me. They're all exactly one block away.

Which means I - and everyone else in my apartment past the hour of wheneverbarsopen - have been subjected to whatever effluent happens to roll in our direction, for the past year.

Hearing snippets of drunks conversing, shouting, screaming, spitting, laughing, fighting, crying.

It's all exactly the same, one night from the next. The dregs of our town stream past our windows. Sometimes they stop to have a chat or a smoke directly beneath them. Sometimes they sit in their cars and play the radio. Sometimes they get arrested.
Whatever they do, they do it with gusto. You have to admire them for that.

It's been an experience. An education.

Everyone is the same when they're drunk. It is the great equalizer.
Every single person sounds the same.
All the posturing, all the bluster and shouting of a drunken fight, sounds identical to the one that happened last night, the night before that, last week, last month. Between two other, identical strangers with equally pointless lives.
The same braying, ignorant guffaws have come out of a thousand drunk face holes attached to the front of a thousand different drunk heads.

Everyone attempting to reason with the cops sounds the same.

I have heard all the jokes. I have heard all the threats. They are all the same.

Everyone is the same. And the common denominator, it is low.

There are probably a half dozen trains of thought available to choose from.
The insults, the words....they are all the same. They sound the same. It's like all men and woman get handed a specific drunk voice when they enter a bar, like a party favor. Here is your hat. Here is your noisemaker. Put it in your larynx.

Even the syntax, the timing and the phrasing.
It is as if we all learned how to posture from movies, or from watching the guy last night.

I haven't heard anything original in a year.

It is enough to make you never want to be drunk again, and that's a genuine shame.
To see the potential for the magic truth-and-beauty-unlocker drug that is ethanol get squandered nightly by scum.
To see what these people have bubbling inside them make its way to the surface, ejected as steaming anger or barely concealed lust or, most often, as stunning ignorance in the form of words.

Or vomit. Always a classic.

This experience, if you haven't guessed, is often trying. Whether it happens early in the night, when you're still idly sitting around, or if you're actively dropping into sleep before the first round of "FUCK YOU"s begin....

Remember mosquitoes? As a child? How awful and jarring a tiny noise could be, even if it was faint and in some other corner of the room? How once you heard it for the first time, you were hyper aware of its continued existence?

This is the gist of it. It doesn't have to happen every night. There may be a week, perhaps when the rain washes all the stupid away, chases it into more private locations where the really terrible potentiality can be unlocked, when nothing happens that I can hear.
Or it's something harmless like hearing a fellow male awkwardly put the moves on a pliable lady.


It may be that that's the worst part, the inevitability of it all. The knowledge that this isn't going to stop any time soon.

People will always be the very worst you can imagine. They will always get drunk at bars, because that is what they know to do. It is what they were taught.

People will always act the way they were taught, and the people who taught them were useless shells of human potential. How can we expect any better of them, when those who came before them were just as meaningless.

Those who came before them, just the night before.

It's the unbearable sameness of it. I want to sit, with a sniper rifle tape recorder, and play back the sounds these people make to them. To their doppelgangers the next day. If there was a way to crush it into them, to force them to reach an understanding of themselves, surely the only course of action it would be rational for them to take would be mass and immediate self annihilation.

Right? Right?

There has to be a way to get them to kill themselves.

I can't possibly do all of them myself.

Especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes

I've currently got the loose strands of a transcendence storm clogging my drain.
One of these days I'll work up the courage to put my fingers in there and clean it up, but this ain't my first rodeo; I know transcendence to be a sticky mistress and I like feeling clean still yet.
Until then I'll continue to poke at it with my big toe each time I take a shower and marvel as my extended metaphors take on a disgusting life of their own.

.....Sexually.

I'm not actually sure what that means.

So, cue Ghostface Killah! Obviously!


What.

WHAT WHAT Would you like to talk about. Pocketwatches? West Sardinia. Born and raised. Flautists? Astronomical. Emulsifier. Efflusive. Not a real word but by god it ought to be.

There's no drug out there for my people. I've been forced to manufacture my own, out of sheer willpower, within my own body, like a Bene Gesserit witch. Manipulating on a molecular level, every cell of mine a little factory. My endoplasmic reticulum is my own private drug mule, smuggling steroids NO NOT THOSE STEROIDS I'm talking about St Anthony's Fire, my god man, don't you listen?

In a legitimate, non-non-sequitur, have you ever smelled metal that's been in contact with a lot of human skin? WHY does it smell that way. It's startlingly unique. When was the last time you smelled a coin.
Oh don't give me that old toss about germs. You're surrounded by germs, cantgetridofthem, go ahead, put that penny in your mouth. What's it going to do, kill you? You've put worse things in there. When you were a kid, I mean. Didn't you? Or have you gone through life without investigating something with ALL. FIVE. SENSES.

