December Wolves: Avarice Wolf

I don't know what happened. I thought I had a weekend to catch up and even get ahead on this promise and I couldn't find anything I wanted to write about. There's something about Jersey Shore in the archive, but it feels kind of toothless and it wasn't really begging to be written. I came back to a couple paragraphs I wrote after playing Borderlands with a very important friend of mine and it ended up going to an interesting place.

I mean, okay, self-flagellation on here isn't really a surprise. But I'd like to think I'm actually learning and this is proof of it. Anyway, have you heard of Courage Wolf? The title is a reverent nod of the head.

I'd like to confirm that Borderlands has reached Diablo 2 levels of addictiveness. A good friend of mine and I started playing at about 9:30 p.m. and didn't stop until 4:30 a.m. a couple weeks ago and that's an invigorating feeling that I haven't had in a very long time.

The alcohol didn't hurt. I've written a lot about my feelings around alcohol, but it felt right here. Here the alcohol was used as celebrating something, my friend being back from another college semester.

Borderlands is very, very addictive. Very, very fun. I don't care what the metacritic score is. It does what it does very well and even miles removed from the ability to play it, I'm still jonesing for the "shoot enemies and guns come out" mechanic, as popularized by Diablo 2. But I don't think I'll play it any time soon.

My computer can't run it and the cheapest console that can run it costs $200. Which means, I'm looking at $250 (at the very least, and that's not including the 10% tax that brings the purchase up to $275 , which means it's closer to $300 than I'd like.) Now all that said, I could ask for a PS3 for Christmas, but what's holding me back is the backlog of PS2 games I still haven't gotten through. Looking back on what I wrote around consumable media last Christmas, I think I'm in danger of losing that important "I've got what I've got and I'll get around to new stuff when I'm done with the old stuff" perspective that I had before.

Let me go down the list of things I haven't finished or gotten to that I wrote about in that post last year:

Videogames:

+Killzone and Odin Sphere (right) have been beaten. Odin Sphere I made sure I beat in the true ending way so there was no bullshit and I could say I was finished and didn't have to replay the game. In Killzone, I don't think there's different endings, so I feel like I got the core message of that game. The core message being shoot things that are hard to kill.

+Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 haven't been beaten. The difference between then and now is that I'm starting to play God of War 2 again and am a couple hours further than I was at the end of the school year.

Books:

+The War Within and But Is It Art have been finished. The War Within was pretty much devoured and imbibed in January, and But Is It Art was gifted to a friend's girlfriend who is currently a

n art major. So they're consumed and thought about and dispensed with, until I come back to them. (Which I don't, but that's another subject for writing. Do I really go through my "library"? I've got shelves of books, but I don't really pick through them, I look for something new.)

+The End of Faith, The Mystery of Capital and The Arab Predicament are all cluttering up a "I SWEAR I WILL GET TO THESE" shelf. The End Of Faith is one of those books that I feel uncomfortable even picking up since apparently atheism is getting pretty douchebaggy and I am nominally Catholic. But I bought it, so I ought to read it. The Mystery of Capital I haven't even seriously started. I'm maybe 10 pages into it. It's very far down on the list, behind oh God everything else. The Arab Predicament, I think I'm half finished with but have put down and now can't find in the web of music, other books and games that I need to finish.

+The Essential Rumi, however, is in my work satchel, so I'm three quarters finished with that and it's a peculiar book with wonderful poems about getting drunk and loving God and loving women and are you going to drink that wine, because if you're not, I will. It's a breath of fresh air. Hella refreshing.

(Yes, I used the phrase hella refreshing. I make squishy noises with the English language.)

Phew.

After all that, I'm still very far behind and that's from this time last year.

I have all these things to get through before I even begin to think about new games and books. My parents don't know what to get me for Christmas, and guess what I want: More books! I have lots of them and I am slowly finding the time to read them. But what I really want for Christmas is the ability to look forward in my life without losing sight of the great things I have in front of me.

