If You're Worried You Won't Ever Find Great Love, sorry not sorry, You Probably Will

You might be trying to get over someone right now, or maybe you're waiting for the first someone, or maybe you're waiting for the first someone in a while. When I'm in that headspace, I always think of that one Dance Gavin Dance lyric, "I know we test each other to feel the limits, we all need partners for the pain of existence". I've experienced loneliness and great love, and in some ironic joke played on me by the universe, both at the same time. I've experienced the pain of great love fading and eventually disappearing altogether, I've experienced my heart beating through my chest when kissing that special someone, I've felt the pterodactyls in my tummy, I've felt the chills down my spine, the electricity through my veins, the fireworks going off in my mind, the earth stop spinning for a singular moment. I've experienced awful fights where you're not yourself and you say something terrible because you're hurt and you want to hurt them back. I've experienced moments where you look at that person and, poof. It's gone. The fireworks have turned to ashes, the pterodactyls have turned to air, the magic has gone and nothing. There's nothing there anymore. It happens. Life happens. Love happens. Falling out of love happens. You've probably heard yourself say something like, "What if I go through life trying to find the person I love second most?" or "I don't want to end up alone." or "Love sucks, it's just too painful." or "I thought I was over them, but I'm not. Maybe I never will be."

Maybe that's true for you right now. But chances are, it won't always be.

A while back, I had a bunch of those thoughts, and whenever I feel sad about my own lonely existence or I'm sick or just any not happy feeling in general, I go back and watch How I Met Your Mother. This is relevant, I promise. Around about episode six of season one, there's a moment that I guess stays with you the entire show, and long after you've stopped watching.

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(Caption: Robin: "How do you do this Ted? How do sit out here all night, in the cold, and still have faith that your pumpkin's going to show up?"
Ted: "Well, I'm pretty drunk. Look I know the odds are, the love of my life isn't going to magically walk through that door in a pumpkin costume at 2:43 in the morning. But it just seems as nice a spot as any to just ... you know, sit and wait")

And the weird thing is, I think that's all of us. Waiting for that moment of serendipity as you walk into the coffee house and he or she is reading your favourite book and you just know. Waiting for that moment where love creeps up from behind and pistol whips you, takes the self-preservation out of your emotional wallet and you're left bleeding feelings all over the pavement while wondering exactly how you got there.

I think the first thing that you have to be is patient with yourself. I do believe that generally, when you look for something, you'll likely find it. But remember that you're exactly where you're supposed to be, and you have to give yourself permission to be exactly where you are in life. And that you do have a life outside the person you'll end up with one day.

But let's talk statistics. You realize that you're one of seven billion human beings on this earth, right? If we factor for gender, sexuality and age, that usually leaves several millions of other humans just like you that are pretty much all potential partners. If you won't listen to me, at least listen to Tim Minchin. The statistical likelyhood of you ending up alone is actually worse than you finding someone you don't mind making pancakes for in the morning.

The other thing is, do you know how easy it actually is to fall in love? As unfortunate as it is that I'm quoting a 2003 sitcom twice in one article, if you have chemistry, you only need one thing. Timing. And timing's a bitch.


(Source: https://za.pinterest.com/pin/413134965786670188/)

Chemistry happens to be pretty easy actually. In an article about the science of falling in love, without going into too much detail about hormones and actual brain chemistry, the prescribed ingredients for seeing the sun shine out of someone's ass is;

• Find a complete stranger (I hear this is optional, just someone you're relatively attracted to)
• Reveal intimate details about your life to each other for about half an hour (don't mention your basement full of dead babies, that's second date material)
• Stare deeply into each other's eyes for about four minutes (although I hear this doesn't have to be done entirely consecutively)

That's it. The actual process of falling in love is so stupidly simple and automatic that you rarely ever realize it's happening.

Allowing yourself to get out there and open up to another human being? That's fucking scary. It's so terrifying that some people go their entire lives without ever doing it. And some people get hurt or go through some terrible things that prevent them from ever letting themselves be vulnerable enough to fall in love. But that's okay. Because we don't always properly mourn or grieve at the end of a huge relationship. We don't bury the past in that same place as our formative memories where they embarrass us at night while overthinking our lives but don't actively influence our every day decisions. We don't create graves for dead relationships. Often, we keep watering dead plants. Often, we keep trying to reconnect wires that have been cut. Try to repair broken machines. Try to find a dead spark.

