Always makes me go through and re-evaluate who I'm following on social media when I ask an AI about myself and am told "Ratralsis seems interested in gaming (EarthBound podcast), art (digital artist, webcomic creator), and adult content. Flight Rising, a dragon collecting game, is another hobby."

I did follow an EarthBound podcast somewhere, and some of the artists I follow do post adult content, but I'm not thrilled at being described as having those as my primary interests.

That's life, though, I guess. In a hundred years, if I'm remembered at all, I'll be remembered as the guy who liked niche SNES games and porn. And maybe as having Flight Rising, a dragon collecting game, as another hobby.

For the record, when I talk about my 18-year-old cat Tina still "enjoying her life," here she is jumping to try to grab a plush BB-8 on the end of an elastic string.

It's mostly played with by other cat, the relatively young 14-year-old (as in, 72 in cat years) Max, who does not care at all that he's also extremely old and that he even already has his own BB, except that his is still in his leg from when he shot by somebody a year before I adopted him:

But sometimes they both go for it, and I make sure to let Tina have her chance to jump and grab and bat at it.

I have to be careful, because sometimes she overdoes it, goes up on her hind legs, falls over, and decides she's done playing. It probably hurts her a lot (she's extremely thin, so she's got no cushioning, and the way she walks makes me think she has joint pain), so I always try as hard as I can not to play in ways that would force her to actually jump or go off-balance. But sometimes she still goes for it, and I even got a picture of it today.

I'm still working on my book most nights, is why I don't post on here very often.

It took me about a week to get that "Doctor Worm" story where I wanted it, which meant a hard limit of 1000 words. It meant a lot to me to finally write it. I've felt for years that the song is about someone desperately trying to fake it until he makes it. Someone with crippling low self-esteem, with lines like "I'll leave the front unlocked 'cuz I can't hear the doorbell" suggesting that Doctor Worm is so fucking needy that he's willing to risk his safety for the sake of getting someone to listen to him play the drums at his place.

"Experimental Film" is the exact opposite: it's someone who hasn't even figured out what their film is going to be about, but he's so convinced that it's going to be great that he's insisting that the ending will make your head implode and you're going to be in it.

It was a fun story to write. I have nothing else to say about it.

That's not true. I have a lot more to say about it, but I don't think the story resonated with anybody, so writing more about it here probably won't mean anything.

The three jokes I posted afterward are, to me, absolutely hilarious, because they each suggest an entirely unreal world with rules and logic that are different from ours. One must destroy all apes in the world of the third joke, because apes threaten the supremacy of humanity. That's extremely funny to me. Not destroying apes; the idea that the mere existence of an ape would threaten humanity's grip on our planet, to the point where even simple jokes declare that one must destroy them without mercy and at any cost. That's fucking funny.

It's kind of like… I know a guy who makes music, and it's super meaningful to him, and he embraces disharmony, and I absolutely can't deal with disharmony. I just don't like it! And I think it's great that he does! Do what makes you happy, you know?

I want to think that my jokes are like that. I like them, and I hope it's okay with other people that I waste their time with them, even if they don't think it's as funny as I do to imagine a world where scientists who think that a chicken who crossed the road didn't exist are being hunted down and killed for their heretical beliefs.

My current writing class ends at the end of April, so that's about nine weeks away. I'm frustrated, because I won't actually finish the third draft of the thing by then. I was almost halfway done with it by the end of November, but after a frank conversation with my tutor, I was convinced to scrap it all and start over. The third draft, I mean. I still have the second draft.

It's probably better this way, but it's annoying. It's why I'm spending so much extra time on it now. I'm trying to rebuild what I'd already written and then get past that point.

I'm frustrated. I have a solid grasp of how to write, but not how to write novels, you know? I've written so many essays and reviews and things that I can pretty easily string words together and not repeat myself or make grammatical errors, which puts me ahead of a lot of people. But coming up with plots and characters and themes that resonate with people… I think that the evidence all points to me being just as bad at it as I think I am.

Like… I have this character, and I really like him, because he's this completely evil villain, and he thinks he's a good guy. Tale as old as time, right? But I still like him. There's a chapter in the book where he breaks into a room where this six-year-old girl has snuck off to do some late-night reading, because he's a good and righteous person who has to hunt down the evil bastards who rescued her from a criminal gang and took her to the orphanage where she now lives, and he tells the child, in no uncertain terms, that she's going to help him find those evil bastards, and he's going to kill them, and when he leaves, she's crying, and he thinks, yep, I sure am a good person.

And that's fun! That's a fun story to me! Because you know this dude's bad news, and that makes it okay when he gets killed later! That's what writing's all about! Or something. But will people actually enjoy reading it? I'm not confident!

Well, so it goes. At least a few people liked that photo of my cat I posted earlier this week.

Took this photo today, and today marks 18 years to the day since I adopted Tina: February 14, 2006. We've had our ups and downs, and she's very frail now, but as long as she's enjoying her life, I'll do what I can to keep her as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

Hilarious jokes to share with friends (part 1)

Q. What's the difference between a lawyer and a skunk?

A. There is no difference. All lawyers and all skunks are identical to each other on to the molecular level: they are eternal, unchanging, and perfect.

Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?

A. Only the chicken knows for sure, and the chicken is long dead. Scholars are left to argue over incomplete evidence and can only craft incomplete theories. There are some who believe the chicken never existed at all, but they are in the minority and are currently being hunted down and eliminated.

