Retro Review: Thief 2

An arrow to the face is never healthy.

The reboot of the Thief franchise awoke a desire in me to replay the original trilogy, starting with Thief 2: The Metal Age, the only game in the series I'd never finished. I wanted to see if my memory of the high quality of the originals was accurate, or if I was viewing these old games with my nostalgia glasses on. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; too often we feel that because we loved something in the past, especially when we were young, that that thing is truly great and worthy of our fond memories. We become biased. We think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a classic cartoon/comic book, and how dare Hollywood and Micheal Bay touch our precious memories? TMNT is a pretty fucking stupid concept. The original creators even admitted as much. But for some reason, we're obsessed with the preciousness of our childhoods, and that includes all the junk pop-culture we mindlessly consumed as adolescents. I guess it's because youth is something we cannot recapture; therefore, anything that reminds us of our formative years become a fetish, and we paw and mishandle said thing, futilely grasping for that "teenage feeling." Whatever, I don't know. Let's not mistake ravings and quick conclusions for anything concrete.

Thief 2 was the last game Looking Glass Studios ever made. It was released in 2000 and somewhat rushed by Eidos, its publisher, because of the commercial failure of Ion Storm's Daikatana, a truly terrible game that I might replay/review someday out of a masochistic desire to understand the late Nineties video game industry. Nostalgia rears its ugly head once more. Anyway, Thief 2 flew under my radar when it was released, probably because I was fifteen and more interested in playing multiplayer mods for Half-Life and Unreal Tournament than messing with a first person sneaker. Thief invented its own genre, with its only real descendent being Dishonored. The object is to hide from enemies, and either avoid them all together or knock them out with your blackjack and drag their bodies to a nice hiding spot, all while collecting loot. Avoid loud surfaces like tile and gravel; stick to carpet, grass, and stone. The shadows are your friend, though any quick movement, even in total darkness, can render the unwary thief seen. It's a deep, atmospheric game, with complex sound and visual systems that the player can influence with a variety of unique arrows. Moss arrows dampen sound, allowing you to cross noisy surfaces, where water arrows take out torches, giving you more darkness. Noise arrows distract guards, while fire arrows relight torches, and rope arrows provide vertical access to otherwise unreachable locations. The complexity of these systems makes Thief 2 an adult game; I know I didn't possess the patience or understanding as a teenager to appreciate the series. Nostalgia, it seems, is not always wrong.

The aforementioned systems of light and sound manipulation are preserved to some degree in the 2014 reboot. What that game missed, however, is almost everything else. Thief games take place in a dark fantasy universe influenced by the Medieval and Victorian periods, with dashes of Steampunk (anachronistic steam-powered machines and tech--think Jules Verne, or even Brisco County Junior) to finish off the cocktail. This universe features two opposing religious groups: the Pagans, a collection of wild people and monsters who worship the Trickster God, who is a sort of amalgamation of Satan and Pan; and the Hammerites, a strict, industry-obsessed order (think the Medieval church) who pray to the Master Builder. These factions are overseen and secretly manipulated by the Keepers, a magical secret cult who read the future by interpreting glyphs. Everything takes place in the City, a sprawling feudal society built upon various versions of itself. This is a pretty dense stew, yet Thief 2 adds another faction, the Mechanists, who split from the Hammers and are able to build steampunk security cameras and giant combat robots. So there's a lot of mythology created in just the two original games, a mythology that serves to flesh out the experience of playing Thief 2. As a writer, I've always admired world building. I play video games to be transported to another world, and Thief 2 does this better than its newest relation.

 Not quite 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but close.

The early Thief games are exploratory experiences. They are nonlinear; the player proceeds through large, labyrinthian environments with nothing more than a crude map and a compass. Thief 2 features some amazingly large levels. There are sprawling estates, a huge bank, a lighthouse and submarine, a trip across the roof tops of the city to climb up a towering fortress. I am reminded of Tim Burton's Batman while exploring Thief 2; there's an Art Deco look to some of its architecture. The freedom to be set loose, without a thousand hand-holding prompts to look at this or go here, is a feature sadly missing from modern game design. The player is not trusted in Call of Duty; you can't even open a door without a buddy. You're a sad sack along for the ride, just there to mindlessly shoot at foreign caricatures. Thief trusts the player, and such trust was an essential element to Looking Glass Studios' games. Dark Souls is the only game I've played recently to bring to mind the sort of exploratory freedom inherent to the Thief series (though almost completely missing in Thief 2014). 

Angelwatch. Nice Art Deco angel. Looks like something Batman would roost on.

The plot focuses on Garrett, player character, master thief and former Keeper initiate, who becomes entangled in the schemes of Karras, the lispy, genius inventor who commands the Mechanist order. Karras seeks to wipe out all organic life; he thinks that he is a prophet and performing the will of the Master Builder. This sort of religious fanaticism is interesting, for it's uncommon in games, which usually tend to be apolitical or jingoistic (Call of Duty), whatever will sell more. Garrett ends up looking to the Pagans for help, despite them being the antagonists of the first game. Garrett is a likeable antihero. He's a thief, and not above killing (though killing humans results in mission failure on Expert difficulty level), though he grows enough as a character to keep our interest, while still maintaining his roguish self-serving charm.

Missions proceed as a list of objects, most of which can be accomplished in any order the player likes. One cool thing about Thief is that you almost always have to find your way out after completing your goals. Most missions take over an hour to finish. According to the game clock, Thief 2 took me over fourteen hours to complete, but that's not counting deaths and restarts, of which there will be plenty. Thief 2 is difficult, but less so than Thief: The Dark Project. The AI will jump on you if you mess up, either by being too careless in your movements or too obvious, though they are easily thwarted by climbing a ladder or a wall. There's an important balance to keep in mind when making stealth games; you don't want too-smart AI, or otherwise the game wouldn't be fun, yet you don't want AI you can literally dance around. Thief 2 strikes a good balance. The 2014 reboot does well with AI, though it sometimes tows the line between too unforgiving and just smart enough.

