Voices

When I was a kid I used to do these voice imitation things. Like, I'd put on different accents, imitate celebrity voices or whatever. One time, I went about a week or so changing my voice every day. I'd spend one day speaking in a cockney accent all day, the next, an Arnold Schwarzenegger imitation, the next I'd do a hoarse Glaswegian voice. Anyway, it got to the point where I forgot what my actual voice sounded like. Have you ever had that? It's a surreal moment of depersonalisation. It was kind of like that thing people get when they hear themselves on a recording, the "do I really sound like that?" moment where they're not entirely certain it's them because they're hearing their own voices without the differing timbre and such created by their own skulls. It was like that but taken to the extreme. "Do I really sound like that? Hang on, what do I actually sound like?" 

It was genuinely terrifying, like losing a piece of the self, or rather, not knowing it at all. Never told anyone about it either, never wrote it down anywhere, but people (randomers as well as family and friends of) would always say that I don't sound like I'm from Liverpool (sadly, I do sound more Scouse now, which is a shame as I cannot stand that fucking accent...thinking on it, probably some psychosomatic thing that caused the change in voice in the first place...hmm) and of course, that just fueled the fear that I had done something to my voice. That it wasn't *my* voice, if that makes sense.

Lucky Chloe

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4O0UphHT6uE/maxresdefault.jpg

This is Lucky Chloe. She is a new character in the fighting series Tekken, joining the roster when Tekken 7 releases. Except maybe not (at least in America) because of the fans outraged at the idea of a cute character in their grimdark serious fighting game series (the same series that has characters such as:  http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120821020820/tekken/en/images/7/7d/Alisa_Bosconovitch_TTT2.png a literal robotic schoolgirl, http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110830171938/tekken/en/images/c/c4/Gon_-_Full-body_CG_Art_Image_-_Tekken_3.png a tie in promotion chibi dinosaur, and many more...I've also got to include this scene http://s1.dmcdn.net/UyHV.jpg because it's the badass main character of the series being made to wear a thong...serious bidness!).

Reading through the comment sections on various sites (listed at the end of this missive)the outrage runs the gamut from the aforementioned "you can't put this in my fighting game!" to "screw them for appealing to the popular vocaloid crowd" to "this character is oppressive to females and only reinforces stereotypes!" to which I say...fucking shut up! The arguments seem different but they all boil down to the same basic point, "I feel undue privilege, give me what I want or I will scream." 

Your fighting game? No sir/madam, it's the makers (Harada's) game. He could make the game's roster consist of nothing but Lucky Chloe reskins and it would be perfectly fine because it is "his" (well, his teams, but he's the boss so) game. 

'It's just to appeal to Vocaloid fans', yes, and? Vocaloids fairly big in Japan but, hmm, lets think about this, a Japanese game trying to appeal to a Japanese audience...there might actually be something in this one...except the outrage is justified because...what? It's not targeted at you? Get the fuck out.  

And lastly, my favourite, the "this character is oppressive to females" blather. This one I love most of all because it's so utterly hypocritical, basically "you can't tell women how to act or dress, only I (and people like me) can!". Add in some casual racism (as tends to be the case with these people commenting) along the lines of "Japan needs to start acting more like us civilised people in the West" and you have to laugh if only to curb the murderous rage now burning within.

Anyway, to end this (not really focussed tirade), here's a picture based on the Tekken character designer Harada's tweet saying he'd make a big, burly man character to appease the offended inclusionary folk.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4d63E6IAAARLeb.png:large

Bless that man.

- Outraged points of view were taken from Gamespot, Polygon, Ign and Eurogamer website comment sections. (The reports themselves were about the outrage)   

Gamergate

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/WEDdCMgxnn8/maxresdefault.jpg

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5573/15053630528_f4bdbb4438.jpg

I've pretty much stayed out of this whole gamergate thing, I think I've talked about it with maybe two other people and it was like a five minute "yeah, it's pretty bullshit, can understand both sides, blah blah blah" thing but yeah, my ire has slowly been rising...the first photo linked is from the xoxo festival of last year, the second is of this year. We'll get back to that in just a tick.

