Translator’s Note: The title translates to My Summer Labour, a play on Millennium Kitchen’s 2000 video game Boku no Natsuyasumi [My Summer Break]. 

 

“An adventure is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.”

― Tim Cahill

 

An Ancient Campaign

In the halcyon days of June 2023 a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign was to begin. Born from my friend Rhys’ mind, a world made just for me. Emanation was, when first conceived, just a world with loose JRPG stylings in which a campaign could be held that wasn’t quite as stringent on setting as something like the average euro-tolkien fantasy. Rhys (without checking) has never played a JRPG but Pokemon, as far as i'm aware. I on the other hand have gone so far as to play the Slayers JRPG on the Super Famicom, so yeah I’ve played JRPGs I know what they’re like. I think possibly Rhys set these plans in motion to try and wrangle me back into caring about TTRPGs again, for that company we made together, after I’d spent the spring writing a book set in the universe I was supposed to be creating a game system for. 

The basics of the setting were written down and the group had made all of their player characters. Emanation was at this moment just the name of a Roll20 group. I created the character Helvia Dannica, a pretty simple Square-Enix adjacent character design with a meagre backstory fine for a nascent DnD campaign (particularly in a group that struggles with consistency). The setting was designed kitchen-sink-like with a prison inside a floating head of a dead god made by an evil emperor with varying tech levels all over the world. 

We had one session. 

 

Shut Your Mouth and Look at My .WAD

Around this time I had just so happened to play the original DOOM (1993). The allure of the .wad was calling to me. What if I went above and beyond and made my DnD character’s backstory in a Doom .wad. Has this ever been done before? There I was in GZDoom with such a large laborious task ahead of me. Writing a backstory for a DnD character. Are there any greater insurmountable tasks for the TTRPG player? However, I was writing a character backstory with non-orthogonal walls. 

Still waiting for the second session that I did not know then would never come. I was enthralled by this intellectual property brownfield site that laid before me of a TTRPG setting born of someone else. What if I were to take this setting and disguise it as my own cooking? Delightfully devilish.

 

He Was Aware He Was Still a Child

The Doom .wad idea wasn’t working out. I didn’t like the software, or at least, I didn't want to expend the effort to learn the software to make a mod in which narrative structure was already difficult. What if I went back to my roots? My 9 year old roots of using RPG Maker VX on my mum’s work laptop making Kingdom Hearts fan games where Sora meets Pikachu, Those really were the days. What better way to tell a short contained story than a terse 1-2 hour turn based top down JRPG. Perfect. I’ll just get started on that. Already in an hour I have a dramatic heart wrenching scene of a small girl’s parents being murdered in front of her at a young age. This will be so easy. I’ll be the coolest guy in a group of 4 people ever. 

 

Oh. What if…

What if I made an anime opening for my videogame of my DnD character’s backstory. 

Wow, ok. That took at least ten hours. What.

So by this point I’d maybe spent 14 hours on what amounts to at most 6 minutes of a game. I was planning 1-2 hours. 2.3 hours of work goes into 1 minute of game. So for an hour and half of game we’re looking for 207 hours of work. 207 hours of WORK at a wage of £0 an hour since nothing in that anime op was original and not really under fair use. I should probably just cut my losses here right? This is kind of a ridiculous thing I'm doing. However, in my experience that's not really how the creative process works. Also, It's fun. 

 

A Human Work

I pressed on. I lovingly crafted the opening moments of the game, the slums using music from The Pillows the Field and Ork’s cave with music from Nier Automata. The original plot was simple, Helvia takes a job from her friend who is essentially something like a fixer from the Cyberpunk universe, this job gets her into a situation, she fights the empire, tragically loses and ends up in prison beginning our DnD campaign. Oh but what if there's a cowboy town?

 

So south from the Slums Helvia lives in she ends up in a cowboy town to catch the train to the city Charalis. Of course it's not as simple as just buying a train ticket. OH NO! The train conductor and famous business owner the Great Sancho has been captured by bandits and is being held in the mines. Helvia goes and saves him, meeting Arabella and Alvin in the process. To keep the game simple there was only going to be one party member. With each party member comes a new class to properly fit with skills, weapons and armour. So the pair began solely as local NPCs that led Helvia on her journey. I kinda like parties though. I like a group of discordant people coming together in that style and growing together to fight evil. It’s pretty cool. Whatever, what's two more. That’s fine now I have three characters. It's a trio like Sonic Heroes. No problem. The cowboy town of Gilded Hills culminates in a shootout at high noon which in RPG Maker was very very hard to code and now a year and a half after making it I can't really do it myself. 

 

A Month Gone

Oh jeez, it's now July. I’ve been making an unsellable videogame for a month? Oh well.

Helvia saves Sancho and her Alvin and Arabella all climb aboard a steampunk train to Charalis. Now Charalis is important enough that I think it deserves a cutscene. So back to Sony Vegas I made another short video full of other people's art. It looks pretty cool though.

The sprawling cityscape of Charalis consisted of such a large space that I didn’t want to detail and so I bypassed this by having it a closed world overworld Mario style. There are points you can visit but you can’t walk around. So, you have a goblin who drives you around the city in a little yellow car. The job given to Helvia by her fixer takes her to the headquarters of the rebels against the empire, the Syndicate. Here the leader Maldor (it's ok he's an important character but not a party member)  asks Helvia to help him take down the evil empire. Cloud Strife like she tells him she's not interested. To earn some money, Alvin and Arabella do some jobs for him. Then Maldor joins the party (wait what? That wasn't the plan?) and the four of them attack a city checkpoint allowing the party to leave the city into the open world of the Hurkan Region. (What that was supposed to be the end wasn’t it?)

