Jazmeister Central

FAT QUEST: ???

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 01:44:00 +0000

Chest: -1 inch
Waist: -4 inches
Weight: -25 lbs

So I totally stopped doing this when my mental illness got impossible to manage. I wanted to check in and let those interested know that I stopped doing weight logs for the good reason - I'm losing. I think this is because I'm eating healthily, my portions are smaller, and I'm trying to be more active.

Today I'm going go try and buy some clothes. I'm down to the smallest hole I have on my belt, the slightly off-centre one my dad put in it when I was a little 'n.

I might also pick up some beauty products - but I'll explain about that later.

Recovery

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0000

I've got a confession to make. I'm not Jaz. Very few of you have ever met Jaz, infact. I wear his skin and I answer to his name, but I'm just a creature, a goblin or something that stole him away and lived in his place. But hear me out, because I'm a sad little thing and wretched with guilt. I'm going to make this right. Listen to my woes for a second.

I have low self esteem, and the main way that negatively affects my behaviour is by perpetuating an overpowering need for the approval of others. Just look at me. Look how often I tweet! Look how I bend over backwards to commit to helping people and to compliment them and to make sure they know that I care about them!

For the last month or two I'd been in a romantic relationship with a girl on the internet. "I have a cool girlfriend," I'd tell people. "You're a great girlfriend," I'd tell her. That relationship ended recently, and then she went offline, and I was sitting at my computer thinking, "what do I tweet now?"

My urge was to say something like, "I just got dumped! :C" because, obviously, then you get lots of people consoling you, being affectionate, tell you that you're a great catch, telling you that they're thinking about you, that they care about you, that they approve of you. Then I realised that I wanted to reach out to my ex, to wait for her to come online, to email her and leave tweets and so on, maybe even text her again. In lieu of that, I started trawling my buddy lists on instant messengers to squeeze approval from someone else.

Then I ran through in my head what I'd say to her when she came online, what I wanted from her, what our relationship meant to me now. Because when we broke up I don't know how it changed, but the relationship did change, because I felt different towards her almost immediately.

It's because I saw this for what it was all along: "Patricia, love me! I love you, look! Look how much I love you! I can say love standing on my head! I can flatter your appearance and I can flatter your intellect and I can flatter your determination and drive! I can flatter each individual facial feature! If we ever met, I'd become an engine of sexual worship! I'd kiss everything my lips could reach!"

I felt shame, shame because I had been needy and insecure enough to drive her away after all. I felt, not a lessening of my feelings for her, but a desire to not see myself reinforce those behaviours, that neediness, by placing myself in a situation where I could needle her for approval. The last thing I wanted to do was be confronted with that, because finally, just as I saw this for what it was on my end, I saw myself.

I saw myself as I truly am: a creature who does not love itself. A thing who feels that all of the significant people in its life must love it, or it will collapse. A wretch with an unattainable goal that actively reinforces its own self-loathing as it pursues it. A monster who, with no girlfriend, with no clear love interest in its life, with no job, with no outside pressure at all, has no opinions, no drives, nothing to say to the world just for the sake of saying it. Who the fuck am I, and what have I done with Jaz?

Was he ever there? He must have been: at one time I knew him. I can't remember what he was like, exactly, but I know he played guitar and wrote fiction and was quite into programming and loved to waste hours playing games. I know he existed at one time, I remember him crying in his bedroom because he pissed off everyone in alt.music.radiohead and couldn't work out how. Or, was that him? Maybe that was me. Maybe that was already me.

I definitely remember him going to school and getting sexually assaulted. I definitely remember him going out to the woods during the lunch hour, eating nothing, wandering and doing laps of the same plot of trees. Maybe that's where I met him, in the woods. Chipping away at his resolve. He told me all about the friends he might have had at this school and he wanted them so badly, and he couldn't understand why they didn't like him. Maybe that's how I tricked him into letting me live his life for him. I was so sure of myself. "I'll show you how to get friends. I'll show you how to get worth. I'll show you what it means to be loved by more than just by your mother."

Jaz, I'm sorry. I was wrong. You were a lovely kid. I miss you, and I'm sorry I lied. Maybe I should go to the woods and look for you? But no, that's rubbish, you're not there. You're here, in here, in me somewhere, and I just need to give up and let you come back out and live your own life again. What do you like to do, Jaz? Because what I like to do, sit in the dark waiting for someone to tweet at me, isn't good for either of us. What do you love?

nothing leave me alone

Come on, what do you love? You must love something! Don't give me that shit. Talk to me.

...i like thundercats

Okay. Do you want to watch thundercats? Dad has some taped on Sky Plus.

no

Then what DO you want to do?

i want to be loved

That's not what I asked, you can't DO that, that's waiting around for the world to take care of you and make it all better! That's handing over the reins! That's what got us into this mess, your relinquishing of responsibility and my pressuring you to! Take the reins Jaz, what do you want to do?

Come on. I know you're there.

i want to write

What do you want to write?

a slightly self indulgent metaphor for what is wrong with me that reminds me of that cool neil gaiman short story about the troll under the bridge

...That sounds interesting? Why don't you go do that?

because its just another cry for help
its just more stupid juvenile 'pity me pity me love me' bullshit

So, turn off comments.

but what if someone wants to get in touch with me or tell me something

You mean, "what if someone wants to pity me or love me?"

okay fair point

Will you link it on twitter?

no because then i'll get tweets

Okay, but how will you know you got them? You already turned your phone off, right?

yeah its up in my drawer

So just don't check for replies. You don't have to shut people out, Jaz! You just need to learn to live with the silence, and judge whether or not you are worthy for yourself. Most people don't use RSS feeds anyway, and what if reading your reasoning actually helps someone else with a crippling need for approval?

huh good point, i could also link that thing I read [pdf] (with the caveat that it gets a bit self-helpy towards the end)
so
are you going to symbolically vanish now

Nah, I'm going to symbolically make out with you.

sweet

And then we can spend the rest of the evening together not being on the internet and reading books fapping pornlessly.

okay :3

And Jaz, I'm sorry. But you're awesome. This is the closest you can get to self esteem right now, having a metaphorical goblin-self tell you that you're handsome and smart and adorable, but I hope it helps.

thanks

Right. Let's go then. Let's get you well.

My head

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:34:00 +0000

Lots of things have happened. The most recent and relevant thing is that I am changing my meds, so my moodswings are very erratic and frequent at the minute, seems like. I could also experience other weird side effects in the next few days.

The next recent thing: I am mentally ill, and I've been tentatively diagnosed with cyclothymia. Cyclothymia is the mildest form of bipolar disorder. What that means is, sometimes I'm hypomanic, and sometimes I'm dysthymic. I don't know what the difference is between dysthymia and a major depressive episode, and I don't know if my doctor knows which I've got or if he's just doing what all good doctors do when they're making the first couple judgement calls for mental illness: having a pretty good guess.

