Author: Wren

Sunday Afternoon Musing

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Sorry for the break in schedule, but today you get a musing post because I forgot that I hadn’t written a flash fiction piece for today and I’m way too tired to do more than chronicle my thoughts on something.

I spent the weekend traveling around Wisconsin, attending senior art shows and a wedding. The art shows were super fun and the wedding was absolutely wonderful, but I’ve kind of hit the point where I’m both exhausted and wired. Laying on my bed for the next sixteen hours sounds amazing, but so does going for a hike since the weather is beautiful. I want to pretty much punch anyone I run into if they want me to talk to them, but I also want to not be alone since I haven’t been meaningfully alone since Friday morning (both events were for friends of my girlfriend, so the trip was more fun that it would have been if I’d been doing it alone). The wonderful contradictions of being an introvert who doesn’t really like being alone.

I enjoy driving places. The feeling of being in motion, that horizon as it rolls past, seeing new places… All things I love. Most of my trips, though, have been done alone. Driving to my grandparents’ cottage, visiting friends in other cities, going to conventions, almost all of them have been solo trips. It was nice to have someone along for the ride this time, to talk to and just keep me company. I’m not a huge conversationalist all of the time, which I’m sure can be frustrating to my girlfriend at times, but I like having the option. Plus, it’s just comforting to have someone in the car with me.

I don’t really know why I had such a good time, beyond getting to spend time with my girlfriend and her wonderful friends. I’d expect myself to enjoy that stuff, but to be one hundred percent ready to slap someone by the end of a full weekend like this. I like social engagement with my peers, just in smaller doses than a full evening of people following by a wedding the next day. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to wake up this morning and actually be looking forward to getting breakfast with everyone. It was a delicious breakfast and I was sad to be leaving everyone, though I was totally ready to just be home.

Which I am now. Home. And exhausted. Sorry if this rambling post didn’t make too much sense, but I’ve gotta write every day and sometimes that means writing rambly blog posts so you can keep up your daily blog posts and not tax your already exhausted mind to the point of getting frustrated or upset.

Now I’m going to go tax my already exhausted mind to the point of frustration by trying to successfully fight enemies with the annoying sword system from Skyward Sword until I decide I’m better off quietly reading a book. Have a great day!

Saturday Morning Musing

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There’s a part of me, deep down inside me, that worries I’ll eventually run out of words. Not in a “be unable to write or talk because I can no longer use words” sort of way, because even I do not have enough senseless anxiety to worry about that. This part of me is specifically afraid of running out of Things to Say. It worries that I’ll eventually say everything I have to say of any consequence and I’ll no longer be able to convince myself that I should be writing.

I don’t remember who it was, which irks me greatly, but I saw someone on Twitter post that to be a writer, you need a bit of an overly large ego. The whole idea of being a writer is predicated on believing that you have something to say that people want to hear. You can’t really write a story or a newspaper column or even a tweet without believe that what you are writing is something that someone wants to read. Sure, a lot of tweets are pretty dang meaningless and don’t have much thought put into them, but there’s also a lot of rather casual arrogance out there about writing.

Just like when you talk to a friend, writing a message includes the implicit belief that they care about what you have to say. Tweeting includes believing that the people who follow you care about what you have to say and that random strangers could potentially care about it. Writing a blog says that I think you, whoever you are, care about what I have to say. Writing a book says that I think a bunch of strangers will care about my thoughts or stories. No matter what I do, I have to believe that what I have to say is something that someone wants to hear.

I know it might just be a result of my OCD and the particular ways my brain words, but that thought feels like a vortex it’d be really easy to get stuck in. I struggle regularly with the belief that I don’t have anything worth saying. I don’t really posses an ego large enough to simply brush past that doubt, so I often wind up trying–and failing–to justifying writing something. And it isn’t just blog posts. It is everything from text messages to Facebook or Twitter replies. I can’t tell you the number of messages/comments/replies that I’ve typed up and then deleted instead of sending. For today alone, my best guess would be at least two dozen.

