AAAAHH

“Only fools prefer the past!”

– Leto II

Copies were probably made and distributed.

At long last, I am beginning to make older versions of AAAAHH.com accessible again! This is accomplished through the power of SUBDOMAINS. Hurray! Hurrah!

http://ben.aaaahh.net/

This is the only vintage website I have on hand at the moment. When I get back from SHINE 2022, I will dig through my HDD and see what else I have buried. I want to put up my old point+click adventure games, but I am not sure if my flash projects will run anymore. It is a pity Flash died–so many great games were created using it!

If you frequent this website, you might notice some unsettling memes titled PROPAGANDA. It is election season, for better or worse, and that means doing your part to affect the discourse surrounding politics. We live in strange times. So many opinions, so much ideology! It is important to remember my golden rule: VOTE CORRECTLY! My propaganda will serve as your gentle guide, elucidating a path through this age of darkness. Like a warm candle!

Hopefully this spurt of effort portends future upgrades to the site. It is frankly quite outdated at this point. There is enough content now that users need a sidebar in order to navigate it all. Blogs, art posts, and political memes are all heaped into a single archival page! You readers deserve better.

Putting this here for my own reference. I wrote 7000 words for this wacky fantasy adventure game: https://ariannaarguetty8.wixsite.com/mysite

Good time to have student loans.

(But we should be working together!)

“I modify the human desire for war.”

-Leto II

No, those are not mounds of shit. That dingy wooden structure is a shower, and those two piles are the water heater. A tank is buried beneath the mounds. As the sun beats down on them throughout the day, the microbes inside get to work breaking down old plant matter and the compost piles heat up. The water in the buried tank can reach a hundred degrees!

This picture doesn’t really do the piles justice. Crimson black seaweed is mixed up with wood chips and saw dust to create a natural water heater. A spigot inside the shower shack spits out bathwater for bathers to enjoy and wash themselves with in the open air. To emulate the shower experience, a watering can that can be hooked onto a pulley can be hoisted and tipped above a bather’s head.

The whole experience was more than comfortable. The warm water, the cool breeze between my naked thighs, the open sky above! Three pails of water was all I needed to do the job. I can’t imagine it is very pleasant once the weather cools, but it was so refreshing to have an after-dinner wash in the evening air after an afternoon of hiking around the Maine wilderness. This wonderful setup was provided to me and my girlfriend by the Deer Isle Hostel. We thought we were just getting a room in some artsy cabin–we had no clue that we had signed on to join a low-tech commune powered by solar panels and compost.

The shower was just one of the nifty technologies that this lovely compound employs to avoid modern waste. The outhouses were composters too! But I’ll show those off at a later time. For now, I just wish I could bathe myself outside again. Maybe I’ll get a bucket and some rope and have some fun on my back porch…

“The wolves are but an extension of my purpose, and my purpose is to be the greatest predator ever known.”
-The journals of Leto II

I feel exceedingly empty sometimes. I recently bought birthday gifts for people that no longer want to associate with me in any way. The garden grows exceptionally this year regardless. We let the beds overflow with life of their own. Clover and strawberries gave way to towering wildflowers and onion stems. Even a lone tomato, impoverished heir to last summer’s dynasty, peeks its little yellow flowers out over the side of the box. An understory of green stems create a paradise for little bugs, and the overstory, a buffet for bees and flower lovers of all kinds. Every square inch of soil is being used. Next year, I will not have access to this much soil. I may take some of the dirt with me and see what comes out of it when placed in a pot.

Experience the ultimate simulated reality!

Download here:
http://www.sargunster.com/btwforum/viewtopic.php?t=10183

“My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know this, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who marries him, cannot have a proper way of thinking.”
– Elizabeth, Volume II Chapter I

I have been digging into Jane Austen’s big book lately, and it feels good to be reading something so unabashedly English again, both in terms of complex language and plot. The English is beautiful, of course, though it takes some practice to be able to read this dense style efficiently. The ideas being expressed aren’t so different from our own, though the infrastructure of meaning, the words and flowing sentences, are more ornate and complicated. An acceptance that words are going to be used in ways that are slightly different than our own usage is a must. Daring explorers are rewarded with a trove, a bounty, of lovely interesting phrases.

“ready acquiescence”

“these sort of inconstancies are very frequent.”

“thwarted”

The unique way that Austen folds sarcasm and cutting evaluations of character into intricate, vocabulary-dense sentences is surely part of why she is such a famous and beloved writer. But sometimes the bullshit is slashed right through, and we are shown gems like the quotation at the top of this post. There, Lizzy speaks directly to what everybody, reader included, had been thinking for the past hundred or so pages: Mr. Collins is a dipshit and an idiot. I laughed when I reached that sentence, because it is so different than the language we are accustomed to in the novel and because the feeling conveyed is not one minute out of date. We say the same things in the same way about people when comforting our friends today, except the words and phrasing is a little different.

Between these glimmers of light are long periods of visitation in which language must be employed like a dagger between a smile. If life was anything like the novels say, being of the higher class in old England sounds like a major chore. Neighbors and family could descend upon your household at any time, and polite custom was that you’d entertain them. From Defoe to Austen we find the living room to be a maze of endless small talk and gossip. Protagonists have to fake ill just to escape. The neighbors are trying to pry open your brain with blunt talk of the weather! I argued, once, that the English custom of visits acted as a kind of social prison, a living room panopticon. The constant surveillance from visiting neighbors ensures that perverse, criminal, or marginal behaviors are neatly suppressed. And in novels, the surveillance really does seem constant! Every other chapter of Pride and Prejudice takes place in a dining room or living room and seems to surround the visit of somebody or other.

It is refreshing when Elizabeth breaks free and let’s something real slip out. She is a wonderful protagonist precisely because she manages to break rules constantly. She’s like a bull in a language china shop. I am just making my way into the second volume of the book now, and I am unspoiled. I have no clue what will happen to the characters beyond a general sense that Darcy will turn out to be an okay guy in the end. I wonder, however, if the prospect of getting married will force Lizzy into conforming and putting aside her rebellious charm. That would be a tragic low point!

            Last month, Sam crossed a trickle of a stream in the woods and found himself in a place that he could only describe as another world. The colors seemed to stand out stronger there, and the light was so bright that it almost hurt to look beyond the shadows of the trees. He wanted to go back to this magical forest, his secret place, but instead he sat at his desk, chin on his hand, bored in school. The fifth grade had nothing to teach him. He already read books on his own, and he could multiply well enough to get by in math. Under his elbow sat his math textbook open to page 57. The class was somewhere on page 32, but, since Sam possessed an uncanny ability to focus on tasks, he went on ahead whenever he finished a set of problems. The class seemed to move in predictable circles. Whenever his teacher, Ms. Bucket, began to even hint at talking about something new or interesting, a troublemaker across the room would swear or shout and then Ms. Bucket would start shushing and disciplining and nothing would get done. Both Ms. Bucket and the students left that classroom every afternoon feeling exasperated and worn out, and neither learned much of anything.

Soon, Ms. Bucket would see that Sam had completed more than enough extra pages of worksheets for one afternoon and give him permission him to grab a laptop from the cart. This was Sam’s favorite part of every class because he was left mostly free to explore the internet as he pleased. He was supposed to use the laptop to log into IXL and complete even more math problems online, but he preferred to look stuff up in the search bar. He loved to look up cute pictures of baby animals, or pictures of games he wanted to play but couldn’t. Sometimes he looked up creepy things like organs or giant wasps or monsters and freaked himself out. He wished he could just stay home and play on the computer there rather than come all the way to school to do it.

Ms. Bucket did soon notice that Sam was bored, and she went up to his desk with an apologetic curve of her eyebrows and a smile. “Wow, you did all that?”

Sam looked at his hands and nodded. “Yes, it wasn’t very hard.”

“Awesome work as always, Sam. You can go grab a Chromebook.”

