December Again

So November draws to an end for another year, and with it, National Novel Writing Month 2019.

There's a feeling I talk about, which is that hollowness when you finish reading a really good book. It's this slight ache, a moment wherein you feel two things very keenly.

The first is: This came to an end, and the rest of the world just moved on, how can that be?

The second is: The space that this occupied was so great, and so full; how can I possibly fill it again?

It's not just reading a book that leaves you like this, though.

For a month, half a million of us - or pretty close, anyway, I don't have the official stats for this year yet - lived in the worlds we'd made.

It occupied space in our brains. We were distracted, not quite fully with it, because our thoughts kept drifting back to that thing that we were creating. Characters and scenes and dialogue and themes and literary tricks and a thousand other little aspects of the work we were undertaking, constantly ticking over - for some of us set solid in stone, for others, roiling like a cloud of plasma. Either way - always present, always taking up space.

I can tell you how my characters smile.

Like, I can see it in my head. I can put each of them right in front of me, bid them smile - even imagine the thing that makes them smile - and see how they do it.

I can tell you the thing that each of them is worried about. I can tell you the person they are thinking about, right now, and in what context. I can describe to you how they would deal with a hundred different problems and situations...

...and then I stopped typing, and put the novel down, and there it is.

Sure, it can do with a second draft. That's the work of it. Taking the first draft and sweeping it into something better; but the skeleton is there, the shape, the clay of the object. It exists, and it was brought into existence out of my brain.

Now my brain sits there with a hole in it that is novel-shaped.

You may wonder why I am telling you all this.

I am telling you because, despite how generally draining it can all be - how disheartening it is to not make word count for a day, or to realise that you may not make it to 50,000 by the end of the month, or how frustrating it is to encounter writer's block...

Each ache, each moment's lost sleep, each frustration, is a piece of stone that you chip away. And you chip all of those away, until you are left with sculpture. With art. Beautiful, and yours.

Every hour you spend typing (punching the keys, for those that recognised the first image) is an hour's worth of work that you have put into something that is yours. A thing you created. A story. A novel. And it probably isn't the best thing ever written, because very few things are - but you made it. You made a thing, that you probably didn't think you'd ever make.

Sure, you told yourself you would, one day. After this. After that. One day. When you had that idea. One day. But until then it is time to obsess over detail, over whether or not you are a good enough writer to carry it off, if you have time, if you are creative enough, and so, and so, and so, until we manage to mentally talk ourselves out of it - again.

So why do I talk about it so much? Why do I post about it on my social media, blog about it, tell other people about it?

Because, folks, I want to share this with you.

I want you to join in, to feel the way I feel, to write the story that you have in your skull. I want you to get to the end of December and have stories you can tell people about that novel you just wrote. I want you to be able to talk to other writers and understand how it feels to make a thing and let it stand. To be able to read your own work, and even if you spend 99% of the time finding flaws in it, seeing at least one or two lines that you think...

...wow, that's actually really good.

And then thinking:

I wrote that.

It's a good kind of mental tired.

My NaNoWriMo project this year was called Phase Shift, also styalised as [PHaSe/SHiFT] because I am that kind of dickhead. It's a transhuman scifi coming of age slash thriller. It's set in the Eclipse Phase RPG setting because I love it.

I set myself the challenge of having every chapter title be a song lyric, and have it be relevant to that chapter. Here's a playlist of all those songs in order - it's not a bad list if I do say so myself.

If you want to read it, just get in touch. I even made two cuts - one of them with all the smut cut out, in case it isn't your thing.

And when it comes around to the end of next year? Will you maybe consider joining me on this most novel of months?

I hope so.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

And The Pearl Became The World

The title of this blog comes from a Jonathan Coulton song, called Always The Moon, which you can listen to right here.

I think we can all agree that, whatever we think of Lord Of The Rings, Tolkien did a pretty admirable job in terms of world creation. (I also think it's the law that whenever you talk about world creation, you have to mention him. At least once.)

