Hi please read my ludicrously long essay

Question is taken from, for my purpose as much as anyone's, here

The specific question:

temperance: can you describe a strange dream you’ve had?

I think this is one of those questions that may as well be prefaced with a "you've activated my trap card!" thing from yu-gi-oh because if you didn't know the answer to the question then you just managed to pick the one question that doesn't so much have a single answer as it does an entire fucking tome, or two, of weird Umberto Eco kinda shit. As a result, I've tried to separate out this ridiculously long post into sections to make it a little easier to follow. It is still going to be incredibly long, even by my standards.

Introduction, where I lay a foundation to make my craziness feel coherent

I don't know if you're familiar with S-Town, the spinoff podcast from Serial, but it's about a guy, John B. McLemore, a horologist who, as I recall (not going to listen to the series to check) was largely self-trained, and almost certainly autistic/hyperfixated. Between certain concerns about the state of the, as he called it, shit town (hence the show title) and pervasive sense of moral decline, economic destruction, and impending environmental catastrophe, he found himself in a depressive spiral that, likely fueled by brain damage caused by the mercury he worked with in his practice, led to him eventually committing suicide.

I spent a lot of my formative years living in Alabama, and as a kid of a fairly liberal family and with noted brain problems of my own, I felt a certain kinship with the guy. We were both the sort of people who would be the kind to make like a 300-page google doc, and mine would directly cite his. In a way that's sort of what this post is, though I only know the stuff he wrote by proxy of it being reported in the podcast; aside from numerous citations about worsening climate conditions and similar bad news, I remember him highlighting Lady Gaga's work with performace artist (involving induced vomiting), Millie Brown. Here's an article about her from the Guardian, by the way; parts of the interview are arguably related. That said, the reporting in the podcast by Brian Reed suggested that the document I'm referring to was pretty meandering and not very clear in all of its arguments, something with hints of odd conspiracy-theory reasoning. To me, a clear sign of the way in which mercury poisoning was taking a toll on him, as he tried to make sense of a number of deeply distressing aspects of the world he lived in and felt mostly powerless to change.

This sort of feeling, a feeling also made manifest in the actions of Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation, is a key part of all of this.

The pages from Akiyama Haru's current serialization, My Blue Garnet, were something that I read as I was thinking about the answer to this question, and trying to make my thoughts into something that a reader might have a chance of following along with. I had gone out for a short walk, and come back, and felt almost like a small part of my subconscious had been spilled out onto the page. There are certainly parts of it that felt more than a little familiar, from the first chapter's POV character's childhood, to her struggles in trying to find a job, and how all of that tied into her sense of self-worth.

Akiyama Haru has done something like this a few times; her story "A Meaningless Sunday" has visuals that strongly match the way the dream I experience feels, elegiac and almost threatening, and another story of hers, Sakuma and I, is the story I wish the one I'd made for the Kindred Spirits fan collab could have been. She's probably most known for her previous seralization, Octave, about a pair of music industry hopefuls who struggled to be sustainable in a stressful, competitive, capitalistic world, and how their anxieties manifest in them being unable to open up to each other. It's not a cozy slow burn; in fact, it could make for a stressful read from the ways in which the characters' trust issues manifest.

I feel an odd but profound spiritual connection to her oevure. The manga industry is known for being cut-throat and stressful, but Akiyama's work really feels tied deeply to an understanding of what it feels like to have experienced stress and angst related to work and the future that you have a nervous breakdown. I don't know that she has -- and I certainly don't care to pry or speculate -- but her work carries with it a specific air of verisimilitude in how it portrays it. Before this new chapter dropped, I might have said that the only way that her oevure could have felt more like an abstract painting of my own brain is if there was a digression about diving deeply into the sea and exploring the strange fish that exist there. What incredible timing on this one.

Setting the scene

None of this really answers the question on its own, though, but I think it does help set the scene. Let's go back to the year 2010. Living through the 2008 financial crisis while in college definitely makes you feel a certain way about your relationship to your job. With the risk of financial stability collapsing at any time, it would be sheer foolishness to consider anything that wasn't basically a guaranteed, high salary. Trying to rely on music for financial stability would be a fool's errand, and so I had to push through in the fields that I was majoring in, physics, and the field that I was actually good at and wanted to make progress in, computer science.

