“They say that the golden age is gone, never to return. But I believe that we can somehow bring it back. I must believe... if I am to carry on.”
—Narrator, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Between the verdant hills of Arcadia and the rainbow falls of Shella, the cleansing fires of Kilanda and the wheat fields of Fum, the tranquil streams of Tipa and the crystal blues of the Jegon, even between the burning sands of the Sahara and the majestic geysers of Yellowstone, there creeps a sick miasma, snuffing out the golden glow, slowly killing us all.
You can try to fight it, hold your heart high like a crystal chalice filled with myrrh, try to banish the miasma with memories of the golden age—but your chalice is running dry and the memories are fading fast and you’re all alone because everyone around you has already dropped dead and you’re starving for myrrh and the miasma is closing in faster than ever before.
How long do you think you can survive by yourself, lost in this monstrous fog?
Eventually, you’re going to need someone on your side, because you can’t banish the miasma alone.
So pack up your caravan and dust off that old magic racket, because we’re heading to the unnamed fantasy world of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles to collect some myrrh, banish the miasma, and maybe—just maybe—bring back the golden age.
(This is a cut chapter from the essay “Lost in the Miasma” that I felt didn't fit with the overarching theme of the essay, but I still wanted to publish it, as it captures some of my thoughts on the modern gaming industry and works by itself as a short contained essay.)
The miasma—or the internet—has made gaming as a whole worse for the consumer on a physical, technical level; it has corrupted the games industry to such an extent that game development is now pretty much only about making as much money as possible as quickly as possible as easily as possible while ignoring all ethical values and disregarding the consumer almost entirely. The miasma has enabled a gross disregard for game preservation, player feedback, and, most importantly, the overall quality of the games themselves, all the while making it easier than ever to forever milk cash out of the player through endless low-effort downloadable content, microtransactions, and by pushing fake money purchased with real money that is then used to purchase dumb mystery boxes that contain dumb prizes chosen basically at random, which amounts to literal gambling.
*note: these notes are presented without proofreading or editing of any kind; many were taken with speech-to-text.
dress for success; die a mess
no one wants to do nothing, it just ends up that way
Google/apple have yet to solve for the whole connected-to-wifi-but-pulling-out-of-the-driveway problem, which seems like a simple thing to fix—but what do I know? (not much) also i could see someone saying something like “uh, you shouldn't be on your phone while pulling out of your driveway to begin with???”
“did mister shouty really be sausages”
when I think of “video games,” I think of the color green. it is interesting, the colors that pop into your head upon thinking of things.
with writing, I have a real fear of stagnation or “regression of skill,” which makes me afraid to stop writing for any prolonged period of time (even though sometimes I want to take a break) for fear of this kinda regression-stagnation stuff happening. idk if this is an irrational fear or not, as once I went a month or so without writing, and, afterwards, wrote some pretty OK stuff, almost as if the break “refreshed” me in some way, but idk if this example is the rule or the exception. there’s also this question of “who are you trying to impress anyway?” and the answer to that, I think, is myself—not you. but then that calls into question why i even post my writing for public consumption at all, and then my cool persona starts to fall apart now doesn’t it?
“i hear you telephone thing listening in” —Mark E. Smith
“And he has, that is exactly what he has done, whatever he wanted. As if attempting to reach the end of his desires, to find out what is there at the end. Discovering instead with horror that his desires even when instantly and gorgeously gratified only make him increasingly unhappy and insane.”
—Intermezzo, Sally Rooney, 2024, p. 411.
As of writing this, I have been married for nearly seven years, and within that time, I have thought about sleeping with an unquantifiable number of people who are not my spouse: men, women, non-binary, otherkin—whatever. I am not picky. Pretty much anyone I see that I find even remotely attractive, I end up thinking: “What do they look like without clothes on? How do they kiss, I wonder? Are they wearing a wedding band? Would they be receptive if I made an advance? Do they have a boyfriend? Would they prefer top or bottom? Do they have a girlfriend? Have they ever thought about having sex with me? Are they thinking about having sex with me right now?” and so on.