I mean - yes, it does end up being kinda racist, and it's got elements that are pretty problematic, but just as we find the flaws in it, we also have to accept that it had depth that was beyond a lot of its contemporaries. It helped to spawn entire genres and subgenres, and prompted a metric ton of tropes - not all of them great, but hey, we're talking volume rather than quality - that survive to this day, mostly unquestioned.

Without it, the world of RPGs that we live in today - wherein there are multiple super-popular D&D-related streams and youtube channels, and RPGs themselves have a far deeper cultural penetration - would have been very different, even if Gary Gygax himself went on record as not being terribly impressed with Tolkien's work. (I personally agree with him.)

So when I do my own work - writing, preparing for RPG campaigns which I am running - I feel like I have to do a reasonable job in putting together the world, unless it's already been made for me.

Everyone does this part differently. I'm sure there's lots of different approaches, some of which I would find utterly perplexing, some of which I would find absolutely fascinating. Several of the books I have on writing talk about world building, and they address it in several different ways.

My methodology is a little more slapdash.

Gareth L Powell, in his book About Writing, addresses one of the questions that people who write get asked all the time:

Where do you get your ideas from?

Short of having several funny responses (Neil Gaiman used to trot out "I get them from the little ideas shop in Bognor Regis"), the real response is: everywhere. You get ideas from everywhere. From experiences you've had, thoughts you've had in passing, a scene that plays out in your head from a song, a turn of phrase, a feeling you want to evoke. The most important thing is, you don't start with just one idea. You collate the ideas, clump them together, and form something out of the mass that is more than the sum of its parts.

Like a pearl.

That's why it's a good idea to collect as many ideas and notions as you possibly can. Write it down. You never know when it will come in useful.

For example. A setting I put together for several Pathfinder games I ran included a bunch of ideas and notions that had occurred to me over the space of years. One village was basically a smashing-together of the home village in Monster Hunter 3 and all the parts of Lilo & Stitch that I really liked, splashed with some heavy inspiration from Nation by the great Sir Terry Pratchett.. Another came about from an idea I had when I was reading the Pathfinder core book and wondered: what if there was a city, dedicated to the god of cities? In its centre was a statue that I rescued from a writing project I started (and never finished) back in 2002, a huge angelic figure with a pair of swords - one pointed at the courthouse, another at the library, the two most important parts of the city.

Having imagery like that is important. Even in a simply descriptive narrative, if I describe that statue to the people who played in that game, they'd probably be able to remember the city of Kayde. Likewise, if I describe the people with the tattoos that glow in firelight and the harpoons they craft while singing to themselves, they'd think about Haku, the village of leviathan hunters.

There's another direction to approach this from, though. The content of your world can inspire moments - can inspire situations. Sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes situations inspire the world and the content in it. Sometimes there is something you need to have happen, a scene that plays out in your head or a few lines of dialogue that you need to use, and it is then on you to make the world a place that supports that happening.

My current writing project involves mecha.

This picture is the life-size Gundam statue that was outside of Diver City in Tokyo. The chap looking up at it in the foreground gives you a good idea of scale. It's a big machine.

Mine are, too. At least, they are going to be. The Gundam RX-78-2 here (aka the Grandpa Gundam) is 18.5 meters tall, that's just over sixty feet in old money. Mine are slightly shorter - fifteen meters as an average. Still, I require that sense of scale to be impressed upon people. I need there to be several scenes in which mechs and people work together, or at least, close to each other - just to demonstrate the difference. So that when I describe the main character feeling like some kind of goddess every time she plugs into her mech, one understands what I am talking about.

After all, it requires creating a world in which mecha exist in the first place, right?

A scene I envisage involves the main character defending a group of civilians. A group that know who she is, and who are rooting for her every step of the way. Someone - I don't know who - yelling at her from the ground to get up, to get back into the fight. (This scene flew together after listening to this song by Against The Current and watching this scene from Spider-Man Homecoming, by the way.) I need to make my setting work, so that they can know her name, they can know who she is and who she is fighting against, and the fight can be brought to an area that this can happen.

