Reality by Nex

With my attention span again reminding me that I can't focus on anything for more than half a second while sober, I've started yet another creative project, an attempt at blogging my playthrough of Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride from a first-person perspective.

You can find that here: Three women, a panther and me

Odds are I'll be updating that blog more often than that one -- assuming I don't totally fuck up the crucial "write about DQ5 while playing it" concept -- so please do check it as often as your F5 key will allow.

At the very least it will give you a new perspective on one of the best roleplaying game stories ever written.

Plus, I'm not getting paid, so my ego could really use a bit of propping up on this one.

If you really loved me you'd do it.

Tonight I conducted an experiment.

It seems to me that with Twitter being the latest vehicle for the extrapolation of information, a little bit of misinformation (particularly "tragic" misinformation) can become widely believed almost instantly.

So I planted a seed.

Two points:

1. While there is such a Twitter account as @importantnews, they said no such thing about Mr. Danson.
2. As far as I know, Ted Danson is alive and well.

Despite that, hundreds of people believed me at face value without checking any of the facts. The rumor spread and I started even getting emails from friends asking if I was personally affected by the news (hence my concerned Twitter post).

No, I'm not concerned, nor would I be if Ted had died. He was great on Cheers, but it's not like he's my uncle or anything.

Though it did entertain me to see just how gullible the masses are and how easily manipulated Twitter really is. I'm smiling; what more do you want?

(This originally started out as a review of the Xbox 360's Batman: Arkham Asylum. Then, well ... it changed. Consider this a look at how games journalism works at 5:47AM.)

Have you ever seen one of those Discovery Channel documentaries on how amazing the jaguar is?

It’s a big cat, yeah, and has all the grace, sharp teeth and innate evil that comes along with that species, but more impressive is just how amazing this animal is at killing shit. Have you seen this thing? It’s insane! Here’s a 350lb animal that thinks simply killing huge herbivores is pussy shit. While those lazy-assed lions hunt in packs to take down some malnourished wildebeests (who probably would have died of dysentery anyway), the jaguar is busy biting airplanes in half and dragging boats around with its dick.

I'm single again.

I think I'm done dating. Forever.

That's neither hyperbole or whiny teen angst; Instead it's a melancholy commentary on my own personal definition of "forever."

Maybe I'll update this with a longer explanation later on, but for the moment I'm going to take some dilaudid and stop thinking about it.

Point 1: I'm an atheist.

Point 2: The universe -- reality -- serves no purpose except to exist. We're all collections of molecules and organized energy randomly, chaotically smashed together by chance.

Point 3: This shit is really fucking depressing.

This is how I came to the idea that religion was not the stupid institution to be rebelled against and endlessly mocked of my childhood, but the important, crucial guiding figure in the lives of billions of people that it truly is. Most people simply can't -- or won't -- face up to the reality of existence, because the reality of existence is a great reason to eat a gun.

Or, more specifically, it offers no reasons not to. When you're down, when your girlfriend has left you for some other dude, or you can't pay your rent, there really is no valid, overarching, eternal reason not to cut your own head off to escape from the crushing ennui of life.

On the other hand you have these pleasant stories about some magical sky wizard and a bearded guy in robes who loves everyone and wants everyone to be happy. They tell you there's a very good reason to keep on keepin' on: Because life is precious and helping others is important and everything is interconnected and important.

They make for nice stories, but then reality crashes the party with its reason and logic and math and the ideas behind the entire thing fall apart.

It's sad.

Why?

You love us men occasionally and we will request such things, but when we break up, we men inevitably stumble on these photos and sigh. Seeing the sublimely beautiful form of one whom we are no longer allowed to send flowers or whisper "I Love You" unexpectedly to is a torture worse than death.

If love is humanity's greatest gift to itself, revelling in the impermanent ethers of the emotion must be our most painful slight.

Mass media is inherently guilty of corrupting any positive messages women ever get during their upbringing. From the time you ladies are young you're inundated with overtly sexualized images of how you "should be" if you ever want to hope to attract a mate -- a goal that the media insists is the ultimate prize in a young woman's life.

Now maybe I'm old-fashioned -- and yeah, Freud was a bit off on some of his concepts -- but let's examine something for a moment: Freud had this idea that during development people create their image of an ideal mate based on those representations of the opposite sex that they have close at hand, ie their parents. If a hypothetical young boy has a mother with brown hair, thick legs and small breasts, it's quite likely that he'll seek the same in a mate, or at least have some innate predilection towards such once he's grown.

