To Be Different.

To seem outside.
Outside the rest
Outside the norm
Outside of your friends
you almost mourn.

To realise your different.
Thinking individually
Analysing separately
Seeing life in solitary
you almost whimper.

To feel so alone.
You’re deserted
You’re isolated
You’re unescorted
you almost break down.

To be that scared.
Feeling distressed
Feeling discouraged
Feeling petrified
you almost cry.

To be so different.
You feel these things
You know these things
You hate these things
but you’ll find YOUR way

…..hopefully.

Excerpts of a Skype Conversation – Mad Men

So I started watching Mad Men finally. It’s okay, I’m only on episode 2 so I can’t really say much and there are a good 70 episodes or so it seems on Netflix to rummage through. It got me thinking as I’m sure it got many a people thinking, and my thought processed tied in once again to an article I put up on here about being insignificant, it was entitled – the beauty of being a speck and I hope you read it.

But here is the excerpt of my one way conversation to my sleeping girlfriend about Mad Men and the questions it made me ask, enjoy (note, each paragraph is a separate message send sporadically across the 2 episodes):

”
first episode of Mad Men – Pretty sure the italian dude is gay.

in fact definite.

whenever I watch TV, or read about how someone’s day went in terms of what they did at work, I am CONVINCED that people sit around in offices (less so cubicles) delegating work, sleeping on a couch and counting down until the next meeting. All they do in that time is wait and think about highfalutin ways of convincing their boss, their client, their delegates that they’re actually doing work. I’m convinced to the core nearly that most of the time in a working day is wasted on convincing people or reassuring people and the true amount of work that does get done, takes the collective time of maybe an hour to two.

weird how mad men is only about 50 years back yet it seems so ancient

also what the hell is wrong with drapers wife’s hands

took me until half way through episode 2 to remember that Don also see’s a woman in the city thus being an adulterer

Jon Ham has alot of veins in his head

Jon Ham has like no muscles in the back of his neck. Like the trapiezes or whatever the hell they’re called

I may have an issue with the show just in terms of how outdated it is of how people behave. You know that I prefer being straight about things and all this ‘what you’re supposed to do’ bollocks irritates me somewhat

watching the social interactions and the realisation of how far we’ve come, it makes me wonder how far socially we have to develop. Sure some people are socially awkward, I roam that space in my free time, but women are much further than where they were, there is still work to be done but I don’t believe some of the militant feminist I hear shouting about facts that don’t seem to come from anywhere else but themselves thus sort of disproving themselves in the fact that no one else has found what they’ve ‘found’ to be true. So yes equality still has places to go, I mean gay people are still fighting for marriage and bigotry is still being fought. But it seems that the majority that are brought up in this modern age don’t see anything else other than just another person whose only real difference in their base traits as a human is their sexual preference. 

So equality still has to be moved forward, bigotry has yet to be dispelled and never really will down to personal experience. But I still wonder, people have progressed so far in 50 years, INCREDIBLY far, will there be a new barrier to fight? I can’t imagine many social sects that have to hide away, will there be a next social fight at all? Will we even see it?

I think about alot of big things that stretch out it seems. Maybe that should be the focus of whatever game i end up making

It wouldn’t ever really be based on core mechanics more core concepts and story.

But how do you lay everything out in front of someone? How do you make someone feel small yet still as significant as the person to their left?

How could anyone possibly lay out the world before someone like some metaphorical map and show them that – you won’t see this, and even if you’re lucky enough to do so you may not understand it until it’s all blown over and the victor been declared. There will be years upon decades of possible research in order to allow the layman to understand this hugely amazing concepts and structures that you can’t understand the way they work. We talk about stars and planets with still an air of mystery but we’re all walking around on some glass floor where we can see the bottom of the knowledgable pit below us, but act like it isn’t there. You can’t expect everyone to know how each thing works but as a collective we’re a society that enjoys the nice and neat little one line tag that just says – it’s a ball of burning fire suspended in the sky.
”

I think it’s incredibly important to realise these things. To realise what you do know and what you don’t. To realise the strides that have been made in the world around us that didn’t require us, we didn’t help in anyway but it still came about.

