What’s Important

So it’s Christmas. A time for family, for reflection, for drinking too much and eating too much and propping up the retail industry. I’m officially pretty humbug – I go in for the ‘eating too much’ and that’s about it – but around this time of year everyone starts spewing on about ‘what’s really important’. Like spending time with loved ones, even if they give you a headache, and thinking about all those starving kids in Africa while you watch your own little monsters unwrap their mountain of gifts and proceed to systematically destroy them by bending all the wrong parts or putting them in the washing machine.

By now, with less than ten days to the big shambles, everyone should be pretty deep into their panic. There are dinners to be planned and last minute presents, despite the fact the stores have had the Christmas stuff up since mid-November and everyone’s been wearing Santa hats for over a month now.

So, when the day itself arrives, the big family lunch is over and the panic subsides a bit, you should be getting a bit of deep contemplation in. It’s your last chance, really – nobody has ever claimed a strong sense of spirituality about Boxing Day, so you have to get all that thinking done of Christmas afternoon. Here are some handy steps and starters to get you through this trying time:

1. Find a comfortable chair. In the shade outside is good.

2. Engage brain. This may take a while, depending on how much you use it during the year. Christmas thinking is a full-blown maintenance test, you have to use everything to see if it all works before you abandon most of it for another year in favour of the Autopilot.

3. Pick one of the topics below. I’ve organised them according to mood, so you can spin out that sunny optimism or create a dark aura of intense self-righteous anger around yourself to ward off unwelcome conversation:

Cheerful: Wasn’t this a great year? I mean, what happened this year? President Obama was sworn in and the Western world has taken another giant step towards giving people of any race and creed equal rights. And Tiger Woods struck another blow for the black men by sleeping with over half the women in the US! What great progress we’ve made! And then his wife put women’s rights in the ring by making him schoose between her or the golf! Oh, and science will soon be able to play with genetics like Lego. Truly, we have come so far.

Gloomy: This year was pretty bad. There were a lot of wars. Kevin Rudd’s still koala-faced and kinda weird, and now Tony Abbot, Lord of the Weasels, is leader of the Opposition. That’ll be a showdown: koala versus weasel. Copenhagen will be another miserable waste of time and soon my house will be flooded as sea levels rise. My granchildren will have to be surgically gilled to survive in a world that is increasingly full of saltwater. And my team lost in the first few rounds of the AFL. Yippee.

Rage: Everyone screwed me over this year. [insert something your neighbours/local council/government/universe did that was not 100% in your favour and continue along that line, getting really steamed up and consuming so much alcohol you eventually get up, shout something incomprehensible, and fall asleep].

And now you’ve done your thinking.

On the matter of what’s important, last night I heard a line from the new Bon Jovi song, ‘We Weren’t Born To Follow’: ‘life is a bitter pill to swallow’. Either the guy who wrote that couldn’t find a good rhyme that wasn’t totally idiotic, or he actually believed that. Maybe I’d just had a really excellent day, or was in a freakishly good mood, but that started me off on a strange track of thought. ‘Life is a bitter pill to swallow’ implies that it’s something unpleasant that’s been forced on us, like a surprise Christmas shopping trip to Carousel, when in actual fact there is nothing but that ‘bitter pill’ and that ‘bitter pill’ is what allows bitter pillocks like the guy who writes the songs for Bon Jovi to write really stupid lyrics. That’s not even touching on the fact that, as a band, Bon Jovi have enjoyed relative popularity and wealth that could not have been achieved if they were just a collection of loose atoms somewhere. Even if you believe in some sort of afterlife – which I don’t – or reincarnation – which I don’t – you still only effectively get one life. Either you spend all eternity afterwards sitting on some cloud somewhere, bored to tears and wondering if you can swap your white robe in for some jeans and a t-shirt, or you completely forget everything about who you are or were, so going round the bouy seems like a totally new experience. You get one shot. Medical science has lengthened that shot somewhat since olden times, when everyone was dead by forty and they didn’t have Foxtel, but it’s still just one shot. Once you’re done, you can’t turn around and say, ‘Can I try that again?’

So, bitter pill or not, make the most of it. Become knowledgeable in something, a cause that you can put some serious work into if you like the whole warm fuzzy thing. Travel a lot. Hitchhike and backpack, don’t take set, staid, vanilla tours. Learn as many languages as you can while you do so, whatever – just make sure that you know, when you’re lying dying in a hospital bed, that your life was as good a story as you could make it, and that when the time comes for someone to write your biography it’ll be a damn good read.

