EDVGT II

(cont. from An Exploratory Dialogue on Video Game Theory)

It's a Choose-Your-Own-Dialogue! To have your character begin playing a game at the LAN Center, click here (just as soon as I've written that part). To get up and purchase a drink from the LAN Center, continue reading!

This terrible, fantastical nonsense won't do at all. I require caffeine to function, and I'm willing to sell my soul to Coke for it...I feel dirty buying energy drinks at a LAN Center, especially when the games industry loves to partner with the beverage industry to insert "BAWLS Guarranaxx" as a cornerstone of the Liberated Nerd's identity...

"Excuse me, but don't I know you?"

It was a vaguely familiar face asking me the question, tentatively probing just as I racked my brain for a name. I was going to suggest "Valerie," but she beat me to recognition.

"Haven't we had a philosophy class together," she realized. "It was PHL 555, I think, 'How To Be a Living Embodiment of a Philosophical Point of View?' And I think your name is Joan?"

"That's right," I nodded, taking a bottle out of the fridge. "I remember your name, too, I think...Balere, isn't it? I didn't know you played video games."

Balere was a woman about my age, a lanky, pale woman with black hair and clear Spanish ancestry. "Play?" she asked. "I don't just play them, I study them."

We re-introduced ourselves as I paid for my drink, the way students do outside of classes. It can only be said to have to do with a kind of deception that goes on between students and teachers, or maybe only some students - or maybe between students and students, instead. She was actually a major in video game theory, which naturally I had never heard of. I was in the kind of stupor where one doesn't remember whether caffeine, alcohol, and/or sleep deprivation are the biological culprits, and at first I was a little bit confused.

"Wait, you study game theory? And what, come here to LAN centers to apply it or something?"

"No no," she said impatiently. "Nothing like that. I actually study video games themselves, and what they mean as a medium, with all the possible implications of that." As she said this, she paid for her own couple of energy drinks, a pair of absurdly massive "Monsters." I cringed a little, but then of course I was drinking the same crap...

An Exploratory Dialogue on Video Game Theory

3:00 AM. I had left the mirthless yellow light of the LAN Center's basement lobby, and was currently in a black booth in front of a computer. Somewhere in-between there must have been something about me walking in, or attempting to, but I don't remember any of it.

These places are terrible. You get the vile sense that maybe there's something else at work - yes, of course. It all makes sense now. That morbid buzzing light in the lobby sucks us in like a work of Kafka...and inside the shadowy basement, there are comfortable chairs, video games, the soft sounds of wanna-be soldiers lulling one softly to sleep over headsets...why of course, you can come play video games on credit, no need for cash up front...and if your liver is missing in the morning, it shows what a hardcore gamer you are...

TBC

They're Stealing Our Gigs

Now Serving The Most Metal Thing to Come Out of Mexico Since Diego Rivera

Next thing you know, Mexico will have musical-genre-oriented political parties. There will be genre discrimination...the "metal fountain" and the "emo fountain" (one will have blood instead of water, but I'm not sure which)...now, where are the Indie Mexicans in all of this? Will they be inspired to take up arms against lovers of commercial music?

With any luck, this will spread up north. It would be a great way to get people into politics! No one gives a rat's ass about which of two slimebags they vote for, but they're willing to kill over taste in music!

And in the grand scheme of things, what's really important? Let the Master swipe our rights and property from under our noses, so long as we don't have any emo kids representing our culture's music. At least history will remember us as suckers with good taste.

O Little Traveler

Now Serving Corruptea, the Official Tea of Rod Paige

Throughout all of today - which, incidentally, was a Tuesday - I was walking around with a very small glass shard in my sock.

I'm looking at it right now, on an envelope from my mom. The original Mental Health Association return address, printed on the envelope, has been stickered-over twice, once to correct the office address, and again for our home address.

I dimly remember a time when I don't think there was anything so hodge-podge or crudely re-used in my life, but maybe that's just me. I also dimly remember my mom relating a story about a friend of hers whose son had died after stepping on broken glass, thinking it was no big deal. The sad thing is that it took me a College Education to suppose that the story might have been exaggerated.

That's assuming my memory to be true, which is a bold enough assumption on its own.

Holy shit - this just in - Laurie Brown has broken the story on CBC's Radio 2, Easter has been turned into a gift-holiday. With her characteristic subtlety, she asked: "When did that happen?" Similarly, my mouse's battery-light is flashing red.

Now, having enough money to buy batteries, why do I feel like it's the end of the line?

So my foot feels fine, and I haven't seen any blood yet. I should probably check it...yes, it's fine. I'm a regular Johnny Appleseed...if only I could somehow prove that I've pulled off this amazing feat...oh, that juicy pun is tempting me...I could do it again tomorrow, this time with witnesses. Yes. Wait. No.

What a savage little fucker. It's still there on the envelope, looking very shiny and pointy. It makes my toes tingle to think about what I did all day, like another memory of my mom involving me, an outlet, a screw-driver, and slow parental uptake.

Not so slow that I fried myself, mind you. The electricity might have been off anyway, who knows...alright, people in the dorm room, and I tossed the glass shard. Mom would have wanted me to bag it...note to self, ask someone about glass in the trash compactor...

I Like It

Now Serving A Slice of My Identity

I have no idea who runs this site, but $10 says they're white. (That's a lie, I'm not willing to fork up ten bucks if I'm wrong. I'm probably right, though.)

I'm also willing to bet that the authors could add their site as an entry. After all, it is a blog, and that in itself is very white...

Some Minutes of "The Signal"

Now Serving The Signal

If your fourteen kids were slaughtered because you belittled a God for having less, at least you know you got under a God's skin. If your grief hardened you so much that you became a rock, at least you don't doubt the legitimacy of your grief. If your fate is to revisit that loss with every rainfall, weeping intermittently for the rest of time, at least know you care Enough.

Priests grow up to be poets and philosophers.

Movement is what the eye holds on to, and gripping movement is how we know genius when we see it. Everyone stops, so they won't distract themselves.

There's the discovery and the watching someone else make one, to discover what was unique to you. An inclination to smugness can make this pleasant, to make up for the unpleasantness it brought you to before.

Running in place makes for resentful muscles.