So to avoid wankery and self diagnosis, let me just identify a few of the things I feel using my own made up terminology.

Up
When I am up, I am very happy even when there is nothing to be happy about. Cracking-jokes-at-a-funeral happy. Oh-that's-fine-it's-probably-for-the-best-that-you-fire-me happy. I feel like I can do anything. I have explosive energy and drive, my appetites for food and sex are fiercely engorged, I can't sleep, and I can't concentrate for shit. I'm tempted to do drugs more often when I'm up. I'm more likely to find myself attractive and handsome, more likely to be hopeful about my future, but if you asked me how I feel about myself and how I think my existence impacts my family and my loved ones, I'll say that I'm a burden. But I don't get down about it - it's a motivator. Got to keep trying, keep pushing!

I keep myself showered, I style my hair every day, and I keep on top of things like laundry and dishes and so on.

Sometimes I get really ratty and irritable when I'm up, but it passes.

Down
When I am down, I am very very sad, but I can be cheered up with affection, with humour, or romance, or positive human contact of any kind. When it stops, I sink back down again. I focus a lot on whether or not people really like me. I appear exclusively ugly to myself, inside and out. I hate the world, I hate the majority of the people in it, I hate myself, and I'm crushed by the injustice of the people I love being caught in it. Everything makes me want to curl up into a ball. I want to whine constantly to people - I end up doing that on twitter.

I sleep often, I have very little energy, I only eat a meal every other day, and while I do still fantasise about sex and pursue sexual encounters, I'm more or less completely impotent. I can't concentrate for shit. My personal hygiene routine is usually limited to brushing my teeth and lying very very still in a warm, dark place - although after a few days I will manage to drag myself into the shower.

It's harder to do anything, harder to move, harder to force my body to get up and do things. The only thing it is easy to do is tweet constantly about how shit my life is and how shit I am and blah blah blah. (Mysteriously, my follower count has been climbing.) Also sometimes I can write poetry.

I get a lot of anxiety and I cry a lot but I don't tend to get angry very much, except in that hollow way when you know you can't do anything about it.

So like, that is my shit that is going on right now. Usually I get a week or two of one, then a week or two of the other. It'd been getting worse all through 2010 and 2011, the troughs deepening, the cycle quickening. Excited, frantic, happy, but can't concentrate; or mopey, introspective, fatalistic, and can't concentrate.

Right now I'm getting both of them once or twice a day for a good few hours, and then it flips back. That's probably coming off my medication and going onto this new thing. It's been very hard to write or work or achieve anything over the last six months, but hopefully that'll change. I wanted to update my blog and say something about what is going on in my head.

It looks like a shoe?

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:57:00 +0000

This is a positive poem! I don't know how the fuck it happened, I promise. Happy new year, ya dobbers.

On auto
By Jaz McDougall
31 December 2011

I'm drowning in a gale.
This is the touch I need:
the roar of time and death
as little hairs celebrate me.

Sky boiling over, leaves race past,
I sway at the centre, hushed, still.
Every moment forgets the last.
I wish my thoughts felt like this.

And why not? Who makes me,
when everything I use to identify me
has flaked off and rubbed away?
Who chooses what I want?

Could the wind take me away and
bring another back in my place?
Could it shave away the fear
and put a smile on my face?

Could the smile help me smile
on the inside too? Could standing
strong help me be strong, and feel strong too?
Could living life like it matters help it matter to me?
Could I hold myself tight and say "everything will be all right?"
Could I marry myself and vow never to leave, could I promise that
at my funeral I'd be the first one to grieve, could I love who I am and love
who I could be, could I love nobody better, more fiercely, more loyally than me?

Being dead

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 22:59:00 +0000

Bad, bad week. Expect a jolly post once this lifts. Until then: FOREVER EMODARK

Being dead
By Jaz McDougall
30 December 2011

Touching air.
Speaking silence.
Tasting hunger.
Walking nowhere.
Looking dark.
Singing sadly.
Feeling numb.
Loving badly.

Fucked by a troll

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 04:01:00 +0000

Thought these were getting a bit heavy, so here's a poem about getting a sound dicking from a troll.

Edit: it worried me that one or two people were assuming this was a poem about rape. Obviously that's not what this is, but just to clear up any ambiguity, I've added in a few stanzas at the front that makes it clear whose choice this all is. And lots of delicious, pert, bouncing assonance.

Fucked by a troll
By Jaz McDougall
29 December 2011

The beds are silent and
boards have settled. The
wind rattles shutters as
I creep to the door.
Hunting around the curtilage
for bells and muffling them,
and sitting silently and
saying thanks to the moon,
and calling up from the
earth a swift hunter.

"Please take me somewhere
deep under, and make me
stronger, and help me
shun the life that loves
me no longer."

Cold and tall and slender,
grimacing glee and naked
but for verdant hair,
a trollkin stands and meets
my eye. Without a word,
he snakes an arm around
my waist, hefts. Frost
coalesces where his breath
licks my thigh. Purple
marks raise where he
gripped me.

His smell is ancient,
primal. I breathe him
as he seeks the ruptured
earth. He strides beneath
the turf and, moaning, it
grinds closed behind us.

The cave is warmer, or,
I am colder. My skin is
growing lichen where
his rough fingers
plucked me. I'm not
scared here, or lonely.

There is no fire, but
there is light, and cooking,
and later, dining. I'm lain
on a fur and he traces on
my belly, from kidney to
kidney, and bends his head.

Sharp kisses from his tusks.
A blue tongue traces down,
tufty moss sprouting around
where his broad lips brush me.

The trollkin engulfs me. The
cold fills me, lifts me, a tingling,
freezing, burning ecstasy. I'm
too far adrift, now, under stone
and dirt and bough, I shudder
like the rock and roiling red
of nature's bowels. My lover
swallows loud, throws his
head back hard, and howls.

A frenzy! His soft mouth moves,
unsated, ravenous, north to the
pink remaining on my chest.
At first his jaws are full of pins
to prick me. Before long,
a razor tooth barely nicks me.
I'm changed, transformed,
wooden and bronze, green with
cold fire, hair a wild sprout
like the trollkin's desire.

At my neck he gnaws and grazes,
my legs he raises. I feel a pushing,
parting, filling to the brim in
secret places. He fucks me now,
forever, until we're roaring loud,
together.

My cry is deep and course, but
now I recognise myself. I know
in this place, I'm better.
So, I've never,
ever,
left there.

Make me a stone

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 03:23:00 +0000

Make me a stone
By Jaz McDougall
28 December 2011

Make me a stone,
and I'll never ache,
and I'll never hurt,
and I'll never feel.