A tree beast, a Pagan monster. These things are scary as hell. The sound design of Thief 2 is beyond compare.

New gamers might be put off by the lack of direction. The inventory system is hard to navigate, for you essentially have to cycle through all your items before reaching the one you need. The graphics aren't good, though you can improve them with a readily available fan patch.  The ending leaves a little to be desired, which is why I think I never completed it years ago. You have to repeat the same level, Casing the Joint and Masks, an obvious sign that Looking Glass was rushed, and then you embark on the epic scavenger hunt that is Soulforge, with its harsh architecture and legions of waddling robots. Yet, all together, these are small flaws that do little to distract from the core quality of the game.

Immersive Sim is the term used to describe Thief, System Shock, and Deus Ex. Games like this aren't really being made anymore--the newest Deus Ex is good, but it doesn't have the freedom of the original, and neither does Thief 2014.  Those looking for well-written, atmospheric entertainment who have somehow missed the Thief series should check it out. It's usually available for under ten bucks on Steam or Good Old Games.

Final Rating: Honey Crisp-sweet, crunchy, and filling like any good meal.

 

Book Review: Frankenstein

Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare, the cover art on my copy of Frankenstein

Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to remedy a history of lazy reading by going through the classics. As a writer, it's important to have a constant diet of literature to serve as inspiration for one's own work, not to mention the knowledge and experiences gained through reading in general. Since I've been interested in both the horror and Gothic genres, I decided to tackle Frankenstein, and wow, I don't think I've disliked a book this much since my freshmen high school English teacher made us read Toni Morrison's Beloved.

The story of Frankenstein has been bastardized and rewritten almost beyond recognition ever since cinema started adapting the novel, therefore bringing it to the public consciousness. One of the most common errors made is referring to the monster as 'Frankenstein'; Victor Frankenstein is the creature's creator, and his creation is never given an actual name but instead referred to as the 'daemon' or 'fiend,' as well as countless other negative epithets. The monster has no bolts emerging from his neck, and the particularities of his creation are glossed over, so there's no throwing of the switch, no electrical life-giving, no shouting "it's alive, it's alive, it's alive!" The metaphor of man abusing science is preserved, however, and it's this theme that's probably Frankenstein's greatest legacy. The Island of Dr. Moreau, Jurassic Park, and countless others have played with the same basic story, and it's important to recognize this, despite the work's other failings.

So, during the epistolary introduction, we meet Victor Frankenstein, a haggard, beaten young man, who, after being found marooned on an iceberg, relates his life story to the naive leader of a failing Arctic expedition. Just a few years prior, Victor was a passionate college student, influenced by ancient apocryphal texts as well as new advances in the sciences. He learns chemistry and eventually discovers the secret of life, which is never revealed. Victor uses his knowledge to construct a new being, the creature, an eight-foot tall idealized man. When he brings his creature to life, however, he is immediately stricken by his ghoulish appearance (the creature is described as having taut, translucent skin that reveals all of his inner workings), and subsequently flees, abandoning his nascent creation. Victor, I think, is supposed to be a sympathetic character, but it is at this point in the novel that the reader first experiences disbelief. Victor has been working on this project for months; his health has suffered; he's neglected correspondence with his family, and we're to believe that he'd run away like a little ninny after achieving what would be heralded as the greatest scientific feat of all time? Victor retreats to his friend Henry's care, and is more or less bedridden for half of a year by what amounts to a panic attack. Our protagonist's delicate constitution shall reveal itself throughout the novel, to the point where the reader has grown quite tired of Victor's fragile health. I don't know, maybe it's a Victorian thing; pre-antibiotic times were tough, I'm sure, but I couldn't help coming away with the conclusion that Victor is a pussy, especially considering his later actions.

So after recovering from his women's ailment, Victor returns to his home country of Sweden, essentially forgetting about the eight-foot tall monster he's created. Cue suspension of disbelief. Victor doesn't even really try to look for his monster; he visits his lab, shrugs his shoulders, and off to Sweden he goes. Mary Shelly must have had it in for scientists, because Victor comes off looking like the the world's dumbest, most irresponsible human-being. When he gets home, Vic discovers that his brother has been murdered, with his family's harmless nurse Justine the chief suspect. Upon investigating the scene of the crime, Victor spots his monster, who flees. He puts two and two together and figures that the creature is to blame. YET HE DOES NOTHING when Justine is put to trial and convicted, on the basis that no one would believe him. She dies because of him, he knows she's innocent, and he chooses to remain silent. At this point all of the reader's sympathy for Victor has vanished, since he's revealed himself to be a selfish, self-pitying asshole. Oh God, the whining. Victor whines, complains, and cries woe is me constantly after this point in the novel. Our suspicions that he is a pussy are confirmed, and it is only the allure of the monster that keeps us reading.

After the trial, the creature confronts Victor, and reveals his past. Awakening dumb and innocent, he wanders into a village and is driven away because of his fearful appearance. He lives in the woods, eventually moving into a wood shed, where he can watch a rural family. From their interactions, he learns to speak, and he teaches himself to read after finding a copy of Paradise Lost. There are references to the aforementioned work throughout the novel; Victor is compared to Satan, the creature to Adam. When the creature works up the courage to introduce himself to this family, whom he's fallen in love with, they attack him and drive him away. He subsequently vows revenge on Frankenstein for bringing him into a life of loneliness and misery; hence his murder of Victor's brother and his framing of Justine. The creature tells Victor he'll stop killing his family members if Vic will make him a female counterpart, and Victor reluctantly agrees.

The creature is an interesting character; despite his brutal actions, the reader can't help but feel sorry for him, since he never experiences a positive interaction with humanity. I feel like the novel should've been told from the creature's perspective. Instead, we get asshole Victor.