Q. What do you call a 400-pound gorilla?

A. You must never call a gorilla of any size anything at all. To do so is to offer dignity they do not deserve. You must eliminate all non-captive gorillas on sight, mercilessly and at any cost. Glory to humankind!

Someday somebody else besides him

He glanced around the room nervously as he approached the podium. He looked down at the notecards in his hands. In his distraction, he stumbled on a bump in the carpet, and those notecards nearly flew away from him. He recovered, but he felt the flush in his cheeks. He hoped it wasn't visible.

After what felt like an hour, he reached the podium and put a hand on its dark, shiny finish. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He turned and faced the room. He straightened the notecards. He'd memorized everything he wanted to say, but holding the cards was reassuring anyway.

"They call me Doctor Worm," he began, looking at everyone in the room and at none of them at the same time. There were so many. Most of them were watching him. A few watched their phones. He was a little envious.

"Good morning," he continued. "How are you? I'm Doctor Worm."

So it turns out that if you have Windows 11, you can use the preview version of something called Cocreator in Paint. It's another AI image generator.

I don't know yet what the limits are on how much I can use it, but I started with 50 tokens and used up four of them so far.

Buy my favorite books

I don't normally do this, but if you didn't see this, it's an opportunity to buy 39 of the 41 Discworld novels (they list 38, but when I went to redeem it, the 41st book was included) for $18.

$18 isn't nothing, but these are my favorite books. Period.

HILARIOUS prank played on my 18-year old cat!! She thinks she's being given a tasty treat in bed, but it's REALLY her thyroid medication and a potassium supplement!

She totally falls for it!! Haha!! Get WRECKED, idiot!!

Parting Words

Today I want to write a little bit about the parting words of yet another video game character I like.

Parting words, of course, are pretty important. It's the note you go out on, so you want to make sure it's a good one! Everybody will remember if the last thing you say is something stupid. You have to say something cool and memorable.

The Final Fantasy series has a lot of recurring characters. Mog the moogle, for example. But it's generally understood that it's a different Mog every time you meet him, in the same way that it's a different Cid. Similarly, it's generally understood to be a different Shiva, though she's always a big ice woman. Odin and Ramuh might even talk to you in FF4 or FF9, but I think most people understand that the Odin and Ramuh you meet in FF6 are different characters entirely who happen to share the same names and similar character designs.

There may be multiple exceptions to this rule, but there's only one whom I, personally, care about: Gilgamesh, from Final Fantasy 5.

Gilgamesh is a boss character you fight multiple times in Final Fantasy 5, but you don't meet him until you're quite a ways into the game. Still, he's instantly memorable. He's a big, goofy brawler of a man who rushes into battle because he's employed by the game's big bad and he's going to stop you from doing whatever it is you're doing. Your first battle against him takes place on a big bridge. The song that plays when you fight against him is called ビッグブリッヂの死闘, or "Biggu Burijji no Shitou," and if you didn't catch that, "Biggu Burijji" is just the English phrase "Big Bridge." "Shitou" means "life or death struggle," so the song is generally called "Battle at the Big Bridge," or "Clash on the Big Bridge," or something like that.

That's Gilgamesh's song. It's been remixed and rewritten and performed a hundred different ways, all of them phenomenal. When you hear that song, you know Gilgamesh is coming. You're going to have to fight him.

Gilgamesh is defeated multiple times in FFV, and eventually the big bad decides that it's time to throw Gilgamesh into the void between dimensions. But that's okay. Gilgamesh won't let something like that stop him. He comes back for one final scene shortly before the end of the game.

But in the meantime, Gilgamesh explores various worlds. Gilgamesh shows up in other Final Fantasy games. It's not really necessary for me to list all of his appearances, and I'm honestly not sure that every single appearance of his is "canonical," that is, if they're all meant to be this same guy. His appearance in one of the rereleases of FF6 as an Esper, for example, doesn't really square with what we know about him in FF5. Dude isn't an Esper. He's just a dude. Magicites are made of dead Espers. Gilgamesh isn't dead.

But I think it's safe to say that, when he made his first appearance outside of FFV in FF8, that's meant to be the same man. I like to think it's the same man in FF12 (voiced by John "Jake the Dog" DiMaggio, no less), as well, but, again, I can't really prove that. I can't prove anything.

And I don't have to. It's not really the point.

The point is that, eventually, no matter how many games he may or may not have shown up in before making his way back to FFV (and the list can only grow from here), he does make his way back.

He interrupts a battle against a boss called the Necrophobe, or Necrophobia, if you prefer. I kind of do, since that's what it's called in Japanese, but it's possible that the one who named him didn't really know what that word meant. I've heard that the summon spell Odin got its name almost entirely at random, for example, and it wouldn't shock me if the same were true of a lot of other things in Final Fantasy. Gilgamesh himself, for example.

Gilgamesh doesn't have to interrupt the fight. You can avoid this scene if you play the game the right way, but I would call that playing the game the wrong way. You should see Gilgamesh's final appearance.

He makes it clear that this is his big return, and that he couldn't let himself go down in history in such an uncool way as simply having been banished. The Necrophobe says he'll deal with Gilgamesh, and Gilgamesh taunts him, saying something like "Do you really think you can defeat me, Gilgamesh?"