Some people say that anyone can be a writer and that is definitely true. What people often fail to take into account is that, like any other trade or art, it takes a lot of work to actually be decent at it. People go whole careers without ever being good at it and even fewer ever wind up being considered great. Writing gets treated as an after thought in a lot of work places and by a lot of people, but our increasingly electronic world depends more and more on writing. Thanks to the internet, the main way we interact with people is through writing. Video chat may entirely replace text-based communication on the internet eventually, but I think it’ll be a while before then since video still uses a lot of cellular data and that can still be very expensive for a lot of people (myself included).

Yet here I am, struggling to keep up with my daily blog posts because I feel like I don’t have anything worth saying. I find myself circling back to previously picked-apart topics and thinking I don’t have anything worth adding. I can’t find any thought or idea worth writing a poem about. I can’t think of any story worth telling here. That nothing I have to say is worth posting about.

It took me a while to realize that in order to consider whether or not something is worth saying, I actually need to have something to say. There’s little reason to shout down something as worthless if there’s nothing actually there and one thing I know for a fact about myself is that I’m not going to shut myself down over nothing. There’s always something at the core, even if I can’t seem to find it. Every thought spiral, every depressive episode, every single needling anxiety. There’s always something there, beneath the emotional/mental turmoil.

While it felt like a huge epiphany at the time, I’ve got to say that it really hasn’t changed much. I still wonder if everything is worth posting or writing or even considering long enough to see if I have enough there to write about. Hell, I wrote most of this out and then nearly trashed it since I don’t have much of a conclusion or anything thought-provoking to say. Mostly, I just wanted to say this so maybe someone else thinking the same thing would know they’re not the only one wondering if their words are worth it.

I’m pretty sure they are. Probably. You never know until you try?

Keeping Up

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I live in a hole that fills with water
And all I have are my two cupped hands.
I can keep up if I constantly bail,
But a single falter is all it takes
To watch the waters slowly start to rise.
I have no time left for thoughts of escape.
I’m not even sure that I would want to.

Return to Celeste Mountain

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One of my go-to unwinding games has been Celeste. I really enjoyed playing through it the first time and, while I can’t recapture the catharsis I felt as I watched Madeline work through her problems for the first time, I still spend some time reflecting on how they still apply to my life as I try to get the additional collectibles or set a personal speed record for a level. That’s why I always start from the beginning of the level and, unless I’m doing a speed run, explore the entirety of each level, including talking to everyone again.

This game has plenty of collectibles and even additional levels if you get certain collectibles. These tapes are called B-sides, and you can find one hidden in every level you play through. The rooms they’re in are usually hidden in some way, requiring you to make a split-second decision to alter your course, thoroughly explore all your options, or to notice that a wall isn’t really a wall but a hidden entrance. Each room has a puzzle involving timing your jumps from one set of blocks to another as they switch which set can be interacted with. They’re not terribly challenging once you figure out your path, but they’re not easy, either. That being said, I found it a lot easier to find the B-sides on almost every level than some of the other collectibles.

The hardest things for me to find where the Crystal Hearts. There’s one hidden in every level, though the ones in the B-sides aren’t really hidden so much as the goal of the level, and I found maybe two of them during my first play-through. When I went back and spent more time meticulously combing through the levels, I found three more. I’ve still got two more to find on the traditional levels and then a bunch of B-sides to complete. The Crystal Hearts are used to unlock the last level of the game, The Core, and I only just got enough of the hearts to start exploring The Core, so I’m looking forward to dedicating the time to getting through that level. I’ve already spent half an hour exploring it and finding almost nothing. I got through the first puzzling bit, but it feels like I haven’t gotten that far yet.

The last collectibles are the Strawberries scattered through all but one of the main levels. Like all of these collectibles, they have almost no impact on the main game since only the Crystal Hearts actually unlock anything, but they give you a reason to start exploring and a reason to keep exploring even after you’ve cleared the level. They’re often quick to get and encourage you to do more than just get through the level. Usually, you can find the Strawberries in hard-to-reach, out-of-the-way places that require you to change how you’re getting through the screen in order to collect them. Unlock the Crystal Hearts and B-sides that just require contact to collect, the trick to the Strawberries is that you have to stand on solid ground after collecting them in order for them to stay collected. If you die before then but after getting the Strawberry, it just pops back to its original place.