All twenty! Depending on which dimensional theory you've Wikipedia'd in the last few hoursdays. Depending on how many girls you want to impress - (NOTE: Girls are not impressed by dimensional theory. The only ones who would be impressed by dimensional theory are much, much more well versed in dimensional theory than you ever will be, you hulking oaf.)

(No, No, Wait, I take that back why were those all in capitals. Well, capitalized. Anyway, I take that back that last bit, those aren't the only girls. There are always truly dumb ones who will be impressed just because you'll appear to be discussing a highly intellectual topic that is unknown to them. These girls are not worth the effort. Boys too, probably. Boys will probably be more threatened by your pretend showoffitude than girls, that's their nature. Their purpose. Anyway. Awful people, all of them. Avoid them at all costs.)

AFTER ALL, WHAT KIND OF PERSON WOULD BASE WILLINGNESS TO SLEEP WITH SOMEONE EXCLUSIVELY ON PERCEIVED EXPRESSION OF INTELLIGENCE?

And do you know which clubs they frequent?

We were talking about metal. Metallic.

People keep saying blood is metallic, or at least leaves a metallic taste in your mouth.
I'm so tired of tropes, of terrible infinite loops of oheveryoneknowsthisaboutthis that were generated in some meaningless etch of history decades ago.
Lemmings don't actually jump off cliffs, salt isn't really bad for you, etcetcetc.

And you can never correct people, you know, lest you be forever known as Dirk Funbuster, Effortless Prick and Ruiner of Parties.

That sounds like a bitter sentence, like this is some personal slight I've been reliving recently, when in fact I mostly keep quiet when I hear people say facts. Rest assured this is not some facebook status lashout at an anonymous stranger (who? oh just some oxymoron).

Pedantic: "of or like a pedant". That is, "a person who is excessively concerned with formalism and precision, or who makes a show of his or her learning."

Bastards, all of them.

Is this blog rapidly devolving into my usual strand of invective-laced denouncements of the human race?
YES. It's what you've paid for. You should judge a person by how many people they think are bastards. I'm willing to bet it has a binomial distribution. That is, if you plotted the human race according to EACH SUBJECTS OPINION of the BASTARDS-TO-HUMANS RATIO, then when you went to change the song the mental image would completely fall apart and you'd be unable to continue!

Didn't see that one coming, did you?! Look, it's much much simpler if you'll just, look, give me your cocktail napkin. And a pen. THIS is a histogram. No, it doesn't matter what it means, just listen to what I tell you. Think this way, I'm coaching you, god damn it.
WHY?
Because once I've fried your brain with lightning, I'm going to scoop it out through your nose like a fucking Egyptian priest, plop it in a jar with a thousand desiccant packets left over from all the food and fur coats and vacuum cleaners they ship and when it's finally dry I WILL GRIND IT INTO A POWDER AND INJECT IT RIGHT INTO MY GODDAMN EYES.

I WILL TURN YOU INTO DRUGS, YOU WALKING CROPS. I WILL HARVEST YOU.

....I'm sorry, that was out of line. Anyway, look at this graph. If you think everyone's a bastard, you're probably a bastard yourself. If you think very few people are bastards, you probably aren't an interesting person yourself.

This is a meaningless distribution. Everyone thinks some people are bastards some of the time. Abraham Lincoln said that, I believe, and look how HE ended up thank you very much.

People have always enjoyed vicarity. Vicariousness. "Substitution". Hide behind someone else, they will live the life you are too afraid of living and you will view their triumphs and be jealous, and you will not view their miserable failures because they will be acutely aware that this vicariousness is how they make their living and they've got to sell it, by god, or their lives aren't worth anything.

If I ever get -

Scratch that.

WHEN I get my own society to command, we're going to be Reverse Spartans.

When every lad comes of age (ladies shall be exempt from this. you know how you had to go to a separate room for sex ed? I still don't know what they told you in there, and I'd love it if you believed that they told us some pretty remarkable, secret things that you don't know about. Oh sure, guys will tell you about the dick video. They'll fight among themselves for the right to disclose penis secrets to you AND LET ME TELL YOU THIS IS ALL AN ACT. You have no idea about tertiary sex organs. No idea at all.)

ANYWAY, the test. The test to be recognized as a man, nay, as a human being (look, alright, feminists, you'll get your own test or something, I'll work it out later just shut up for now, it'll all be equal in the end) starts in the same manner as the Spartans, as the Starship Troopers, as the Army Rangers.

Every to-be-determined-age male will be abandoned - naked! - miles away from civilization, off in the wilderness or maybe a foreign country or just a parking lot a ways out of downtown, who knows.

The point is, if they can somehow find their bearings, cobble together some survival gear, and prove their mastery over nature that is their birthright as dominant life forces of the universe

and if they use this unleashed potential to make their way back into our civilization

WE'LL FUCKING SHOOT THE BASTARDS.

