“Get Firefox for Android,” the ad in the center of your newly invoked browser will announce, and if you’re like most people, you’ll brainlessly enter your phone number and click on the button that says “Send me the link”, and Firefox will send the link to your phone instantly by text message. SMS & data rates may apply, you’re advised, but since nobody knows that SMS means “Short Message Service”, and data rates are about baud rate (one character at a time) or bit rate, one bit at a time — characters are generally 8 bits, or one byte, if my history class memory about the 21st century serves me rightly. I’ve been wrong before, which is why I carry a 2.4 average back home, in an unbroken record of scholastic defeats.
My point about the graphic above is that everyone’s doing it, which is the classic concept for sales & marketing. It’s being made “dropped in the lap” easy to click your way around the internet and load up your smartphone with stuff you’ll never use, just like you do with your closets, drawers and any other storage space you have. Stuff seems to accumulate even when you can’t remember taking it in.
Until an Android videogame can be loaded in just as easily from a phone-friendly browser, my new Android games won’t see the dawn of the New Age of Gaming.
As usual, it’s all about positioning. There was one review of one of my spiritual games on some big-deal blogger’s website, but he shredded all my efforts with a simple “it’s retro” and dumped a bit shit on any chance that spiritual gaming could be of interest to anyone.
Very sick people like to take dumps on others’ efforts, to bring them down to their level, have you ever noticed that?
Even a “simple review” of a video game can be devastating to the growth of the tiny little newborn spiritual gaming industry — there are precious few making anything like spiritual games, and ALL non-violent games are of the 3-year-old variety, nothing non-violent for grownups except “brain-trainers” which are all tied to psycho-emotional marketing efforts, so what you’ll be seeing in your face for the next twenty years will be variants of Arcade and Blood Games, the industry standard which drives the market toward the hardware offered this season.
Some of the Blood Games will be military, and some will be vampiric blood-sucking and pyro, but all of the Blood Games will involve great gobs of gore, wading through pools of red, and blowing folks up right in front of yourself.
I have real memories of seeing my buddies blown up, shot, sick from Malaria and dying of jungle rot from a Tiger Trap, with sharpened bamboo stakes dipped in powerful biological puke to make it impossible to recover from the wound.
If that’s your desire, you won’t have to play a video game to get it — things will be getting a LOT worse in the next few years, and you’ll be able to play “war” with real guns when they show up at your door.
I’m only too aware of the “1/3 Rule”, which states that only 1/3 of the people who manage to find my video games will actually click on them and download them, and only 1/3 of them will actually TRY the game, and only 1/3 of them will actually LIKE them and be able to use them in their work. One-third will HATE my game or ALL my games, and one-third won’t know WHAT to do, so they’ll as usual do nothing.
It’s the same on the internet as it is in the tabloids.
When you’re “out there” in public, 1/3 of the people who find you will hate you, 1/3 will love you, and 1/3 will be totally indifferent.
If you decide to hide out for the duration, I wouldn’t blame you. It’s a shitty world out there, and most of the cockier assholes tend to write destructive and hate-filled blogs, because that’s the nature of the beast.
On one site, you’re warned about all the false gods of the local religion, in that particular case, the Prophet “Saint Gurdjieff”, a man who posed as Russian, worked as an undercover spy for at least two opposing factions, was a well-known hypnotist in an age when hypnotism was considered black magic, and who established one of the most important spiritual schools in the West.
He was a scalawag and a scoundrel to the newspapers and sensationalist gossip-mongers, and he put his people through some serious changes, but he was an honest and sincere teacher; he did a good job of softening up the West, as did many 19th and early 20th century teachers and gurus, such as Paramahansa Yogananda and Swami Mozumdar.
So this self-proclaimed “Gurdjieff” site slashes away at everyone associated with anything even remotely associated with Gurdjieff, including commentaries from uninformed people about a subject they’ve never actually explored, and then finishes the ranting tirade with “so that’s why you should join MY group!”. I think not. In the end, he asks you to take him on faith and disbelieve all others. You’ve no doubt run into this type before.
If you go for the bullshit, it’s your call.
It doesn’t have to be Gurdjieff. It could just as well be about Newton, or Stephen Hawking, with whom I have a running dispute about information theory, or the site could be dedicated to the memory of Police Chief Redding of the LAPD, against whom I led marches and public demonstrations in 1968 and 1969. I have the photos and clippings to prove it.
You can’t reason with a set mind, and the bloggers about whom I’m talking are of the “forever frozen in place” variety, meaning that they have a personal or money reason for saying what they’re saying, and nothing I say, do or prove will be to their satisfaction.
You can’t win an argument against a fanatic.
If they don’t win the game, they shove the board and pieces off the table. Behind all their ranting about the failings of others and the wonderfulness of them, is a personal unexpressed Hidden Agenda, which is a plan to control you, market you, make you a believer, and pwn (that’s the new word for “own”) you. If their raw animal fear, anger and hatred appeal to you, perhaps you SHOULD follow them to their personal Hell.
