Paul William Fassett - Writer/Artist

Sam and Ernie - Chapter Two

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Sun, 18 Jul 2021 04:21:00 +0000

C H E C K M A T E

A series of short stories

By: Paul William Fassett

“I’m in pain,” I said.

“I imagine you are. A broken bone can be painful.” The shrink replied, with his massive forearms crossed under his chest.

“Well, do you think we could do something about it?”

“I can give you some Tylenol.”

“I was thinking something that might actually help with the pain.”

“It’s prescription strength.” He shrugged.

I stared at him, my mouth hanging open wide enough to catch flies. “You know, you could at least act like you care.”

“Do I care that you’re in pain? Yeah and I wish I could do something about it.”

“You could give me some pain medicine.”

“You’re an addict, Sam.”

“Oh, fucking whatever. I’m not an addict. I just don’t want to be in pain!”

“That’s what every addict says.”

“I’m not an addict!” I threw my pillow at the wall and pushed myself up on my bed so I could sit up.

“Then you’re suicidal.”

“I’m not suicidal, you fucking goon.”

“You don’t take that many pills unless you’ve built up a tolerance, or you’re tired of living. Which is it?”

He had me in a check. I sat there thinking about my next move, but before I could come up with a response he was ready with another question.

“Are you ready to join the world of the living?”

“Yes.” I responded without even having to think about it, really. I was looking forward to seeing people again, even if it was these people. He brought me my chair and tried to help me into it, so I swatted his hand out of the way.

“I’ve got it.” I kicked the chair, and it rolled away from the bed. “Can you at least lock the wheels?”

“Nah.” The shrink turned away and walked out of the room. “You’ve got it.”

It took about fifteen minutes to get my chair back to a place where I could slide into it. I wasn’t quite used to getting in and out of it yet. The group was in session when I finally got back in my chair. The first face I saw was her’s. The tall girl with the eye brow. We locked eyes for a moment, and I was the first to break the stare. Couldn’t wait to stop looking, to be honest, because… Well, listen. Boredom is the worst kind of torture.

I know that water boarding is probably way worse, but when you’ve got one of my brains, the worst thing you can be is bored because my brain won’t let me sit in silence. It’s gotta talk and talk and talk, and hum a song on repeat for hours, or wonder what my ex is doing right now, who she’s fucking? Is he better than I was? If my dick still worked, would she’d still love me? Then I saw her face. That off putting face frowning was haunting me all night and all day today, and when I saw her sitting in group it was like deja vu. Where once was a smile, now all that was left was a frown.

I pulled in next to a guy that… I can only describe as comatose. He just stared at people. Never said a word, barely blinks, just stares. He’s wasn’t a drooler or anything. I mean, I could swear the lights were on in there, but it was like he’d found the perfect grift. He got to watch the drama but didn’t have to participate. Sometimes I wish I was comatose. People come in to talk to him, from time to time. Probably family. A young girl, mostly. It’d be nice to just sit and listen to someone without the inevitable argument.

A skinny guy in a long sleeve turtleneck was talking as the shrink was sitting down. Everyone stopped their individual conversations like mom just walked in the room and caught us doing something naughty.

“Hello everyone.” The shrink pulled out his clipboard. “Ben, why don’t you start us off?”

The guy in the turtleneck shook his head. “I’d rather not.”

“Just start with how you’re feeling.”

He leaned in closer to the shrink and whispered something.

“Ben, it’s okay. Everyone is here for, more or less, the same reason. No one is judging you.”

Speak for yourself, I thought.

The guy just sat there looking down at his fingers which were worn down to scabbed up nubs. “Everyone is looking at me.” He whispered.

“Okay, Ben. How about you, Sam?”

I shook my head as well. “No thanks.”

“Why not?”

“I already said everything I needed to say.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“You know what?” I sat there thinking and there was a thought rising up. A thought that a part of me wanted to push back down, but I was never very good at that. “What kind of doctor are you?”

“I’m not a doctor. I’m a therapist.”

“So, that’s why you couldn’t give me medicine. You’re not a real doctor.”

He smiled. “That’s right, Sam.”

“So, what was it? Got to med school and just couldn’t hack it?”

“Actually, it’s a funny story,” He said, still smiling. “Want to hear it?”

“Not really,” I said.

He didn’t seem to hear me or didn’t care. “I was supposed to drain an infection out of someone’s genitals.”

The group elicited a simultaneous groan.

“That’s fuckin’ gross, doc.” Ernie said.

“Not a doctor, remember?” I said.

The shrink smiled again. “Anyway, when I smelled it, and saw that guys balls oozing puss, that was it. I decided right then and there that I wasn’t cut out to be a doctor.”

“Fascinating.” I said, turning away from the group.

“Okay, so now that I’ve broken the ice with something embarrassing, how about you tell us something embarrassing, Sam?”

Ernie raised his hand, and the shrink pretended to not see him.

“I think Ernie has something he wants to say,” I said, pointing to Ernie.

“I got one hell of a story,” Ernie said.

The shrink sighed. “Fine, go ahead.”

“Okay. So we’re sitting in my friends basement, and we’re probably ten years old right, and there’s this kid who lives down the road. Weird kid. Never said anything. He’d just stand at the bus stop and laugh at nothing. No idea who the hell invited him. We’re playing board games and this guy starts petting my friend’s dog. Then he says, hey everyone! Watch this! He turns the dog over on his belly, and hand to god,” Enrie put one hand on his chest and put his other hand, palm out to the group. “he starts jerking off the dog.”

I wasn’t paying much attention up until that point. No matter how boring the story is, when you hear the words: “Jerking off the dog.” You straighten up and pay heed.

“Okay, I’m gonna to stop you there.” The shrink said, but I leaned over and waved him away.

“Shut up, man. You can talk about balls oozing puss, but he can’t talk about a guy jerking off a dog?” I leaned my chin on my hands and waited.

The shrink looked around and saw that I was not the only one with an eager expression, waiting for the story to continue. Ernie’s eye brows raised, the unibrow did the same, even turtleneck guy stopped fiddling with his fingernails.

“Okay, fine. Continue.”

“Right, so the kid starts jerking off the dog, and I’m watching with amazement as this little red lipstick like thing emerges from a hole in front of the dogs dick, and it’s seriously like something out of a horror movie. Like a tentacle that sucks the dmt out of your pineal gland or some shit. Kid looks at us and says: ‘Watch this.’ And we’re waiting as if we’re about to see the most magical fuckin’ thing we’ve seen in our entire life. Then it happens. The dog cums.”

He’s laughing, the group is laughing, and I want to laugh but I don’t let myself. I just shake my head. “How’s that embarrassing? Sounds like the other kid is the one who should be embarrassed.”

“We all took turns.” The group was mortified. You could even hear gasps. “What, I was like ten. How old did I say I was? Anyway, I was young enough to not know what we we’re doing to the dog, but I’ll tell you this. That was a happy fuckin’ dog, right there.”

“Okay, now it’s your turn.” Ernie said, looking straight at me.

There was something I wanted to say, but it didn’t feel right. What if I said it, and it didn’t make anything better? What if it just made shit worse? Admitting you’ve done wrong is like giving someone a chance to hate you for it. Build resentment and throw shit in your face. “No thanks.”

“Hey,” Ernie pointed a meaty finger at me. “That’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair,” I said.

“I’m sorry, but I have to agree with Ernie.” The shrink leaned on his clipboard. “You made him show you his, now you gotta show him yours.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked around the group. When I got to the unibrow, she looked away. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, but I knew I wasn’t going to say it.

“He’s not gonna do it.” Ernie crossed his arms. “I knew it. No balls. They cut your dick off in the hospital or something?”

“Give me a minute, you fucking neanderthal. Maybe I’m not as gifted at embarrassing myself as you are.”

Ernie rolled his eyes. I could feel everyone looking at me, and I felt something. A feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time since every day became roughly the same as the last day. I felt adrenaline. My hands shook and my body became warm. I cleared my throat and took one last look around the room and closed my eyes. “It was after the accident.” My voice was breaking, so I took a moment to swallow down the saliva growing in my throat. “I was supposed to be going to physical therapy, but I figured, what’s the use? You know? I’m trapped in this fucking chair no matter how many push ups I do, so I would take a bus downtown and sit at a coffee shop. I did this for weeks. One day I decide, enough is enough. I’m just going to go home and tell my girlfriend that I’m done with therapy and come clean. So I go home early, and as I open the door, I can hear a sound that every man knows. I shut the door slowly so as to not interrupt, and I come around the corner to the bedroom door, and there’s a big pair of balls, slapping against my girlfriends ass. My best friend is fucking my girlfriend doggy style in my bed.”

My eyes are still closed and I’m seeing the image in my head as if I was there again. Normally, at times like this, I’ll shout the image out of my head, but you can only shout: “Fuck off!” at the top of your lungs when you’re alone in your apartment. “I remember feeling helpless. I always imagined this scenario, I think we all do. Like, what would I do if I came home and found my girlfriend fucking another guy. I’d pull that guy off her and start beating the hell out of him. Maybe shoot him and her. I didn’t think about that. I just watched and thought to myself, what if she leaves me? I sat there watching until my friend came, and when they rolled onto their backs to catch their breath. That’s when they saw me sitting there. They didn’t say a word. I just wheeled away into the living room and waited. He left in a hurry. Not a word spoken. And when she came out of the room, she was furious. Yelling at me, telling me this was my fault. And you know what I did? I apologized.”

The room sat in silence, and the shrink just kept writing.

“How’s that? Good?”

“Yeah,” The shrink said. “I think we’re done for today. Sam and Ernie, can you stick around?”

“What’s up, Doc?” Ernie said, like some cartoon bunny.

“I have an idea. Ernie, your room mate just got released, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you do me a favor and bunk with Sam for a little while.”

“Whoa,” I said. “What? I don’t think--”

“It’ll be good for you. Trust me.”

“I’m not staying with him.”

“I don’t think you have much of a choice.” The shrink said, standing up.

I yanked on his pant leg. “You can’t make me room with him. He’s a maniac. He already broke my finger.”

The shrink got down on one knee and placed my hands in my lap. He leaned in and whispered in my ear.

“Then you better watch your fucking mouth, or he might break something else.” He smiled and walked away.

Check mate.

Sam and Ernie - Chapter One

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 04:19:00 +0000

M O N D A Y I S J U S T A N O T H E R D A Y

A series of short stories

By: Paul William Fassett

“People are stupid. Most of them, that is. For example, a lot of people can’t tell the difference between entertainment and fact. When one gets all mixed up with another, the line between them gets blurred, and the part that’s supposed to be nuanced becomes...” Ernie gestured with his hands, and his arms flapped up and down like a bird. “inflated. That’s why you got guys out here, on the street, talkin’ about rich guys stealin’ from poor guys, and politicians are out there fucking kids. Meanwhile, there’s a whole world out there that aint like that, and they can’t see it. They all think the world is falling apart. A lot of them think the world was better when they were young.” The circle was quietly waiting as Ernie took the edge of his finger nail and dug something out of his ear. He must have got something because he flung it somewhere on the carpet. “That’s it.” The shrink tilted his head ever so slightly. “I’m done now.”

The shrink put his papers on his lap. “Why are people stupid?”

“You’d have to ask them.” Ernie chewed on the same finger that did the digging. I gagged mentally.

“No, I mean why do you think they’re stupid?”

“I just fuckin’ told you, doc. They watch too much TV!”

“Have you ever thought about how they got to be stupid?”

“Am I...” Ernie paused and looked around the circle for help, but found very few eyes were even looking at him let alone offering advice. “Am I speakin’ a different fuckin’ language, here? I’ve said it like, three times now. Try to keep up, Doc.”

“Keep up, Doc!” An exaggerated laugh from a prehistoric looking woman sitting next to Ernie. She was all teeth, no gums. An eye brow bisected her face separating her long forehead from her large shin. Long, bony legs peaked out from under a sundress.

“Alright,” The shrink gave a nod and crossed one leg over the other. “Take it this way.” The shrink tilted his head back. We sat for an uncomfortably long time in a silence broken only by the errant cough and a loud tick. “I don’t believe that we’re born stupid.”

“Yeah!” Ernie pointed at him, nodding his head in agreement. “Ignorance is learned.”

“Exactly. So, who teaches them?”

“It’s the goddamn parents. When I was a kid, you had five or six different moms on your block kicking your ass up the street every time you fucked up. Now, get this, my grandson kicked my son-in-law’s ass, and had the balls to call the police on his dad! Can you believe that shit? My mother would’ve put my ass in an oven if I did some shit like that.”

“You ever pick up anything from your parents, Ernie?”

“I see where you’re going with this. Yeah, I got a little bit of an anger problem.” His face turned up into a sad smirk. “Probably got that from my dad.”

“So, we can’t really blame them for being stupid, can we?”

“Yeah you can! No one has the right to be ignorant. That’s what my dad always said.”

“Is that why you broke Sam’s finger?”

“First off,” Ernie said. “I didn’t mean to break his finger. Second, he told me that the Phillies sucked. We won the pennant seven times!” Ernie was up out of his chair, coming at me again like he was going to break my other pinkie.

“I didn’t ask for this.” I said, turning my wheel chair around.

“Wait, Sam. Just wait a moment.” The shrink pointed to Ernie’s seat, but he stood there, defiant. His face was flushed and sweating. “Ernie, what the hell? We’ve talked about this. You can’t go around hurting people that don’t agree with you.”

“Seven Pennants!”

“So fucking what? You’re like the child that none of the other kids wanna play with. Picking on a guy in a wheelchair. Real tough guy shit. Sit the hell down!”

The cave-woman elicited a pointed and short laugh which drew angry eyes from Ernie.

I never noticed it until then, but the doctor was about the size of an orderly. His shoulders were the size of footballs, and he didn’t dress like any doctor I had ever seen. A t-shirt, black, with some white words written on it.

Monday is just another day.

And then he said something that I… Well, I don’t know how to explain it. It just sort of hung around in my head the rest of the day.

He said: “Do you like being a slave, Ernie?”

Ernie sucked some air between his teeth. His jaw was clenching and grinding. Surprisingly, he sat down without another word, and I turned my chair around. The shrink turned to me, uncrossed his legs and wrote something on his legal pad.

“How do you feel, Sam?”

My eyes got wide, and I turned to observe the room to see if I was the only person surprised. “Me?” I pointed at myself, a little dumbfounded.

“Your name is Sam, right? Are there any other Sam’s in here?” The Shrink looked around the room.

“I feel like my finger’s broke!”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Like some retard broke my finger!” I could see I was getting under Ernie’s skin. “I can’t even shuffle a deck of cards, which is about the only thing to do in here. Why is there no TV?”

“Rot’s your brain,” The Shrink said.

“I don’t want to be here. You people made me come here, and now I have a broken finger on top of everything else. So if you think I’m in the mood to...” I scrunched up my face. “Talk about my feelings then you’re wrong. I don’t belong here. I’m just visiting. You people belong here.” I pointed at Ernie. “You need to live here.” I think I hurt the cave-woman’s feelings. She wasn’t smiling anymore and she shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

“Okay,” The shrink said.

“Okay, what? Like you think it’s okay to be attacked by someone when all you want is to be left alone?”

“Calm down.” The Shrink motioned to someone behind me, and before I could finish I was being wheeled away from the group and taken to my room, where the orderly left me sitting at an angle pointing far enough away from my bed that I would have to use the hand with the broken finger to steer me towards it.

Well played…

I spent the rest of the day in my room, staring up at the wall, thinking about how I hurt that woman’s feelings. I couldn’t get her face out of my head. Not because she looked like a Frida Kahlo painting, but because… I don’t know. It was the first time I had seen her not smiling, and it was because of something I said.

Hello Father

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 16:31:00 +0000

The church of Ulcanus stressed the importance of confession. Their priests like to say that secrets are weapons the wicked can use against the otherwise righteous. Now, I’m not sure if I endorse the church but I can vouch for one thing. Secrets are fantastic weapons.

We walked into the church sometime around two in the afternoon, and the place was pretty much empty. It’s not like it was a deli or something. A church is probably the last place a person wants to be on their day off. Nobody wakes up at seven in the morning on a Saturday and says, yeah, I want to sit on a hard bench for two hours in a non-air-conditioned room with a hundred other sweaty people. You go because you believe you have no choice.

Murals of ancient battles were painted between every ceiling beam, and statues of the seven stances of virtue marked every third pew on either side of a long and wide red carpet while the seventh statue, by far the largest, loomed high above the pulpit. All of the statues were of men posed in a stage of sadness. The one behind the pulpit depicted a man cupping his face in the palm of his hands.

There was a conversation coming from the confessional, so I did my best to ignore what was being said. We sat in a pew nearby and waited, and in a few minutes the curtain to the confessional opened. A middle-aged elf in a tailored grey suit power-walked from the booth to the front doors with his head down.

Incense assaulted my senses and made my eyes water after I drew back the curtain and entered the confessional. The light was swallowed up behind me by the curtain and only a shaft of light illuminated the wall. It carved out the shape of a man. His face looked droopy, like the shadow of a slowly melting man. Through the window, I could make out a black veil which covered his face. A black nylon cap covered his cleanly shaven head. He reminded me of a novelty condom I won at the boardwalk last year. It was plastic figurine for your key chain. There was a pickle man in the condom with little thin arms and fat cartoon hands. That was a pretty good description of the priest, actually. He had all these brown moles on his cheeks which looked like plant bulbs about to bud under the nylon. The veil was pulled back revealing a rummy, ruddy face that protruded and bulged through an opening in front making his face look like the top half of a muffin.

“Hello father.” I closed the curtain behind me and sat on a tiny bench. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the priest’s face became clear. He was old, like someone’s grandfather. His nose was a fat, blood vessel flecked bulb of flesh dangling from a collapsed nose bridge. “This is my first time… Doing this.”

“What do you seek to unburden yourself with?” The priest replied.

He said it like he was just repeating what the home office told him to say to every new customer. It was hurried and matter of fact. I expected this moment to be much more intimate but instead it felt like I was going to be buying something soon. I expected disdain. A part of me really wanted to be hated.

“I’ve been thinking about someone from high school lately? She was someone I kinda… Well, I wasn’t very nice to. Every now and then the memory will just pop into my head, and it’s so vivid that it’s like I’m living through it again. All I can do is shout the memory away. I’ve got a lot of debt on my soul, and I’m not totally sure it should be forgiven.”

“Ulcanus doesn’t forgive, but he will unburden you. Take sin into himself and make it his own.”

“Does he? Can he? No matter what?”

“Yes.”

“But how do I forgive myself?” I watched the priest carefully.

“Is forgiveness what you need, or is it something you want? What difference does forgiveness make if the sin is no longer yours?” The priest said.

“I guess that’s why that guy that just came out before me look so relieved. He just got done dumping all his problems in your lap. That makes you a sort of saint, don’t you think?” I watched for a change in his expression, but I got nothing. He just sat there, arms crossed, staring off away from me into the darkness.

“Son, do you have something to confess?” The priest seemed to be getting anxious already, and I hadn’t even started to confess.

“Sorry father. I’m just a little nervous is all.” I sat there thinking about what I was doing, why I was doing it, all that. I couldn’t think of a good reason to stop so I just kept going. And you know what they say about secrets. They aren’t secret if everybody knows. “So… Okay. I was about thirteen. I used to go to one of those kinds of schools that used to bus people in from all over. Real diverse crowd, you know? Which means you get into a lot of fights, form cliques, do you know what I mean?”

“Yes, go on.”

“Well, I was one of those kids that listened to rock music. Had long hair, plaid button downs, all that shit… Sorry, stuff.”

I watched the priest sit silently in the dimly lit cubicle beside me, but he seemed oddly un-swayed. He seemed like he as hard as wood. A soldier of god braving stories of depravity through a ten-inch window. I doubted my story would even elicit a response, but I wanted him to look at me like I was the most disgusting human he had ever met.

It would’ve lent a great sense of irony to the whole charade.

“I only had about three friends in that school.” I continued. “They were two guys like me that no one else wanted to hang out with. There was this one girl. Her name was Sarah. I thought I had it bad, but Sarah didn’t have any friends. She had this gimpy little walk where she would bob up and down on one side, all hunched over, looking at her feet. One of my friends used to follow her around school imitating her walk. I laughed. I mean, I laugh even to this day, but I always feel bad after. It was nice at the time to be the one dishing it out for once instead of being the one taking it all the time.”

I sat on that thought for a moment and really turned it over in my head as the priest listened. I had never said any of this out loud before. The thoughts had lived inside a corner of my head for so long that they were gathering dust. I just happened upon the memory on my way to the church as I was searching for something worthwhile to confess to. Memory is like that. The moment you find something hidden you haven’t thought about in a while, and you dust off the pictures and thumb your way through them, they tend to stick with you for a while until you put them back where you found them.

“And you wish to confess to this?” The priest said, breaking the silence.

“Yes and no. Just bear with me. We had this talent show near the end of the year. I had done the one last year and really embarrassed myself. I didn’t know what to do so I made like I was removing my thumb,” I reenacted the illusion for him through the window, but he never looked over. “Anyway,” I said, deflated. “It was a disaster. The teachers basically made people clap for me. It was fucking brutal… Sorry.”

The priest sighed but didn’t respond.

“Sarah goes up on stage and whispered something into the microphone that no one could understand and hobbled over to the piano. She was so shy…”

I took a breath and thought about the blurry Sarah from my memory. There was a feeling I hadn’t felt in so long. It felt like someone had a rope tied around my lungs and was tightening it whenever I tried to speak. I remembered her being cuter than she probably was which seemed to make the memory even harder to relive.

“So, there she was behind this piano, and she started playing. I looked over and my friends were giggling, and a part of me wanted to join in. But I got this sinking feeling. I looked over to my friend Daly, and he was whispering something to a friend next to him. I could see he was planning something. I always remember moments like those in slow motion because I was thinking at that moment that I should have said something. Like, I should have at least tried to talk him out of whatever he was about to do, but I couldn’t. I just sat there…

“Then Adam, this other kid popped up out of his seat and yelled out. Hnnnnnnnggggg! Like a retard, you know? Loud enough for Sarah to stop playing. She just sat there on that bench in front of the piano… Frozen. The whole crowd was silent and looking at us and within maybe twenty seconds half of them were laughing. All two, maybe three hundred of them. That’s when I realized everyone was looking at us. Meanwhile, I was looking at Sarah, and she was looking back at me. Dead at me.” I could picture her face in that moment as if it were happening again.

“I can’t take my goddamn eyes off her, father. As much as I want to, I can’t do it. I can see from where I’m standing she’s about to cry. I can tell. Then Adam slaps me in the chest and looks at me all cockeyed as if I’m the asshole for not laughing. So… I laughed.”

I stopped when I remembered her eyes. Those trembling wide blue eyes staring down at me. When she ran off the stage, I felt like such an asshole. She didn’t deserve what she got from us. She was just on the wrong end of the pecking order. I was in that confessional for a reason, and I was sure Benny, my partner, was getting tired of me drawing this all out.

“How do you do it, father? How do you forgive yourself?”

“Well,” The priest said after a short pause. “I’m not as experienced as you—”

“But you’ve done things, right?”

“We’ve all done something we regret.”

“So how do you forgive yourself?” I let my voice drop down lower for emphasis, and I watched as the priest shifted on the bench.

“I confess.”

His voice was sounding raspy and ragged. It was a sound I knew well. Everyone starts out that way as they try to figure out if they’re in danger.

“And that works?”

“I wouldn’t be a priest if I didn’t believe it did. Trust me. You’ll feel better now that you’ve said it out loud.”

A slight breeze blew the curtain open momentarily, and the daylight in the church receded behind the sound of neglected, metal hinges squealing. The church doors slammed shut, and that seemed to startle the priest who was clearly not expecting the sound. There was a silent moment where neither of us spoke.

I came closer to the window frame and stared into the priest’s eyes.

“Do you have anything you want to confess to me?” I said.

I could see the fear coating the surface of his eye. It was wet and trembling.

“What is this?” The priest’s voice was tremulous. His mouth hung open, shaking, and his jowls swayed slightly.

“This is confession.” I stared on.

“I don’t know what—”

“Yeah you do.” I said.

The priest leaped to his feet and swung open the curtain only to find Benny, who was the size and shape of a wall, standing between him and the exit. I opened the curtain in my cubicle and revealed myself to the priest. My appearance takes people by surprise. Long, curly brown hair, three-piece suit, and a well edged, short cropped beard. My mother used to tell me I had delicate features but those are all gone now. Years of fighting have taken a toll on my nose and eyebrows. The priest stood there staring at me with his face shaking like he had come down with a case of delirium tremors.

“Take a seat.” I pointed to the rows of benches just outside the confession booths.

Benny stepped backward exactly one step and held out a ham sized palm to show the priest where to sit. With some hesitation, the priest minced his way to the pew and his long, black, silky robe swished with every step.

The priest sat down with his back to me and peered around his shoulder from the corner of his eye. “I don’t have any money,”

“Oh, you got plenty of money, father. We’re not here for that.”

“What do you want then?” His voice took on a higher pitch as the anxiety began to wear away at his composure.

“You’ve got the look of a man who is confronted with a choice,” I said. “A choice like, do I just sit here and see what these guys want, or do I try to run? Or are you thinking about fighting?”

“Listen, just take whatever you want. Ulcanus will forgive you.”

“See that?” I nodded to Benny who was standing beside the priest. Benny looked down at him with a subtle smirk creeping into the corners of his mouth. I sat down behind the priest. “He’s trying to bribe us already.”

“Then…” The priest stammered. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want a confession.”

“What am I confessing to?”

“You mean you can’t think of one little thing to confess to? Nothing?”

“We all live in sin—"

I interrupted him. “Come on now. How about this? Tell me about the worst thing you’ve ever done. Look at me when I talk to you.”

The priest turned around slowly but never looked me in the eyes.

“I’m going to be honest with you,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you. Nod your head if you understand me.”

The priest nodded.

“But I will if you make me. So, most important rule is, don’t lie to me. Got it?”

The priest nodded again.

“What’s the most fucked up thing you’ve ever done?”

Our eyes locked and as they did, I felt my eyes twitch, and my skin became warm. The priest looked at Benny as he stepped closer, and his face screwed up as he tried to stifle a sob.

“I…” The priest tried to catch his breath. “I’ve done things…”

“What kind of things, father?”

The priest looked down at the ground with his arm draped over the back of the bench. A tear fell down his face and exploded into a tiny wet dot on the floor.

“To children.”

“What kind of things, father?”

“Please, don’t make me say it.”

“It’s not real until you say it out loud, father. Go on.”

For every moment the priest bought with his silence, my patience thinned. In these situations, it’s all I can do to keep from beating a confession out of people.

“I touched them.”

I smiled. “Where did you touch them, father? Like, on the hand or something? Don’t sanitize the truth. Let it set you free!”

The priest sucked in air in short, stammering bursts.

“Their private parts.”

“Their private parts? You mean dicks? Vaginas? What? I need specifics.”

“Both.”

“Both!” I laughed and looked at Benny who was unamused. “He’s a playboy, this guy.” I leaned in with my elbows on my knees and my chin in the palm of my hands. “Did you like it?”

The priest leaned away as the sobs came and soon he was a blubbering mess. “I…”

“Aye aye. Yeah, I think you did. Think you still do, too.” I took a moment to take him in. Just moments ago the priest was sitting stoic in his dark little box judging all the sinners and now... Well, when confronted with his sins, he fell apart. Just like everyone does. It was kind of disappointing. “You’re doing good.” I patted the priest’s shoulder.

The priest breathed in, composing himself. Stuffing his sadness away.

“Just one more question, and we’re done. Okay?”

The priest nodded slowly, never taking his eyes off me as he leaned back.

“Did you ever make them touch you?”

The priest stared into my eyes and began to sob. He tore himself away from my gaze and faced the front of the church, slowly bending over to place his head between his knees.

I looked to Benny and nodded. “I guess that’s the answer.”

I pulled a garrote from my pocket with a silver metal handle attached to each end and stood over the priest. He was reciting a prayer to himself when the wire went around his wrists and neck and constricted. I yanked the priest and pushed with my foot on the back of his pew. He rocked back violently and screamed.

The wire drew blood from his wrists, and I would have noticed if I hadn’t closed my eyes. In cases like this I create pressure in my skull like an artificial yawn, and the world goes fades out into what I can only describe as the sound of wind rushing in from a car window.

“Benny!” I opened my eyes and saw what was happening. “Deal with his fucking hands, dummy!”

Benny bent over and tried in vain to grab the blood slicked hand that yanked back and forth, as the priest struggled, trying to free himself. Whatever Benny did worked because I could feel the wires tighten as the priest’s voice soon squeaked from existence. His tongue hung from his mouth like a turtle leaving its shell and darted in and out as he tried to lap up air into his throat. It’s never the choking that gets you. It’s the lack of blood to your brain that kills you. The sound of his body hitting the floor was the last sound that anyone would ever hear the priest make.

Benny and I left through the back exit of the church and exploded out into the sunlight. We didn’t speak until we were on the highway heading back to Fishtown.

Benny looked at me and then back to the road ahead of him. He weaved in between cars eliciting long, angry beeps. He kept looking at me, and I could sense he wanted to ask me something but was afraid to.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Benny replied.

“Bullshit. You keep looking at me.”

“Nothing, Jim.” A long moment went by, and I could feel that he was queuing up a question but as to when he was going to fucking ask it, that was anybody’s guess. “I was just wondering.”

“About what?”

“About that girl you were talking to the pedo about.”

“Sarah? You were listening?”

“I was right outside the fucking curtain. What did you expect me to do? Cover my ears?”

I sighed. “What do you want to know?”

“What happened?”

“She ran off stage, crying.”

Benny laughed. “That’s fucked.”

“Yeah.” I looked out the passenger side window as little drops of rain dripped down and swallowed up other drops becoming fat and falling away from view. “I just remembered why I was thinking about her.” I leaned back in my seat and adjusted my suit jacket.

“Why is that?”

“She died yesterday. Saw it on my codex.”

“You’re friends with her on codex?”

“Ain’t nobody friends with her anymore. She probably didn’t even remember me. She just accepted anyone that sent her a request, I imagine.”

“How’d she die?”

“Some muscular thing. Shit just ate away at her over time like rust.” I smiled. I have a habit of smiling when I’m uncomfortable.

“What are you smiling about?” Benny asked.

“The priest was right.”

“About what?”

“I do feel better.”

A Wizard's Guide To: Propaganda

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 23:44:00 +0000

I watched Fox news today.

Don't worry... I'm okay.

I like to do this thing where I pit the two media giants against each other to see which parent should win, Mom or Dad.

And I've gotten really good at predicting what one side will say about the other side, but Tucker Carlson is a slippery magician. I want to tell you about a level 2 wizard spell that will blow your mind, it's called confirmation bias and it can literally build kingdoms. The spell is used to confuse your attackers by making them think you're a pretty cool guy and that you should totally hang out sometime and talk politics.

The spell has a linguistic component, but it doesn't need to be vocalized. It can exist in any written word. Watch this clip from the Tucker Carlson show and see if you can spot the spell going off?

How The Spell Works

Post your timecodes in the doohickey below.

The moment the spell goes off is not actually shown in the video. See, I lied. I'm kind of a fucker and you fell for it. The spell actually goes off the moment you read the title.

Tucker: 'Painful, depressing' debate had some telling moments.

Let's break down this spell because the incantation and components are hidden in the wording and if you wish to seize the power of this incantation, you need to study it.

The word Tucker is the first part of the incantation. It summons images of the spirit or demon summoned, in the victim's brain. That image comes with all the biases that the image conjures. The name is important because even though the image in the thumbnail shows the reader the spirit or demon being summoned, the name binds them to our realm and our thoughts. Then you hit the victim with something unexpected. You associate the demon with doing something unexpected like this ancient incantation:

Pit-Demon: We actually help the gnome immigration problem

See, associating a Pit-Demon with helping is unheard of, and the gnome immigration problem is the hook that snares the victim. It promises that we will agree with their premise because the gnomes, are in fact, a problem.

With our example from FOX, Tucker is associating the debate-which pinned a level 20 Republican Rakshasha against a level 20 Democrat Osyluth-with the words depressing. Depressing is a word of power capable of snaring any ear or eye that sees it from 30 feet or less in a radius around the cursed object.

It targets the same part of the brain that cannot turn away from a car wreck. Depressing and painful are the words which trigger confirmation bias. They assure the victim that they are okay to feel this way, and that we're bros, and so what if you occasionally watch your room mate jerk off into his socks, that doesn't make you gay. Just means you have a thing for socks.

The victim is drawn in because they likely thought the debate was depressing as well, so it's a sure bet that a lot of people will click to have their biases confirmed. The victim can resist the spell, however, if the cursed object fails to ensnare them, that's when content matters. Let's look at the video for more words of power that will be used to tighten the hold this spell already has on our victim.

Country, You, and Proud are wicked strong power words. The video starts out complimenting the country of origin of its victim, re-assuring them that they won the genetic lotto and ended up at the right place and best of all, at the right time because the time for action is now. It all depends on you. The spell is assuring the audience of their own intelligence for the very act of clicking on this video but also thanking them for being brave and thinking what needed to be thought.

The Tucker goes on to say that we should be proud to live where we live because of all the cool shit we've got, and that we should want the same kind of awesomeness for our grandkids. Once you have your audience in your grasp, usually through the compliment sandwich technique, you need to hit them with fear. Fear of losing this great country that we were just informed is the best in the world, and we wouldn't want to end up like Sweden, would we?

So, the spell continues by once again reassuring the audience that The Tucker agrees with them, that he is just as capable of seeing reason as you are and you are right to feel the way you do, the only difference is, The Tucker doesn't agree with why the debate was depressing.

WHAT A TWIST! Now the audience must stick around to watch the video until the 2 minute mark when attention will start to wane.

So before then, we need to convince the victim that we, The Tucker and the wizard he was summoned to protect, are in fact their friend. Conversely, we must convince them that their friend is their enemy and we do that by telling the target that we see the same problems they see. The osyluth is barely comprehensible, and he has the glassy eyed demeanor of a meth head in the midst of a binge, but he seemed absolutely stellar next to the guy that bound me to this plane of existence, but the osyluth isn't going to get anywhere by telling the world that the rakshasa is racist against gnomes and wishes to collapse their tunnels into the country, because that won't work.

Even though we just got done attacking the health of the other guy, and the raksha literally won the last election against a level 20 narzugon using personal attacks. Given all that, we still don't think it's an effective way to run for president. This is double think, and it is a feat that level 4 wizards can take to increase the chance that the spell will succeed against fortitude checks.

To increase the hold over the victim's attention you have several options, but the best techniques are usually visual. If your cursed object has a visual component, it's best if you show Elves, Dwarves and gnomes in the midst of crimes to intensify the fear. Fire is a good evoker of fear as well, so show lots of it with people celebrating around it to evoke primal fears. Why do we defend this rakshaha and his racist ways? We don't, but we also don't believe personal attacks work. Perfect. The spell has taken hold because the idea we want to implant has been spoken and heard three times. Now you can suggest just about anything and because your audience agrees with your premise, they might just end up believing you're a friend.

Now you've learned confirmation bias. You're welcome.

The Shadow Self of Gaming

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 12:56:00 +0000

TO LIGHT A CANDLE IS TO CAST A SHADOW

PANDORA’S BOX

The story of Pandora is a common myth heard among many civilizations and societies across the world, though with each culture, it tends to change. Like the story of Adam and Eve, knowledge is often seen as a burden, or a curse. Pandora’s box is a cautionary tale that warns against the breaking of vows, and the dangers that come from curiosity and the obtaining of forbidden knowledge. When Pandora was born, Zeus gifted her a gilded box. He told her that under no circumstances should any mortal be allowed to gaze into the contents.

Every time Pandora saw the box, however, an urge to open it came over her. She resisted the temptation for as long as she could until one day, her curiosity over took her willpower and she opened it. Evil spilled out of the box and into the world of mortals whereas before this time, mortals knew nothing of good nor evil. With this knowledge, chaos would sew destruction across the land but at the end, something else came out. Something glittering and golden. A radiant light spilled out. That light was hope so while mortals would now know the desperation and terror of evil, they would also have the hope required to fight it.

Carl Jung wrote that the Psyche is broken up into two realms. The Conscious Realm and the Unconscious Realm. The unconscious realm consists of the Personal Unconscious which is comprised of past experiential biases collected throughout life, and the Collective Unconscious which is a collection of societal biases. Jung called those biases, Archetypes.

For the most part, people live in the realm of the unconscious for the majority of their day. The unconscious consists of biases which inform instincts and allow us to function day to day without expending mental energy. Jung stated that to realize one’s true self, one would have to confront the unconscious, and in doing so, confront the shadow self that lies inside of each of us. He implies that until the shadow is exposed to light, it will grow inside us, blacker and denser.

The shadow is not inherently evil. It is a collection of all the traits and proclivities we do not wish to admit we have. When we wonder why the neo-liberal operates the way they do with a seeming disregard for human decency, we chalk it up to sociopathy. If Carl Jung is right, however, we may be seeing a shadow self that has grown so dark, so dense, that before it gives up the thing that is killing it, they will collapse in on themselves like a blackhole, dragging everything around it into the abyss.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

Edward Bernays

OPENING THE BOX

Human beings have a deeply ingrained habit of passivity, which is strengthened by the relatively long period that we spend under the control of parents and schoolmasters.

That quote comes from a writer named Colin Wilson. The idea is that passivity is a learned behavior. It is learned through childhood when you are taught to eschew all wild ideas and thoughts. It is taught to you when you are told to sit down and be quiet. It becomes a habit when we start school and the novelty of life wears away and we come to realize that losing control over what we do from minute to minute will be our reality throughout the best years of our life.

This passivity must be learned in order to function in society. To function in an office, you cannot have people running around, singing songs and dancing in the halls between cubicles. Throughout our childhood and well into our adulthood, our intensity for life is stamped down upon by the shoe of society and ground into the dirt until we, like everyone else, learn the docile nature of polite society.

Perhaps this is necessary. Perhaps to have a well-oiled and functioning society, some amount of passivity is required of the population, but what does this ingrained passivity cause in us?

I believe that because of the nature of how we learn, we have come to depend on fast thinking or intuition. A teacher calls your name out of the blue, what is the answer? Learned intuition has you covered as it always has an answer at the ready, whether right or wrong, you are likely to say something.

On the other hand, if your curiosity gets the best of you, and you ask too many questions, you made be told to sit down. You may be told you are disturbing the class, or derailing the teacher’s well laid out learning plan. Education, oddly enough, is in many ways, discouraging curiosity, at least here in the states. As a result, I believe we rely on our intuition much more often than we should for problem solving.

Daniel Kahneman the writer of Thinking Fast and Slow defines lay intuition and expert intuition as system 1 processes meaning they come from the thinking fast system, yet one comes from a learned expertise in a given subject, and the other comes from experience in tangentially related subjects, or biases. If true, that intuition is a lot like habit in that the brain is working automatically from memories gathered over the years. If this intuition fails us, we learn a new lesson, if the intuition succeeds, we learn a different lesson, but this is an automatic system, and in order to go from lay intuition to expert intuition, we will need to engage system 2 which is the slow thinking process.

I come to this conclusion, not because of something Kahneman said, but because of how he defines both systems. System 1 is fast, instinctive, and emotional, and system 2 is slower, deliberate, and logical. System 1, in order to learn how to adapt to unknowns, must receive feedback quickly and rapidly in order to learn, which is why we are able to learn control schemes so quickly if we are constantly exposed to problems that need to be overcome by using those mechanics.

System 2, on the other hand, is only engaged when intuition is either incapable of solving the problem, or curiosity is piqued by a complex problem. As an example, system 1 can solve 2+2 but it cannot solve 24*17. In lab experiments, researchers noticed that the pupil of the test subject would dilate when system 2 is engaged. They noticed that when the test subject had to multiply two sets of numbers in their memory, the pupils would dilate, three numbers would tax the patient, their pupils would fully dilate and their heart rate would increase. They noticed that when the subject had to hold 4 or more sets numbers, the pupils would return to normal. They knew that this was a sign that the subject had given up and that the task was exhausting them.

In these moments of intense concentration, test subjects suffer from what is called Perceptual Blindness. This blindness occurs when test subjects fail to see something that is obviously out of place in a scene simply because their attention was directed at a complex task. This is different from tunnel vision in that the vision area does not narrow but instead, the brain does not register anything outside what it is focusing on.

So, if system two is engaged and taxed, and the test subject is essentially blind when this happens, it would reason that it would probably be a bad idea to engage both at the same time if it is even possible to do so.

Puzzles are often used to engage system 2. Take this example. You are running through a dungeon and suddenly you come to a choke point where progress is halted by a puzzle you must solve. There are 12 items, and 12 chests, each chest has an engraved plaque on it. The player may try to intuit his or her way through this puzzle, but with this many possible combinations, the player will be there a long time. They must engage system 2 to read the descriptions on each plaque and think through what certain words mean and how they relate to the items they are holding, but when they decide what item to put in the chest, it is usually intuition making that decision based on biases of past experiential feedback. This is why intuition is often wrong, but also, why it is often right.

If this puzzle had pictures instead of plaques, all the player would need to do is look at the images and through pattern recognition, they could intuit their way through the puzzle, never engaging system 2 at all. If that is the case, it is very possible that a player could engage in combat while solving the puzzle at the same time.

When system 1 is fully engaged and goes on uninterrupted, the player enters into a state that designers call, flow. Flow is used to describe the feeling of meditative performance when someone is operating as if on auto-pilot. Sleepwalking through a task at high efficiency and absolute accuracy. This flow state is only interrupted when the subconscious interrupts it to deal with a system 2 process, or the flow state is broken by a mistake.

It would reason, then, if you wish to put your players in a flow state, the game must be relatively easy to play and have a control scheme that is familiar. When we are in this flow state, we are much more open to suggestion so it would be important when influencing behavior that we stay away from engaging system 2 because when the subject is thinking rationally instead of instinctually, it is more difficult to create new habits.

When system 2 learns something, it is filed away as memory to be pulled out when needed. Facts, history, stories, subtext and meaning, all of these things come from a slow and ponderous process of engagement with media of all types. The reason I bring this up is because system 1 has a much more important function than that of system 2. Things learned by system 1 eventually become habit when exposed to it time and time again. As I said before, system 1 learns through repetition. The more an action is repeated, the more myelin forms around that neurological connection. Think of white matter as a series of telephone wires transporting information. If the shielding around that connection is thin, interference is experienced. If the shielding is thick, however, the data can travel down the line without interruption. Essentially, this is how myelin works. This is why a learned behavioral process of system 1 is easy to do without thinking or effort. It also explains why a habit is hard to break.

In the book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains that habit, like addiction, is difficult to break because it is an automatic system that the addict is barely aware of. A person trying to quit smoking cigarettes, for example, may exhibit poor impulse control if cigarettes are around and available to them. To quit, the smoker must make a conscious decision to do so, and every time they are offered a cigarette, they must expend mental energy to resist. This mental energy is used to power the slow thinking system 2, in order to break the cycle of habit exhibited by system 1.

But in order to be tempted in the first place, the cigarette smoker must be confronted by a cue which kicks off the routine, and the smoker is rewarded by the rush of nicotine.

These cues take on all forms like an emotion, such as stress, frustration or anxiety, or a pattern such as going outside to talk to friends at work, or every time I do x, I get to smoke or simply seeing someone smoke. Whatever the case may be, there are subtle, sometimes invisible triggers that give us the impulse to indulge in our routine, and because system 1 is so good at taking over for system 2, most of us don’t even realize we are about to indulge in our habit until we have already done it.

Picture system 1 and system 2 as two friends at a bar. A guy spills a drink on system 2 and before system 2 can think of a rational way to deal with this problem, system 1 is pushing system 2 back saying: “I got this bro.” And before you know it, you’re in a bar fight.

To change a habit, you must engage system 2 and exert willpower. For years it was thought that willpower was like a muscle, and if you just worked it out, it would grow stronger. Studies have shown the opposite, actually, that the more willpower you exert over a short period of time, the harder it becomes to maintain it. Basically, you can run out of willpower if you drain the tank. However, small changes to a routine over time can affect real change and those changes can have ripple effects with other, tangentially related habits.

A famous experiment by Bargh, Chen and Burrows studied the effects that certain words had on how we felt mentally and wondered if that manifested physically. The experiment consisted of two phases. The first phase consisted of a series of words that the students would be asked to arrange into a sentence. Some students were given words that were typically associated with the elderly, and others were given words that were associated with youth. The researchers then would ask the participant to go outside and walk down a corridor to fill out a form in another room. They measured the walking speed coming into the first phase of the experiment against the walk speed after the experiment and found that those who got the elderly words walked significantly slower than when they came in, and those that got youthful words walked significantly faster than when they came in.

This is known as Priming. It is why certain words can make you feel a certain way, usually depending on the bias you have from system 1’s fast paced judgements.

Another experiment used money and paper as a primer for emotions. The study forced half the participants to count pieces of paper with their dominant hand, while the other half counted a large stack of money. The researchers found that those that handled the paper were warm, caring, social, affable, and helpful, while those that handled money were the opposite. It has been suggested that money, like food, triggers a survival instinct, while others suggest that money is a trigger to feeling self-reliant and that one’s own self-reliance is then projected onto the needy in their proximity.

We now have three core elements of habituality, or for a less gentle word, addiction. Cues, Behavior and Reward. If a person follows this loop a behavior will become a habit and over time, that habit will be engaged in before the conscious mind is even aware of it.

If we were to disregard the dubious ethics of taking advantage of these mental weaknesses, we would be willingly giving mass to the shadow.

POINT OF NO RETURN

To understand why it is so hard to reverse course for the industry, we should look at some numbers. Activision reported in 2018 that revenue from Digital Online Channels which include things like: Subscriptions, Downloadable Content, Microtransactions, and digital copies of games topped 5.7 billion. In a further breakdown, 2 billion of that revenue came from King which creates mostly free to play titles featuring microtransactions heavily.

This is important information to know if you are to make an argument that a company or sector of industry must move away from certain predatory practices as the money that would be lost in doing so must be made up in some other way or the stock could potentially lose billions in value which would result in massive layoffs and a depression in the market. Also, when a business plan is successful, there is no motivation to change.

Many have suggested that increasing the price of games may reduce the need for supplementary income from microtransactions. Some have suggested a simple 10 dollar increase to the price of games. However, when you look at the billion-dollar profits of microtransactions, it is still in the best interests of game studios to sell a game at a loss if it will generate billions in post purchase transactions. Even if it was enough to stem the inclusion of loot boxes, and microtransactions, the public has shown that it doesn’t want higher prices. The public actively rages against any hint that games will become more expensive.

If we were to follow the rate of inflation, a game that cost 49.99 in 1980 would cost roughly 155.00 dollars today. That price would also be a huge barrier for entry to many people and would sell a fraction of the copies that it would sell at a 60 dollar price point. Research indicates that even a price increase of 10 dollars would decrease sales dramatically, and no studio wants to be the first to increase their prices.

For an analogy, let’s look at the newspaper industry for a good example of what happens once you open the box and how once it has opened, you can never shut it.

When Newspapers first started struggling with sales, they made a bargain with the devil. They sold advertising space, and in time the newspapers came to rely on that revenue to stay afloat as the public was unwilling to pay more for printed news. Now, for a moment, let’s forget what being beholden for a living by the corporations you may be investigating can do to journalistic integrity. Let’s focus on what an infection can do once it enters the blood stream. In time, as they tried to compete with the speed of television, and then later, the speed of the internet, newspapers sold more and more advertising until it was mostly ads. In time, thanks to a psychological phenomena called Banner Blindness, people were able to ignore the ads, so the marketing departments had to come up with new tricks, hence, native advertising. Now it is hard to tell what is an ad, and what is actual news.

It is also becoming harder to trust what is printed, and newspapers are becoming a shadow of themselves but at this point, can they turn back from the left-handed path they’ve taken? Like the story of Pandora, once you open the box you cannot put the devil back in.

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

Hannah Arendt

Thinking Fast and Slow

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 14:02:00 +0000

This is the script that I ended up throwing away as there was just too many problems, but I am looking for feedback. I still have about a week or two's worth of edits to makes and mistakes to right. Let me know what you think of this script.

Arguments

Human beings have a deeply ingrained habit of passivity, which is strengthened by the relatively long period that we spend under the control of parents and schoolmasters.

Perhaps this is necessary. Perhaps to have a well-oiled and functioning society, some amount of passivity is required of the population, but what does this ingrained passivity cause in us?

On the other hand, if your curiosity gets the best of you, and you ask too many questions, you made be told to sit down. You may be told you are disturbing the class, or derailing the teacher’s well laid out learning plan. Education, oddly enough, is in many ways, discouraging curiosity, at least here in the states. As a result, I believe, we rely on our intuition much more often than we should for problem solving.

This is also why a game like Sekiro takes a while to learn for some people as it is requiring you to learn four mechanics: attacking, deflecting, jumping, and mikiris in order to beat the game. The problem with this design, as said above, is the fact that intuition needs rapid feedback to learn quickly, and mikiri counters and perilous attacks don’t happen as often or as rapidly as say, a combo. The player learns these mechanics, as a result, slowly and over a long period of time.

System 2, on the other hand, is only engaged when intuition is either incapable of solving the problem, or curiosity is piqued by a complex problem. As an example, system 1 can solve 2+2 but it cannot solve 24*17. In lab experiments, researchers noticed that the pupil of the test subject would dilate when system 2 is engaged. They noticed that when the test subject had to multiply two sets of numbers in their memory, the pupils would dilate, three numbers would tax the patient and their pupils would fully dilate and their heart rate would increase. They noticed that when the subject had to hold 4 or more numbers, the pupils would return to normal. They knew that this was a sign that the subject had given up.

So, if system two is engaged and taxed, and the player is essentially blind when this happens, it would reason that it would probably be a bad idea to engage both at the same time if it is even possible to do so.

Puzzles are often used to engage system 2. Take this example. You are running through a dungeon and suddenly you come to a choke point where progress is halted by a puzzle you must solve. There are 12 items, and twelve chests, each chest has an engraved plaque on it. The player may try to intuit his or her way through this puzzle, but with this many possible combinations, the player will be there a long time. They must engage system 2 to read the descriptions on each plaque and think through what certain words mean and how they relate to the items they are holding, but when they decide what item to put in the chest, it is usually intuition making that decision based on biases of past experiential feedback.

Knowing all of this, system one could be seen as experiential and perceptual, and system 2 could be seen as introspective. When we talk about deep, meaningful experiences, I think we are usually talking about experiences that engage both systems at different times. A sort of roller coaster of fast thinking, and moments of slow, introspection.

THINKING FAST AND SLOW

Dark Souls is a game that makes curiosity a system. Even the game play and exploration ties into this player curiosity aspect. The player, in their state of ignorance upon entering the world of Dark Souls, is immediately faced with the ambiguity of it. The game opens with the player locked in a cell. A body is thrown in from above us. The body has a key, but who was that knight that threw in the body and why did he help us escape?

Now that our curiosity is piqued, and system 2 is engaged, we are more likely to explore our surroundings. That’s why the tutorial section of the game is just outside our door written on the floor because in this inquisitive state, where there are no threats around us, we are more likely to engage with the scribblings.

There are a few things to this game that inspire curiosity and thus, engage system 2 in some problem solving. Items are signified by a bright white glowing smoke. The reason it is so bright, so white and noticeable is because the developers wanted to draw the player towards items so that they could setup interesting interactions. If an item appears on the other side of a chasm, the player may spend some time looking for a way to access the other side. This sign posting can act as breadcrumbs leading the player to the next area. Items, in some cases, act as breadcrumbs and sometimes they act as a perfect setup to an ambush.

In a boss fight, this curiosity plays a factor in that we must examine a boss fight the way we would approach any problem in the game. For the curious player, we may see ways to use the environment to protect us, or see that the boss has a tell before they do a certain move that has killed us so many times before. The more obvious the tell in the early stages of the game, the better the chance the player will remember the danger associated with it. However, this is totally a system 1 routine. The player is receiving feedback and reacting to that feedback, learning patterns and so on.

Sometimes the key to killing a boss laid in the environment’s design itself, and whether it be climbing a ladder to do a plunging attack or looping the capra demon dogs up the stairs, the environments, in a way, were part of the mystery of dark souls and being curious about it often lent the players rewards through secret areas, and items hidden just out of view.

As the game progresses, the tells for attacks can become less obvious, quicker, deadlier, as the player becomes familiar with the game and its systems. They learn to watch the boss from a distance, to search for tells, to look for weaknesses in defense. Does the boss leave themselves open at any point in the fight and how many swings can I get in with this sword before I need to roll out of the way? The curiosity about bosses deepens the more challenging they are, and this is when the player may start to experiment. What would happen with this boss if I use this damage type, or throw this kind of bomb at them, or use this spell, and so on. If the boss is too easy, the player may never feel the need to experiment.

The curiosity will deepen even more as the player attempts to understand the world they are in, and in a game like Dark Souls, this can be done, somewhat, through dialog with NPCs, but where you will find more information are in the descriptions of each item you find. Each item, no matter how important, has some sort of background to it, and illuminates a bit more of the story world.

A books worth of material has come from people taking, what is essentially a broken story, and putting it all together into something that explains at least the past events of the game. But the focus of the game is us. Everything happens in this world because we have approached. The world of Dark Souls is in a state of stasis and until we enter the area, the events are doomed to repeat themselves over and over again without variation in an infinite loop of repetition. What we do in the game world determines the outcome, not some overlord that is pulling the strings. In fact, the antagonists of Souls games are much more passive than anything else and this might be the most important part of the world of Souls games, because we are given no reason to hunt down the lords of this world and take their souls other than a cryptic opening about becoming a husk.

Sure, it may seem it is a quest to end our curse, maybe even convinced that if we do not kill for souls, we will somehow become just like a husk, but there is never a threat of that. There is no danger to us becoming a husk. There isn’t a time limit hanging over our head, or a life count that ticks down every time we die. What actually pushes us through the story of Dark Souls is simply a curiosity, at first, to see what happens next. To uncover the mystery of that fantasy world. On subsequent playthroughs, once the mystery has lifted, we may be playing for mastery, but chances are we will still be uncovering new things we didn’t know existed in our previous attempt.

I mean to argue that in a game like Dark Souls, curiosity is key to its success and that sometimes it is not what is said that makes us curious as much as what is not said. That which is left out is the essence of mystery.

HOW PLAYER CURIOSITY DRIVES SYSTEMS

Gameplay Antithesis – LA Noire

In LA Noire you play as a beat cop who works his way through the ranks in the LAPD to eventually become a detective, investigating all manner of crimes, the most compelling of which are the murders.

I want to talk about crime for a minute in service to strengthening the curiosity argument. All manner of crime has a certain level of fascination to it. Most of this fascination comes from motive, but some are even compelling from an execution standpoint. Bank robberies for instance are inherently compelling just from the idea that someone could pull off the act with any kind of efficiency. Film has tackled these ideas from the impulsive, and explosive antics of Bonnie and Clyde, to the hyper organized and expertly executed robberies of a movie like Heat. Our curiosity lies in how the robbery goes down, and our curiosity is peaked when we believe that the robbers won’t get away with it, and a conflict with the police is imminent.

Murder is most compelling when it is a human interest story. People want to know who did it. They want the perpetrator to be captured so they cannot do harm to another innocent life, but it’s also interesting because we want to know what would possess a person to do something as heinous as take another person’s life.

Murder is curious because of our connection to it as humans. The survival instinct is strong.

LA Noire puts us into a world where not only are we investigating crime, piecing together clues, and interviewing subjects, it is seemingly embracing curiosity.

The only issue is that it holds our hands far too much. We are not allowed to fail. Our curiosity only leads to a success state, while our lack of curiosity leads to a fail state for which we will be forced to do the whole thing over again. In a particularly bad mission, you are quite literally forced to arrest the wrong guy, and I think this is a symptom of a larger problem. The game doesn’t actually want you to be curious. It actively fights against your curiosity because it doesn’t really reward you for it. In fact, at times, it punishes you for it. For instance, during an interrogation, a point in time where curiosity should be rewarded, if we ask a question, we must make an accusation. Which means that instead of the question being a way to dig for information, it acts as a point of no return.

This is bad because when you justify your question, you are basically choosing, right there on the spot, whether you think your hunch is right, and based off the things you know about the question, you either know the answer, or you don’t, and no amount of questions are going to get you any closer to understanding.

If you didn’t find the item, or talk to the person that confirms your question, you just have to take a guess. You could try reading the face of the suspect, but it is sometimes a crap shoot. The problem is, curiosity can lead you to a fail state or at the very least leave you feeling like you made a mistake, and the result is, you only ask the questions that you feel you know the truth about.

The game forces you to play it safe because if it wants you to find the info, it will allow you to find it. Just walk around until your controller buzzes. Rotate the object to win.

The criticism I often hear leveled on the game is that after a couple of missions, or cases, the game becomes a boring, monotonous game where you follow the same procedure over and over again, ad-infinitum like a video game version of Law and Order.

Nothing makes you curious in this game after the initial novelty of exploring a crime scene wears away and wear away quick it does, because the illusion of choice goes right out the window once you realize you can only do what the game wants you to do. The world, while seemingly real, is surprisingly free of any kind of life. Exploring it yields no meaningful rewards tangible or otherwise.

Risky behavior leads to possible failure, and the result is that player expression and curiosity is limited due to the expectations the game is placing on the player, not the other way around.

In fact, LA Noire is a prime example of a game’s linearity actively working against its potential. What the system does is make us expect something, and then it repeatedly delivers exactly what we expect and almost never deviates from the formula.

LA Noire rewards the player for their curiosity by allowing them to play more of LA Noire and when they fail they punish the player by making them play… More of LA Noire. A solution to this problem would have been to allow a player to fail and have there be consequences for that failure. The threat of convicting the wrong man, or having a criminal be found not guilty of a crime due to lack of solid evidence, constantly hanging over the player’s head would force the player to become more thorough in their investigations not because they have to in order to move the story forward, but because they want to be a good cop.

RESEARCH ABOUT PASSIVITY BECOMING A LEARNED BEHAVIOUR…

There are many ways to inspire curiosity in a player. Some games do it by hiding items in out of the way areas like Baldur’s Gate type games. If you wander away from your objective you may stumble onto an engaging encounter, or you may find yourself a stash of powerful weapons. In games like Dishonored, player curiosity is stoked as much by what is said as by what is not said.

In Dishonored 1 and 2, we are given small glimpses at different worlds, factions, and people’s lives through either cutscenes or through environmental storytelling. Dishonored 2 does a far better job of this in a particularly interesting side area in the mission to cure or assassinate Addermire. In the opening city area is an apartment that has become infested with bloodflies. Through the mechanics of the game we learn that fire is a good way to kill the nests and flies when we throw liquor bottles that burst into flames, trivializing them. Then we learn that dead bodies are great for luring flies away from areas when we witness a nest of flies attack and swarm a dead body on an upper floor of the building.

Then as we explore more, we find that there is a weeper who is responsible for this whole thing that has been cultivating the nests, and taking care of the blood flies. This piques curiosity in the immediate story, but throughout the game, this technique is used to great effect. What isn’t said through environmental story telling is told through the mechanics or through journal entries, letters and books found in the area. None of this is mandatory to the player, all of this is optional and completely missable, and because there is a possibility of missing these details, or just plain missing out on items like bone charms and runes, the chance of missing out and missing out PERMANENTLY entices the player to seek these things out.

Removing Her

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 13:37:00 +0000

Removing Her

By: Paul William Fassett

I have lived for hundreds of years, traveled the endless dimensions in search of meaning, and I have found nothing but pain. Meaning is in the experience of life, and that meaning changes from person to person. Experience is what tells us that water is wet, that fire is hot, and falling down, though painful, is just a lesson to be learned.

Sometimes our experience can control who we are, and no matter how hard we try to break our programming we end up repeating the same mistakes because we are trying to avoid pain.

But pain is universal. At some point we all experience it.

What if you could shape your experience? What if you could tailor the memories of your life to fit the lifestyle and future you desired? Would you become a different person?

Kaiber Kully was a man of special talents that only his closest friends knew about. Which is why Jaden found himself with a broken heart knocking on Kaiber's apartment door.

Kaiber wasn't expecting company. In fact he was meditating. It was the only way he knew how to deal with all the pain he took into himself from others. He stood and looked in the mirror, quickly dealing with his hair by running his fingers through it until it was brought to lay back against his head.

Bang bang came the sound from the door.

“Hang on a minute,” Kaiber said.

Kaiber never saw himself when he looked in the mirror. His lips, though thick and plump could be thin and tiny, depending on who he saw there. His small dimpled chin could be large, jutting, round or covered in hair. He never saw himself anymore or felt like himself. He had experienced too much of other people's lives to know who he was anymore.

Bang bang the sound came again, and this time Kaiber had enough. He swung the door open to see his friend Jaden standing there, looking like his muscles leaped off his skeleton and wriggled out of his skin.

He was like an empty flesh colored sack. His skin seemed to hang off him, and deep circles ringed the outside of his eyes. Every hair on his head seemed to be working for itself going this way and that way, and he gave off a smell that should never come from a full grown adult.

“Jaden, what are you...” Kaiber didn't know what to say. “What happened to you?”

“I'm a mess man. I can't sleep, I can't hold down food. I haven't left my apartment for weeks.” Jaden slid around Kaiber and walked to the middle of the living room, sitting on the arm of Kaiber's beat up green couch.

“Why?”

“She left me man. She just walked out.”

“Who, Katey?”

“Yeah. I thought maybe something happened to her. I came home, and all her stuff was gone.” Jaden was in a panic. His eyes were wide and dark. He paced and sat and repeated. “No note, nothing. I called her on her codex, and she had her serial number changed.”

“Why? I mean, what happened?”

“I looked into that, you know. I had a PI go and find her. She moved in with some Elf named Jock.” Jaden grabbed Kaiber by the collar. “I need you to help me man.”

“Calm down, Jaden.”

“Seriously! You don't know what it's like to live in my head! She is in there, fucking that Jock asshole, in my brain, all hours of the night. And she enjoys it. She enjoys every fucking minute of it, and all I can do is lay in bed and watch her, hear her moaning in my head. I can't fucking take it anymore!”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Kaiber asked, hoping he didn't know the answer.

“Take it away,” Jaden said.

“Take what away?”

“Her. Get her out of my head. Do that thing you do and get rid of her.”

“No.”

“Come on man.” Jaden was pleading. His face took on the pallor of a dying man. His lips trembled. “Look at me. You know I wouldn't ask you to do it if it wasn't important, man.”

Kaiber turned away from his friend and was walking to the door when a clammy hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

“Look at me!” Jaden held his wrists out, and several cuts scabbed his forearm like tree bark. “You have to help me man. I can't take it anymore. There's a decade worth of memories in me and every thought is her.” He beat his fist against his head as the tears came spontaneously.

Kaiber grabbed his arms and pulled Jaden in and hugged him like a mother would a crying child. Jaden's body convulsed and bucked with each muffled cry becoming louder and louder as tears soaked through Kaiber's shirt. A minute seems like an eternity when you are holding a crying man, trying to come up with a reason not to help.

Jaden pulled away, wiping the tears from his eyes, never looking up from his feet.

“Jaden. Do you know why I don't don't mess with memories anymore?”

“No,” Jaden said.

“Your memories don't just disappear when I go into your head. It's not like I take an eraser and they are gone.”

“I don't care what you have to do, I just want to forget her.”

“Listen. Whatever you are feeling, I will experience it. Your pain, your memories of her, that feeling of betrayal, anger, whatever, it becomes mine.”

“I...”

Kaiber could sense his friends hesitation, but his resolve didn't seem to break.

“Would you do it for me, Kai?”

“Is it worth losing me as a friend?”

“It doesn't need to be that way...”

“Yeah it does. Jaden, every time I see you from now on, I will be reminded of your pain. I feel it like it's happening all over again. Every time I see Katey, every time I think of you two together, I'll feel that agony. I'll have to cut you out of my life. Are you sure you want to do this?”

Kaiber sat on the couch and watched as his friend stood there thinking, his face contorting as if sudden pains had shot up his neck and face. Tears rolled out silently from his eyes, and his mouth moved in a wordless cry as pain etched lines on his forehead.

He sniffed and took a deep breath, trying to gain composure and sat down on the floor.

“I keep thinking,” Jaden said. “How I could deal with these thoughts but there doesn't seem to be a way out. Drugs, liquor, I've tried everything and all it seems to do is make it worse. If there was a way for me to pry her out of there I would, but just when I think I am over her, I find myself at her apartment, banging on the door. That elf fucker beat me so bad I thought I was going to wake up in the hospital. She stopped him. I went home that night, in pain, and figured, that's it. That was the wake-up call. Then I was laying in bed and I thought, she must still love me. She stopped him from beating me to death. There must be some love still in there. It's sick! I know that, but I just want her back, and then I want her gone, and then I want to kiss her, and then… I just want to kill her.”

Jaden laid his arms on the coffee table and rested his chin on top, staring through the glass top at Kaiber's feet. Kaiber already knew it was over. Jaden had made his decision.

He stood and went to the medicine cabinet and pulled out a red gel capped pill as big as a suppository and when he got back to the living room he laid it on the table in front of his friend.

“Take that, and lay down on your back.”

Jaden took the pill into his fingers and looked at Kaiber, a smile inching its way, tentatively, yet never committing to his face. It was a sort of silent thank you. Jaden swallowed the pill and laid back on the carpet as Kaiber came around the table and sat on his knees next to his friend.

It only took a few minutes before the pill took control and Jaden was drifting off to sleep.

Kaiber closed his eyes and in the jumbled mess of his mind, through all the voices of past memories. He sifted through the slide show of images, pushing aside photos and large novels of peoples lives that he had archived away in his mind. Kaiber turned off the hundreds of televisions stacked high as skyscrapers playing childhood memories of lives he never live, and cleared the space in his mind to be empty, and clear of clutter.

He pictured his friend's face. The mask of pain he seemed to be wearing as a new persona, the premature wrinkles, and dark eye rings, his voice, he built a version of his friend in his imagination, lying on his back in the empty black void of the memory world. A tiny white dot formed at the center of Jaden's forehead and a beam of light shot from it like a beacon.

Kaiber placed a finger inside and pulled at the white dot until it tore open and he was able to fit his entire hand in, and as the dot grew larger, Jaden's head, neck body and legs tore open to flood the empty space with a white light, and when the light receded, and the world of Jaden's mind rendered itself, Kaiber was there, with Katey, looking into her large green eyes.

She was young then. Long blonde hair, tiny pointed ears, small among most elves. Kaiber knew her then, knew whatever Jaden knew. Knew she was only half elven, and hated that about herself. Like she had no identity. Kaiber felt Jaden's insecurity, like she was only with him, a human, because she was insecure, unsure of who she was.

Kaiber was in bed with her, her body on top of his, her sweat becoming one with his sweat, feeling her tightness, her wetness, the warmth inside her, the intense pleasure.

The memory split and they were in a room, a hotel room, and she threw something across the bed, almost hitting Kaiber. She creamed at him, told him he was making it hard to breathe. Kaiber felt what Jaden felt. The fear, the anxiety of her leaving him. Of her wanting to leave. All he wanted to do was cross the threshold of the bed that seperated them, and hug her, tell her he was sorry and that he'd do whatever she wanted, but he didn't. He didn't want her to know how weak he felt around her. How utterly powerless her inability to be honest with him made him feel.

Roller coasters, video games, movie nights with friends, Kaiber even saw himself in Jaden's memories, felt the jealousy that Jaden felt whenever Katey talked to Kaiber, or laughed at one of his jokes.

The hallway was just an outline of a hallway accented by a narrow floor, no walls, no ceiling, just a void and a helpless feeling that Kaiber could fall at anytime and be dumped into an endless fall. An echoed called to him as the hallway seemed to stretch forever into the empty horizon.

Kaiber walked on as the floor became thinner and thinner until he was walking a tight rope, his arms stretched out at his sides, taking one step at a time, and though he wanted to stop, turn around, and pretend it wasn't there, the echoing sounds and the muffled pleasure, forced him forward.

A single missed step sent him tumbling over, just barely able to catch the floor with his fingers. He hung there listening to the sounds grow louder as a door appeared above. It slowly swung open, and the noise was clear. Kaiber clawed his way up to the floor, and into the room on his hands and knees and when he rose he saw Katey, and a formless, shapeless thing of a man, twisted into impossible shapes, writhing in a sweaty pleasure.

Kaiber clawed at his face closing his eyes so he couldn't see the woman that he loved betray him, to toss all those years aside for someone she barely knew.

The floor turned soft and Kaiber was sinking. He tried to trudge toward the bed, but the mud was thick and each step took him further down until he was waist deep paddling trying to keep his head above the black, thick bloody mud.

His head went under and when he opened his eyes he could see Jaden, hanging from a door knob, dead, a note pinned to his chest. The lack of air caused him to gasp and Kaiber felt the mud clog his lungs like vomit that would never rise and the last thing he saw was the lid of a storage chest closing as those memories were stored away in Kaiber's mind.

Kaiber only saw Jaden when the stabs of painful memories became too frequent. It comforted him to know that Jaden was happy again. Able to live. If he was happy, it was like Kaiber had permission to be too.

One day he saw his friend at a street side diner, eating with a young woman. Breaking his own rule, Kaiber went to see his friend, and they exchanged pleasantries, asked how the other was doing. Doing good, they said, and only one of them was lying.

Her name was Britney, a half elf girl. Kaiber looked at her long blonde hair, green eyes, small pointed ears, and he started to cry. She reminded him of Katey, even that ineffectual look behind those beautiful green orbs.

Kaiber walked away, embarrassed, unable to see them together anymore because he knew what he had done for Jaden was only delaying the inevitable. Like a wise man from earth once said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

It was a lesson well learned.

The Case for Evergeen Model and The Effects of Destructive Versus Constructive Design

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 20:54:00 +0000

The Case for Evergeen Model and The Effects of Destructive Versus Constructive Design.

The Evergreen Model, also known as the 4+2 method, is a set of business basics that the Harvard Business School call their “Four Primary Management Practices”. They consist of: strategy, execution, culture and structure. The Harvard folk go on to claim that with just the mastery of two the secondary management practices, you too can have a successful business. These secondary practices are: talent, innovation, leadership and mergers. The idea here is that if you don’t have mastery of any of these areas, you hire people who do which will bring us nicely to the video games industry.

The triple a video games industry, as it has been taken to being called, is a strange place as far as technology sectors. It would make sense that someone who has a history of great ideas is put in charge of leading a company, but the video game industry sees ideas as expendable. It is a place so full of talent, yet simultaneously fearful of creativity. It is a place that doesn’t need to bargain for wages because the passion keeps employees there, until it doesn’t anymore. The video game industry sees talent as replaceable because there is such a high demand for their jobs that there is no scarcity while other industries wither and die for lack of talent and innovation, the gaming industry is rigid and unchanging and has only gotten larger and more profitable every year.

In general, a place that doesn’t appear to appreciate its own talent yet benefits greatly for the efforts of its talent.

What, if anything, does the triple a industry excel at in the secondary management practices list?

Leadership and Mergers.

It is hard nowadays not to hear evergreen model being bandied around and most of the time, used outside of its true meaning. So, what is the evergreen model?

It is a research project, essentially, that turned into a business model.

There were 160 companies in The Harvard Business School’s studied 160 companies for the Evergreen Project with the goal of gathering data on variables that contributed to the growth or decline of these companies over the span of 10 years. A specific set of variables emerged from this test which is the basis of the 4 + 2 method.

I often hear this term applied to game design in the context that the Evergreen model is a way to constantly generate revenue from a single game title by constantly upgrading the game from version to version and charging for this additional content. Even this context is wrong in a way because, aside from companies like Blizzard, these companies are not making a constant stream of revenue from a single game, but sequels of a game in a cycle of destructive obsolesce.

My case in this essay is not for the Evergreen model, nor is it an endorsement of a subscription model. What I want to talk about is the two schools of thought in the Evergreen model of constructive design, versus destructive design. Or in video game speak, expansion versus sequel.

So let’s dig in, shall we?

Constructive versus Destructive Design

For this essay I will be comparing two companies, side by side to see what their strengths and weaknesses are and to see if I find any commonalities between them and from there, construct a framework for which the Evergreen Model can become a sustainable model for a company that doesn’t wish to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

The two companies I will be comparing have a lot in common and yet, not a whole lot in common at all. A paradox of parent and child ownership: Blizzard and Activision or Activision Blizzard if you’re nasty. A merger of two names so large that they kept both.

We will be looking at three titles: Blizzard’s largest title: World of Warcraft, Activision’s Call of Duty series and Bungies Destiny series.

Okay, so on the constructive side of this argument is World of Warcraft.

As for the destructive side of the argument we have Call of Duty, and Destiny.

WHAT IS CONSTRUCTIVE AND DESTRUCTIVE DESIGN

First let us talk about constructive design. Constructive design is best exemplified by MMORPGS who, instead of making older content obsolete either from neglect or through sequelization, add onto the content already there and at times, make it better by improving it.

In constructive design, we do not delete content. Just like the law of thermos-dynamics, our content never disappears, it just changes.

Destructive design is the yang to the yin. Planned obsolescence in the face of an incoming sequel. The way it works is this. You make a game, like Inifinite Warfare. You add DLC and a season pass that has a bunch of new multiplayer maps, maybe some single player if you like that kind of thing, and then… Bam! A brand new sequel comes out even further splitting the playerbase. All that hard work and effort is all for nothing now because you have effectively killed it as a publisher. The title may still have a playerbase that has yet to upgrade to the newest platform, but with consecutive title releases, that playerbase shrinks more and more until it is abandoned completely. Destructive design favors short term profit over bucket loads of profit in the long term.

Let’s look at how World of Warcraft does constructive design.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT

To say that World of Warcraft was a highly anticipated game is underselling its impact. When Blizzard teased its newest title they had a reputation for quality that is the envy of most studios. They were renowned for their quality titles and their ability to make games that were both fun to play, and highly addictive. Starcraft was an e-sport before we really had a name for it and Diablo 2 is still played to this day even though Battlenet no longer supports it.

When a company is this well known for quality and they jump onto a relatively new gaming genre, good things are bound to happen. At this point, their major competition was Dark Ages of Camelot, Ultima Online, and Everquest which was a personal favorite of mine. Their direct competition, however, was from Everquest 2 which was releasing a mere 15 days before the highly anticipated MMO, no doubt in an attempt to undercut WoW’s sales.

Everquest 2 did not live up to expectations and in a lot of ways, seemed a step back from the original as it was rushed out before all functionality was complete, while World of Warcraft sailed out of the gate with a whopping two-hundred and fifty thousands sales in 24 hours with one-hundred thousand concurrent users.

Vanilla World of Warcraft came out in 2004 and remained untouched for a while until complaints about the end game started trickling in. Within the few months after the initial release, Blizzard released several patches one of which added a PvP arena for a type of combat with capture points, a quest system and so on. Patch 1.2 was released in December and included, among other balance changes, a new dungeon called Maraudon which was a 40 – 49 level dungeon. They also fixed the awful torrent patching system they used.

They added many high level dungeons and raid bosses in 1.3 as well as meeting stones which were the first iteration of their dungeon finder system making it easier to find groups.

Most of the changes were quality of life and content editions to keep the player base happy. They were able to do this because of subscription fees that allowed the development team and QA more breathing room to make bug fixes, balance changes, and so on because this was a game as a service. You can face the fact or don’t, but the reason why most stand alone titles get terrible patch support lies squarely on the fact that there is no budget laid out for things like minor bug fixes. I’m not saying the money isn’t there, but a corporation that reports to a board and has to maximize profits are not terribly concerned about the title they released months ago. They are already moving on to the next release.

World of Warcraft was going strong at this point and while all these patches were going live, Blizzard was creating their first expansion, The Burning Crusade.

EXPANSIONS

First, let’s talk about what an expansion is and how it differs from DLC. DLC is a bit nebulous. It can mean anything from a hat for your horse to an entire 30-hour campaign if you are CD Projekt Red. For the most part, DLC is a small add-on that adds a bit of content to get those concurrent player numbers up.

An expansion is like an entire new game that tacks onto the end of the game you already bought and keeps you playing for as long, if not longer than the base campaign. It is the very definition of constructive design.

When Blizzard released their first DLC, The Burning Crusade, they were already crushing the competition and every MMO announced or being released was starting to look eerily similar to WoW. When the expansion released, WoW was boasting a subscriber count of 7 million and every expansion since that point increased their numbers. Wrath of the Lich King brought them up to 11.5 million subs and Cataclysm brought them to 12 million but this was the start of the decline and ever since, their numbers fell back to pre-Burning Crusade levels.

The reason, as far as my research shows, is that Blizzard started on a path to destructive design. They re-designed old areas and replaced starting zones for old races with new starting zones. Some zones switched factions. This change was much too much for players and it wasn’t uncommon to hear complaints from players stating that they wished there was a way to go back to the old design with updated direct x 11 capabilities. The reason for this backlash, I believe is from the fact that old content, which players enjoyed, was no longer available or changed beyond recognition. It’s like what happens when a sequel comes out and you find yourself wishing you could play the old maps with updated graphics.

Cataclysm lost Blizzard nearly 3 million subscribers, a million of which they got back with the Mists of Panderia expansion which quickly lost them even more subscribers. Since then, the trend line is pretty steady, they haven’t added significant amounts of subs, but they haven’t lost them either.

And the expansions keep coming because the game is still very much profitable.

This is an example of the destructive power of the destructive model and the power of a constructive model of design. You start with a solid base game, and you just keep adding to it being careful not to kill the things players like and fix the things they hate. At this point, World of Warcraft has become absolutely bloated with features which can be daunting for new players, but the benefit is, there is nearly something for everyone.

Then in 2018, Blizzard did something that the playerbase has been asking for. A thing that Blizzard had shut down private servers to prevent. A thing that seems a no-brainer. They announced World of Warcraft Classic. A return to Vanilla content. A return to the design that brought the original hordes of players in. It was met with applause from the community:

Players in fact, contrary to popular opinion, knew what they wanted. What they wanted was to play the game they had bought originally. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a plan to add the expansions, and honestly, maybe they shouldn’t. As one player put it:

The Constructive Design Model and Agile Development

I was told recently by a colleague of mine from China that the Asian market is much different than the American market because the Asian market values collectability. Pokemon, antiques, card games, if the game has some sort of collectible component to it, the Asian market will eat it up. At least that is how he put it.

The benefit of a constructive model is that you are not constantly reinventing the game from the ground up. You have the ability to act quickly to customer demands because there is no three year development cycle to implement a pokemon like catch it all minigame in WoW. The resources and time dedicated to a project like this is minimal in the scale of a triple a title and if you were, let’s say, to want to break into the Asian market, it would behoove you to appeal to them specifically even if the rest of your market isn’t interested. Those who don’t want it in their game can ignore it, for the most part.

The other benefit is that when a competitor comes into the market, they have a long road to travel to compete with you. Imagine the absolutely monolithic heights a game like Elder Scrolls Online must climb in order to compete with the sheer scale and amount of content that WoW has on offer even with a rabid fanbase such as Bethesda’s. An MMO, to compete in this arena must do things either significantly different, or similar in methodology with a glut of content out the gate and a plan to release more in order to have a chance at competing. In order to compete now, ESO will need to release content almost as quickly as WoW is, and to be frank, they don’t seem up to the task. When they do release content, it is nowhere near as expansive. They have, however, been picking up in popularity since launch with huge patches delivered that included a thieving mechanic, Morrowind expansion (thanks Bethesda), and their latest expansion Summerset Isle which proves that the more content you release, the more players you bring to your platform.

By some very unscientific calculations and from looking at players who have completed every achievement in the game, it would take the average player over 600 days to complete all of the content on offer in a game as expansive as WoW and for a game with a subscription model, this is exactly what you want. You want your fan base to keep playing because there is no possible way they could experience all the content on offer in just a month or so, where other MMO’s tend to lose subscribers over the span of a few months due to a lack of content.

Often you see players leave WoW to try another MMO they are excited about, just to end up resubbing to WoW once the other game runs out of content.

This is the power of the constructive model of design. You do not take away from the player, or make content obsolete. You add to it while keeping the integrity of the other half of your game intact.

GIVING AWAY EXPANSIONS ONCE A NEW ONE COMES OUT

Our antithesis argument, Call of Duty and Destiny have a problem with doing expansions right. See, in these games, the model is quite a bit different and causes problems with splitting up the community, which can be a problem because what content these games provide is small enough to become boring before the next expansion even releases, which can explain their dropping player numbers, but World of Warcraft doesn’t have this problem because even thought there is some splitting of the community, not only is there a glut of content to experience otherwise, but the expansions get rolled up into the free to play model once a new expansion comes out.

This is a very player facing model because, if you think about it, the more expansions you release that the player base doesn’t have access to, the more you split the audience. So, think about it this way.

World of Warcraft has 6 expansions, currently. Imagine you just bought WoW because it isn’t free in this example. You play through the content and now you want to play with your gamerboy and gamergirl friends in some dungeons and raids, but they’ve already done the vanilla content ten times or more over and they are bored by it. You decide to get up to date on the expansions by buying one of them, but then your friends want to play a dungeon or a raid in another expansion that you don’t have, or they want to grind high level gear.

In order to catch up to them, you would need to spend 360 dollars plus the subscription fee just to play with your friends. I believe this is the reason WoW picked up the free to play model and went with an early access form of expansion releases. Basically, when you buy the expansion, you are paying Blizzard to play that content early before it is rolled up into the base game for free. It is brilliant from a business perspective as not many people are willing to wait for that part of the game to become free but for those that are, their patience is rewarded.

It also cuts down on the amount of player base splitting for the reasons stated above. When the player base is split, the player base who goes without the expansions normally quit, hence player rate drops.

CALL OF DUTY AND DESTINY

Let’s start with what could possibly be the best example of destructive design, Destiny, which has a problem that could have been easily addressed if greed had not blinded both Activision and Bungie to the potential profit that could be had from continuing development of their base games.

When Destiny was being teased at the various expos, it was so unbelievably hyped by fans of Halo that it seemed like the second coming of Christ were about to emerge from his tomb and proclaim from the mountaintop that he with a capital H has risen. With hype this large, the only logical thing that Destiny could have done was release with a ton of content that would live up to the expectations of players. Expansive open world maps, tense encounters, a great story, incredible loot, all that would have been amazing.

What we got instead was… Well you all know how this went. We didn’t get what was promised and many in the playerbase felt cheated even if they were pumping an obscene amount of hours into the game.

Bungie began releasing content to enrage the playerbase further with lackluster expansions and DLC. When the Taken King was released, we finally got a glimpse at what could have been with Destiny. The problem is, what was sold to us and promised to us was a game that will be expanded on over the span of ten years. Thie quickly turned out to be, not only a lie, but the first in what will likely become several sequels.

Bungie made their destructive design decision here when they decided that Destiny 2 would not be an expansion, but instead, would be a sequel.

This would have been fine if what Destiny 2 released with was even better and more expansive than what OG Destiny had on offer, but it was clearly smaller in scale, and far less ambitious and even did away with features gamers had grown to love in the base game.

This was a destructive design decision because your choice to play one or the other decides what content you get to experience instead of having all of that content rolled into one game. The strength of World of Warcraft is that the game is always expanding and giving the players something new to come back to when they leave.

For Destiny, there is no such incentive because not only has Bungie followed a destructive model of design, but they have also proven that when they do release DLC and expansions, it is usually rather lack luster, not to mention short, recycles old content and so on.

And we have seen what happened to World of Warcraft’s numbers when they started changing and deleting old content. The player base revolted.

Now before you type into the comments, you just said you want them to recycle old content and now you are saying that is a bad thing.

Listen, there’s a difference between expanding a game with brand new content and saying you are adding new content when what you are really doing is using old content and calling it new. If you can’t tell the difference, then I don’t know what to say to you.

Imagine if Destiny 2 was just an expansion to the base game. Imagine having all the old multiplayer PVE and PVP content alongside the new content. Maps you know, and maps you don’t know, all in the same playlist, and every two years you get even more content. More things to keep you playing.

In ten year’s time, the game would be approaching what WoW achieved but in the multiplayer FPS genre.

Now let’s talk about Call of Duty. Of all the games that I have talked about here, Call of Duty is the franchise most poised to do a constructive design. Call of Duty has a whopping 15 main titles in the series. That means 14 single player campaigns (sorry black ops 4), 15 sets of multiplayer maps and several maps and entries into the zombies series.

What I propose for this is a constructive model of design that rolls all of those games into four different game modes. Past, Modern, Future and zombies modes.

The past mode would roll all of the world war two era games into one playlist.

The modern mode would likely be the largest playlist with some of Black Ops entries being rolled into it. We’re talking modern warfare, ghosts, etc.

The future mode would have the movement and weapons of the future games and would have those playlists to pull from.

The way this would work is that even though some of these games might have outdated graphics, the gameplay would be roughly the same throughout as the game play could be dictated on what the current version of the engine is and since artists usually have downtime between titles, they can work on updating the graphics for older maps as free DLC (but knowing Activision that will likely be called cosmetic DLC and sold as such). You keep the gameplay the same for each mode to ensure that the player does not become disoriented when the gameplay changes from the latest iteration of World War 2 gameplay to Call of Duty 2 era gameplay and movement and violently switches to wall running and slide dashing. Each mode has it’s own specific gameplay model that way map designs don’t need to change.

Essentially, all you are doing is importing maps and assets like weapons into the newest version of the engine. Player models would all be updated versions meaning you wouldn’t need to worry about the animation engine and needing to change skeletons and bone weights or tweaking old player models.

Imagine queuing up for World War 2 games and having over 80 maps to choose from on rotation. Imagine how easy it would be to expand this game. You would still charge for future expansions, but all past titles are rolled up for free as a part of your subscription fee.

The downside to this is that the sheer size of each modes install would be prohibitive, but with this model, you have the budget and leeway to change maps, texture sizes, and since textures, models, and light maps are the majority of a games size, if you redesign texture placement, have a base player model set across modes, you can reuse a lot of textures strategically to ensure a smaller install size.

THE EFFECTS OF DESTRUCTIVE DESIGN

The effect of destructive design is much like the effect of DLC splitting a player base but multitudes worse in that the only people who are likely still playing your older titles are those who hated the new entry, have no interest in the new title, or those who cannot yet afford to purchase it. A subscription fee can be seen as pernicious by some and a sustainable development environment for others.

It can be seen as pernicious because I would think that most people do not even acknowledge a fee in their bank statements unless they look at them often. A subscription fee sits in the background, consuming your money while the content you pay for is sitting there untouched.

But it also provides you with the resources to provide a real service to the consumer with constant patches, support and content. It is a constant sort of revenue that you can predict for a period of time.

Each title released is a sort of calculated risk. When a studio releases a stand-alone title, much research is done to determine how the product will be received, what it’s likely meta-score will be, and if all shows the title will do good, the project continues, as is, to a release state. If the score is bad, then that title might be pushed back in order to provide more time to polish the product. This is the critical phase of a project. Every month delay is making the risk and exposure of your product much more visible to the executives.

It is critical at this stage to get gameplay and presentation right so there are no more delays and hits to your stock price.

With each title being riskier and riskier financially as project bloat inflates the budget for your sequel, you would think a model like this would be useful. When your expansion flops and no one wants to play it, there’s still incentive to pay and play the content they previously enjoyed before the expansion came out with possibly better graphics and updated game play.

The other problem with destructive design is that it encourages developers to drastically change the things that players liked and be stuck with that decision for the development cycle of an entire new game. This tendency comes from player expectation with sequels. Bigger, better and more. Developers, to justify their sequel, seem bent on fixing things that didn’t need fixing which is a problem that the constructive model doesn’t have because it doesn’t need to justify its asking price. You are buying an expansion to get more content, not to have a different experience.

With constructive design, you have the ability to patch often and improve the experience. The budget for a non-subscription based, destructive model game title is much lower for patches and as a result those games do not receive the support they sometimes deserve. When the company lacks a good response to issues that plague the game, in the community’s eyes, their faith is shook. They start to grow suspicious of that companies next title, and most of the time they move on to something else. This is why having a support budget, in the form of a subscription fee, is good for the customer. It’s just not that great for their wallets.

So if you’ve ever wondered why games don’t do this, there’s fear, mostly, that a subscription model would not be well received. I personally don’t mind paying for service games, but my main fear in this design is that eventually, games die, and triple a studios are known for killing games. In many cases, the community surrounding a game have managed to keep titles they like alive through private servers, but these cases are few and far between.

But there are two schools of thought on this. Those who will never pay a subscription fee to a game, and those that would rather pay a fee than to pay for the whole game.

What side of this argument do you fall into, and why? Let’s discuss in the comments below and on Discord which you will find a link to in the description below. If you like this channel and haven’t rage quit yet, subscribe.

This has been a rant from strat-edgy, and now that you’ve heard it, go play some games.

Prison

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 04:40:00 +0000

It's like prison. No other way to describe it. No matter what my plan of escape is, there will always be three walls and a barred gate keeping me here.

I went out last night with a friend to a bar where the women hung out with men twice their age, and tried not to betray their disgust when the withered old hands snaked around their thin waists. Fathers living out some sick fantasy about their daughters, and the whole time my friend kept egging me on.

“Go on man. You're like, better than any guy in here.”

It was the kind of rah rah, go team go bullshit you'd expect from the well meaning friend. The equivalent of a two man pep rally. He didn't understand where my head was. The whole time I kept thinking about how I couldn't possibly compete with the kind of green these guys laid out on a daily basis to their ex-wives just in alimony, let alone on their arm candy. No one in their right mind would even want to. Those women weren't there to meet mister right, and those guys were only there for the girl of the night.

So there I was, standing in a crowd, my hands at my sides, standing still. I was careful not to move in the off chance I might bump into someone as we watched a cover band do their best impression of another band who did it better, and all I could think about was how much I hated this scene. How much I hated it years ago, and how much I still hate it now that I am single. The heads of men bobbing up over the crowd like a spinning buoy, surveying the sea of bleach blond and tight night dresses.

Last week is a mystery. I drank like I was trying to die, and maybe I was. Maybe that was the point. I drank long islands by myself until the night was a slide show of events I don't remember the order of, and at the end I threw it all up.

I woke up in my bed, and I didn't remember how I got there. I went outside to check my car and there were no dents, in fact I parked it perfectly. It was like a magic trick. On the driver's side window was a little spot of grease, like maybe at some point I passed out in my car, and fell asleep on the window.

I searched the house, the parking lot, and my van for my missing glasses and they were no where to be found.

My phone had a crack in the glass covering the camera and there was a video on there that I had recorded the night before. The only evidence that a night had even occurred.

I hit play.

A bleary eyed me looked into the camera as I walked through the streets of my neighborhood.

“You know what I hate? I hate that I have to do this.” I said into the camera. “I hate that I have to be here another year and that I spent so much of my life waiting. Most of all...”

The video flipped and streaks of street lamp light blurred across the screen and everything went black with a cracking sound. The me from the night before cursed his stupid clumsy fingers, and the video ended.

She messaged me today. She asked me how I was feeling? Was everything okay? I answered back with one word: lonely. She told me that it would get better, that I should just give it time. She said that her life was crazy, and that was the end of the conversation, if you could even call it that.

I picture her going out all night to bars with her Jersey friends, living it up. Newly single, ready to mingle, the kind of carefree living afforded only from living at home with your parents. She was able to move on, the center of attention of all her would be suitors, all men wanting to stick their fingers inside her, and here I am staring at a blank page trying to figure out how best to channel my rage into something productive. Lying to myself that if I just stay busy it'll be alright.

I must go out to meet people, that's what my mother tells me. I must work out, get in shape, I must do this, I must do that, but at the end of the day, these four walls are my prison, and even when I leave, in my mind I am still here.

I KNOW YOU WON'T READ THIS

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 04:22:00 +0000

I KNOW YOU WON'T READ THIS

I came home tonight and she was sitting on the ground next to her suitcase packing. It didn't really phase me because I had been expecting it even though nothing tonight had been going according to plan. In fact it had all been going to shit.

I took off my shirt and went to hang it up and when I walked into the closet I saw the skeleton of hangers and empty racks in the incandescent light. The sadness rose in me so quickly like a pain shooting from a stubbed toe that I had to turn around. I sort of gasped and walked out the bedroom door. She followed asking me what was wrong, and I didn't want to cry in front of her again. It was humiliating enough the first time, to cry, looking for the other person to look back at you with love in their eyes, but instead all you get is that sort of cold resignation.

I was forced to deal with that fact that all of this was over a while ago, but every time a little more of her disappears from my life, I feel like I am mourning the death of a relative. Because that is what she is, at the end of the day, a part of my family.

That's the hardest part of all this. Knowing that I am not losing a girlfriend, I'm losing a family member.

I keep going back through memories in my head trying to figure out where everything went wrong and all I keep thinking about are those moments. You know them. Those moments of pure joy where I got you laughing so hard that you couldn't breathe and your hand got going like you were swatting away flies.

I remember we were high, laying in bed watching Fraggle Rock, and I pointed out the one Fraggle in the background, during the musical number, was wearing an evening dress. You said it looked like the kind of dresses that wardrobe on set used to make you wear when you were doing extra work.

I did my little directors voice and said: “Hey, it's a little inappropriate for the scene don't you think?”

And you did the wardrobe voice: “Ahh, she's in the background, no one will see her.”

I called her a Fraggle hooker and you did that soundless laugh while you tried to catch your breath and we kissed and made love without reservations.

It was a moment.

Now, just six years later, it's over and I don't know how to cope with it and you seem fine. It's like a fucking betrayal. It's like some bad science fiction movie where my whole life has just been a simulation and none of this was real.

But, I guess it's better this way. You've been phoning it in and I have been driving us both crazy trying to figure out why you hate me, and I'm one of those kinds of people that will hang around even if shit is awful. I'm never one to give up.

Still though, the memory of you is like a tick. Every time I pry you out of my brain and just try to let go, or tell myself everything will be all right, it's better this way, we are better off as friends, a little part of you is still in there, in my skin, and you grow back and suddenly I'm crying again, I'm embarrassed, I feel emasculated, and worse of all, alone.

I wanted to write this and feel some sort of vindication, feel some sort of release, but even typing these words I am finding my vision blurred by the tears welling up in my eyes.

There's no quick way to do this. No quick fix for what I am feeling. I never expected it to feel this way. To feel this broken up over someone ever again. Not after the first time I had my heart broken. See I thought I sealed all those passages up, but I didn't.

Maybe I should have.

You need time to be by yourself. I guess we all need time.

I always wondered why people did it. How could someone end their life? Now I know how. They just couldn't deal with the pain anymore.

I don't even know who I am writing this for… Maybe it's cathartic, a word I've never fully understood but have nodded my head whenever I've heard it.

I mean, I know you'll never read this, you've never read anything of mine voluntarily, but I guess in some way, I'm holding onto the hope that you will because I've never been able to say these things to you before.

I probably never will.

Announcement - A challenge to you, and myself

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 21:59:00 +0000

Announcement - A challenge to you, and myself

I will be proposing a challenge to myself, and to the people who read my blog. Whether you be a writer or not, let's do something together, shall we? For the rest of the year, I will be writing thirty short stories, which is approximately one short story every 8.5 days.

The challenge starts today and will end on New Years Eve of this year. Prizes will include:

self-esteem.
An impressive library of short stories to bother some editor at a magazine with.
Most of all will come the discipline of doing a thing you love every day for a year!

The rules are simple:

Stories must be at least 500 words, and free of as many grammatical errors as possible.
Story must be a story and not just random thoughts. Ask a question, then answer the question by the end of the story. You know, plot.
Stories must be posted at the end of the week, Sunday before midnight, or you're tardy for the party. (doesn't mean anything, just means you should be ashamed of yourself)
Once your story is up, post it at the #ShortStoryAWeek on twitter so we can all read it!

If you are one of those rebel types, and just not into following rules, join the club. I'm not a fan either. Post anyway. Everyone is welcome in this big bus of love (which is really just a utility van without windows).

So come on people. Join me. Let's do this thing and prove to the world that success is just another word for will power! And beer. Lots of beer. Or coffee. You know. Whatever drug you need.

Join us at
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23shortstoryaweek&src=typd

Middle Aged - Drama Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 20:13:00 +0000

M I D D L E A G E D

I've come to a place in my life where I am middle aged. When I turned thirty, and people did that thing where they like to make fun of you as if you were an old man, it rolled off my back. I was in the best shape of my life, living my dream in California. I did stunt work, I did photography professionally, and I boxed with guys much younger than myself, and came out on top nearly every time.

I recently blew out my knee boxing. That's when the realization hit me, as I laid on my side in that ring, grasping at my knee, trying to extend it. At thirty-six years old, that kind of injury ends any hope of continuing that hobby. The first in what will probably be a series of things I will have to give up on as time beats away at me like sea water worn wood. Eventually I will be nothing but deep ruts, knotted coils of flesh, brittle bones, and forgotten dreams. A pile of misery draped over a lazy boy in a room without lights, unable to sleep because it feels like something is missing.

At some point I will give up on whatever dreams I may have had for being a published writer of renown, and I will give my life up to servitude. Begging for the scraps off the president of the companies table.

I've gained weight. Heavier now than I have ever been. It's probably why my knee went out. I think about my weight daily. I think about, how even now as I write this, about all the things I need to do, but haven't done, and I forget about them the next day. If I am to die a no one, it will be because I felt like no one, and my weight will be The Sword of Damocles hovering over my head, never knowing when it will break it's tiny tether and kill me.

I had always wanted to write this. I tried many times to include so much of my life in the fiction that I've written, but it never felt right. It felt like a cop out to write about my life, and disguise it as imaginative. Like I could have plausible deniability for everything that had happened to me, every horrible decision I made, every person I hurt, every dumb thing that I did, while getting the same feeling of release when a massive weight is lifted from one's shoulders.

It isn't right. You have to take credit where credit is due.

Friends - Comedy Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 07:14:00 +0000

Here's one from the archives, back when I used to call myself Will Huxley.

F R I E N D S

Friends. Friends is a funny word. First of all it assumes that more than two people actually like you. Which I personally don’t think is possible. I mean think about it, these are people who live vast differences apart from one another, pretending to like being around you.

You ever notice when you say something to someone, how they might sit still and frozen for a moment, as if processing the information, and without responding, go back to whatever activity they were embroiled in.

Let’s say you said it again louder, perhaps you were making sure they heard you.

Let’s say you continue to assault your victim, by asking, “Do you know what I mean?” Over and over.

What you don’t realize is this person is trying to ignore you, because you have said something so insulting, that they are considering whether or not to continue being your friend.

It really is a crap shoot, you never know when you are going to say something that can end this friendship at any moment. Yet we continue to say friends. My friends, your friends, BFF best friends forever, far flung friends, and my favorite, friends with benefits. But we continue to use the word “friends” to describe what amount to unsteady cease fires in a middle eastern country. Shaky at best.

I would say it's an alliance. Two people get together every once in a while to fight off boredom, that's all this shit is, a cure from sitting around your house doing nothing. Now you can go over to someone else's house and do nothing there!

But you can't be a boring friend, no sir. You have to keep your friends entertained. Make sure to keep the good times going, have to have plenty of things going on at once.

Maybe you can watch a movie. Maybe you can watch a movie, and listen to music. Maybe you can watch a movie, listen to some music, while you text someone on your cellphone. Maybe you can watch a movie, listen to some music, while you text a friend, while your other friend watches videos on his iphone. Let's say you watch a movie, listen to music, while you text a friend, while your other friend watches videos on his iphone, and updates his fucking facebook, while the cat licks his asshole, and then one of you shouts above the dub step music playing in the background: "Having a great time!"

God people are fucking boring...

My Fellow Anglos - Comedy Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 22:49:00 +0000

M Y F E L L O W A N G L O S

PAUL WILLIAM FASSETT

Never been too good with the whole; public speaking, thing, but here it is. I am president. I didn't actually think this would happen, you know? One day I am sitting in the bathroom of a Chili's writing some last minute material for a gig I had at this bar on Santa Monica, and now I am here. Who thought being funny would have qualified me to lead the free world.

My fellow Americans… Who opens a speech that way? It's so weird. Of course I'm American. I mean, I couldn't be German and the President, right? That's ridiculous. They outlawed that kind of thing right?

My stomach hurts. There's just, so many fucking people out there. Like… Oh my god, hundreds of people. Could be thousands, I don't know. Was never a, count the amount of jelly beans in the jar kind of guy. I think I am going to shit myself.

I'm not ready for this. I'm not. What the hell was I thinking? Running for President. It was supposed to be a fucking joke, people! Do we not get jokes anymore?

Fuck! What have I done? Okay, yeah, I'm definitely going to shit myself. Feels like someone gave me an ipecac enema. I'm gonna end up shooting off of the toilet like one of those water pumped rockets.

Okay, Ethan. Get it together. You can't shit your pants on the first day. What would Obama do? Shit… What would Obama do? I have no idea. I don't watch the news, that shit is depressing. No, wait… What would Geroge Bush Junior do? Stumble his way through a speech, tell a fucked up joke, and spike the microphone. Alright, yeah, that might work.

Some guy is waving to me. Should I wave back? I point to myself as if asking, you want me? He looks at me like I'm retarded. Not a good start. I take those first steps towards the lights, behind the curtain, into the view of screaming crowds of people. Expectant, hungry people, all looking up to me to feed them. Feed them what?

You know what? Screw this whole, my fellow anglo saxons shit. I'm going out there like a boss.

I'm gonna tell a dick joke.

Less Than Human Interaction - Drama Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 20:27:00 +0000

Less Than Human Interaction

Drama Monologue

I've kind of forgotten what it was like to have friends. I communicate with people who say they are my friends, but that's it. Can you call a facebook friend a friend? If so, I got a ton of those.

I just wish it was easier you know? To get to know people, and god knows I've tried. I just get the feeling that people aren't interested in making new friends, like as if the idea of having someone else in your life who is asking for a slice of your free time is just too big a commitment. Social media becomes a sort of screening process for who is worth your time, and who is worth just one hundred and forty characters.

I swore I would never sign up for an account on one of those sites ever again, but… I go through these bouts of, I don't know, I guess it's depression. I just feel like I am so far away from everyone I know, so far removed from what I know, that all I want is to touch something real, and if I can touch it, or hear it's voice, I would at least like to pretend it's real.

I started drinking again. I said I wouldn't, I know, but it's the only thing that keeps me off the ledge anymore. I just wish I knew where to go from here. I'm on an island. I put myself here, for sure, but how do I get off?

It's like I'm waiting for someone to come swing by on a boat and pick me up. It doesn't happen that way. I know it. So you know what? That's it. I'm done feeling sorry for myself. I'm gonna get on the beach, jump in the water and start swimming for the mainland, because isolation is bad enough, but feeling sorry for yourself is even worse…

(Pause)

I wonder what's on Netflix?

Outrageous - Drama Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 15:29:00 +0000

O U T R A G E O U S

You say you have to lay people off. That’s terrible, and you look awful. You're really getting yourself worked up about it, huh?

It’s never easy to ruin someone’s life, is it?

Don’t look at me like that! You just stood here for an hour, and told me your sob story, then you stood here for another hour, and told two other managers about it. You stood here talking, and the guy you’re about to lay off is actually doing work. In the time it took you to stand here and bitch, I could have paid that guy for three hours of work. Maybe we should lay you off? Maybe we should take your pay check?

The hypocrisy is staggering. You stand here with your fake sadness. That puppy dog look. Meanwhile there is some guy working his ass off in the heat that is about to be told to gather his things, because today is his last day.

You come up to me, you tell me about your troubles. You tell me how this affects the departments. How it has put you in a terrible mood. How if we keep firing people, we can never train them right. Everything you say is about the bottom line, and in the same breath you curse the bottom line as if it has nothing to do with you.

What about them? What about their lives? What does this do to the morale of our employees to see people culled like cattle? What does it do to a family to hear their breadwinner was laid off?

But yeah, I hope you survive this terrible crisis. Now go do your fucking job.

Al Pacino's Speech From Glengarry Glen Ross - Drama Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 12:11:00 +0000

Going to post something a little different today. I couldn't find this out there in monologue form so I transcribed it from Al Pacino's awesome performance in his absolute destruction of Williamson in Glengarry Glen Ross.

You stupid fuckin cunt.

You, Williamson, I’m talking to you shit head. You just cost me six thousand dollars. Six thousand dollars and one Cadillac. That’s right. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it, asshole?

You’re fucking shit. Where did you learn your trade you stupid fucking cunt? You idiot. Whoever told you that you could work with men. Ohhh I’m gonna have your job shithead. I’m going downtown and I’m going to talk to Mitch and Murray. I’m going to Lemkin. I don’t care who’s nephew you are, who you know, who’s dick you’re sucking on, you’re going out. I swear to you, you’re going down!

Anyone in this office lives on his wits. I’ll be with you in a second.

What you are hired for is to help us. Does that seem clear to you? To help us. Not to fuck us up. To help men who are going out there to earn a living, you fairy, you company man. I’ll tell you something else, I hope you ripped the joint off because I can tell our friend here something that might help him catch you.

You want to learn the first rule, you’d know if you had ever spent a day in your life out there. You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is.

You fucking child.

Goodbye - Drama Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Sun, 15 Mar 2015 05:36:00 +0000

G O O D B Y E

By: Paul William Fassett

The last thing we said was goodbye and this is how things end. With that word so final, so bitter, so acute. Goodbye. Now all we see of each other are snapshot memories, text messages, pictures on facebook but none of it is real.

None of it. Not even our memories.

If I pursue, you'll pull away. You needed this space, this vast empty desert between us that births no life, no plants, no wild things. We're left with sweet untruths. Memories that never happened. Loves that never blossomed. One single night that was supposed to be so much more but never reached it's climax and now we crave it again. To see things through. To claw at each other like hungry flesh craving animals.

We want to relive the real thing so we can remember what it was really like instead of just romanticizing it.

But goodbye is final. Goodbye is... Farewell. How do you close the distance created by such a word?

Analyzing Monologues and Tips On Performing

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 15:40:00 +0000

I am going to do a different kind of monologue today. This monologue is going to explain my thought process when I write a scene as well as my thought process when I coach an actor to perform it for an audience.

Let's take a look at a dramatic monologue:

Oh but you are so perfect! You take every opportunity to tell me when I am wrong! You think I can't make decisions on my own! That I'm going to somehow end up on the street without daddy there to tell me how I fucked up.

Did you ever stop to think that maybe you don't have life nailed down the way you think you do? I mean, you know what they say about glass houses right?

You sit there every day, judging me. I come to you for help and all I get are those eyes, probing me. Have you ever looked at yourself? Asked yourself...

What the hell am I doing here? I mean, if the only purpose of life is to keep on living. To wake up in the morning, eat, sleep, repeat, then why do it!

Look. Will you do me a favor? Go out with me today. Just trust me, we’ll just, go for a walk or something. Down at the park. Just you and me. You don’t have to talk to anyone but me and hell. Maybe you’ll get a tan.

What do you say? Will you come?

My thoughts on an effective monologue and an effective performance are kind of one in the same. In order to understand a monologue you must understand the audience and how they will react to a given written word once performed.

I think a common mistake by actors is they see a given monologue and they believe that it is one note. I see good actors give an otherwise boring yet thoroughly convincing performance simply because they do not understand that they are not performing for the camera, but instead, the audience. They do not understand the emotional arc and how to manipulate their audience both physically and emotionally.

Now I know what you may be saying. "No shit Sherlock." You say that, yet you may be thinking this is simpler than it is. "Just act good." Please, it's not that simple.

A monologue is supposed to have an emotional arc, whether that arc be a build up to a fall, or a frantic roller-coaster of emotion with many dips and many highs and devastating lows.

Let's walk through an example real quick:

Anger:

Anger is a powerful emotion. It has impact on you, the person you are angry with, as well as the people around you who are not even involved in the conversation. Ask yourself what happens when you yell at someone. What do they do?

Most back away, reel back. Especially if you catch them off guard. So if you are in the audience, or behind a desk at a casting, and someone makes you reel back, surprised, that's powerful. You make them take notice. You shake them out of the mundane, day to day, one millionth: "I'm so sad, daddy why don't you like me." Monologues they hear every day.

I'm not going to be so bold as to say they don't see anger but when you can command their attention the whole way through by taking them on an emotional journey, then you have done your job. The next stop on the journey is the calming stage. You are coming down off your anger now, because you realize you aren't mad at him. You feel bad for him, but there is still some anger there and you can't just let go of it totally.

Calming:

Did you ever stop to think that maybe you don't have life nailed down the way you think you do? I mean, you know what they say about glass houses right?

You sit there every day, judging me. I come to you for help and all I get are those eyes, probing me. Have you ever looked at yourself? Asked yourself...

What happens when you whisper? When you speak low. People come forward, they lean in so they can hear what you have to say. You have their attention now only because you started off so explosively. Let's rate our anger on a scale of 1-10. A 1 is slightly irritated. A ten is spitting mad, your face red and crumpled. In the beginning you are at about an 8, a 9 if you are brave but by the time you get to calming, you have slowly brought your anger down to a five. When you get to the end of the calming state, you should be somewhere along the lines of a 3 to a 1.

In transit between these feelings should be a moment of silence. A moment of reflection for your character. Time to think about what you are going to say.

What this moment really is, is time for you to gather your emotion for the next scene. Whether you use the Meisner technique, or you pull your emotions from an event or person in your past, this is your moment to gather it.

Surprise anger:

What the hell am I doing here? I mean, if the only purpose of life is to keep on living. To wake up in the morning, eat, sleep, repeat, then why do it!