UNIMAGINATIVE, UNGRATEFUL FUCKERS. WE'VE GIVEN YOU THE TOOLS YOU NEED TO START YOUR OWN SOCIETY. YOU'RE THE ALL-POWERFUL APOTHEOSIS OF OUR IDEALS, AND YOU CAME BACK HERE??

We were counting on you, you shitfuck! We're desperate for something, anything new! We were going to let you loose and leave you alone for a few decades, and then once you'd built something innovative and exciting out of the wilderness we were going to go and steal it from you for ourselves.

How do you think we've managed to live this long?

Aside from a cold appreciation of my own genius I felt that I was a modest man.

A 1961 Aerospace Medicine paper included a fine example, from the diary of a French anthropologist who spent four months in the Arctic with a Hudson's Bay fur trader:
   "I liked Gibson as soon as I saw him...He was a man of poise and order, he took life calmly and philosophically...But as winter closed in around us, and week after week our world narrowed until it was reduced to the dimensions of a trap...I began to rage inwardly and the very traits...which in the beginning had struck me as admirable, ultimately seemed to me detestable. The time came when I could no longer bear the sight of this man who was unfailingly kind to me. That calm which I had once admired I now called laziness, that philosophic imperturbability became in my eyes insensitiveness. The meticulous organization of his existence was maniacal old-manliness. I could have murdered him."

This is all Lev Grossman's fault.

Edit - GUYS. GUYS. I'm so fucking good. Or at least I used to be:
              "So what is needed, essentially, is nuclear power that doesn’t cost an infeasible amount (read: an arm and a leg), that doesn’t produce dangerously radioactive waste (read: an extra arm and a leg?), and doesn’t result in weapons proliferation (read: extra arms for everyone!)"
          .....you mean you guys don't read copies of your old fuck-around essays from years back?

Fine, you fuckers don't like rambling, masturbatory, self-aggrandizing rants about video games you haven't played?

FINE.

Let's have rambling, egocentric, maniacal screeds delivered in the manner of the drunk shouting his manifestos into the ears of those around him who are only trying to have a good time.

You scum.

Cue audio!

Sure, sure, I am your typical young adult up in arms against The Man (oh god, I had to separate those words. I am no longer "young adult", I am a legit Young Adult. By which I mean a decrepit, lecherous old man. Lock me away in a home so I can rot without today's youth having to look at me and be reminded of their own mortality. I am dust.) but I am also quite often completely respectful to actual authority.
Proper, earned authority. I was a little fucker when I was a kid because I thought I was better than everyone else. Smarter, probably. I don't know.
Early school is about 25% learning academic material, and 75% other shit.
How to deal with your peers.
Familiarizing yourself with the concept of stupid people having power over you.

My mom keeps things like report cards and childhood intelligence tests (from back before the Internet, so you know they're legitimate). There are two recurring phrases - the first one is "gifted", so, you know, suck my dicksmarts. The second is more varied. Sometimes it's the solid "does not get along well with others", other times it's just a (-) grade in the "social" category of those massive elementary grade sheets. My favorite is the personal note sent home from school that throws around my "lack of tolerance for my peers" (no shit, asshole - they 're stupid!)...

But my goal is not to defiantly justify childhood behavior, because mostly I was a cock.
We were all horrible cocks. Children are just fucking awful. Let's never do that again.

So. I was talking about my respect for legitimate authority.

This is due to my upbringing, which was due to my parents upbringing. That is how this works.

I am only managing to piece this all together now, thanks to recently having been forced to take a long sobering look at myself as a...product. As a process? As a person! That's the one.

Probably because I thought I was such hot shit in the brain department. That's the source of the original shaping of my mind.
I was told I was smart, and so I learned that being smart was good.
Was the best thing.
If I was excellent at sports or something, I probably would have been encouraged to develop muscles or...sportsmanlike behavior or team....coordination....sportsball....points.
As a parent, you're just sort of constantly on the lookout for things your child could potentially be good at and once you've found something you just sort of gently prod your kid with it until it latches on or they decide they don't actually want to play the piano, mom, thanks.
(If you grow up in asia, the second option is replaced with a second helping of the first option.)

Oh right. We were talking about respect.

My fascination stems from my lack of complete understanding exactly as to what respect is supposed to be, I guess.
Excuse me while I dictionary it.

Okay yeah I remember what it was like to be a teenager again.
It's even in the fucking definition!
"A feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements."
So when people spewed stuff like "Show some respect for your elders!" or tried to use "respect" and "authority" together, I was confused! Those people hadn't done shit for me in the respect department - in fact, they were obviously lacking in the abilities, qualities, and achievements category!

