Life and Times of a Flying Fox

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Life's Virtue

    Continuation of my last post, although not really much of one. I haven't lived a day where I didn't think about it, and other things happened since then that have made me really wonder about how I view my own life and life in general.
    I don't know what to think anymore.

    My friends and I, not being immune to the inclinations of massive weebs or capable of ignoring internet trends, all played Undertale last month and all of us came away from it with different things. Something in the game really bothered me though, and it is very relevant to how I feel about life and have felt about it for years.

    I don't expect everyone who reads this to have played the game but for the sake of brevity and not giving away spoilers, there were times in it where I, as in me, and not the ideal person I was trying to be in the game, would have fought and killed. The first instance was when I tried mercy repeatedly and it did not work. If someone didn't tell me that you can spare everyone in the game, I would have gone that route because I am a person who believes in trying to talk, trying to avoid fighting - but I will do hat is necessary to preserve myself, the people I care about, or the things that I believe in.
    This is the first time I have ever wondered if doing what's necessary and doing what's right should be conflicting goals. I have felt that they were for years, and thinking on it further, there have been many instances where I have gone against my conscience because it was less practical and less objective to be kind or passive or compassionate to the greater good.
    A frightening thing about this is that I believe this is necessary. Destroying paradise to save it may be the only alternative. Killing someone to spare them pain seems practical and logical, but that doesn't mean I think it's right. I kill mosquitoes to preserve my life and the lives of the people in my house, that doesn't mean I think it's right. I dislike taking life at all because we barely understand how it's given in the first place and to us it is a precious thing, and I am disturbed by and even ashamed of killing even insects. But I have, and I will. My grim resolve has always been a point of pride for me.
    I have, as of late, been disturbed by the notion that this grim resolve brings me very close to others who have justified horrible acts like genocide and war in the name of the greater good. Maybe they were disturbed by them but that doesn't excuse the outcome of their decisions. I do not know if I would be the same way. I don't want to hurt people without a good reason, But if I thought I had one, I would.
    I don't think I am a cruel person, but I am a violent one. I believe fighting is the only way to solve some problems and I might be too quick to jump into it sometimes. I wonder how many times I could've spared a life by trying to relocate something in my house instead of killing it. Maybe I would be the kind of person that would ignore a passive route in favor of a violent one just because it didn't occur to me to try it. I hope I never have to make these kinds of decisions. I am not the kind of person that should be in control of peoples' lives. I don't know if I ever will be. Fighting is a huge part of my life's experience, I don't know if the habit can be broken or the experience turned to good, or if I would end up hurting a lot of people for nothing.

    The second instance is far more ambiguous to me. I believe I might be lost in terms of being a pacifist, and I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing - I might have to find out one day - but this was something I never felt resolved on. Again, without spoilers, I believe in mercy killing - or I did. I'm not so sure anymore. A very large part of my last post was based on this belief that sometimes it is both right and necessary to kill something or someone quickly to save it from suffering.
    My definition of suffering.
    My definition might not be the right one and I am no longer comfortable with assuming that it is.

    This was the point that I moved from talking about the game with one of my friends to life experiences. I once killed a bee with a dismembered wing when I was 12 by stomping on it as hard as I could to make its death as quick as possible. I then cried for nearly an hour. I believed I was saving it, and in that instance, she agreed, but that was not the only instance. Spiders can survive without their legs but I have robbed them of that chance as well under the belief that I was saving them from suffering. I comforted myself with this.
    And now I am disgusted by it, and I have felt loss and shame at several instances where I have done this all over again because of it.

    My friend told me a story. She used to raise butterflies when she had the time. She had a newly emerged butterfly drying, but it dried too close to the tank edge and its wing was crippled from it. It couldn't fly.
    She asked me what I would have done.
    I didn't have an answer at first, but I said I would have arranged everything in the tank so that it could get to everything by walking, and I would have made sure I cared for it, because if I crippled something, I would be responsible for its care. I would owe it a good life. I would be at fault for taking its life away.
    I am a terribly conceited person.
    She told me what she did. She let it out every day. She helped it to balance and practice flapping. She encouraged it to fly, and it wanted to learn. It wanted to overcome its obstacle.
    She believed in it. I would not have.

    I treat broken animals, or people, or nations, like invalids. I do not believe in them.
    I claim to value life, yet for the longest time, I dismissed its greatest virtue.

    In this regard, and it is quite substantial to me, I am a vile and stupid human being.

    And an extremely ungrateful one.

    I was born dead. More specifically, unable to breathe. I inherited all the problems of my family, but this was the most immediate. I was revived through surgery and kept on a breathing machine for some days. (I think the time quoted to me was 2 weeks but I am not sure.)
    The nurses often worried about me because I would punch the helmet so hard that it would fall off and I had a grip like a vice.
    When I got older I could barely see at all. I had cataract surgery to give me the chance to see and not go blind. My eyesight isn't perfect but I do have it.
    I am a visual artist even though I have sight impairment. I overcome my unique obstacles with raw determination.
    I was not a lingual kid. I had to try multiple times to be able to write the letter B and tell it apart from a 3. I struggled with communicating my feelings to others for most of my life. It was only in my late teenage years and early adulthood that I really, really put in the effort to articulate, and it was a struggle for the first 3 years to say what I meant. (I used to just make abstract art, I originally drew because pictures made more sense to me than words, but words no longer sufficed to tell people what was wrong, or what hurt, or why.)
    I challenge anyone to tell me that I am not articulate now. I still have a lot of difficulty speaking and I know that, but the proof is in my blog posts. I can do this because I tried.

    I have robbed that chance from others.

    Determination is life's virtue. Sometimes a deformed child dies because nature is complex and adversarial, but that does not mean they are doomed. Sometimes a maimed animal dies because life is non-partial, but that does not give anyone the right to decide they cannot survive prematurely.
    Yes, they might suffer, and that does bother me. I do not want things to suffer.
    But they have the right to try.
    Almost 25 years ago a medical staff believed in me enough to give me a chance. I have not returned the favor to anything else.

    I don't know if I can ever make up for this.

    But my friend believes in me. She believes that anyone can recover and thrive as long as they are alive.
    Maybe I should adopt this belief.
    I don't know what I believe.

    I don't know what to think anymore.
    Except that, if nothing else, I do believe in life's virtue.

    I wonder if I can ever do anything to help those suffering or disadvantaged to fly.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Life's Value

    Without going too much into it, someone who happens to be one of the very few people in the world I both respect and admire believes that I do not value human life. On reflection maybe they are offended that I value other things above life, but that isn't to say I don't value life itself. Their belief might be that the world would be a better place if people did value life above all else. I do not agree.

    If I valued life above all else, I would be against abortion; I am not. It is worth noting that my mother tried sex one time and I am the consequence of that one moment of curious weakness, even though precautions were taken. She never wanted a kid, and I believe I might've ruined a large part of her life plans. She only had me because my grammy wouldn't give her the money for an abortion and attempting to have one in other ways would have made her parents disown her. Putting me up for adoption would've resulted in the same thing. She was left with no other choice but to raise a kid she didn't want and was ill-equipped to deal with, and I feel that was wrong. My grandparents, much as I love them, were wrong to put her in that position. She at the time depended on them for financial support (which she had to leave anyway later in my life, the reasons of which I might have gone over before in another post but suffice it to say american health care needed revising then and it does now) and couldn't afford to be thrown out of her own house. I am aware that had she been allowed to take the route that I think is ethically proper, I would not exist. This doesn't bother me. Above all else I value a person's right to do with their body and their life above all else, and I do not believe the preservation of my own life should take precedence of that value.

    If I adopted their values, I would also be against drug use - or abuse - which I am not, because as I said, a person has the right to do whatever they damn well please with their bodies and their lives. I don't use drugs myself, I don't smoke, and I don't drink. I don't do these things because I have no desire to suffer the inevitable health problems that arise from their use (which would be magnified in my case anyway) but I will not object to another person doing these things even if it kills them because I believe that would infringe on what is ultimately the most sacred right to me. I have relatives who smoke, and I care a lot about one of them, but those are her lungs to destroy, not mine, and though I'd like her to at least try to quit in her declining age so that she might live longer and healthier (because I cannot imagine the world without my grandparents, although realistically I will have to someday) I know that it must ultimately be her choice to do so and all I can do is try to encourage her without imposing.

