Why there hasn't been many posts on the blog???
Basically in the last few weeks in times where I'd usually crank something out for the blog I had some other project to occupy that time. But I might as well make a blog post out of that so here they are in chronological order.
Oyasumi Punpun vol 9
This came in the mail so I scanned it, which went pretty well. Previous volumes took like ~8 hours but this one I broke 5! Most of the time saved came from the fact that I realized that really no one was expecting me to combine the 2-page spreads, and I was terrible at it besides, so I got to skip all of that. Easy! And good news for all readers sick of my BS screwing up those beautiful spreads
Also it's been fully translated and such now. It's great! Punpun is always great! Which is why I am so sad that I think it must be ending soon. Well, I think. Maybe not. I wouldn't be surprised if the next volume was the last, at any rate. Nice even 10 volumes sounds good, right? Plus Punpun's run into Aiko again, and the whole Pegasus thing seems to have reached the climax. And oh man oh man mfw I realized the cult thing that his thing is a fraction of is the same cult that Aiko's family is in at the very beginning, with the duck thing, oh man, oh, man, and the pyramid, and oh man, the series has a cohesiveness to it that is staggering. Plus it has some really refined commentary. Plus it is really emotional, like, farthest reaches of my emotional capabilities emotional. And it has the best art of any current series at this moment imo. So yeah. Read it, read it, read it.
Essay on Kate Chopin's The Awakening
This thing almost drove me insane. 1000 word essay on the meaning of dreams and awakenings in the novella. Easy. Like actually should be really easy. But no. I was like alright fine dreams anticipate further character development and awakening serves as an actualization of that but that's too dull. I decided instead I should try to talk about the structure of the story and of the character as being based into figurative dreams and awakenings. This was a topic I initially wrote some 4500 words about. Then I realized that that was over 4 times as many words as I was allowed to have. And unlike in high school, that would probably not fly. So I cut out a bunch, rewrote it like twice, and the result is like, geez I have no idea. I honestly cannot tell if it made any sense whatsoever. I think I might have had the occasional good idea but I can't tell if I illustrated it at all. So bun. Back in high school I guess I was just lucky that I was allowed to blow off word limits without repercussion. Or maybe I could have done that here too if I asked but like bun I ought to be able to do this too I think. So yeah pretty frustrating. Grinded at this for most of three days and I think it just got worse and worse aaaargh.
Essay on Marilyn Dumont's A Really Good Brown Girl
This one went a lot better overall. Focused on the paradox of minority writing in regards to identity both limiting and enabling work. Sort of a “have your cake and eat it too.” It was a comparison essay between two poems in the book and I was like “hey she acknowledges the bind here and then she can express herself here without being tied either way” which I'm pretty happy with as a thesis but I think I really only scratched the surface of how friggin' cool dual acknowledgment/utilization of binds – be it cultural responsibilities, cliches, genre expectations, whatever – can be. Anyways yeah pretty happy with this one even though it also had to be 1000 words so I guess maybe I can do this stuff anyways.
November Novel Writing Month
I tried this again. You may remember last year that I tried it and gave up about halfway through both the 50000 words and the month. I just got sick of it, really, realized that I was stuck writing a lot of stuff I didn't really have any interest in. This time I did the opposite: started like way way late into the month (i.e. like a week and a half ago) so I didn't have time to get sick of it. Hilariously bad idea. I also decided that I would be less likely to get sick of any particular part of the story if I didn't obligate myself to write like anything. So what I wrote has essentially no plot whatsoever. That wasn't really enough to stop me, though. I churned out about 25000 words mostly last weekend and I was like whew this is going good and then I read some of it again and I thought woah, this is not going good at all.
Basically I hated it. It was just really really uninteresting. Now I don't know why you'd be interested in reading why I thought this thing I was writing was uninteresting but it's either that or insights into why I think Community is still plenty good this season or maybe why Hidamari Sketch is so good so whatever let's try this for a change of pace.
