excerpt from Knees

The first time we see someone is the only time we actually see them. It’s our single opportunity to perceive a person as an image, a shape in the world, a set of visual data with no context or meaning. We perceive them as tall or short, ugly or handsome, and though we see a face, there is something uncanny about how its components don’t seem to quite fit together, at first: mouth and eyes and nose and ears seen in rapid succession, but separately, mentally catalogued as pieces of a whole. People are for those first few moments of interaction a collection of features and movements and gesticulations forming rapidly into meaning, into something we can understand. And that is the key difference – we stop seeing people, and we start understanding them.

Over time, people will become uglier to us, or more beautiful. The size we understand them to occupy in a room changes. We see them wearing, in addition to clothes and hairstyles, attitudes and beliefs and dispositions. Our eyes are still at work, but then so is the lens of our understanding, and our understanding is that person’s relationship to ourselves. We see them in terms of distance – physical and emotional – and we understand that ultimately they exist either outside of ourselves or in a space in which we also occupy, two bodies overlapping like a Venn diagram. 

Reunion

I spent two hours this morning on Facebook, looking at pictures of people I went to high school with. I feel compelled to explain that this was made possible by a massive group list of invitees to my 10 year reunion, that this wasn't two hours spent skulking stalkerisly, but two hours of moderately-committed browsing. Think of me less as the man in a black sweatshirt darting lawn-to-lawn and peering through windows, and more the guy kicking back poolside and scrolling through his cell phone.

It's incredible seeing the difference 10 years make. I can only imagine what this will be like after 20, or (knock on wood) 30 years. Some of us have grown beards. Others have gone goth, metro, cowboy. Most of the men who stayed in California have bulked up considerably; some of them have even managed to stay in shape.  Our faces are the same faces, adorned with different hair cuts and outfits and spouses and children and lifestyles. All of us look older. 

I won't be attending my 10 year high school reunion because I've only just moved to the UK, though I do find myself wondering if I would be attending if that weren't the case. I think the answer is no. There is already too much quiet panic simply sitting here in my flat, flipping through this combination Rolodex-Time-Machine, simultaneously experiencing what feels like both memory and future, somehow.

Yours truly on the right, high school edition

It seems to me that for almost every person, attending your high school reunion must be a psychic tug-of-war between observing what people have become and wondering what their impressions of what you have become might be. And I can't help but wonder if it's actually something buried beneath the skin of that dynamic, something simpler and more solipsistic: I wonder if maybe we are unsure of who we have become ourselves. I wonder if we flip through photos and attend 10 year reunions because we require some sort of general calibration to understand who we are 10 years into adulthood. 

This may not be true for everyone, but if I'm honest, this is true for me. I search the faces of people I haven't seen for 10 years for glimpses of my own reflection. I feel like a man who has somehow forgotten what he looks like. After two hours of this exercise I land back on a picture of myself and I wonder - how much have I aged, exactly? How do I measure the silver in my hair? How far from my bones hangs my skin? What are the new trimmings around the recognizable core of my face that I have somehow learned not to see over these last 3,650 days? 

The people from my class have migrated to sundry careers and livelihoods. We are assistant managers at local car dealerships. We are buyers for Target. Some of us have become, inexplicably, bona fide ranch hands. And all of this, as dizzying as it seems, is the easy stuff. It's the stuff that you can measure and understand, somehow. What someone looks like. Where they work. How many kids they have, and with whom.

But the thing you can't measure, and I think the thing that terrifies me most about walking through those doors, is how you've aged and grown emotionally, intellectually, and morally. You know, all that cheap, flimsy plastic "who-you-are-as-a-person" bullshit. What terrifies me specifically is that I do believe I've grown in all of these ways (I've quit drinking, I've entered a long-term partnership, I've committed to loving and doing right by my peers and friends and family), I believe I've grown in all these ways but I'm terrified that it's not actually true. 

I think it's easy to be someone new in a new place, with new people. People who haven't seen you drunkenly take out your anger and frustration on your best friend. People who didn't watch you blunder from one fuck-up to the next for four years. People who haven't observed you at your most soulless and truly vacant. I think we live in the lie that the person we are is the person we are right now, currently, in this moment and over the past few weeks or months or years. But in truth, I fear the person we are is who we have been, at each and every moment until now. I fear that we are the litany of ourselves. 

I do think people change, and that people can improve. But maybe we don't change or improve as much as we think we do, or as much as we need to believe we have in order to make it through each day. Maybe the person who we actually are is like that ever-recognizable aspect of our face: slightly saggier, puffier, done up in more makeup or bordered by more gray hair, but unchanging in some essential way that is hardwired into the human brain. And you can almost imagine it jumping out at you, after those first few steps into a dark room done up with streamers and half-full helium balloons, a room of muffled music and heavy heat; you can imagine that core aspect of yourself searing like a light bulb in the darkness, transforming you from a stranger into someone that has always and will always be known.

The man with the torn iris

I work with a man with a torn iris, in his right eye. The iris of the left eye is normal, perfectly round, a full stop swollen in a pool of lunar blue. But the iris of the right eye is torn straight down the center, as if a small knife had been inserted into the pupil and dragged down to where the azure meets sclera.

