Ithaka Update

Hi all,

You’ve probably been wondering what’s been going on with Ithaka of the Clouds. Well, I’m here to tell you all about it.

The bad news is that we got somewhat stalled in the beginning by two bouts of ill health. Verena had already produced a dozen or so drawings when she caught the Flu from Hell. I don’t know what kind of mutated supervirus that thing was, but it just wouldn’t die.

As for myself, I have suffered sorrowfully at the dreadful dactyls of the Dentists of Doom. I’m not going to barbarously bore you with all the diagnostic details, but a series of shamefully and shockingly daft dentists first failed to perceive a perfectly plain problem until it became seriously severe, then carelessly caused a sizeable selection of nasty new problems [this is where I ran out of alliterations] during surgery intended to fix the original problem. My mouth is the post-apocalypse now.

There are also good news! Progress on Ithaka has been slow, but what we’ve come up with is extremely exciting. It’s still very much a Lands of Dream game, but we’re approaching it with a sense of freedom and joy that really lets us go anywhere we want. It may end up taking a little longer to make, but this game will be a memorable experience.

There’s more I’d like to share about Ithaka – the themes that are evolving, the places it will take you – but I’m not going to give in to the temptation. It’s probably not good for marketing, but I believe you will have a better experience if you don’t know what’s coming.

Oh, the stretch goals! When I felt too sick to work on something more challenging, I started work on the updated editions/remakes of The Book of Living Magic and The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge. Both of those should be ready within the year. Desert Bridge in particular will still require a fair amount of work, but so far I am very pleased with the results.

Next Friday we’ll be going to Greece for a month, so we’ll probably be hard to reach – there’s no internet where we’re staying. We will, however, be working; in fact, we’ve done much of our best work in that place. And who knows what kind of strange creatures we will encounter that might make it into the game? Anyway, our journey towards Ithaka is about to take a massive leap forward, and we’re both looking forward to what we’ll discover.

Thank you for making it all possible.

– Jonas

PS Once we come back, we’ll start contacting the people who haven’t gotten their perks yet.

I was going to send this to everyone who supported our campaign via the Indiegogo page, but it seems to be freaking out on me, so I’m posting it here.

Links! 03/06/2013

Time for more links.

  • Oneiropolis Compendium: The Moddhey Dhoo. I’m kind of sad the Compendium can’t get more attention; I think it’s some of the best writing I’ve ever done. I don’t think there’s a lot like it on the internet. Anyway, here’s a new entry.
  • Scientists As Heroes: Greg Egan’s Teranesia. We’ve been a bit slow due to illness, but The Secret Gates is turning into a rather nice site.
  • Curing Cancer: A Fable. Steven Brust nails it. “The liberal doctor understood that sometimes cancer was harmful, but thought it could be controlled so it would be a kindlier, gentler cancer.”
  • Recessions can hurt, but austerity kills. No comment necessary.
  • Occupy Gezi. Pictures that you need to see.
  • Mass protests shake Turkish government. Already outdated, but contains useful background info.
  • The death of Ibragim Todashev. A very, very strange case.
  • The New Fuck You. I am legally obligated to post this song every now and again.
  • New Age of the Fist. Another song I need to post regularly. Dedicated to the delusional shithead who called me a “brocialist” for saying identity politics are middle-class. Because, you know, your whole terminology is totally not the product of middle-class academia. No, I’m sure it was invented by striking miners.
  • Bundle in a Box. Contains all four Blackwell games, plus lots more.
  • Intersectionality and identity politics and The objectivity of oppression. “After all, the people who are troubled by the discourse of intersectionality are not white supremacists or Westboro Baptist style homophobes, but tend to be people with egalitarian political principles and a strong commitment to social justice.”
  • Purity leftism. The tendency of the German left towards clownishness and politics-as-lifestyle is precisely what’s kept me away after my early encounters with it during my student years. I still feel conflicted about that, but I also don’t believe that growing dreadlocks, stuffing euro bills into your nose and dancing about in front of a bank particularly threatens capitalism. Or that sitting on sofas drinking coffee is a way of stopping student fees. Thanks, but I don’t want to relive 1968. I’m stuck in 2013 and I’ll like to fix things here.

