Artylo

I have recently found myself falling into fits of anger, directed solely at my peers and those of a similar age to me. I have found myself unable to engage in even the simplest of conversations, instead choosing to sit by the wayside, nodding along, not contributing any units of meaning. I have also recently been making pyrrhic strides towards reaching out and trying to reconnect with past peers, of whom I have been neglectful. Both of these efforts of mine have been met with nothing but apathy.

The conversations are all brief. Within them, there is nothing but feigned interest, and an air of secrecy. You would think that people would be most excited about the opportunity to talk about themselves, to be probed and pressed on to speak at length about their passions and interests. Perhaps it is the age we live in, but that is seemingly no longer the case. My peers have become scared to talk about themselves, their projects, their aspirations. Every detail about them is hidden behind a veil of secrecy and gated by a perceived reputation, reserved only for spouses, significant others, and those they hold closest to them. When asked by anyone else, they will merely cover the facts. They will talk mostly of their education or their profession, as if those institutions are the traits that define them in the minds of others, instead of merely an alma mater and a source of income. Topics concerning internal thoughts, personal passions, interests, and opinions are seen as too revealing, too characterful for the public eye.

People in my life will shrug off questions about themselves, their recreation, their dreams, and try to pivot the conversation into asking me instead, as if somehow my life is naturally more rich with meaning than theirs. After briefly indulging them, and turning the light on them once again, they will continue to hide behind their veil of secrecy and give you nothing. This almost comically turns the conversation into something uncomfortably boastful and single-sided by omission. One party is comfortable with speaking about themselves, while the other is neither interested in them or speaking about themselves. They get to know everything about you – you get nothing. The person beside you remains as much of an enigma as when the conversation started. A compete and total lack of vulnerability and trust.

My own attempts at fostering a social and love life are frankly pathetic, for they all have as their foundation some deep and utter misunderstanding of what people want out of others. Despite spending a sizeable amount of time, mulling over the finer details of conversationalism – an exercise of which this text is not – I still struggle to find a common language with which to alleviate the stress and the inhibitions that people bring to any conversation. Communication is frankly never effortless, and there is unfortunately no way to shoulder both burdens on one side of it.

I attribute this to a kind of snobbishness that comes along with thinking about one’s words too carefully. Most people speak with a gut feeling, rather than seeing it as an opportunity to put to practice their social skills – something which is completely natural. Yet, most conversations die the instant the last message doesn’t end on a question – a known technique, which would almost be insulting if one were to notice its use against them.

My mother once shared with me a quote, which she had read somewhere: “Most people speak of other people, fewer speak of events, and the least of all speak of ideas.” I unfortunately do not know who to attribute it to, but since hearing it, it has become an ever-present and unignorable pattern in my observations on life.

In it laid my greatest failing, in my ability to engage with smaller, more clandestine topics. It is exactly in my ambition to escape mundanity, and to elevate myself – to be of interest, that I become the maker of my own undoing. People say they admire those possessing knowledge, wisdom, and intellect, but ultimately admire them from afar – some distant, unattainable standard, which sets them as better per se, but ultimately outs them as no longer part of the larger group. By attaining this otherwise desirable trait, they forfeit their identity as part of the greater disinterested whole. There is perhaps something to the idea that intelligence is a self-inflicted malady, if not shared with the greater whole. If not shared, increasing the average wealth of knowledge in the group, then it only serves to drive a wedge, increasing the delta between those who posses it and those who do not, inherently leading to divides and conflict.

It strikes me as some gross maladjustment in my own views of what it is to be sociable. Throughout my brief life, I put considerable effort in presenting myself as someone competent, unthreatening, knowledgeable, and jovial – the categories of greatest concern in my own narrow view of what it is to be pleasant around others. However, by being so characterful, I now assume that I appear odd, too open, or too intense. The topics I now find interesting have become too cerebral, too demanding, and too niche to engage with. In striving to always have something to say on any topic, I have ruined my ability to speak to others, who put less effort in their own interests than seemingly I do. There is no sense of surprise and curiosity anymore, as anything they could say I have already heard before tens of times over. The fundamental pillar of being curious and showing interest in a conversation has become impossible for me to execute on, because in their discomfort and secrecy, I am beginning to egotistically suspect that the people around me merely preoccupied with breathing and sustaining a heartbeat, and nothing else is of concern to them.

Has the joie de vivre been ripped away from this generation to such an extent that we must all merely satisfy ourselves with the knowledge that capital is being accrued and that she said, that he said, that she said what?

Frankly, I find it impossible to engage in a conversation discussing people who I do not know, nor will I ever meet. I do not know of them, and the only knowledge I have of them I receive from you. A list of names with prejudices. Is it not common courtesy to not discuss people who are not present? What comment could I offer that isn’t an express judgement on their character? How can I jest, if not at their expense? All I can do politely is offer sympathy, and that is simply too pathetic to even be considered engaging in a conversation at all. So, I sit there and say nothing. The topics in my mind, reserved only for explicit mention, and even then not put on full display, as to not centre the conversation around myself and appear too boastful or familiar.

Literature? Philosophy? Politics? Culture? The spice of life? All topics for the utterly deranged.

Do you not have something better to talk about?

The small topics of family, occupation, recreation and aspirations, which ought to usually serve as nothing more than stepping stones into larger conversations have now simultaneously become the whole conversation, despite being paradoxically omitted from it.

I do not deny that in my cloistered life, I have undoubtedly forfeit the ability to discuss people and events, since I often engage with neither on a physical level. It is undeniable that in abstaining from vices, such as drinking, I have drawn too great a divide between myself and what is considered common, and forfeit many opportunities to be sociable with others as a result.

People would have you think they are more open to partaking in group activities, sharing in common interests. But what happens more often that not is that the activity too becomes far more characterful. Different levels of familiarity, along with different levels of interest, resulting in different levels of willingness to put time in and engage with it draw new lines of divide, where one can become too familiar with the activity for the others to be willing to catch up. Yet, even when it is genuinely new and of equal interest to everyone, such a novel activity demands much more willpower to engage with than something trite and familiar. Yet there is this constant urge to action, to adventure, to physicality.