Victor isolates himself on a remote island somewhere off the coast of England after journeying there with his buddy Henry. He builds a laboratory and commences work on a second creature, only to suddenly renege when he becomes conscientious and fearful of the consequences of his actions. He theorizes that the two creatures would breed and produce a malevolent race that would wipe out mankind. I don't really know what kind of scientist Victor is. A dumb one, I guess. How two creature could produce enough progeny to challenge the human race without inbreeding, I can't imagine. All the presupposed malevolency of his creature is an imagining of Victor's--his creature has known nothing but violence and hatred, so how else should he act? I think the creature's deal was very fair, yet when he shows up at Vic's lab, our wonderful humanitarian tells him the deal's off. The creature, predictably, is pissed, and tells him more or less that he's going to kill everyone Victor loves. Victor, somehow, misinterprets this, especially the line "I'll be with you on your wedding day." Vic takes this to mean the creature will kill him when he marries his sweetheart Elizabeth, despite the fact that the creature has done nothing but strike at Vic's friends and family, while leaving him to suffer. His friend Henry is soon murdered, and still he does not connect the dots. He proceeds with his wedding to Elizabeth, vowing to kill the creature, keeping a pistol on him; yet he allows her to retire by herself immediately after the wedding. The creature murders her. At this points the reader has had enough of our brilliant scientist, and we wonder how the hell Vic was smart enough to bring the creature to life in the first place.

The fact that Shelly glosses over the creature's creation raises many questions. For instance, did he simply reanimate dead tissue like in the movies? If so, why doesn't Victor ever consider using his knowledge to bring his murdered family members back to life? Probably because all Victor can do is think of himself.

So Victor vows to kill the monster (Christ, why'd you wait till he killed everybody?) and that's how he ends up in the Arctic. The conclusion is disappointing; Victor dies of pussiness (he really does; he dies in the ship's cabin from some unnamed ailment, unable to confront his monster) and the creature finally gets his revenge, though we're left uncertain to his fate.

This is the first book of Mary Shelly's I've ever read; she's known mainly for Frankenstein and nothing else. Did she mean to make Victor so unlikeable? Is his arrogant and selfish nature a commentary on scientists of her day? Her main theme, that science is a dangerous tool, is not quite conveyed to the reader, since Victor's problems could have easily been prevented had he but not abandoned his monster. I guess not every classic is truly a classic.

Final rating: Red Delicious. 

Apophenia Chapter Two

School 8/16/08

Hoover University does not have a beautiful, idyllic campus. There is some pleasant landscaping and a slender clock tower that stretches two-hundred feet into the sky, but for the most part it’s a nondescript environment. All the buildings are utilitarian and brick, flat-roofed, with sterile insides and windowless classrooms. There are kids riding their bikes, walking around with headsets, moving in great crowds like the migratory herds of African megafauna. I fade in and march with the stream, flowing down the main strip, heading toward the Victor B. Tooms Liberal Arts Center, a hulking rectangular structure. There is a mulberry tree near the entrance, and a stick-limbed boy with disheveled hair is reaching into the branches, plucking berries and tossing them into his mouth. He sees me staring and nods, murmuring to himself. His lips are purplish-red, and he’s gotten stains all over the collar of his yellow-green soccer shirt. His backpack is tiny and pink, like a little girl’s. I want to punch him in the throat, but the odds aren’t with me, so I walk past and enter the Tooms building. My classroom is the first door on the right. I sit down at a desk and stare at the diminutive form of Peter Gibbons, professor of Creative Writing extraordinaire, AKA the Great Communicator, a friend to students, a lover of discussion and its inherent chaos.

            “Hey Leona!” he says. We are the only people in the classroom. “I think, uuh, I’m afraid we may have an issue.” Professor Gibbons has a nasal voice, thick beard, and wide-rimmed glasses. He’s dressed in black jeans and a black turtle neck, looking quite the poet, I must say.

            “What do you mean?” I ask in my most innocent voice.

            “Apparently you, uumm, assaulted Chad Arroyo outside of class yesterday. I found him gasping for breath and holding his throat. He wrote your name on a piece of paper.”

            “That’s odd,” I reply. “I don’t recall punching Chad, and I don’t really understand why anyone would want to.”

            “Come on, you, uuuhh, you have to admit that you and Chad don’t agree on much, and your disagreements are rarely civil,” he says, his eyebrows arching. Gibbons is a frequent devotee of the filled pause, a curious habit, I guess, for a professor.

            “Can you see me hitting anyone?” I ask, showing him my tiny fists. “These are women’s hands. I can rarely find gloves that fit them. They aren’t made for fighting.”

            “Leona, I can’t, uuuhhh, verify this incident, but I feel like you should resolve your differences with Chad before the situation, you know, escalates.”

            “Let me ask you something: did anybody see me hit Chad? Were there any witnesses? Where’s the evidence, I guess, is what I’m saying.”

            Professor Gibbons shakes his head, his shoulders rising spastically. I can tell he doesn’t believe me, but other students have entered the classroom. He doesn’t have anything on me, just a scrawled name, and I’m not about to confess to hurting Chad Arroyo, who walks in and takes the seat right next to mine. He’s looking at me, trying to bore a hole through my head, but I open my notebook and begin to mindlessly doodle. “Leona,” he whispers. A featureless face has taken nascent form on the paper before me, a great head with owl-like eyes. “Hey, hey! Excuse me!” says Chad. I give the thing a bloated torso and stubby limbs. Its eyes are disquieting. They are dream eyes, eyes that stare out from blackness, empty and cold. They say things to me, things I can’t recall while conscious. A hand appears on my desk, fleshy, covered in fine hairs. It is a well-manicured hand, one that does not know hard labor, and once again a violent urge seizes me and I almost stab it with my pencil.

            “What do you need, Chadwick?” I ask, still working on my drawing.

            “Can you look at me while I’m talking to you?” he says.

            “I would rather not,” I reply.

            “Why did you hit me yesterday?” he asks.

            “You must be mistaken,” I say. “I would never hit someone.”

            “You know, I could’ve reported you, and then you might have been expelled.”

            I look at Chad. He’s short, oval-faced, his hair combed off to the right side of his head, giving it an almost toupee appearance. His jeans are too tight, and he’s wearing skateboard shoes with no laces and no socks.

            “You’d tell administration that you got beat up by a girl?” I say.

            “I didn’t get beat up. You punched me in the throat.”

