The Fish Speaker

The Bridge

I’ve lived a long, short life of twenty-three years. I’ve got two more of those ahead of me, I hope, and maybe another if fortune has my back. Youth is the precious gold of time, a thing lost forever but never cherished until the end. Age is but iron that rusts in the rain, a strength often shorn of gladness. Today I stepped over another iron bridge on my journey to the havens. It was well-worn, orange-stained, and caked with onerous graffiti, the word Love on its side barely discernible.

It’s hard for me to write this kind of muse, since I’ve aged much more than most before they reach that bridge. I’m too self-aware, if that’s possible or makes any sense. I’ve witnessed the errors and folly of many on the other side of the bridge, as if I were staring at ants, picking at them and burning them with a magnifying glass. A strange folk they were six months ago to me. Now I understand the world a little better. Socrates said the rest.

Ye call it a first crush, though it’s probably a pittance of what the means to others. It was (and is) friend of mine here, where I am, with whom I randomly hung out with one night with others and found myself liking him more than the norm. I’m good at making friends when I set my mind to it. I form deep attachments in the blink of an eye, a wound of my long dependence on my twin to bring others into my field of vision. Still, it was different for me. I really liked him, on a more emotional and visceral level than I’d known before.

He charmed me without realizing it. He’s straight, of course, so there was never any chance of anything beyond a good friendship. Nevertheless, the attraction remained. Here fortune smiled on me: the glow in my heart didn’t sweep across the field of my mind like a ravaging wildfire. At once it met a bastion of steel, a wall of age that it beat upon and singed, but never conquered. I kept my cool. From the very beginning, I told him about my crush and he accepted it. It became a kind joke among us, and so things progressed as all good friendships do, yet though nothing physical ever happened between us, this one bond drove me mad. I kept thinking about him day in and day out. My day revolved around whenever I saw him. I stressed irrationally when he wasn’t with me, and even worse when he was in the company of others without me. The lord of my realm—my intellectual, rational mind—grew enraged at all this turmoil that I’d seen before; it threw a thousand different curses at it, mocking me for being so silly. It was silly.

But I didn’t stop, of course. That attraction made our friendship more wonderful. I loved spending time with him and doing something I’d would have thought boring before, listening to him to compose a song, talking to him about everything and nothing, and letting him effortlessly draw me out of my precious shell. It didn’t really matter what I was doing. I would drop it if he ever needed help, or be there if he needed me, and offer my aid at every little thing without a drop of thought. I dreamt of him without shame and hugged him without humility. I rode the high and reveled in it. 

The wall loomed over me, though. I saw the hands of the clock on its side; I felt the grains slipping out of the hourglass. I knew it would soon end. The world isn’t so kind to keep people together. It does as it must. The very thing that brought us together would sunder us. I knew enough to savor the moment, a lesson I’d learned the hard way before. I hadn’t learned that it only made it worse. I had a few precious moments with him: a deep hug here and there, the priceless, earnest clasp of a hand, a memory burned into my mind and soul.

Then it ended. He left today, as I knew he would. As I knew he must. I expressed my care for him several times before. I helped him carry his luggage out to the taxi and gave him one last hug, as well as a quiet nod to his “we’ll see each other soon enough. Don’t worry.” Maybe. No, definitely, but not as it had been. I had crossed the bridge, and there was no going back. I went back to my room, wept, and mused silently. I went out as normal to lunch and found pain stabbing me at every turn that we’d made together, even when I walked by his old room right down the hall from mine. I was tired of love, like everyone else, but I couldn’t let it go.

I recovered when he texted me back again. We talked as if all was normal. It was. It is. Life went on. Life goes on, but tomorrow is coming, a tomorrow without him. I’ll be fine. Not now. Soon. I’ll be better for it. I’ve had a taste, and I want more. I’ll cross the bridge again soon. I’ll meet others. They’ll touch me deeper and change me more. This was my first, and I’ll always remember it. It hurts. It still hurts. It will hurt.

I’ll have it no other way.

I love you. Take care. See you around. 