I am entranced by this tear in his iris, even though I know it's impolite to stare. In conversation I make full, panic-inducing eye contact, and I wonder if this is rude. The eyes are where you anchor your gaze so as not to stare at cold sores, cleavage, and scars. Where are you supposed to look when the eye itself is disfigured?

Every day, I wonder how it happened. I imagine a chilly schoolyard under a sky the color of old socks, the clatter of two boys dueling with sticks. I imagine the sharp end of a twig striking just so, the shrieking and then the two boys going pale at the sight of blood and what looks like uncooked egg whites. I imagine instead a rock fight, a capricious neighborhood cat, a night of too much teenage drinking. I do not imagine for a moment a child born with this eye. The tear is too jagged, too much like the edge of a torn aluminum can. It has too much of this world in it.

The tear is like a castle window where the wall below has been kicked in, by time and by trespassers climbing through in the dead of night, to drink beer and laugh and shatter brown glass against the old stone walls. The iris is the color of shallow tropical water, of a tide pool. And somehow the pupil opens into the tear like a maw beneath the surface, an impossible cave the depths of which are death-black and unreal.

And it is perhaps the blackness of the eye behind the tear that is the most unsettling, the blackness into which light pours and lands against cones and rods and retina and undergoes its transformation into meaning. And as I hold my breath and stare into the eyes of the man of the torn iris, I wonder: does he see more, or less?

On loneliness

I've been living in the UK for a total of 17 days now, and I think it's fair to say that as much as I'm enjoying my time here, I'm a tad bit lonely. I don't want to overdo it, and I certainly don't want to sound dramatic. If I did want to sound dramatic, I'd say that realizing it's only been 17 days feels a little bit crushing, like stepping with your full weight on an empty aluminum can is a little bit crushing.

At the same time, I'm lucky to feel this lonely, because I realize that I haven't felt lonely in a very long time. For the last three years, I've (more or less) lived with my fiance, whose company I don't think I could have really appreciated until now. Absence, it turns out, does make the heart grow fonder.

Absence also encourages you to slip on your diet and eat tortellini three nights a week, to default to a pentalogy of sloppy t-shirts, to stay in on evenings when you should really be out there, soaking in the fresh night air and absorbing the culture like a six-dollar roll of paper towels.

Absence, contrary to what I imagined, isn't a cut-out of a person. It's not a human-shaped void on the opposite end of the couch. Absence is a miasma, a film that lightly coats the surface of everything in your day. It's a little less color in a photograph. It's slightly shittier resolution on your TV. Absence is subtle, but it's fucking pervasive.

Previously, I've characterized love as the realization that a certain person makes your life better than it would be without them. Love is that realization, and the work that goes into maintaining that relationship because - whether you're happy or sad or getting along  or fighting until you're blue in the face - your lives are more rich and full with that person in your life than without them. I've been fortunate enough these last few years to enjoy an abundance of love. Love from my partner, from my family, from some very special friends.

I still love these people, and they still love me. But we're at such a distance that for most of these past 17 days, we haven't actually been in each other's lives. It's like belonging to a cell phone plan but being just out of range of service. You find yourself checking constantly  for a signal and cozying up to weird corners of your apartment in the hope that something faint might come through. Sometimes it does, and the faces of the people you love most crackle through the screen and you hear their voice and their problems and its good to be together again, if only for a few minutes.

And sometimes nothing comes through, and it feels as if you are bobbing in the middle of a large, black ocean.

The Cinema, and other terms

I went to the movies with folks from work this week, only they didn't refer to it as the movies but as the cinema. And after contemplating this difference long enough and thinking of the theater as the cinema myself, I had to admit that going to the movies started to sound a little funny: it sounds like something a fast-talking, 1920s Hollywood producer would say.

The Electric Cinema, supposedly the oldest theater in Birmingham.

Tasya suggested I write up a blog post on the difference between the British cinema and American movies, but it turns out I don't actually have much to report. We went to a small art house theater (which I understand isn't really indicative of most British theaters) and watched a private screening of The Goonies. Long story, don't ask.

Instead, I figured I'd share a few other British terms I've picked up over the last couple weeks. I've actually decided against validating any of these on online, so do let me know if I've got any of them wrong. Also, I'm going to assume that readers are fairly familiar with the most obvious British terms (the boot & loo, telly, windscreen, etc. being the kinds of examples I'm thinking of here) and won't bother with them here.

Pavement - What the British call the sidewalk. As far as I can tell, no one in Britain uses the term "sidewalk."

Quid - Slang for a (Great British) pound, the equivalent of how an American might refer to the dollar as a "buck."

Squid - A five-pound note.

Taking the piss (out of someone) - Giving someone a hard time.

Pudding - Any kind of dessert. This actually clarifies a line in Pink Floyd's The Wall for me, though I'm a little disappointed the kid wasn't necessarily eating an actual pudding cup, which is what I've always imagined.

Biscuit - A cookie or a cracker. This is especially weird because there are a surprising number of KFCs in England, and from what I understand, none of them have traditional American biscuits. Something about that just seems wrong.

Jelly - Referring to gelatin, like Jell-O. I think this is why most Brits generally find the idea of a PB&J revolting.

A full stop - English term for a period (in punctuation).

Nipping off (to nip) - To do something quickly. As in "I'm going to nip off to the loo right quick" or someone nipping between lanes in traffic.