Solidarity

resist

It always takes a spark, a step too far by the powers that be, for people to rise up. They don’t always win. Often it’s just the beginning of a larger struggle. But once people know that they can rise up, that they have it in them to resist, no unjust authority is ever quite safe again.

resist

The people of Turkey are fighting back now. What sparked this – another excess of capitalism, combined with police brutality – is not the point.

Please refrain from tiresome cyclical debates about individual responsibility or collective guilt. The people of Turkey didn’t choose or create this system; if you believe elections really matter all that much, or can actually represent people’s opinions or needs, you’re buying into the myths the system uses to perpetuate itself. Being forced to choose between different shades of evil while being terrorized by the media is not a meaningful choice, does not convey responsibility, and this discussion is largely a distraction and an excuse for apathy.

resist

Yes, some will try to use this uprising for their own political ends. Not extremists, but liberals. Social Democrats and the like. Some of them will probably succeed. Yes, the worldwide media will try to spin these events for the benefit of the international ruling classes. Yes, even if this fight is successful, it will not end capitalism.

So what? This is a battle against capitalism. It’s not about cliques or identity or lifestyle. It’s not a conflict engineered by the EU or the US as an excuse to bomb people. It’s the beginning of mass consciousness. Nothing will be the same afterwards, even if the media will do their best to tell you so.

this is violence, not words

This is the battle for real, meaningful change – the same battle being fought in Greece, in Spain, in Egypt, in Tunisia, and all over the world. It’s one battle. It’s not about intersectionality or allies or debates about pronouns. When we say “silencing”, we don’t mean that someone was mean to you on Twitter, we mean that the media are ignoring the protests, the internet is down, and the police are coming to beat in your face. When we say “policing”, we don’t mean that someone disagreed with you, but what you see in the picture above. We mean water cannons and tear gas, not middle-class insults.

If all you have to offer is cynicism and apathy, maybe you should look at yourself in the mirror and wonder about your place in the world. And I mean that literally – spend some time pondering whether your unwillingness to believe in any struggle doesn’t have something to do with your socio-economic position. “Nothing will ever change”, “people aren’t capable of creating a better system”, “all revolutions fail due to human nature” – you can say that because you are still comfortable. What happens when you’re not? Because that’s coming. What happens when you no longer have a choice?

Analysis is useful and necessary, because we know from all the previous uprisings that movements can easily be co-opted and that the system can provide hollow victories. Battles aren’t won via emotion. If you have genuine analysis to contribute, do so.

But what is also necessary is solidarity. Reject the nationalist bullshit that tells you that other people are your enemies. Reject the identitarian bullshit that tells you the struggles of other people are beyond your understanding. Speak up. Spread the word. Show your support.

This is your struggle. This is our struggle.

resist

How are you?

So, my dental surgery didn’t go so well. I have a giant gaping wound in my mouth, a tooth with a hole in it that should have been fixed, no way of eating, trouble closing my mouth properly, and a surplus of anger, disappointment and despair.

But what about you?

Seriously, what about you? I know there are a lot of very nice people reading this blog (and you, yes you, I know all about your filthy habits, you terrible nun), but I suppose in recents months my posts have either been political analysis or “OMG MY JAW FELL OFF AGAIN!” So how are you doing? Played any good games recently? Seen any good films? Read any good books? Music? Noms? Kittens?

What’s up, folks?

My curse upon your venom’d stang

Teeth.

I hate teeth.

If there is a Creator, the existence of teeth proves that He’s one evil son of a pre-Creator void.

I don’t have a good history with dentists, especially not in the last ten years here in Germany. I don’t blame myself for this; it’s hard to know if your dentist is good, you know? I mean, you can tell if your dentist is nice, especially since most dentists I’ve met in Germany are insane, cruel bastards, but a nice dentist isn’t necessarily a good dentist. The one dentist I went to for a rather long time seemed really nice, but as it turns out that two-tooth root canal that went on for eight months wasn’t such a success. One tooth is now missing after breaking in the middle of the night and being removed by a deranged racist emergency dentist who told me stories about how Alexander the Great slaughtered the Persians, the other is still there but apparently hasn’t been filled as far down the roots as it should have been.