That necessitates a setting in which militarism exists, in which a society can know of war and know it happens. It necessitates a specific culture around mech piloting, around pilot elitism, and it requires specifics within the war that might lead to people seeing more than just a soldier in a cockpit - maybe instead of just a soldier, they see a saviour.

Setting details can lend a lot of credence to your particular flavour of military scifi.

After all, we all know who this guy is.

My work will pop up sometimes on my Patreon, and on my DeviantArt account. If you're interested in this current project, we can totally talk about it.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Our Demands Are As Follows (What You Are Owed Part 2)

So I blogged about this once before - specifically around Neon Genesis Evangelion and how the writer was treated in regard to its ending - but a couple things have happened recently that make it relevant once more.

While the constant drone of "not in MY franchise" happens whenever the overlooked and underused non-white non-male non-hetero folks get a look in, these two events are a little different. They're only loosely connected, but they are two different angles of a similar attitude.

For the first, we revisit Batman.

A LOT of people have played Batman over the years. Off the top of my head, just counting live-action film appearances, I count Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and now - Robert Pattinson.

A lot of people seem to have issue with this.

For sake of flying my own flag, I have to tell you my favourite Batman movies were the Nolan-directed Christian Bale movies. That said - I don't know if he's the best Batman on that list? Like, Nolan does a good job of the movies not being much about him at all, and more being about the clash between him and the forces at work trying to influence Gotham.

I did blog once before about the people that could play Batman, in which I wandered through my own brain for a while and had a lovely time. I came to the conclusion that most people could play Batman, really.

So why are people mad about Pattinson?

Could it be that his appearance in a certain series of movies has tainted his reputation? Much like Kristen Stewart? Well, yes. Frankly. Despite both of them putting in solid performances in a variety of other roles, they will always carry the sparkle curse with them, because we as a species are horrible people.

(I did my own fair share of hating, don't get me wrong. I'm just capable of seeing that it was pretty childish, I was wrong to do it, and now I know better.)

Herein, several batpeople.

Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Ben Affleck all playing the same character. Except not, really. As mentioned in my last blog, they're all kind of different Batmen. Affleck in particular is playing THIS Batman.

It's hardly his fault the writing, direction, cinematography and general production values of every movie he was in were frankly awful.

So given that how successful an actor is as Batman relies so heavily on the rest of the movie not being garbage, all we can assume each of these individuals bring to the role - aside from how okay they are with their suits having nipples - is a chin.

Robert Pattinson has a chin.

The end. Like, literally, that's it. He'll probably be fine, honestly. He will not be a worse Batman than Val Kilmer or George Clooney, simply by virtue of Tim Burton probably having nothing to do with the movie he is in. He probably won't be worse than Ben Affleck, because I have no idea what kind of drugs were being used when Batman V Superman and Justice League were being made, but I think they probably ran out.

Are we owed a better Batman? Are we owed a better Batman movie? Better DC franchise in general?

Well it would be nice to see, but - they aren't our political representatives, and we haven't commissioned these people to make these things to our specifications. They don't actually owe us anything.

Remember that sentence, as we dive into our next situation.

How we feeling about Season 8 of Game Of Thrones?

Yeah. Lots of mixed opinions.

Again, flag on the mast. I don't watch it. I know a lot about it, because I am surrounded by people who like it, and by people who watch it religiously. It is next to impossible to ignore its existence, especially seeing as every day there's at least one news story about something regarding the show. Be it a Starbucks cup, a bit of foreshadowing that the writers have made happen, or about a petition to reshoot Season 8 entirely.

...wait, what?

Okay so... I don't have an actual proxy for this. I have similar experiences - Babylon 5 for example, which was shuffled about a lot and didn't necessarily get the respect it was due from corporate - but I don't know if I've ever invested in a show for seven and a half seasons only to discover that it is currently being run badly despite being set up very well.

There is, however, an explanation.