    Which brings me to the matter of suicide. I am not against that either. I have friends who contemplate it every day, and I sometimes make myself sick with worry for them, and I feel - and I tell them as much - that the world, and especially me, would suffer greatly from their absence. I try to talk to them, I try to, as honestly as I can, give them some hope and make them want to continue existing, and I myself often challenge what I say to them later on to try to justify it myself because it is very important to me that what I say to them is what I believe to be the truth, but I ultimately know that there is always the chance that someone I care about might end their life to end their suffering and I have to accept that is their right. It is their life, not mine. They own it, they can use it as they please, and they can take it. I am aware that in some parts of the world knowing someone has this intent - or even desire - and not trying to actively stop them is considered criminal, but I would not infringe on the most sacred right to me under penalty of law or death and I think it goes far beyond criminal to try.

    But all that said, I still do actually place value on life. All life, not just human life. It is a process I do not fully understand and which humankind has been trying to figure out for as long as we have been sentient, and for all intents and purposes - scientific or other - it is a miraculous thing. I am the kind of person who stopped eating meat because they couldn't live with the knowledge that we arbitrated an expiration date on other animals. I am the kind of person who needed to be explained that square watermelons aren't a callous invention of humans because shaping the melon itself does not actually cause the plant pain and that it, in fact, wants animals to consume its fruit. The same friend, who is a biology major, has often explained things about life to me in an effort to diffuse my guilt that we must consume other life - plant or animal - to sustain our own. There was a time when I was so disturbed by this that I would often lose my appetite (which for those who know me is almost impossible) and I now deal with this feeling through, for lack of a better phrase, the magic of science. Plants cannot feel pain as we do, so chewing up a leaf does not make it suffer needlessly, although they can still be damaged (which can sometimes make me take care when walking through tall growth) but those who care for plants while they grow do so with care and are concerned, if only for the purpose of monetary gain, with the plant's, for lack of a more accurate term, happiness and well-being and the things we consume do live in the conditions which would meet their needs as healthy happy living organisms and I must content myself with that.

    I must also content myself with, although this is a little harder, the knowledge that even though we ultimately kill yeast in the process of baking or brewing, there is the likelihood that they have lived several generations in that span of time and thus have lived several full lives in their idea of a preferred environment. I sometimes wonder if humans might meet a similar end one day by some creature who is using us to cultivate a result, and I think I can be content with that too.

    On the subject of human life, it is true I am a misanthrope and I, on the whole, view the world as wrong and unjust and that part of that I blame on humans, but I am not an inhumane person - at least not intentionally - and I consider humans with the same regard as animals in terms of my ethics on their lives, although I personally prefer the company of most animals to most people largely because animals on the whole have treated me more honestly than most people even if they didn't much care for me. Animals are not plants, they are not stationary and they don't depend on other species to procreate. As a result, animals do not, as a rule, like being chewed up, gored, shot, cleaved, or any other form of pain, and I do not like inflicting pain. I was that kid who tortured caterpillars when I was very young and later became disturbed when I realized what suffering I put them through. When I was 4 I cried over the carcass of a dead bird. I cannot say why, except that I remember the impression of a great overwhelming sadness and confusion. I dislike causing creatures pain and sickness just to satisfy our curiosity about the world, and even though I have to accept that the ends will sometimes benefit medical science for all animal species, including humans, I still don't think I could ever inject a rodent with AIDS and watch it die to study its immune system. I sometimes wonder how the scientists who do this live with themselves. Maybe they try, as best they can, to make the life they sacrificed count for something, and maybe not all of them cause pain and death to other creatures lightly. Or maybe they are just detached enough to not be affected, and maybe some of them don't value animal life at all, or at least not nearly as much as human life. I don't know. I'd like to believe the former, even though the latter has been evidenced to exist. I'd like to believe that is a minority though, and since my scientist friend is also someone who values animal life a great deal and is very much concerned with the well-being of all creatures (she is not a misanthrope as I am, and loves humans as much as any other animal) it makes the former much easier to believe.

    I often speak in anger, as is a cultural phenomenon of americans and probably not a very good one - of wanting to kill someone or some group in some very specific methodology. Right now, as I am, I cannot imagine taking a life and I would very much appreciate if, for the moment, everyone who sees this happens to believe I'm full of shit, but unfortunately I have actually been angry enough to make someone suffer and there were times in middle school when I became angry enough to try to kill someone. It was lucky I didn't know to aim for the neck with my heel instead of the skull in one instance. I have learned to accept many things about myself, this is not one of those things, and I have some very legitimate anger issues that I am always fighting with. I do not like the idea and on an intellectual level I always feel there is something very wrong with taking another person's life. This also attributes to why I won't help anyone kill themselves unless they are incapable of doing it themselves and they explicitly ask. I will help someone suffering paralysis with no hope of recovery to die, if I am certain that is what they want. (My mother and I have discussed this exact scenario, and we both agree to take the other's life in the event of its happening. We cannot be happy existing like that, unable to do the things that bring us joy because they involve our mobility.) I will not help someone obtain helium tanks if they are in full control of their faculties though, as one of my friends learned (and which I somewhat regret. I am in conflict about whether my refusal to help was disloyal or whether it was selfish to place my desire not to kill someone above their desire to die), and I will not help someone research ways to die or advise them on the subject at all. I would always feel that I inadvertently caused their death and thus robbed them of any other option that might have eased their pain and while I do not condemn suicide I view it as a last resort when there is nothing left and I cannot live with myself if I caused someone to forsake all hope when there might have been some.

    I made a few posts about my anger and how I feel about it, so I won't go into it here, but suffice it to say I sometimes wonder if I am a monster and if one day it will come out of me and I won't be able to control it. What I fear most is that I might kill someone and later come to know the details of their lives. People are valuable to other people, even when that seems unlikely (something I have personal experience with) and I might actually rob a child of their parent, someone of their best friend, or an animal of a part of their family. I am not sure I could live with that. I have thought about what I might do in that situation, and only one answer comes to mind.

    On the note of self-preservation though, I do not agree with the consumption of other animals but it is my choice to not consume them myself and I cannot expect that of others. Although I think a person's sacred right to choose ends at the point where it damages or takes another's right, or their life, I do know that a lot of livestock are well cared for in most facilities and though they have been arbitrated a life expectancy, which I disagree with, their life, such as they have it, is usually made comfortable. (With the exception of veal, which I will condemn people for consuming.) I am the only vegetarian in my family and they are good people. I also don't condemn someone for hunting game if they use most of what they kill and they don't endanger the environment by leaving a rotting carcass lying about. Some people do, and because there are significantly few carnivores left in my area, the bodies go uneaten and they do rot and fester. (We hunted the wolves to near extinction here but the deer have thrived in their absence.) Even if someone isn't going to use the whole carcass themselves, they should submit it to one of the many facilities here that will. (Deer jerky is a popular market here.) Aside from the practical concerns, though, I think it is disrespectful to the life taken to not utilize its body as best as you can. I disagree strongly with hunting something you do not intend to eat and I view trophy hunting as careless and don't believe the people who do this have a proper respect for life.

    I also believe that when necessary it is acceptable to kill in self-defense, human or otherwise. It would be ideal to incapacitate the threat, but in the heat of the moment it is not always possible to aim for the arm or leg as opposed to the chest. It is not a clear issue on whether it is always justified, nor is the whole story ever given, but it can be necessary and sometimes the only immediate option. Whether or not I think it is ethical is ambiguous beyond that.

    But the real issue that started all this is whether or not I think it is kinder to let someone die than live in suffering. I suppose the problem with twitter is that 140 characters isn't enough to really explore a topic, so what I said was taken out of context. I was led to believe that people - humans - were living in the middle of a warzone where they were being bombed all the time (and I took that quite literally) and that there was no apparent end to it in sight. I don't know these people, I don't know if they have an internet connection to offer their own insight (Can an internet connection survive constant bombing?) or their own wishes, but as is the case with how I view everything else, whether or not they live is their choice and though I would personally find it dubious to choose to live that way, I wouldn't infringe on their right to their own life.

    However, I find it dubious simply because I personally would find living in suffering worse than death and would take the latter over it. Maybe this is what others find so inflammatory, in which case, we simply disagree on a fundamental level based on our separate values and beliefs and I would be content with that if it weren't implied that I value life less than they do just because mine differ.

