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November 2015

First impressions of Fallout 4 (totally not a review)

I’m a little ashamed to say I’m on my second play through. Not because I have no life but because when I got into work, one of my friends told me he was on his fourth and I was dismayed.

I’m gonna try and refrain from fangirling too hard because that makes me sick and it just isn’t me. And this is by far a perfect game but its pretty freaking close.

The game itself didn’t take too long to install and load up although I wished I would have just downloaded it so I could have had my own private mini midnight launch instead of waiting feverishly for the post and deluding myself that it might have come a day earlier like that one time ages ago I may have imagined. Although obviously I fucked it up and had to reinstall it because I let it download the update mid installation so it was all installing from the net and I couldn’t see the entire loading bar which drove me nuts so I had to reinstall for sanities sake.

But when it was finally loaded, I started and found myself oddly gripped by the opening live action cinematic and then created my character of which I based on David Morrissey’s depiction of the Governor from Walking Dead. And before you jump down my throat calling me a philistine for using that version and not the fu manchu moustachioed comic and novel version (all of which I’ve read exhaustively, except the latest novel I think), I say fuck you David Morrissey is better looking, face it.
I think his face and his depiction of the Governor is also a lot more rounded and likeable and I was actually sad to see the show stick with the comic storyline and his death, when they went off the rails mid season and used the books a little I thought he might have been remodelled into an ongoing character and that would have been more interesting than just sticking to the source material with a few deviations.
I think his character was perfect for the character displayed by the voice actor for the male protagonist in fallout 3 Brian Delaney. I was initially sceptical about the voiced protagonist as the previous games had silent protagonists and voiced protagonists in rpgs like mass effect can get a little annoying and break immersion slightly because it feels less like you are the main character and more like you’re watching the main character do stuff.
But I have to say it really sold the immersion and the emotion at the start of the game, the game didn’t kid me and expect me to care about the main characters wife or kid (like in fallout 3 where you’re supposed to care about your fictional dad played by Liam Neeson) but I was very aware purely through the voice actor’s acting that the main character did care about his wife and child and that sort of sold the emotion of the game.
And when the ‘event’ happens, I really felt like someone who had been tossed into this hostile landscape, whose home and everything he’s known had been destroyed and had to sleep on the floor of truck stops office while it rained and radiation clouds blew through with only a dog to keep him company. It really felt morose and beautiful and that you had to live another day to get revenge and to rebuild a life for yourself and make something beautiful out of all the ugliness that surrounded you and I really loved it.
Despite that, I was proved right about the downsides of the voiced protagonists, mainly and I see a lot of chatter about this, it’s almost impossible to be evil.
Now I suppose you could just kill everyone but its hardly enslaving people and eating babies a la Fallout 3 is it. And the evil dialogue options just sound angsty and mean in Brian’s voice, he just seems too nice a guy to do all that fucked up shit. So twinned with my David Morrissey Governor smooth talking gunslinger character, he came off less monstrously evil and more misunderstood monster. Less Count Dracula more Frankenstein’s monster.
And to be honest I really dug that, good and evil are so subjective so losing the karma system and making good and evil more ambiguous seemed like a step in the right direction. If anything the karma system just evolved into the companion approval system, so depending on which character you pick to come with you, determines what you want to say or do to impress them. But again not one companion is Hannibal fucking lector, where would be the practicality of that? Every character, evil, cruel, vindictive or not has to be in some way likeable or redeemable so that you enjoy their character and want to follow their progression and I think Bethesda delivers on that well.
The factions are also really interesting and have their own sort of style; on my first play through I sided with the minutemen and set about uniting the settlements of the commonwealth, basically creating a people’s army. I don’t know what it is about this game that’s different from elder scrolls, in Skyrim and Oblivion I really didn’t see a problem with joining the mages guild and using the magic I learned for a little bit of thieving on the side. Or joining the fighter’s guild and then turning those talents to assassination, but in F4 the factions are a little more involved, a little more compelling. I couldn’t swear allegiance to the minutemen and then swear an oath of service to the Brotherhood of steel, it really feels like you’re either one or other and each faction is heavily tied into the main plot of the game unlike in Elder scrolls where each faction is its own quest line in a way. I can’t say which I like more to be honest; I think they both have merit.
The game play is great, the exploration (which is always the crux of rpgs like this) is top notch, the anal crafting is minecraft levels of addictive, I literally had to pull myself away from it just to actually play the game main game it’s so intoxicatingly addictive.
I think they really nailed the levelling and perk system too; it’s perfect for someone like me that likes to create a lot of distinct characters and loathes everyman grinders who spend ages making a character that’s good at literally everything. I’m sitting her playing my talker, small guns character and I can’t wait to start a big guns character who swings bats at people, now I’m playing that character and I can’t wait to play my slashy stealthy character who uses silenced weapons and crafts his own explosive traps.
But the game as a lot of people have said; is not really an rpg, the dialogue wheel is a little stunted and the voice actor does make it seem like you’re further away from the actions than you’d like.
Overall, I’m enthralled by it, I want to get lost in it, I almost feel like I rush it just to try and absorb everything I can get, I want to experience everything and I can’t wait for dlc.