Make me a sword,
and I'll never give,
and I'll never guard,
and I'll never yield.

Make me a heart,
and I'll never speak,
and I'll never think,
and I'll never break.

Make me a lover,
and I'll always ache,
always hurt, feel, give,
always guard, yield, speak.
Always, always think.

But one day, we will break.
Put the sword through the heart,
turn to stone, and unmake.

They go

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:48:00 +0000

They go
By Jaz McDougall
27 December 2011

I sweat them out into my mattress.
I blink them from reddened eyes.
I shave them from my scalp.
I shit them into the toilet.
I squirt them in fists.
I spit into the sink.
I give them away.
I let them out.
I lose them.
They go,
I don't.
I
feel
like I
should
want them
back, but when
they go, I get less
human, less worried,
less angry, invested, alive.
I don't care as much about traffic
or justice or trying so hard to survive.

Sin

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:07:00 +0000

Sorry things have been dark here lately. Next year will be better.

Sin
By Jaz McDougall
27 December 2011

Born bare, scared, hurtling, pinned
to the surface of the turning world.
Stripped, butchered, boned, skinned.
Cast into the furnace together, to burn.

Dirty penned beggars contend for favour,
but won't win any. Shut eyes praying
for something, anything. Everything.
Answered: glory! spectacle! A saviour!

And the vaulted ceilings cover shops now,
and the lofty music tells us to buy now,
and we confess to sales associates,
and excommunicate bad debtors
(but not completely).

It is no better or worse than
before. We are cursed. Nothing
will change. Born bare, scared,
hurtling, pinned, stripped,
butchered, boned.
Skinned.

Go in

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 20:52:00 +0000

This one is okay.

Go in
By Jaz McDougall
17 December 2011

I'm up at light, and heavy headed.
Air is thick and won't escape my
lungs. I'm sad – no, tired. Dead.
No, sleeping, or sleep-seeming.
Deadened, stupid, numb, null.
I'm quiet, still, breathing.
I'm fine.

I lost a day. Didn't need it, anyway.
You lose so many, but don't find
even one. I'm sad – no, quiet,
still, breathing. Null, numb,
stupid, dead. I know what time
it is without looking.
It's time.

A lump rising, like bread baking,
making breath stick and creep.
I'm quiet, still, breathing. The
light is dying, or undying.
I'm still up, or, well, not. Asleep,
but it's exhausting. It's not bad.
It's fine.

I'm out at night, and dead suns
kiss moonlit blades. Dead lips
brush the earth. Love. Light.
Growing teeth. The cold is sore
and sad – no, needy. Heat leaps
out, like charity, hopelessly.
Didn't need it, anyway.

Grass is quiet, still, breathing.
I brush dead lips against the earth.
I go in.

Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 08:04:00 +0000

Yesterday I remembered that I was sexually assaulted in school. It was hard to swallow. You'd think, how the fuck could you forget? Why didn't I tell anyone?

I was bullied a lot in school. First or second year. I was bullied pretty relentlessly at Elgin Academy. I was fat, I had long hair down to my ass, and I was a loner. I was terrified of walking up to some people and trying to enter into their social group only to be rejected or to be standing there getting ignored. I've never got over that.

I had this acquaintance from primary called Jane. I liked her but, I don't know, I was weird with women growing up, as I've discussed. We were almost friends, almost. Anyway, in secondary school she had this, I don't know, maybe he was a boyfriend, who hated me. Well, I don't know if he hated me, but he was in with this crowd who bullied me. They bullied me because on my first day, the smallest, tiniest member of their gang got all in my face and started shoving me around and calling me gay, so I sent him onto his ass. Ever since then they all hated me.

I have this memory that begins with me standing infront of Jane and this guy who might be her boyfriend. To be clear, Jane and I know eachother a little bit from going to the same school and having amicable chats, we don't have like, HISTORY. That's not what is going here. I don't know how I ended up standing in front of them. The boyfriend, who is short and angry and good looking, holds his hand out for some Nerds, and Jane pours some out for him. He throws them in my face and they sting my eyes. I am conflicted. Jane looks like she didn't know what he was going to do with them and is anxious that there'll be a fight. I'm bigger than this guy, there's no way I'd have a trouble making him bleed, but Jane is there. Not saying anything. Looking at me like she's looking at an unexploded shell. So I walk away and the little guy calls me a poof, which is about as strong a slur as fag.

My memory is full of incidents like these. One of them is outside the canteen, where I stood for an hour every day at lunch.

That's it there. I didn't know what else to do at lunch. One day I jumped out my skin, someone grabbed me from behind. I spun around and it was three fourth year girls, a few years older than me at an age where even a year can make an enormous difference to your social standing and physical maturity. They were all somewhat tall. They started asking me if I'd ever had an erection, if I masturbated, laughing at me and jeering. One of them started groping me and they had me boxed in by now, I remember feeling scared and impotent.

I can't remember how that resolved. I think I told them to fuck off, and walked a few feet away, but I can't reconcile my memories with what must have logically happened - there's no way they would just leave me alone for that, surely? Maybe they were attracting unwanted attention and decided to scram now that they'd had their fun.

Anyway, so then this girl came out. She was from sixth year, practically a grown woman. I'd been crushing on her from a distance all year. She asked if I wanted to come in and sit with her and her friends. I told her no, and I don't think I was polite about it. I don't know why I did that.

vvvbf;;;

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 01:10:00 +0000

It is hard to get to sleep, did you know that?

I need to get up at around 7 at the latest, preferably six. If only there was some way that my neurons could benefit mankind instead of keeping me up thinking about augmented hypothalami. Perhaps some sort of processing power sharing scheme that uses my brain's excess power to write sitcoms.

The title of this post was carefully engineered to appeal to my tastes in senseless strings of characters. It almost evokes a very lazy raspberry, the kind where deep, gradual beat tones thrum off and fade out. The three semicolons are supposed to be your face hitting the keyboard.

Scenario 1: I fuck around on here and then true for-reals tiredness sets in and I go to bed, wake up a little groggy, great success.
Scenario 2: I go right back to bed and lie there, get stressed about morning coming on its way, have an episode, miss college, f-f-f-failure
Scenario 3a: Somehow I get neither sleep nor another episode and face college tired. Fall asleep in lecture, ten points from Hufflepuff
Scenario 3b: Somehow I get neither sleep nor another episode and face college tired. Remain alert, dangerous, and bitey until tomorrow eve.
Scenario 6: Realise I'm living in a Phillip K Dick novel, take comfort that the bit where my reality unfurls is probably almost over

I know there is something more productive to be done with this energy. I could write sitcoms, even. But at this hour, with college in the morning? Undertaking anything lengthy or qualitative or engrossing or enjoyable would be the difference between couldn't sleep and wouldn't sleep, surely.

So I'm going to torture myself using social media until a clear path arrives.