            “So do something about it, you pussy,” I say, looking back at my drawing.

            “Besides report you? What do you mean, like hit you? You think I should’ve hit you?”    

            “Or go tattle. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

            “There’s something wrong with you,” he says, moving to another desk.      

“How is everybody today?” says Professor Gibbons, his voice modulating upward. “What did everybody do over the weekend?” Gibbons always starts off class like this; he gets all excited and energetic, like he feeds off of sunny vibes and reckless youth, and suddenly the ums and uhs vanish, and his sentences rattle off like machine gun fire. 

            “I played the new Fallout and kind of forgot about life,” says Dexter, last name unknown, some starched shirt wearing, long-legged, wannabe poet.

            “Me and my sorority sisters went up to Chicago and ate pizza and hit the bars and visited family, and like, totally drank too much, and, you know, had like a great time!” says Roxanne, clad in pink sweats, hair in a bun, her eyes too far apart.

            “Fuckin’ A,” says Chad.

            “To be young. Yes, the exciting adventures of youth! Language, though, Chad,” says Gibbons.

              “There’s some dude eating berries off of the tree by the doors,” says Chad. “Did anybody see this weirdo?”

            “Yeah, that guy does that like every other day,” says Robert or Rupert, I can’t ever remember. He’s a fat kid with an enormous toad-like head who always wears flip flops no matter the weather. I loathe the sight of his pasty white feet, large-nailed, soft and translucent.

            “Let’s talk about poetry!” yells Gibbons. “This is creative writing, remember? Everyone get out a piece of paper and write twenty words. No thinking, just do it.” This is a typical exercise, one that the prof likes to use about once a week. He loves free-writing, just absolutely adores it; I am fairly certain that if given the option, he would spend his days vomiting out onto the page one disparate sentence after another, the end result being a pretentious mess of incomprehensible nonsense.

            “Chad, read what you wrote,” says Gibbons.

            “Punk hardcore twee remodifier, twisted at the hip, nailed to the cross, cigarette in the pocket: I’m blessed. Love: Mom.”

            “Yeah, that’s good, yeah, uuummm, excellent!” says Gibbons. “This is what I tell you people: you don’t have to labor over art. You don’t have to rack your brain and cut off your ear. I mean, that might help—passion’s great and all—but the amount of time spent on a piece doesn’t necessarily ensure its quality. It’s subjective, of course, what exactly constitutes great art. People have wildly differing opinions. Britney Spears and the Beatles, you know, which is better? I have my opinion and you have yours.”

            “But my opinion’s the best,” I say.

            “How is it the best?” asks Chad.

            “Well, you like Radiohead, for instance, as everyone here well knows. I can give you a million reasons why they suck. Thom York looks like a sleepy-eyed gnome, and he caterwauls to no end, and after Ok Computer they started putting out tuneless nonsense. Kid A sounded like B-sides married to Aphex Twin drum beats. They don’t play their guitars much anymore. Thom exchanged them for Pro Tools.”

            “Leona, would you please…” begins Gibbons.

            “And the Beatles are objectively better than Britney Spears, who came from the Mickey Mouse Club and MTV, and who had like a billion songwriters working side by side with marketers trying to figure out how best to sell her sex appeal to adolescents and make her record company millions. She can’t sing, she can’t write, he’s just hot,” I finish, not knowing why I’m so agitated.

            “The Beatles are overrated,” says Robert/Rupert.

            “I’ve never been too fond of them,” responds Dexter.

            “The Velvet Underground are the indie Beatles,” states Chad.

            “So what you’re saying is that her art lacks integrity,” says Gibbons. “Is that right, Leona?”

            “Yeah, I guess,” I say.

              “And you don’t think the Beatles made music for money?”

            “Well, no, I know they did, but they wrote their own stuff and played their own instruments,” I reply.

            “So all music must be written by performers in order to be good?” asks Gibbons.

            “No,” I say, while knowing where he’s going with this.

            “When you have a piece of art, you divorce it from its creator and the creator’s intentions,” says Gibbons. “You judge it on its own merits.”

            “Why can’t you have criteria for judging art?” I ask. The rest of the class sighs; they’re tired of my arguing and my contrarian disposition. I don’t particularly care.

            “A good piece of art is successful in doing whatever it was created to do. By that criterion, Womanizer is a fine song. You, Leona, obviously have your own criteria by which you judge art. Is your opinion better than mine? Who decides? Writing music or poetry isn’t like building a bridge or solving an equation. Do you understand what I’m getting at?” asks Gibbons.

            “Maybe you should be a math major,” suggests Chad.

            “Maybe you should stop wearing women’s jeans,” I say.

            “Okay, discussion time has ended,” says Gibbons. I listen to his lecture for a while, but I soon start to drift into the hazy netherworld of the daydream. Doodles fill my notebook, surrealistic creatures and geometric shapes. I manage to draw a decent caricature of Diesel, his head a football-shaped moon, saliva dripping from his yawning maw. Most of the class is paying attention except for a boy in a green army jacket. He always wears a Stetson hat with a turkey feather emerging from the band, and he has this hat pulled down low; his hand moves fast over a notebook, a large hand with big knuckles and protruding veins. He could be drawing the same things that I am—maybe he even has a brother named after a type of engine. I read an article the other day that suggested it was possible and maybe even probable that we are all living in a simulation based on mathematical laws. Like, there’s some advanced posthuman civilization that decides to simulate life using unimaginably powerful computers. Since simulating the entire universe on an atomic level would require an infinite amount of energy, it is reasonable to assume that they would look to conserve resources, hence, this could all be a show put on for my benefit. Professor Gibbons, Chad, Stetson hat guy, they’re all shadow people, zombies, and if I go and look at Stetson guy’s notebook, drawings will magically appear. A connection will be forged on the basis of randomly generated data. Of course, maybe I’m the shadow person. Maybe I don’t have thoughts. Maybe this is the first second of my life, and as soon as I walk out of this classroom, I shall cease to be.

