The Starry Night

Take a look at this painting.

Just...look at it.

Vincent Van Gogh painted it in 1889. It's a view from out of his window at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France - somewhere between Montpelier and Marseilles.

The thing is - it's also kind of not the same view. The church is different, for one thing; in fact the entire town is plucked from the void. It does also bear mention that - at risk of sounding obvious - the night sky just doesn't tend to look like that.

What Vincent was painting, therefore, wasn't just what he was seeing. It was what he was thinking.

We are all familiar with Van Gogh's ear, obviously. The exact circumstances that led to him severing it - either in part or as a whole isn't known - are less well known. It seems to have been the end result of his artistic relationship with Paul Gauguin, leading to an acute mental breakdown. It may sound extreme but - to finally be painting with one of your most respected peers, who ends up treating you like some kind of insolent child... we have all heard the advice of never meeting your heroes.

What followed was months of treatment, and to-and-fro between the yellow house he had shared with Gauguin and the hospital. Vincent suffered from hallucinations, and was known locally as "the red-headed madman" - the citizens of the town had the house shut, and he was forced to stay in hospital.

It was by his own admission that he entered the Saint Paul asylum in May 1889.

Imagine how it must feel to look at the world through eyes coloured by those experiences. To not only be unable to trust one's own mind and senses, but to be ostracised for it. Perhaps, if there had been sufficient support and treatment, his relationship with Gauguin wouldn't have deteriorated to the point of self-mutilation. The understanding of the working of the human mind is incomplete today, let alone 130 years ago; and our treatment of the mentally ill today hasn't necessarily improved very much, even if the science has.

So when we talk about what Vincent was thinking rather than what he was seeing, this is what we mean. All his paintings from this period of his life are distinct - put them together with his other works and even the absolutely uninitiated (like me) could pick them out as being different. The world through the eyes of a man at war with his own mind. Which makes the precision of the turbulence in the air all the more impressive and striking - the painting can be used as a model for fluid dynamics, and nobody is quite sure how.

The eye is drawn all around the piece, too. It never settles. You can stare at a specific detail, but always you are drawn on - across the town, up the cypress, up into the night sky, to the moon,, down to the brightness of Venus (which was actually in the sky at the time), across the sweep of wind and light, and back down to the town.

It doesn't show us what it feels like to be in that state of mind - how frightening, how awful it must be - but something about it echoes that deepest recess inside of us, that shadow within our skull that threatens to obliterate reason and agency. Something about the sweep of the strokes in the sky, the town nestled beneath the light of the moon, the looming cypress, the luminescence of the stars that seems to bleed liquid-like into the porous sky around them.

It's like what is there, but shifted slightly off-kilter.

I don't know if there is any comfort to be drawn from it - that doesn't seem to be what the painting is for - but I, at least, value the piece as a means of stepping outside one's own worldview. A way to see the sky at night as a totally different thing to that which your eyes show you. To demonstrate that not everything runs parallel to your worldview.

I'll see this painting in the canvas, one day. I'll stand in front of it, and I'll see how it looks from that different angle.

Slightly off-kilter.

Down Here

(You should probably be warned: this one is about depression and various other mental health issues. If you aren't in the frame of mind to read it, no offence taken. I've written plenty of blogs that are about something else. Try this one, which is about the Fermi paradox, and where all the aliens are.)

So. Hello again.

People will often talk about how depressed they are, and I can almost guarantee that - unless it is said in jest - the person in question isn't suffering from depression.

I don't mean to gatekeep. It's just such a small word for such a heavy condition.

Heavy. That's a good descriptor.

Something that comes up with fair regularity when I talk to fellow sufferers and survivors is that only the people who have been there - or are still there - can really grasp you, when you talk about the condition. Which I daresay is true of a lot of this really heavy stuff. It's true about a lot of experiences - how do you really convey how it feels to parachute jump to someone that has no frame of reference? So of course it would apply to mental health, to traumatic experiences.

In terms of depression, heavy is a good term, because it makes literally everything feel heavier. The process of achieving anything, pushing for anything, even going anywhere, even doing basic things, just takes that much more effort. You know when people talk about how hard it is to get out of bed in the morning? Imagine that, but it isn't because bed is lovely and cosy and warm. It's because actually galvanising yourself to stand up requires a literal self-pep talk and takes half an hour. Because your door is all the way over there, and everything else is all the way out there, and then you have to deal with this, and that...and it's all so god damned tiring.