So the book series that the TV show is based on is called A Song Of Ice And Fire. The first book, A Game Of Thrones, came out in 1996. A Clash Of Kings - the second novel - was released in 1998, followed by A Storm Of Swords in 2000. It's at this point that the author, one George R. R. Martin, starts taking longer to finish his work - because he is threading together a more and more complex world, more and more embedded story seeds are coming into bloom, and because it's hard to actually follow up on a complex beginning. The next book (A Feast For Crows) came out in 2005, five years later; six years after that, the most recent volume (A Dance With Dragons) hit the shelves in 2011.

Thirteen years, five novels. Two more in the works according to the man himself. The creation of the world that the show-viewer loves so much has taken quite a lot of time.

It's in the gap between that last novel being released and now that the entirety of the TV show has run. One season every year, aside from last year - which caused a lot of consternation amongst the fans, as I recall.

The plot that Martin had written thus far ran out partway through the seventh season, as best I can tell. Which meant that one of two things had to happen.

1) The show goes into hiatus until Martin finishes his work, and then adapts each novel as it has done previously.
2) The show tries to pull together the plot known only to someone else to fit within the constraints set upon it by HBO, and releases it in as timely a fashion as possible.

Now, you and I both know that option 1 won't happen. As mentioned - the year-and-a-half wait for Season 8 was enough to send half the internet into paroxysms. Can you imagine if they were told they'd just have to wait for as long as it took?

It's not a conversation that happened, but it's a conversation I think the showrunners probably had in their own heads, and decided against having to actually address. So they did the best they could, with what they had, which has proven to be not necessarily to the liking of the fans in general.

The fact is - they were never going to do as good a job as Martin, because he's the one writing the thing. He's the one that knows where all the threads are going. He's the one that knows which of his buried bits of foreshadowing were actually foreshadowing and which weren't. He's the one that has as long as he needs to finish a book that is going to be as long as it needs to be to tell the story he wants to tell.

They have a season, to tie everything up in as satisfactory a way as possible, to cap off the seven seasons previous in terms of character development and arc, to provide a suitably dramatic conclusion. Something that I don't think was honestly possible.

So the fans are angry, because the fans didn't get what they wanted.

And so a bunch of the fans - like, over a million at time of writing - have signed a petition demanding a do-over. No death threats, not like poor Hideaki Anno with Evangelion, as I explored in this previous blog. At least none that have been reported. Just petitions, stating that:

...to which the obvious response is...

...I mean, think about it.

If you are an individual who believes that you DO deserve better, that the showrunners owe it to you to make a better show, that you are entitled to something that is greater than what you were presented with - would you be willing to wait until a year (at least!) after George R. R. Martin finishes The Winds Of Winter? Whenever that might be?

Because that is what would get you better. That is what would result in the show being more satisfactory, more in line with the quality of previous seasons. Having it be based on the writing of the actual author, the actual creator of the world, rather than people viewing it from the outside.

Could you wait that long? Do you think the people that made the petition could wait that long? If you aren't willing to wait that long, do you still think you are entitled to more?

I've said it before. I will say it again. The creators of these works owe us literally nothing. Unless you have gone to them to commission a piece of art, and they agree to the terms, and you pay them the agreed sum - in that case alone, you are entitled to the result that you have paid for. That isn't what happened. You didn't knock on their doors, hand over several million dollars, and then explain in painstaking detail how you want this complicated fantasy story to pan out.

They are not politicians elected by us, they are not accountable to us. We did not vote for Martin to pen the first book in 1996, and we didn't vote for David Benioff (whose prior writing includes X-Men Origins Wolverine) or D. B. Weiss (whose prior work included several unused scripts for various other projects). We didn't put them in that position on the understanding that they would deliver a thing that we wanted, they didn't give us a manifesto, and they didn't make us any promises.

And that is without even going into how much what we are watching (well, what YOU are watching, and what I am seeing second-hand) is being pushed down by HBO, wanting to fit everything neatly into the box of "Television Show" that they have made - which as we all know, doesn't always make a good show.

For what it is worth - I'm sorry that those who have followed this show from the very beginning have had to see it come to an end in a substandard fashion. I'm sorry that the show that you enjoy so much has suffered at the hands of corporate nonsense, because that's what happened. It sucks, it really does. I know.