But then he speaks to each member of the party. He tells Krile that her grandpa was strong. He tells Faris that he thinks she should try falling in love and be more feminine (which is a really weird thing to say, I think). He tells Lena that he hopes she never forgets her kindness to animals and her gentle heart. And he tells Bartz that he wishes he'd been able to have a one-on-one fight against him, and that Bartz has some good friends.

The Necrophobe ends this farewell speech by shouting at Gilgamesh to die. Gilgamesh replies with his final words:

それは！こっちのセリフだぜ！！

And then he casts the Blue Magic spell, Self-Destruct, killing both himself and the Necrophobe. And that's that. That's the end of Gilgamesh.

Now, I'm willing to give my own half-assed translation of most of Gilgamesh's dialogue, but not his final words. So here's the detailed translation, instead:

それ: That. Pronounced "so-re." Companion of "This" and "That over there." Refers to something a little far away from the speaker, for example, something that another speaker has just said.

は: Years ago, a Japanese tutor of mine referred to words like this as "postpositions," but they're usually just called "partciles." This one, pronounced "wa" even though it uses the letter for "ha," marks the word that came before it as the subject of a sentence. So now we know that the previous "That" is the subject of Gilgamesh's final sentence.

！: An exclamation mark. Despite it generally being used to end a sentence, here, Gilgamesh is just using it like a very loud comma. He's pausing mid-sentence. He's shouting.

こっち: Pronounced "ko-chee," with a glottal stop where that hypen is, so it's romanized as "kocchi." Means "this direction," and is companion of "that direction" and "that direction over there." Generally, "this direction" means "towards the speaker," so if you were to tell someone "Come this way," you would be telling them to move towards you, the person saying it. In this case, it refers more abstractly to Gilgamesh's side of the conversation, rather than to his physical location.

の: Another particle, this one, "no," is a marker of possession. That is, "this way," or "my side of the conversation," owns the thing that is going to come next in the sentence. See also "Biggu Burijji no Shitou" and how I seem to be implying that it means "Big Bridge's Life or Death Struggle." Let's not dwell on that, because the finer points of why it doesn't really don't matter here.

セリフ: "Serifu," which is a Japanese way of writing the word "serif," which means "line." While in English, this refers to little markings on written letters, in the Japanese language, it also refers to lines in a script, or lines of dialogue. "こっちのセリフ," then, means "my line."

だぜ: Pronounced "da ze," this is a verb followed by a particle. The "da" part is a short form of the verb "to be," conjugated to refer to "my line." The "ze" part is just something to add emphasis. We use phrases like "the heck" in English to do the same thing.

！！: Not just one, but two exclamation marks end this sentence.

If you put it all together, what Gilgamesh is saying before he blows up, his response to the Necrophobe shouting "DIE!", is:

"THAT! IS MY LINE!!"

And then he blows up.

This is actually something of a set phrase in Japanese. You can find it easily in many places if you Google it. I know, because I did! And you can, too! It's easy! Easy and cool, and you should do it!

So Gilgamesh isn't saying anything unique here. Or special. It's something that lots of folks have said. But it doesn't change the fact that he said it. And then he stuck around in the zeitgeist of Final Fantasy for decades. People love this goofy bastard, and I'm one of them.

When I hear the song "Battle at the Big Bridge," I'm known to sometimes tear up thinking about just how cool Gilgamesh is. That's not even a joke! I love this silly sometimes-multi-armed guy! I didn't even get into that part of it! Sometimes he has extra arms just so he can hold more weapons! AND I love his song!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the best thing you can ever do, as a writer, is to write as hard as you can. Write something sincere, and earnest, and don't apologize or hold back. You've got a joke character? A recurring minion of the big bad who has no plot significance beyond being a guy you fight several times? Write that bastard for all you've got. Give him everything. Don't back down. Don't make it multiple characters for all those boss fights, even though you could have. Don't worry about overdoing it. Overdo it.

People will remember.

I'm back to work on my book for a little while.

I have a couple more things I want to write here, but it might be a bit. One is something I've been kicking around in my head for over a year and just haven't written out, which is, obviously, the hardest part of writing and also the part that matters.

If I'm lucky, my major expenses are over for at least a couple of months. That's what it'll take for me to get back to feeling kind of okay again. We'll see what happens. My Ko-fi page remains up for now at https://ko-fi.com/ratralsis.

I realize I'm just making excuses instead of whatever it is I'm supposed to be making here, but that's just how it is sometimes. A lot of the time. Most of the time? I hope not, but please don't do a data analysis of my blog and tell me about it.

For what it's worth, I do feel bad about it. Hopefully that counts for something.

Worth it

I'm having a rough few months, financially. Feel free to slip me a couple of dollars if you can, but don't feel bad if you can't: https://ko-fi.com/ratralsis

And on to what I wanted to write.

Years ago, when I was but a young college student (I have no idea what demographics I reach with this blog, but I don't THINK it's a lot of high schoolers? Prove me wrong, I guess), I made the decision that I was going to spend my final fifteen months in college doing whatever it took to lose weight and get into better shape. I'd been steadily gaining weight each year since I'd finished high school and it was getting to a point where clothes were hard to find, seats were hard to fit into, and my back and knees were giving me chronic pain.

