The Real Thematic Core of Indie Gaming Darling Outer Wilds

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Outer Wilds is a game that respects your time and your curiosity. Though I’m going to argue the theme is letting go, you should hold on to the experience of playing it yourself before knowing anything and spoiling it! Stumble around blindly like a cool 4 eyed space amphibian, then come back for some thematic discussion.

 

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Addendum to 2013 Death Grips Article

In the article to which I allude in the title I made certain comparisons to Rage Against the Machine - the high energy, non-mainstream yet mainstream, politically and emotionally charged with the caveat that Death Grips does not give a damn about anything approaching meaning or protest. Their protest is of sanity, an interesting type of protest in a world that's arguably getting more insane by the year, where it would no longer matter if, say, most of its inhabitants were exterminated (by their own complicity, appetite for violence, and indifference) in some kind of terrifying schizophrenic drug apocalypse. In a sense the apocalyptic vision is much more compelling to the apathetic drop-outs of the post 90s than 'fighting the man' since that fight doesn't seem fair or winnable, especially when its old champions were themselves arguably under the thumb of the same corporate America they claimed to despise.

But I digress. In the post I didn't write so much about my personal approach to Death Grip's music, which I felt had to be remedied in an addendum. I do so not only because the other post got a decent amount of hits (which is rare for me), but that I didn't examine the music so well, and I have always had contrasting opinions on it. It was incredibly interesting in 2012, and kind of dicked around with half-baked albums and moments of glory since then.

On the one hand there is something laughable in the balls-to-walls insanity of any Death Grips album. MC Ride screams unintelligible lyrics with the odd half-yelled statement (some of which hints at greatness, most of which was too cringey for non-headphone listening) while on the other hand the track parallels his delivery with high energy percussion, warped samples and effects, and breakneck pace and, at its best, compelling inventiveness. On Exmilitary (in my opinion  their most interesting album) the energy was pushed as far as it could be and the very good use of a sample ('Rumble', a song with an interesting history which was clearly being channeled for a purpose) really caught my attention. I loved the production because it was insane and very intriguing with samples and effects and at their best the lyrics matched that.

So I got the instrumental version of Exmilitary (then titled: Black Google) and finally I got to listen to the production and was very enamored of it. 'Spread Eagle Cross the Block' was the song that first really caught my attention but, for me, the lyrics only rarely improved it - stripping out the insane vocals made it easier to admire the production. Since that time I've loosely followed the band and they've had a couple of good moments where lyrics and production were briefly perfectly in sync, but by and large I've been disappointed. The instrumental album Fashion Week brought me in to take a closer listen but failed to hold any attention. It was interesting and at times pretty good but lengthy and kind of derivative and exhausting to listen to, especially as it seemed to confirm my view of the band as one that worked simply because it was a mainstream breakthrough for more aggressive sounds in a time just before bigger acts broke the seal.

It's hard for me to keep caring about most groups and artists if they release the same album a dozen times and disband (Linkin Park with their eternal cycle of remixes, late Wu Tang where its importance was only because it was Wu Tang and we were empathetic to their plight of never releasing a relevant album again, RATM which I loved when I was young and now find kind of funny [though the ROCK is still primo], and so forth). I will keep listening if I like the original idea enough that it doesn't bore me later on (Drum and Bass when I was younger, chamber pop like Prefab Sprout now) or that is flawlessly executed or completed by its flaws. Most of the time I am not overwhelmed, which is why I've always been on the skeptical side regarding Death Grips. Being transgressive, outrageous, and loud has value but kinda pales if used to ring the same note time and time again. Eh.

Then I chanced upon Interview 2016, which is all instrumental, way more focused than Fashion Week, and actually piqued my interest again. On first listen it was lively, a bit chaotic, but controlled enough to remain coherent enough to demand a second listen (and be pleasurable to the ear). And so, I suppose, my final judgment is that it's alright, what do I know? Basically nothing. I'm a sloppy blogger and Death Grips has at least ten thousand fans and probably they make a good amount of money and get to play big shows and fuck around with the media by releasing free albums and making incredibly dense aggressive music as a counterpoint to mainstream, sort-of-depressing, flaccid shit like new Kanye and even new Chance where twelve years of gospel stylings and samplings are recycled into deep nonsense that is praised for reasons I will never comprehend. I can't go on in this wasteland without making people angry at me, and that querulousness is why it doesn't matter how I feel, but I'll be damned if I won't write something after all this silence.

