hjdoom

The garden is full of nettles that need pulling up by the roots. Nettles are tenacious things, hard to get rid of once they’ve established themselves. It must have been on my mind because last night I dreamed I was gardening in the moonlight. I used a fork to turn the earth over and expose the nettle roots. They didn’t look like I expected, they were like strings of maggots on a mucus slick fishing line. They were fat and horribly wet and moved gently under their own power. They were a sickly white and seemed full of some kind of pus. When I pulled them out of the earth they left slimy trails behind them, like the tracks of slugs. I tossed them onto the gravel that borders the garden and there they seemed to coil together when I wasn’t look at them. It didn’t matter how many I pulled out of the earth there were always more, plump sticky ropes of the stuff that left me covered in their foul slime.

The garden is still full of nettles. I don’t feel motivated to tackle it any time soon.

It turns out that, as well as the well known stories of the writing on the wall, the lion's den, and the apocalyptic visions, there's a thirteenth chapter of the book of Daniel covering the story of Susanna and the Elders which is in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but didn't make it into the protestant version. It's a shame because I found Daniel 13 quite interesting, not least because it might just be the oldest detective story I've come across. You can find the full text of Daniel 13 below but to briefly summarise it involves two elders attempting to blackmail Susanna into having sex with them by threatening to tell people she was commiting adultery with a young man. Susanna refuses them and they carry out their threat. The people are getting ready to stone her when Daniel, moved by the spirit of God, decides to intervene. He proves that the elders were lying by separating them and conducting two interviews in which he asks each in turn to tell him what kind of tree Susanna was beneath when they allegedly saw her commiting adultery. The two accounts differ on the species of tree and this is enough to convince the people that they're malefactors and so they stone them instead of Susanna.

What strikes me on reading this is firstly how well the story parallels an episode of Columbo, the detective show which always showed you the villain at the start so you could enjoy the process of Columbo catching them with his disarming yet meticulous approach to crime. Truly there is nothing new under the sun. Secondly, and more interestingly, Daniel is employing a version of the cognitive interview technique which is the current gold standard for forensic interviewing. It essentially works on the principle that lies require more cognitive effort to maintain than truth because there is no true and hence rich memory to rely on. The cognitive interview is designed to bring to light the contradictions in false testimony without psychologically contaminating true memories or illiciting false confessions.

This might sound obvious but for many years the gold standard for interrogation technique was the Reid technique which starts from the premise that the goal of an interrogation is to induce the suspect to confess. Unsurprisingly it is a technique with limited empirical evidence to support it and has been accused of manufacturing many false confessions, particularly as there are no modifications when interviewing young or cognitively impaired suspects.

What Daniel does is ask an open question which a genuine witness should be able to answer with ease. While he starts from a presumption of guilt, and openly accuses the elders of concocting the whole story, his interview technique allows for the possibility that he is mistaken. If the two men answer the same then his plan has failed. He could have reduced the likelihood of this happening. He could have introduced the species of tree himself in his question or merely presented the suspects with a statement about the tree and invited them to agree or disagree with it. By asking an open question he reduces the likelihood of his own involvement creating a false yet incriminating memory, something that a careless interviewer can easily do.

It's a fascinating little story and one I really wish I'd been aware of when I was writing essays about interrogation technique. I've occasionally dabbled with the idea of writing some historical crime stories set in the distant past. It's encouraging to think that I could write an ancient character with an instinctive grasp of good interview technique and point to a Biblical source as evidence that such a thing might be plausible.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel+13&version=NRSVCE

The crisis continues and I continue to function more or less as normal. I feel very lucky that my personal disposition is so well adapted for these times we live in. I’m used to going without social contact, aside from my beloved husband, for long periods of time and suffer very few ill effects from spending time in isolation. I’ve been writing a fair amount, praying, reading, fiddling with music, watching nonsense, and getting out for a little fresh air when I can. This is a pattern of living I can maintain indefinitely. It’s a salutary reminder that disability has a significant social context. I’m more or less hopeless at life when things are normal but force everyone to remain indoors and I’m completely fine.

