Quick update (France again)

Just to say, I'm not actually entirely sure about my first post on the french elections anymore. My thoughts on austerity being the only option were based on the market's reactions to the idea, which actually seems to have been a lot less antithetic towards the idea of French Socialists than I expected. So either I was wrong (and the market seems to be acting out of character), the markets are not really expecting them to do anything really significant, or socialism was already built into the share price before the election (I personally find that most likely, but there have actually been scraps of sympathy for France's new direction). Whatever it is though, France is unlucky about the Greek elections, since they really have spooked the market. Which really isn't going to help Hollande's strategy.
Let noone say that I don't admit straight away when I think I might have been significantly wrong (at least if I remember). That said, I will still be rather surprised if Hollande actually manages to abandon austerity without market panic.
A 75% tax rate is still really stupid, though.

It's actually hard to believe that someone would seriously say something this stupid (OA)

Not really much to say about this particular post. I'll just say that I actually tend to focus a bit more on the issue of men getting raped than on the same issue for women, for two reasons: Because it gets too little attention, and because I find it a rather annoying reinforcement of gender stereotypes - men as big and strong, women as weak and delicate. Which in turn leads to the whole thing of  rape victims having being raped seeming to reflect badly on the victim. Just to make it clear, all rape is terrible, and I assign exactly the same level of heinousness to both. Oh, and I'll link you to Survivors UK, since it's a charity that deals with exactly this.  

Originally, this post was going to be a continuation of 'On Democracy'. But several people have said something to me recently which annoys me. Including two teachers, which terrifies me beyond belief. As well, a lot of people seem to assume it’s true when they're talking about the subject. So what is the statement? 'Women can't rape men.' This is a statement so complete in its idiocy and utter in its inaccuracy that it's almost beautiful. Unfortunately, it's only almost beautiful. So now you get to sit through an explanation of everything I can think of that's wrong with this statement. This is going to be a long one.

First, an explanation of how the male body works, since this is apparently a subject on which people are pretty much entirely ignorant. There is no really delicate or tasteful way to say this. Erections aren't to do with desire, or even necessarily with pleasure¹. That's why aces (like me) can have sex, despite the fact that I, for example, given the choice between having sex and being locked in a coffin for an equivalent amount of time, would choose the latter². Without much hesitation. And among aces, I'm by no means unique in that - or even particularly extreme. In fact, a lot of aces find out that they're ace having had sex regularly for some time (or, indeed, because of having had sex regularly for some time). All that's required for an erection is a stimulation of certain nerves. So the biological barrier that people apparently think exists? Doesn't.

Secondly, whilst we're on the topic of indelicacy, the statement reveals a startling lack of creativity. There is more than one way to rape someone. There several sex acts you could force someone to perform even if they were an eunuch, and that's without using the devices humans seem so obsessed with coming up with to make it easier. Vibrators, for example.

Similarly, there are such things as drugs. How different is forcing someone into sex through force, and forcing someone into sex by drugging them? Really? They're both rape. You can rape someone through force, through threat of force, through blackmail, through drugs, through deceit, or in a thousand other ways I haven't thought of. And the terrible thing about many of those is that the victim might actually help with their own rape - because the rapist, in a way, makes them want to be raped. Not, I hasten to add, because they want to be raped, but because they prefer it to the alternative of being beaten senseless and murdered, or whatever else the rapist is threatening. Or because they don't really know what's going on, and don't really understand that they've been raped until later.

Fourth, there seems to be an underlying assumption here that if you enjoyed it, it isn't rape. This is about as valid as the idea that it isn't rape if you yell surprise, except that noone actually believes that one*. Say you rape someone, and it actually ends up improving their lives. They achieve nirvana, and never suffer again. That makes it OK, right? No. You are still a soulless rapist**. It doesn't matter that it ended up being good for them; people have ownership of their own bodies - that's why doctors need permission for lifesaving operations. Completeness leads me to point out here that, technically, it is legal to give consent after the fact - since only the victim is allowed to prosecute someone for rape. But, just because someone enjoyed something, doesn't mean they're not going to be angry that you forced it on them. I enjoy chocolate cake, but if you hold me down and force me to eat it, even if I enjoyed the cake, I'm still going to be rather unhappy about it afterwards.