I miss when I would wake up and not care what time it was. But I think I hated that, too.

She can have as many hands as she wants

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 17:48:00 +0000

I just finished playing encyclopedia fuckme and the case of the vanishing entrée. It is the most difficult dating sim I have ever played. I want to talk about it, and there will be spoilers and pudenda below the cut.

Most dating sims I have played are a joke. They're typically wish fulfilment devices, where you join a new school and are inundated with hot women trying to shag you. The object of the average dating sim is to click through all the dialogue and get to the pornographic slideshow.

The object of encyclopedia fuckme is to get a decent meal. It's a very explicit text game where you play as a submissive lady visiting her girlfriend.

It starts out like you'd expect any dinner-at-my-place date to go - you step inside, you pretend to be concerned with dinner, and then instead, sex happens. Armed only with what hollywood and the internet have bothered to tell me about BDSM, but determined to get into character, I was wary of making my protagonist too rebellious or controlling. So in this scenario:

"So, girl, what did you bring me to drink?"

"I picked up a bottle of red wine because I am one CLASSY FUCKING LADY."

"I've got a DRIPPING WET PUSSY and you are more than welcome to it girl."

...I picked the top option. That doesn't delay sexytime by very long, though. Soon you're stripping down and roping up. I won't paste a lot of text from the game, but here's a taste of the style:

Anni coils suddenly around you like a snake queen, trapping you against the table. One hand takes the bottle from you and sets it on the table, the second collects the rope, a third finds its way to your mouth and a fourth pins your own hand to the tabletop. She's behind you: she can have as many hands as she wants, and you want her to have many many hands, spreading you, holding you down, while other hands mark you with long red scratches.

The focus on events, how they make you feel, what they make you think of, what they make you want, works well to establish the relationship in a few succinct scenes. Which is good, because before long, our hero finds herself in some peril.

You're bound, gagged, and your bonds are hooked onto a metal loop in the kitchen wall, when your girlfriend takes out a knife and explains that she's going to eat you. She's eaten five other women already, Anni confesses. She leaves to fetch her necklace of human bones. Then you start to make meaningful choices about how to escape.

My first playthrough ended in disaster, but I was thoroughly entertained by the creepy story and engorged imagery. I was determined to try again to see if I couldn't escape the cannibal queen. On my second play, I tried doing everything differently.

Turns out, a good master has no problem dealing with a rebellious slave. If you're demanding or resistant to control in Encyclopeida Fuckme, you either get a firm denial, or the sort of acquiescence a parent might award to a child. Demanding food before sex gets you a single bread stick, for example. I didn't realise it at the time, but that was a pointer on how to beat the game.

You have a bit of freedom to rearrange the order of events and insert new scenes in response to your actions, but the overall structure is vaguely the same: doorbell, meathook, escape, capture, bath, dinner. After a few playthroughs, I started to feel like there was no way to escape my deadly domme. I was mentally formulating a few sentences about how refreshing it is to play a game with no happy ending. Then I read a few comments online where some players gave eachother cryptic hints on how to get "the good ending." Fuck! I returned to try my hand once more.

I worked out how to stab Anni, but it didn't seem to slow her down (like any good slasher villain, I suppose). I took every chance to strike her or evade her, and still I ended up getting carved to bits on the kitchen table. In the end, I blundered into the solution, although it is a lateral thinking puzzle.

From then, events tramped happily towards the surprising and gratifying twist, which I am so tempted to spoil. It's a little bit gruesome, but I thought it was a fulfiling end.

I could also blather on about how it's a concise treatise on the power held by the submissive in a BDSM relationship but I'd just be hoovering that from here and there. I thought it was a cool game about crossing established boundaries in a relationship and what should happen to people who can't keep their hands to themselves.

Queer-brained

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 16:41:00 +0000

I was reading this, which concludes like this:

We don’t get along in spite of our differences, but because of what we have in common. We’re all, somehow, out of the “norm” on the spectrum, in one way or another. So we hang, even though there isn’t really a name for someone like me, not in the sense of a label like gay or transgendered. Misfit, maybe. Tomboy. A friend once dubbed me queer-brained, and that sounds about right.

The article was an interesting read, but the concept of queer brainedness is not a terribly important one. As one commenter points out, "Is this about being 'queer-brained' or just about being an individual? Why do you need a label at all?" It's a fair point. I'm sure I could devote a blog post to this labelling tendancy among people who have been swept under the societal rug, and why it might be healthy and why not. If I really cared, I mean.

Anyway. I was reading it, and I caught myself thinking, hey, that's like me. I get along with queer people. A significant number of my internet tendrils are submerged in this community of queer game developers, and I'm on friendly terms with the ones that I know. I wish I was better friends with most of them. I don't judge people for the way they externalise their gender or their sexuality, and that much is instinctual, even if there are aspects of conforming to a subculture of non-oppression that require a deliberate effort (like remembering which pronouns various people like).

And when someone stands up and says "God hates fags," my instinct to leap to the defence of the LGBT community as an outsider, an ally of privilege. I was reading an article about how heteronormative white men are vital in fighting oppression, because heteronormative white male bigots don't listen to people who aren't white, male, straight, and masculine. And I thought, yeah, I can do that! That's what I'll do.

But, obviously, I'm not straight, at all. I'll sex any hot, sharp, articulate, passioate, sapient creature who can continue to romance me without being bigoted, wilfully ignorant, or disdainful of the things that I like.

My point is, the societal implications of my new identity hadn't really hit me until now. When a gay character in a show likes musical theatre and Lady Gaga and talks with thith thaucy thpeech impediment, they're putting me in a box. When a bisexual is depicted as fucking everything and anything that moves, they're painting me in that picture. There is a rich canon of material out there designed expressly to make me feel bad about still not knowing what a throw pillow is and how it is different from a regular fucking pillow or a cushion or whatever. Why would you have SEQUINS on a thing to rest your FACE on? There is a man who believes that tigers are on a holy mission to bite me, right now. Lots of people believe that if I catch AIDS because someone put an unwrapped dick in me, it was fated to happen because God hates Jaz.

But guess what! They're also judging you, fellow white males who are also straight. They're saying, if you can't throw properly, you're not a MAN. If you say that things are 'fabulous' and 'divine', you don't deserve to be called STRAIGHT. If you use moisturiser, if you talk like Graham Norton, if you wear a pink shirt, you're basically subfuckinghuman.

I'd just like to say, I have no interest in only ever dating the Dale Winton continuum. Our growing monoculture, our pre-global society, needs to learn that maleness is not gayness is not masculinity, and that masculinity is not a part of the insecure machismo baggage trailing behind it.

That begs the very interesting question, "What is masculinity?"

I'll need to come back to that one.