Maybe this is just some late booming appreciation of the world around me. Maybe this is madness descending upon me as I can’t really handle the idea of some of these sometimes truly impossible concepts to grasp. Maybe this is just life, realising that you as a person are surplus to requirements and it’s your duty to understand the world and fit it to your beliefs on how to conduct yourself.

I don’t know and I just hope I don’t have to see a psychiatrist over this 😉

Gamers Chase the Next Failure.

In any game there are nearly infinite loops to test and check what key is pressed, where the player should be, if the AI is falling, is the Player trying to run into a wall? These checks are done every ‘step’ of the game.

(Very quickly a step is a short period of time in which everything on the screen is recalculated to where it should be. Basically it’s like a frame but that only depicts what’s on the screen not the full checks done throughout the program. Just like frames more steps makes a game smoother and vice versa).

Now all these actions within a game have a success or failure outcome, a binary value. The game itself also has success and failure states overall e.g. Did the player kill the Boss? Did the player beat the timer etc etc. So why can’t gamers also have this success and failure outcome or mindset?

Well in reality they do. Think of any new game you’ve picked up, the very initial success or failure you’ll come across is your ability to move the character, your character, you (if the immersion is of a high quality) across the screen or around the map. Now good practice in gaming means that it’s usually the same controls as the last game, WASD or the arrow keys, the analog stick on your favourite console gamepad.

Imagine, if you will, that you’ve just picked up a Steam Controller, the one that didn’t have analogue sticks and just 2 tracking pads with  buttons in a different place than you were used to; Now you’re in that success/failure condition, now you’re in a position where a continual failure loop runs until you learn how to control the character at which point it becomes true and you move on. Now realistically this would take a small amount of time, it’s the smallest and most basic barrier to entry so it should take the shortest period of time. If the game is well thought out and structured you may even get a nice tutorial to help you along.

Well now that you’re moving you think you’ve got it in the bag? Not at all. Each game is different, the enemy AI don’t all react the same, now you’ve got to learn how to kill these things without killing yourself. Well you might mash buttons in some vain attempt to survive your virtual death, but the learning curve is there for a reason and unless your progress through it, you won’t get very far in the game at all. THIS is the 2nd success/failure loop.

So you grind away, maybe you get a lucky run here or there, but you keep running headfirst into a huge brick wall with failure painted across it in neon-yellow because you hate that colour. You may get frustrated, you may relish the challenge, but ultimately everyone is trying to learn how to better control the character and kill the enemy with minimal damage, minimal error and most importantly the least amount of screw-ups you can be held accountable for, because those are the most annoying – when you’re good enough but you still do idiotic things from time to time.

Now let us say that you can move your character, you can kill the enemies relatively well. Surely there’s no more failure? Well here is where games split into the beautiful tapestry of gaming that we currently have and continually grow upon (except you EA, you stop it already!). In olden games the AI would just get faster and harder until you failed, it was purely skill driven. In the deepest meaning of the title of this article, those people really were chasing after the next failure, hoping it was just beyond what the previous one was. In a mission with story your end goal isn’t this ticking time bomb with the variable ‘X’ on display, no, it’s when the last boss/race/platform/puzzle has been beaten. It’s when you’ve destroyed the Reapers, killed the Dragons, Spelunked all the caves and Jumped through enough Orange portals (not the blue ones, that’s how you get cooties). In multiplayer there is a similar thing going on as with olden games, it’s purely about self-improvement over each and every enemy you face, how your skills stack against theirs and how far that will ultimately get you.

Gamers chase after the next failure as it makes us learn, we may hate it, we may throw a tantrum (looking at you CoD players), or we may throw our hands above our head with a mighty laugh at how far we got yet how badly beaten we were.