Which brings me onto my fifth point - that physical pleasure and actual enjoyment don't have to coincide. Buddhism was right all along. If I get physical pleasure from decapitating attractive women***, I might enjoy it, but it’s probably not going to be good for my long term happiness. The same is true of rape - getting physical pleasure from being raped doesn't actually mean you enjoyed it. Actually, when you think about it, that makes it worse, long term. Pain can be dealt with - I'm not belittling it, but humans are surprisingly good at dealing with pain. That's why torture is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control. But if you actually enjoyed it? That can lead to lovely results like Stockholm syndrome, self loathing, and the feeling that 'my body betrayed me'. So even if the man having an erection did indicate that he was experiencing physical pleasure, that wouldn't make it not rape.

There, is of course, another way you could look at the statement, which is to assume that men are all sex-obsessed, and that there's no way a man could be raped because they always enjoy sex. This involves ignoring everyone ace or gay, everyone with hypoactive sexual desire disorder, many of those with schizoid personality disorder, and I'm sure a lot of other people. But if we do ignore them, this explains why no man in human history has ever refused an invitation to consequence-free sex. Ever. You could also look at the statement as saying that women are clearly far too weak and pathetic to force a man into anything. Even if that were true, there are these marvelous modern inventions called guns. And drugs. And blackmail. Actual physical strength isn't a barrier. I'm not going to add these to my count of problems, because they rely on the people who say that men can't be raped believing in ridiculous sexist stereotypes, and I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt³.

Even then, however, there are actually more problems with that statement than there are words. That's never really a good sign. It's sexist, idiotic, and belittles the suffering of thousands of people. So before you say something like that, do put in a tiny bit of research. There's a statistic (here, for example) that one in six men will be raped in their lives. I'm not sure that that's entirely accurate, but the numbers are still really high. So don't make sweeping generalisations like that about subjects you know nothing about. And when talking about rape, don't assume that it's a man raping a woman. Using he and she is fine, since English doesn't have gender neutral pronouns (although referring to a rapist as it wouldn't really worry me too much⁴), but as soon as you start to think of rape as a man forcing sex on a woman, you've gone wrong.

This post turned out rather serious, but at least I got through it without descending into inarticulate swearing. So, to counterbalance that a bit, here's a fun game for you. See if you can find the Star Trek quote in the above post. It’s from The Next Generation⁵. Next time, unless large numbers of people say something else to me that makes me question whether they have the intelligence of a retarded herring, I'll probably go on with 'On Democracy'.

*For the sake of my sanity, I'm just going to believe that's true.
**Also, that has never actually happened.
***Which, I must point out, is an example from Sandman, not from my deranged imagination.

¹ It is possible that there may be a relationship between the two for some guys. But it's an 'if', rather than an 'iff'.

² This becomes untrue, for the record, in the case of an airtight coffin - I don't like sex, but I do prefer it to death.

³ Though on reflection, I'm not entirely sure why. But I'm still going to.

⁴ Referring to the victim as 'it', on the other hand, unless they happen to be one of the few people for whom that actually is the correct pronoun, is utterly unforgivable dehumanisation, and you should never do it. Ever.
⁵ 

More on my ongoing frustration with the French Presidential elections

OK then, France decided. They’ve decided to go with the socialist. I was right on that one, and now it remains to be seen if I was right in the more significant part of my prediction. I didn’t intend to do anything else on current events, and certainly not so soon, but… oh God, I just saw Hollande on the news promising that he’d have a tax rate of 75% on the rich. No you won’t. Not if you have an ounce of sanity in your body, you won’t.

