Public letter to Disney

Dear Disney.

I apologize for all the crap I've spewed on you for sucking in comparison to Squaresoft, being sexist pigs with no imagination, being hopeless at making games and being solely focused on making money rather than produce good stories, and a number of other failures.

In respect of the chokehold you now have on my childhood idols and standards of heroism, I will not make violent, vulgar, exaggerated threats, nor ironic, bitter and bitchy jokes. I lay down my sword and my spear at your feet and I kneel in horror at the damage you could do to my fragile inner child. I will beg. That you in aquiring Marvel, and all that it stands for, do not make it into the regular mainstream, mindless, kiddy crap you usually produce in the name of income. That you do not stand in the way of what could be great, violent, gory movies of characters that are indeed great, violent and gory. That you do not reduce such imminent figures as Thor or Wolverine or Deadpool to the shallow pastell-colored idiots that frequent your productions.

I beg of those at Marvel to not give in to such attempts at brainwashing, should this my humble request be denied.

Together with the giants of Marvel we are standing at the threshold to a dawning new age, and it is you, Disney, who will decide whether it will be an age of conquest and glory or a heart-tearing, pathetic disaster.

I await your answer with greatest humility.

// Not a fan of yours, but clearly of Marvel

Deeper

Without darkness there would be no light.

I paint my walls black, I pull down the blinds. Speak to the demons inside my head, but I see no light, I find no light. Maybe there is no light. I never wanted it anyway, I forget why I was looking for it in the first place. I let the darkness gulp me down and I slide down its throat, spreading my palms and my fingers against its silky flesh. I wish I could keep my eyes open and let it crawl in through my pupils and settle against the back of my eye sockets, but I can't. And when I let myself relax, when my eyelids fall, then I see it.

Darkness, light. Like seeing two sides of the same coin at the same time through some twisted trick of fate, it only flickers by an instant but that instant is enough for darkness to cough me back up and I break the surface gasping for air. My blood and bones shiver with fear, having stared into the abyss and let the light shoot up through them, into them. Let us never do that again, they conspire around me, let us let up the blinds and never speak of this again. I do, but I know the story. My blood and my bones both have only patience that lasts until their cells have been exchanged and a new bustling generation perk up at my simple nudge. The old are gone, but I remain. I have the most exciting thing, I tell them, that I want to show you. If you only paint the walls black and pull down the blinds. And off we go again, for me to catch another glimpse of night eternal and get another chance at letting it gauge my eyes out and replace them with its own. For blood and bones to once again be pierced by light and live another generation fearing that which lives beyond darkness. Both asking ourselves the last and vital question;

like that which we fear and seek, would we survive without each other?

Dissidia - does that mean anything btw?

The new PSP game Dissidia: Final Fantasy from Square-Enix is something as awkward as a Square-Enix fighting game starring characters from Final Fantasy, the key word in awkward being fighting game. Considering that Enix is a pure rpg company and the first thing that comes to mind in terms of fighting and Square is The Bouncer and Ehrgeiz, hardly any technical knockouts, I looked at this game as pure marketing fluff that might amuse FF fans but mostly just abuse the fame.

However, now it's been released in Japan and the US, and it's getting pretty decent reveiws. Especially as a fighting game with an actual story (can always rely on Square for that) no matter how haphazard one would expect a game combining twelve different sets of characters would be stitched together. It also appears Square has learned from more action oriented games such as Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core and the fighting is both easy to pick up and with some depth for those who like to learn timing and supercombos. I also get the impression the fighting is very intense, with a lot of things happening at once. I'm hoping for battles in the spirit of the Sephiroth battle in Kingdom Hearts II; fast, difficult, all over the place, but quite obviously within reach of victory with a little bit of effort and skill, and of course with the burning determination to beat the bastard dead.

The final word remains to be said; the game is released Sept 4 in Europe, and I will return then with the verdict. Do expect that I might be a bit more inclined to hail it to the skies then; having Cloud visibly present does tend to put me in a very agreeable mood.

Hooray

I've written more lately than you might think. Sadly there's no updates to Kirya yet, and The Island still needs that inspired rewrite that I'll give it someday, I promise. What I've been doing lately instead is to just write. Sit down with no pressure, no purpose, and no aspirations and just write what comes naturally. If the story makes no sense or it all seems unlikely, it doesn't matter. I've removed all outside pressures of "how should a good book be written" or "this sells" or "the reader must understand what's going on" and all that crap. Sure, that's important, when writing as a skill or a job. But just writing, this wonderous thing that I discovered as a child and that allows me access to a world beyond this, it doesn't need all that. Just writing, which is what I really love and not the make-sense-commercial-writing.

Since I've gotten stuck with several of my serious projects because of those things, because all the formalities robbed me of the passion, I decided I'd start over. So yes. Lately I've been writing random shit, sometimes what just comes to mind like a diary, sometimes stories from a random thought or a dream I had and just let them develop as they will, with barely any editing, often writing the whole thing in one sitting without rereading anything until I've finished. Most of all; they don't have a deliberate point or moral to them.

Vanity, that I've already uploaded, was halfway such a thing. Not quite as pure, and definitively not refined enough in my opinion. But I finished one today that could possibly survive as a text even outside the protective love of my computer. So I'm uploading it. It's also in swedish, for a change. 6 pages, called Vandraren (for now at least). Do let me know what you think. I say that all the time, but no one ever does XD I'll just keep trying.