Alright so awhile back when I was writing a lot of short stories I wrote a bunch involving some college age kids, usually they'd have some sort of conversation or argument, usually about conventions in art, and that was it. They were really heavy on references and wordplay and basically just little attempts to be clever and occasionally I'd also have a few ideas I liked in them. The characters, which I reused in a lot of these stories, were pretty fun too. So when the novel rolled up I was like, sure, I could do this sorta thing for 50000 pages. I combined it with an idea I had had for an actual novel for quite awhile to be like, the central plot (although the idea from day 0 was that said central plot was completely abandon-able if I ever got sick of writing it) and set to it. And it was fun but not as fun as writing those earlier short stories. I realized I was feeling a lot more limited here and it was strange because if anything the greater number of established characters and larger structure affording more microcosms of weirder things but nevertheless I felt pretty fettered. I think I understand now but at the time I didn't and I just quit. So here were my problems:
I was scared of making it too weird. Especially with formatting and the prose. Everything seems really dry as a result. Why did I worry so much about making it too weird? I dunno I think I thought that if any one part was especially strange it would just ruin the whole thing. I don't think this is a valid fear, though.
I was scared of making it too personal. This is something I really just have serious difficulty getting my head around. I was scared of adopting any character traits I saw in any of my friends in any characters in the book 'cause I figured that might offend. I didn't want to include any stuff that had happened to me because I figured any changes I made would be, I dunno, too easily seen as fantasy projection or something? I especially didn't want to include any of my own ideas in it 'cause then maybe every idea in the book might be assumed to be mine and that wouldn't reflect well on me. And even then I didn't include ideas that wouldn't reflect well on me 'cause I figured that people who didn't know me might assume the thoughts to be mine. Then I realized that no one who didn't know me would read this. Then I realized that even people who did know me weren't likely to read this and really any sort of personal stuff ought to be fair game. Like, the first emotion that must be abandoned in creation is shame, right? And if you don't write about what you know, what can you write? Which leads me to my next thing:
It was really about nothing and thus very hard to care about at all. Structuring it in such a way that I could sort of do anything was I think a good idea still but I think not committing to anything inadvertently committed me to nothing. Like I couldn't have many climatic or interesting things happen because then I would have to write them and my dread of having to write something later, as in, locking myself into writing a specific thing later, prevented me from establishing any sort of dramatic narrative. Instead I just had a bunch of references I kept oblique enough to abandon later if I needed to. Bun.
Plus it wasn't really clever enough to support itself without a narrative and I struggled with that ol' awareness/reflexivity double bind. This is because of the previous three things mainly. Plus when I got struck due to them I played the ol' meta card, which is a powerful card if you're being clever but sort of breaks down when you aren't. And plus (as I discussed in the novel, lol) if you start being reflexive/meta/whatever it looks like you're trying to be clever even if you're trying to be sincere, and this, sincerity vs. cleverness, I think is like THE problem with postmodern/postpostmodern literature. DFW deals with it really well in a story in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. And by deals with I mean he illustrates a failure to deal with it. And so do I, I hope. We're pretty low when the best we can hope for is to illustrate a problem in literature rather than actually deal with it.
OH WELL.
A lot of the ideas I came up with I still really like, so there's that, at least. I also like a lot of the characters. I also wrote myself in as a character, how wacky. I've always liked that idea, even though it really flies in the face of the personal stuff/meta issue above. But like sort of sneaking myself in was really fun. I really liked the idea of having “shadow plots” and “shadow characters”, stories that run through the whole novel and are interesting but never are actually commented on. I started to do that a bit so that was good. I also would have liked to bring back the sort of content/style I had in the original short story dialogue dealies I mentioned earlier, and although the problems I mentioned above were a big deterrent, I did get a bit of that same sense at times. I'd say maybe every section had three or four things I liked and then a whole bunch of blegh.
