AAAAHH

This is the story of Perfection Eden, a Factorio Death World that has seen the rise and fall of many great civilizations.

In my exploration of robinsonades (novels/stories about castaways surviving in remote locations alone), I cannot help but look to my favorite video games as contemporary leaders in the narrative tradition. Video games are capable of taking survival narratives further than books by allowing players to actually undertake the kinds of creative processes that protagonists in survival novels can only go so far as to describe in text. The Crusoe fever dream that so enraptures childrens’ imaginations can be brought to life through gameplay. Like playing pretend with rocks and sticks in a forest, games offer “playgrounds” or “sandboxes” where imaginative play can thrive even among adults that haven’t used their childhood imaginations in decades. This post is about a particularly magical situation I managed to play out in Factorio, a game that, according to Steam, has devoured over 200 hours of my life.

Factorio is the perfect example of a robinsonade game not only because it arranges its players in a scifi castaway scenario on an alien planet, but because it forces players to consider their own footprint as a castaway. What sets Robinson Crusoe and its heirs apart from other wilderness survival tales is that distinct relationship that the castaway forms between himself and his island (or in this case, planet) and the natives that already inhabit the land. Henry David Thoreau had a grand old time learning about his little forest, but he didn’t have to worry about disturbing Indians. So much of the tension in Robinson Crusoe hinges on his fear of being set upon by cannibals, and Factorio sets up the same relationship between the player and the alien planet’s voracious insectoid lifeforms. Crusoe sets out from the start to build a camouflaged, defensible fortress in anticipation of attack, and Factorio players that wish to live long enough to get off the rock and return home would be wise to do the same…

But is this true? Do you really need to construct hard walls and endless lines of automated machine gun turrets in order to survive and thrive? Like any great sandbox game, Factorio makes few strict demands of the player, and a few months ago I found myself in an incredible situation that changed my entire perspective on the game. Violence is an effective answer to many problems in Factorio just as it is for Robinson Crusoe himself, but when the biters came to devour my factory, I was forced to find an alternative path.

Here is the scenario: my friend Mark and I had generated a Death World, a map variant loaded with a huge quantity of biter nests (biters are the name for the alien insects that live throughout the Factorio world). The biters are set up to multiply and seek the player more rapidly, and respond more ferociously to the player’s actions, than in the default game. We felt the pressure immediately: the more biters we gunned down, the more seemed to emerge from the forests to take their place. Our defensive walls needed constant maintenance, and we could barely produce enough bullets to meet demand. We forged on, however, extracting and burning ever greater quantities of wood and coal to keep our boilers running. The factory must grow, and there was no Lorax around to warn us of impending consequences! We did not quite realize that a storm was brewing beyond our borders.

Interlude: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a work that I suspect holds some influence on Factorio, poses a similar relationship between humans and giant insects. Nausicaa takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting in which humanity clings to life on the fringes of vast, poisonous fungal forests inhabited by large and potential sentient bugs. As the story goes, greed eventually propels these human kingdoms to seek the industrial powers of the past and wage war across the land. Bombs and chemical biological warfare return, and this destruction of the land triggers an event known as the “Daikaisho,” a great wave of insects that emerge from the forest to flatten humanity. Nausicaa takes place on the verge of one of these prophesied daikaisho events, and the titular protagonist Nausicaa desperately seeks a way for humans to live at peace with the forest and its inhabitants.

Little did Mark and I realize that our own Daikaisho was at hand. The biters that surrounded our factory fortress were incensed, and they came upon us from all directions at once. We were overwhelmed–our beautiful production lines, rows of belts and machines, were crushed and devoured. Our walls crumbled away as the reserves of bullets drained. The steam engines slowed as the flow of coal become a trickle. Soon, they were dormant, the cold heart of a factory that no longer existed. Hours of work had been lost, literally eaten, before our very eyes. Mark gave up and disconnected, but I decided to play on.

While the biters had their way with my factory, I fled east. Before the Daikaisho, Mark and I had established our very first rail line with plans to establish an eastern mining outpost that would have given us more iron than we could have ever used. Thankfully, our train was not yet destroyed, though the outpost with its many expensive electrical miners was surely gone. Locomotives, marvels of engineering they might be, are not very useful without goods to transport and rail lines to follow. I rode the track for a while before hopping off near a strand of undisturbed trees in the wilderness. Exiled and forlorn, I wandered into the woods and settled into a clearing. I was a little depressed, if I can speak honestly. I didn’t move for some time. I mostly watched the dwindling map feed of my old base as the insects crushed it to nothing. My bird’s eye view of the carnage shrunk as radio dishes lost power or were eaten, and eventually the feed cut out entirely. I was completely cut off then. Alone.

After many days and nights I woke myself up and took stock of my situation.

I had in my possession a few rounds of ammunition, a machine gun, various crafting odds and ends, automation machines, belts, and a solar panel. That last item was the product of some new energy research that had been completed shortly before the fall. Among all the weapons science that we had conducted to stave off the biters, how fortunate that we bothered to make any solar panels at all! Even with my boilers silent and many miles removed, I could still harness the power of electricity. I immediately installed the panel and hooked it up to some crafting machines set to transform my pockets of crude metal into the armaments of vengeance. My encampment was cozy, if anything. I had a few storage bins loaded mostly with junk, the means to craft complex items on a very small scare, and a natural wall of trees to hide me from the biters. I set my crafting machines to pump out bullets and dumped all the metal I had into the input bins. I didn’t think anything else could have been useful.

The factory was dead, but I suspected it was not entirely obliterated. Perhaps I could take it back and restart the steam engines? Certainly, there could be materials enough left over to craft even more bullets. Yes, I decided then that all hope was not lost.

TO BE CONTINUED…

With fresh ammo and an unquenchable thirst for biter blood, I set off to my old factory to take it back. What I find there brings me to the brink of despair.

This post contains spoilers. Some pretty amazing things happen throughout this manga, so if you want to experience them blind, do not read further.

This morning I finished Nausicaa. I didn’t feel anything at first. I felt kind of empty, actually. As the morning progressed into the afternoon, I realized I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It is sad in the same way that Lord of the Rings is sad, and I can easily see the lineage of environmental fantasy from LOTR to Ghibli. If you need another comparison, think of it this way: Nausicaa does for storytelling what Breath of the Wild does for gaming. I read Dune this year as well, and they follow a similar track. I’ve been blessed with great media this year. In short, if you feel very deeply for trees and living things, read Nausicaa!

The movie is amazing, but it is only a shadow of the sprawling adventure held within the manga. So many great characters and moments, not to mention the entirety of Dorok, are cut. I recommend watching the movie first, then trying the manga. It took me a while to build the motivation to hook myself. Exposure to Dune and Moebius help.

War manga? Environmental Apocalypse? Coming of Age story? Medieval Fantasy? Nausicaa has it all.

It is such a moving work, and it is cool too. I mean, it does every cool thing I can think of. It invokes and possibly helps to originate one of my favorite tropes, THE DEVIL MACHINE. I don’t exactly remember where I found the term, but I think its from Earthbound. Giygas lives within this massive organ, a mechanical atrocity that someone in the game calls a “Devil Machine.” It is horrific, and stepping inside it is possibly one of the most memorable moments in gaming, especially as a final boss. The Devil Machine lurks in Nausicaa’s world as well, a perfect “boss” if you will for a war manga like this..

Perhaps I’ll elaborate more, but for now, I need to enjoy a beautiful Friday.

If you hated Holden Caulfield back in high school, you were experiencing The Catcher in the Rye as intended. Cold stoicism is baked so heavily into our upbringings that Holden’s inability to read a room or shut the fuck up is disgusting. Holden is a loathsome, whiney little crab on an exhausting trek across New York City. He often makes decisions that induce an immediate butt pucker response in teenage readers desperately convinced that they would never act so cringe in their own lives. Like so many protagonists in high school literature, his suffering is a direct affront to the ice cold self reliance mythologically greasing the wheels of a wealthy Tri-town. Holden is all too smug for somebody showing so much vulnerability. Why doesn’t he take this fantastic opportunity his parents are giving him and make some correct decisions for the first time in his life?

Well, I think I tried to argue as much in my essay for Mrs. Deorocki. I recall disagreeing with the premise of the assignment (the essay was likely to diagnose him with a mental illness), instead choosing to analyze how Holden’s various decisions lead him into trouble. Fortunately, that essay is lost to time. There were some serious miscommunications going on in sophomore English. We pretty much unanimously thought Holden was a helplessly annoying fuck, and Deorocki’s attempts to paint Holden as a rebellious hero fell on deaf ears. All the angles are a failure: how do you convince a bunch conservatively raised elitists afraid to upset their own helicopter parents to see a cringelord as a countercultural hero? And how do we convince this repressed, extremely depressed group of post-9/11 proto zoomers to feel anything for this cingelord’s depression. As far as we were concernced, Holden just needed to get a grip on himself and face the facts. We were coping, why couldn’t he? Loathing loathing loathing at Masco. On the counterculture angle… I think that’s just dated. Did people really ever resonate with the “phony” thing? Was that cool at some point? We 21st century zoomers were a lot more sophisticated than that. We also curated finstas… so perhaps not.

As an adult, it is a lot easier to disentangle oneself from the Holden nightmare and appreciate The Catcher in the Rye for what it is–an extremely well written novel loaded with bizarre, entertaining dialogue spurned on by the brief misadventure of an unwell kid. Salinger’s book is seriously entertaining to read, and the language is so plain that the pages flow like water. It’s like if Donald Trump monologued a coherent narrative. Here is a favorite passage of mine:

The cab I had was a real old one that smelled like someone’d just tossed his cookies in it. I always get those vomity kind of cabs if I go anywhere late at night. What made it worse, it was so quiet and lonesome out, even though it was Saturday night. I didn’t see hardly anybody on the street. Now and then you just saw a man and a girl crossing a street, with their arms around each other’s waists and all, or a bunch of hoodlumy-looking guys and their dates, all of them laughing like hyenas at something you could bet wasn’t funny. New York’s terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed. I kept wishing I could go home and shoot the bull for a while with old Phoebe. But finally,after I was riding a while, the cab driver and I sort of struck up a conversation. His name was Horwitz. He was a much better guy than the other driver I’d had. Anyway, I thought maybe he might know about the ducks.

“Hey, Horwitz,” I said. “You ever pass by the lagoon in Central Park? Down by Central Park South?”

“The what?“

“The lagoon. That little lake, like, there. Where the ducks are. You know.”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance?”

“Where who goes?”

“The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come around in a truck or something and take them away, or do they fly away by themselves–go south or something?”

Old Horwitz turned all the way around and looked at me. He was a very impatient-type guy. He wasn’t a bad guy, though. “How the hell should I know?” he said.

“How the hell should I know a stupid thing like that?”

“Well, don’t get sore about it,” I said. He was sore about it or something.

“Who’s sore? Nobody’s sore.”

I stopped having a conversation with him, if he was going to get so damn touchy about it. But he started it up again himself. He turned all the way around again, and said,

“The fish don’t go no place. They stay right where they are, the fish. Right in the goddam lake.”

“The fish–that’s different. The fish is different. I’m talking about the ducks,” I said.

“What’s different about it? Nothin’s different about it,” Horwitz said. Everything he said, he sounded sore about something. “It’s tougher for the fish, the winter and all, than it is for the ducks, for Chrissake. Use your head, for Chrissake.”

I didn’t say anything for about a minute. Then I said, “All right. What do they do, the fish and all, when that whole little lake’s a solid block of ice, people skating on it and all?”

Old Horwitz turned around again. “What the hellaya mean what do they do?” he yelled at me. “They stay right where they are, for Chrissake.”

“They can’t just ignore the ice. They can’t just ignore it.”

“Who’s ignoring it? Nobody’s ignoring it!” Horwitz said. He got so damn excited and all, I was afraid he was going to drive the cab right into a lamppost or something.

“They live right in the goddam ice. It’s their nature, for Chrissake. They get frozen right in one position for the whole winter.”

