///back to home///
I have already played vampire survivors. And vampire survivors. And a hundred million games that were all vampire survivors.
But they're all fun! There's a lot of reasons why I enjoy the genre it's in, and I'm easily enough entertained to have had fun with its bretheren, but when I bought vampire survivors,
a game my friends recommended to me, and launched it for the first time,
the next few minutes saw me dissolve from anticipation to apathy. I have already played vampire survivors. And vampire survivors. There is nothing new under the sun.
Vampire survivors is a very fun game, and one of the defining ones of its type. The premise is incredibly simple: Pick one of a handful of voiceless survivors,
shut down your higher brain functions and watch the numbers go up as you slowly navigate around
increasingly tankier enemies straight out of a 90s top-down RPG as the clock ticks upward to a time limit. 20 minutes to dawn is vampire survivors.
Death must die is vampire survivors. I've played more of these than I can name, so what makes this one different?
It's the curtain. It's gone now.
When you kill a large enemy in the game, it drops a chest. Picking up this chest subjects you to an array of flashing lights and blaring slot machine sounds akin to a pachinko machine, because it is a pachinko machine. The
minimal interaction spurring an endless feedback loop of greater and greater wins is addictive, or at least meant to be. This is not a bad thing - noone ever made the claim that it's anything beyond a flashy way to waste time - but being so overt about it
was like putting a giant mirror in front of me that displayed all the hours I've spent shooting metaphorical balls through metaphorical pegs, and deeper than that, a learned allergy to a lack of stimulation.
Boredom is the most important thing in life. Boredom takes a person and reduces them to nothing but their absolute fundamentals. Boredom lets you twist those fundamentals into something greater, it creates a festering desire to create something different.
Boredom is the basis of human creativty, and derived from that, fulfillment. It's something that deserves respect, not annihilation, but through the trillion different means we now have to entertain ourselves, it's very near to it. Very few people can truly say
they haven't succumbed to it, and among those few are most everyone who could be considered a driving force for the zeitgeist, no matter the scale. We all want to make, we all want to learn, anyone who claims otherwise is either kidding themselves or trying
to sell you something.
Usually some kind of pachinko machine.
fbg
we're the first set of online kids. we've had email addresses since we were young but we were young enough to be around when internet hadn't really taken off.
despite this, our exposure to it has had irreversible and drastic effects on the capacity we have to critically absorb information. the instant gratification promises
of the mid 20th century have finally come true before our very eyes, but it's not in the form of some miracle drug or a marked and beaten path towards fulfilment, it's
in the form of advertising being beamed into your brain a million times per second, faster than you can even realize you're being manipulated. it's the broken promise
of the past generations, the death of the claim that there's always something to look forward to.
and then at one point someone starts a service. legal, easy prostitution. a new fact of life tapping deeper into the pleasure centers of men than even the constant amassing
of an informational backlog from these popcorn "social" media sites. it's no coincidence that this is also around the same time those great warriors on the forefront of the male
plague such as tate and kirk are gaining such huge presence in the world. they're very much engineered and marketed as the only way out of this godawful plague of male garbage,
but with a shred of care and criticality it's not hard to see exactly how they're promoting this exact thing.
porn over time has had the most ridiculous tone shift out of any kind of exploitative media. from vhs to dvd to ashley madison then to live video streaming and now your own
personal little harem for only $5 a month. the most dangerous part of it is the reframing that their genius marketing team has done to the concept of online prostitution. sex
work is not inherently evil work, but as is the difference between a girl and a pimp, so also is the difference between an easily exploited teenager and a corporation built
on promises of endless expansion.
this idea of buying ownership of the content these people produce is something i feel hasn't had enough attention. it's the most directly vindicating thing to these greasy
animals, and the effect that it has on their brain and their already rotted attitude towards women is enough to turn them into nothing more than slobbering bags of sexist hate.
it's direct exploitation of the engineered social abstraction that men already experience as a direct consequence of the patriarchy itself, serving only to perpetuate it and
drive any hope into the ground, because that's what makes sales go up. twitter is guilty of this, as are any of these corporations that peddle porn.
onlyfans is the worst of these by far because of the false promise of security it gives to women.
you know you've got an incredible marketing team when you can say as a joke that you're gonna "give up and start an onlyfans at this rate",
because that's exactly who they're praying on, and we've subconsciously bought into the idea that a company owning the rights to your body is something that is normal and
respectable. most girls on the platform make pennies, and are exposed to stalkers and creeps from across the entire world in return. it's abominable. the well-off content
creators on there are even less respectable, taking the resources they've already built up over time elsewhere and using it to bring people to a platform run by the lowest scum on
earth to exploit the people that don't realize the extent of how much they're being taken advantage of.
porn is a male power fantasy designed to rip your brain to shreds so you go consume more of it. it's manipulative and reinforces the degradation of women, their portrayal
as objects for use, their willingness to accept violence with a smile, and their subjugation towards men. even just a few years ago, choking was still pretty much reserved for the kink
community, but the maturing of the first group of kids to have grown up with this view of sex imprinted on them by unfiltered access have made it somewhat of a staple to many.
