The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata
Ep. 5: “Wings That Cannot Lift You”
SCRIPTUM
Intro:
Welcome to The Cornucopia. I am Billy Kirby. I have this QWERTY keyboard I saved up for. I typed on it for the introduction of my last episode. Its keycaps glow white through black plastic, shine through and down onto metallic base of keyboard itself. There’s this dark aspect to the light that shines through the keyboard’s keys. If I remove a keycap, lean in over the board, and stare into the light, a tunnel forms. It is a black tunnel at the center of which a deep white light emanates as if from a great downward distance. It is bone-chilling. It is soft in some ways. If I remove a keycap and lean in and over and stare into the light, it blinds me somewhere elsewhere in my head’s brain such that dustlike floaters form in my eyes which take time to disappear, to give way to the opacity of the time it takes. The springs of the individual keys rubber-band each key’s position on the board after each depress, after each actional input, each key rising from the typing fingers now so adept at their business it is no longer necessary to look at the fingers on the board, that it became this way possibly a long long time ago, as of typing lessons in elementary school which took place on box monitors and black or silvery keyboards with membrane switches: a mushy typing-texture. Nothing like the dinosaur which teaches you how to place your digits along the Main Row, left and right indexes on F and J respectively. Nothing like the tunnel of light which emanates now from my modest gear. No RGB lighting; just a void-white tunnel your mind has trouble measuring the distance of. Hello. And welcome.
Episodic Germ: Tiny Note:
Suddenly a verb comes to my head: “metaforming”: the noun-form a “metaformation.” What does it mean? Unpacking: n.: Something forming which is aware either of the way it’s forming or of the “nature” of its formation.
Meat Hammer:
So then what’s this episode about, really? What’s the Point of Interest? There are infinite addictions out there, I’m sure, given the state of the human mind and its capacity for language. Let’s specify the variable’s context a little. In the culture of the US of A, one of the least sexy addictions I can think of is Videogame Addiction. Often in the US, and especially in reference to the “US Perception” as is disseminated by various endemic Media, videogaming is viewed as a non-salutary kind of hobby, and rarely vocational. Not to mention the WHO (World Health Organization) recently accepted gaming as a classification for a bona fide capital-A Addiction, right up there with gambling, substance-abuse, and the like. Some addictions are obviously more socially acceptable than others. That being said, what makes video games so stigmatized by modern US culture apart from the way our media outlets view them? Maybe that’s not a significantly interesting question. Maybe a more interesting question would be, What makes such an un-sexy addiction so… enticing… to so many people? I should preface this Q with the sentiment I share toward the concept of addictions as per limned to in the previous paragraph. There are infinite addictions. Anything you could do, in my vantage point, per this perception-mode, yes? Thus I’m not looking at it from the perspective of a health professional, it should be noted. I’m looking at it from the perspective of a person trying to make manifest the necessity of thought, of a person who engages in excessive thought about an excessive number of arbitrary things. So then what’s this sensation, again, that keeps our subject-types enthralled with their addiction? What, to make this analogous with cigarette-smoking, for instance, is the nicotine-element here? Well, maybe it’s something to do with a dichotomy of self. There’s this game I enjoy called League of Legends. It takes place in the form of a 5v5 multiplayer matchup with a roster of over a hundred characters or “champions” with whom you use the abilities and skillsets of to advance beyond and out-strategize your opponents. It’s the line-walking here involved in the game’s mechanics as they relate to the self involved in the game which most triggers the contemplation at hand….
There are points of goosebumps (-pebbles, -flesh, etc.) which appear broadly on expanses of your skin as Ultimate Contemplation kicks in, sets off, inflates the eye sockets. And then of course there’s the Q. of the What of the nature of the contemplation point at hand, here. The Q. being something along the lines of, How can anyone be in two places at once? The tentatively proposed answer is: art. In the case of computer-gaming, as is ours—our case, here—the screen: the monitor’s screen: the window opened up unto an isometric portal or vision: the world behind the screen: the limited P.O.V. so much like our own in natural circumstance. We become voyeurs of a space occupied by our own understanding of its compliance with our limited capacity for interactions with it. The concept of the interaction like a pair of wings that cannot lift you or take you anywhere or, as far as this analogy goes, even flap: an impossible use: utility: a purely aesthetic function. This so and such that, when you press and de-press R on your keyboard to initiate the champion Kindred’s ultimate ability in order to survive mid-fight, you know and feel it is not only your action or only her action onscreen, but a melding of the two: thus the “inter-” prefix: it’s become an interaction: between the onscreen champion’s mechanics and your own, your own biology’s nervous system’s hairpin-triggerish coordination and the sub-interactions of the game’s coding working in unison, together, much the same way you can be in two places at once: as with your eyes’ immersion in the screen and the space you occupy around about the screen.
Meat Shredder:
Then we kind of somehow get to the as-it-were crux of the parsed thought at hand, of the understanding of the necessitation for something as substantial as an addiction like Videogame Addiction: the interaction or ability to interact with the media you’re consuming as you’re consuming it. In some ways it’s as if there are simultaneously two Yous: there is the you outside the screen, looking in, and the you inside the screen, reincarnated as the champion you control. It almost makes you wonder about (like) the unnatural quality of the level to which entertainment and/or art has advanced. I open the Riot Games client and the League of Legends logo blips onto the screen of my Hewlett Packard monitor, whose green light-strip ebbs and glows below HP logo. I drink Sprite-Zero from a plastic bottle (advertising my dentist’s officious practice) whose pull-top lets out a burst of carbonated air. I chug; I chug and log into my League account. I queue for a match. I put slowed-down hip-hop on via Firefox’s YouTube opened on my second monitor. Part of the addiction’s appeal seems to be this dichotomy of Self—of the self—of experience(s). There are Forces Unknown which threaten to shift the course of the whole parsed thought here and now into absurdist tension, that the idea (w/h/y) of the thought itself is one that does not have a stake in daily life. May I proffer a Rich Camel Crush? May I invite you to sit and stay and talk awhile? We do not have the sort of time for this here, in the podcast, but that doesn’t foreshorten the idea of the proposition I’m making. While the Whole Parsed Thought may seem, by some standards, antiquated or misnomerish, it’s still itself a thought which deserves at least enough attention as would be required to ensure its notional value.
Meat Processor:
So then where do we go, dear listener, with our new thoughts? Where do the new thoughts themselves go, in the end, when we’re done with them? Is it all some paranoid recycling process? Do the words sustain or somehow (like) reinforce the arrival of other words? Are we at all like the thoughts we have? I want to leave you with an image I have in my head. Of course, when I tell it to you, it will not for you be my image, but your own. That is not a problem. That is the way it always goes. Consider blackness, or the oncoming idea of blackness, of the dark, of the fear you might’ve had as a child of what for you constituted the dark. This the whole premise for the domestic night light—this Fear of the dark. As a child, lying in bed beside my older brother, I’d roll onto my side, open my eyes, and face the window. Through the glass pane, far off and constant, the local church’s lights would serve as my reassurance of vision in the night. It’d be that, with minimal effort, the room about would seem to dematerialize, focally, such that all I could see were the large metal beams of the church’s parking lot’s light fixtures. See the lights. Watch as they shine reassuringly. Not an overpowering sense you get, but warm on some internal level it is clear can keep your Fear at bay until, at last, your eyes daze shut and dreams kick in, forever.
[AUDIO CREDITS]