My weight was not crazy high. At my heaviest, I was 255 pounds. A lot of people in the world are heavier than that and are perfectly fine and, let me be clear, I'm perfectly fine with them, too! I'm a big believer in the idea that you can be healthy at any size. But I can't. Or at least, I couldn't. I wasn't healthy, and I wasn't happy, and I decided to do something about it.

So I dieted. I exercised. And I lost about a pound and a half a week for months. I started in September (I graduated in the beginning of December the next year, hence my fifteen months, because my college class schedule was odd), and when the summer break began, I had to go home and wait before I could come back for my final quarter and finish my final classes and graduate. I did not walk with a hat and robe and all the other fancy accoutrements, because I already had two Associate's Degrees and had done so then and didn't want to do it again.

My college years were odd.

Anyway.

So I had to go home, and that meant no more access to the gym at school, where I'd been running on an elliptical every day because an elliptical is easier on my joints than a treadmill and I don't like stationary bikes as much.

So I approached a friend of mine from my old college, the one where I got my two Associate's Degrees, who'd spent his whole life studying martial arts. Around the same time I'd started my fitness journey, he'd started one of his own: he'd begun a 100-day program called IRON BODY TRAINING under the tutelage of his master, a local carpetlayer in a small town who happened to be the grandmaster of a style called, according to the friend, "Slide-In Black Panther Kung Fu," but which Google tells me might actually be called "Black Panther Combat Gung-Fu." In other words, if you Google that second phrase, you might find the grandmaster of it! I won't tell you his name, though! You're on your own!

All I'll say is that he looks EXACTLY like all those fuckin', like, strip mall dojo masters who can't do martial arts for shit, just another slightly paunchy middle-aged white guy with gray hair and a goofy smile, but I met the guy years after this story and he really actually is an insanely skilled martial artist. I mean… is he deadly? I don't know. I just know he was very skilled and very strong when I met him and he would regularly travel around for competitions and exhibitions. It might be that he's just a good performer who tricked me. I won't claim one way or the other.

What I will say is that the IRON BODY TRAINING that my friend was doing was pretty serious. It was a 68-minute routine that relied on a lot of isometric poses and body-weight exercises mixed with difficult yoga poses.

It isn't the hardest workout around if you don't want it to be. It's as hard as you want to make it. That's the fun of the isometric exercises involved, where you need to tense your muscles as hard as you can while you do them. You get out what you put in. And, since I suddenly had like eleven weeks stuck at home, I asked my friend to teach it to me. He agreed, on the condition that I commit to it. See, the IRON BODY TRAINING is a 100-day program. You do the exercises every single day for the hundred days, and you have to follow some additional guidelines:

No intoxicants or stimulants, that is, no alcohol or caffeine No other recreational drugs No sweetened foods (that is, no chocolate, candy, milkshakes, etc.) No fried foods No red meat No sex of any kind, even the kind you can have by yourself

A lot of people get to that last one and feel the need to make a joke about how they could do the rest, but not that. Whatever. As my friend put it, it's not like the IRON BODY POLICE will come and take away the powers granted to you by doing the IRON BODY TRAINING if you break the rules. But he had followed the rules, his master had followed the rules, and he made me promise to follow the rules. So I did.

I remember asking him a couple of times about the finer points of the rules. For example, could I still drink a protein shake after a workout if it was chocolate-flavored? I was having a hard time finding protein powder that WASN'T sweetened. And what about sugar free chewing gum? That's still sweet, too. He told me that those were fine for the simple reason that avoiding them would have been harder than it was worth. So, if you think those are breaking the rules, I did break the rules. Sorry.

I could tell a lot of stories about doing the hundred days and how I was going crazy for a burger and a latte by day fifty and then day on day 101 I bought both and they made me sick because the flavors were so disgustingly overwhelming, but that's not actually the point of all of this.

The point is that, after learning the full IRON BODY TRAINING, I wound up working a temp job at an Autozone warehouse. And it was a very physically taxing job! It hurt my back!

There was one exercise in the IRON BODY TRAINING that was really good at stretching and working out knots in my back, though, so I would do it while on my breaks (trying to at least do it where nobody was watching, of course) or at home after work. I don't know what it's called outside of the IRON BODY TRAINING, and I don't feel like explaining it. I'm sorry. You'll just have to wonder, I guess.

And I told my friend this. I told him that I had started doing some of the IRON BODY TRAINING exercises to stretch out my back and feel a little less pain on the job. And he thought about that, and then he said, "Then it was worth it for me to learn it."

It wasn't enough for him to learn it and do the training himself to improve as a martial artist or improve his own physical health. He had to teach it to someone else (me), and that someone else (me) had to use it to improve their (my) life in some way. Once that had happened, it was worth it for him to have ever learned it to begin with. That's what it took. Him learning it led to it helping somebody.

And that, I tell myself on a regular basis, is my baseline, too. I complain sometimes about my writing not reaching nearly as wide an audience as I'd like, but I stick with it, because if I've made life a little better for even one person, then it was worth it. That's what keeps me working on my novel, too: the idea that, once it's finished, it might reach a single reader who cares.

Yep. That's where I was going with this. I wanted to try to encourage anyone out there who's working on something that doesn't seem to be doing big numbers that maybe it's worth it even if you have a small audience.

