Bear with me. I don’t plan on making this sort of thing a regular affair, but I’ve somehow become embroiled in a big ol’ Twitter discussion about a Norwegian celebrity’s “right” to make entertainment from her coping with depressions and anxiety. I’m going to be a dick and not post any of that; a) It’s in Norwegian, and b) The minutia are frankly not very interesting.

However, it did make me acutely aware of my own perspective on certain aspects of my mental condition that I’ve considered intimate to the extent that they are character defining traits at the very core of my soul, and with an effect I feel is apparent in everything I’ve done for most of my adult existence. As such, I thought it was time to share my thoughts and experiences, and perhaps someone out there would get something out of it as well.

Without beating around the bush, I’ve suffered from social anxiety for as far back as I can remember, and I suffer from regular bouts of deep depression. Once, I would characterize it as crippling. The notion of walking to the general store and buying supplies would be gauged against the pain of hunger, and for the most part I’d prefer the hunger. Those of you that know me know I’m a skinny man. Part of that is my body type, but food quickly proved to be the primary reason I’d have to deal with strangers, and as such, I taught myself to avoid having to buy it.

Long time friends will remember me refusing to buy my own food when we went out to eat, them having to take my order. I’d play it off as though it was some weird quirk of my personality, that I was doing it to annoy them or god knows what. To be honest I don’t know what I was thinking, but the shame of asking my friend if he could order my food for me was nothing compared to the idea of talking to a stranger.

I couldn’t buy my tickets on the tram or on the bus. I’d rather suffer the prospect of getting caught without a ticket than have to get in that line and pay the man. I couldn’t take taxis, because I’d have to tell the man where I was going, and the silence in the car during the ride would give me cold sweats thinking about what would happen if the driver tried to strike up small talk. I’d rather walk across Oslo on foot than do a more sensible thing, and I did, many times.
I got tremendous exercise from all the walking I did, so I guess that’s something.

School.. Man, I had 75% absence in my last couple of years of high school, before I escaped that whole thing altogether. I hated walking into the room, sitting down, being around the other kids. I didn’t learn shit, because I was too busy thinking about my own condition and, I suppose, what they might be thinking of me. I wasn’t even skipping school properly. I’d be in the hall reading, or drawing, or just staying away from other people.

I loved programming work because I was left alone for the most part. I’d show up, sit down, run down my task list. My first development job was wonderfully anti-social. I’d get up, get dressed, listen to music under a hoodie on the train (unpaid, got away with it 90% of the time), go into the office, nod at the producer, sit down, and do my best, because if I delivered, no questions were asked.

This angst, and the introversion I for the longest time felt it forced on me, shaped my career. It made me pursue solitary work. It made me work in a musical genre as narrow and counterculture as they come. It made me so unaccustomed to speaking with Norwegians, my primary relationships came from the internet; I’m still a hundred times more comfortable speaking and writing English than I am my native language. At my most Norwegian, English creeps through.

The aforementioned Twitter discussion started because I read an article about a TV production centered on a Norwegian Z-list celebrity’s dealing with her own depression issues (which are probably entirely legitimate in their own way). My knee jerk reaction was to want her to shut her god damn mouth about it, and I was rightly challenged by others; I’m commonly hyperbolic and talk before my brain’s filtered the idea I’m communicating. You can probably chalk that up other social issues but I’m not going to make any excuses. I can be a real douche.

I’ve been trying to think harder about why I’m so angry about the notion of an entertainment production about a hipster with a biochemical sadness. She describes angst and depression as though it were a “taboo”, and I can not for the life of me fathom where she’s coming from. I’d ask, what kind of bizarre silent reality is she coming from, where people don’t talk to each other about their problems? I couldn’t imagine the world where she was being held down and repressed, because I’ve never ONCE felt like the world has denied me a chance or a place to go for help.

Because I grew to realize, as I grew older, that what I was so damn worried about all the time was an idea of myself, and how my own idea could be challenged by other people’s ideas of my self. My sickness is a combined arrogance, narcissism and irrational fear. Suicide was a very common notion in my head for the longest time, and I flirted with it repeatedly, but in retrospect I see that I was in love with the narcissistic idea of my “self sacrifice”, and I’d obsess about how I’d want others to remember me. If I’d leave a “dent” if I went in this way or that way. I’d listen to Henry Rollins’ “I know you” spoken word piece over Nine Inch Nails’ A Warm Place, and just cry and cry. Oh me. Oh poor poor me and MY pain.

I’m approaching 30 now, and after about 15 years of processing what it “means to be me”, the single most liberating thing was a kind of existential kick in the balls. I’d walk home through the Vigeland Park late at night because, again, I’d never take the tram, and this is going to sound cheesy, but I’d look at the stars and I’d think, man… On a cosmic scale we are so boned. What makes me so fucking special?

I think that’s the only taboo associated with angst and depression; The self centered, narcissistic shame. The constant, self-imposed notion of fictional peer pressure to achieve an internalized ideal self nobody on the outside actually gives much of a hoot about.

So when you go on TV and decide to share your pain because others can learn from it and feel better about their suffering, my response is that you can take that back to your own long critical looks in the mirror, and maybe meditate a bit on what it means to be trapped inside your own head when you find it necessary to do your mental laundry in the public space. I literally can not think of a more self-aggrandizing way to process your own mental health.

My argument has never been to keep mental disorders out of the media. But I know people with real mental issues, chemical mental issues, and boy do they have a real fight. You can keep your body dysmorphia and “suicidal tendencies”. I’ve been there, I know dozens of people who have been there, I know several who ARE there. Hell, I still can’t order a sandwich at Subway without assistance or talk to flight attendants. Being a “special weirdo” is common like the cold. Everybody suffers, and everybody worries; Welcome to planet earth.

Perhaps I’m provoked by the approach, where the idea seems to be to focus on an individual, while the problem is intrinsic to the human condition, and just as varied. Insecurity, self doubt and existential angst are as normal to the human mind as the need to use the toilet. Some think that is a mental challenge too. When you parcel it up for consumption, my brain conjures up images of understanding TV audiences gravely nodding their heads, now with a new found understanding of how Those People feel. And that drives me crazy.

I’d strongly urge angst-ridden depressives to talk to their friends and family, or if that is a problem, make new friends. I have a fantastic girlfriend who is my polar opposite in the social context, but she is totally understanding of my situation and has always been there for me. She couldn’t have been if I hadn’t been open and honest about my irrational bullshit issues. Online forums are excellent if you can’t deal with people face to face. Learn to discuss your suffering objectively, so you can gain some actual insight and not just spin your wheels in your own fantasies. When I was cutting myself in my teens (probably the only habit I still feel some actual shame about), I was doing so as a kind of flirtation with suicide at first, but after a while it became more about exposing myself to pain and simply processing the trauma in a compartmentalized format. I stopped cutting myself, because I’d made it mundane by considering it to the point of tedium.

I wish I’d been taught more about existentialism earlier. Or even what the word meant. So I could’ve seen myself as the small, insignificant dude that I am, and so I could have gotten on with my life sooner. I live so much better knowing that I’m not the center of the universe.

So that’s My Post on that topic. I hope someone out there will get something out of it.

The past couple of days have been, in a word, dreamlike. It’s taken at least a full day for the reality, and gravity of the situation to sink in. But I want to start at the beginning.

The preceding week was all upside down. I came down with a cold and fever on Monday, and my girlfriend followed soon after. With the requisite cough-driven sleeplessness, our clock spun uncontrollably. We’d go to bed at 7 in the morning and wake up at night.

This Friday afternoon, we were shaken out of our sleep by a violent bang and our slightly-ajar bedroom windows shaking so hard in their frame we thought they might fall out. In that sleep state, we were obviously shocked awake, but we didn’t fully understand what had happened. For all we knew, it was just an unusually hard rush of wind, which of course turned out to be the case. We made jokes about our enormous cats attacking the windows to catch flies and went back to dozing.

The sirens soon followed. Sirens aren’t uncommon as we live downtown. There were a lot of them though, and I sleepily made the dumb joke that “I guess them done found themselves a negro!” It didn’t stop though. More sirens. Police sirens, ambulance sirens, fire sirens. Even a siren I don’t even know what is. I dug out my phone and looked up the news, and read the first report of a large explosion downtown.

Now we live literally 3 minutes walk away from the site in question. It’s a street I walk frequently, where my friends walk frequently. It’s around the corner, up a hill and take a left. Now I was being confronted with images of that well known, safe and quiet area in a state I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

Terrorism is a constant topic in Norway. There’s a distinct Norwegian undercurrent of somehow being entangled with the US, and following 9/11,  as we are close allies having partaken in joint armed conflict, the fear that Norway could become a target for Jihadist terrorism has been a frequent topic. Personally I have thought the notion was ridiculous. If anything, Jihadists should LOVE Norway. It’s the perfect neutral staging area. Any terrorist attack on Norway would be, I think (perhaps naively), condemned even by the Jihadists: They have too much to gain from us remaining unaffected.

So when I’m being shown a terrorist attack on my city, my brain flies into analysis mode. Perhaps that’s the programmer in me; I take refuge in abstract thought and problem solving. A block away, people are dead and dying, and I’m instead sitting safe in my beautiful home, considering what kind of explosive might have been used, why the location was picked, why  there’s so much office-supply debris if the detonation happened street level. My brain simply treated the situation the same way it did during 9/11, when I was trying to figure out how on earth the towers could fall.

Friday was spent in disbelief, watching the news, flicking between CNN and Norwegian media, even making jokes about inaccuracies in the international pronunciation of Norwegian names.

(As a sidenote, on Twitter, someone became enraged that people were making jokes, and I was livid. Don’t you dare tell me I can’t make jokes when I’m nervous and uncertain, you self righteous moralist prick. )

Gradually as the scope of the event became clearer, we were glad so few had passed, and that whoever carried out the attack had chosen such a bad time to cause damage. Relatively speaking, we felt we had got away cheap.

