snakesnakewhale

EDIT: /u/southsamurai has picked up the gauntlet. May the sun shine on all their days.

With only a modicum of regret, I am stepping away from Lemmy.

Nothing to do with this community or Lemmy itself. Love y'all.

Rather, since leaving reddit I've observed a huge improvement in my mental health and my feelings of personal effectiveness. I'm taking this as a sign to exit social media for now, as an exercise in overall self-care.

So I'm releasing this community to, well, whoever would like to step up! This will likely be my last post here, but I'll keep an eye on my inbox.

~~If there are any takers, just hmu.~~

For example, I didn't fall in love with Titanfall 2's environmental art design---it felt a bit generic to me, like it was meant to be the backdrop for a shooter, as opposed to the Sevastopol in A:I or the station in SOMA that felt like existing locations.

Ditto BioShock: Infinite. The world felt like it was built around the premise of being an arena shooter, not the other way around.

BioShock 1 & 2 are exactly what I'm talking about though.

Even Borderlands 2 has great world-building: the corporate history that can be inferred from the level design, the weapons & the NPCs makes it one of the richer games I've played.

Would love to hear others' thoughts on your favorite FPS environments!

Wisława Szymborska, 1986

What needs to be done?
Fill out the application
and enclose a résumé.

Regardless of the length of life
a résumé is best kept short.

Concise, well-chosen facts are de rigueur.
Landscapes are replaced by addresses,
shaky memories give way to unshakable dates.

Of all your loves mention only the marriage,
of all your children only those who were born.

Who knows you counts more than who you know.
Trips only if taken abroad.
Memberships in what but without why.
Honors, but not how they were earned.

Write as if you’d never talked to yourself
and always kept yourself at arm’s length.

Pass over in silence your dogs, cats, birds,
dusty keepsakes, friends, and dreams.

Price, not worth,
and title, not what’s inside.
His shoe size, not where he’s off to,
that one you pass yourself off as.
In addition, a photograph with one ear showing.
What matters is its shape, not what it hears.
What is there to hear, anyway?
The clatter of paper shredders.

Edward Hirsch, 2020

Instead of a pebble to mark our grief
or a coin to ease his passage
you placed a speaker
at the top of his head
and suddenly a drumbeat
came blasting out of the grass,
startling the mourners on the far side
of the cemetery, clanging the trees,
scattering the swifts
that had gathered around the stone
like souls of the dead,
souls that were now parting
to make way for a noisy spirit
rising out of the dirt.

Tracy K. Smith, 2007

Winter is a boa constrictor
Contemplating a goat. Nothing moves,
Save for the river, making its way
Steadily into ice. A state of consternation.

My limbs settle into stony disuse
In this city full of streetlamps
And unimaginable sweets.
I would rather your misuse, your beard

Smelling of some other woman's
Idle afternoons. Lately, the heart of me
Has grown to resemble a cactus
Whose on flower blooms one night only

Under the whitest,
The most disdainful of moons.

Edward Hirsch, 2020

Moon-head is shouting at me
to back the fuck up
on the forklift
I am trying to jab
into a tower
of wooden pallets
stacked all the way
to the sprinklers
laid out under the roof
of the warehouse
where I am struggling
to control the prongs
of a monster
and avoid dousing
everyone on the floor
of E.H. Sargent & Co.,
my summer of chemicals,
the school where I learned
that someone
is always shouting
at someone else on the job
to back the fuck up.

Nikainetos, 3 BCE

Traveler, I am the grave of Biton:
if you go from Torone to Amphipolis,
give Nicagoras this message: his only son
died in a storm, in early winter, before sunrise.

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

This journey is exploring us. Where the child stood
An island in a river of crisis, now
The bridges bind us in symbol, the sea
Is a bond, the sky reaches into our bodies.
We pray : we dive into each other’s eyes.

Whatever can come to a woman can come to me.

This is the long body : into life from the beginning,
Big-headed infant unfolding into child, who stretches and finds
And then flowing the young one going tall, sunward,
And now full-grown, held, tense, setting feet to the ground,
Going as we go in the changes of the body,
As it is changes, in the long strip of our many
Shapes, as we range shifting through time.
The long body : a procession of images.

This moment in a city, in its dream of war.
                                We chose to be,
Becoming the only ones under the trees
                                                            when the harsh sound
Of the machine sirens spoke. There were these two men,
And the bearded one, the boys, the Negro mother feeding
Her baby. And threats, the ambulance with open doors.
Now silence. Everyone else within the walls. We sang.
                                We are the living island,
We the flesh of this island, being lived,
Whoever knows us is part of us today.

Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.

Fire striking its word among us, waterlilies
Reaching from darkness upward to a sun
Of rebirth, the implacable.     And in our myth
The Changing Woman who is still and who offers.

Eyes drinking light, transforming light, this day
That struggles with itself, brings itself to birth.
In ways of being, through silence, sources of light
Arriving behind my eye, a dialogue of light.

And everything a witness of the buried life.
This moment flowing across the sun, this force
Of flowers and voices body in body through space.
The city of endless cycles of the sun.

