quickie

The message isn't immediate, but it's urgent.

- Dreamed three nights ago that everyone from Choice died in a plane crash. Woke up feeling depressed. Don't remember the first dream from two nights ago but I remember waking up in the middle of the night and thinking it was about as bad as the night before. And then I fell asleep into another dream where my old piano teacher was chastising me for not being able to play two chords in succession even though I haven't seriously played in a decade. When I woke up, I realized that the sound she was expecting me to play wasn't a fifth interval below like she claimed.

(I only know that because I took a sight-singing class, not from piano.)

- Been randomly reminded lately I don't like standing out or being the center of attention- although this applies to more than social settings. I'm most comfortable when no one notices me [so I can freely stalk I mean observe people]. Every time I surprise one of my housemates by mysteriously disappearing and then reappearing later (because they don't notice me leaving), it almost feels like a badge of triumph. Although I should probably stop doing that and not give my old roommate more reasons to call me ninja Ryan. Okay, I'm reveling in this a bit too much.

This kind of ties into my aversion at being seen doing everyday things or randomly running into people who recognize me, which is why I tend to act rather shady whenever I notice someone before they notice me. Honestly, half of the time when I see someone I know [that I wasn't expecting to see], my default instinct is to hide from their sight rather than greet them. No offense intended cause I do it to everyone at some point.

- Going by this blog it would probably seem like there is always something on my mind. Which is probably mostly true, except for those times where all I want to do is be distracted by something because I'm too tired to even passively ponder. Ironically, that's partly why I grew up enjoying turn-based RPG's. If you're not familiar with the genre it looks mostly boring to watch... compared to first person shooters or action games or say Starcraft. One of my friends tends to call most of the games I play generic which is more of a pronouncement on the genre itself because the games in question weren't really that generic to begin with - except for the Tales games, but those are well-made generic games that happen to still be pretty fun anyway.

But back on topic, I tried explaining to Harrison a few years ago [while playing what I think was Digital Devil Saga] that I tend to play these games when I don't feel like thinking and I don't think he really understood it well. Maybe it's for the journey and the illusionary sense of accomplishment and the number-crunching and the lack of stress...

- Loneliness is state of mind or reaction to being alone. I would feel less lonely in general if I didn't know what other people I knew were doing at this moment, and I suppose habitual Facebook usage is partly to blame for a lot of those times where I do start feeling down for no real significant reason. But when that's not occupying my attention, then I could hardly care less about being alone. I'm pretty accustomed to doing things on my own anyway, even though it's nice to do them with other people when the opportunity arises. "Introvert time" at coffee shops is becoming one of my favorite pastimes now. It helps that I actually drink lattes now.

- Living alone again for the first time in a year and a half. It feels surreal.

Twin Peaks

Through the darkness of future's past, 
the magician longs to see. 
One chants out between two worlds... 
"Fire walk with me."

So I started watching Twin Peaks- the 90's murder mystery show created by Mark Frost and David Lynch- over the weekend, and now I am equal parts obsessed and terrified. Most of the time the show is just strange, quirky, and at times eerie (per David Lynch fashion - see Mulholland Drive), but for the few moments where the show breaks past the surrealism barrier and into the realm of unconscious nightmares, I almost couldn't bear to watch even though I just had to keep going. And then I'd close my eyes to go to bed after finishing an episode and I'd see that face. D: D: D:

If just for those moments, it's probably the most terrifying show I've ever seen, and I haven't even reached the big reveal episode yet oh my god I just did and it was even more traumatic than I expected ****.

It's unfortunate that the show was forced to end on a cliffhanger, though... and after 23 years, with no sign of a continuation in sight. And Lynch doesn't seem to have any interest in finishing the story after his follow-up movie to the series got panned by the public. It's disappointing... but such is life, I guess.

everything late

B: I wish everyone in the world were just like me. Life would be so much easier.
Me: I dunno about that. If I were to meet myself I'd hate me.
B: That says more about how you see yourself, doesn't it?