Frankly, I’m appreciative of these casual, ruthless and uncaring bloggers. They’re out for blood, and they know that shit attracts flies. I regard their blogs as a sort of filter, by which folks who really don’t need what I have to offer a chance to get through life without it.
SOMEBODY has to warn people about me — usually, it’s me who warns them, as you’ll see many times in my writings over the past five decades of professional writing. Gosh, if I’m as awful and terrible as one guy who has never met me and never read my works says, then one would be ill-advised to go up against me.
Gee Whillikers, you already know that I’m a long-time game developer and that I LOVE a good fight, so if you want to go glove-to-glove with me in a fair fight, I’m ready. I have the attention, sharpened wit, literary skills and the will to win that will make it fun for everyone except my worthy opponent.
Want to knock heads? Meet me in TF2 Map 2Forts on the bridge anytime. I usually reserve my duels for close friends in the gaming community, but if you’re hostile and you want to take a little back from me, I’m right here, waiting with a big wide smile. I’m a friend, if you want one, and a reluctant but frighteningly effective enemy if that’s your style.
It’s so important to NOT “give yourself away” to someone, to give away your own responsibility for driving your car, meaning your body, your mind, your emotions, your spirit.
Maintaining your own integrity is YOUR job, not something you give away to another. Trust is great, but every “Truth” you encounter MUST be tested against your own experience, and YOU must decide which path to follow, which “facts” to ignore, which to accept, and which to reject.
Taking charge of your life means taking responsibility for your actions, certainly, but you must also take responsibility for what you believe, what you feel, and what you accept as true.
Nobody who really can help you would take advantage of you, especially when you’re weak or down. I’ve played Team Fortress since 1994, when we invented it and wrote many pro levels for the game, and you’ll never find anyone who will say I shot or stabbed them in the back, even as a spy, which is where you’re supposed to stab in the back, but I don’t.
Often, I’ll run for the Intel without firing a shot. I always go face-to-face in a duel, with matched weapons. Vicious bloggers tend to run out of their cave, hit someone in the back from ambush, then run back into their cave and hide until the next time they decide to emerge and do harm.
Most of the bloggers out there belong in the Brute World, not the Hell World. They’re not actually evil, just dedicated to organic life and all that that entails. In short, they want your money, your trust and your soul, and some of them, your money. You should never spend money you haven’t got, and never for something you don’t actually want and need.
You’ll never catch me asking you to trust me. Everything has to be tested against what you know to be true. It’s part of your job description to know how to test something and what exactly constitutes success or failure of the tested item.
I don’t need to give you examples of hate-mongering “reviews” or blog-writing. First of all, the so-called “reviews” are actually personal attitude expressed as a third-party opinion.
It’s all about hate-mongering and fear.
Spiritual gaming is a threat to the gaming industry, which thrives on blood & guts. If vampires sucking blood and soldiers machine-gunning unarmed local population ever goes out of style, spiritual gaming might just step in and take their place.
Frankly, I’d hate to see that. Right after I finish this blog, I’m going into Team Fortress 2 in order to get the enemy’s Intel, and then I’ll probably spend an hour or two trying to find a magic ring for my New Ladder Assassin in Diablo 2. I don’t play Diablo 3, because it’s visually annoying to my elderly eyes, as are most of the photo-realistic video games on the market today. They surely do like their fog and smoke laid on thick. In an Android, you don’t want to throw out thousands of particles, unless you want to slow the game up real bad.
Spiritual gaming has its place, but so does ordinary gaming. In your organic life, the Rule of 1/3 will continue to apply. One-third of your life will be spent resting or sleeping; another third of your life will be spent working for your livelihood, and the other third should be spent playing, to regain energies needed for work and rest and yes, you need energy to rest properly. Fainting on the bed in an exhausted heap is not resting.
Playing? Am I advising that you waste time playing?
It’s not wasted time. Playing is very important, and every animal plays at something, even an amoeba, although you couldn’t tell it from Adam. My amoebae have formed two soccer teams, and I’m planning on taking them on the road, maybe even having my club go pro, and sign them up for the Western Amoeba Soccer League.
When that happens, you’ll be able to see all their games — except the blackout Home Games, of course — on your Android phone, or your Tab, Pad or Laptop.
I wonder if Laptop will get shortened down to “Lap”. Probably; everything in the info age gets chopped to reduce character bytes for data transfer. Under 160 characters, you can send a message as a Short Message, meaning it’s cheaper. If your message is over 160 characters, the message gets broken up into parts and you’re charged a different rate.
There’s a move underway to make a single-rate yearly account for the very rich, but you won’t be calculated in that venture. Only the very rich can save money on their cellphones. If you think about this, it makes some sort of odd sense. The rich don’t pay taxes, either.
“So where does in say in The Book that this world is fair?” my Nana Celia used to say, and she was right. It doesn’t specify.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby