Although the radiation (and generous use of oxycodone) has started to relieve my back pain, I'm still unhappy.
I don't want this blog to be a journal of my depression, because that's not what life's about. My life has been turned upside-down, but that doesn't cancel out the good times I had before or the good times that I know will come after. The hole that I'm in is just so deep right now that it's almost impossible for the light to reach me.
It's six in the morning. I get to go home for the weekend today, see my wife for about 24 hours before I have to turn around and come back for more therapy. All I can think about is the fact that I must leave her. That terrible stay coming up in January. Those weeks all alone again.
I've spent so much time living just for the sake of not being dead. Being with my love was supposed to be the beginning of a new kind of life, a self-determined life. I would make my own terms and be free.
I can't think of spending another month in some cold, gigantic city full of strangers, living in a tiny room with my mother. I don't know how I'll survive.
What if this isn't the end? What happens to me if this is just my life now?
Friday, December 27, 2019
Friday, December 20, 2019
CAR T - 3
This week was my first week of radiation therapy. With a combination of oxycodone and tramadol, I'm able to lie flat on the table long enough for them to do the treatment; it still hurts to lie flat on the table, but I can manage it. I can't believe that even with all these strong painkillers, I still hurt this much.
I'm so tired and unhappy. I don't find fun in anything anymore. It's a chore to even write these sentences. I don't feel like writing, or reading, or playing videogames or listening to music. I haven't worked on games programming in forever. Before my back started hurting and it became a moot point, I didn't even feel like exercise.
The emotional ups and downs have been just as hard as the physical ones. My entire life has been turned upside-down, and at this point it's still unclear if it will ever return to normal. The only way I've been able to make it by is to not think about it too deeply.
I'm so tired and unhappy. I don't find fun in anything anymore. It's a chore to even write these sentences. I don't feel like writing, or reading, or playing videogames or listening to music. I haven't worked on games programming in forever. Before my back started hurting and it became a moot point, I didn't even feel like exercise.
The emotional ups and downs have been just as hard as the physical ones. My entire life has been turned upside-down, and at this point it's still unclear if it will ever return to normal. The only way I've been able to make it by is to not think about it too deeply.
Friday, December 13, 2019
CAR T - 2
I've been suffering steadily increasing back pain for a while now. There was a tumor in my lower spine earlier this year; they treated it with chemotherapy and the pain went away, but it's back now. The doctors have agreed that the best way to treat it is radiation therapy, in the lull before I go to Portland for the long stay. Because of this, we're celebrating Christmas tomorrow.
I wasn't able to do my CT scan today; being on my back hurts the worst, and I couldn't lay still long enough for them to do the scan. They gave me a shot of morphine and tried it again. I made it through the scan the second time, but my back muscles were still on fire. Even blunted by morphine, the pain was excruciating. At least the nap afterwards was nice.
I'm upset. I had a few weeks left of normalcy before I had to go away; now those are gone. I won't be able to kiss my wife, play with my nieces and nephews, or talk to my older siblings for months at a time. In all actuality, it was rather naive of me to think that radiotherapy could be as simple as one visit; it still doesn't take the sting away.
I wasn't able to do my CT scan today; being on my back hurts the worst, and I couldn't lay still long enough for them to do the scan. They gave me a shot of morphine and tried it again. I made it through the scan the second time, but my back muscles were still on fire. Even blunted by morphine, the pain was excruciating. At least the nap afterwards was nice.
I'm upset. I had a few weeks left of normalcy before I had to go away; now those are gone. I won't be able to kiss my wife, play with my nieces and nephews, or talk to my older siblings for months at a time. In all actuality, it was rather naive of me to think that radiotherapy could be as simple as one visit; it still doesn't take the sting away.
Friday, December 6, 2019
CAR T - 1
As I write this, it's November 29th. In four days, I will go to Portland for the first appointment on the road to CAR T.
They will check my veins and discuss living arrangements. I might even get an actual timeframe, instead of guessing and dreading.
Now that the sadness has passed, all I feel is anger.
I'm angry that over a year of my life has been taken from me with no recourse.
I'm angry that I have to be away from my wife for an entire month.
I'm angry because I feel like people won't speak plainly to me. I'm angry because I'm broke and don't have my driver's license. I'm angry because people tell me not to be angry--dammit, don't I have a right to be angry? Everybody else overreacts to trivial things; why can't I be mad that my life has been endangered and every aspect of my growth has been completely derailed?
I wanted to study math and computer science in a big university; that was a pipe dream before I'd even started. I wanted to get an apartment with my wife; that only became more difficult the harder I worked at it. I wanted to excel at my stupid little retail job; obviously, I can't now. I wanted to have the dentist fix my teeth, and I can't. I wanted to earn money, and I can't. I wanted to begin my life, and now I can't.
And yet, I'm still expected to keep a stiff upper lip and not stress the small stuff. Even as obstacles and indignities beset me, each one washing away my resolve like a stream eroding a mountain, I have to hear the most stressful, high-strung people in my life tell me to "calm down."
When am I allowed to be upset?
They will check my veins and discuss living arrangements. I might even get an actual timeframe, instead of guessing and dreading.
Now that the sadness has passed, all I feel is anger.
I'm angry that over a year of my life has been taken from me with no recourse.
I'm angry that I have to be away from my wife for an entire month.
I'm angry because I feel like people won't speak plainly to me. I'm angry because I'm broke and don't have my driver's license. I'm angry because people tell me not to be angry--dammit, don't I have a right to be angry? Everybody else overreacts to trivial things; why can't I be mad that my life has been endangered and every aspect of my growth has been completely derailed?
I wanted to study math and computer science in a big university; that was a pipe dream before I'd even started. I wanted to get an apartment with my wife; that only became more difficult the harder I worked at it. I wanted to excel at my stupid little retail job; obviously, I can't now. I wanted to have the dentist fix my teeth, and I can't. I wanted to earn money, and I can't. I wanted to begin my life, and now I can't.
And yet, I'm still expected to keep a stiff upper lip and not stress the small stuff. Even as obstacles and indignities beset me, each one washing away my resolve like a stream eroding a mountain, I have to hear the most stressful, high-strung people in my life tell me to "calm down."
When am I allowed to be upset?
Friday, November 29, 2019
CAR T - 0
My latest scan did not have good news for me. I will not be returning to work December 1st, or any time in January, probably not even in February.
I still have the cancer. It's been vastly reduced, but it's still holding out in an area near the base of my spine. That black smudge on the scan is the worst thing I've ever seen. I do not get to return to work. I might not even have a job to return to once I'm done; I've used practically all my leave time.
My next treatment is CAR T cell therapy. My immune cells will be extracted, genetically modified and cultured in a lab, then sent back to be put back into my body. This is also the end of the road, as far as curing the cancer is concerned; if this doesn't work, all they can do is try to keep it in remission.
I feel like I'm wasting everybody's time. I got married--what if I never get better? What if I took almost a year off from work for no reason? I will probably never have a child for fear of leaving them without a father. What if I leave my new wife without a husband?
I have a few appointments in December, then in January I will have to stay in Portland for a month--another month away from my wife, away from home, in a gigantic city I don't care for to spend my days getting poked at the clinic and living in closer proximity to my mother than I ever wanted or imagined.
I hate not being able to work. I regret every time I ever complained about my lowly retail position. I have watched multiple seasons of TV in a single sitting and played more video games than I ever thought I'd be able to. I've read three new books and started (and scrapped) my own novel more times than I can count. I would trade it all away if I could just do some work.
Mom refuses to let me help with chores, drawing from a seemingly bottomless bag of excuses whenever I ask and getting mad if I just do them anyway. On the other hand, my wife's apartment is so cluttered, and her aunt so capable in mess-making, that I can only make small scratches on the surface before I'm exhausted for the day.
I know my wife means well, but a little bit of my heart goes away with every meal she pays for and every trinket she comes home with. All my life, the only thing I've wanted is to pay for dinner, to buy my own models and movies and games, to save money and pay credit card bills. Once I got a short taste of financial freedom, it was ripped away from me in one night at the hospital. I might as well have never grown into an adult--nothing changed, after all. Now I'm back to asking for instead of earning money, back to having everybody cart me around, back to special treatment and being pitied and talked down to instead of respected as a peer.
I wish I'd worked in some place I could avoid, like a restaurant or a fish-packing plant or something. Since I worked in the biggest grocery store in the city, there's no avoiding going in. There's no avoiding the pity, the "How have you been," having to tell them that no, I still can't return to work, I'll take care, thank you for the well-wishes.
I just want my life and my independence back. Having it and then having it taken away is worse than never having it at all.
