blog update 164

Infrequency of blog posts

I have been pretty busy with a few things. I got a 3DS, which is cool. I'll post the friend code sometime soon maybe so all my DIEHARD BLOGFANS can be my PUNCHINGBAGS in STREETFIGHTER. Lies in all caps are FUNNY. Seriously though I am learning Dudley but it is going slow. Really fun though.


I've also been working on UNLIMITED TACTICS THE EXCITING NEW TACTICAL RPG FOR THE PC quite a bit. It is getting legitimately impressive. It has graphics now. Graphics! No longer will we be competing for the Dwarf Fortress crowd! Normal people could have a reasonable chance of being interested in our game!!

Soon I think we'll put it up for funding on 8 Bit Funding. Could a career as a game developer be far behind??? Yes. But I do have like, two or three pretty decent ideas that are also within my means as a programmer. Ideas SO GOOD I will not even mention them on this seldom-read blog for fear of thieving.

I've also been reading a lot:

Oyasumi Punpun

So I scanned the last two volumes of this and now Hox, veritable God among us, is cleaning them up and making them English and shipping them out at roughly a chapter a day. Wow! The only thing more impressive than this is the chapters themselves. Even having seen them as I scanned them, I still find myself compelled by the developing plot, perhaps even more so as I speculate about how whatever mute gestures I've foreseen will occur. I mean he turns into a triangle what is up with that some sort of visual symbolic of him retreating into himself as a person or becoming more emotionally hardened?? I have to say I'm almost disappointed with the "twist" of him being a good writer. Well sure I mean something was bound to happen on that front but like, meeting the girl in the bar that remembers how good the story that Punpun jotted down in her notebook was? It's a bit far-fetched, like, how good could that story really be? I dunno I feel this segues into topics like "is it possible to be naturally talented at writing" and if so "how does one naturally write literature?". Not "how" as in "how is it possible?" but literally "how would Joyce's writing look if he had never studied Aquinas, Blake, etc? The fact is is that nearly every good writer is a good writer because they were a good reader first. If natural talent for writing exists, it exists in the ability to observe, I believe, and someone with that ability is more than likely to be drawn to literature already. So what has Punpun, who, to my knowledge, doesn't really do any "heavy reading", and I believe we aren't supposed to have any impression of the contrary, written that has been so naturally impressive to this "artsy" girl? We are supposed to think it carries some sort of intrinsic poetic quality, I think, since the content of it was described as "weird". But just how does one even conceive of the idea of writing that naturally? Maybe I'm being too shortsighted. It just sort of bugs me anyways.

That is, though, like, absolutely the only thing that bugs me in that series right now. It is fantastic. I feel like it is becoming the modern version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Or maybe a version of that where Stephen grows up in a void of culture, instead of an overbearing culture. Basically a lot of what Punpun does is driven by his wanting love, but I feel like that in turn is him just wanting some sort of fulfillment, some richer emotional state beyond what he encounters in his typical life. Something like the attainable hope he felt with Aiko. This seems to be a recurring theme in the series, with his uncle clutching on to his guilt over the incident at the pottery class - his only remaining "God" (holyshit this such a good series that scene was just fantastic) - because it was at least a powerful and meaningful emotion capable of giving his life a sense of purpose. I'm sure I could come up with some strenuous applications of it for the rest of the main cast, too, but you get the idea. An aesthetic of meaninglessness, not just the existential "what is it all for in this vast universe?" meaninglessness, but a more literal "my emotions seem trite and I feel like there is more to be had" meaninglessness just floods the work of Asano, and again I'm quick to call him "a voice of a generation", because I really do think that that this our generation's problem: art has become so accessible that it has lost its gravity. This is a bit of a tangent I guess.

The Vapid Generation

So basically I feel like the defining movement of my generation, or at least the movement that I most identify with, is the "struggle to remain human". SOUNDS KINDA WEIRD COMING FROM SOME KID WHO SPENDS HIS TIME ON THE COMPUTER MAKING A GAME FOR OTHER KIDS WHO SPEND ALL THEIR TIME ON THE COMPUTER, RIGHT? Also sounds way weird for me to point out the negatives of art being easy to get at through the internet when one of my strongest beliefs is that all art should be free and accessible to everyone. Okay anyways.

