//

More than anything in this life, I fear the Enemy. Why then, did I go back into the mines?

It was dangerously dark for most of the ascent. That is why I had brought my lantern. Though, I admit, I did not light it for fear of giving away my presence to beings with more sensitive eyes. These mines did not feel like home, they felt long, cold, hollow. I clung to the parchment, feeling every groove as I stepped through the black. To turn corners I ran my fingers along the wall until it bent away. And though I could not see the new void on the other side, I felt it. Being confronted with open darkness is a strange thing. You can stand for as long as you would like, straining as hard as you would like, your eyes will never adjust. At night, or day, it is hard to tell, when I made camp. I unpacked, set my alerts, ate a ration, slept, and packed together all in the suffocating grasp of the dark. But I am convinced, or have convinced myself, that this was what kept me alive. I think that it took four days of travel before I finally left the stairways and came into the Eighth Ring. At this point my maps were blank.

Cartographers, amongst whom I barely count myself, had marked every previous route carefully and with ample precision. Between my start and the Eighth I made only two corrections. The first being a door misplaced on the wrong wall, confusing the room’s cardinal positions. Probably it was engraved in such a hurry as I am reluctant to imagine. The other, unfortunately, was the appearance of a new passage. The rim of which felt sticky. I left there quickly before making my notes. The maps kept me guided and safe on the way up. I owe everything to those who came before. The Eighth, however, is counted as one of the lost settlements. There are no maps of it. No memory. It was taken from us, stolen by many claws and many fangs. I am young and unwise. But I have learned what is left of our history. Far above, where the walls are cool and the air draws in from without, in the Rings, we had our home-hearths. We had life. Until the Enemy came and we were driven deeper. Down into the relative safety of the lower Rings. We were cut off from the high passages that connected us to the others. Down below lived only Dvaergi now. And we did live, for a time, in each Ring. The Enemy followed. Our barricades only held so long before we gave them another of our hearths, another score of our lives. As we were driven deeper and deeper, time passed. To pay time's due we gave our eldest, and with them our memory. It was far too late before someone spoke up. We no longer know our own tunnels, something must be done! Perhaps we hoped within us that keeping it out of ear and out of mind would force it into unreality. Unmake this tense reality, that we might wake from a bad dream. But we only stole from ourselves. The places of heritage our people kept and lived in for uncountable lives one after the other, were now foreign to us. That was when the Cartographers were founded. An order of the differently-sane charged by duty, spirit, or other feeling, with mapping our old home. We had tried, of course, to fight the Enemy, but our efforts were paid back in spent blood. Smarter folk than I figured that lone Dvaergi fared better than groups. And I mean not to downplay the cost of this discovery. Groups of fives, fours, threes, all lost to the terror in the tunnels. Their warmth is gone. We leave nothing in this world when all is said and done, save for the memories. Our maps are those memories. They are the paths we walk, the directions for life encoded in runes and scribbles, written in every colour, pressed into thick parchment like brooks eroded into the side of a mountain. Maybe that is why I ventured up. To preserve what had been us, and what might be us again. Maybe too, I longed to see the fabled sun.

Maneuvering through the barricaded pass-gate strained me some, but I emerged on the other side feeling more courage than fear, or maybe courage is measured simply in its presence against mounting fear. As soon as my heart quieted I flexed my ears and heard the familiar notes of silence. For the first time since I left the relative safety of the mapmakers’ holdout between the Ninth and Tenth, I lit a fire. Despite the tremble in my hands, I struck the stones and sparked flames with the first. Memory flowed into me and I saw that day, in my small youth, when my mother held my wrists to guide my strike when I first lit our hearth. It felt like she was still holding gently on. The flame stuck to the stone, and once I placed it into the lantern and had adjusted the mirrors, light flowed easily, casting an orange glow on the painted stone. The tunnel seemed larger at once, and the soft hues of our old colours still sat in the walls.

Now I am here. In a place none of my kind have stood for eras. With a blank parchment and my sister's ink set. Let us make a map.

//

Thanks for reading!

The above is an excerpt from a prospective story under the working title “Pitch Black Reflections”. I hope you enjoyed it!

With love <3 -Ventus

Night Light

An every day miracle to me, is the fact that when I walk the short eight minutes from the train station to my apartment at the end of work, I can usually (in the spring and with clouds permitting) see the Moon. Known by many names, Diana, Marama, Nanna/Sin, my favourite being Luna, it is a deity to many peoples. Throughout our history, few things have been as certain as the rising and setting of Sol, and the phases of Luna.

It pulls on our seas, and gives us a pale light when otherwise the night would be nothing but pitch dark. When it is too dark to see and to keep safe from what lurks in the primordial forest, instead we are given the light of the sun even when it would be impossible. A mirror hangs over us, giving us so much.

So why is the moon, when it appears as a central piece in the stories we craft, SO DAMN SPOOKY?