- Sometimes I'm too afraid to speak up out of fear of being criticized (I take criticism pretty heavily) or judged... but I've been feeling more lately the need to be bolder about what I think or feel. Some problems just continue to persist the longer you don't speak up about it until they start to drive you nuts.

Also, sometimes I wish people were more direct or honest with me, but I'm also afraid of what they might say for the same reasons. But maybe I ought to speak up for myself for once. I really appreciate it when others do for themselves.

- That said, there are some things I still would feel more conflicted about mentioning. Things like being forgotten when people organize stuff, which has happened for me in multiple circumstances. If it happens often enough it almost feels like you're purposefully being left out of events, or else you're just not that memorable- need I mention the fact that Nathan didn't remember me being at more than half of the events that both of us were at over the course of college, and we lived together.

I had the advantage then of being more involved when plans were being made or organized because I lived in such close proximity to everyone. Right now I feel like I'm more in the periphery of communities or social circles rather than in the middle of any one. I still experience self-doubt about whether or not it'd be worth trying harder, whether or not I'd really fit in anyway when I'm so prone to being quiet by default in the presence of all these folks to begin with. I don't even realize it sometimes.

The thing is, if you bring something like this up... well in past experiences, it started to annoy people to the point where it made the person more likely to not be invited. Or maybe it just depends on the attitude used when doing so. But the whole "I don't want to be a burden" and "maybe I'm not that likable" mentality just gets tiresome after a while, when all you just want to do is make all these unhealthy voices stop. Is it better to work to prevent the situations that cause these voices to occur from happening, or find ways to reduce their effects when they do [seemingly inevitably] happen?

- Last night I dreamt that my family's neighbors in socal put us under house arrest for not being neighborly enough to the general community... plus two other dreams I don't remember anymore. I don't usually have psychological dreams, but this dream actually follows from how I felt about approaching community growing up. I don't know if it's just the way social gatherings have been since I left home, but I've always sort of lamented how private my family's home life was growing up, not bothering to share more than small talk with our neighbors whenever we actually did see them, and me always being warned to never tell other people this and that because I have a bit of a blabbermouth problem sometimes. [and I still do, so maybe it's better for people not to tell me anything. but if you warn me to secrecy beforehand I'll get the point.]

But I mean, even from the church perspective, small groups were sort of a foreign concept to me until I came to college. It meant that people actually recognized you for once as more than just a face at church... after a while, anyway. But in any circumstance, it makes more of a difference once you step outside of your bubble and actually try to know the people around you beyond the superficial level. It means the risk of being more vulnerable to more people at once as well, but I believe the additional perspective on life you get is worth it. "One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with..."

But seriously, it makes all the difference.

Ironically, the sermon today was about community and I couldn't focus because I felt like I've mulled over this subject way too much in my life for it to just come up again. That and my mind's been preoccupied with other stuff anyway... but that's for another day.

a little of

Less serious post:

A: My P is coming out right now.

K: Oh, yeah, I should tan right now. *pulls up jacket sleeves*

I'm thankful for these random moments.

- I started writing reviews for books on goodreads after Eric suggested I start, and I got kinda carried away after the first one. Probably will start writing short blurbs on there more and save posts on here for more in-depth impressions when I feel it for certain books.

- Our Comcast internet started hating on all things Google the past few days, and in the process of trying to google I mean bing the solution I got bombarded by messages about how much better Bing is than Google... and got results to help sites hosted on Google servers, which didn't help much... and of course it all magically started working again a few hours later each time. I just hope this lasts long enough for me to finish writing this, cause of course blogspot and 70% of my other internet activity is hosted by Google. >_>

[It wasn't a service provider DNS issue cause the problem persisted even if you used direct ip addresses to the sites or used alternative public DNS servers... and my hosts file didn't have any references to google either. Sigh.]