 

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Je suis Jeffrey

I did this strip which the lovely Florian brought to life after The Charlie Hebdo attacks, obviously because of the play on the famous slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’. I thought it was as good a time as any talk to talk about freedom of speech and the clash of the secular and religious worlds. A controversial subject but I’ll try really hard to put a dick joke in there somewhere.

I’m basically an atheist, I say basically because I distance myself from the mainstream movement of atheism+ and all this political correct feminazi new age atheism that has nothing at all to do with scepticism and is in fact a lot worse than most religious doctrines have at least had hundreds if not thousands of years to hammer out basic principles whereas atheism+ is a clusterfuck of entitled knowitall morons who want to preach their navel-gazing to the world.

So as an atheist a couple of years back I was really anti-religious and I joined all these lame little facebook groups to argue with religious folk for fun and just to sharpen my claws. I don’t really do that anymore because sjws and feminists are much more fun to troll and you don’t really get anywhere with religious people. There will always be religion, there will always be people who believe and there’s no changing that and arguing with them just sends them further down the rabbit hole I find. But feminism and sjwism is a different story, you can’t save the most diehard of the zealots but the people on the outside looking in can be saved, there are undecided people in the soup of the left and the middle and those souls can be directed away from the train wreck of social justice.

In as much as the radical right are laughed at because we on the left dominate popular culture, the radical left are handled with kid gloves. Essentially the moderates on the left by remaining silent, tacitly supporting, or even attacking the right just for being right or the Christian right just for being Christian, gives these ideologues the consent they need to wage their ideological war. Radicals as always hide behind the moderates and the principles they stand for so the extremists on the left will preach the same things as any other liberal, for gay rights and equality and between the sexes and freedom of speech then when your back is turned they’re propping an ideology that runs completely counter to those liberal principles because they’re afraid of being called racist if they don’t.

Yeah you weren’t sure when I was getting to Islam, well there you go, threw you a motherfucking curveball didn’t I? Pow right in the kissa!

That’s right, the problem with the left right now is that they’re too tolerant, to a point where they tolerate intolerance, they will happily attack a Christian bakery for not wanting to make a lesbian wedding cake but they will prop up and even try to justify the religious ideology that is leaving bodies all over Europe.

The cake thing is a great illustration of the differences between an Islamic country and a Christian country, biggest problem gay people face in a Christian country; Have to travel down the road to a different bakery. Biggest problem facing gay people in Islamic countries; trying to avoid being thrown off buildings.

I’m by no means defending Christianity, I’m just stating a fact, if I was gay I would much rather live in America or the up and than anywhere in the middle east.

I’m just so fucking sick of having these atheist apologists attacking Christianity to defend Islam. I see this everywhere, we talk about the violent terror attacks of Islam and they’ll throw stats at you showing that only 5% of terrorists attacks are from Islam or they’ll talk about the Christian crusades. And if you ask why aren’t these non-Islamic terror attacks talked about mainstream media they’ll put on their tinfoil hat and say the media refuses to report on them and instead just focuses on Islam to stoke up tensions. Which could be true but it’s a conspiracy theory, it can’t be proved either way so speculating on it is fruitless.
The fact of the matter is these attacks happen and unlike the crusades they’re happening right now, the difference between Christianity and Islam is that Christianity left the dark ages in the dark ages. Islam is bringing it back every other day.
These arguments don’t hold up, should Christianity be held to account for the crusades in the present and have that example used to justify Islamic violence in the presence. It’s like Jew beating a German to death because of the holocaust and siding with the Jew because at some point his relatives who are long dead were oppressed by the long dead relatives of that German so it’s ok. Or in the past the ancestors of that German were Vikings that burnt down a Saxon village so the English can now burn down Berlin for fun.

We live in the here and now, the use of these arguments are the manipulation of solipsistic sophists who only care about being perceived as on the right side of history but have no idea where right is because of their cultural and moral relativism and complete narcissism.

Political correctness is a shield that ideologies that cannot be defended with logic and reason hide behind political correctness is the enemy of freedom of expression. They use terms like ‘Islamophobia’ to characterise their dissenters not as rational actors reaction to a violent bigoted and hateful ideology but as mentally ill bigots themselves who should be more tolerant of other cultures and stop hating on brown people.
So again for the Ben Afflecks of the world, Islam is not a race, they’re an ideology and like all ideologies they should be put under scrutiny. Muslims are not an oppressed minority; they’re one of the fastest growing religions in the world.
Not that I’m saying in any way that that justifies the oppression of individual Muslims, they’re not all terrorists either, there are extremists in all religions. But I won’t go so far as to be a cultural relativist and ignore something which should be apparent to everyone, there are no jainist terrorists so there must be a problem inherent in Islam and a reformation is sorely needed to bring them into the 21st century kicking and screaming if necessary because as it stands their ideology is not compatible with western values and at the end of the day it’s the moderates who will suffer all round.

Ok rant over. Sort of an incoherent brain fart but it was good to get it out, my head feels lighter.