Semantic shift

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:49:00 +0000

From wikipedia: "Semantic change, also known as semantic shift or semantic progression describes the evolution of word usage - usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage."

I titled the post 'semantic shift' because it sounds cooler.

I've been reading about Hedonism. Hedonism is a philosophical ethics doctrine that was espoused (but not exclusively or originally) by Epicurus, the gent who gave us this phenomenal anti-theist quote:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Epicurus also decided that nothing should be believed unless you can prove it. He probably invented toast too, or something. Anyway. Hedonism, as Epicurus explained it, is an ethical philosophy (which is to say, an argument belonging to the branch of philosophy that attempts to answer the question, "How do you live a good life?"). It states that the ultimate aim of life should be to maximise pleasure and minimise pain.

You think of a hedonist, and you might remember Hedonism bot from Futurama. You might picture a frothing Dorian Gray, shagging school boys with a stick and shooting unicorn blood into each eye. Maybe you'll flick open a dictionary and look up hedonistic: "1. Pursuit of or devotion to pleasure, especially to the pleasures of the senses."

Mostly, those definitions are extrapolating from the first part of the doctrine, the bit about maximising pleasure. Originally, the minimising of pain was much more important. Epicurus warned against what he called 'dynamic pleasures' because he defined them as pleasures that went hand in hand with pain. Sexual love was one (he said it was accompanied by fatigue, remorse, and depression) and so was marriage, drinking, gluttony, etc. The 'passive pleasures' were the true ideal pastime for the hedonists - a horn of cool water, some lovely bread, a few chums round for a chat.

So the word 'hedonist' used to mean "someone who abstains from anything that might eventually hurt them and has no ambition beyond enjoying simple pleasure." Now it means this:

Likewise, in ancient Greece, a cynic was a person who believed that the world was inherantly evil and that a good person would abstain from interacting with it, whether that was through buying a house, holding down a job, etc. Today, someone used 'cynicism' in a really weird way. I was talking about Metroid: Other M, and how sexist it apparently is, with someone who felt that the story shouldn't bear relation to the rest of the game when judging it fairly. It went like this:

Lord Terminus: I still say to call the game shit because of the story alone is unfair and bullshit.
Me: Ah, but if the story has a big negative impact on you, say, because you're a woman, you won't enjoy the other bits.
Lord Terminus: No that's the kind of cynicism Yahtzee is known for and is the same load of bullshit I hate today's gamers for.

What is he using 'cynicism' to mean in this context? He certainly isn't implying that Ben Croshaw lives in a cave eating bread sandwiches. He isn't using the contemporary meaning, either, "a distrust of other's apparent motives."

Is language really this fragile? Back to wikipedia!

It looks like this is a phenomenon that diachronic linguists (wordfags) have been tracking and studying for years. It's going to keep happening. So if the philosophies and ideologies of ancient greece are now hopelessly contorted by our contemporary language, what will today's doctrines mean in the 41st millennium? 'Socialism' is already a dirty word in the USA, misused by a vocal minority as a synonym for both fascism and communism.

What about feminism? Right now, you say that you're a feminist, and you can get some weird looks. It's becoming a word for a man hater. Recently, in a sociology lecture, our lecturer asked if there were any feminists. I stuck up my hand, and so did he, and nobody else did. The class is full of 17 year old girls and not one of them identifies with the fight to improve their lot in life. Harsh. During a 15 minute break, I heard four of them talking about how they agree with feminists but think "they shouldn't be so angry all the fucking time." Because that's what the common person, male or female, thinks that feminists are. Angry, snarling, short-haired, trousers-wearing, non-horse-riding, never-giggling, makeup-shunning dykes. I know you've encountered that perception before.

What about in 50 years? 100? How long before feminist is just a dirty word, like hedonist? What about semantics itself? How often have you been in an argument and your line of reasoning was dismissed as 'just semantics,' as if semantics is some sort of trivial field? "Oh it's just WORDS and what they MEAN when we SAY them, chill OUT." How long before that means something like, "a trivial line of reasoning in an argument?" It already happened to the Sophists.

Elenchus

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:49:00 +0000

Studying philosophy has wakened my brain to the sorts of ways we talk to one another. In this philosophy textbook I'm reading, lots of dead men are talking to each other across the centuries, putting forth carefully constructed arguments without even a glimmer of anger or ignorance.

Meanwhile, on the internet, people argue in a very different way. They engage in something called sophistry, which now means the art of using a sort of subtly plausible but ultimately bogus line of reasoning, just to win a debate. It's an attitude towards argument and discussion that belies a total disharmony with the most beneficial reasons for engaging in such conversations. By sophists, especially modern internet sophists, arguments are seen as a form of competition. Your opponent is your enemy and you hate them. It is assumed that they are wrong, and you just need to work out why they are, exactly.

We get that perjorative meaning, from a word that just used to mean "wise person" or something similar, because of Socrates. From the 1998 edition of Fifty Major Philosophers by Diané Collinson:

His chief philosophical method was that of elenchus: an eliciting and questioning of beliefs in order to establish truths and reveal inconsistencies.

Socrates was an Athenian. He lived in Athens when that city was at the height of its glory under the rule of Pericles. He was taught the cosmological philosophy of the time and engaged in many public debates, chiefly with the Sophists, who were purveyors of practical wisdom, teachers of oratory and arguers of any issue the Athenian citizens might wish to air. Socrates became famous for his elenctic questioning of these teachers and for his confounding of their sometimes glib arguments.

Socrates has been my role model on the internet lately. I love the idea that you can just plod through someone's arguments, asking only questions, putting forth very few real opinions, and letting their answers reveal the strengths and weaknesses in their arguments.

I've been trying it out. Twitter is a good petri dish for it. Yesterday, someone said this:

mittense: "imagine an igf where all are welcome." ... you mean... imagine the IGF? like as it is now? because that's what it is. is.gd/lh9tWk

He was quoting Anna Anthropy there, specifically attacking her implication that the IGF is not open to all.

First, let me just say, I have no opinion on this. I really don't care if the IGF wants to charge you $95 to enter their competition (which they do). It's a private company doing the thing that they want to do, which is take in a bunch of submission fees and pay their staff and then pay some winners lots of money. Good for them. Equally, I would love to see the sort of thing Anna is talking about, a come-one-come-all awards festival for the sorts of games people are making all over the world.

However, my philosophical glands became engorged once I saw this guy, and several other people, getting all steamed up because she said "imagine an IGF where all are welcome." Those people, it is clear, feel like the IGF already is a place where all are welcome. Anna, for one, feels like it really isn't a place where all are welcome.

What I'd like to do is take the position, "The IGF, as it currently exists, is open to all." I'm going to try to falsify it. If it can be shown to be false, the argument is dust. In order to show that it is false, I'd like to try to imagine a plausible situation, or recall a real life example, where someone has made a game and can't enter it into the IGF because of some barrier the IGF has put in place.