OK then, let me introduce you into a rather interesting (to me) bit of economics called the ‘laffer curve’. The laffer curve goes like this: at 0% tax revenue, obviously, you’re not going to raise any money in tax. Similarly, at 100% tax, you’re also not going to raise anything in tax (no one has any incentive to work, and noone can actually afford to pay anyone for anything, etc.). It follows that there must be some kind of theoretical maximum tax, increasing from which one is actually reducing one’s revenue*. Now, there’s not really much agreement on what, exactly, this maximum rate is – especially since it’s going to vary from time to time, and economy to economy, but the midrange tends to be about 70%.

Those of you who’re good at maths might have worked out where this is going. But I said that it was variable, didn’t I, and that there wasn’t much agreement. So there’s quite a bit of leeway, isn’t there? 75% could work, couldn’t it? Well, there’s two problems here. Firstly, the laffer curve tends to shift to the left as you get richer. The richer someone is, the more incentive they have to avoid taxes (1% is quite a bit when you’re on a five figure salary), and the more capable you are of doing so – through clever accounting, straight up leaving the country, or whatever else. The more money someone has, the less you can charge them before they just stop paying you. There is no way 75% is going to work out here.

Then there’s the reason why we don’t know where the peak of the laffer curve is – why we don’t go for the tip of the laffer curve in our tax-raising. Taxation has a bit of a distorting effect on the economy, even before you reach the maximum tax revenue, since laffer curves are just focused on immediate tax revenue. The more taxes you have, the less people can spend, and the less benefit companies get from the money they actually do earn, so the slower the economy grows and the less tax revenue you get over time, since you have less total money to take your taxes from. There are some more technical reasons why more tax is a good thing, like an increase in what’s called deadweight loss. OK, how do I explain that? It’s sort of similar to the ‘consumers have less money to spend idea. Hmmm… there’s a level of cost for something at which point it’s not actually worth it for the company to make it. Obviously. And there’s a level of cost at which an individual stops wanting to actually buy a product, because the benefit they get from buying it is less than the cost of buying it in the first place. That one’s probably pretty obvious too. In a perfectly competitive free market, a company is going to have to charge the absolute minimum level at which it’s actually worthwhile for them to make it in the first place, and anyone for whom that minimum price has them end up getting more benefit from the object than they end up losing from the amount they had to pay.

Now, when you tax someone, you effectively create a gap, meaning that the amount of money that the company has to charge for something before it’s worth it for them to make it, and the less the consumer can pay before it stops being worth it**.

Now, the economy is not perfectly competitive. But the tax thing still works, anyway. Utility is lost, and the economy suffers as a result. That’s as far as I’m willing to go in explaining that. You also don’t get jobs coming in at the rate you used to, since multinational corporations tend to avoid 75% tax rates. Basically, taxes go too high, the economy suffers for it. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of different reasons for taxation, kept to a reasonable level. I’m just not getting into them here, since they don’t really fit with the point I’m making at the moment. A 75% tax rate is a serious problem for the economy long term, and it’s not even going to be raising more money for them in the short term.

Reducing the French reliance on nuclear power is stupid too, by the way.

Hopefully, this’ll be the last economics-y current events thing I’m going to do in a while. And before I finish, I’ll make clear that there is still a chance for Europe, even if I’m entirely accurate. You see, all my predictions are based on a single premise. I’m assuming that Hollande actually is going to do what he’s said he’s going to do. If he ends up being a pathetic wishy-washy wet rag who changes basically nothing, then France will probably be fine, or at least get by with the relatively minor immediate damage that’s going to come from market panic.

So Europe’s only hope of salvation is if a politician breaks his promises. As if that would happen.

*Actually, there could, in theory, be more than one. Quiet.

**Wow I’m simplifying economics a lot today.

The Bean Sidhe

One of the things I wrote which people seemed to moderately like was about the Lenhan Sidhe. To be honest, I like it too, at least to the extent of ever actually like my own work*. This isn’t even trying to be a copy of the style I used with that. I could probably do something very similar, but, well… I don’t really want to. So this is about another little piece of Irish mythology, told in a way that’s a bit similar, except almost certainly worse. I don’t normally do this kind of serious/depressing stuff though. Just put up with it.