Thankfully, you don’t actually need to complete the level again in order to accumulate the collectibles you’ve gathered while re-doing a level. If you want to leave after getting that last Strawberry instead of making your way through the entire level, you still get the Strawberry (and your additional deaths), added to your record for that level. While the death total is interesting to see and compare to other parts of the climb, deaths are definitely not something you want to collect. I haven’t found any kind of negative impact resulting from having a bunch of deaths recorded and I’ve reached four figures in the deaths department, so I expect that I’d have encountered it by now if it existed.

I really enjoy replaying the levels. Sure, I’m only racing against my own timer at this point, but the game is really easy to pick up and put down as my time allows. The whole system is super portable and easy to use for short periods of time, but most of the games I have do not work that well in short periods. If I’m playing for only five minutes, I’ve only just finished loading into my Breath of the Wild file. Or I’ve gotten to the first checkpoint on one of the later levels in Celeste. I really can’t emphasize how great the portability of the Switch is and it feels like Celeste was specifically made for the accessibility and ease of use this platform provides. I can save and resume even in the middle of levels without needing to worry about getting sent back to the nearest checkpoint.

A month and a half after I first finished the game, I’ve gotta recommend it again. The levels are fun, there’s so many reasons to keep playing after you’ve beaten the game, the themes are mature, and the plot actually has something difficult to say. If you read, play or watch nothing else I’ve reviewed, you need to play this.

Ready Player One: The Book

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After writing the review for last week, I sat down and powered through the rest of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. I liked it a bit more than the movie in some aspects and a bit less in others. The plots are essentially the same: the game world’s creator passed away and left his vast fortune to whoever completed his puzzle first. There are a series of challenges and puzzles, each set awarding a key and then a gate, at the end of which is the prize: Halliday’s Easter Egg (in this case, an easter egg is something hidden by the developer of a game, usually as a way of leaving their mark on the game they created). The exact challenges are all different, though some are more similar than others, but the basic ideas of the competition are the same.

Overall, I probably liked the movie more, but I think that is a result of the different reference period. In the movie, the cultural references have been expanded to include more modern references in addition to the 80s references. While the movie was super fun to watch because I could look for things I knew, the book felt like it was touting the superiority of 80s culture and implying that there hasn’t really been anything worthwhile since. It wasn’t a huge deal because either I knew enough to understand the references or they were explained well enough by the narrator, but it felt a lot like I was talking to someone who is so convinced that they are correct in their opinions that they refuse to even listen to what you’re saying.

Despite this feeling, I actually liked the characters from the book more. They felt a lot more human and behaved a lot more like every gamer I’ve ever met. They get things wrong, they make mistakes, they’re all hyper-paranoid, success-obsessed dorks who are so focused on their current goal that pretty much everything else fades from view. The protagonist abandons his friend and, to a lesser degree, his quest for the prize, in order to spend time with his romantic interested. As soon as he’s back on the quest, after being rejected by his romantic interest, everything else fades away as he tries to make progress on the next puzzle between him and the next key. At the same time, some of their interactions felt a little off as well.  The eventual relationship between the protagonist and his romantic interest feels even weirder than it did in the movie, when she suddenly just gives the lead to him as soon as they meet. The relationships between the other characters who aren’t potentially romantic partners feels a lot more natural, so the contrast makes the fledgling romance stand out even more. There’s also a deus ex machina moment from Ogden Morrow, where he just shows up and fixes something.

That part was probably the most frustrating part of the novel that they thankfully changed for the movie. The protagonist comes up with this ridiculously complicated plan that relies on getting extremely lucky and not only does everything work out as he hoped it would, it all turns out even better than that. Everything just falls into place for him at the end. As soon as crunch time starts, gone is the fallible human character who made mistakes. He gets replaced by a god who is nervous about whether or not his plan will succeed, but who ultimately manages to pull it all off without any major stumbles, thanks to several other lucky occurrences from the past. There was no tension at the end of the book because it was so obvious he would succeed, and not just because I saw the movie. Plans that shouldn’t have worked, work. No one recognizes him or sees through a rather desperate plan. He manages to just have everything he needs to make it work, because he’s a little magpie who collects shiny things that just so happen to always be exactly what he needed later on.