“Yeah? What do they eat, then? I mean if they’re frozen solid, they can’t swim around looking for food and all.”

“Their bodies, for Chrissake–what’sa matter with ya? Their bodies take in nutrition and all, right through the goddam seaweed and crap that’s in the ice. They got their pores open the whole time. That’s their nature, for Chrissake. See what I mean?” He turned way the hell around again to look at me.

“Oh,” I said. I let it drop. I was afraid he was going to crack the damn taxi up or something. Besides, he was such a touchy guy, it wasn’t any pleasure discussing anything with him. “Would you care to stop off and have a drink with me somewhere?” I said.

The book is loaded with gems like this interaction. It is a ridiculous, meandering narrative, but Salinger’s power of characterization transforms Holden’s seemingly pointless depression quest into a gripping novel.

I think the hatred that Holden invoked in my adolescent self deserves a deeper look. Perhaps you felt it too? Whether in Salinger’s time or our own, kids seem to always get to hating themselves. Why? Why?

A week or so back I posted a short rant about how the MBTA had adopted all of these TV screens and were using them as ad space rather than to communicate useful information. Well, as if god himself were listening, my very next trip to Malden Center proved me wrong.

Of course, this critical message was only one of many images in the rotation. It shows for a brief segment of time before switching back to ads. If you’ve grown to realize, like me, that the TVs have nothing more interesting than military recruitment posters, then why would you ever watch them for alerts in the first place? The fact that you have to endure advertisements to see if crucial ride information might pop up in the rotation is ridiculous.

One of these panels should be permanently set to rider information and alerts! It can be a permanent billboard, well labeled and specifically dedicated to announcements of this kind.

I am going to chalk this one up to ignorant design. I’m sure the MBTA can’t really afford the brainpower required to integrate a straightforward system on top of their existing information spaghetti of websites and apps. It is a miracle we get to ride the orange line in the first place. That said, if somebody consciously decided to mix alerts with the ads in order to force train goers to watch them all just in case an alert shows up… that’s evil man.

After completing my thesis, the academic portion of my brain shut down for a long time. It has been almost a year now since I have seriously written an essay or even read an academic text. A part of me (mainly the brain) feels very guilty about this, but the more physical portions of my body sigh relief every day. The work of creating an essay is long and thankless. It is hard on the body too, like inverse exercise. When seriously writing, I become nocturnal, I eat very little, and I jerk off constantly to the point of exhaustion. It isn’t a pretty sight.

Well, the old itch is starting to act up again. Now that my Minecraft mod is complete, memories of writing projects and ideas are starting to trickle back into my shower thoughts. Now that I am not shackled to a University, I can focus on exploring ideas that really speak to my interests. Of course, a lot of it surrounds video games. Now that I am not explicitly studying English, I can remove the explicit literary basis of my work and focus specifically on video games and gaming culture. I would like to attempt a true video game essay, and this time I want to do it write. No deadlines, no nocturnal cycles–writing for myself! And if it is good enough, perhaps I can share it with the world. I am old enough now to realize that greatness in writing takes endurance.

So, what have I been thinking about? My thesis focused on Robinsonades and ends with an analysis of “Robinsonade Games,” pretty much only talking about Minecraft. A Robinsonade, if you don’t know, is a genre of survival stories that begins with a shipwreck/planecrash/whatever and follows the adventures of trials of a protagonist surviving and thriving in the wild. “Robinsonade Games” is a term I have coined to describe video games that use this premise as a basis for open-ended gameplay loops. The popular but less descriptive term is “open world” games. As I detail briefly in my thesis, these kinds of games have dominated the popular market. From Minecraft to Breath of the Wild to the new and fantastic Elden Ring, open world exploration coupled with crafting and unscripted engagement with game objects has absolutely captivated the world.

