[HOME]
Whatever Dept.
Whatever Series
Vidya Thoughts SubIndex
Someone said, that when she was a very young child, she blindly assumed that everything around her was "rendered" to her vision and perception, as is the case in a 3D video game. Or even a 2D one. The stuff out of sight, isn't rendered to someone's consciousness. That stuck with me forever. I've had dreams where as I'd approach someplace, it'd appear as a glowing mesh model, and as I'd get closer and closer, opacity and textures would slowly fade in. Really cool to watch, it'd be even cooler if I could see that IRL. That was only in a few dreams I ever had.
The fast-paced, super flashy (literally, like "epilepsy warning" sensory overload stuff), loud BANG BANG ZOOM ZOOM vidya was usually not my style. Too hardcore and focused on getting the highest kill count... I don't mean to sound like a pearl-clutcher "oh no think of da childrenz" person, but there are indeed whistleblowers who go over the top with yelling out poorly-phrased arguments against things. What they say is technically correct, but they present a terrible argument. It's really by design.
I don't fully understand the true nature of reality, but every month, as time goes faster and faster, and I notice more and more strange things that don't jive with how I was taught the world works, and my experiences of how reality is, it's... strange. Remember that stuff about word deletion? I can only wonder what words were purged, and what "old documents and old writings" were edited, or removed and a false replacement shoved in. I can't enough stress what a LIE history is, but you're surrounded by gatekeepers who keep putting out bullshit and confusion! A tell is they have a dead eye. The needle through the eye. Think David Bowie, one-eyed characters in media. "Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye". "Woe to the idle shepherd, his right eye shall be darkened and his right arm clean dried up". Think about the tip joint of the ring finger being cut off, mangled, or marked differently from the other fingers.
I'll talk about "well the whistleblowers were right" some other time. For now, my preferred genres of vidya were the more casual "walk around and talk to people", but I never played Animal Crossing, and once rented Harvest Moon and that was about it. I did come to enjoy some Bethesda games, but then I got a little carried away with the crafting and grinding and not so much the gameplay and story, so I backed off. Some things kinda... "get" my brain a little too much.
Pokemon REALLY appealed to me, because hey, cool monsters, sense of adventure and exploration, and for real, a MASSIVE part of the appeal was the roughness. The coarse, gritty, roughness. The glitches. The instability. When the game broke, man it BROKE! VG companies consider that "bad design", with ambiguous, weird monsters and crazy broken mechanics, missingno, glitch city, mysterious NPCs doing bizarre things but pretending to be normal. All that stuff. So much mistique and wonder. Think of all the really cool glitches in primitive games! And when they're patched out, some wonder and mystery is lost. Like Swordless Link in Zelda Ocarina. You could do all kinds of crazy stuff! Broken games are a blast!
Just imagine if IRL could just break and there'd be jittery IRL graphics and weird noises and things jittering, man that'd be so rad! I want to visit IRL glitch city and hang out with IRL missingnos and catch my very own 3trainerpoke and show it to my friends, and then they'd show me their ghfjkghdf things, and the world would get more and more insane with weird colors and noises all over the place. Man. I can dream, though.
But we don't live in Glitch City right now. Anyhow, OG Pokemon certainly left an impact on those who played it. But Pokemania was really... something. Something that'll probably be its very own page by its own title. Moving along.
Video games are a literal illustrator of "the seen" and "the unseen", and interesting in-between stuff. IRL has "the unseen", the "force" or "magic" (If I'm using that word correctly... It could be that "magic" is the practice of manipulating the Force/Unseen, and that's rebellious and malicious, because you're not supposed to mess with that stuff. You're supposed to leave it alone and let it run as it's intended.) In VG, you see solid structures with collision data. Without the collision data, you could just phase right through it, like a ghost. Imagine if THAT was something you'd see and do IRL!
In addition to collision, there's also various other datas. And that's also an IRL thing, but IDK what exactly goes on with it, how it works. But you ever noticed capillary action? Water creeping back up the faucet? Water has inherent magic properties. It can cleanse things, if it's not too saturated. Past a certain point, it won't work. Water is also inherently cold. It's a special property. But school won't teach you that. There's a theory out there, that water is a crystal, and those "separate into H and O" "experiments" (those are demonstrations, not experiments) are canned. Could be.
Nobody actually knows what fire IS! Nobody knows what it IS. Even with metal tongs, can you pick up a flame itself? It defies density and buoyancy. Gravity, they kinda indirectly tell you it's "weak" and that proposed theory is about to go way of the smilodon and "stars burnt out trillion years ago". Some things that were pushed as "facts", are now being swept under the rug and retconned out. You can see this with how dinosaurs and apes are depicted in "official literature" that "scientists" with their "peer review" (hint hint) push out.
Really, a huge huge part of my childhood fascination with the idea of VG, was all these crazy variables. In a VG, you could levitate, clip through walls, jump miles high, watch the world load and unload in different ways, watch as the jittery broken model and flashing textures of what used to be a giant scorpion stretch for an in-game MILE, walk on fire and see it stick out from the tops of your character's feet, all kinds of wild stuff. Floating platforms, waterbreathing, flying, hyperspace, non-euclidean spaces... It's a damn shame all CGI companies and game studios go for these days, is the "rendering skin, fabric, water, hair" pissing contests. There's a really good short clip out there, of a movie director saying it's pointless for art to imitate life, when art can be its own thing. Life already exists, and it's stale and boring and DEAD. You don't see people flying or breathing underwater or walking on ceilings or passing through walls. And you certainly don't see any missingnos. Lame. Life sucks. Boooo.