 

That frustration aside, I think I appreciated the way they overcame the antagonist in the novel a bit more in the movie. It made for a much less tense and showy moment, but I like the critique a little better. The movie says it is easy to hide in a faceless crowd if you are faceless as well, but the book says that relying too much on technology to work for you without having a proper understanding of it allows other people to use it against you.

They also changed some of the points that the game world’s creator makes at the end, but I feel like the movie’s point made a bit better than the books. Even though I enjoyed the book, I felt like it was trying to say a few important things about the world but sort of stopped a few steps short of actually saying them because it just assumes you’ll understand. If you enjoy video games and want a cool book about a virtual reality world that doesn’t wind up asking questions about what is real and does the “real” world matter if we live our lives in the virtual one, you’ll enjoy this book. If you dislike pandering or feeling like someone is saying that nothing cool or worthy was created since the 80s, then you probably won’t like this book.

Coldheart and Iron: Part 15

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READ FROM THE BEGINNING

I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my eyes, but otherwise lay perfectly still, barely even breathing. After a moment, my eyes started to clear and the dull grey sheen of lamplight reflected off the barrel of a revolver stole my attention.

“Stay still like this, and nobody gets shot.”

I looked past the gun to find a man, perhaps a few years older than me, crouched over me. He wasn’t the one holding the gun, but he was clearly in charge of the much younger man who was. The younger man kept his eyes trained on me, barely even blinking, as he firmly held the business end of his gun to my forehead. I glanced between the three things I could see for a moment, from gun to young man to old man and then back again.

“Good.” The older man smiled, a grim line across his weathered face. “I know you’re Wayfinders and I hope you know I wouldn’t be doing this without enough people to make sure your skills don’t count for anything. You can speak, but only to me. If you shout stuff to other people, you get shot along with anyone who does something because of you.” He looked around the room. “Everyone got that? Just sit tight while I talk to your leader and no one gets hurt.”

“What do you want?” I tried to keep my voice calm, but there was more heat left in my voice than even the older man expected.

“Well, I want your supplies and weapons, of course.” The older man chuckled. “Those are my main interests and all I really need out of this raid.” The laughter disappeared from his eyes and his face returned to its thin smile. “That being said, I wouldn’t mind your laborer.. Building a long-term, permanent base isn’t easy when you haven’t got the skills or manpower to get it done. But you Wayfinders make excellent slaves. Knowledgeable and hard-working.”

“If all we have to look forward to is slavery, what’s to stop us from fighting until all of us or all of you are dead?” I took a deep breath and focused on the older man’s light green eyes, letting all of my anger show for just a moment. “Doesn’t seem like a good idea, letting your captives know they’ve got nothing left to lose.”

The old man leaned back for a moment, and then laughed. “Damn, you’ve got a mean glare. No wonder you’re the leader.” He leaned down for a moment and swiftly threw a punch at the side of my head. I heard a sound a like a stapler being used on a piece of cardboard followed by a ringing in my right ear as my head started to throb.

“You, shitbrains, can call me Al. I’m in charge, now, and the reason you’ll go along with my demands is that I’m going to put all the kids in a chamber full of sharp objects and unscrupulous men and make sure you know exactly what is happening to all them as a result of your behavior.” Al leaned over and slapped me on the cheek, his grim smile once more stretched across his face.

I closed my eyes against the throbbing pain of my temple and tried to pull my thoughts back together. It took me a couple of moments, but Al hadn’t moved when I was able to talk again. “Fine. Congratulations, asshole. You’ve captured the largest group of Wayfinders to pass through the area. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

Al grinned. “You’re damn right, I am. It was easy, too. A couple offers of safety and membership in my clan was all it took to get some of your people to betray you.”

“Trevor.”

“Yep. You really ought to treat your paying customers better.” The grin changed to a smirk. “Seems like he was tired of being told what to do, so he opened the back door for us. Probably wants a little personal revenge, which he’s allowed so long as he doesn’t break you.” Al shrugged and looked toward the doorway. “Seems a little excited at the idea of some time alone with you. That man carries a grudge like no one I’ve met. It’s almost beautiful.”

He turned his face back to me and smiled a genuine smile. “That’s how I knew he’d fit in just fine. Can’t survive out in the wild without some kind of fire in your gut to keep you going when it feels like hell itself has frozen over.”.”