            The rustling of papers disturbs my reverie. I hear the tail-end of a sentence from Gibbons mentioning that there will be a quiz on Wednesday, which is interesting, since we never have quizzes. I look around to ask someone what he said, but there’s no one sitting next to me.

            Arroyo flicks a wad of paper at me as he gets up for the door. It hits me in the tits. I unroll it and discover a ten digit code that I presume to be a phone number. Instead of throwing it in the garbage, I stuff the paper in my pocket.

            “Leona,” says Gibbons as I prepare to leave.

            “What,” I say.

            “We can’t have these frequent, um, distractions every, uuuhhh, class. I know you have strong views on, uuumm, art, but we can’t rehash the same conversation. I’d appreciate it if you kept that in mind.”

            “What are we having a quiz over?” I ask, figuring I can’t fall any lower in Gibbons’ eyes.

            “Stalin’s Mustache,” he says, looking at me shrewdly from behind his thick frames. The aforementioned volume is a two-hundred page collection of poems written by the prof about, you guessed it, Joseph Stalin’s facial hair.

            “Any particular poem I should read over?” I ask.

            “Just read as many as you can,” says Gibbons.

            “Sure,” I replying, wondering how many cups of spiked coffee that will take.

…

            I’m sorry to do this to you, dear reader, but I have to insert one of Gibbons’ poems. You need to suffer as I did. Imagine reading a small novel of this stuff.

Stalin’s Mustache: An Affirmation

It wasn’t unexpected, you furry wet leach, that your sexy shimmering shaking would lead to something of an affair, which, now don’t get me wrong, brotha (reduced to the vernacular, yet again) I enjoyed as much as a man/boy/woman/transvestite could, especially when considering the rather fecal circumstances that you are undoubtedly loath to remember, seeing how you shat spanked cummed your way through the interview, filthy hobo that you are, you dirty girl/boy/baby, you ridiculous fat swine, you smelly flee-bitten poopy-eared Commie, you hairy twat, you stinky taint, you delicate beautiful busty whore, I really, really, really, really want to forget/preserve/consume/digest you, but alas, the Dictator prevents it, he is always getting in the way of our bristly porcine love, and I like to think that some day, you and I shall walk together, man and mustache, hand in hand, foot in mouth, genitals joined in whiskery abandon.

A Poem from Apophenia

What am I but an extension of my mother’s labyrinth,

 a creature meant to bend and slide through corridors of refuse,

walking on the chipped pavement till my shoes rot away and my soul touches the grimy earth that yearns to swallow me as it has swallowed millions like me,

 women teetering on the tremulous, sharp edged blade of time,

 turning out their pockets for cigarette stubs,

 shrugging off advances and bills and weak paychecks and everyday people who would

eat your heart if they could,

 slice it up and spice it up on a plate,

 the inevitable pull of currents dragging us downward,

 pregnant and dilapidated, maids to trolls, keepers of the brood,

 a sorry lot of bed-wetters, prospective alcoholics,

 future drug addicts and wife beaters,

 little boys and girls who just weren’t able to be happy,

 just like their mothers, just like their mother’s great sprawling messes,

 abysses that yawn and call for more and more and more,

 their stomachs as endless as the company I keep,

 my kin, my kind, my home.

Music: Lover's Story

I wrote this song today. I think it is pretty. That is all. Listen on Soundcloud.

Video Game Review: Thief (2014)

One thing is certain, Thief is pretty.

Thief is the sequel to the classic first person stealth games developed by the now defunct Looking Glass studios. This is a series frequently cited to be among the greatest games of all time, so the expectations for this new title, which is a reboot, are high. Like the Looking Glass games, you control Garrett, a master Thief who has the ability to disappear in darkness, and who disdains combat as a sign of amateurism. The game, however, still leaves you capable of dispatching your enemies with a variety of arrows, though combat is certainly discouraged. Sneaking up behind enemies and bopping them on the head with the blackjack to render them unconscious is a better idea, or just avoiding them all together. Though the previous games let the player use the blackjack, I wish the game would differentiate between knocking a guard out and killing them, since, in both cases, the end result is the same. Guards could wake up after about three minutes and resume their search, and if the player knocks them out again, it could be lethal. But alas, that might make a hard and unforgiving game, which Thief can be.

 Hey, a Keeper Library. But where are the Keepers?

For a game that wants the player to pay attention to its story, Thief's narrative sure is incomprehensible drivel. During the prologue, Garrett loses his protege, an unlikable noisy, murderous thief named Erin, when she falls to her apparent doom from a roof top into a mystic ceremony involving a magic MacGuffin called the Primal and the city's leader, a totalitarian old fart called the Baron. Garrett is knocked out, somehow for a year, and when he wakes up, he's got a piece of the Primal lodged in his eye, which is the game's explanation for his Focus ability, which lets you see traps and loot easier. Soon, he's involved with Orion, a populist leader who wants to recover the Primal for some reason that's never explained. Nothing gets explained with this game: the only character that isn't a half-written cliche is Garrett's fence Basso, who disappears before the game's third act. The narrative reeks of rewrites and stitches; I wonder how many times they tried to cobble this story together from disparate parts. The end result is an unsatisfactory tale. So what, you might say. This is a video game, not a novel. As long as the gameplay is good, who cares? Well, it matters because the original Thief games had excellent plots with well-developed characters, and it's a shame the reboot is such a mess, and, as I stated before, this game takes its plot seriously, and its discombobulated narrative affects gameplay. Their are plenty of cutscenes which take control away from the player, as well as odd free running sequences in which you aren't certain whether or not you are controlling Garrett. These sequences will be hard to tolerate if you're a fan of the Looking Glass games, for the previous titles emphasized player choice and agency. In the old Thief, Garrett usually had to find his way out after infiltrating a bank or castle; in new Thief, the game pushes you along during its missions, and back tracking is usually impossible. 

Hey, a Hammerite Cathedral. But where are the Hammers?