Functions of Extreme Worry and Anxiety in Modern Society

These days most anybody is or knows someone who is very on edge, suffers from Professionally Identified Anxiety Disorder, or suffers from bouts of Extreme Worry (a disorder which includes subsets like '90's style extreme' and 'extremely incapacitating'). I see this more and more often. While I am fortunate enough to simply be extremely paralyzed by it, I realize looking around in my life that plenty of people seem to function nominally well under such pressures. A minority of acquaintances have more serious issues and the effects aren't always immediately apparent, but when I stop and think about it I can see hints of avoidant behavior and other quirks. I used to always write them off as high-strung but I've come to a number of realizations in the past year especially.

I mean I've gone long stretches without worrying too much, or with only minor worries blown out of proportion. Every now and then something relatively important will fill me with a sense of dread that cannot be banished. I refer to those most often as moments of clarity. I had a few such moments when I lost the ability to write effectively for this blog, and killed it, and knew that I blew it, and didn't have the energy or drive to replace it with a better one. I've had such moments about about personal relationships, and they've have kept me from the blessed realm of sleep. I regularly get the sensation of growing dread when I think of my life. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one, and I've seen people with much less fucked-up lives than mine worry outrageously.

I've seen lots of unhappy faces on the streets. I assume most of them are facing some kind of anxiety. I can't blame them. There seem to be about a million things to worry about. There are always hundreds of things going on. You're missing out. You're probably sick with something. There are new illnesses every day. The planet is not dying. The world is under attack by fanatics who think the planet is dying and want to ruin your standard of living because they're hippies. People are out to get you. Lies and murder rule the streets, maybe even the world. You're going to lose your job. You're unemployed already and nobody will ever hire you. You'll never be in love again. The love you're in is falling apart. You're not in love, of course, you're far too rational for that. You're over-thinking things. You're not living your dream. Someone somewhere is stealing your dreams from you. You're insufficient for your dreams. Your dreams are killing you.

Let's Talk About Mental Health, But Let's Not Say Anything Meaningful About It

End the stigma. End the persecution. End the long decades of rotting lives at the bottom being forgotten and ignored. But whatever you do, don't point out how mental health has been adversely affected by the modern world, because that's where we make our profits. Let's not stigmatize the status-obsessesed, the oversharers, the internet addicts, sociopaths, borderline sociopaths, the narcissists, the identity fetishists... in short let's just change the perception by stating that it's not the ill person's fault they're ill, and give them a modicum of respect, and continue on our deranged way. Some day we'll all be mentally ill, if we aren't already.

So let's have a mental health awareness month, a couple corporate-backed mental health awareness movements every year, some nice infographics, some nice ads, some good progressive and compassionate copy. Let's take some real steps, let's end the crisis before it gets worse, or at least make a pretty big deal about acknowledging it. Just let's not pry into where it's coming from, or why more people than ever are getting ill. Keep condemning the suicides and the silence. Don't look over there at the causes: that way lies madness.

Poverty, mental illness, illiteracy, substance addiction, lifestyle addiction, non-normative sexuality (itself a freaky frontier that's easy to support especially if you want nothing to do with it but want to appear a progressive and compassionate person), and  megatons of other stuff. It's no longer anybody's fault. Those who declare it a function of individual responsibility, as well as those who declare it a function of societal responsibility, are entrenched in ideology. The truth is far simpler than anyone wants to acknowledge: they're all Bad Things. Mental illness is just a Bad Thing, that needs Attention, and requires Awareness. The problem is that mental illness not photogenic. It doesn't respond well to attention. It's really, really ugly and it's got deep roots and deeper pockets.