I almost picked my head up to look toward the door, to see if Trevor was watching this, but the young man with the gun must have noticed me tense because he grunted and pressed the gun into my head a little more forcefully than before. Unable to move and suddenly much less curious, I took a few deep breaths and forced myself to make eye contact with Al. “Did you hurt anyone?”

“Only the sentries, but they’ll be fine.” Al sneered. “They put up a small fight, but we beat them into submission. Nothing some rest and a bit of doctoring won’t fix.”

“Can I see my people?”

Al gestured off to the side, at something outside of my field of view. “Sure. But only if you lie still while my two guys here unzip this sleeping bag and zip-tie your hands.” After I nodded, two more men, both even younger than the man with the gun, walked up and flipped me over, so I was face down and the gun was pressed against the back of my head. They unzipped the sleeping bag and, before I had time to do more than simply consider whether or not I should attempt an escape, they had my arms pulled back and bound. After they’d finished pulling the ties tight enough to start cutting into my wrists, they turned me over again and propped me up against their legs.

All around our area were fifty or more of these bandits. They were all men, and all but Al were about half my age or younger. Behind them, standing in the opening to the hallway, was Trevor and a few of his people. I shot them the meanest sneer I could muster with my head still throbbing and then turned my attention to the other Wayfinders around me. The two sentries, a scout and one of the trainees, were slumped against the wall near the entryway, bloody and unconscious, but I could see their chests move as they breathed. The rest of the Wayfinders were in a position similar to my own, either stuck to the ground by the barrel of a gun or in the process of being bound where they lay.

I watched Camille get propped up like I was and I did what I could to catch her eye while still looking around the room. She noticed and, under the guise of shifting her shoulders, shook her head. After that, I turned my attention to Natalie who, from her position on the ground, did the same. Her head was turned toward me as one of the young men finished restraining her, so I got to see the rage that flashed in her eyes when he yanked the zip-tie tight enough to immediately draw blood.. As I watched the blood drip from her wrists to the back of her shirt, I focused on breathing calmly and scanning the room, to see how everyone else was being treated. It took everything I had to stay sitting when I saw everyone get treated with the same brutal disregard as Natalie was. Only two people weren’t bleeding when they finished tying us up and I wasn’t the only one to get punched in the head.

I finally found Lucas, propped up in the corner behind and to my left, just as Al was sauntering around to my front, and I shook my head at him, relaying Camille and Natalie’s message. His eyes looked as angry as I felt and he had a large bruise already forming on one side of his face, but he ducked his head in acknowledgement. When Al squatted down in front of me, I took another deep breath and barely managed to avoid headbutting him in the nose.

“Well, shitbrains? What’ll it be.”

I gritted my teeth and spoke through a clenched jaw. “We’ll cooperate, but only if you promise not to harm anyone further. We’ll build your base, but only if you let us go unharmed and untouched when we’re done.”

Al grinned again, the same grim line again. “I can’t make any promises, shitbrains. My men get a little eager. I can, however, promise they’ll start with your non-paying customers first.”

“The nomads?” It took me a bit longer, focused as I was on trying to remain calm and follow the plan Camille had put together for situations like this one, but what he said earlier about children finally clicked. Getting punched in the head certainly hadn’t helped, either. “Can’t you just let them go? They’re of no use to you. You don’t need to use them to keep us in line.” All of the anger I’d held was quickly drowned in a deluge of rage at the thought of what those children were likely to see before we could pull off our plan.

Al’s grin changed to a toothy smile as he chuckled. “It might be a little late for that, shitbrains. They’ve all been packed up and sent off to our base. Plus, you’re in no position to argue.” He poked me in the temple and the pain flared again. “Plus, I know you’ve got a plan of some kind. Every other group of Wayfinders has. Only a moron would give up free insurance.”

I slumped against the man propping me up, wracking my brain through the fog of pain and nausea  to come up with a way to protect the nomads that didn’t involve throwing away the plan Camille had made. I took several slow breaths to calm my racing heart and looked up at Al. “I’m going to kill you.”