These kinds of games are captivating because they cast aside traditional media tropes like linear plot and dialogue in favor of a more intuitive approach to play. They do not bog players down with tutorials or rules because there is intrinsic fun in discovering the game for oneself. Open world games often resemble toys (or a SANDBOX) more than traditional, story driven games. Like a bag of blocks or a forest trail, the game world provides players everything they need to make their own fun. What REALLY captivates me about these kinds of games how, in the absence of prescribed gameplay, players and communities of players invent their own styles of play. THAT is what my essays will seek to explore.

One of the few good parts of my thesis are the segments in which I attempt to describe how the popular approaches to playing Minecraft have changed over the course of a decade. I cite early survival tutorials and Lets Plays from 2011 and compare them to Dream’s Manhunts (if you don’t know what those are, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7t5B69G0Dw — A+ Minecraft content!!!). The popular Minecraft content from 2011-2012 presents the game as a kind of Crusoe-esque roleplay. The modern speedrunning tradition spearheaded by the likes of Dream, or the esport-ish Hypixel minigame servers, use Minecraft in a totally new way that redefine how the game is perceived. In my view, the power of these video games is that they provide a means for transforming gameplay into narrative. Really great games offer an unlimited potential for narrative building. I want to dig into this diversity of gameplay and explore how communities of players can influence popular modes of play, or innovate play, or create new and unintended experiences in the virtual world.

This is all pretty rough, as you can tell. I think I want to start with Factorio, a brilliant Robinsonade Game about an industrialist crash landing on an alien planet and exploiting the land to build automated factories and kill natives. Sci-fi Hatchet! Until then, thanks for reading.

OR… I could just work on Super Better Than Wolves version 2.0… 😛

Not a commercially viable product, but it sure is fun.

At the risk of completely doxxing myself, here is a picture taken today of the Malden Center MBTA station, inbound track side:

The ipad-looking devices in the center of this photograph are TV screens. They cycle between advertisements and mask advisories. Now, if you have ever rode the MBTA for any consistent period, you are certainly aware that the service is supremely inconsistent. Stations close suddenly all the time, delays are rampant, wait times are long, and sometimes they have you switch trains three times in a single trip for seemingly no reason. The orange line seems especially prone to these issues, but I am biased there.

Today, the stations between North Station and Back Bay were shut down. A shuttle service, buses (or a single bus, not certain), picked up the slack. My girlfriend and I were not made aware of this until some time into the trip when the train operator mumbled the situation into the microphone. This was actually pretty good for the Orange Line. Sometimes I am not aware the train has stopped its service until I look up from my phone to realize I am one of the only people left in an idle train while an angry voice spams me to get the hell off. These are rude surprises, and can extend thirty minute train rides into hour-long affairs, but at least we were aware this time.

It hit me, however, that there is no information about delays or closures anywhere in any of the stations. Sometimes the largest stations have attendants yelling about these things, but Malden Center is not one of these. It hit me that we have these fancy new ipad screens plastered all over the station and they function purely as revenue machines, ad space. Wouldn’t it be amazing if these things actually conveyed some useful information? How hard would it be to hook them into some kind of network and set them up to provide information about closures and delays? That way, I can know what I am getting into before I get on the train. It would be even better if this information were displayed BEFORE paying the fare, so I can save myself three dollars and go home.

This page serves as a basic recipe guide for the various crafting recipes that you may need while playing the Better Than Wolves. I have labeled every recipe, so ctrl+f will reveal that which you seek. The recipes are presented in a somewhat chronological list, with the most important survival recipes up front and the more complex, mechanical recipes at the bottom. This list is not exhaustive. It mainly serves to highlight crafting recipes that you will need to get started. It concludes with crafting a windmill, pictured above. A more robust guide will follow (someday!).

~RECIPES~

NOTE: Sawdust, sticks, branches, saplings, and some other flammables are great sources of fuel for the campfire. If the item hanging above the fire has white steam coming off of it, then it is cooking. Do not let the fire get too high for too long or the food will burn. Whole logs cannot be placed in the campfire or they will smother the fire.

NOTE: stone tools cannot be made with branches. The shaft would be too flimsy!

NOTE: Oak logs, birch logs, and coal are the best fuel, they will completely fill the fuel slot of an oven.

Most flammable items can be used as fuel in the oven.