There's maybe four or five sections that I do like, too. Most of them are just tangentially related to the rest of the book and really just feel like short stories. So maybe I'll post them. I'll post one of them in a second in this post at least. Anyways writing those sections was pretty fun and I think I sort of stumbled into a format I really enjoy, which is a short story where you parallel some sort of technical explanation of something obscure or maybe entirely made up with a fairly mundane plot about a semi-dramatic incident in someone's life, or maybe just a general overview of the guy's life. DFW does things like this a lot. So yeah this is a section of my book where I talk about one of the major characters and also the video game with which he is obsessed. I have not edited it nor will I even attempt to edit it or even reread it before posting because whatever.
No wait I did reread a bit of it and it seems way more over the top than I remember. Oh well this is it:
VX
James Heath lived in the big house of Jack's father's for seven years. He emerged less of an adult than when he entered. The last four years he spent there alone. This was arranged by the creator of VX, who had stepped in to continue paying the bills at the place after Jack wound up in the hospital. James was totally unaware of the situation. All he knew is that after Jack had left, he didn't know who to pay rent to, so he stopped, which was convenient, because he also had stopped going to work. Food was always present, but he was not aware that this was due to the creator of VX having food shipped to him and even going as far as to pay the delivery guy extra to go put the stuff in the fridge/pantry. It might seem unfeasible that our James would be so ignorant as to never question how it was that he lived in this house for absolutely nothing and seemed to have infinite food despite being in contact with no one and living in an empty house, but this is a hidden talent of the human brain. Just as one abstracts the circulatory system without question so as to focus the conscious brain on more relevant tasks, James regarded the supply of food and shelter as a natural process enabling him to live, i.e., play VX, and gave no more thought to it than he did each breath.
Deep down, he probably thought Tom had something to do with it, and he felt like an unannounced kindness from Tom such as this was made such that it not be acknowledged, that is, Tom was doing this as a secret favor. James had no reason to believe Tom would do this besides Tom being a generally nice guy, and, James liked to imagine, probably pretty successful and wealthy after all was said and done with his new career. The fantasy of Tom supporting his career in VX with the money he made with his job at the design company – and it was a fantasy – was much preferable to thinking that Tom was just never going to contact him, that maybe he was a failure and ashamed, or had come to hate James, or, and this was the true one, he was dead. So James stored the idea of the food coming from Tom in the depths of his brain and never thought of it and played VX and ate and showered and took little walks and hung around with Jason and browsed the internet and sometimes slept. Of course, it was the first task that took up the vast, vast majority of his time.
VX is the fifteenth game in a series of competitive games made by a small-time developer who only went by “why”. As far as anyone knew, it was just one man, although the games were of exceptional production value. Although the roman numeral for 15 is really XV, why opted to name it “VX” because “that sounded cooler”. Diehard players of VX often get the formatting for roman numerals mixed up in their head because of this. VX is a game that is played 2 on 2, through the internet. Each player on the team has a vastly different role. My role was to get yelled at over the mic by Jack. Jack's role seemed to largely involve yelling. On the other team, Tom's role was to make stuttering sounds and jab at keys every few seconds while James made twitching movements with his whole body. Intra-house games came to an end after only an hour or so and never resumed. Apparently James got Paul to play with him a few times, but I think most of his teammates early on were friends of his from past video games that he knew through the internet. James had been playing video games for longer than he could remember and had a good stable of friends that he had met through them. Of them I think we only really knew one, a guy Jeff who lived near us that James played fighting games with, apparently. Jeff called James “toaster” in real life which was pretty awkward. I think Jeff and James played as a team for awhile but James' skill in the game improved at such a rate that I don't think anyone besides “static”, his final teammate, could really have kept up with him.
VX is a game where one player, designated “V”, is playing a fighting game with the “V” from the other team. However, the attacks “V” has access to is determined by the moves of “X”, who is playing a puzzle game that is difficult to describe. The whole game is hard to describe. When the match starts, “V” and “X” are chosen randomly, and can change again during the game. All players see the same screen, with the puzzle elements intertwined with the fighting game. What this means is that no one who hasn't invested significant time and effort into learning to do so will have no idea what is happening at any given time. Jack usually yelled things like “Hit him!” without realizing that it was he that was supposed to be doing the hitting, and that I was the one controlling the blocks flying around in the background. At least I think.