Health in general in decline. Increased incidences of diseases of affluence, first world problems like anxiety, a weakening breed finding new ways to pity itself. Dementia rears its ugly head. Cancer from years of worry-free high-living catching up to us. The natural, polluted world with its natural conclusions. Let's keep consuming so the economy doesn't falter. Let's not ask questions. Let's never wake up from our nightmare as it gets darker and darker.

People are less mindful than ever. Overconnected to everything via the internet. Bombarded with images of opulence and excess that they will never know, for which they are programmed to have an insatiable lust. Lost in meaninglessness, with false meaningfulness leading them astray. Conditioned to worship at the altar of Mammon. Real vs. VR. Terrorism vs War. Inequality is Solved. Internet sickness. Quality of Life. 12 Steps to a Better You. Fired by Text Message. 10 Cute Cats That Will Cure Your Blues. The Babylon System is winning, the world is changing, nobody seems to give a shit. Money rules everything, people with money call the shots, and most people believe their half-truths. Meanwhile a million unchecked distractions clamor for everyone's attention, and the individual (despite the hype of optimists) has never felt so insignificant in a world of Social Networks, Big Ideas, and Batshit Maniacs. There's no fucking respect, I'll tell ya.

In my opinion it's no mystery why people are getting all fucked up and sick. They can't police their own thoughts, they can't control their government and corporate sanctioned addictions to legal substances and activities, they can't escape without losing their future. People are generally more separated by technology than they are brought together by it. A whole generation is living a shitty, loveless, poor existence wrought by their elders and blamed on them – and I'm sure they'll turn out fine and well-adjusted despite this, but they take a sickening amount of shit from a world so unfair it's parodic. Suicides everywhere... a sinking quality of life, urban hellscapes, the decline of the natural world and a bunch of insane technofucks claiming we should divorce ourselves further from our roots, as if our current divergence isn't at least partly at fault for the insane clusterfuck we've wandered into. Jargon rules the day, but it never saved one life.

And the isolation. Alone in a sea of identity, tired of the cult of identity, feeling like nobody and nothing and stumbling through a life ruled by the pleasures of others and the whims of the greedy, powerful, and detached. Faces are masks, genuine humanity is in decline and retreating to the quiet places. Hope is dying along with mental healthiness. There is nobody to talk to, but everyone wants to speak out about how it isn't shameful to be mentally ill. Of course not, but the cure isn't in reinforcing the status quo, just like how all the cures to all of what ails us as a species are not in keeping things comfortably similar to 'how it is'. We don't want to look into what's harming us, like the obstinate addicts we are. Maybe things seem worse than they are, maybe I'm a shitty blogger and an alarmist, but things're bad enough and breeding vast populations of stunted narcissistic sociopaths incapable of human emotion or connection – populations in all age groups, not just the young tech-savvy millenials who already have tons of opprobrium piled onto them coupled with an increasingly grim outlook.

The world is increasingly soulless and irreal. Appearances have replaced qualities. Abandon all hope, because nobody gives a shit anymore. The pressure to succeed can only be met by dishonesty and combativeness, the competition is severe, the world is at the edge. Don't ask any questions. Don't step out of line. Don't live - exist. Just repost the memes, make those donations happen, and keep ignoring the people you know who are sinking, the people you pass on the street who are already sunk... keep your eyes on the newsfeed. Let the internet do the good works for you. This is the least self-aware era and it needs to be ripped violently in half by a comprehensive, blood-thirsty, no-prisoners satire before we destroy everything of value and premise our future on misery, ignorance, and disgust. The time to wake up is fast approaching, and a world of comatose automatons will greet it with indifference.

Meeting Cool People in Your 20s

It's a daunting prospect because many cool people in their 20s are probably traveling between one cool place and another, or one interesting life event and the next, and your only chance to meet them – unless by some accident you're going to a cool place and you're in your 20s – is to travel with them and be more personable, good looking, and cleverer than the rest. However, when they find out you're simply traveling for life reasons and not to TRAVEL like a cool 20 something everything will fall apart as they suss out just how uninteresting you are, after they realize you're not actually an unreadable human cypher, but rather (pick one of many appellations - I'm going with 'lousy deadbeat').