Sam did as he was asked, and soon he was surfing the web while the jeering class moved on around him. He thought that today he would do some research on his magical place in the woods, so looked up the word the keyword “forest.” He was met with a sprawling page of boxes, each containing a picture of a lush, green forest. Some of them were bright orange, images of the woods during Fall when the leaves change into beautiful warm colors and die off the branches. Some of the pictures were of jungles, the wet and misty rain forests. Only one picture reminded him of his magical forest. It showed a tree so bright that its cracked, brown bark looked orange, and massive dragon scales of bark flowed down the trunk of the tree like lava. Sam read the caption to himself:

“Redwood Forests of California.”

I discovered this unfinished opinion piece in my hard drive.

-BEGIN TRANSCRIPT-

It’s shiny, it’s smooth, it’s packed with expensive components, it’s competitively priced. It’s the Steam Deck.

There are a few reasons the Steam Deck has me going wild. First and foremost, Valve’s latest project speaks to me on an instinctual, almost primordial level. I am a Gameboy baby. Always have been. In fact, I grew from a Nintendo playing baby to a Nintendo playing adult, and these days I’ve spend more time looking at a Switch screen than I care to admit. I also really like computers in general. Spending time with them is cathartic. I like installing things and browsing internet forums and generally wasting time on a screen. The problem with Nintendo systems like the Gameboy and the Switch is that they don’t let you do very much with them besides play games. The Steam Deck promises to take the beautiful concept of a personal computer and merge it with a portable gaming console under one sexy plastic package.

Do you even know what I’m talking about? It occurs to me that unless you are already immersed in the computer gaming world, the Steam Deck might be niche knowledge. If you aren’t in the know, Valve, creator of the venerated gaming platform Steam, is creating its own portable gaming system. It’s basically a grey Nintendo Switch without detachable controllers. In turn, a Switch is a sort of really powerful Gameboy. A Gameboy was like a phone before there were phones, except that it can’t make calls or texts or access the internet. You used to look like a tool for carrying around a Gameboy, but look now—everybody is glued to their phone screens. I like to consider the Steam Deck the latest in a lineage of Gameboys stretching as far back as the history of electronic gaming itself. The Steam Deck is a very fat Gameboy.

Besides its drab color scheme and bulkier design, the Steam Deck performs a similar role to Nintendo’s product. The Switch was a major step forward in portable gaming because it could bring large 3D games like Zelda portable. Before, such titles were relegated to home consoles. The deck can play high quality games portably, and it can be docked and attached to a monitor or television to project its screen onto a larger display. For folks that mainly game in their homes with immobile Playstations or Wiis or PCs, this may not seem particularly interesting (although there ARE reasons stationary gamers might be interested in a Deck, to be discussed later). To longtime Gameboy babies, however, the Steam Deck represents the culmination of a decade spanning project to liberate quality gaming experiences from the confines of the home.

The history of mobile gaming is long and fractured. Before the iPhone made it cool to stare at a computer screen in public, there were Gameboys. I inherited the original Gameboy from my father and a Gameboy Color from somebody (maybe my brother), but I was too young to really use these things. They were arcane toys that beeped, and without backlit screens, actually seeing what was going on on screen was difficult. I remember there being a booklight adapter for them that could be clipped to the Gameboy to illuminate the screen in the dark. I didn’t really “get” the Gameboy until I got my first Gameboy SP sometime in the early 2000s. I had a Yoshi’s Island Cartridge with it, and while I wasn’t very good or successful with the games, I was in love. Super Mario World on the Gameboy was one of the first games I ever beat all by myself. When I finally realized you could escape your bedroom in Pokemon Ruby by setting the clock, the course of my childhood changed forever. Pokemon and Mario were my Gods. The Gameboy eventually became the DS which eventually became the Switch. PSPs, Ipod Touches, and phones also entered the mix.

The problem with mobile gaming for many years was that the quality of the experience was always a few steps behind that of the immobile console and computer games. For example, most of my favorite games on the Gameboy SP were ports of SNES games. While Gamecube players were experiencing beautiful 3D gameplay in Wind Waker and Sunshine, the Gameboy were largely stuck with games made a decade ago. If it wasn’t a ported platformer, Metroid, or Kirby, I was probably playing an RPG like Pokemon or Fire Emblem. While 2D platformers and turn based RPGs flourished on the Gameboy, it could not capture the kind of immersive 3D experiences that was being developed for the more expensive equipement. The DS opened with Super Mario 64 DS, a port of the genre defining 3D platforming masterpiece that was originally released a decade before. Even the 3DS, though it had some truly console quality experiences in the likes of Smash 4, was mostly a Pokemon/Fire Emblem machine. These Gameboy style games were fun and addictive, but you weren’t playing Dark Souls. As PC gaming and the indie revolution really took off in the 2010s, the DS line felt increasingly lackluster. It wasn’t until the release of the Switch in 2017 that modern gaming experiences could finally be had on a portable platform. Until then, mobile gaming was usually second rate.