Mostly because the only thing I respected was smarts - more specifically, the smarts they told me I was good at. This is a selfish and childish view of the world, so it's a good thing I was a selfish child at the time.
Shit like doing math really fast, or knowing the periodic table a few rows down. Pointless trivial "smartsy" stuff that we were rewarded for doing in our early school career in the hopes that it would point us towards actually fucking learning something.
Except we were braindead children! Shih-tzus! All we could see was the finger, desperately pointing at something delicious but far away that we were incapable of thinking about!
This metaphor has exceeded its utility!

Which is why nowadays I have a legitimate reverence for people who are more intellectual than I am, even if they aren't particularly better people - a fact that I'm capable of noticing now, which adds a pleasantly annoying element of cognitive dissonance that I can prod like a sore tooth when I need to.

Things like having a PhD or being fluent in multiple languages or understanding fluid dynamics automatically elevates you into this strange, elven superior plane of existence.
You have earned my undying respect by unwittingly jumping through the only hoop I hold.
And that's absurd, and inaccurate!
But it's an explainable byproduct of the way my brain was built by myself and others.


This is the reason I have to work in the sciences.

It's also the reason I don't care where I work in the sciences (to a certain extent).

This is, when you stop and think about it, a serious fucking issue.

I'm in science for the wrong goddamn reasons. I was drawn to it because people go "Ooh!" when you're eight years old and you tell them you like chemistry and physics.
And I genuinely did, don't get me wrong. I still do!
There is legitimacy to my motivations now that I'm a grown ass human being; an earnest interest that I have had to manually scrape together (which is as it should be, now that I reflect on it).
But the notion of free will and the ability to just decide to be whatever you want to be when you grow up is demonstrably false. You're being defined, refined, specified, from day one.

*the author then proceeds to scrap this post for 2.5 weeks but I'll be damned if I'm erasing something that took an ounce of actual effort to produce, even if it's poop. In this metaphor, the words above are literally poop that I forcefully delivered to your doorstop. This is a poop metaphor. This is a poor metaphor. *

There are two other things I admire besides smarts.
One of them is skill. This is different than grace, but barely.
That was the thing that made me really drop the book and stare at the wall (the most) about the way Pullman drew together His Dark Materials.
Used to read it with grace. Now you're going to have to learn to cultivate skill.

Story of my fucking life.

Thirdly is talent. This is integrated into the other two, to be sure, but it's worth separating.
You can teach yourself to Art. Well. Feynman did it and he was already a goddamn Nobel laureate by the time he buckled down and had an exhibition of his paintings.
I'm willing to believe you're capable of learning just about anything, given enough time and dedication and nothing nothing nothing else going on.
This is where the shared belief among men arises from - the thought that, if we lost/gave up everything and moved to a Shaolin monastery for the next restofourlife, we could become a grand master badass. If we Jason Bourne'd ourselves for ten years, we could take down a small country.
This is a necessary lie we tell ourselves, often directly after being rejected by women.
But I do believe there's some truth to it, anyway.

The point is talent is like....a "rare candy" you get to use to cut some of the grueling dedication out of mastery.
You get a completely random amount/distribution of talent and its up to you to do anything with it.
This arbitrary resource is way more apparent in some people, or they were just lucky enough to find something they were good at quicker than the rest of us, and that's worth respect.

Or, rather, admiration. Man, I really don't like the word "respect."

I told you that story so I can tell you this story so I can tell you more stories forever.

I've once again had lots of nocturnal free time on my hands and nothing to occupy me on the internet. So I've turned Klosterman-esque again, peering into my own wonderful navel in the hopes that it will explain how, in 1977, John William's "Star Wars Theme -  Main Title" managed to top out at #10 on the Billboard chart.

Does this mean that people were requesting it be played on popular music radio stations?
Were people going out and just buying the cd that much?
Where was this song getting played?


Author's Note - Uh, I realize after finishing this several hours later that this might have been better split into two or three separate "acts" like my WoW tales. This is just a warning that, you know, tl;dr is acceptable.


So.

I'm going to talk to you about Minecraft.

What that means is, I'm going to talk to you about Uplink.

Uplink was a computer game released in 2001 that - and this is quoting the Wikipedia article, which offers a more succinct and accurate summary than I am capable of - "is best described as a simulator of the cinematic depiction of computer hacking."


What it was, if you haven't played it, was a shitty hacking simulator a la rad 90's movies.
It was....cybarcryyyyyme. Possibly to the X-treme. Certainly to the max.
It was the video game equivalent of wearing fishnet shirts, crazy futuristic eye makeup, Rad Fucking Hacking Goggles....
It was this, but without any graphics effects because those cost money and anyway what the fuck even are they doing oh my god what a great film.

"Use your best viruses to buy us some time...."I can't make shit like that up.

I think I found Uplink when I was in 6th or 7th grade which, now that I look back on it, was actually pretty close to when it came out.

At that impressionable age....I cannot begin to tell you how fucking awesome this game was. Everything was a cool blue color and you could like, upgrade your RAM so you could hack better...mainframe...data....traceroute....systems?