You've got no stories, you've simply worked to stay alive, your academic papers won't turn undergrad heads and will fail to impress even highschool kids - both under and overachievers will probably laugh at you. They've traveled extensively and wonder about people who settle down, but they don't even know there are people who intentionally hobble themselves and live in flyover cities nobody cares about, with real friends and real intrigues that still fail to fully ameliorate the truth of a dismal reality with nothing dynamic, no progress, and no aims. You've basically shot yourself in the interesting part of your head.

Upon the moment of self-reflection and awareness, you can actually watch the interest on that cool young person's face drain away, and harken to this: they will begin to tell good stories more often than they will ask you about yourself, and when you volunteer information about yourself, they will give a nice response and continue moving the entire discussion away from a chance for you to explain yourself.

Why? Because there's no explaining to be done: you failed to take interesting risks. Instead of flying by yourself to a place where you didn't know the language and hadn't memorized the liquor prices and internalized the laws, you stayed at home and on Friday you went and got drunk with some friends. You probably complained about something. Instead of meeting a bunch of people in your hostel, hating some and really enjoying others, and having hazy chaotic heartfelt discussions with complete strangers where you disburdened yourself of existential problems that troubled you for a decade, and maybe getting laid by a righteous intelligent beauty, you washed the dishes and looked out of the shitty grimy window of your 20-something's rat shit warren and laughed humorlessly about the big mystery of why you're not happy. You realize that, in your 30s, you might make a passably good bitter comic, but the tradeoff is likely not worth it.

You done fucked up, and the only way to proceed now is to try and make as much fast money as possible and then fly to Thailand and follow the young mostly-white westerner migration unto Bali, Australia, and all the rest, maybe unto wherever the new Phi Phi is unfurling, where you will bask in good times and tough lessons. And if you fail to do that, you might just end up marrying someone a lot cooler than yourself, and the discrepancy will haunt you until you die... you will warn your children not to be diffident, not to value knowledge over experience, but they will fail to listen and instead live according to their whims, and it will haunt you then and every day, as it does now, because in truth you have nothing, less than nothing... people with nothing might have a good story, but nothing comes to your mouth when the time for a good story arrives, and you can't ace the telling anyway. Your mind is full of tedium and despair and grim stories about being poor and aimless and drunk, and it has set you apart from your peers forever. You have probably broken it.

You have turned yourself into nothing and start to doubt anyone could overcome it, but as you tell a sure to be interrupted story about your most recent uninteresting and static days, or some mild anecdote about your sterilized and irreal existence, you will realize it doesn't matter. You could even try to explain the consolations of being an anchorite in an apparently boring and lifeless city, try to get them to have a beer with you, but the idea will immediately fill you with revulsion, and you may vomit from stress and grief. Why would a normal person want to have a drink with a broken subhuman like you? Why make it totally awks by even trying? Why would anyone, anyone at all who wasn't related to you, ever give the tiniest shit? Your life achievements and goals can be summed up by the image of a late autumn puddle with a couple of dead rotting leaves in it - it might be weirdly beautiful, but mostly it's just sad. Just rewrite your resume, you boring boneheaded fuck, and try not to think of all the fun other people just like you are having, all of which goes to show, really, that a bad attitude is a real disability, and possibly the worst.

Cyber Menace

In shitty apartments all over the world, one thing is law: you get the internet and you let your friends use it( unless you are very suspicious of them; in which case, why are you hanging out with them?). You don't even need a public terminal (say, for instance, a hilarious, very poignant, and svelte circa 1998 laptop you bought from an IT guy for a bag of weed) because almost everyone carries with them an internet capable phone now. So there's no question at all that there's some kind of cyber menace... and, check this out: it has already claimed lives!