When you finish a game of VX, the winner doesn't really matter. In fact, the winner isn't even like, especially displayed. The game will end even if neither player loses, but it will end immediately if one player loses. At the end of the game, each team receives a letter grade based on their performance. The letter grade reflects both player's performance. The game will also verbally say something, a word like “Incredible!” or “Excellent!”, which reflects only the performance of the individual that hears it. Teams have a overall letter grade that is made up of an average of their letter grades. Players also have an individual rank that can only go up and is based on consistently doing well. The highest rank is unknown. The highest achievable letter grade is unknown, however, any game that gives a team an A+ automatically submits a replay file of the game to some mysterious judges, who review the game and see if the team actually deserves some higher grade, such as “S” or “M” or even the mythical “*”.
What this means is sort of irrelevant. The relevance is that James and his longtime teammate static, playing together as g0d`toaster and g0d`static respectively, often played A+ games, which means they often got emails a few hours later telling them what judged score they actually achieved.
That is also sort of irrelevant. Also sort of irrelevant was that the timing of judgment often worked out that the reviews would come in around 3-4AM.
Here's the relevant part: James Heath opening these emails one by one and shouting. A lot. Either things like “S MINUS WHAT IN THE EVER LIVING FUCK ARE THEY SMOKING etc” or things like “THREE STAR OH WOO YES OH SWEET YES YES OH etc” and honestly I couldn't tell the difference at this time, to me I just heard “FUCK YOU DAVID TRYING TO SLEEP HA HA HA JUST SEE IF YOU CAN KICK MY DOOR DOWN AGAIN.”
I mentioned it once to Jack, who agreed that, yes, it was annoying, and yes, it probably would keep him up, if he was trying to go to bed. I tried mentioning it to Tom, but he made some dismissive remarks about it being good to have passions, but maybe not so good to have obsessions, or “monomania”, the term I suggested which he said was a bit much, and felt that it would be better to address the “root problem” here, which I said was located somewhere around his head, which was somewhere around his anus, and that sorry that was rude I didn't get much sleep last night. Tom and I were on Good Terms and I dang well wanted to keep it that way, he was, at the time, my only link to certain persons in which I had acute interest. But that's another thing, and the relevant thing now was my going to class on two hours sleep, and how I felt capable of physically throwing 6'5” Jason down the stairs when I passed his yawning, satisfied, rested, physical insult of self on the staircase. I was twitchy when I was sleep deprived, I admit it, and short tempered, and high strung, and essentially everything I didn't want to be in those days.
Upstairs, twitchy and short tempered and high strung was everything James Heath wanted to be. Good VX play required not so much mental concentration as mental chaos. A certain abandonment of the senses occurs when overloaded to this extent. Sound cues. Situational rules to remember. Multitasking. Switching rapidly between making broad choices and extremely taxing small precise movements. Reflexes. Knowledge. Strategy. Speed. It was perfect. It was perfect. It was perfect.
The real world was inferior on a level of rules of logic. VX was more logical than logic. Cause and effect was a model of a temporal prison. VX was the world of infinites. James could not shut up about it when we were out with him, which was more and more seldom.
In 2014, Jack is in the hospital, Jason is just gone, and I move to the basement to get further away from the noise coming out of James's tiny attic. I talk to Tom about issues of bill payment, why has no one kicked us out yet, etc, etc, and he knows as little as I do and also can't afford to care. Within the year I'm gone and I hear later that Tom hits on some opportunity and moves to New York only a few months later. I didn't tell James I left. We held a big party downstairs; he didn't hear.