I'm not so foolish as to say that making a difference in a million people's lives isn't more impressive than making a difference in one. I'm just saying that making a difference in one might still be worth it. So go for it. You never know.

https://ko-fi.com/ratralsis

I'm not proud, but I've had to deal with thousands of dollars in expenses in the last four months from emergency surgery on my cat to replacing the valves and faucet on two sinks in my house plus the drain pipe to one and the garbage disposal in my kitchen for the sake of stopping two leaks and preventing a third while the faucet was merely squeaking.

I can recover, eventually, if nothing else comes up, but even a few bucks right now (if you can spare it, obviously) would be highly appreciated.

I don't know what I can offer. Maybe I can write you something if you have a request.

It's the Same Damn Moon, Bud

I can't believe it's been over three weeks since I said I wanted to put some pressure on myself to write about "Slay the Princess," and I didn't do it. I just didn't write!

Instead, I wrote many thousands of words of my actual novel and also spent more than a hundred hours converting dozens of files from one programming language to another for my actual job, which, in case I haven't reminded you in the last few entries (I PROBABLY HAVE, THOUGH), is "computer programmer for large and faceless company you've probably never heard of and have almost certainly been affected by and we like it that way."

So, now, I'd like to write about it. It's been a while since I even played it! I'm going off of memory here, which is one of my favorite ways to write.

Slay the Princess is a visual novel that uses Ren'Py as its engine. It's creaky and not terribly well put-together, but I love it anyway, because that's the kind of gamer I am. I enjoy seeing people do strange and interesting things with engines like Ren'Py, and this is a game that absolutely does that. I imagine that its code is a mess of true/false flags that determine what dialogue appears and what options you can choose at any given point. It's part of who I am, as a computer programmer. I love imagining how things are coded.

When the game starts, you don't have to follow the title directive, that is, you don't have to go slay the princess. You can walk away. You can, in fact, continue walking away over and over until the game ends. There are achievements for it and everything. There are achievements for everything else, too. I normally don't like achievements like these in games. I like them in this game.

What bothers me about achievements in a lot of games is that I just want to play the damn game and be left alone. I want to explore. I want to see things on my own, and sometimes that means missing things. It actually means missing things quite often. I'm okay with that. I believe that everyone should have their own unique experiences when it comes to video games. It is one of the things that makes video games unique.

Recently, Super Mario RPG was re-released on Switch, and several podcasts I listen to covered it. Invariably, the first question asked by one host to the others was "What party are you using?" They all discussed how they played the game as individuals. I love that, even though I think they all made the wrong choice (everybody picks Bowser over Geno, which is simply objectively the wrong choice: Bowser can't use Geno Boost, the best goddamn ability in the game, and his attack power isn't even as high as everyone thinks it is). The fact is, that freedom to choose is what makes games special. Your choices matter. They mean something.

They mean everything.

They are the only thing that means anything.

When I played the demo of Slay the Princess roughly a thousand million years ago, I got every achievement. All the achievements were related to which Chapter 2 I saw. The choices made in Chapter 1 determine how Chapter 2 begins. That makes sense. By replaying and seeing them all, I got a sense of what kind of a game Slay the Princess is.

If you haven't played the demo, but you have played the game, then don't go back to play the demo. It's alright.

If you haven't played the demo or the game, you should probably play the demo. It's very good.

The demo ends very early in Chapter 2. You meet the Princess again, and see what has become of her, and the game ends. Or, really, it restarts. Your choices in Chapter 1 shape who she becomes. Who she is. How she greets you. If you killed her in Chapter 1, she might show up as a ghost in Chapter 2, with an X-shaped scar on her chest from where you plunged your pristine blade into her and pierced her. If she killed you, she might show up as a giant, a monster, physically imposing and powerful and ready to do it again. If you were kind to her, and did everything you could to avoid harming her, then you'll see one of two Princesses in Chapter 2: the Damsel or the Prisoner. My favorite ending of the demo was the Prisoner.

To see the Prisoner, you have to take the pristine blade when you see it in the cabin. You have to listen to the Narrator, who tells you that you have to kill her. You have to go into the basement of the cabin with the pristine blade in your hand. It doesn't matter what you say to the Princess as you descend the stairs. Of course it matters. All of it matters.

What matters more is that you mustn't actually attack the Princess. You must drop the pristine blade and speak to her. She'll speak to you. You can ask her questions, if you want. It doesn't matter, except for the fact that everything you do matters. You can ask her for name. She won't tell it to you. She is simply the Princess. You have to tell her that you don't want to kill her. That you want to rescue her. She's shackled to the wall by her wrist. She tries to gnaw off her arm like a feral wolf in a trap. You have to free her. You use the pristine blade and sever her arm. Good job, hero. She's free. You have to resist the pull of the story's Narrator and warn her that you're being forced to kill her against your will.

She'll take the pristine blade away from you, and, with her remaining hand, cut your throat, killing you.

Chapter 2 begins much like Chapter 1, except now there's an additional voice in your head joining the Narrator and the Hero: the Skeptic. You return to the cabin. The Skeptic forces you to take the pristine blade before you descend into the basement of this new cabin. It's not like the old one. It's fortified. It's solid. There's no escaping this one, and there's no escape for the Princess, either: she now has three chains attaching her to the wall. There's one for a shackle around each of her wrists, and a third iron ring around her neck. Your previous plan won't work this time. You won't be cutting her free.

I loved the Prisoner when I played the demo. She was my favorite. I liked seeing the Skeptic. I liked the idea of approaching the Princess with caution and deciding that I liked her more than the Narrator. That I didn't want to hurt her, but only after I made it clear to her that hurting her was an option. It was a fun story: two people who don't trust each other learning that they can. Then the world conspired to make sure that they couldn't try the same trick twice.