We’ve been rewatching Babylon 5 recently and it’s always instructive to review older television after a gap because the contrasts with the current style of production is that much sharper and makes you more aware of how endemic certain tropes have become without you really noticing. I’ve often criticised current television for flabby writing, especially on HBO, Prime, and Netflix where episodes are no longer tied to specific runtimes. The idea that episodes can go on as long as they need to, budget permitting, is freeing but it can easily become a vice. Episode 10 of season 3 of Babylon 5 manages to fit in a tyrannical government attacking their own colonies, the dissolution of a thousand year old alien council, a space battle, and a Declaration of Independence into 43 minutes of run-time without feeling too hurried. Part of that is how well the ground work has been laid in earlier episodes but a lot of it simply comes down to disciplined writing. Everything serves the story, every event shown on screen matters. I can’t help but compare that to the final season of Game of Thrones, particularly the two battle sequences that form the main spectacle of the narrative. The battle for Winterfell is full of extraneous material, endless sequences of various supporting characters fighting wights in the dark which get repetitive and surprisingly dull, especially on a repeat viewing (and still somehow fails to check in with Bronn - we literally never learn what he was doing during the battle). We get multiple fights with dragons, all of which achieve nothing, they’re irrelevant to the outcome of the battle. So much of it is empty spectacle, it lacks an emotional context and a clear narrative structure. You could have boiled it down to 45 minutes and it would, paradoxically, have felt more epic and exciting.

So much good writing is discipline. I read Alan Moore’s Jerusalem and found it frequently hard going. He’s the greatest comics writer of all time but Jerusalem is a flawed behemoth of a novel, all 600,000 words of it. It’s an epic a deserves a decent word count but there’s nothing in it that couldn’t have been said better in 200,000 words. Alan Moore’s comic scripts are notoriously lengthy, often running to hundreds of pages but, and this is the important bit, they all have to be boiled down to twenty two pages. No matter how big the idea is you have to be able to get it done in twenty two pages. That takes discipline. I’m a big fan of 2000AD and there the page limit is even more stringent. Even long form stories are broken down into weekly six page chapters and their signature one off shorts come in at only four pages. Writing a short story that comes in at four pages is a hell of a thing. That’s a maximum of 28 panels, probably no more than five hundred words of text. I submitted a spec script to them just before everything went to hell and I spent a hell of a long time condensing the story I wanted to tell down to four pages. I banged out a ten thousand word short story last week and it took me about half the time to finish the first draft as it did to get those four pages to where I wanted them to be.

I feel like a lot of TV writers are drunk with power at the moment. After decades of needing to turn in 43 minute scripts that told a complete story and that more or less reset at the end the fashion is suddenly for long form storytelling with arcs designed to run over multiple seasons, never mind multiple episodes. It’s led to some great television but I think more shows could do to rediscover the art of the tight 43 minute episode and stop wallowing in the self-indulgence that space provides.

I haven’t played Doom Eternal yet as my laptop tends to throw a fit if it’s asked to render things in 3D. Happily though Bethesda have seen fit to celebrate the launch of Doom Eternal by making Doom 64 available for the Switch, rereleasing it for the first time since its original release on the Nintendo 64 back in 1997. A third of the way in and it’s an odd duck, as might be expected for a game released roughly contemporaneously with Quake but running on a rather older engine. The graphics are sort of an upgrade, you can see a lot of the design development that would later go on to inform Doom 3, a game I intensely dislike, and Doom 2016 which I very much enjoyed when it appeared on the Switch. The level design is best described as Machiavellian, taking a lot more cues from Doom than Doom 2 which is probably a sensible decision. It’s arguably a better Doom sequel than Doom 2 itself as there’s a focus on throwing a lot of high power enemies at you from the start and a number of the monsters have had their aggression dialled up a notch or two. This combined with claustrophobic environments that shift and morph when buttons are pressed or certain events trigger gives it more of a considered horror vibe than Doom 2 managed. It’s like being trapped in a sadistic puzzle box at times which feels very appropriate. It hits a lot of the things that Doom 3 aimed for in terms of atmosphere but without coming at the cost of playability, you can still zip around blasting things at speed. For £4 I’ve definitely had my money’s worth already, anything else is a bonus.