James lives in Jack's dad's big house until 2017, when the internet goes down and nothing James can think to try can bring it back up. He moves in with Jeff, who lives pretty close to him at that time and considers it an honor, doubly so when mysterious checks follow toaster to this new abode. James is at this point a “Demigod” and static is a “Immortal” and their team has an average grade of “M”. Jeff is a “Legend” and with Steven, also a “Legend”, they have an average grade of “B”, but they don't really play so often these days. Steven agrees that it is an honor for g0d`toaster to be staying at Jeff's place.
In 2022, Jeff's relationship with a girl he's met at work gets serious enough that James's presence at home is becoming a major inconvenience. He is relocated from a main floor room to a corner of the basement and seems to not even notice the transplant. He hadn't seen Jason in a year and thus had not heard even a word about Tom or David or Jack in about a year too. They were slowly slipping away from him. Across the Pacific Ocean, g0d`static attends his grandfather's funeral and thinks about how when his own parents die he will likely have to kill himself. The funeral also marks the first time in a few months in which he has left his house. He is a “Old One” and James is an “Elder God” and their team grade is “**”. There are only fifteen teams with a star ranking at this time. Only three have “***” or higher. The highest ranked team is players named “lucifer” and “satan”. They have the only “****” ranking in VX. James regards their name choice as a deliberate response to his and static's “g0d`” tags and is both honored and disgusted. He regularly has nightmares about them, about playing with them, as they do regularly. Sometimes, though, the nightmares are just “about them”, somehow the concept of them, even though he has never seen them or heard their voices. Someone has told them once that they lived in Brazil, which would explain some latency issues.
In 2028:
<~g0d`static> hey how you pay for internet
<~g0d`static> do u have job
<~g0d`static> or parent or what
<~g0d`toaster> what?
<~g0d`toaster> oh not sure
<~g0d`toaster> some government thing
<~g0d`toaster> i think
<~g0d`toaster> why?
<~g0d`static> u have house?
<~g0d`toaster> yeah
<~g0d`static> i come to america
<~g0d`static> live in yr house?
<~g0d`static> ? ok?
<~g0d`toaster> huh
<~g0d`static> i'm on street
<~g0d`static> made to leave
<~g0d`static> by parent
<~g0d`toaster> oh uh
Uh he was living in the basement of Jeff's family's house still and it was at something like a “boiling point”, which, hilariously enough, happened at around the same time as the boiling point for static's, whose real name was Tanaka Ao, parents. A major opportunity on the Mandarake online store. A major lack of funds in the personal account. A quick dash out to grab his father's credit card. It was the one too manyth time. Meanwhile Jeff and James shuffle in the early evening to be told by the wife that while Jeff was “walking James” (the wife's term), the kid had taken first steps or said first words or something, and the whole situation was huge and confusing and exploding, and had nothing like the one-frame explosion cancels of VX for James to punch in through before the argument started. James and Ao and six other players, including lucifer and satan, were at the rank of “Grand Master”, currently speculated to be the highest rank. The g0d` team had a ranking of “***” while their antagonists had maintained “****”. But the devil had not won yet.
So static did not move to America, but he did get kicked out of his parents house. Before the final cutting off, he was made to endure one cruel revenge by his father, who had barely tolerated his presence since like 2014. He was made to watch, screaming, as his father smashed and ripped to fairly small bits his entire collection of anime figures, anime DVDs, anime posters, video games, computer parts, manga, wall scrolls, body pillow covers and sometimes even the pillows themselves, the feathers and little synthetic puffballs settling as his father in a pulsing berserker stance. He was screaming out prices, begging that these be sold and the money used for anything, even things specifically to torture him, even the bullet that would kill him, so long as they lived on. But no.