All the hacking was automated. All you did was execute programs. It was a glorified script kiddie run of a game, and yes I'm using the verb "run" in the proper Neuromancer usage.

Did I mention I just read Neuromancer and Snow Crash back to back the other week?

I think if I had read those books and played this fucking game at the tender age of 7th grade (you do the math, I'm 23 and I don't have to), I might genuinely have become....

A 23 year old with no computer skills whatsoever, wistfully pining for the day when I can hack the Gibson based on eyeliner and techno music alone.

God I need a pair of those goggles.

When Google Glass releases a public product, I'm putting Uplink on that bad boy and going to a train station or the last remaining phonebooth in New York with rollerblades, goggles, spiked hair, the fucking works.  And I'm going to accomplish nothing at all, just like in that goddamn game.

Here's the deal - maybe it was because I was playing a cracked game (Yeah, thats right. I had a hacked copy of a game about fake hacking. Analyze that one, fuckers [and no, I have no recollection of how I obtained that copy - probably through Kazaa Lite, I think was the P2P of choice back then])

Maybe I just blew at fake hacking. Who knows.

Whatever the reason, after maybe an hour or two of invested time - I'm feeling pretty good. I'm a decent fucking hackster. I've pulled some clever backdoor....scan.....download.....security bypassing...on the CIA? Rival companies? I genuinely don't remember.
You start off doing a bunch of really shitty, small scale stuff like copying emails or changing some guys social security number, and you work up to VIRUSES THAT DESTROY ALL OF THE INTERNETS.
(Oddly, the most menial starter jobs were the most accurate portrayals of hacking at the time. Before everything was on the internet, only important documents were. So that's what you hacked, I guess. That or like, Yahoo News.)

Except you never got that far. At least, I didn't. Because all of a sudden, after you've upgraded some of your shit, you get a "LOL NOPE U GOT CAUGHT DUDE."

Just, game over. Maybe you forgot to cover your tracks? Except they never tell you how to cover your tracks. And only the higher level programs allow you to delete evidence of your backdoor anyway. What the fuck, is what I'm trying to say.

What the fuck. It was always so disheartening an experience that I would immediately bury Uplink again, only to rediscover it maybe 8-12 months later.

That reminds me, I should really download that fucker again and give it a go. Play real. real. fucking. careful. See if I still get busted like 1/3rd of the way in.
 You people need to understand how fucking amazing this game can be, if you put your role playing face on. This game could seriously impress some US Senators. I genuinely believe that if you played this game while the people who debated about SOPA watched, they would try and have you arrested.

The point is, that almost guaranteed out-of-the-blue game over (before you could build up enough money to buy an emergency REMOTE SELF DESTRUCTION OF YOUR HACKING DECK upgrade, thats right the game had that) totally ruined the game. You began to expect it, and cringe knowing about it.




Now. I said I was going to talk about Minecraft, and that's because I've been playing Minecraft again lately.

We're going to gloss over the last few patches that Notch has pooped out (or I guess Notch is off that project now, isn't he. Explains a lot.) because they're dumb as fuck. HEY. You know what this beautiful indie wonderscape of a videogame with fairly unique crafting mechanics and limitless imagination potential needs?

BORING STALE RPG-ESQUE TROPES.

Oh, man, remember when you could just pick a direction and run, exploring randomly generated geographical wonders, constructing rude shelters to survive the eerily unexplained zombies that emerge?
DID YOU ENJOY THAT?
Here's a Hunger bar! Now you have to eat food to stay alive at regular intervals!

Oh, and here's ENCHANTING! Utilizing a completely meaningless "LEVELLING" system, you can spend EXPERIENCE POINTS to upgrade your TOOLS into GEAR you can CARE ABOUT AND LOSE.

God, I'm not getting my point across at all here.

A pickaxe used to just be a pickaxe. Now, if you GRIND to a certain level and put your enchanting table a certain way, you can make it a REALLY GREAT PICKAXE that like, mines faster and doesn't break as fast. It introduced only bad RPG elements to a system that was already functioning perfectly for no reason.


In short, these last few patches have served the exact same function for Minecraft as the Prequel Trilogy films of Star Wars has to the greater Star Wars canon.

But it's fine, because I just ignore the ones I can and adapt to the ones I can't avoid.

Because here's the thing about Minecraft.

You can fart around in single player, and it's fascinating for a while. This strangely stark, infinite world that you have to start from scratch in. You can build sand castles and learn the basic mechanics of the universe on your own (How to grow trees. How to survive a lava surge. So on.), and it will be a satisfying experience.

But.

Multiplayer is so much more than the sum of its parts.
Once you've played multiplayer, and built these phenomenal...masterwork constructs as a testament to mankind's dominance over the cyberworld, or explored the strange phenomena that arise from complex behavior being determined by overtly simplified coding, you can never go back.