In-between missions, Thief places you in the City, which is intended to be a playground for Garrett, full of side missions and secrets. This doesn't work like the Assassin Creed games, however, because the City is divided into numerous loading zones, each represented by a glowing window or a pile of stacked debris. Navigating the City, which should be a blast, is therefore a tedious chore. You have to figure out which zone connects to which zone because it's not always apparent on your map. The original two games did large levels very well; Thief 2014 takes after Deadly Shadows, the third entry in the series, which featured a higher level of detail but shoe-box sized environments. I'm assuming this was a concession in order to fit the game on the last generation consoles. In any case, the City is a failure, although many of the side missions are fun and more reminiscent of the previous games' style. 

Hey, burricks. We haven't seen a live one since 1998.

Despite their numerous sins, the developers did get the essential feel of Thief right. The stealth systems work well; you have a light meter with three different settings, and you're only safe (relatively) in complete darkness. Garrett will be heard if he runs or if he steps over broken glass or alerts a caged bird. Guard AI is impressive, and on Master difficulty, challenging. They investigate opened doors and thrown objects, and with a couple slashes of their swords, take Garrett's life. Swoop, a new addition that allows Garrett to glide quickly with a push of the space bar, feels powerful and satisfying. Garrett always moved like a lumbering tap dancer in the previous games; here, he feels more like a master thief. Guards are pretty much your only enemies besides Freaks, supernatural monsters who are blind but have heightened hearing. They are also vulnerable to light, which is a cool reversal of usual gameplay. 

Basso, I wish the entire game was about you and Garrett's adventures. That would've been interesting.

Thief isn't a terrible game. It's a solid modern stealth game that you'll enjoy if you're able to look past its many faults. But we have to compare it to its excellent predecessors, and average doesn't quite cut it. It's a shame they got rid of the dark fantasy lore that was the series hallmark. The Hammerites, an industry-obsessed religious order, are no more, and the Pagans, a creepy bunch of woods people who worship the Trickster God, are never mentioned. There are no Ratmen or Haunts or zombies. Thief has been stripped of its outlandish elements, and what remains is gritty and grim-dark, but ultimately less interesting. 

Final rating: Red Delicious--tastes like cardboard, mushy texture, yet will do in a pinch.

An explanation of Pointless Venture's rating system: We use a five apple system here. A classic is Gold Rush, excellent is Honeycrisp, average is Golden Delicious, poor is Red Delicious, and awful is Winesap. Try the aforementioned apples and see if you don't come up with the same rating.

Music: The Isolationist

Here's an older track called the Isolationist. The recording is nicely layered with a rushing feel due to my inability to keep up with the click track. Kind of a folk/pop/punk number. Click here.

What I'm Working On: Apophenia

Chapter One of Apophenia, a work in progress.

This image came up when I googled apophenia, along with a surprising amount of porn.

Home 8/13/08

I have the gambler’s fallacy; that is, I am always seeing patterns in random information, patterns that seek to deceive and rule the thoughtless mind. For example: on my ride home from class, I, Leona Elizabeth Chaney, a twenty-two-year-old woman studying Creative Writing at Hoover University, decided that it had been way too long since I’d experienced an unpleasant incident on the commuter bus, and my good luck was soon, therefore, to run out. I pulled the handle and shouted to the driver and nearly sprinted through the doors. He gave me a look, a fat, greedy stare, his jowly whiskers undulating as he brayed some unintelligible complaint through blubbery lips. I flipped him the bird and started walking quickly, my hood up, the cracked sidewalks deserted, nighttime leaving only ghosts and oddballs like me. The houses on this street were condemned, but you could hear people moving inside, and lights flickered from behind boarded windows, and there was always the smell of something burning. I shouldn’t have been walking down this street; that was the conventional wisdom. It was a rough neighborhood, and I was by all appearances a vulnerable young woman. But there were more weirdos on the bus than the street in my experience, and this was my neighborhood, and I didn’t care if it was dilapidated and inhabited by meth-heads. I grew up with these meth-heads. We played together on the playground, broke bottles together, smoked cigarettes and drank beer together. The first boy I ever kissed, Danny Aronofsky, turned into a fine meth-head and an upstanding citizen. These are my people, I guess, is what I’m saying. I’m more scared of the ones that I don’t know.

            It’s ten o’clock at night, and as I pass the Dupont house I see the Conan twins pumping iron in their front yard like a bunch of freaks. Dave is shirtless, his muscled torso glistening in the cool air as his brother Arnold slaps him repeatedly in an effort to get him pumped. “Easy weight, easy weight, easy weight!” he screams, tossing his disheveled surfer’s hair from side to side, his bull-like neck taut with pulsating veins. The Conans have dragged a squat rack out into the middle of their grassless lawn, and Dave is crouched beneath the weights, his eyes facing down, his legs bulging out of their cut-off jean shorts; after a final slap, he steps up and takes the barbell on his back. I count five forty-five pound plates on each side—ten plates in all, plus the weight of the bar, a total of four-hundred and ninety-five pounds. Dave’s face is red; his eyes are wild and glazed like an animal’s, and I watch as he takes an enormous breath and squats down, all the way down. His hamstrings hit his calves, and he bounces up into a half squat, his teeth gritted, a slow scream emitting from his mouth, and for a second I don’t think he’s going to make the lift, he’ll have to drop it quickly off his back, but then the bar goes up and Dave is standing. He takes two steps forward and racks the barbell, Arnold punching him in the chest, hollering and carrying on like a baboon. The weight secure, Dave immediately stumbles and falls, losing consciousness. “No way!” yells Arnold. “No way you passed out, bro!”

            “Is he all right?” I ask. Arnold looks at me, seeing me for the first time. He’s the better-looking of the two; he’s got an endearing gap between his front teeth that softens his macho image, and back in high school there was a rumor that he was kicked off the football team for soliciting his teammates, which is, of course, hilarious. Like his brother, he is shirtless and clad in a pair of ill-fitting jean shorts. In the dim light, he looks orange, and I wonder if he’s been hitting the tanning bed a little too often, or if he’s smeared himself with bronzer. 

            “That’s only happened once,” he says, pointing at Dave lying motionless, “and he woke up the last time.”