To say I was a bit disappointed by how this turned out in the final version of the game would be… well, it would be exactly right. I was a bit disappointed, but just a bit.

The Princess has a plan to escape, and it's the same plan she had the first time. She won't trust YOU with the pristine blade, so you have to give it to her. If you don't, she beats you up. This is a recurring theme in the game: the Princess beats you up in most of the paths. It's kind of sad, in a way, just how poorly you do in physical confrontations against the Princess, but I suspect that if the game had it the other way around that it would be even sadder. Can you imagine how pathetic a character she would seem if you could just slap her around at your leisure? And how pathetic a character you would be, too, for that matter?

If you trust her with the pristine blade, she will use it to cut through her own neck. This, as you might imagine, causes her to die, and her head hangs on a thin strip of flesh before gravity tears the strip and her lifeless head falls to the floor. But she asked you to take the head with you when you leave the cabin, so that's what I did. I trusted her, and she trusted me, to an extent, and now she was dead. Whatever she had planned, I would go along with it. And so, carrying her corpse's head by its long, beautiful hair, I left the cabin, and she revealed that she was actually still alive, and able to speak, and she thanked me, and then the world ended.

That's what the Narrator said would happen if I didn't slay the Princess, and I had not, in fact, slain the Princess. The Narrator was right. The world ended. Ghostly hands appeared from nowhere and they took her head away, and I saw myself in a mirror, and the voices of the Narrator and the Hero and the Skeptic fell away and I was left in the void at the end of the world with those magical hands puppeting the corpse of the headless Princess I had just saved, the one I had spent a hundred million years wondering about, wondering who she really was, what her real name was, how she was meant to end the world. Here she was, dead and possessed and confused and doing her best to give me the answers and not yet able. But she would be, if I kept going. If I started over. If I went back to Chapter 1, with no knowledge of what I had just done, and tried again, tried something different, because I would be forced to try something different, so that I could bring a new vessel to this Princess made of hands in the void at the end of the world.

What else could I do?

The game opens with this message:

Whatever horrors you find these dark spaces, have heart and see them through.

There are no premature endings. There are no wrong decisions.

There are only fresh perspectives and new beginnings.

This is a love story.

And it's true. There are no wrong decisions.

In fact, none of the decisions you make matter at all, except for all of them, and they are the only things that do.

And I did, in fact, love the Princess, and I wanted to know her better, the way one might love a statue, or a painting, or a god, and wish to know it better.

So back into the cabin I went, at the start of Chapter 1. I couldn't make the same decisions this time around. The game would not let me. So I chose a new Chapter 2 this time: the Tower.

I'll spare you the details of each choice I made. All of them mattered, but I'll tell you a secret. I'll tell you something that I've not seen a single write-up of Slay the Princess tell me, and I sincerely believe that it's the most important thing of them all: I keep saying all of your choices matter. And that's true: they do.

But they only matter to you.

My choices, the ones that I made, only matter to me.

The fact that I sent the Prisoner to the Princess made of hands first matters only to me.

The fact that I sent the Tower to the Princess made of hands second matters only to me.

The fact that I sent the Damsel to the Princess made of hands third matters only to me.

The fact that I sent the Fury to the Princess made of hands fourth matters only to me.

The fact that I sent the Witch to the Princess made of hands fifth matters only to me.

It is the only thing that matters when one plays Slay the Princess. What do you do? What do you choose? Who are you, to the Princess? Who are you, to yourself? This doesn't matter to anyone else. Nobody else will ever, ever care.

Even the Princess doesn't care. The Princess made of hands will finally gain enough knowledge after the fifth vessel brought to her to regain her full consciousness, and you will have an opportunity to speak with the Narrator a final time before you meet her. He will answer some of your questions.

So will she, each time you see her.

I won't bore you with the details.

What matters is that the Princess, as we all suspected, those of us who played the demo, and who played it dozens of times to see everything we could, is indeed a Lovecraftian cosmic horror. She contains multitudes. She contains all the vessels we gave to her and more. She is all of them. She is change incarnate: the Shifting Mound is her name. She was never a Princess, but that's how you saw her. You saw a Princess before, but now she is a goddess capable of destroying universes, and she wants you to join her, to take her many hands and end this world just like the Narrator said she would.

You have choices here, of course, just as you had them every other step of the way. None of them matter any more or any less than any other choice you've made. What did you ask the Narrator when you had the chance? It doesn't matter. What vessels did you bring to the Shifting Mound? Doesn't matter. You'll reach this point no matter what you chose, unless you ended the game early. Here you are, and here she is, and now you have a new set of choices.

I didn't want to kill her.

I didn't want to destroy the universe.

So I didn't.

I went back to the cabin, one last time, along with the voice of the Hero. The Narrator was gone, but I was there, and the voice of the Hero was there, and the pristine blade was there. I chose not to take it.

The princess greeted me as I made my way down the stairs for the final time. "And there you are," She said. "Hands empty. So you don't feel like reacreating our first meeting detail for detail. I wonder what else will be different."

She misspelled the word "recreating." That bothered me. I wonder if it was ever fixed. I saw several updates saying that typos were fixed, but I haven't checked this one in a while.