But, like... a petition? To reshoot an entire season? To make it more to your liking?

We aren't entitled to that.

And so the creators, when subject to this kind of treatment, are justified in having this opinion:

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Best Of The Bad Bunch

Having just come back from Nine Worlds - and there will probably be a blog about that - I am absolutely shattered, having socialled myself into a coma. What this means is that the blog will not be some kind of epic sojourn into perfected academic understanding of any particular topic.

So I am, instead, going with a suggestion provided by my lovely significant other, inspired by a brilliant panel featuring several brilliant authors:

Who are your seven favourite villains?

Well, alright then. Hold onto your britches. In no particular order.

Carter Burke

YOU KNEW IT WAS COMING.

Okay so Carter Burke, right? If you haven't seen the 1986 action science fiction horror movie Aliens, you haven't lived - especially the special edition, look for the sentry guns and the scenes in the colony before the marines show up. It is my literal favourite movie ever made, if the last blog didn't clue you in on that fact. If you haven't read it, it's about Bishop, go read it. Now. Yeah, now. Then come back here.

You back? Good. Okay.

Carter Burke. The man who made the xenomorph look reasonably honourable. The greasiest rat-fuck son of a bitch to ever become dogmeat. When he bites the dust, you feel the most deep sense of "yeah fuck you" satisfaction, because you hate him. You hate his slick smarmy attitude, you hate his duplicity, you hate his lying fucking face, you hate the way he makes these empty hand gestures and gapes like a dying fish. You hate him. You hate him so thoroughly and so completely.

And then he gets his head fucking eaten.

Delicious.

-

Rick Deckard

TW-TW-TWIIIIIST

You see, Blade Runner is a noir flick; this means that the morality is all higgledy-piggledy. So you need to look deeper than the surface when you look for who is right and who is wrong, and in a previous blog, I talked all about why Roy Batty wasn't wrong.

So we have Rick Deckard. He used to be a Blade Runner - he still is one - and a Blade Runner is a person who, in this setting at least, hunts down Replicants and retires them. Given that Replicants need a very specific test to even tell them apart from humans, what that basically means is that Deckard hunts down people and kills them. The only crime those people commit is to not do what the company that makes them tells them to, such as wanting to live for more than four years.

Rachel doesn't know she's a Replicant. Roy does, and wants to live. Deckard wonders at one point if he might be. (He isn't, by the way. I will die on that hill.) Both the original and 2049 really serve to erase the difference between Replicants and people. So - yeah, Deckard's a professional murderer cleaning up corporate messes, who would retire himself if they told him to. He forces himself on vulnerable girl, and gets piss drunk because he can't deal with his job but keeps doing it anyway.

Sure, the greater villains of the piece are Tyrell and Bryant - the corporate overlord and the demanding police chief - but Deckard, being presented as the protagonist while actually being an assassin for hire, surely takes the cake there.

-

Megatron

"I would have waited an eternity for this. It's over, Prime."

Sure, there are a great many different Megatrons in different Transformers timelines - but all of them are awesome, let's face it.

I am particularly fond of the gladiatorial pit-fighter of Kaon presented in Transformers Prime. He just oozes hostility and nastiness. When presented with perhaps certain death, at the mercy of a human controlling an industrial drill, Megatron tells him simply:

"Kill me now, boy. Or you will never get another chance."

Jack doesn't, obviously.

In another episode he has to fight a super-powered Insecticon bare-handed, does so, wins, then turns on the Autobots and dares them to have a crack at him too.

He then falls the fuck over, because he's near death himself.

Bad. Ass.

-

The Tessier-Ashpool Family

You know what Cyberpunk is - I already talked about Blade Runner - now meet the real villains of the novel that pretty much started it all, Neuromancer.

The Neuromancer in the title is an AI. As is Wintermute, who gave their name to my Starfinder character. They are both created as a way for an insanely wealthy family to keep maintaining their fortune and their legacy, a family that hated the earth enough to build a literal space arcology - the Villa Straylight - and that hated being in space so much that they just stayed there, in their baroque nightmare, being frothing mad and wealthy beyond understanding.