Merry Christmas

Exam Insanity, Amongst Other Excuses

Just a brief note for your entertainment and edification: two musical numbers I came up with in recent months, for different reasons. There were accompanying videos and pictures, but WordPress wants me to pay for stuff, which I refuse to do on principal.

The first is the (now locally infamous) ‘Still Ranting’. As the title would suggest, this is a modification of Portal’s masterpiece end song Still Alive, which I cobbled together as part of a trolling joke about a friend of mine who put together the short-lived ‘Poorly Drawn Comics’ site. Unfortunately, said friend was… less than appreciative.

‘This was a triumph

I’m making a note here: huge success

It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction

Poorly Drawn Comics

We do what we must because we can

For the good of all of us

Except the ones who are trolled.

But there’s no use crying over every mistake

You just keep on trying ’til you run out of cake

And the ranting gets done

And you get all steamed up

At the people who are commenting.

You’re not even angry

You’re being so sincere right now

Even though I broke your heart

And killed you

And tore you to pieces

And threw every piece into a fire

And as they burned it hurt because

You were so happy for me.

Now these points of data make a beautiful line

And you’re page hits are up

You’re releasing on time!

So be glad you got burned

Think of all the things you learned

From the people who are still alive.

Go ahead and block me

I think I prefer to stay away

Maybe you’ll find someone else to read you.

Maybe a woman

THAT WAS A JOKE. HA! HA! FAT CHANCE.

Anyway this cake is great

It’s so delicious and moist.

Look at me still talking

When there are others to read

When I glance in here

It makes me glad I’m not you!

I’ve experiments to run

And there is research to be done

On the people who are still worthwhile.’

Actually, rereading that, maybe his anger was not so unjustified… Please don’t sue me, Valve.

The second one of my holiday ditties (may I be struck down by a xylophone if I ever use the word ‘ditty’ again) is the Democracy Song, a spontaneous creation inspired by my friend’s Politics and Legal teacher. This teacher apparently decided to bring a cake in the shape of Parliament House to class, something which has claimed my Absurdity Of The Year Award. This piece is meant to be sung loudly, to the tune of This Is The Way We Brush Our Hair (or, if you’re too macho for that, What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor), preferably in a public place while skipping around wearing pigtails.

‘This is the way democracy works,
Democracy works, democracy works.
This is the way democracy works,
Earli in the morning

The people vote in the representatives,
The representatives, The representatives
The people vote in the representatives,
Earli in the morning

The Upper House is full of nobs,
Full of nobs, full of nobs,
The Upper House is full of nobs,
Earli in the morning

The children will eat the Parliament house,
The Parliament house, the Parliament house,
The children will eat the Parliament house,
But Bob should keep his day job.

Bogans, bogans, bogans, bogans,
Bogans, bogans, bogans, bogans,
Bogans, bogans, bogans, bogans,
Bogans, bogans, bogans,

We’ll never let the immigrants in,
Immigrants in, immigrants in,
We’ll never let the immigrants in,
Because we’re xenophobic

It’s a really screwy job,

Screwy job, screwy job,

It’s a really screwy job,
And they’re screwing it up.

Climate change is up the spout,
Up the spout, up the spout,
Climate change is up the spout,
And Penny Wong is creepy.

Wilson Tuckey is a troll,
Is a troll, is a troll,
Wilson Tuckey is a troll,
And he eats politicians’

Enjoy.

Dead Rising… And Falling Again, With Help

Time for an erratic post. What with exams finally over – and all the information that I hurriedly forced into my brain subsequently and unceremoniously dumped – I have turned my attention back to the important things. That is, games. And zombies. And games with zombies in them.

My most recent acquisition is Capcom’s Dead Rising, the not-at-all-based-on-a-certain-Romero-film game about a freelance photojournalist trapped in a zombie-infested mall for three days. Gameplay-wise, it’s a masterpiece – flaws like the transceiver and poor human AI are momentary irritations that fall away when you find the next unlikely tool of zombie mutilation. A personal favourite is the heated frying pan, used to melt the faces off the shambling undead, though nearly all the weapons in the game are a joy for zombie fans, with amusingly brutal animations or nerdgasmic destructive power, and quite often both.

The story, told through ‘Cases’, is… a fairly typical old-school zombie-horror backstory. Mutant bugs and secret government experiments were in there somewhere. To be honest, I didn’t care. When, two hours into my first playthrough, I was informed by a darkening screen and some ominous music that ‘the truth has been lost forever’, I celebrated by killing a few more zombies with a lawnmower. And then with a chainsaw. And a post-hole digger. Side missions involving rescuing other, slightly less enthusiastic survivors or despatching those whose high-spirits have gotten a little out-of-hand – to the point of intentionally maiming and killing humans along with zombies – were similarly ignored unless they were in my way. And while the continual updates from the goody-two-shoes janitor made me feel as though I were in some way missing the actual point of the game, I was in fact playing it the way it was meant to be played. The save system is built around the New Game Plus system, in which all your character’s details are carried over to the new game (you can only run one at a time), so spending the first couple of runthroughs gleefully smacking zombie arse helpfully levels you up enough to make taking on the more annoying bosses easier, as well as giving you experience of the game’s weapons and environment.