*In order that I can continue to do so, I generally attempt to avoid rereading it, at least as much as possible.

The original form of the following manuscript was found next to a rusted iron knife handle, which, unfortunately, could not be preserved. Due to the obscurity of the dialect, even within the now extinct Irish language, and it’s lack of any particular literary merit, it is generally considered to be of little interest beyond the purely academic, and even within such circles, it is far overshadowed by other texts. As such, few translations exist, of which the following must be considered the best

They did not weep for me.

I think that that’s what hurts the most. It shouldn’t, of course. There are so many other things. What he did to me… I shouldn’t even want to think about it. But it seems so far away now, I have a hard time even summoning up an emotion about it now. What happened to my child – my daughter… Nothing. It should have broken me. Maybe it did. Maybe I’m still lying there in that old Galway hut, dreaming the dreams of the race that the gods made mad.

I don’t think it can matter, anyway – the tears, I mean. However hard they cry, the end is the same. A journey alone to troubles that they know not of. There’s no love that can follow them there. I try to follow them, sometimes. As though hell would let me leave. But maybe it is the last mercy. That’s what I dream, sometimes, when it gets too much. As though that would make it better, somehow.

But whatever might await them there, where I cannot go, it is the journey that pains me. What cruelty there is, in being torn from all you know? And what cruelty for those who must remain, to force them to abandon those whom they loved? To know that they too must take alone this journey, and to know not when?

I know, of course. I see when it comes. I see the innocence of youth, and know when it will be snuffed out. I see the dying, who long for release, and I know how long they must linger. And every great statesman, each young maverick who longs for change, I see how short a span they struggle against. I see them burn so bright, but always they must be conquered, until I weep with the crowning of each new king, the heir to a thousand remembered tragedies.

Maybe I could say that that is my purpose in what I do. But that would be a lie. A damnable falsehood, I might say, and though I must suffer here, I have still too much pride to give due cause for my fate. I could say too that I weep for all that none must suffer as I did. That there is one who will mourn you, child of Mil Espáine, no matter how far from all you know you might fall. That would be closer to the truth, I think. It is why I don’t simply walk into the ocean, why I don’t flee from the world, and hide myself away. But in truth, I mourn simply because I can do no other thing. I weep for the ending, for the fear that must come with it. I weep for those who have to be left behind. Even now, even after all these years, I still feel the pain, fresh and new every time, until all that I used to know is numb. I weep because I still care.

Maybe one day I’ll stop.

The French Presidential Elections May 2012

OK then, I don’t normally comment on current events. I tend to find them a bit uninteresting, and besides that, they’re really messy and open to a lot of interpretation. That being said, I feel that I must now give the whole of Europe the following warning: You are completely screwed. For anyone who isn’t following European politics, France is going to have an election on Sunday. Y’know, one of those things I hate so much. Now, as of today, when the far right decided that none of the candidates were quite xenophobic enough, Sarkozy is expected to lose the election, and the head of state in France will be the left wing Hollande.

Now let’s be clear here. I don’t like Sarkozy. I, honestly don’t follow French politics that closely, but what I’ve seen of him hasn’t been great. But I’m not going into that any further. Because this isn’t about politics, or about my personal opinion*, and it’s not about France. It’s about Europe.

OK then, economics time!** Whilst Sarkozy wants to cut spending, and make all the French people poor as dirt, on the basis that people are much more likely to spend money and get the economy moving again if they don’t have any money. Hollande, meanwhile, wants to deal with the problems of ordinary people, spending the state’s money in order to allow people to get out of poverty, and to gain confidence that they won’t suddenly be starving tomorrow, and so start spending again, since it’s probably lack of confidence that’s the main problem***.