 

Now the game lasts about 3 hours and you have a full party with an adventure ahead of you. Here in the open world you can meet more party members, Sanjiro, Sophie and Dirk. So there's now 7 party members, 7 classes and 7 sets of weapons and armour. In this video game that’s just a backstory for a DnD character that hasn’t been played in about a month by this point for an audience of 4 people. Huh?

 

Scope Creep

But what if there was more game?

What if there was a big mountain with dwarves hiding inside. Ok so now I’ll need to make a mountain path up towards the stronghold. There aren’t many good mountain tiles baked into RPG Maker MZ so I must go looking online. I spent a very good portion of my childhood instead of growing or being outside scouring forums for RPG Maker, saving various free distributions from friendly pixel artists willing to give to me their free labour. Though this was some 15 years ago now. I was cast adrift from the bulging pictures folder on my mum’s work windows vista laptop. I had to scour once again which is as it turns out quite time consuming. I eventually found a nice tileset, nicer than anything in the RTP. It made me consider switching all the tilesets. However, this would mean remaking every single map in the game. For the first time in this journey I decided against the long life consuming option and just stuck with what I already had. No backtracking, only forward progression. 

 

The party climbs Mount Dornak and finds the dwarven citadel of Mazh-Douk at the top. Here the Maldor’s brother lives. Famed gnode crafter. Have I not talked about gnode yet? Conceived as a way to have power as a physical object in the world, gnode is what the world of emanation runs on. The gnode crafter asks you to retrieve the flame of his forge back from a dragon deep in the dwarven mines. After defeating said dragon you return the flame granting you access to the game’s crafting system. Yeah, it was getting to the point where this 1-2 hour DnD character’s backstory sprawling JRPG which was now around 4-5 hours had a crafting system too. 

 

The overworld also contained a yak farm, here is where the party could buy a yak granting the player access to the fast travel system. A cottage where the party finds a witch. If they can find the right herb from the swamp they can turn her back and gain Sophie as a party member.  Sophie is an optional party member, she’s also a magical cat girl. How cool! The other optional party member that you find during this portion of the game Sanjiro is a samurai. These guys don’t have much story in the game but I liked them. There was a plan at one point for each of the characters to have playable flash back sections. Sophie was going to have a soundtrack of purely city-pop karaoke tracks. Sanjiro’s section was to be black and white and use soundtracks stolen from Kurosawa films.

 

Emotional Weight

Going west from Mazh-Douk the party comes to the town of Veridora. After the checkpoint attack was blamed on the free city of Veridora rather than the Syndicate the empire is knocking on their gates looking for retribution. Dirk the sad knight is met in the tavern just outside the city. Helvia and friends convince him to stand up for himself and fight back. They sneak behind the bushes and watch a very long and lazily unedited cutscene which is actually just a scene from the anime Gate which I have never watched but it kind of fit what I was going for. After the cutscene you’re whisked away to a hilltop above the city where the General Gideon Ironheart is revealed to be Maldor’s brother. In a shocking unwinnable boss fight where the player takes control of Maldor alone he sadly falls in battle. After this calamity Another cutscene plays as the transition to another chapter in this “small” game introducing yet another character Pumazz the wizard.  

 

Arrested Development

It has to stop somewhere. The clock on the bottom right of my computer monitor now had an 09 in the middle of the date and here in the United Kingdom that means September. Summer had concluded and still there was no next session of our DnD campaign and STILL there was no backstory made for my character. What I had was an ever expanding notion of a JRPG. The notes written about this game will probably be as important as the Silmarillion. Pumazz was to send the party on an adventure to 4 different dungeons to craft the philosopher’s stone to then use that power to take down the Hurkan Council in Charalis. I had a few ideas of the ending of the game. It would be something like the party members were all actually employed by the governor to dispatch the rest of the council and in the end turn on Helvia, or that in defeating the authority structure the party would then find themselves having to replace it. 

 

However, we’ll never know how the game ends. All we know is somehow Helvia ends up in prison inside the floating GodHead above the world. As the sun set on 2023 and I spent a day of my life remaking the main menu of the game I could feel my attention waning from this project. It had grown too large for the confines of RPG Maker and what I wanted it to be now it would have to be restarted. So here lies the future for Emanation. It will become a TTRPG setting for now. The original game serves as the foundation of the setting’s atmosphere and eventually once we have enough fans willing to hand me their hard earned money with big grins on their faces we will see the Helvia Game in all its glory in unreal engine 5 made with the largest graphics you’ve ever seen. 

 

Emanation’s Continuation

I suppose I just kinda wanted to play with RPG Maker again, some childhood nostalgia. This adventure into my past mutated into a months-long obsession that I no longer want to finish. Yet, is any art finished or is it just abandoned? So here to the loyal reader able to reach the end of this winding blog post, you may play Emanation Origin’s: Helvia. There are some warnings though that come with this download. Yes, I did use AI art in this. AI art is a problem, I never want to see AI generated art replace any artist in the world. Seeing as the audience for this game was extremely limited and I sadly cannot draw and for expediency I used it for character art here. Please Forgive me. The other warning is that the game is very unfinished and even more untested. Please don’t allow yourself to feel hollow when you aren’t able to find an ending to this story. One will exist one day. What would be even cooler though is if you fan-wrote your own ending. Its extremely easy to soft lock yourself in this game or miss flags rendering the experience troublesome to say the least. Please excuse this and as I said above please give me money to make this again but better in the mid to late future. I use a lot of music in this I DO NOT OWN ANY OF IT please Square Enix don’t kill me. I promise it’s out of love.