    Actually, my concern for others is exactly why I feel so strongly about this. I think it is wrong that people have to live in fear and that their lives are full of pain - I feel this way about all humans, not just those whose circumstances are more precarious, although I would say that their plight might take priority - and I do not want anything to live like this. I have been accused of seeing people as abstracts, that cannot be farther from the truth. I see them as people, they have relatively the same nervous system I do. If you cut them with a knife, they bleed. If you shoot them in the chest, they die. If you kill someone they care about, they cry. If you subvert them and use them and take away their rights, they feel despair and anger and indignation. It is the sheer fact that we are talking about humans that I feel such indignation on their part in the first place. I am against war. It is sometimes inevitable, but it should be avoided whenever possible specifically because it ultimately makes a lot of people - real people - suffer, and more often than not, they are just caught in the crossfire and not even soldiers themselves.

    However, I do not know a lot of the context for that particular subject. I honestly don't think that what I say has any real gravity on it for that reason, but I find it insulting that I am accused of devaluing life when nothing can be further from the truth. I am, at most, guilty of ignorance which I wholly admit to, but I am not uncaring and I do value life.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Chance

    I will give you a humbling piece of information that most of you will likely ignore.

Everything that has ever happened to you, good or otherwise, was random chance.

Unfortunately hubris and general lack of objectivity make people unaware of this, so they go about their lives either believing they themselves went wrong somewhere or sneering at people who can only afford a bike when they themselves drive an SUV.

I'm getting really fucking tired of running into the latter.

    We actually have very little choice in our lives, if at all. Circumstances dictate just about everything that happens to us, and the only time we really have a choice is in how we deal with those circumstances. Even so, our choices are often limited by what or who we know, where we are, how old we are, and/or how much available resources we can expend on an option. Every living thing has to cope with this, it is what makes up life itself. Humans are no different.

    What separates us is our ability to demonstrate such arrogance that we often think we're above the natural order of life. We aren't.

    Which basically means that someone who is in a better position than someone else has nothing to gloat about. They're just there because of luck, and luck is a fickle thing that cannot be controlled. Autobiographies written by millionaires, in a comparison between them, revealed that a very small percentage of them attribute their fortunes to luck, but scientific studies have shown that, through testing the actions and reactions of different people in a set of predesigned circumstances, that humans often believe they have more control than they actually do. It begs the question of how lucky those authors really were. I think they were extremely lucky.

    This isn't intended to dishearten people who are actually trying to make something of their lives. Your own effort is a factor, even if it isn't the primary one.

    It is intended to tell those who are successful in any endeavor or just life itself, in no uncertain terms, to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down because they really aren't any better than the rest of us and their position is not a guarantee.

It makes sense to be proud of your effort, but not your accomplishments. Your entire life boils down to chance and your only real measurement of self-worth is how well you deal with the circumstances.

    Considering my circumstances, I think I dealt with them pretty well. In some things, my effort was not small, nor was the priority of trying, and that's the best anyone can do.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Universal Truth

    Today I was once again confronted by my greatest fear.
    It underlies everything that terrifies me, it undermines my confidence and whatever purpose I have ever found, and it has lived in the back of my mind for nearly 7 years.
    And today I looked at it with the dispassionate observation of someone so used to something morbid, it no longer elicits fear or revulsion from them.
    It has been thus for a good while now. When you live with a monster for as long as I have, it becomes familiar to you. In its familiarity, it becomes a part of you, and you can look upon it as if viewing one of your limbs or a piece of furniture in your house that has always been there.
    I looked at it today, and the questions that it poses, and I believe I have found the answer, albeit within the cradle of other questions, or concerns, that bring their own discord. But it is an answer I can believe with all my being, and in that way, it brings me some peace.
    A universal truth that frees me in part from my own vices, and connects me to the world at the same time.

    I am afraid to not exist.
    I am afraid that nothing will exist - and the speculation that the universe has a lifespan, fragile as scientific knowledge might be in the face of time and new discoveries, confirms that fear as legitimate in its own capacity - and that everything that we are, that we did, will be forever gone.
    This fear has made me sick.
    This fear has caused me pain, some nights it would rend my stomach like a black hole opened up inside of me and I would be kept up at night with the pain and grief. Other times it would trigger such extreme anxiety attacks that I would not be able to stop vomiting for close to 15 minutes, even when there was nothing left inside of me, as if I hoped to purge myself of the fear itself with enough violent convulsions.
    This fear has left me desolate and brittle. It crushed the foundation of my world and I almost went insane from the effort it took to rebuild that foundation from scratch - discarding or repurposing shards of beliefs and ideals and purpose that had fortified me for most o my life. There were times when I would shake with silent screams in the dead of night and wallow in anguish so frigid that it would numb me to all emotion after a time, and the only thing that kept me alive was the tiny spark of my animal instinct to survive. I would pick myself up, feeling spent and dry, allow the small part of me that appreciates dark cynical humor to take over for a moment, and apply myself to the simplest of tasks, just to stay alive.
    Just to keep existing. For all its futility, and for all its fragility, because the most primal, feral part of me, the legacy of my species, derived from the culmination of time and circumstance that created the first life to emerge from the oozing pools of proteins across the precursor to our planet, was telling me to survive; to eat, drink, breathe, move my limbs, satisfy the savage lust or instincts that surfaced in the absence of my humanity, and engage in the fight for life every plant, every creature, everything that is swept up in the process of life, has fought for a span of time so great that I cannot truthfully admit to comprehending it.
And once I regained my reason and could apply it to the whole of what I am, I realized those instincts were right.

I have since battled to survive against parts of my own humanity. Indeed, my ability to ask lofty questions and my knowledge of self-awareness often seemed like a curse. This was what truly made me a misanthrope, for beyond my established beliefs that people exercise too much cruelty or, worse, apathy, was the realization that our own unique ability to reason, to fathom, and to explore - our own humanity - has caused most of our suffering throughout our history. If not for my fear of the void, and my own strong instincts, I might have taken my own life just to rid myself of such implications.
    And such implications, as well as many others, stemming most often from this one fear of mine, have changed me immensely.
    It is that change which I have sought to undo for almost as long as this inner war with my fear has gone on.
    And it is this desire I must now renounce in the face of my latest epiphany.

    Not a single thing you can do or say to a person can make you or them return to what you were. Not any revelation of the workings of the universe can return you to where you started, or reverse damage. No act of damage control, by any group or nation, can truly erase the scars of hardship and strife from the slates of our histories.
    No one can go back.
    I cannot find the peace I desire that I once had before this all started; the certainty of my purpose; my unwavering faith in my beliefs, spiritual or otherwise; my hubris the likes of which the young possess who believe they are irreplaceable. These things were mine once, they can never be mine again.
    We cannot go backwards because we cannot unmake what we have wrought. We cannot erase our mark.
    We do leave a mark.

The consequences of my struggle have not remained isolated to myself; they have effected others, directly or otherwise, and we all effect the world, perhaps even the cosmos. One of the first truths I gleaned when I started this journey of potentially self-destructive enlightenment was that time is a human abstract that we created around...around change. Change, which is the only true constant in the universe, and yet I never realized until now the implications of what that meant. It remained obscured to me for years, perhaps because my own dogged obsession with undoing the damage I caused myself blinded me to it, or perhaps because I was not yet wise or developed enough to appreciate it.
Or maybe I needed to suffer these experiences to really understand it in more than just an intellectual capacity.
I must abandon this thing that I have lamented over, because only then can I open my heart to the truth.
We do exist.
Our world does exist.
    Our sun exists. It was born from a culmination of gases and plasma reactions.
    Our galaxy does exist. It came to be formed as the gravity from a dead star drew other celestial bodies toward it.
    Our universe does exist. Its origin is a mystery to us, and yet here we are, living inside of it, which we have vague ideas about its nature and continue to speculate on its birth - and its death.

    Everything exists in one form or another. Our corpses serve to feed other life forms and sometimes are transmuted in the fashion only nature itself can perpetrate. Our fetuses are formed from the union of two members of the opposite sex and the offspring carry remnants of both parents - scars of their own, in a manner of speaking.
Clouds exist, they empty themselves when it rains, the heat from the sun resurrects them from the water. An empty sky is not proof that clouds do not exist, for all one would need to do is glimpse a puddle to know that at a previous tie, they had.
Everything in nature effects nature itself. What mark I, my race, my planet, will leave is not something I can know, but I do believe there will be one, great or small, for that is the most absolute law of nature, the universal truth.

That is one less monster I must contend with.

Friday, August 7, 2015

My friend's story

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Double-Edged Sword

    It is not unknown to those close to me that I feel the most productive way to get past misunderstandings or conflicts is to share my feelings and understand something of theirs - in fact, it is probably the only way I can understand people at all, and my only means of relation, which isn't unknown to most of my friends either.