If you know me in real life or follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed me complaining of pains in my jaw since last December or so. They’ve been really irritating, sometimes even making it impossible to sleep without painkillers, and they’ve been a big distraction from my work. So I went to the doctor, of course – in January, a couple of weeks after the pains started. What might be causing the pains wasn’t entirely clear, so the doctor sent me to a bunch of other doctors, including the dentist.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, my dentist was pregnant and not actually there. So I got an appointment with her replacement. She couldn’t find anything wrong with me, but sent me to have some kind of 3D scan taken of my entire jaw.

The first time I went back, they hadn’t gotten the results yet, but I was mainly there because one of my shitty fillings, done by a previous dentist, had fallen out. They put in a new one, and in the process accidentally delved too greedily and too deep, so that the new filling presses on the nerve and makes chewing quite painful.

The second time I went back, we talked about how to fix the new problem… but they hadn’t managed to look at the results yet, because they wanted to examine them with some expert. They told me they’d call me as soon as this expert was available.

I waited and waited and waited, but no call came.

When I went back for the third time, said doctor had either left or been fired (my impression was the latter) and replaced by a new doctor, one who described himself as an expert at all things jaw-related. He examined my teeth and gave me a long and aggressive speech about how all my problems were due to how crooked my teeth are, which could only be fixed via orthodontic treatment that would cost something like 6000€. What about my results? Oh, he hadn’t looked at those.

It was something of a miracle that I didn’t have a nervous breakdown right then and there. I managed to delay it until I got home.

A few weeks later I went to yet another dentist. She looked at my teeth, and within a couple of minutes noticed that there was a fucking hole in one of my fucking fillings, right where the fucking pain began. Yes. All of the idiots who had looked at my teeth before had missed the most obvious thing in the world. Unfortunately, at this point five months had passed since the pain began, and the roots were thoroughly infected.

“We’ll have to open this up to see what’s going on,” the dentist said. “It could all be mush down there.”

Not one of the best things to hear.

Attempts to fix the problem under normal circumstances failed. Even after antibiotics and painkillers and prayers to the Great Atheismo, the amount of pain caused by even coming close to the nerve made a root canal impossible. It doesn’t help that I’m mildly resistant to anaesthetics. The only solution was to sedate me.

Of course, since Germany is well on its way to copying the United States’ catastrophic healthcare system, necessary procedures like these now have to paid for out of one’s own pocket. Have I ever mentioned we’re not rich?

So, tomorrow we will paying something in the vicinity of 1600€ for me to be drugged and for several of my teeth to be fixed (all of them essentially the errors of previous dentists). Now, if you made a list of my top ten horrors, Dentists and Unconsciousness would take two of the spots. The only way this could be worse would be if the dentist’s office was on a plane. Made of spiders.

I am terrified.

If everything goes well, we will be a lot poorer but I’ll finally be able to think clearly again, which would also lead to more updates for you people. Maybe we could even finally continue our damn cooking show. It’s not easy to do a cooking show when you can’t fucking eat.

If everything doesn’t go well… you can quote Robert Burns at my funeral.

Old Words

I’ve started reposting various things I’ve written that are no longer available or that I feel ought to be available directly from my site(s). This will be an ongoing process, but here are the first three links:

These were originally written for Nightmare Mode, and I think they’re a pretty good summary of how I view the medium.

This is a making-of of sorts, until now only available as a PDF with The Sea Will Claim Everything. It’s meant to be read after you’ve finished the game.

Verenaday!

surprize! ai iz present!

Today is Verena’s birthday, so I won’t be online much. Instead we will have some nice food and go to the zoo (even though it’s raining) and then to the cinema. It will be a wonderful day, rain or no rain. Yes. We will make it so, as Jean-Luc might say.

You know what would be a very nice thing you could do? If you love the work Verena has done on the Lands of Dream series, both as artist and co-designer, you could head on over to her site and leave a message telling her what her work means to you. Verena gets a lot less feedback than I do, mostly because she’s a lot shyer than I am, but none of these games would exist without her. I know that the feedback I get is a big part of what keeps me motivated and hopeful as an artist, so I think this would be a lovely present for her.

Go!

Links! 06/05/2013

This is one of those posts with lots of links in them. I should do them more regularly, because I have interesting stuff to link to and not always enough time to write long, rambling philosophical posts about shrubbery.

So, here we go. Linkies!