Brief notes for those who don't know anything about gamergate, it started when the ex-boyfriend of a female indie game developer accused her of sleeping with a games journalist to get her product a better rating. This might not be entirely true (or at the least is unprovable, though it is a fact that the two accused started dating the day after the review came out which is fairly suspicious in itself though not at all any indication of guilt).This accusation of (note well) of falsifying journalistic endeavour led to a massive backlash against gamers by a group of people who said that such wild claims were examples of the rampant misogyny and lack of diversity in gaming as a whole, the general view being that the male gamer was upset that his hobby was being usurped by emergent female gamers, whilst female gamers in support of such males were falling victim to institutional gender bias (somehow).

Gamers argue it's not about misogyny or being upset about more/less diversity in games (which is a contestable point anyway), but rather that it's about the lack of oversight these games journalists have, that, in effect, these journalists are free to write whatever they want, however they want and receive whatever they want in the forms of free games, merch, etc. and never be held to account for it and that leads to unmitigated corruption with the medium itself.

That is a very, very brief summation of what has transpired thus far in the whole sorry saga. Why I linked those two pictures though is because they are pictures of the XoXo festival, a festival that claims to highlight and support diversity and independence in art and technology. It's all about diversity, right? That's what it claims? Now count how many of the people there that are NOT white, 20ish, males. If you cannot count without using your fingers, don't worry, you won't run out of fingers, hell, if i say take away the white women from that NOT list, you'd probably only need the one hand to count the rest. That's not a diverse crowd. That's a group of people, a very large group of people, who want to sound as though they support diversity because it's the "moral" thing to say. Oh aren't we good because we say good things.

Now compare that audience of people made up of those bemoaning the lack of diversity in gaming with:

http://metalmusicman.com/files/pictures/evo2k11/evo_crowd_shot.jpg

http://na.lolesports.com/sites/default/files/9-28-2013set1%20(46%20of%2055).jpg

There's still an overabundance of males in both pictures, yes, but compared to the ones at the diversity symposium? The second picture was from League of Legends, a game with a reputation for a terrifying toxic environment, so toxic in fact, its developers had to implement ways to curtail player interaction because it was damaging the title...and yet still, there's asians, there's africans/african-americans, there's white folk, male, female, all there having a good time, but it's gamers who have the inability to diversify/cope with diversity? And yet, instead of looking at the quote/unquote journalists attacking people who were attacking them (not as people, but as journalists), other media picked up on it and were heavily sympathetic to the plight of the poor women so traumatised by this event. Which is why women like Zoe Quinn (which I should've mentioned at the start was the woman who started this whole furore) and Anita Sarkeesian are getting articles in places such as cracked.com, polygon.com, even british tabloids like the guardian (oh sorry, it's a broadsheet, snicker snicker) where they talk about their plight and what they've had to suffer through, because they have suffered, that is without question, they've been attacked, time and again. Not because they are women but because what they purport as truth is anything but. Anita Sarkeesian in particular has made a living out of being a victim, it's actually quite masterful, because there'll always be a pack of moral activists willing to jump on the lance pointed at her lies when she screams "misogyny!"

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that gaming is this great, all inclusive thing, because it patently isn't, but as hobbies go it's definitely got a fair leg up on most of its competitors, and for it to be attacked and slandered in such a way is sad, most of all. Not because I like gaming (though I do, a whole freaking lot), but because of what attacking it without thought shows our society to be. The observation I take from it (and other things like this) is that there are far too many people who are far too interested in looking and appearing correct and moral than actually being correct and moral.

Anyway, I've bored you all long enough now, go have an ice cream and/or carbonated beverage of your choosing.

Frozen Iron

Do you wanna build an Iron man? Come on, lets go and save the day! I never see you anymore, come out the door, it's like you lost your way! We used to be avengers, and now we're not, I wish you'd tell me why...do you wanna build an Iron man....it doesn't have to be an Iron man....

Do you wanna build an Iron man? Or ride around our flash new cars, i think some company is overdue, I've started talking to that AI you've got hidden in your walls!

It gets a little lonely, saving a world from certain doom, just watching as the foes fly by....

Tony, please I know you're in there, people are asking where you've been, put down the dutch courage, i know you're trying to, we're right out here for you, just let us in....

Us avengers only have each other, it's just us and Nick Fury, what are we going to do....

Do you wanna build an Iron man....

Originality is dead; long live originality!

Ideas are a funny thing. Not funny "ha ha" but funny in a very stroke the beard and go "hmm, yes, quite" kind of way. I say they're funny in a strokey beard kind of way because they've all been done before. Or thought up before. Or experienced in a fevered dream brought on by too many custard creams and mint liqueurs. The point I'm laboriously driving at is that being original, truly original, is a very hard thing to achieve.