We encounter this place in the third act of the novel, a novel which begins in the murky underworld of Chiba City in Japan. Chiba is a place profoundly ruled by poverty and crime. Case - the main character - rents a plastic gun early on, just in case something bad happens. He rents a plastic gun. That's just a thing he does. Imagine the kind of world that creates that demand. Now imagine the kind of people who have more money than ACTUAL sense, like literally, who hang in orbit up above that world.

If you need more evidence as to their literal evil, one of them - the patriarch - has sex with and consequently murders a clone of his own daughter.

So fuck these people and everything they stand for.

-

Carnage

In terms of Marvel villains, there's few I like more than Carnage.

I mean... he's pretty great, isn't he? When you think about it. Like Venom is cool, but Carnage is like cool but injected with maniac juice. Venom is a dangerous foe to Spider-Man, who defeats his spider-sense and can catch him totally unaware. Carnage is all that, plus, if he wants to, he can turn his hand into an axe and eviscerate you with it. Something he is very willing to do, because he loves eviscerating people.

There's just something so much more dangerous about the Carnage symbiote than most other bad guys in the Marvel universe. He sits between the huge deific threats (Apocalypse, Galactus, Thanos) and the powerful-but -mortal bad guys (Omega Red, Doctor Octopus, The Mandarin). It took one of the literal most powerful heroes in the Marvel universe to actually put him down, via flying him up into orbit and ripping him in half.

See?

He's scary. He's violent. He's hard to defeat in a way that is morally sound. You can slap around a mugger, you can web up a thug, but Carnage? Carnage demands that you run, or fight. Just to survive, let alone to win.

And when you consider that the symbiote can infect other people... like, say, Wolverine... or Juggernaut...

...or Multiple Man...

Yeah, just thinking about that makes me sweaty.

-

Donnie Darko

I'm gonna have to explain this one...but also I kind of don't want to.

See, the entire trick to the movie Donnie Darko involves watching it, understanding it, and then interpreting it properly. If you do all these things, then I daresay you will agree with me insofar as that, in terms of the bad guy - Donnie is that guy.

Sure, there are worse people.

I mean, Kitty. Kitty is the most horrible, awful individual I can imagine. She's like that pink flowery shithole woman from Harry Potter but actually real. We all know someone like Kitty.

And Patrick Swayze... like, (SPOILERS) when you find out some wealthy pseudo-Christian self-help guru has a bunch of child porn stashed in his closet, you're probably not surprised. He's still an asshole, and he still needs punishing.

I am not going to go into the core of the plot. What I am going to do is tell you to go and watch this movie, and then understand this:

Donnie looked at what Donnie had done, and decided that what Donnie had done was the wrong thing to do.

Villains often think they are heroes of their own story. It's rare that they can witness evidence to the contrary and realise the fact.

He does.

-

The last villain is one that may surprise you, and herein I will present all the choices I went through before settling on one:

The Human Race
SPACE!
Stalin
War
Yourself
Film Production Companies
Internalised Homophobia
Religious Extremism
That Guy On The Bus That Always Wants To Talk To You Before 8am
My Grandmother
George Lucas
Whoever Threw Out The Whedon Script For Alien 4
Nazis
Whoever Didn't Throw Out The Script For AvP Requiem
Rocky Balboa
Stalin
Impressionist Painters
Lists
Wasps
Buzzfeed
Calorific Content
Empty Carbs
That Weird Feeling You Get When You Drink A Cold Beverage Too Quickly Like Not Brain Freeze But Like A Chill In Your Throat That Is Just Super Uncomfortable
Superman
Yourself
Batman
Magneto
Professor Xavier
Nazis
Yoko Ono
Tyler Durden
Scott Pilgrim
Toxic Masculinity
When They Change The Recipe Of That Thing You Like And It Just Tastes Kind Of Wrong Now Like Not Super Different But Different Enough That You Don't Like It Much Any More And You Can't Explain Why
That d20 You Used The Last Time You Failed A Save
Lists
Yourself

No, really. Yourself. From Enter The Gungeon.

