December Wolves:We Are So Fucking Witty

Fuck nostalgia. I am alive in this moment and no other. Now, excuse me while I update my facebook status with that. This is another blog about how stupid and short-sighted I am.

Congratulations on complaining about reposting on a useless facebook group.

Really, I was moments away from commenting that on a thread but luckily, I realized I had nothing to say except berate other people on a thread for berating other people. Realizing this, I felt like a real winner.

It goes like this. One of the people is super catty about making sure there aren't reposts in a Facebook group with over 9000 pictures on it. So, she and this other guy (both friends of Eleven Names, by the way) constantly post on the thread that the picture is already here. Infuriatingly, they don't provide links. It's frustrating to have someone tell you it's already there and not have the courtesy of showing where.

But yes. Posting on a facebook thread and being smug about how people are wasting their time seems lie a bad way to go about the business of the entertainment in my life. It's not like I'm contributing anything. Snark is a vessel for showing how intelligent you believe yourself to be. And in a conversation where people are already getting out of hand, it's unwise.

Beyond that, it's more embarrassing for me that I was actively searching for that thread so I could look smarter. I had to look for that picture at work and then type something into that little text box and look for a way to put those people down. I should be bigger than that. I've been on the internet for a good decade of my life now and I'm reinforcing this tendency for replies and attention?

I'm a college graduate, man. I'm too old for shit like this. But I'm not, really, am I?

I want other people to see how intelligent I am, damn it! I want to be recognized, by the universe at large, I suppose. I reinforce this dumb cycle of hate with everyone "in before Person X says Y" or every witty comment I feel compelled to make. I know it's a larger part of the game of top dog, but for whatever reason, I'm hesitant to walk away from it. (I mean, I just love Courage Wolf!) It's one way of staying in touch. But reading it I just feel like I'm done.

That's it. Simply fed up and tired. This feeling might pass in the morning. I hope it does, but if I take nothing else from it, I guess I'm just going to try to leave positive messages or none at all. Hey, that sounds kind of familiar. What's old is new.

(And no, I'm not going to end the blog on that note. I've done that too many times before and by now that's one of my tropes. The other, in case you're wondering, is trying to connect myself to a larger idea.) Life is short and I should have better things to do than prance around on the internet showing off my presumed plumage. And if I don't, frankly, I ought to shut up and create them. So I'm going to go do that.

December Wolves: Avarice Wolf

I don't know what happened. I thought I had a weekend to catch up and even get ahead on this promise and I couldn't find anything I wanted to write about. There's something about Jersey Shore in the archive, but it feels kind of toothless and it wasn't really begging to be written. I came back to a couple paragraphs I wrote after playing Borderlands with a very important friend of mine and it ended up going to an interesting place.

I mean, okay, self-flagellation on here isn't really a surprise. But I'd like to think I'm actually learning and this is proof of it. Anyway, have you heard of Courage Wolf? The title is a reverent nod of the head.

I'd like to confirm that Borderlands has reached Diablo 2 levels of addictiveness. A good friend of mine and I started playing at about 9:30 p.m. and didn't stop until 4:30 a.m. a couple weeks ago and that's an invigorating feeling that I haven't had in a very long time.

The alcohol didn't hurt. I've written a lot about my feelings around alcohol, but it felt right here. Here the alcohol was used as celebrating something, my friend being back from another college semester.

Borderlands is very, very addictive. Very, very fun. I don't care what the metacritic score is. It does what it does very well and even miles removed from the ability to play it, I'm still jonesing for the "shoot enemies and guns come out" mechanic, as popularized by Diablo 2. But I don't think I'll play it any time soon.

My computer can't run it and the cheapest console that can run it costs $200. Which means, I'm looking at $250 (at the very least, and that's not including the 10% tax that brings the purchase up to $275 , which means it's closer to $300 than I'd like.) Now all that said, I could ask for a PS3 for Christmas, but what's holding me back is the backlog of PS2 games I still haven't gotten through. Looking back on what I wrote around consumable media last Christmas, I think I'm in danger of losing that important "I've got what I've got and I'll get around to new stuff when I'm done with the old stuff" perspective that I had before.

Let me go down the list of things I haven't finished or gotten to that I wrote about in that post last year:

Videogames:

+Killzone and Odin Sphere (right) have been beaten. Odin Sphere I made sure I beat in the true ending way so there was no bullshit and I could say I was finished and didn't have to replay the game. In Killzone, I don't think there's different endings, so I feel like I got the core message of that game. The core message being shoot things that are hard to kill.

+Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 haven't been beaten. The difference between then and now is that I'm starting to play God of War 2 again and am a couple hours further than I was at the end of the school year.

Books:

+The War Within and But Is It Art have been finished. The War Within was pretty much devoured and imbibed in January, and But Is It Art was gifted to a friend's girlfriend who is currently a

n art major. So they're consumed and thought about and dispensed with, until I come back to them. (Which I don't, but that's another subject for writing. Do I really go through my "library"? I've got shelves of books, but I don't really pick through them, I look for something new.)

+The End of Faith, The Mystery of Capital and The Arab Predicament are all cluttering up a "I SWEAR I WILL GET TO THESE" shelf. The End Of Faith is one of those books that I feel uncomfortable even picking up since apparently atheism is getting pretty douchebaggy and I am nominally Catholic. But I bought it, so I ought to read it. The Mystery of Capital I haven't even seriously started. I'm maybe 10 pages into it. It's very far down on the list, behind oh God everything else. The Arab Predicament, I think I'm half finished with but have put down and now can't find in the web of music, other books and games that I need to finish.

+The Essential Rumi, however, is in my work satchel, so I'm three quarters finished with that and it's a peculiar book with wonderful poems about getting drunk and loving God and loving women and are you going to drink that wine, because if you're not, I will. It's a breath of fresh air. Hella refreshing.

(Yes, I used the phrase hella refreshing. I make squishy noises with the English language.)

Phew.

After all that, I'm still very far behind and that's from this time last year.

I have all these things to get through before I even begin to think about new games and books. My parents don't know what to get me for Christmas, and guess what I want: More books! I have lots of them and I am slowly finding the time to read them. But what I really want for Christmas is the ability to look forward in my life without losing sight of the great things I have in front of me.

Borderlands, then, is representative of all the things that are new and shiny in front of me and (as Visa and Chase are trying to point out) I can totally kind of afford them. I recognize that there is something inside me, whether native or not, I don't know, but certainly cultivated, that I want new things. Because the old things won't do. The graphics on the PS2 aren't as good as the PS3 graphics. I like David Aja's art more than I like Mike Mignola's on Hellboy, even in the library form, or whatever the excuse this week is.

Borderlands is indicative of moving towards the altar of moar (if I can blaspheme to have religious and 4chan imagery working side by side) and I'm ashamed to admit, I thought I wrote pretty definitively about that last year. I will get to Borderlands when I get to Borderlands. I will get to the Immortal Iron Fist Omnibus over Christmas, because that's at least one indulgence I'm allowing myself. But I'm taking everything else slow. No rest for the wicked, remember?