 

The final thing I have to say is please wait patiently for the first release of Emanantion: The Goblins of Chipping-Slucis. A 5e adventure set in a distinctly unfinished part of Helvia Game. Here in TTRPGs Emanation will live for a while and I hope you enjoy playing in the world as much as I enjoy making it. The creative process can take you down many strange discordant roads but as long as the process itself is fun, know that in the end you’ll have made something you can be proud of. However, if you’re reading this and Goblins of Chipping-Slucis still hasn’t been released please berate me for my laziness here on the Megalithic Prints Discord Server or here patreon.com/kinbur.  

Hey guys, sorry I haven't made a video in a while.

What are we doing here. I live a normal life. I throw my disabled scrawl into an internet void that I "improve" with a slightly more erudite lexicon than the average English speaker lay bare on a black, red and orange webpage.(What is that, something ducks walk on?) Although sometimes that void has a way of coming back at you. The scant praise I've received from the few that have viewed this page feels unearned. It feels like I've used honesty as a shortcut to artistic merit. If I am to continue down this path I fear I am to run out of pain to share. I've only got so much pain to bare. A lot of it is boring. A lot of it is recurring. A lot of it is fleeting. By turning pain to text you create eternity of a moment and by sharing text you allow others to see themselves in yourself, but, I am myself. Maybe this was a mistake. I wanted to be Delicious Tacos, I wanted to be DigibronyMLP, I wanted to be Tim Rogers. I'm typing this now in a Sublime Text 3 window only because Tim Rogers mentioned the program fleetingly in one or two videos. I like the clean aesthetic. I have spent my meager artistic career in imitation. My first poast to this website is an imitation of Don Jolly, however the pain is my own. When others see themselves in my pain I have nothing left. Kill this author. Don't expect anything I write to be truth. Don't create a notion of biography. Everything here is a lie. My readership consists of people who intimately know me. Stop that. Stop knowing me. I wanted an internet fanbase (I think) I wanted hot E-Girls in my area. Any money, experience, fame I am to ever earn is in the pursuit of crushing puss. That is the goal. I have no other intent. This is a poast in response to event (I give thanks to my loyal fans who have reached out in my DMs). Take it however you want. I am dead and I have killed me.

Perhaps this is too harsh. I have issues with sharing myself. I have carefully built walls around myself in every environment that this website takes a sledgehammer to. I think that was the point, or did I just want to play around in HTML and then realise I needed content other than a lorem ipsum to warrant the £10 yearly domain fee. On the reverse I know to see yourself in art is a privilege. Any kind of relating to my writing should fill me with glee, but it doesn't. I mistrust my mastery of the English language to articulate myself properly to anyone who's opinion of myself I care about. I probably shouldn't have poasted anything to the internet that I would feel embarrassed if someone saw. I've got one of the most abstruse and utterly inane recalcitrant streaks. Just take the praise. Use it as fuel to make more. Make more until you are known. Surely that's what you believe anyway. It's okay. You're allowed to be here. No one is telling you to leave. Stop hiding. Just say something true with intent and resolve. There are enough depression merchants in the world. Be better. Create better things. Jesus Christ, edit your writing. Congratulations!

Kind of rambling. Think I lost the central thesis here a while ago. I'm happy that anyone has taken the time to read anything I've written. Listened to or watched anything I've made. Time is finite and you chose to spend it on me. Thank you, that extension of that is everyone who will read this which is presumably only people who have known me in real life, thank you for spending time with me. Pretty weird that this exists right. Who would do this. Fucked up shit that I post about my dick on a website then put it as my instagram bio, what's that about, weirdo. It's unfair that deep down I want every acquaintance to be an archaeologist and me Mohenjo-daro. Just put yourself out there, man. People like you. These poasts have all been written hunched over, in a tricky time. That's probably the best way to experience them. You can usually tell I feel better about my life if there are less poasts here. Which is good because there are some serious gaps.

One day I'd really like a video essayist to boil down my stuff into a simplified world view, I think that would be so awesome.

Jeez, there are a lot of references in this one. I'm trying to have more fun with this and I think it's working. I'm no Dostoyevsky nor do I wanna be. I'm me. I think what I've been trying to say for the last 821 words and 3,528 characters is that I don't see everything below this as me anymore. I'm getting older and I've trapped myself in amber here. I'm learning more and talking to more people. I'm starting to even feel confident about talking to people. Still no hot E-Girls in my area but that's ok, I'll live. I still want to do this but I don't want to imitate as much anymore. If someone is going to relate to something I've put my name on I want them to relate to me not my current muse. We're all gonna make it. :)

I sat on a bench at Whitstable train station. Though the night was not warm there was a slight film of sweat about my person, in all my folds. Strands of hair from my bulbous haircut cling to my forehead. My belt, which fit fine when standing, dug into my sides and my ill fitting jeans bunched on my knees.

"I wish you could've stayed"

About twenty minutes prior bridged by a The Smiths soundtracked walk to the train station I had been watching a film I love, following by playing a game I love, followed by reading a book she loved. All with the woman I loved. I quickly replied a disarming response.

"You have work anyway"
"I felt different tonight"

Previously I had declared my love to this woman on a railway bridge on my birthday sometime near midnight, after the last train. A long disappointing procession of feelings spilt on a beach followed by manic dancing. After that I had to walk a lonely two hours home along a motorway before going to work after three hours of sleep. Now 2 months later she was telling me she felt different. She wished I could've stayed. She was not single at the time of my declaration. Shamelessly I had calculated how to save my friendships from the unraveling of stealing a mutual friend's girlfriend. However eleven days after my birthday she was. Two months, she definitely was. The conversation continues telling me she had butterflies the whole afternoon we had spent together. This woman I had spent laying on my bed upside down just angling myself to view the corner of my monitor to see the online signifier on discord just to kill myself a little every time she went online and didn't message me. This woman had both ruined and liberated me. Never before this point did I want anything so earnestly, so desperately. Now, she was the one who wanted me. I told her I noticed that she felt different. Stretching my memory, I believe I convinced myself I noticed through implanting false memories. After a winding conversation it was decided we would get wine sit meet on a beach and see where that took us. Before we said goodnight she told me not to tell anyone else, at this point I lied little did she know I had triumphantly sent her message to "The Boys" in victory. That night I didn't sleep. I watched High Fidelity.