Al’s smiled faded a bit, back to looking like a dark slash across his face, as he shook his head. “You wouldn’t be the first who tried, shitbrains. All you Wayfinders say the same thing.” He slapped me across the face a few times before standing up. “Over a dozen groups, now, and not a single one of them has. I wouldn’t count on succeeding where they failed. It’ll just get you and all your people killed.”

He gestured to the two men behind me and then turned around. “Alright. Get them wrapped up and then start piling all their gear on the sleds. Don’t leave anything behind. And if they resist, start breaking the bones of whichever one is closest.”

Trevor took a step forward. “What about your promise? I want my time with him.” He pointed at me and sneered. “He’ll need rest after I’m done with him and a ride on a sled seems like just the thing to drive home my beating.” I watched him as he spoke, staying near the door and well out of arm’s reach from me, smacking his fist into an open hand. “Maybe I’ll make his people watch. That’d be fun. Or maybe I’ll make him watch me rough up his people. So many options,” Only the fact that two much younger and larger men were holding me up kept me from leaping at him.

Al looked back at me, noting the scuffle that ended as one of the punched me in the other temple a couple of times. “Heh, that’s awful petty of you. But we need to get back to our place right away. You can have your time with him when we’ve gotten everyone settled and him properly manacled.”

Trevor stepped up, anger overriding the unease he’d been showing. “You said I could do it whenever I wanted. Well, I want to kick the shit out of him right now! Half my guys here want the same thing.Who gives a shit if they’re already bloody by the time they get there? ?”

Al shrugged. “Fuck if I care about what you want. You’re in my clan now and you do what I say. If you’ve got a problem with that, you can join the workforce.” A bunch of muttering broke out amongst the other laborers and two of them pulled Trevor back into line with them. Al turned around to face me, smirking. “Guess I can see why you’d be bossing him around. He’s a bit of a shit.”

I didn’t reply. It was taking all of my focus to just pay attention to what was going on around me, much less form a sentence. The last couple of punches had really taken it out of me and, now that I wasn’t going to get any more beaten up, I let my focus go.

They dragged us all out to the entryway, wrapped each of us in a large tarp, and then piled us onto a sled in an uncomfortable tangle before tying us in place like a bunch of crates. After laying there for a while, unable to see what was going on, we finally started moving. The only sound aside from the whisk of the runners in the snow was the tick of my watch as it counted away the seconds until we arrived at our captors fortifications. Around me, I could feel each of the Wayfinders tensing their muscles and stretching as much as they could. The cold was leaking through the tarps, so I stretched as well, trying to keep my body warm and my muscles limber for whenever Camille gave us the single to break free.

After well over ten thousand ticks of my watch, I felt the sled begin to slow. I was freezing cold and my arms were so stiff I wondered if I’d be able to move them at all, much less attempt an escape. The only thing that had kept me conscious as the sled ran was trying to keep track of how many seconds had passed. Part of me wanted to just let go, to let unconsciousness take me, but I needed to stay awake and listening for Camille’s signal. Thankfully, the sled eventually came to a stop and my poor, throbbing head was no longer being bounced around.

We had arrived. I tensed myself for Camille’s signal as people started untying the ropes, but the only sound was the crunch of snow and the rustle of rope. Silence reigned around me and, before I could stop myself, I fell unconscious.

Tabletop Highlight: How to Waste Your Time and Destroy Your Relationships

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Are you tired of your peaceful and content existence? Do you have valuable relationships you wish to destroy via petty arguments and baseless accusations? Do you feel like you have too much time on your hands and not enough to spend it on? Do you find yourself desiring to feel either the same penniless destitution my generation finds so common or the baron-ish wealth of the landed gentry from a time before anyone but a blooded noble was considered fully human? If you answered “Yes” to any or all of these questions, then I have the solution for you, you potentially masochistic misanthrope.

The solution to your lack of actual problems is clear, stranger. Simply go to the nearest book or game store and purchase yourself a copy of Monopoly! If you can convince your treasured friends and family to play it with you, they will not be treasured by the time your game is through. If you’d prefer to draw out this revolting and evil alienation you so desire, you need not worry. Depending on how many people you have convinced to join you in hell, it may take several days for them to realize their burning hatred of everything about you from your smug grin to their mental concept of you as a thinking, feeling individual. A single game of Monopoly, if played correctly by a competent bunch of adults, can take in excess of three hours, and it is only that short when one or more players is excessively more skilled at deception, betrayal, and debauchery than the others.