    So, on one such occasion, early in the morning, when most people with proper obligations would likely be asleep, a friend of mine and I worked out our...differences...about a situation that arose a few weeks ago that had been eating at me - and given that was a night when I had nothing better to do but seethe in the mire of every bitter resentful thought I'd ever had in relation to my family (of which there are many, but objectively, there are many other thoughts associated with many other emotions as well, they just weren't at the forefront of my mind at the time), it came to the surface again and I could not hold it down.

    We did work it out, but she said something to me that made me totally aware of why I was so indignant on the topic in the first place, something I subconsciously knew was wrong for years, and which I attempt to rectify as often as I can, but until I heard it spoke plainly, I wasn't able to produce a concise explanation. Indeed, it seems my friend said in a single sentence what I had been trying to convey to her for over 3 hours.

"I'm not going to praise you like a dog for it."

    Without context, this likely means very little, so I will offer what I hope is concise. I have not had an easy life, it isn't a unique occurrence, but it isn't normal either. I grew up in a house where my mother resented me - or rather, the fact that she had me, and all the implications that brought along with it - and grandparents determined to pretend nothing was wrong, that we cared for each other deep down, and that any protest I raised about my mother was just the usual things kids say about their parents. It is not unusual for a child to tell their parents they hate them at least once - it is, however, unusual for their parents to express mutual feelings at least twice. The only reason I remained with my biological relatives was because getting an abortion or later giving me up for adoption would make my grandparents disown my mother and thus cut off a vital lifeline since we were, to put it bluntly, shit poor and barely able to afford transportation.

    For the record, my mother isn't an indecent person, she swallowed what she could of her resentment and tried to take care of my physical and medical needs to the best of her ability, in fact, that's why we ended up in the most ghetto part of town living off stale bread and cereal, because when we lived with my grandparents who owned a lot, lived in a clean trailer, and had 3 proper meals a day, we were seen as too rich for the government to give a damn about us but the fact remained we were too poor to help ourselves so a lot of the blame for my shitty childhood can be blamed on the system and not necessarily on my mother. (Although I doubt very seriously she needed to hit so hard, especially with such blunt, heavy objects.)

    So it was that, since kids are more attuned to feelings than older humans are, I grew up feeling the vibes of a mother that offered almost nothing in the way of emotional support or affection, and since I was forced to accompany my grammy to her day job every weekday since I was 2, and her day job was unfortunately a daycare where I had to share whatever dosage of affection I could manage to steal with 20-30 other kids, who I ended up deeply resenting myself for this reason, that I ended up getting in a lot of fights, and thus came home almost every day with my grandmother having some new complaint of whose hair I pulled or who I threw off the fort or how many kids I cornered in the sandbox like a rabid wolverine, and after a while, it just became easier for someone to mention when I went a whole day without terrorizing anyone - although my grammy would still mention every incident at the table because she loves to complain about her kids. I think it's genetic.

    And I never reserved this for daycare, and later, school, either. I noticed how much more everyone liked my cousin. My grandmother denies it, even today, of course, but my mother always says he wasn't always yelling and screaming and trying to hit everyone, which I've always believed to be the result of the fact that he had a parent that loved him regardless of how inebriated she became so I took out my bitterness on him as well and to this day my grandmother denies I ever did that, too.

    It isn't hard to imagine how school went for me - pretty much the same, except now I was willing to go to more extremes to inflict pain onto others for the sake of potentially alleviating some of my own. Didn't help I went to the worst middle school where broken glass and chipped wood were often concealed weapons in the halls. Even the kid who needed 2 crutches to get around could fight, and you wouldn't want one of those connecting with your jaw. I'd know. There wasn't a person in that place I hadn't tried to - quite literally - take a chunk out of, but by highschool I became sullen and stayed inside my head mostly. I would still attack others, but only in self-defense. I decided, at that age, I was tired of people. They never offered me what I wanted, although I had no idea what that was until junior year, when I experienced it for the first time - love.

    By the time I found the internet and some semblance of a refuge (although admittedly not a very secure one) from the things I hated most about people I was already used to having a glacier for a soul, I went without meaningful relationships for so long that the first couple times I experienced real friendship online it hurt, not unlike how frostbite feels when exposed to warmth, and lashed out in every direction having no other understanding how to act to new and confusing feelings. It turned out I became just as unpopular online as I already was in real life, and it was starting to make me hate myself quite a lot, and I struggled for a long time with trying to figure out what was wrong with me, why I didn't have things like emotional support or reliable presences, but there's probably another blog post in this menagerie of thoughts detailing that struggle and it would take another 6 paragraphs to go over it again anyway.

    So, along with a lot of other things I came out of that experience with, one of the things I realized was that criticism has been a pretty strong point in my life. My mother preferred to ignore me, although she would break from that to sometimes yell at me for getting into trouble in school because she hated getting calls from those people and being dragged away from other things to go talk to them in school (she danced a little at graduation because she could finally take them off speed dial and I swear I saw her giving double birds to the college doors we used for the ceremony when we were heading for the parking lot) and the teachers themselves had all kinds of complaints about me. if it wasn't my reign of terror (especially in elementary school) it was my lack of speed at work, my refusal to do some things set in front of me (I regret nothing of that one, by the way), or my outspoken dislike of some subjects such as math. The only thing anyone did like about me was that I was honest, I suppose because it made it easier to land me in a heap of trouble, but had the backfiring effect of me telling almost every teacher I had how much I didn't like them and why. (Probably the only thing in elementary school my mother was ever proud of.)

    On top of this, I at some point made the horrible mistake of getting into the creative mediums. It was music first, but as I didn't have the aptitude for reading it, it was not encouraged by my band teacher, or my mother, who majored in music at university and assured me I would never even qualify for half the classes she took. Then I tried art, thinking I'd have liked to make video games. At the time I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted in games that have ironically come to pass today. (Namely, sandbox and simulation games, as meta has always been my way of having fun) and started taking it seriously in 8th grade, only to find out largely through highschool and online interaction just how much of a beatdown that was asking for. I don't think I went a day in sophomore year without getting torn a fresh new one by either an art teacher or some prat online about everything under the sun from my poor anatomy to the content I drew (fanart, mostly) to my use of color (the usual complaint being "too much") to line thickness, and at first I lashed out at people as always, but ended up meeting a lot more resistance than before, maybe it was just because this was something I wanted to succeed at and I thought the whole firing off at people thing wasn't helping so I eventually learned to take it in stride and deal with its aftermath privately or to my friends.

    But in my adulthood, I cannot help but think I have endured too much criticism with too little praise.

    Anyone who's known me for any length of time is intimately aware the kinds of things I struggle with, even when the catalyst for those things is years bygone and what remain are shadows that still haunt me. It would be nice to be told, sometimes, by my friends at least, that I am making an effort to deal with a lot of deep-seeded issues, of which I only covered one in this post, to be told that I'm making headway, preferably as more than an afterthought so it doesn't come across as insincere. Few people bother to offer me that courtesy up-front, I can only think of two who have, and one of them was involved in that original discussion.

    That was what I felt so indignant about; that I have tried, and still put forth a great deal of effort, to resist or ignore the developed habits or instincts that have made me insufferable in the past. It takes a great deal of effort for me to drop whatever I'm on about and let someone else vent for a while. It takes a lot of self-control to compose my fury into concise sentences, I would like a little appreciation for what I have already accomplished over the years instead of being told that my effort is not good enough or that I still have a long way to go before I will be acceptable to others.

    It is this that makes me think we humans are too quick to criticize others but doling out praise rarely crosses our minds. I have been guilty of this injustice myself, and as someone who hangs out largely in creative circles, I see it from others first hand. I think more effort needs to be taken, on the parts of everyone, to balance out our criticisms with our praise.

    Why? Because imagine working hard on something like a painting, a video game, or self-improvement, and only to be told when you're doing something wrong, and never have potentially months of effort recognized. Imagine if everyone went silent when they couldn't think of anything to criticize you on. Would you not start to feel that your effort has been wasted, having not received any affirmatives from others? No, that is not conceited to desire or even except, it is human nature. We are social creatures, we need the approval of others to feel good about ourselves, it is why we desire friends in the first place, it is why we do much of what we do outside the basics for maintaining our health, it is why we become depressed if we feel unwanted.

    So, I take it upon myself to practice some things in my everyday life in an attempt to give to others what was denied me for so long.