At this time I was living at my grandmother's house whilst my mother was in the process of evicting an abusing live-in cunt that was her boyfriend at the time. Not knowing what was in store for me in the evening I thought I'd need condoms. Having the lonely teenagehood that I did, at the ripe age of twenty-two, I had to ask my friend "what condoms do I buy?". Without telling my grandparents what I was doing I left and journeyed to Tesco. I arrived and stared at the condom aisle. Strangely one of my managers at the Tesco that I worked at was here also in the capacity of manager. I snapped up a box and covertly bought them. That evening I sat on a bench near her house. I sat and watched two rabbits run in and out of the bushes, two magpies pecked the dirt to my left, joy. She appeared from behind me, beautiful. Immediately she was disappointed i didn't arrive with the wine we had promised to get. I, deeply afraid of something so new, planned us going to the shop to get said wine as an activity to push the time of performance. A singular condom in my jean pocket we awkwardly walked to Sainbury's. She was quiet, she was unsure, she was upset I failed in providing. We didn't get to talk about feelings until we were at the seafront. After an hour of red wine lips and circling conversations of her old relationship I frustratingly had to sit through. I was so close. Months to this point. SHE ASKED FOR THIS JUST DO SOMETHING. She had begun crying. I decided this was the point I should kiss her. Not my first kiss, that was at the age of fifteen when my sister was having her eighteenth birthday at our house and I annoyingly hung around enjoying the feeling of being accepted by older people. I stumbled into a game of spin the bottle in which the bottle landed on me when some profoundly ugly girl was spinning. In my backgarden the same backgarden that I had had my fourth birthday in eleven years earlier some woman stole my first kiss which I eagerly gave up. Passionless, she asked me "oh my god was that your first kiss." Proud of myself having reached a milestone, at that point I wasn't sure I ever would, I answered in the affirmative. Now my second kiss seven years after my first was happening. Awkwardly I tried to prop myself up on the stoney beach and she pulled away and said "no, no, no you've clearly not done this a lot." She taught me how to kiss. From this moment I felt as though I had found the purpose of life. All moments of strife and sadness was all for this. We ran and jumped over the groynes down the seafront. Held hands and kissed. Eventually we came to a beach house. In the dark she instructed me to take her bra off. Fumbling my hands under her leopard print blouse I, with some skill, unhooked her bra without ever taking my eyes off hers. Now shirtless she attempted to give me a blowjob. Shamefully, I couldn't get erect. Nerves, cold and wine had all combined into an extremely disappointing sucking of my frustratingly limp penis. Trying something else I shifted her round off me and dove my hands down her back under her skirt and tights and back round and awkwardly plunged my fingers into her. Which I initially, expectedly, failed at again she taught me the right thing to do until eventually she told me to stop. Later she told me to strangle her. I certainly didn't want to hurt her but I wanted to do what she wanted and I obliged. Sometime after kissing she pulled back looked in my eyes and asked "why do you look so sad?"

Marie and Anna moved to their flat in Kentish Town sometime this year. One is an "influencer" the other works in an office, it doesn't which does what. Marie grew up in a brothel in Paris, Anna grew up on a cow farm in rural France like the opening of Inglorius Basterds. Anna's father would force his three daughters to milk the cows as he sat in his wooden wicker chair. The same chair he would sit on in his stained underwear and force his daughters to perform sexual acts on each other straight faced, milk moustached. Just like Inglorius Basterds.

The two would go to bars and find lonely looking men. There they would say all the right things take their drinks and cigarettes. They made this balding 24 year old trainee risk assessor feel like a Moorish sultan for the night, the girls being his captured occitan concubines. They would take these men back to their mandala covered grey flat where they would almost have sex with him and then tell him they'd rather wait. They'd discovered the best schedule for texting a man to make him completely dependent on their contact. After enough time the man would stop responding due to an unfortunate suicide. They wouldn't notice. This wasn't some feminist power fantasy getting back at the men that had wronged them, they simply didn't care. They were far too attractive to care about women's rights.

One night when Marie saw an aged white bearded man at what she called her favourite bar she saw her next target. His name was john.

"So where are you from?" Marie asked after hearing his distinctive Irish accent after ordering a cider.
"Everywhere and nowhere" John Replied

Marie laughed harder at this than was natural.

John was immune to her. He built adventure parks for a living. Seventeen year old girls would beg him to employ their chubby, greasy haired, gamer boyfriends because in six months he'd completely change them. John liked to surround himself with his improved boys and aged ugly women. In this community he was a king. He was a platonic ruler wise and caring but demanding. To him Marie was another person to make an unfunny joke to. John's dismissal of Marie began a deep infatuation. This isn't what she knew, she was beautiful and French. John's girlfriend was a crackling, wrinkled, Easter Island head. Marie had ruined herself thinking she could debase a king amongst men. John didn't care about her, John cared about the way the blood pulsed in his hands after a long day hauling logs and tightening screws.

The next day Marie had pre-paid for a double mastectomy. She began to take testosterone pills and dyed her growing scraggly beard and now unkempt hair a pale white. Anna was found hanging from the clothesline the week of Marie's strangely rapid transformation. Marie didn't notice, she continued to perfect her Irish accent by way of YouTube video. She began to sail the Regent's Canal looking for work in her rowboat. Blood pulsing in her hands. Ordering ciders.

The death of every pretty French girl births an Old Irish man.