Well, that's not entirely true I suppose. It can be quite easy to be original, putting on your socks with a shotgun loaded with not buckshot but tadpoles, yes, I think it's fairly safe to say that no one has shot themselves in the foot with frogspawn whilst getting dressed in the morning, so I guess I should amend my previous statement to "It's very hard to be original AND be a success at it". Which is fine you know, as my bufo related sartorial story has shown, being original can be overrated, and vastly so. Though, that's not to say you should ever stop trying or striving towards being different. I would argue the worst thing a person can ever do is stop pushing for change and simply accept everything as it is, that's basically a living death. But you can introduce change without being novel about it and that's fine.

It does annoy me however. The other day I had an idea for a story and I got super excited about it. I was lying in bed, doing my usual thing where I can't sleep because apparently I store all my thoughts in my pillow, when it was like a switch just flipped. The story popped into my head, the characters all fully developed, the twists, the underlying meanings, the ending , everything, it was a fully formed story. The last week I have just been running it over and over my head seeing what I can add, what I should take away, but there hasn't been much for either side. Then, just as I sat down the other day to write it, a little voice whispered in my ear "Hey, isn't that just The Wizard of Oz?" and I stopped and then I thought about it and then I did a little inward screaming. It wasn't entirely the story, it was just very similar. Then I started comparing the idea I had to Neverwhere (by Neil Gaiman), Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll) and a number of other stories and of course, it was all very similar. Character finds themselves in a fantasy land, has struggles adapting, experiences heartbreak/overwhelming physical or emotional trial and prevails, becomes hero, goes home...and yes, I've read about the hero's journey, the monomyth, and it's a very interesting thing, but it just annoyed me that it...well...that it was so perfectly fitting.

I'm still going to write the story because how could I not? But I am still annoyed. Not at the monomyth, not at the idea that originality is a night unobtainable ideal or even that my story is similar to other stories. I'm annoyed at my own brain for getting so worked up about it, letting me become so excited to be writing this thing before going "hey, that character, remind you of anyone from any other story? tsk tsk, Terence." Because, and I think I've said this before, my brain is an asshole who likes to troll me, and I hate him for that! But I sure do love anthropomorphising my organs and blaming them for flaws such as my growing insanity and also my expanding waistline, damn you stomach, can't you just lay off food for even a moment! Yes, all their fault, not mine....I'm sure.

Anyway, that's enough for now...I know, I made you wait a month (WHAT?!) from my last little rant, I was busy, doing things, like unknowingly plagiarising everything in existence, which is quite a feat, let me assure you of that. Later taters. 

Inconsistency

So yeah, religion, how about that eh? Me? I love it! Completely unfounded belief in something just because it feels right? Heck yeah! What I hate about it is (ironically) all the hate it causes...it's just...imagine you're God, or a god, whatever, you got all this fantastic power, you know everything, control everything, can see across the whole breadth and depth of existence and what's this?! Someone doesn't believe in you?! Out of the whole universe, from its birth to death, a statistically insignificant number of atoms either don't acknowledge, or even refute, your existence!  Drown them! Drown the lot of them!

Oh, okay, maybe that was an over-reaction, let's save a family of them and have them repopulate the Earth (itself an insignificant speck against the backdrop of, you know, the whole fucking universe!) because there's no way that the generations of inbreeding as a result of this will backfire in any way...not like the last time you did that it inadvertently created fucking Murder (.....that's not to mention that that could only happen because you created death simply because your creations, which you made that way, ate some fruit....which seriously, what were they supposed to do, they were idiots! they didn't have any intelligence until eating a fruit from the tree called the fucking tree of knowledge! what did you think was going to happen?! Oh, your arch nemesis who took the form of a talking snake told them to eat it and you couldn't do anything about it; least of all just let the thing slide like the forgiving being you are supposed to be??? Good for you! *rolls eyes*.)

Anyway, I'm getting away from myself here; the point is religion is okay. It is only a tool, after all, and you don't blame the hammer for being used to murder someone. The problem is many people just use religion as an excuse to inflict harm on others. He's eating a foodstuff that my book says we shouldn't! She's throwing away her hard earned cash by gambling! They're having fun on a Sunday! Those rat bastards!