I still have the cancer. It's been vastly reduced, but it's still holding out in an area near the base of my spine. That black smudge on the scan is the worst thing I've ever seen. I do not get to return to work. I might not even have a job to return to once I'm done; I've used practically all my leave time.
My next treatment is CAR T cell therapy. My immune cells will be extracted, genetically modified and cultured in a lab, then sent back to be put back into my body. This is also the end of the road, as far as curing the cancer is concerned; if this doesn't work, all they can do is try to keep it in remission.
I feel like I'm wasting everybody's time. I got married--what if I never get better? What if I took almost a year off from work for no reason? I will probably never have a child for fear of leaving them without a father. What if I leave my new wife without a husband?
I have a few appointments in December, then in January I will have to stay in Portland for a month--another month away from my wife, away from home, in a gigantic city I don't care for to spend my days getting poked at the clinic and living in closer proximity to my mother than I ever wanted or imagined.
I hate not being able to work. I regret every time I ever complained about my lowly retail position. I have watched multiple seasons of TV in a single sitting and played more video games than I ever thought I'd be able to. I've read three new books and started (and scrapped) my own novel more times than I can count. I would trade it all away if I could just do some work.
Mom refuses to let me help with chores, drawing from a seemingly bottomless bag of excuses whenever I ask and getting mad if I just do them anyway. On the other hand, my wife's apartment is so cluttered, and her aunt so capable in mess-making, that I can only make small scratches on the surface before I'm exhausted for the day.
I know my wife means well, but a little bit of my heart goes away with every meal she pays for and every trinket she comes home with. All my life, the only thing I've wanted is to pay for dinner, to buy my own models and movies and games, to save money and pay credit card bills. Once I got a short taste of financial freedom, it was ripped away from me in one night at the hospital. I might as well have never grown into an adult--nothing changed, after all. Now I'm back to asking for instead of earning money, back to having everybody cart me around, back to special treatment and being pitied and talked down to instead of respected as a peer.
I wish I'd worked in some place I could avoid, like a restaurant or a fish-packing plant or something. Since I worked in the biggest grocery store in the city, there's no avoiding going in. There's no avoiding the pity, the "How have you been," having to tell them that no, I still can't return to work, I'll take care, thank you for the well-wishes.
I just want my life and my independence back. Having it and then having it taken away is worse than never having it at all.
Friday, November 8, 2019
A small update
Things have been difficult lately. It's getting down to the wire, financially. I've been scrambling like mad to find freelance work opportunities; transcribe audio here, fill out a survey there. That kind of thing.
My workouts are going okay. I went from 210lbs at my very heaviest down to a pretty stable 196. My health care network provides free gym membership for three months for cancer survivors, so I'm going to apply for that soon.
Things will get real if I can go back to work on December 1st. It's the earliest estimate for when I can return to work; however, my latest PET scan shows that I still have some cancer, and might need some more therapy. That eats up time.
I'm also working on something big: I'm developing a video game. Not a free browser game, not a random experiment or game jam entry; an actual, full-length game that I can put my name on and be proud of it. I've been working on it for five months, and it's shaping up nicely. Hopefully I can have a demonstration ready before January; but if not, that's okay, too.
If anybody's reading this, I ask only that you wish me luck. There's still room for it to get worse before it gets better.
My workouts are going okay. I went from 210lbs at my very heaviest down to a pretty stable 196. My health care network provides free gym membership for three months for cancer survivors, so I'm going to apply for that soon.
Things will get real if I can go back to work on December 1st. It's the earliest estimate for when I can return to work; however, my latest PET scan shows that I still have some cancer, and might need some more therapy. That eats up time.
I'm also working on something big: I'm developing a video game. Not a free browser game, not a random experiment or game jam entry; an actual, full-length game that I can put my name on and be proud of it. I've been working on it for five months, and it's shaping up nicely. Hopefully I can have a demonstration ready before January; but if not, that's okay, too.
If anybody's reading this, I ask only that you wish me luck. There's still room for it to get worse before it gets better.
Friday, October 25, 2019
Anniversary and Accountability (to myself)
This post is going up on the 25th. On October 20th, 2018, I was diagnosed with cancer. Since then I've had about six surgeries, dozens and dozens of doses of chemotherapy, three leaves of absence, a dozen or so extended out-of-town hospitalizations, hundreds of dollars worth of medication, and the bottomless support of my family, coworkers, friends, acquaintances, and even perfect strangers around the world.
But what have I actually done?
I've started another game programming project. I feel like it's The One(tm). I felt that about the last two or three projects, one of which I got sick of long before finishing and the other I couldn't even get past a basic, unimpressive prototype. But something's different about this one, I can feel it.
Dismayed by my ever-increasing weight at the doctor's, I've redoubled my efforts to control my gluttony and get some exercise done. Limiting my appetite is harder than it seemed at first and my disgusting flabby gut hasn't gone away yet, but my arms are noticeably bigger and I can do 15 pushups without feeling like I'm going to die.
In my opinion, not enough.
I have big plans for 2020. I had big plans for 2019 too, but that got sidetracked by the cancer ordeal. I'm hoping that I get good news and can return to work in December, and then things are getting real.
I plan to:
It's a fact I've known for a long time, but have yet to internalize. I've had terrible food that was bad for me just because I was having a bad day. I've quit workouts too early because I was bored and distracted, not because I'd hit my limit. I've went back for seconds and thirds and so on just for the fun of eating, and that's why I'm in my position: overweight and out of shape.
I've said "I don't feel like doing this" about work, about programming, and about social activities. It's one of the reasons I have so little money, and definitely the reason I have no finished games under my belt and very, very few true friends. I've messed up my sleep schedule by staying up all night watching YouTube or playing video games, and as a result missed out on genuine learning during my high school and college days.
The fact is that there is no quick fix, and no excuses. My situation right now, as an adult, is a result of my own behaviors and choices. No amount of lying to myself will change that. I've had more than ample opportunity to reflect. This illness I've been stuck with for well over a year now is my chance to start my life over again.
But what have I actually done?
I've started another game programming project. I feel like it's The One(tm). I felt that about the last two or three projects, one of which I got sick of long before finishing and the other I couldn't even get past a basic, unimpressive prototype. But something's different about this one, I can feel it.
Dismayed by my ever-increasing weight at the doctor's, I've redoubled my efforts to control my gluttony and get some exercise done. Limiting my appetite is harder than it seemed at first and my disgusting flabby gut hasn't gone away yet, but my arms are noticeably bigger and I can do 15 pushups without feeling like I'm going to die.
In my opinion, not enough.
I have big plans for 2020. I had big plans for 2019 too, but that got sidetracked by the cancer ordeal. I'm hoping that I get good news and can return to work in December, and then things are getting real.
I plan to:
- Pay my credit card debt in full within 3 paychecks
- Lose my disgusting gut that hangs over my jeans
- Get my driver's license, maybe even a car
- Move out with my wife
It's a fact I've known for a long time, but have yet to internalize. I've had terrible food that was bad for me just because I was having a bad day. I've quit workouts too early because I was bored and distracted, not because I'd hit my limit. I've went back for seconds and thirds and so on just for the fun of eating, and that's why I'm in my position: overweight and out of shape.
I've said "I don't feel like doing this" about work, about programming, and about social activities. It's one of the reasons I have so little money, and definitely the reason I have no finished games under my belt and very, very few true friends. I've messed up my sleep schedule by staying up all night watching YouTube or playing video games, and as a result missed out on genuine learning during my high school and college days.
The fact is that there is no quick fix, and no excuses. My situation right now, as an adult, is a result of my own behaviors and choices. No amount of lying to myself will change that. I've had more than ample opportunity to reflect. This illness I've been stuck with for well over a year now is my chance to start my life over again.
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Nothing Doing
Since Halloween is an important holiday for my wife and I, there will again probably not be a blog post this week. We're having a short staycation together, planning to visit lots of haunted houses and costume shops.
Some good news though, I'll be able to return to work December 1st at the earliest. That's coming soon, although it feels like forever.
Happy Halloween!
Some good news though, I'll be able to return to work December 1st at the earliest. That's coming soon, although it feels like forever.
Happy Halloween!
Friday, October 11, 2019
Re: Blizzard and Hong Kong
I've loved Blizzard for as long as I've been old enough to play games. I got my first taste of real-time strategy from Starcraft; MMOs from World of Warcraft. I love Overwatch to death. That's why it's breaking my heart to see them do something so scummy, and, in a word, evil.