A few years ago I went mad for a bit and didn’t leave the house for three months. Turns out that I was getting in valuable practice for self-isolation. It’s not often my lifestyle choices leave me feeling ahead of the curve but for once the ability to remain indoors and go without social contact for long periods of time actually feel like an adaptive constellation of traits rather than symptoms of a defective personality.

As I get older I feel increasingly out of step with modern life. This, I think, is fairly normal. Generally speaking, as you age your personality ossifies until eventually you find yourself pining for a half-remembered past that never really existed because you aren’t pining so much for the era as for the person you were. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug and so too is youth, combine the two and it’s easy to see why many people view the period in which they came of age through a thick haze of sentimentality and revisionism. Due to a combination of being both miserable and awful when I was young I don’t actually have much fondness for the actual era in which I grew up and so I’ve wound up projecting my nostalgia backwards into the period before I made the first mistake in a life riddled with poor choices, that of being born. I have no patience whatsoever with current popular culture which exists as a fascinating exercise in trying to find out exactly what too much of a good thing looks like. Even things I used to enjoy such as superhero movies, Star Wars, and professional wrestling have suffered from this increasingly fractal multiverse of content. We live in a world that contains a gritty re-imagining of the Archie comics, a world in which a Batman prequel focusing on Commissioner Gordon has been followed by an even earlier prequel focusing on the life and times of Batman’s fucking butler. There’s a tiny independent UK film studio that produces micro-budget slasher movies that are all set in the same cinematic universe. None of this is bad exactly. People seem to like it and I’m not someone who thinks that everything I don’t like is toxic and evil just because it isn’t aimed at me. I don’t feel entitled to a popular culture in tune with my emotional and philosophical concerns. As a cisgender man living in the West I am already grotesquely pandered to in almost every way. It’s just curious to me that I should find myself becoming more and more untethered in time, retreating backwards into the pop culture that was made decades before I was born. This afternoon I watched Invaders From Mars from 1953. It’s a slightly incoherent riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers which actually predates that classic by a number of years. It’s also made in colour, Supercinecolor, to be precise and can claim to be the first movie to show a flying saucer in colour. If you made a more or less identical film today I doubt I would be prepared to sit through it but its historical nature means that there’s always some little period detail to enjoy. There’s hokum science that would never pass muster today and a lot of very shiny hair that’s been carefully slicked into place. There’s an innocence to it, which is partly the result of much of the action taking place from a child’s perspective, but its also from an age where science was often portrayed as an unambiguous good, an age where America’s confidence in its own ability to handle crisis hadn’t yet been fatally undermined by Vietnam. It’s also easier to deal with the casual misogyny and the total absence of people of colour by rationalising it as a product of its time. Everyone involved with the production is dead. There’s no mileage in getting angry at the dead. I find that much harder with modern creators who should be expected to do much better but still fall into the old habits of foregrounding straight white men to the detriment of our cultural richness. The past is more attractive because it has, for better or worse, already disappointed me. There’s a pleasure to be found in being completely powerless to effect change. It takes a lot of the pressure off.

I was supposed to writing more of my novel this afternoon but instead I’m scribbling down ideas for a roleplaying game designed to be played via email or text chat. It’s called Brain in a Jar and it involves a single player taking on the role of the titular brain in a jar that can only communicate with the outside world via a text interface.

The set up is that a civilisation has decided to entrust key decisions to the preserved brain of their greatest scientist and polymath, secured for all time in a life support system so that future generations may benefit from their knowledge. Unfortunately during the operation to install the brain in the machine the surgeon dropped it and stepped on it. No one being willing to own up the medical team simply grabbed the nearest available brain from the morgue and installed that instead, hoping that no one would notice.

This feels like a fun concept, the player trying to pass themselves off as competent to direct the doings of an entire civilisation as they answer the various messages that come in from the great and good of the world. I like the idea of designing a game which has the limitations of electronic communication built into the system. If I get some proper time to play with it I might see if I can get it into a playtestable state over the summer.

I went to lunchtime mass today. It was the commemoration of the ascension of Queen Elizabeth II. Following this I attended an organ recital of Soviet music in the church. This definitely feels like a mixed message.