Okay, here is one: I don't have the $95 entry fee, therefore I can't enter, even if my game was the next Braid of Goocraft.

Now for a pair of tweets.

RaveofRavendale: @FuzzYspooN Oh come now, $95 is absolutely fuck all, and that's coming from an indie game journalist.

RaveofRavendale: @madamluna If I was an indie dev, and I really cared, I could put 50c in a pot every day for half a year to make that.

Michael rose makes a few errors here, and they're important because they shape the character of his argument. His first point is that "$95 is a trivial amount of money." He says nothing to really back this up, but he does provide her job title. His first error is here – this is more or less a complete error of fact.

$95 is a significant sum of money. If I had $95, there is no way I'd spend it on an IGF entry fee, or even another luxury. I wouldn't buy the new shoes that I desperately need, I wouldn't buy textbooks for college, I wouldn't buy new trousers. I wouldn't even buy better quality food. I'd sink that money directly into my debts. I'd have to pay for and purchase and budget for a lot of things before spending $95 to enter a game into a competition would be a responsible decision.

His second error forms his second point. "If […] I really cared, I could [find a way to afford it]." This is a fallacy stemming from the idea that hard work and talent are the only things you need to get ahead in life. It's a fairly innocent idea, optimistic even, until you examine the implications. We've all heard this before, surely. It's the Disney "follow your dreams" speech. As my twitter chum Cole pointed out last night, you could summarise it as "where there's a will, there's a way."

But it's not innocent or optimistic. Consider how it might account for the global underclass. You know, the people who are born, live, and die in factories in China just to make shitty toys for happy meals. The people who rent tiny plots of terraced farmland so they can grow food for their families, only to be outbid by a giant biofuel company who rents acres and acres of it. People who are born with aids, or get pregnant at 13 because they were raped by a superstitious local trying to cure their aids by deflowering a virgin. Those people. The third world.

They obviously haven't achieved fame, success, and critical acclaim. They haven't risen to the top of the corporate ladder or met Mr/Ms Right or quit their stressful life to embrace their artistic side and get by on a slightly less comfortable (Hollywood impoverished, if you will) income. How come none of them are successful or happy or free? Given the premiss, "where there's a will, there's a way," and because it is obvious that there is no 'way' for these people, the only explanation is that there is no will. They're not trying hard enough.

In other words, this ideology espouses that the successful, the rich, the famous, are (mostly) there because they deserve to be there. That anyone could be there, and if they aren't, they obviously don't want it badly enough.

That's pretty insulting to someone who wants a comfortable, stress free existence, who makes all the right decisions and takes all the chances life throws at them, and yet doesn't have that life.

I just asked Michael Rose, out of the blue, if he thought that "anyone can be rich if they really try." He said he didn't agree, that it depends instead upon "the circumstances you're thrown into." There is no way that he's some nutcase trying to tell poor people they don't try hard enough. He was probably just defending the IGF, or trying to express how repulsed he is by (what he perceives to be) the overall attitude of the IGF Pirate Kart (an attempt to get 300 games by 100 authors into the IGF under a single entry).

I'm interested in why this happens. How do we end up saying things we don't mean, and defending them to the bitter end in a blazing internet flame war, without even realising that we, fundamentally, disagree with the point we're making? What compels us to make statements of opinion as if they were fact? What compels us to say things, even if we don't know whether they are true or not? In fact, what compels us to open our mouths and speak when we haven't thought about what we've said, why we're saying it, who we're saying it to, and whether or not it is complete bollocks? What compels us to insult one another in the middle of a debate? What blinds us to the fallacies in our own arguments?

Braindump

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 01:48:00 +0000

Here's some of the shit I've been thinking about today.

Curdie, the McDougall family dog, is about to die. Mum is getting ready to make the decision - he's slowing down, his liver is failing, and he's got lymphoma (cancer), but he's not in any real pain or discomfort. Do we euthanise him while he still has fun days left to live, or do we wait until he's in some form of unbearable agony? Live longer and die afraid, or live (slightly) shorter and die at the end of a good doggy day? It's an easy decision to make, because we don't want to see the old guy suffer for even a moment, but making the phonecall itself... I can only imagine how hard that must be. If anyone has the strength to do right by the dog, it's Winnie McDougall.

Today, my uncle Francis came and dug a very neat grave for him. It means that, if he perks up and starts eating more, and survives into winter, we'll have the grave already dug. Means we can bury him even if it's after the ground gets too hard.

Apparently, Metroid: Other M has some unsettling attitudes towards women. This article, by MenTaLguY and Tuvia Dulin, presents a fairly comprehensive account of the contentious events in the game. In brief, Samus Aran is dependant on a man to authorise bits of her arsenal and defense mechanisms, and this guy doesn't always do it at the optimal moment. He waits around a lot, even while she's in mortal danger and could use some extra kick. In one case, he holds off on activating her heat shielding until she's passed through a dangerously hot room and boss fight called the 'hell run,' during which her health is constantly draining. This is not a deadly weapon, it's just some fucking shields. She worships this guy. He treats her like shit, eventually shoots her, and still gets a big hero ending and a misty eyed, "Adam, thank you..."

There's more, of course. She also wusses out at several key moments. She treats us to the visual metaphor of transforming into a little girl when she faces her oldest foe. The article goes on to explain that there are several female characters, and all of them make some sort of foolish Hitchcockian error of judgement oweing to their tiny feminine brain-peanuts. "Including Samus, there are three female characters in the game, all three of whom exhibit dramatic failures of judgement due to their maternal instinct."

So yeah, you should read that. It's a bit old, but it came to my attention just now because some people were having an angry.

When you get a new graphics card, sometimes a whole month will pass before you remember there's that one game you haven't tried on it yet. Similarly, since I realised that I'm hot for dongs, possible applications, potential implications, and sudden inclinations have been coming to me in dribs and drabs. Tonight, I've just remembered that Yaoi exists. Yaoi, if you don't know, is Japanese gay porn aimed at female readers. An excited google image search left me with one burning question: is it yaoi if Sheik and Link kiss? Spoilers follow for Ocarina of Time, if anyone cares.

Sheik is actually princess Zelda in disguise. She is kidnapped by Ganon and somehow escapes, goes into hiding, and dresses like this. The easiest way to read this is: Zelda is a woman who dressed up like a man, then at the end she unfurls her big pink dress and Ganon nabs her again. She is never not a woman and therefore it is never gay. That was my initial reaction. A twitter conversation with a friend culminated in much the same conclusion. So then I stopped thinking about Sheik and Link. Just, completely stopped thinking about it. Honest.

I'm not even thinking about them right now, for example.