Words hold no value, so I am urged to act - but how can I act, if I cannot get past words?

There is no conceivable way to push others to better themselves, if they are not already open to doing so. It it is their wish to remain mundane and disinterested, then that is their privilege, and you as their peer have to accept that they are lost, both in the effort of self-betterment, but also to you as a person.

If nothing else has become apparent to me over the last ten or so years of attempting to write as equal parts plea for employment and sado-masochistic self-therapy, it is the fact that my psychosomatic idea of what a thought is often comes out as one singularly large unbroken sentence, moving from topic to topic. It's really quite hypnotic.

Cultural reference aside, my brain has always worked off of the premise that there will be absolutely no thoughts for extended periods of time, with that blase tranquility being briefly, yet violently interrupted by a outburst of several blocks of justified 10pt font text, all at once—no breaks in-between—usually featuring at least one run-on sentence, which by no feat of syntax could be split apart into non-dependent clauses, and constitutes a paragraph in and of itself, as it gets slaughtered by the kind of stylistic interjections that only an em dash could possibly resolve, if bent to the point of architectural instablity.

That and the adverbial participle — the thing literally every single person who has ever tried to systematically teach how writing and translation is done, has failed to convince me is such a bad thing; the gerund; the verbal adverb. Subjectively, passionately, and regretfully, I will continue to reject its omission from the common tongue, mockingly abusing it, having no ounce of remorse.

I’ve been in a crazed kind of runt the past couple of years. It’s most definitely a ‘me’ kinda problem, so I’m not necessarily looking for sympathy or anything as benign as that. What I want to try and do instead is work through this in a way that ‘you’ (the hypothetical reader) could understand what I could possibly mean by such an inflammatory title.

Every once in a while, I feel the urge to recommend something to someone. Some fragment of culture, be that a song, a film, a video game, a blog post, a video. To do so, I give myself an aneurysm. Because I am so infinitely up my own ass, I feel like there is one abstractly ‘correct’ way to recommend something to someone, and that is usually with what I affectionately call “the bare minimum”. Nothing about the story, nothing about why it’s actually the coolest, most subversive kind of exciting thing ever grace your eyes, nothing about character, nothing about the circumstances in which it was made. As the kids say – no spoilers. However, in my mind, I take it a step further than simply “no spoilers”, and essentially demand that you go into it—preferably immediately, as we stand, here in the hypothetical white void—with nothing more than a name, and only once you come out on the other side of the experience can we have a conversation about it.

There is already a major kink in my thinking, because I imagine most fully formed humans out there, wouldn’t cross-dissolve into a smouldering pile of ash, if someone, on their recommendation, walks into a cinema, knowing that the film they’re about to see has a twist somewhere in it or that it is about some recognisable theme. My distaste for biographical criticism, also makes me unable to directly say that a movie is cool, because it’s directed or written by so-and-so in so-and-so period, despite this obviously being a meaningful addition to the experience for me, and if someone else were to obsess over such marginalia.

In reality, in totality, what I really want to say is: “You should have a look at X.”

If I wanted to make a more risky, personal assumption, I’d probably add an “I think you’ll like it.” or a “I think it’s really rad.”

You might very well think that that seems completely sufficient, but I, from my ivory tower, would leer and say that you have, in fact, wildly misjudged how effective this “bare minimum” is. The bare minimum should be enough, but never is. The crux of the method is that it completely relies on two completely unreliable things – reputation and the recipient’s will. Two factors that would make the average stoic take their own life in abject frustration.

If you’ve gotten this far into this here text, then those two requirements are already in play, in some part. You have already made an assumption on my character and on my intelligence, based off the wording and the menial wit on display in the first three paragraphs, so you’ve already made a value judgement as to whether or not I am genuinely capable of saying anything that is worthwhile to you, of value to your life, and of some use. If you didn’t like me, you wouldn’t have gotten as far as this sentence, and would have gone on to do something else. You have already exerted your will in a feat of patience and/or tolerance to deign reading what I have written, be that out of interest, morbid curiosity, or some other motivator. The same is likely to happen with the hypothetical recipient of a recommendation. The question of “Why should I listen to anything you have to say?” hovers sinisterly over nearly every aspect of inter-personal communication, because it is simply part of its nature.

So how do you overcome that punk-ish sentiment? How do you essentially, convince someone why a cultural fragment is worth experiencing, without saying anything about it; without them convulsing at the thought of taking your word for it?

Most would probably just cave at this point and give them a morsel of information, just to whet the recipient's palette. In a sense, circumventing the cultural fragment’s natural sequence of divulging information, and getting to the good part immediately for the sake of selling yet another valued customer on the gross market opportunity of seeing something they’d like by dangling it like a shiny carrot in front of their famished eyes.

I am of the opinion, that if the recipient, upon hearing my bare-bones recommendation, then goes on to read the abstract, or watch a trailer, I would be somewhat fine, just as long as this act of diminishing their own experience is something they do at their own peril. This sounds slightly self-defeating, considering that the end goal here is, in fact, them seeing the thing you are recommending. However, I want them to see the thing itself, not the marketing that comes along with it. If I wanted this to be an exercise of marketing—which it probably sill is anyway—I would have just shoved a trailer and some exciting pictures in front of their eyes, and be done with it, essentially outsourcing the problem to a third party of admen.

Ironically, the only way to deal with reputation is having one. The reason why people will want to listen to you, is because you’ve said something before and it turned out to be true for them as well. Establishing bona fides is all well and good, but walking up to someone and disclosing your impeccable series of correct guesses on whether or not they’d like the song you’re going to suggest they listen to isn’t necessarily moving in the right direction to achieve “the bare minimum”. In reality the sentence becomes: “As a years-long fan of this kind of thing, and after writing at least 700 pages worth of material on why you and others like you should see the thing, I think this thing is rad and you should see it, because I’ve been right about this kind of thing before.”