The save system was irritating to start off with, but I got over that pretty quickly. Because Frank, your character, has limited health – you start with four points, and will lose one if a zombie manages to get his decomposing mitts on you – the distance between the save points (disguised as restrooms) becomes frustrating pretty quickly, especially if you’re attempting a trek through a heavily infested area *cough*Al Fresco Plaza*cough*. This forces you to think more strategically, especially when combined with weapons of varying effectiveness that break after a certain number of uses and restoring health, and eventually the joy of a well-planned (I use the term loosely – it is a zombie smasher game, after all) sortie overcomes the frustration of not being able to save whenever you like. That said, it does not make rescuing the irredeemably stupid survivors any more pleasant.

I understand why the survivor AI had to be compromised, and I think the developers made the right choice – having 800 zombies on screen at once vs. decently bright humans… Tough choice. In a way, the AI’s tendency to stubbornly charge into the middle of the largest crowd of slavering monsters and then, with the pistol you’ve just handed them, loose off six shots only to hit you with every single one, makes the game more true to its horror movie heritage. Nearly every character in the typical horror movie acts with a stupidity that is somehow worse than the fanged, slobbering nightmares they’re trying to escape from. Having to hold hands with or carry the more terrified survivors – which removes your ability to do anything but dodge and pray – was a nice touch, though.

But whatever gripes I have about terrible plot, annoying AI or Nintendo Difficulty are completely superseded by the fact that the game allowed me to hit a lot of zombies with a lot of big, fun objects. One last point worth making, of particular amusement, is just how ugly Frank is. The devs wanted an ‘everyman’… but quite seriously, the guy is a troll. So, in summary: Dead Rising makes me happy. Very, very happy. It will probably do the same (amend that to ‘probably has done the same’, because I’m behind the times) to all other fans of the zombie horror genre. Hooray for disembowelment!

October

Ten days into the new month and already it has become clear that it is the Month of Change and Introduction. The score so far: October heralds the end of the school year for me, coming up short and fast and rather shorter and faster for a those friends who will be taking their TEE soon. October has introduced me to the game Scribblenauts, an education in itself and the only game that allows me to satisfy my English teacher vs. C’thulu fantasies. It has brought the unpleasant news that I still have to wait two months for the single most important film event of the year – sorry, fanpires, I’m talking about Zombieland.

October has also brought forth two connected events rather closer to me. I don’t usually talk about my life on the blog, figuring that it’s ever-so-slightly disturbing and that, as most of my readers are friends who feel some sort of obligation to read one another’s blogs, they’d know already, but this particular tale cannot be passed over. I feel many important lessons may be learned, so pay attention.

The first of these events – which are not, by the way, in chronological order, for reasons of dramatic integrity – was the passing from my life of a friend. This chap, who shall be here known as ‘Bony’ (enjoy whatever innuendo you feel is necessary), was convinced that a continued association with yours truly was too hard to sustain by a particularly good prank, as played by myself and another associate. Bony had a number of blogs and virtual outlets for his creativity and thoughts, similar to the one you are viewing now, and on a quiet and rather dull evening, me and my associate stumbled across one and thought it would be productive, not to say entertaining, to leave a few comments for our friend under a variety of assumed names. Hands together for the internet, folks; it’s the only tool since government and religion that makes being an arse so easy. Anyway, in fits of hilarious creativity, we successfully trolled Bony’s blog all evening, all the while having a pleasant conversation with him and others. Confused and not a little irritated, Bony initially assumed it was us, but with all the care and wit of a rhino stuck halfway through a wall we led him astray. His efforts to track us were to no avail, either, leading him to believe that we were somewhere in a basement in Queensland.

Having satisfied ourselves, we left Bony closing down his multitude of blogs in an attempt to forestall further trolling. In the following week, we chuckled to one another about it, and one fine evening, in the middle of a conversation with him, we revealed our role in the prank, feeling that whatever combination of abuse and blunt objects were thrown our way would be well worth the laugh. We were rather surprised and disappointed when he left us with a limp parting shot. I have subsequently been informed that our schoolboy prank was rather soul-destroying, and that dear ol’ Bony could no longer sustain the pretence that he didn’t want to spool my guts over the branches of the nearest tree. Therefore: RIP Bony.