It just makes sense that in a society so ill that it sometimes creates psychiatric disorders at almost the same rate as it creates landmark celebrities, there would be a cyber element. The internet is everywhere and still spreading. Some people can't look away from it or live without it. Being without it is missing out, but being part of it is not always what you want. Some, the wild or wise, might even call the contemporary situation one involving significant levels of Cyber Menace.

"This ain't your granddad's Neuromancer, kid."

Sure, it's easy to pish posh the point away by citing the unreal possibilities of the incipient cyber-era, which is so different from even what Nostradamus saw it was (due to relativistic drift and/or other variables) that contempory people are still trying to say what the hell is going on with no recognizable degree of accuracy. It's all... you know... dust in the wind kind of shit. Typos of the blogosphere business.

The internet business: the potential is awesome but the reality is also very convincing in another direction than what is classically termed hopeful. I don't really need to cite anything, I feel. Pretty much everybody has or has heard a fantastically gut-wrenching and uncomfortable internet story by this point. Facebook is turning some people into wrecks and offering hilarious insights into human nature to others. It's a fact of life, even: you play with the internet and you get burned. You get played. Or you get an okay laugh or chuckle while you shake your head. #SMGDH with a side of #LOL, please, and don't overdo it.

People's day-to-day living and actual worlds are all affected by the digital world. Well, not mine, but then again I'm a blogger and nobody cares, so I can actually sit down and look and see people get affected by the internet media they consume. It's a weird era, and unfortunately it's not always fun YouTube videos weird. I find it all very strange and I can feel its draw as much as the next human. Still, everybody should have to admit: a reality check is in order.

Beyond the hype, the laughter, the outrage, the trolling, the well animated distractions, and the jargon lie actual problems. Let's see what the impossible potential of the Cyber Menace can do about that, before we consider it a friendly necessity.

The Following Tweets Presented Without Comment

Is Death Grips this Era's Rage Against the Machine?

 ^{[citation needed]} Apart from the heightened requirements for being considered legit anti-corporate and the fact that Death Grips isn't that political, it almost seems possible. Time moves in cycles, and it has been a while since there was a Rage Against The Machine-esque group in or near the mainstream, that I know of, but Death Grips seem to be the perfect candidate. Behind the facade, they don't even have coherent words to get an agenda from... actually this whole thing is falling apart: the new Rage would obviously be a New Sincerity band.

However, I get this sense from Death Grips that they're projecting an even bigger identity than what they actually possess. It's like how Rage was part of the 'Che Guevara T-Shirt era' of counterculture, a largely corporate construction referencing or alluding to deep things like a Tibetan monk on fire or how bad racism was. Death Grips is the new counterculture, which may be more legit, but has even less coherence.

As far as I know only Death Grip's tendency to release their albums for free is solidly anti-corporate or at all activist, and they don't really project any leftism or rightism in their lyrics at all. They more exist in a great, drugged out realm where politics can't claim them for its own insidious purpose. The idea that they are not just dudes making music, and instead dudes getting paid a lot to make music for some kind of viral marketing project, is very tempting mostly because I'm a hugely cynical skeptic.

The machine has won. Rage was one of its products and the crowd that used to listen to them sincerely have all moved on, mostly towards being yuppies. Death Grips exists in the absence of hope or progress, an aesthetic the group wallows in, as if to prove there is nothing left – a statement powerful enough to put it on equal footing with the largest, least counterculture countercultural movement of the 1990s.

It all relies on the idea that maybe Death Grips is saying something by screaming incoherently about drugs and paranoia and lust, but I know for a fact the group's listeners do not wear Che Guevara shirts. I have my ideas about their fans, in particular I think a lot of them are anything but as hardcore and mentally unsound as the music suggests, and the music writes a bigger cheque than Rage ever did because it seems to mostly be balls-out insanity.

Note that both groups were signed to Epic Records Co. Death Grips is no longer with them due to self-releasing albums and other rebellious things that Rage never did at all. Rage did manage to get a very comprehensive listing as 'questionable music' in the wake of 9/11, when any actual radical had not listened to them for nearly a decade. Ultimately very idea of counterculture 1990s is either very scary or incredibly laughable so I would put the two groups in different categories at least temporarily. I don't think the distinction would help either band and to be honest I don't think they have anything in common at all.