So now that our audience is leaning in to hear what we have to say, we hit them in the face with a 6 maybe a 7 if you can get there on the anger scale again. Once again you have them reeling back emotionally from the onslaught you are hitting them with. Once again, you are slowly bringing all of this anger down to the moment of emotional bareness. Here is the finale.

So while you are working your way through the anger scale, tears should be being brought forth. In order to do this, your anger must be about something real. Something or someone from your life that you can associate to this. Once the tears start coming , let them flow. Do not try to control it. Sob if you have to. Many people try to control the emotion. Do not. Allow the emotion to control you.

Your goal is emotional bareness.

Sincerity:

I get sad watching you. Sitting there, watching the world pass by in fucking…

Emotion has you chocked up, tripping over your words. Look for elipses. They are either lapses in the characters train of thought, or they are tripping themselves up.

Sound bites, on the news, while the real world is out there happening every day without you. All this time. All this pain. Just avoiding life.

This is the moment of sincerity of emotion. You have about 10 seconds max to transition from anger, to sadness. Preferably with tears. Sadness is equal to anger in a lot of ways. Anger is an expression of hopelessness at times. The hopelessness in this case of watching someone you love waste away. Wasting the potential of life because they feel they are incapable of doing anything worthwhile.

Every point in this scene should be emphasized. Pauses used to gather thoughts and emotions should be inserted to increase the tension. When you pause between thoughts, what does the audience do? They listen, they lean in. They wait, impatient, for the next word. Use that impatience to increase the tension. The question that this peice asks of the viewer is: Will the characters come to understand and accept each other for their flaws... Well, will they? That depends on you. Depends on how you chose to play the next part.

So, for sake of argument, let's say that while you are angry, the sadness should show through. The voice should be calling out in anger, but the face should show the despair you feel over feeling helpless.

What is the audience doing? If we have taken them on this roller-coaster ride, they should be right there with us, wanting to share in our sadness.

At the end of this scene we have a moment to think once again. To wipe our tears, maybe even laugh at ourselves. Look at the mess we've mad of ourselves. We haven't cried like this since we were kids. You take a deep breath and look at the man, wasting away and say:

Hopeful:

What do you say? Will you come?

You have just taken your audience on a journey. Led them through a story that has an end. A complete three act within just a snippet of time. They still have questions. What did the father say? Did they go for their walk? Did they come to understand each other?

These questions are good, it shows they were paying attention.

So what is essential to a good performance? A knowledge of how the audience will react when confronted by a particular sound, volume, or emotional cue. How do you sharpen this knowledge?

That will be a topic for next time.

I hope you enjoyed this entry and that this helped open your mind a little.

Knock Out! Part One - Novella

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 03:23:00 +0000

K N O C K O U T !

P A R T O N E

BY Paul William Fassett

Damn this mental block. It's come from working on the same thing over and over and then compounding the problem with never leaving the house. I spent the last year, maybe more just sitting around, waiting for inspiration to strike me but that's just not how it works. Inspiration isn't like a living thing. It's something you force into existence by getting out there. Talking to people. I love to be around people, not just one though. I need many people. When I am around just one, things get awkward. We run out of things to talk about after about fifteen minutes and then I spend the rest of the time trying to come up with small talk to keep the whole thing going.

I guess I should describe myself, give you a mental picture of who I am. I've got average length hair. A couple inches on the top, short on the sides. It's curly and dark brown. I used to try and straighten it when it was long but whenever it would rain it would just get curly again and frizzy. Frizzy was the worst. Made me look like I had an afro. I tried everything from hairspray to putting corn oil in it. Yes, cooking oil. I expended a lot of energy trying to pretend I was something that I wasn't, that now that I am older I don't know who I am. I guess I am average with a few exceptions. I have a uni-brow. I pluck it of course but on days that I forget it's very obvious and sometimes I go weeks without plucking it and don't realize until someone makes a comment.

I work at a restaurant for people who want to seem fancy but don't want to spend a whole lot of money to prove it. It's called The Hunter's Lodge and there are tons of pictures of hunting dogs and guys in those Sherlock Holmes hats looking off into the distance with a rifle in hand. I went from being a busboy to a fry-cook in a year. Not exactly a move up but it was slightly more money, so I guess there's that.

I was walking back home from work that night, because my car was permanently fucked, costing me about four hundred dollars a month to maintain. It was currently sitting in a permanent parking spot in my apartment complex and I had to get the tags updated just to keep the landlord from towing it.

So yeah, my life was pretty much in the shitter. The only thing I had to look forward to was boxing. I paid thirty-five dollars a month for a locker and the privilege to take all of my aggression out on a heavy bag. I never trained with anyone there because the private lessons were stupid expensive. That's about half a weeks pay. Not that I would have wanted to train seriously. The idea of being punched in the head for a living is the last thing I would call a good time.

I guess that brings me to the event. My apartment is nothing to write home about. It's about four-fifty a month and less than that in square footage. I had some noisy neighbors too. Real rioters. The guys below me blast their music at a decible just shy of a jet engine and all hours of the night too. The girl living next door doesn't make a whole lot of noise though she is coming and going at all hours of the night. Anytime someone closes their doors around here it vibrates our paper mache walls like a gun shot going off.

That brings me to the trouble. The whole ordeal that's got me tied to a chair in some guys fucking basement.

For Roger

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 19:04:00 +0000

F O R R O G E R

I have to break with tradition and post something that is not a monologue today. Just recently something happened that shook me up. Made me question life.

I have been reading recently about MRA and MGTOW and the philosophy behind Men Going Their Own Way and one of the topics was how men feel trapped in life. My research goes back to late last year but all of that research didn't really set in until my partner came home from her acting class last Monday saying: “You won't believe what happened.”

I was confused at first. I thought maybe she meant someone else. Maybe even got the name wrong. When she repeated herself, said the exact same words and the same name, I searched her face for signs that this was some kind of joke. So she said it again.

“Roger killed himself.”

The man in me didn't know how to react. It wanted to cry but I hesitated and questioned why. I only met him once, at a Christmas party. He was the kind of guy that was always smiling. Infectiously positive and upbeat. I talked to him the entire night, I mean almost exclusively. He was just the kind of person I liked to be around and now, that's it. I won't get another chance. I won't get to know more about him. He's gone.

We would all have to start referring to him in the past tense now. Remember how Roger used to smile all the time and how he used to make us smile?

Just hours before it happened he was on facebook posting about his favorite 80's movies and in a couple hours he was loading a gun. It just didn't make sense, so it shook me. Shook me hard. I couldn't sleep, I started feeling anxious. I mean, I only met the guy once. What was my deal?

I guess it was the question that bothered me the most. What could posses a man to kill himself? Against all the inbred survival instincts a man has that fight to keep him alive, someone could still do it. The thought that at any moment, for any man, life can suddenly close in around you and become too much to bare. So you elect to end it... Men are the majority of suicides in this country and in fact the world. What is happening to men when they feel like they have no one they can turn to? Are we so cold to each other as men, so distant to our feelings, so dismissive of baring our pain to others that we feel like the only alternative is to cease to exist?

It scares me. Makes me feel my own mortality. Forces me to confront the pain of the people who knew him even better than I, who must now either deal with the loss, or pretend it doesn't hurt them. His death is making me ask myself: “What is the point of all this? Why do we exist?”

It's not a question to take lightly but yet so many people do. To their detriment.

It's strange... You can always Monday morning quarterback this kind of thing. I stay up nights now, wondering if I could have done something to prevent it. When I look back on the day I met him, I can swear I could sense a strangeness about him. Conjuring up some kind of sadness that I just ignored. Maybe there was. Maybe it's just hindsight but I still wonder to myself; What if?

The fact of the matter is we were having fun and he was a fun guy to be around. Easy going and easy to talk to. If that's the last memory I have of him, so be it.

It's a good memory at least.

For resources and help:

http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/getinvolved/reasons.aspx

The Erosion Of A Man - Drama Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 20:51:00 +0000

T H E E R O S I O N O F A M A N

BY Paul William Fassett

You call me weak. Maybe you're right. You all think there's something wrong with me. You always have. Maybe you're right. Even as a kid. Let me finish. Even when I was little.

I said let me finish!

You fucking people... You women wear men down. Chip away at us like a river through a fucking canyon and it's not enough that I'm worn away to dust, you keep taking and taking and you make it look like it's my duty to give.

It started with mom. She did a number on me. That evil bitch of a teacher I had when I was in fourth grade. You remember her? Mom swallowed every stupid thing that woman said about me. She said that she thought I was disabled. She meant retarded. Mom came home and told you three and that was my new nickname. Retard.

Laugh. Go ahead and laugh. It's funny. I grew up thinking there was something wrong with me. I always second guessed myself. Looked to you and Mom for approval and here I am, still begging for it.

I'm glad she died and don't give me that: "She's your mother." bullshit. An asshole is an asshole, regardless of title.

Remember my Kung Fu teacher? The one with the toupee? Mom made me take a martial art because she was tired of me getting picked on. You remember how you used to fuck with me Sherry? You remember how you would pretend to be sparring with me when I would get home, slap box me and shit. Knock me fucking silly. Embarrass me.

Well we were at the dojo and everyone had left so me and Sifu worked together on my forms because I had a belt test coming. Mom called and asked: "You ready to go?" I thought for a minute. Do I want to go home? Because Sherry is going to start beating on me, Mom is going to lecture me about reading more and the rest of you are just going to gouge away, so I said fuck it. I'll stay.

We worked on my forms, and he stepped down on my thigh so I would get deeper into a horse stance and when I couldn't get any lower he would grab the muscle and say: "Flex." but he didn't need to tell me to flex because I was already tense. Everytime he'd grab me my body would seize up. Soon I relaxed and he relaxed and when he asked me to pull my pants down so he could look at my legs, I didn't think anything of it. When he asked me to take off my underwear, I knew something was wrong but he was strong and I was weak so I didn't disobey. I kept thinking: "Stop thinking so much. This is some kind of test, just go with it."

Before I knew it I was lying on my stomach, trying not to cry, clinching my teeth, imagining I was somewhere warm, that the stabs of pain were an ocean wave washing over my back, that my tears were just spray from the ocean bubbles popping on my face. I learned that night that if you concentrate hard enough you can create pressure in your ears and the world sounds like the ocean, so I concentrated and his grunts went into a tunnel and it was like I was being tossed around inside a wave, unable to breath, suffocating, every tiny breath of air making me more aware of the pain.

I passed out at some point and I just remember being in the car, a gentle reminder and a hand on my knee telling me that no one could know what happened. I bled. I bled for days and you made fun of me for being in the bathroom so long. Said I was jerking off. You had no idea because you never looked! You never asked. You didn't care...

All the guys in my class used to joke about Sifu. They knew what he used to do to other kids. They thought it was funny. Something to joke about in the locker room. I read in the newspaper they arrested him recently and I cried. I cried for an hour, sitting on the floor, clutching the paper, all the while feeling guilty for feeling like that. Because who was I to cry? I let him do it!

Some kid spoke out, against all of his better instincts, against all his fears of ridicule and now the bastard is in jail.

I keep thinking to myself, why didn't I tell you, tell mom? If I told someone, they would have stopped him. Put him away. I let him get away with it, so all those kids he raped, I helped him get away with it by being silent. I was complicit.

You helped him too, by eroding me to an emotional nub, you are just as guilty as I am.

The Camping Trip - Villain Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:18:00 +0000

T H E C A M P I N G T R I P

BY: Paul William Fassett

Yeah, my wife gets around. She gotten around to just about every house on the block. That's why I don't sleep with her anymore. It would be like raw dogging it with a prostitute. Don't know what kinds of exotic STDs you could get from that thing. As if it weren't bad enough my kids tore that thing up coming out of her, now I got every guy with half a hard on wearing her out like hobo with a dumpster coat. Don't look so surprised Brad. Everyone knows my wife has been sleeping around. The neighborhood knows it. I know it. You know it...

I can tell by the look on your face you're angry. I would be angry to if someone was bad mouthing my girlfriend.

Now you look confused. Well, allow me to clear things up for you, Brad. You have been fucking my wife.

You think that I didn't know? You thought this camping trip was your idea? You thought we would come out here, act like best pals, and you would break the news to me gently? You might have even prepared yourself for a little fist fight. We would wrestle around, hit each other a couple times and at the end we would hug it out. Best friends forever, bros before hoes!

Sit the fuck down!

I'm the one with the axe, Brad. So listen.

Did you think I was just going to let you run away with my wife, live in my house, raise my kids! And I wouldn't do anything about it! I thought you knew me Brad. Hah! I thought we were close.

Don't run away Brad. You're just making this hard on yourself!

Penicunt - Comedy Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 04:18:00 +0000

P E N I C U N T

By: Paul William Fassett

Penis... Let the word swirl around in your head like mouth wash, then spit it out.

What a sterile sounding word, right? I prefer cock!

Wait, that came out wrong. I mean it's a word with a little punch is all. You can almost imagine your dick with a feather mohawk and a beak clawing the eyes out of some other cock. It's a masculine word. That's the problem with society today. People are becoming walking pussies by words that are supposed to describe their fun bits. Even words like cunt. You think cock has punch, try calling someone a cunt. That's like a hard right hook to the jaw. Words create visuals, especially the ones people are afraid of. When I hear cunt, I think of a huge pot hole in the street filled with oily water, surrounded by dead birds.

Pussy though... Now that's a word I can get behind. Like a fluffy cloud floating in a big blue sky, all alone, made yellow and orange by a low hanging sun.

When I think of vagina, though, I don't imagine a warm wet playground like I would like... No. I think of some obscure village in Romania that raises sheep whose number one export are wool pelvic wigs. It's sterile, too clinical a word to be sexy.

Don't believe me? Then let me prove it. Close your eyes for just a moment and imagine this. Your girlfriend is laying on her back, naked, ready to... Receive you... She pulls you closer and whispers into your ear: “I want you to insert your penis into my vagina.”

I think it's safe to assume you would be a half mast sailboat floudering in the water hoping for a wind to take you far far away. So the point is, political correctness is great and all, but leave my genitals alone, unless you plan on knocking them around a bit.

Just don't call it a fucking penis.

Null Object Pattern - Dark Villain Monologue

noreply@blogger.com (Paul William Fassett) — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 21:23:00 +0000

This is a snippet from a story I am working on called Null Object Pattern. Works as a sort of weird monologue and should hold a casting directors attention.

N U L L O B J E C T P A T T E R N

BY: Paul William Fassett

You don't matter. I wouldn't shed a tear for you no more than I would shed a tear for the millions that died in the Holocaust. Now I don't deny it was a tragedy, I'm not a complete monster. There's just no emotional attachment there. I didn't know anyone that died there so how could I weep?

After all, people cry more for dead pets than they do the deaths of people they never met.

Just yesterday I was coming home from work and through my windshield I could see a bunny, or a rabbit, (hard to tell the difference). It was white, with pools of blood gathering at its matted fur. It must have gotten hit by a car maybe, I don't know. It was limping, bloodied, up to the curb dragging an injured leg behind it.

The curb was too high for it to climb but it tried nonetheless. Over and over again. Failing each time. Smacking up against the curb flatly, then falling back until it finally just laid there, breathing heavily, ready to accept death.

But death never seemed to come...

It just kept on breathing, and breathing, and blinking, and breathing, and breathing. Blink, expand, contract, expand, contract, blink...

I watched unable to move, unable to think of what I could do, aside from watch and feel sadness for the pitiful little thing. His blinking became slower, his breathing shallow, until its body shuddered with a coughing fit. Slowly its chest rose, and deflated. Mouth dropped open, eyes stared ceaselessly at me, as if pleading. Pleading for help, or comfort, as if I should run from my car, cradle its head and shout up to the dark sky:

“No! Not this one! You can't have him!”

I didn't posses the power to do anything, and it didn't matter... It was a dead thing, and didn't matter...