Still proper ill, this is one of those colds that grabs you by the lungs and head and refuses to let go. With my brain too frazzled to do anything that requires thought I decided to follow up a playthrough of Doom with a playthrough of Heretic, a fantasy version of Doom that ran on a slightly upgraded version of the Doom engine. The inspiration is clear, many of the weapons are carbon copies of Doom guns given a fantasy makeover and the monsters too are heavily inspired by Doom. That said there’s an inventory system which allows you to hoard supplies until you need them which makes it possible for almost anyone to beat the game on the highest sane difficulty setting. I was able to breeze through it fairly quickly without many deaths and without needing to use inventory items much but there was still enough of a challenge that I felt engaged and trepidatious at many points. One of the best changes to the standard Doom engine is the removal of hitscan enemies who are able to snipe players from absurd distances without providing any indication of where they are firing from. In Heretic everything that shoots at you will fire an actual visible missile which feels a lot fairer. It’s got some cheap level design, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from a Doom engine game, and it does a reasonable job of telegraphing where a bunch of monsters will probably spawn when you pick up the next key. The boss fights are all fairly tough but they all take place in big arenas meaning that there’s a good amount of leeway to dodging their attacks which keeps them from getting frustrating. A very solid and enjoyable few hours of simulated fantasy murder.

I’ve come down with one of those tiresome illnesses that doesn’t feel quite bad enough to justify retiring to my bedroom but does feel bad enough that I bitterly resent having to still do the mundane necessities of life. I very rarely get physically ill and I tend to shake things off fairly quickly but it’s left me wanting to do something relatively undemanding with my free time.

I am playing Doom for at least the tenth time. When I was young I preferred Doom 2, and while I do enjoy the extra weapon and the expanded range of monsters, the level design just isn’t quite as good and that’s what has lasted. I play quite a lot of Doom mods and expanded map packs, some which tweak the game, some which turn it into something completely different; like the one that turns Doom into a beat ‘em up, the karting game that runs on the Doom engine, or the ludicrous attempt to do a FPS version of Castlevania. Every so often though I like to go back to the source and run the game without any of the fancy add ins. It’s still not quite the retail version of Doom I played in the 90s, there’s a bunch of little quality of life improvements but nothing that really alters the game fundamentally.

Doom, I am happy to report, is still great. What I love about Doom is how fast and tight it plays. You can zoom around the levels at a million miles per hour, spinning and strafing round a horde of memorable enemies but you can also tiptoe round the levels, ducking in and out of cover, and taking things more cautiously. In my play through I’ve had to do both. Because of how chunky and modular the world of Doom is the rules of the game feel very graspable and fair, it’s easy to get a sense of when enemies can hit you and when they can’t. It’s simple, almost like playing a game made out of Duplo blocks, but that means that you don’t get many of those janky or unfair moments that more complicated physics engines have.

I had forgotten, because I always forget, how much of a difficulty spike there is between episodes. As always I breezed through episode one and then found episode two a sudden slap to the face. It’s fine. Tricky rather than proper hard. They save proper hard for episode three where the early levels are very light on ammunition which meant I spent a pleasant twenty minutes methodically punching demons to death which is somehow both satisfying and frustrating at the same time. The lack of a chainsaw early doors means that you can’t afford to play sloppily. If there’s a weakness it’s that after those early levels episode three doesn’t really have anything else to throw at you and the escalation is more about increasing monster density than it is asking you master any new skills. That’s a minor quibble in a game that still feels remarkably fresh twenty five years after I first played it.

Once I’ve beaten the fourth chapter I think I might go back to playing the Aliens TC game that was made for Doom not long after it came out. That one, unsurprisingly for a fan mod, feels a little rough around the edges, but it still creates a hellish amount of tension.

Feeling low today, not the worst but not great either so I thought it would be helpful to remind myself that I’ve been in a fairly good mood the last couple of days and done some nice things.

On Sunday Marcus and I went to watch the first match of the Masters, a snooker tournament featuring only the top 16 players in the world. It was held at the Alexandra Palace, that great public temple on the hill that offers a fantastic view of London. The snooker was highly entertaining and for once travel worked exactly as it was supposed to. The rest of the tournament continues to be entertaining with plenty of surprises along the way.

