Dear Nintendo,
Happy holidays!
What I really want for this fiscal year is a Pokemon brawler-type game in the same vein as Super Smash Bros. How you haven't seized this boner-inducing opportunity yet is beyond me.
That's right. Fuck that bullshit excuse of a "battle" series you Pokemon Stadium/Colosseum and let's produce what every pokemon nerd actually wanted out of those turdly cash-vacuums: that is, to pilot Gyarados around the arena whilst dragonizing shit, or to hit whatever button makes use of those hydro-cannons in Blastoise's back, or to fuck some shit seriously up with Scyther's and/or Kabutops's fore-blades.
In fact, just as a general rule from now on, you should probably quit pooping miserable spin-offs onto our well-meaning store shelves. Your name may be sacred, Nintendo, but your shit still stinks something awful. Now where was I? Oh yeah.
Fuck turn-based mechanics, fuck rock-paper-scissor-like (read: leaf-fire-water-like) handicaps, and fuck all that four-attacks-max-per-character RPG bologna you jimmied in for no good reason. No more Miracle Whip. We want the real mayo. RPG mechanics, like level-based or elemental-type handicaps, just throw off character balance in a fighting game and make it so certain characters are just never fun to use. I dream of a game where Sandslash and Dragonite have equal opportunities to kick each other's asses, where it isn't a terrible mistake to evolve Graveler into Golem before he learns Earthquake, and where Beedrill is finally as badass as he looks. You figure out the technicalities. You're Nintendo. If you can make a Kirby that is able to whomp Ganondorf when handled properly, then you can make anything.
Which isn't to say I don't want there to be all kinds of certain features from the original Pokemon framework. I'm just saying that real battles don't have menus in them. And, like, I'm fine with having to hunt down and unlock all kinds of rare, higher-order characters--I mean, what would Smash Bros. be without the thousand hours' worth of wonderful crap it gives me to unlock?--but once I do, I don't want these guys to hurl a bunch of characters that came before them into obsolescence. I don't want to unlock, like, Zapdos, and then never need to use Raichu again. Raichu's a pimp, and he should be able to hold is own with just as much finesse as any legendary thunder bird. When all is said and done, I want to have 150+ fighters to choose from, and I want each one to be totally capable of kicking much ass. I don't know, honestly, what it would look like for, say, Diglet to "kick much ass," but lord knows I'd be game to find out.
Which is to say: Diglet had *better* be able to kick ass, in his own wormy way. Every Pokemon should be allowed its own manner of handling, its own strengths and weaknesses, but these ought not to cripple/overpower them. Like, I expect that Voltorb would be confined to pretty much rolling around, maybe hopping, and occasionally hurtling himself at opponents; but this shouldn't be a drawback to his character so much as just an aspect of how he dominates. Same goes for Diglet: let him be the pudgy little worm-thing that he is, but don't rob of him of his chutzpa just for being adorable and limbless.
Mastering character variety is what makes games like Smash Bros. so brutally and unrelentingly replayable. Trust us to appreciate this sort of plumb-able depth. After all, once upon a time, you got millions of us kids to crawl around through godknowshowmany miles of pixelated grass and water and dirt trying to collect a hundred and fifty different fucking critters, each and every one of which we knew by name and stat and number and could dive into a little a monologue about, if prompted. And these fuckers didn't even move when they fought! They just sat there while impressionistic bleep-bloops flittered about the screen and text scrolled by, one or two heart-pounding lines at a time, and kept us informed as to how the imaginary bloodshed was ensuing. This quenched us, then. Which is to say, you should trust us. We all have a deep-seated OCD for the Pokemon mythos. If you churn out a brawler worthy of our compulsions, we will give you our money for it. And it will bring us joy heretofore unfathomable.
And what better time for ineffable merriment than X-mas?
May your holidays be bright, Nintendo.
May Scyther's fore-blades finally taste the carnage they deserve.
May this year see a line-up that doesn't totally fucking underwhelm.