It was one of those days where I'm trapped in my own head. It was one of those weeks where free time comes as a burden to be filled rather than a pleasure to be had. One of those months where I depend on the world to entertain me rather than myself. Another one of those years I've lived. Two days ago at a lull in conversation I stared too long and too deeply into a woman's face and she into mine, I feel guilty now. The silence in between songs sounds louder than the very familiar tunes. There are many kinds of love in this world and I count anyone able to experience any of them lucky. There is no quicker way to self hatred than to lay for an hour watching YouTube Shorts you can't relate to. Recently I've been asked more frequently about my romantic life or I've just began to feel self-conscious enough about it I've started to notice a pattern. People always mean well. People want to know me. Why do I always assume they want to judge me, why am I so unjustly quick to judge them.

These past six months I'm the furthest I've ever been from myself yet my soul continues to lug the prison of my flesh around with it everywhere it goes. This feeling reminds me of being 9 years old walking from the year 4 & 5 classrooms up the hallway to the year 2 & 3 classrooms, someone had recently told me that if you push against someones parallel palms with your own the fake feeling of a ball will appear betwixt your hands. This was another proof against the supremacy of reality. A great wish I had at this time and perhaps one I'd still have if i hadn't become so used to the reality of it was to be some kind of incorporeal personality. To be without a body. My belief was this was the answer to all the bad feeling. When I was a child i would silently cry in my mind asking God to show himself and give me an answer to the question I couldn't articulate there was nothing but silence.

When I hit puberty I put on a lot of weight that never left me. Throughout my teenage years this made me feel unlovable and so the thought of women did not cross my mind even if they actually did like me. A happy ending would've been to have been proved wrong when I finally did fall in love with someone. It was not a happy ending. Every ill conceived core tenant of my self hatred fell away in the face of love. In someone else I had found the purpose of reality. However, my hated body (among other tings) destroyed my hopes. The welling tears and feeling at the back of my throat when I began to type the opening line to this paragraph reminds me this teenage girl feeling of fatness is still an all encompassing part of me. For a decade I've rounded my shoulders to hide my chest and protruded my head forward in an attempt to destroy and semblance of a second chin. All my life people have told me I'm not that big, or that I carry it well. I don't want to be any kind of big or carry anything well. I heard once that anorexics hallucinate themselves as morbidly obese in a mirror when in actuality they are emaciated skeletons. I've long hoped this to be the case for myself.

I don't compliment people. I think about it, I think a lot of things about other people but I don't compliment people enough. I worry others will wonder of my intent the way I do when I am complimented. In this life I have learned you can be oh so smart or oh so pleasant, and it is truly better to be pleasant. Although, I find myself not brave enough to be pleasant. The connections between peoples hearts is all we have. My childhood wishes prove this me, as I understood it at the time I wanted to do away with anything that wasn't soul of ourselves. It wasn't necessary to me. I so deeply wanted to love and be loved for the contents of my soul and I remain the same.

Recently I went looking for someone from an old chat for a possibly unfinishable project of an extremely limited audience, and came across a message chain from someone I would have said was a good friend at the age of 10. She was asking about my widely publicised against my will ankle breakage some 4 years after I had moved schools away from her. Her messages were filled with laughter and Xs but most importantly genuine interest and concern. I could only ordain to give her one word answers until eventually I just stopped replying. She sent me two subsequent greetings garnished with 13 year old girl niceties that I did not see fit to reply to. I've done this to multiple people, I did this to the only woman I've ever loved.

I haven't got a date as to when I decided I would estrange myself from my father's side of my extended family but I have been for some years now. I'll be told they miss me, my sister relaying the harrowing message from my grandfather "I'll be dying soon. I just want to know what I did wrong." My aunt tried to get the address for my current workplace so that the family could surprise me. I don't feel guilty enough about this. I know the reason I hide myself from them is a feeling of inadequacy that I cannot give them what they want. I don't know where I got this idea of social-transactionalism from.

I want to apologise to everyone I've abandoned. Every time I feel lonely I feel extreme guilt for the people I've actively pushed away. Though I'm still not brave enough to say it to your face and I want you to continue to leave me alone,

I am sorry.

You can never go where you have never been
No matter how far, all you have seen
Growth but always from the same root
Twisted thorns and vines always in dispute
The weavers forever know whence you came
Past incapable of being aflame
A grove of your life
Not truly your fife

Destiny Islands the opening stage in Kingdom Hearts is my true home. I first played it when I was five years old, but I remember that opening level like I do my childhood bedroom. I can play the Destiny Islands theme song in my head for hours and never be sick of it. Video games have this feeling of “hangout-ability” to them that is entirely new for humans. I will never go to those islands, but I have lived there for 17 years. I’ve spent a good portion of my life hanging out on a Minecraft server jumping my character around abstract constructions in circles not focusing on the act of playing a video game but hanging out inside it. Every truly memorable game has these hangout spaces. Kingdom Hearts is full of them. GTA Online exists as one of these and works extremely well at doing so. There’s very little “game” there however the population for that world only grows.

The RPG town is a good example of the hangout spot. Its important for the flow of an RPG to give respite from the dangerous fields and dungeons and a time to just explore a well-designed European style but made by a Japanese guy town where you can talk to it’s natives and they give you a meaningless 2 lines of dialogue. Final Fantasy XIII’s downfall was not the different but good combat system or the way it tells its story through text logs found in the menu at the game’s beginning, but the eradication of the town. It happens in the story the characters do find townly respite in cutscenes, but the players never do. Square Enix clearly saw the town as superfluous thinking it slowed down plot and game progression.

For a generation Whiterun from the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a famous hangout location. The first city you most likely come to in the game holds most of the memes from Skyrim that are parroted every day. These spaces give you the ability to live in the world of the game. To really soak in the atmosphere that combat, or any other phase doesn’t allow. You remember the town you lived in 6 years ago much better than a film you saw 6 months ago.

I believe that Minecraft’s success is that the game that allows the complete design and construction of your own personal hangout space. Its not the first but its low resolution allows an ease of creativity and with a small barrier of material collection the creative spirit is exercised within limitations allowing a home to be crafted.

The leafless branches of the forest form a web of black over a deep blue-grey sky. Wind blows through the tunnels formed by the hiking path and gets caught under the nylon of her tights. Arms tightly crossed as she trudges through the night. Led by a phone’s torch only able to see a circle ahead of her. She thought she saw a scowling face behind a passing trunk, she angles her head lower and continues, ignoring her surroundings. Among the bushes and growth at the track’s edge she hears a flute in the distance. She stops for a moment. The flute lingers but is distant, so she recommences her lonely journey. The flute grows closer as she aims her torch light onto an oncoming figure on the path. The clop of hooves, the figure skips closer playing his flute’s dirge. She stops stunned at the strange creature. Although it moves erratically towards her its tune is unwavering. The torchlight uncovers thick backward-bending legs under a pot belly covered in fur, a beard draped overtop shrouding a scowling face topped with short horns. As it draws closer it tucks its flute into its navel. It approached her and stuck its face below hers as she stared at the ground away from it and screamed:

“A life spent in ignorance of one’s woes is the freest from grief. Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when you have seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed you should go back from where you came.”

Finishing its wisdom, it laughed a screech and jauntily passed her leaving her alone again in the dark forest. She dropped to her knees. The torch went out. After a moment of contemplation, the sun began to arise at the end of the tree’d tunnel. She pushed herself back up to her feet and glanced behind her. The beast-philosopher was gone. The winter sun brought little warmth to the now visibly frosty bracken laden forest. She turned away from the sun for a moment but refused to return whence she came and carried onward.

Slayers is old and therefore good.

I found Slayers by seeing the main character in an anniversary line-up image on /a/, I saw it was 104 episodes long with multiple OVAs and thought well I’ll give it a go I doubt I’ll finish it. Then came the decision of subbed or dubbed. The English dub is of that dangerously 90s quality, by no means bad, unpolished, and loud. Instantly upon hearing Lisa Ortiz’s portrayal of Lina Inverse in the pre-opening monologue I knew the dub was for me. A long-time watcher of anime I find that there’s something missing with subtitled anime when I watch it. I find I don’t take in the voice actor as much as I build a synthesis of their voice and my inner voice reading the subtitles. Watching subtitled anime puts too much of myself into someone else’s work. Gourry another main character has the same voice actor as Seto Kaiba in 4kids’ Yu-Gi-Oh, Amelia as Ash Ketchum in 4kids’ Pokémon and Zelgadis as Kyon from the dub of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I never watched Slayers as a child, but it feels like I did.

The show originally from an award-winning light novel from a bored office worker writing what he thought would win the competition is simple. A basic anime style with manzai comedy in a basic japano-european fantasy setting. Its simplicity is its essence, in my pretension I often surprise myself when I just find something fun, even though I keep doing it. If I can’t cite a work in a philosophical discussion is there any point in consuming it? Often, yes because its fun.

Slayers has notghing important to say. It doesn’t try to say anything really. It has strange pacing, its unfunny and sometimes very poorly animated. There’s very little to recommend about it. Except that I like it a lot. It’s plagued my mind since first seeing it. I haven’t searched eBay for “name of thing I’m into” like this since I was very young just typing in “Pokémon” to see all the stuff I wasn’t sure if I wanted enough to go to my parents, hat in hand begging to be bought a Groudon figure.

Adding something to your personal canon is a strange feeling, maybe only if you’re as autistic as I am. Do you have the space to champion more media as informative to you as a person? Do you deserve to have more? Does adding more dilute what is already there? If more things can feel this personal to you does that make you a simpler person? Does anyone care? Probably not.

Media worship always feels dirty and hollow to me even though it often is my main activity in life. Modern atomisation has left me without a local community, little attachment (that wasn’t built myself by constructing esoteric ironic belief structures) to my nation, and few friends. I do have a list of media though that I pretend explains me. A lot from Japan, a country I’ve never been to and have no gnosis of. It feels like I arrived too late to truly engage with the early online communities, but I spent much of my childhood lurking forums and seldom poasting. I certainly arrived too late to Slayers. I tried to join the Slayers discord under the promise of hidden media only being posted to the discord. My heist plan was set, I got in, but discord doesn’t allow you to lurk. Instantly I was given welcome messages, I ignored them. I trawled through their channels looking for the promised scans of manga or whatever it was I was looking for but instead I found people posting about their lives, selfies, and the meals they cooked. This wasn’t what I wanted, I’m not used to communities of shared interests I formed a personality of contrarianism and individualism around puberty’s inception branching off from the perceived norm and getting into manga, weird websites, and video games but deeper than other kids because I really get them. Except that’s a lie. I was in an anime club and played video games with my friends for years. I tell myself that I am unique in my media interests no one else would like “an unknown 90s anime” like I do, except the thousands of people that do and talk about it every day, no one else likes Kingdom Hearts as much as I do except everyone who does. I like to isolate myself in fandom monasteries, monk-like reading ancient texts I secured from the Romes of whatever is on the front of my mind at the time of my swirling canon. Never will I meet others of my faith because I’m frightened their faith is greater than mine. I’m sure it is.