When it comes to gaming, I'm not an alarmist or an elitist. I don't particularly care if a game has microtransactions, or if a sequel is radically different from its predecessor. I hate talking about games, because the gaming world is full of snobs and elitists that will call you out for every last thing, from liking the wrong game to playing on the wrong platform. YouTube gamer Markiplier aborted an Undertale let's-play because fans criticized him for giving a character the "wrong" voice while reading their lines. It's stupid, but that's gamers in a nutshell.
However, Blizzard and Hong Kong is one subject where the gaming community at large is almost unanimously correct.
For those of you who don't know, Hong Kong has been experiencing a protest movement almost all year. You can read about it here. The citizens of Hong Kong are fighting for their sovereignty from mainland China, sparked by a proposed extradition bill that would allow people wanted by China in Hong Kong and Taiwan to be captured and extradited to the mainland by local authorities. Thus, there was potential for non-Chinese citizens to come under Chinese authority. Since then, the protests have only escalated, with Chinese mainlanders allegedly being disguised as Hong Kong police, anti-protestor actions by triad gangs, and an 18-year-old protestor fatally shot by police on October 1st.
That's the gist of it, excluding the fact that China is an authoritarian police state, which holds ethnic and religious minorities in concentration camps and actively censors information from outside China, among allegations (and mounting evidence) of executed prisoners having their organs extracted and sold on.
Back to Blizzard. Blizzard makes an online card game called Hearthstone and hosts tournaments with real cash prizes at stake. Chung Ng Wai, Blitzchung, was a competitive Hearthstone player. On October 5th, Blitzchung was banned from playing competitive Hearthstone and his prize money withheld after he made a pro-Hong Kong statement during a post-game interview. The two casters conducting the interview, Blizzard employees, were fired. Blizzard, the company, has received a lot of criticism, from a small employee walkout and calls for boycotts to statements by American lawmakers.
Corporations do this every day. Apple, whom I hold no love for, removed an app used by Hong Kong protestors from their iOS app store. I despise iPhones and their closed ecosystem of proprietary accessories. I don't give a damn about Apple.
But Blizzard was my friend.
Or, they used to be.
I still have a Tracer action figure on my bedroom wall and an Overwatch art print opposite. Proudly displayed on my dresser, a Warcraft 3 "battle chest" box. I gave the Starcraft 2 demo passes inside to anybody who would take them because I was excited about the classic game finally getting a sequel. D.Va stands on my Xbox One, among Warhammer 40k minis and Halo figurines, somewhat blocking the cooling fan. Overwatch was my favorite game on Xbox, until financial concerns caused me to end my Live subscription.
I asked for Warcraft 3 for a birthday. Once it was installed, I blazed through it and its expansion in a week. I lost days worth of sleep to World of Warcraft. I bought Starcraft for my older brother, but fell in love with it myself despite its steep difficulty curve. I used to read my Diablo 2 strategy guide religiously. I don't actually care much for Diablo 2; I just read the guide for fun. Until this controversy came to my attention, my greatest material desire was shot glasses with Overwatch "sprays"--stylized symbols--on them.
I'm not going to make a public display of destroying my games and merch, as some on the Internet have done. That's stupid and nobody would care. I also won't pretend that I don't love their products. Even as I write this sentence, I hear music and sound effects from Overwatch in my head, and The Frozen Throne is still in my disc drive. I loved it so much that I had to take it with me for my months-long hospital stay earlier this year.
Games are art. That is a fact, that is not up for debate, and if you disagree then I want you to stop reading this article and come back when you have some common sense.
There is a saying: "Love the art, not the artist." It means to distance the painter from the painting, the musician from the music, the author from the book. Someone you disagree with, even a reprehensible person, is capable of making something truly special and meaningful and worth sharing. Unfortunately, the world is not made of art and artists.
I doubt the voice actors of Thrall or Jim Raynor care about Chinese interests. The friends I made in Overwatch and my opponents in Hearthstone aren't Blizzard employees. The people who animate the cutscenes in Blizzard games, with their loving attention to detail, probably could not have seen this day coming. They're not to blame for the situation in China and the action of CEOs that don't care about games, that don't care about art, and that wounds me. It hurts my feelings on a personal level, where I thought corporations like Blizzard could never reach.
I don't think I've said it enough. I love these games. They dominated my perceptions of fantasy and sci-fi and inspired my own abortive attempts at art and game design. It was an emotional investment, like your favorite sad song or a book that changed your life. There's a reason why, of all the classic games I own, three of the four on proud display in my bedroom are Blizzard classics. It's why, when I needed comfort during my hospital stay and space was limited in our tiny car, I took Warcraft 3 with me: a game from my childhood, downloading game demos on a dial-up modem and inadvertently stumbling upon a masterpiece that I was too young to appreciate.
Blizzard already has my money. I bought Diablo, Starcraft, etc. at full price from retail stores. Same for all of my merchandise. But from now on, these games that I used to love unconditionally will forever leave a bad taste in my mouth. I don't know if I'll ever play them again, or at least any time soon. Those fond memories are now tainted through no fault of the games or their authors, but for the heartless cogs of corporate America and the times we live in.
I'm not an activist, and this isn't me "weighing in" like some worthless Twitter pundit.
This is a letter from a fan with a broken heart.
When it comes to gaming, I'm not an alarmist or an elitist. I don't particularly care if a game has microtransactions, or if a sequel is radically different from its predecessor. I hate talking about games, because the gaming world is full of snobs and elitists that will call you out for every last thing, from liking the wrong game to playing on the wrong platform. YouTube gamer Markiplier aborted an Undertale let's-play because fans criticized him for giving a character the "wrong" voice while reading their lines. It's stupid, but that's gamers in a nutshell.
However, Blizzard and Hong Kong is one subject where the gaming community at large is almost unanimously correct.
For those of you who don't know, Hong Kong has been experiencing a protest movement almost all year. You can read about it here. The citizens of Hong Kong are fighting for their sovereignty from mainland China, sparked by a proposed extradition bill that would allow people wanted by China in Hong Kong and Taiwan to be captured and extradited to the mainland by local authorities. Thus, there was potential for non-Chinese citizens to come under Chinese authority. Since then, the protests have only escalated, with Chinese mainlanders allegedly being disguised as Hong Kong police, anti-protestor actions by triad gangs, and an 18-year-old protestor fatally shot by police on October 1st.
That's the gist of it, excluding the fact that China is an authoritarian police state, which holds ethnic and religious minorities in concentration camps and actively censors information from outside China, among allegations (and mounting evidence) of executed prisoners having their organs extracted and sold on.
Back to Blizzard. Blizzard makes an online card game called Hearthstone and hosts tournaments with real cash prizes at stake. Chung Ng Wai, Blitzchung, was a competitive Hearthstone player. On October 5th, Blitzchung was banned from playing competitive Hearthstone and his prize money withheld after he made a pro-Hong Kong statement during a post-game interview. The two casters conducting the interview, Blizzard employees, were fired. Blizzard, the company, has received a lot of criticism, from a small employee walkout and calls for boycotts to statements by American lawmakers.
Corporations do this every day. Apple, whom I hold no love for, removed an app used by Hong Kong protestors from their iOS app store. I despise iPhones and their closed ecosystem of proprietary accessories. I don't give a damn about Apple.
But Blizzard was my friend.
Or, they used to be.
I still have a Tracer action figure on my bedroom wall and an Overwatch art print opposite. Proudly displayed on my dresser, a Warcraft 3 "battle chest" box. I gave the Starcraft 2 demo passes inside to anybody who would take them because I was excited about the classic game finally getting a sequel. D.Va stands on my Xbox One, among Warhammer 40k minis and Halo figurines, somewhat blocking the cooling fan. Overwatch was my favorite game on Xbox, until financial concerns caused me to end my Live subscription.
I asked for Warcraft 3 for a birthday. Once it was installed, I blazed through it and its expansion in a week. I lost days worth of sleep to World of Warcraft. I bought Starcraft for my older brother, but fell in love with it myself despite its steep difficulty curve. I used to read my Diablo 2 strategy guide religiously. I don't actually care much for Diablo 2; I just read the guide for fun. Until this controversy came to my attention, my greatest material desire was shot glasses with Overwatch "sprays"--stylized symbols--on them.
I'm not going to make a public display of destroying my games and merch, as some on the Internet have done. That's stupid and nobody would care. I also won't pretend that I don't love their products. Even as I write this sentence, I hear music and sound effects from Overwatch in my head, and The Frozen Throne is still in my disc drive. I loved it so much that I had to take it with me for my months-long hospital stay earlier this year.
Games are art. That is a fact, that is not up for debate, and if you disagree then I want you to stop reading this article and come back when you have some common sense.