Then the shooting was reported.

The shooting changed everything. As the situation on Utøya escalated, my state of disbelief reached almost a critical state. I became obsessed with theories. I got into heated debates on Facebook and Twitter about socio-political questions of perpetrator identity.

(Many were making assumptions that this was an Al Qaida attack, which I would openly ridicule and make light of. Further, perp ethnicity became a topic, and it was driving me insane. A pet peeve of mine is prejudice and assumption; I believe strongly that people need to eat the world with their own teeth, so to say.)

There was no way for me to bodily walk up and see the site. All I had in reality to make me *feel* the situation was how all traffic in the area had been directed down my street, resulting in a cacophony of engines and sirens outside our windows. The discussion and theory-crafting became more real to me, as the situation’s gravity escaped into the virtual space of news reports and anonymous discussion online.

As more details of the shooting surfaced, I remembered  how small Norway is, and the time interval between the attacks. Me and my girlfriend concluded early and confidently with practically everything that is now known about the perpetrator short of his name and address: We knew this was the bomber, we knew he was Norwegian, and we KNEW he was right-wing. It made too much sense, and I’m ashamed to admit, I was even gloating at the prospect of all those making racially-prejudiced comments against people of foreign ethnicities  in the Oslo streets having to take a long hard look in the mirror and examine their assumptions about the world, and the gray scale of politics.

Armed forces stationed outside parliament

As I was proven to be correct, the “fun bubble” finally popped. The death toll on the island rose as night fell, and certain details such as how this scumbag pretended to be a police officer, deliberately using these desperate kids’ need for safety to murder more of them and how they were targeted for something as mercurial as an interest in politics.. It finally broke me in to realize that this wasn’t just happening. It was happening in my home, to people like me, with my language, my past, my future, and it made me acutely aware of my nationality.

If you’ll allow, I’m going to get a bit new-agey here. There’s something about sharing a “spirit”. We like to think that when a bomb goes off in Iraq and several soldiers are killed, we all empathize equally, but I don’t think we can. Unless we share spirits with those affected, we can’t relate fully and bodily to their experiences. The sadness and grief is always tied to those left behind, and if we can’t put ourselves *precisely* in their place, then I humbly don’t think you can experience the connection as primal as it can get.

I’m a jaded, fatalistic cynic. I’ve been shocked and depressed by terrorism in the past, but I’ve never felt touched by it. I’ve been safe, in my “fun bubble” of analysis and anonymous discussion. Even as we lit candles on our balcony for the victims, we were still discussing and debating the events more than we were genuinely feeling them.

Yet I couldn’t sleep last night. I laid restlessly watching the news over and over again. When the news broke that the Utøya death toll exceeded 80, I thought it had to be some kind of bad joke, or a typo. As the number spread through the news and was confirmed further, I reached a kind of numbness. It wasn’t interesting anymore. It was just painful. A horrible, deep, grinding pain that made the world gray and brittle. It made food, games, literature, everything immaterial.

How can you enjoy anything or even think of anything else when somewhere someone’s mom isn’t answering her son’s calls? When a child warns her parents not to call her for fear that a murderer might notice and find her? When kids swim in ice cold water in the night, trying to pull their wounded friends to safety? When perhaps over 80 families whose lives mirror your own are irreversibly broken, and for what? One man’s belief?

We went for a walk today. Everything is cordoned off, so there wasn’t much to see other than people, rain and armed army personnel. All stores were closed, so everybody outside were in the same confused, curious and disbelieving daze. There was a soft quietness to the city I have never experienced in my life, and as we made a wide circle around the perimeter, I felt both pride and grief. Pride in being born into a country that congeals and gathers to heal itself so whole heartedly, a country where the government takes a back step to the fates of the victims, and a country where, and I really believe this, something like this can happen without breaking our spirits.

Welcome to terror-stricken Oslo

If there is a Norwegian spirit, I think I know it better now than ever before. I’ve never been a flag-waver, even so far as actively avoiding any flagging of any sort: I believe in people more than I believe in borders. But the Norwegian spirit is resoluteness. The ability to be smacked in the mouth, take it and stand proud still. Because we know we are good, and you simply can’t prove us wrong. No matter how many of our innocent young you murder over your petty, infantile “beliefs”.

Norway is small.  Norwegian poet Nordahl Grieg once wrote this. “Vi er så få her i landet, hver fallen er bror og venn”. We are so few in this nation, every fallen is a brother and friend. In 2007, 32 murders were committed in Norway. 90 or more dead in a day is unthinkable.

I once lived in the same block as the murderer, and worked nearby for years. A friend of my girlfriend’s went to high school with him. Her brother once beat him up. Norway is too small for this to happen. We don’t have the “luxury” of bodily mass or distance to cope with such an event. Every death is physically felt. Today, as we saw interviews with trembling, crying kids who have experienced one of the worst and incomprehensible events of violence in Norwegian history, I finally broke and cried.

We won’t change though. That’s not what we do. We don’t raise our fists, if not for rebuilding.

The pitiful mass-murderer, who armed his cowardly self against unarmed children, in the safest most peaceful country on the planet, will experience the horror of anonymity, as his memory will go quietly into the fog like a bad dream. We are better than to give him his due. He will go to trial, and he will spend the rest of his life among people who hate him. His eventual grave will be forgotten and uncared for. His family will cry bitter tears over how he has smeared filth over the gifts they have given him. His chapter is done.

Our chapter begins now, and our job is to defy his will and that of those like him. We’re too good.

I want to tell those who are left behind that I’m there with you to the best of my ability. We’re all together in this, though some of us have carried an unfathomable burden. The rest of us will be there with you, those who passed will never be forgotten. You have become symbols of what we are in this nation, what we fight for, and you won’t be disgraced.

Back when I was a paperboy I started out being pained by the whole ordeal of lugging all those papers around and running up and down all those stairs. Can you imagine dragging a cart up and down hills and running up and down stairs during the Norwegian winter? Jeez. With time though, I was seeing pretty sharp benefits. My physique got awesome (holy hell do I believe in the Stairmaster now), I was making my own money, but best of all, I got extremely skilled at manipulating newspapers one-handed. From rolling them up with a figure-8 flick of the wrist, to throwing them long range horizontally like a Frisbee to softly land right on the recipient’s doormat, every new delivery was like a challenge to figure out the longest possible distance from which I could hand them the paper with the least amount of energy.

Screw the money. Feeling that I was not only mastering a task but actually feeling like I was making innovations in it were the best memories from running all those paper routes. To this day, I think the best thing you can get from anything is that sense of mastery. This is partially why video games that are poorly balanced at higher difficulties piss me off so much, because they’re denying the player the chance to master something that initially feels insurmountable; The best thing you can possibly get from video game mechanics. It’s also why I have a deep respect of anyone doing any job that put in a little extra effort. I watch garbage men and McDonalds register workers and it makes me just warm inside whenever I spot a new “technique” someone has come up with to make their job easier.

I’m a firm believer in programming as an art form. It’s engineering with a sprinkling of genuine authorship. I think a developer’s individual touch is as important as the resulting product, so seeing students be taught Java conventions drives me up the freaking walls; Isn’t the whole JOY of programming the manipulation of language to describe a complex structure? Coding, to me, is about individuals working together, and when I join a team I will bring my individual quirks with me; My naive belief is that individuality will strengthen the group and the project simply by virtue of individuality spawning creative mastery in a way that schooling won’t spark.

I have some features as a developer that I’m very proud of. The biggest pride is that when I write a UI, dimensions are always simply parameters. I feel an itch every time I type in coordinates or rectangles literally. My UI will always flow to the size of the canvas; I make no assumption at a locked resolution. 80% of the time this isn’t very important. But sometimes there is nothing more comforting than knowing that the form factor of the screen displaying the product can comfortably be an unknown variable.

Anyone else out there have developer “quirks” or habits they feel proud of? Specific facets of your “developer’s mastery” you feel makes you a definitive asset?

in·cred·i·ble [in-kred-uh-buhl] –adjective
1. so extraordinary as to seem impossible: incredible speed.
2. not credible; hard to believe; unbelievable: The plot of the book is incredible.

The game follows an FBI-agent assisting the local law enforcement to solve a bizarre murder mystery in a small rural town. The game takes on strong occult overtones, and features a bizarre collection of townsfolk, all of which behave nothing remotely close to normal.

I’d followed Giant Bomb’s “Endurance Run” of the game, which lampooned the title for a pair of full play-throughs. A curious thing happened during that long stretch of gameplay;  As the game introduced them to its menagerie of ridiculous characters and spaced out protagonist, they laughed at it, while groaning at the awkward controls, terrible localisation, bad graphics and silly audio production. However, as the endurance run stretched on, you could notice a subtle change in atmosphere. The game, with all its flaws, endeared itself to the players. By the end, it was even the centerpiece of a heated discussion on the site’s 2010 game character of the year award.

When I found a copy of the game for myself, I was ready to laugh at it like I’d laughed at Ed Wood’s nonsensical cinema. Instead, I found myself drawn to it, and the shocking revelation dawned on me that this piece of muddled auteur debris was genuinely entertaining. Even more so, it was making me look at other ostensibly more competent titles in my collection with a new-found disdain; How boring!

This is Deadly Premonition, a game so overflowing with unchecked ambition and self-indulgence, so broad in scope and in its generosity, its urge to entertain, so perfectly singular that it has become, in my mind, close to what the gaming press has been clamoring for for years; “our” Citizen Kane.

Scope, art and budgets

Games like this aren’t made anymore. They just aren’t. Historically, the scope of a role-playing game is balanced directly against the budget allotment for asset creation. Games such as The Elder Scrolls II, which offered a frankly ludicrous amount of terrain to explore (twice the size of Britain, allegedly), did so by repeating a limited collection of assets. Its scope was allowed to grow unchecked because the very design and ambition of the game treated art assets as a means to an end. Spiderweb software’s Exile series of RPGs offered players *vast* worlds presented by a collection of a few hundred tiles and characters that didn’t animate. As the complexity of game engines grew and artists were given more tools, the amount of time spent on creating art clashed directly with the conceivable scope of a title.