Gamers enjoy failure to a degree and that’s incredibly important, because the majority of the time you’re going to be failing. You’re going to be losing lives, running out of time and realising only too late that there is no platform beneath your boots of levitation [+5 speed]. Gamers will lose, lose and lose again with hopefully further periods of time apart up to the point of where we feel satisfied, when that hunger for pixels has been quenched and washed down with a hearty helping of good well oiled game mechanics.

 

Gamers will chase the next failure.

(Inspired by the Will Wright video @ http://criticalpathproject.com/?v=38452635) 

The Eternals

So one night I got bored and went through kickstarter. I came across a game where the idea was you could explore the entirety of the cosmos. This gave me an idea, well it gave me several but I just focused on the idea of the the Universe having this bizarre order to it. If you’ve read my previous entry on this blog you’ll see my post where basically I have some form of brain high at the inexplicable size of everything we know of and don’t know about.

I’ve no idea if i’ll be able to write more on this, I hope I do but I don’t know where I could take it, but I guess almost anything is possible. So enjoy

”

Out in the Cosmos, if you stand back far enough, everything has Order to it; Galaxies form, stars burst into life and planets are sculpted by the forces of their surroundings. On those planets creatures emerge, proud yet cautious of the tiny spec they inhabit in the vast open wilderness of the Cosmos. We’ve seen many a cycle on many a planet, the creatures born unto their spec roam, explore and claim dominion and yet inevitably they all fade away into the deep darkness. We watch each and every one of them dissolve into nothingness as Order prevails, we do not weep for the cycle begins a new and we have seen many a cycle in our everlasting lives. We merely recite a saying older than ourselves and older than time itself for safe passage to the great beyond and then we rebuild.  This is the burden of the Eternals. We place Order into the Cosmos.

“

The Beauty of Being a Speck

Note this is very off the cuff so I may waffle on as I try and get my words to fit my own understanding as conveying an idea can be a beautiful and incredibly complex thing, but that’s for another time.

I was reading some xkcd comics as I’ve done again and again, year after year. I always seem to keep coming back to it, the reason being each time I come back I understand more than I did last time. First time I found xkcd I didn’t get about any of the comics other than the ones based around life. Then I did some Maths at a relativily impressive school and I was best as Mathematics. So when I came back to xkcd I realised I understood alot more of the jokes that feature Mathematical problems as part of the setup or punchline. Now 2/3’s of the way through my Computer Science Degree at a Russel Group University (basically a top 10-15 Uni’s I think) I’ve gone back again by chance and I understand more of the jokes about problem solving and computer languages.

So getting back on track, I was reading an xkcd comic where they reference Baby Boomers. I thought to myself that the Baby Boomers made all this awesome music and crazy style that we just associate with the times like the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s even some bits of the ’90s. I thought about what my unfortunate generation have produced or at least what they like and have made famous and to be honest I focused on the negative stuff, the stuff I hate, the culture that’s been born of idiocy. This is something I’ve spoken at in length in the past on a wordpress account I have. There’s a culture of just drinking until you throw up and that’s somehow funny or cool, and weed is acceptable. Now I’m totally fine with weed, I’m such a stuck-up bastard that stoners were the only people chilled out enough who liked me and I liked them because they didn’t go out with the ‘lads on tour’ or do ‘tactical chunders’.

 

So there I was thinking about the decades that my parents grew up in and were influenced by and then I was there stuck thinking about the crap that I see around (admittedly it’s not all bad, it’s just more obvious). I started to think about what my kids might get up to when they’re born, what mark they’ll leave on the world, how they’ll push entertainment in a direction they want by voting with their money, what trends might rise and fall in their time. I then thought about what their kids will experience and how the world will change to them too and I realised I probably won’t get to know and that is where part of the beauty lies.

I won’t be alive long enough to see how this planet pans out, I won’t be alive enough to see the big changes in the world that are influenced by the new generations. It’s ultimately unknowable and there is such a fantastic beauty there. You can’t know, you can never know, you have to accept your mortality and move on because there is nothing else to do. There’s so much that you can’t know but what’s more is there’s so much that each one of us doesn’t want to know for whatever reason, we hate the subject matter, we don’t feel it’s worth knowing, we associate bad connotations with whatever it is. There is in everyone this vast gap of knowledge, sure you might know why things work or are the way they are but not everything.