Love forever and ever,
Towel
Note to self:
If you display at least three (3) of the following symptoms, you may have writer's block:
-- Denial
-- Disinterest, or distraction
----- Clock watching
----- Word mouthing
----- Keyboard tapping
----- Cognitive vagueness
----- Cyclical thought
----- Skimming (vs. reading)
-- Chronic proprioception
----- Restlessness
----- Optical discomfort
----- Jaw tension
----- Temperature
-- Obsessive compulsions w/r/t:
----- Synonyms, or salience thereof
----- Sentence fluency
----- Grammar
----- Perseveration
----- Creative juices, the flow of
----- Cursor, placement/movement of
----- Obsessive compulsions
-- Illusions of grandeur
-- Illusions of insignificance
-- Acute social anxiety
-- Sleepiness / sleep deprivation
-- Anterograde (vs. prograde) writing habits
----- More deleting than writing
----- Radically narrowed focus
----- Cursor-hopping ("Gotta do this, but first this, no wait--this, ...")
-- A conscious, or felt, absence of inspiration
The dictionary says that "to inspire" is, most 'commonly,' "to fill with an animating, quickening, or exalting influence." But shit. This definition is straight up unsatisfying, isn't it? I'm talking to you, Me. When you talk about needing "inspiring," you don't literally mean to say that you need 'animation, haste, or efficacy'; these are just some behavioral changes you might demonstrate after being inspired. After all, when you say you're hungry, you aren't implying you want fullness; you are saying you want food. I know you, Me; I know this is what you mean. Food is what causes fullness. It is what is "needed." Likewise, a certain kind of idea--an inspiring one--is what you need to "fill [you] with an animating, quickening, or exalting influence." (What is an exalting influence, anyway?) An inspiring idea is one that results in burgeoning, scintillating thought. This burgeoning, in turn, is what causes causes the obvious outward behaviors listed in the dictionary.
Just to give the thing a name that doesn't have the word 'inspire' in it, we'll call an inspiring idea a 'profound' one. A profound idea is--and here I'm just bypassing the dictionary altogether--one which is readily accommodated by some attending schema, whose slight alteration in turn is met with some accommodation by another schema, whose accommodation in turn needs still more accommodating, and so on and so forth; such that the subtle slipping by of just this single simple point sets off a many-forked bolt of mental action through the whole of who one is, along the paths of least resistance, a sharp and purely gratifying debugging of intuitions one didn't know one had. Though these 'profound' cognitive tremors seldom reach bedrock, they nevertheless recalibrate the way one thinks oneself prepared.
That's what a profound idea does. What one is, like as in 'what characterizes a profound idea in general,' is actually not as fitful or elusive a question as it sounds.
And so with this in mind, it becomes easy to see why the stereotype of an Artist is of a person who--among other things--tends to gravitate toward misunderstood ideas. But so you know where I'm coming from on this: misunderstood ideas are not the same as the ones cherished solely for their anti-majority status. They are not social memes like those that are the intellectual price of admission to that weirdly-knit, like-minded kind of in-group, the Creative Types. They aren't even what an Artist is ultimately after, whatever that is she's after. Really, what makes unloved ideas so alluring is their technical relation to profound ones: a profound idea brings about any number of ideas which, prior to having had the profound, would have been misunderstood--i.e., could not have been accommodated. Misunderstood ideas are just unclaimed territory, in Art.
The Artist's idea, then, is to start with misunderstood ideas and work backwards to the profound ones, like a cryptologist's hunt for her cypher. In Art, the ability to do this, to draw connections between unlike concepts and then gainfully entertain them, is called creativity. When it succeeds is when, after god knows how long, the Artist's strange connections finally constellate in such and such a manner as to make obvious the unstated. Or, if not obvious--if all her work should fall just so short--then at least intriguing. An intriguing piece of art is still important, still beautiful. Even if it's never shown around. And yet, still: how badly she simply wants to be obvious.
