Power Lies Beneath

I've made a small game that can be downloaded for free HERE

It tries to emulate the experience of opening a mask pack, released in 2001.

The box can be panned, rotated, and zoomed, and by clicking on the tab, it can be opened!

And a randomised pair of the 88 possible Kanohi masks will pop out!

Hey everyone!

Was 2016 something or what? Everything that’s happened aside, I want to say I’m fairly happy with what I got done last year. I really put in more work for Power Lies Beneath, work that I can carry over. I’ve also officially restarted my hobby as a music composer and I’m currently mixing two tracks. 

I have very high hopes for 2017. But for those who follow me for the Power Lies Beneath game, I’m sorry to say that that’s been suspended for the moment. It’s been a decision I’ve gone back and forth on since Bionicle ended again, and I’ve decided that the resources and expertise that have gone into that game can be better spent and applied in my current project. 

My current project is a 2.5D vertical scrolling Shoot ‘Em Up called Sunsear. Details will be forthcoming, but know that this will be an original IP (which is a big incentive for me). My goal is to release either by December 2017 or early 2018. It won’t be a long game, but it’ll be a sweet game. 

I hope you’ll still follow me if you were mainly interested in the 3D open-world Bionicle action game I was developing. I may decide to do some quick touch ups and release what I have later on. What doesn’t feel like much to me may end up being very fun for you all. I’ll have to see about that.

In the meantime, enjoy the impending theme-change!

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

I HAVE FOUND MY FAVOURITE POST ON THE INTERNET

Sarah is allergic to strawberries. As soon as she puts them in her mouth, her face swells up and she gets hives. It’s non-life-threatening but uncomfortable for her.  

Sally is also allergic to strawberries, and has the same symptoms. 

Sarah informs her friends she is allergic to strawberries so they can stop using them in shared food. Some of them even stop eating strawberries too (or, at least, stop eating them around her), so she is more comfortable. Sarah researches places she can eat out that will take care with her allergy, and chooses restaurants who agree they can accommodate her, or who do not use strawberries in any of their cooking. 

Sally, on the other hand, goes into restaurants specifically advertising only strawberry desserts, orders a dessert, and makes a huge fuss when she gets sick. She takes to social media, the local newspapers, everywhere, to tell people how terrible this restaurant is for not specifically accommodating her personal allergy. She goes back frequently to insult and harass specific staff. Some staff have even quit because of her. Sally says it is her personal right to have her allergy accommodated in every single place she feels like eating! She posts pictures of herself all swollen and ill everywhere and blames the restaurant and the staff for her discomfort. 

Be like Sarah, not like Sally. 

Not every villain, not every time, and certainly not to everyone at once, but there should be moments. We should, occasionally, be able to see ourselves in the bad guys, be able to understand how they got there.

Because it reminds us not to fucking go there.

Antis who get upset about villains having relatable qualities (often couched as being “romanticized” or “woobified”) are people who cannot bear to ever think of themselves as having the capability of being wrong.

It’s hard to learn how to have conversations when you have auditory processing problems, and a lot of the things people say sound like gibberish.

It’s hard to learn how to have conversations when you have language problems, and a lot of the words people use are confusing, or it’s hard for you to put your thoughts into words.

It’s hard to learn how communication works when people ignore the things you say, treat them as cute, praise or correct them, but don’t respond to the actual content of what you are saying.

It’s hard learn what makes people uncomfortable when you always make people uncomfortable anyway because you don’t have the motor or language skills to avoid making people uncomfortable, even if you understood all the social rules perfectly.

It’s hard to learn a lot of things from and about people when your natural body language and way of using language is different from theirs; it’s like trying to learn how people work in a country where you don’t speak the language.

It’s hard to learn the same things about interaction other people are learning when people interact with you differently.

It’s hard to learn about body language when you have visual processing difficulties, and have trouble reading other people’s body language without staring.

It’s hard to learn about a lot of things when you’re not noticing all the things other people are noticing because you’re focusing so hard on monitoring your body language, or speech, or eye contact.

It’s hard to learn how friendship works when people pity-friend you, set up fake forced friendships for you, or pretend to be your friend when they’re really bullying you.

It’s hard to learn how to be friends with other people when other people don’t want to be friends with you.

It’s hard to make friends when you’re more stringently supervised than other kids your age.

It’s hard to learn how boundaries work when people respond to your pain or discomfort by deciding there is something wrong with you.

It’s hard to learn that whether you want to interact with people is relevant when people treat it like it’s irrelevant.

It’s hard to learn how to interact with others when you are taught that the only way to do so is to do things that are physically impossible for you. Or mentally impossible, because you can’t process language fast enough. Or a terrible idea.

It’s hard to learn about caring about other people’s feelings when you are taught that if you cared about other people’s feelings you would do things that are physically impossible, or mentally impossible, or a bad idea.

It’s hard to learn how to navigate the social world as an autistic person when you don’t have a lot of, or any, autistic role models.

It’s hard to learn how to develop your own social judgement when people constantly tell you you have to accept their interpretation of a situation, because you don’t understand, because you have a social skills problem.

It’s hard to learn social skills when people say they will teach you the social rules, but some of the things they say are wildly overgeneralized, wildly oversimplified, or just flat out not true, and they enforce them on you anyways.

It’s hard to learn that interaction with others can be pleasant when people are constantly cruel to you or insist you do things that hurt you.

It’s hard to learn a lot of things about relationships when you’re afraid to get close to people because you’re constantly acting in a way that is unnatural to you and hiding things about yourself and you’re afraid of how they will react when you finally slip up.

It’s hard to learn a lot of things about relationships when you feel distant from others because you’re constantly acting in ways that are unnatural to you and hiding things about yourself.

It’s hard to make friends when people are constantly bonding over things that you don’t like, can’t do, or don’t relate to, and when a lot of your life experiences are things other people don’t understand or can’t relate to.  Or when people you would like to or might otherwise like to be friends with say bad things about people like you.

It’s hard to make friends when you don’t know who thinks bad things about people like you.