Between low belief in my ability to find internships and related opportunities in physics due to mediocre academic performance, I decided to spend the summer between my sophomore and junior year at home, and I would be largely left to my own devices because even if I wanted to spend time with some of my high school friends, it wouldn't be feasible -- likely another influence of the 2008 financial crisis, my dad switched jobs and took a position working out of Las Cruces, New Mexico. I was left to my own devices, and I decided to use some of that time playing old video games I didn't have as much of an opportunity to do before, but found compelling. In the golden days of the Wii's virtual console, this would include Super Mario 64, which I'd downloaded to my laptop to spend the next 24 hours¹ playing.

This was how I spent my first afternoon in New Mexico: playing through the opening of Mario 64; the first floor of Peach's castle. Bob-Omb Battlefield is a very compelling stage that demonstrated that the development team got it in one. If I was ever playing Mario 64 at a kiosk or with friends, this was definitely the level that I would be playing, if it wasn't a secret stage. I don't have much, if any, recollection of playing other stages than that one, but it's also a very good stage and one that so perfectly nails how to make a 3D platform level that most of the rest of the game feels like a letdown in comparison. But that's not the only level there; no, I was getting all the way to Jolly Roger Bay, a level that, I think it's fair to say, downright broke my brain.

If you've played Jolly Roger Bay, you know that the level starts off pretty gently. You start on a calm shoreline surrounded by cliffs, and the surrounding water provides a gentle introduction to the swimming mechanics, low on threats beyond making sure that you maintain your life, as it is your air meter. You can refill air/life with coins, or just by resting at teh water's surface. However, there are also no mission goals in that area, only a couple red coins. You need to explore further. And that's where that is.

EEL FEELS

My first reaction to Unagi the Eel, which I saw while watching a guide to help me collect the stars², was "oh god what is that, that's the ugliest fuckin thing I've ever seen". And in the first mission, Plunder in the Sunken Ship, it's easy to progress through the stage without thinking too much about the creature. While it has taken residence in the part of the aforementioned ship you need access to for level completion, dealing with it is so simple that it's easy to pay it almost no mind; swim near it, surface to restore your health, and then dive back down into the ship, and use the video guide on youtube to figure out what the proper order to the treasure chests inside the ship is³.

No, it's the following star, Can the Eel Come Out to Play?⁴ that really broke me. Unagi is now mad that you've messed with its home. It's now taken nest on the edge of the stage, and you have to get close to him to drive him out, because there's a star on his tail. You have to make contact with the star while it swims around the perimeter of the stage while ensuring that you don't touch the tail or that you get in his line of sight and get attacked. You have to get pretty up-close and personal with it, and it's in this moment that you really witness how unpleasant a creature it is.

There's a lot that makes Unagi unsettling. The creature's fangs are very large and always exposed, and nearly always chomping. The game provides a distortion effect to make it appear to constantly undulate (as if to mimic the distortion of seeing through water) that makes it constantly look off-model with itself. And the expressionless, pale blue eyes call to mind the introduction to the Tell-Tale Heart. It is a creature that is unknowable, unbeatable, and a constant threatening hazard to Mario in that part of the stage. The perfect storm of the sort of creature that, had they known of it, would enrapture the minds of all the great writers of New England drama and grotesquery: Melville, Lovecraft, Poe.

It is the feeling of being stalked, as you try to get its attention and force it out of its nest, that makes it so attention-grabbing. It's not merely a large creature to swim around but the process of doing this makes it actively lunge out at you to attack. As this is a water level, the camera can be placed in any number of strange angles, and so may even catch you less aware than you thought, unable to flee. This pervasive feeling of being preyed upon in order to progress takes the discomfort of needing to witness the creature into true survival horror, made all the more intense by the limits that the swimming mechanic enforces on Mario.

This experience has wedged its way into my brain. If my sleep has been disturbed enough for me to become conscious of my dreaming, the eel is always in some way inside of it. It does typically show up Mario-inspired levels, but typically ones that have more going on in them than Mario 64. One that lingers in my mind is a stage that was clearly inspired by some of the loose machinery of Splatoon's Octo Expansion and the sunken test chambers of Portal 2, a dark enclosed area that connected to an eel-patrolled body of water.