Cheers - I initially thought this was an alternative for "thank you" but I've heard people say "Thank you, cheers" on multiple occasions now. It's kind of like a hybrid of "thank you" & "goodbye." I don't think there's a proper alternative for this in the US.

Rubbish - Saying something's no good. In America folks will sometimes call something "trash," but calling something rubbish in England seems to be way less critical. Then again it just might be the accent making people sound nicer than they are.

Shit(e) - Also saying something's no good, and again seemingly less pejorative than saying this in America. The context I heard this in was at a pub where someone was wanted a cigarette but had quit. He sad, and I quote: "Nah, I used to smoke 'em, back before my life was shite." He was piss drunk and Irish and I liked the cut of his jib quite a lot, actually.

Also, I met someone this week for whom the term "Time to shit or get off the pot" was completely novel, which makes me suspect this is a decidedly American phrase. I'm not sure if that's due to the fact that it's especially vulgar or especially direct, but I do like to think that it's American because of both these things.

Hailing from the United Kingdom: Initial Anecdotes

Before moving to the UK, I promised myself and others I'd keep an informal blog going detailing my trip. I'm now four days in and I figure I should make good on that promise. I've been putting it off so far for two reasons: A chronicle of my journey to the UK seems rather egocentric and mundane (because we live in an  age in which traversing continents in mundane), and I've actually been documenting little snippets on Instagram after caving to the years-old social media tool that I suspect is already becoming outmoded.

The square in the center of Nottingham. 

So for both of these reasons, I've decided to largely excise the more boring details of my trip (the eight hour flight next to the man who looked like an Indian mash up between Patton Oswald and a business-suit-wearing teddy bear; and the four hour layover in Amsterdam where I managed to sleep for 30 minutes spooning not one but two metal arm rests of a deserted airport bench); I've decided to excise these details and share just a few anecdotes that have stuck with me from this past week.

Anecdote #1, or, For my fellow Americans who have also not had to put a 6-gear car into reverse before
I picked up my rental car at the Birmingham airport. I'm blanking on the make and model, suffice it to say it's a bright red miniature diesel SUV with a total of six quiet gears. Upon picking up the car, I more or less hadn't slept for a good 22 hours or so, making my 80-minute drive to Nottingham something of a dangerous journey.

Finally, I wound my way into Nottingham, which sat like a maze of old-and-new architecture below iron gray clouds and a faint but fat rainbow. Relieved to be off the freeway, I pulled my vehicle over and parked behind a black hatchback. It took all of thirty seconds to realize that I still had several hundred feet to go before reaching my apartment, and so I put the car into what I thought was reverse but was actually first, and my acceleration nudged me one foot closer to the hatchback. I studied the clutch to ensure I was reading it correctly, and yes, reverse was shown as being in the same direction as first gear, only further out. So I gave it another go and came just short of kissing bumpers with the next car up.

At this point, exhausted and a bit loopy, I stepped outside of the car for a bit of ice-cold air and weighed my options. As far as I could see it, sleeping in the car for a few hours and hoping the hatchback was gone when I woke seemed my best bet. It was then that two blonde girls sporting cigarettes and thick lipstick materialized near the hatchback and, relieved, I gave them a big Yankee smile. They gave faint smiles back, but by the time they finished their cigarettes and climbed into their hatchback, it was fairly obvious I'd creeped them out considerably.

And yes, I have since figured out how to put my clutch into reverse.

Anecdote #2, or, Details of my apartment
I'm staying in temporary housing in the town of Nottingham, in the Eastern Midlands of England. My apartment is fairly nice - I have a fridge, freezer, full bathroom, bedroom, and washer and drier. My washer and drier is an two-in-one unit and is located in the kitchen, which means it washes very little laundry at one time and is about as effective at drying my clothes as it is at fixing a Sunday roast. One of the oddities of British apartments is that all of my appliances have their own wall switches, meaning that my stove, fridge, washing machine etc. won't work unless the wall switch is turned on. This is also true for my bathroom fan, which looks to be about 50 years old and is labeled by its wall switch, menacingly, as "ISOLATOR." It growls like a V8 and has the throbbing red eye of a Cylon.

The fire blanket of unknown efficacy.

Probably my favorite feature of my apartment though is the Fire Blanket. This is a substitute for the apartment-sized fire extinguishers that I've ever owned, and I assume that the idea is that if a kitchen fire breaks out, you simply smother it with the blanket. I haven't taken the Fire Blanket out of its casing - I'm paranoid it'll switch some sort of building-wide fire alarm or something - and I honestly have no idea if it would be more or less effective than a traditional fire extinguisher. Still, I can't help but imagine an English mother tucking in her darling little English fire to bed with his favorite blanket and wishing him goodnight.

Anecdote #3, or, Not really an anecdote but a note about the bells
As I write this, I hear the bells chime the hour from the market square. They're about ten minutes off, but the bells are heavy and deep and beautiful and I love them more than anything else here so far.

Anecdote #4, or, On using the term "period"
I signed up for a bank account yesterday which was full too many weird moments to document here without going (even more so) overly long. The strangest moment came when I was attempting to recite my email address, which starts with "mr.", which I described as "M-R-period," to which I received a very strange look indeed. It took a couple back and forths to realize that what I was describing is called, in England, "a full stop." Though I didn't confirm it, I have a sneaking suspicion that the term "period" is used primarily to describe notable eras and menstruation.

Anecdote #5, or, A reason to go to the mall
The last thing I'd like to share is that the Victoria Mall, which is maybe a 10-15 minute walk from my apartment, has on its second floor an open air market. Here you can find produce vendors, butchers, and hawkers of inexpensive soft service ice cream. It's a far cry from what I'm used to in American - and especially Californian - malls, but I find it delightful. It provides a compelling reason to thrust yourself into the throbbing artery of commerce each day or two, and also, who doesn't like taking home fruits in waxy brown paper sacks?

One of the stalls at the Victoria Market Centre.

In the back of the market is a little all-day breakfast diner called 'The Frothy Coffee." It served probably one of the more disappointing English Breakfasts I've had so far (the "toast" was cold white bread skinned with a bit of margarine). The titular Frothy Coffee, however, was divine in that particular way only certain cheap fares can be. A frothy coffee is is simply freshly steamed milk poured over a tablespoon of dehydrated French Roast, and is one pound per cup. It is warm and smooth and has that burned nicotine flavor of Folders, and throughout the Frothy Coffee, you can spot tables full of couples over sixty holding tired looking shopping sacks and wearing beige foam mustaches.

Next to the bells from the market square, its one of my favorite details of Nottingham so far.

Moist Towelettes

There is something obscene about Moist Towelettes. The way they quiver when held, the faint chemical smell of lemon that wafts from their folds when unfurled. An open Moist Towelette diaphanous like a square of rotting flesh held before a lamp. That something so damp and easily torn dwells inside that hard little square of waterproof plastic packaging.

Moist Towelettes are horrific: Moist Towlettes too-wet and oozing in a clenched fist; crumpled and smeared with barbecue sauce and assorted condiments; strewn like snake moltings in grass overgrown. Moist Towlettes disintegrating into dust long after their one-time use in Post-Apocalyptia, coveted by those survivors who sustain themselves by finger-scooping baked beans out of tin cans torn open with pickaxes and pliers.

They travel through time and space like astronauts tucked into rocket ship. Safe against all probability, their fragility concealed. Hurtling through emptiness until the hull is ripped apart, dumb fleshy tentacles reaching in. Exposed to air, worthless the moment they're used.

How League of Legends can help educate and keep new players by bringing out the best in its community

I've been sharing an idea for Riot Games' League of Legends with friends, coworkers, and anyone who will listen recently, and so I decided to put it on paper in its full, thought-out form. Because I predict this post will get upwards of double digits in terms of paragraphs, I'll go ahead and opt to provide a succinct TL:DR summary up front: 

League of Legends should implement a 'mentors' system, in which seasoned level 30 players can act as a team 'captain' or 'leader' for a group of 4 lower-level players. Implementing such a system would achieve the following:

• A better introductory and learning experience for new players
• Less inter-personally toxic solo matches
• Less negative 'smurf' activity by high level players
• Better new-player retention for Riot 

In the following paragraphs, I'll detail this proposal and dive into how it could achieve each of the following bullets. But first, some assumptions:

1. League of Legends is incredibly difficult to pick up as a new player. As a new player I need to learn the game, the metagame, my character, my teammates' characters, the opposition's characters, and how to communicate and interact with the other players on my team (not to mention how to successfully play my individual role within a team). And the worst part is that as a new player you don't even realize you have to learn all of this stuff. Riot makes a commendable effort via forced bot games and tutorials, but nothing really prepares the new player for all of this learning. In fact, most of this stuff becomes somewhat obliquely obvious in extremely acidic, negative ways once the new player starts getting into randomly-matched solo games.
   
2. The community in League of Legends can be extremely toxic. I've had some random pick-up games where folks tend to guide you or give you constructive feedback, but for the most part, communication between randomly matched (new) players tends to begin in earnest only once things are already falling apart. This devolves into the team bickering, insults, threatening reports to Riot games, and generally turning in on itself. Most people have seen the game on Twitch.TV and so have an idea of what good gameplay looks like, but very few of us understand out of the gate how to not only play - but interact - as a team. This results in everyone blaming everyone when really the group has failed itself.
   
3. Smurfing sucks. 'Smurfing,' for those not familiar with the term, describes a high-skill/level player creating a new account to play against lower-skilled/leveled players. The result is that the 'smurf' usually destroys their opponents. League of Legends has been around for 4 years, and has hundreds of idiosyncratic characters: there is no way I can expect as a new player to compete against a seasoned player posing as a newbie, and the resulting mismatch sours my experience and my team's experience as well. 

The solution

All of the above outlines a pretty poor story, but it can be overcome by a single system: Create a program by which skilled, high level players can opt in as team captains for new players to the game, and provide rewards for those players. On the flip side of that coin, new-players would have to indicate that they would want to play with an experienced team captain, either in classic blind-pick modes or in team builder. What would result would be a 5v5 game in which 1 player on each team is a seasoned team captain committed to leading his team.

A better introductory and learning experience for new players

As a new player in one of these captained matches, I will have the benefit of not only playing with a more skilled player, but having that player actively involved and invested in my positive participation in the match. Tips as simple as what skills to level first with my champion, or how to better play my position can make a world of difference if made early in the match, and if made in a positive way. And remember, these are players who have opted-in for guidance, circumventing the possibility of resentment at being told what to do.