Despite the seemingly innocuous nature of this chunk of cardboard, the game of Monopoly is actually a clever device that was created by distilling all of the worst things in the universe, such as war, hunger, income inequality, the housing market, police brutality, the abuse of power by elected officials, the stock market, and anyone who walks around in a top hat and a cane as a part of their usual outfit without being able to understand that they look like a bit of a jerk. After that, a few other awful concepts were thrown in for flavor (capitalism, gambling, and vanity), and now any child can cry themselves to sleep at night as they listen to their parents arguing over whether the banker has been skimming off the top or not. Both adults know the banker has had their hand in the cookie jar, but one of them has no proof and the other is the banker who will refuse to admit it because they have gone from the sweetest, most honest person in existence to a horrendous and unrepentant liar in a matter of hours.

Wars have been fought over money and land in the past, and this game now allows you to bring the horrors of war to your family and home. You may go the entire game without seeing a bloody corpse, but that’s only because verbal eviscerations and emotional destruction don’t leave corpses, merely the hallowed-out husks of once-vibrant people. Argue with the people closest to you with such reckless abandon that problems from the very beginnings of your relationships will resurface and raise the stakes at the start of every turn, from who wins a simple game meant to emulate land-ownership by the incredibly wealthy into a competition to determine who has the moral high ground. Such vile hatred shall be spewed that you will find yourself dwelling on both what you heard and what you said for at least several days afterward. If you cannot shake it off and make yourself believe that it was simply a game and not a nuclear missile shot straight at all of your relationships, then such feelings will consume you until there is nothing left of who you once where or you have gotten extensive therapy.

Despite the giddy anticipation I can sense you feeling as you contemplate this mental and emotional self-destruction, I must urge you to reconsider. You may revel is such depravity, but please keep in mind that innocent lives hang in the balance. Sweeter souls than yours can be destroyed by Monopoly, if only be being caught up in the wake of destruction that follows this foul pastime. Spare yourself and these poor beings the wrath of capitalism pretending to be a family-friend game. Pick up Settlers of Catan instead.

A Man of Numbers

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All Theodore cared about was numbers and all he wanted out of his life was to find particularly challenging sets of numbers to play with. Let the others have their social lives and their romances. Numbers were all he needed.

Columns of reference numbers scrolled past as he looked for a break in the sequence. Each column’s total should equal all of its reference numbers added together which should equal the total of the column left of it plus the number of reference numbers in the column.

It was a tricky algorithm, but it ensured only he could create new reference numbers. If they didn’t all add up correctly, the program wouldn’t close when he tried to exit. It meant staying late, frequently, but he didn’t mind.

After almost two hours of searching, he found the new reference number and followed it to the document it represented. It was a few sheets of transcribed meeting notes someone had hidden on the network.

After he finished reading through them, his heart was racing as he typed an email to his boss. They were hiding something from their bosses and he’d found them! He hit send and went home. Tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough.

The next day, he met his boss on the main floor to watch two security guards and the man’s manager talk to the culprit for a moment and then gently guide him out. Theodore recognized his cousin Bill, as Bill tried to pull away from the guards.

Bill saw him and shouted. “Theo! Please!” The guards grabbed him and continued to guide him toward the foyer. “Theo! Tell them! We were just making plans to throw a surprise party for Gus’ birthday tomorrow!”

Theodore’s stomach lurched. Gus, his boss, turned to him and sighed. “Dammit, Theodore. Not again.”

Saturday Afternoon Musing

Wren Leave a comment

You even wonder how much better the environment would be doing without all the crap people mail you in order to entice you to get a credit card, take out a small loans, refinance student loans, apply to committees, or help fund organizations that somehow got your home address but not your phone number? Sure, the relative cost to the company sending the junk mail isn’t very high because paper is still pretty cheap and I’m guessing they’ve got some way to save on postage for bulk mailings because stamps are fairly cheap for inter-US mail, but that stuff has to add up eventually. The same thing applies for environmental impact. Sure, it is a lot easier to measure the impact of ten thousand sheets of paper instead of just the five that went into making the advert for a credit card with outrageous terms hidden deep inside the fine print, but it still adds up eventually. Especially when you take into account how often they send them.