Yet, even after you’ve assertively established your credibility and stacked the deck in your favour, you will find that even from a position of authority, you simply can’t make someone do something, just because you said so – even if it is telling them to have fun.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone discover something I’d recommended them half a decade ago, and it’s suddenly a new point of obsession for them. Ideally, I’d be content that they’ve finally seen it, and that it has brought them so much joy; yet, I can’t help but think about that nagging “I told you so”-kind of rhetoric that goes on in my head. It feels like something has been taken from me. I think it has to do with being denied the acknowledgement. In a sense, the reputation that is in part a requirement for recommendations is also part of the reward. The one that recommends, gets to risk gaining or losing reputation with the recipient. By recommending, you gamble on your ability to do so again in the near future. If they kick the can down the road for long enough to where they forget that you made a recommendation to begin with, you simply don’t get to have that conversation that comes after them seeing your thing and you just have to live with it.

You’re simply trapped in the Catch-22 of possibly not saying anything, leading to them not having any real extrinsic motivation to see something, or conversely saying too much, leading to a lesser experience. This isn’t even accounting for the possibility that you could even build said cultural element up so much in their eyes, that it couldn’t possibly ever meet the expectations you set.

So what is the point then? You tell someone about something and they don’t see it – you don’t tell someone about something and they don’t see it. They’re all to busy with all that stuff that makes up life. Just keep all those precious little cultural treasures to yourself and let things be as they will. Is apathy the way out of this? Is becoming a mute, cloistered archive of all things interesting any less maddening that engaging in the psychological warfare of talking about culture?

I can’t help but think that most people nowadays don’t even need a recommendation. Not from other flesh and blood people anyway. They’d rather have the TV play its predetermined schedule for the day, the computer spit out an algorithmically divined selection of things based on their profile in a marketing firm’s database, harvested from internet trackers logging previous internet purchases and regional trends. Curation as a skill itself has widely become devalued. You can almost assume that if someone wants to go out of their way, break the mold, find something that is of interest to them – they will.

The only real way to maybe get someone’s attention nowadays is the rather loose New Journalism approach of talking more about your personal experience of the day leading up to, during, and after having seen the cultural fragment in question. This again, assumes that the reader, listener—what have you—is in fact aware of you as a person, and respects you enough to be interested in how this morning’s breakfast and the late divorce of your parents affected you while experiencing said thing of culture.

It’s kind of a joke, but you know exactly what I mean.

Sentences like “Ah, this movie helped me get through a rough breakup.” do have a certain power, because they don’t necessarily speak to the contents of the thing in question, rather the effect it had on you as a person in a particular circumstance. You can almost assume that recommending Wong Kar-wai’s In a Mood For Love to someone who has just been rejected from someone they loved will in some way resonate with them. The question them becomes in what situations is it OK to bring up things like Godzilla: Final Wars, Bringing Out the Dead, or The Men Who Stare at Goats. You can’t simply walk into someone’s funeral and put a boxed copy of Takashi Miike’s Gokudō kyōfu dai-gekijō: Gozu (Yakuza Horror Theatre: Bull's Head) on the casket for anyone who needs it, regardless of how functionally relevant and pertinent it might be to your dearly departed’s imminent resurrection.

Another way to approach discussing culture in general is to only do it if you and the other party are on equal footing – i.e. you’ve both experienced the cultural fragment at some point and, due to your general familiarity, you can now discuss it at any length you find satisfactory. Maybe this opens the gates to a more direct line of recommendation, which entirely relies on its relevance and close proximity to to the topic at hand. If someone engages you in a conversation about punk rock and mentions liking The Sex Pistols, you can sure as hell mention Amyl and the Sniffers, because it’s the right time and place to do so. This obviously comes with the preset expectations of “Is the thing being recommended even close to being as good as the thing that prompted said recommendation?” Yet another gamble that one must make in a vain attempt to appear cultured and draw parallels in between the arts.

Now we reach another morbid kind of blockade that rears its ugly head – relying on others to be cultured enough to talk about anything. This is obviously an incredibly snobbish assumption, but there is a statistical unlikelihood that two or more people in a given radius have experienced and are willing to talk about one common cultural fragment. This likelihood is obviously directly influenced by the cultural fragment’s recency and wider appeal. The more popular a thing is, and the more recently it has been experienced progressively increases the statistical odds of it entering the cultural zeitgeist and appearing in conversations. As a matter of fact, the more widely popular something is, the more likely it is to be recommended from one person onto another.

This leaves us in the rather precarious situation, where niche and foreign language cultural fragments are essentially delegated the label of “not worth anyone’s time”, and cannot in and of themselves be the seed for communication, simply because the likelihood of both parties having an equal familiarity with the fragment is so infinitesimally small, that it might as well be insulting their intelligence, by suggesting something so wildly out of their purview.

From this, I feel like on could extrapolate the nature of what it means to be cultured as a whole. Three people come to mind: one who is familiar with a large—likely eclectic—number of cultural fragments; one who is familiar with the currently relevant cultural fragments, which comprise the zeitgeist; and one who is intimately familiar with only one aspect of culture, be it one genre, art-form, etc.

I believe that the last one is easiest to be dissuasive of, simply because it could be considered a specialisation or an expertise. There is something borderline academic about someone who devotes themselves to a singular point of focus. Variety is the spice of life, so there must be some allure to subsisting only off of something that will inevitably grow stale and repetitive. This allure is completely unknown to me. Of those kinds of people, out of my own sheer ignorance, I’d say they are very intelligent, but they are not my broad definition of cultured.

The other two are a bit more interesting, because all that really separates them is a knowledge of history. Inevitably, the one who is only in step with the zeitgeist will turn into the other through the natural passage of time. This isn’t to say that all those who eclectically seek all forms of culture were once only interested in what was synchronically relevant, but there may be some behavioural correlation.

