The Bad News Bears Go To Dantooine - 2

RAAAARGGRRRRRRGGRRRR

Hey! Before you dig in, did you know that subscribers to my Patreon can now read Galaxy of Zeroes every week-ish (cough) in the virtual pages of The Hurting Gazette?

The blockbuster seventh issue is still free to try here! It's super-sized

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Thank you for reading! 

*

So lets talk about Ships.

Everyone hates the Ships minigame. Everyone has also been pretty vocal about that since they introduced it. Let’s talk about why.

     

A normal Arena match is played with five characters against five other characters (unless you’re playing something like a raid and therefore attacking the computer). Ships started out that way as well, with five ships against five ships, with a carrier for each side. Every fleet needs a carrier – currently the most powerful and popular carrier, without question, is Thrawn. You do see Admiral Ackbar and Tarkin as well, but very rarely Mace Windu.

      

Poor Mace. Between Clones and Jedi, the Galactic Republic faction actually has a strong fleet – just not Thrawn strong.

     

Anyway. When Ships started, the max time for any game was 7:30, up from the 5:00 of timed Arena combat. Between the carriers and reinforcements (something unavailable in any other part of the game), ships games naturally run longer. At the beginning, they ran so long that they had to nerf half the ships’ defensive capabilities and reduce the opening number of ships from five to three. They lowered the max time down to 5:00 at some point in there, and it plays better now but games still run a lot longer than Arena contests.

     

If I had to describe the experience, I’d say if the regular game was baseball, the ships minigame is baseball for people who really like sabermetrics. It’s the same game, roughly. Galaxy of Heroes is a wonky game in a lot of ways – by which I mean it encourages a wonkish mindset. It’s OK for things to be kind of boring or even kind of elaborately boring to an asinine degree, because what they’re trying to do is entice players to spend money. Much of the game, for me, and I imagine for the developers as well, consists of testing the patience of even the most committed free-to-play users, such as myself.

     

Ships takes the regular game and adds another layer of fiddly shit in order to scramble expectations. The presence of static carriers and the use of reinforcements does give combat its own distinctive feel, but it also makes for longer games. That’s only a bad thing if people aren’t having fun, but the fact is that the earliest incarnations of Ships were terrible. It was a slow game seemingly for no other reason that defenses relative to offensive capabilities were poorly balanced. People avoid Ships still because, frankly, it just wasn’t very fun for a very long time.

      

But something important regarding Ships, which I believe I’ve mentioned before: the Fleet Arena is the only source for Fleet Arena tokens, and those are the only tokens you can use to buy Zeta materials. And as I know I’ve mentioned Zeta abilities represent the most significant upgrade in the game.

      

So if you’re following along so far, let’s now talk about the game’s single biggest Achilles heel.

     

The developers manage a pretty tight grip on the metagame, and they do this primarily through making powerful new characters that lead the game precisely in the direction they want to go. Sith were dominant in the meta for a long time – and still are, as of this writing – but they’ve been putting a lot of effort into rebuilding Jedi the past few months. They’re not completely competitive yet. Twenty-two out of the top twenty-five teams on my Arena node are currently led by Darth Traya, with two led by Bastila Shan and one lonely team led by good ol’ Emperor Palpatine. 

       

Jedi have been on the receiving end of a concerted effort to reboot the faction for a few months, after being completely unplayable for most of the game’s existence. General Kenobi has always been good, but General Kenobi was also the only playable Jedi for long stretches of the game’s history. They started with goosing Grand Master Yoda’s stats to make both of his Zeta abilities more effective. His Leader ability still isn’t anyone’s favorite, but otherwise they succeeded in making him a lot more formidable. Actually kind of a tiny green cyclone of pain, which is probably what Yoda looks like to you if Yoda wants to beat your ass.

      

Beat your ass I will, but enjoy the exercise of violence I will not . . . much.

      

But, everyone already has Grand Master Yoda, and a lot of people even already had his Zeta abilities, so that one upgrade wasn’t going to push anyone to spend a lot of money. Which is why they introduced Bastila Shan right after, telegraphing her significance before putting her on sale for a month.    