He then got a part-time job at a Family Mart and spent all of his time there, at a local public bath, or at a local internet cafe. He slept whenever possible in any of these spots. He played with random players, who spammed him later with personal messages demanding to know the secrets of his skills. He played as g0d`bread. why? did not fund him like he did James because he did not like the style of his play. Funding or no, James also took a bit of time to land on his feet after finally being made to move out of Jeff's basement. The checks eventually followed him to a cheap apartment his brother helped him get. He was also contracting arthritis and had been experiencing symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, but he hardly noticed. It was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 2028 when he finally talked to static again. What had passed, or didn't pass, between them, or within them, didn't matter. The end of their last game, played that April, where g0d`statc's legendary chain of block-cancels into a “surreal beatdown” by g0d`toaster, earning an extremely rare “VX” grade, still a hot topic in many discussion circles, the end of that game seamlessly connected with the start of their next one, played that night, against two well-known Korean players who, after the match, reportedly entered every channel and forum they could with “THE KINGS ARE BACK” on the tips of their fingers.
Only for one week in 2030 could they be called the actual kings, after a series of matches against Chinese players GMOst`toro and GMOst`carrot gave them five consecutive “VX” rankings. Controversy erupted instantly, the extreme rarity and unlikeliness of the situation had people calling into question every aspect of the matches. Judges were interviewed, plays were reviewed and rereviewed, and the g0d` players reached a new grade of “****”, tying them with lucifer and satan. At the end of the week, though, the entire debacle was pushed aside in the public consciousness by lucifer reaching the rank of “Final Master”. That day, James' brother called to tell James that he had read in the paper that a Jack Barnes had died, and was that the Jack that he knew? And it was also that day that James felt a completely debilitating pain in his right wrist that numbed his fingers and left his hand a flopping fish on the keyboard. The match scored a “B-” and at the funeral, where he overheard that Tom was also dead and he talked to no one and recognized no one and seemed to be recognized by no one, he decided that he would never play VX again. The devil had one.
James' favorite day to recall as he walks slowly through a local park is the day when I broke his door down. The money from why? keeps coming in, although no one is sure why at this point. He doesn't remember the day as the day that I broke his door down, though. Nor does he remember it as the day that I snapped a canvas over my knee on the bus ride home, or ineffectually punched Jason in the stomach as he laughed in the seat next to me, or made a girl cry for the very first time ever, which is certainly the way I remember the day. He doesn't remember or make the connection that it was after this day that money started arriving for him from nowhere in the mail. He remembers it for when he opened the email that said “g0d`static and g0d`toaster, for your performance in match 223034 with briang0 and schappie0, we have awarded you a * award. Congratulations.” And then he remembers playing the loudest song he had the loudest he could and singing along as loud as he can and standing on his chair, and what else is irrelevant.
He remembers the nights in the basement after he had finally learned to be quiet, remembers the silent clench of fist, shudder at elbow and slow nod, eyes closed, after hitting “Galactic Champion”, the rest, the tattered mattress and drafts, is irrelevant. He remembers hitting “Veteran” and telling Jason breathlessly about the percentile, which was like 96th at the time. He remembers hitting “Legend” and rubbing it in the face of Steven, who was at “Hero” before anyone they knew but got stuck at “Hero”, getting like constant “C+”s, for like a year. He remembers his first “****”, awarded for a match where he played X almost the whole time and comboed like his life depended on it. He remembers the feeling of neurons rewiring in a sensory bypass of consciousness tedium: colour to sound to muscle as one circuit. It was perfect, perfect, perfect.
He remembers meeting g0d`static in #VX, although he had run into him in the game before. At the time they were just static and toaster. When he wonders where static is now, which he does pretty often, he gives up after he realizes that he can't picture anyone's life in Japan at all. He sometimes realizes that he can't picture anyone else's life at all. They run around looking for matches. The run around dropping bricks in holes. They run around looking for something to punch or block. Problems without solutions. In VX, problems solvable, perfection. He remembers telling Jeff about VX, describing it like “Tetris and 3S without all the problems”, to which Jeff said “Since when do Tetris and 3S have problems?”, to which James just chuckled knowingly. He remembers speaking to someone, he can't remember who, about the difference between Tetris and VX. He doesn't remember much about the conversation, except that the Tetris player was a good Tetris player but only an okay VX player and wasn't taking “You're not very good on V” as an excuse for his mediocrity at the latter, and he remembers the advice he gave: “Think about wholeness, VX is a game that demands wholeness.”