    The first thing I do, and I view this as the most important, is to try and point out something good about someone's effort. Though I primarily practice this in the creative circles, it can be applied to many other things as well, and it helps to pay attention to he good traits about your friends when adopting this habit as it makes it so you can offer them honest approval when they're really down on themselves.

    The second thing I try to do, although my lack in some skills or fields of studies can hinder me on this one, is when I don't like something, I attempt to explain why, and offer an alternative. The latter is the hardest part and sometimes involves composing an answer for several minutes or leaving it for later. This is something I really wish more people would do, because my perspective is only one, and someone else with more knowledge about how some things work might come along and offer a better, or at least a different, one, but even so, it can be heartening for people to see that someone even cares enough to explain themselves instead of shouting in all caps about some new feature or update they hate or some use of color that hurts their eyes, or some way of behaving they find offensive.

    The last thing I try, and this is likely the hardest one for me, and one which I often have difficulty abiding by given my bent to take a view and go with it full-throttle, is to tell people that what I am saying is what I feel, what I think, and a lot of other I statements. It should be a given that whatever someone says is their opinion "by virtue of the fact they fucking said it" (a quote I picked up on a forum that tends to have a lot of nasty opinions being thrown around like spears) but this is not always apparently to everyone and I think it helps jolt them to the realization that they don't need to take all advice to heart, but there's no harm in mulling it over either.

    It is also important to realize that criticism, while it can be helpful, is often used, especially now in the age of information, as a weapon against people. There are many people who will shout it to the rooftops just to hurt someone or disguise insults and threats under the pretense of offering criticism. I assume that at least a few such individuals will come across this and since I have only ever met 2 people who are truly unaffected by what others think or say about them, I'm going to assume such people have emotions and feelings like everyone else so I offer to those people a warning.

    Criticism, especially destructive criticism, is a double-edged sword. You might be able to dish it out, but that doesn't mean you can take it. Most of my life has been spent in spite, I am no stranger to vindictive motives, I have been on both ends of them more often than is considered sane by most people, and I can tell you that while you're loading that shot you want to take at someone's weak point, there is always someone on the next hill trying to get a bead on you, and people like me - and there happen to be a great deal of us, especially online - take a sick and twisted delight from tearing into people who are just trying to be harmful. Unless you want to dedicate yourselves to being bulletproof, which I can tell you as someone who has tried is a pursuit that takes years and even then can never truly be realized, it is not worth whatever grim satisfaction you gain from hurting another person to risk alerting the ever-present snipers to your existence and potentially making yourself a target. You don't believe me? What do you think is the largest motivation of people posting articles about others on ED? Granted, not even I'm that vindictive, but it just goes to illustrate there are far nastier people out than me looking for an excuse and someone making an ass of themselves offers the perfect one.

    To everyone else, remember that block of text up there, because even if you're not like that, it should serve to demonstrate that criticism is a double-edged sword. Never offer it unless you're prepared to take it yourself, and in those instances, having a little praise on your record might encourage others to pay you the same courtesy. That is, after all, why we bother with courtesies to begin with. It can only improve our species to recognize the strengths of others as well as their weaknesses.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

No longer using Gamasutra

http://i.imgur.com/d2RW5gS.png

    I feel like this needs explaining since apparently a lot of people don't get it. I never use my real name. Paranoia is only part of it. The biggest reason is that I hate it. It carries weight for me that I cannot bear and one of the best things about the internet to me is the ability to get a clean slate without a hundred preconceived notions about my character, not all of them unjustified.

    As far as I'm concerned, it is my right to choose who I am; even if that means throwing away everything I was - or trying to. Even without the use of my government-recognized identity that shit still haunts me and is always coming up. I have a hard enough time as it is trying to function with so much shame and self-hatred, I shouldn't have to be forced to carry every mistake I've ever made around like a fucking badge and never be able to redeem myself.

    Assuming it's even possible to be redeemed, considering how I've tried for years and still cannot be the kind of person I want to be.

    My life sucks enough, I really don't need it to suck more.

I place no value on how we are born or what we are given anyway. All that matters to me is what we do.My name, my ethnicity, my culture, my birthplace, my age, my gender, and whatever else was forced on me without my consent are meaningless. They are also meaningless to me in other people. I don't give a damn what name your parents gave you, what color you are, or where you grew up. Whatever part of you they make up is too insignificant for me to consider judging you by them even partially, and I damn sure don't respect them as a point of pride or shame. If you're proud to be black, or female, or from Canada, that just tells me that you have not accomplished anything meaningful enough to be proud of, or that you're clinging to a label like a fucking highschool kid.

    To my knowledge, most of us are gestated in a womb and each one is equipped with its own unique variety of shit sandwich dispensers that we're forced to eat as soon as our cells start dividing. Most of life is spent dealing with the aftertaste, and I think that's wrong. I rip the outward identities aside and give people a chance to define themselves by their choices and their actions and to hell with anyone who cannot see the wisdom in this.

    The bottom line is I'm tired of this shit, I will not participate in any community or group that values such superficial things and personally think anyone that does value them is shallow and beneath contempt. Call me when you fuckers finish puberty.

Friday, March 28, 2014

Embers

    Yesterday I shared my thoughts with a group of friends about anger, how I believe it's like a flame that, when not used up immediately, will seed itself into the hearts of those who kindled it and become a burning ember, hot enough to hurt its benefactor but tame enough to never go out, it will singe and crackle and deteriorate them from the inside out, and it will flare up when other emotions are fed to it, and it is very, very hard to dislodge once seeded in the human soul.

    I sometimes feel I was born with such an ember, like I was born angry, disquieted, full of an unending raging fire that drives the engine of my hate and which rarely lets me feel peace. Even now, I can feel it in my heart as it simmers and makes my chest and stomach feel hardened by heat. I can feel the constant turmoil as smoke of unease rise from it and yet never smother it as they build up inside of me, and my only outlet is that sometimes, I need to blow off steam to keep it from festering. I have kindled such a fire my entire life, I do not know what it's like to never be angry, save for a few times in my life where I felt like it might be truly gone - but not gone, just at its lowest burning point when I knew what contentment and tranquility were.

    Such is the nature of my being that I contemplate anger and rage often, I am very familiar with all manner of dark emotions, I am especially sensitive to and understanding of fear; fear drives people like nothing else, in many of our positive traits there is a shadow of fear, looming as we strive to not fail, to achieve before our short stints into the universe we call our lives run out, and the thing which we at the moment cannot possibly begin to fathom but which makes us more than the sum total of our parts diminishes forever and we become nothing but a resource to be used by the rest of the earth, recycled back into what I believe the true order of the universe. Fear has driven people insane, but it has also resulted in many achievements by mankind, it is the seed with which we might know understanding and empathy for others, it is the growing anxiety that promotes action and thought to overcome our hardships, and it is through fear that we come to know courage; true courage is to overcome a fear to accomplish a goal, to rise above it, without fear there can be no bravery, no progress, no courage, it is the darkness t our light.

    But more than fear, the shadow behind us all, behind everything we do, making stark the contrast of the light, I know anger. I am an embodiment of burning rage, I am hate incarnate, behind my fear is always the heat of anger, its dim burning light suffusing the shadows and the light, and through this smoky light and heat I have come to know fire. Fire burns and sways whimsically, fire cannot be contained, it cannot be controlled, it must be respected or tempered, but it has great potential for destruction, and it is wild, so wild that when it unleashes its true power it can devastate everything around it, it can grow and flare out so much that it cannot control itself, it no longer has direction, except to burn and consume and grow and unleash its wrath on everyone and everything in its wake, and it is so absorbed in its hot rage that it loses any cohesion or sanity, and when nothing is left, it burns out, extinguished by its own fury, defeated by its own mad consumption of everything around it, a smouldering shadow of its former self, a black smattering of embers.

    And yet those embers live, and they cannot be extinguished easily, as if fueled by some infinite supply of napalm they burn through the smoke and the blackened world the fire left behind, and they bide their time and grow, they grow into new fire and that fire continues to gain strength and momentum, and only the gods know when it will turn from its dancing whimsy into the violent display of naked rage that is pure destruction; the shadow of what I am, my personal fear, and what is always remembered about me by everyone, that I am fire and I am dangerous, I am wild and without restraint, I am capable of causing harm to everyone around me whether intentional or not, and though I dance whimsically through the air and burn with a luminous gusto, it only takes a little gasoline to turn that into an ugly and terrifying wrath. I am an ember.