There is a saying: "Love the art, not the artist." It means to distance the painter from the painting, the musician from the music, the author from the book. Someone you disagree with, even a reprehensible person, is capable of making something truly special and meaningful and worth sharing. Unfortunately, the world is not made of art and artists.
I doubt the voice actors of Thrall or Jim Raynor care about Chinese interests. The friends I made in Overwatch and my opponents in Hearthstone aren't Blizzard employees. The people who animate the cutscenes in Blizzard games, with their loving attention to detail, probably could not have seen this day coming. They're not to blame for the situation in China and the action of CEOs that don't care about games, that don't care about art, and that wounds me. It hurts my feelings on a personal level, where I thought corporations like Blizzard could never reach.
I don't think I've said it enough. I love these games. They dominated my perceptions of fantasy and sci-fi and inspired my own abortive attempts at art and game design. It was an emotional investment, like your favorite sad song or a book that changed your life. There's a reason why, of all the classic games I own, three of the four on proud display in my bedroom are Blizzard classics. It's why, when I needed comfort during my hospital stay and space was limited in our tiny car, I took Warcraft 3 with me: a game from my childhood, downloading game demos on a dial-up modem and inadvertently stumbling upon a masterpiece that I was too young to appreciate.
Blizzard already has my money. I bought Diablo, Starcraft, etc. at full price from retail stores. Same for all of my merchandise. But from now on, these games that I used to love unconditionally will forever leave a bad taste in my mouth. I don't know if I'll ever play them again, or at least any time soon. Those fond memories are now tainted through no fault of the games or their authors, but for the heartless cogs of corporate America and the times we live in.
I'm not an activist, and this isn't me "weighing in" like some worthless Twitter pundit.
This is a letter from a fan with a broken heart.
Friday, October 4, 2019
Continuity
My wife has an encyclopedic knowledge of her family. Once, while slightly drunk and almost fully asleep, she gave me a rambling account of a much older generation's participation in World War 2, a parade of great-aunts and uncles and grandparents meeting eachother, falling in love, falling in battle, through to almost the 1950s. It wasn't a single anecdote; it might have been the cold open on a History Channel special. I need to ask her about that again as soon as possible; at the time, I was just nodding along and trying to sleep.
In contrast, family has not been especially emphasized as a value to me. My maternal grandmother is justly reviled by everybody I've ever talked to. My father, who committed suicide when I was just a baby, left behind no photographs, no recordings or items or written works. I have a single miniscule Polaroid of him as a child, hidden in a scrapbook full of unfamiliar faces. An entire branch was effectively pruned off of my family tree in a matter of minutes, some time in the late 1990s.
In some ways, it doesn't matter at all; in other ways, the loss of my father is the oldest, deepest wound I will ever have. From what I understand, he was a highly troubled man and I'm probably better off for never knowing him. That's a story that will have no ending. All I have to prove that he existed is a photo of a stranger.
What set off these thoughts is a blog article that I saw--of course--on Reddit. It talks about medieval scribes who, in the process of copying books word-for-word by hand, would often scribble and doodle in the margins of fresh books. What caught my eye was this particular quote:
This struck a chord deep, deep within me. The hand that wrote that, that copied that manuscript, that probably copied dozens of manuscripts, is indeed no more. That person, his name, his parents and descendants, his lineage; they're all lost. Much like my father and his photograph, the only proof of this poor medieval laborer is 27 words in a corner of a page in a much larger book: a microcosm of the human condition. It made me think of being remembered. It made me think about the time I just said "yes, honey" as my wife recalled more about her family than I'd ever known about mine.
The desire to be known and understood is partly why I'm writing this blog. It's why I have a few dozen journal entries on my hard drive. It's why I hesitated to throw out the journals I kept as a teenager, even though all I did was moan about not having money or a girlfriend. But what do I, myself, remember? Not much.
I have strong relationships with one sister and her own family, and one older brother and his growing family. There's my mother, of course. That leaves two aunts, two uncles, four more siblings, and all of their children as a complete mystery. Most of them have been out of my life since before I was born; they're my kin, but they're unknowns. We live in the age of cellphones and Internet, I could talk to them any time I wanted; but where would I begin? We're perfect strangers to each other.
What makes me so concerned now, anyway? It's not like I ever cared before. I'm not about to be some historian and write down everything that ever happened. I don't know how grandpa met grandma or what kind of brothers and sisters they had, and if I'm honest: I don't care. It'd be nice to have my family's entire history in a giant book for future generations to see. But I'm not in a big hurry to make it happen. Where does normal familial continuity end and obsessive recording begin? Is it weird that my wife knows so much about generations past? Is it weird that I don't? I don't know. If I have any descendents, and if they're reading this now, maybe they know the answer.
In contrast, family has not been especially emphasized as a value to me. My maternal grandmother is justly reviled by everybody I've ever talked to. My father, who committed suicide when I was just a baby, left behind no photographs, no recordings or items or written works. I have a single miniscule Polaroid of him as a child, hidden in a scrapbook full of unfamiliar faces. An entire branch was effectively pruned off of my family tree in a matter of minutes, some time in the late 1990s.
 |
| I looked for an obituary and only found this. I don't even know if this is him. |
In some ways, it doesn't matter at all; in other ways, the loss of my father is the oldest, deepest wound I will ever have. From what I understand, he was a highly troubled man and I'm probably better off for never knowing him. That's a story that will have no ending. All I have to prove that he existed is a photo of a stranger.
What set off these thoughts is a blog article that I saw--of course--on Reddit. It talks about medieval scribes who, in the process of copying books word-for-word by hand, would often scribble and doodle in the margins of fresh books. What caught my eye was this particular quote:
This struck a chord deep, deep within me. The hand that wrote that, that copied that manuscript, that probably copied dozens of manuscripts, is indeed no more. That person, his name, his parents and descendants, his lineage; they're all lost. Much like my father and his photograph, the only proof of this poor medieval laborer is 27 words in a corner of a page in a much larger book: a microcosm of the human condition. It made me think of being remembered. It made me think about the time I just said "yes, honey" as my wife recalled more about her family than I'd ever known about mine.
 |
| My wife wanted to be a nurse like her grandmother. This is a pin her grandmother wore. |
The desire to be known and understood is partly why I'm writing this blog. It's why I have a few dozen journal entries on my hard drive. It's why I hesitated to throw out the journals I kept as a teenager, even though all I did was moan about not having money or a girlfriend. But what do I, myself, remember? Not much.
I have strong relationships with one sister and her own family, and one older brother and his growing family. There's my mother, of course. That leaves two aunts, two uncles, four more siblings, and all of their children as a complete mystery. Most of them have been out of my life since before I was born; they're my kin, but they're unknowns. We live in the age of cellphones and Internet, I could talk to them any time I wanted; but where would I begin? We're perfect strangers to each other.
What makes me so concerned now, anyway? It's not like I ever cared before. I'm not about to be some historian and write down everything that ever happened. I don't know how grandpa met grandma or what kind of brothers and sisters they had, and if I'm honest: I don't care. It'd be nice to have my family's entire history in a giant book for future generations to see. But I'm not in a big hurry to make it happen. Where does normal familial continuity end and obsessive recording begin? Is it weird that my wife knows so much about generations past? Is it weird that I don't? I don't know. If I have any descendents, and if they're reading this now, maybe they know the answer.
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
No Post This Week
I'm sorry, but it's been a rough week and besides, I couldn't find anything to write about. I had to apply for disability, found and subsequently lost a freelance job captioning videos, and my wife got sick.
If you're a regular reader of this blog (there might be at least one between the 3-8 views on each of my four articles) I apologize for the lack of content this week. Hopefully, I'll have something good by next Thursday.
If you're a regular reader of this blog (there might be at least one between the 3-8 views on each of my four articles) I apologize for the lack of content this week. Hopefully, I'll have something good by next Thursday.
Thursday, September 19, 2019
A Legendary Site
Once upon a time, the internet wasn't the endless public playground that we begrudgingly let consume our life enjoy today. As a clueless kid in the early 2000s, using the Internet was like being adrift in the ocean, or maybe lost in an unfamiliar city. I found websites either by word-of-mouth, seeing somebody else using a site at the library, or searching things I liked in Google and just scrolling for hours.
Being shuffled from state to state in my early youth, it was hard to find friends. There was no continuity; every year or two we would pack up and move, and I would never see the majority of those people I knew ever again. Combine my lack of deep ties and my own unwillingness to meet my mom halfway on things, I ended up spending a lot of time indoors. My free time was usually split 50/50 between reading physical books and spending time on the Internet or otherwise using the computer.