The person he was speaking to remembers it well, has it in a .txt file named “toaster vx chat.txt”, and looks at on occasion. He has it in a folder with a failed project that he began after seeing why? propose the idea on his blog. It was like Tetris, except the blocks didn't clear, and the game didn't end, so you just kept building higher and higher and higher. why? suggested it be called “Tower”, the actual programmer referred to it himself as “Tetriminos of the Sun”, and the only released version was called “Babel”. You drop bricks as fast or slow as you want. Your Tower is as organized or disorganized as you want. Once you go up enough, the camera scrolls off and the bottom disappears. There's a background that starts with sky and clouds then goes to stars and then galaxies. It is an “art game”. After working on it a few days the “artist” realized he was terrified of it. He told James why at the start of “toaster vx chat”. He said: “babel made me realize i'm afraid of heaven”. And toaster said, and this is what he remembers much more than the advice about wholeness, was “just play vx more its actually living :D”. He claims this offhand statement by James, who was, at the time, responding to pretty much everything said by anyone with a suggestion that they play VX instead, he claims this remark changed his life. They talked about the merits of VX for an hour or so until static signed on and James left to play more.
In 2055, James doesn't know if there ever was a rank beyond “Final Master”, but he suspects not. He doesn't know if anyone still plays VX. He doesn't know if lucifer and satan are still the top two players, or even who they are or if they still live or what. He suspects there was no rank after “Final Master” because it was the fiftieth rank. He still suspects that there could be a team better than those two, though, a team worthy of the grade of “VX”. He can see them in his mind. The dim flashes on the impact of the brick still burn his closed eyelids. The soft swoop sound played when the bricks drop out the bottom of the well echoes in his brain. The undeniable tremor that runs through his whole body as the bright flash of a gold parry gives way to a flurry of finger movements, the reversal combo, he clenches his wrist as he involuntarily moves to recreate it. VX is perfection in that it contains perfection in that the hazy city sky contains a celestial perfection in the grand symmetry of galaxy within galaxy. The gap between “Galactic Champion” and “Cosmic Hero” was crossed by &yohiro in 2025. Within clunky bone and flesh lies the perfect graceful movement. In static lies the tone. In the chaos of the world, James Heath had found VX. Our God Colin watched him play all of once, mild concern clouding his face as he focused more on the twitching pudge around James' cheeks rather than the utterly incomprehensible firework vomit on the screen. We had nothing to judge James' life by but our own, and that hardly seemed fair. Criticizing him left us feeling ugly and hypocritical. The joy in his face as the office chair slowly swiveled to meet my foot and his wrecked door planted a seed of guilt in my anger almost instantly. Anger cannot meet joy, joy is the despair of anger. James was, is, the happiest of all of us. My first draft of my paper on “The Fundamental Light of Humanity” was called “A Study of Flow and Ecstasy Through Competition in the Game VX”, but it was scrapped.
One idea I had in those stages was a “Fundamental Hole of Humanity” as a counterpart and motivating contrary to the F.L. of H.. I have since abandoned it, but if it existed, James would be the only one I know who has come close to filling it. He filled it with some billions of bricks dropped and exploded, blocks turned cancels and cancels turned jabs. He filled it with thirty-nine keyboards and a lot of friendships and a lot of futile arthritis meds. He filled it with VX. And someday, maybe, we'll all find our VX too.
So yeah
The idea was a lot of stories like that that interconnected, some being big summaries of a whole life, most being just events that developed character a bit. The other sections I liked the most were elaborations on this game and the creator of it, by the way, maybe I should have just tried to do the whole thing on that. I dunno.
But that's what I've been up to essentially
There's also the standard new music and anime and sitcoms but this post is plenty long enough so I'll cover that later.
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