I was having difficulty deciding what to write about today - while trying to drag my carcass out of bed - because every topic I half-settled on seemed so big, and so looming, or so trivial and so unimportant. And that was something I had to do after I got up, which in and of itself seemed like a task fit for Hercules (not one of the big ones, just like shovelling the shit out of the Augean stables).

So why not talk about that?

Then I wondered if maybe talking about depression was a bit much for a Sunday lunchtime. Do people really need my perspective on this illness again? Is it something that should be read? Something that deserves reading?

That's what made me decide to do it.

The thing is, with exposure comes understanding. Just like anything else on earth. I can't write about what it is like to run an Olympic marathon, or raise children, or earn a million. This, though - this I can talk about. And the more I and others talk about it, the better others who don't suffer can understand.

It's a neat little encapsulation of an experience; sitting there at the end of my bed, willing myself to move, and knowing now that this very moment is my topic.

That's what it is like.

It's a duality. A split motivation. You know you want to do the thing, you have to do the thing. The thing requires being done. But doing the thing is beyond you and you know it. You want to not have to. You desperately want to not have to even make the decision either way.

A common thing for people with non-diagnosed depression to think about themselves - or be described as by others - is lazy.

It gets used as an invective, as a pejorative. It gets used as a weapon, against ourselves, by others against us. Mostly because people like to believe that mental health is something that can be fixed by well-wishes and just Not Wanting To Be Like That, that way they don't have to worry about it. Which is ridiculous.

The guy missing two legs and one arm - if we expect him to do everything as quickly as someone with a full compliment of limbs, we're frankly mad. How could we think that? It's cruel and idiotic. Likewise, we don't expect the person undergoing heavy chemotherapy to be as full of energy and drive as anyone else. To do so would, again, be cruel and idiotic.

But depression is a mental health issue, so it pretty much gets ignored. It gets equated with people just being a little bit sad, and nobody can understand why being a bit sad can stop you doing anything.

The spread of knowledge, people's grasp of the situation, the illness for what it really is, has greatly improved in recent years. At least, as best I can tell. There is still the stigma, though. How do you talk about it? How do you talk about it to people that don't know? Especially when actually doing so is one of those aforementioned tasks, that seems all the more insurmountable from the bottom of the cliff.

Well, this is what I'm doing about it.

I'm talking about it, for anyone to read if they see fit.

I think, maybe, I ought to talk about it more.

Sure, it's daunting - but I'm not going to let that stop me.

Trash Movies, Terrible Movies, Awful Movies

So as I was trotting through Gosport High Street yesterday with my better half, we come across some DVDs on sale, which leads to a discussion about movies - specifically, about the grades of bad movies.

Now we can all acknowledge that there are movies that are objectively good, right? Like you can't claim the Godfather is a bad film. You just can't. You can dislike it, and that's totally valid - but it isn't by any definition a bad film.

We all want different things out of a film, however. So quite often we can admit that our favourite film ever is not the best film ever made. My favourite film ever is Aliens, followed by Blade Runner, Transformers: The Movie, the original Alien, Donnie Darko, Collateral, When We Were Kings - but out of them, I believe that Blade Runner is the actual best film I have ever seen.

And let's face it - we all like some movies that we have to admit are kind of trash. Commando? Gone In Sixty Seconds (yes, the Nic Cage one)? Any Rambo after the first one? Any Jean Claude Van Damme movie? Top Gun? Pacific Rim?

But then, there are also some movies that are only good because they are trash. Movies like the three scientifically proven worst movies of all time. Of course there are a lot of truly bad movies that are also great to watch because they suck, rather than in defiance of how much they suck - but the difference is that a lot of them were made knowing full well that they sucked.

No, a movie can only be truly horrible if it was made with the honest belief that it isn't horrible. The filmmaker is putting together something that he genuinely believes is good, or at least, worthy of actually being watched, consumed by other human beings as a non-ironic and non-awful piece of media.

Those three movies - Plan Nine From Outer Space, Manos The Hands Of Fate and The Room - were all made with the best intentions, and I love them a little for it.

Like, sure, Ed Wood probably didn't believe that he was going to be the next Eisenstein - but he didn't think he was taking a huge shit on the pages of cinematic history. Tommy Wiseau, though? In his head he was ALREADY the next Eisenstein, and the next James Dean or Marlon Brando to boot. Harold P. Warren made Manos because he was trying to prove to someone - over a coffee shop bet - that he could make a horror movie pretty much by himself.