For I Cannot See Azekah

Been a while since I wrote something on this blog. My life has been very busy, joyful, and exhausting all at once. Things keep moving along and changing for better and worse. Nevertheless, I somehow managed to grab some small snatches of time to reflect on my “deconversion,” so to speak, from Christianity and religion in general, something that moved me enough to type a post out.

I won’t bore you with some sad story. I was homeschooled in a dedicated Christian family until I was twelve, then enrolled in some college courses in a local university, mostly Spanish and some computer stuff. My family has often flirted with fundamentalist notions, but has always stepped away from them thanks to their experiences with reality and other perspectives, albeit less satisfactorily than I would deem now. In any case, in all those years I struggled with religion, questions of my existence, my salvation, etc., that gave me a lot of grief, guilt, and discouragement. It was a trial to be a Christian, as I was told, yet something was not right.

There was no grand moment in which I left the faith. I left it over a period of years, little by little, inch by inch, drifting away as Lewis once said. The issue I posited before God, the great notion I set before the Great White Throne, was a simple one: “If You won’t save me, please don’t waste my time.”

The Faith taught me to test the signs. The Faith taught me that struggle, doubt, and agony were the core of my existence as one of God’s people, yet it also told me that all that angst could be extinguished by God if I asked. I asked. Many times. In my heart and openly to others. I begged and pleaded for salvation, without an ulterior motive or insipid “not yet” from Augustine. Can you guess if my salvation came? You need not.

Countless times I prayed the prayer, and nothing happened. And that hollow echo, that hope answered with nothing, eviscerated my faith. If God was so wise, so gentle and kind, I should not have such a battle. I should be confident in my salvation and in my place in the universe. Others told me it took them time to reach that serenity. I didn’t understand why it should. God is beyond time. Why should He string us along with a blind a trust until the end of our existence? Why all the waiting? Why all the pain, if God is so good and declared it to be so?

God wasted my time. I was tired of the guilt, and I had no more desire to talk with Him, to watch Him deny me an earnest prayer. As soon as I left the house that propped up my faith, it collapsed. I stopped going to church, and nothing happened. I stopped reading my Bible, and I stayed the same. I didn’t become some listless, helpless mind devoured by a Lion roaming the earth, seeking my soul. I was me. All that left me was the guilt, pain, doubt, and sorrow. I stopped caring. I found I didn’t need God.

I have not needed God. I don’t hate Him. I don’t hate the religion, religions, or faiths that worship Him. I’m one person on a world with vast seas. Others need different things. Perhaps some do need God. I wish them well. I only wish God were better than He is, that the Faith had kept its promises. Still, I step into a cathedral and feel awe, and rejoice in the notions of the Faith that raised me, lifting my eyes towards heaven and something better than myself, an ideal and paragon for my soul. I thought to have those without the chains around my neck, and so I have.

I saw the banners of Babylon around my walls, pounding them with the world and its realities. I looked for smoke from Azekah to tell me there was hope in the cause. But I saw nothing. Lachish was still. Azekah was gone.

Babylon won and took me from Jerusalem. By the waters I knew salvation at last, and I laid down to rest.

The Truth

The chief danger to Europe is not in some evil Muslim/immigrant wave, but in Europe’s society failing those immigrants. Immigrants immigrate because they’re searching for a better future: no country has anything to fear from them if it delivers on that promise, regardless of creed or color.

Despite all the popularity of American declinism, I have “faith” in America more than Europe because of one thing: its society knows how to assimilate newcomers. 

And yes, I’m still alive. Just very busy, but very happy. And alive. 

Hypocrisy Isn’t A Sin

http://www.utne.com/Politics/American-Empire-Pushing-Toward-Iran-Persian-Gulf.aspx

Especially if the reverse situation is simply impossible.

The US has a tendency to overreact to threats, but the US military is far more sage and pragmatic than people realize. Iran has the potential to critically destabilize a significant amount of oil flow in the midst of a very shaky global economic recovery. It’s hardly a good idea to test the effects of disrupting a quarter of the world’s oil.

