Global Offenses
Over the last week or so, I’ve been sitting here and watching the world go crazy. Well, that’s not accurate. The world’s been crazy all along, and there have been plenty of examples of that popping up all over the…
Category Playing Games
Familiarity
In this world, there are so many things to experience, weird and wonderful and varied and vivid. Most of us will only see a handful of them – basically nothing, when compared with what’s possible. Even just in the realm of…
Edge of Empowerment
Power is defined every bit as much by what it can’t achieve as what it can achieve. Even an indestructable man can’t save himself from drowning, even a walking god can’t reverse death. Omnipotence is a contradiction, a rock made…
Attachments
It becomes necessary, after a certain point, to ask yourself: “What, exactly, am I getting from this?” It isn’t necessary to have a good answer, but it’s necessary to ask. Sometimes it’s terrifyingly easy to spend an hour, a day,…
Game Over
They’re all playing games. It’s the only explanation I can think of. The way a game is framed, victory is the only thing that matters. Accumulate your resources, destroy your opponents, be the last one standing, survive at any cost.…
Dark Souls
People in dreams are perceived in reverse order. When we are awake, we see a face, a body, a set of mannerisms, a manner of dress, and we recognize the familiar, and we put a name to the person. In…
Grasping
Everything seems so huge when we’re small, and then shrinks to catch up with us. As our awareness gets bigger, everything we are familiar with begins to seem smaller, more self-contained, better understood. It’s not so much, really, that our…
Panacea
If you love art it becomes easy to see in it a panacea. Art is many things, but it is not everything. Art can remind you of better times, but can’t bring them back. Art can make you fall in…
Prisoners
A couple of years ago, I was driving across the Bay Bridge when I realized it wasn’t over. That makes it sound like I was in a way darker place than I really was, but there was a part of…
Hunger
When we’re hungry, we can gain insights our overall physical and mental state by the foods we crave: Sugary and sweet stress salves or crunchy salty protein reinforcements, our hungers reveal our deficiencies, real or perceived. Our tastes in entertainment,…