The food thing annoys me. You can't eat pigs, because they're filthy! You can't eat cows because they're sacred! You can't eat people because oh so many calories! And I also guess it's a sin...the point is, the human thing aside, because that's a joke, because of the calories, it made sense when it was first introduced. "Don't eat the meat!" says noted historical figure Joe Blogg of Babylon.

 "But!" say the people.

 "You'll die unless it's super fresh because we can't store meat properly as we've not yet invented refrigeration and we live in a fucking desert," continues Joe Blogg.

"We don't care!" say the people, eating the bacon and promptly expiring post haste.

"Hmm," says Joe, "I know...People, hear me! You know that God dude? Totally hates you eating those animals because they're like, his favourite creations and shit."

"What, all of them?" says one of the audience, who somehow survived death by bacon.

"Erm, yes...I mean no! Some are also possessed by demons, which he hates, and if you eat them, you take the demon into you and become corrupted! For example, by eating a pig, you become like the pig demon, full of sloth and gluttony."

"Well, sir, I am convinced, because after that plate of bacon, and the second, I cannot move a muscle save to adjust the cushions on my ottoman...ottoman...say, that's a great name for an empire!" and off went that audience member to found an empire based around footstools.

It made sense back in the day, not so much anymore. People don't really die from eating meat anymore. It's an archaic practice that is only still done because it's what has always been done, which is no excuse to do things!

Then there's the whole thing of attacking homosexuals because a man shall not lay with another man and all that bullshit. Again, probably because back in the day that probably was far more dangerous to do because of hygiene reasons. Got shit on your knob? It's staying there because all you got to wipe it off is a dirty rag, or you can wash it in the river, I guess, but you know, that probably ain't much cleaner....because fish pee in it...you know.....doesn't just apply to homosexuals, but heteros as well, think about it. "Don't have sex!" "Why?" "Because demons live in semen and labial juices, they're attracted to it, and they can get into you via that and corrupt your mind and body!" "Are you talking about STDs?" "....that sounds like scientific demon lingo, you're not a demon wearing a man suit are you?" ".....no" then he grew fangs, his eyes glowed yellow, he sprouted wings and flew away....weird conversation, but he had a point, maybe this science thing could be right? Could it be that being promiscuous is looked down upon because it was ridiculously unhealthy back in the day? Probably. I'd also wager there was a lot of jealousy involved in making it morally reprehensible. 

Which leads us neatly to attacking women, denigrating the entire gender because of original sin, right? We only live these shitty, temptation-filled mortal lives because a woman had a major hankering for an apple, which to be fair, haven't we all had at some point (I may be projecting here, as I bloody love apples) so let's blame her! As opposed to, you know, the being who inflicted the punishment in the first place because his astoundingly arbitrary rules were broken by the crack team of his infinitely less powerful adversary and the woman who literally had the IQ of a retarded sponge (remember, this is before intelligence was even a thing, sure Adam had his little interview things with God, but they were on the intellectual level of say, your average sports journalist.). This is something I feel that gets overlooked a lot. In terms of plot hole, that ranks way up there, and the cover of "well, he's a bit unknowable, you know, we don't know why He does these things, but we do know that we shouldn't know, you know?" is fucking ludicrous. If God is truly unfathomable, then why follow anything He's apparently said, who interpreted it in the first place, how did they do it correctly if He is literally, not figuratively, but literally unknowable. He says woman are bad, maybe he meant it like 90s kids used the word bad, to mean good, and for centuries, millennia, that was (perhaps deliberately) misconstrued? 

I do realise I've gone on a bit too much here about religion from an Abrahamic perspective...mostly because that's the one I was raised with and the ones I despise the most because of the harm and hate they cause in the world. Announcing you're a Jew, a Muslim or a Christian in certain areas is likely to result in your head being caved in, and for what? It's not the religion that causes the hatred, well, sometimes it is, ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"...again, the woman thing, I wonder what's up with that, I reckon the bible writing men just had a serious vagina envy thing going on), but mostly, it's the users of the tool. They're free to pick and mix what to use, to take away from the texts, and instead they go with the stuff liable to do the most damage.

What's really sad is the ones who do do the good crap from the books are the ones you don't hear about. The ones who are temperate and who let things go on, not judging, letting people do their own thing, who don't proselytise, who just live their own fucking lives...course, you don't know how much of that is their own choice and how much of that was forced on them by their parents and how much damage they'll do to their own kids simply because they don't know any other way of being.

