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:

• 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

I feel especially driven because of a YouTuber I've been watching lately, Wes Watson. He's currently a fitness instructor of some kind who also makes vlogs about his time in prison. It's easy to laugh because of his over-the-top intensity and some of the stories he tells, but the reality is that I want to take his philosophy to heart. He never gives himself an inch, and at the core of this philosophy of intentional suffering is one kernel of truth: nothing that makes you stronger will be easy.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, ‘The hand that wrote it is no more.'"

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.