As I mentioned, there were few agreed-upon "hubs" for the Internet in the 2000s. There was MySpace, but I was too young for that. Instead, the Internet as I understood it was segregated into many, many small groups centered on specific interests. A lot of the ones that I visited were fan-made websites for video games. One such website was The Sacred Realm, in my opinion the greatest fan site of all time, and nothing you could say will ever convince me otherwise.
It's clear to anybody who looks that The Sacred Realm is a labor of love. Unlike today, when the largest websites are made of and given value by user-submitted content, websites of the past were largely authored and administrated by one person, or a handful of people at most. Rather than copy-pasted from official sources or built from a template, much of the content on The Sacred Realm was handwritten by the site's owner-operator, Lysia.
Here's a brief section she wrote about the infamous CD-i Legend of Zelda titles:
This website fueled my addiction to the Legend of Zelda series like nothing else. I knew about the Zelda games for the Phillips CD-i before they were YouTube memes, before YouTube was even around. I devoured fanfiction and wrote dozens of my own stories, usually no longer than a page and written with equal parts poor grammar and wish fulfillment. (Why would Link and Zelda be listening to Franz Ferdinand and dating characters from AdventureQuest? I didn't even know back then, much less now.)
My friends, such as they were, were typically wealthier and had a seemingly constant stream of new purchases (games) to talk about. They were less than impressed with my dedication to The Legend of Zelda. While other kids were catching the newest Pokemon and drawing that pointy S design on anything that held still, I told anybody who would listen about how I'd finally found an Ocarina of Time ROM and was stuck on the first dungeon. In other words, I didn't have a lot of friends.
Sadly, all good things had to end. One day, I went to visit The Sacred Realm and it was just... gone. All the fan fiction, all those loving hand-written descriptions, the files for download... all gone.
It's said that The Sacred Realm "merged" with Zelda Universe, but really I don't see it. Zelda Universe is a fine site, don't get me wrong, but it has a much different focus and feeling. It doesn't have articles and bios for every character in the series, or hints and tricks for the games written from the webmaster's own experience. The content it does have is great, but it can never replace what The Sacred Realm meant to me.
Just like The Sacred Realm, there really is no resolution to this blog article. One day it was there, and the next day it was simply ended. Almost all of it was saved by WebArchive, but it's not the same; it's a museum piece now, a vision of how the Internet once was. Those warm golds and browns, those unfinished stories, those articles and book scans... They're a vision of how I once was, when I was little and the biggest concern in my life was downloading the trailer for Twilight Princess, a game that I wouldn't have a chance to play for almost a decade after it released.
Nowadays, it's hard to imagine the fate that befell The Sacred Realm happening to a website that anybody majorly cares about. Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and so on are all owned by gigantic corporations. They wouldn't vanish on you one day like mist in the wind; they might change hands, update their looks now and then, but it seems like they're in for the long haul.
Lysia, if you're somehow reading this: I want to thank you for a big part of my early childhood.
Being shuffled from state to state in my early youth, it was hard to find friends. There was no continuity; every year or two we would pack up and move, and I would never see the majority of those people I knew ever again. Combine my lack of deep ties and my own unwillingness to meet my mom halfway on things, I ended up spending a lot of time indoors. My free time was usually split 50/50 between reading physical books and spending time on the Internet or otherwise using the computer.
As I mentioned, there were few agreed-upon "hubs" for the Internet in the 2000s. There was MySpace, but I was too young for that. Instead, the Internet as I understood it was segregated into many, many small groups centered on specific interests. A lot of the ones that I visited were fan-made websites for video games. One such website was The Sacred Realm, in my opinion the greatest fan site of all time, and nothing you could say will ever convince me otherwise.
 |
| The site as it looked in 2009, saved by WebArchive. At this time, it was still called "Legends and Adventure." For simplicity, it will be called The Sacred Realm henceforth. |
It's clear to anybody who looks that The Sacred Realm is a labor of love. Unlike today, when the largest websites are made of and given value by user-submitted content, websites of the past were largely authored and administrated by one person, or a handful of people at most. Rather than copy-pasted from official sources or built from a template, much of the content on The Sacred Realm was handwritten by the site's owner-operator, Lysia.
Here's a brief section she wrote about the infamous CD-i Legend of Zelda titles:
Nintendo would rather forget that these three games ever existed. I haven't actually played them myself, but I have seen videos of the gameplay, and screenshots, and they really are very ordinary, especially compared to the Nintendo Zelda games. If you think that the Link from the Zelda cartoon series was annoying, he's nothing compared to the Link in these games."They really are very ordinary." When talking about the CD-i, that's a phrase that could only be written before the invention of YouTube Poop.
 | |
| The main page for Link's Awakening. All of this was written by Lysia, rather than copied from the manual or another website. |
This website fueled my addiction to the Legend of Zelda series like nothing else. I knew about the Zelda games for the Phillips CD-i before they were YouTube memes, before YouTube was even around. I devoured fanfiction and wrote dozens of my own stories, usually no longer than a page and written with equal parts poor grammar and wish fulfillment. (Why would Link and Zelda be listening to Franz Ferdinand and dating characters from AdventureQuest? I didn't even know back then, much less now.)
My friends, such as they were, were typically wealthier and had a seemingly constant stream of new purchases (games) to talk about. They were less than impressed with my dedication to The Legend of Zelda. While other kids were catching the newest Pokemon and drawing that pointy S design on anything that held still, I told anybody who would listen about how I'd finally found an Ocarina of Time ROM and was stuck on the first dungeon. In other words, I didn't have a lot of friends.
Sadly, all good things had to end. One day, I went to visit The Sacred Realm and it was just... gone. All the fan fiction, all those loving hand-written descriptions, the files for download... all gone.
It's said that The Sacred Realm "merged" with Zelda Universe, but really I don't see it. Zelda Universe is a fine site, don't get me wrong, but it has a much different focus and feeling. It doesn't have articles and bios for every character in the series, or hints and tricks for the games written from the webmaster's own experience. The content it does have is great, but it can never replace what The Sacred Realm meant to me.
 |
| Another fansite I frequented around the same time as The Sacred Realm. It's still up but apparently abandoned. Note that php error, and that "Save GoldenEye" button leads to a defunct petition website. The FAQ was last updated in 2006. |
Just like The Sacred Realm, there really is no resolution to this blog article. One day it was there, and the next day it was simply ended. Almost all of it was saved by WebArchive, but it's not the same; it's a museum piece now, a vision of how the Internet once was. Those warm golds and browns, those unfinished stories, those articles and book scans... They're a vision of how I once was, when I was little and the biggest concern in my life was downloading the trailer for Twilight Princess, a game that I wouldn't have a chance to play for almost a decade after it released.
Nowadays, it's hard to imagine the fate that befell The Sacred Realm happening to a website that anybody majorly cares about. Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and so on are all owned by gigantic corporations. They wouldn't vanish on you one day like mist in the wind; they might change hands, update their looks now and then, but it seems like they're in for the long haul.
Lysia, if you're somehow reading this: I want to thank you for a big part of my early childhood.
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Star Trek: The TV Show For Today
Star Trek is perhaps the first TV franchise that tried to demonstrate social issues via a metaphorical framework. (I'm not a huge 60's TV buff, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm wrong.) Moral issues surrounding pacifism ("The Arena") proxy warfare ("A Private Little War") and even environmental concerns ("The Devil In The Dark") may not have been the order of the day on Star Trek, but they were undeniably present throughout the series. Show creator Gene Roddenberry said:
While Roddenberry was concerned with network censors, Star Trek's basic premise is actually a perfect fit for the traditions of classic sci-fi. Star Trek first aired in 1966; Orwell's anti-totalitarian 1984 was published in 1949. Frank Herbert's Dune, with its then-radical ecological perspective and spice as an allegory for oil, came out in 1965. The classic silent film Metropolis, for all its clumsy naiveté, still attempted a relatable, socially-conscious story in 1927.
None of this is to diminish Star Trek's accomplishments; rather, it places the show in an important context. All the same, it's interesting to look at what had, at the time, been cutting-edge social and political commentary.
For all the goofy, campy adventures that Kirk and Spock embarked on, there were equally as many that could be considered morality plays. "The Doomsday Machine" revolved around a giant robotic space ship that destroyed planets; the crew speculates that this is all that remains of an ancient civilization, having deployed their equivalent of the atomic bomb. "A Private Little War," mentioned above, shows the destruction of a peoples' way of life by the introduction of new, modern weapons--perpetrated by both the Federation and the Klingons, standing in for America and Russia in a metaphor for the Vietnam War.