 

I’ve been watching Cosmos recently, a show with Neil deGrasse Tyson and it talks about some of the different scientists discovering things about our solar system such as that we’re one of many planets, we’re one of thousands of solar systems, one of thousands of galaxies but all tied to this Universe of which there could be more, who knows. The Universe seems to me to be like the biggest machine that you could house in a factory, but each cog that makes up that machine is incredibly tiny, the Universe works on a vast spectrum to intricate degrees that are ridiculous. The chance of our lives on this tiny blue speck are tiny, the fact there are 7 billion of us is a miracle and the fact that some of us are lucky enough to find various kinds of love through family, friends and relationships is a bigger miracle too.

 

You’re so small in this Universe and you are loved by and love maybe a handful of people and there is so much that you don’t know. It makes everything seem, to me at least, to be just beautifully irrelevant, I’m here to enjoy life and do what I can with the time I have and from an Atheist point of view that’s all I’ve got too, I’d better make the best out of it. I think if people genuinely took time to think about sayings like ‘You’ve only one life’ and that sort of thing, if you actually sat down and truly thought about all the repercussions that means you’d feel blissful in the realisation that we’ve managed some truly ridiculous notion of order in a huge machine that works upon chaos and chance.

 

There’s this beauty to life which is more than just how nice the day is or how happy you are right now or how lucky to feel to have the job you do, the friends you do, the partner you do. There is a beauty that is so close to us that is just ignored it seems nearly everyday. If I could comprehend this feeling so I could feel this way all the time I’d be on some euphoric high for the rest of my life just knowing that this is it, there’s so much more, there’s so much beautiful chaos, not destruction or hate but life and nature and cosmic events that make all this so, in the truest meaning of the word, awesome.

 

In Cosmos it was said that when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide it will send so may stars out of their normal orbit that for a million, maybe a billion years (I forgot which unfortunately) there would be a star show each and every night. I can’t imagine something more fitting to the idea of the Universe’s alluring chaotic tendancies than being able to have generations upon generations look up at the night sky and see shooting stars, stars that burn so bright and so plentiful.

There is an ineffable beauty to being a spectator of this grand machine work, so enjoy it.

A Mother’s Day Poem

So this past weekend was Mother’s Day in the UK.
Now in a very out of character move I actually went ahead and wrote a poem for my Mum which I’m going to share here. Now it does require some back story of my early life:

At the age of 10 my father whilst walking in the Pyrenees had a heart attack after walking ahead of his friend & my older brother. This essentially meant no one was there to perform CPR at the right now. Now at the age of 20 now a good 10 years (and more depressingly half my life) later I am at home with it.
In that time my Mother continued with the work she started with my Dad. They were both very good accountants (so I’m told) and started several companies with their work friends and other stuff like that. So my Mum continued along those lines and also used to get called in by other companies to help sort out their finances and stuff. In the 10 years since my Father died (this is a measure of how much work she’s done) she managed to raise over £1,000,000 which is incredibly impressive.
Now this does give some insight into my life, yes it was quite cushy but depressing due to the whole death thing. There was also some family fall out due to the events naturally as everyone was grieving and dealt with it in their own way.

So given all of the above here is now the poem I wrote for my admittedly amazingly strong mum:

To my Mother on this day
I thought I’d try to convey
That even though I am away
This is still a special day.

Our family befell a tragedy
And you became a dad to me
Always loving wholeheartedly
As only a mother does naturally.

And 10 long years later on
I’m so proud of my Mom
Even though dad is gone
Everything is not woebegone.

So to my Mother, I love you
Hale’s only honourary Jew
Our family has made it through
And it’s all because of you.

Our Great Depression Is Our Lives.