    But through these musings of mine, I have perhaps discovered a different kind of ember.

    Fire is wild, perhaps that is my best definition for who I am, I am not grounded nor do I desire to be. I rail against being caged and do not stay in one place or on one subject for long, I become withered in any type of confinement, I must always seek new things, but this is not unlike the most elusive of human psychology, creativity, something so untamed and misunderstood, mysterious and whimsical, that it cannot be controlled, it cannot be bottled and stored away for later, it withers in confinement, like me, it needs to wander, it needs fuel, it needs freedom. It is also an ember.

    But it is the opposite of me; where my greatest challenge is dampening or channeling the ever-raging fire inside of me, this ember of mine is but a spark that I have difficulty kindling. At a point in my life several years past now when I was truly miserable and angry, I could kindle my spark with my own fire, anger fueled my creativity, deep-seeded, passionate hate, but now the two burn in different realms, one is diminished though still potent, and the other is but a small coal in which I am only aware of in those brief moments when I feel a warmness unlike the heat of rage. Inspiration. And inspiration is the flint on which we spark our creativity.

    Because so little is known about the creative process of humankind, I have no scientific basis for which to advise others. This is an issue of philosophy, it requires introspection on the part of the individual, but what I do know is that if anger is hard to smother, creativity is hard to kindle. It is like a wisp, a tiny blue flame burning so softly and giving off almost no light, but when it flares up to its full glory it spreads like wildfire through my entire body, motivating me to great leaps of creation and motivating me to do things such as paint or write these passionate entries. It does not burn slowly, it consumes every bit of inspiration in the soul, the world around, and then, like anger, it weakens and withers to the tiny cool ember it was before, and when it flares up again is an unknown to all, even the bearer of the tiny flame.

    These two embers are so opposite, one of destruction and the other of creation, yet they are so frighteningly alike, they coexist in my soul and effect my being in profound ways, and I can feel both of them, see them in my mind, and when the flame of creation flares inside of me I can taste its smoke on the exhale, which does not choke me like the smoke of my anger, but stimulates me to act, to create, to burn lively and dance in the light of my own ember.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

True Faith

    Around 1AM I made a speedpaint and posted it around the web around 2:30, after finally figuring out how to upload it as a jigsaw puzzle so people can play with my spontaneous art.
    Why? Because I want it to make people happy, and ifs omeone comes across it and it brings them a little warm feeling in their day, I consider that a victory.

    Around 3AM I started to have what I call a fear spike - that's when, for whatever reason, be it eating too much junk food, staying up when I'm tired, not getting enough vitamin K, or struggling with the horror that is existential crisis, my naturally extreme anxiety mounts into something that has a 50% chance of growing into a full-blown panic attack and if you have no idea what that looks like or god forbid feels like, I hope with all the sincerity in my heart you never do. Anyway, this happened frequently in Q2 and Q3 of last year, but around winter I finally was able to get adequate medical treatment and started getting really proactive about balancing the little things like diet and productivity that effect our chemical and mental health.

    But even so, these things still occur. And when they do, they make me look hard at my life, because even though fear spikes amplify all of your issues by a thousand, when you're feeling better, the issues are still there, and the best thin you can do is try to deal with them.

    In my case, I have dealt with this and several other problems related to my health for years - sometimes, my entire life. As a result, I am a very introspective person. Sometimes I will even dig into the parts of my soul that physically and mentally hurt to disturb so that I can understand a problem. Sometimes that only increases the intensity of my anxiety-laced depression but it also turns over a rock in my mind and shows me the absolute most disgusting things about myself, and when the shock and horror wears off, I can begin to accept those things, or try to change them.

    I say this because I want to go back to that picture I made earlier in the morning. It's a very light, dreamy picture. It's supposed to make you feel good looking at it. In fact, aside from some of my vent art, all of my art is focused on vibrant expression and feeling good in different ways.

    Sometimes, people believe I'm an optimist for that reason. I find that somewhat insulting because when I think of optimists, I think of people who deliberately turn the other cheek at the world's injustices and breeze through life by ignoring their problems instead of confronting them. I am a very confrontational person when it comes to my issues. So why, then, is my art so happy? Wouldn't it make more sense to draw your true feelings instead of fluffy happy things?

    The truth is that my art does contain my true feelings - I have looked at some of the ugliest things about myself and I have been in a lot of really depressing situations. I acknowledge the world's evils, I rage about them frequently, I talk to my close friends about how depressing life can be sometimes and I am a very intense, serious person but in spite of all that, I still see the patches of light in the darkness of our world.

    I consider myself a misanthrope - I don't hate people, but I hate some constructs of human society like anything having to do with money, separating people by class, the degenerate, petty ways in which we compete with each other for power and the aforementioned money, but don't hate individual people. I actually think humans as a species are incredibly flexible and steely at the same time. We are capable of imagination and even though the universe's lifespan has been calculated and is pretty much common knowledge, we continue to create, build, and thrive in the face of complete destruction. We are amazing in our ability to stare hard truths in the face and continue with our lives. In truth, I want to help people continue to do that. We are a strong species, and we hold each other up.

    I also consider myself a cynic - the idea that the only thing between me and uncertain death is the network of people I surround myself with who all have their own emotional crap to deal with and the doctors, police, firefighters, and everyday heroes who are not infallible and just as capable of screwing up as the rest of us is terrifying, but at the same time, we've survived for thousands of years and we really can support each other. We all have emotional crap and flaws to deal with, and when we all hold hands we can help hold each other up. Sometimes, one of my friends or myself needs others to compensate for their falling down, but the next day I might be bearing up under one of my friends who just needs to cry for a while.

    And that is beautiful to me. I am not putting a friendly face on a horrible concept; I'm acknowledging that there are things that frighten me but have genuinely found an aspect of something that speaks to me in a positive way.

    That's what I want my art to reflect.I want my art to be very human, I want to show people optimistic images that also speaks to them or that they can relate to. That is a tall order, but I think when we really explore humanity - all sides of it - we gain true faith in it, and it makes everything less scary.

Monday, December 23, 2013

Rough Edges

    A discussion on a forum prompted this entry, it made me think about what I consider the two primary opposing sides of the internet, and even though you could say this is true for real life as well, I find it reaches its extreme online, when people seem to devolve into the most basic components of their psyche. I'm talking about the polar opposites of people who are predators, tormenting others for fum and are seemingly untouchable, especially by the other side - the sensitive people who are easily hurt and more interested in genuine human contact than the distant relationships preferred by the former. It can usually be observed in its most primitive form when several callous individuals on a forum or in an IRC are verbally abusing someone who is probably crying into their keyboard as they type out rebuttals in all-caps.

    My natural inclination is to side with the latter; Regardless of the circumstances, I don't feel there is any honor in harassing someone weaker than you and seeing people gang up on someone of a weak constitution appalls me. I have an almost predesigned desire to defend the minority, but objectively that does not make the tormentors instantly villains.

    In fact, they're as much victims to a cycle I've observed over the years as the people they're hurting - because they're turning those people into them. All of these callous, pessimistic remarks people make cannot entirely be the result of trolling even if there are a few people who just want to stir the pot; no, most of it is just people repeating what the internet generation before them told them when they were probably crying into their keyboard, and most of them are too proud to admit that. They're spreading the toxicity of cynicism and misanthropy to the next generation and that generation will do the same thing to the next.

    Possibly the worst thing about all that is that even though there are few people willing to admit they were once the naive innocent newbie they are now trying to turn into a miserable cynic, there are even fewer of them that are willing to admit that even in a small way, the vitriol of others' poisoned words still hurt them. We have created an environment where having your feelings hurt is not acceptable and in doing so we've repressed encouraging compassion and humanity from everyone. Instead, people demand that everyone be as thick-skinned as they think they've become, but nobody seems to realize, or care, that thick skin can have rough edges, and in most cases, those edges are barbed with the poison of misery.

    Sometime ago I tried to be untouchable, I wanted to be able to bounce insults off my skin like others seemed to do so well, but after trying for a solid 3 years, I realized that it was not only impossible for me, but self-destructive. Now, my philosophy is that the healthiest thing to do for the sake of yourself and your relations with others of your species is to be honest about how you feel. I practice this in my daily life. If I see someone who looks like they're hurting, I try to reach out to them to the best of my ability and I am not afraid to be sincere even though I live in a time period when sincerity is viewed as weak and sarcasm is a mark of the strong and clever. I know that this makes me a target for people who are malcontent or for people who are just bored and trying to get a rise out of me, and I'm not going to pretend those people don't succeed because doing otherwise would mean they have no consequences to their actions, but what I'm more afraid of is that if someone doesn't show the kind of honest sincerity I demand of myself every single day, then there will be no example for others and we will always live in an emotionally repressed society.