Of course, Trek's commentary isn't always on the mark. The second season episode "The Omega Glory" features perhaps the worst plot twist in all of Star Trek, revealing that the warring "Yangs" and "Kohms" featured in the episode are actually yankees and communists, having emerged on their own on an alien planet--complete with their own Pledge of Allegiance, American flag and Constitution. Wrap your head around that one.
As Star Trek evolved with spinoff series and films, so too did the questions it tried to answer. The Next Generation featured episodes concerning assisted suicide in "Ethics," veteran health and PTSD in "The Hunted," and even the pain caused by a broken home, seen through Worf's interactions with his estranged son Alexander. In at least one case, the series predicted a social issue that wasn't on anybody's radar yet--video game compulsion. The episode "Hollow Pursuits" sees recurring character Reginald Barclay withdrawing from work and social life, instead preferring to live out power fantasies in the holodeck.
As the questions evolved, so too did the answers--and not always for the better. In my opinion, "The High Ground" takes an almost comedically centrist stance on the issues posed by terrorism. In the climax, Beverly Crusher protests "You didn't have to kill him!"--referring to a man who had repeatedly threatened to kill Picard and was about to do so before being killed himself. The conclusion of "The Hunted" sees the crew simply beam up and warp away at the end, leaving the Angosians to deal with their traumatized veterans--no suggestions as to how. In the episode, it's presented as a matter of simply unplugging a computer chip; this makes the whole story entirely less applicable to real life, and is just one example of the saccharine, idealistic view that broadly characterized The Next Generation, especially in earlier seasons.
Things would change with Deep Space Nine, the third live-action Star Trek series. Continuing the Cardassian subplot introduced in later seasons of The Next Generation, the series dives into complicated topics like racial nationalism, war crimes, religious sectarian violence, an unofficial "deep state" within the Federation, and even genocide. Rather than ideal scenarios contained to one episode, Deep Space Nine revisits these themes time and again via the overarching story of the Dominion War, and neither side comes out clean.
Rather than using science fiction to soften, obscure and bowdlerise the issues being discussed, Deep Space Nine treats the Star Trek universe as a backdrop on which to paint a picture of the real world. "In The Pale Moonlight" sees Sisko commiting a number of increasingly desperate and immoral acts to bring a new ally into the war. In "It's Only A Paper Moon," Nog escapes to the holodeck to cope with a traumatic injury sustained in a previous episode. Although not entirely realistic, it stands head and shoulders above "The Hunted" in portraying psychological trauma.
These episodes are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Deep Space Nine. Kira openly despises "collaborators," Bajorans that aided the Cardassians in the occupation--yet eventually learns that her own mother was a collaborator, too. Gul Dukat, the primary antagonist of the series, has a warped fixation on Bajor; he despises Bajorans as "soft," yet constantly seeks their approval after his brutal occupation of their planet. An outlaw group called the Maquis is made up of Federation colonists stranded on the wrong side of the border by a peace treaty gone awry. While there are still heroes and villains, every character and organization in Deep Space Nine has skeletons in the closet.
Since then, Star Trek's dealings with real-world topics have largely been hit-or-miss. Voyager, the follow-up to Deep Space Nine, tends to focus on more orthodox, totally fictional plots. Although it has some decent qualities, it relied overmuch on time travel as a catch-all solution in many episodes and suffered from a highly variable quality of writing. Enterprise returned to the adventure-of-the-week format of The Original Series, but concluded after only four seasons. I haven't seen Discovery, but plot summaries I've read seem to tell a story about generally seeking peace without drawing any specific parallels.
With Star Trek: Picard having recently wrapped up filming, an animated comedy by Rick and Morty writer Mark McMahan in the works and a host of other rumors to keep fans speculating, only time will tell if the franchise will return to classical sci-fi, using the future as a lens for the present, or continue with action and adventure-focused plots that rattle no cages and may seem safer to Paramount and CBS executives. Whatever happens, everybody will have their favorite series; there's a Star Trek for everybody.
"[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network."
 | |
| Mining destroys the Horta's natural habitat, forcing it to retaliate. Image owned by CBS. |
While Roddenberry was concerned with network censors, Star Trek's basic premise is actually a perfect fit for the traditions of classic sci-fi. Star Trek first aired in 1966; Orwell's anti-totalitarian 1984 was published in 1949. Frank Herbert's Dune, with its then-radical ecological perspective and spice as an allegory for oil, came out in 1965. The classic silent film Metropolis, for all its clumsy naiveté, still attempted a relatable, socially-conscious story in 1927.
None of this is to diminish Star Trek's accomplishments; rather, it places the show in an important context. All the same, it's interesting to look at what had, at the time, been cutting-edge social and political commentary.
For all the goofy, campy adventures that Kirk and Spock embarked on, there were equally as many that could be considered morality plays. "The Doomsday Machine" revolved around a giant robotic space ship that destroyed planets; the crew speculates that this is all that remains of an ancient civilization, having deployed their equivalent of the atomic bomb. "A Private Little War," mentioned above, shows the destruction of a peoples' way of life by the introduction of new, modern weapons--perpetrated by both the Federation and the Klingons, standing in for America and Russia in a metaphor for the Vietnam War.
 |
| Kirk and Spock discuss the irony of a nuclear explosion saving the day in "The Doomsday Machine." |
Of course, Trek's commentary isn't always on the mark. The second season episode "The Omega Glory" features perhaps the worst plot twist in all of Star Trek, revealing that the warring "Yangs" and "Kohms" featured in the episode are actually yankees and communists, having emerged on their own on an alien planet--complete with their own Pledge of Allegiance, American flag and Constitution. Wrap your head around that one.
As Star Trek evolved with spinoff series and films, so too did the questions it tried to answer. The Next Generation featured episodes concerning assisted suicide in "Ethics," veteran health and PTSD in "The Hunted," and even the pain caused by a broken home, seen through Worf's interactions with his estranged son Alexander. In at least one case, the series predicted a social issue that wasn't on anybody's radar yet--video game compulsion. The episode "Hollow Pursuits" sees recurring character Reginald Barclay withdrawing from work and social life, instead preferring to live out power fantasies in the holodeck.
As the questions evolved, so too did the answers--and not always for the better. In my opinion, "The High Ground" takes an almost comedically centrist stance on the issues posed by terrorism. In the climax, Beverly Crusher protests "You didn't have to kill him!"--referring to a man who had repeatedly threatened to kill Picard and was about to do so before being killed himself. The conclusion of "The Hunted" sees the crew simply beam up and warp away at the end, leaving the Angosians to deal with their traumatized veterans--no suggestions as to how. In the episode, it's presented as a matter of simply unplugging a computer chip; this makes the whole story entirely less applicable to real life, and is just one example of the saccharine, idealistic view that broadly characterized The Next Generation, especially in earlier seasons.
 |
| Worf and his son have a complicated relationship, which continues into Deep Space Nine. |
Things would change with Deep Space Nine, the third live-action Star Trek series. Continuing the Cardassian subplot introduced in later seasons of The Next Generation, the series dives into complicated topics like racial nationalism, war crimes, religious sectarian violence, an unofficial "deep state" within the Federation, and even genocide. Rather than ideal scenarios contained to one episode, Deep Space Nine revisits these themes time and again via the overarching story of the Dominion War, and neither side comes out clean.
Rather than using science fiction to soften, obscure and bowdlerise the issues being discussed, Deep Space Nine treats the Star Trek universe as a backdrop on which to paint a picture of the real world. "In The Pale Moonlight" sees Sisko commiting a number of increasingly desperate and immoral acts to bring a new ally into the war. In "It's Only A Paper Moon," Nog escapes to the holodeck to cope with a traumatic injury sustained in a previous episode. Although not entirely realistic, it stands head and shoulders above "The Hunted" in portraying psychological trauma.
These episodes are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Deep Space Nine. Kira openly despises "collaborators," Bajorans that aided the Cardassians in the occupation--yet eventually learns that her own mother was a collaborator, too. Gul Dukat, the primary antagonist of the series, has a warped fixation on Bajor; he despises Bajorans as "soft," yet constantly seeks their approval after his brutal occupation of their planet. An outlaw group called the Maquis is made up of Federation colonists stranded on the wrong side of the border by a peace treaty gone awry. While there are still heroes and villains, every character and organization in Deep Space Nine has skeletons in the closet.
 |
| The leader of the Dominion suffers from a disease Starfleet engineered to wipe out her race. |
Since then, Star Trek's dealings with real-world topics have largely been hit-or-miss. Voyager, the follow-up to Deep Space Nine, tends to focus on more orthodox, totally fictional plots. Although it has some decent qualities, it relied overmuch on time travel as a catch-all solution in many episodes and suffered from a highly variable quality of writing. Enterprise returned to the adventure-of-the-week format of The Original Series, but concluded after only four seasons. I haven't seen Discovery, but plot summaries I've read seem to tell a story about generally seeking peace without drawing any specific parallels.