If your relationship with someone is a person, a separate entity, and that entity is either changed beyond recognition or has passed on, you have to properly grieve for it, in order to move on with your life. And this is the world's most inexact science. If there was a button after every break up and I could remove all the bitterness, animosity, pain, happy memories, shove it all into a box and set the box on fire and scatter the ashes atop Everest, the label would be worn from overuse. But it's not that simple and if you've found a way to make it that simple honestly, I'd pay for your council. The only thing I can say is, there are a couple of things to try.

• Try a pallet cleanser. The best way to get a bad taste out of your mouth is to wash it down with something else. It's okay to play the field, try something casual before moving onto something serious.
• Find something of your ex, and destroy it. It's oddly cathartic, but don't go overboard. The point is to make it blatantly obvious to yourself that the person is out of your life, and that you're closing the door behind them
• Try writing an angry letter to that person, then tearing it up.
• Talking with your ex like an actual adult sometimes works. Finding out what worked, what didn't, how the two of you will proceed in the future, talking over issues you had with each other and resolving those issues and solidifying the notion that breaking up is without a doubt the best course of action can help speed up the process
• And finally putting distance between you and your ex. Simply put, if that person isn't going to be the most important person in your life, they don't need to be the person you spend the most time on. Spending time on self-care and with friends, going out and trying new things and reminding yourself who you are outside of your previous relationship helps to ground you in single life again.

It takes time and effort to move on. But before you know it, you'll wake up and the sun will be bright and air will taste different and you'll have started the first day of the rest of your life.

But after all that, maybe it's not that easy. Maybe you won't meet the love of your life or the next great love tomorrow. Hell, maybe you already have and they slipped through your fingers. Maybe you have several times and it just never seems to work out. Maybe you felt it so deeply that you doubt anyone will ever come close to making the sun shine the way that person did.

But hey, news flash. Great love comes at you repeatedly, in different intervals, until one of those fuckers finally gets you to tie the knot and go have kids.

That's just life.

Seven billion humans, all with roughly a lifespan of 80 years. If you don't find great love with those odds, if you don't find at least one in a million in all of those millions, if something so fucking great and as it turns out, not all that improbable doesn't happen to you repeatedly over the course of your whole goddamn existence, you probably weren't meant to fall in love anyway.

Love happens. It'll happen to you.

And where you are right now is good a place as any to wait for it. Just keep your eyes open and let it happen when it comes. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, so don't worry too much about the timing.

"I know we test each other to feel the limits, we all need partners for the pain of existence."

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Letter to Myself; subtitled 2016

"So if you got a flame that's blazing hot within, take a deep breath and feed it oxygen."
~ Watsky, Never Let It Die

Every year I write a letter to myself to reflect my own progress as a person and to sort of have an army of past versions of myself egging me on to continue with life and not walk into oncoming traffic and to tell me that even though it was tough I made it this far so  I can make it through the next year, and I usually end it off with some stupid tagline like "Thanks for not killing off the main character of your story" which is dumb and cliche but when you're  crying so hard it feels like the veins in your forehead are going to burst and that the only thing you can, have and will ever be able to feel is sadness then stupid sentiments from past me to me help. This year I decided to post mine online as kind of a thing to say, hey, this is something you can do, even if it's dumb and cliche. There aren't really any rules and you can tell your future self anything you want, but I don't recommend writing when you're super sad. Write it when you can say something meaningful to yourself.

So anyway, here goes.

Dear Matthew

This year's been a tough one. It seemed like for every step forward, I took two steps back. Sometimes it seemed like there were more bills than money, sometimes our money seemed to disappear just as it came in. Sometimes things went right, but for the most part, they just went really wrong. Sometimes bad things happened, and they were unavoidable, and so often I got to that breaking point where I sabotaged myself out of poor self-esteem and emotional and physical exhaustion. More vividly than ever, I was reminded that willpower is an exhaustible resource but self-depreciation isn't.

