and with finality,

As it stands, this blog is sort of a monument to my teenage life, even though it didn't really start when I was still a teenager. When I look back at the posts I wrote I see a good evolution of myself as a writer. Maybe other people read something different - there's obviously a point where there's a slow decline of how passionate you could tell I was writing about videogames and comics.

Not only that, but things happened in my life. Maybe I messed up - it all depends on whether or not you know the truth and what you think of me as a person. It turns out a lot of people aren't necessarily invested in knowing what the truth is, but just need someone to be afraid of.

One of the things I talked about on the blog a lot was the amount of artists involved in pop culture who have little knowledge of things outside of pop culture. To make strong art, you need strong inspirations. As one of my closing statements here - expand the things you're interested in. Your life will be rewarded for it.

##SKELETONPARTY was occasionally a place for some of my darker thoughts and little slices of experimentation with fiction, but primarily it was a place to categorize how I felt about the things I loved. Maybe that doesn't come off so much in an article about what would be the genesis of Devil May Cry. ha ha.

Maybe you'll read more into what I wrote here than I was capable a lot of times of actually putting into my posts. For what people I have that read this thing and think there's useful information here, I'll keep ##SKELETONPARTY open. You can still find it in the dark, even if it doesn't seem like a place that welcomes you.

The real question is going to be what comes after a place like this! There's obviously a lot of history here. Honestly I'm not even friends with the people the originally encouraged me to start a place like this originally anyway, what use do I have for propping up the past and giving my nostalgia a monument?

There comes a time in our lives when meeting new people is what we should be doing. I'm out having new experiences and there will come a time soon that I'll want to write about them.
Wherever I go, I doubt I will update this space to let you know, but that's what makes it fun right?

Strangers you are, you might already be reading me and not knowing it. I hope when you see someone with a skeleton as an avatar, or you stumble on down somewhere dark and lonely, you think of me.

You can be assured that I still feel like writing, but being connected to all of this past lately is doing me absolutely no good. Writers have an interesting relationship to their work that's fundamentally unlike that of other artists because we have to sometimes consciously think of every word that we're putting down.

For those of you terrified at the prospect of someone like me going off and creating a new space or a new identity - you should examine yourself in the mirror. You are afraid of someone you never even bothered to talk to about wanting to go on living and creating.

This is also for you. Whenever you see a skeleton you can be paranoid that it's me. You can never be assured just what kind of person it is that's behind the things you love after all. Maybe you'll be afraid, or maybe you'll let go of that fear. I'll know.

For the rest of you though, my silent audience that seemed to come in short bursts whenever it pleased, I'll be out there.

Thank you and goodnight.

W E L C O M E T O T H E S U R V I V A L H O R R O R

OPINION: Resident Evil is probably better for taking a dive towards being a weird pseudo-action horror game occasionally starring the undead. Also opinion: Barring the REmake, which is probably the only example of a legitimately terrifying game in the series, the best versions of Resident Evil are the ones that aren't really about anything.

There have always been better alternatives to horror than Resident Evil as a series. Capcom probably understands this. The fourth and most famous numbered entry ditched a preoccupation with creating an atmosphere of dread and creepiness with one of tension and exhaust. When a moment of restituted happens in Resident Evil 4, it's generally a much needed break as a lead up to the next set piece and an opportunity for the player to chill out a little.

The best version of Resident Evil 4 is the one with the largest focus on an extra game mode that supplies the player with a character of their choice, a stock of ammunition and increasingly large hordes of cannibal villagers out for blood and sweet chainsaw executions.

Giving the player the opportunity to exist in a perfect vacuum is the best execution of Resident Evil.
After all, none of the character interactions in these games extend beyond the bizarre. Leon (the protagonist) is what Capcom imagines as the perfect American action hero in 4. He is soon supplanted by Chris Redfield, the dough faced and flat nosed special forces commando from the very first game only now grizzled and attempting to smuggle his guns into a foreign country in Resident Evil 5

(picture: caption: the guns are his arms)

Taking all of these aside and putting them in a blender is what gives you the Mercenaries, which had a release on the 3DS as the aptly named Resident Evil: Mercenaries 3D. A game with no cartoonish, hilariously evil pharmaceutical company or sneering British bio-terrorists.
Breaking the game up into these little intoxicatingly feverish set pieces where you're tasked with killing many quickly is basically the absolute crunchy inner core of the third person action game.

At some point last year I bought Resident Evil: Revelations 2 and let it sit in my Steam library while I wasted time on a bunch of puzzle games and visual novels and waifu simulators. Side point: Resident Evil is as much of a waifu simulator as a game like, well, Waifu Bartending.