Less inter-personally toxic solo matches for new players

As mentioned above, I truly believe that real negativity and toxicity in League games comes from when a team is performing poorly. Players want to perform well and will get frustrated that they're not, so they take it out on each other. With a team captain and receptive new players, the communication within a match could instead build positive momentum early. Even when a team doesn't win, positive, helpful communication throughout the match should lead to more "good games "than "**** yous." 

Less negative smurf activity

I can't proclaim to know exactly why all players feel the need to smurf, but I can safely assume that a large part of it is to feel skilled at the game (ie to feel better at it than someone else). What League of Legends lacks today is a positive, constructive way for players to experience this feeling outside of hard-fought victories. Acting as a team captain would provide that opportunity in an extremely positive way. Riot could even go one step further and create custom skins (or provide experience or point boosts) for participants, increasing the value for participating high-level players to participate positively in the community. In short, the captain mode allows for balanced smurfing for the good of new players.

Better new player retention for Riot

This one is (hopefully) pretty obvious at this point. New players will have better played, less toxic matches, and can have assistance from game experts in tackling the learning curve. Because at the end of the day, League of Legends is extremely fun. It's just super daunting as a new player. 

Who am I and why do I care?

I'm writing this because I'm a level 14 player who has tried to break into League of Legends on and off for the better part of a year and a half, and have kept turning away because of immense frustration and feelings of hopelessness. I'm writing this because I want Riot to build this system, and I want to opt in for guidance from a seasoned pro. :)

I also work in the game industry as a community program owner, and I have implemented systems like this and seen them work with great success. What I see in League is a community that is extremely skilled and knowledgeable, and while certain interactions I've had have been negative, I see huge potential for this community. And with efforts like the Tribunal, I think Riot might just be the company to empower its players to reach that potential.

So there you have it. If you like the idea, please pass it along! It's my hope that someone at Riot will see this and consider building the thing. Otherwise, always happy to hear feedback in the comments section below. 

Mourning the Beta Fish

My girlfriend’s fish died this morning. That was the first thing she texted me today, so I can only assume she found him just after waking up. Our text exchange was as follows:

   “Clyde died :(“

               “Ohhh, baby I’m sorry.”

               “I’m surprisingly sad”

               “:( I got a hug for you okay?”

               “Ok, I need it”

               “I understand. It’s sad losing a pet you’ve had for years. Even if it is a fish. I love you lots”

               Looking back on text messages can be a real bummer, especially if there was legitimate feeling involved at the time of communication. There’s something demoralizing about seeing what you remember as a symphonic swell of sadness represented by a frowny face. What’s also difficult is trying to tell someone you love that you understand their pain or sadness, because really, how do you know that you do? How do you know the gut-sick feeling and surge of sour chemicals to the brain is the same biochemical reaction your loved one is experiencing? How can you guarantee their pain isn’t amplified compared to yours? That what you think is real pain is a light thud against a callous heart?

               Short answer to a long question. You can’t.

~

 

I have two cats, Toast and Scuba. This is a recent development in my life, one that sort of slinked up and sunk its claws in and took hold, which is appropriate, I guess. We (my girlfriend and I) picked up Scuba from the shelter. She was a kitten then, dark brown dappled with caramel, hiding behind a scratching post and small enough to lay flat in your cupped hands. Toast came along  because I felt guilty leaving Scuba at home all day while I was at work; he was my brother’s cat, and though he had been adored by their toddler, they had another kid on the way, and apparently cat litter can wreak biological havoc on a pregnant woman and her unborn child. So Toast, who was an absolute goliath of a Siamese (and a little brain-damaged by being toted around the house by my niece since kittenhood), joined our family. 

Toast, left, and Scuba, right.

               Our family, my cats. Distinctions you make when you love someone you don’t live with.

               My girlfriend hadn’t grown up with pets, and though she was excited at the prospect of bringing home a kitten (because who can’t be excited about that?), we both weren’t sure how well this would pan out in the long term. The general rule of thumb was that she didn’t really like pets, and didn’t understand why people thought of them as “members of the family.” She’d seen her brother attacked by a dog when they were both kids, and as for cats, well, unless you grew up with the feline variety of house pets, it’s kind of hard to understand the appeal.

               Cats, balanced creatures that they are, tend to walk the line of being more trouble than they’re worth. Since bringing home my cats, I’ve had countless electronic cables chewed through, several carpets perforated, houseplants uprooted, furniture dethreaded, allergies agitated, and every smooth surface of my house coated with cat hair and dander. On the other hand, if I sit on the couch, my cats will bound from whatever small catastrophe they’re causing just to be with me. They settle on my lap and hum like the fine-tuned motors of muscle cars. Toast, the Siamese, rattles with affection even if he’s sitting near to me. If I don’t want to pet him because my hands are otherwise occupied, he’ll simply place one paw on my arm, just to have some form of contact. And if I do pet him, he lapses into a sort of nirvana attainable to humans only through years of spiritual journey and meditation.

               In short, they’re a vessel to pour love into. It’s one of the simpler forms of love, I know. It’s a love of simple affection, and of duty. But it’s ultimately satisfying, and over the course of the past year, I’ve seen my girlfriend start to get this as well, not from me trying to explain any of it to her (though I’ve tried), but from watching her agitation slowly outweighed by affection. I can see it in her face when she smiles, Scuba on her lap purring at full volume and her eyes closed in sleepy bliss, when my girlfriend looks at me and says, “She is so cute.”