Life will very often take away your belief in yourself that you can survive the harshest storms and overcome the tallest obstacles.

Life will often leave you with deadlines too close to make and fear too strong to conquer and too little direction to even start plotting a course to somewhere.

This is not weakness.

This is life.

Life throws curve balls. 

Strength of person comes from laughing at the absurd odds you beat. Strength of person comes from knowing how unfair life is, taking the blows in your strides, and getting back up after you fall. After all, it's not about how hard you can punch, it's about how many you can take and keep on fighting. And it'd take way too much time to remind you that you can take a whole lot of blows. In short, I will simply say, you survived 2016.

To the end of self betterment, I would like to ask that in 2017, we wait for the second marshmallow. Because I am nothing if not self-aggrandizing, I just mean that life is a little like the Marshmallow test. We can either eat the one in front of us, or wait a little while and have two marshmallows. I suppose that's my round about way of asking that in 2017 (and hopefully every consecutive year until the day I die) we decide to save money for a better day instead of buying a tub of ice cream and eating our feelings. In 2017, instead of discounting time spent studying now as time wasted for a test we might fail, we study now and reap the benefits of having to do less work in the future.

It's hard to feel it but fear and hyperbolic discounting control everything we do. 2017 is a year I hope isn't about that.

All in all, thank you for staying true to yourself. Thank you for making it this far, thank you for trying to go farther. Dad always says that you can only lead as far as you've gone, and you can only go as far as you work to get to.

It's been a tough year.

But so was 2015. And we made it through both. Maybe 2017 will be awful, and we all know, in trilogies, the third is the worst. But life always regresses to the mean. It might not always be good, but that also means it won't always be bad. And when it's bad, there are always friends to nag to, a blog to give your unsolicited views on the world to, and the knowledge that it won't be that way forever. Life is a series of tough years each varying in levels of toughness. Every year since the doctor delivered you and slapped your butt and gave you screaming to your mamma is a tough year.

Life throws curveballs.

Dust yourself off, get back on your feet and yell real loud, "Is that all you got?"

There's a flame inside you that can never be snuffed. There's a sparkle in your eye that can never be dimmed. There's a song in your heart that never stops playing. There's a wit in your voice that will never start fading. There's a universe in your mind that's always expanding. There's a story you're writing that just hasn't ended. There's that instinct to survive so sharp, it'll never dull. You always talk about the day you'll walk into traffic, but live like it'll never come. There have been better men, but a whole lot of them never made it to where you are. There are plenty of worse men, and they've made it really far. There's that part of you that you can trust to be right when everything else says you're wrong. There's a swagger in your step that never truly goes away, waiting for the right song to come on.

You're a writer, and artist, a genius, a madman, a singer, a guitarist, a pixel artist, a programmer, a loving member of a loving family and a man with a whole lot of good friends you can count on, a survivor, a fighter, a visionary who sees a whole different future, just a man with a couple dreams, a man with wounds to suture, a conquerer, a strategist and a straight up panicker.

But for all that, remember that everything and anything can change in a single moment.

Life throws curveballs.

And I know it sounds a little like I'm saying everyone experiences it, so you don't have to be sad. I know it can be hard, and it's okay to cry until the tears reach your nose and the snot reaches your eyes and it's okay because you will feel insufferable sadness for a little while but it all ends and you'll see the sunny days again. You walk through dark trenches and you you fight as an atheist in a foxhole.

Life throws curve balls.

But you catch a few of them.

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A Rumination on Sonic Heroes; It's Kind of Underrated.

Not often does a game come by that makes you stop, pause and think, “Huh, you know what, that’s actually a pretty clever.”

And Sonic Heroes is somehow, against all the odds, one of those games.

Sonic Heroes is a 2003 PS2, Dreamcast and Gamecube game (with a lost Australian PC port that is very hard to get one's hands one, believe me) that sold reasonably well and was on release received very well, but as it aged more and more people started just hating the game, roasting it as if it were a 12 year old beauty vlogger posting her first video and utterly failing on camera.