One of the things I find fascinating is that, compared to the actual tone of the parts of the level where there's much of anything to interact with, the music for Jolly Roger Bay appears, at first, to be pretty calm and relaxing. It's one of the prettiest themes in the Mario series, and because it's so distinctive, will also worm its way into your brain. In the context of the threat from the eel, though, the last few chords around the turnaround, which go farther outside of the key and do include the tritone (a D# major chord in the context of a G scale root), the song would take on a more threatening aura for me; since it takes a little while to even get to the shipwrecked bottom of the stage in the first place, I was more likely to hear that passage as I was getting close to the eel, too. There are people who will talk, at least semi-jokingly, about getting complexes from the drowning timer in Sonic games and its obvious influence from Jaws. Perhaps it's for the best; in the context of the eel, such music might be on the nose.

In a way, I think the song enhances the feelings of distress by being so calm -- the stage is set up perfectly to impart that calm aura, which makes it all the more effective when it's broken. Similarly, the etherial nature of the introduction to the Gene Wilder Wonka factory makes that movie so effective as horror the moment that the tone changes once they go in the tunnel, as you've let down your guard for the shift in a way that a movie that is openly about horror might not make you.⁵

While ideas in Jolly Roger Bay would be revisited, possibly most conspicuously in Mario Galaxy, they would not approach the stage with the same tone. Future eels might be designed to be less threatening in appearance, those eels weren't made easier to avoid dealing with, the background music would take on a more ominous tone, or multiple such options would be taken at once. Mario Galaxy nearly duplicates the Jolly Roger Bay floor in one of its late-game stages, but uses more ominous music and has eels that are more of a nuisance than a mandatory hazard, though still large and threatening. This makes Jolly Roger Bay, for all its flaws, a stage that has no emotional equivalent, a stage whose tone is unmatched. For as much as the Mario series' long legacy has inspired itself to revisit music in newer games, the song in Jolly Roger Bay and Dire, Dire Docks has never appeared in another mainline Mario game.

This massive shift in tone between Jolly Roger Bay's entrance and end can, oddly, serve a practical purpose outside the game if, like me, you find the eel irrationally terrifying. Consider the polygraph test. For a number of high-ranking security positions, passing one is a necessary precondition for receiving clearance. It is, however, extremely easy to beat, as long as you're willing to lie. What the polygraph actually measures is a physiological stress response, under the presumption that lying will increase your stress, and some brain activity, under the presumption that lying will require more work generating mental imagery and storytelling. This can be beaten if, when trying to tell the truth, you strongly envision...something that can cause you to genuinely feel stress without much effort. Maintaining a mental image of something calm while lying can also help to defeat the two things that the polygraph measures. For me, were I asked to submit to a polygraph, would simply switch from watching the relaxing shoreline of the opening section of Jolly Roger Bay to envisioning the horrid creature stalking its depths, ready to lunge out at a moment's notice.

That the polygraph is so easy to fake, and yet still so relied upon for serious verification in the US is an irony not at all lost on me. A product of a security state less interested in finding fundamentally trustworthy individuals as it is finding people so accustomed to lying that it is beyond second-nature to them. Certainly not, on its own, the cause of this nation being so fundamentally wretched, but a very unmistakable indicator of the structures underpinning its wretchedness.

In the process of being hyperfixated on the eel, it's impossible not to think of it more abstractly. This is not so much a question of dream analysis per se; the eel only exists because it was created through the coordinated efforts of a team making a game, and is not, on its own, a matter of random natural happenstance. The eel was created with some intentionality, and therefore has meaning. The existence of the eel says something, and its initial home is tied to it.

Ships in the Mario universe are almost never actually on the water, but fly in the air⁶. Throughout Super Mario Bros. 3, all of Bowser's immediate underlings are piloting one, stocked full with all manner of absurd weaponry, towers of cannons and guns stacked on top of each other, firing out constantly. We see only one at the end of that game actually on water, near Bowser's fortress and patrolling a lake of what is implied to be blood. While they are not in Super Mario World, it is where the sunken ship level motif -- clearly designed, especially in its entry way, in the manner of these SMB3 airships -- is first found, as Mario makes his way through tunnels filled with ghosts to eventually reach a pit that leads to the Valley of Bowser.