I learned later that this can be different if you didn't take the pristine blade with you when you first met her the first time you played through Chapter 1, but it doesn't matter any more than anything else.

I told her I didn't want to be a god, and she said she didn't, either. I asked her to leave the cabin with me, and she agreed.

I told her I loved her.

She was embarrassed, and said she loved me, too, but didn't want to be all sappy about it.

We left the cabin.

The game ended.

I was told that my unique path through the game would be represented by "Our Song," and here it is.

And none of this, none of it, matters, except to me, and to me, it's the only thing that does.

The game has a lot of achievements. I mentioned that before. No matter what you do, you'll unlock achievements. If you meet the Witch in Chapter 2, you can gain enough of her trust to get her to agree to climb the stairs out of the cabin with you. You can let her go first and stab her in the back, or you can go first and she'll stab you in the back. These choices are mutually exclusive, and each have their own achievement. This encourages you to see everything. To see how much and how little each choice you make matters. To encourage you to keep replaying the game, to get your perfect "Our Song," to see all of her forms and her shapes and how you can shape her, and that is what you do with your choices.

The Princess, the vessel for the Shifting Mound, is a reactive creature. You are the only thing in the game world that makes choices. She will always react to you coming down the stairs with the pristine blade with the same dialogue each time you do so. It's mechanical. It's a computer program. There's nothing random about it. There are no ghosts in this machine: she is only a machine. Your choices are all that matter, even though none of them do. You will, no matter what you choose, eventually reach a point where the world ends and the hands of the Shifting Mound appear from nowhere to claim a new vessel. Sometimes the vessel is nothing more than a heart, cut out from a body made of metal blades. Sometimes the vessel is so large that all you can see is the giant head, hands of the Shifting Mount covering its eyes. Sometimes the vessel is a head and torn-open torso without a heart at all, and sometimes the vessel is a beast, a six-legged lion, a ghost, or a rotted skeleton.

It doesn't matter. The Shifting Mound does not care.

Some of her dialogue does change, it turns out. The first couple of times you see the Shifting Mound, her dialogue is always the same, but if the vessels liked you, or made it outside, then some of the Shifting Mound's dialogue is more positive. If they didn't like you, if you were always hostile and cruel, then some of her dialogue is more negative about the world outside. It's subtle, but it's true. I can prove it. I've seen it.

But nothing will change the fact that, after the fifth vessel is taken, you will face off with the Narrator and then with the Shifting Mound, and then you have to make your choices. How does the game end? Do you end the universe with her? Do you kill her, once and for all? Do you leave the cabin with her for an unknown world where neither of you are gods? Do you kill her in the cabin and start the entire cycle over once again, either kicking the can down the road or, perhaps, perpetuating a cycle that's always been happening and always will?

No matter what you choose, you will find a page that tells you "Our Song." And it will be yours, and yours alone, and it will matter only to you.

According to deeply-flawed website Goodreads.com, the sex-and-alcohol-loving Buddhist monk Ikkyu once said that "Many paths lead from the foot of the mountain, but at the peak we all gaze at the single bright moon." In other words, just because the ending is the same, everyone can take their own path to get there.

You won't see that in a movie, or in a novel. You might think you're being clever by saying "What about Choose Your Own Adventure novels?", but fuck you, those are just single-player games, and so is Slay the Princess. It's a single-player game, and it has the same final screens no matter what you do, except for the fact that we all took a different path there.

Statistically, given enough players, I'm sure that someone else has or will get to the ending the same way that I first did. And that's okay. Ikkyu didn't say that everybody was unique, and neither shall I.

All I'll say, and what I think Slay the Princess is saying, even if the writers didn't mean for it to, is that your choices matter, even if they don't seem like they do. Even if they don't matter to anyone else.

So choose carefully. It all matters.

On writing sex and violence

There are only two kinds of scenes that I absolutely hate writing: violence and romance. I was going to give this post a clever alliterative title like "Fighting and Fucking," but I think it's probably better not to be so flippant about it. I also don't particularly want to make people imagine that I'm going to discuss fuckfighting, which is either a way for two characters to fight each other while also fucking, or a way for two characters to fuck each other while also fighting, depending. I'm not writing about that. I've also never written those kinds of scenes.

But when it comes to writing fight scenes, I just don't think they're that interesting. I don't think that they're that interesting when I see them on TV or in movies, either. Sometimes they can be visually impressive, but they're often just flashy spectacle that doesn't mean much to me. It's like watching an acrobatics display at the circus. It's fun, but I don't think they should be jammed into the middle of something else.

It does, in fact, make a lot of superhero movies less fun to watch.

I don't mind it if the point of the work is to have fun action scenes. Jackie Chan movies, for example. The whole point is that you've got this incredible athlete and acrobat doing incredible martial arts choreography. That's fine.

It's the same with sex scenes. I don't really need those jammed into the middle of a movie that isn't about that. Showing me the rhythm of a male character's thrusts in and out of someone isn't going to tell me anything I actually care about regarding that character.

Unless, of course, that's the point of the work. I don't just mean porn, either, though of course I do also mean porn. If I'm watching porn, then I'm probably there to see the sex scenes.

Not always. I'm surprised I haven't talked about it on this blog before, but I can't find it using the search bar, so maybe this is the first time I'll be mentioning the old adults-only Japanese visual novel "Tsukihime," which I totally downloaded from a site that had a bunch of other adults-only Japanese visual novels because it was advertised as having a better plot than most.