NOTE: The only way to acquire a tuque is to knit. Wearing a tuque is strongly suggested.

NOTE: The millstone and hand crank work together to crush hemp into fibers.

NOTE: Hemp fibers can replace string in most recipes.

There are pigs afoot. Be careful out there.

If I remember correctly, today marks the third complete year of this website’s operation. As you may have realized, I have not been utilizing it as regularly as I have in the past. I have become somewhat burnt out on writing, and I have instead occupied these past few months with the pursuit a long held dream of mine. I am making a Minecraft mod!

I have been collaborating with people all over the world to produce a custom version of Better Than Wolves loaded with new content and tweaks to make the survival experience more engaging in the long term. Thanks to my friend Sockthing, it also adds these beautiful new gourds! Pumpkins and melons galore!

More exciting, they grow right on the vine in patches of creeping tendrils! This change will make farming feel a little more engaging and a lot less video-gamey. Any feature that encourages the player to build new structures (in this case, a dedicated pumpkin patch) is a great feature in my book. Systems that encourage the player to respond to problems creatively are at the heart of Minecraft’s design. Unfortunately, the bozos at Mojang seem to have forgotten that in their drive to make Minecraft like Terraria.

I have been having a blast with this project. Polishing my coding abilities while testing my sensibility for game design has been an extremely rewarding experience. Unfortunately, I doubt future employers are going to be impressed when I attribute my lack of portfolio worthy productivity to a niche Minecraft mod. Perhaps I can spin it..

For one thing, this project has given me a much more realistic perspective on making a video game. Seemingly simple feature ideas can stack up very quickly, and when it comes to actually programming them, sacrifices need to be made. A man can only stare at an IDE for so long before despair kicks in. And I have been *putting in the hours.* These past two weeks alone, I have streamed two sessions of roughly six hours of coding each. I can only imagine that the total hours of trying to mod Minecraft stack up into the triple digits at this point.

Another thing–this is a rare moment where a project I am working on is actually driving itself to completion. I have set myself some deadlines of course (many of which I have actually managed to meet), but there isn’t a boss or professor telling me to do this. Every day, I load up Eclipse for the pleasure of it. I love Minecraft, I love Better Than Wolves, and now I am finally putting this dedication toward contributing to these things myself. I’ve grown a stronger attachment to the wonderful BTW community, people that have selflessly walked me through so many hurdles and bugs and stupid questions. Never has my sense of purpose and belonging in life been stronger. Seriously.

While I hope that people will use my addon to create all kinds of amazing experiences and stories, I think I am the most excited to see it completed. I want to play this thing so bad. I want to sink a weekend and more into just playing my work, a Minecraft fugue.

So yes. That is why I haven’t posted much writing. I will try to be better. In the meantime, here is an excerpt from my BTW Player’s Guide:

Cows are gentle herbivores that amble lazily in search of fresh pastures to graze. In order to support their massive bulk, cows are constantly eating. In fact, a herd of these bovines could clear an entire field of grass in a few days!

Though generally tame, it is best not to spook a cow. Their powerful legs can deliver deadly kicks from behind, and, despite their immense size, an enraged cow can cover a lot of ground quickly. This makes cows much harder to hunt than other animals, though the prize of taking one down is sometimes worth the risk. Cows hold within themselves a surplus of food and crafting material. The beef within a cow is extremely nourishing, and their hides can be cut to make leather armor. Finally, the bones of a cow are hard enough to craft a pickaxe out of, which will grant you the ability to break solid stone and mine for ore.

If you want to hunt a cow, it is best for your health to trap it in a pit or take it down from a distance with a bow. A cow doesn’t need to be killed, however, to benefit the player. A man can survive on milk for days, and cows are happy to provide their milk to anyone with a bucket. If the udder is engorged, then the cow is holding plenty of delicious milk to harvest, but take heed: do not try to milk a cow that doesn’t have a full udder! It bothers them to be poked and prodded.

Thanks to their hardy nature and tough hooves, cows can survive a night of monster attacks better than most animals. If the zombies had any brains, they’d leave the bovines alone.

