Day 191: Verdant

Just a little one for tonight. Fran is lying in my bed, and the light and the typing keep her awake, so I don't want to be too long. It’s late anyway, and I’m full of fish and chips, and I’m tired like you wouldn’t believe.

We had a long relationship talk this evening. Being an adult is hard, and messy, and there are no obvious answers. But we're doing the best we can. I think that's all any of us can do.

Check this out though. It’s a picture I asked my friend Jackson to draw for the blog, and he’s knocked it right out of the park. I love his style so much, the detail, the curlicues, the flow and the verdant decomposing sense of life. I’m still not sure how I’m going to use the picture, my Blogger template doesn’t allow for header images, and my web design skills are paltry, and probably the whole blog needs an overhaul - but it’s finding the time, the energy, as with everything else.

But regardless, the artwork is fantastic. It's exactly what I was picturing when I gave him the vaguest, least helpful spec imaginable. Thankfully he somehow went and drew precisely what was in my head. Go check out his stuff on Instagram, it’s seriously the best.

Anyway, I’ve got a bed to jump in and a girlfriend to go snuggle down next to. See you for now.

Day 190: Scores

Tired from work, from writing late last night, from fighting to get that post done when the thoughts were fizzling and evaporating somewhere between mind and screen. Stumbling after them in the dark, grabbing their tails, forcing them back into existence. Forcing myself through the misery of writing so badly, of the words being such a malformed betrayal of the initial impulse to write. Forcing myself to finish a draft that made no sense, that was so clumsy and hesitant, that simply did not work. The night getting late, seeing the time, grabbing tufts of my hair and wanting to scream that I flat out could not do it, that I could not get a post up, that I would have to write just a single sentence saying that I'd failed and I had nothing for today.

...But then doing star jumps in my room to get the blood pumping. Making another mug of tea. Slapping myself back awake and grinding out a second draft that made slightly more sense. Tidying it up, trimming it, making it as presentable as possible. Publishing it to the blog, letting out a sigh of relief, and then going to Red Dead for half an hour to unwind my frazzled brain before bed.

Riding my horse far out into the wilderness, watching the ground change beneath me, the rustling of the grass. Listening to the wind soughing the trees. Seeing silhouettes of trees on distant cliff tops, stark and lonely with the moonlight shining through them. A gully far below me. Unseen water flowing in the dark.

Then PlayStation off, six hours sleep, and up for a Saturday open. I'm stuck working a perpetual Saturday open. It always seems to be Saturday open, I'm trapped in purgatory, or in an American TV show where the twist is that they're all really in purgatory. Hey, American TV show writers - come up with better twists!

And now I'm home again, feeling flat and low. But I don't need to be low. It was so tough getting that post finished last night, yet I managed it. If I'm going to focus so intently on the times I fail - and I am, I am going to focus on that - then it's only right, only fair, that I also focus on the times I succeed.

If you keep track of all the goals your team concedes, but not the ones they score, well, then you have no idea how the match really went, do you?

Except, of course, the problem with depression is it finds ways to discount the positives. "That goal doesn't count," it says. "You were offside. You were lucky. It won't happen again." Or else it says the other team are too easy to be worth winning against. "Happy about beating those amateurs? Get real. They're awful. To have only won by the amount you did is embarrassing. It's actually more like failure..."

But that's depression. We know this. I know this. It is the nature of the beast.

I've been playing better recently. That's all that needs to be said. I've been improving. I've scored 190 goals in 190 days, and that's pretty special. Some have been halfway-line belters; some I've walked in after tussles in the box.

But they've all gone in.

Take the victories. Appreciate them for what they are. Keep turning up, let the result be what it may, and remember to enjoy the game for its own sake. It's all just a laugh on a Saturday in the rain, eh?

And make sure to rest. Rest is important. It's what I'm going to do now.

Day 189: Let's have an argument about Apu

Or, OK, a friendly discussion.

You’ve seen the rumours that Apu is going to be written out of the Simpsons, right, due to the character’s problematic nature as an Indian-American stereotype?

And I presume, like all my other friends on social media, you’re up in arms about this. You feel it’s a step too far for political correctness, that it’s needless censorship of something you love, taking way too seriously a show that at heart has always been irreverent and intended to shock.

What about Groundskeeper Willie? you cry. What about Cletus and Comic Book Guy and that Italian chef? It’s only a silly cartoon! Where will the crusade end?

Well, sorry, buddies, but I’m not really with you here. I agree in part, but there’s a real issue of privilege that you’re not seeing, and it makes me sad.