I read or heard on "The Age of Persuasion" recently that one of the biggest trends in marketing lately is selling things to be "authentic". The specific strategy was to imply, even if it could not be true due to basic chronological restrictions, that your parents or grandparents used the product. The cliche of "things were made better in my day" is becoming still more widespread even though practically no one saying it actually predates things like planned obsolescence. More than just the quality of the product, though, is the marketing of the quality of the experience. I don't watch a lot of TV ads (hipster) but from what I can tell the number of ads showing a nuclear family eating in the suburbs is going up at the rate that the event itself is going down. Or rather, the rate of the event probably isn't going down, but the ads cause the viewer to remember only the occurrences of these meals in their youth, and, when contrasting their frequency now with this confirmation-bias created consistency, they suppose that some new factor in modern life is causing their displacement.

Now, I'm not saying this sort of family life is specifically fulfilling or not. The type of emotional and intellectual fulfillment I'm speaking of is a deeply personal and subjective thing. I would call it "the experiencing of transcendental emotions or thoughts". I'm almost sure anyone reading this blog has experienced it because I feel all children with sufficiently un-tragic childhoods experience this on a semi-regular basis. At that point, all your thinking and feeling and learning is pushing your own boundaries, going onto new ground. It's hard for it not to be. I think what really makes these nostalgic family ads so successful is the fact that the viewer relates not to becoming their parents in the scenario, but reverting to their childhood.

BAM well that's obvious, that's one of the most common things I read in psychiatry. What I'm saying is sort of different and likely wrong, though, that said desire isn't just a want of freedom or a lack of responsibility or whatever, but the ability to see the world for something new again, to have a wide array of new experiences and ideas and emotions, and not just to have them new but for them to be overwhelmingly new and different and strange. It's the overwhelming that's key. I feel like there's really no upper bounds on emotions relating to discovery and realization and contentedness. Yeah yeah dopamine sensors biology blah blah let me have my say. Basically I feel like since these emotions are evolutionarily some of the most useful ones, they represent the state that humans want to be in.

Again, sort of obvious?

Why this generation sucks at it

So I feel like a lot of people actually achieve a lifestyle where they are, if not entirely fulfilled on this scale, at least aren't yearning for it. Historically, I mean. Nowadays I feel like a lot of people don't, and especially a lot of young people think they won't. Uh getting tired and this post was actually going to mainly be about Nabokov so maybe I'll just put down why in brief and hopefully I'll come back and flesh it out. Probably won't for a long time, though.

1. You will never have enough money to do absolutely anything. It is nearly impossible to work until you are "rich" when "rich" has shot up from millionaire to billionaire. There are products and experiences that everyone sees that essentially no one can own or have. It is hollowing. Even if you aren't particularly materialistic it can be a bummer of a realization when you see something that you don't really want and wouldn't buy even if you could, but you can never even prove that because you will never be able to buy it.

2. All attainable lifestyles are insufficient. Somewhat infuriatingly paradoxically, we are pushed more than ever into a lifestyle of degrees, careers and luxury. And a family life! Focusing on one of the two is bad! As is neglecting anything! So you have to give 100% at home and at work! That's impossible! And yet, it seems like we're being told that it's the best way to live, and the ideal you should strive for. I dunno.

3. Art and culture have lost their mystique. HEY GUYS I LIKE ART AND FEEL IT IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF HUMANITY. Basically I feel like a lot of the really "transcendental" emotions one gets can come from appreciation of art. Actually I'd put it at as one of the big four:

-The feeling of understanding something or realizing something, "epiphanies"
-The feeling of conveying some idea or emotion, "creation"
-The feeling of being overwhelmed emotionally by someone's creation, "rapture"
-The feeling of being blissfully unworried and satisfied, "contentedness"

I'm pretty happy with those definitions for now I guess. They could use some work though. Also they seem like some weird mix of progressive and categorical so I dunno.

Actually a better way to structure this post would be to talk about how I feel like today's culture is making each of these harder to obtain than before, and comparing it with how I feel like people in older generations had experienced these.

But I should get to bed.

Hey this was a weird blog post this blog is about weird stuff like your weird-ass book and now your weird-ass half-baked philosophy we want more ranting about the crappiness of Naruto or more lists of albums or your opinions on that new Starburst flavor-set

Uh yeah I guess it has been weird lately? I dunno. I still think about stuff I used to think about too but now I'm writing less often due to stuff mentioned at the top of the post and by the time I do it's like, the most "serious" stuff is what it's distilled to.

Also I've been reading like nonstop Nabokov, Joyce and Asano lately so I guess it's one of those moods? They all have such interesting opinions on such matters.