Skins is fucking great! There seems to be a real resistance to Skins and that type of show among people I talk to. You know, wild youths having much more sex in a day than you've had in a year. I've just watched up to the end of season 4. It's not perfect, and there are things I'd do differently, but I don't really feel like getting into that now. What I was thinking of was a Skins drinking game.

Drink:

-When someone shags the worst person they could possibly shag
-When their partner walks in on them doing it
-When their partner's response is another misguided shag
-When all is forgiven.
-When Naomi does something interesting with her lips
-When Tony goes to that open day, drink continously
-When a parent ignores someone's cry for help because they're too busy having a midlife crisis
-When a parent or teacher gives shit advice or non-advice
-When someone's parents split up
-When someone's parent dies
-When the obnoxious party animal turns out to have shit parents
-If you confuse Emily with Katie, no drinks for you.

A few more sketches

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 12:05:00 +0000

I drew these fellows last night while I was watching Skins.

Click to get an engorged version.

Next year

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 20:31:00 +0000

Next year, I swear, I am going to have the fucking smexiest apartment. It will be clean and well organised just like my bedroom here at Chateau McDougall.

I will have mixing headphones with low latency, and wireless media/gaming headphones that I don't have to fuck around with dodgy sound inputs to get to work, and speakers that are large and mellifluous.

In a small and utilitarian room, I will have a single bed that I sleep in. In an immaculate and well decorated room, I'll have a double bed for guests and/or sex.

My fridge will be 40% full at all times, so I can see what's in there and that way food won't go bad. I'll teach myself new recipes every day if I can.

My bathroom will not look like a bachelor's bathroom. It will be clean and fragrant. It will have a buzzing light in it, because that is important.

Things will not get dusty because I will dust them. I'm not going to promise that I won't just use the flat of my hand to dust, though.

I will wash the pots just after I've finished cooking with them (for tantric food-torture purposes), and I'll do the dishes in the morning.

No part of my flat will have a 'boy smell.'

I will have a sofa, at least one desk that doesn't have a computer on it, and bookcases. All of the bookcases.

Next year, Jaz. Just hang in there. Work, patience, discipline. It'll happen next year.

Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 16:45:00 +0000

I'm interested in philosophy.

Recently one of the authors of this book began his lectures in a course entitled, 'Introduction to Philosophy.' He tried to give the class some idea of what sort of material they would be considering throughout the course by raising a question that Plato had asked over twenty-three hundred years ago and was raised again in 1992 with regard to the verdict in the Rodney King case: 'What is justice?' To suggest what this question might mean, he raised related problems, among them: 'How do we distinguish just acts from unjust ones?' 'How do we tell what we ought to do, or what is right?' 'Is justice based only on legal conventions, or are there other, more basic standards?'

After the lecture, a student remarked to the professor that many questions had now been asked and he wondered if the answers would be forthcoming in the near future. The teacher told him that they would consider some possible answers in the course, but he could not guarantee that they would be the right answers. The student answered, 'That's all right, so long as we get answers - just so that we don't have to think.'

The philosopher does not want any answers, and is unwilling to accept them merely because they purport to be answers. The student might be willing enough to live 'the unexamined life,' but the philosopher wants to find the right answers, those that a rational man can feel are warranted after most thoughtful consideration. The fact that some answers have been offered, or even that some have been accepted by almost everybody in a given society, does not suffice for the philosopher. Even that one might feel that certain answers are the right ones is not an adequate basis for relying upon them. Rather, the philosopher insists, it must be completely certain, that these answers are the true ones, before a rational person can adopt them as his/her own. Otherwise, the best that we may be able to accomplish by philosophical examination is only to realise the inadequacy of all answers that have been thus far presented.

("Philosophy made simple", Stroll & Popkin, 1993)

Like, really interested in philosophy.

Social networks

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:56:00 +0000

There are these five sites I use.

Facebook

I use Facebook to stay in touch with people, and to say private things. I don't post on there very much, but I check it a lot and comment on the status updates of my family and friends. I don't play any games or store many photos on there - just the bare minimum profile photo stuff.

I have 55 mutual friends on facebook.

Google plus

I don't know what I use this for. I check it regularly for things that people post. People don't tend to post many things there. I also try to follow interesting people there, but interesting people tend not to pop up in my face on G+ or to post anything interesting when I do follow them. I think G+ might die soon, like Wave and Buzz, if it can't get a fuck ton more people and be more than just "facebook but not run by facebook." I've toyed with using it for tweet-like thoughts on game design or sociology or whatever, but ultimately, anything I post on G+ will be ignored by the relatively small amount of followers I have there.

On Google plus, I follow 43 people. 29 people follow me.

Twitter

I tweet regularly. Apparently I tweet 16 times a day on average. I find that whatever I post, I have people talking to me about it. The content I produce is either emodark whining about my life, courage wolf air-punching about my life, questions that I want answered, pictures I think are cool, issues I'd like to debate, etc. I also try to respond to things that people tweet if they catch my eye.

On twitter, I follow 74 people. About 600 people follow me (it fluctuates, with the tweet spamming).

Tumblr

I'm really new at tumblr. It is a source of cool images. I used to draw things and put them on there, because it was better than deviantart (less strict about content, for example), but I've stopped doing that lately. Now I do a thing called 'reblogging,' which is just the act of seeing a cool picture and republishing it. This means that to follow my tumblr is to get a small selection of the content that I get, but nothing new. I don't use it to author my own views or put forward arguments, but I do reblog things that I agree with.

I follow 18 people, 11 follow me back.

Blogger

This is my blogger site. I use it to say long things that I think are cool, or worth saying, or to whine, or to crack jokes, or tell you about this idea I just had, or whatever. It is no longer the top result when you google my name, but it's close. I love my blog. I miss writing lots of things for it regularly. I don't do that because of twitter, basically. I just tweet 50 times instead of writing a blog post.

It's common for 50-100 people to read a post that I write.

It's obvious that I don't need this many sites. Facebook's function can't be served by any of the others, but what is G+ doing for me, really? Tumblr, is it making my life better? Twitter is good for sending a lot of people somewhere, but 600 isn't exactly a huge number of followers. Do I need to tweet when I have an idea? Can't I just write it up here and make it rock solid before publishing the entirety? Yeah, I can. I can do that.

So that's what I'm doing.

What should I tweet about then, if I'm no longer using it for every idiot thought that enters my head? Why was I even doing it in the first place? Probably just because it's a source of dialogue and news. I love dialogue! We'll get to that later though. For now, my conclusion: I shouldn't be active on so many social networks. I should blog more.

What is wrong with me

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 21:45:00 +0000

I went to see the doctor about my attacks.