With Star Trek: Picard having recently wrapped up filming, an animated comedy by Rick and Morty writer Mark McMahan in the works and a host of other rumors to keep fans speculating, only time will tell if the franchise will return to classical sci-fi, using the future as a lens for the present, or continue with action and adventure-focused plots that rattle no cages and may seem safer to Paramount and CBS executives. Whatever happens, everybody will have their favorite series; there's a Star Trek for everybody.
Thursday, September 5, 2019
Springerfield
When I came home from the hospital after my stem cell therapy, I had to stay at a large hotel-like guest house with my mother. There were a number of reasons, but the long and the short of it is we could not avoid eachother for several, several weeks. It was an amazing house in a beautiful part of town, but being trapped in ~300 square feet with somebody that already somewhat drives you bonkers will fray anybody's nerves.
A lot of this had to do with cable TV. I'm a person who can entertain myself for hours with one thing, whether it's a book, knitting, videos, etc. Mom, on the other hand, gets bored very easily. It's just the kind of person she is. Since neither of us were interested in getting lost in the big city trying to find some fun, this meant Mom watched a lot of YouTube and especially television.
Mom doesn't really tend to like casual, funny or uplifting TV. I had to ask her to stop watching Forensic Files, because hearing every detail of horrific murders and violent sex crimes for hours on end started to bother me around day 10. (Mom also refuses to wear headphones.) After that, she started watching the next thing down on the grand tier list of all TV shows: Jerry Springer.
I'm not a bleeding-heart, but something strikes me as intrinsically wrong about the Jerry Springer show, and all other shows in that genre such as Dr. Phil, Maury Povich, Steve Wilkos and so on. A stern older man in nice clothes talking down to young people doesn't strike me as good TV. It gives people of my mother's generation and earlier a thing to point to and say "See? Kids these days are ruining this country with their drugs and hip-hop and pre-marital sex, back in the 50's/60's/70's we would never __________."
Recently, I was browsing Reddit. I deactivated my account long ago when I got sick of the same old memes and "discussions," but occasionally I like to kill time by checking out some old haunts. I check the front page, some technology subreddits, some related to video games, and... r/trashy. The subreddit's own stickied post, written by a moderator, says: "/r/trashy is a celebration of trash: people, things, media, etc. that boldly and shamelessly violates social conventions and cultural norms. Satisfy our voyeuristic drives by sharing trashy images, videos, stories, and fashion. All forms of trash are eagerly welcomed."
Reading the posts on this subreddit, I was forced off my high horse and faced with a conundrum. Why do I love seeing pictures and videos of people drinking while pregnant, urinating in public, fighting in Wal-Mart, defacing art and generally being disgusting, offensive human beings... and yet goofy, light-hearted Jerry Springer is what sets me off? Some fully-clothed "strippers" having a staged slap fight is Sesame Street in comparison.
There isn't any closure on Reddit, unless a commenter chimes in with a news article. You look, say to yourself "that's horrible," maybe leave a comment, then you move on to the next one. Nobody announces "You ARE the father," there's no jeering crowd or jilted ex running backstage to cry. No staff roll, just the knowledge that somewhere in the world, somebody changed a diaper on a store display or wrote political graffiti on a goddamn crab.
So why do I do it, and why is it "better" in my mind than trash TV? I'm not entertained, or at least I'd like to think not. But if I don't find some enjoyment in it, then why do I go down the rabbit hole every other week? I asked my older brother for his opinion and he offered that, while different, Jerry Springer and r/trashy fill the same needs for different people.
It makes sense to me. I'm not a fan of theatrics or unnecessary showmanship. In the time it takes to watch an episode of Springer, I can watch my fill of street fights and ugly breakups on Reddit with time to spare. Comparing Dr. Phil to something I might look at is like comparing Operation! to an anatomy textbook. I want the gritty details and I want them now, not scrubbed clean, neatly packaged and handed to me by CBS. It's not realpolitik.
That still leaves the question of why I look in the first place, even if it disgusts me, upsets me or makes me angry.
I tend to view myself as humble, but the truth is I think of myself as "better" than almost all of the people who end up on the front page of r/trashy. You can talk all day about the intersection of drug use, poverty and poor education in practically any area in the United States. I certainly did in a number of college classes; there's an example of my privilege right there. I'm not a bad person, nor am I ignorant; I know some people weren't "raised right," given the same sort of societal training that I was. I know hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have it infinitely worse than I could ever imagine, right here in my own country.
But to a certain degree, I think there's some schadenfreude in all of us. A paper by the American Pychological Association titled "Self-Esteem, Self-Affirmation and Schadenfreude" found that "the misfortunes of others can evoke schadenfreude because they provide people with an opportunity to protect or enhance their self-views." In other words, watching somebody be publicly shamed or ridiculed (say, via a post on the Internet) for something that that damages my ego gives me gratification. Put even simpler, r/trashy reinforces that my behavior and morals are correct and good by putting counterexamples up for everyone to laugh at.
So when I laugh at some people brawling at a Chuck E. Cheese, I'm not laughing at the fight itself, or the fact that people think it's okay. I'm not exactly lording it over them that I know not to do such a thing. The shared understanding that such behavior is not okay is just comforting, in a strange way.
Image credits:
Lucky Strike ad: Silberio77 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
 |
| The view from my hospital room during the therapy. Mom was here too. |
A lot of this had to do with cable TV. I'm a person who can entertain myself for hours with one thing, whether it's a book, knitting, videos, etc. Mom, on the other hand, gets bored very easily. It's just the kind of person she is. Since neither of us were interested in getting lost in the big city trying to find some fun, this meant Mom watched a lot of YouTube and especially television.
Mom doesn't really tend to like casual, funny or uplifting TV. I had to ask her to stop watching Forensic Files, because hearing every detail of horrific murders and violent sex crimes for hours on end started to bother me around day 10. (Mom also refuses to wear headphones.) After that, she started watching the next thing down on the grand tier list of all TV shows: Jerry Springer.
I'm not a bleeding-heart, but something strikes me as intrinsically wrong about the Jerry Springer show, and all other shows in that genre such as Dr. Phil, Maury Povich, Steve Wilkos and so on. A stern older man in nice clothes talking down to young people doesn't strike me as good TV. It gives people of my mother's generation and earlier a thing to point to and say "See? Kids these days are ruining this country with their drugs and hip-hop and pre-marital sex, back in the 50's/60's/70's we would never __________."
 | |||||
| Harmless old-timey fun. Young people can cherry pick too. |
Recently, I was browsing Reddit. I deactivated my account long ago when I got sick of the same old memes and "discussions," but occasionally I like to kill time by checking out some old haunts. I check the front page, some technology subreddits, some related to video games, and... r/trashy. The subreddit's own stickied post, written by a moderator, says: "/r/trashy is a celebration of trash: people, things, media, etc. that boldly and shamelessly violates social conventions and cultural norms. Satisfy our voyeuristic drives by sharing trashy images, videos, stories, and fashion. All forms of trash are eagerly welcomed."
Reading the posts on this subreddit, I was forced off my high horse and faced with a conundrum. Why do I love seeing pictures and videos of people drinking while pregnant, urinating in public, fighting in Wal-Mart, defacing art and generally being disgusting, offensive human beings... and yet goofy, light-hearted Jerry Springer is what sets me off? Some fully-clothed "strippers" having a staged slap fight is Sesame Street in comparison.
 |
| Sample r/trashy post. Took a minute to find a good example that wasn't NSFW. |
There isn't any closure on Reddit, unless a commenter chimes in with a news article. You look, say to yourself "that's horrible," maybe leave a comment, then you move on to the next one. Nobody announces "You ARE the father," there's no jeering crowd or jilted ex running backstage to cry. No staff roll, just the knowledge that somewhere in the world, somebody changed a diaper on a store display or wrote political graffiti on a goddamn crab.
So why do I do it, and why is it "better" in my mind than trash TV? I'm not entertained, or at least I'd like to think not. But if I don't find some enjoyment in it, then why do I go down the rabbit hole every other week? I asked my older brother for his opinion and he offered that, while different, Jerry Springer and r/trashy fill the same needs for different people.