Now something like Sharknado or Birdemic is awful but the person making it knew it was awful. That's an inescapable fact. You can't watch either of those movies without knowing full well that they were composed by someone effectively making a cinematic equivalent of a Twitter shitpost. They would fit into the trash movies that we enjoy despite them being trash, rather than BECAUSE they are trash. Lets face it, if The Room had any kind of competency applied to it, nobody would watch it.

So, we have trash movies, and we have terrible movies - but there is a third category.

Just as movies can be objectively good, movies can also be objectively bad, as previously discussed - but then, such movies can be bad and also entirely lacking any kind of merit. Any kind of saving grace, such as the unwitting hilarity of sex scenes involving the navels of the poor female star (I'm looking at you, Tommy), or an amazingly homoerotic volleyball scene, or one-liners that are worth watching the criminal misuse of Claymore mines ("Let off some steam, Bennett").

Some movies just...lack those. And those movies are just...bad movies.

Remember The Core?

If you've seen this movie then I bet you just made a face, and that face is the face you make when you think about movies as bad as The Core. It was truly a steaming pile of ass, a coprolithic gathering of moving images that made little sense and lacked any kind of artistic worth.

We can think of a few of those, right?

Like, it is no secret that I see the Bayformers movies as being truly disasterous. In the context of the fact that they came from a relatively rich universe with actual developed characters, the criminals responsible made a shitty series of disaster movies with all the warmth and character of a contact lens. Racist, sexist, lazy bullshit that doesn't look good or sound good.

So. The three categories of bad movie.

We have Trash Movies, which we like despite their being sucky. We have Terrible Movies, which we like because they are sucky. And we have Awful Movies, which we can't like even if we'd want to, because they suck that much.

Now time to start making lists...

Monetised Moments

When was the last time you truly had some time just to yourself?

I was thinking on this topic as I was sat on a bus, at 08:25, two thirds of the way into my morning commute. Usually I am on the bus half an hour before this one, but I have been working in another department - different starting times.

I was sat looking out of the window. Sat ahead of me was a mother with her three children, one in a pram, all trying to make the most noise. To my left was an older woman, who was comparing notes with her equally old equally womanly companion about who was alive or dead from their school days.

As we went across a set of traffic lights I found myself meeting the eyes of a man sat alone in his car. He was smiling.

It occurred to me at that moment that it is difficult to simply...be alone.

"But John," I hear you yell, hanging out of the windows of your octagonal residences upon the back of your gelatinous god. "But John, you can be alone any time you want! And besides, people hate being lonely!"

I'm not really speaking about loneliness. I am more speaking about something that I am very keenly aware of, being an introvert: the requirement of having time to one's own self, to not have to deal with the draining business of being around others.

Average rent and average pay being what it is, it is difficult - if not impossible - to rent a home alone. Not unless you don't eat, or similarly lack the need for any utilities. Far more likely that one will share a home, mortgaged or rented, with other people. Now, for any of my housemates reading this - I love you, but it means that alone time becomes a friggin premium grade resource, when there's more than two of you in a building.

Then there is the aspect of travel. Owning and running a car, and driving only yourself wherever you need to go, is...actually kind of expensive, if you compare how much the monthly costs (and the cost of instruction, testing and purchasing a car) run up to alongside a bus pass. What this means, though, is constantly sharing your travel space - the time spent on the way to and from the place of work is almost always occupied by other people as well, waiting for the transport, riding it, making the last hundred yards on foot. Always, always surrounded by others.

You get to work.

Who gets their own office? That's managerial only, I daresay. Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of tasks that necessitate people being stuck in places by themselves - but it's not so much your space as a space that you are occupying for a task, that anyone else can pretty much just waltz into, because of the aforementioned lack of ownership of the space. It's just where you are when you relabel the things or unload the boxes or whatever.

It's not just in our day-to-day lives. If you want to go anywhere, you pay more to earn more space. Not only more legroom but more space between yourself and the person beside you. More ways to achieve minor privacies, tiny mercies. Buying two coach tickets just so you can have both seats to yourself. Hiring a taxi to take you to the airport. Flying first class. Flying private. Hotel rooms on the top floors to avoid having to interact with your other guests. Private and personal transport to all your destinations.

You can always go outside, but - again, a new set of rules. Out in the world, literally anyone can bother you or interfere with you. You can't sit around as you see fit or just relax. You are out in the world, in the grip of the elements, and people will probably look upon you with suspicion if they find you just lurking out of the rain in the middle of a wood.

Solitude is a positive thing. The time taken to just be alone with your thoughts, to process, to be under no external person-pressures, to be in private and not have to adhere to any rules or regulations aside from those which you set yourself. It's important. Ask anyone who can't have any for an extended period of time. Ask your introvert friends, who like leaving your parties early, not because your party sucks but because they've run out of the ability to be around all the other guests.