            “Maybe he’s due to not wake up, then,” I say. Arnold furrows his jutting brow, tilting his head like a dog. The house behind him looks like it’s about to implode. I’ve never been in there, never entered the hallowed sanctuary of these aspiring bodybuilders. I imagine the halls to be lined with pictures of grotesquely-muscled men and eighties action-movie heroes, the kitchen stocked with supplements like a laboratory, shelves full of dianabol, testosterone, trenbolone, and other miscellaneous body-altering chemicals. There are probably weight plates everywhere, maybe even a few books containing training routines and exercise theories. No doubt there are copious pornographic materials. The brothers look like they would have guns, so there’s likely an assault rifle or two lying about. The bathroom is most assuredly a toxic waste dump.

            “You wanna work in?” says Arnold, gesturing toward the squat rack. “Squats will give you an ass like a basketball. That shit will bounce down the street.”

            “What’s wrong with my ass?” I ask, feigning outrage.

            “Nothing,” replies Arnold, giving me his gap-toothed smile, “But everything can be better.” This sort of attitude reflects the essential innocence of the brothers, in spite of their aggressive demeanor and intimidating physiques. They believe in the merit of hard work. They think they’re going to make it—I can see them driving all night across the country, rushing to Hollywood and Venice Beach, trying for the American dream with all the other millions of eager, young cannibals. They could be sleeping next to the ocean by Friday. They could be waiting tables in the Golden State or dancing at Chippendales. They might get a commercial or two, a bit part, but after a while they’ll have to resort to Gay-for-pay because California isn’t cheap and neither is bodybuilding. I want to tell Arnold this, but for some reason I accept his offer to lift weights. Surprisingly, he’s nonplussed, as though he expected me to jump under the bar wearing jeans and a blouse.

            “Hey,” says Dave, suddenly coming to. “A chick.”

            “You made the lift, asshole,” says Arnold, stripping the bar of plates, tossing them onto the ground, making a racket. He leaves a forty-five on each side of the barbell and looks at me doubtfully, trying to estimate how much my thin one-hundred and thirty pound body can lift. I shrug and do a couple of warm up squats before stepping under the bar.

            “Easy weight, easy weight!” screams Dave, wobbly on his feet.

            “Don’t you punch me in the chest,” I warn him before taking the bar out of the rack. The weight digs into my upper back, and I feel myself leaning forward, threatening to topple, but I steady, knowing that I’m trying to do too much, that I’m always trying to do too much, and that I’ll never be able to stop.

            “Rack the bar,” says Arnold. “You don’t want to pull something.”

            “That’s only body weight,” says Dave. “Anybody can squat bodyweight.”

            “Every man maybe, but not every girl,” replies Arnold. He moves toward me, arms outward to cradle my waist, and I squat down, the bar feeling like the weight of the world. It doesn’t pin me at the bottom like I thought it would—I get stuck halfway up. The weight becomes impossibly heavy, my legs push but nothing happens, I feel myself sinking as I strain and grit my teeth, but then Arnold is pulling up on the bar just with his fingertips, and suddenly I am able to ascend. He and Dave help me rack the weight, and I lean against the bar, my legs wobbling, gasping for air.

            “She’s kinda crazy, ain’t she?” asks Dave.

            “We like crazy,” says Arnold.

            “You shouldn’t have helped me,” I tell them. “You should’ve let me feel what it’s like to be pinned.”

            “We were being gentlemen,” says Dave.

            “You don’t know what a gentleman is,” says Arnold. He punches his brother on shoulder, and Dave hits him back, and then they’re wrestling on the ground, arms entwined, shoulders pushing against each other like beasts battling for mating rights. I leave them to couple with each other.

            It’s not far to my house, only two more blocks. It’s a converted double-wide hidden by tall pines that shake and shudder in the wind as I walk down the gravel driveway. I call the front yard the moonscape—it’s cratered and littered with junk—and although many would find the disordered refuse to be a source of embarrassment and stress, I am always comforted by the sight of our old refrigerator lying open, its confines now a nest for rodents, and reassured by the wrecked skeleton of Mom’s Chevy sedan, with its artillery-sized rust holes and absence of intact windows. This is our past on display; we can walk through it at anytime and marvel at the relics we once used. How many have that luxury? Most people throw away their lives. Their happiness is dependent on the acquisition of new things. The future is fresh, shrink-wrapped, contained in a brightly-colored box. It is never worn, used, or decayed.

            I open the door and step inside. Mom is cooking spaghetti—I notice the smell of her oregano-heavy sauce immediately—but instead of walking to the kitchen to greet her, I head for my room. The hallways of the trailer are cluttered with Mother’s junk: stacked cardboard boxes, heaps of clothes, trash bags bulging with odd shapes. I step sideways and wedge my shoulders through the horde, fitting easily between the walls, my body a reed. My room, of course, is not like the rest of the place. There are few possessions, no decorations, and everything is ordered and arranged precisely. I have space in my room, space enough to move and breathe. The window is open, letting in the fresh night air, and I fall back on my bed and let it wash over me. The oregano stench is wafting underneath the door; Mom must be making a week’s worth of sauce. She does that often, prepares food in advance. She usually grills hamburgers and stacks them in the fridge for nightly consumption, but spaghetti has become her latest obsession. It’s cheap, filling, easy to make. For a grotesquely fat woman, you’d think she’d have a more varied diet, but alas, money is always the determiner, the underlying factor behind every decision. I’m sure she’d dine daily at every fine restaurant in the area had she the money. But her money, obtained through disability payments and child-support, is always thin, especially considering that she has taken a lengthy sojourn (nine years and counting) from her job as a bank manager in order to focus on my younger brother Diesel’s development, a task which, I’m afraid to say, she is not quite qualified to handle.

            There’s noise beneath my bed, the sound of a poorly suppressed cough. I shake my head and sigh and tell the little bastard to reveal himself. He complies, pulling himself out headfirst, gremlin eyes peering up at me, a mischievous, shit-eating grin on his cherubic face. Diesel is shirtless, as always. He is clad solely in a pair of Captain America boxer shorts, as is his wont to do when unsupervised. Clutched in his filthy paws is a BB gun, realistically modeled after a nine-millimeter Glock pistol, a present from his long ago vanished father.