I want to watch the President bleed out on stage while surrounded by his goons, who are all hunched over his morbidly obese body, protecting him from further gunfire, totally unaware—in that very chaotic moment—that the president is now just a corpse, having given up the ghost after the first bullet ripped through his skin and shredded through the cartilage around his sternum and slipped right through his spine and then, finally, burst out of his lardaceous back; the bullet—blood, pus, and serous fluid twirling behind it like a little horizontal tornado—lodging itself into the wall right behind where the president once stood all tall and arrogant while giving some elaborate speech about how we’ll soon reach the Promised Land if we just rape the planet a bit more and get rid of all those nasty poor people in the slums eating all the cats and dogs, right before he collapses, simultaneously pisses and shits himself, and then twitches out a little bit in his own bloody-piss-poop juice before going completely still and just ceasing to be a thinking thing at all.
*note: these notes are presented without proofreading or editing of any kind, and many of these notes were taken with speech-to-text.
since moving to email-only communication, many have reached out to me, and the overall tone of these people has been very different from the general tone you get from people on social media (note that some of these people are indeed the same people from social media, but I’m not going to name names); they’re way more personal, understanding, and empathetic; as if, since they are no longer potentially being seen by others, they have shed some upper-crust layer of their persona thus revealing more of their true selves; they’re “more comfortable,” is the main takeaway (i guess).
why does an RSS reader need “enhanced AI features???”
Syd Barrett The Madcap Laughs; One of those albums that I pretended to like in high school but ended up really liking a whole lot in adulthood and now I can't tell if I just pretended so hard that I ended up liking it, like pretending myself into enjoyment? Dark Globe has to be incredible, though, I think.
“To breath, so to speak, without air … To be, in a word, unborable.”
—The Pale King, David Foster Wallace, 2011, p. 440.
Question for you: What do the following three people have in common? 1) a young boy who spends hours a day contorting himself in very painful ways so that he can eventually lick every part of his own body, including “the papery skin around his anus” and the back of his own neck; 2) a GS-13 Revenue Agent at the Peoria, Illinois IRS Technical Auditing Branch who can complete over 100 tax audits per day and levitates a little bit while doing so; and 3) a verbose college kid addicted to Adderall who is able to tap into such heightened states of awareness that he is even aware that he is aware of being aware and can describe everything around him with near-perfect clarity.
Keep that question in mind—we’re going to come back to that later.
Just a heads up that, while typing this email, I was (am) listening to the track titled “Elwynn Forest (Ambient)” from the official World of Warcraft Soundtrack—which was ripped by some person named “Homer” (per the attached metadata)—which I had illegally pirated some time ago (along with nearly a terabyte of other video game music, all of which I had listened to while playing the actual games in question at some point in my life [meaning I did not just download this stuff to have it for no reason—each soundtrack holds some sort of special meaning for me]), all of which I have had stored on my second hard drive for many revolutions (the drive is named “X-Drive,” and yes, this predates Elon’s co-opting of the letter X, which is also a good reminder that I need to get a new drive for storage sometime soon). And I was (am) listening to this track on repeat, of course. And if for whatever reason you don’t believe me, and you think I’m just trying to be cute or clever or funny or whatever, I have attached a screenshot of my desktop with both X-Drive and the Rhythmbox media player pictured as proof of these claims (see attachment titled “proof.png”).
“It’s so nice, Ellie bringing friends over. She never brings anyone over, always in her room tinkering with something, head wrapped in a headset, sometimes on the holotable or clacking away on one of those old letter boards—the key thingies, whatever you call them—old stuff.
(context: this is an email response to a reader who provided feedback on my scathing critique of social media found in the first issue of Mognet; essentially, this is a follow-up clarifying some of the WHY of why I left social media.)
Hello Reader,
I really appreciate you reaching out. It kinda made my morning when I read your email. I didn’t know I had this type of influence on people—or even one person, for that matter. I was especially surprised that it was you who reached out, as I was under the impression that, for some reason, you didn’t like me or something, but that was probably just my mind playing tricks, as it often does.