And in the ways I list above, solitude has become something that can be charged for. Just like every other commodity, privacy and alone time - necessities for those of us wired a certain way - has become something that has a price tag, and our mental health suffers for it.

Not the most pressing problem on the world's plate, but certainly one that I notice more and more.

The Strangling Fruit

I had no idea who Jeff Vandermeer was when I first saw the Annihilation trailer.

It had been suggested to me because, hey, I like my sf and my weirdness. I might see some value in it. So I watch the very first trailer that came out, then I googled the name, and then I immediately bought and devoured the book - first in the Southern Reach trilogy.

Then I had to wait the interminable gap between that point and payday to get the next TWO books, because not reading them at this point wasn't an option. They thoroughly grasped me - the writing style, the flow of the story, the mythology spun out of it, everything formed an experience that I didn't even realise I had been waiting for.

Getting to the end of that third book left me so hungry for the movie that the wait for it reminded me of when I was seven and Christmas was still two weeks ago.

And now it's here, and I have to report that the movie - which is on Netflix right now for a lot of folks but got a cinematic release in the US - is excellent.

The acting is understated, the performances all very believable - which, given the content of the movie, only adds to the feel of it - and the casting is exceptional. The five women fronting the movie all put in excellent work, including Natalie Portman, who I am not terribly fond of usually. They all have depth - they feel like real people. How they deal with each other feels real, too - and how they change, as the situation around them falls apart.

And it does fall apart. Unlike every other horror movie, though - this one isn't their fault.

That's a very common trope, amongst horror movies - in movies in general, in fact. That the thing that goes wrong, the bad situation that has to be resolved by the characters in the piece, happens because someone fucked up. Either it is incompetence, or a literal flaw in character. Slasher flicks often happen because the victims dare to exhibit lust. The xenomorph wouldn't have ever become an issue for humanity were it not for pride and greed, in that order.

None of that happens, in Annihilation - because we don't know why this happened. The setup is very similar to The Thing. The why is so much less important than the result. It's also not very important that we understand every part of it, because - oh hey, get this - the problem isn't a human one. It's very much a black swan.

What follows is a journey into a part of the world in which everything is going wrong. Actually, not wrong - just different - but to us...very wrong. It's rare that I see cinematography, prop work, sound engineering, all come together to achieve this in such a complete way. Passing into Area X, it is incontrovertible that the five women of the expedition have entered a place that is unnatural and irregular. There's some very obvious visual cues but some not-so-obvious ones too. Little things, subtle things that play on your mind after the fact.

Portman's character is a biologist, so she can explain why some of the flora and fauna they find is wrong as hell - but you feel it, just looking at this stuff. Plants that have multiple different flowers, different types of flowers, different styles of growth. It should leave you with a degree of unease - and you may not even know why. Just that what you are looking at isn't right, isn't the way it should work.

And that's before you ever meet the deer, or the bear.

I'm not going into why they are wrong. You'll find out.

I like unanswered questions. I like open endings. I like not necessarily knowing why a thing has just happened, just that this is how the characters in the movie are dealing with it. I like gorgeous shots that show you things that upset you but you don't quite know why. I like diegetic and non-diegetic sound engineering that leaves you thinking.

I like all of those things, and that's why I liked Annihilation, an awful lot.

You might, too.

Frontload Your Outlay

I would like to begin this blog with a Pratchett quote.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. 

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Makes sense, right?

This is Victoria Street, in Ryde, somewhat near where I live.

After and before rain, about five hours apart, taken today. This is a main road - major bus routes use this road pretty much 24-7-365. It's the main route out of Ryde into Newport, the two biggest population centres on this bedevilled isle.

Anyone remember that line in Bad Boys wherein Martin Lawrence walks into the drug lord's mansion that has been shot to pieces, and quips that it looks like Beirut?

This bit.

So this is the particular side of Beirut that Lawrence is referencing, the civil war in the 80s.

This is what Beirut looks like now, for comparison.

Ryde isn't Beirut. It doesn't have a civil war to deal with. It has another problem.

See, that road out there gets resurfaced with some degree of regularity, but the job never seems to stick. It gets farmed out to the lowest bidder, and it gets tamped down with a little tarmac, and then the tarmac gets smashed to shit again. So money keeps getting poured right into the hole.

