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."