- Played Ultimate Werewolf for the first time the other night. It's like Mafia but with more official roles cause there's a rulebook and role cards and artifacts that totally change up the gameplay. For the Hilgard folks, all of the roles we had when we played are there: Mafia = Werewolf [kills one player each night], regular folks = Villagers, Doctor = Bodyguard [prevents one person from dying each night], Detective = Seer [checks if one player is a werewolf each night], Town Fool = The Tanner [wins if he/she gets lynched], and Cupid is there in his full glory [chooses two people to be the Lovers and if one dies the other dies automatically] and I had a hell of a time being him twice in a row.

There was also the Sorcerer, who happens to be on the Werewolves' side (although they don't know who each other are) and gets a turn each night to ask the Mod if a person is a Seer; the Hunter, who immediately shoots someone dead the moment he's killed (and in one game unwittingly killed both of the Lovers I chose as Cupid hehehe); the Lycan, who is actually just a normal villager but appears to be a werewolf to the Seer; the Witch, who chooses once per game to kill/heal a player; and the first person to die in the game gets the ability to send a message from beyond the grave the next round in the form of a single letter to help identify who the killer is, so long as that letter isn't someone's initial (examples we used: "G" which meant glasses, "F" which meant fan, "M" which meant muscles, etc.).

Each player also got an artifact with a special ability that they could use once during the game. Some examples: copy a person's ability if they're special... which prompted the moderator to say "sorcerers wake up" rather than "sorcerer wake up" on accident once, so everyone knew who the sorcerer[s] were; force one person to answer a yes/no question truthfully; demote one player to a villager if they aren't one for the rest of the game; force the last lynched person to send a 1 letter message from the grave; steal another person's artifact; void, which means this artifact does nothing; and so on.

And there were a bunch of roles we didn't even touch because we'd need way more than ~10 people (Vampire: Kill a villager each night, who dies in the middle of the day; Drunk: is a villager until the third night when they find out their real role; Hoodlum: chooses two players on the first night and wins if they are dead and he/she is still alive; and the Chupacabra and a bunch of other stuff). Dan was complaining that there were too many special roles going on at night, which made the nights extremely longer than usual cause every single special role had to wake up on their own turn every night. To be honest, though, I thought it made for a really funny game even during the nights... which got compounded by the moderator having to ask people to wake up cause he/she forgot who they were haha. Fail mod.

- I've effectively been on a video game hiatus since I moved [not counting Dota cause that's not a game I binge on for days in a row and I only play when asked to], but I still follow news on video games semi-frequently along with all those kickstarter updates. I can't recall the last time I've been so hyped for upcoming games. Just this week:

-- Chris Avellone (writer for Planescape: Torment, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Mask of the Betrayer, and Fallout: New Vegas among others) and Patrick Rothfuss (author of The Kingkiller Chronicle, of whom I'm not solid on but this could still be good) added as stretch goals to the Torment kickstarter, which hit 3 mil today.

This combined with Ziets (creative lead on Mask of the Betrayer), Mitsoda (lead writer on Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines), Morgan (composer for Fallout and Planescape: Torment), and what we've seen from McComb, Saunders and Cook so far... this is the game I'm most looking forward to... that isn't a sequel anyway, otherwise it'd be Dreamfall Chapters.

-- They also released a sample track from Torment that I've been listening to on repeat: The Bloom.

-- Double Fine Adventure officially announced with the title Broken Age.

-- The makers of Bastion announced a new sci-fi themed game called Transistor.

-- Ducktales (NES) announced coming out this summer remastered with the voice actors from the original cartoon. NOSTALGIA.

-- and this was from a couple of weeks ago, but season 2 of The Walking Dead, the adventure game, was announced as targeted for this fall.