    We humans feel emotions and are influenced by them. To ignore them or force them down is to deny ourselves of an inherent part of our nature, and when we start to accept and understand those emotions, we can be more understanding of the people around us.

    I'm a well-established misanthrope. I don't trust people by nature, but even with my innate suspicion, I don't believe the majority are trolls and the minor percentage of trolls that do exist are far outweighed by ordinary people who are hurting. My ideal world is one where people can freely exchange experiences of emotional pain without fear of being persecuted for it and I think that will be possible one day if we learn to shed our rough edges.

Friday, October 4, 2013

Puppet Master

Today started like any other day, I ran into some asshat on a forum who I didn't like so I wrote up what I considered to be a pretty clever post stripping them of their dignity and tearing them a new one but since he happened to be a mod with no respect for other people's works of art he deleted that post and cried to his mommy about how I was mean to him so I had to remake a thread and exercise my infinite creativity and word my next post in a way that still made it clear that I didn't like him without giving him a reason to delete it. Unfortunately some other mod edited my post which I just re-edited back (and removed their edit message specifically to spite them because how dare you alter my art) but I think they got the message anyway.

SO, what was this about? Well, it started as just me being angry that I can't play Spyro on my new Vita which don't get me wrong, it's a good investment but not being able to play the PSX games that I actually give a crap about is a huge disappointment and I probably wouldn't have bought one if I knew that so because I can't be assed to dig up the old thread I'm just going to copypaste his response in the new thread and hopefully if you aren't a stupid soulless monkey worthy of my eternal disdain you'll know exactly why I don't like this asshat.

And the rest of this entry will make complete sense to you.

I'm also working off the assumption the thread will be locked because apparently having someone not play your shallow game of statistics justifies shutting down a discussion a passionate fan cared about.

"Sony clarified that statement well before the launch of the console. Those of us that bothered to read the Vita FAQ before buying the device knew that only Vita-certified Playstation Store content, meaning content that was specifically tested on the Vita, would be downloadable to the Vita. Support for PS1 Classics was not included until months after launch, and Sony at the time promised only that "at least 100" PS1 Classics would be Vita compatible. Sony passed that number within 3 months, so it doesn't have to do any more. At no time did Sony state that the Vita could run "everything" that the PSP could run.

False advertising suits are extremely difficult to win in US courts. You basically have to prove that the seller lied deliberately, and that is essentially impossible unless it was foolish enough to write down its intentions, or was recorded discussing them. Nobody ever received a penny, in or out of court, for any claims related to the Vita's compatibility with PSP content. People are entitled to their own wrong opinions about anything, but when it comes to the law, only the courts' opinions matter.

You are missing the point anyway. You have only made arguments for why a company could make the PS1 Spiro games Vita compatible. You haven't made a business case for why any company, whose objective is to make a profit, should bother. You have provided only anecdotal evidence of demand to play the games on the Vita, which does not even need to be refuted, because it is irrelevant to the publisher. The publisher cares about how many people want to buy the games in the future on the platform. Not how many people want to play the game on the platform. There is a difference, that makes all the difference. You haven't provided even anecdotal evidence that there is market demand to purchase the games, and you won't, because it doesn't exist. Sony knows exactly how many copies of the Spiro PS1 Classics sold in North America in the years before the Vita was released, and it was so few that the games were given to Playstation Plus subscribers for free. You will never convince Sony that there is money to be made in certifying the game here, because the data says otherwise. You are wasting your time trying.

As far as your jail-breaking argument is concerned, the rampant piracy of PSP games, especially in Europe, is the main reason why game publishers were reluctant to invest significant amounts of money in Vita games at launch. That is why we got mostly cheap ports of existing games, and indie games, from every publisher except Sony. Publishers want to see how secure the Vita proves to be, relative to the PSP, before they invest any real money in AAA Vita games. All that jail-breaking the console will do, in the long run, is to ensure that the Vita never gets more than a handful of exclusive third-party AAA games. If all you want to do is to play PSP games, then buy a PSP. Sony still sells them, for less than a Vita. If you want more AAA Vita games, then your obsession with PSP content is not helping; and your disregard for copyright laws is really, really, not helping. "

Note the legal babble, the general up-his-own-ass behavior that comes with ponces like this, but also note the thing that lack of any passion behind his words except to defend the most evil thing about any industry ever; the business-end.

Before you read my response to his bowel movement he's passing off as a post, let me give you some perspective on why I just insulted anything business like in the gaming industry or in any industry to ever exist:

"Hi there Mr. Bigshot Businessman, I'm an artist and a creative spirit. People in my field are usually doing all of the grunt work for, getting treated like shit by, and being screwed out of decent payment or recognition by people in your field. It's nothing personal, I just hate you and everything you represent. It comes with the territory, have a nice day."

So I have a slight bias just because if every CEO on the planet caught fire and burned down the entire highest tier of their respective slave operations they pass off as companies then I would convert to Mormonism and be reassured that good does exist in the universe, and the thought of the internet basically making it so that people can self-publish means that they're cutting off the middle-man and now every industry in chaos teetering on the brink of extinction honestly makes me frisky enough to feel up the corpses of the jackasses that created those power-structures while said power-structures crash and burn in a smouldering heap of what used to be their foundation.

So, knowing my immense contempt for living hell that is "The Industry", here's how I responded to this jackass:

"This is typically why I like dealing with indie developers a lot more than huge companies. If I asked this same question to an indie dev about their game, I'd get an answer from a developer, not some random forum users who think too highly of themselves, especially when they can't even spell "Spyro" properly.

What part of "I don't care about business mumbo-jumbo" did not clear with you the first time? I don't care, I have no intention of caring in the future, and you can sure bet that if I ever have the chance to develop and release games I won't care then either, because some of us have the moral integrity to care about other things besides money and you can get off your high horse right now because if you seriously think spewing a bunch of legal crap when some die-hard fan expresses an honest and passionate investment in a series they care a lot about is something to be proud of then you need to seriously re-examine your moral compass.

And please don't reply, just go get the other mod, I liked that guy a lot better. They were very direct. Or at least don't take three paragraphs to say what you can say in three words: "I don't care", because it's obvious that you don't in fact care at all and I'm really not interested in talking to someone who has probably never even played these games and can't relate to what they mean to people.

And by the way, maybe people wouldn't be motivated to hack their system if they're just release the content officially. Considering most of the content I care about on the Vita is Indie content anyway I don't feel that threatened if some triple-A company loses out, in fact nothing would make me happier, considering the way they treat their customers.

And by the way, playing PSX games on a handheld with dual-analog sticks was a huge appeal of the system for me but I guess that if anyone asks me if a Vita is good for that in the future, I'm going to say "No, I recommend saving up for an OpenPandora. It might cost $300 more but it can also do a lot more than PSX games without jailbreaking."

And as for respecting copyright laws, I can play Gameboy Advance games on my PSP as well as Genesis games, NES games, SNES games (although with horrible lag), GameGear games, and N64 games. In fact, the system being a portable emulator is a selling point for most people. I suspect that Vita sales will skyrocket once people can use it for the same purposes and if it chases off all the greedy triple-A companies who care so little about their userbase that they would actually not make a game available to them just because it won't sell well when it costs them nothing, then I consider that a victory, in fact, more power to the indies."

And in truth I wish Triple-A genocide for all consoles. This industry has screwed over too many people, from fans and customers to developers with dreams for it to deserve anything less than hate and contempt. People SHOULD rage against it, people SHOULD hate it, people SHOULD support independence from it, and people SHOULD be excited for the day when there is no industry, there is no middle-man, and there is no puppet-master businessman running the show anymore.

When we finally wash our hands of big companies dominating gaming, or music, or film, we will finally reach a point where people will no longer have their ideas shot down at the gate because it doesn't sell, and anyone who advocates this mentality that what sells is what gets done is 150% in the wrong.

Anyone who believes a developer being stopped from making a sequel to a game they care about by their superiors because it "doesn't sell" is a reasonable demand is wrong. Anyone who believes being forced to make sequels to a game just because it sells is a good decision is wrong. Anyone who believes in upholding copyright laws that ultimately strangle developers or take away their rights to do as they please with what they created is not only wrong, but a sick human being, and anyone who cannot see the damage these practices do to the industry is not only wrong, but blind with ignorance.