Single player Minecraft is 100% weird and creepy now. I don't have anything else to say about that matter.
People have for some reason connected this Minecraft game to various points along the Autism spectrum and, while that's a completely ignorant and internet thought process to have, I TOTALLY GET WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM.

Playing single player Minecraft is like choosing to play World of Warcraft on a private server where it's just you, in Stormwind, alone and safe and empty and meaningless.

(Tangent - Wow, that's a strange feeling. My mind had a half second lapse where I actually didn't know the name of the human stronghold city, but my fingers just powered on through going "Dude, come on, it's Stormwind.")

AND, once you open the mind boggling Pandoras box that is MODDING Minecraft, there's DOUBLE no going back.

It's strange, because every iteration you encounter blows you away.

At first, I played it just because it was a very unique, interesting game at the time - maybe a year or two ago, when it first came out.
Then I went online, and Gabe and Co. had me building reverse waterslides and rudimentary, rectangular towers.

Then shit hit the fan, and we found out how to get infinite anything.

This was a very interesting time, because we had a built in awareness that we could very easily spoil this game forever if we just infinitely spat diamonds out of our assholes and steamrolled this pristine universe into a Dyson sphere of our own immeasurable power.

So we sort of pretended to act "surprised" whenever we needed a fresh stack of Obsidian and it serendipitously shot out of one of our chests. If somebody new came onto the server, we tried to protect their innocence as long as possible re: the Santa myth of Minecraft. Let them spend an enjoyable day tunneling to the earths core, crowing about their handful of diamonds.
It was fun for them. Who cared about the truth.

Part of this, I do not deny, came from the fun of sitting on a throne of solid gemstone while others crawled in the dirt. But this is a fleeting, petty joy and it just got fucking old. Eventually we were just hemorrhaging diamonds willy nilly, and building stupid Byzantine structures. Floating sky islands made entirely of glass, full of snow and golden apples. Like some bullshit Greek pantheon, we were decadent assholes accomplishing nothing.


The real fun came when we would cast off all of this glorious, meaningless power and enter a strangers world, just to look around and cause general mischief.

Oh my god, we absolutely were Greek gods. "Oh hey no don't mind me I'm just a poor old traveler, draped in rags, totally not a deity in disguise who's slumming it because I'm bored of throwing lightning bolts into herds of ignorant lesser beings for no discernible reason. Now answer me these riddles three, passerby. WHOOPS JK JK now your grandmother is a fine fat goose! Btw I fucked your wife. Have fun with that baby."

Random IP's dredged up by Gabe were invaded by  jaded trickster entities....
only to find that these new worlds were already inhabited by gods far more powerful than us.

Never get cocky on the internet. That's a good rule.

People had found out how to import externally-generated files into Minecraft servers, allowing complicated 3D models to be magically converted into precious blocks. We would load up inside fantastically large structures built of bricks that never touched a virtual avatar's hand.

Tremendous structures, recreations of real-world chapels done at absurd magnification, filled to the brim with limitless "precious" materials.

Completely bereft of any sense of meaning or accomplishment.
Most often, these remarkable structures weren't even the product of the people who ran these servers. They had just found them elsewhere and, thinking they looked cool, imported them into their own private/public spheres of influence.

It was a first hand proof of what happens when you remove all effort from an undertaking that generates meaning solely by how fucking colossally difficult it is.

It was lifting weights in zero gravity, and worse, it was bragging about it to your friends who were also doing it.

These worlds we entered invariably had the same template - a centralized "spawn" location full of massive, impressively unoriginal and meaningless structures, populated with signs laying down the meaningless glazed "rules" of that server and containing a half dozen twelve year olds begging for diamonds, building 1x1 stacks of dirt into the clouds, or slapping each other with empty pixellated hands.

Outside of the spawn in all directions was the same thing in various forms - it was as if these magnificent structures had - shock of all shocks - just been warped in from some more civilized planet into a wilderness full of shitty, cuboid sod huts and one or two fantastic mansions obviously owned by the Admins of the server, who spent their time split evenly between building up their own personal incredible castles and keeping everyone else out of them.

We began to develop a contempt for these worlds and their inhabitants.

This is where the magic started happening.

Soon, new server-side mods were being put down that allowed for greater theoretical working of wonder - stuff like a server-based meaningless currency construct that allowed people to earn and spend completely incorporeal money in exchange for items that were freely and infinitely generated by the server admins.
Stuff like physical, massive "runes" that allowed for personal teleportation and invisible doors and all sorts of pointless psychological bullshit that masked any actual cool creative advancements (and don't get me wrong - the Rune system is really cool, it gives weight and meaning while retaning the "in-game" magic that used to exist)

People began to COVET things in a thousand identical virtual Edens.

So the game began to change, for us.