As you can probably guess, I think I have to agree with Sarkozy here. Let’s be clear, there’s a lot to be said for the ‘spend’ policy. I normally don’t really like Keynsian economics or deficit funding, or anything in that vein. I won’t really go into why, except that habitually spending more than you earn is really only a good idea if you can reasonably expect to die before it catches up with you****. But during a recession it can be a good idea to, just temporarily, allow oneself to go a bit over budget, in order to get stuff done. You can pay it back once you have money again, and you can get the economy moving again a lot faster, with a lot less pain. There are even examples of it seeming to work – Roosevelt’s New Deal is one you’ve probably heard of, and if I remember rightly (my internet is rather spotty at the moment – it took me about as long to post this as it did to write five hundred words – so I can’t look it up), the Japanese spent their way out of the Great Depression too*****.  But I’m not aware of a single case where the zero welfare free market approach has really worked. I’d rather like to believe that it does, and, it’s true, the free market does tend to stop sulking eventually, and to go back into boom mode, but it’s a rather painful process, which gets a lot worse if the government’s been trying to hold back the recession for some time. I mean, let’s look at some examples. There’s Ireland recently. Or Hoover†. Yeah. There are problems with spending one’s way out too, but it’s a decent option.

Unfortunately, it’s a decent option when you aren’t in debt already.  When FDR started the New Deal, a national debt in the billions††† would probably have led to a lot more than just getting thrown out of office. Things get a whole lot harder to work when you’re already heavily borrowing, and you start wanting to borrow more.

But that’s overshadowed by a bigger problem, which I think France is about to run into††††. The market doesn’t just lend you money. The market is a group of investors who’re mainly looking out for themselves. If they don’t like what you’re doing, and they don’t think it’s going to work, they’re not going to want to lend you anything. Which is fair enough – if I was going to lend large amounts of money to someone, I’d want to think I was going to actually get it back†††††. And the market is currently holding firm to the belief that the best way to do things is via austerity, rather than growth. Which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially since growing one’s way out of recession requires rather a lot of money, which you have to get from the market. If France tries to grow its way out of recession, no matter how good a strategy that should be, I’m pretty sure they’re going to run into problems (I actually felt the need to specify that they were the French presidential elections of May 2012). And France is a rather big part of the Eurozone. France goes down, the results for the rest of Europe would not be entirely positive ones.

Oh, and I changed the layout of the site, if you didn’t notice. Not really intending to stick with this layout at the moment , but we’ll see.

*At least as far as possible.

**Amazing. It really is true that nothing can make economics sound exciting.

***Recessions are just about the only things in existence where ‘just ignore it and hope it goes away’ would actually be a valid strategy.

****For the interested, a basic description of why I don’t like the country being in debt: Firstly, interest. Do you have any idea how much interest countries have to pay on their debt? It’s really not very nice to think about. We don’t have enough money anyway (clearly – we’re deficit spending), and all the money you have to pay in interest has to be taken out of something that’s actually useful. Secondly, if you’re in debt, you’re going to basically be at the mercy of the markets, which, as I’m going to show, is going to be a rather bad thing once you are in recession. Which will, sooner or later, happen, at least if you’re capitalist. And thirdly, it shows rather a lack of foresight. Once you’re in recession, you’re going to want to spend more money, and you’re going to have less to draw on from the normal, non-lendy sources. The more you’ve borrowed, the harder borrowing tends to get, so deficit spending makes it a lot harder to cope once you actually are in recession, especially if you add in the last two.

*****OK, more technical stuff. The New Deal helped, but it’s debatable how much it did to actually end the depression, given that as soon as spending was reduced, the American economy went right down again. The only thing that really got the American economy truly started again was a good war, so they had a nice market to sit back and produce stuff for, whilst their competition was rather effectively removed. The Japanese, meanwhile, didn’t have quite as successful a recovery as America, possibly due to the fact that, when the war started, instead of getting themselves a new market, they got repeatedly bombed. So you can do rather a lot of debating as to whether spending one’s way out actually works.

†FDR’s predecessor, not the secret service psychopath††

††Alliteration always amuses Acanthus’ author.

†††Still using British billions. I’m bloody minded like that. And to be clear, this still holds even if you’re working with the actual value of the debt, so in FDR’s time, because of inflation, the actual debt number I’m talking about would have looked a lot lower.