Oddly enough, time seems to be a large point of contention. Or rather, more specifically the age of a given cultural fragment. For some there is an invisible line over which they will not cross. As one film crosses the mark of being released forty or so years ago, it seemingly becomes “too old to be enjoyable”. I can somewhat see how the cultural and social sensitivities of the age can disagree, but most people just refuse to indulge in older things on a purely sensory basis – “it doesn’t look as good”, “they talk weird and it’s boring”. Shunned actors, insensitivity over race and gender, exploitation, suffrage – all now, apparently, so deep into the past, that anything that seems to bring them up is cause of distress and discomfort. The growing pains of an art-form, then seen as just the art-form, now revolting and unworthy of being experienced. Trying to talk to someone under the age of 30 about Sunset Boulevard might as well be asking a creature from the space age what the The Paleolithic Age felt like – not because of their inability to have seen and enjoyed it, but due to their sheer unwillingness to even entertain the thought of doing so.

With the release of the new Elden Ring DLC, I’ve obviously been forced to enjoy the spontaneous shift in a lot of my favourite internet broadcasters and video makers’ priorities to cover that instead. People are usually more excited about a new non-Armored-Core From Software game than I am, and that’s completely fine. It has, however, as always tends to happen, elicited in me a kind of senseless confusion. I see these people, who have no doubt been swayed by the overwhelmingly positive word of mouth that the Dark Souls series and the other derived games in From’s catalogue, going in with a kind of gleeful, childlike enthusiasm. These are people who are self-described fans of the series, who have gone through various titles in that now lengthy lineage. They boot it up, stand in awe of it for a little bit, because these games tend to be quite pretty to look at, and then beeline it for the first wall to hit their head against. And by wall, I obviously mean the first godforsaken creature that has a big health bar that goes across the bottom of the screen. They then proceed to spend their whole afternoon, chipping away at the thing, until it eventually relents, and then go into other chatrooms and make statements, such as: “This boss took me 10 hours yesterday, but I finally got it.” To which the crowd pathologically goes: “Wow.”

So here’s the fundamental thesis I want to put out there. What if, you didn’t put the 10 hours in, and just turned around and looked for something else to do? What if, you, as a player, noticed that you’re having kind of a tough time getting this seemingly insurmountable obstacle down, and just for a moment, considered that this might not be the most immediate path forward? What if, there was some other objective, which could give you the boons and upgrades necessary to topple that insurmountable thing, were just somewhere else? Come back to it when you’re more prepared, have the right tools, numerically stronger, etc.

I obviously understand that there is some pride in just winning one of those “hard” fights through sheer endurance and strength of will. I also understand that it is also completely possible to beat anything if you spend enough time dodging every move it has, and then getting a swing or two in. But, most players I’ve seen, have a kind of zealous dogmatism about exactly “how” such an encounter should be tackled. There’s a machismo that comes with fighting mano-a-mano. Rules such as: No additional summons, no healing, no armour, no dodging, no spells, no level-ups, no safety nets. Now, I don’t sincerely believe the average person does all of this all at once – there are some fanatics out there who indulge in this kind of catholic self-flagellation for fun and profit, and that’s fine. But most people seem to at least agree on no additional summons, and using as little healing as possible. Those two stipulations are the bare minimum to be considered “good” and “not cheating”.

It is interesting to me how, as a communal experience, these stipulations have become such a rule of law that any defence of anything to the contrary is generally cause for mockery and sneering. This has evolved to such an extent, that the NPC summon signs of yore are somehow seen as “less cheating” than the new-age Elden Ring Ashes summons – with actual player summoning, of course, still being seen as the ultimate form of self-defeat and admission of weakness. All this, for a game, which for the most part is a single-player experience versus a lot of computer-controlled adversaries, with little to no “actual” competitive stakes.

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that a lot of Dark Souls’ and the series’ fame came from being essentially televised on livestreaming and video sharing websites. These rules spawned from the constant one-upmanship that comes with being in the actual competitive environment of online broadcasting, where you actually have to stand out to be noticed and have a financial incentive in getting more eyes on you playing said game. Titles featuring keywords, such as: “Soul Level 1, No Healing, No Items, No Walking, DDR Pad, Deathless”, are obviously a pastiche of years upon years of people wracking their brains on how to peacock that they beat the hard game, even when making it even harder.

For the average player at home, there is ultimately near zero incentive, outside of some masochistic sense of personal fulfilment, to actively engage less of the game’s mechanics, use less of the tools, and ultimately accomplish feats of great skill and attrition to achieve what essentially amounts to impressing a bunch of NPCs on their computer screen.

There is one recent example of what I’d consider to be a good approach to playing these games. YouTube user ji-mothy started publishing a series of videos titled: “Playing Dark Souls as Miyazaki Intended” about eight or so months ago. It is a somewhat practical, somewhat hypothetical playthrough of the game, where the goal isn’t to simply beat the game, but rather find a route through it, which completes all of the NPC quest, so that there is a summonable NPC before every though fight, gather items that make certain areas and fights trivial, before they are necessary, and minimise backtracking and fast-travel. In that way, you can actually see that there is some though into how the straight line of progression isn’t always intuitive in these games. Sometimes you have to run with your tail between your legs, and go to some fundamentally different place, rather than trying to brute-force your way through an encounter. Sometimes the first boss is the last boss you should be thinking of.

The only downsides to said playthrough is that it is essentially impossible to intuit as a first playthrough. The whole process simply requires too much game knowledge to be divined by someone who is just picking the game up for the first time. The NPC quests are somewhat possible to accomplish naturally, but the item hunting and the correct sequence for the path are near impossible to map out as concisely.

This is more of a personal anecdote, but I think adds something to the topic at hand:

I genuinely believe that there is some substantial merit to always starting any Souls-esque game with the Deprived class, or equivalent. Having no initial gear forces you into a state of mind where the initial hurdle is just getting something to put on your back. It inherently prohibits anything but high-risk manoeuvrers when it comes to tough fights, so it forces you to go out there and gather resources elsewhere. It even does this thing I really like, that I’ve never seen be talked about, where you can grind a lot of the early mobs to rarely get pieces of their armour and weapons, while also getting the raw currency to buy gear from the first available merchant. This gives the games a kind of Diablo-esque quality, where you’re always on the lookout for the next drop, and trying to get full sets of armour, exhausting the loot tables for every new mob you see. This makes grinding the same camp of mobs over and over an actual appealing choice to me, because I get cool loot and it contributes to something else down along the line.