Gabe was more overt. He was the hot headed revolutionary. You can find his youtubes, I'm sure you've seen them - worlds ransacked in late night raids, glorious structures ground down into their base components and rebuilt into massive, hilarious pirate ships smack dab in the middle of the shambles of the remaining metropolis.
Giant trollfaces of obsidian and sand.
Built by hand, god damn it.

If they could have put a burning happy face on the side of every reconstructed office building, I'm sure they would have.

I was more personal, more quiet.
I began to reverse engineer teleporter "keys" - see, since the rune had to physically exist in the world, the way you kept it private and personal was by "keying" the waypoint with up to four distinct blocks, making a 4-unit key out of any combination of obtainable materials, arranged in a direction-dependent pattern.

This acted as both a fast-travel option that allowed you to warp across the map to your remote home base, and as a personal security that meant nobody could come in and nab your sweet carats or (more likely and less elegantly) hack your base apart, ransack it for precious materials, and fill it with lava swastikas and 1x1 dirt towers forever ascending skyward. Maybe, if you got a particularly clever griefer, a signpost with "FUCK UR SHIT PWNED BY SESSHOMARU93" would be left in the wreckage.

If the golden age of Minecraft was innocent imagination unleashing, the silver age was bitter mind games against random strangers.

Truth be told, it was almost as fun.

See, the concept of security was nonexistent. We were all equal in power - anyone could build a pickaxe and "brute force" their way into your complex.

You could build doors, yes. Doors that only opened when you pulled a lever right next to them, in fact! This strategy just managed to confound the incredibly shitty (yet murderous in all the right ways) AI undead that shambled around mansions and huts alike (Zombies - the original equalists)

But a fellow player would just - if he was nice, like me - bring his own lever and jam it into the wall next to the door. It was like carrying the key to the city.

If you were a douchebag, you just pickaxe'd a gaping goddamn hole right next to the door.
We were all Juggernauts capable of carving a 1x2 tunnel through earth, stone, and fucking solid bricks of iron if need be.
The only thing that stopped anyone was Obsidian, mainly because it took like 30 seconds for a Diamond axe to cut through.
Except even if you were insane enough to carve enough obsidian out of the earth's fiery heart to encircle your compound like a giant, black physical manifestation of Sakoku itself...the fuckers would just either tunnel under it like mole men or abseil over it like self-erecting cranes made out of 100% dirt.

The only solution was to put as much distance between yourself and other people as possible before attempting any undertaking of meaning - avoiding the same people who made the game fun in the first place.
It was a time of complete insanity and ingenuity. The two often sync up like that.

So you built a teleporter miles away from civilization and lived in constant fear of logging on and finding the contents of your meaningless treasure chests magically transformed into a big cock made of lava on your front lawn.

(Once, I logged on and Gabe had relocated our pirates booty chests to another part of our deserted steppe hideaway. I was convinced we had been masterfully fucked with, as nothing else in our compound [slowly growing more ornate with the spoils of half a dozen bourgeoisie bastard's bases] was disturbed in the slightest. I freaked out for a solid day until he remembered to tell me where the treasure was hidden. If this was an Edgar Allen Poe story I'd have throttled him to death before he'd said a word.)

The game stopped being about building anything new. It became entirely about raiding tombs of those who had gone on to other servers, and hacking the warp mechanism of the fools who remained.

See, there was that brief but beautiful moment when new technology was introduced but the layman didn't fully understand the ramifications of using it.

This was what the first hackers felt, when they cut to the core of the first operating systems and found front doors of streaming code hanging invitingly open.

Everyone's first warp key set was the Minecraft equivalent of setting your password to "1234".

4 of any one block type was a good one. That lasted about a day.
Or one of any type and 3 blank spaces.

The beauty of it was the perceived (and actual) amount of security the system offered, and the completely idiotic way most people used it.

So while one of us was thinking up new and maddening maximum security combinations we would "reserve" by constructing the first of its kind and linking it to nowhere (okay, uh, North Glass, West Stone Pressure Switch, South Pumpkin, East Lapis Lazuli! Lets see the fuckers work that one out! NOBODY has pumpkins!), the other one of us would be laying down potential outgoing runes and just brute forcing different combinations with frightening speed.
(Okay, 4 brick. Nothing. Write that down. Uh, 2 brick 2 glass. Other way. Bingo. Mark that with a sign. Build new one.)

The resource-based warpkey mechanic also provided a tangible gap between the meaningless day to day 12 year olds with chests full of stacks of dirt (a surprisingly useful find, when you're busy building a perfect floating sphere of dirt to live in - but that's another story to ask me about: the Shapes program) and the obviously-friends-with-the-admin rich fuckers with literal golden thrones.

It takes 9 diamonds to make a solid block. Four blocks means if you want to use that warp key combo, you need 36 goddamn diamonds.
But the glorious thing about it was, if you did have those diamonds....a 4-diamond key is just as insecure as a 4-wood key. It was like having a giant cartoon safe locked with the padlock from a gym locker.