Borderlands, then, is representative of all the things that are new and shiny in front of me and (as Visa and Chase are trying to point out) I can totally kind of afford them. I recognize that there is something inside me, whether native or not, I don't know, but certainly cultivated, that I want new things. Because the old things won't do. The graphics on the PS2 aren't as good as the PS3 graphics. I like David Aja's art more than I like Mike Mignola's on Hellboy, even in the library form, or whatever the excuse this week is.

Borderlands is indicative of moving towards the altar of moar (if I can blaspheme to have religious and 4chan imagery working side by side) and I'm ashamed to admit, I thought I wrote pretty definitively about that last year. I will get to Borderlands when I get to Borderlands. I will get to the Immortal Iron Fist Omnibus over Christmas, because that's at least one indulgence I'm allowing myself. But I'm taking everything else slow. No rest for the wicked, remember?

Anonymous versus Scientology - Pittsburgh Edition

An interesting thing happened in Pittsburgh yesterday: thirty or forty nerds (of both genders) stood up from their computers and walked, drove or used public transportation to get to the local office of the Church of Scientology. There, in below freezing temperatures, they stood in masks, hats, sunglasses and coats, and peacefully protested the tactics employed by the Church of Scientology in suppressing information about its beliefs and practices.

However, these were no ordinary nerds, and this was no isolated, easily ignored protest. The protesters were members of internet strike force Anonymous, a group that sprung up out of some of the least censored places of information exchange on the internet: the *chan family of boards. The boards, which include the notorious 4chan, serve as a home to one of the internet's most vibrant, rapid-paced, bewildering, brutal and intellectually incestuous cultures. Serving as houses of exchange for images as well as ideas, they are the secret forges in which lolcats were forged and the breeding grounds in which memes exponentiate.

Anonymous emerged as a kind of group identity in these troubled waters, a sort of lurking presence that would have you believe they are always behind you, watching what you do, always there to mock anyone who displays overweening pride, a collective voice moving through the shadows. You see, anyone can post anonymously on one of these boards, but you never know which anonymous comments are Anonymous.

This shadowy group of forum dwellers and IRC aficionados was incensed when, on January 18th, the Church of Scientology attempted to have a certain infamous Tom Cruise video (check the tag) removed from Youtube as a copyright violation. Considering this act an act of internet censorship, Anonymous launched Project Chanology on January 21st with a video in which a synthesized voice read out the following message over intensely menacing music and time-lapsed footage of clouds:

"Hello, Scientology. We are Anonymous.

Over the years, we have been watching you. Your campaigns of misinformation; suppression of dissent; your litigious nature, all of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who trust you, who call you leader, has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed."

The message continues, in brilliant propagandistic form, and was merely the opening move in a strategy which yesterday saw actual human beings taking to the actual streets in actual anonymity, except for the brave few who left their faces uncovered, and those who were picketing in areas where masks were prohibited. Some of those made do with hats, scarves and sunglasses. The nearest protest,as far as I'm concerned, was the one in Pittsburgh.



A friend of mine, who we're going to call Jordan Edwards*, was able to make it to the scene. He took the pictures you're seeing, and had this to say: "Besides the fact that it was a protest, everything seemed pretty cordial. No one was shouting anything, they were just waving signs and talking politely to the people who stopped or honked their horns."


*The illegitimate son of John Edwards. Yes, this is a pseudonym. Somewhat.

The rest of the pictures depict similarly peaceful scenes, which seem to have been a general theme for the day, with protesters apparently enjoying themselves. There was an incident in Hollywood where a Scientologist woman apparently approached, heckled, and then assaulted protesters before being dragged back into the Scientology compound and subsequently arrested. I find it infinitely amusing that, as she approaches and attempts to provoke hostility, Anonymous begin to chant, "Don't feed the troll!"

I think this is the first time we've seen an internet subculture become actively involved in protesting organizations or events in the real-world that do not directly threaten them. Certainly, it's the first time an internet subculture has organized global protests of an organization in under three weeks.

Pundits and traditional journalists have frequently disparaged the internet generation for writing about things on their blog, but not taking action in the real world. Events like this, which remind me of flash mobs (or, more accurately, smart mobs) on a global scale, make me wonder if we're just still figuring out how to best arrange such displays.

It's something to keep an eye on.