Between the nature of the airships as brutal weapons of war and the large, menacing, invincible sea creature that associates with this specific one, it's hard not to read it outside the context of Godzilla, the destructive monster that became an international icon of Japanese filmmaking, and which was directly, explicitly inspired by American war crimes, the dropping of nuclear weapons over the civilian populations over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I cannot possibly imagine that Nintendo would, in the wake of the Iwata Asks era, ever openly state that the airships in Mario were a way of illustrating how someone who was in their youth in Japan in the 1940s felt in the wake of those airstrikes, but the subtext is, to me, profound and inescapable. Thus that creature might be thought of as guarding the boundary of the American security state in a more concrete, or at least more culturally constructed, form than the personal interpretation I suggested earlier; how I could interpret the level's key setpiece vs. the interpretation that shaped its creation.

AMERICA

The remix of the song I've posted here was one I made near the end of 2014. The period of at least late 2014 through 2016 is a period in my life I'll call the "hell years". Grad school had gone well enough up until this point that I got a research assistant position with the theory group of the computer science department, which came with a healthy stipend, and meant that in my immediate friend group I was the one with the money, usually paying meals or helping to cover someone's rent, but it was still only just barely enough to live on. The theory department's research was all on cryptography and distributed agreement, and my particular work involved work both with myself and my advisor and some members of Sandia National Labs.

As you would probably guess, a national lab in the state of New Mexico has the nuclear bomb and trinity test project as a key force in its genesis. I think most people here would not be comfortable working for such an organization, which over this entire period was managed by a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin; for as much as the work they do might be putatively about nuclear deterrence or counterterrorism, we've seen how the US government actually goes about attempting to achieve these goals; the broad consensus is that these are largely an excuse for the modern colonial project, with applications to quashing domestic reform movements as well.

Two major events hit international news in 2014, at nearly the exact same time, relevant to this. In July, Israel launched an attack on Hamas in Gaza, a move that, especially when taken as the template for their more recent incursions into the West Bank, was an act that did not appear to be motivated out of self-defense but out of a desire to colonize land held by Palestinians. Israeli soldiers killed protestors against the war, one act of many that should have been condemned as a war crime. Reading the many papers relevant to my research, the number of authors tied specifically to Israeli institutions became impossible to ignore, and my morale for my position dropped massively.

Nearly concurrently to this, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, killing him. This moment, and the surrounding lies by the police used to justify it, galvanized a massive protest movement that has continued on since, and expanded to include protests of several other high-profile killings of Black men and women across the country. As someone whose coming of age began during the Bush years, the racist institutions that set this unrest in motion were, of course, inseparable from the binary for-or-against-us thinking about support for America as a nation that inspired persecution of fellow citizens. If the people in charge of most of this country are going to dig their heels in saying that opposing this is opposing America, then the obvious ethical answer is to oppose America.

The obvious practical answer, however, was not so easy. The pay for my position wasn't great, but it was still enough to keep myself afloat and even help my friends out significantly. However, my motivation to continue to wokr on what I was doing was dropping massively, and very quickly. I was beginning to fall into a deep depression that was, in fact, leading to ideation, and suffering severe stress on top of it. This particular period of my life is one that I have some memory over, but this mental condition is not well-suited to retention. One thing I do remember is sleeping terribly.

Because I was sleeping terribly, my dreams were much more vivid. They were almost never of anything other than the eel, an uncanny recurrence that only made my ability to sleep even worse. As far as I'm concerned this is the only dream I've had since; if I'm sleeping badly enough to have a dream to remember, the eel appears in it somewhere.

And now: the VGM Vault portion of the post

This is the context in which the cover of Dire, Dire Docks⁷ I've posted here was produced. This was made in December of 2014, at the end of the semester. There's a hint of desperation to it, and also a touch of irony.

It isn't actually the first remix of the song I've made -- in fact, on youtube I published it as yet another dire dire docks remix because it was based on an arrangement I'd done for NES w/VRC6 that I'd uploaded on 8bitcollective within a year or so of the song first catching my attention; the famitracker file is dated as last saved on August of 2011, and I suspect that I made the entire song within a few days of that date. I don't particularly relish making music for the NES due to the massive channel limitations and the lack of available timbres; it feels too limited and makes it nearly impossible to get a distinctive sound.⁸ When I uploaded the finished product to 8bitcollective, it was, probably by virtue of being a recognizable, compelling, and familiar tune, not to to mention in a style with more square waves than I usually use, one of my more popular tunes on the site. I believe it made the list of most-liked tunes for that week.