I've played maybe the first chapter of the game I bought before I got easily sidetracked. There's a mode within the game that offers mission-based levels where you're a bloody steamroller cutting through re-spawning undead abominations until the end goal of the level.

It is Pure Resident Evil, distilled to its finest essences. Dumb, goofy costumes and over-the-top melee animations sandwiched with bizarrely complicated weapon customization and character progression. It is not Survival Horror as two words together. It is neither Survival nor Horror separately.

If traditional horror games are like reaching into a bucket of frothy bile so you can get a key to open the door in a rusty room you've been locked in. Then the purest form of Resident Evil must kicking the bucket across the floor and picking the key up from the ground.

Where I should be overjoyed that the newest entry unveiled at E3 will be returning to its roots, a part of me is sad I wont be solving international biological terror with shotguns and cowboy costumes.

that's the end I guess

ARBITRARY LIST OF COMFORT FOOD

1. A Nice Steak Purchased At Fry's
2. Shrugging Off An Existential Crisis In A Way That Doesn't Affect You
3. Megaman X
4. Realizing That The People Most Invested In Your Hobby Are Also The Ones Ruining It
5. SKIN

positive emo (SMTIV)

the below introduction contains spoilers for SMTIV and references to suicide and depression also I am no longer depressed so I decided to post it incomplete

I've been struggling through depression lately over the last few months more than I usually do, which has been tough. For a life insert: I've been working night-shift for the last year and change, which has contributed a lot to the depression I've been feeling.  You miss out on a lot of things, the sun among them. Even while I'm writing this, the glimpse of the sun I got was while it was disappearing over a mountain.

The denizens of Tokyo in Shin Megami Tensei IV have lives a lot worse than mine could ever possibly be. Not only do they have to constantly be mindful of the fact that a brutal death is waiting around likely every corner (if they don't starve) they've never seen the sun before.

That's not really what drew me to start playing SMTIV though! It was actually complete happenstance that I even ended up here. More real life insert: Usually when I am depressed there is a shortlist of games I play. Almost all of which focus entirely on positive emotions; imagine lots of teenagers with their hands on their hips trying to solve some mystery.

My shortlist is mostly games I have an emotional connection to for one reason or another. I am a sentimental goofball and up until just a few years ago, I didn't have an interest in things that were based out of negative emotions or despair.

Look at it this way: I didn't even really start reading books until after highschool, so imagine the worst motherfucker upset at 'art games' as me from the years of 13-18. Even still after not being that person, I tended to avoid things that weren't, I dunno, build for entirely positive purposes unless I was already happy.

Instead of crawling back to the sunlit vistas and friendship-togetherness of Chrono Cross or Final Fantasy VIII's morality play of learning how to be a better person, I sort of accidentally fell into Shin Megami Tensei IV's fucked up world where every plot development seems to directly deal with fucking up the life of someone else.

One of the first plot twists in SMTIV comes as a revelation to the player about the nature of the world where the game takes place. A character called "The Black Samurai" has been giving people illegal literature that contains references to worlds where people don't live by a strict caste system or have alternative political or religious systems to the ones they live in.

This, in most cases, causes people to either go insane and die, or turn into violent and bloodthirsty demons, in the literal sense of the word.

I didn't even realize I was helping propagate a ruthless caste system until a little while ago, at a little less than halfway through the game. This ruined Tokyo and the world sitting ontop of it is built out of alternatives though, It's not like the game has so far railroaded me into one path over the other.

Every turn in the story brings with it more decisions to be made, and uniquely SMTIV's offerings of moral choices have made me actually stop and put down my 3DS on more than one occasion just to think.

When the decisions are this weighted and larger parts of the narratives and whole characters weigh on your actions and responses, it lends more credence to how oppressive the game feels. Maybe it would be purely enough if like some of the games in the same series that came before it, the game was mainly about how it was constructed around the plot, but SMTIV's whole existence as a game from start to finish is opressive.

 Alternatives that I'm given aren't much better: going a more chaotic path quickly turns you into the kind of person who affects a ruthless, might-makes-right kind of approach to the world. You can become the fascist god-emperor of the post apocalypse world!