Elden Ring takes this a step further by allowing you to sell items uncharacteristically early for the series, so simple actions like gathering herbs and various miscellaneous crafting items from the ground can contribute to your next level-up or your next piece of gear, even if very laboriously and menially. Suddenly, you could be out there collecting flowers and mushrooms, so you can finish the next dungeon or beat the next boss, which I find immensely cool. It almost achieves a kind of Monster-Hunter-esque MMO-lite quality, where you can gather materials on your own time, fight harder monsters with other players or summonable NPC companions, and then sell the excess gear to vendors, contributing to the overall rewards of the endeavour.

As a sort of reward for myself for getting through some bureaucratic bullshit, I've been replaying Fallout: New Vegas these last couple of days - maybe weeks at this point; I can't tell.

It's kind of the only game that makes me want to keep saying things like: "When I go old and senile, just put me in front of a computer that auto-runs this on boot, please." It really is just my favorite thing in the whole world to completely annihilate my day and compulsively ignore any biological needs with. I also keep saying that I'll only ever play it once every decade or so: A) because I know what it will do to me, and B) because it will have been a long enough time to where things are probably staring to get fuzzy in the ol' memory department.

All that to say, this is my second kind-of-proper big playthrough, in which I know I've left a bunch of things unexplored the first time around. I don't even have a stipulation to do anything really different each time - just do whatever makes me happy, you know!

This time around, I am just stunned by the sheer size of the experience. I feel that whenever I played this around the time it released, I was mostly just some kid beelining it to the next main quest and getting things done whenever I found something along the way. Now, I've been essentially ignoring the main path and dipping my toes into the absolute shitload of faction side-quests that seemingly always existed in there, but I never found.

There are these weird new impressions forming in my head, since I'm not really committing to a choice of faction in the big picture kind of sense just yet, but I am walking around the ranks of the big players and helping them out of sheer self-interest. This has earned me a reputation of being a "Smiling Troublemaker", which is new to me in a mechanical sense and in a personal one. I've learned that being an absolute baby-faced, blue-eyed angel isn't the only way to approach the sliding scale of characters' opinions of you in this game. You can be good to them, but also take your cut whenever they seem to benefit from your services a bit more than what they paid for.

I like to think that even before engaging the big players on the map, I've already made a name for myself and established where my ideology sort of lies, so that by the time anything actually important to the plot happens, I will have some sort of in-universe reference from which to draw.

Some of the things I wanted to try out this time were learning how to play Caravan, checking out some of the more obscure unmarked quests, and getting all companions, while completing as many of their personal quests as possible.

I already know what you might be thinking. You want to learnt the thing no one ever bothers to learn; You want to learn Caravan? I felt like I had to do it, because I keep gushing about how much I like this game, yet I ignore massive chunks of it. That and I like retaining niche and relatively useless information for potential financial benefit. Turns out, you can make a lot of caps playing Caravan - especially if you get good at it like I did. First couple of games were obviously rough, but eventually I stacked the deck in my favor and robbed a merchant of all their money the moment I bought a bunch of stuff from them. I went on a 37 game streak after that. I still go back to the Mojave Outpost every once in a while when I'm strapped for cash. I play the lady at the bar for all she's got, repair my stuff back to full and then pickpocket most of that money back on my way out - life is good.

Something that’s been rattling in the back of my mind these past couple of months has to do with the algorithmically suggested content on sites like YouTube. Obviously the whole conceit of going on a website like that and just getting a straight up unfiltered feed of the stuff you’ve subscribed to is no longer on the table – I can sort of grow to live with that, even if it is reluctantly. However, there are some implications that come along with total algorithmic suggestion, which I am growing increasingly frustrated with on a pure “I interact with the things on screen” level.

I think the primary benefit of the new style of feed is the mixture of videos from channels you are subscribed to, along with some random stragglers from random people on the website who are posting in the same vague categories that you usually watch. You can get your weekly Tim Cain or 3kliksphilip video on the same page as the VoDs for someone’s livestream from a day ago with a total of 300-ish views. This is all randomly broken apart by a video that is obviously doing numbers into the millions, because the algorithm has generally sensed that this is of wider appeal to most people using the website, or the world as a whole. The contrarian in me obviously feels a little bit too patronised by that assumption and has absolutely no interest in that mass market crap, for better or worse. The former two categories, however, are all well and good, as far as I am concerned.

I mostly notice this stuff, because the very top of the website features a scrolling list of the topics it thinks I enjoy, from which I can select to only see videos suggested within that category exclusively. I essentially use this as a kind of indicator as to what the algorithm is using to generate the suggested feed. In a way, the dynamic has now changed from me simply listing my interests and being served exactly that which I’ve listed out, to me listing out my interests and the algorithm making educated guesses as to what I’d like to see, while I also make educated guesses as to what it was thinking about me and figuring out ways to change my patterns in order to make it actually show me what I want.

Let’s say I’m interested in Monster Hunter as a video game series. I’d generally like to see stuff from any of those tens of titles, because I’ve gone through most of them and have a general idea of what’s what. The unfortunate thing is that one of those games has mass market appeal, while the others remain niche and obviously less spread by the algorithm. What this results in is the algorithm noticing that I am into Monster Hunter as a whole, and then trying to present me with the most popular videos on that topic, which are almost always guaranteed to be those of the rather recent title – Monster Hunter: World. As previously stated, I’m the kind of contrarian hipster type, who doesn’t necessarily think that newest stuff is better for simply being the most recent. As such, I tend to not like that the broader idea of Monster Hunter is reduced to World and its expansion Iceborne. It becomes a self-reaffirming logical fallacy that if I like Monster Hunter, then I surely like World. However, to have it not only suggest World I’d need to not watch any of those videos, otherwise it’d continue to think it was right in its assumption and double down on it. If it sees that I’m not interacting with the “Monster Hunter: World” category, it doesn’t assume to make that statement any vaguer. It just assumes I’m not interested in “Monster Hunter” at all, even if I go to seek out videos of older titles on my own.