- Since Sammy forced me to buy the latest Starcraft 2 expansion a few days ago, I'll probably be breaking the hiatus now... except I feel like playing Fallout 2 and Alpha Centauri and Front Mission 2 while watching videos of Anachronox instead and I should probably stop now.

book update and current thoughts

Currently reading:

1Q84: This is the third Murakami book I've read (after Wind-Up Bird and Kafka, both of which I loved), but I feel like the Murakami spell is starting to wear off on me now. It's still got the usual stuff you'd expect from him- cats, woman's ears, lonely people, kinky sex, and stories about the war in Manchuria- but somewhere down the line it starts to fizzle out. The first half of the book felt fairly engaging, and there were a few chapters that really struck out to me, but by the last third of the book I was just wondering when it would end. I mean, Murakami's writing does tend to go on and on and on and- well, it's written in such a way that I don't mind it as much; you're just going along for the ride and seeing where it takes you. But even this was a bit much for me. Technically, I guess it makes sense considering that it is longer than the former two books... but really, I think it could've been a lot stronger as a novel had it been shorter and more concise this time. There really wasn't enough going on to justify how long this book is.

(To be honest, I'm not surprised that he didn't win the Nobel Prize last year... but that's another story.)

Dune Messiah: Finally starting this. James mentioned something about how Children of Dune- the third book in the Dune series- is the real Dune so to speak (as in, represents the true message of the series or something along those lines I'm guessing), and I'm starting to get a sense of that here. The foreword got across the point of how this book sets the situation up for the rest of the series by expanding on elements that would only make sense in the aftermath of the original Dune: because what's important isn't the ending, but what happened in the long term because of it. Essentially, there's a vision underlying the series that isn't entirely made clear in the first book (and it stands on its own pretty well anyway as a science fiction epic), but the overarching theme comes more to light with this one and the books after. I'm a bit curious to see what that is and how well it gets conveyed through the later installments, particularly since I get the sense that opinions on this seem to be rather polarized online for some reason.

Pale Fire: A 999 line poem with a foreword and commentary essentially attempting to one up the poet, that reads somewhat like a literary jigsaw-puzzle-choose-your-own-adventure with traps, or at least so far. I started the practice of writing in the margins of books that I expect to keep around (which began midway through 1Q84), and this book is definitely a keeper; it's so fun to write in! The "author" (as opposed to the author of the author) is rather full of himself and tends to make obscure references to things that have nothing to do with the poem itself, which ends up turning into its own story. It's amusing.
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Other thoughts:

- It's funny how much a simple smile + hello from a random person will do to brighten your day.

- I feel pressure sometimes when writing here to have to discuss something profound or witty or whatever, as if the total sum of my life experiences has granted me the wisdom to have a voice about such things. If anything, I'm more confounded by how much I don't know in the process of trying to write, and it can be paralyzing in a way. Like at the outset of this post, I felt like I had so much energy coming in from this week that I could just talk about life, the universe, and everything, but as with every post it's turned into a struggle to say something cohesive enough to merit posting. That and there are subjects I'd like to broach but question the appropriateness of in a public/semi-private setting as the one here... you can't take back what you've said once you've said it, especially online (where Google Reader happens to store copies of posts you've published even after deleting them).

- This may have been said here before, but lately it's been coming to a point where I really appreciate a lot more those folks with whom you don't need to be in constant contact with in order to enjoy hanging out with them when you do. High school and college really spoils you on that apparent need to talk to and see the same people all the time in order to "be in the loop" so to speak, and at some level that can easily lead to burnout if you overdo it, when in reality it's more normal to not see people for days, weeks, months or years even sometimes. But really, how much trust and effort does it take to be confident in your relationships with other people when they aren't immediately accessible? Too often now I find myself switching hats between enthusiasm and discouragement all over appearances and how people first seem to respond, without really trying to look at the situation for what it is.

- I'm finding that sometimes it suffices to simply enjoy the presence of other people being themselves when they do happen to be present. This applies even when you aren't that close to them; closeness is a privilege you end up receiving or partaking in as a result of life circumstances and other factors, not a right that you're entitled to just because you've been around or known each other that long. As such, it isn't something worth fretting over or idolizing. Be thankful for those chances you do get to talk about something meaningful and make the most out of them while they last.