The Speed Dating Panel

oh gosh you don't even understand the kind of exhaustion that wracks your body after an event like phoenix comicon. it is the kind of thing where the phrase 'oh gosh' immediately comes to mind because I have been dryly swearing and quipping about every unfortunate interaction (there are many) that happen there for four days that it started bleeding into my regular work life.

heads up: if you're coming from The Website this is where i seem strikingly condescending about the things i like if for the purpose of serving my own cynicism
the con was great - really it was. we had a blast from start to finish. we drank with dudes that ran a hentai website and talked about the shit we've seen in life. i get a sense that the webmaster is a hell of nerd who's simply found a niche that can serve other people well enough to keep him afloat.

i went to a speed dating panel and met a number of great women but unfortunately had to miss the queer /lgtbq speed dating panel afterwards but like
god there's a thing i have to talk about

The Guy who runs the speed dating panel is a massive man with a predictable chinstrap beard whow as dressed as a jedi the entire convention with a requisite plastic lightsaber. at the beginning of the speed dating panel he made a point of saying that for the sake of stirring up the atmosphere and easing some of the shy nerd boys (well, men) into being comfortable his articulate jabs would come only at the expense of the males in the room

and then anytime a woman did anything they were the person being directed at. the reason I'd go back though is because the women were routinely laughing at his jokes, while the men were angrily stewing as he took attention away from them.

he talked about finding love and happiness at a convention - a place where nerds gather and talk and buy and commiserate and drink, as being not just possible but proven. at one point after the conversations were over with our partners, i watched a young dude (probably 18) who i assume has shitty opinions about women in fandom balk and storm out as he found himself not receiving any contact info from any of the 25+ women he spoke to for the entire hour. he exclaimed "i fucking KNEW this would happen" with the shrillness of someone between adolescence and adulthood
while the orchestrator balked with a "yeah yeah, get the fuck out of here."
he stormed out

kicked the door

and all the women laughed

-sk

NU-DOOM MURDERHEADS

i really like the way DooM looks when i type it like that, so for the purposes of talking about new id software/zenimax/Bethesda game DooM i am going to type it like that. i feel like DOOM fits the feel of the original two games much more and doom 3 doesn't exist in a modern enough context in terms of relevancy to even be capitalized properly.

the point here: i played the new DooM. i thoroughly enjoyed it! two idiot gamerheads (black hair mand and purple prose man called the game 'playable sugar' and numerous forum goers at select button dot net have claimed pretty much the same (one even got banned for it!)

playable sugar! yes! i have a sweet tooth for this kind of thing. some people have called it Dumb Fun but they are the most wrong out of all of us. they are the kind of people that like Hollywood Horror Movies because regular horror movies gross them out too much/make them uncomfortable.

DooM is the smartest fun. DooM is action shoot game Metal Gear Solid 2. DooM is a game where the plot is nonsense but the story is structured around DooM being a franchise that exists in hearts and minds everywhere.

plainly, DooM is about DOOM. outlining the ways i think this is true will require me to spend even more time with it but i got some ideas

go play it while i think about it

a new post

Haha whoah it’s been a few months since I updated. Could you guys even remember what all has happened since I was regularly posting lmao here’s a rundown for you if you’ve been living underneath a snorlax (heh, a little referential humor for you.)

 

·         MGSV released and I played it and spent like a hundred hours dicking around at the start.

·         Hollywood proved it is bad, and then proved it is bad again (link scarjo story here)

·         The latest Tom Clancy game continues a long line of pro-fascist narratives

·         Marvel Rebooted its creative universe

·         So did DC

·         Image released a bunch of comics I was really excited about (like Birthright) that I completely forgot about

·         I started playing one of the best tabletop card games I ever tried, Champions of the Galaxy

·         Street Fighter V was released. Last time I was posting there was not Street Fighter V, and now there is.

·         Hyper Light Drifter finally came out and the OST and basically the whole dang thing is particularly sublime.

actually after that last one (because this could have been a particularly lot of bullet points) the beginning of this year has been kind of amazing for independent games. Superhot and Welcome to the Gungeon and Hyper Light Drifter and Elliots Quest and Galak-Z were all so good and so different from Colorful Indie Platformers that I feel happy heaping praise upon them. True indie games have also been making waves too and the beginning of this year was just kind of super amazing for all of the vidcons that have been coming out lately. And so many comics ughh whoah holy shit it makes me actually want to take part in my hobbies in a meaningful way

 

for the most part im pretty sure (90%) that most of my readership has bled away from the site so if youre swinging by to read this well BLESS because theres probably going to be a dearth of more content (yeah gotta get that Sweet Content) coming here soon since ive started feeling better about being a person and a writer in general haha ha hAH AH AH ah

ive always wanted to walk the line between whatever/however I think about things and it feeling like im telling you (the Reader) directly about them because I hate writing that comes off as overly formal, but yes I see the point to all this academia and stuff its just Not For My Blog.

 

play a videogame today friends, ill be back right around the corner eternally behind you in the mirror

new year

hooray it's 2016
yes i know i missed basically the entire tail end of last year
i was waist deep in journeying and adventuring

our own skeleton friend isn't around to make a post for us this year like he did last year unfortunately, so we'll have to get by on our own. our hearts go out to him.

(that sort of writing can be found here: god bless this mess)

things that happened at the end of 2015

-prospective career changes
-more writing that didn't get published
-getting my life in order
-planning next years events


fin