Now it's not hard to spot that the game hasn't aged very well and truthfully it's a little unfair on the completionists (and may Segata Sanshiro have mercy on whichever poor fool attempts a 100% on a Sonic The Hedgehog game) but I haven't played the game since I was a wide eyed child and it wasn't until recently that I picked up a copy of the game that I could truly see it for what it was;

A rough around the edges masterpiece that deserves more love then we give it.

I will admit to my own bias here. I'm in love with the idea behind the game more than the game itself. On paper, this is the most well designed, conceptually brilliant action-platformer I have ever had the pleasure of just swirling about in my brain. And if it weren't for this game solidifying Sonic The Hedgehog as the cornerstone of my childhood gaming experiences, I'd probably be a very different person today. But if you'll allow me to gush for just a second, I promise, I do eventually get to talking about the great game design in Sonic Heroes.

Trying to articulate the plethora of thoughts I have about it is almost impossible. Every time I try, a new idea pops into my head. While the final product may barely be worth an IGN approved 7/10, teetering dangerously close to 6 or maybe even a 5, and while Railway Canyon munched through my lives faster than any of the teams could blast through with Sonic speed, I have put this game down, picked it up, put it down, sat up thinking about it at night and picked it up again in a vicious cycle.

As a kid, this was only the second or third Sonic game I actually played. I remember being wholly nonplussed by having to play as Sonic’s shitty friends and kinda just wanted, well, a Sonic game. And whilst I didn’t hate the game, when I received the PC port of Sonic Adventure DX, I had a much better time with Adventure, owing much to the fact that I never bothered finishing anyone’s campaign other than Sonic’s in Adventure and thereby preserving the mirror polished sheen of nostalgia I have for the game. I finished Team Rose, 70% finished Team Sonic, 40% finished Team Dark and barely touched Team Chaotix. I’d never really had much of a drive to return to Sonic Heroes but once my PS2 died and I had gotten better at playing videogames and learnt more about game design, I thought that I definitely owed it to myself to revisit it. But I still delayed playing it. I don’t really understand why but I wanted something new. And it wasn’t until I had picked up and dropped Sonic Unleashed, purchased Sonic Adventure 2 off the PSN and gotten the Sonic Humble Bundle and finished Sonic CD that I thought, now is the time.

So a funny thing happened when I booted it up. I’d always had a gigantic soft spot for Sonic Heroes’ theme song. It’s cheesy, wasn’t very well mixed and definitely dated, often called straight up garbage by many fans but somehow, I knew all the lyrics to that fucking song. All of them. And is the intro cinematic played out I screamed them along.

Okay, so maybe I liked the game more than I thought. But I mean, this game just aged poorly, it's definitely not as great as I remember it being as a kid. Hell, I didn't even like it that much as a kid, I liked Shadow The Hedgehog more because I was an edgelord shucklefuck with bad opinions.

But then I went into Seaside Hill WHICH IS STILL ONE OF THE BEST DESIGNED SONIC LEVELS OF ALL MOTHERFUCKING TIME HOW IN THE HELL CAN ANYONE EVEN HATE THIS GAME (more on this in just a moment).

And then Ocean Palace came, and still. Sure, some control and physics issues popped up but nothing game breaking. The water looked gorgeous and the world was vibrant and all these bright colours were on the screen and Sonic Heroes was hitting all the right notes in a scarily tight rhythm.

And that's when it hit me.

It's not just my nostalgia.

I've gone back to games before and hated them, even if I loved them as a kid. I've gone back and recognized my own biases many times before and still loved games that I knew were utter filth (looking at you, Sonic Adventure DX). But this, this wasn't bad. This was great. This was amazing. This was, dare I say it... Perfect. Of course I did have to face reality when I managed to remove the nostalgia facehugger impregnating me with sparkling eyes and an inability to notice genuine flaws, and it wasn't perfect, and of course, I eventually did manage to get an less biased and better thought out view of the game, but the first three levels is just honestly fantastic. I can't gush enough. But anyway, I'm going to move away from the nostalgia boner hardening in my pants as I write this because Seaside Hill, and maybe Seaside Hill alone, subverts the Sonic level design formula in such a brilliant way that it still blows my mind to this day and I need to meet Yuji Naka and hug the man for his wonderful contribution to the world.