- This past weekend + week might've been the best experience that I've had in a long while, and the antithesis of a lot of the personal issues I've been struggling with for the past few months. If you were a part of it in any way, even if it didn't seem like much: thanks. :)

Kickstarter Game Projects Addendum

(previous post)

Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey [ongoing, 3 days left]

(3D adventure; the long awaited sequel to Dreamfall: The Longest Journey)

Torment: Tides of Numenera [ongoing, just launched today]

(wrpg; successor to Planescape: Torment, in a new setting)

Potentially in the future:

The Longest Journey Home?

(2D adventure; conclusion to April Ryan's story in both the original TLJ and Dreamfall)

I don't think Dreamfall will hit the 2 mil stretch goal to greenlight this, but now that we know that they have this in mind post-Dreamfall, chances are it'll come up again on its own...

All of my favorite games are getting sequels. AHHHHHH.

The Master and Margarita

I took a break from reading 1Q84 (which I'm about a third of the way through now) to finish up this book I found used back in an Oakland bookstore the night that Justin coerced me into going bike riding with him. I have this random thing for Slavic books now after Dostoevsky and the two Slavic lit classes I took for the series humanities requirement at Berkeley, so when I randomly came across this on a bookshelf it drew my attention.

The basic premise is that the devil, known here as Woland, shows up one day in 20th century atheistic Soviet-era Moscow with a retinue of supernatural folks (including a pretty awesome talking and walking black cat named Behemoth... who in my mind while reading didn't look anything like the cat pictured on the cover) and wreaks havoc. Technically there's also two other storylines intertwined with this- the first, a secular retelling of the weekend of the Crucifixion from the perspective of Pontius Pilate, and the second, the effect that Satan's adventures have on the love story between the titular couple: the Master, an author who has been persecuted for writing a novel about Pontius Pilate (which is strongly suggested to be the former storyline), and Margarita, a woman who he has an affair with. But the couple from the latter plotline don't really show up for a third of the book, and for all we know the book could've just been a bildungsroman about Ivan Bezdomny, the young poet who first encounters Satan and goes insane for it. Basically a lot's going on in this book.

This book was a lot easier to read than say, Gravity's Rainbow (although you could probably say that about most books), and the plot itself isn't hard to follow, but at the same time it was hard to tell what the general purpose or theme was at a first glance since a lot of it seemed so nonsensical. A lot of crazy stuff happens that's treated somewhat like a natural occurrence even though it isn't - I would point to the NSFW pictures on the internet associated with this book of two naked women flying through the sky on a broomstick and a giant pig as an example... It makes sense if you read it. After One Hundred Years of Solitude I found out that the proper term for this is magical realism (or as according to Wiki: "a genre where magical elements are a natural part of an otherwise mundane environment"). 

I don't think I quite got what the purpose of magical realism was until this book, though. Soviet Russia obviously is a rather perfectly mundane setting for the kinds of acts that happen, and if you go into it knowing that it's a satire of the social/cultural conditions of the Soviet era in the early 20th century, you get the sense that the author is trying to vent about all of his personal issues with that culture. Every humorous and farcical act in this book seems to be making fun of the snobby literary elite class, whether it be from their being placed at the mercy of a being they don't believe in, Satan, or the stupidity of their reactions to the magical and supernatural acts happening in front of them, or the fact that the magical disappearance of some of them from their apartments is considered somewhat normal because hey, sometimes people disappear in Soviet Russia. 

It gets to be pretty slapstick humor-wise- not enough to make me laugh out loud while reading, but it's still fairly entertaining to see how the situation unfolds. It's a fun read - although if you're not familiar with aspects of Soviet culture and the references made it can be hard to appreciate; even after finishing the book, I couldn't quite see why some folks would deign to call it one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

It turns out that there's a lot more to this book than just silly antics and poking fun at Soviet culture. 

[spoilers follow - from this point on, it's less review and more analysis]