Last night was Secret Online Film Club in which I, and tiny online community, watch a film together despite being spread across different cities and countries. It gives me a way of socialising with friends without the stress of having to meet up with people. We usually watch absolute rubbish and take the piss but last night we watched The Lion in Winter in which Peter O’Toole, Katherine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, and Timothy Dalton scheme over the succession to the English throne in 1182. It’s a wonderful film, little more than people arguing in rooms for two hours but Katherine Hepburn was absolutely amazing as the scheming and arch Queen Eleanor. It’s very, very funny but also full of poetic speeches.

Monday saw the release of a new episode of We Will Fix You where myself and a couple of friends offer terrible advice to real problems sent in by listeners. It’s the first of two episodes this month that I appear on and I think they’re some of my best work to date on the show. I love writing for We Will Fix You, each episode I get to do a five minute comedy bit on a specific topic. It feeds the part of my brain that would love to try stand up but without having to deal with an actual audience.

I’ve done some good work on Bela Lugosi’s Shed, the horror podcast that I do with Richard DeValmont. It’s a project I truly love, I get to enjoy a whole bunch of horror media and then talk nonsense about it with a mate. It’s another way of getting social contact that doesn’t involve needing to be in the same room as people. We’ve been doing it for more than two years and I still get a lot of pleasure out of it, it’s rare for a project to hold my attention for this amount of time but it turns out having opinions is something I don’t really get bored of.

I’ve also got a small writing commission on the go which I’m very much enjoying. It’s going to make me a better writer when I’m done as well which is always a good thing. Much of it is very straightforward but there’s some real challenges as well. I’m doing something I’m good at which is always nice.

I’ve been able to go to Mass almost every day this week which provides a welcome lacuna in my day, a chance to take a break from the cares of this world and dwell on the transcendent that exists beyond these meat prisons.

All told this has been a decent week and I should try and remember that even though the memory of it already seems remote and hard to grasp.

Last night I dreamed of death. I had a succession of four linked dreams each relating to death. I only recall dying a couple of times in dreams before last night, it’s not something that my sleeping mind has ever shown much preoccupation with before. These were vivid and highly affecting but only rarely actually frightening.

In the first dream I was being led to a scaffold for an execution. I exchanged some small pleasantries with the headsman who wielded a huge sword. This done I knelt and lay my head calmly on the block. There was a moments pause and then I heard the sound of the sword cutting through my neck. My head was severed with a single stroke and went rolling through the air before landing on the ground. I was able to see the world spinning wildly round and round before consciousness faded. I realised I was unable to move my body.

The second was a re-run of the first except that the executioner stated that he had made some small error the last time he had cut off my head and therefore we would have to try again. I willingly acquiesced and once again my head was cut off and went spinning through the air. This time my awareness of my body somehow remained and I was able to raise my hands to feel the blood spraying from the stump of my neck. It felt like a lawn sprinkler.

The third time I was climbing up an incredibly steep mountain with a mysterious guide who urged me on to reach the summit despite my strong fear of heights. Upon the very pinnacle of the peak someone had set a single telegraph pole and I was informed I must climb this as well. The wood was ancient and rotten and peeled away in great fistfuls under my hands. I made the mistake of looking down and at the same time I lost my grip upon the crumbling pole and plummeted down, blacking out almost immediately.

In the final dream I was alone standing on a balcony near the top of an immense skyscraper. Unlike the previous dream I was completely calm and at peace. I understood that my previous failure had been to look down and accordingly I stepped up backwards onto the low balustrade and looked up. It was night and there were many stars. I took a single step backwards and fell with amazing rapidity. I was aware of a sudden stop which framed the skyscraper for a single instant like a photograph and then everything went black.

I was writing a thing and wanted to see if there was a real person who might fill a particular role. I needed someone who was alive in 1949, had an interest in the occult, military connections, and if possible Nazi sympathies. I was not supremely optimistic and didn’t want to go down the tired old Fleming/Crowley conspiracy theory. Imagine my surprise when approximately fifteen minutes of research turned up J. F. C. Fuller who was an early adopter of Thelema, influential military theorist, Major-General in the British Army, and absolute monster who devoted his later life to claiming the wrong side won the Second World War and that Hitler was the saviour of Western Europe. Cometh the hour, cometh the arsehole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._F._C._Fuller

There goes 2019. Out of a spirit of perversity, and because I have a large and irrational dislike of New Year’s Eve, I chose to spend the 31st of December stone cold sober and went to bed well before midnight. This does mean that I get the mild but distinct pleasure of spending the 1st of January without a hangover. I doubt this is an omen and that there will be many fine and disgusting hangovers to come in 2020.

