The machine hungers for new blood.

A quarter century, and back to the starting point. Not much to show for all the trouble — a couple babies, a resume full of too-short jobs, a few boxes of the antidepressants I now can’t afford, too many books, too much debt. But it doesn’t matter. In the town nothing’s real except the town. It’s morning and grandma is baking me cake.

We wanderers are protected by Kron, god of change. If we stay too much time in the same place, Kron will send powerful winds to blow us all the way back. That’s a reminder of our eternal destiny as wanderers.

(A wanderer from Fuurai no Shiren, SNES)

man I just love Colors for the Nintendo DS :D

Found in 4chan, unknown source.

People today are richer than ever, more knowledgeable than ever, more powerful than ever. It was to be expected for modern age to cause an explosion of consumerist excess. But now they finally appear to be finding that excess has a bitter aftertaste. Two generations ago, people wanted more money; today they want less work.

They say in Japan, a post-crisis advanced economy, cars have lost their meaning as markers of social status. Young people are not interested in cars; they find it’s a crude, troublesome gadget for outdated tastes. “Not prizing treasures difficult to obtain keeps people from committing theft” —not having an expensive car and mansion saves you the pain in the ass that are alarms and dogs and insurances and electric fences.

They say the USA are facing an unprecedented crisis of their own right now. Hopefully they’ll find the same solution.

Natural: eating when you’re hungry, sleeping when you’re sleepy. Finding the path of least resistance, like water: Slow life. Natural buildings. Bicycling instead of driving. Eating local food. Reusing electronic components, fetishizing outdated technology. Giving things instead of throwing away. Preserving local culture out of romantic nostalgia; local culture you did not grow up with because your parents were too busy being normal. Picking scraps of clothing and wood and furniture from the trash for your own creations. A return of the ethos of hospitality.

My utopia is a society where everyone is a hobbyist, a dabbler, where things like Wikipedia and Craft and Instructables are the new practical education — a society not of consumers, but of makers.

I am 0% Pill Leoboiko, and am about to stop existing.

I become fully manifested two or three days after my body goes clean of antidepressants. Once the harshest pains of withdrawal are appeased - once the dizziness and nausea and brain jolts are tolerable enough for me to think - I wake up and look around, take a deep breath and shake my wings only to find I no longer have any. Then I’m overwhelmed by despair so strong I can’t even go through the motions of the basest vital needs, say feeding or getting up. They call it “depression”, this glass cage, this chained blood –I call it insight. I call it reality. I cannot handle it at all.

So I suicide softly with the magic potions, and suddenly the pain is gone and a strange spirit possess this abandoned body. I call him, I call this entity the 100% Pill Leoboiko. 100% Pill Leoboiko doesn’t care much about love or sex or the madness and beauty of art and life, and while he’s not exactly content with selling himself to the corporate religion he’s at least resigned –“have to do it for my family”, he says (myself, I’d be ashamed of presenting such a boring failure of a figure as the model of a family). He’s not “happy” (if such a thing even exists), but he kind of enjoy going home after a day of hard work and watch in silent contemplation as time drips by.

* * *

If I close my eyes, even for minutes, the night-mares catch up with me, rendering me terrified and paralysed and hallucinating alone in the dark.

The Other has no such problems. He’s unable to dream.

* * *

I’m throwing the drugs away, I’m thinking of myself now, I’m taking my life back. Only I’m not, of course. I feel too old to even fantasize about that —thirty years aged in two —I’m swallowing my dearest serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor this very moment. There, good boy, well-behaved boy. I’ll be gone in a few minutes now. Hope you do well, Other; as a last jest, this clown sings for you to remember that—

if the dam breaks open many years too soon
and if there is no room upon the hill
and if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you in the dark side of the moon

Only the first game is done, mind you; this will be a serialization. Expect a feed in the next few days.

Update: feed now at http://namakajiri.net/the-guia-games-project/feed.xml.

Having said that, I figure I’m being a fucking hypocrite with my disgust for “curriculum parents” — the kind of parent who enrolls his kids in a dozen language courses and personal improvement whatnots, “paving their future” with a cash carpet. The thing is, they are right — they are making their kids’ future “better”, albeit for an awfully short-sighted, ignorant measure of betterness. I, OTOH, am rising my children for art — but art is a lie. What right have I to tell them to get away from the dehumanizing corporate machine, to shut their ears to the siren call of consumerism, to seek their interests and become great human beings — when I myself have sold my soul and prostituted my mind?

Art is my religion, it’s the particular lie I chose to believe in to make the bleak reality tolerable — passing it on to my kids and sheltering them from the System is exactly the same as telling tales of Heaven to shelter them from death. Perhaps there’s no escape from the parental sin.