Whats worse is that they invariably did it anyway, to flaunt their wealth to nobody since it was a secret combo anyway.

The higher-up resources like gold and obsidian were the easiest to crack. They were the most predictable.
The hardest combos to crack were the most obscure, mundane, least used items with a recurring element. (Cactus Lever Water Water? FUCK that guy.)

I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned from that somewhere.
We learned it by being the most paranoid motherfuckers on the planet. We had decoy chests full of just enough treasure to dissuade the most persistent of Indiana Jonesing motherfuckers.

The gorgeous part was, since we had all the top key combos under lock and....key *shades*, the first step upon cracking somebody elses base key was to establish a hidden waystone of our own, usually directly under the existing gate. That way, even if they changed their combo later on, we had an actual, physical, mother fucking back door hidden in their program.

I mean house.

Even then, our "protest" was futile.

The general modding community never stopped churning out innovative ways to ruin fun.

Server information was stored in logs, At any instant the admins could just roll back to a time when shit wasn't wrecked.
Then they started just warping to people, completely disregarding the suspended disbelief caused by the physical rune gate system.
Eventually we got banned for something stupid like ignoring the coded in rules about "not using programs that give your character literal no-clip flight, x-ray vision, super speed, godlike powers used only for trolling", something something.
We didn't have the fight in us anymore anyway.


I logged on today, for the first time in a little less than a year.
It's fucking awful. Every server and its grandmother is 'roided out with these bloated generic laundry lists of mods. No flight, obviously.  You can just straight up type /lock and lock any chest or block you don't want anyone else to touch.
Strange artificial RPG elements. Stock markets. "Abilities".

You can place special blocks that prevent anyone from disturbing anything within a massive radius of that block.
Admins can immediately identify WHO moved WHAT block just by clicking on it.
Everything that used to be "Deathmatch" or "Survival" is now named "Hunger Games", for some inexplicable reason.
Doors just wont open if you aren't the person who set them down. And it's all obviously third party because the actual game itself just goes "Yeah dude, just open that fucking door? What's the problem." and then glitches and warps you a half second backward in time because it's being told what to do by a 3rd party security monster.

Ugh.

I managed to break in anyway, of course.
And I made a decent afternoon of it, it almost had the magic old Minecraft had.

Not old old Minecraft, of course. We'll never have that again, and that's a sad fact.
But I was creeping around some rich fuckers underwater compound, trying to figure out how to get myself in and set up a base warp somewhere in his storage cellars.

See, if you have to choose between some little dipshit griefer or me breaking into your house, you want me. I'm a conscientious burglar.

If you have a beautiful, original, or at least time-invested structure? I respect that.

I swam the length of this asshole's underwater tunnel system, looking for a way in that didn't involve breaking glass. I carry reserve batches of common items so I can replace anything I break. Sure, I might bash down the wall directly NEXT to your door, but I will patch it up when I get to the other side.
Eventually I got in by swimming straight up an ornamental fountain, then building a floating bridge of dirt (that I politely shoveled away as I crossed) across to the  nearest balcony.
Fuck, I built myself a portable furnace to lug around just to smelt sand so I could replace a few glass panes I broke
(What fucker puts person-locked doors INSIDE his own house with an actual sign that says "Security Check"???)

I accidentally flipped a switch in a guys automated farming room, with contained torches shedding 24/7 light on rows of cultivated plants - it was a gorgeous facility, and he had this marvelous system wired up to a single switch that flooded the whole room and pushed all the grown wheat with flowing water directly up to your feet. Never seen anything like it, and it was already ruined because I knew he had just found the plans online and built this thing from a blueprint.

But you know what? I went back and replanted every fucking square of wheat I disturbed.
Did I end up with bushels of spare wheat stuffed down my trousers? Fuck yes, I'm a gentleman thief and I just spent like 10 minutes planting your crops, shitbeard. I just earned that. You just payed me.

The reason for my anger is the fact that half an hour later, after I've squirreled myself away up in a corner of his floating cloud garden (deep in the inner shell of the hollowed-out island, like a stowaway on the Titanic), I get a message from this fucker going "BREAK INTO MY HOUSE AGAIN AND I'LL BAN YOU."
"Listen, buddy, I didn't know what that lever was going to do. And I replanted everything, anyway."
"DON'T CARE. READ THE SIGNS. YOU'RE LUCKY I'M NICE"


So. A way to have fun that focused on breaking arbitrary rules is no longer an option.

Boo fucking hoo, I know. I'm fully aware that my stance is that of the cranky old man complaining that things were more fun back in the day, even if the day in question was mere months ago when the "rules" of the video game in question were less strictly laid down.

I guess I'm just glad I was there for a part of it, when the predecessors to these strange, alienating plastic worlds were just forming and you could get away with jacking into a phone booth, strapping on some goggles, and hacking the Gibson.

Even though that was never a real thing anyway.