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

waist deep

hello

i am basically waist deep in MGSV right now and have been busy with things
MGSV is a really good game and at times a really goofy game and not necessarily the kind of high note i was expecting the series to end on
i am expecting Konami to bury it and the fox engine and Kojima to not know what to do for a year or more afterwards, kind of like when Itagaki split from Tecmo

Gerimi Burleigh of Optichouse Dot Com!

Hey folks! You wouldn't know it unless you were following Infinite Longbox on Tumblr at the time, but I covered Phoenix Comic Con for them this year and you can find my interviews I did for them with some very exciting people over there.

Unfortunately for personal reasons I was no longer able to commit at the website itself, and now I will be posting my last two interviews here on my personal blog as they would be if I had presented them on the website itself, sans reviews of content.

the man himself! 

Now I know most of you wont be familiar with Gerimi Burleigh which is unfortunate but I present this interview as a means to rectify that. He's a brilliant guy who's been working on some awesome independent comics for the last few years now and I really want to share his work and dedication to comics here. It's taken me much to long to get this out here and after deliberating, I've decided to run it here.


SK:Hi I'm Sam Kittreland I am with-

GB: Gerimi Burleigh from Optichouse.com

SK: And what's your most recent title?

GB:Morningstar, it's a western about Lucifer's fall from heaven...as a western!

SK: How did you come up with the idea for Morningstar? Is it something you've been thinking of doing for a long time?

GB: I've been sitting on this idea for probably like fifteen years, maybe even longer then that. I was at San-Diego Comiccon years ago and inbetween going to panels, I was just sitting around doing some sketches in my sketch book. I just drew some cowboys with the shotguns and the trenchcoats and for some reason it occurred to me to put angel wings on them. After I did that, I thought 'there's a story here'. And after that it just took a little while to massage it and build the pieces around it, realizing it was going to be about Lucifer and his fall.

GB: It's an eight issue series, and I have issues one through four published now, and I'm busy writing issue five.

SK: Would you say Morningstar is the longest series you've worked on so far?

GB:Yeah definitely, the other book I published in 2009 was a self contained graphic novel called Eye of the Gods that one is a psychological thriller that was a one-hundred and forty-four page book so it's equivalent to like a four to six issue miniseries. Morningstar is gonna be a little bit longer than that.

SK:After Morningstar, what do you have planned?

GB: Well y'know I have sort of a young adult fantasy story that involves a bunch of teenage girls that are like barbarian princesses. Either that or a vampire gladiator epic I have planned to do.


SK: That sounds really cool. So I noticed last night while I was reading it that Morningstar draws a lot of references to old western movies, so what were some of the artistic influences you had? Did you draw a lot from other comics or cinema?

GB:It was definitely cinema. I can remember as a kid watching a lot of the Sergio Leone Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, The Outlaw Josie Wales and obviously The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Even if I necessarily didn't understand what was going on as a little kid-

SK: It left an impact -

GB:Yeah, the imagery of those stories is so powerful. Of these gunfights and lonesome cowboys. They were an equivalent to samurai warriors, except on horses with pistols instead of swords. That mystique of the tone that they carry is what I tried to go for in the comic.

SK: Even artistically going to the whole samurai thing - the cowboy is one of the most famous silhouettes in the world. It's very iconic imagery and i'm surprised I don't see more western comics. Could you see yourself doing another western?

GB: I'm not neccesarily concerned with what genre I work in because I love all genre, I love fantasy and western and horror, when I come up with a story it's more about the journey the characters are going on first. Whatever that emotional arc is I may decide that "oh this is a good horror story or a good western." I can take a different type of story that I was originally planning on doing as horror and shift it into a western. I try to be fluid about it and let the project tell me what genre it wants to fit into.

SK: What was it like growing up in Los Angeles as someone who wanted to do comics, or was it something that came to you later in life?

GB: Well you know it was a really great environment! You have art center out there of course, I didn't go to school there but I have friends who went there, a lot of the animation industry is based there too. In fact in college I was an animation intern at Nickolodeon. It's great to be around people who can show you - it's one thing to go to art school it's another thing to go to work at a job where people are doing creative work professionally. Some of the things you learn in school are theoretical and people do things different just out of the necessity of work - producing creativity on demand, on a schedule is very difficult and very challenging, and to learn a lot from people who do it they show you...not necessarily a shortcut, but ways to do it and be efficient.