However: this does not mean that Death Grips is not this era's Rage Against the Machine. Epic Records execs must have seen the same underground/indie/counterculture buzz in both bands in order to want to sign them. Nobody cares that much about either band right now, but Death Grips is alive at least. Death Grips did not get the over-mainstream cool people and instead nabbed the indie nerds who are too cool and self-aware for horrorcore but into something similar, to the eternal chagrin of the Execs, who then dumped DG after finding or making a suitable excuse. I know they were part of the corporate overlords' plans somehow. Just like Rage. More the fools us.^{[citation needed]}

User Comment Rodeo: Rocktoberfest

Listen well, for I know that reading internet user commentary is an unhealthy practice. Every day, many people are drowned in sorrow and rage by scrolling down on a YouTube video. The most vulnerable and fearful video posters have been known to disable commentary altogether – suspecting the wildest, dumbest, and most impassioned responses. User Comment Rodeo asks the rhetorical: why is internet commentary such a low thing? Has it any value? Who gains by it, and who are the principal commentators? Why is it largely hateful, negative, illiterate? Does it reflect on human society in the year 2013? What conclusions can we draw about the spitefulness of modern humanity? It is known the internet can have deleterious effects on health, especially mental health, and I believe that the biggest user comment posters are also the most mentally unwell.

For this instalment of User Comment Rodeo, I wanted to stray as far as possible from the usual set of questions and the usual set of very obvious samples and go a-huntin' for more specialized examples. The beauty of user commentary is that it is limitless: if it could be used to generate energy we could go some distance to solving the energy crisis. If only impotent rage held any value at all, we could even begin to trade it, bringing in an era of fantastic riches. Since it doesn't, I changed the parameters on the UCR 3000 and waited for a haul of brilliant material. Me, getting content farmed? Hah, I'm farming the internet every day and rolling in the 'lulz' like it's dirty money.

You will see above an example of the 'intentional double post'. User is 'raging' at a localized advertisement and revealing a rather high level of acrimony. If you didn't know about the problems of a New Zealand national on Youtube, you know. That has value: not as much value as an AD BLOCKER perhaps, but value nonetheless. Double posts are generally due to user error, but as you can see, they are very enjoyable and visceral when they are intentionally done to express some idea or other.

Here's another double post, which demonstrates the flip-side of 'double posting for emphasis'. It also demonstrates how searching for double posts is risky, because they're not so highly amusing if they're not New Zealots taking the piss out of corrupt businesses, biased governments, and the eternal problem of YouTube advertising.

This is an apologist double post. A big company was at risk of being called mean things, and someone had to stand up for them. Of course length has an inverse relationship to content and quality of communication, so I don't really know where this guy is coming from. "Yeah, you know, who cares if it's people like me who enable large corporations to skirt legal issues, hide from effective taxation, and blow up clouds of careless birds with impunity. They're good for the community, they're sincerely gracious to their employees, and they're not Pamela Wallin."

Let's get back to the relatively basic single post - in this set I'd like to cite one poster (you might have noticed them already) who manages to miss the point, be a buzzkill, and expose himself as a deviant square all at the same time. Also there's an Internet Drug Expert (very cool), and what I think is a tween hipster there in the middle (VICE Montreal or die, bro)... suffice it to say there is only one truly insufferable poster, and the quality of the rest of the comments was significantly higher than what I'd expect from Youtube Comment Sections. People spend their time doing this kind of thing, maybe in isolation, maybe while they ride public transit... scary, isn't it? You may never know who these posters are, but if you're lucky you'll never know who they are.

I decided to close this rather lazy UCR on a high note. Spam comments like this are everywhere, some newer ones are offering drugs but I do enjoy an old fashioned Pick Up Artist 'advertisement'. This guy is very subtly a spam bot, but you'd never know just by reading the blatant yet  comment. The internet... it only cares about the one thing it will never possess: sex.