People should be excited for an age where video games, music, art, books, movies, cartoons, and any other form of creative media are published by the same people who made them with their own two hands and people should get angry when those people are made the industry's bitch and crushed and milked and abused until there's nothing left in them. People should get angry when developers quit their jobs because the pressure from asshats who have no idea what their job is like becomes unbearable. People should get angry when big companies have such disdain for their own userbase that they won't even have someone with knowledge of internal workings answer questions for the community. People should feel suspicious and distrusting of any institution that isn't open and transparent with how they do things and people should outright disdain any organized project or effort where the voice of that effort cannot even speak with passion and free will, like a human being.

Right now is how things are, I'm speaking for how things should be. Things should be open, things should be fair, things should be fueled by imagination and the desire to share your ideas with other people, the desire for people to like your ideas, and the belief that your ideas mean something. Art of all kinds is not a damn race to the finish, it's not a competition, it's not an institution, and it's not an industry and none of those things have any place in art. Those things exist to control and exploit talent and all the gain is made by the soulless jackasses who pull the strings.

These business-focused systems benefit nobody but the greedy. They should feel threatened with the current age of information-sharing, they should be humbled by the efforts for people to break free of the institution. They cannot adapt without giving the people power they always should have had to begin with.

Any enemy of this ideal is my enemy.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Coinflip

    Everyone who knows me knows violence and cruelty even in video games disturbs me, in fact it's a fanatical obsession of mine to raise hell about how popular mainstream shooters are because people like to pretend they're mutilating other people or living creatures and until recently, I've never understood why this is acceptable and mainstream. Why would you laugh at this? Why is it funny on TV but not in real life?

    Well, everyone who also knows me knows that the last few months of my life have been...a relapse, of sorts. The abridged version is that I suffer from extreme anxiety, am prone to panic attacks (If you've never had one I hope to god you never do. If you've never seen one, I'd imagine it's the most pitiful thing you've ever looked at but it's a really severe problem and I recommend calling 911 if you don't know what to do.), and basically, I'm a nervous person in general. I've been a pretty relaxed person since 2009, but around February or so I started having those stomach knots that feel like you've got some kind of bug as well as all kinds of negative self-defeating thoughts, and this continued until around Memorial Weekend when...that thing happened I already talked about in 3 other blogs. Skip ahead a couple months and I'm basically in a state of mind where everything is worth revisiting, even the things that I am basically trained to hate on sight like modern Western animation and shootyman games. One interesting thing that I've recently learned from the doctor and on-call crisis worker was that excitement and terror are two sides of the same coin - just like love and hate. What this means is that essentially the same chemical reactions in our body are responsible for feelings of love as well as feelings of hate, give or take a few milligrams.

    This really got me to thinking about what other human responses are essentially similar - a lot of what we view as opposite has often been described as a coinflip by other people, a good example that also happens to be completely on-topic to my intended subject is comedy versus tragedy.

    I can't take credit for this little piece of information because it was introduced to me by two friends seeking to explain to me how humor works - I realize that sounds silly but to be honest with you, I'm not inclined to humor naturally. The sense of humor I do have was refined for the sake of socialization and because I associate being funny with being charismatic which is an extremely desirable trait for your average internet nerd, and that just happens to describe me fully. Anyway, my point is that there are aspects of humor I just don't "get" and one of those is the most popular kind of humor; the kind that comes at another person's expense.

    Ever since I was a kid, I've been bothered by scenarios in cartoons or even some live action shows where the comedy comes from making one character miserable, even indirectly. My favorite Spongebob character is Squidward, I feel bad for him because I wouldn't want his neighbors either. Whenever Tom & Jerry was on CN regularly at some point in the 90s I always favored Tom. Whenever my cousin would watch Fairly Odd Parents (usually to get to Invader Zim ;v) I'd feel bad for the criminally insane teacher. You can ask my cousin about that by the way, if it's one of those days where he can even remember breakfast he'll gladly tell you what a hippie I've always been about wanting to hug everyone, especially the people with problems who are imperfect and very skewed. (People like that get full-featured episodes in anime. Probably why I like it so much.)

    But anyway, I think you have a pretty good idea about the trouble I have with understanding "cruel humor" as I call it. One of the few western cartoons I like is Courage because aside from a couple characters, nobody is really evil and everyone just has their own problems that are usually resolved with hugs and empathy. (Also some episodes legit make me feel like crying. Space squids anyone?) But aside from MLP's recent phenomenal popularity, people don't like cartoons with hugs and empathy, they like cartoons where the cast are different breeds of jackass, and they like games where they can be a jackass themselves for the amusement value it apparently has. However, like I said, I just don't get it, and spent two hours listening to (and arguing with) these two people about it.

    One of the things I took away from it was that humor is mostly cruel when you think about it, and that's because humor is how people deal with tragedy. Humor is how people overcome it, and after the fact we find humor in horrible memories because it makes those memories not so bad. It's a survival mechanism.

    I'm going somewhere with this. While it is generally considered rude or insensitive to find humor in someone's current misery, it's common to make light of the bad times and even to relate to them. Thinking about it this way makes it easier for me to understand what it is about watching an interpretation of treating someone like shit that makes it funny - a lot of other people can probably relate to the character in those situations, and they might not be laughing at their misery, maybe they're laughing at past misery of their own. We as humans are also generally concerned with others in our lives, though to different degrees. If some stranger in IRC really needs to vent about their bad day, I will volunteer to listen, but I'm on a more extreme end of that spectrum. Some people would concern themselves with their immediate family and friends while others would be concerned with anyone looking down that they passed. Point being, we're all saps for a sad face - and seeing someone suffer through misery wouldn't amuse us - at least not to the same level. Maybe we'd have an "I've been there" moment, I get those sometimes, but we'd be genuinely concerned with that person even more because of it and we'd want to help them. Even though I feel this way about fictional characters or interpretations of human behavior, I think some other people might distinguish between "tv and real" by thinking of TV as a reflection of past experiences or registering it as an interpretation of a bad experience and not the same thing as a current trouble someone is having, which is completely different to them regardless of how it's portrayed.

    Another thing I've considered are things that are not related. I used to believe intent and action were synonymous, but have been questioning that lately. I am not what you'd call an accepting and understanding person by nature, and I have to work very hard at being one, but on two separate occasions people have told me some of their nastier thoughts, and both people asked me not to say anything so I won't go into detail but basically, these are the kinds of things that we make villains out of - yet neither person would ever harm another. Then I reflected on the dark part of my mind. You know the cub thing? I get off to far worse, some of which is so despicable that the only time it doesn't make me hate myself is when I'm horny. Until this post, in fact, I've never been comfortable enough to post that in a public place because of how horrible a person I thought I was for imagining the kinds of things I did.

    But the thing that I thought about the last time someone confided some really horrible thoughts to me was "This person would never hurt another person, they don't want to hurt others, they make a sincere effort to not be a jackass." And then something occurred to me. "There are no evil people, only evil acts." When I thought about it, the possibility occurred to me that thought and even intent do not make a person a bad person, and mutilating people on a video game is more equal to intent than action. Only acting on cruel intent - causing misery to a real person - might really be an evil act, and even in those situations, I have to ask myself if that person is really evil, or if there's something else going on. Obviously cutting up a completely innocent person is not acceptable and jail time is warranted. I don't want anyone to suffer, and I do mean anyone. But, even Hitler wasn't an evil person, he just allowed evil things to happen - he also chose to be a vegetarian because he hated animal cruelty and dragged his country's economy out of the gutter. You could say there are no good people either, but there are good acts just like evil ones.

    This is important to me because it means that even someone imagining bludgeoning in someone's face for holding up the drivethru is probably not going to do it, and even if they're really thinking about it, their clear premeditated thought only becomes evil when translated into action, and if it never is, it's just that person's private thought that might be forgotten as soon as the line starts moving again. I'm sure every human has thoughts like this, few of them act on them. People talk about shooting their wives on facebook, blowing up schools in texts, and punching that indie developer in the face for saying PCs are for spreadsheets all the time, and is that inherently evil? No, it's free speech and still only in the intent category. All of this probably sounds really obvious to some people, but I've given a lot of though about the subject for a week, especially tonight, and thinking about it like this hopefully can help me become more accepting of others on the whole.

Those are just my thoughts on some things, I have a lot of thoughts I need to write down lately, but that's enough for right now else it'll get off-topic.