If we are to take that as true for the purpose of our argument, then don't we have to assume that the media ideal -- that of the hyper thin, hairless, large-breasted, blonde woman -- is only relevant for people who are brought up by women who meet that ideal? Since women who meet that ideal are so rare, don't we have to assume that the stereotype is true in so few cases as to be inherently false?

Thus men -- and I do mean all men, even those who are going to try to disagree with me -- have a wide range of tastes. Some like larger women, some like their mates to shave their pubic hair, some like freckles, and so on.

Of course, it would be cost prohibitive for the media to use spokesladies who represent EVERY variation in the female form, so they instead settle on the simple stereotype. You can fault them for being lazy, but it's not as if they're maliciously ruining women's lives.

What's the point of this whole thing? Simply, women need to learn to like who they are no matter what they look like and no matter what Cosmo tells them. There's a reason why men exhibit much fewer symptoms of body dysmorphism, and that's that we know that some woman, somewhere will like us the way we are, assuming we aren't total bastards.

And even then, some women have had total bastards for dads, so they probably dig that too.

Thus, ladies, don't fret so much if your eyebrows aren't trimmed, or if you put on a few pounds. We men don't care nearly as much as you'd think, and unless your goal is to bang the entirety of American mass media, you will eventually find someone who digs you exactly the way you are.

At the moment a surplus of acetaminophen is doing a dance through my blood/brain barrier and as a result my nose is only picking up the scent of chemical burns. Normally one downs a few Tylenol and gets relief from aches and pains after half of hour of the pills breaking down and converting into their component pieces in one's bloodstream, but if you take too much -- not enough to actually hurt you, but close -- your head gets a bit foggy and your sinuses burn.

How does this tie into the racism argument swirling around Resident Evil 5?

It's a metaphor: These games scratch an itch, in this case entertainment, and as a series continues it will inevitably broach subjects that some find touchy, or painful. Racism, for instance.

Like the burning in my sinuses -- which has already begun to dissipate -- those bitching about their perceived racism of Resident Evil 5's angry African villagers will forget about their anger a few days after the game hits shelves. A week from release it will be just another footnote on the RE5 Wikipedia page.

With that sort of attention span, how can any subject generated by a videogame -- even one as potentially incendiary as racism -- be considered meaningful? How can I be expected to give half a fuck when everyone will have gotten over their hurt in less time than it takes to construct a proper gallows on which to lynch the offending party in a show of ironic overreaction?

But of course, since I'm paid to weigh in on this kinda thing, I'll offer the following on the controversy: Assuming Capcom did intend some slight against the native folk of Africa, who gives a fuck? You don't see PETA bitching about the game's portrayal of evil zombie dogs do you?

If games are art -- as many of those proclaiming RE5's racism would argue -- it is free to explore subjects like racism in any form it sees fit, and while that gives the viewer the freedom to react in any way he or she pleases, it is not anyone's place to demand the inevitable recall or official apology from the corporation.

(Yes, I realize no recall or apology has yet been demanded, but it's coming. Wait until the game hits shelves and Fox News gets a hold of it. It doesn't take James Carville to tie Obama's recent election to some blasphemous game that paints blacks as bloodthirsty savages.)

I wonder what it is about driving endless freeways early in the dark of the morning that makes my brain compile such awesome ideas. I don't dream anymore -- aside from drug-induced nightmares when I forget to avoid such things -- so maybe my brain compensates by being all hyper-creative when my body is doing the muscle-memory thing to steer.

After driving for 8 years it takes an almost sum-negative amount of concentration to trace a straight, 300 mile line, so why wouldn't my mind take a shot at completing the novels, screenplays and assorted other attempts at monetizing my ideas which I'd otherwise left abandoned since moments after my attempts at beginning them?

Now all I need is some sort of car secretary to take down these ideas as they come to me. With the economy in shambles I imagine hiring someone to clickity-clack on a typewriter while I drive would be inexpensive, right?

Or, even better, I could tell the higher ups at Wired that I need an intern! Right? I can totally justify that! I have, like, files to sort and shit. And my salary totally warrants not paying a 19-year-old journalism major to do all the stupid shit I can't be bothered with during my strenuous 2 hour work day.

After all the pain medication I've been on in my life, I wonder if there is some scientific, empirical way to test my peak tolerance to opiate narcotics.

Sure, I could down pills or shoot heroin until I OD, but then I wouldn't be around afterward to marvel at just how much it took to put me down.