     

And that makes sense. They want me to drop either crystals (which cost money) or, preferably, human money. There’s no way to get enough crystals to be able to afford to buy the latest character packs when they appear – and I will point out, the character packs in the store often do not include set amounts of shards. Right now the going rate is 1,299 crystals for anywhere from 5-330 character shards. And I probably don’t have to tell you the payoff for those isn’t always the best.

Or you can pay $19.99 American dollars for 30 shards, guaranteed, which is about the going rate. It varies a bit depending on how hot the character is. After the first month or so they start selling premium characters in the Shipments store for a slightly better freight – right now you can get 4 Bastila shards for 320 crystals, so you can do the math on that.

     

The only way to get that many crystals, the amount you would need to ever be able to justify actually buying new character shards in the store, is by winning in the Arena. First place in the Arena – which goes out every night at 7:00 PM – gets 500 crystals and 900 Squad Arena Tokens. (Squad Arena Tokens aren’t that valuable except for the fact that the Squad Arena Store is the only Store that sells the Prestige ability materials which you need to upgrade your Carriers for Ships – there was an old lady who swallowed the fly.)

      

By contrast, coming in First in Ships gets you only 400 crystals, along with 1,800 Fleet Arena tokens. (Remember, Zeta mats cost 2,000 Fleet Arena tokens and every Zeta ability requires twenty Zeta mats. See what I mean about the math starting to stack up?)

     

If you’re thinking, wait a minute, 400 really isn’t a lot less than 500, well . . . that’s a very good point. Because the thing with the Ships minigame, it’s simply a much smaller game. Ships didn’t start until the game had already been going for a while, and there just aren’t as many ships in the game as characters. Even once they started releasing ships at a steady pace alongside characters, there are just fewer ships in the Star Wars universe than characters. Around the time of the release of Rogue One they added nine Rebel characters to the game, but only two Rebel ships, to give you the idea. Now, you needed many of those characters to fly their ships, but fewer than nine.

 

*

Galaxy of Zeroes

Introduction

Future Farmers of Alderaan

Of Mos Espa 

Much Ado About Nihilus - Part One 

Much Ado About Nihilus - Part Two

Which One is Starck Again?

The First Star Wars Essay 

Ready Player None 
 

If This Goes On - I

If This Goes On - II

If This Goes On - III

If This Goes On - IV
If This Goes On - V

The Bad News Bears Go To Dantooine
1
2
3

Next week's installment should now be up on the Patreon! 

Subscribers also receive access to tons of other goodies, including updated complete ePub files of my first two fantasy novels The Book of the Loam and A Darkness in the Time of the First, as well as ePub files of Tomorrow Is Always The Best Day Of My Life and Whistling in the Dark: A (Very) Short Book About They Might Be Giants.

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dude the Order of Saint Dumas called and they want their stuff back

The Bad News Bears Go To Dantooine

My large son, he is not so bright but he makes up for it in anger

Hey! Before you dig in, did you know that subscribers to my Patreon can now read Galaxy of Zeroes every week-ish (cough) in the virtual pages of The Hurting Gazette?

The previous issue is still free to try here! It's super-sized

The double-sized premiere issue, featuring “The First Star Wars Essay,” is still free here. 

Thank you for reading! 

*

So let’s talk about how I got decent at this damn game.

Notice I didn’t say “good,” I said “decent.”

There is a great deal of humility in learning how to do something not well, but decently, and being aware at all times of just how large the gap remains between decent and well. Perhaps I aspire one day to reach beyond mere mediocrity – but you’ve got to pay your dues before you can pay the rent.

Something about video games that I never appreciated before is that they present a windows into worlds where actions have consequences. Things make sense because players have to be able to depend on some degree of consistency. Even given the element of randomness inherent in the game system for something like Galaxy of Heroes, the randomness is predictable. You can set your watch by it. I know that every different kind of item to be farmed is meted out according to odds that range from “parsimonious” to “grim.” And it sucks, sometimes, to do something like drop 200 Cantina Energy in one fell swoop – which buys 12 shots at node 8-F at the Cantina Battles table, at 16 points a pop, with half of one left over – and get one measly Veteran Smuggler Chewbacca shard for my trouble. But I know the next time I have just enough for three shards – 48 points – I could just as easily get all three shards from all three chances.

It’s consistent enough that I can make reasonable common-sense estimates regarding how long certain things are going to take. In the case of Veteran Smuggler Chewbacca – well, I didn’t pick just any random character. Right now as of this writing the biggest question mark on my horizon is whether or not I am going to be able to get the aforementioned Veteran Snuggler up to the requisite seven stars by the next time the event comes around for Jedi Training Rey, currently one of the most powerful characters in the game. He’s one of the five characters you need to finish the mission to unlock her . . . and he’s the last one I need, incidentally.

(I should point out that I literally just now picked up the game, saw that I had 21 Cantina Points, and bought one go at 8-F – and got one snuggly shard for my trouble. So it’s just luck. And algorithms.)

Perhaps I should back up a bit here . . . it’s easy to get lost in the weeds because long-term plans for this game tend to metastasize, as they generally follow the story logic of the “swallowed the spider to catch the fly” type. The important thing to remember is that the most powerful character in the game is currently Darth Traya.

Yeah, her.

 

So powerful is she that the all but two of the top twenty Arena teams in my node have Traya, and some of them don’t even have her all the way up to seven stars yet. If you recall, there’s only one way to get Traya, and that’s the Heroic level of the Sith Temple Raid. And it so happens that the absolute best character for getting past the most punishingly difficult level of the temple – that’s right, our boy Captain Tryhard himself, Darth Nihilus – the character who does it best is none other than Jedi Training Rey.

 

Please don’t ask me how. The reason why Nihilus is so damn annoying in the first place is that he has 

some kind of weird protection regeneration ability that deflects the vast majority of damage – unless, that is, you know how to slide your damage under the protection, and the character who can do that the absolute best is Rey with a dedicated Resistance team. The most common team I see when I look is usually Rey (“JTR”), with the game’s other Rey (“Scavenger”), BB-8, R2-D2, and the powerful generic Resistance Trooper.

(An aside about generics: faceless characters like Resistance Trooper, Resistance Pilot, Hoth Rebel Scout, and Hoth Rebel Soldier are actually important, even though it really hurts to have to allocate resources to get my Resistance Trooper up to Gear Level XII when other, cooler characters who are also significantly less important languish. I’m looking at you, seven-star General Grievous. Perhaps the most useless rare character in the game, but I love him perhaps not despite but because of his uselessness. He tries his best. I’m proud I got my angry son up to seven stars even though there was literally no reason to do so except my vague suspicion that he will one day be a Fleet Commander in the Ships minigame, same as Holdo. Presumably either Hux or Snoke will one day also be a Fleet Commander for the First Order, since they already have a lot of ships but still no carrier. Neither Snoke nor Hux are playable yet, and one must assume the developers are aware of the absences.)

(“Holy shit,” the developer gasps, “you realize we could do . . . Snoke! He’s in that movie too, we could make him a playable character!”

“Let me see if I understand you correctly,” the other developer answers, “Snoke . . . from that movie we saw?”

“Yeah! I was just reading – did you know that was a Star Wars movie?" 

  

“I suspected as much,” the second developer mused. “Call it a hunch. But this – this changes everything.”)

So anyway. JTR does something really quite clever but very complicated and leads her team to a considerable amount of damage against that punk Nihilus.

This is an example of everything I hate about the game, by the way. They designed an essential challenge such that there is really only one viable option, meaning that you’re stuck playing the game at their pace. Which, I mean, fair enough, it is their game. But I hate being siloed into a very specific set of actions, especially when it’s a multi-step process that forces me to build my entire medium-term plan around accomplishing just this one thing.

There’s not a lot of creativity in that kind of game play. In fact, there’s quite a bit of white-knuckle grim determination.

 

Here we see a big difference between the game play in Galaxy of Heroes and the kind of game you’d buy (hopefully as much as possible) all at once and play in its completed form at home on your TV. My game playing experience is free, yes. Never paid a single dime. But the game is obviously not designed to help players like me in ways that discourage us from spending money. There are always opportunities to get ahead if you’re willing to part with actual hard-earned currency.

So it’s not as if long stretches of boring languor are going to get me to rage-quit the game. I mean, they might in theory. But whereas another type of game might put a premium on never consciously trying to frustrate players through sheer tedium, Galaxy of Heroes has such tedium structured as part of the experience. They always play fair with free-to-play players – by which I mean, everything is available if you have the patience. They’re counting on people not having that much patience. 

But over the long term? As of this writing they have just introduced a maddeningly fiddly new system for mod enhancements, one that introduces yet another currency into the game economy. Doesn’t look as if they have any plans to stop expanding the game anytime soon. There’s just a lot to keep up with. In lieu of being an oil tycoon the only way to stay competitive in the long term is just to show up and do the damn farming. 

 

With that said, there’s really no way for me to be competitive in the Arena anytime soon. I’m stuck around one hundred on any given day – on a good day I can maybe beat a team in the seventies, and on a day I don’t pay any attention my team on auto will tend to settle somewhere around the one-teens. Pretty consistently.

So they’re not a good team. Not even close. Every character in it is good, but ultimately they’re a team of utility players without much direction – Emperor Palpatine on lead, with Vader, Thrawn, Tarkin, and right now, the generic TIE Fighter pilot in the fifth slot. Even if my team is maxed-out there’s still only so much that set of characters can do in Arena. Not compared to the wall of Trayas at the top, or the Jedi and Resistance teams scattered among the Sith for most of the rest of the Top 50 on any given day.          

It’s a placeholder, basically, because I know I’m not competitive in that realm. The problem is that the game doesn’t sit still. Traya is on the top now, but as sure as the sun rises, in a few months it’ll be someone else. Traya will undoubtedly still be important but will in her turn recede into precisely the kind of utility player represented by the likes of . . . Emperor Palpatine, Vader, Thrawn, and Tarkin. 

 

Because, I mean, I finally got my General Kenobi up to seven stars. Remember him? It’s been an eventful summer. He’s still very playable, especially since they’re slowly building Jedi into a competitive faction – all the Jedi teams in the Top 50 are led by Bastila Shan, another Old Republic character, about whom I know only that she whomps ass.

It took a couple years for me to get that General Kenobi. They introduced him, and the original Tank Raid, when I was just fresh out of my nervous breakdown rushing like a freight train towards the climactic end of 2016. A different world ago. I was patient.

The long and the short of it is that I don’t anticipate being competitive in Arena anytime soon.

I am, however, quite competitive in Ships. And that might be almost as good.      

*

Galaxy of Zeroes

Introduction

Future Farmers of Alderaan

Of Mos Espa 

Much Ado About Nihilus - Part One 

Much Ado About Nihilus - Part Two

Which One is Starck Again?

The First Star Wars Essay 

Ready Player None 
 

If This Goes On - I

If This Goes On - II

If This Goes On - III

If This Goes On - IV
If This Goes On - V

Next week's installment should now be up on the Patreon! 

Subscribers also receive access to tons of other goodies, including updated complete ePub files of my first two fantasy novels The Book of the Loam and A Darkness in the Time of the First, as well as ePub files of Tomorrow Is Always The Best Day Of My Life and Whistling in the Dark: A (Very) Short Book About They Might Be Giants.

Your support helps create new content for this blog while paying my bills, and I am incredibly grateful to everyone who subscribes. Every dollar counts and is appreciated.

Seriously still need an agent, or a publisher for that matter. Please inquire at teganoneil5000 at outlook dot com.

It will be a while.

If This Goes On - V

imagine this forever

 

Hey! Before you dig in, did you know that subscribers to my Patreon can now read Galaxy of Zeroes every week-ish (cough) in the virtual pages of The Hurting Gazette? 

 

OH, AND THIS WEEK'S ISSUE IS FREE TO TRY HERE??? IT IS TRUE!!!

 

I am also happy to announce the release of the first issue of The Hurting Gazette Omnibus, collecting the first five issues in their entirety in original reading order. That's almost 70K words - about as big as Brave New World, if you're keeping track at home. 

The seventh issue is now available through my Patreon. The double-sized premiere issue, featuring “The First Star Wars Essay,” is still free here. Thank you for reading! 

*

CW: Suicide, self-harm, politics.

So let’s talk.

There’s a quote commonly attributed to Karl Rove, from an October 2004 feature on the Bush Administration written for Rolling Stone by Ron Suskind. Everyone who could have said it has subsequently disavowed it.

You may know the quote. It’s pretty famous:

People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

You knew when you saw it that it was going to end up in the history books. Such a naked display of arbitrary power – reality itself is just another constituent to be heard from in its turn and then, perhaps, heard from less as time goes on.

It was also nakedly delusional. It’s almost like something they might say in a comic book. Not a particularly good one.

Anyway. Those guys failed spectacularly at everything they tried. Only it was a funny kind of failure, one that came with very little in the way of personal, professional, or political consequences. That’s really weird, I mean, when you think about it.

I think about it a lot. I sincerely hope you do too.

So the National, of all people, used this famous quote on a track on their 2017 album Sleep Well Beast. That was my favorite album of 2017, but 2017 was a weird year for me where I didn’t listen to a lot of new music. 2017 was also an emotional charnel house from January through to December. It’s that kind of album. If the idea of doing a rock album about the heat death of a tired grown-up relationship seems unpleasant, well, it’s probably everything you think it is. But like I say, my 2017 was pretty rough. I think there’s a chance yours may have been too. It was that kind of year.

It’s a very inward facing album, filled with observations that could perhaps be described as “musings.” It’s . . . well, I’m beating around the bush here, but it’s a rock album about being middle aged. And not the Springsteen “Glory Days” middle aged – no, this is a contemporary middle age, all quiet despair and disassociated bonhomie. It’s not an album about longing for youth. Being older is just taken for granted, and there’s something really reassuring about that. It’s not an album I think I could recommend to a twenty-year old and expect them to love – I mean, it’s just kind of sad. The kind of thing you listen to when you want to think about old memories, not make new ones.

If you know anyone who’s really into this album, maybe ask after them?

For a good while in the late Summer and Fall of 2017 I was really into this album. I bought it the week it came out at Target, because that’s the only place that sells CDs next to the dog food. That still sells CDs. This would be right before my mom went into the hospital for a couple months, so I would have a lot of time in the car driving back and forth by myself, listening obsessively to this and a few other things, the most recent Ariel Pink (which dropped the week after Sleep Well Beast), a newer band called Alwways.

So think about that quote from above, from the Rolling Stone piece, and imagine a recitation of that played over a low-key instrumental section of a song about being emotionally disassociated in the last days of a doomed relationship – “I’m always thinking about useless things / I’m always checking out,” he goes, before cooing “I only take up a little of the collapsing space.” Only. Matt Berninger has been reduced almost to a tiny pinprick of wounded beffudlement against the horizon. I hadn’t encountered that quote in a while. I heard it a lot over those few months, by now I can probably recite it from memory, to give you an idea of just how maudlin things were (well, maybe, get a couple drinks in me and I’ll show you my Karl Rove if you know what I mean). I puzzled over that quote in the song, on the album, an album without any other kind of political content whatsoever. It was perhaps an unexpected bit of “wisdom” to be chewing over in the first year of the Trump Administration, but maybe not by quite so much as you’d think.

The National put that quote in a different context and made it a lot easier, once I had thought about it for a while, to see the emotional tenor of those words. The reason why it seems so cartoonishly evil is that, to me at least, it sounds like something you imagine someone saying, in terms of the fact that it lays clear the malice at the heart of the sentiment in a way that would usually only be a dog whistle. Imagine sitting in traffic and drifting off in boredom, putting these fateful words in the mouth of the impossibly beautiful woman who no longer gives you the time of day. Like the woman in these songs – only described by her absence, a chiaroscuro person.