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Green Sunday Chapter 4 Everyday is like Sunday (Raw)

Another excerpt from the next chapter of Green sunday. I’m losing a lot of hours in the day, still under the power armoured boot of fallout 4 and this new workout is really killing me so I didn’t have much time to do anything else today but copy and paste this excerpt. Well I hope you like it and as always if you want to read the rest of the chapter you by going on inkitt http://www.inkitt.com/stories/25507/chapters/4

~
On the edge of town, halogen lights burned cold with a tinny buzzing sound that was both soothing and nauseating with a hangover.  Early morning was shaking its head and wondering what happened, it was dark, the air was thick and electrifying. A gas station sign flickered on and off, it was empty, a dead time, the cold concrete forecourt stood bare and desolate and dirty and drab, cricket sounds etcetera etcetera.

The stale, sterile light inside the gas station, lit everything up with an off colour sickly blue tint. It was just a small town gas station like you’d see in any crappy slasher movie. A one story affair with minimart inside stocked with all the essential corn and meat based snacks and energy drinks that turned your piss green and soupy.

“Daryl! You better not be sleeping again, anyone else steals any gas I’m gonna take it out of your ass!” A booming cigar scarred voice came from somewhere in the back, through the thin corkboard walls of the gas station. A young man with his feet up on the counter slid the magazine covering his face off one eye and opened it casually, before fixing his chair to the upright position and surreptitiously letting the magazine fall into his half cupped hands giving an ever so effortless yawn.

“Shut up you old fuck, I’m still living, nobody out here” He said in a semi raised voice which he then quickly lowered to address himself “Gotta be four in the morning, no one needs gas in this goddamn town no more, everyone driving those piece of shit rollerskate cars they got”.

Daryl rearranged himself in his seat and got as comfortable as he could get with his eyes open, reclining only slightly. Pausing to look around and take a whiff of the cool night air cut with the smell of disinfectant on top of latent smells of puke and piss with a definitive lingering scent of really cheap booze that would burn your gut worse than drinking straight from the gas pump. But it was probably cheaper to drink from the bottle.

He took a second and resigned himself to the fact nothing was going on and the roads were dead and dark and he rationalized a resting of the eyes. Gradually letting his heavy lids close and become hazy. Taking last winking glances at the transparent glass doors of the minimart entrance. Just as he hit the point of no return with his dozing the doors parted soundlessly and then closed again quickly giving him pause to whether he really saw anything.

His eyes opened and rolled to the attention position as if waking from a coma, he could have sworn he saw someone come in. He strained to hear, slight padding damp noises, a stray wondering off the street drawn by the smell of stale complex carbohydrates.

He straightened up into his seat and stepped back into his body he was on the cusp of drifting off from and looked around. “Err can I help you?”

A rustling sound, cans rattling; instant foreboding crossing the brow beneath his trucker cap, a dry damp grease formed where he rested the magazine while he was sleeping and sweat rolls off it now as he feels the urgency of being alone. “Hello?”

Sounds of gumming and biting, ripping, crinkling, a dog for sure, he curved around the counter picking up a tire thumping bat from under his seat. Walking briskly full of action around the front of the counter until reaching the door at which point all his nervous energy left him with a cough and he became lifeless and limp trying desperately to hold the bat firmly in a clammy palm, dangling by his side like a twig.

“Who’s there?” Daryll called out like all those other clichés in the movies, and he cursed himself for falling into that trap but a new sudden fear of the unknown twisted in his guts now and he felt compelled to ask.

A scuttling sound of bare feet on linoleum, sent a cold shiver up his spine and a dry gob of spittle down his throat, the noise got deeper in the back of the store and he felt his feet dragging him listlessly in the direction of the sound, the bat swinging at his shins languidly.

“Hello” He called out again groping at the wet walls of his sanity trying to come up with any number of reasonable conclusions to this event; a dog, a cat, a racoon, a crazy homeless guy, a drunk chick, some hungry pothead or all of the above.

He turned the snack isle slowly, which was oddly paired with feminine hygiene products. He rested his shaking hand on the side of the metal shelves and forced himself to look around it from where the noise emanated. His body felt numb and pulses of adrenaline coursed through his brain and sent shocks all the way down to his fingertips.

Hunched over a small mound of assorted snacks and raw or semi-raw meat products, he saw the naked back of what appeared to be a child. His skin looked cold and drawn and wet, like a fish or a lizard almost. He was so pale he looked almost blue and he hunched over the food making soft sopping gnashing sounds.

“Hey! What’s going on here, you’re gonna pay for all that” Darryl said beginning to trail off at the end as some of his strength came back briefly, breathing in, pumping up his chest and breathing it all out again.

The child almost without turning lurched at Daryll, who with a sudden surge of nervous strength kicked him to the ground again dropping his bat with the feral rush of energy. The child staggered back and twitched frantically on the ground, his mouth frothing with a pink and red substance that came from all the openings on his face, deep red veins rising up on his cheeks and forehead. His teeth exposed, with the look as if they’d been cut on bone or razor wire, his eyes rolled back and forth in his head, cheetos crumbs stuck with blood to his fingers as they scratched at the linoleum floor trying for some traction like a beetle knocked on its back.

~

Thanks for reading and again if you want to read more you can at the following link;
http://www.inkitt.com/stories/25507/chapters

 

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Dexter vs Dexter

As usual I have nothing more than a topic in my head to start this semi-literate ramble brainfart type endeavour and the longer I stay away from fallout 4 the harder it gets to breath. But I really enjoyed the dexter books hence the name of the blog. I also really liked the show and I wanted a somewhat side by side comparison, keeping the spoilers to a minimum.

The first book is called ‘Darkly Dreaming Dexter’ and it’s essentially the basis for the first season of the tv show. Which I shamefully admit I watched before I started reading the books because I’m a pleb, there you go, happy now?

I do this a lot in fact, I watched the walking dead before I read the comics and then I read the novels but the comics came first so that doesn’t count. I watched the silent hill film before I even knew they were games, the same with the resident evil series. So all around I’m a big media pleb, ain’t life grand?

After the first season of the show it gets a little squiffy. In the first book it wraps up nicely, ok I lied there are gonna be some spoilers. But in the show it wraps up a little skew because in the show, he kills the ice truck killer but in the book he lets him live and he recurs later on in the fourth and fifth book and becomes somewhat of a pivotal character.

The book is a lot more morally grey since he doesn’t actually have inner conversations with his dead adoptive father Harry and instead communes with a supernatural entity inside himself which he calls the ‘Dark Passenger’. He alludes somewhat to this in the show but it’s done a little cack-handedly in my opinion because it’s brushed off as if it’s an addiction whereas the book goes full fahrenheit/indigo prophecy syndrome with fucking demons and voodoo and ancient Babylonian gods.

… Which I actually rather liked but someone obviously conked that on the head because it never really goes back to that in the book and the show gives it a wide berth for probably good reason, it begs beliefs I guess. Too tinfoil hat, Alex Jonesy I guess, I thought it was fun but I guess that was a rabbit hole that might have taken the books up the garden path and since I really liked the following books and I’m still reading them into book seven tells me it wasn’t all that bad.

The first things you notice between the books and the show, in the show he’s this bad ass judo serial killer who kicks the entire ass all the time for some reason. It was cool but in the books he is less John Wayne and more John Cusack… in con air, the film where he didn’t do much.
It’s not that I don’t like him being more vulnerable but I feel like a lot of the time he doesn’t get to be the hero of his own story and after like the tenth time he’s faced death but been saved at the last minute it gets a little annoying.
I mean I don’t begrudge it for using a device like that, I try my fucking damnedest to avoid that ‘ooh he’s about to be killed but then someone saves him at the last minute’ thing, but it’s like literally an unavoidable tension building device. I can’t really think of one of the books from the series where it doesn’t happen except the first now I strain my brain.

Another massive difference is the scope of the book, in the show we follow all these other characters like Batista and his sister Deborah as they have their own arcs but in the book it’s a first person narrative from Dexter’s perspective so these characters become window decoration. And this may sound like a criticism but when you’ve got a TV show about a blood spatter expert by day serial killer by night, I don’t really give a shit about how his friend’s love life is going unless it somehow connects to the serial killy stuff you know, it’s just fluff, useless TV show filler nonsense and the book cuts through it like crate paper to get to the good shit.

That being said the structure of a TV show meant that he had to kill someone per episode and the show handled that quite nicely, a little like the freak of the week supernatural/Buffy style. But in this case the monster was human. But even supernatural couldn’t keep that up and the books don’t even really try to have a murder per however many chapters. On average he’ll killer around one or two people a book, which is perfect because it really allows for a lot of emotion and tension and it really gets into the right frame of mind, it’s deliciously descriptive without making you want to gag like American Psycho levels of gore. It’s subtly macabre, casually sick and twisted, I love it ha-ha.

I think the biggest difference is that Dexter’s kids are fully fleshed out characters… somewhat in the book, whereas in the show they’re just flaccid annoying extras, in the book they have inner workings of their own. And spoiler alert, although there evil father isn’t in the books, what he left behind inside them is enough to make them interesting as they turn out to be just like Dexter. That being said, Lindsay hasn’t really gone into that aspect of their characters yet. Dexter has promised to ‘show them the ropes’ but he never seems to get around to it. He’s always so wrapped up in himself and his work and his ‘other work’ to really take the time and I can’t help empathising with that I guess.
Dexter is an animal and he deals with things as they come I guess, his own self interest and self preservation will always trump training his foster kids how to murder people.
In terms of where the story is going I think that’s going to be a big future problem because spoilers, his brother, the ice truck killer seems to take a keen interest in the kids and there may be a clash of who’s wings they’ll be taken under, Dexter being discernibly the lesser evil.

I genuinely love and get swept up in these books, I suppose in a scary way I and Dexter (Jeff Lindsay the author) have a similar inner voice and I love his style and his wit and the more and more I read the more influenced I get by his dark wit.

That’s fangirling enough for one blog haha, thanks or reading/.

 

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Green Sunday Chapter 3 Step right up (Raw)

Yeah you got me, too fucking busy playing Fallout 4 to do a proper blog so I just copied and pasted a chapter from my zombie novel, but come on, this game is like fucking crack, it’s better than just completely dropping off the grid like Jessie Ventura.

“I despise your killing, and raping”
“You’re… despicable”

“Are you, my judge?”

“It’s just… you should be punished”
“I’m going to chop off your arm, so are you ready?”

TJ sat on his bed half watching a kung fu movie he had on in the background, trying to learn kung fu from osmosis. He polished his sword, checking for minor imperfections left by the douche in the knife shop, before wiping it off. He lovingly slid it back in the sheathe placing it gently in a red trunk at the bottom of his bed.

TJ’s bedroom was the standard unashamed man-child room every man secretly desired but had taken away from them at some point by age or shame or usually a woman. TJ seemed immune to all; happy to like the things he’d loved all his life with only a slight sour tinge of regret rolling around on his tongue before he swallowed it down with some mountain dew.

His room was a fairly boxy affair in a reasonably sized two story house. He chose the room when he was a kid because it had one of those cool sloping roofs that had what was like a little skylight window that let in all the moonlight. And he could put posters on it too.

Movie and anime posters adorned the walls in no particular order from Dragonball z pride of place above his tv and ps4 to Cowboy Bebop over his bed the one where Faye Valentine had her ass facing out in those little yellow hot pants. Full Metal Alchemist brotherhood, Samurai Champloo and Attack on Titan and Berserk, his door hiding a slightly cute pink Elfen Lied calendar that was way out of date. He had a really cool Gantz wall hanging on the wall behind his desktop monitor that his mother sneered at, the tight black uniforms she thought looked sort of ‘bondagey’ she commented once. To which TJ, reddened of cheek quickly informed her that it wasn’t the case and it was his room and she should always knock before entering.

Then you had the various zombie related paraphernalia; you had your walking dead shirts and cap, Evil dead bobble heads, which made various chainsaw noises and spouted the relevant catchphrases when tapped. Original Night of the living dead and Dawn of the dead posters both signed by the Tom Savini, a return of the living dead tarman ‘action figure’, return of the living dead 3 playing cards, Shaun of the dead airfreshener, zombies on a plane travel sweets… you get the picture; ‘nerd likes zombies trope’.

His real pride and joy lay dormant in the red trunk, an assorted collection of crappy fantasy knives and cheap knock off kung fu weapons he picked up at various flea markets and gun shows that rolled through town. He didn’t really get much of an allowance to splash out on any one piece, or even a reasonably priced but painfully drab cold steel machete. And the thought of working some nine to five job just seemed antithetical in a world that he believed would be all teeth and rotten flesh by the end of the year.

So he just picked up what he liked the look of, not really knowing what he wanted or what he wanted them for. They were all basically tacky wall hangers, despite that his mother wouldn’t let him hang on his wall because they made him look like a ‘weirdo’. There they remained in that box or under his bed, ready to be viewed with a satisfied smile as soon as he looked inside his little man-crate full of toys. When he closed it he felt a little hollow thud inside and instantly felt maudlin, he stared at the bluing sky as night crawled out of the caves and crags to blanket the sky.

TJ’s house was in a fairly secluded part of town. The town itself was rural and mountainous, a small town lined by high trees and cliffs with a whole lot of nothing in between, think Twin Peaks meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Nightmarish small town America in all its horrible banality and tremulous quiet beauty only ruined by its noisy stereotypical inhabitants.

He took to starring off into the trees, trying to imagine hordes of his dead facebook friends tearing through the undergrowth and him savagely cutting after them, sword flashing above his head like a hun on heat. Then he really started to think about them, their frozen stock photo faces, twisted and rotten coming at him through the trees and it was real for a second and he wanted nothing more than to buy a big gun and hide under his window drinking and peeing in the same bottle waterworld style for fear of moving. It came in waves and he settled back into his fantasy comfortable in the thought of its unlikely occurrence but also wanting nothing more than having his mundane existence upended by throngs of the flesh nibbling inclined.

Well what little life there was, he thought to himself as he stared off into those dark esoteric woods, if only they’d come then he could be who he truly wanted to be.

~

As always you can find the full chapter on inkitt by following this link http://www.inkitt.com/stories/25507/chapters/3

Thanks for checking it out.

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Green Sunday Chapter 1 (Edited). Fallout 4 out tomorrow, goodbye world.

Ok finally paid to have the first chapter edited, this is just a cheeky re-release of chapter one, gonna be posting a lot more chapters this coming week from sheer laziness and my inevitable complete immersion in Fallout 4.

The wind blew through the cherry blossoms in the Sakuragoaka gardens. Musashi knelt and cleared his mind, letting his cares drift on the wind. He saw without seeing as he closed his eyes, his mind clacking in the dark of his dreams, igniting a small flame of consciousness. His thoughts wandered silently as he smelled the fires burning in the distance, food cooking in the next town over. Dogs’ barks travelled over the mountains as whispers in the cool evening air were ushered in by the coming night.

The ground he knelt on was soft, and grass stained his dark brown robes. He hadn’t washed for days or combed his hair. Cleanliness had become a pretence he didn’t much care for.

Suddenly the air became tighter and sharper as pinpricks brushed his skin. His eyes cracked open and let in some light as his mind came soaring back, like a demon hurtling into this world. A foot touched down on the grassy earth and sent shockwaves through the ground and then another and another and another and another and another.

Three sets of two … his eyes closed again as he listened. Three men or one six-legged demon. He’d only know when he cut it. They’d only exist when his blade touched them and then only for a moment after.

He took a deep, slow breath as they approached. Steel breathed out sharply as their swords loosened from their ramshackle sheathes. The air took on the smell of iron and copper. They approached from behind as Musashi meditated; their steel quivered as the light hit the blades.

His heart beat like the leather drum of a mighty ship approaching a certain destination. He fancied his attackers could feel it in the very ground they stood upon. The vibrations through their feet made them feel numb and light-headed, losing the tips of their swords to a strange feeling of giddiness as they got close to the kneeling man.

He took one deep breath, taking in the last of the sweet smells of the cherry blossom tree, its pink petals falling as it swayed in the wind.  Musashi brought his sword forward in his waist wrap and turned the blade in its scabbard, pushing out his bottom lip as he did. His grizzled lower jaw cocked to the side as he felt the greasy stubble on his face with his other hand. He sighed a little as he slowly pushed up the hilt, gently popping the blade from the sheath with a slight jerking motion from his thumb.

The blank figures flapped slightly like the sails of a ship in a changing wind. They sprang to life, having come too close to turn back. Their fear pushed them onto this mortal stage to face blood and sweat and bone and will.

The vagabonds tensed their legs and took their stances, trying to gain strength from the earth. They swallowed and took their pride up like an iron flag and they bounded towards the old man resting his eyes in the cool afternoon. He listened to the gears of the world slowly turn, smelling the sweet and tart smells of the grass and the blossoms mixing in the dying evening.

Their swords were heavier than his and they bolted forward, shaking like they were held together with string. His sword was a dancing feather and cut through the air like a blossom from the cherry tree. His hand had barely touched it; his grip was light and nourished the blade with his will; it stayed straight and did not falter in the wind; it moved with it, flowed on it and cut it like a ship parting the waves. He felt a natural exhilaration for what was meant to be: men travelling towards their destinies, whatever they may amount to.

They set on him, their movements those of men underwater. His great eye saw all their movements but recognised them only as insignificant shapes in the dark depths of a boundless ocean. His mind only thought of cutting, his blade sharpened by his burning will, a searing desire to be seen by the ambivalent god of the moon and stars.

They scattered like leaves, their bodies wanted to be cut; they were made complete by his blade, a cut for each and each in place; not a drop of blood fell until it was ready to fall and Musashi sheathed his sword once more.

Suddenly, as if from the sky itself, a crack appeared and Musashi felt a foot on his shadow, a tightness in his chest, as if his guard had been penetrated by some unholy force; he quickly drew his sword again; it was already halfway out when he heard a scream tear through the heavens, a star falling with the force of the earth itself. It eclipsed him, like an insect in the wake of a great mountain.

“TJ STOP SCREWING AROUND IN THE YARD AND TAKE OUT THE TRASH!”

“MOOOM, I’M FILMING FOR YOUTUBE!”

“-AND YOU BETTER NOT BE PUTTING HOLES IN MY FENCE WITH THAT SWORD!”

“NO, MOM”.

TJ sighed heavily as he looked at the jagged cut in the water cooler bottle he had picked up on his way home from the local movie theatre it bled out over the unevenly cut grass as his fantasy faded into the corners of his mind. He scratched his neckbeard as he looked at his crappy mall katana sticking out of the fence, still twitching from the force of the swing. He must have let go when his mom called him.

He looked into his digital camera and sighed audibly into the vacant lens.

“Hey fat ass!” A nasal voice rang out from over the fence and TJ turned like Michael Jackson in ‘Thriller’. “Yeah you, neck beard, over here!” His neighbour leant on the fence like a crow, with a superior sneer sitting atop his pointy douche bag goatee. He looked like a hipster Ming the Merciless with a pair of poser shades dangling from his fingers.

“You better watch it, man. You almost put another hole in my ass with that pig sticker of yours. Hommie doesn’t play that. My exit hole remains an exit hole. Feel me?” His neighbour flailed his sunglasses in his fingers and tried to sound like a black guy.

“Err, wut?”

“What are you doing, man? No one wants to see some fat re-re in his mommy’s yard, cutting up bottles with a butter knife, when they can see handsome motherfuckers like me and my associates chopping on some real meat with some big… mmm weapons!” He smiled and motioned with his sunglasses at TJ’s camera and his bottle massacre. “We’ve got over sixty thousand billion subscribers, nigga. Wut chu got, like one-two thousand maybe? Some tight-fisted jackers fapping their flaccid nubby dicks over fat retards getting sweaty in extra-large tees.”

TJ averted his gaze as he attempted to jostle his sword free of the fence. His pits were wet and stinging, shame and anger swelling. He said nothing and shook his head from side to side trying to get his emo black bangs out of his sweaty face; he just took it.

“Stay off my fucking YouTube, asshat, and keep that mall sword crap in your pants.” His neighbour hopped off the fence, laughing. “Now where the fuck were we? Oh yeah.” He turned to the camera as it focused on his goateed, smug face, and put his sunglasses back on. He slicked his floppy black hair back on his head.

For the full chapter and to vote for Green Sunday in the Inkitt Vendetta thriller contest you can go to http://www.inkitt.com/stories/25507?utm_source=contest_share #vendetta #amwriting

Thanks for reading and peace out.

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Hype… hype never changes.

I, like probably millions of other manchildren (and maybe actual children) are hyped as fuck for Fallout 4 which releases next Tuesday, by released I mean I get to wait half the day for it to install on my Xbox one -_-.
I just thought I’d have some fun rambling about it because I’m constantly in these facebook groups either bitching about New Vegas (I won’t shake that fucking tree here ha-ha) or laughing at people comparing it to modern shooter graphics.

I’m almost at a loss for the levels of fanboyism I’m holding in, sheer unadulterated pure uncut 100% Columbian hype.

But I can’t help feelings a little bit iffy, I don’t know if it’s just because Fallout has become so mainstream over the years. For a title so niche to gain such mainstream appeal is good but also troubling to me, I hasten to add I didn’t play the original Fallout games until I saw Fallout 4 was being released and I needed an outlet for my building hype.
So I’m by no means an OG Fallout gamer, but I’m not a dirty casual either, I’m a console peasant who played his first Fallout game on a ps2, yeah it was Fallout BOS. I liked it because it was like Baldur’s Gate with guns and powerfist and it’s actually the first and only Fallout game where you got to play a ghoul.

After that I saw Fallout 3 come out and being a massive Oblivion fan it completely had me and had me bad, for months. I truly loved that game, the music, the atmosphere, the guns. Although overall it ranked as something of a letdown but as the constant apologist I blame myself for building it up so much something I’m desperately trying to resist with Fallout 4.
It was mainly the story and the levelling system I took issue with, coming out of Oblivion I found just putting numbers into a stat sort of unsatisfying as opposed to actually practicing the skill to build it up in Oblivion. Which I found more realistic; the more you swing a sword the better you get at it, but in Fallout it didn’t matter you just levelled up for completing missions and could spend skill points however you wanted even in skills you didn’t use.
But I had issues even with that system in Oblivion to be fair because I couldn’t resist once I had trained with one skill to the max to train with another until I mastered them all, which took some of the punch out of the game. The new levelling system for Fallout 4 looks pretty interesting and I’m actually really happy that it’s been streamlined and something that always annoyed me about previous Fallout games has been addressed.

Pistols, they never get pistols right, because you find one at the start and use it until you find some super mega blaster or some huge shotgun and then you never see it again but finally Bethesda have made pistols their own skill as opposed to just reducing it to small guns and big guns. So in a way they’ve streamlined it but also made it more intricate since every type of weapon not just its class has its own skill so you have a small guns skill but then an individual pistol/shotgun/assault rifle skill that focuses on one particular type of weapon with its own special attributes. Which I think is such a great idea because now you can literally make and use any gun you feel suits you best and your play style. Whether you want to be a long range sniper or a hip shooter pistolero or a shotgun surgeon. I think it’s just a great idea that gives every weapon a use and a purpose as opposed to just being something that clutters your inventory and is never used.

All games have their problems and they all reach a state of terminal velocity where they can’t satisfy the way they could at the start.

Also I had problems with the story of Fallout 3, not necessarily with the quality, I have taken to taking videogame storylines with a pinch of salt as of late, because they will always be secondary to fun gameplay and I’ve come to accept that. Waiting for an emotional rollercoaster of a game that Spielberg would be proud of is just too much to ask and games that try are hit and miss coming somewhere between tear jerking if a little tacky Last of Us vs. Engaging if completely insane pretty much any game by David Cage (Heavy Rain, Fahrenheit Syndrome, Beyond Two Souls) but I digress, I’ll get into that in more depth in a later blog probably.
The problem I had with the story is that there wasn’t very much of it, and that’s not to say they weren’t lots of quests and characters, what I mean were there were certain main quest lines that had achievements attached to them. And the problem I have with that is it just makes the game seem less fluid, less pick up and play, I liked how in Oblivion you could literally walk into any tavern or come across a stranger and be swept up in a harrowing quest and then get a piece of special equipment.
There are elements of that in Fallout 3 but I just felt like it was more rigid and a little less forgiving. But regardless of that I still found myself just exploring for hours completely ignoring the story for the most part. I spend probably 80% of my time on Fallout 3 just exploring and making up or piecing together stories from the surroundings and things I find and I think that’s a great strength of all Bethesda games. A lot of the times they just sit back and let the surroundings tell the story, they give the gamer the pieces and they have to put it together themselves which makes them that more engaged in the story.
That was just one thing I worried about looking over the leaked achievements for Fallout 4, they’re doing the same thing with the main story quests, giving them achievements for completion. I dunno, I just think money and the xp and the fun alone should be reward enough, but it’s just a pet peeve.
Another thing that worried me is the changes to the dialogue, it’s changed from a box of text where you select lines, to a more Mass Effect style dialogue wheel, now I see a lot of ‘genius’s’ and gaming hipsters saying this is Fallout ‘Dumbing down’ and to an extent when games fall into the mainstream there is a level of streamlining they go through to maximise their appeal like with Skyrim. But to anyone with common sense, the reason dialogue wheel replaced the text box is because we have a voiced protagonist for the first time in Fallout history and he only has so many words he can say, so unfortunately dialogue will be more limited.

Whether this improves immersion into the game or makes it worse I can’t say until I play it on Tuesday (More likely Wednesday, fuck took like a week to install eso and now I never play it -_-). I can’t say listening to Captain’s Shepherd’s monotone voice for hours on end with its varying inflection from anger to *shudders* flirtation increased anything but my threshold for cringe.

But this is Fallout, this is Bethesda, Bioware is but flies compared to Vigo!.. I mean Todd Howard.

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Green Sunday Chapter 2 This Charming man (Unedited)

This is the second chapter of my romzomcom novel work in progress Green Sunday, it’s currently in the process of being professionally edited but in the mean time I thought it would be fun to post an excerpt from the raw manuscript.
I just posted this as an excerpt because the whole chapter is about four thousand words long, which is just way too long for a blog. So if you want to read the rest you can on inkitt by following this link Green Sunday. 

An old TV sitting on a greasy looking shelf played in the background in a local greasy spoon diner on the edge of town. Accompanied by the sounds of knives and forks sword fighting and people taking value deluxe bites out of reasonably priced burgers and washing them down with complimentary milkshakes.

“The Pudgiwara corporation said they were sorry for dumping the one thousand tonnes of toxic waste in the bay and they said they’d never do it again” The news anchor furrowed his brow sincerely before quickly moving on to the next segment “In other local news a young boy of fourteen was arrested after a prank backfired outside his suburban home. The boy; who is yet to be named for legal reasons, was tricked by his friends into believing that another biological outbreak like the one in Arkham, Louisiana was occurring. Police state the boys wore make-up and ragged clothing and pretended to be the undead. The boy fearing for his life retrieved his 22. Calibre rifle he received for his third birthday and slaughtered them all in his back yard”

“Hahahahahahahahahaha!” Incongruous laughter broke out and it seemed like all the knife and fork sword fights ended abruptly but the laughter went on regardless as the story played out in between mouthfuls of raw hamburger meat.

“The fourteen year old boy, then fearing for the fate of his family, went into his suburban home and strangled his entire family to death with a draught excluder”

“Hahahahahahahahahahaahahahaha!” A dirty hand, topped with dirty chipped nails scooped up a clod of hamburger meat from a bowl as he laughed.

“What’s going on out here?” A fat sweaty man in an apron and not a lot else came out of the back and stood quizzically next to a middle aged red head waitress with a face like a leather riding saddle.

“Some crazy guy, all he ordered was a bowl of raw hamburger meat and he’s just been sitting there eating it, then he just started laughing” The middle aged woman said, her face wrinkling up in places never before thought possible.

The fat man’s sweat patches grew under his apron; he started to look like he belonged in a sauna or in a tropical plant house as he breathed heavily.

“The boy is currently under observation at Hellspass psychiatric hospital” The man’s laughter began to run down like the motor of a car slowly sliding into park, a greasy hand touched the arm of his salvation army coat and the slow come down took a sudden bump.

“Hey buddy you’re freakin’ people out, can ya keep it down? People are trying to eat” The fat chef said in an apologetic tone as he furrowed his brow into painful ‘v’s, which seemed to stretch all over his slippery bald head.

“What’s that?” The man said without turning his head, a chunk of un-chewed hamburger meat falling from his mouth onto the semi-clean counter as he opened his mouth and turned his bloodshot eyes in his skull.

“I said-“

“I heard what you said”

“Huh?”

“I just can’t tell what I’m looking at” He picked his teeth with a dirty nail and sucked his gums, dislodging raw meat from his teeth.

“Look buddy, we aint looking for no trouble, I think you better just pick your sorry ass up and leave- right now!”

“Did you make this?” The strange homeless guy squeezed the hamburger meat in his hands, letting it ooze through his bony fingers. He had shoulder length mousey brown hair with a beard, completing the homeless chic, his features were thin and gaunt, dark eyes hidden under heavy lids. He wore a long olive drab army jacket that went all the way down to his ankles just barely hiding the fact he was wearing plastic bags tied with string around his feet instead of shoes. To complete the ensemble a threadbare shirt and pair of pants that looked like they were stolen from an old people’s home washing line. Printed across the front of the jacket was a name written in bold dark green lettering ‘CARPENTER’.

“What’cha talking about buddy? That’s raw hamburger meat, aint nobody ‘made’ it, drifters like you don’t belong here, it’s time for you to move on now!”

“You know, I used to be just like you”

“Get ou-!” A glob of hamburger meat cut off the chef mid sentence, the slimy gelatinous meat by-product getting in his eyes and nose. It felt like a fist made of lumpy snot hit his sinus wall and he felt disorientated long enough for the dishevelled man to kick a bar stool under his feet from his seated position. The chef fell forward as the stool hit his shins, tripping him; Carpenter rose like a jack in the box from his stool to slam the chef’s dirty face into the counter.

He pressed the chef’s face into the clean-ish off colour lime green diner counter spreading blood and raw meat and spit all over it, the chef strained dreamily as his skull was pressed against the hard surface.

“You know it’s rude to interrupt someone when they’re eating.” Carpenter, squeezed the chef’s head with his forearm pressed against it tightly, the veins on the chef’s head stuck out like rail road tracks, pumping hot kitchen grease. Carpenter took his other hand and ran his finger up from his face taking up some of the hamburger meat, getting under his nails, he sucked his finger.

He took the pressure off and sat back on his stool like he got up to get the salt and the chef stuck to the counter with blood and sweat and hamburger meat, peeled off and his unconscious body hit the linoleum floor of the diner like a sack of dried hams, parting stools and chairs and brows as he fell. The diner fell silent, food went un-chewed in open mouths, coffee cups shook uncontrollably, babies continued crying, the dishevelled man went back to watching the news and laughing.

~
If you’ve read this far you can check out the rest of the chapter on inkitt by following this link Green Sunday.

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