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in the late 1990s I found myself in China as an Oracle salesman. Entire oppoukent blocks had been abandonned as well off originals had now situated the selves in former tax shelters in Taiwan, Singapore, portions of the bay area so I found myself alone in a British colonial apartment block with nothing but the cyborg I was trying to sell them.

The cyborg would climb the thick wood stairwell in the morning as I began another night out trying to get Jason Fong and other notable tech types to by into our technology. Mainlanders would soon occupy this spot. Capitalists would swoon in making their lives into the 30 usd a plate street food you encounter today, but back the. It was still colonial opulence. The cyborg would mutter random phrases like a monkey’s paw, truthisms that we couldn’t quite muster tales of wor delivered on different planets interplanetary dispatched of UFOs aground in Shenzen and visa booklets larger than life itself. My passport swelled.

Eliza

There’s this magical theater where all the girls go to masturbate. Elizabeth knows it well. She sits in the front row, unzipped khaki shorts, and masturbates to the hunky guys she has plastered over the unicorns on her trapper keeper. The movie is never terribly interesting mostly housewives confronting mundane situations like an ex-lover who pops up as the principal of the kindergarten or a former friend who fucked your ex now on the other side of a business deal. There are some robots that mop up the house, but the films never depicts them as more than domestic servants so Elizabeth has lost interest. Primarily the films are about sex, but not the physical kind more the weird emotional kind capitalism consumes as lifestyle. The weird fetishistic touches of consumerism she is allowed, the way her house and body are in some commune of domestic malaise that drives her to the bedroom and that’s when Elizabeth watches, when the movie gives tips on the clit and the pectoral muscles. Where to touch your husband and why. When it’s all over she goes home.

Dream

i work in this high tech future park maybe somewhere in Seattle. There is a zombie out break somewhere out there, but ya know class politics and all of that. I am homeless in this high tech park and must sleep in the park. I am paranoid and stash a shotgun inside a small circular aquarium I guess? Not sure. Regardless the night comes and I’m trying to be inconspicuous when this guy I know from New York shows up and kisses me or maybe he tries to bite my nose it is strangely pleasurable but also weirdly humane as if he’s sparring me his desires. I am then accousted by a roving band of Africans who I am frightened by but turn out to be just like me and rather safe. At some point I fish a flashlight out of the aquarium and we go through my stuff. The next day I am in a car and we’re discussing how the zombie outbreak must be like horrific in lower class circles (I know I’m homeless right?) when I am on my bike and in that same place in the park some cops knock me off my bike using water. It’s a roadblock and they’re checking folks for the virus. I am asked if I know this man and I gingerly say yes.

Ludums: Irem on Nes, Alien: Isolation, make your own adventure aka Minecraft

My new job involves long sit downs in a glass cubicle filled with constant fiddling with variables and often 16 minute returns from a Swedish server built in a summer by a former golf pro. Let that context inform these reviews.

Metal Storm is probably the best NES game I never played. The music is awesome. I mean really I hear the tunes in my head at work sometimes. It is at heart an R-Type game, but where r-type felt like a draft in memorization as difficultly Metal Storm is more of a full fledged novel. It requires consistent play with its central mechanic: the ability to reverse gravity at will. Its the way the game manages to introduce puzzles with out every signaling you are in a puzzle that makes it unique. I am not sure where, maybe level 3? In which you have to trick some magnets to fire, nearly crushing you, jump onto their platform, and then reverse gravity to get around a block. This section isn’t overtly difficult, but it does require skills. Later level require you to think about power ups switching from shields to blasters to take out different objectives. Its not as Mechanically complex as I would like it to be, but when you attenuate to its antiquated nature it becomes a gem you hum as you reconsider and plot out your next move.

The hardest part of Alien: Isolation is the beginning. That first stealth puzzle is really the most difficult thing in the game so far. After you’ve managed to take down 3-4 humans the Alien is easy peasy. Why? Because the Alien means death. It is that simple. What to reset a puzzle? Run away from the Alien. Alien: Isolation makes a good case for presence and graphics in video games. It is essentially a love letter to H.R. Geiger and in that it’s a game whose skin is more compelling than often the storyline is. In fact Isolation’s story is sadly rather weak. Its gameplay however is compulsive. I knew I needed it the second I saw the hack tool that said tool exists fully realized inside a set of stealth rules that create serious tension is even better. Alien: Isolation is a film that was chewed and cured into gameplay. However its designer had the lateral thinking skills available to iterate on the known gameplay elements enough to make it work. The result is engrossing exploration situations that are tense, but rarely frightening. The world design brims with detail, but it’s really the story Geiger is telling that makes it important, from the communal shower stalls to the lightbox hallways, the lived in way the station resembles an oil rig or the abundance of hiding spots the belie another meta-game: which spot is truly strategy and which is merely aesthetics? Film is a great medium to play in.