Ego-stoking boasts now out of the way, October also brings news to the rather sparse crowd of Unconcerned readers, by way of an update and insight into the mind that sporadically tries to entertain and provoke thought: I am writing a screenplay. Having been reminded that maintaining the title ‘writer’ actually requires me to write something, and inspired by a friend who is also working on a movie, I decided to step away from the ethereal novel and try my hand at producing something for the big screen. Due to lack of creativity, the working title of this work is also Unconcerned, but due to health and safety regulations is not based on the content of this blog. As I mentioned before, most of the readers of this blog are long-suffering friends who have already had more than their fair share of this project rammed down their throats as I strive to produce something ‘new’ and ‘interesting’.

It is a twist on the post-apocalypse genre, in which buildings are left standing but humanity is not. In most of the genre, it is the other way around, with enough of the population left hanging around to revive the human race – thus providing every stereotypical sexless nerd’s dream by creating a world in which no female can rightly say ‘no’. This always seemed a bit weird to me. It’s nice and allows a ‘we will overcome’ theme, but it seems a bit unlikely given the fairly well-explained disasters. I have reversed this, by having a strange and completely random disaster with very strict consequences – a real end to humanity. Which sounds like a real downer, when I come to think of it. Oh well.

So October is the Month of Change, bringing forth from its fresh corpse an unlikely metaphor for the freedom of summer. In which I will be forced to get a job. Joy and rainbows all round.

Last Man On Earth

Imagine waking up and finding yourself alone. Not just in your home, but your street, your city, and your planet. This is no zombie apocalypse, either: the pressing need to keep your organs on the inside of your skin is not major motive. Maybe the world is trashed and broken, maybe it’s as clean as it was yesterday, but you’re alone, one hundred percent truly and totally isolated.

The issue of survival would raise its head, but somewhere amid the ruins there’ll be food, or small fluffy squeaky things that can be turned into food. If everything is strangely whole and abandoned, it’s even easier. So then you settle down in your house, or the largest standing building you can find, build a fire out of broken office furniture and roast your little dead squeaky thing. Now what? Sleep. Then in the morning, you eat what’s left of the squeaky thing, and head out into the bright and empty world…

And again you hit that question: now what? The only threat you’re under is starvation, and that’s so far-off as to be invisible. You don’t have a job to go to; you don’t need money. Maybe you hold out hope that there are others in the world somewhere, but it may take you some time to get to them.

The question of life as the last human on earth is a complicated one, but it comes back to this: if you’re the last man on Earth, how can you tell you’re not hallucinating everything? There is no one to ground you in reality, so reality itself is questionable…

The Line In The Sand

Society equals rules. They tell us: do not steal. Do not kill. Do not wander around in public without at least a fig leaf, please. These rules, particularly the last one, are for the protection of the general public.

We, the public, abide by these, for the most part. Even when we cut close to the line of the law, we feel a vague, itchy uncomfortableness. There are those who enforce the law – the police, the judicial system – but, in reality, what keeps most of us from straying beyond the rules are the words in our heads. They are the line in the sand, a warning not to step beyond and a dare to do it anyway. We all know the consequences of crime: a fine, or jail, or both. For most of us, the threat of that is enough to turn that line into a wall, which we then promptly forget in favour of the latest football scores.

So we decide, at least subconsciously, to keep within the legal bounds of society for ease. We no longer have to think about it; it just is. And because we know that society equals rules, we accept that.

There are other rules, though. Ones less visible, and some harder to define, rules that funnel our thoughts and beliefs. They are drilled into our heads by every form of media: family values, the benefits of faith, the existence of a transcendental ‘true love’ that crosses all barriers. In action, we don’t always abide by these rules; the evidence in our lives barely ever supports them. We still feel it our duty to defend these ideals, though. They worm themselves into the lowest level of the brain and lodge in there, projecting the illusion of a united society onto the back of the images streaming in from the eyes. Without those ideals, societies are just large groups of people who, for reasons of ease, aren’t killing and eating each other. Small family groups and circles of associates.

Those ideas are binding, though. You can’t destroy them. People hold on to them so tightly, like little lifebouys. You can choose to ignore them, though, and make your own decisions based on the evidence of your own eyes. It’s all very ‘ignore the lies’, but it’s worth considering what you really value, and whether you value it out of truth and necessity, or because the TV tells you to. It’s outside another kind of line in the sand, but there’s a big ol’ world out there.