I had certainly tried to do some professional work before this moment. The stuff I'd managed to do didn't end up with me getting much money, and the stuff that might have made more money didn't work out. Though I'd been writing and arranging music for a long time at that point, it was clear there was no way it could pay the bills. The irony, then, comes in selling a fan-favorite in an intentionally cheesy manner. The sounds I wanted to make were more deeply rooted in progressive rock and psychedelic traditions, in funk and freer jazz, not the sort of cleaner, playful tone that Mario was more known for. To really hammer home the punchline of "reluctant crowd pleaser" I chose a voice for the melody based very explicitly on the DX-7 Rhodes clone, used so often that a site dedicated to tracking DX-7 uses in music had to put all the uses they've found on a separate page. Nothing against Luther Vandross, who's a very talented musician in his own right, but this is very decidedly not my style, or at least at the time it wasn't.

And then it's got a drum-and-bass thing going on top of everything else partly because the track does something similar in the game as it develops and you move through the stage, but I found the idea of mixing a style that was still somewhat abrasive and intense with this smooth-as-margarine instrumentation funny, illustrating the sort of creative tension at play and contributing to my emotional struggle -- who would ever ask for something like this? Why would they want it? And therefore, how could I sell it? I was barely holding up financially as-is, supporting more than myself, and I sure as hell couldn't move to an even less lucrative side-job.

All of this is not to say it's entirely out of the prog spectrum, or that I treated the arrangement as a throwaway gag or intentionally made it unlistenable. I'm still quite pleased with the way I managed to reharmonize it, and it does retain some influence from the kind of music I found motivating.

For that matter, the note I have on the VGM Music Maker file is "totally was listening to schubert's impromptu in g-flat major for inspiration on the direction of this". Which is at least partly in reference to this. And that, in the context of my feelings in the moment, would have been way too on-the-nose. Like come on, I want to maintain at least a little bit of abstraction in my work!

But wait, it gets worse!

Not everything was terrible at this time. I finally got engaged to my long-distance girlfriend in 2015. Because she lived in Mexico, we knew it wasn't going to be an easy process to actually getting married -- indeed, it took years -- but it did mean that I still had some positive things to look forward to in the future.

Unfortunately, I had made a rather reckless decision to get an overly fancy Tanzanite engagement ring for her, something that I would need to finance in order to afford, and going into 2016 it was becoming increasingly clear that my decision about my employment at the university was going to be made for me. Donald Trump, the right-wing frontrunner, was very explicit in his hate of immigrants, especially those from our southern border. Things were not looking good. The dreams came back, and so did the bizarre subgenre.

In particular, in the start of the year, I made a similar arrangement of the bonus stage of an MSX Sonic-inspired fangame called Sonyc, and then followed that up with one of [Aquarium Park]⁹(https://mushroomhill.hopto.org/owncloud/index.php/s/qqVjAYc277F8R8F) from Sonic Colors. You'll notice that both of these songs, despite the similarity in structure, are more repetitive, and a little hastier as well. If you look at them in comparison to Dire, Dire, Docks you can definitely detect the presence of a severe mental breakdown if you know what to look for.

So let's talk about Ravel's Bolero.

Bolero was one of the last pieces that Ravel was able to write, and it's in an unusual format compared to the rest of the work of the famed composer and arranger. Over a constant, harried triple-meter loop of percussion rolls, a single melodic theme repeats, and repeats, with more and more instruments joining in to perform it until the entire orchestra is part of it, and the final repetitions end in a loud, abrupt crash. It is strange, it is hypnotic, it is jarring, and it is strongly tied to Ravel's own mental state at the time.

In 1994, a scientist-turned-painter by the name of Anne Adams found herself profoundly compelled by the structure of Bolero, and made a large painting mapping the notes to colors and pattern structures in the work. I have placed a print of it on imgur and I cannot keep from thinking how uncanny it is. The sharp structures, the color choices, the shapes...this is only slightly more abstract than how I envision Jolly Roger Bay, when I do, and placing the two panels of the image top-to-bottom, how the painting seems to go from clouds, cliffs, and sails, to increasingly deep water. The shapes take on slightly more menacing looking forms, mouths and eyes and scales (as in fish scales, not musical ones) and glowing teeth, as finally a large pinkish mass seems to lurch forth from it all.

OK. Let's try to tie this all together.

Anne Adams and Ravel both spoke about their work as if brought to do it by some deep-seated compulsion, an almost instinctual drive. This was probably true. At the respective time in both of their lives, they were showing signs of being in the early stages of certain kinds of frontotemporal dementia, brain decay affecting the regions of the brain responsible for things like executive function and language. In order to do something to compact this essay down to an absurd length from a more insufferable one, I'll direct you to this Radiolab episode about the relationship between Ravel, Adams, and their presumed shared condition.

However, I should highlight one part of the episode. In offering an explanation for why these conditions manifest in such a specific creative-yet-mechanical way, the neurologist Dr. Bruce Miller, at UC San Francisco's memory and aging center, suggests a theory that I find deeply compelling. As the language and executive function portions of the brain become weaker, the much older and more, in a sense, primitive, parts of the brain become a much more dominant force on behavior. These parts of the brain are more mechanical, more tied to basic function and survival, and vision -- a lot of people who suffer from these conditions find themselves suddenly, like Adams, deeply compelled to create visual art, often of a mechanical and repetitive formation.

To step back for a second, another work that adapts from Ravel's Bolero is White Rabbit, the song by Jefferson Airplane, written by the band's singer Grace Slick. The lyrics, claimed to have been written as Slick was coming down from a hallucinogenic trip, come through with a urgent force, as if trying to narrate the end of a world, tied to an insistent triplet rhythm that increases with intensity throughout the song, building to its final, screamed, "FEED YOUR HEAD". If it was written near the end of a hallucinogenic trip, then in a way the massive shift in perception probably would feel like being expelled from a different world -- not too differently from how Lewis Carroll's Alice books, the main source of reference for the song's lyrical imagery, end.

The drive to create like this might be part of the decaying parts of the brain attempting to continue to assert itself, to express what last parts of the sufferer's vision can still be achieved, a sort of living will made from the creative spark, before it is subsumed by the urges we see in less mammalian and less carnivorous creatures, to avoid predation and seek shelter. The memory and aging center website includes a collection of Adams' art. There's an explicit aquatic theme permeating several of her works featured there. In a metaphorical way, I think of Adams as being haunted by Unagi too.

The image that I posted with the drawing of all the eels is one that came a bit later, but certainly felt driven by the same sorts of compulsion. I am not claiming to have frontotemporal dementia -- I think the sheer length of this article would be proof enough that my language faculties are yet in working order -- but those two years of compounding stress wore down on me and compulsive art like that was, again, one of the ways it was expressed. It certainly felt recognizably similar.

Here I attempt to explain the perceived sensations of chronic stress

The analogy I'd make to conceptualize stress is the kitchen of a small, understaffed restaurant, seeking to feed an unruly mob who might become placated if they are fed. In order to compensate for the lack of a full staff, the kitchen prioritizes the actions that most guarantee their own safety -- the act of cooking food for the mob. As a result necessary maintenance tasks fall by the wayside in order to maximize efficient mob-feeding. Cooking is a priority, but cleaning doesn't directly serve anyone in the mob, so dishes pile up, which cuts down both on the available tools and working space for the cooks. Over time their actions become more constrained, more basic, as they lose access to the tools and clean space they need to operate.

The kitchen's clean space becomes more crowded, and the only way that the cooks can safely chop up all their vegetables without risking damage to each others' extremities is for some of the cooks to just stop working. And those other chefs don't start cleaning, no, they're already becoming very worn out from all that frenzied cooking, and besides, cleaning is a distraction¹⁰ from the very necessary task of cooking so you can't do that, NO! Either cook or get out of the way for the people who will.

"Tunnel vision" is a phrase often deployed as a metaphor for a singular focus, but it can be very literal in terms of the brain's visual cortex, especially when under the presence of certain hallucinogens. The world becomes smaller and more constrained, yet things seem to fade off into the distance, and the delineation between that which we see and which we dream becomes narrower. "Life is unreal", sings Don Fagen on Steely Dan's Your Gold Teeth II, a song off the album Katy Lied. The album's songs focus largely on related themes of losing one's place in the world (Bad Sneakers, Daddy Don't Live in that New York City), profound workplace peril (Black Friday), and hallucinogenic experiences (Doctor Wu). The cover art, of a katydid zoomed in with a very soft focus, captures effectively how that sort of tunnel vision feels -- and the subject winds up being a very alien-looking large-eyed creature.