It makes sense to me. I'm not a fan of theatrics or unnecessary showmanship. In the time it takes to watch an episode of Springer, I can watch my fill of street fights and ugly breakups on Reddit with time to spare. Comparing Dr. Phil to something I might look at is like comparing Operation! to an anatomy textbook. I want the gritty details and I want them now, not scrubbed clean, neatly packaged and handed to me by CBS. It's not realpolitik.
 | |||
| Someone with a smartphone and no shame is better than TV in my opinion. |
That still leaves the question of why I look in the first place, even if it disgusts me, upsets me or makes me angry.
I tend to view myself as humble, but the truth is I think of myself as "better" than almost all of the people who end up on the front page of r/trashy. You can talk all day about the intersection of drug use, poverty and poor education in practically any area in the United States. I certainly did in a number of college classes; there's an example of my privilege right there. I'm not a bad person, nor am I ignorant; I know some people weren't "raised right," given the same sort of societal training that I was. I know hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have it infinitely worse than I could ever imagine, right here in my own country.
But to a certain degree, I think there's some schadenfreude in all of us. A paper by the American Pychological Association titled "Self-Esteem, Self-Affirmation and Schadenfreude" found that "the misfortunes of others can evoke schadenfreude because they provide people with an opportunity to protect or enhance their self-views." In other words, watching somebody be publicly shamed or ridiculed (say, via a post on the Internet) for something that that damages my ego gives me gratification. Put even simpler, r/trashy reinforces that my behavior and morals are correct and good by putting counterexamples up for everyone to laugh at.
So when I laugh at some people brawling at a Chuck E. Cheese, I'm not laughing at the fight itself, or the fact that people think it's okay. I'm not exactly lording it over them that I know not to do such a thing. The shared understanding that such behavior is not okay is just comforting, in a strange way.
Image credits:
Lucky Strike ad: Silberio77 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Sovereign Me
My name is Alex. I live on the West Coast, I spend most of my free time in front of computer screens or TVs, and I drink lots of caffeine. I've completed some college but never been to university, I consider myself a computer programmer but have never released anything worthwhile, and I own two guitars that I never play. I knit occasionally. I bring my smartphone with me when I go to the bathroom. I am 23 years old.
I have cancer.
As of the time I write this sentence, I'm getting married in roughly 18 hours. My fiancee, who I've already been calling my wife in private, is the strongest and most beautiful woman I've ever met. She broke me out of my shell and showed me there is life beyond my own self-doubt and the things everybody else wanted from me. She taught me a way to live on my terms and nobody else's. I've known her since high school, but only got to know her in my last year of college. In retrospect, the years before then seem wasted, pointless, inefficient.
I've leaned on her throughout this sickness.
I was diagnosed in October of 2018. I'd been sick for years before that; a cough that wouldn't go away, then fevers and hot flashes, then rashes and vomiting almost everything I ate. I visited specialist after specialist. I drank two liters of laxatives and underwent a lung biopsy. I lost 20 pounds. I've had cameras in every orifice. They only caught the lymphoma after I got a CAT scan for a kidney stone. God, I wish it had just been a kidney stone.
That night, I was summoned to a hospital in a big city. They gave me a port and I began my new life as a cancer patient.
Once I started receiving chemotherapy, I felt better within a week. The rashes disappeared, the fevers stopped, and I was able to eat without puking my guts out--in fact, I was utterly starving for months after my discharge.
For a long time, I thought it would actually be that easy. Getting chemo every other week wasn't so bad, except for the wasted day. I went back to work after some months of leave. I got a credit card and used it to pay for some overdue dental work. I discovered a local Mexican chain that's one of my favorites now. Life settled back into routine for a short while.
At the hospital, it never seemed to be enough. The PET and CT scans continued to show "some activity." I went back to the big city for more chemotherapy that made my legs swell and finally caused my hair to fall out, down to my eyebrows and eyelashes. I had to take longer and longer absences from work, until it was announced that I would be receiving stem cell therapy in an even bigger city, even further from home. I would have to stay there for two months.
I got another implant just for this therapy.
I had to receive special shots to force my bones to make more stem cells, which were then collected via my brand new implant. Then, as I understand it, BEAM chemotherapy destroyed my immune system, and my own stem cells were used to rejuvenate it after the fact. I had to live in a hospital ward for a month, then stay in the city for another month so they could monitor me while my immunity returned.
The worst parts of it were:
However, I made it through and I'm home now. The catheter has been removed, although I still have the port. I have to wonder... what next? I still can't go back to work, according to the hospital papers. I can't make any plans with the specter of another possible months-long treatment regimen hanging over me. The only thing I can do is wait and fill time.
It's been agonizing not being able to go back to work, so in order to make work for myself I've decided to start a blog. A blog isn't like a novel or a video or a computer game; there is no defined end, and at some point in a blog's lifespan you lose sight of the beginning, too. I've kept journals on-and-off at various points in my life, and I've always secretly hoped that somebody unattached to the situation would read them. A blog will fill that desire quite nicely.
I've always been timid at heart. I've always gone with the flow and avoided rocking the boat. It's kept me calm in trying times, but it's also made me indecisive and slow to act on things that are important to me. Sovereign Me is not only the concept that I rule my own destiny, that my life is a kingdom and I am the king, but that the kingdom must be defended. My individuality, my passions, my right to be myself without the burden of anybody else's opinions; that is Sovereign Me.
Image Credits
Port image: By PanaromicTiger - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6692890
Catheter image: By General Ludd - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27359127
I have cancer.
As of the time I write this sentence, I'm getting married in roughly 18 hours. My fiancee, who I've already been calling my wife in private, is the strongest and most beautiful woman I've ever met. She broke me out of my shell and showed me there is life beyond my own self-doubt and the things everybody else wanted from me. She taught me a way to live on my terms and nobody else's. I've known her since high school, but only got to know her in my last year of college. In retrospect, the years before then seem wasted, pointless, inefficient.
I've leaned on her throughout this sickness.
I was diagnosed in October of 2018. I'd been sick for years before that; a cough that wouldn't go away, then fevers and hot flashes, then rashes and vomiting almost everything I ate. I visited specialist after specialist. I drank two liters of laxatives and underwent a lung biopsy. I lost 20 pounds. I've had cameras in every orifice. They only caught the lymphoma after I got a CAT scan for a kidney stone. God, I wish it had just been a kidney stone.
That night, I was summoned to a hospital in a big city. They gave me a port and I began my new life as a cancer patient.
 |
| A device something like this is implanted in my chest. Image credits at the end. |
Once I started receiving chemotherapy, I felt better within a week. The rashes disappeared, the fevers stopped, and I was able to eat without puking my guts out--in fact, I was utterly starving for months after my discharge.
For a long time, I thought it would actually be that easy. Getting chemo every other week wasn't so bad, except for the wasted day. I went back to work after some months of leave. I got a credit card and used it to pay for some overdue dental work. I discovered a local Mexican chain that's one of my favorites now. Life settled back into routine for a short while.
At the hospital, it never seemed to be enough. The PET and CT scans continued to show "some activity." I went back to the big city for more chemotherapy that made my legs swell and finally caused my hair to fall out, down to my eyebrows and eyelashes. I had to take longer and longer absences from work, until it was announced that I would be receiving stem cell therapy in an even bigger city, even further from home. I would have to stay there for two months.
I got another implant just for this therapy.
 |
| Like this. Mine had three lumens, but was otherwise very similar. |
The worst parts of it were:
- Having to pee for the last three hours while my cells were collected
- Having to put tape and plastic over the catheter while I showered
- Everything else during those months
However, I made it through and I'm home now. The catheter has been removed, although I still have the port. I have to wonder... what next? I still can't go back to work, according to the hospital papers. I can't make any plans with the specter of another possible months-long treatment regimen hanging over me. The only thing I can do is wait and fill time.
It's been agonizing not being able to go back to work, so in order to make work for myself I've decided to start a blog. A blog isn't like a novel or a video or a computer game; there is no defined end, and at some point in a blog's lifespan you lose sight of the beginning, too. I've kept journals on-and-off at various points in my life, and I've always secretly hoped that somebody unattached to the situation would read them. A blog will fill that desire quite nicely.
I've always been timid at heart. I've always gone with the flow and avoided rocking the boat. It's kept me calm in trying times, but it's also made me indecisive and slow to act on things that are important to me. Sovereign Me is not only the concept that I rule my own destiny, that my life is a kingdom and I am the king, but that the kingdom must be defended. My individuality, my passions, my right to be myself without the burden of anybody else's opinions; that is Sovereign Me.
Image Credits
Port image: By PanaromicTiger - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6692890
Catheter image: By General Ludd - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27359127
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)