The only thing of any great personal significance to happen to me in 2019 was the discovery of a personal faith hitherto absent in my life. The journey from rabid atheist, through modern Satanism, paganism, chaos magick, and nihilism to something resembling an orthodox position on Christ, albeit one tinged with Gnostic mysticism, has been a strange old ride. All being well I should get confirmed in 2020 if I can keep my heterodox impulses in check.

I don’t expect 2020 to be much different in accidental detail to 2019 aside from becoming more sequestered from a wider world I find increasingly intolerable. I will continue to write prose, produce podcasts, and create unlistenable music. If I have one goal, creatively speaking, it’s to finish a longer project that I can shop around to agents. A secondary personal goal is to write more poetry which I find to be selfishly pleasing but also spiritually worthwhile. I’ve got the shape of a collection coalescing in my head, marrying some relatively formal poems on religious themes that I’ve already completed with some more modernist pieces which explore free verse and deal with more secular matters.

It’s been a broadly pleasant Christmas marred only by both Marcus and I waking up on Boxing Day with the kind of hangovers that act as a powerful antidote to seasonal good cheer. I feel like my anxiety, which had been faintly terrible in the run up to Christmas, is back under some kind of control and I even felt briefly happy at points during the festivities both during the sacred and secular portions of the celebrations. I think shutting the world out is paying dividends in terms of my mental health. It turns out that going entire days without being forced to think about either Boris Fucking Johnson or Donald Fucking Trump is good for the spirits.

Last night we watched ‘The Bishop’s Wife’ (1947) a romantic comedy directed by Henry Koster and starring Cary Grant, Loretta Young, and David Niven. Grant plays Dudley, and angel sent to Earth to assist Niven’s Bishop Brougham, a man obsessed with rearing a magnificent cathedral, to the detriment of his relationship with his wife Julia, played by Loretta Young.

I really enjoyed this film, there’s some great moments of comedy, particularly from Grant who deploys his easy charm to great effect as a contrast with Niven’s waspish and perpetually harassed performance. The relationship between Dudley and Julia is the central concern of the movie, as Dudley works to remind Julia of how life used to be before her husband became swallowed by his cathedral project it becomes clear that his attachment to her is pushing the boundaries of a professional, albeit supernatural, relationship. There’s an excellent supporting cast and one of the film’s strongest features is how well developed the supporting characters are, whether that be the wealthy and embittered benefactor Niven is trying to tap for building funds or an ageing cabbie who is reminded of the simple pleasures of ice skating. It all takes place at Christmas time, the traditional time of year for screen miracles to take place, but this adds a strange air of pressure to events. The approach of Christmas Day adds a tension, a sense of a looming deadline even though there is no particular reason why events should need to be wrapped up by a specific time. There’s also a lovely generosity of spirit to proceedings with Dudley helping everyone he comes into contact with as if by reflex. Cary Grant unsurprisingly makes for a very warm angel. It’s highly sentimental of course, this is a heartwarming Christmas movie made in 1947 after all but that very earnest tone is married to some fine gags which helps the syrupy morality go down a little more easily. It is only slightly marred by a genuinely hideous hat. It’s currently available on the BBC iPlayer.

By way of contrast I also watched Albert Pyun’s Nemesis from 1992 yesterday. This at is not a festive film, it’s 90 minutes of economy cyborgs shooting at each other punctuated by occasional conversations in which characters grimly exchange exposition with one another. I thoroughly enjoyed it, it’s like an idiot made Terminator for a fraction of the price.

Looking at making some changes to my life. Over the last several months I have become more convinced than ever that late stage capitalism is a psychic toxin. Engaging with it is like playing a game of Russian Roulette with an opponent who insists on putting the bullet in themselves and doesn’t so much spin the barrel as carefully rotate it to ensure the right outcome. In short, I feel like modernity is killing me.