            “What were you planning to do with that?” I ask. He continues smiling, his mouth missing most of its teeth. Diesel doesn’t speak much, and seeing how he shows little aptitude or patience for school work, however trivial, his teachers have begun to consider him special in the unfortunate sense, which is not accurate, no matter what Mom believes. The diminutive freak knows what he’s doing, and he frequently employs a sort of low cunning that will inevitably come in handy during his future career as either a petty criminal or politician, the latter probably being his developmental ceiling if he ever learns any impulse control. He certainly has the entitlement thing down.

            “You were going to shoot me in the ass with that, weren’t you?” I say. His continual grin says it all. I lunge toward him, trying to grab the pistol, but the imp deftly dodges and jumps back, pulling my door open and vanishing into the recesses of the trailer. His skinny, worm-like body has no trouble tunneling beneath Mom’s immense horde; I’ve often found him sleeping under four feet of piled clothing. Maybe he’ll grow up to be a coal miner or a spelunker, some adventurous troglodyte with no fear of tight spaces. I don’t know. It’s impossible to know.
            I hear Mom lumbering through the halls, her steps as heavy as a Sauropod’s. Her great bulk prevents her from sliding in-between the clutter leading up to my room, so when she desires my attention, she always raps against the wall and gently bellows my name. She does so now, drawling out the o and then the a in Leona, and I hear Diesel howling in mimicry, his cries mixing with those of my mother’s. I could just ignore them; it would be simple. Mother can’t make her way through, and I could lock the door to keep out Diesel. All I want now is some sleep and quiet. The thought of spaghetti on my plate is nauseating.

            “Leona Elizabeth, please come out and eat dinner with your momma!” she says. It’s always hard to tell whether she’s feigning indignation or not.

            “I’m not hungry, Mom! I’m tired and I want to go to bed!” I yell.

            “Honey, I fixed all this s’ghetti, and you ain’t gonna come and eat any of it?”

            “Just put some in the refrigerator. I’m really not hungry.” This approach, the stress of my lack of hunger, is probably foolish, since my mother cannot imagine satiety.

            “I wanna hear ‘bout them writers you studied today. Come on, honey, I’ve had to chase Diesel all around all day trying to make sure he don’t hurt himself. Let me talk to yous.” My mother’s grammar, always terrible, is a constant source of irritation. I don’t want to come out of my room because my mood has darkened, and I’m afraid I’ll say something to hurt her, as I seem to do daily. Her pleas continue, and Diesel starts chanting heathen gibberish behind her, and I’m forced to come out, since it’s obvious I won’t be getting any peace. As soon as my door opens, they shut up. I follow Mom’s gargantuan behind, two giant ham hocks swinging from side to side, scraping the clutter, pushing it hard against the walls. We sit down in the hideous yellow kitchen, clustered around a plastic table, the spaghetti heaped up on our plates. Mom never does any dishes, and I refuse to touch the mold-covered plates piled and stacked across the grimy counter. We use only paper and plastic now for our dishes and utensils. My plate is Ferrari red, the food on it resembling the scattered insides of some disemboweled creature. There are two meatballs, both as large as my fist, resting atop a mountain of pasta, sauce leaking off of them in slow flowing streams. I tentatively cut off a chuck with my fork and push it around the corner of my plate, waiting for it to animate and walk off.

            “Leona, come on now, don’t do that,” says Mom. “You’re setting a bad example for Diesel. Look at him, he’s playing with his food.”

            Diesel is holding a bloody meatball in the center of his hand, tearing off ragged pieces in great shark-like bites.

            “Why don’t you ever make him wear any clothes?” I ask, knowing the answer.

            “He just tears them off him, what am I supposed to do? Little boy’s got too much of his father in him.”

            “Yes, I remember Bill walking around naked all the time,” I answer. “That was one of the reasons I moved out as a teenager.”

            “Now come on, let’s not go reliving bad times,” replies Mom, shoveling a humongous forkful of pasta into her mouth. “Tell me about your day.”

This is how our conversations always begin. I could go missing for years and pop up in the kitchen suddenly like a ghost, and the first thing Mom would say is Tell me about your day.

“I lifted weights with the Conan brothers,” I say.

“Lifted weights?” My mother gives me a quizzical look, arching her unibrow. “Why would you do that?”

“I also punched a kid in the throat in Creative Writing,” I continued. “I waited till after class. I hid by the door, and as he came out I jabbed him right in the larynx. It was quick, stealthy. No one saw me. I blended in with the crowd. I don’t even think he knows what happened.”

“You could get expelled for something like that. Why on earth would you hit some poor boy?” asks my mother.

“I took a chance. I thought I could pull it off. I’ve done it four times now to separate individuals, and I’ve gotten away unnoticed three out of the four times. The next time I’ll get caught. So there won’t be a next time.”

My mother stares at me like I am the spawn of Satan. Diesel is rubbing his meatball all over his face, giving him a grotesque, fleshing-eating appearance, but Mom says nothing, she just continues to look at me flabbergasted. I excuse myself and throw away my full plate of spaghetti. Back in my room I feel bad about all sorts of things. I wonder if the Conan brothers are out there in their yard, pumping iron into the night. I wonder if Chad, the boy I punched, is having trouble breathing or speaking. The night air is very cold, but I don’t shut my window. I sleep with all of my clothes on.

Music: Pleistocene

 

A hard rocker dredged up from the depths of the Theme Park Mistress catalog. Click Here.

Music: A Day in the Life

I've had the principle riff of this song for ages, I just finally wrote lyrics for it. Kind of bluesy, kind of low-fi hard rock. I wish I could play the drums, but Reason and its infinite loops will have to suffice. Click here to go to Soundcloud.

The Wait is Over: New Song: White Whale

Finally dusted off the old guitar and microphone and busted out a new jam. I finished Moby Dick about a month ago, and there's some of that work's influence in the lyrics. Check it out on SoundCloud.