Every once in a while, by some miracle, that very specific “Monster Hunter: World” category turns in the much vaguer “Monster Hunter”, and the quality of the selection becomes much more in-tune with what I actually want to see. The problem is that I have no way of clapping my hands together and saying “good job, now keep it that way”. As such, it inevitably notices that I could be watching more numerically successful videos in that category and goes back to being specific and mostly popular stuff.

What I find profoundly tiring about the senseless perversion of the conversational maxims nowadays is the seemingly insatiable urge for people to lecture others. Doubly so on the internet. I think this is somewhat of a new endeavour in everyone's repertoire, a honest to god brand new learned behaviour in the communal melting pot.

Of course, lecturing someone implies that there is some sense of superiority and of ego. One believes that the other could benefit with having something explained to them, so they do so with a sense of complete entitlement and with no consideration of one's receptiveness towards such an act. I see slighter examples of this online, like under interviews with rather oratorically gifted people like Orson Welles. Just here and there, someone will have isolated some pleasant and articulate phrase as one of the many comments. This in and of itself is not a bad thing - sententiae are after all fit for purpose. What is not to share? These individuals, however, cannot help themselves by just highlighting what they find pleasant to the ear, but the feel obligated to comment further on how "this is some advice a lot of young people can benefit from" or "this is a valuable lesson for everybody to learn right there". How observant. That these are words that the elusive "I" has deemed valuable - words that souls of perceived lesser taste ought to immediately apply. Of course, this seems innocent enough, but to me it speaks to a much larger shift in the way we perceive others and appreciate information.

Surely, if we are listening to or reading the same material, and we then come across the same sententia, which is evidently universally applicable to all facets of the human condition, something that everyone should and ought know, then why surmise that everyone else has somehow missed it. Why belittle the intelligence of your fellow man by acting as if your own intellectual facets are somehow better attuned to what is considered tasteful or profound. If the sententia is truly what you say it is, then shouldn't it be evident to the recipient without further elaboration on why this particular fragment is of vital importance for our species.

There is a whole industry of people who have essentially created a career putting together listicles of advice or quotes from famous people. Just the other day I came across a video, which was roughly about ten or so minutes, which essentially revolved around listing three sentences that were supposedly uttered by Ernest Hemingway, as advice to aspiring writers. This was of course padded for length and supported by several metric tons of visuals and calls to action, which as you might imagine could be a wholly different and lengthy topic of discussion. Yet, surely if I were to seek wisdom from the greats, then I would seek it out myself. That I would find meaning in their work or conversations they had had with their peers, rather than some montage bereft of all context.

The film critique industry has essentially morphed from mostly critique, analysis, and conspicuous marketing, into a factory for ready-made opinion pieces, which viewers eat up wholesale and regurgitate instead of indulging whatever thoughts they might have on the particular film. Dozens upon dozens of "Ending Explained" videos and articles, where people are given objective answers to subjective questions. Works to which many flock to immediately upon the credits rolling, just so there isn't any shred of ambiguity left. Not immediately knowing or being confused causes people to feel excluded from the group - excluded from people that can somehow explain - people who are perhaps confident enough to state their opinion at all, regardless of the consequences, in a way that to the rest of society looks like expertise and some higher sense of wisdom.

We're essentially begging each other to remove all doubt. To blindly trust in the loudest voices of our generation. Not doing so might open one up to being wrong or to being misinformed. In the court of public opinion, those are seen as grievous acts. How dare you not be aware that this is the case! Aren't you a fool!

This makes people afraid to share their thoughts and encourages a capriciously Orwellian exercise in doublethink. The environment which allowed for there to be the public's opinion and the private opinion is slowly being eroded. Conversing on a topic might seem fruitless when there is a video on the topic, which can be shared instead. The material doesn't contain the point - it is the point.

There is not innate reward in being able to synthesise your own thoughts any more. It's much easier to be indifferent after all. It's much easier to plead media illiteracy than it is to open oneself to ridicule. Expressing positivity or negativity towards a work might alienate you from the diametrically opposed group after all. Taste is prescribed, not cultivated.

Recently, I've been coming across a lot of media that mentions mansplaining - the act of a man explaining something, typically to a woman, in a manner seen as patronizing. I feel that that too is a symptom, or at least a more common example of what I'm seeing. In a sense, we want to perceive others' passions and interests as fundamentally their own and as non-transferable. There is no way of opening someone's eyes to something your hold dear without shoving it down their throat or presenting it as the rule of thumb. It creates this inane sense that the people around you are somehow less intelligent and less receptive to things, which you consider to be, of finer taste. That in and of itself motivates people to lecture and to present themselves as holier than thou. To present the information in a way that is mimetically palatable. If a lot of people believe something, then it must be correct. And if it is correct then it must be what people believe.

This kind of reasoning is indeed very democratic, but is liable to a vocal minority controlling the narrative and essentially prescribing what the majority opinion of a work will be. Worryingly so, this isn't even entirely isolated to fiction. News and information has become too plentiful and too difficult to sift through, so we flock to simple, pre-chewed, and condensed information, where some supposedly learned figure has handily decided what is important and what isn't for us. Being informed is becoming an exercise of trust in others, rather than a search for an objective truth.

After five years, I looked into her eyes and that girl was gone. The girl that knew me best, the one I had only ever grown fonder of over the last ten years. What peered back at me was a different woman – a woman who had been so desperate for me to never notice. It finally became clear to me why she had been so apprehensive about meeting all this time. The way she would avert her gaze, so that I could not dispel all doubt, that the girl I knew and adored was no longer standing there with me. Only a fading reminder of who I used to be. What I had been talking to over the last half a decade was a ghost of my own past – one she no longer embodied in earnest, but nonetheless kept up as a charade, so that we might keep what little we had in common tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

It had been so long that all I could remember of her were vague smudged shapes, resembling nothing more but a deteriorated and withered image of her. No new memories had formed over such a long time, I was beginning to worry it might not all be true. My eyes ate up every detail of her like a starved beast, clawing for every morsel it could get its hands on. A visage once forgotten, now renewed with little conjecture. Yet, for her, the significance of this event seemed to be yet another footnote in an already busy day.