SK: Would you ever consider setting a comic book in the area that you grew up in? or something autobiographical about growing up in Los Angeles?

GB:Well I do actually have a book that I plan to do. My fiance works in educational psychology and she does a lot with special needs kids that are emotionally disturbed. I had an idea for a horror story that kind of revolved around emotionally disturbed children, and in that one I realized it was based on stuff I heard from her that in general the kids had to deal with and how the trauma effects the family. When you can add a little bit of supernatural horror to something that is real horror that people have to do in their life, that's really powerful. I realize it made sense since I know the area that we live, why not just base it around our real lives? Why not just inject fiction into an environment that I was familiar with?

Morningstar

SK: What kind of stuff did you grow up reading?

GB: Well I was always a big nerd, I loved Dungeons and Dragons as a kid and I ran tables as a DM. I read a lot of Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms stuff, R.A Salvatore. In terms of comic books I grew up on G.I Joe and X-Men, I was kind of a Marvel Comics kid. I read a lot of indies, I tricked my parents early on as a little kid into getting me a subscription to Heavy Metal Magazine. My local newsstand - they didn't care about selling it to kids, it's just another magazine. I showed it to my parents the first couple of pages that it was a comic magazine that I could be reading. I definitely didn't show them any of the T&A or violence [laughs] I was definitely reading stuff that wasn't age appropriate for me. My taste in art has always been skewed to darker and more mature stuff anyway.

SK: Was it...I kind of want to ask, have you been drawing since you were a little kid? Or did you get exposed to comics first?

GB: Well I was always drawing throughout all of my life. I think the turn of it in comics for me was...I was reading G.I Joe and Transformers because of the cartoons. I had a friend take me to a local comic shop. There was a time where I would miss things and think it was gone forever, and my friend was all "Naw there's this place you can go if you miss something."

SK: [laughs] Yeah, a comic shop.

GB: Yeah, and the thing that really blew the doors off of my mind was that my local shop had raffles every weekend and they would give away some comics, and I got the very first trade of Walt Simonson's Starslammers. That book was as impactful to me as Star-Wars. I had seen it by then, and I know even the Star-Wars comics that like Archie Goodwin wrote and Howard Chaykin drew were very influential, but for me Starslammers felt like it took all of the things in sci-fi and fantasy in cinema and made it that exciting in comics. That's when I became addicted to the medium and wanting to read stuff beyond the cartoons that I knew. That's what led me to wanting to check out superhero stuff and be open to all kinds of genres within comics. It wasn't that long after that I started wanting to draw my own comics.

SK: I've been avoiding asking people while I talk to people I kind of try to avoid asking any of the indie artists which character for Marvel or Dc do you want to work on, I don't really believe that the endgame for the industry should be working on someone else stories...so maybe is there something that during Morningstar has been burning to get out of you?

GB: Well with Morningstar...hm, honestly the first graphic novel I did, Eye of the Gods the reason why I did that was because I didn't feel like my writing chops were up to the challenge of doing Morningstar. Which has seven main characters plus others whereas Eye of the Gods is a little more intimate. Morningstar is kind of the book that I said if I only ever did one comic in my life, Morningstar was that story.  I figured y'know life is short, who knows what's going to happen to you? Once I felt I was ready to tackle it I took it on. That said  everyday I may come up with an idea here and there for a story. Sometimes it's just one line of inspiration, sometimes it's just a paragraph. Sometimes I'll sit there and write a five page document and be like alright I've got it all plotted out. I've got more stories planned for my life than I could ever do before I die, and they're all over in different genres. Fantasy, horror, not so much so many superhero comics. Not because I have a distaste for superhero comics! I grew up reading so many of them and I feel like so much has been said in American comics that I don't know what I could bring to it that's different, so I felt like going and exploring other genre that aren't done as often in superhero comics.

SK: Is there anything you want to say to people that are going to hear about you today? Should people check out Morningstar first or Eye of the Gods?

GB: The main thing I would say is to check out my website, optichouse.com! I have the first whole chapter of Morningstar and the first 30 pages of Eye of the Gods and usually the first 12 pages of each issue. Just check out the website and see if it's a flavor you like.

-sk