Minecraft is not a game I have ever binged in before, but last week with the server down I redownloaded this hot MS property

and got to work on my first house which in turn became a 3 hour construction binge including torches, numerous pick axes, cobblestone fences, creepers, and a garden on top of a house. I wanted to change nature to make my house more realizable. It was strangely satisfying to finally have a minecraft property something like what I had seen in youtube videos and then a day later I was bored, so I crafted numerous swords and set out on a journey at midnight fighting Zombies and eating pork chops, minecraft is a game that understands play. It understands that you shouldn’t take it seriously rather that frivolity becomes seriousness the more you play. It is a game that is entertaining as long as you are entertaining. Its the perfect sandbox for tots. Good work Notch :)

Lovely Planet

The enemies are symbolic to the point of parody. Their simple signifiers are so red for bad blue for good are subverted by the expressions they give: only the red ones are truly alive. The stages are small. No pretense like invisible walls or infinite skyboxes, rather the game is more like a movie set. It artfully admits to being a game. The mechanics are sparse, kill the baddies get out. Red is your enemy. The music reminds of j-pop in the best sense, the random splatters of text rarely make sense. The protagonist’s ludicrous cartoon hands bring forth images of being a demented possibly perverted cupid roaming a strange post-logical sky land.

All of this is a reason to play Lovely Planet. Let me tell you about the gameplay: its simple. You move in ways accustomed to fps players, you jump mildly like jumping flash, you shoot square arrows, the blockiness of which revels in its own laziness. Even the less refined aspects of the game are churned into irony, the game is powered by a logic only a Japan fan could know, but its fun and the game quickly breaks into flow.

The flow in turn reinforces the repetitive nature of the game. You try, you succeed, but the leaderboard tells you: you could do better. You will do better.

The PC Race

Its my lunch my lunch break so I take out the hospital appointment card and proceed to jettison to a far away land via motorcycle taxi. For the last few months or year I have been having consistent prickly pains in my feet and hands. I was told I needed to see a foot Doctor, but a perplexed vascular specialist. The department however says pain and the Doctor gets out a small reflex thingie bangs a few nerves and takes my blood pressure before she declares me insane and prescribes me to an anti-psychotic for schizophrenia, but I am getting ahead of myself let me tell you about my new PC.

On Saturday after class I walk into a PC shop and buy a new PC. My brain is tired of running over the various possibilities of PS4, Wii U, or PC. The PC is the right price so I buy. I have to wait. I go outside to smoke and suddenly I am worried they are cheating me. Is the PC going to be switched? Is it going to be an I7? I try to calm myself down and go upstairs. A quick look over and a tech shows me the windows specs. I am cool.

I park my electric bicycle and take a motorcycle taxi home clutching my pc. At first returning to steam is all disappointment. All the games i didn’t finish, the strangely imprecise user interface of windows. Its a let down. Plus the pc runs in 720p instead of 1080, but then I get going in steam and skullgirls shows up and lovely planet takes my time, steam becomes luxurious again. Tony comes up and i have a joystick now, plugging the joystick in I forget about my Destiny and super mario 3d world desires and just begin to game, but that’s the thing: gaming laptops are just big gameboys. The joystick is really all I need, the keyboard is an unnecessary addition, i switch to big picture mode.

There is something about someone telling you are crazy or not telling you and with confidence prescribing you to a medicine for psychotic episodes that gets you down. The confidence with which the Doctor prescribed me, her aloof air, it was the almost fascist sense of decision that annoyed me.

The PC has all these features I don’t need. They dig into me like little sickles further aggravating me. This is just a game machine, an 800 usd game machine. I am thinking of switching to Steam OS. But just a few good games is all a system needs. Its just what good games, steam is full of medieval themed fantasy adventures, sci-fi a tad more realistic than imaginative, but then Lovely Planet pulls me in. I game a for a bit forgetting about the world.

The psychologist tells me I need to reduce my stress. Apparently Japanese themed quirky fps games provide this for me. The PC contains bounties of distractions, exactly what a psychotic needs.

On the concept of gender weakness

In the binary our society maintains (at least until “sex” is questioned enough to reveal new orientations) there is a weaker and a stronger sex, but this weakness is not the result of fortitude, rather it results from pleasure and the ability to give it. In other words the ability to be pleased in turn a sign of coercion, a weakness in a gender. If weakness comes first and hence allows pleasure is another question, but what can be ascertained from porno is quite simple: the giver of pleasure is often stronger than the receiver in terms of gender, yet when we consider the binaries strong and weak I do not see them as connected causally, rather the two are connected by correlation. Strength alone can not give pleasure, rather sadism, infatuation, obsession, neurosis, and other factors like say the texture of one’s hands or the stiffness of sexual organs comes into play. Strength is only necessary to carry through with pleasing and it can be the case the pleaser in actually is quite weak and is only able to satisfy by means of a contrivance. Weakness then is never adjacent to strength, it forms no yin yang with in gender, rather it propagates and is buoyed on a series currents that only confer the illusion of strength, as much as say a prostitute might pretend to be pleased to further a customer’s services, pleasure in fact does not need strength and can quite easily inflate itself on chimeras of weaknesses. In other words the strong might pride themselves on the pleasure given when in fact they have grown weaker, and the receiver has just merely increased their “weakness” so as to feel more. The later I think is central to sexuality, its not that “male” is strong, rather it is that “female” is weaker. And that weakness has very little to do with the strength we hear about in male fiction, rather it is something wholly other and makes the origins of the social orientation “strong” weaker.