As she turned her back on me and began talking with her acquaintances – ones that I neither knew, nor was introduced to. As she eagerly tapped away at her phone, visibly impatient, the only thought that ran through my head was to bolt. Run away from here as fast as possible. “You are nobody here anymore.”, it said. “Make this all go away.” There was no longing to match my own. No fears over missed opportunities, no dread over an ever-growing distance.

All she did was keep on typing, messaging someone she probably heard from day in and day out. Someone she had seen several times in the last week, month, year. Someone who was obviously closer to her than I would ever be from now on, and perhaps had already been so for even longer.

I could barely listen to what was being said. My mind was rushing with all manner of pained thoughts and shattered expectations, culminating in one desperate unspoken sentence: “I won’t wait another five years for this.”

And then he came, and they kissed - as if I should have known. There was all that warmth I could no longer see with my own eyes. All of this busywork that had made our chances to meet null and void was no more than an elaborate smear campaign. One orchestrated specifically to avoid the reaction I was currently taking the full brunt of. Every fibre of my body felt like death. It was almost pathetic. I had let it happen again. I had let my best friend turn me into a fool once more. All of those pleasantries, passionate exchanges, deep sincere hear-to-heart conversations were nothing more than having your cake and eating it.  I could no longer even entertain the thought of being there for her. At that moment I died and came back, as if awakening from a long dream. Unfettered by sentimentality or want, as that old version of me that had felt this before. Its tongue split in two, as it spit venom, hatred, repulsion, as it began thinking of revenge, of cruelty. My own Ahab, stabbing away from hell’s heart.

Not a word, not an expression, I broke off. No one seemed to notice.

I sat alone on a wet bench in the garden grounds, as more content individuals around me spoke colloquially to each other. My phone began buzzing, but I couldn’t bear to look at it. It could have been a call that would change my life and I still wouldn’t pick it up. All I could do is sit there, unblinking, filled with every emotion my body knew how to synthesize. Every moment we had shared, I tore to shreds. Trent Reznor understood me. Johnny Rotten understood me. The both offered solace to an aching mind with words which I was finally able to meet half-way.

I blinked twice and sat in an uncomfortable chair, surrounded by grins on all sides, in a room that was as baroque as it was large. It echoed every sound, including the ones no one else could hear. I clapped. I clapped for hours as everyone’s name was called, even her – especially her. The echoes of his claps meeting the back of my head with a deafening thud. They were having the best day of their lives and I wanted nothing to do with it. I was no longer there for her. I wasn’t there for me either. It was everyone else. I sat there until the very last person had gone and left.

I picked up my bag and left, in a rush. I dared not look behind, as if embodying some contemporary image of Orpheus on his way out of Hades. Then I looked, on purpose, so that it may all fade away to nothingness. Every step along those long winding stairs screeched as every muscle in my body followed my only desire – to get away as fast as possible. Hiding, like a rat, evading her every gaze. I walked for hours in any direction that came to mind. Parks, roads, buildings all blended in.

Another two blinks and I was leaning against a wall in a long corridor that was devoid of all life. One of those spaces that is only ever traversed - never a destination. Slowly standing became slouching, slouching became sliding, and sliding became sitting. Every piece of fabric on me was either choking me or making my own heat even greater. The only compassion I was to see that day was when a cleaning lady passed by and asked me if I was feeling well. What could I say to her? Regardless, it came out as “Oh, I’m just waiting.”

There’s this feeling I get when I am scrolling through my Twitter and I see that one of the thousands of accounts which I have followed has just switched, unnoticed, from whatever artistry or wit that initially attracted me to them all those years ago, to straight up hardcore porn. Such a rare sight fills me with the appreciation that all my peers have grown as gracefully as I have over the years, much to the same effect.

At some point that was some kid that really liked Pokémon that is now actively seeking out the exact angle at which they can capture their carnal pleasure so that others may fill whatever is missing in their lives with it in exchange for some poultry sum. And for what else than the pursuit of freedoms and self-love, both physical and mental. And here I am, in the small hours of the night, mixed with both a disgust that this is the very first thing I see of them in so many years, and an indifference, marked with all manner of considerations as to what, why and how. It’s not prostitution – it’s self-expression, I am led to believe by the times and the communal tribune of ethics and morality en masse. It is ultimately a very personal, intimate choice, isn’t it?

There is something about this sexual revolution, urged by websites and services, which can enable young men and women - hell, even people of all ages – to sell themselves with such reckless abandon. I’m not trying to be dismissive of it, because I to see the mercantile alure of selling high-resolution photography of my own misshapen crotch as particularly amusing and even somewhat appealing in a mercantile sense. Yet I cannot help but condemn these platforms for ever putting that type of choice out there. Aren’t there easier ways to develop a love of one’s own physique? If it is avarice driving it all, then surely we wouldn’t want young women jumping to the conclusion that this is some get rich quick scheme for which there is no downside in participation? I say young women, since I imagine men a much more aware that they are the willing recipient in this transaction more often than not. A generation of men, waiting like pigs at the trough for their next Valentine’s Day limited edition signed post-card.

If it were an appreciation of the natural, an act of patronage for some faraway distant muse that they wish to support financially, so that she may live carefree and devote her time to pursuing such self-expression, I’d be more open to it. However, there is this insidious subtext that permeates these circles. Thirst traps, limited-time exclusive collections, personalised memorabilia, displays of superficial physical affection. A simulation of genuine affection, serving those desperate enough to need it. It’s all a subtle coquettish dance around an impossibility, which exists solely to whet the appetite of those left unsatisfied in their social and romantic pursuits. At which point does it stop being laudable self-expression and become genuinely indecent in that same stigmatic way that prostitution is often accused of.