So for those of you who don't know, the rule for any given Sonic game is high path is best path and low path is death path. You're encouraged to stay on the higher, faster path and rewarded for the skill you display by managing to stay on it, but punished for bad play in the slower, much more "platformy" lower path. The bottom of the stage usually has the most spikes, pitfalls, long stretches of slow and tedious platforming, water, enemies. While I do appreciate the nuance of the logic, where you're forced to get better at the game by having to do more challenging sections in the bottom of the level that teach you more about the game's mechanics and intricacies of controlling a meth addict blue hedgehog, it's almost a guaranteed trap for newbies. You will fall into the bottom, and because it's so easy to fall to the bottom, it feels like the game is subtly corralling you towards the lower path but in truth the game is trying to challenge you to stay high, the route which guarantees the fastest clear time and most secrets.

Sonic Heroes takes that formula and says fuck you, here's how we do it.

So Sonic has always had a very natural difficulty select built in. Tails is easy mode because flight let's you get back to the top. Knuckles is intermediate mode, because he glides and can climb walls, so he's how you get to know the levels the best and explore without being burdened by tail's flight limit. Sonic is 'hard' mode, since he takes the most skill to use, is the fastest, but he offers the most rewarding gameplay. 

Sonic Heroes then took that concept and threw it right into the very level design of the game. 

So you control Sonic, Tails and Knuckles all at the same time, or rather you control one of the three at any given time and the other two are delegated to being two AI nincompoops who for the most part stay out of your way and sometimes even help you get shit done faster, and you switch out who is the "leader" aka, the character you control. Each character comes with their own unique team formation. When Sonic leads, everyone gather behind him in a straight line and runs in his slipstream. This is the fastest way to get around and is dubbed Speed Formation. When Tails is the leader, the team forms in a totem pole formation to make it easier for Tails to take off at a moments notice. This is called Flight Formation. When Knuckles is the leader, he literally uses his best friends as either fucking boxing gloves to pound everything from the environment to enemies, or he curls them up into balls and hurtles them as hard as he goddamn can into the ground. This is Power Formation. You can also glide in Power Formation, by performing a "Triangle Dive", but unfortunately you can't climb.

Got all that?

Now the whole level is designed to modulate the difficulty, pace and aesthetic of play to which formation you end up playing in most.

Like speed running and fast paced platforming challenges? Play in Speed Formation and you'll get taken through super hazardous super fast routes with loops and twists like the rollercoaster a Sonic game should be. Need to take it slow and explore the level? Play in flight formation and you'll do more platforming but it's slower and easier to navigate. Like brawling? Play in power formation and you'll have plenty of enemies and destructables to abuse like Michael Jackson's dad abused his kids. 

So instead of High Paths and Low Paths, you have Speed, Flight and Power paths. You can easily change from one to the other and you can play as any formation on any path, and often certain sections demand a quick change in order to progress. The greatest thing about this fluidity is that it asks the player to use the game's mechanic's creatively to find the optimal route through the stage. There's a whole lot of replay value because your runs don't ever look the same as you take different turns and change to different formations. The mechanic of formations create a fluid dynamic of path finding and platforming challenges but create three entirely different aesthetics. I think I jizzed in my pants a little writing that sentence. 

I lie awake in bed at night thinking to myself "Fuck me, who ever designed Sonic Heroes is just really fucking brilliant." The complex dynamics the mechanics form, the nuanced gameplay, the variety, the creativity, I just swirl it around my mind and wonder how anyone can so easily write this game off.

And I think now would be the best time to talk about my criticisms of Sonic Heroes, or rather, everyones criticisms. Because these are huge errors, and it says so much that I can honestly call this game a rough around the edges masterpiece knowing full and well how bad some of these are;

The physics is garbage.

For one, Sonic moves just a little too fucking fast. Or rather, he accelerates too quickly, you shove the analogue in any direction and he goes and rockets off without consent, blasting through with Sonic speed when a brisk walk would have done just fine. The problem is as much with the acceleration as it is with the deceleration. You have to run in a tiny little circle once you've asked permission from the board to stop and filed the proper paperwork because there's no real way to stop yourself dead in your tracks. But at least Sonic will stop when he reaches the edge and do a little edge pose.

Power characters will slide right the fuck off.