The stressed brain seeks escape, and when it cannot achieve that, begins to shut down, possibly as a means of self-preservation. While mental breakdowns are usually something we associate with "crazy people" societally, I believe just about anyone is capable of experiencing one as long as their living conditions are both intolerable and inescapable; the only question is how long it will take.

I think now is a good time to go back to Haru Akiyama. In a lot of her works, there's a similar visual composition to these sensations, particularly in scenes where characters are troubled over discomfort and uncertainty about their future. Shots might come at oblique angles, panel space is narrow, the characters are depicted with lots of close environmental detail so they appear boxed-in, and panels frequently contain a lot of lines converging toward the panel's center. Given that this is such an effective illustration of how this kind of chronic stress response feels to experience, it's an incredibly effective shorthand for characters feeling trapped and boxed-in.

Akiyama's shorter stories tend to end with a melancholy coziness to them; if not a happy end, per se, they are at least peaceful endings, the characters finding outlets of escape whether wholly real or partly imagined. I was not in a mental or social space to find such peace, and was, to speak a bit euphemistically, seeking very drastic and concrete means of escape.¹¹

And an odd thing happened.

I felt we needed another section marker here, where an odd thing happens

In spring of 2016, Meow Wolf opened their first permanent exhibit in Santa Fe, The House of Eternal Return. A collection of ideas inspired by various movements in modern art, the the work also serves as a commentary on new-age scamming and, of course, the exploits of capitalism in general. Imagery in the exhibit is intentionally hallucinogenic in style as well, vivid, high-contrasting neon colors enhanced with blacklights and a mazelike, explorable structure where various ideas seem to melt and fade into one another. If you ever get the opportunity to visit it, I would highly recommend it.

When I went with my family in August of 2016, I was at some of the lowest of the low, as work was ending and I had no new alternatives, no saving, and negative desire to move back in with my family.¹² However, they had come up for the weekend, and we went to visit the exhibit. I, not really knowing anything about it, and not paying attention to it (there was simply too much happening all the time in 2016 to pay attention to an art project in a different city), had no idea what to expect. As we were waiting in the ticketing line by the entrance, a funny thing happened.

I heard a song playing over the audio system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rKC7ElkTUQ

It's not quite breakbeat, exactly, but it was uncannily similar to what I was doing, especially in the context of the (re-)remixing Aquarium Park that I had done only a few months before. After writing a song I have an uncanny knack of wandering into new songs that sound absurdly similar to what I'd done, but this seemed unprecedented, all the more because my aesthetic decisions had been so intentionally incongruous. How on earth would someone else have come up with this idea and then, having heard it, decided to actually perform it as a song?

Trying to work this song into the semiotics of Jolly Roger Bay and Unagi probably added a very necessary three months to my life, whereupon my circumstances finally started to change for the better. Recovery was slow, but it crystallized into the concepts I'm writing about here, an obsession that weaves itself into a sort of theory of mind and the nature of war.

Interestingly, this is what We Will Become Silhouettes is about, lyrically -- pressure, stress, and isolation, and with an inflection of nuclear destruction. In a very real sense it's the epitome of this feeling of desperation and being driven to create, an attempt to desperately form some kind of connection amidst an increasingly tenuous relationship with the world. Communicating both to a world fading from touch and to a self unable to remember its own experience.

At the time, place, mental state, and creative impulses I found myself in when I first heard it, it managed to reach that connection probably even more effectively than the people who made it could have ever intended.

I wrote a VGM (Genesis) cover of the song a few months later, at the start of 2017. It took a while for me to be in a place where Unagi dreams were not constantly interrupting my sleep, but at least the kitchen was finally starting to close down.

While I don't expect many, possibly any people to have read this far down, I hope to inspire a similar sense of connection, however epehemeral, with the people who listen to my work. The world is, I think, always a little more hostile than we give it credit for being, and I hope that with these works I can make it just that little bit smaller for people.

I've long given up the idea of ever making money off any of this stuff. I still work on it from time to time. I've made more stuff in this style since 2017, but it's tended to be a bit more chill, and I haven't found myself as desperate to finish it. If you have managed to read this far, I must thank you very sincerely for making the trek across this monument to my own descent into madness. If I weren't the one writing it I'm not sure I would have been able to.

