AAAAHH

At the risk of completely doxxing myself, here is a picture taken today of the Malden Center MBTA station, inbound track side:

The ipad-looking devices in the center of this photograph are TV screens. They cycle between advertisements and mask advisories. Now, if you have ever rode the MBTA for any consistent period, you are certainly aware that the service is supremely inconsistent. Stations close suddenly all the time, delays are rampant, wait times are long, and sometimes they have you switch trains three times in a single trip for seemingly no reason. The orange line seems especially prone to these issues, but I am biased there.

Today, the stations between North Station and Back Bay were shut down. A shuttle service, buses (or a single bus, not certain), picked up the slack. My girlfriend and I were not made aware of this until some time into the trip when the train operator mumbled the situation into the microphone. This was actually pretty good for the Orange Line. Sometimes I am not aware the train has stopped its service until I look up from my phone to realize I am one of the only people left in an idle train while an angry voice spams me to get the hell off. These are rude surprises, and can extend thirty minute train rides into hour-long affairs, but at least we were aware this time.

It hit me, however, that there is no information about delays or closures anywhere in any of the stations. Sometimes the largest stations have attendants yelling about these things, but Malden Center is not one of these. It hit me that we have these fancy new ipad screens plastered all over the station and they function purely as revenue machines, ad space. Wouldn’t it be amazing if these things actually conveyed some useful information? How hard would it be to hook them into some kind of network and set them up to provide information about closures and delays? That way, I can know what I am getting into before I get on the train. It would be even better if this information were displayed BEFORE paying the fare, so I can save myself three dollars and go home.

This page serves as a basic recipe guide for the various crafting recipes that you may need while playing the Better Than Wolves. I have labeled every recipe, so ctrl+f will reveal that which you seek. The recipes are presented in a somewhat chronological list, with the most important survival recipes up front and the more complex, mechanical recipes at the bottom. This list is not exhaustive. It mainly serves to highlight crafting recipes that you will need to get started. It concludes with crafting a windmill, pictured above. A more robust guide will follow (someday!).

~RECIPES~

NOTE: Sawdust, sticks, branches, saplings, and some other flammables are great sources of fuel for the campfire. If the item hanging above the fire has white steam coming off of it, then it is cooking. Do not let the fire get too high for too long or the food will burn. Whole logs cannot be placed in the campfire or they will smother the fire.

NOTE: stone tools cannot be made with branches. The shaft would be too flimsy!

NOTE: Oak logs, birch logs, and coal are the best fuel, they will completely fill the fuel slot of an oven.

Most flammable items can be used as fuel in the oven.

NOTE: The only way to acquire a tuque is to knit. Wearing a tuque is strongly suggested.

NOTE: The millstone and hand crank work together to crush hemp into fibers.

NOTE: Hemp fibers can replace string in most recipes.

There are pigs afoot. Be careful out there.

If I remember correctly, today marks the third complete year of this website’s operation. As you may have realized, I have not been utilizing it as regularly as I have in the past. I have become somewhat burnt out on writing, and I have instead occupied these past few months with the pursuit a long held dream of mine. I am making a Minecraft mod!

I have been collaborating with people all over the world to produce a custom version of Better Than Wolves loaded with new content and tweaks to make the survival experience more engaging in the long term. Thanks to my friend Sockthing, it also adds these beautiful new gourds! Pumpkins and melons galore!

More exciting, they grow right on the vine in patches of creeping tendrils! This change will make farming feel a little more engaging and a lot less video-gamey. Any feature that encourages the player to build new structures (in this case, a dedicated pumpkin patch) is a great feature in my book. Systems that encourage the player to respond to problems creatively are at the heart of Minecraft’s design. Unfortunately, the bozos at Mojang seem to have forgotten that in their drive to make Minecraft like Terraria.

I have been having a blast with this project. Polishing my coding abilities while testing my sensibility for game design has been an extremely rewarding experience. Unfortunately, I doubt future employers are going to be impressed when I attribute my lack of portfolio worthy productivity to a niche Minecraft mod. Perhaps I can spin it..

For one thing, this project has given me a much more realistic perspective on making a video game. Seemingly simple feature ideas can stack up very quickly, and when it comes to actually programming them, sacrifices need to be made. A man can only stare at an IDE for so long before despair kicks in. And I have been *putting in the hours.* These past two weeks alone, I have streamed two sessions of roughly six hours of coding each. I can only imagine that the total hours of trying to mod Minecraft stack up into the triple digits at this point.

Another thing–this is a rare moment where a project I am working on is actually driving itself to completion. I have set myself some deadlines of course (many of which I have actually managed to meet), but there isn’t a boss or professor telling me to do this. Every day, I load up Eclipse for the pleasure of it. I love Minecraft, I love Better Than Wolves, and now I am finally putting this dedication toward contributing to these things myself. I’ve grown a stronger attachment to the wonderful BTW community, people that have selflessly walked me through so many hurdles and bugs and stupid questions. Never has my sense of purpose and belonging in life been stronger. Seriously.

While I hope that people will use my addon to create all kinds of amazing experiences and stories, I think I am the most excited to see it completed. I want to play this thing so bad. I want to sink a weekend and more into just playing my work, a Minecraft fugue.

So yes. That is why I haven’t posted much writing. I will try to be better. In the meantime, here is an excerpt from my BTW Player’s Guide:

Cows are gentle herbivores that amble lazily in search of fresh pastures to graze. In order to support their massive bulk, cows are constantly eating. In fact, a herd of these bovines could clear an entire field of grass in a few days!

Though generally tame, it is best not to spook a cow. Their powerful legs can deliver deadly kicks from behind, and, despite their immense size, an enraged cow can cover a lot of ground quickly. This makes cows much harder to hunt than other animals, though the prize of taking one down is sometimes worth the risk. Cows hold within themselves a surplus of food and crafting material. The beef within a cow is extremely nourishing, and their hides can be cut to make leather armor. Finally, the bones of a cow are hard enough to craft a pickaxe out of, which will grant you the ability to break solid stone and mine for ore.

If you want to hunt a cow, it is best for your health to trap it in a pit or take it down from a distance with a bow. A cow doesn’t need to be killed, however, to benefit the player. A man can survive on milk for days, and cows are happy to provide their milk to anyone with a bucket. If the udder is engorged, then the cow is holding plenty of delicious milk to harvest, but take heed: do not try to milk a cow that doesn’t have a full udder! It bothers them to be poked and prodded.

Thanks to their hardy nature and tough hooves, cows can survive a night of monster attacks better than most animals. If the zombies had any brains, they’d leave the bovines alone.

Once again, we find ourselves living under the yolk of the bomb. Behind all the posturing and the bluster is one simple fact: they’ve got atomics, and they might just use them.

Ma made spaghetti 

every night, to the tooth,

like unrefined grain. And if you did

not eat it, she’d bite her hand and cuss.

Her slipper would connect with your

jaw and you would sleep

bruised, hungry.

Ma’s rules, said Sal, weren’t too hard.

“Come home when the streetlamps come on.”

Well, what if they never came on?

Sometimes my brothers would tell me

to do things without explicitly saying 

anything at all. Laced together, 

my sneakers, worn flat, hand-me-down ragged, 

made a bolas. I gave them a Lone Ranger lasso swing and 

fwoop, missed.

I shattered the lamp on the

second swing and Stephen started running.

I knew he’d tell but I couldn’t chase him on account

of my shoes hanging from the pole and 

the sidewalk being about a mile or so of beer bottle.

I took a shortcut over papa’s grape wall, but

I slid on some moss and cut myself ten thousand times

invisibly 

on the crab grass below. A shower of rich 

black pustules pelted the earth. A single

exploding grape permanently alters a white shirt.

Ma was ready with the slipper when I got inside.

I knew Stephen was sitting

just around the corner,

listening from the bottom step.

I have kept this image on my computer all year. When the politicians attempt their brain-melting trickery, I look at this picture to remind myself where I stand:

Over one year ago today, a protestor wielding a traitorous confederate flag was allowed to prowl the seat of our legislature. Others wore Nazi paraphernalia or openly supported white-race militias. Others were just idiots, but they were all united in a common cause: to overthrow a democratic election. The president of the United States sat by and watched the show, his face glued to Fox News and Twitter.

From experience I know that many of the more conservative leaning people of the United States become irritated when the word “fascist” is used to describe certain behaviors that the right has undertaken in recent years, but the January 6th riot pretty much wraps the word in a bow. Storming a democratic process with the intent to disrupt a democratic election, capture politicians, and and steal documents is exactly the sort of activity that a Brownshirt would engage in. And as we know from our history classes, the Brownshirts were a rabble, a militia. The thugs that the KGB/whatever Putin calls them now hire to kidnap and torture Russian dissidents are people willing to do dirty work for cash. The idiots that are willing to attack Democratic institutions in the name of their glorious leaders are the foundation of future fascist states. History has shown us the fruits of this path over and over again, but, as my old history teacher once said, “people just don’t know their history.”

I can’t guess what the average Trumpy wants, and I suspect they are not entirely sure what they want, either. The Neo-Nazis and the Neo-Confederates, however, have very well defined prejudices and goals. They want America to be a new China or a new Russia- a state run by bosses, fueled by slavery, and controlled by force. The greatest failure of the Trump administration (and there is a heap of failures taller than a skyscraper), was the elevation of these fascists to political relevance. The worst part is, there is in all likelihood an alarming number of people out there that see this trajectory as a success.

Don’t let the fascists win. They want to enslave us and rot the heart of democracy out of our world. Let January 6th stand as a reminder that our way of life is always transitory. Unless we work to maintain and improve the values of the United States, our country is just as likely as any other to go the way of Rome and erode softly into failure.

I like the idea of observing January 6th as a day of reflection on the state of our government. When there is enough grievance to allow confederates to rally the masses, then there is something seriously wrong here. On the other hand, perhaps there has always been a violence-idolizing strain of America obsessed with bringing back the old ways. If that latter case is true and the confederates are mobilizing once again, then get the guns ready fellow Patriots because it is time to remind the traitors what it feels like to be the losers.

We made the most of it.

At this rate, it looks like Inktober is going to run into Thanksgiving.

I discovered, recently, an essential aspect of the fall season that grows as the days shorten and the trees grow bare. , I feel a keen sense of foreboding. It is a foreboding for the cold. It is a foreboding for the dark. Dark days and drizzling winds carry a whisper of winter. Foreboding is at the heart of this perilous and exciting time of year!

Get out there and enjoy it while it lasts.

America, wealthiest nation on Earth, hub of global innovation, is the only place that doesn’t offer you free, straightforward healthcare. Our nation also lacks a slew of other safety nets and nice things that our friends across the water have had for decades. Perhaps you have heard this all before. That’s good, because this really simple discrepancy in the civilized world is finally reaching ears. I had the good fortune of living in London for a while, and I was floored by how easy it was to settle in and get some healthcare. I didn’t even have to sit on the phone with anybody or log into a digital portal, and it was completely free. When people in Europe pay their taxes, they get that money back in services. In America, tax money seems to enter a black hole. Or, more accurately, it lines the pockets of a thousand bureaucrats and inevitably returns to the richest people on the planet.

I am very happy to live in Massachusetts. Though “Taxachusetts” is sometimes a painfully valid nickname, our state actually has services to offer its residents. We pay our home-care providers, we give disabled people quality educations and jobs (not quite minimum wage though), and if you need health insurance you will be able to find some. We also support the best universities and public schools on the planet, fostering the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to live such technologically advanced lives. Our state does amazing things with its taxes, which is more than one could say for New Hampshire, Mass’s cranky northern brother that skims tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes from individual homeowners every year and only offers its residents opium addiction and anti-abortion legislation. Hey, at least we can shop up there tax free!

All I’m saying is, the taxes aren’t going away. They just aren’t. Anybody that claims to lower your taxes is lying, or else they are moving your taxes on to somebody else (hint: somebody poorer). So rather than throwing up our hands and letting the politicians pocket our money and walk, why don’t we try to make taxes work for us? If you are going to be taking our money anyway, I better get a tangible good out of it.

Oh wait… somehow this discussion always falls to the small folk, the lower and middle class taxpayers. There does exist in this insane year of our lord 2021 a class of people that wield such an incredible mass of wealth that collecting a few billion from only a handful of them would easily pay a lion’s share in services. How did this happen? There was a point in American history when the stars aligned for the ultra-rich and they finally managed to get a puppet into office. His name was Ronald Reagan, and by his decree our nation was plunged into a forty year+ reign of conservative policies that have allowed levels of wealth inequality to match that of the oil and steel barons of the early 20th century.

Now you are probably thinking, “well shit, if only we had somebody up in the white house willing to consider amending–” WAIT WE DO. Trump is out of office, and Biden’s limping operation, geriatric as it is, has put forth some really straightforward ideas about moving taxes off the working class and onto the tech gods. These measures one-by-one have been shot down, of course–first by republicans and then by democrats. Both are in the pockets of billionaires. Remember the old cave man maxim: “Democrat bad. Republican worse. All lizards.”

The latest attempt to tax billionaires by collecting off their asset gains is novel, temporary, and probably won’t even get off the ground:

“The tax would be levied on anyone with more than $1 billion in assets or more than $100 million in income for three consecutive years — which applies to about 700 people in the United States. Initially, the legislation would impose the capital gains tax — 23.8 percent — on the gain in value of billionaires’ tradable assets, based on the original price of those assets.”

“Billionaires have avoided taxation by paying themselves very low salaries while amassing fortunes in stocks and other assets. They then borrow off those assets to finance their lifestyles, rather than selling the assets and paying capital gains taxes.” -Jonathan Weisman

700 people could give a fraction of their wealth so that we can invest in infrastructure and fix our healthcare, and they won’t. Let that sink in. You should be mad.

Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, has decided that this proposed billionaire tax is unfair:

“‘I [Manchin] don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people.” People, he added, that “contributed to society” and “create a lot of jobs and invest a lot of money and give a lot to philanthropic pursuits.'”

Manchin, of course, makes millions in kickbacks from the fossil fuels industry and probably millions more in invisible bribes that we will never know.

Yes, praise be the techies. Our mech overlords, hallowed and merciful, have already done so much for us. We should leave them alone to play with their fancy electric cars and launch rockets while normal people perish in overstocked hospitals and starve in the streets.

Perhaps the Besos’s of America will remember the people that made them. They probably won’t. Never forget that we pay well above our fair share in taxes so they don’t have to. God bless Amazon.

To live in a new world.

Death is a part of the hobby.

My brother saw the knob on top of my tank heater and decided to mess around with it. He twisted the thermostat up to 90 degrees. I came home to check on the tank, and when I dipped a finger in it felt like bathwater. My gourami, unnamed, could only swim in fits. He sank like a leaf to rest on the rock between spurts of activity. His gills hyperventilated. He seemed miserable.

I never found the body. Either my merciful family decided to discard it while I was not home, or the fish jumped shift. If the latter case is true, perhaps his body slipped into a crack between the floor and wall. The phantom scent of bad fish wafts into my nose sometimes when I pass the tank, and I do not know if I am imagining the smell or not. Either way, my fish is gone.

My fears ultimately came true. I am not ready to keep a fish, emotionally or physically. I will stick to my snails and shrimp.

RIP. He was a good fish.

I hate Tom Brady I hate Tom Brady fuck Tom Brady Tom Brady is a cocksucker and a bastard. Fuck Tom Brady.

Bill Belichick is washed.

Inktober is an old tradition of making ink drawings every day of October. I have attempted to do it before, but I have never made it to 31 days. Will 2021 be different? Yes!

Some adherents to Inktober will follow a template of themes. I don’t have the energy for that, so my drawings will be random. I will post whatever flows from the pen.

The equinox is here, and summer dies a slow death with it. The breeze visits more often, and the air hardens. Further north, trees already begin a transformation of hue. Apples ripen on branches and gourds are plucked from the earth. Fall has come!

It is hard to acknowledge that the long, hot golden days of the year are over, but the change of the season brings with it the promise of cozy days ahead. Cherish the weather while it is still warm-ish. The frost will be here soon enough, and the winds will eventually win out over the pleasant air (climate change allowing).

Happy Mid-Autumn! Get a look at that plump moon in the sky.