I love the Switch, I really do. The thing is, I don’t use it for the Nintendo games anymore. At least, I’m not using the ones Nintendo wants me to use. Like the Gameboy that came before it, the Switch has an expansive library of ports. A slew of indie games previously only available on PC or console have never been better after finding a home on the Switch. You can also hack the Switch to emulate pretty much everything up to the N64 (and even PSP games to an imperfect extent). I particularly like having Dark Souls portable.

-END TRANSCRIPT-

It is a little scatterbrained. I was pretty hyped for Valve’s handheld.

The Steam Deck is actually in my hands now. In some ways, it makes me miss my old Gameboy SP. It is far too large for comfort (though resting it on my belly in bed takes much of the load off), and the battery life is awful. On the other hand, the Deck is providing me the greatest portable Minecraft experience I have ever seen. I can play Better Than Wolves in bed. That’s incredible.

I plan to write a real Steam Deck review sometime. It’s is a fantastic project littered with bugs and flaws. It is a project so fantastic that the flaws barely matter.

Happy Solstice! I love the long afternoons of June.

An animator that I subscribe to on YouTube, vewn, recently released a wonderful (and long!) new project called Catopolis. I recommend checking it out here. Watching this video brought down the rabbit hole and I stumbled across an older animation of hers that I happen to love:

FLOATLAND

The animation depicts a nostalgic scene: messy cozy carpeted bedroom, big CRT, and an even bigger game for the protagonist to get lost inside. The main character, lit by that warm static glow, smiles with glee as she builds up a digital garden, fights monsters, and flirts with the game’s charming romance avatar. The images are edenic, a gamer’s paradise. She seems to have endless free time to enjoy an open ended gaming experience, and there is seemingly nobody around to disturb it. The pure joy of the immersion eventually gives way to boredom, of course, and then a depression. She ignores texts from friends. The alcohol bottles and burnt cigarette butts begin to stand out a lot more. The loneliness is palpable here.

Despite the spiral into despondency, the video does not actually end on a sour note. It’s hopeful, actually. The protagonist eventually completes the game. She reaches level 99 in all of the game’s various activities and discovers “true love” with the romance guy. From there, the game ends, and the protagonist peels away from the screen, crawls across her room, and opens a window. Natural light and color return!

“You’ve reached your fullest potential here in Floatland. It’s time to say goodbye.”

Anyone that has played a game like this, be it World of Warcraft or Runescape or Minecraft or Sonic Adventure 2 Battle Chao Garden, might see the fantasy here. Open ended games don’t usually say goodbye. They are designed, in fact, to be lived in. Players can grind and build endlessly until the gameplay loops feel familiar. I find that the allusions to drug use in this animation are apt–nothing makes life in the virtual world more engaging than a drink or a smoke. Even when all the pleasure and surprise is utterly sucked dry, the habits can feel like a cage. The game isn’t going to give you a key anytime soon.

And that is why I love how this animation ends. After the climactic existential moment, there is a true release. Vewn doesn’t actually provide us any concrete escape. In fact, the protagonist doesn’t even smile as she looks beyond her window, but a weight is lifted nonetheless.

I have found that, as I get older, my hunger for stimulation has not abated, but compelling myself to discover new sources for that stimulation has gotten more difficult. It is easier to sit in my chair and stare at virtual worlds both new and well trodden than to get up and go outside. When I do finally get out there, however, I am reminded that the physical world, forests and fields and cities, are a thousand thousand times more complex and interesting than anything anybody has ever rendered in a game. A drink and a smoke make these places more interesting too, so best take that habit outside too if you really must.