Ground combat is also for the most part worthless, considering that you could slide right off the edge midway though a combo and if you don't like a power character (I'm fucking glaring at you, Big the obnoxiously voiced Cat) too fucking bad. You need him. Every member of your team is vital because some obstacles can only be overcome by certain members. Since only the power characters can glide, they're the only ones who can use the fans to rise to higher platforms. 

Other than that, the major criticism and missed opportunity I must bring up is that you can't change formation mid air.

I dream of the day where my team all homing attacks in unison onto an enemy, we change mid-air so that tails can fly us up, and from as high as we can, we use the triangle dive to reach a far off platform safely.

I understand that the scope of the levels would be changed and the size of some of these levels are already fucking huge, some taking well over ten minutes to finish.

But damn if it isn't a nice dream.

Sonic Heroes isn't just a great game, it's a proof of concept, a show that unlike his contemporaries, Sonic doesn't only work well in a team, that's where he works best. The team formations create interesting platforming scenarios and if we just had better spaces to play in and slightly better physics, I honestly think Sonic Heroes could have been one of the greatest games of all time, it might even have put Sega back into a place where they were a dominating force in the gaming industry.

But alas, it is not so, and Sega hasn't voiced any plans to make a sequel or a reboot of the the game, which is a crying shame. 

All in all, the soundtrack is phenomenal, it's a Sonic game, that's a given at this point, the levels are well designed even if they get more linear as the game goes on and while I miss hubworlds and the chao garden from Sonic Adventure, they aren't necessary.

All in all, I do find it tough to recommend just because it is a Sonic game, but if you can stand the roughness, honestly, it's a great fucking game.

But play it in sessions.

Because they shitty physics will kill you dead, and even I rage quit no less than six times.

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Being Bisexual; Sex, Depression, and figuring out which chopstick is the fork

"So like, when you, you know, do it with boys, which one of you is the girl?"

The other day someone asked me one of those questions that comes up in every "Things you should never ask gay men" video which I'd assume is common knowledge about basic social interactions. As I bisexual, I have the privileged of being able to "act straight" in most company, so the questions I get about my sex life are usually of a mostly hetero-normative variety. People tend to perceive me as being more "straight" and I am a E2-E3 on the Purple-Red Scale which I believe far better describes my sexual orientation than just simply stating "bisexual" or 3 on the Kinsey Scale. As a side note, no one has really developed a system for non-binary gender attractions, which is very unfortunate since I don't think I could state mine any more eloquently than "As long as they got da booty".  For the most part, I'm not a very flamboyant or eccentric person(or maybe to a lot of people I am, but I like to think myself at least a little bit grounded), my usual demeanor is usually either cynical or exhausted, unless you allow me to go off on a tirade about something I'd display socially unacceptable levels of affection for. Another fun complication this brings about is that the gay-dar doesn't really go off around me and no one really gets any signal from the bi-wi-fi either, which makes dating boys a lot harder than it should be. When my queerness does come up it seems to be this sensational piece of gossip that isn't usually talked about, and while I strive to live in my full truth, I gotta say yet again for the people in the back;

(credit; inhumanshieldsketches)

So I'd like to ask everyone in the world to really read this next sentence over, read it a couple times, even if you've taken this advice to heart and you're the strongest, most active LGBTQ ally out there and especially if you don't know a lot of queer folk;

Our sex lives are as personal as yours is, so unless we're really close, don't ask us anything that would be too forward to ask a stranger on the bus.

Especially anything phrased as awfully as which one of you is the girl. I like what someone said about gay sex, and to butcher the quote, gay sex is literally one of the manliest things you could do because there's literally only men involved, so why do we keep asking questions like "Who's the 'girl'?"

There is no girl. That's literally the point of homo pro boning. Which chopstick is the fork?

But the actual meaning veiled behind some sincerely disturbing ideas about masculinity is even more perplexing. Who wears the strap on when you and your husband do anal, Deborah? Who is topping and who is bottoming isn't really anyone's fucking business. Some guys are also versatile and do both, just like some guys like fucking girls and boys because why deny yourself half the world's pleasures? Also, and I cannot repeat this enough, anal is not the only form of sex gay/queer men can have.