I speak to you     You speak to me

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

I think of the image brought into my room
Of the sage and the thin young man who flickers and asks.
He is asking about the moment when the Buddha
Offers the lotus, a flower held out as declaration.
“Isn’t that fragile?” he asks.     The sage answers:
“I speak to you.     You speak to me.     Is that fragile?”

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

Many of us     Each in his own life waiting
Waiting to move     Beginning to move     Walking
And early on the road of the hill of the world
Come to my landscapes emerging on the grass

The stages of the theatre of the journey

I see the time of willingness between plays
Waiting and walking and the play of the body
Silver body with its bosses and places
One by one touched awakened into into

Touched and turned one by one into     flame

The theatre of the advancing goddess     Blossoming
Smiles as she stands intensely being in stillness
Slowness in her blue dress advancing standing I go
And far across a field over the jewel grass

The play of the family stroke by stroke acted out

Gestures of deep acknowledging on the journey stages
Of the playings the play of the goddess and the god
A supple god of searching and reaching
Who weaves his strength     Who dances her more alive

The theatre of all animals, my snakes, my great horses

Always the journey     long     patient     many haltings
Many waitings for choice and again easy breathing
When the decision to go on is made
Along the long slopes of choice and again the world
The play of poetry approaching in its solving

Solvings of relations in poems and silences
For we were born to express     born for a journey
Caves, theatres, the companioned solitary way
And then I came to the place of mournful labor

A turn in the road and the long sight from the cliff

Over the scene of the land dug away to nothing and many
Seen to a stripped horizon carrying barrows of earth
A hod of earth taken and emptied and thrown away
Repeated farther than sight.     The voice saying slowly

But it is hell.     I heard my own voice in the words
Or it could be a foundation     And after the words
My chance came.     To enter.     The theatres of the world.

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

Born of this river and this rock island, I relate
The changes : I born when the whirling snow
Rained past the general’s grave and the amiable child
White past the windows of the house of Gyp the Blood.
General, gangster, child.     I know in myself the island.

I was the island without bridges, the child down whose blazing
Eye the men of plumes and bone raced their canoes and fire
Among the building of my young childhood, houses;
I was those changes, the live darknesses
Of wood, the pale grain of a grove in the fields
Over the river fronting red cliffs across—
And always surrounding her the river, birdcries, the wild
Father building his sand, the mother in panic her parks—
Bridges were thrown across, the girl arose
From sleeping streams of change in the change city.
The violent forgetting, the naked sides of darkness.
Fountain of a city in growth, and island of light and water.
Snow striking up past the graves, the yellow cry of spring.

Whatever can come to a city can come to this city.
Under the tall compulsion
                                                            of the past
I see the city
                                change like a man changing
I love this man
                                with my lifelong body of love
I know you
                                among your changes
                                                            wherever I go
Hearing the sounds of building
                                                            the syllables of wrecking
A young girl watching
                                                    the man throwing red hot rivets
Coals in a bucket of change
How can you love a city that will not stay?
I love you
                                like a man of life in change.

Leaves like yesterday shed, the yellow of green spring
Like today accepted and become one’s self
I go, I am a city with bridges and tunnels,
Rock, cloud, ships, voices.     To the man where the river met
The tracks, now buried deep along the Drive
Where blossoms like sex pink, dense pink, rose, pink, red.

Towers falling.     A dream of towers.
Necessity of fountains.     And my poor,
Stirring among our dreams,
Poor of my own spirit, and tribes, hope of towers
And lives, looking out through my eyes.
The city the growing body of our hate and love.
The root of the soul, and war in its black doorways.
A male sustained cry interrupting nightmare.
Male flower heading upstream.

Among a city of light, the stone that grows.
Stigma of dead stone, inert water, the tattered
Monuments rivetted against flesh.
Blue noon where the wall made big agonized men
Stand like sailors pinned howling on their lines, and I
See stopped in time a crime behind green glass,
Lilies of all my life on fire.
Flash faith in a city building its fantasies.

I walk past the guards into my city of change.

Muriel Rukeyser. 1962

Girl grown woman     fire     mother of fire
I go to the stone street turning to fire.      Voices
Go screaming        Fire        to the green glass wall.
And there where my youth flies blazing into fire
The     dance      of sane and insane images, noon
Of seasons and days.     Noontime of my one hour.

Saw down the bright noon street the crooked faces
Among the tall daylight in the city of change.
The scene has walls        stone        glass        all my gone life
One wall a web through which the moment walks
And I am open, and the opened hour
The world as water-garden        lying behind it.
In a city of stone, necessity of fountains,
Forces water fallen on glass, men with their axes.

An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass,
Behind the wall I know waterlilies
Drinking their light, transforming light and our eyes
Skythrown under water, clouds under those flowers,
Walls standing on all things stand in a city noon
Who will not believe a waterlily fire.
Whatever can happen in a city of stone,
Whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall.

I walk in the river of crisis toward the real,
I pass guards, finding the center of my fear
And you, Dick, endlessly my friend during storm.

The arm of flame striking through the wall of form.