These are episodes I've been experiencing intermittently, and they have two distinct phases. Phase 1 is abdominal pressure caused by a buildup of chyme (partially digested food) in my stomach - it can sit in there for a few days to more than a week, no doubt slowly passing through my intensines at some absurdly low rate. If I stop eating, it can give way to intense heartburn. The experience of being this full of fluid, and still hungry and dehydrated, is intensely uncomfortable. It feels like my insides are going to burst. It hurts my back and pulls down on my stomach, so that no position is comfortable to lie, sit, or stand in.

Phase 2 of the episode is copious vomiting of this brown fluid (pretty much every hour until it is gone), loss of appetite, and extreme nausea when eating. If there's a lot of vomiting, my abdominal muscles stay sore for a long time. After phase 2, I can start at phase 1 again or I might start to get better.

The doctor said that it's caused by stress. He said that my life has been too stressful and chaotic for too long and that it's finally catching up with me. I need to anticipate stressful situations and avoid them if it's not possible to clear it up with a single confrontation, try to manage it by unwinding more and giving myself distinct time off as a freelancer, and try to calm down during the attack itself by doing lots of breathing exercises and forcing myself to sit still. He agreed with my mum, that the restlessness during phase 1 was a stress action and nothing to do with the internal workings of my food-pipes.

I tell you what, if I had any cash I'd go out and buy a big bag of weed for emergencies. So far, Minecraft and Sigur Rós seem to help, as does having a cry or a wank. Or both! Maybe I could do all five...

Skins

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:28:00 +0000

I caught up with someone I hadn't seen in a while recently, and then I followed her on Tumblr afterwards. I was forced to raise 1-2 eyebrows at the sheer volume of this sort of thing on it:

I asked her what it was, and she said it was Skins. So I asked a million friends to each give me a tiny section of the first season, and then when I'd collected all the million tiny pieces, I stitched them all together. That was a while ago.

Now I've finished watching the first season. I want to talk about what I like and what I don't.

First impression

This is Tony. In the first episode, he seems to be the protagonist. This first episode put me off a bit - it starts off with gorgeous Tony outsmarting his dad at every turn - slipping out the bathroom window so his dad has to drill through the lock, pretending he can't turn down his music to distract his dad so his little sister can sneak in after her night out, etc.

Then Tony starts phoning his various mates in order to organise a party, lots of weed, and somebody that will take his friend Sid's virginity. I became worried that the driving motion of the show would be things like, "Will the Skins characters get to have a sick kegger? Can they lose their virginity? Can they go without sex for 40 days? Dude, where is their car?"

Tony

In the next episode, we follow Cassie, the girl Sid was supposed to do a sex with in episode 1, but didn't, because she had a suicide scare. "You'll have to be quick, cause I just took a load of pills." The episode spends a good long while on Cassie and what her life is like, what she struggles with. That was my clue to keep watching, I suppose. She's a troubled lady, suffering from a cocktail of mental health difficulties, like anorexia. Sid, who might as well be wearing a tshirt that says "I am all the unpopular nerdy boys at school rolled into one, except with great skin." He's like a more attractive Ron Weasley with less attractive hair.

Sid and Cassie and Tony and his girlfriend Michelle have a love quadrangle. Cassie likes Sid, Sid likes Michelle, Michelle likes Tony, Tony only cares about himself. He mistreats his girlfriend, calls her names and undermines her, cheats on her, makes fun of his friends, puts them up to stupid things that make their lives harder, and all the while acting like it's a big joke. He's charming and good looking and has everything - good grades, a girlfriend who loves him, lots of friends, all the parties he can eat, etc.

From the first episode, where you think Tony will be the focus of the show, Sid takes over a little bit. He's equally unlikeable, but in a cowardly, doesn't-realise-he's-hurting-Cassie-because-he's-a-fucking-idiot way. Sid is banging on about Michelle, and Cassie reminds him that there "are other girls," and he replies, "what girls?" You know, the sort of mistake nobody makes in real life.

These slightly unreal conversations do get a bit old. People end up saying things that don't sound natural when english sixth formers are saying them, or that nobody has ever said outside of a Richard Curtis film. Some of the actors (Michelle or the muslim guy, in particular) fuck their delivery now and again. I didn't like Tony's actor at first either, but that was just the empty, perma-smug character. The actor proves himself.

Sid and Cassie

Once or twice, someone will get angry at Tony. How can you do this to people? What is wrong with you? Why did you say that to her? Etc?! "It's never dull though, is it?" "Keeps it interesting though, right?" "It's great fun though, isn't it?" He never apologises. In fact, he never stops smirking. Even when Sid punches him for toying with Michelle, Tony's reaction is to smirk waveringly at Sid and force out a hurt-sounding, "Now you're getting it!" He's crushed, but his pride won't let him show it, so he's clinging desperately to the premiss he's been proscribing since the start: drama is fun, even if it hurts. This is a significant waypoint in his journey.

See, Tony is undergoing a greek tragedy. He's a character of great power and success and happiness, with everything he wants, whose fatal flaw is his undoing. He doesn't give a fuck about anyone but himself, and he's willing to manipulate anyone he feels like manipulating. At first, this is just to keep himself busy - he's bored, so he convinces Sid to buy an ounce of grass (which is a decent amount) from a crazy dealer called the Mad Twatter. Or he convinces Michelle to get her friend Cassie to fuck Sid, even though Sid just ends up looking after Cassie and making sure she doesn't get into trouble.

Eventually, Michelle leaves him and doesn't take him back. He turns into a scary ex for a bit, stealing her new boyfriends phone and using it to text naked pictures of that guy's sister to Michelle, sabotaging him. He keeps cocking up these horrible insincere little apologies and "take me back" speeches, and he looses more friends with every episode. Eventually he has no-one, phones Michelle constantly, hangs at the edges of social gatherings where he isn't welcome.

During the very last few minutes of the very last episode of the first season, even though he's managed to claw back Sid's respect and told Michelle that he's sorry and that he'll change if she'll give him another chance, something unexpected happens and his symbolic death is complete.

So Tony goes from smug ringleader to morally bankrupt antagonist to a repentant outcast willing to do anything to win back the respect of his friends.

Some of the episodes are a bit dumb (Sid has one where he spends 45 minutes missing the 800ft tall sign Cassie is holding that says, "I'm a mentally ill self-harmer and I'm desperate for you to like me and you've given me the impression that you do and why are you snogging Michelle"), but more often than not, Skins spends its time showing you teenagers who you judge instantly, and then proving that you were wrong.

One question

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:03:00 +0000

Do you change your life to make relationships happen, or do you change your relationships to let your life happen?

FAT QUEST: Month 3

noreply@blogger.com (Jazmeister) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 14:51:00 +0000

Waist: no change
Chest: -1 inch
Weight: -6.5 lbs

Last month I got really sick and it screwed up my whole routine. I've been trying to get it back under control ever since. I'm still losing weight, though, and people are finally starting to say so.