Once more, in bold this time, anal is not the only form of sex gay/queer men can have.

Sex is a conversation covering so many broad topics and some of the best sex you might ever have could involve no penetration whatsoever. Sex isn't just hump hump hump cum roll out of bed and go back to hating yourself. Sex is intimacy. Sex is fun. Sex is beautiful and wonderful and whatever you and the person you should be unashamedly fucking decide it is. Sex can be sloppy or romantic or a drunken flurry of limbs or missionary while staring unblinkingly into each other's eyes or mutual masturbation or three hours of 69 but as long as it's consensual and fun and you and your partner communicate that's all that matters.

But those are just some of the most recent things I've had to deal with. The other thing is that, for one, coming out kinda throws your identity out of whack. For the longest time I ignored or disregarded all of my same sex attractions because I knew I was into girls and that definitely without a doubt made me straight because if I wasn't straight then I wouldn't be into girls. I had a lot of toxic thought processes like that and once I overcame those thoughts it also threw everything else I knew into a different perspective. And now, I look back and I'm finding my tastes are also changing because I'm allowing myself to like things that I thought I couldn't like because I liked other directly conflicting things, for example, I found myself unashamedly enjoying Kanye's Power and 2013 me would have slapped my shit broken for doing something the muggles would do. I'm still finding new hardcore and metalcore bands every day and Stray From The Path's new single brought a tear to my eye with how unbefuckinglievably dope it was. And that's great. I used to be the kind of elitist fuck that wrote all of hip hop off as garbage made by garbage musicians. Which is an incredibly naive thing to think because if I heard Watsky's x Infinity or All You Can Do three years ago I would have spun on a fucking dime. Or maybe not, I mean, three years of personal growth is nothing to discount. But things I really used to like I'm finding a little awful now. Some of my favourite anime seems super awful and unbearable. Most anime actually. I used to be able to identify with it because of how much of an outsider I used to feel like and a lot of shounen is written specifically to help people relate to and overcome that feeling. But everything I watch nowadays simply just misses the mark with me. I find myself much more of a snob about animation quality for one, but as soon as I see some awful homophobic or misogynistic trope dancing around the screen for a cheap laugh, it gives me that feeling in my stomach I got in highschool when my friends kept saying "that's so gay!" when they really meant "that's so shitty!".

This transition of character has kept me up at night honestly wondering if I have any idea who I am, or who I want to be any more. Life keeps handing me curve balls and every time I think I know something with absolute certainty, I get punched in the gut and told, lol nope.

But oh well. Such is life.

The takeaway from this is that people change. And that shouldn't depress you. It depresses me sometimes but it's ultimately for the best. We all have to be deconstructed in a cocoon of formative years before we can emerge as nihilistic but ultimately content with our general place in the universe butterflies. So just to reiterate;

-Our sex lives are as personal as yours is, so unless we're really close, don't ask us anything that would be too forward to ask a stranger on the bus.
-There is no girl, it's the literal point of homo pro boning. neither chopstick is the fork
-Anal is not the only form of sex gay/queer men can have.
-People change, you're going to change, but that shouldn't depress you.

But like, seriously, ever notice how hard Kanye goes in Power?

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Saints Row, and how to properly manage spectacle creep

"It was too crazy for Saint's Row."

As I neared the completion of the Enter The Dominatrix DLC, after having my mind fucked sideways in a dirty alley without a condom, I had an odd thought; Somehow, for four (and a half) games, Saints Row has managed to constantly churn out these batshit crazy third person open world GTA parodies that somehow are actually really good.

On paper, I'm pretty sure the design document of any Saints Row game simply states;
"Make it like Grand Theft Auto, but throw in the craziest scenarios you can think of, toss in huge set pieces and then tie it together with ridiculous character creation. Add a dash of whatever seems to be popular this year."

Saints Row 2 had that Need For Speed; Underground visual aesthetic. Saints Row The Third threw in a bit of Just Cause with some Left 4 Dead, Saints Row IV threw in Prototype. Gat Out Of Hell threw in a dash of mediocrity (honestly should have just been DLC man). But the spectacle of it all never wears out. It's like one of those carnival freakshows, you keep coming back just to see if it has anything else that's so unimaginably weird that you just stare agape and wonder how much cocaine was involved. But let me get to the point.