So to clarify.

Enter The Gungeon is a super-fun twin-stick bullet hell game with an amazing soundtrack, superb pacing, graphics to die for, replayability out the ass - it's just great, I can't recommend it enough. If you don't believe me, go watch a review or LP. Try Dunkey, his one is pretty much on point.

You see those crosshairs?

You, as the player, are entering the Gungeon in order to take - from its depths - a gun that shoots into the past, to kill your own mistakes. That is your end goal, the reason why you decide to enter this mad labyrinth filled with bullets that shoot you with smaller bullets, and enemies that are puns on firearm terms. This is why you bullet hell. This is why you have to live.

And when you lose all your health, where in most games you would be killed by the thing that killed you - in Enter The Gungeon, you get shot by the time gun.

You are literally shooting yourself from the future.

The thing is, THAT is what kills you. That is the thing that stops you. Not the bullet that the cute little shotgun shell just shot at you. It's the bullet YOU shoot.

One of our greatest enemies is ourselves. Our doubt, our internalised hatreds and fears, our damage, our dissonance. Of course, we have a lot more enemies than that - systems that are rigged against us, people that hate us for being us, people that casually harvest their fortunes while damning the rest of us to a forever up-hill climb. One of the things we can definitely work on changing is ourselves.

And a thing we should definitely stop doing is shooting ourselves before we have a chance to fail.

...huh.

Well done, John.

So yeah. There you go. My seven favourite villains.

Normal service resumes on Sunday.

World Of Words

The world is a scary place.

If I gave a list of the ways in which it was scary at the moment, the things that were being done not just on UK and US soil but far wider, then I would have to come back and update this blog every few hours - just as each new and toxic thing emerges, like an iceberg being hauled out of the ocean, or a thriller determined to deliver a shock every three pages.

So of course, the world of fiction is a very attractive one.

No reason why that is wrong, of course. It's not. Whatever form of escapism floats your boat, as long as it doesn't stop you getting in the way of getting shit done. I blogged about that once before. I also blogged about why people tend to like taking part in activities that are defined and precise - because there's no room for uncertainty.

Sometimes we read about things that parallel scarily with what is going on in real life. Anyone who has actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four will see the uncomfortable similarities with the way modern life and modern living seems to be going. Sometimes we go back to reading the things we've read a thousand times before, such as myself with H.G. Wells' The War Of The Worlds - I read it something like once a month.

The thing with fiction - with video games, with movies, with anything like that - is that we can put it down whenever we want. Our thoughts and feelings remain with us, but whatever stress and tension is created by the media itself goes away when we will it so.

The bad guys are more believable, too.

I mean, having read the first six volumes of The Expanse, I find myself understanding why the folks that end up as the series antagonists do what they do. Sometimes it is a shitty and selfish reason, but that doesn't mean I don't understand it. Sometimes it is misguided or ill-conceived, but I still grasp why the person in question would do that dumb thing, because we all do dumb things at times.

I don't understand a lot of decisions being made today that directly affect my life.

Like some of them are obvious, yeah? Cutting business tax, using public funds to cover business costs, reducing government outlay to the general public, reducing culpability - all of that is pure greed manifest in political language. That's wealthy folk looking after other wealthy folk.

A lot of their decisions seem to be just...nasty. Just plain hostile for no good reason, much like my last blog detailed.

So why wouldn't we go back to fiction? Why wouldn't we read about heroes triumping over villains, or threats far greater than just base humanity being defeated by courage and honour?

And even if the bad guy wins, it's a fictional world that he has triumped over. It's not us. It's not you and me. It's not our friends.

...and contrary to what a lot of folks might have you believe, indulging in the world of fiction is not mutually exclusive to engaging in the world of the here and now. Immersion in either is a terribly dangerous thing, and can lead to burnout and fatigue - at the least.

So pick up a book, folks. Watch a flick. Dig into some old comic books.

Ain't no shame in it.