In conclusion, some religion is fine, most is bad and only used to exclude and harm others whilst making one's self feel better. Personally, I'd go with Norse mythology as it just makes sense, plus Vikings were pretty fucking cool, even if...no...especially because they spent hours before battle shampooing, conditioning and braiding their hair, because what point is there in looting, raping and pillaging your way through a country if you don't look fabulous whilst doing so?! Exactly! None at all!  

        

Death and other things.

Lately, I've been thinking of death. Not in a big way or anything, just in the way where one is falling to sleep then jolts awake when the thought "oh crap, I'm mortal, one day I will no longer be!" pops into one's head. 

It's annoying. I really do jolt awake, I'll be there, slipping off into sleep then boom! My brain says in a creepy voice "Hey, bitch..." and I say "...yeah?" and it replies "You gonna die!" and I sit up and make a kind of mewling noise and stare at my hand, touch the walls, pick up a book or whatever, just something to convince myself that I'm still here, that things are real. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining as such. I've had those thoughts/reactions to said thoughts for pretty much as long as I can remember and they used to be more frequent to the point where I'd have them every night. Now it's only like once or twice a week so yeah, that's a marked improvement. It's just this last week that they've become a regular reoccurring thing again. Mostly, it's down to university. I might actually fail this year. I wouldn't be so arsed because I don't even want to go onto the second year of this course, but I need to pass it to get onto the first year of my new course. I didn't learn this until quite recently, after I'd pretty much given up any pretence of caring for the current course. So I was way, way, WAY behind on work and knowledge of what I needed to do and I know, don't misconstrue this, I am blaming myself entirely for it. I counted my chickens before they were hatched, ate my goose before it was cooked and other such avian related metaphors on making poor assumptions.

This, of course, leads to stress. I'm having to make up a lot of ground in things I don't want to, or even can't really, do and it's not really going fantastically well, no, not well at all. Which leads to me being awake, depressed, fatalistic, at five in the morning. Then, when I do get to sleep, I have anxiety inducing, cryptic dreams about, well, everything. I can't even explain. Like, last night I had this dream I was at a formal party and this girl I once knew was there and we got to talking, but she was a completely different person. It was someone I really cared about, I hadn't seen her in quite a few years, she had, literally, a new face, a new personality, new mannerisms, almost entirely different to the person I knew, but it was still her, and in the dream she tried to engage with me but I rejected her. Obviously that wasn't the only thing, there was also a part about being a vampire and trying to sell a castle but being unable to let go of it. 

From them it's easy to see what the problem is. Holding onto the past, incapable of accepting change and moving on. But then, maybe it's the other way. Maybe it's that I should be holding onto the past. I mean, I do tend to stop and drop things pretty abruptly, simply letting things go because it's easier than holding on. I don't know, I'm starting to hate going to sleep though, again, which is something I thought I'd gotten over.

As I've said in other pieces, depression is something you don't really ever get over. The best you can do is suppress it for a while. At the end of it, those thoughts always come back. The ones about not being good enough for anything, anyone, the thoughts about how insanely close to oblivion everything just is, so what's the point of anything.

I can feel it there, at the back of my mind. I think it's there at the back of everyone's mind. At least, I'd like to assume so, because then it would mean I'm less crazy by virtue of everyone else being crazy too and, you know, that shits relative. It's frustrating though. Every time, I fuck up. Not other people, me. Myself. I. Who knows, maybe Douglas Adams was right with the other Trillian thing. You know, if there was another you created who, in their life, had made the opposite choices to yours, they'd wish they made the choices you made. In other words, we'd both regret the choices made....grass is always greener is what I'm trying to say in my own, distinctively obtuse way. I don't know. Can't find out. Just nice to think that no matter what I'd be fucked up anyway, right?

But yeah, it's always my mistake. It might sound egotistical, or conceited, but honestly, I've basically been in control of my own life my whole life, people have bent over backwards to help me and all I've done is piss on their help. All I ever had to do was be something slightly other than myself and I might actually be somewhere right now. Hell, even these diatribes are a lesson in self-gratification aren't they. I could stop writing them, right now, could not post it. But I'm going to, aren't I? The whole world must know and read about the all Great and Powerful Terence...though I'm sure they won't. Maybe it's a cry for help. I don't know, I have a bad time actually asking for help. Maybe, I really don't know. Indirect, perhaps. Not that I think anyone really could, or indeed, even should because I think that way. 

I better get to work, increasingly disjointed rant over.