“Ours was a generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken”

The above is a quote from F.Scott Fitzgerald the American author of many short stories such as what is now called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but many more will know him for The Great Gatsby. The above quote makes me recall the scene I saw in the cult classic Fight Club:

“Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off. ”

I’m talking in particular about the bit in bold.  When I became incredibly stressed out a couple months back due to a very high work load of stuff I didn’t love, want or care for in the slightest, these quotes spoke to me. These quotes made me think that there is so much banality, so much pointlessness to life, the quote from Fight Club speaks about this point in greater depth than F.Scott Fitzgerald’s does.  Right now I’m at University and I do as much as I can to keep myself content with what I’m doing, sure I have to deal with a bit of shit from time to time but life isn’t perfect, if it was it’d be boring and we’d all come up wanting.

So when I found these quotes they spoke to me, I realised so much about what I was doing and where I was, from several sentences that most might ignore, and in the case of Fight Club completely over look because ‘oh cool that dude punched the other one lawl’. I realised that I was working my ass off, on assignments that those who’d set it didn’t care for and any thought about well-being was non-existent. I realised I was paying more than three times what people used to pay several years back in the UK for what was definitely not anywhere near three times as greater a service – Seriously question what £9,000 is worth and then think about if dodging lectures due to their boring and sometimes not even relevant material is worth that much (hint: 1 penny is already too much). I realised I was basically paying an exorbitant amount of money each and every year, to be quizzed, to be questioned and to be watched to see if I could ‘cut it’ all for a lousy bit of paper. A lousy bit of paper that meant somewhere near 20 doctors or professors, who’d I never met – they knew nothing of my personal beliefs, loves, hates or anything – these people thought I knew roughly what I was doing.

It was a demeaning realisation. That I was just working my way through some system just so I could apply for a job and be slightly more qualified than someone else but being realistic still starting at the bottom. And the time to apply for jobs is getting closer with each passing day and i’ll be honest, that is a terrifying idea. The idea that the work I produce will have to be of such a high quality that I get paid to do it? That’s insane, I barely see myself as an adult and quite frankly I don’t want to. Growing old is mandatory, growing up however is optional.

Everyone wants to do what they love for work. But what happens when what you thought you loved turned out to not be that great? What happens when that love is removed through hours of graft by people you’re paying to test you with the most vague and appallingly set questions? What happens when the love is gone but the bills remain?

I don’t know, and that is very fucking scary.

I’m All Alone (Good & Evil)

I’m All Alone

”
I am all alone.
There’s no one else.
At last a space to be myself.

No one who’d chide, blame and slur.
No one who’d row, bustle or stir.

No one who’d fuss, shout and riot.
No one who’d besmirch, abuse or violate.

No one who’d taint, sully and smear
No one who’d belittle, scoff or sneer.

No one who’d taunt, barb and provoke
No one who’d hit, punch or poke.

I’m all alone
There is no one.
A space void of any fun.

No one to grin, laugh and smile
No one to amuse, cheer or beguile.

No one to enchant, charm and please
No one to bait, goad or tease.

No one to frolic, skip and dance
No one to love, court or romance.

No one to adore, love and fancy
No one to wed, bond or marry.

I’m all alone
There is nothing.
A life devoid of Anything.
“

Weekly Recap 21/03/14

So I’m writing this 20 minutes before I have to go stream vidya games on my twitch channel whilst listening to 90s punk pop (nothing quite like nostalgia).

Stream
As I said I’ll be streaming at 9PM GMT Friday & Saturday as per usual. The channel has taken a bit of a beating over the past month. From the glorious 99 boundary with our toes on the line of the big 1-0-0, the channel has shrank back to 96 which is a bit of a kick in the teeth. But if you want a chance at getting a free game or just meeting some fun gamers head over to the channel here.

Youtube
This week I only got 1 video down but it was the first video I’ve ever been really proud of and it was quite heartfelt, so if I had to put only 1 video I’m glad it was that one, check it down below.

Twitter
I’ve only said it 4 times but I need a new way to say “As Per Usual” because here once again his the link to my twitter account where you can find all the mundane activities I get up to and also hear my opinions on most recently World War Z, Assassins Creed Unity & How my friend was turned on by a plastic bottle.