Sorry, people: morality is (and always has been) rarely relevant to geopolitics. It’s always funny to see people express or even hint at moral outrage over these kinds of situations. It’s sort of like getting mad about a cat fighting a mouse.

The Truth

The people who believe, even half-heartedly, that Stephen Colbert would make a good president are precisely the reason the system never changes.

You all latch on to absurd examples of hope that are either monstrously unviable, patent lies, or grand disappointments in the making. It’s why “Change We Can Believe In” turned to ash, just like I knew it would. Meanwhile, everything goes on as it was, while the supposed warriors for freedom and independent thought keep getting manipulated more easily than the ignorant masses.

Stephen Colbert is a comedian with no political experience; he seems like good materiel precisely because he is not in the position. If he were to somehow ascend to it, he would be simply constrained by the nature of the Office of the Presidency as every other President has done. He would not revolutionize the world or fix all of our problems, even most of them. He would probably be a very average president, like most presidents throughout history.

The problems facing the US are painful and serious, but they are neither existential nor critical. Our country is in an excellent position all things considered. Yes, income inequality needs to be narrowed; yes, our K-12 education system needs to be fixed; yes, our infrastructure is in great need of repair, but we are not collapsing, on the verge of collapse, or approaching the verge to begin with.

The president we should want is someone who is willing to work within the system, to compromise on the issues of his party, to speak honestly about our position in the world as a superpower and how we should deal with that, to play the game of Washington when it is appropriate, and to rebel against it during the rare times it is not.

When you get right down to it, making fun of Washington is pretty damn easy. It doesn’t make you qualified to take Washington on.

Meanwhile

PSA

For all you wanna-be elitist jerks on the Internet who think they’re so smart when they criticize people over meaningless typological shit instead of the actual content of their posts, here’s something very simple that you rarely ever get:

When someone uses “your” to mean “you’re,” it is a typological error, not a grammatical one. “You’re” is a contraction of “you are,” and is pronounced exactly the same as “your.” The user means to use “you are,” but the brain confuses the two homonyms for completely understandable reasons. While it is technically grammatically incorrect to use “your” in a sentence in the place of this verb conjugation, the intent of the user is clear, and it does not go against standard grammar, as it does not cause a conflict in person or number. The error occurs in the transference of linguistic output from the brain to paper, not in the basic linguistic output. A true grammatical error would be the use of “you is” or “you’s,” but it’s funny how nobody makes that mistake. 

Unless your post is some scholastic work or other such entity that is bound by the expectations of standard grammar, which serves only as a structure through which to facilitate and improve general communication in certain contexts, you don’t make yourself sound all nice and awesome when you bitch about this shit: you sound like a giant prick.

It’s the Internet. What you read on the Internet is, for the most part, colloquial speech, which has never been (and never should be) bound by such expectations. Record yourself talking and you’ll realize this pretty quickly, or you could grow some balls and fess up to the fact that your superior typing skills don’t make you a better logician or debater, only a more annoying asshole.

Meanwhile…

Italy’s 10-year bonds are back above 7%.

Either everyone’s gotten used to the news, or the market is just assuming Italy’s doing to default now.

2012 might not be the year we all die, but the economic welfare of half a billion people might not fare so well.

Review

I haven’t talked about WoW on this blog in, say, forever, but my dear friend emailed me this and wanted to get my take on this opinion piece from PC Gamer. If you’ve never played World of Warcraft and/or have no interest in it, skip the post. As I recognize this has a more limited audience than, say, my opinions on current affairs or news, I’ll put this under a nice break for you all.

Suffice it to say, I think the article makes a fair point in one regard, but an impractical one all the same. Trying to reform the talent system of a current MMORPG is a monstrous undertaking, and it’s quite arguable that Blizzard has failed in every attempt they’ve made. 

