When mediocrity is praised.

As I threatened, I am going to write a few things based on my thoughts after reading Outrage, the Vincent Bugliosi dissection of the O.J. Simpson trial.

If what we create is a reflection of us

During one of the lectures I attended in creative arts, I told the other students in the room a little detail from my personal experience. That the more personal to oneself a story is, the easier it becomes to write. I have also shared tidbits such as that I decide the theme of what I write before I begin writing. But this opens up a tunnel of thought that I think is worth exploring.

My emotions, continued

I am absolutely exhausted lately. I have precious little hope or prospects, but my willingness to be generous and sharing has in itself become a major, major fault. Is what normies refer to as love a willingness to put oneself in an awkward position for the minimal benefit of others? I honestly do not know, but I am altogether tired of being in an awkward position. I look upon my life and think that I want to go home and rethink it. Then I realise something that Billy Bob Thornton said so well in Bad Santa. It is too late to start over.

My emotions

Emotions are a fascinating thing. I do not believe that there is such a thing as a sentient creature that does not have them. But as I believe I have mentioned before, in the grand scheme of our thought process, our emotions take precedence over our intellect. This is a big part of the reason why the manner in which I write my most direct proxy character, Kronisk, has changed direction in order to make him capable of absorbing emotions and using them as fuel for his powers.

I lack a faith section in my brain? No shit?

Sometimes, when I read something, I get so angry that I want to not only destroy the person who said it, I want to destroy any person who even entertains the thought that it is acceptable. How is voting Campbell “55 million for disability funding is not preferable to 110 million for horse-racing” Newman in working out for you, by the way, Queensland?

But no, sometimes not only does a person say something so utterly ridiculous that it makes me even more certain that at least two thirds of the Earth’s Human populace needs to die quickly. Sometimes they say something so abominably stupid that you make a special exception for them, and say that rather than reducing all populations equally, that person and the population that they represent should be terminated. With extreme prejudice.

Why videogames are not art, and are unlikely to become it anytime soon.

Some time ago now, the great but ailing media pundit Roger Ebert wrote a statement to the effect that videogames are not art. He gave some reasons why. And the whinging from fanboy idiots who were clearly too young to even know what the word Atari means in this particular context was precious to behold. Not because Ebert‘s critique of videogames as an industry was especially well-informed, but rather because the near-illiterate responses betrayed a simple fact about the people making them. Specifically, they had no idea what the word art really means.

The Thing versus The Thing: a critical comparison.

There are some films that a person with a good or overactive ability to visualise, like myself, can watch during the wee hours of night, and feel unsettled by for hours after the fact. Granted, I was still a bit young at this point (VHS was still the only viable home video medium at this time). But the John Carpenter version of The Thing is a film I will have to go senile in order to forget at all.