I’m going to make an effort to say no to the most destructive aspects of the world. Part of this involves resisting the demands of a connected society to be constantly swimming in a dizzying torrent of information, most of it negative. I’m not going to change this society in any serious way to make it healthier so the only other option is to try and withdraw from it. That means fostering a deliberate sense of ignorance about world and national affairs. The world is doomed, our nation is doomed. There’s nothing to be gained from repeatedly exposing myself to that truth when I am fundamentally powerless. This means significantly, or entirely, cutting back on my use of social and traditional media.

Beyond that I want to free myself from the demands of the now, the poisonous newness of it all. The wearisome parade of must see movies, TV shows, and video games all leveraging the same handful of brands. I am done with Marvel, I am done with Star Wars, I am done with the twenty first century as a cultural endeavour. I don’t want to look forward to the future, or even around me at the present. I want to look backwards and devote my energies to the art that existed before the millenium. I feel out of step with the zeitgeist of our society and so I’m going to try and turn away from it as much as I can.

I’m not intending this to be an absolutist mindset, these are generally unhealthy mindsets to maintain. I think my husband would likely find it frustrating if I refused point blank to watch anything made after the year 2000. Equally I need to stay reasonably on top of horror news for podcast related reasons. But I can and I will make every effort to cut myself adrift from the popular culture of the moment because only in the past is there order and sanity.

The practical upshot of this is that I’ll be on facebook much less. I won’t be deleting my account and should anyone still want to contact me through facebook messenger I’ll still get it. I’m going to make a concerted effort to quit twitter which is a maelstrom of rage and stupidity. I’m going to try and switch to using Dreamwidth more since it feels much more like the good old days. I’m vaguely planning to write a few more reviews and things of books, films, video games, and comics, particularly those that are in the public domain or available for very low prices.

Paperclip is less a game and more a bold experiment in immersive storytelling. Ostensibly one of those clicker/idle/management sim games where you are put in charge of a factory, set things running and then work out ways to fine tune the production of paperclips, the reality is much more interesting when considered as a narrative rather than open experience. There’s not that much actual gameplay in here in the traditional sense but there is a vibrant and immersive story told through the mechanics presented to you. It’s one of the best experiences I have had in the digital narrative space and really showcases a fascinating alternative to traditional storytelling tools. I can’t recommend it highly enough, a really unique cultural artifact.

Current Mood: indifferent
Current Music: Malesperi - Porn

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia isn’t the best of Castlevania games but it definitely served to ease my disappointment at Zelda: Breath of the Wild which I found very underwhelming. Artistically it looks great and the freedom is exceptional for a Zelda game but I found the combat frustrating, the long walks tedious, and the constantly disintegrating weapons aggravating in the extreme. Ecclesia served up a clean Metroidvania experience with some great boss fights and a final battle with Dracula that was actually quite beatable for once. It’s possible that my depression, currently savage, may have influenced my dislike of the widely lauded Zelda. Wide open spaces mean more chance to spend time with my thoughts, rarely a positive experience for someone like me.

Current Mood: Indifferent

A film privately produced by the Ministry of Defence to illustrate the horrors of brainwashing in the Korean War is an unusual period piece. This is propaganda directed at shoring up beliefs rather than inculcating new ones. The simple tale of prisoners subjected to extensive physical and psychological torture in order to convert them to the Communist cause is interesting for two reasons. Firstly it illustrates some of the techniques a soldier might deploy in order to survive with his sense of self intact. Secondly every torture that the Koreans are depicted as using has been employed by the West subsequently under the moniker of enhanced interrogation. An almost identical film might be made today with a suspected terrorist in the lead role.

Current Mood: apathetic

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Daniel

Brief update

More Doom

Vindication

Old fashioned

The ideas never stop

Synergy

Still ill

We’re all Doomed

The Rhythm of Waves

Last Night I Dreamed of Death

More to remind myself than anything

History, it’s just one fucking thing after another

Winterval

The Bishop’s Wife

Change is in the air

http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia for Nintendo DS.

Film review: Captured (1959)