It did. It does. That was the game that convinced me that I couldn't learn Japanese on my own and that I should take classes. That led to me deciding to minor in Japanese when I went back to college for my Bachelor's degree, which led to me studying abroad in Japan for six months, which led to my three-month Japanese internship, which changed my life.

And I guess it's fair to say that it was porn, or at least sold along with a bunch of other porn. I'm told that the developers added sex scenes to the game later just because they knew it would help it to sell at least a few copies. I don't know if that's true. I just know that I've been told it. There is a rerelease of the game coming out soon in English that doesn't have any explicit sex scenes in it. I would like to play it.

In any case.

The point is that the book I'm writing now has sex and violence in it, because it's an action/romance novel in a fantasy world. The main characters get into fights. The first chapter is a lengthy fight scene between the main character and multiple bandits. He kills them all, because he's just sooooo strong and cool.

I hated writing it. I hated trying to think of the right way to choreograph the way that one man would kill five others. I still did it, and I think I did a decent job. My guiding principles were to keep it short, keep it brutal, and keep it difficult. Those are my guiding principles when writing any fight scene.

So the hero is shot with a crossbow, and, in return, shoots two of the bad guys with his longbow before the other three even get to him. From there, he hacks two of them to death with his billhook. One gets hit in the arm, the other across the neck, and then the first gets a couple of "whacks" to the top of his head to finish him off. It takes only a few seconds, and during that time, the second guy plants a knife in the hero's arm. So now he's been shot and stabbed, and there's only one guy left. I don't even explain how he kills that guy. I just say that he doesn't want to, but, because the last guy attacks him, he does kill him.

That's the fight scene. If you were to watch it on TV, it'd take about twenty seconds. That's intentional. This isn't an even match. It's one guy who knows how to kill and is very good at it even though he doesn't want to, against five guys who aren't very good at it and want to do it very badly. I decided to give my guy a little bit of extra luck and ferocity in the fight, but he's trading blows. They get in a hit, he gets in a hit. They get one, he gets one.

Later, the other main character, an orc, gets into a fight with nothing but her fists against a much bigger orc who is carrying a club. Same principles apply. She sucker-punches him in the head. He staggers, and comes up with his club to hit in her in the stomach with it. She pivots and punches him in the stomach with her other fist, which doesn't hurt him much, so he brings his club arm down onto her extended arm. She dodges it enough to turn it into a glancing blow, and turns that dodge into a grab for the survival knife on her belt. She stabs him between the ribs, jerks the knife out of his heart, and he dies.

She punches, he clubs, she punches, he clubs, she stabs. I figure that a big guy with a club is going to lead with that club. He's not going to bother trying to do any fancy grappling moves. He won't headbutt her. He won't kick her. He won't bite her. He's just going to keep swinging that weapon, because that's what people with weapons usually do. People with weapons rely too much on those weapons, in my experience. It's a common thing you're taught when trained how to use a weapon: don't forget that you have lots of other options that don't involve the weapon. I figure I'll make this big guy with a club forget his other options. It makes the fight winnable. If he went for a bear hug, I'd have to write in a headbutt or a bite from her to get free, and it would just extend things.

Keep it short, keep it brutal, keep it difficult.

Eventually, those two main characters fall in love and get married. A year later, they have a kid together. Presumably, they had sex in between, but I'm not going to write it. It wouldn't be fun for me to read it, and I don't think it'd be fun for anyone else, either.

How would I write that first sex scene between them? It's funny to me to imagine mumbled explanations afterward as they try explaining, hey, you know, about last night, neither of us have been with anyone at all in over ten years, and nobody of another species ever, so we were kind of rusty in general and didn't really know what we were doing, but hopefully next time will go better. But I know that that'd wind up being the scene in the book that everybody remembers. People would quote that shit back to me later. It'd distract from the whole rest of the novel if I did that.

And on the other hand, if I wrote about how they rock each other's worlds, how they both have a fantastic time, and I write in detail about engorged or throbbing or sensitive body parts covered in various sticky or viscuous fluids, then that'd be what gets quoted at me later, and I don't want that, either.

So I won't. I won't write the sex scenes between them at all. I won't even try to be cute and imply anything about them, either. As much as I believe that good communication is key to good sex, I don't think it helps the story to have the two of them follow that advice. Maybe they talk about it later, when we aren't there watching them.

I always think of what Margaret Weis and Tracky Hickman described in the annotated chronicles for Dragonlance as a "boot scene." They said that they got it from Star Trek, the original series. Captain Kirk and a beautiful woman kiss, it fades to black, and then we see Kirk sitting on the side of a bed pulling his boots on. We know what happened. We don't need to see what was in between.

Truthfully, I don't even think I need to show one of those. I think it's enough to show that they've fallen in love and decided to marry each other and then fade out. No need to show them falling into each other's arms or pulling on boots in the morning. Probably, like all married couples, they fucked. When we see them again a year later and there's a baby, that's pretty solid evidence.

I might have guiding principles on how to write fight scenes to keep them brief and believable, but when it comes to sex scenes, my main guiding principle is simply not to write them at all.

In case you were curious.

Today's brushing of the 18-year-old cat was made more difficult by the fact that the 14-year-old cat was already on my lap, because that's ALSO something I have to deal with nearly every morning.