††††Yes, more than a thousand words later, I reach my actual point.

†††††If we simplify massively, it’s not doing that that got us into this mess to start with. And that’s as far as I’m going to get into that particular debate.

Horror games and other randomness (OA)

This is one of the most... random... posts I've ever done. I'd say I was just finding my style, but I'd kinda like to do more like this. Ummm... Not much to say, it really is pretty random. And I've corrected a few random typos again. There are two unmarked ones this time.

First of all, why are you not reading Hitherby Dragons¹? Seriously - go now. It's far more interesting than what I'm going to write about here, in a way that alternates between awesome, hilarious and occasionally terrifying beyond belief.

Secondly, faeries. Twilight would make much more sense if you replaced all of the vampires with faeries (fairies would also do at a pinch, but are less good), for several reasons:
1. Sparkling in sunlight makes a lot more sense for a race one of whose defining traits is glamour/illusion/enchanting mortals than for a race one of whose defining traits it having less tolerance for sunlight than ice cream.
2. Faeries being creatures who, as mentioned, traditionally rely a lot on mind manipulation, would probably be very interested in someone with a natural mind-shield (as Bella canonically has). Thus, you could get rid of large amounts of Bella's Mary-Sueishness without too much of an effect on the plot.
3. Vampires are rather easy to kill. You can stake them, wave garlic at them, leave them chained up in the middle of the Sahara at noon, cut off their heads, or simply blow them to smithereens (granted, all of these also work on normal people, although one has to be creative to kill someone with garlic). Faeries, on the other hand, are vulnerable only to iron – and sometimes only to cold iron. Even then, the vulnerability to iron varies from 'the mere touch of iron can incinerate them' to 'they aren't actually vulnerable to iron at all - they'll just come back from the dead if you kill them any other way'. Thus, Meyer doesn't have to screw with mythology to prevent her precious Edward from being repeatedly and emphatically dead².
4. Faeries have glamour. Therefore, it isn't really that incredible that they should all be incredibly attractive. Neither is it incredible that someone mortal becoming fey should increase in attractiveness. There isn't really such a commonsense explanation for a mortal becoming a walking corpse and suddenly being more attractive.
5. Faeries tend to be infertile. That's why they steal children. But the key word here is 'tend'. Faeries having children is not entirely unheard of, especially faeries having children with mortals. Thus, the plot could proceed as planned, it could be a complete surprise to everyone (in novel) that Bella was pregnant, without it having to contradict the novel's established system of vampire biology.
6. Faeries are approximately four thousand six hundred and twenty-four percent more awesome than vampires. You may think that that's just my opinion, but it’s not. It's scientifically proven - you can tell by the way I used percentages. This is mainly due to overexposure - vampires are clichéd, and angsty 'vegetarian' vampires are somewhere between 'the cake is a lie' and 'why did the chicken cross the road?' in terms of originality. Like Monty Python, except that Monty Python is intentionally funny³.

It wouldn't solve all the problems of Twilight (chief among them that it is written by Stephenie Meyer, although the plot, characters, and the fact that it's more than three pages long also all deserve a mention), but it would make it make somewhat more sense without actually having to change very much of any real significance. Just something I thought of. And now that I've revealed a more knowledge of Twilight than anyone male should really have⁴, and got to the end of several hundred words about faeries without having to decide whether the singular is 'faerie' or 'faery', onto the actual topic of this post. I promised something random, so here it is: video games.

Specifically, how horrible and deranged they are. I'm not talking about games like Silent Hill, or Call of Duty. Those just try too hard. These are five games that seem innocent enough, but which are really quite horrible if you actually think about them. And so, in order of subtlety:

5: Pokémon
Do I actually have to explain this one? You capture creatures with human/superhuman intelligence (e.g. Alakazam), some of which even used to be human (Yamask), and force them to battle each other for your amusement and profit. If that's not enough, remember that in wars, Pokémon fight with their trainers. Now imagine all the ways a Pokémon could kill you. Or imagine being a civilian in a world where ten year old children are allowed to walk around carrying what are effectively weapons of mass destruction.
4: Robot unicorn attack
You might seem like you're playing as an adorable and colourful unicorn setting out to fulfil your dreams. But as time passes, it gets harder and harder to stay alive. No matter how many people (well... fairies) you murder for your own gain, you might gain friends (dolphins) for a while, but in the end, you have no chance of actually fulfilling your dreams, and a meaningless death is all that awaits you. And through all this, the world and music remain bright and cheery. The heavy metal version is just trying too hard though⁵.
3: Super Mario
It’s a game where you fight enemies by crushing them to death. Or throwing fireballs at them. When you eat strange mushrooms everyone around you becomes tiny and pathetic. Flowers can cause you to gain special powers. So... Horrible murder and strange distortions of reality caused by ingesting unidentified plant matter⁶. Need I go on?
2: Pac Man
You're in an inescapable maze, trapped forever, forced to endlessly repeat the task of picking up objects and chased by murderous ghosts. If you somehow succeed in your task, everything you've done will be undone, and you'll just have to do it again, unless you can do it enough times (two hundred and fifty five times actually), in which case your selfish quest for self preservation will end with the world itself breaking. Try and leave by one of the two apparent exits, and you'll just end up back at the other one. By taking strange unidentified yellow pills, you might be able to fend off the ghosts for a brief while, but they'll always come back. You'll never actually be able to give them more than a temporary defeat. And the longer your struggle to survive goes on, the less capable you are of doing even that.
1: Eversion
OK, here I have nothing. Even I can't come up with a way to make this game sound evil. It's a sort of Mario clone, so I could of steal from there, but I'm above that. You can download it here, or on Steam, and if you can find anything at all dark in it, please tell me. You play as an adorable little asterisk in a bright, shiny little world. What could possibly go wrong⁷?

Right then. That was my list. It should probably worry me that the actual intended topic of the post turned out to be less than half of the actual text. I might do some more in this vein someday, but next up: Rape. Because the words 'consistent mood' mean nothing to me⁸.


¹ I will periodically recommend this blog. Seriously, read it. Now. It is. Really. Good. If you have some spare money, you could do a lot worse than to spend it on some of the other stuff the author's written. She is genuinely brilliant. Incidentally, I was to some extent trying to emulate her style in The Epic of Veris. I failed rather utterly, but to be fair she is really good, and that style is really hard to do right.
² This is edited from OA, since in OA I had a sudden attack of wishful thinking, and talked about how Meyer could make Edward die. If only.
³ I'm pretty sure I'm referring to the endless ad nauseum repetition of Python, not the original work of the Pythons, which is really original.
⁴ Wow. My gender politics were a lot more traditional when I wrote this. For the record, I'm also wrong - Twilight would be a gender thing rather than a sex thing, so it should be 'any man'. Funnily enough, I didn't really conform to gender stereotypes even then, so I'm not sure why I wrote that. It's probably a combination of not really thinking about gender stereotypes (I didn't conform to them, but I didn't really question or challenge them either), and the fact that in those days I was mostly writing for people I kne
⁵ Of all the games on this list, RUA is the only one that might possibly be intentional. Given some of the startup messages, it's at least acknowledging that viewpoint. Honestly, I'm not really sure what to think about it.
⁶ Everyone might know what I'm talking about, so I'm not going to correct it, but the grammar here makes me wince. For the record, the unidentified plant matter doesn't actually cause the horrible murder. As if you didn't already know that. Also, I'm talking about the original Super Mario Bros.
⁷ Yes, it's an obvious joke. Yes, a load of people probably saw it coming. I still had to do it, though. Eversion is actually a really good game. You could do a lot worse than playing it (and I just realised how much advertising I'm doing in this post). If possible, try not to learn anything about it before hand, since it plays better that way, but please do pay attention to the content notice. It's... not a joke.
⁸ Yes, I actually used to plan my next post in advance. And to try and pattern - I'd try to alternate silly/serious, and I wouldn't do two of a series in a row. Ah, when I was organised.