~

My girlfriend’s fish is (was) a beta named Clyde. There had been a Bonnie (they’d been gifts to her and her college roommate at the time), but Bonnie died a couple years ago, and Clyde has been swimming solo ever since. I didn’t see much of Clyde, but I heard about him, principally through complaints from my girlfriend. Having to feed him, clean his tank, stuff I’d tease her about because how can you not tease someone for griping about something so simple? It’s strange to think of him swooshing down the toilet drain now and into the cold, slimy expanse of sewers. Stranger still to think of my girlfriend of not having to feed him, or change his water.

               When the shackles come off, the sadness and the loneliness is always the most surprising feeling. This is true no matter how small or insignificant the shackles.

               The reptile brain usually carries the rep of being the lowest on the animal brain totem pole, and I have to assume that the beta fish brain probably isn’t too far off. So thinking about death for such a creature is difficult. It’s hard to think of that brain as having feelings or emotions as opposed to a relatively complex series of connections and electric impulses.

               But this sort of reasoning doesn’t do much to assuage the sadness, and here’s why:

               A pet is a package of feelings. As an animal it has its own attributes, surely, but a house pet is significant because it is the sum of all of the feelings and emotions we attach to it. As a vessel of love, it’s the combined weight of all of the love we ever poured into that pet. It’s the residual memories of the conversations we had while petting or feeding or even stressing out about that pet. It’s a photo album that you can look into and see not what you looked like or what you were wearing at one point in your life, but instead what and how you felt. A well-loved house pet is an extension of yourself, a cache of memories and feelings and a physical tribute to your capacity for caring and for affection.

               This is why it’s so difficult when a house pet dies. You’re losing an emotional slice of yourself.

               What’s difficult more so is that it feels so trivial – you can buy a beta fish at Petsmart for a few dollars – and this triviality embarrasses us. We’re embarrassed that we feel sad and we don’t really understand why. And that’s fine, that’s okay. But it’s also okay to mourn the beta fish. There’s no creature too small to love.

               And this is what I want to say to my girlfriend, this is what I want to communicate but can’t with so little time and so few words. Instead I rely on digital punctuation. I stamp a frowny face onto the end of my text and hope that she knows to unfold it, to look in that blank space between the colon and the parenthesis to find the acknowledgement of a tear, of a sudden, gaping void, of an emptiness that’s okay to mourn and weep over because it’s the sudden loss of years of love.  

Ad hoc ponderings

How much of writing is remorse? How many of the things you publish & post online are symbols of the things you didn't? How much of it is about who you are vs. who you really want to be? How many of the line breaks are arbitrary? How much is written between the lines? How bad for yourself can you feel before you realize that you have it pretty good? How good can you feel before things start turning sour? How much are you allowed to write before realizing that maybe you don't have all that much to say at all?

And that maybe, that's okay?

Why Tomb Raider is the best game you'll play this year

Two weeks ago, I was fairly certain I wasn't going to pick up Tomb Raider, Crystal Dynamics' latest in a series nearly two decades running. I wasn't particularly fond of what I could remember of the over-sexualized crypt crawler, whose greatest feat seemed to be squeezing her impossible somatotype through dark, cramped corridors. Plus, the game looked to be going the way of so many soulless big-budget titles  these days, featuring series after series of flashy real time events, as if all any of any of us are looking for in our games are prompts to hit the right button at the right time.

However, hearing a few good things from a few trusted friends, I decided to give the game a try, and goddamn am I glad I did. Tomb Raider has it's numerous real time events, and Lara is still rather, well, robust (though looking less like a pistol-wielding Barbie this time around and more like an actual human); however, Tomb Raider offers one of the better examples of smart gameplay and character development available in the market right now. 

The tagline for the series is "a survivor is born," but it might as well be, "a series is resurrected." Look out Lazarus - Lara Croft is providing some serious competition in the miraculous return department.

MASH THE 'E' KEY

Let's start with the real time events (RTEs). For anyone reading who isn't familiar with the current state of games, RTEs are a gameplay mechanic used to offer a more cinematic experience for certain game moments. Because games traditionally offer a suite of controls and skills that the player can utilize as they see fit, the game space hasn't always allowed directors to employ wildly varying camera angles, actions, or events - any of these things thrown into the mix without warning could compromise the experience for the player, especially if they're expected to complete a complex set of actions with the camera zoomed in a foot away from the protagonist's face, for example. RTEs solve that by prompting the player to complete just one or two things at a time, allowing developers to showcase stunning special effects without compromising the player experience.

At it's best, this mechanic can break up game pacing and offer a fresh and exciting moment in the narrative/combat/exploration for a given scene; at it's worst, this mechanic can make a game feel overly contrived, simplistic, and stale. Tomb Raider manages to land in the former camp by doing a couple of things  well.

For one, there are a very limited number of controls that can be used in RTEs in the game (I played on PC, so in most cases, RTEs were completed using the 'E' key). This allows Tomb Raider to spare the majority of the text prompts telling you to what keys to mash, instead using more subtle visual cues to indicate that you should probably react quickly (such as a brief slow-down in game speed, or Lara grappling for a handhold on a rock face). It's a slight change from the norm, but the payoff is considerable - instead of feeling spoon fed each action, you get to feel that you're instead capitalizing on each opportunity as it arises... or hanging on for dear life, as the case may be. 

Secondly, RTEs never stand out as being a core part of the game experience. There are rarely RTE 'sequences' (you know, press key 1, then key 2, then move left, right, up, up, and then hit key 3 to complete the sequence, etc. etc.); instead, RTEs are a single fiber woven in the fabric of the game experience, and they manage to never jar you out of the experience (instead, they're used largely to segue into a new scene or change of pace). 

Which brings us to pacing. 

One step at a time makes for one hell of a fine walk

Another concept I'll summarize for ye olde non-gamers is the idea of flow in game design. This is the general concept that the brain has a certain processing capacity, and that when that capacity is utilized completely (you're not over- or under-stimulated), you enter a state of flow. Think of a project you've worked on where you've lost sense of time, being hungry, etc.: this is flow. In short, it's an experience of optimal engagement, and it requires a constant increase in difficulty as well as a constant increase in mastery. It's a chugging of not only forward, but of upward as well. When done right, it's a 45-degree angle headed up and out. 

Tomb Raider is a shining example of nailing flow in a game. Lara is constantly learning new abilities, upgrading her gear, and selecting new skills, and all of this is left up to the player in terms of what to learn when (allowing the player to 'master' skills as he feels he needs them, giving him control over creating an optimal experience). In conjunction with this constant outward and upward mobility of Lara's skills, the environment is steadily increasing in terms of size and scope, meaning that as Lara learns her new abilities, opportunities to use those abilities blossom throughout the landscape. 

Unlike other games that bar progression based on equipment and skills (Metroid, for example), Tomb Raider never makes you feel as if you're missing out on an opportunity, nor does it force backtracking. In fact, any time you cross through an area you've previously visited, the game takes you through it on a path previously so unavailable, you didn't even know it was there (which beautifully, if you go back and look, it was). Another great touch is that Crystal Dynamics even changes environmental pieces (such as structure integrity, weather, and time of day), further giving you the feeling that old places are in fact new places. 

I mentioned above that RTEs are a single fiber of the game experience, and that's true for all elements that make this game, whether it's combat, exploring/resource collecting, or platforming (the game's three main staples of gameplay). At no point are you limited to any one of these experiences - there's a ton of blend between all three, and major game sections ease so effortlessly into one another that you're hard pressed to think of any one sequence a single gameplay element alone. The result is a game that's hard to put down - it's difficult to find a stopping point, which is incredible considering that the game saves almost every action you take and offers a myriad of camps, which are basically resting points (the beauty with camps is that they serve as upgrade stations, meaning that even though you're at an ideal stopping point, an eagerness to try your new abilities or gear motivates you back out into the wild).

In short, Tomb Raider instills in the player a sense of relentless determination, a drive to march steadily forward to see the adventure through to the end. Fittingly, that determination is matched by Crystal Dynamic's re-imagined Lara Croft. 

More than a pretty face

I mentioned earlier that Lara has returned  looking considerably more human, and the same is true for her character as well. It's obvious that Crystal Dynamics felt the need to reshape the steely exterior that Lara exhibited in previous depth-diving adventures. As a result, the character in this game is naive, afraid, and mortal. Rather than creating what might sound like a sniveling wimp of a kid, Lara seems instead tremendously brave. The fear exhibited in this game is genuine (thanks to both some great voice acting as superb motion capture), and as a result, the feats you accomplish feel greater because of it. There's one scene in particular where Lara is climbing a radio tower. Though I knew rationally that Lara would not fall, that the game wasn't going to end with her dashed on the rocks below, I found myself holding my breath because Lara's fear became my fear. And when I reached the top of that tower, I felt I had overcome something truly dangerous and a little terrifying as a result. The presentation of her character is that good. 

Crystal Dynamics has not only re-established Lara's character, but her raison d'etre through a series of, you guessed it, tomb raids. What seems at a glance to be a potentially heavy-handed and clunky device, the various tomb sections of the game are fantastic. Each is relatively brief but challenging in it's own right, blending into the overall flow of the game to make them yet another humble fiber in this extraordinary journey. Lara's character is markedly different in these sections - as opposed to the struggling, fearful girl we see by daylight, the Lara we navigate through the tombs is thoughtful, curious, and full of wonder. The sections again make Lara feel more human, but more importantly, they help bridge the gap between the girl we see in this game and the woman we know she'll eventually become. 

Humble beginnings

It's difficult to imagine how successful the game would have been if not presented as an origin story. Lara conquers her fears through the game, which unfortunately eradicates the most human, relateable thing about her (I for one can't pull off a series of a dozen bow and arrow kills while side-stepping lobbed sticks of dynamite). While I'm invested in her character and accomplishment now, I wonder if I'll manage to be when the obligatory follow-up comes around. Similarly, Lara finding a survival toolset that fit her needs on the island made for an engaging reason to push forward hour after hour, and it related directly to the story being told. In short, the game was a successful marriage of content and context, but I hope that Crystal Dynamics is thinking hard about how to reinvent the formula for their next go-around, as finding yourself makes for a great story, but a poor series. 

And while this pessimistic Polak is already grumbling about what may lay in store for Lara's future, the fact remains that Tomb Raider is likely the best game you'll play this year. I haven't even mentioned the stunning quality that's gone into every element of this game, from the breathtaking environments to the range of gameplay elements to the amount of polish obvious in numerous weapon upgrades and their meaty reliability in combat. 

A survivor has been born with Lara's latest, and she's held a torch to light the way for the series moving forward. There's no telling yet how this reboot will end, but the beginning of this journey is one hell of a ride, and one I guarantee you won't want to miss out on. 

Why I'm baffled at the outrage surrounding the SimCity 5 Launch

Going to take a quick departure today and talk about video games, specifically the much-reviled release of SimCity 5 this week. If you've been paying any attention to this at all, then you know that SimCity 5 has been mired with technical issues since it's launch, much of which folks are tracing back to it's requirement of a persistent online connection. And the mass opinion has been, by and large, that requiring players to be online at any time they're playing the game is an idiotic move by any and all corporate suits involved. It was the same story with Diablo 3's much anticipated and similarly-plagued launch.

If you're not so familiar with this realm of discourse, the idea behind an always-online connection is that it acts as a safeguard against piracy. Games, much like movies, are pretty juicy targets for digital piracy. Both Diablo 3 and SimCity 5 require gamers to be connected at all times because it helps them enforce anti-piracy practices. It also helps enforce and reduce cheating the game. Both games are fairly revolutionary in this practice (you may be thinking to yourself that MMO's have long-since required an always-online connection, but the main difference here is that SimCity 5 and Diablo 3 can both be enjoyed in a single-player setting).

So what's so bad about requiring always online? The rather robust community of online pirates have their grievances, obviously, but I'm not going to address them. Suffice it to say if you think charging for games (whether it's charging $60 or anything at all) is wrong, then I'm not going to change your mind in this post. However, if you're a working stiff like myself who doesn't mind paying for games and thinks it's fair for companies to charge for their work, then please consider the following:

The implementation of supporting a connection-required game on the scale of franchises like Diablo and SimCity isn't a matter of following the right steps and having your shit together for Day 1 - it's a bold thrust into all but brand new territory. Seriously - no other games have done this, with the exception of those few mentioned above that only support multiplayer, and even those have had years to refine their practices and build - none have had an initial launch that compares to the scope of D3 and SC5.

I work in the industry myself, and I'm fairly appalled at how many critics and developers both have been so quick to bash the game for it's attempt to support always-online. The group I work with consists of extremely dedicated and intelligent people, and we run into unforeseen issues in our launches (and the stuff I work on doesn't even compare to the scale of SC5). It honestly confounds me that SC5's peers can be so quick to forget how challenging and dynamic the work we're doing as a community is, and I bet that the folks wagging their fingers today wouldn't have near the balls to attempt to launch a project as ambitious as SC5.

I used the term territory earlier, and I think that's fitting, because SC5 and D3 are pioneering the future of digital distribution. Point and cluck your tongue all you want, but these two companies are working out the kinks of what will become common practice. These same people condeming innovation will be the ones to fall in line once the community at large starts seeing the benefit of an always-online player base: cheating will be cut down, people will play together more, and the community that you'll find yourself a part of will reflect more people like you - people who paid for the game because you support it's artists; people who want to play according to the rules and participate in something a little bit bigger then themselves.

So sure, feel free to jump on the bandwagon if it suits you. Judge the ambitious new trend that took a few attempts to hit it's stride. But soon enough, your kids will balk at the idea that people used to play games alone, cut off from their friends and peers.

I guarantee it.

Some thoughts on finishing Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

1. Story - plot, characters, and action - is paramount.
     a. Translated works are the best reminder than novels need more than nifty language to have legs of their own on which to stand.
     b. Murder, death, insanity, sex, & scandal are all permissible to write about when done well (and in the right circumstances, are downright encouraged); the very real and raw tension of each should be exploited to their fullest if used.

2. F.D.* was the premier soap opera writer of his time.

3. As far as involuntary facial expressions go, C&P invokes one less experienced when reading modern 'serious' fiction - a sudden widening of the eyes.
     a. Today's most frequent involuntary fiction-triggered facial expression is a smug twist of the lips, which I think is a pretty good example of the point David Foster Wallace is trying to make in his essay,"Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky": that the main difference between writers today and writers in D.F.'s era is that today, we as writers seem to lack earnestness, that we resort to casual irony as a self-defense, and that our very hipness and edginess is in fact a response to the fear that perhaps we won't (or fundamentally can't) be taken seriously.

4. Character is best realized as a texture, and less so as a collection or string of ideas. What makes Rodion Romanych Raskolnikov so real is not the assemblage of his personality traits (which are less intentionally-varied and distinct than those of 'exciting' characters in today's fiction), but the texture of his person as created by witnessing R.R.R. through a number of stylistic and situational lenses.
     a. The monologues in particular do major work for D.F., giving his characters 3-4 pages (at minimum) to define themselves in a stylistically newish light (1st person), while still driving plot and action, the true bread & butter of D.F.'s work.

5. Upon completion, the only phrase that comes to mind to describe C&P is as follows: "That book be ill as fuck."

*In writing these notes in my journal, it became apparent that though I enjoy speaking (butchering?) Russian names aloud, I can't spell them worth a damn.