Once again, we find ourselves living under the yolk of the bomb. Behind all the posturing and the bluster is one simple fact: they’ve got atomics, and they might just use them.

Ma made spaghetti 

every night, to the tooth,

like unrefined grain. And if you did

not eat it, she’d bite her hand and cuss.

Her slipper would connect with your

jaw and you would sleep

bruised, hungry.

Ma’s rules, said Sal, weren’t too hard.

“Come home when the streetlamps come on.”

Well, what if they never came on?

Sometimes my brothers would tell me

to do things without explicitly saying 

anything at all. Laced together, 

my sneakers, worn flat, hand-me-down ragged, 

made a bolas. I gave them a Lone Ranger lasso swing and 

fwoop, missed.

I shattered the lamp on the

second swing and Stephen started running.

I knew he’d tell but I couldn’t chase him on account

of my shoes hanging from the pole and 

the sidewalk being about a mile or so of beer bottle.

I took a shortcut over papa’s grape wall, but

I slid on some moss and cut myself ten thousand times

invisibly 

on the crab grass below. A shower of rich 

black pustules pelted the earth. A single

exploding grape permanently alters a white shirt.

Ma was ready with the slipper when I got inside.

I knew Stephen was sitting

just around the corner,

listening from the bottom step.

I have kept this image on my computer all year. When the politicians attempt their brain-melting trickery, I look at this picture to remind myself where I stand:

Over one year ago today, a protestor wielding a traitorous confederate flag was allowed to prowl the seat of our legislature. Others wore Nazi paraphernalia or openly supported white-race militias. Others were just idiots, but they were all united in a common cause: to overthrow a democratic election. The president of the United States sat by and watched the show, his face glued to Fox News and Twitter.

From experience I know that many of the more conservative leaning people of the United States become irritated when the word “fascist” is used to describe certain behaviors that the right has undertaken in recent years, but the January 6th riot pretty much wraps the word in a bow. Storming a democratic process with the intent to disrupt a democratic election, capture politicians, and and steal documents is exactly the sort of activity that a Brownshirt would engage in. And as we know from our history classes, the Brownshirts were a rabble, a militia. The thugs that the KGB/whatever Putin calls them now hire to kidnap and torture Russian dissidents are people willing to do dirty work for cash. The idiots that are willing to attack Democratic institutions in the name of their glorious leaders are the foundation of future fascist states. History has shown us the fruits of this path over and over again, but, as my old history teacher once said, “people just don’t know their history.”

I can’t guess what the average Trumpy wants, and I suspect they are not entirely sure what they want, either. The Neo-Nazis and the Neo-Confederates, however, have very well defined prejudices and goals. They want America to be a new China or a new Russia- a state run by bosses, fueled by slavery, and controlled by force. The greatest failure of the Trump administration (and there is a heap of failures taller than a skyscraper), was the elevation of these fascists to political relevance. The worst part is, there is in all likelihood an alarming number of people out there that see this trajectory as a success.

Don’t let the fascists win. They want to enslave us and rot the heart of democracy out of our world. Let January 6th stand as a reminder that our way of life is always transitory. Unless we work to maintain and improve the values of the United States, our country is just as likely as any other to go the way of Rome and erode softly into failure.

I like the idea of observing January 6th as a day of reflection on the state of our government. When there is enough grievance to allow confederates to rally the masses, then there is something seriously wrong here. On the other hand, perhaps there has always been a violence-idolizing strain of America obsessed with bringing back the old ways. If that latter case is true and the confederates are mobilizing once again, then get the guns ready fellow Patriots because it is time to remind the traitors what it feels like to be the losers.

We made the most of it.

At this rate, it looks like Inktober is going to run into Thanksgiving.

I discovered, recently, an essential aspect of the fall season that grows as the days shorten and the trees grow bare. , I feel a keen sense of foreboding. It is a foreboding for the cold. It is a foreboding for the dark. Dark days and drizzling winds carry a whisper of winter. Foreboding is at the heart of this perilous and exciting time of year!

Get out there and enjoy it while it lasts.