A real act of self-sabotage, capable of curbing anyone’s boner is to simply look below the scantly clothed photography and look upon the infinite sea of comments, all praising the model’s beauty in one form or another, or dancing around doing so with tongue-in-cheek displays of unrelenting adoration. Look at all those avatars of men, anywhere from their twenties, thirties, forties. Look at the white dudes with baseball caps, the latinos, the Asian kids. Look at the elderly man who also plays his part in this global and multi-cultural worship of the feminine and the risqué.

For me, the dissolution of the para-social contract happens the very instant I become aware that I am not the only one viewing this at a time. That this spontaneous animalistic lust that makes every fibre of my mind and body go: “woah, that is hot”, lest this isn’t actually some private audience, shared between two individuals, but rather a gawking crowd, vying for any morsel of individual attention they can cling to. Perhaps I’d even be among the least creepy ones in the room in regards to age and marital status at any given time.

It isn’t that I am opposed to what is ultimately a transaction where both sides are willing and ready to participate. That at the end of the day is up to them. However, it does concern me in ways that exist outside of the moral or the religious. It’s more to do with how both sides will look at themselves when they no longer need this. Yes, some women will come out of this empowered and rich beyond measure, but what of all those who failed and didn’t play the hearts of disenchanted men to the same extent. What of the men who have to one day face the truth that if anything this pursuit of the carnal isn’t going to leave them in a place where they can look at themselves in the mirror and disillusion themselves, then provide for and appeal to their significant other without the expectation of such frivolous gifts and expressions of admiration and appreciation in exchange for services that amount to being purely financial.

I'll praise the writing for the way dialogue manages to sound genuine and effortless, but the contents of it is just repetitive theme assault whenever its not some cool sounding platitude or recounting the events from the original series. I understand that subtext is for cowards, but honestly, half-way through it sounded like every piece of dialogue was just the line "but I had it worse" paraphrased. Kratos literally went through the arcs of the entire cast in the original series, but he's supposed to say "Hmph."

He even opens up to Freya at one point about Deimos and his daughter and her response is something which I can only describe as "Oh.", before her scripting immediately goes into overdrive to tell you about the next puzzle solution as quickly as possible.

I will give some high praise for the voice cast as a whole, however. Odin (Richard Schiff) being a standout performance, in my mind. Most of the cast were screen actors with very little to no video game credits. I like new faces, but I don't think going the Kojima route is "it".

On another note, I really dig what they did with Freya design-wise too, even if I don't particularly like her character. Can't say the same about Kratos and Atreus' armours though, since they continue to be over-designed rubbish.

This whole game is so in love with the mythos of Kratos that it can't stop bringing it up, because essentially only the player knows that he's a big softie now, everyone else is working on that blood memory of him deleting Greece. Fucking Thor constantly brings it up how he's not really giving it his all, and you can even see it in combat. This guy used to demolish mountains, now he barely lands flesh-wounds on enemies. I even thought that him cutting off Heimdall's arm was a big deal... before it immediately grew back. Oh yeah and Thor gets to have a scar on his belly, which for some reason doesn't heal like his other wounds. Violence is not nice, after all. Changed man, right?

All I really wanted was to hear this again. Somewhere. Anywhere. Let it rip at the very end and bring him back to his reformed blue-collar milquetoast self. It'd even drive your point across. You know... themes?

But they don't, because they want to keep some of the past, but discard any association with it. Different game, right? Then why call it by the same name? Surely you could have made this a new IP and it would still work if the themes were solid, right?

No. The themes only work if they retroactively denounce and diminish a series of games they want to have nothing to do with, nor emulate, nor channel in any way outside of simply recalling iconography.

They say the originals were mindless and violent, yet why do I remember every single plot beat, every trial and tribulation he went through, enough to recall them for these new games. Are those games not narratively rich and effective? You draw from them so much, I can't tell.

Greetings to the old guard. I suppose that I should make you aware that this here page is under relatively new management. Yeah, it's still me, just slightly over a decade older and not that much wiser. We run a tight ship here as of now and the deck has been sanitised of whatever I found arousing back when I was wee and made little computy games where the little square people exchange numbers and explode violently for your amusement. That still happens, albeit less frequent.

As of a general note, this post may very well self-destruct in the coming months, depending entirely on whether or not Twitter shits itself royally under its new management. I suppose you understand, though you really shouldn't.

I am relishing the thought that maybe this platform is conducive to my acquired taste for long-form rambling, which produces twitter threads ad nauseam. God knows, I can even put things in bold, embed pictures and edit minor spelling mistakes after posting.

Anyway, this is your, I suppose, warning that what my come upon thine screen from beneath my fingers upon contact with my keyboard might not be the same as a decade ago, and that you, who has remained unnotified for several years, might want to reconsider your patronage, subscription status or following of herein blog.

My plans are to ramble incessantly about things no living thing cares about in the spur of the moment. Examples at present won't do either of us any good, so I suggest you wait it out and see for yourself whether these new styling and furnishings still suit your palette.

Here are some links of note:

Here's where I post my film and game reviews, presented in that now-vintage format known as "text". I don't do them quite as often as I should, but nonetheless, I am fairly complacent with their quality enough to peddle them publicly. Some of what I publish on this page might end up on there but all dolled up and more succinct.

Here's my tweety. It's where most of my immediate thoughts manifest as poorly worded write-ups, which, if anything, might serve as your barometer for what is in store for this page as well. Considering the format, I have been restrained up until now, so maybe things will be even worse.

Here's my personal web page, which I have cobbled together with my distinctly ignorant view of web design, using my own two hands and a carbon datable knowledge of basic HTML, CSS, JS and a lot of copy-pasted sorcery. It has a blog I barely use, unless outlandishly grumpy, it has contacts and it even has a button that lets you watch my live show, whenever that is on. Morally reprehensible, uncensored and not all that exciting. I often describe it as some avant-garde faux TV station, which has only one programme and you're forced to watch it at gunpoint. It's all in good fun.

That's kind of where I'm at, at this point in life. Peruse at your leisure.