When Neverwinter Nights launched, it attempted to utilize repeated assets to offer players a vast world while maintaining the visual standards of its day, and Bioware was criticized for the repetitive visuals. This occurred again more recently with Dragon Age II, which is practically notorious for its repeated scenery. You have to sympathize with RPG developers like Bioware and Bethesda, who have to offer players vast, dense worlds, yet still have to compete directly with titles like Call of Duty who can commit its “art budget” to a very constricted set of assets. Creating an RPG that can appeal on the same visual level is an almost impossible task, and so procedural asset generation and other such techniques are very much in the wind as Bethesda prepares to launch its next Elder Scrolls title our way. In more recent years, Spore offered a vast universe of strange creations by leveraging procedurally created assets. For the most part, however, players have become accustomed to beautiful, custom art.

Deadly Premonition has terrible assets. It barely blends between animations; nudging the stick forward sees the protagonist slide slowly across the floor, while still walking at a full clip. Walking by a supermarket fruit counter, the textures are crude, flat photographs of  fruit; They aren’t even bump or normal mapped! The soundtrack seems to consist of a grand total of 6 poorly mixed songs.

Deadly Premonition’s developers, at some point, must have fully come to terms with their budgetary restrictions, yet they still managed to offer an open, living world filled with things to do and explore (whether these things are interesting or fun is another matter). Their goal, apparently, became to deliver scope. If it was intended or not, the way Deadly Premonition almost spitefully subjects you to assets that are *clearly* bad, actually has the effect of adjusting your expectations to the point where it all sort of snaps into place; The poor dialog, the silly music, the controls, and the assets.

Once you adjust to it, everything about Deadly Premonition seems just right in a very rare way that effectively grants it a carte blanche; It can do no wrong.

“Just call me York; that’s what everyone calls me”

You can’t discuss Deadly Premonition without paying close tribute to its protagonist; FBI special agent Francis York Morgan. Clearly an attempt at replicating Twin Peaks’ Dale Cooper’s quirky charm, the effect misfires completely as York proves himself a bit of an arrogant, self-obsessed prick, with so many obsessive-compulsive ticks and strange behaviors that you come to the early, intuitive conclusion that he is absolutely bonkers. This, again, has the effect of making you doubt his claim to be an FBI agent; That he appears to lapse into dream worlds where he kills zombies and monsters, before discussing 80s cinema in the car with his imaginary friend Zach makes everything he says feel unreliable.

The interesting thing is that this works. York becomes the friend you hang out with just because he’s unpredictable in a safe way. He clearly means well, but his conduct is like a steady stream of ticks and non-sequiturs. You giggle at his madness, but you’re genuinely interested in where he’s going with it. In this way, the player takes the part of Twin Peaks’ Harry Truman, being puzzled and amused by this foreign figure, but we can’t deny his methods somehow get results. We’re the straight man.

In fact, the game appears to break the fourth wall regularly, with York’s constant discussion with his imaginary friend Zach, some of which appears to directly adress the player. It’s as though York includes the player in the game by making you a character. When York talks about his love for the film Tremors, I couldn’t help but fall into character. Few games have inspired so many out-loud responses from me  (though perhaps that says more about me than it does about Deadly Premonition…).

“Red Ivy, the shadow thing, the generator, it all makes sense!”

Few things in Deadly Premonition are satisfying. A chess puzzle is so simple you feel almost offended when you solve it, yet York discusses it as a “battle of wits”. Firing a weapon , which you can do at any time at anyone, with absolutely no effect unless it’s a zombie, feels so weak any visceral joy from the gunplay is completely lost.  The game even manages to undermine any seriousness to the combat by having York constantly mutter to himself whenever you score a good hit. Driving around is equally ridiculous; Every vehicle feels like it spins around its center axis, and seem to have a top speed of 50mph, and a turning radius of a full block. Crashing into anything, living or dead, simply stops the vehicle dead with no other effect. As York solves the mystery, the way in which he does it is disjointed and random, with a logic only apparent to him.

The compound effect, however, is of a disconnected, dreamlike consistency. As York falls in and out of a horror-themed riff on Silent Hill’s “dark side”, either side feels equally unreal. After all, this is a game in which you are paid an FBI salary with bonuses for shaving and peeking through windows, and penalties for being “stinky”, before you go riverside and go fishing for submachine guns. Pretensions towards normalcy and realism in this game would have created a number of dissonances with its ridiculous story that the game escapes cleanly by being a bit shit all around. Instead of complaining about the poor driving physics, you learn which cars behave in which ways, and learn to manipulate the system for the best possible outcome; I dare say at this point I’m a pretty effective Deadly Premonition driver.

“Do you feel it, Zach ? My coffee warned me about it.”

Not too long ago, Remedy released Alan Wake, a Twin Peaks influenced game with stellar production values and a frankly ridiculously long production cycle. Released to much expectations, the game, for me, fell flat for a number of reasons. The biggest of which is that the game is about a horror writer, and features some absolutely horrible writing in spite of taking itself seriously. Guys, you can’t do that. Horror is in itself inherently ridiculous. Successful horror stories in whatever medium are without fail dreamlike or extreme, and get to us by manipulating and sometimes transposing our understanding of reality and its rules. Twin Peaks worked as a horror story of sorts because it took its viewers to a strange place where the rules were fleeting and nobody acted anything like a normal person. It effectively used the soap opera format to emphasize the strangeness of its characters and mundanity of its setting to emphasize the ugliness of its dark edges.

This is something Deadly Premonition *nails*. It becomes an unnerving experience because of its flippancy, which is often countered with frankly disturbing actions and stories. This is a game where a rocker guy constantly and frantically snaps his fingers while carrying on a perfectly normal conversation, and also one where characters discuss serial killers that urinate in and drink from the victim’s skull, as the background music consists of whistling and kazoos. It takes you and your sensibilities to a place where their value becomes obscured.

Funny/Scary

What’s interesting to me about laughter is that it’s primarily a nervous reaction. We laugh to communicate our insecurity to the outside world, and we want our laughter reciprocated because that lets us know everything is alright. Who hasn’t been freaked out by a noise or movement, only to laugh to ourselves when it proves to be nothing? The best comedians deliver ideas that challenge our world view, and do so without a smile. We are left to laugh because we subconsciously *desire* the balance a smile would lend the situation. We love to laugh together, because the more of us that laugh, the safer the situation. We’re just animals, after all.

Deadly Premonition makes me laugh all the time. I’ve sat by myself, simply driving around the game world, bursting into laughter for no discernible reason. It’s consistently wrong, and my brain, conditioned by modern and more polished games, finds it hard to deal with the internal consistency of modern game design and how Deadly Premonition seems completely uninterested in any of that. This dissonance is absolutely core to the experience, as the absurdity of light-heartedness reaches a kind of balance with the absurdity of the horror it presents. Zombies moan ridiculously in low pitched voices, but as the game goes on even this becomes tuned to the vibe of the game world to the point where it starts actually being unnerving.

The net result, successfully emulating the Lynchian weirdness of Twin Peaks, is that the game is simply a joy to experience, for reasons that become hard to rationalize. Alternating between being disturbing and being ridiculous, you’re put through an almost literal rollercoaster of emotions. One moment you’re desperately running from an axe murderer in a section so long it actually becomes physically exhausting, and then you’re peeking through a motel window to watch an effeminate man dancing like a stripper.

About the only thing the game genuinely lacks is a sense of emotional attachment to any of it, instead casting you as a kind of disinterested observer. You get the sense that this would be going on with or without you, as the game frequently directs you to carry out tasks for no intuitive reason. Why am I pushing this button? Why did I pick up this object? You’re guided by the game to simply perpetuate its content. You aren’t York. You’re the player. As a result of this detachment, the game is more interesting than immersive, which is starkly divergent to the current trends towards personally immersing the player and urging us to inhabit the player character. Deadly Premonition is absolutely fine with leaving you a viewer, even adopting TV-like mechanisms such as a “previously on…” segment when loading a saved game.

Perfect 10

The notion of perfection is strange to any art form. Outside of the realm of science, where something can truly be described as perfectly matching to an ideal, in art the definition progressively loses its purpose with every new observer of a piece. Deadly Premonition is notorious for receiving wildly divergent review scores, ranging from a 2/10 at IGN to Destructoid’s 10/10 “perfect” score. Personally, I feel the game is perfect, in that it takes its budget, its scope and its vision and combines it to form a sweet spot where they all are appropriate. It’s a game that offers something no other game has offered me; A genuine B-game experience that tells a story unlike any other in a form factor unlike any other. It’s so unique it’s practically punk rock, evoking Grasshopper Manufacture’s games and to a certain extent the work of Platinum Games. With Deadly Premonition, Access have become the anti-Platinum, equally perfect in its imperfection. They’ve created their own playing field, and they have no competition.

The game is perfect, singular and so unique in its time that it escapes all meaningful comparison. For quirky, surreal, open-world murder-mystery-horror games, Deadly Premonition is the absolute gold standard, and I can’t imagine it will ever be bettered.

You can pick it up for a song and a shuffle today, and I can’t recommend it enough. This is a game I feel everyone interested in the subject of video games should play. It’ll broaden your horizons and challenge your expectations.

I have a certain disdain for Apple’s policy of developer lock-in, as well as their entire [blahblahblah catch up with this with me over a beer sometime], so for me the idea of investing so heavily in iOS development was never of any interest. I’m not enchanted with the philosophies that drive objective C, being firmly in the C++ camp, so iOS “development” for me has been limited to design discussions and project planning with my friends who do enjoy working on that platform. I want to stress out that while i think Apple can [Escher-like construction of interwoven expletives], their hardware is good, and their design philosophy is excellent. I’ve been an iPhone owner since the 3GS, and I’ve played a surprising amount of really good games on the platform. It’s solid.

I haven’t played a lot of good games for Android. It doesn’t feel solid.

Which is better?

The discussion invariably becomes a “which is better” question: Should I get an iPhone? Should I get an Android device? From the perspective of one “indoctrinated” to expect Apple-level polish at the expense of features, Android’s good sides will be invisible because you don’t think to look, and its bad sides will be staring you in the face from the get go; Android as an operating system simply feels less responsive. So obviously (literally), iOS is the stronger platform, right? Given the presumption that every Android device is an iPhone competitor, then you may have a strong argument.

However, at this junction, being a Flash developer with a new found fascination for Java and a better understanding of the Android platform, I don’t find myself able to make such a direct comparison. In fact, I think it’s practically invalid; The definition of an “Android device” at this point is incredibly open. Your application, in a single deployment, can theoretically target everything from a tiny-screened uncomplicated Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini to the Samsung Galaxy Tab. You may expect to have access to a joystick, hell, with the Xperia Play, you can expect dual analog sticks. You can assume a single touch screen, or any sort of multitouch input. You MAY be working on a phone.. You may be working on the dashboard of a car.

Android is a very wide canvas, and I feel the idea that Android and iOS are implicit competitors is a misunderstanding.

I believe that an Android developer, to be successful, has to reach a very wide audience, not only in terms of software appeal, but also in terms of hardware optimization; The design must pre-empt a wide array of edge cases. It’s a complicated, arduous task, but the reward, I feel, is that same fuzzy warm feeling I get when a Flash application’s UI flows with the window size. The feeling that your bases are covered. The feeling that you’ve engineered a flexible machine.

And my real argument here is that designing for iPhone with the assumption that you can port painlessly to Android is a grave mistake.

Scale down, not up

At this point, having written an Android app that scales to a subset of devices you are happy with, what’s stopping you from porting to the iPhone with a minimum of change to your design? iPhones have a couple of configurations and little to no change in input capabilities; The biggest in recent times is the addition of the gyroscope with the iPhone 4, easily omitted for the 3G/S at the cost of fidelity, but no actual capability lost. In contrast Android devices have many dozens and more coming, and few input capabilities you can count on.

Being a Flash developer, I’m arrogantly going to assume you are one as well: You are already versed in designing applications with a variable canvas size. You are already used to optimizing to overcome crappy end-user hardware. Designing for a range of Android devices that are comparable to the iPhone will let you write in a language very similar to the one you know, typically with much better performance than you’d expect unless you are forgetting your optimizing lessons. Summary: You already know how to do this shit!

When your application is done and deployed, take it to someone else to get it ported, or use the porting as an excuse to learn iOS dev; Java is a very generic language, the API is uncomplicated enough that parallels can be found on most platforms, and if you are a game developer in particular, you’ll barely be using any of the OS-specific integration anyway. Port DOWN to iPhone, which is the more complicated platform but with a better known configuration. Don’t write your iOS application and expect your design to work within the flowing canvas of the Android platform, because they simply are not the same. But the iPhone is in actuality the lowest common denominator.

I see too many people wanting a cross platform framework for smartphone application dev to, I guess, “make the most money”, and some have found success with stuff like Corona. But this is a compromise layered on a compromise. I personally could never feel comfortable with such an attitude, because it not only undersells the platforms you are targeting, but it compromises your design in a way I feel is unnecessary. It also locks you into yet another platform, with another language. How low are you willing to go for a quick buck, guy?

Fun times!

My first Android game targets the Galaxy S in particular. It’ll be free, and will work wonderfully on all comparable devices. It’s a great learning process. 50fps multitouch accelerometer gravity party-time! It will also be ported to the iPhone when it’s done and tested. That’ll be programming and optimizing work. At this point, I’m having fun just playing.

If you’re a Flash developer in doubt, for what this is worth, I really must recommend getting a decent spec Android phone and getting into developing for it before letting Apple shackle you to their platform in a way that denies you flexibility of deployment. Working natively on a device like the Galaxy S is a total joy; This thing is so full of fun sensors and fancy junk, it’s kind of mind-blowing how little you must do before you’re integrating it all into an experience. And you can take that experience to iOS later, when it’s ready for it.

Everything I’ll say from here on pertain to the Kinect as part of the Xbox 360 experience, and as a games system in its own right. The hardware itself is pretty stellar, and having played around with OpenKinect and openFrameworks for a while now, I see nothing but good uses for it. Outside of games.

There are a number of fundamental flaws to the Kinect experience. At first glance they appear to be software related, but with further use they feel philosophical, for lack of a better word.  There is no denying the slickness of the setup wizard, the sense of eerie drama when the camera performs its self calibrating vertical scan of the room, and the odd moment when your avatar stops being a comically animated character and instead animates to your stance and becomes “some dude” on your screen. It’s certainly got a nice bit of wow to it, but already at this point my sensation that the Kinect was not for me intensified exponentially, along with the sensation that Microsoft doesn’t fully know who it’s for.

The waggle gimmick

Much has been said of how the Wii was founded on a gimmick that became endemic to the weaknesses of its software. The same was said about the Nintendo DS and its double screens. The image of a gamer shaking the Wii remote where a simple button press could suffice has become a joke that has dogged Nintendo almost from the start. The key, however, to Nintendo’s success has been in marrying the familiar and tactile to the chaotic and unknown. They took what was known and infused it with just enough of the unknown that it became enticing. They polished off enough of the edge that the “hardcore” felt precision suffered, but in the same genius move this evened the playing field. They created a system that was familiar enough that it could support titles like Super Mario Galaxy 2 (which will kick your sorry ass in a moment’s notice), yet simple enough that anyone could pick up Wii Sports Resort and learn not to worry about the controller buttons. At least in terms of the game interface, they hit both marks, and created platforms where developers could choose what functionality to use.

Wat.

The Kinect, in contrast, demands creativity of its prospective developers that is actually sort of mindblowing. It asks developers to literally throw away everything they have learned in favor of an interface with no tactile feedback, relatively high response time and a large margin for error. The feature-set made available to games amounts to a slightly shit motion capture studio in your living room, coupled with a truncated set of voice recognition features. Beyond this Microsoft offer developers practically nothing. Sony, I feel, did a very wise thing when they based their Move controllers on a known quantity. When Sony literally up-scaled Nintendo’s solution, they allowed Wii developers a chance to move up to a more powerful platform without losing the value of their experience, effectively cancelling Nintendo’s developer lock-in. This broadens the market and makes for exciting times. Through Kinect, Microsoft attempts to create a developer lock-in situation of their own, and I believe it’s going to bite them in the ass.

The biggest core design problem with Kinect is simply that the system doesn’t just have a gimmick. It’s that it has one gimmick which the entire system is built around. It offers practically nothing beyond its “you are the controller” mantra.

Disconnect

I have a nice and sizable living room. In fact, according to the Kinect itself, it’s perfect. I had to move the living room table and an arm chair literally out of the room before it became plausible to move around in the way the system wanted me to during the calibration process. Even then, my height became a problem as the system would frequently lose my shoulders and head and have a fun little freakout until I’d step back into full view. It certainly worked for the most part, but  I can not imagine the household where this kind of interactivity is suited. A glance at Microsoft’s marketing really shows how huge the philosophical divide between Nintendo and MS really is. At E3 2006, I stood in line for a little over an hour to get a look at Nintendo’s booth. We’d seen so many ads where players were jumping behind couches and flailing around that some of us were worried about just how crazy this thing was going to be.

Turns out, for the most part, Nintendo intended for you to sit on your couch in your living room and relax while playing these games, just like you always did. Of course there were games that asked you to move around more, but always with a certain abstract distance from the action you are trying to portray. The image of some dude on a recliner lazily “bowling” by gaming the gesture system was seen as indicative of a weakness in Nintendo’s design, but that the system has enough dirty leeway to offer such varying styles of play is a boon, not a flaw. It allows those of us who want to really get into it and “play along” to make asses of ourselves, while others who just want to beat their record play any which way they want.

When Nintendo introduced the MotionPlus addon to the Wii, I picked it up with a copy of Red Steel 2. I really enjoyed Red Steel 2, but the game practically demanded that I stand up and put my body behind my motions; I couldn’t get away with winging it anymore. If I wanted to beat this guy, I’d actually have to swing my arm like I meant it. This was very cool for short sessions, but for a game that is actually quite big, I must admit I simply couldn’t commit to that kind of experience; It had taken away my choice to play it lazily, and so I couldn’t relax with it.

The Kinect is, for better or worse, 1:1. Not only can you not wing it.  You also have to literally stand inside your table if the game wants you to do so, if not your move is invalid. It creates an abstract yet direct connection between the real world and in-game actions that are, in my opinion, misguided. The Wii or Move don’t offer physical feedback to motions, but they do offer rumble as an indicator of tactility. The human brain is amazing in its ability to correlate perceptions. The Kinect offers a delayed 2D image as its only response to a relative full-body 3D motion. If you thought judging jump depths in Super Mario 64 was hard, give Kinect a go.

I play games to lose myself. This abstraction of interface, the disconnect between realities, so to speak, is key to that experience. The idea of immersion is not different in games from what it is when you lose yourself in a book or an engrossing film. The interface stays out of the way so the brain can transpose itself to another context. At its best, this sensation of losing the real world is absolutely euphoric. Kinect, with its explicit connection, forfeits the ability to transpose the mind. It can only transpose the body.

Waaaat.

Some Kinect launch titles have understood this. Dance Central notably hides the player from view, allowing players to lose themselves in the idea of matching dance moves, rather than awkwardly watching themselves fail at looking anywhere near as cool as the game is trying to make them feel. Like some people have said, Dance Central is the game that proves Kinect can work. Personally I’m not convinced silhouette detection of the sort Kinect can offer is required for this style of gameplay, considering the popularity of simple games such as Just Dance.

In short, Sam Fisher is a cool character because he is a cool character. I am not Sam Fisher, and no manner of motion control will let me be Sam Fisher. The moment Sam bumbles about with my inelegant motions is the moment he ceases to be a cool character, and Microsoft’s notion that putting you in the game world is the epitome of gamer fantasy is simply flat out wrong.

Personality flaw

This is a personal gripe, and much more subjective, so I’ll apologize in advance. But how fucked up is the Disney Channel-esque aesthetic Microsoft has chosen for its casual line of products? The United Colors of Benetton families in their oversized living rooms playing generic green-orange-yellow flailing-games and enjoying the shit out of it gives me serious chills. There is nothing human about anything Microsoft is showing, from the games themselves to the people playing them in the homes they live in. Microsoft is targeting a type of human being I’m not convinced exists, at least not where I’m from.

Creepy.

Tapping out

In general, from the name to its logo, to its target demographic, to the games it supports and the future it predicts, I have no interest whatsoever in partaking in the Kinect brand from here on. The best possible future I can imagine for the system is significantly less than the sum of its parts, and while I’d love to be proven otherwise I see no reason to have high hopes either. Every moment I spent with it connected to my 360 compounded the sensation that this was, in short, some stupid bullshit.

For Christ’s sake Microsoft, if you were so worried about buttons, just launch a casual controller instead. You know, with less buttons.

This thing drove my "hardcore gaming" for years

Oh and gamers who think full-body motion control is truly the way to go; Go play outside for a change. Take a walk. Reality doesn’t SUCK, guy!

Being an arrogant prick with a history of trying to solve my own medical issues, I wouldn’t let my girlfriend call for an ambulance, even though I clearly wasn’t doing good. I’d insist it was something I could handle myself.

Diagnosis

After about an hour or two, the pains abruptly stopped. My insides ached for the following week, but the pains didn’t return. Again, being an arrogant prick, I assumed they wouldn’t return. And they didn’t, for a while. In the interrim I went to see a doctor, who seemed absolutely unfazed by my description of the pains, promptly diagnosing me with GERD before sending me home with a package of proton pump inhibitors and some ridiculous notion that my pains had to do with my low BMI. I’m a skinny man, but in no way do I actively starve myself. Regardless, hey, the guy’s a doctor, and he seemed very convinced of his own diagnosis. It’s not in my nature to mistrust the expertise of others. I simply assume people know their shit, so hey, time to go home and eat lots, right?

I had another attack a few days ago. This was much shorter, but still very intense, and I finally took my girlfriend’s advice and got an appointment with another doctor for a second opinion. This new guy had a much more open stance, and I’m in the middle of a whole new run of tests to figure out what’s going on. My insides have been aching for over a week, and it’s taking its toll. I spent what should have been a work day throwing up blood.

The freakiest thing about this whole ordeal is that another bout of googling cholecystectomy, something I’ve done somewhat annually  since my operation, makes me come to the really irritating conclusion that the pains I’m experiencing are absolutely the kind of pains I experienced when I had gall stone attacks, but since my operation they have somehow persisted and become worse? It turns out there’s a name for this; Postcholecystectomy syndrome. “Symptoms occur in about 5 to 40 percent of patients who undergo cholecystectomy”. 5% to 40% is a big fucking margin!

Fun with sphincters.

When doctors told me I needed a cholecystectomy back in the day, I was obviously worried. They were saying they were going to remove an organ from my abdomen and that it would have no real impact on my life. That sounded absolutely insane then and even worse now. The message I got was that the gall bladder stores and concentrates bile for those “really tough” digestive jobs, so if my diet was relatively light I shouldn’t experience any issues.

So check this out, and excuse my naiveté; I am, as they say, not a doctor. When I hear digestion I think acids. I think filthy, bastard hard acids. What I don’t think is that my entire digestive tract is designed to sustain a consistently acidic hades-like atmosphere of a PH as low as 2. Obviously the body needs a mechanism to even out that PH so you can, you know, avoid digesting yourself. This is where bile comes in. Bile is super alkaline. As the stomach contents prepare to enter the small intestine, it passes through a particularly tough bit of intestine called the Duodenum, where it is combined with bile to raise that PH to about 7, much more pleasant. So, y’know, you need that bile!

Bile is constantly produced by the liver, and through the digestive process is actually reabsorbed into the blood and transferred back to the liver for reuse. It’s fucking magic, ok, don’t ask me how. So there’s a constant flow of bile, which both aids in digesting fats and also has the happy side effect of making the process of digestion less hazardous.

When the body decides to, (again, through magic), a muscle called the sphincter of Oddi connecting the bile duct to the Duodenum will close, re-routing the flow of bile to the gall bladder where it is stored and concentrated. Later, when the body decides it needs some serious bile business to go down, it will empty the gall bladder into the Duodenum.

This is a core regulating mechanism of the bile duct. And they are snipping it the fuck out of people on a moment’s notice! Cholecystectomy is effectively denying the body one of the ways it can actively regulate the acidity of the contents of the Duodenum. Instead all that bile just flows through your system unregulated.

Oh, unless, you know, the sphincter of Oddi decides to close, and having no gall bladder your bile has nowhere to go but right back where it came from. Ouchies.

Hey, fuck you too doc

At the time, I had no real choice in the matter. My gall bladder, after numerous inflammations, was a mass of scar tissue. It didn’t do anything anyway. It was so broken they had medical students come in to check me out (and thank me, very awkward). So I’m not going to say I wouldn’t have had the surgery. But it makes me absolutely furious to think all the BULLSHIT I was told by every single doctor involved in the process.

Pssh, you’ll never feel a thing.

You’ll just have to abstain from those heavy Christmas dinners.

Oh you’re vegetarian? Then you shouldn’t ever notice!

The gall bladder has a fairly undefined purpose anyway.

I saw several doctors during my diagnosis and preparations for surgery, and not one of them seemed to take the procedure very seriously. How do you build a relationship of trust with the people whose bodies you are irreversibly changing by attempting to give them false comfort? I would much, MUCH rather go into life after surgery taking my body’s new deficiency seriously rather than just pretend like nothing happened, and I’m thinking now perhaps all the times I have tested my digestive system with things I shouldn’t eat – because good food was often worth the pain – may have damaged me further.

I’m asking for the decency to describe to your patient the full extent of the picture they’re about to step into, and not leave it to them to discover later what other people have done to them. It may be a paradox, but it’s much better to sign up for messing up your life if you are fully aware that’s what you’re doing.

I wish I’d been a fully informed and willing participant in the decision making that resulted in the changing of my life.

My chief complaint about Sonic 16 was simply that the pleasure derived from it was directly proportional to the speed and momentum you were able to build up, and the game adored taking that momentum away from you with enemies coming at you too fast for you to realistically react.

Sonic 16 was the R-Type of platformers, rewarding memorization and trial and error with a sense of exhilarating flow that wasn’t really available elsewhere. That said, when he wasn’t running like a madman, Sonic was, by any standard, a very boring character to play; If you weren’t playing Sonic “right”, I felt, you weren’t playing a very fun game.

Regardless of which port was superior, the 16-bit Sonic was the true starting point of the franchise, a franchise that started out obsessed with speed, flow and momentum, but gradually, literally lost its way with a menagerie of spotlight-stealing supporting characters that wound up diluting the game’s personality to the point where it was impossible to care about.

As the series has evolved, it has become one of the most wayward of franchises. Almost every single title to come out since Sonic CD has been weakly attempting to toss up the formula and find some sort of modern uniqueness to make it relevant, and they have for the most part been failures across the board.

I rather enjoyed the first Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast, but even that game was often a complete bore to play because of its insistence on contrived storytelling and unpolished supporting characters. As the modern titles experimented with Sonic’s sole unique attribute, speed, the emphasis on memorization and trial & error made the games even harder to love.

Them's a lot of generic looking mascot dudes!

Sonic the Hedgehog needs to grow up.

There is light however. There has been one branch of the series that surprised and impressed me. Sonic Rush on the Nintendo DS brought the game straight back to level-for-level traversal with a huge emphasis on constant speed, alternate paths and a trick combo system that aided both your score and your momentum.

Topping it off, courtesy of Hideki Nakanuma (also known for his stellar work on Jet Set Radio), was one of the most fiercely hyperactive rave soundtracks ever committed to a platformer; I don’t use the word “rave” lightly. This was straight up rave, 303s, pitched up samples, cut up breakbeats, outright randomness. This was a game that not only played fast, but felt inherently fast.

The soundtrack was absolutely central to the game. When playing through stages with Blaze, the only playable supporting cast member (thank god), a remix of the original tune would play with more up-beat percussion. The result tentatively approached synesthesia, urging you to go faster, flow better, do more combos, and just headnod like a jackass to the catchy infectious music.

Sega has since abandoned Sonic Rush, and proceeded to create this shit instead.

“Sonic the Hedgehog”, a next-gen “reinvention” of the series that among other things featured Sonic, a surreal blue hedgehog, romancing a generic human princess lady, all set to generic techno rock (the de-facto standard music genre for Sonic ever since its brief ridiculous stint with big-band calypso after realizing it wasn’t 8-bit anymore). Sonic Team seems utterly incapable of evolving the Sonic franchise.  When hordes of fans clamor for the pure gameplay of old (though IMHO this is also misguided), Sega again and again looks to Sonic Adventure for inspiration. It’s crazy.

As Sonic 4 is about to hit us, created by Sonic Rush studio Dimps, playing by the 16 bit template to a fault, I have to wonder if Sega haven’t completely and utterly lost their marbles. I have a vague hope that Sonic 4 will at the very least be a competent platformer, but without a real hook to its character beyond trial and error resulting from unplayable speeds, it blows my mind that they haven’t stolen more from Sonic Rush’s mechanical innovations, such as a trick-powered boost meter letting you maintain your ridiculous speed while simply powering *through* any obstacles in your path.

It started with a few too many Paulaners, reading Eurogamer’s articles on Sonic 4 and Sonic Colors, and the resulting drunken musing;

Why on earth doesn’t a game character named Sonic have any sound-related powers?

One of my favorite moments in the absolutely stellar Limbo is a set piece in which the rules of the game change in sync with a pulsing rhythm in the background music/ambience. Being largely abstract, finding the rhythm in the ambient chaos to traverse a range of insta-death hazards was an almost transcendental experience as a gamer.

Here was a game that understood that a large portion of our brains is continuously working on processing environmental audio, and leveraged it to craft a deeper connection with the player.

Most games are more than happy relegating music to the status of background noise. It’s as though we have music for the sake of having music. Sound is feedback, but we are rarely offered a chance to feed back into the sound in a meaningful way. Some games play around with this, but with the way the market seems happy to overlook the technicalities of sound, I can imagine the interactive soundtrack of SSX Blur, rewarding flow and skilled play with music that “leveled up”, could have been a tough sell to the funding party.

If any franchise has a natural connection with sound, I suggest, it would be Sonic the Hedgehog. From the banality of the name, to the fact that the character’s inherent abilities are tied inextricably to flow and rhythm. I would love to play a Sonic game in which the soundtrack shifts to telegraph challenges, increases in intensity with the gameplay, and rewards flow and skill with not only progress, but with a better experience. Anyone who has played REZ will know the sensation of advancement is as tied to evolving the music as it is to actually winning the game. A huge part of the appeal of rhythm action titles like Guitar Hero is the inherent reward mechanic; By playing better, you get to hear better music.

Fingers crossed Sega will look to Rush again for their future titles. They need some fundamental color like this angle to differentiate themselves; You can’t coast on nostalgia like this forever. Worst case scenario, Sonic 4 will remind veterans of the series of how clunky it actually is in today’s environment.

For a character called Sonic, it’s about time he actually breaks the sound barrier.

Lovecraft, an atheist, had no such shield as religion to instill in him a sense of significance. He was a fearful prejudicial man. You could argue that his ambitions as a writer was a grasp at immortality and significance, and in a way, he has succeeded; We still read his work, and will for a long time to come. This is the classic conceit of the starving artist. We grasp at creativity and produce to expand our existence enough to hopefully touch enough people to matter. As a musician and programmer, I see literally no difference between development and art.

So I’m struggling, as I do periodically, with the cosmic horror of Flash development, or indeed, with web development. On general terms, the absolute fewest of us have the luxury of working on a large project; something intended to last beyond the span of a client’s advertising budget. The last time i wrote something special -a role-playing game for kids funded by a well-paying client that still gets significant use, years beyond its intended lifespan- was years ago. I look at the work I do slip between my fingers and vanish into the uncaring void of the internet.

How do you cope with the sensation that nothing you do outlives the common housefly? I return to this subject on at least a monthly basis, and it can be absolutely devastating.

Outside of the money, what really keeps us in this industry? Anyone have any inspirational stories of transition? Goals met, the future changed?

But i can’t help but feel there is something to how i do things that must be at the very least affirming to some developers out there. Flash developers often work alone or in small groups, and few really have a big community to hang out with. It creates an atmosphere where you are never really comfortable with your own skill level, and for me at least it fostered a belief that everybody out there were doing rocket science and I was still building Lego cars and didn’t even bother to make the colors uniform.

I’ll write down some specific beliefs that have helped me a lot.

Object-oriented programming is there to make your life easier, not the machine’s.

When AS2 first dropped on us and i was firmly embedded in AS1 and prototype hacking, i could barely grasp the need for inheritance, and interfaces came much later. I was comfortable with functions-as-classes, long rambling frame scripts and include statements, and i felt like i was on top of the platform and what it could do.

Every time i tried to read about OOP i would be drowned in talk about design patterns and other things that are only really material from a philosophical point of view, but are often portrayed as fact, and digging your way through the religious forum conflicts you find out there can serve as a royal boot to the head if you’re trying to find your way in. My first bumbling steps into OOP were moving from include statements and frame scripts into a single frame script that instantiated an Application class. The actual difference was semantic at best, but it felt good  to test the waters.

The actual BOOM moment where i suddenly “got it” was when i started doing application design on paper. Previously I’d drawn visual states -Big boxy wireframes and rough line charts- and eyeballed the code from there, which was good while i was in the moment, but hell to return to a while later. When putting down thoughts i stopped writing MovieClip or Button, String and Array, and instead started naming things just what i physically imagined them to be. It’s an obvious thing in retrospect, but much like understanding Arrays and other such abstractions that no longer name objects, it was a huge mental tectonic shift. An image isn’t a MovieClipLoader in a MovieClip, it is simply an Image.  The change in work process was literally over night. I stopped starting at Application.as and working my way outwards. I started creating dozens of stub classes simply to have the names and concepts in place before i began the actual coding.

It dawned on me that OOP didn’t just let me apply programming principles i felt were beyond my need. It let me alter the fundamental constructs of the programming language. By compartmentalizing problems, i had been given the opportunity to break an application down into dozens of individual small problems that were typically easily surmountable, that in concert could be used to solve even bigger problems. A hypothetical image gallery is an ImageGallery loading xml into an ImageList containing ImageListItems consisting of an Image and an ImageInfoOverlay. I don’t have to worry about how the Image is displayed in the ImageList, the Image handles that. I don’t have to worry about what information to display about an image on mouseover, the ImageInfoOverlay does that.  Mentally, i’m not thinking about abstractions like sprites or arrays anymore; Those are simply words i use to describe a concept. The concept is what actually matters.

In summary: OOP lets you dictate the language in which you write your application. It is this key principle that lets a developer move from one OOP language to another with relative ease. I shudder to think what i would have gone through trying to learn C++ or C# with only AS1 under my belt. If i have any specific wisdom I’d like to impart on a developer new to OOP concepts, it would be this: Make it easy for yourself first, and you’ll be typing what is natural to you.

It is okay to have many classes, it’s okay to be verbose, and it’s okay to be an idiot

Actually, the more classes the better, because with every class you are bending the language semantics to your will. This comes down to the absolute basics. Say you are implementing a geometry algorithm for the first time. The document you are learning from refers to points as vertices. At this point, i would typically create a class named Vertex that simply extends Point and does nothing more than call super(). All i have done here is change the name of the Point class. Why? Because it’s one less step for my brain to walk while i’m learning this new algorithm.

I’m an artist first. I began as a designer, I consider myself a musician first, and i have the attention span of a cat. In spite of this, i find programming hugely empowering and satisfying. It wouldn’t be half as fun if i wasn’t able to recognize that my brain simply works in visual and physical concepts, not deep abstraction. It’s a common saying that programming is like explaining to a really, really dumb person how to do something, but i think it’s important to realize that you are also talking to yourself most of the time.

I’m comfortable with my own inability to work effectively with heavily abstracted patterns like MVC, because they don’t speak well to me as a person. My goal is to complete a task and ship a product i feel good about, not successfully apply a design pattern someone else put together in their own language. Which brings us to the next point.

If it floats your boat…

Design patterns can be absolutely wonderful things, but they should in my opinion be read as philosophies, not sets of rules. It is entirely possible to work within a very abstract design pattern and not be aware that you are doing so. I cherry pick concepts from patterns that i like and apply liberally with little real concern beyond getting the job done with a minimum of pain; Patterns are typically merely solutions to generic problems, and there is no reason to be afraid of them, or treating them like a set of commandments.

You’ll find a lot of technical developers with a very technical point of view that will, for instance, decry the merits of a singleton, while as a developer under stress a singleton can be an enormous timesaver. Don’t let the philosophical debate around patterns stop you from reading into them and taking with you what you need. In the end it should all help YOU be a better and more effective developer and prevent headaches, not the other way around. My first venture into patterns, a rudimentary exploration of MVC, resulted in me actually feeling dumber than before, and was a serious setback for me as someone getting comfortable with new concepts.

Fuzzy coding is fine within a known system

Don’t be afraid to create utilities for speeding up your workflow, even if it does mean doing something “dumb”. Unless it’s realtime or inner-loop code, optimization isn’t something you should even have to consider for solving menial tasks. Here’s one of my favorite utilities of recent:

Say i want to set up a TextFormat with a font name. I know the font is called “whateverfont”, but the actual embedded name of the font if i want to refer to it embedded is case intensive and may have spaces or extra characters that I’m not aware of, such as Whatever Font STD. Before, this would entail using an enumerateFonts call to grab the font objects, and then manually look through them to get the correct font name. With this utility, i simply call FontUtils.getFontBySimilarFontName(“whatever”). It allows me to be fast and loose, at the cost of a couple of extra loops when it gets called, which is ONCE when i declare the TextFormat. This is a trade-off I’m very ready to make, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to.

You should allow yourself to be fuzzy and loose when coding, because it, again, takes your mind off the menial boredom and keeps your eyes on the ball.

Have fun

Don’t let nerds and sourpusses bring you down. Programming isn’t “for smart people”. It’s just another language, albeit one where clarity is the point and not the model. Don’t let high-end tech-talk make you feel poorly about your skills. Don’t be afraid to mix and blend. Think naturally. When you are starting up, think about the product you are making and not the individual problems within it; You can solve each problem on its own. Whatever way you solved the problem, the problem remains solved.

As Apple show off their new poorly named bullshit device that hurts the world and further closes off technology from hacker culture (high five Steve, you’re a fucking champ), the question on many lips is “so hey, Apple guy man, if you’re intending to challenge Netbooks, where be the Flash support?” To which Apple has no valid response, and fanboys and haters roll into cartoonish catfight balls of fog and violence over the pros and cons of this decision.

The primary pro, as far as i can tell, is that hey yo, woop, HTML5 is coming, and you know that will do everything Flash does so HEY FLASH IS DYING YO GET OFF THAT SHIP WITH THE OTHER RATS CANT YOU SEE DEY RUNNING LOOL.

The wild borderline incoherent ramblings of the HTML5-as-ark-of-the-covenant crowd never ceases to amuse me. I’m first in line to say i’m happy the web is finally up to supporting a native video object. In fact i strongly prefer the YouTube HTML5 player.

But video is not what Flash is.

The big ish with HTML5 is simply that it does not and will not do what Flash can currently do, and applications written in HTML5 are web apps like any other. Web development is and has been for over 2 decades a collection of kludged up solutions and technologies working in awkward tandem. AJAX for instance isn’t a technology as much as a methodology, but consumers lap it up as though the web is actually evolving as a development platform. The platform itself grows at an absolutely glacial rate, but developers and serverside tech are getting better at hacking it.

You know that funky Chrome startup page? A few snapshots and transitions? It takes over two thousand lines of code to get that up and running. TWO THOUSAND. I have written networked multiplayer video games in that many lines. That shit is bananas, b.a.n.a.n.a.s.  How, exactly do you propose this “leap for HTML” will take over for Flash? You are delusional.

The choice here for Apple would be between Silverlight, Unity3d and Flash, three technologies in direct competition over a very narrow web market segment that HTML5 has no intention and little hope of filling; Games. The more popular choice for developers in this regard remains Flash, and with good reason. There is a huge community, the platform has reached a level of maturity its competition has to work their asses off to match, and the language offers easily portable code, good OOP tools and is an excellent springboard for graduating to more powerful compiled languages. The day i have to write a game in markup and JavaScript is the day i quit the business and never look back. Terrible languages being brutalized to perform duties they were never designed to do.

What developers like is what gets used. I challenge you to point out a good collection of small-team indie games developed using pure web technologies that have had any real impact. What Apple has done here is simple. They have barricaded themselves off from a market that challenges their business model. Don’t stoop to assume otherwise.

If you haven’t played Animal Crossing on the DS or Wii, i strongly suggest that you find an opportunity to do so. On its own the game is addictive, but its weird implementation of massively multiplayer online play is really worth a long look. Nintendo are infamous for their friend code system, which puts users who want to play together through a good few burning rings before they can actually do so. Because of this system, you will never openly communicate with an identifiable unknown. The system allows for play with random strangers, but communication seems to be reinvented every time. If you are connected friends, you might get a full suite of options, but for random strangers you’re typically given what amounts to a few emotes and canned phrases. For a game with MMO pretentions, this is obviously hugely challenging.

Animal Crossing lets users that aren’t connected friends “interact” through side-effects of their actions. I had a real moment of wow when i spent a few irrational minutes making a pixel perfect nazi swastika pattern and put it up in my clothes shop for my (already utterly irreverent) animals to wear. Soon, the swastika pattern had migrated from my town to my few friends’ towns. And then the ball just rolled from there. Friends of friends of friends of friends would see nazi animals show up in their towns.

Media in Animal Crossing spreads like a disease. It’s a viral mmo.

An animal will show up in your town and ask for a new catchphrase. The next day, it might have moved out to another town. Which town? You’re not the one who decides. This lets you communicate ideas, but only to random recipients. This system is epitomized in the bottled mail system, which lets you write a message, put it in a bottle and toss it into the sea. Whoever gets the message is apparently completely random, throughout the online service. I have gotten bottled messages ranging from ascii cats to sorrowful suicide notes.

This is what makes Animal Crossing so enticing for adults i think. A combination of pure OCD collectomania and a world that seems wildly chaotic. In my mind, after a few weeks play, an Animal Crossing town is like an out of control train in a tight turn teetering on one rail.

What we begun putting together today is a purification of the bottled mail system. An anonymous client that lets you post messages into a pile, and retrieve random ones you haven’t written yourself. When you retrieve one, it is removed from the database. This ensures that a message is anonymous and personal. Of course, the system is widely open to abuse, but i actually don’t mind that aspect. Sitting on the beach sifting through debris for gold, you’re likely to find a whole lot of junk.

I’m hoping the system will find a place as a way to let off steam, and let off guilt. Somewhere to confess, or to be heard by someone who will know that somewhere, out there, a single individual posted this thought for a single individual to read. The internet is so often about the individual entity spreading information as widely as possible; the cluster bomb collateral damage model of information.

This narrows the focus back on the individual recipient, and theoretically eliminates the egotist exhibitionist publisher.

It’s the Anti-Twitter, anti-Facebook. It’s not about the masses, but the individual, sporadic connection of strangers’ eyes meeting sporadically through the window of a passing bus. The prototype is in development here, and I hope you’ll find it interesting as it evolves. At the time of writing it has almost no effort whatsoever put into the UI. Making it pretty comes next.

1. Being happy about video games
2. Being angry about video games
3. Video games
4. Being angry

and also realizing that this is essentially true, i think it’s time to diversify.

I’ve been thinking a lot the past year about what makes a relationship work. I’ve seen friends and their relationships, i’ve reflected on my own, and i’ve considered the literal term “love” and what that means for people.

The more i think about it, the less i can describe love as a constant state of being. I’ve seen relationships you could only call turbulent work out beautifully, and i’ve seen peaceful relationships fall apart at the seams seemingly at random. I’ve also seen the opposite. Some seem to drift along indefinitely on a soft cloud of balance and ease, while others meet in meteoric drops with catastrophic consequences that last for years.

It all has something in common though; There are always moments when you don’t feel the same love you wish for, or feel unable to give what you feel is expected of you. Both sides hurt.

Not loving, as in not feeling that deep irrational draw towards your significant other, doesn’t mean you don’t want to love them. Sometimes your body just lacks the chemicals to produce that emotion. Perhaps you’re exhausted and lack the capacity. Perhaps he or she does, or some other outside influence is blotting out the parts of them that you fell in love with.

No matter the social stigma of saying so, deep down everyone wants to be beautiful and amazing. Egotistically speaking, when you find someone amorously responding to you, you want to maintain that state of attraction because it makes you feel wonderful. Later, if you grow to deeply care for them, you want to maintain that state of attraction because you don’t want to disappoint them, or feel like you somehow duped them into affection for you in the first place.

But you can’t always do this. You can’t always be the postcard picture of yourself you want to be, and neither can they. There will always be moments where you’re unlovely, and there will always be moments when the one you are engaged to will feel less attracted to you.

Love is no different an emotion from any other, and it is not a constant. It comes and goes. What remains is the friendship, and the conviction that it’s worth something more.

Reading Moby Dick for the first time makes me think about affection. Ishmael shares a relationship with Queequeg that can only be described as loving, yet it never fully steps into homosexuality. In fact, i can imagine this element of the story would be uncomfortable for some readers, though there is no notion of sexuality. They sleep together and treat one another with genuine physical affection, but not in the way of lovers but rather that of truly close, childlike friends. Ishmael freely admits to being attracted to Queequeg, but his attraction is with balance and peace of mind. He seems attracted to Queequeg’s freedom from the shackles of the white christian man, and what that represents.

I’m convinced this freedom from physical attraction is what keeps a relationship together. Eventually, that magical buzz of intense physical, sexual attraction fades to a low hum, and the foundation of the relationship is laid bare and vulnerable. At this point, a relationship ceases to be primarily about sexual drive and becomes a state of deep and honest friendship. Dull day-to-day things like diet and sleep habits bubble to the surface, and the moments you feel unabridged, frank and dizzying love for the other becomes relegated to moments in time. You make time for these things, you plan them, you procure supplies, you mentally prepare. You do laundry, clean your apartment meticulously. Get a good night of sleep, a long shower, a clean shave. You make time for a moment in which you can be perfect again, so your partner will feel that shine he or she felt when it began.

Every time i feel less than perfect, when i feel my edge is dulled and i can’t be everything to my girlfriend that she wishes me to be, it crushes my heart, and i’m reminded that i can’t take love for granted. I can’t blame her for not feeling strongly drawn to me when i’m a morose unshaven insomniac wreck with little time for pleasantries. Those moments of love have to be inspired, maintained and lifted. In a dualistic turn, love is the incentive for staying in the relationship, but the friendship is the actual long term payoff.

However, you can’t have one without the other.

I don’t have a solution or master plan, but i know it all comes down to trying, and fighting to keep it. Eyes on the ball, so to say. It comes down to deciding what’s important, and that those moments of unbelievable warmth and incoherent streams of emotions flooding your mind to fast you can’t formulate sentences to describe them are the reason you want to keep going, and those moments of eventual coldness are bee stings that will eventually fade.

You won’t always feel loving or loved, but the times you do are worth fighting for.

… truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.
— Moby-Dick, Ch. 11

Kotaku pointed me to this excellent interview with LSL series creator Al Lowe, which again directed me to this great summary of the series. Thank you, hypertext markup language, for delivering on your promise.

It’s funny how a franchise as sad and awkward as Leisure Suit Larry can be remembered for being funny. The first LSL was a complete horror show to me, filled with people who detest you in a filthy city where imminent death or dishonor is around every corner. There was a strong tone of sadness to the whole experience. Later games in the series became progressively weirder and grew in scope, and the character himself seems to be more of an idea of a lonely guy out of touch with reality than some charicature.

Another point of contention is how the series is often referred to as pornographic, when it’s positively tame and thoroughly benign compared to insane things like Dead or alive Xtreme 2, a game i actually bought out of curiosity, and occationally play just to be weirded out by the trippy david lynchian creepiness of it.

Check out the articles, particularly the interview. I thought it was genuinely interesting and a little alarming to be reminded just how mature the games really were compared to the oversexed T&A mania we’re seeing in nearly every game with a female character these days.

Speaking of female protagonists, here’s a list of some i thought were pretty rad.

Cate archer – No one lives forever
I’m a tremendous fan of this series. I thought they absolutely nailed the female protagonist, with just the right ratio of sexy and elegant. Cate chopped up trenchcoat wearing special agents with her katana stolen from ninjas before picking a lock with her hair pin, investigating the scene of a crime. Later she’ll be fighting more ninjas in a house caught in a tornado. Then she reports in on her makeup kit communicator. Cate was a no-nonsense trained killer who never lost any of her femininity.

Awesome.

Jade – Beyond Good & Evil
She’s downright impossible not to like. She’s got an original design that doesn’t emphasise her ass and tries to create a character that’s simply naturally attractive, and then sets out to make her awesome through her actions. I hope i wasn’t the only one that thought the idea of sneaking into a compound commando style to get photographic evidence of crimes is a more exciting way to solve a problem than with guns..?

Samus Aran – Metroid series
This is such a nobrainer. Samus is one of the few game protagonists out there where gender is genuinely irrelevant to the character. Samus is a human being in a context where that is exactly all that matters. Her imposing armor serves to remind us of that, and the more recent games frequent audiovisual cues remind us of her femininity. With Samus Nintendo made a female character everyone thinks is a total badass without alienating anyone else based on gender. That’s impressive. Then again, since Smash Bros on the Wii, they’ve done their best to sully this achievement by wrapping their lead lady up in skin tight spandex catsuits. Oh well.

Julie – Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.²
Don’t roll your eyes just yet. Heavy Metal is a magazine notorious for its t&a content taken at face value, but it’s one of the most sexually empowering publications as well. I absolutely love the idea of the fantasy “heavy metal babe” saving a world populated by strong women and weak men against everything inhuman about the corporate entity, all in latex and leather, wielding chainsaws and uzis. It’s totally off the hook, but to me the game was a complete fantasy world, and that’s something we shouldn’t forget; playing with the rules is what makes a fantasy fun.Sidenote; Ritual entertainment (RIP) were notorious for this kind of over the top dumbass muscly men and big titted strong women shooting enormous guns at eachother. It was deliriously politically incorrect, and i loved them for it. Here’s a toast to Ritual!

It’s complete bullshit to say female protagonists should be exempt from sexuality. No male protagonist with a semblance of realism to them is created without sexuality in mind, be it overt or not; it’s simply human nature to look at a person of the opposite gender and consider the probability and value of mating.

In my opinion, we need to reinstate a policy of dignified sexy. We live in a society where sexy women tends to be equated with childlike weakness and sexual subservience to man, particularly in terms of fashion. Sexy has become the domain of girls. There was a time when sexy meant dangerous, and was a property of women.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/18/no.tag.ap/index.html

Man, i grew up in a neighborhood with 2 gangs of highschool kids fighting among themselves, and screw you if you were a 10 year old who wasn’t in family with any of the gang kids. Me and my buddies formed a little gang of our own. Since playing in the parks and such was basically asking for trouble, we had such a tough time finding “safe” places to play, and it’s weird to look back at it now and think of how ridiculously unsafe it was.

We built a fort in the woodworks of this bridge:
Among those boarded sections underneath. We’d stock up on candy and coke, sit in our bundle of boards, look at what floated past in the river below, and count through whatever fireworks we’d collected last newyears. We printed out the anarchist cookbook at my dad’s office (he was a teacher back then), we’d go to the gas depot to get dry ice for bombs and other such nonsense. When winter came and we didnt dare go under the bridge (we had to do a lot of awkward climbing to get under there), we looked for alternatives nearby.

We found a passage between two buildings that gave us access to the supports under the riverside buildings. I dare say we owned the river for years. We’d go shoplifting, go under the buildings to count our loot.

We found a way to the roof of the old WW2 submarine bunkers at the harbor . I remember buying water melons and other squishy stuff only to bring it up to the roof of Dora and throw it off the building. Splat.

The best fun we had when i was a 2nd and 3rd grader was going to Kristianstèn fortress
At the time they were doing army exercises in the area, and part of the fun was finding a way up the fortess walls and get into the main grounds without being seen. One of the best childhood memories i have was sitting on the walls of that fortress with my then-best-buddy Tor-Egil at a summer night (bright night), and hearing Deathprod playing from scaffolds at the TMV festival. TMV, or Trondheim Mechanical Workshop, was just a bunch of dry docks and artist studios, and they’d throw these ridiculous rock festivals. Deathprod’s “Treetop drive”, rolling like fucking thunder across town, and me running like a madman from the fortress to TMV to get closer.

Super old picture heh, can’t believe that tripod crane was that old. We climbed to the top of it to see the Deathprod show. It was scary and awesome.

At wintertime, all the snow in the school yard would be plowed into these enormous heaps, and of course the kids would play king of the hill on it. It was sheer madness, you had 6th graders tossing 2nd graders on their heads, and not a teacher in sight. The sense of being able to gang up on one of the bigger kids and bringing the fucker down was about as good as it could get.

God what’s so wrong with kids feeling LIFE? I asked my mother about how she felt about the things i did when i was lil and she basically said “after a while, i realized it was meaningless to try and stop you, so i tried to ignore it”. I’m so happy she did.. I had friends then whose mothers basically held them by their necks, and it always sucked when they couldnt come out to play, and we’d be telling them about what we did later and they’d be so sad about it. I think true motherly love is in guiding your child, not in controlling it. When i overstepped, you better believe i heard about it. When i stole money from my mother when we were in a terrible rut, and she slapped me, you better believe i never stole from my mom again, and you better believe i learned that money has more value than candy and GI Joes (i collected cobras). Parents should know when discipline and “reality” matters and when it doesn’t. I’m not saying i turned out wonderfully, but i have nothing but positive memories of my childhood, and if i’m scarred i’m scarred by what i’ve done to myself, NOT by what i’ve experienced, and believe me i’ve fallen and cracked my head open a good few times. My right eyebrow makes no sense at all anymore.

Kids need danger, and pain, and loss. They need all these things because it makes them stronger, and it makes them more compassionate. Kids won’t understand what inflicting pain is until they’ve been inflicted pain upon, and i think a parent’s role, AND the educational system’s as well, is to comfort, explain and guide. Not judge, control and shove. I feel terrible thinking about kids today, because their parents are under such immense pressure to mold their children, and i think it’s creating a lost generation of conforming fools who don’t know the first thing about truly having fun on nature’s premises, not through toys, not through technology, not even through other people, but through exploring the world, learning and experiencing the pain of fucking up and realizing you’re the only one to blame.

Children must learn to be diligent, or they’ll come out as spoiled assholes without the ability to fight for what they believe in on other terms than the purely advantageous. They need to do like i did, ride an unfinished custom bike down the steepest road in their home town without knowing it doesn’t have any brakes. Be so scared they’re moments from pissing and shitting their pants and throwing up all at the same time, and then come out of it with a hard learned lesson. They need bruises and cuts, they need to staple themselves to the table by accident. They need to see their own blood and know what it means.
They have the right to know they’re REAL and WHAT’s real, and i think it’s the parent’s role to give their kids that right.

I understand that my case was extreme and that i had little choice in the matter.

What i WILL call foul however, was *every fucking doctor i consulted* assuring me that i would feel literally no difference in terms of eating habits unless i “ate a particularly massive christmas dinner”. If you’re about to undergo this kind of surgery, and some doctor feeds you this bullshit, keep in mind that the resulting sideeffects of the surgery is so different from person to person that there’s literally no reliable statistic.

So let me share my eating experiences. These are unpleasant details.

Water, or really any liquid on an empty belly = cramps, pain, possible diarrhea.
Green apples = cramps, pain. Dies out after about 5 minutes.
Ice cream = *guaranteed* cramps and diarrhea within 15 minutes. Depends somewhat on the brand of ice cream; i’ve had little ish with Haagen Dazs, but other brands will destroy me.
Tough meats = cramps and pain

Alcohol. Beer is a major no-no. Liquor is okay, i’ve had some issues when a lot of it goes down. Nothing like the absolute, mindblowing agony of the cramps it used to give me when i still had my wrecked gall bladder.

Worst of all, some days just fall apart by the seams. I’ve had days when i wake up with cramps, get more cramps when i eat, and go to bed hungry at night because i simply can’t eat anything. Sometimes this goes on for days.

Don’t get me wrong; now is *nothing* compared to the mind shattering debilitating pain of what i used to go through, but don’t let any whitecoat tell you you can keep on living like you used to. Today, eating is like a puzzle, and my options can become very very boring at times. Sometimes i wish i could get it all in pill form so i didnt have to think about it. Nothing sucks more than being invited to a dinner and having to turn down the meal because you simply can’t take it.

Think frozen concrete, black overcast skies, freezing cold, heated sidewalks melting the snow into a filthy sludge made worse by the sludge sprayed in by passing traffic (because our government insists oslo is a traffic-centric city, thus puts more emphasis on clear roads than clear sidewalks). Think getting up in the morning faced with putting on 4 layers of clothing, and preparing to trudge through the morning rat race, dodging airconditioned public transportation as best you can (doing your best to avoid the few places in wintertime where viruses flourish). Think about junkies and addicts and beggars looking a hundred times sadder than any other time of the year, and think of their desperation pushing the crime rate.

It is bleak, bleak, bleak.

Then again, think spending cold nights with your loved ones, watching a movie you all love, having a cup of warm chocolate. Think of the lazy weekends spent feeling completely fine about staying indoors, tending to your nerdy hobbies. Think about wrapping yourself in a soft blanket friday night. Think about not having to give, pardon me french, a flying piece of crap about fashion, and being allowed to wear the most retarded junk in your wardrobe in the name of keeping warm.

It’s like a surreal refuge from everything popular media teaches us about society. As a man, you learn to appreciate female parts other than the curvy ones, as eyes, lips, smiles and nervous laughs take on a whole new dimension of intrigue, and then when it’s summer again, walking down the street on a warm day in a tee and shorts, eating gelato with your friends, it’s like childhood christmas all over again

Norway is a love it or hate it country. It’s a safe, quiet and dare i say quaint country that believes it’s more than it really is, but it’s also filled with people facing the same predicament every year: how to cope with the flux. In a sense, it unites us far more than any flag could. I love this country, for all its agonizing winters, and i think it makes me a better man, or at least a more humble one.