America, wealthiest nation on Earth, hub of global innovation, is the only place that doesn’t offer you free, straightforward healthcare. Our nation also lacks a slew of other safety nets and nice things that our friends across the water have had for decades. Perhaps you have heard this all before. That’s good, because this really simple discrepancy in the civilized world is finally reaching ears. I had the good fortune of living in London for a while, and I was floored by how easy it was to settle in and get some healthcare. I didn’t even have to sit on the phone with anybody or log into a digital portal, and it was completely free. When people in Europe pay their taxes, they get that money back in services. In America, tax money seems to enter a black hole. Or, more accurately, it lines the pockets of a thousand bureaucrats and inevitably returns to the richest people on the planet.

I am very happy to live in Massachusetts. Though “Taxachusetts” is sometimes a painfully valid nickname, our state actually has services to offer its residents. We pay our home-care providers, we give disabled people quality educations and jobs (not quite minimum wage though), and if you need health insurance you will be able to find some. We also support the best universities and public schools on the planet, fostering the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to live such technologically advanced lives. Our state does amazing things with its taxes, which is more than one could say for New Hampshire, Mass’s cranky northern brother that skims tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes from individual homeowners every year and only offers its residents opium addiction and anti-abortion legislation. Hey, at least we can shop up there tax free!

All I’m saying is, the taxes aren’t going away. They just aren’t. Anybody that claims to lower your taxes is lying, or else they are moving your taxes on to somebody else (hint: somebody poorer). So rather than throwing up our hands and letting the politicians pocket our money and walk, why don’t we try to make taxes work for us? If you are going to be taking our money anyway, I better get a tangible good out of it.

Oh wait… somehow this discussion always falls to the small folk, the lower and middle class taxpayers. There does exist in this insane year of our lord 2021 a class of people that wield such an incredible mass of wealth that collecting a few billion from only a handful of them would easily pay a lion’s share in services. How did this happen? There was a point in American history when the stars aligned for the ultra-rich and they finally managed to get a puppet into office. His name was Ronald Reagan, and by his decree our nation was plunged into a forty year+ reign of conservative policies that have allowed levels of wealth inequality to match that of the oil and steel barons of the early 20th century.

Now you are probably thinking, “well shit, if only we had somebody up in the white house willing to consider amending–” WAIT WE DO. Trump is out of office, and Biden’s limping operation, geriatric as it is, has put forth some really straightforward ideas about moving taxes off the working class and onto the tech gods. These measures one-by-one have been shot down, of course–first by republicans and then by democrats. Both are in the pockets of billionaires. Remember the old cave man maxim: “Democrat bad. Republican worse. All lizards.”

The latest attempt to tax billionaires by collecting off their asset gains is novel, temporary, and probably won’t even get off the ground:

“The tax would be levied on anyone with more than $1 billion in assets or more than $100 million in income for three consecutive years — which applies to about 700 people in the United States. Initially, the legislation would impose the capital gains tax — 23.8 percent — on the gain in value of billionaires’ tradable assets, based on the original price of those assets.”

“Billionaires have avoided taxation by paying themselves very low salaries while amassing fortunes in stocks and other assets. They then borrow off those assets to finance their lifestyles, rather than selling the assets and paying capital gains taxes.” -Jonathan Weisman

700 people could give a fraction of their wealth so that we can invest in infrastructure and fix our healthcare, and they won’t. Let that sink in. You should be mad.

Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, has decided that this proposed billionaire tax is unfair:

“‘I [Manchin] don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people.” People, he added, that “contributed to society” and “create a lot of jobs and invest a lot of money and give a lot to philanthropic pursuits.'”

Manchin, of course, makes millions in kickbacks from the fossil fuels industry and probably millions more in invisible bribes that we will never know.

Yes, praise be the techies. Our mech overlords, hallowed and merciful, have already done so much for us. We should leave them alone to play with their fancy electric cars and launch rockets while normal people perish in overstocked hospitals and starve in the streets.

Perhaps the Besos’s of America will remember the people that made them. They probably won’t. Never forget that we pay well above our fair share in taxes so they don’t have to. God bless Amazon.

To live in a new world.