The Silence of Empty Streets

Anyone that knows me would say I have the faintest twinkling of an inkling of an obsession with the modern apocalypse genre: the silent earth of brown and grey wastes, and the bloody streets of the zombie rising, are images that have firmly attached themselves as the screensavers of my brain. Fortunately, I am not the only one who suffers from this curious infection. In my cybernetic trawlings, I have stumbled across many blogs and webpages with headings like “The Only Problem I’ll Have When The Zombie Apocalypse Comes Is Containing My Excitement”, despite the fact that anybody who is going to pour a significant portion of time into maintaining something like that is going to be one of the first to be ripped apart by the undead hordes. I salute them.

Obviously the disappearance of very nearly all of humanity is not an image that appeals to everyone, but I can understand those to whom it does. Humanity is a very big, complex thing these days, but in the Western world particularly, its major feature is how dull it is. Obviously for those struggling to live in third-world nations, this is not a concern, but the western apocalypse fan would scorn such a simple plan as giving up all his belongings and heading out into the wild to starve, because there will always be a civilisation to return to. Our world is one of concrete, metal and glass, all blunted edges and warning labels and political correctness.

When the human race is wiped out by nuclear war/strange diseases/the walking dead, all of that goes out the window. No one is going to tell you not to strap ammo belts across your chest and then set your t-shirt on fire. Getting up at seven to go to work is no longer an issue, as your boss and most of your coworkers are most likely dead, and even if they weren’t, the people who run the supermarket certainly are. Of course, waking up at all could become one of your major concerns, depending on the nature of your little global catastrophe, but this tends to be overlooked. Money, that which had driven the grey drudge of your life before, is no longer an issue, as the key point of bargaining after the apocalypse is that you are alive and most merchants are dead. If they are not dead, it becomes a question of who has the bigger piece of wood with rusty nails through one end. The fact that you, the survivor, are a clammy sort of person who sits in an air-conditioned office all day and who has spent your entire life collecting skills that are completely and utterly useless when dealing with the zombie horde or the issue of producing food doesn’t bother you – the apocalypse will automatically turn you into a survival machine.

The image of the post-human Earth is one of freedom for any apocalypse fan. There are those who await the storm for the opportunity to create their own society afterwards, a sort of power dream/revenge fantasy in one. Others, myself included, are in it purely for the absolute control over your own life that comes of being responsible for your own survival, and the thrill of having no one yell at you for throwing that brick. Without ties to people or work, the latter kind of apocalypse enthusiast will wander the silent streets of the old world, decapitating the occasional shambling corpse along the way. These days, too, more and more apocalyptians are becoming aware that being able to build your own website is not high on a list of skills required for survival; they turn these skills instead to spreading awareness, creating global survival plans (which they control, obviously) and chronicling their forays into the world of combat, food production and basic mechanics and medicine. The 21st century has, so far, produced some interesting things, but the most fascinating of these is a breed of person not only ready to deal with the inevitable collapse of society, but who are looking forward to it.

And… We’re On In Five

Well, I’m back. I’ve rebooted the page (not that you’d notice, apart from the fancy new header), reorganised everything and even got myself a twitter account so you can see what’s on my mind at any given moment, because your life is as empty as mine.

In gaming news – because you wanted to know so badly, I can tell – I have recently become addicted to seeking out and playing the weirdest freeware indie games the net has to offer. Of particular note is Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s (of Zero Punctuation fame) Chzo Mythos, a series of four adventure games with a ludicrously complex but deeply compelling storyline. Despite having graphics that made me laugh on first opening it up, the game actually manages to be quite suspenseful, although playing for longer than half an hour at a time will result in extreme frustration as you wander aimlessly back and forth, trying to figure out what the hell you’re supposed to be doing.

The beautiful thing about indie games is the freedom they have. While they are not graphically as impressive as Fallout 3 or Halo, they are far more exploratory, probing the depths of what games can actually do. Disturbingly, they can be quite philosophical, based around concepts of death, as in the platformer Fringe, or madness, as in Flipside. Many are also entertainingly surreal, something I think there is not enough of in mainstream games. The independent games movement is using gaming to explore our perception of reality.

Playing all these marvellous little games, most of which rely on very simple mechanics yet which are still very gripping, has made me want to boot up my very rusty and malformed coding abilities. My programming prowess currently extends to a particularly bad half-finished text-based game about being trapped in a house with a mad stalker zombie chainsaw guy (I was young, please forgive me), but with time and a lot of help from the internet, I may be able to learn how to make something worthwhile. I certainly have enough ideas.

Of course, this will be wedged between schoolwork, my fledgling script, and occasionally updating the Black Knight, so progress will be slow. I’ll keep you posted.