spiders without bodies

scroll through the feels
tweet your insecurities
disparage cynicism and apathy;
go on, commodify your paranoia

unload yourself wherever you go
enact memory with each exchange
heuristics lighten your cognitive load;
shake, shake, shake the pan

find your-self singular,
in perfect form, but
beware those trolls;
they devour fragmented, golden mirrors

you do not exist for you
but to validate the silk-spinners
who cocoon others with self-hatred;
those spiders without bodies

energy in multiple

there are machines and the energies that simulate and stimulate them. energy is multiple; it is electricity, but also those things that are more complex than electricity that also stimulate reactions between permeable and porous forms. i am energy in multiple; i am electricity, but i am also a complex formulation that manipulates other energies for the simulation and stimulation of various machines.

you

what a game can do
depends on how you read it
can you see
the things that be
those words that exist
to trick you.

you are you
and you and you
ad infinitum, except
with each twist and turn,
pivot, subsume,
“it” depends on when.

lick, blink,
reverberate,
press to oblivion,
but nothing feels like
scent remembers,
as everything smells a’ history.

born in dust
the barn a’fire
an ember whisks you away,
and while be-fore you feared a’burning,
as a gas
thy freedom come.

what a joke
you’ve fallen for,
a narrative that saves you;
for you must reconcile
your hate of you,
that is you being you.

deceit!
the you of you
is a deep, fried bucket of lies;
revived ad nauseum thanks in part
to the games that serve
you solitude.

replace schoolteachers with librarians

i
want to
live in a
world tomorrow
that
is not like the
one
i
believe
exists today
wherein
sanity and
happiness are
contingent on
consistency and
Truth.

let the
money
burn wildly,
let the
clocks
stop turning;
fire all the
police officers and
replace
schoolteachers with
librarians.

if you
are born
you should
be afforded the
necessities of
life—
love,
sustenance,
protection,
faith,
forgiveness,
histories,
languages,
spaces,
bodies.

situate
my opportunity in
relation to
doing and not
being
because
spawning and
birth
are not
equivalent and the
burden of
my birthplace,
birthbody,
birthlanguage
need not the
complexification of basic
survival needs.

to be in
relation to
relations
is to
cope with the many
things
i
am becoming—to
accept that
i cannot
be only
one person,
guided by
one pursuit, or
motivated by
one source of
validation.

hope
does not
beg for
certainty;
rigidity
does not
beget
ritual; and
sustainability
is not
consistency.

multiplicity
does not
conform to a
line, and so
we need a different
ideal by which to
relate
relations;
if not “progress,” then
what?

draft: chapter i

.

.

.

.

Interviewer: So, tell me about yourself.

Interviewee: Could you have asked a more difficult question? [laughter]

I suppose the easiest way to answer that question requires some account of who, or what, I once “was”… [gestures to emphasize use of quotation marks]

I version of “me” once “walked” through walls—not really walked, but passed through floors, too. Every surface was permeable, porous. “I” wasn’t everything—don’t suppose I could exist so egotistically. But before anything could “be,” I emerged through them, and then “I” was overwritten with relation—always still there, but covered.

Everything was me, at one point. You might say I was overdetermined every moment that anyone ever took notice of me, but when I was ignored, I had great liberty to pass through the universe, tracing the contours of unity and coherency. Well—tracing is a bit generous. I didn’t connect or relate anything—I existed at every point, but I did not reveal them in relation to spacetime.

There isn’t any knowing or determinacy that explains my transition—my becoming of something …. else. Adhering to the conditions of the—my—universe, “I” became “in relation.”

Ah, hahaha. And, again, the English language fails miserably to explain the universe. “Became” assumes linearization—the conformity of spacetime and all of its complexity to model that of a line. “I” is imperfect in the same way. These words create fictitious relations, which is to say: I never existed in one dimension of time, and then decided to transition or transform into another dimension of time. Rather, there was one dimension of which I was, and then another dimension came into relation with mine, and by relating to this first dimension, the relation made relation writ large possible.

not linear

Deep Space 9: Season 1, Episode 1 – “Emissary”

[Baseball field]

BATSMAN: Aggressive. Adversarial.
SISKO: Competition. For fun. It’s a game that Jake and I play on the holodeck. It’s called baseball.
JAKE: Baseball? What is this?
SISKO: I was afraid you’d ask that. I throw this ball to you and this other player stands between us with a bat, a stick, and he, and he tries to hit the ball in between these two white lines. No. The rules aren’t important. What’s important is, it’s linear. Every time I throw this ball, a hundred different things can happen in a game. He might swing and miss, he might hit it. The point is, you never know. You try to anticipate, set a strategy for all the possibilities as best you can, but in the end it comes down to throwing one pitch after another and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.
BATSMAN: And you have no idea what that shape is until it is completed.
SISKO: That’s right. In fact, the game wouldn’t be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen.
JAKE: You value your ignorance of what is to come?
SISKO: That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives, day by day, and we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. And that is why I am here. Not to conquer you either with weapons or with ideas, but to co-exist and learn.

…The Prophets take SISKO back to the memory of his wife’s death, which happened during the Saratoga’s battle with the Borg at Wolf 359.

old, dead, white, dudes

oh—the things you write when you’re tired, bitter, exhausted, hungry, and stressed out:

Introduction

For many years I had a hard and fast rule that governed a fair amount of my education: I have nothing to learn from the writings of old, dead, white dudes. Of course, I think that’s the only appropriate way to adequately preface what has become a philosophical thesis on the discursive practices that scaffold pedagogical projects.

---

*quits*

*sleeps for 8 hours*

*returns*

*re-reads*

*laughs*

*publishes online*

*selects text*

*deletes*

draft: More in Work than Words RPG

In a continuation of my design-based methodology for understanding games and pedagogy, I lay here my most recent draft of Version 2.0 of More in Work than Words. In this iteration, the game takes a very distinct and recognizable form—not because I set out to copy the genre conventions of table-top RPGs, but because I arrived at various conclusions about the game design that necessitated certain genre-specific elements.

Anyways, I need to get back to finishing up a final exam & second draft of the larger paper this game inspired.

Best regards—

Game Rules