An eccentric German café owner asked me in an interview, “why don’t you just stick with the writing to pay the bills”. Would anyone pay for the untrained ramblings of an unknown author. How does someone become someone worth reading? I pretend to write for myself, for the intrinsic value of the plotting of my being into words. In reality, I know my true hope is that I could be paid for it. That I could define myself as “writer” and not feel like I’m playing at the role. Is it to be published to become a writer, to have public readings in bookshops?

I have long been an artist without a medium if I could be so bold as to use that word. Although I truly believe the creation of art is a facet of humanity and that it is impossible to be a human without creating something of varying resolution during a lifetime, to name myself artist feels like a trophy I did not win. A month ago, I made the decision to write and post no matter the outcome. The outcome, meagre, but I have become proud of what I’ve written. So far, I’ve found writing has allowed me a more refined introspection that has made me more comfortable in endeavours elsewhere. I have rooted myself in the language and bled the radiator of my mind.

This past week I declared to that German that writing is my “dream”, or at least that I am discovering that it is. The kind of declaration you don’t realise you’ll make until someone of perceived authority makes you. The kind that you know in your heart of hearts will have deep introspective ramifications. This contract of creativity made between me and this man I most likely will never meet again will only weigh on my mind. No one else will care about the outcome of this.

A month deep has left me craving more than my ability allows. I find making anything to be a deeply scary activity. Any assertation to my existence feels entirely too impolite. To slink into the dark corners of life is all too easy.

Sometimes I think I died and didn’t notice. My room is filled with pervasive grey. It washes across the monochrome furniture. The toilet in the adjoining wet room reeks of piss. Stains cover the sides of the bowl. I allow the stench to fill the room. The only window in the room lets in a sliver of light. The street above filled with traffic causes the room to rattle. I am confined to my bed. I wanked earlier, the cum remains in my underwear. Trinkets adorn the room around me they’ve lost their meaning in the mire of the present.

BANG
BANG
BANG

A fist crashes into the firmly locked door to the room. I get up to make sure it truly is locked. I’m safe. I noticed my breathing has become heavy. I go back to laying on my bed. My roommates are having a house party outside in the kitchen/living room. A week ago, they slid a pamphlet under my door telling me it's okay to ask for help. It’s not.

The ceiling becomes concaved in my delirium. I’ve been awake since 5am on my trip to the nearby Tesco for my sustenance for the day. A meal deal and a loaf of bread to keep me going. Everyone morning I go I check the flat’s bins. The only time I enter the kitchen and the only communication with those I live with is emptying their bins. Four bin bags leak a foul sludge onto the floor. I lift them up and creep along the hall and exit the flat. The brisk winter air is refreshitng to my deeply stale body. I drop the bags into the large bin in the car park. The morning announcements at the train station next door begin to play. I must return soon before someone else wakes up. Time has lost its meaning in this life.

Emails scare me. Things I fully willingly signed up try to intrude my solitude with a kindly written email. They want to help me. They don’t understand that I’ve decided that I’m beyond help. One day I decide to change, upon removing the objects from my room a flatmate catches me:

“Are you leaving?”

“Yes”

I lived with them for 6 months.

I sent myself home, back to my mother. I am failed. The familiar walls of my childhood bedroom begin to grow old with mould. I waste my time here. I pretend for apply to jobs. A year goes by, I barely notice. A man moves in with my mother. Living with a terrorist can dull you into a sense of calm derangement. It was ok though because I had learnt to live in my room alone. One meal days, cowering in the safety of odd hours. When the world was locked in I was given a job. I pushed a trolley around a supermarket. I was given an offer to have a life I wanted to take it, I paid for it. I built beliefs to keep me in my prison.

Now I find myself living in the ruins of my life. A post-apocalyptic vision of my childhood bedroom. 5 years on from whatever event caused my statue of liberty to be buried in the beaches of my soul. I begin to pull back the vines and shrubbery and search for places to begin my settlement. Akin to the Anglo-Saxons living amongst Roman villas. I don’t know how this land was constructed but I will endeavour to build what I can in its grounds.

Jealous of a baby's focus on it's mother.
I am pulled from one place to another.
Life draws and quarters.
But only yourself possibility slaughters.
Uncounted personal promises you didn't keep.
The mountain wasn't always this steep.

In a lonely room even plastic flowers wilt.
A desperate feeling of guilt.

When the ocean is still on the horizon and the sun wanes in the sky the hollow feelings fall away. Missions and beliefs solidify in the brain cultivating permutations of unending futures. No danger can be found in this pristine garden, no height harrowing, no criminal haranguing and no thought disparaging. In this realm of heroes, only the myth of a great becoming can emanate from the soul. The dried grasses act as pillows for dreams to whisper in the reeds. Possibilities fall down the mountainside as the gods challenge their eidolon legion. Humanity's gift of the bountiful Eden to play out their lives of joy and sorrow. The dark clouds cannot gather under Helio's rays. The warm dusty haze turns any malaise into an epic. The myths arise from the wine-dark sea drunk on their own deep importance. They call from the past and the future in holy combination. Ancestor and descendent conjoined in the ever-lasting present. For their glory, they ask to sample divine struggle. Fear festers in the alleys and passageways of neurons forged in dark solitude. They evaporate in the sun's embrace allowing unused tendons to strengthen and old worries to relax. Worship the sun as the sun worships you.

Remain not in the corners of humanity's creation. Sustenance cannot be found in a concrete shadow. Fear rules in this controlled land. In God's garden, no man is alone, the earth walks with him. When no one else will the moon will listen. All has its place for serene perfection is a common sight in this wild land. God's country is all that the light blankets in its hope. Adventure is the only way forward without it the flame of the soul is smothered under mundanity's veil. New will always exist for those who seek it.