Those words are arrogance. It doesn’t seem plausible that a real, live human being would actually say those words out loud because the philosophy described in them is so obviously, patently absurd and self-defeating that you’d need to be extraordinarily high to have it make even a passing kind of resemblance to sense. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore” – famous last words for conquerors since time immemorial. The underlying premises behind reality do not change simply because the ruler deems them inconvenient.

So why is this woman absent? Why are there no songs about her on Sleep Well Beast? I puzzled over that a bit but I think the answer is fairly straight-forward. He’s not blaming her. This isn’t “Idiot Wind” with its suffocating bilious rage. The fact is that the relationship died, and sometimes when that happens it’s no one’s fault. The album knows this. It doesn’t really want to drag the other party into it on anything other than the level of allusion, because it knows that it would just be petty, vindictive, possibly just repellent. Two people who once loved each other are now on completely different planes of reality. He doesn’t try to blame her for his behavior, or use the album as an opportunity to air a one-sided grievance. There’s a power differential between the semi-famous rock star and the person who isn’t, and Berninger never oversteps, in my judgment. The person who isn’t a famous songwriter doesn’t usually get many chances to settle the score.

I mean, sure. There’s lots of pleading, appeals. The core of the album, found a little over halfway through, is a song called “Empire Line,” whose chorus is the simple question:

Can’t you find a way?

Can’t you find a way?

You are in this too,

Can’t you find a way?

It’s the worst sound in the world. It sticks in your throat because you know what the answer is. He knows what the answer is, too.

But crucially he doesn’t try to represent the conversation as equal when he knows it isn’t. It’s not actually about her at all. It’s about him. She’s not in this too. She left a long time ago. That’s kind of the problem. She’s not there, and neither is anyone else:

I’ve been talking about you to myself 

‘Cause there’s nobody else

And I want what I want

And I want everything

I want everything.

Maybe that’s the problem.

One of the best pieces of advice I got in my entire college career came in the form of an observation about the Great American Novel Moby Dick.

I am certain the person who made this observation had made it a hundred times before to hundreds of undergrads. I didn’t even like this person, truth be told – but this one very simple thing has stuck with me long past almost everything else. I’m paraphrasing, but this is the gist:

The most important parts of Moby Dick are the parts with the whale minutiae.

If you’ve read Moby Dick you know the feeling of huffing along somewhere in the deep thicket of the novel and coming across those first chapters of factual recitation of whale lore. It’s not a fun feeling because it’s an acknowledgement that this wonderful book which had begun as such a rousing pulse-pounding adventure story and buddy comedy in jolly old Nantucket was actually maybe going to get a tiny bit dry and tedious before all was said and done.

Now, I’ve read Moby Dick twice and I can assure you that the tedium is intentional. It’s a very contemporary impulse, actually, the construction of an archive of interpretive material beyond merely the symbolic or metaphorical or psychological level. When you read Moby Dick you have to grapple with the fact that the significance of whales to human myth and imagination – no small significance, either, as whales remain the only animal whose sheer size naturally conjures associations with divinity – is no greater than the significance of whales to human science and economy. It is at the intersection of these that we see the process of dismantling the living creature into pieces precisely measured for separate sale by capital, the process which consumes so much gory (and homoerotic) real estate in the middle of the book.

What’s the whale a metaphor for? Maybe there is no metaphor. Maybe the point is that the whale is bigger than we understand. To make any creature or person or phenomena into a metaphor is to rob them of the most basic right of standing for themselves. The whale is its own reality. When the whale asserts himself the book promptly ends. He alone survived, etc.

Star Wars isn’t a metaphor. This book is about a lot of things but this book is still always consistently about Star Wars even when it’s about everything else, and the reason why isn’t because Star Wars represents anything at all. Star Wars doesn’t stand for anything but itself. Culture writing in this late capitalist hellscape of 2018 resembles nothing so much as the crew of the Pequod setting out to hunt, capture, and vivisect the mighty leviathan. It’s gruesome business. We filet every square centimeter of meat for piping hot takes, served daily all year round.

I mean, come on. This book could have been about anything, really, but the reason why it’s actually about Star Wars is that by being about Star Wars there’s a chance more people might read it. I don’t think I’m giving away any trade secrets there, hoss.

But Star Wars – well. Star Wars is big enough to accommodate even the most capacious intellect because it’s a beast designed around the idea of scale. From the very first moments of the very first movie you are seeing things that are designed to impress upon the audience, and convincingly, the illusion of size. People like seeing really impressively large things on the movie screen. Give people a window into a universe where really impressively large things happen on a regular enough basis and they’ll make you a billionaire.

Star Wars isn’t a metaphor. When I lost my shit in the grocery store parking lot because I left my keys in my car, I really was going back and forth between having an active breakdown and figuring out how best to use Starck and the Phoenix Squad. I’ve been on this farm for a year and I still have not missed a day of farming my game, even in the midst of the most grinding depression and poverty and despair and apocalyptic current events, it’s still a reason to get up in the morning even after two and a half years.

I used to think I should feel ashamed about that but I guess writing a book about the process has, at least so far, helped me appreciate the significance of wringing whatever meaning from life that you possibly can while you can. And honestly, after doing this for two and a half years and counting the scale of the endeavor has sort of become the point. It’s a part of my life.

And now it’s been a year.

Didn’t plan it that way, certainly, but I write these words on the July 4^th, 2018 – one year to the day after I last saw my ex outside the terminal of the Cleveland airport.

How has it been a year? It doesn’t seem long ago now, just a little bit. A year on the almond farm with my parents and their dog and cats.

How has it been a year?

I bought a chain a while back to wear around my wrist – beautiful piece, stainless steel. Fits my general motif. I wore it for a few months and it was quite comfortable – fit perfectly on my wrist, not too heavy.

You see . . . it was a hard thing, a very hard thing, to realize that I have within me a streak of slavish dependency. That makes me ashamed of myself. I avoided being alone for decades because I was afraid of what I might find out about myself, and sure enough, I only had my final revelation about being trans after I’d been living semi-independently from my ex, then at art school. I was afraid of being alone – so afraid, terrified of something I knew was hiding in the back of my head, getting ready to leap the moment I let my guard down.

Peoples’ emotions are very loud for me . . . and I think just that fact made me desperate to stick to as many other people I could. If I was around someone else I didn’t have to listen to my own problems. I could just ignore them, which I did for over twenty years – we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. But you can’t outrun a faulty premise. I found it exceedingly difficult to make good decisions while acting under an incomplete understanding of myself.

So what happened? Lying to myself did nothing but compound every problem in my life. It led me to a place where my only options were simple: change or die. I’ve hurt people . . . more than a few. Not intentionally, certainly, but that’s cold comfort. I didn’t know anything about myself, in so many ways . . .

Suddenly I nod off. I’m trying your patience. More than usual. I’m having trouble getting through the fog, this last section has been hanging pregnant over my head for the better part of the week. 

I jerk awake. The room is dark and my computer is on the floor next to me. I don’t remember turning the light off or putting the laptop up . . . I’m still listening to Stars (“Sunrise / oh sunrise / when will the night be gone? / It won’t let me go”) on my headphones. I turn the music off. I hear a scream . . .

 

. . . AND IF YOU WANT TO SEE HOW IT ENDS, CHECK OUT 

THE HURTING GAZETTE 7, 

FREE THIS WEEK AT MY PATREON.

 

*

Galaxy of Zeroes

Introduction

Future Farmers of Alderaan

Of Mos Espa 

Much Ado About Nihilus - Part One 

Much Ado About Nihilus - Part Two

Which One is Starck Again?

The First Star Wars Essay 

 Ready Player None 

 

If This Goes On - I

If This Goes On - II

If This Goes On - III

If This Goes On - IV

If This Goes On - V

No new Galaxy of Zeroes this week. You need more???  Next week we'll be back with something completely different.

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