on top of this, the effort to reframe it as some kind of empowering act is one of the most evil things the corporate world has done, and pushing it publicly, let
alone having it be promoted by the OWNERS of a website that has a minimum age of THIRTEEN FUCKING YEARS OLD, the precise age where most of these younger boys' brains are being
wired into what kind of man they will be in the future, is THE way that this cycle continues and keeps everyone fucked up forever.
so men stay lonely, and women stay toys.
fbg
I've always had an affinity for the decrepit. Over the time I lived in Zurich, I spent a large chunk of my time escaping the pristine city
to the few places left behind, relics somehow left behind by a greedy machine. All of them attract a similar kind of riff-raff - as much as there are those
who have a bone to pick with authority and seek somewhere beyond its reach, many are fellow explorers, seeking to drown themselves in the nostalgia of something never to exist again.
others seek to put their silver dollar under the tounge of the forgotten, to leave their mark on something already neglected, abandoned, to endow a sense of person onto
something ancient, a defilement, a small victory against the world so hostile to them, built by those who constructed these great landmarks, one of which was left
slowly bleeding out the last of the air in its lungs. Others still hold a fascination for the morbidity of places, facilities dedicated to the care and sustenance of
those within
its now flaking walls, intrigued by the stories held within, the anger, the pain, the sorrow embedded in the bones of a building made of love and well-wishes.
Unfortunately, the tendrils of that authority are spreading. This entity so opposed to the natural flow of decay has taken notice of these vagrants who defy it so harshly.
Spreading out from the city, by its hand
one of the older modern tributes to human folly is slowly being reclaimed by the body that facilitated its construction, crawling out of the rotten woodwork, putting up
fences, boarding windows, vigilantly opposing those who want to enter, however hard they may be to sway. It's never been more difficult to access
the grounds, but this deterrence effort has inadvertently turned into an effort of preservation - the continued weathering of light, wind, wilderness and,
of course, humankind has taken
a sharp decline following an incident caused by some less well-intentioned visitors that ended up with a room burned to ash, the destruction of the terrace and the landmark piano painted, smashed and abandoned in the main hall. These new heightened security measures have the benefit of guarding against all but the
most determined.
They affect the spirit of the grounds as well. Looking in from the outside, you can see that desire paths are being visibly overgrown. Foxes and deer scurry from every step, carelessly
discarded trash has all but disappeared and the interior of the ward has completely changed its shade. The few unboarded windows, formerly beacons of relief for those stalking
within, have been covered, blanketing most all of the upper-level rooms in utter darkness where once was a stark portrait of a place abandoned decades before.
the covering of the former entrance used by most fellow trespassers necessitates entry by a much more sinister porthole leading into a set of hallways near-indecipherable
to those unfamiliar with the facility. The now inaccessible terrace that once gave each visitor the levity to continue their path boarded up, broken into, then boarded up again.
The catacombs beneath, once privy to beams of light clawing through decades-old foliage now drenched in pitch-black ichor. One of the only seemingly incorruptable segments, the
row of surgery wards - giant theaters, lit by a diffuse light through
fogged glass, littered with unused medicine bottles, long-abandoned surgical equipment, and in one such room, a large pool of a caked-over red fluid rejected by the
linoleum floor - are still mostly unchanged since the first time I ever saw them.
The Villa Nager stands. It may stand for a long time, still. It is, thankfully not the only one of its kind. As great a loss as it would be for such a rich history to be forgotten, there will
always be those dedicated to preserving it. It feels like a living creature: a sad, demented old thing, grasping at the threads of a past that barely remains within its walls.
If the Villa Nager goes, it will be missed.
fbg
I've never been good at taking photos. I know the theory of it all, and I'm good at spotting things to shoot, but it doesn't really matter to me as much as other things.
Truth be told, I don't really know what gets me up in the morning, at least so far. Every now and then there's something that I'm just dying to work on, but I sleep in
a lot more than I don't. Maybe I get bored as soon as I settle down, it really seems the longer I'm in a place the more ridiculous things I do to make it more interesting.
So what happens when a place beats me, instead? None of the homes I've had have really fought me to keep on top like this one has. We seem pretty evenly matched.
It wears you down, though, massively, to be locked in a struggle to keep your head above water for such a long time. I'm really starting to feel it. My flowers wilt
despite my water, my books' covers bend in the sun, but I don't control the seasons nor the stars, so why do I feel so responsible? Maybe I'm wilting too.
It feels so good to escape the circus now and then. you really do tend to lose yourself in it, even if you don't realize or care. As soon as you step outside and take your
first breath of fresh air, you feel it flow through you from skin to bone, infesting you with a kind of feeling you had no idea you had missed. Sure as shit won't solve all
your problems like a magic wind but it'll help you get through em, I guess. There's nothing too deep about it all, either. It's just pure, altruistic niceness. no ulterior motive, no
underlying cause or worry, just something that helps the days go down a little easer. It's easy to haze out, to accept the world around you the way you've shaped it, but
there's a tiny, tiny step between that and taking yourself for granted. All the work i've put into realizing the impact of everyone in my life for shaping it into the way
it is and how
the knowledge of such affects me doesn't seem to matter all too much if I'm not in front of a mirror.
Self-reflection is a difficult art to master.
fbg