These are the moons in Skyrim. Notice how they're depicted as shaded balls reflecting light. I tried searching for moons shown in Fallout 3 and 4, but I got mod results and I wasn't sure if it was in the base game, so I went with these. In Fallout 3 and 4, the moon is also depicted as a reflective ball. Some mods make it a little more artsy, and more closely resemble the overbright, cold, electric disk you actually see the hologram of, projected from the real Firmament.
Speaking of, it's worth noting that in Skyrim, there's a book called "the Firmament" that discusses constellations in that world, and in Zelda BOTW, a bird character talks about "exploring the Firmament". And these two worlds, Elder Scrolls, Zelda, and many many more standard "high fantasy" games are RIGID about their depictions of a world with:
- Castles
- Monarchs, knights, nobles
- Dragons, stock western and eastern legendary monsters
- Wizards, magic, staves, crystal balls, demons
- Medieval community and economy. Everything is locally sourced.
- Swords, shields, bows, arrows, horse-pulled carriages
So that's fantasy, right? Got unicorns, dragons, castles, kings, adventurers. Anything goes in fantasy, right? Right? Fantasy? The sky's the limit, anything's possible?
So riddle me this one, batman, if anything goes in fantasy, tell me where are the:
- Electronics
- Black box consumer tech that everyone uses but no one can make from scratch
- Telephones. Landlines, even. Where's the 1920's landline rotary phones?
- Photography. Any kind. ANY PHOTOGRAPHY, where is it. They could make color photos in the 1800s, it was just too expensive.
- Engines, cars, trains, airplanes, helicopters. Gimme a kittyhawk. Where's the kittyhawk?
- Computers. Don't tell me wizards don't have computers.
- Genetic engineering, creepy white labs where labcoats play "god".
Yeah, some of these modern or pre-modern things might appear in some "goofy" parody type fantasy setting, as a joke. Or maybe tastefully incorporated in a plausible way, but can you count all examples on one hand?
In Harrypotterland, they use freakin' dip pens. DIP PENS. There's a "theme" going on here. Themes and things that are strictly prohibited, are something to look for. For starters, all characters seen in all media are sex-inverted. That's an easy one. The setting and tone also come with a blacklist of things. In fantasy settings, you can talk about there being a firmament up there, and magic being real. In sci fi settings, it's space space space space and humans wearing alien suits.
Dip pens are good for thick pigment inks with binding agents, or inks of strange chemical makeup. Interestingly, Hebrew dip pens are often made of plastic or wood, because there's something against using metal on "sacred text" or documents of spiritual significance. Metal is toxic to minor spiritual entities. There used to be fairies, and Japanese folklore talks about yokai that once were non-metal objects. How "convenient" that in the days of electrified metal objects everywhere, no fairies, djinn, or yokai are to be found. Or is it because these entities LOATHE metal, and now we're surrounded by electrified metal? Hmm. Also, fountain pens are a good example of tech degrading. Modern dip pens suck too, except for a few brands. If you want good dip pens, find some vintage ones for sale, they're cheap and NOS. Fountain pens were at their best before the 1980s, now shitty disposable crap pens are standard because easy to manufacture. Fountain pens are now a very niche thing. But look into it! - Jan 14, 2021
But tell me how many fantasy settings where "gods" are canon, that depict there being One Single True Masculine Creator God. Zelda and Elder Scrolls have their pantheon of sex-inverted "goddesses", but those are male... with fake tits and a gash wound. Or maybe they tuck, whatever. You know what I'm getting at.
Speaking of horse-drawn carriages, interesting thing. They're specified as being "horse drawn". If you know what this is:
That's an old world building from before the flood! They're all over the world! Some areas have more than others, but they're on ALL continents! Everywhere! There used to be a one-world civilization, that has been destroyed maybe 1000 years ago, maybe 800, maybe 400, who knows! The people who know sure aren't telling us plainly, but they lightly allude to it!
Train engines are an ancient invention! Passenger trains are also the best mode of mass transit, but TPTB push airplanes, which suck. But airplanes have their own interesting "things", for a specific article another day. Point here is, those ancient, giant buildings had to be unburied, they have extensive "basements" (they're sunken skyscrapers... hint's in the name, sky SCRAPER), and those aren't basements. The Industrial Revolution, when BAM suddenly all this tech appears out of nowhere, buncha machines up and running out of NOWHERE... Yeah, they dug out the ancient Giant (yes) machines from the Giant buildings. The buildings were made for 8-9 foot tall people, maybe even taller. Giants. Six fingers, tall craniums. Some of them thought it was cool to eat humans. Giants weren't "fee fi fo fum" idiots, they built crazy tech, they built those huge sunken buildings that have since been adapted and used for Government purposes.
Those giants built tech that we reverse engineered for use today. But by "we" I mean people who are 5-6 feet tall, so.
(Long enough, I'm wrappin up this page)