See, the solution is to spend the cash to resurface that entire section of road. Be prepared for the disruption of services, take the steps that you have to, and then cease worrying about it for as long as this full road surface will last. Which, if you do it right might be quite some time.

You'd save money in the long run, too.

The thing is...

Working on the assumption that the goal is to actually solve the problem, to give the citizens of Ryde (and the Island, and anyone who uses our public transport) a better situation, frontloading the cost is the most obvious "best" solution.

This is a false assumption.

Assume instead that those in charge of filling those potholes have no interest in a permanent or long-term solution - they have different metrics in mind. They care about how much money they are spending in this very moment, because potentially, they won't be around in several years to actually see the windfall of not having to keep throwing money down the hole. They can just ignore it and ignore it and ignore it until such a time as...well, not that it stops being a problem overall, but that it stops being THEIR problem.

The rebuilding of Beirut was left to a private company. There was a lot of issue surrounding this. Their business arrangements and such were very heavily tied in with the interests of the local government, and everything was over-budgeted, resulting in Solidere (the company that managed the rebuild work) making an immense profit.

The fact was, though - when it was finished, it was finished.

The government was going to be around for a while, it appeared. Those companies that sought to make money from the rebuilding of an entire city were survivors. They weren't there for the short-term, only hopping in to make their cash and then vanish. They were in this for real.

While that particular practice is still shameful as all hell - literal war profiteering, using the destruction of a place to make money from its rebuilding, see Iraq for more details - the difference between how the island deals with it and how it gets dealt with elsewhere is huge.

The other problem, I suppose, is that none of the people that would have to sign off on repairing the road actually drive on it. So why should they notice? And when it is brought to their attention, why should they care? The ability to adjust one's perspective, to ponder if something is a problem for another individual that isn't yourself, is...well...

...I hate to make a sweeping generalisation, but positions of political and economic power don't seem to reward any kind of empathy.

So I guess we'll just have to keep getting wet feet.

Putzing With The Plot

Dungeon Crawl.

The very words make my SKIN crawl. They're just...boring. Just. Boring. Check for traps, pick the lock, open the door, kill the monsters, solve the puzzle, rinse, repeat.

Of course, they can be made more interesting. Making the dungeon make sense, for instance. Why have just a random coagulation of caves and junk when this place could be a sprawling catacomb for the thousand generations of a noble family's dead? A literal hidden fortress, carved out of the back of a cave by orcs? The basement of the tower of a Dark Lord (tm) that remained even after the tower was obliterated by the Chosen Ones (tm)?

My first RPG experience was Heroquest. From that came Advanced Heroquest, then a brief stint at D&D, before I fell into the pitch blackness of the World of Darkness. You find a dungeon in WoD, you are probably about to learn a lot about the person who owns it, and not necessarily the kind of stuff you can bring up at the dinner table.

WoD became my RP mainstay for years. Absolute years. I just stopped playing the kind of game where you'd grab a sword and yomp off into the dark to kill a big bad. It was all about shades of grey and narrative and the motivations and struggles of the individual.

Then along came Eclipse Phase, which - with its posthuman technology and its potential for absolute existential horror - provided a whole plethora of opportunities for doing something else. Something new. Here's a system where you can do both. You can worry all about the Tharsis League's most recent push toward industrial action on Mars, while also kicking in the doors of an exhuman terror cell to clean house.

I like it when a book messes with a standard narrative - I like it when a stereotype is used in an interesting way or the expectations of the reader are used against them. I love it when a movie does this, too. Arrival is a killer example. It takes a viewer's assumption and uses it to inspire.

So why wouldn't I like doing it in an RPG?

The thing I did most recently in Pathfinder...well, let's maybe not give away too many details. The players might be reading this after all. But suffice to say, a not-insignificant number of individuals the world over have lost their memory and have no idea why - and that number includes some of my players.

Because why not? I don't just want to run a number-crunch where we work out how many times you can roll to disarm traps before you fail one and lose some HP. I want my players to think. I want my players to have to wonder about if this is really the way their characters - specifically their characters with the problems and limitations that they are currently suffering from - would solve this problem. What they would assume to be the right path. How they would deal with the notion that, just maybe, three weeks ago, they didn't feel the same as they do now.

I get too invested in character. I love playing a character. I get the feeling that there's some RPGs that are more geared toward being your character, playing them and engaging with them (and through them the rest of the group), than others.

So I like putting folks in places where they can explore that. Where they can decide what they think is the best or right way forward. Chances for them to talk to each other and the denizens of the world we're making.

Generally taking the good old-fashioned narrative and turning it on its head can be good for that.