Too long I've subsided on life's offcuts. Like an ill-treated dog hoping for any scraps that may fall from a table. The mange of this lifestyle has killed my spirit. I threw myself into the oubliette of self-pity and inability. Slowly my roots crack these weak stone walls. My fire will not be unseen in this dark cavity. Through the tunnel of life's despair it guides me to that great light. His anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life. Do not allow those deep-seated demons to chain you in a self-flagellating ritual. Unapologetically declare to yourself and all who will listen a divine purpose. The only failure is those who will not face the task.

O, Magpie I salute you though
Still you find it within you to curse me so
Small whims that I desire
Are cast onto the pyre
As the fire grows
My life it slows

Rabbits that I follow through the wood
Take me to places I never could
Met with events I am not prepared
What foolishness to think I should be spared
The pain within, these amplified
From which I must refuse to hide

I used to save every picture I came across online that I liked, just in case I ever needed them. Somewhere along the line I stopped. Now my pictures folder lay woefully empty after a succession of childhood laptops with mysteriously empty hard drives. Media is getting lost. Servers are going dark, and their contents evaporate on the wind. Its time everyone starts hoarding anything they find worth hoarding.

yt-dlp can allow you to save all those Youtube videos that teeter on the edge of being taken down.

yt-dlp works in the command line so it can be strange to use if you aren’t used to such programs but its highly versatile and it’s father yt-dl was taken down from even DuckDuckGo’s search results so using it is going against big tech in some small way. Make sure you install FFmpeg too.

Pasting this into your command line replacing the red text with your youtube video/channel/playlist url will begin downloading.

yt-dlp --embed-subs --embed-metadata --merge-output-format mkv YOUTUBE HTTP LINK

Here is a sample command to convert a video file into an mp3 using FFmpeg

INPUT-FILE.mkv ffmpeg -i -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 128k -f mp3 OUTPUT-FILE.mp3

Also, you can use the program HTTrack to download webpages to hoard.

One day you might be the only one left with a certain file, and it'll be your duty to host it.

As a young child my Americophile grandfather told me the story of the Alamo, I’m not sure I understood at the time what a Mexican was or when in history it was supposed to have taken place. Sometime between Odin and 1066?

We all grew up in America, even those of us who didn’t. The culture permeates the globe. The Marshall Plan Vassal States are fed ever increasingly with American ideas in cultural globalisation. As a British person sharing a language with such an alien nation is ever taxing in trying to maintain a separate identity. 9/11 has had a bigger impact on my life than 7/7 ever did and I had to look the second one up.

American politics rule in the Atlantic world. European opinion polls on American presidents as if Europeans are supposed to have an idea of who the president is and what they stand for implicitly. The French, the most resistant to Americanisation, have begun to cite American universities as the source of their political ills, a wonderful scapegoat.

As America ages and its face is smeared with decades of realpolitik shit the world’s “hero” has become a joke. America seems unable to find a puppet to lead it that isn’t a farce. At least Trump was entertaining. America was unfortunate to be in the lead at the time of great informational dissemination, any previous empire didn’t have to tackle the issue of armies of shit-posters mining at its foundations. On the other hand, no previous empire had the ability to give its population destructive catharsis through any niche media form the corporate parasite-ridden mind of a crypto-human could want.

The real issue as a non-American facing the colossus is, it isn’t evil. “America” has found itself at the centre of a global system it has no choice but to perpetuate for fear of what replaces it. Boundaries were drawn in the Zero Hour of 1945. A new destruction myth for the world to replace our creation myths, it’s no wonder we can’t think of anything better with that as our foundation. Our new foundational myth allows us to think anything away from that is better, it must be.

The world we live in was forged from a hell, the fires of hatred and raw unfeeling science gave way to a world of deep fear and the understanding that fear it turns out makes a lot of money. It’s been known for a long time now that the best way to move product is to fear the absence of it. Food, shelter, armies, nukes. Anyone born after 1948 has had a gun at their head in the form of an interlocking system of hellfire at the tip of rockets only stopped if everyone can just learn to behave. Sure, we have more food than ever before but annihilation in the most horrific way possible is closer than any medieval prophet could know. Don’t let Fukuyama fool you those nukes are still out there.

Since the rest of the world destroyed itself in ritual sacrifice America was the only source of cohesion left. A middle-aged man in an elderly care home America propped up and attempted to modernise an aged system. Anything they found in their new elderly adoptees sellable they packaged and sent away on the next freighter home creating a cultural swirl where you’ll see a Sailor Moon sticker that passed the Panama Canal in an Afghan market. Cities mirror each other. The human habitat becomes uniform. It’s not America’s fault its their parasite the corporation. They want you afraid and detached.

You must fight the fear, let the fear consume you and you’ll cling to the metal mothers like scared baby monkeys of modernist religions. Communism or fascism won’t save you. Both seem a good way to fight the corporatist structure that seeks to atomise you to the point of ever entering transient fandom-religions that reaffirm your most uncertain beliefs. These commodify your beliefs in a way a pre-Lutheran indulgence merchant could only dream of. Share yourself with the world as an act of kindness, know you are good and that you can create good. Seek not to sell yourself into the bondage of capital you are not a brand you are a human. Pay artists in secret, never pay for entertainment. Support the obscure and meaningful and do away with the known and vapid. Balance the weight of flesh with the freedom of the mind do not get trapped in either. You are both God and Mud.

Choose your hill, defend it. Feed the corporate brain worm when you must with the things you loved as a child, know that you can never return. Build your shamanistic cult in the woods, create your online zine, build strange constructions out of driftwood on beaches, and design your myths to inspire greatness in others, and spread them. Share these things with your people and create the world you deserve. Don’t be turned to the factory output of beings that don’t care about you. If you have no voice scream your spastic moans into the void until someone is forced to listen. Assert yourself onto the world until there is no place left unshackled to a cold algorithm.

Build your Alamo and defend it, no one else will do it for you.