Anyway I’ve got to rush to be prepared for this stream. Let’s hope that this week is a turn around and we see the channel grow 🙂
Cheers guys
Later.

The Learning Curve Isn’t Smooth

Hey guys.

So I want to keep this brief as chances are I may write a proper piece about this later in my future, but I wanted to make a Youtube video out of it, to let people know and to get the word out.
What you’re about to read is one of the new things I do for my Youtube videos and that is the script I wrote. It took 10 minutes to write roughly and it took about 6 minutes to read and improv my way through.
So I just wanted to share with everyone my thoughts, so here is my script with many things I truly believe in that may come back again some day in a different format.

Enjoy:

”
Hey guys what’s going on this is Willza99 also known as the chivalrous gamer

Today I wanted to talk about something alot different than usual. This is more about progession and moving forward. This is something I bring up as it’s been a very big part of my life and also the hardest one to nail down. 

As many of you know I stream on the weekends from about 9PM GMT onward on my twitch channel which a link can be found below. In the time I’ve been streaming properly, about 6 months near about. 6 months, thats near 24 weeks, thats about 48 streams I’ve done solidly.

I’ve streamed once or twice on the weekend and also through the week. So just over 50 streams. 

It’s taken me 50 Streams, over 100 Youtube uploads and I’m willing to bet into the hundreds of hours of work spent on both of those. It’s taken me all that time to realise something that I still have troubles getting to grip with and honestly that is the fact that the learning curve isn’t smooth. It just isn’t, progress isn’t constant and the road to success has stepbacks.

In my personal life honestly my own health has been one of those issues, I did really well at one point and then I got complacent, but the dedication I required to do what I did then was beyond anything else, I was robotic in my actions and honestly I’m not proud of what I did or who I was because what I did was just inhuman and had no emotion attached.

I do no-where near what I used to do now and I’m happy for it, I’m a man who can’t imagine a middle ground so I go all out or not at all, I’m a man of extremes. Part of moving on from what I used to do was to learn to be more humble and be more accepting of where I am but to keep trying to push forward.

Bringing that back round to what I do here and on my stream, I’ve done quite well on both fronts. But there is still something that I just want to address and get out there so maybe someone watching will know and will learn. I never believed the hype I’d hear about how hard it is to keep pushing and keep working and I bet I’ve not even seen the worst of it yet because the higher you are the harder you fall. But recently I’ve brought my Twitch channel all the way up to 99 followers. I never thought I’d have anywhere near 100 people care enough to think “Yea this guy is alright, I like him” but here i was at the 99 follower mark and just 1 away.

Then as if it were out of some sort of movie I fell, only slightly but I fell to 98 after being stagnent for 2 weeks at 99 and each week the hope of someone pushing it over deminishing, I still fell. This week i fell again to 97 which was admittedly another kick to when I was down.

I also noticed a fall on my Youtube channel. I have small enough channels to notice this thing and I care enough that I do notice.

And trust me, as much as it sucks to have someone turn around and just go “no more” you fall into a weird feeling of peace about it, my twitch channel can honestly lose more followers and it will sting, it will sting like all hell that people just don’t think i’m good enough to do this but here’s the rub – They’re not turning up to the streams so why does that follow number matter? I’m playing games for fun and for myself not the mass so why does that follow number matter? I’m here trying to build a community however big or small that people will allow so that everyone can share their true love and passion about gaming and being a nerd because THAT is what matters! Not some stupid follow number, not some subscriber number.

The passion I have for what I do isn’t in the views or the subscriptions or the follows. The pasion I have is in the kind words of the awesome people who follow along and join in.

So from the bottom of my heart to the top of my passion I thank each and every one of you who watch, who take part, who talk to me whilst i’m streaming and talk to each other. I feel such pride when I see the people in teh chat getting on and joking around with each other. 

But I want to thank the people who left also, because if it wasn’t for that I’d have my priorities wrong and wrapped up in some stupid number.

So thank you everyone, thank you.

I’ve been Willza99 also the ChivalrousGamer and I love you guys.
“