If I do find myself able to recall a dream, there's a good chance Unagi factored into it in some way. Having any sort of memorable dream is a very infrequent occurence, but it's still nearly always Unagi-flavored in some way.

It always feels weird writing a post that could qualify as memoir and trying to find a place to end it. After all, as long as I'm here, the 'story' hasn't ended yet, but this is probably as natural a stopping point for this post as I could imagine. Meanwhile, if anyone needs me, I'll probably be reading Otherside Picnic and seeing how I think it might connect to 'aquarium yuri'.

This is a joke about misbegotten notions about ROM piracy, of course; I did not spend a continuous 24 hours playing Mario 64; even if I was not doing a very good job of maintaining a regular schedule for myself at this time, I'd have desperately needed the sleep.
Sorry, I was not prepared to trial-and-error my way through the 15-year-old game, especially with some of the more byzantine things they ask you to do in Thwomp's Fortress. I was primed to consult the guide. I probably even started Cool, Cool Mountain by that point, which had goals that tended to be even less intuitive.
These treasure chest puzzles, along with the fact that a lot of its' space is tutorial filler, leads me to the conclusion that the stage is easily the weakest in the game. Too much trial-and-error in a challenge that's incredibly arbitrary.
Which is, admittedly, the perfect tone for the challenge. I may hate the stage but this part of the tone is deeply compelling.
It probably helps that as filming went on that the actual milk they used to create the chocolate river went bad, and the disgust on the part of the actors becomes a little bit harder to hide; watching the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka tends to inspire a genuine feeling of sympathetic disgust in me, for almost certainly that reason.
And, of course, later in Mario 64, in rainbow ride, we see nearly identical ships to the one in JRB, but without the same wear produced by the water.
I believe that the track might just be called 'Water' in the Japanese soundtrack, but for the US Soundtrack Release the title was Dire, Dire Docks, thus becoming its official title, probably because Dire Dire Docks is the only stage with that music that's actually necessary to play to reach the game's ending, at least without glitches.
This was a concern among professional organists in the era of the drawbar organ, i.e., the 60s. Most organists would favor specific combinations of harmonics with the bars to enable a specific tone, since it was one of the few things they could consistently control and keyboards lacked a touch response. In order to prevent other people from biting their styles, at the end of a concert they'd immediately, forcefully, push in or pull out all the drawbars. These drawbar mechanisms were, incidentally, a clear antecedent for the operator levels and multipliers used in FM synth generators such as those by Yamaha -- and you can get versions of the classic Hammond-with-Leslie sound by keeping the operators independent and enabling the LFO.
Another level fond of imposing, patrolling fish that ends with encounters with several giant eels, I should note. The music to this stage is also probably the only obvious stylistic precedent to my Dire, Dire, Docks cover -- it's also got a breakbeat. In fact, like Dire, Dire Docks, I covered in 2011 with a much more restrained arrangement (inspired by the Game Land arrangement but wanting to make something more inspired by Sonic, Sega, and the Mega Drive), mostly off the basis of the DS game; I don't know exactly when I first played the Wii version. I did about half the music in the game, and I've revisited this project a bit in the wake of the remaster, which will probably be its own post series one of these days; it's technically still in-development, but on the back burner.
"Distraction" was a word levied about regularly by the more liberal opposition to Trump policies at the same time I felt this most strongly, as though legislation mapped directly to physical warfare on a terrain map. I've stated something to this effect before, I believe, but I want to make clear that I would be happy to wring the neck of anyone who thinks that way; I have no respect for someone who treats matters of fundamental rights as a throwaway policy to be sacrificed at the first moment's convenience, the inherent subtext of such statements being levied against the kinds of policies that Trump made the basis of his platform. My use of it is very intentional in that passage; I feel about the use of the word there about the same as I do here.
I want to speak frankly and freely on matters here but this one I'm not going to elaborate on. I don't want to inspire a strategy for someone else.
A particularly fun manifestation of this antipathy came in learning that, as my mother decided to proofread my resume, an act which I had accepted because of my incredibly low state, she decided to edit the phone number in it from mine to hers. We would be fundamentally incapable of living together.

invertigo hayfever

@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

I'm the hedgehog masque replica guy

This immediately became an impromptu VGM Vault post