Comedy is a weapon. As such it must be wielded with responsibility. Irreverence should be used to tear down that which we revere too highly, to remind ourselves that those who would position themselves as gods also do smelly shits out of their bums, that organisations that attempt to rule the world are just as prone to buffoonery and incompetence as any of us. Humour should be used to address power imbalances, to level the playing field.

And, no, there is no topic that should be out of bounds, in my eyes - but the more emotive the topic, the more responsibility the comedy writer holds to navigate the issue adroitly.

Make fun of school shootings, is what I’m saying, but not of parents grieving for children killed in school shootings. Mock Catholic priests, don’t mock the boys that they rape.

I mean, we all know this. It is rudimentary stuff. You can find the funny in any topic, but sometimes you have to work really hard.

And when it comes to Apu? I think too often they haven’t been working hard at all.

I get that the issue isn’t cut-and-dry. These things exist on the spectrum. At one end you have things that are clearly not appropriate. The Simpsons may love to stereotype, but they don’t have a recurring black character who deals drugs on street corners and eats chicken wings and robs people at gunpoint. We can all agree that that would only reinforce negative stereotypes. We can all agree that that would be fucking racist.

Then up at the other end of the spectrum you have Groundskeeper Willie, and what amounts to a silly joke among equals. Scottish people don’t have a hard time of it in America - Americans creepily idolise the Scots, scurry to find any vague connections to Scotland in their own ancestry, love the idea of a country with history dating back more than a few centuries (disregarding that of the indigenous folk the current Americans starved and massacred and cheated out of their land). The portrayal of Willie is offensive, totally denigratory, and utterly harmless.

It’s power balance, see? The scales are equal, and it’s like banter between friends.

And then you have Apu. Where does he sit on the spectrum? For me, somewhere in the middle. He’s become a rounded character (although he wasn’t early on), many storylines have treated him with respect, there have been great jokes by him, at our expense (like when he’s referred to, next to a “Christian” and a “Jew” as “miscellaneous”, and he replies: “Hindu! There are 700 million of us.”)

I like him. He’s one of the family. He is a living person now, and to phase him out of the show would be to do him a disservice.

But the power balance is all wrong. You and me see the funny accent, the catchphrases, the octuplets, and believe it all to be, like with Groundskeeper Willie, friends ribbing friends.

But it’s not about us. We are not in a position to know.

Have you ever been spat at in the schoolyard and told to fuck off back to the Kwik-E-Mart? Have you ever been yelled at to get a bath because you stink of curry, or because your skin is the colour of shit?

No? Then how can you know whether a representation of Indo-Americans is problematic? It is not your problem. You don’t get it. If the portrayal of Apu cannot hurt you in any single way then how can you say whether the portrayal is hurtful?

Do you see this? Do you understand this?

Sometimes your viewpoint is simply not the important one. Sometimes something that brings you some pleasure brings more people great pain. You have to step outside yourself and into their shoes, and think about it from their point of view.

A lot of Indo-Americans have stated they appreciated having Apu on their screens growing up, appreciated the exposure he gave to them - that it was nice to have even a stereotype of themselves up there as part of the conversation, even if he was voiced by a white guy putting on an accent unlike the way they really spoke. That the fact he evolved into a deeper character and how he entwined with the Simpsons family furthered race relations in the 90s.

But so many have also talked about childhoods with bullies daily shouting “Thank you, come again.” Of daily minor hate crimes all revolving around the one reference point that all schoolkids knew. That they still had to endure growing up where the most prominent figure like themselves on TV was a servile, penny-pinching convenience store owner who sold dodgy, out-of-date hot dogs and spoke in that voice designed by white people to make other white people laugh. The same voice white casting directors keep insisting Aziz Ansari and Hasan Minhaj and Kal Penn and Aparna Nancheria and every other Indo-American actor puts on in their auditions for cab drivers and store owners and whatever comedic sidekick role has been written for them, despite none of them talking like that.

I don’t want to see Apu written out of the Simpsons (even though it barely matters, as the show hasn’t been close to relevant for over a decade). But I think it’s healthy to have the conversation about it. To not be scared about bringing these points into the open. To listen to opposing points of view, and really think about them, and allow for the possibility that we may have been insensitive, callous, confused.

This isn’t a battle of extremes, of one right and wrong. It’s a discussion, messy, uncertain, and one we are so lucky to be able to have. Don’t be offended that people are offended at something that you yourself are not. Be cool, be open, consider alternatives, and above all stay civil. You’ll be surprised where the journey can take you..