The Fate of the Book

So much very subtle and quiet hype about the end of the bound stack of paper sheets known as 'the book'. There have been many books over the years, and I think everyone can agree that they were not always perfect, nor ever had an overwhelming reputation for improving the world. But there's a certain something to books and even if they are dying, take heart: our generation will be able to come by books cheaply for the duration of our existence, unless they begin burning bales of books.

If the global stock of books is significantly destroyed in the next twenty years, or publishing is severely repressed by economic or colluded forces, then at the very least books will have predicted that. Basic reading and communication skills will not likely be replaced, so language will continue, and the flow of ideas will merely take on another, potentially better form. Or our eyes will atrophy from an unmitigated hegemony of digital screens, flashing lights, and confused information.

Maybe there will be a tidal-wave of information in the future which will overwhelm us. Maybe it will get the better of us. We could be changed forever.

Or the book could go on well into the future, as some type of elitist symbol that nobody understands. Probably this view of the book's future is already some cliche that has been analyzed and exploited in hundreds of books. Maybe the book will suffer a renaissance in a few years, or maybe all the news sensationalism and existential dawdling will come to naught, and the book will be as ubiquitous and burdensome as ever – perhaps forever.

In the end, if it goes, the memory of the book will either be exterminated, merely forgotten, or enshrined by some freakish bibliophilia committee as the centerpoint of some futurist, knowledge-based cargo cult. And however it goes, the book will remain as at least a symbol.

But in the meantime there is all kinds of mawkishness about books and print media in general. It seems that the publication industry gets more fatalistic while the technology industry fills with empty hype. There is no real confrontation between the two industries. Largely, the recent history of the matter is that the print industry has had to accept and learn to work with tech, gadget, and electronics industries. It's not really the same as the music industry and the internet, though there are similarities.

So these publishers and maybe even some bibliophiles are very worried and the internet is very unconcerned. That's basically the gist of the story. In my mind television, the postal service, and radio are the real danger zones, and they're still around more than ten years after the internet. Writing killed or perverted most oral tradition anyway, so whatever happens at this point is fair and not unprecedented.

Christmastime and Other Stories

No I am not releasing a volume of existential/seasonal short fiction. That danger has passed. Though it does seem to me that every year Christmastime starts earlier, or maybe that's just my imagination or relative youth. I don't have too many years to really extrapolate anything from, but my hypothesis is that, since the 50's, Christmastime has begun to begin earlier. What this means for the planet is anybody's guess.

I don't really think that heavy visualization and especially musical cues are necessary until mid-December. If I was to de-Grinch a bit, I would say December 10. I really think we should leave Halloween decorations up longer and just take a little time out of this Christmas thing, that's going on. Somebody has to reign in these Christmas Lobbyists. They're taking over.

I think sometimes that all the early emphasis burns me out when the December upswing begins. This is probably a yearly thing now that is unconscious, subliminal like seasonal affective disorder - but more mysterious. Infinitely better looking on an application. "Doctor, we're dealing with record amounts of Christmastimeosis. We don't have the spearmint antibiotics to deal with this!" ; "You fool! Just give them disability and get them out of here, we don't need a damn epidemic!"

The bottom line is that anyone who was not heeding the cues about Christmas creep got their late shopping vote-banned by the supporters of... well I'll not even mention him. Still, I mean if a five-year old misses their X-Box with Kinect, somebody has to be held responsible. Julian Assange is who should be called on Dec. 26th for forcing internet power users to go to a brick-and-mortar store. Give him time, though. No doubt this will be added to the growing list of offenses which, I am told, includes geomancy.

I guess they'll add several Days of Christmas in the next 50 years. Maybe it'll be good for us and not just a cynical economic tweak. Maybe aliens will steal Christmas (I already have the script, Michael Bay, and you'll have to get in line for it) and hide it on the moon. They'll get our extra days but we will have just enough time to assemble a rag-tag task force of curmudgeonly misfits. You know who will emerge victorious, with extra Days of Christmas into the bargain.