So when you're making the sequel to a film, book, game, play, whatever you can think of, you have to deal with the inevitable spectacle creep. "The stakes are heightened as they've not only Taken his daughter, but they've also Taken his wife." Every new iteration has to have bigger explosions, bigger bad guys, bigger blue sky holes, larger amounts of CGI alien soldiers to fight, epic battles in space... But there's a ceiling. You cannot keep rising.

So how have they managed? Well, I have to assume at least some cocaine is involved. Look, after driving into oncoming traffic with a tiger in the shotgun seat, fighting zombie clones of a giant russian man named Oleg, after riding velociraptors out of a computer simulation, after beating Santa Clawz with the actual fucking north pole, after jumping out of a plane and hijacking an airborn a tank while shooting hostile skydivers, after going to hell and shooting the ever living crap out of Satan whose daughter had fallen in love with you, after preventing nuclear war and becoming president, after fighting sentient toilets, beating up mexican wrestlers with sex dolls, after beating up prostitutes and gimps with gigantic weaponised dildos, even you'd question the sobriety of whoever the fuck even wrote this shit.

In all fairness, try spending an afternoon just coming up with insane scenarios. Try right now. Just start with Abe Licoln, a Batman cosplayer and a barrista who curses like a sailor but has a soft spot for fluffy kitties, and ask, what's the weirdest thing these three could get up to? Maybe fly to the moon and witness an alien orgy gone wrong. Or visiting the city of Atlantis but accidentally starting a civil war over whether are friends or food. They could get trapped in a computer except it's running Windows XP and every ninety minutes a different teenager comes to wack off to hardcore porn and they have to fight off the malware being downloaded onto the hard drive.

That's just off the top of my head.

Saints Row has embraced spectacle and made it a selling point. Saints Row may have started as "GTA, but batshit", but it's quickly become an acid trip monstrosity that is full of cheap thrills and just enough substance to lose hours to. And it has, for the most part, pretty tight gameplay. For all of the parts that make it a Grand Theft Auto clone, at least mechanically, those parts are always done really well. What also carries us through all the insanity is a somewhat revolving cast of genuinely likeable characters, from the ever cool Johnny Gat, to the chronically sarcastic hacker Kinsey Kenzington, to the adorkable Matt Miller and even Keith David, no connotation needed.

Saints Row is trying to sell insanity and Spectacle Creep is its ally, not its weakness. I'd wager the first order of the day in the writing room is to push the spectacle all the way to its ceiling and tone it back from there. Instead of aiming to go crazier than what came before, aim to go as crazy as possible and then compressing it all into a gang management sim slash Grand Theft Auto clone and suddenly you end up with a solid game with tons of replay value and a word of mouth marketing campaign that includes a bunch of people inadequately trying to describe how crazy Saints Row is. All the character customization and the vibrant city to explore and the cars and gang operations is the just the platform it's delivered on, and you see the progression of the game through its history there, in the dynamics, and not in the presentation.

The other thing you can do is also sell the same game every year with a fresh coat of paint and never try to innovate or push the ceiling or break the mold in fear of a fanbase that only worsens with its expectations as time goes on, but who am I to question the giant that is <Assassin's Creed/Fifa/PES/Call Of Duty/Gran Turismo/PGA Tour/NBA/Any EA sports game ever made>

I guess the take away from this is that more games should experiment just for the sake of experimenting, but we shouldn't get caught up in just delivering bigger and better. It's okay if you just deliver better. It's okay if you scale down the size of your city but tighten up the gameplay and sell the player off as a sex slave as cover for infiltrating an organized crime syndicate. Doing insane things every once in a while is what makes life worth living. But don't do insane things just to be the bigger better iteration of yesterday's game. Approaching the design of your sequel with this in mind is a pitfall many creators fall into, and it's how franchises end up at that point of uncertainty, where they no longer have an identity. Look at the scope of any trilogy of Marvel films. It just widens until you have to ask the question; "We've saved the world, where do we go from here? How do we increase the stakes?"

Saints Row is still asking the question "Is it too insane for Saints Row?".

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