The problem is simple, though a little obfuscated: people use games to escape from reality, and reality, unfortunately offers us few real choices. This applies just as much to nations in geopolitics and individuals in their daily lives. No, you cannot actually quit your job on a whim. Sure, you can theoretically, but you’d be screwed and suffer terrible consequences. Likewise, America, for all its might, cannot just bomb China: there would be fallout. The best description I’ve come across is that of a high-level chess game: yes, there are a host of theoretical potential moves in a match, but the vast majority of them are so terrible that they’ll quickly lead to one’s demise. Life essentially forces us to min-max.

Therefore, and especially in RPGs, we desire so-called “real” choices, gameplay decisions that allow us to define and mold the characters to our vision without constraint. However, since WoW at its heart attempts to mimic aspects of the real world in its gameplay rather than build itself off of a blatantly artificial framework, like FPS’s or other game genres, min-maxing intrinsically rears its head. There have always been the best of specs and the best of choices for every situation. Sorry, it’s just how it works.

Having played WoW for around five years, I’ve largely supported Blizzard’s attempts to reform the talent system. I remember the talent system as it was in their first expansion, the Burning Crusade (BC), almost five years ago now. Skill and class progression was entirely limited to the talent system, along with an annoying system of spell ranking that we thankfully no longer have. At Level 10 and each level after, a player received a talent point to spend, meaning there were 61 talent points in Burning Crusade. Each talent had at least two points to spend in it, though almost every single one modified a percentage value of some kind. Each point was a trivial gain.

In the latest expansion, Cataclysm (Cata), the talent system underwent a significant revision. About half of the talents were cut out, the talent points in each tier were reduced, and signature specialty (spec) abilities were given to players on their arrival to level 10, a brilliant design move for MMOs. However, it was still the same old talent system at its heart, with the same old problems. They did manage to eke out a few interesting choices, but not very many and rather marginal.

In the end, Blizzard has come to the realization (which they’ve long known, actually) that their talent system doesn’t work. It’s simply a separate skill progression system like the spells in your spellbook, the ones you get every level. In Mists of Pandaria (MoP), Blizzard’s designers are completely removing the talent system and replacing it with a set of abilities. At a certain level, one must pick one of three different abilities This is great, and I’m highly supportive of the move. The system, in concept, seems very sound and very compelling. It will depend on game design and feedback, of course, but there’s tremendous potential for the system, and I’m glad to the company moving forward from this old system we’ve enjoyed and suffered from for so long.

And yet, I think Blizzard has finally realized that the battle for “choice” is, in the end, a futile one. No matter what they do, the community will form a majority opinion on what’s the “best” choice for each situation. However, I personally think there will be much more room for disagreement and subjectivity, which is what people are looking for. 

Beyond all that, this article actually speaks to some deep philosophical issues and the human condition, as silly as that sounds. Our modern culture values the notion of absolute free will, NO FATE, as it were, regardless of the overwhelming amount of evidence gainsaying it. We are not puppets, but we are children of our circumstances. I would definitely not be the same person if I had been born a hundred years ago, even if you assumed my genetic profile was the same. As products of evolution in a pitiless world, we will always slouch toward what gives us the greatest benefit for the least amount of effort. That’s not sloth: it’s natural selection.

Maybe Blizzard could go farther and reform things, but I think the author is making a silly request. Even in the most well-designed RPGs or games, few real choices are available to us. Bioware games receive a lot of criticism for the illusion of choice, but I’ve yet to come across any game that actually gives me the real freedom to do what I want. It’s a fundamental conflict between the need to have a cogent plot and a need for the conscious mind to rebel against evolution; it will never be resolved. Still, Bioware has done a pretty good job of making that illusion of choice compelling to my mind, which is all I ask. 

I don’t think Blizzard’s new system will revolutionize the game or suddenly give me immense amount of customization, but that’s not really why I play the game anyway. I play it because of the friends I’ve made, for the thrill of high-end raiding, and the gameplay I continue to enjoy after so many years. I didn’t play WoW to get an Bioware immersion experience—I played it to have fun with other people in a world that, once in a great while, can trick you into thinking it might be real.

Isn’t that why we enjoy fantasy?

Um…

I expected the EU summit to be disappointing. I didn’t expect it to be a hilarious disaster.

I should have known better.