to hell with Jack Nicholson

A fellow in the comments section recently expressed his unhappiness about me bagging out gamers. But he was not a jerk. He was alright, this fellow. He just didn't care to be shat on for the fact that he liked playing this game. Fair enough.


And truth be known, I've played a few computer games. I periodically grooved on shooting galaga invaders, doom monsters, and WWII Germans. But that was then, this is now. I'm on a different gig now.

And you're on the gig too. If you're here (unsuspecting google arrivals aside) you're in amongst this thing. In short, you have become aware of the disparity between what you are told in the media and the facts-of-the-matter. I'm sure you can dig it.

I don't care if your focus is Palestine, corporations, the Fed, the Roman Church, the CFR, the Constitution, the Holocaust, whatever. If you get that any one of these things is being misused or misrepresented, then you have already set foot in the camp. If you have used the internet to find out the truth of the matter, you're 'it'. Welcome to the resistance, ha ha.

Whatever views you hold, you have conceded that people should pursue the truth. Which is to say, the truth beyond that which is fed to us in the mainstream media. All Hail Thee! You cherish the truth and seek to arrive more nearly at it. Don't shy away from describing yourself in this fashion or, further, in attempting to embody it. It is a good and noble sentiment and I say this without any media-inspired post-modernist smirk. That the media would have us view such statements as unhip or geeky says all that needs to be said about the media, and about how, right this minute, you and I are not paying it any attention. Instead we are here on the net seeking the truth. Bully for us.

I don't have it by the way. The truth, that is. I merely search with you. (And laugh at my own jokes as I go, ha ha). If this 'truth-seeking' talk sounds religious, that's okay. I suspect that most of the people who come here are not religious or only vaguely so. Frankly I don't care either way. My searching led me to the truth of the equivalence of religions. But amongst religions, some are better, some are worse. Some do more good than harm, and vice versa. But forget the differences. Here we unite and it's the commonalities that count.

Our commonality is that we seek the truth. And we seek it outside the boundaries of control. That's us.

Here on the net, even those of us of a narrow focus find ourselves rubbing up against unlikely things. A gun nut goes to wrh and ends up reading about the USS Liberty. Excellent. The beauty of the internet as a means of seeking the truth is that it defeats the narrow focus. Me? I've had so many unlikely things turn out to be true I no longer dismiss anything.

So where were we? Oh yeah, that fellow who didn't care for me thinking poorly of games and gamers. Mind you, I'd have been him a few years ago. "Who's this jumped-up nobody bagging out games. I play them, I like them and there's nothing wrong with them." But I left that fellow behind as my focus continued widening and everything around me came up for scrutiny. I am the opposite to my bacteria-expert uncle who was declared to know 'the most about the least'. I attempt to more nearly approach the opposite, ha ha. There's no point viewing the micro without the macro.

Computer games, eh? Why not computer games? They're a micro in the macro. Oughtn't they too to be re-considered? We who seek the truth. We who wonder at things. We have no limits, or if we do, we will soon be disabused of them. But we welcome this. It is good and useful. The truth cannot be compartmentalised. It cannot be self-serving. If the things we love are shown to be false, so be it. The truth wins and the only certainty is change. Huzzah!

Let's look at this game in the macro. The big money corporate media is bullshit, yeah? Games make more money than movies, yeah? Money that big will be corporate - bankers, accountants, and other black-hearted sons-of-bitches will all climb in bed and fuck like monkeys. You know that. Movies and TV (same same), are propaganda machines right? They teach you how to think. They say the world is us-and-them. They tell us who to hate. Yes? And games differ from this how?

Hitman posits a world in which one, merely by participating, embraces the rightness of the killing of complete strangers at the say-so of others. Do we - who object to being lied to about Iraq, and the stories we were told about those-whom-we-must-kill - not object to a game that does precisely that? Like I said, if it hadn't existed the CIA or Mossad would have made it anyway.

If we're prepared to acknowledge the wickedness and misrepresentation of: health, insurance, and big pharma; GMO's, food, and starvation; politics, money, and war; of every goddamn thing, why baulk at this game? Question its rightness and if need be, let go of it. It is just another part of the enormity.

But this is no acid test. If you really want to play that game, go play it. As long as you know what it is and don't fool yourself. I smoke Champion Ruby tobacco in Zig-Zag rollies. I know the tabacco companies are wicked. I know smoking is fucked for 28,000 reasons all of which I get. But I smoke. I smoke and I get it. Do you get it?

You and me, the both of us. We're going to be ditching things or otherwise viewing them in a new light - things once cherished. We have to figure out our whole lives over again. What works, what doesn't. What's real, what's bullshit. We will not be told how to be human. We will cease defining ourselves by things that are not us. Can you dig it?

And you're in something big. There has never been a thing like this. It's growing and edging towards dangerous. It has universal appeal. There will come a tipping point when it will take over as the pre-dominant thought. It will be defined by its curiosity, its disregard for thought crime, along with its compassion and seeking of concord. All we want is the truth.

And to hell with Jack Nicholson - You can handle the truth.