Day 188: Red Dead Redissonance

Been playing more Red Dead today. As the game has opened up, pushed out of the prologue and into the main body, I've noticed an increasing problem with ludonarrative dissonance. This is a fancy term used by games journalists to help them forget they're paid to write website articles about children's toys, and refers to the discrepancy between a videogame's story as told through, on one hand, its cutscenes, its dialogue, the blurb on the back of the box, and, on the other, the story of the player's actual journey through the simulation.

So, in terms of Red Dead, we have a game that desperately wants you to think it's about the death of the American West, about civilisation supplanting freedom, about a hard-bitten gang of ageing outlaws who cannot get with the changing times and are destined to rob and ride through an ever-shrinking wilderness as the noose closes inexorably about them. The mood that the game's narrative wants to engender is a sombre, melancholic one.

Yet this is at odds with the tone conjured through your interactions with the game's systems. It is something you can find, if you turn off the minimap and the HUD, and trek out on lonely paths up into pine covered foothills with the moon shining down and the clouds rolling in and the music crying sad and windstruck above it all. And it is something that comes through in certain gameplay decisions - the long button presses, the need to clean your horse, oil your guns. 

But mostly this is not the case. If you let it, the game will guide you around its playground world as you tick off missions, collect collectables, perform chores for irritating characters, craft improved equipment, amass treasure, upgrade weapons, buy outfits and unlock drift cornering for your horses. Your jaw goes slack and your brain turns gooey in the middle and you sit in dribbling contentment as a steady stream of easy challenges and continuous rewards are fed into your waiting maw.

Arthur Morgan, the game's protagonist, is not, as you control him, a tragic anti-hero, but a poster child for consumerism and capitalism, a spoilt CEO hoovering up a land's resources in the name of distraction and entertainment

This is no different to any other mainstream videogame of 2018, or of the past decade, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. And it's not forced upon you. Like I said, you can ignore the "content" and simply use the game to go for a meditative horse ride in a simulated natural world so intricately envisioned that it genuinely brings peace to your mind.

But it's interesting, I think, that the biggest videogames still have such a tension at their core between the ambitions of their storytelling and the asinine nature of their systems. You can't be both a boxed set of HBO's Deadwood and a wood-chip playpen with swings and a slide and a hidden parent clapping you on. You can't tout the mature nature of your interactive storytelling medium - filled with swearing and sex-scenes, obvs - while so patently infantilising the player at every turn.

This is a reason, I think, why titles like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight have resonated so deeply. They get you lost, make you afraid, drop you in an imposing maze and force you up against your own failure again and again until any victory you achieve is utterly deserved. The mechanics of the game match the desired tone.

Red Dead, on the other hand, too often spoon feeds you ice cream. Lots of yummy ice cream, here it comes, lovely in the belly, open wide, nom nom in your mouth, oop you spilled a bit on your bib, but never mind dearest, let's try again, you'll get it this time, well done, here's your reward.

The reward: MORE ICE CREAM.

I like ice cream, I hasten to add. But the game isn't called ICE CREAM SIMULATOR 2, is it?

Day 187: Halloween

Hey you. Have you recently walked into the break room at work to find Gale and John and Lizzie chatting about decorations, and you've said, Oh, what are the decorations for? and they've paused and looked at Gale, who has coughed and said he's throwing a small Halloween party tonight, just more of a get-together really, a quiet affair, and then he's paused again and no one has said anything and Lizzie has started looking through the snack cupboard intently and John has busied himself at the coffee machine, and then finally Gale has asked if you would like to come to the party, and you've said that, yes, that sounds lovely, and Gale has said Great, well, great, OK, yes, OK then, and the three of them have walked out of the break room and now here you are with a Halloween party to attend and no ideas for a costume?

Well, if so then fear not, because I've got you covered with this handy list of practical and cost-effective costumes to ensure your night goes spooooookily well!

- That celebrity you sort of look like. Remember that time you wore your hair down and Todd from accounting called you Emma Stone in the morning meeting, and then when everyone was changing their Facebook profiles to their celebrity lookalikes you set yours to a photo of Emma Stone, and after a second glass of wine you added a comment to the photo in which you tagged Todd and said you didn't see the likeness yourself but maybe he was on to something, and you thought for a long time, on your sofa, alone, with now your third glass of Australian merlot, and finally you added a winking face emoji to the comment, and pressed send, and then you waited on your sofa not really watching Holby City on catch-up until past midnight when your phone buzzed with a notification telling you Todd had liked your comment, and you wore your hair down the next morning, and every day of morning meetings for three months, but Todd never said anything again, and later you found out he'd been sleeping with Lucy from HR since the office pub quiz last Christmas to which you'd not been invited because it would have "made the teams uneven"? Well, maybe it's time to bring back that classic.

- Something slutty. Why not crack out that risque dress from the back of the wardrobe you bought online two years ago and haven't yet had the courage to wear? Oh, but now you try it on you remember that it does make your breasts look less like the plump grapefruit of the model in the picture and more like two pale, shaved guinea pigs that have been gassed to death in their burrows. And the plunge neckline draws attention to that birthmark on your shoulder you hate. And your only tights without obvious ladders are the wrong colour, so there'll be no hiding the lumpy twists of your varicose veins. Maybe a slutty mummy then, which, contrary to the obvious interpretation, is just you in the dress and then wrapped head to toe in thick bandages. Perfect.

- Something political. That's what your co-workers appreciate about you, right, the fact you're au fait with current affairs? How about going as the woman "too ugly" for Jair Bolsonaro to rape? Someone "grabbed by the pussy" by the current Republican president, who bragged about it to the old Republican president's first cousin? Or an immigrant mother fleeing torture and rape in her country just to have her baby torn from her at the US border and interned in a barbed wire camp without adequate resources while being used as a symbol of hate to distract the masses while the ruling elite take all the money and give it to the already richest and most despicable of society? Or, no, maybe a Bangladeshi garment worker, sleeping on a concrete floor with fifteen other girls in a makeshift factory in an export-processing zone thousands of miles from her home village and family, earning a dollar and change for 80-hour gruelling weeks in horrendous conditions, where birth control pills are handed out like candy by managers who think pregnant women make for unproductive workers, and where those who do give birth have been known to do it under desks while at their machines, sometimes flushing babies down the toilet for fear of reprisal from bosses - and all this so the people at the party you are attending, these very people, can buy cheap costumes from Primark and Topshop and wear them once and then throw them away, which of course is also a contributing factor to the fashion industry being one of the worst offenders for pollution on the planet. Err. Why are you doing this again?

- Lucy from HR. She of the office pub quiz. She of the insouciantly tousled bangs. The thighs just the right amount of plump in her designer-label pencil skirts. The spine that arches seductively as she bends over Todd's desk and musses his papers playfully, picks up his pens and chews on them, pulls slowly but firmly on his tie with those long, elegant fingers, pulling until the tie goes taut, just a touch further, before letting it fall back and straightening herself and walking away on six-inch heels that surely she must have taken lessons somewhere to be able to glide so demurely across the room upon. Why not go as Lucy from HR? Slap on makeup, dye your hair, squeeze your calloused feet into heels, drink all of a bottle of Aldi-brand peach schnapps, and turn up to the party screaming to Todd that you've made yourself into the woman you know he wants. A foolproof plan.

- Yourself. Or go as yourself. You're 35. You've been single for four years now. You're not even sure if you're mentally secure enough to raise children, whether you want to bring them into this bitter world sliding inexorable into far-right fascism, but you're rapidly running out of time for that even to be an option. You've been overlooked for promotion on a continuous basis since you started at the firm that you were only ever working in as a stop-gap but in which you've now laboured for so long that it's listed as your employer on your Bebo profile, if Bebo profiles are even still a thing. The wallpaper has been peeling behind your dresser since at least last spring, and you have neither the energy nor the inclination to fix it. It just peels gradually higher and higher, and you feel a similar peeling inside yourself, down in your soul, it is as if your being is tearing slowly asunder, and soon you will tear right through and fall to the floor as two wispy sheets on the ground, not even making a mess because there is nothing, you feel, of any substance, nothing real or pulsing or beating, inside you. It is all dust. And your cat doesn't love you. He only stays because you feed him. You haven't painted in years. You look at your old sketchbooks now and it all looks so mundane, so uninspired, and you wonder if anything fuelled your old belief in your secret talent beyond that central illusion that you were special, that you mattered. But you are not special. You do not matter. You will die, alone, and then you will be gone, and no one will remember that you once lived, just as the universe itself will fade, the very energy that fires it pushing it slowly away from itself, into the reaches of oblivion, until every grain of matter comes to rest isolated and unseen and abandoned, staying there, in stasis, for eternity; empty, meaningless, dead.

On second thoughts, maybe you won't go to that party after all. Happy Halloween though!

Day 186: Vines

Blessed day off. But I slept late, then did nothing until Mike came round to play on the PlayStation. He wanted to see the cowboys on Red Dead. We ate French pastries and drank coffee, while in the game Mike rode my favourite horse off a cliff. Dammit Mike.

After he left I started feeling sad, the sadness descended like evening mist, blanketing everything, and I just sat doing missions on Red Dead and slumping further down in my chair. I finally turned the game off and decided I had to get moving and get out of the house. Then I sat for a while longer. Then I remembered I hadn't done social media posts for work, so I sorted that...

...And then next I knew two hours had passed and I was submerged in classic Vines compilations on YouTube, utterly lethargic, and weirdly nostalgic for an iteration of the Internet that is now dead, which is a strange thing to be nostalgic about.

I flat out couldn't leave the house by this point, so I convinced myself it would save money to just eat cereal and brioche and a banana for tea, which I guess it did, but it didn't exactly feel like I was living my best life. As a compromise I put a load of clothes to wash, which I'd earlier decided to leave till tomorrow, despite having worn the same jeans for about eighteen days now. So I washed the clothes, ate dinner à la depression, and slouched back to YouTube.

Now the day is over, I'm back at work tomorrow, and my room smells of wet underwear. But at least my horse survived the fall.

I'm going to write today off as a non-starter, throw it in the bin, start again in the morning. Bubye.

Day 185: Big moustache

My friend Alex has bought Red Dead Redemption 2, so now all we’re doing is messaging each other about the game.

“These controls are awful!” he says. “How am I supposed to get immersed in this massive world if everything is a press and hold and another button press and you need to grip the controller in a Vulcan death grip to even get your gun out?”

“I think it’s meant to be slow and deliberate, to make you feel like you’re struggling through an oppressive environment,” I say.

“Well it’s ruining it for me. I’m turning it off.”

Alex, in certain situations, has less patience than I do.

But the more of the game I play, the less certain I am in Rockstar’s design prowess. While the world they have created is astounding, I’m not so sure these controls aren’t just the work of a studio that has always had a problem with inelegance in their game design. I like that you have to hold buttons down and it’s slower and more measured. But all the fiddling with button combinations, the lack of clarity in the interface, just makes me confused, and makes my character get up and down from his horse, open and close his satchel, accidentally shoot store owners instead of trade with them. That’s not immersive, it’s the opposite.

- - -

The next day, while I’m at work, Alex messages to ask how you get a big moustache. I’ve told him my cowboy has a big moustache.

I go and hide in the cellar and sit on a barrel and write a reply.

“Mate it’s easy. You just go to your camp and select your tent with the right stick clicked down. You hold in the left trigger, bring up your context-sensitive radial dial, push left to highlight trimmers, hold X and press and hold Square while releasing the trigger. You’ve now got your trimmers selected. Go to your mirror and focus on it with R2 - make sure you don’t have your gun drawn though or you’ll shoot the mirror. Now hold Triangle to enter the interact menu, scroll across…”

Alex puts three laughing emojis in reply, and I feel like I’ve really achieved something with my life.

- - -

That evening I message Alex asking if he’s done many missions.

“Nah not really. I keep getting distracted. Have you robbed the doctors’ in Valentine?”

“No. Have you had a fist fight in the mud?”

“With the fat fella? Yeah. Have you killed any famous gunslingers?”

“Not yet.”

“I killed one and stole his boss gun.”

“Well I want to do that! Have you done the mission where you get the enormous rippling veiny black horse and then you have to sell it to learn how to buy new horses? And the only one you can afford is a mangy Skegness pony that makes your feet drag along the ground while you’re riding it?”

“Yeah haha.”

“It’s very disempowering.”

“How do you get clean?” Alex asks. “I’m dead dirty.”

“Press and hold triangle near a body of water. Push gently on the stick towards the water while clicking L3”

“Haha. No. Is that really how?”

“Yeah but you need to be lightly tapping X and toggling your second inventory dial and highlighting your stamina core with R1 as well.”

“Get to fuck.”

- - -

Already I can see how our playtimes are going to differ. Alex is shooting up bad bastards and blowing safes and becoming the fastest gun in the West, while I’m collecting bagfuls of flowers and brushing my horse a lot and standing on hills watching the night sky and taking all the baths.

But each to their own. I do think the interaction with the world is clumsy, wooly; that the systems are a hodgepodge jostling one another, lacking the synergy and grace of those in, for example, Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But the sheer width of the world, the amount of things to do, the different experiences for which the simulation allows, makes up for any mechanistic clunkiness. Enough width, it turns out, is in itself a kind of depth.

Seriously, though - look at this horse. I could fit it in my pocket it’s that small!