Its like budgeting. Sure, finding a way to save five cents per day on something you’re paying for every day isn’t a whole lot, but that’s a dollar fifty in a month and a little over eighteen bucks a year. Over the decade I’m probably going to be paying off my student loans, that’s over one hundred eighty dollars. And that’s from a single five cents saved. Throw in the other dozen places I can do the same thing and suddenly that’s gone from one hundred eighty to almost two thousand, two hundred. One on its own doesn’t add up to much over time, but all together they do.

Given that a credit card company can send two thousand offers before it hits the magical ten thousand measurement mark, it seems like it’d take a lot of people to really make any kind of impact. But it isn’t just one per person. It’s two per person per month. Sure, the customer list is probably smaller than I think it us, but that’s twenty-four a year for me. suddenly, you only need eighty-four people to pass the measurement mark and I’m willing to bet there are at least that many people getting them in my neighborhood. Throw in the fact that I’ve got four loan companies, five credit card offers, three places I actually bank with/have loans with/had a credit card with at one point, and don’t forget all the places I have memberships that could be upgrade to include a credit card. In total, I probably get some fifty pieces of junk mail a month that I need to sort through for personal information, shred, and then dispose of, which all adds to the environmental toll. Suddenly, it’s starting to feel like I’ve dealing with ten thousand sheets of paper on my own. All without even getting into the “or current resident” crap that just goes straight into the recycling bin.

What a waste! The most frustrating part for me is that I’ve opted into the paperless option for every single one of my accounts and banks and service providers of every kind, but I still keep getting shit sent to me. It’s incredibly frustrating. I’m literally never going to do anything but dispose of this shit for me and nothing I’ve attempted to get them to stop has worked. I’m just going to keep getting this shit no matter where I go because there’s always someone new sending me junk mail as soon as I finally get one of the others to stop.

It just seems like such an inefficient, wasteful system whose only end is going to come when we all get neural uplinks and they can beam the credit card and personal loan offers directly into our brain. Except it probably won’t because junk mail also infects the internet and we still get it in our mailboxes as well. There’s no escape. We’re awash in a papery nightmare of unceasing advertisements for everything from solicitations for a local dentist’s office to a forms asking if we’d like to upgrade our credit card from platinum plan A to electrum plan B that gives us a slightly higher interested rate but also gives us an extra percent cash back on miscellaneous purchases that are almost never what we need to buy until right after the promotion has ended.

Capitalism in the US sucks a lot of the time, because people have found a way to use it that helps them succeed at the expense of either the environment or a bunch of other people, but this is a way that it sucks all of the time. It produces a ton of useless waste for no other reason than to grease the cogs of the money machine in order to turn an ever higher profit from quarter to quarter.

What a waste. I’m going to go for a walk in the sunlight now and calm down from this rant. Have a good day.

Breathe. Hold. Scream.

Wren Leave a comment

Breathe, in deep then out,
Against the coming dark.
Breathe, in deep then out,
And watch the lightning arc.
The storm, the end, comes swift
And ebbs away your will.
So breathe, in deep then out,
And let your pulse grow still.

Hold your head up high
Against the wind’s onslaught.
Hold your head up high
So they will see you fought.
Out-matched, out-classed, out-run
But not ready to die.
So stare into the gale
And hold your head up high.

Scream into the storm
To prove you’re still alive.
Scream into the storm
And maybe you’ll survive.
Broken, beaten, bloody
Of body, of soul and mind.
So scream into the storm
And pray that fate is kind.

~~~

Breathe, a gasp for air
Against the rushing rain.
Breathe, a gasp for air
To flush away the pain.
The Storm, the start, is here
To wash your will away.
But breath, a gasp for air,
Your will is here to stay.

Hold your fist up high
And scream into the sky.
Hold your fist up high
To prove that you won’t die.
Unmatched, stand tall and see
The storm begin to die.
So stare into the sun
And hold your fist up high.

Scream with all your heart
To prove that you’re alive.
Scream with all your heart
To prove that you’ve survived.
Still whole, but bloody,
You won the fight today.
So scream with all your heart
As the storm fades away.