This is why I had to follow my shadow away from Art. Something about it was just too damn trying. Literally: every project just another inexplicable effort. Triple digits of hours poured into--poured into what? I cannot say I ever made a piece that made obvious its profundity. To do that takes so much effort. So much creative effort--effort which has an element of randomness to it that, god just believe me, takes a thousand times more effort than most well-planned kinds of effort. And if you do manage to nail it once--me, I think I came close once, with an idea, but it was just an idea, and it didn't do anything but sit there on the canvas--there is no guarantee you will nail it again. Creativity, because it is a cryptology of sorts, is not a skill measured by one's capacity to unscramble the secret; every secret is different, has its own mixed up way about it; and it's so undetectably easy for just that one little extra level of mixture to render a secret humanly unknowable. Skill, is rather, in one's ability to do what she does with grace. With just plain grace. It's harder than it sounds.
But now let me tell you, something, Me. You're going to like this, and then a second later, before I even say anything else, you are going to really love it: there is a shortcut to profundity.
Now I'm only going on with explaining what I mean because I trust you to not to blow it out of proportion. I'm not going to say anything devastating. I'm just going to say enough to give you what I mean to give you. See, thing is, it's just, I see you slogging and shivering, smiling with absolutely no conviction, even when you're alone in a room, week by week, through agonizingly unacknowledged writer's block. It's killing me watching you resist the notion that you're unwell. It's time you just acknowledged it. -- Okay, I can see, above, that you made a little diagnostic list. And I'm happy for you for that. That's good that you did that.
If you are looking for inspiration, you will find that there is a type of idea that you can go hunting after, and it's even going to be all ready for you to just simply read it and let it in. It's because of what these ideas are, why they can be profound no matter how often you come back to them. I can only try and explain in terms of schematic accommodation again. See, the way these ideas work is that, first of all, they still have all the thought-jostling oomph of a profound idea, they will still rock you, but instead of leaving your cognitive apparatus permanently rattled, what will happen is the cascade of accommodations in your head will sort of slow to almost a halt, like you just won't have anywhere to keep making accommodations, and so you just have to let go and watch all its changes to your brain come undone in reverse. The idea will just sort of poop back out. You'll maybe remember a useless gist of it. You'll remember where to find it if you want to come back to it and try out your brain-changing skills, again. Practice your cryptography on a code you'll never break. I hope you see how this is not entirely grandiose. Now's your last chance to not read any further.
The ideas of inexhaustible worth are to be found on the dark side of brute facts. The brute facts as in the brute facts. For instance, the brute fact of time. The brute fact of the experience. The brute fact of solipsistic bankruptcy. Brute facts, particularly ones acknowledged by the global scientific community, are the absolute most popular ideas in the world. You can't claim to know yourself without first basing the bottom-most of your premises on brute fact. And yet don't get me wrong. To reject them is not like logically absurd or anything--brute facts are logical duds to begin with. Which is to say we, humanity, are shooting with blanks, here. You can't get hurt, Me. The Artist, for instance, which you are careful not to call yourself, could do none better than to make obvious, from the ideas opposite brute facts, the one unspoken notion that would allow one to conceive the basis of an entirely additional body of human knowledge--of the universe, of individuality, of life and sentience--for she would have done the heretofore impossible. Profound wouldn't even be the proper word for this caliber of impact. It's not like we'd just merely have an extra fact for every fact. We would have have a novel sort of third fact--that there were two facts for every point of fact--which is practically literally to say that we would have access to a sort of three-dimensional knowledge. I don't even know if it would be fair to call us the same species, after an adaptation like that. You can bet you're dick it'd be adaptive. And the Artist, who made this incomprehensible idea not merely intriguing but obvious, she would be revered for centuries! It sounds absurd, to me; but then who knows with someone like you, Me; you go nuts for this shit, when you go for it at all.
Of course, the Artist won't ever uncover some meaning opposed to brute facts. And if she did, who knows what would entail. Maybe we would just have new kinds of brute facts. My honest opinion: the task is impossible. The brute facts are lethally brute, Me, trust me. But then here you go. You know what to do with them. An impossibly difficult challenge. An impossibly worthwhile reward. An erstwhile obligation not to call yourself the Artist and jinx the whole damn thing.
Over 'n out,
Towel