Post-Pre-Amble

Have you ever thought through the Fermi Paradox? In essence: Enrico Fermi, Italo-American physicist known to physics-nerds for physics things, and known to all other nerds primarily for the paradox we're discussing, had a discussion at lunch with other heavy-hitters in the physicists of the 50's.

They wondered something like this: The universe is very old. So old, in fact, that IF life is a spontaneous occurrence, (which it is don't @me), it would be improbable to the point of impossibility that we are the only ones home in the celestial mansion. And to the same point, that we were first. Other life must exist somewhere else, or it must have existed at some point. So why, with the natural curiosity of our species, and our attempts at reaching out to others... At this point Fermi blurted our “But where is everybody?!“¹ or so the story goes.

If life is likely, if interstellar communication is possible, why haven't we heard from anyone else? There are many proposed theories to 'solve' the Fermi Paradox. I will not go into detail about most of them, except one: The Dark Forest Hypothesis

This hypothesis makes some assumptions about life. Do me a favour and imagine: You're a lil' guy in a dark forest. Living in a secluded bush, you can't see into other bushes. You think there might be others there, but you have no way of knowing. Now you could do what Humans do. You could shout, at the top of your lungs “HEY, I LIVE HERE, WE HAVE RADIOWAVES, WANT TO BE FRIENDS?” and who knows, there might be someone across the grassy patch in the nearby shrubbery, and they might hear you, and yet they don't shout back. Because they know something about this forest. They have lived here longer than you, and they know. Something big hunts in this forest, and if it finds you...

In this scenario, the safest actions are, of course, to stay silent. Do not let the others know that you are here, because you can never know their intentions.

The Brethren

Dead Space is a damn good series of video games. In it, you fight Necromorphs, a form of transformed disfigured humans and animals that have been affected by “The Marker”. An artifact of unknown origin and religious worship. Due to weirdness, The Marker affects dead tissue. Makes it live again, makes it kill, and makes it transform the corpses through an unspecific process. It is all very gross. Once enough dead things are moving again, they go through something called a “Convergence” event. A term coined, I think, by the church of Unitology. An in-universe religious entity that is totally-not-at-all scientology-based bonkersness. What a “Convergence” event does, is not entirely spelled out. Since you stop it not once, but twice.

Playing through Dead Space 1 and 2, it seemed like aliens weren't discovered. I know it didn't feel all that like a universe post-first contact.

In Dead Space 3 protagonist Isaac Clarke and a cast of characters including: your ex, her new boyfriend, a traumatized soldier (whom you can also play as in co-op), and a group of religious fanatics are marooned on an icy planet called Tau Volantis. As you explore above and below the frozen wastes it becomes obvious that something lived here before you. Some alien race had structures, civilisation, language here, and then, in an instant, the entire surface was covered in ice. Since then, humans have landed, and they too succumbed to the harsh conditions, making you the third known occupation of the surface. Through data logs and exposition it eventually becomes clear that when the planet froze, it was undergoing a Convergence event, and the original inhabitants tried to stop it. Finding your ex, escaping the religious freaks, and getting off Tau Volantis are the game's primary objectives, that is, of course, until a moon tries to eat you.

Tau Volantis' moon turns out, is not a regular moon at all. It is a living creature, with far too many terrible beaked tentacles and a colouration that shows it's connection to the Necromorphs in no uncertain terms. The Convergence event is revealed to be the gnarly birth of a space monster called a “Brethren Moon”, made possible by the copious amount of dead meat gathered on the planet.

The moon, or moons as we realise, are some kind of apex predator in the universe's eco-system. Attracted by amassed psychic energy from living creatures, like humans, or the original inhabitants of Tau Volantis. They are born from the convergence events, and, I assume, after space-birth, will proceed to devour the entire planet. A connection betwixt the planet-eating moons and the “Planet-Cracker” spaceship that is the location of the entire first game can definitely be drawn, but I digress.

In the end it is up to Isaac Clarke and his maybe-there co-op companion Carver to finally put a stop to the moon. After the Unitologists restart the convergence process a ticking clock starts, as the moon slowly approaches the planet. Hungry.

Dark Universe Theory

Serious answers to Fermi's Paradox don't really include being eaten by moons. In the context of Dead Space, however, it seems the only solution.

When a planet of beings, such as humans, or the Tau Volantians, gather in sufficient numbers. Two-digit billions or more, perhaps. The psychic energy becomes so strong, that it calls to the Brethren Moon. A Marker did find it's way to earth. It paved the way for Unitology as a religion. And with time, Earth too, would succumb to the maniacal manipulations of these things that hunt planets.

It makes sense why Tau Volantis is unique. Why the humans of Dead Space haven't found alien life before. Only the planet which very very nearly got devoured, and only avoided its fate by the heroic acts of self-sacrificing people, shows signs of previous inhabitants. Perhaps, I think, because no others have survived the convergence, or managed to stop it.

There are many other ways to solve the Fermi Paradox. But for me, the Dark Universe where something big, hungry, and hunting, lurks just outside the scope of human endeavours. That is where the best stories lie.

Thank you for reading, and don't look the Moon in its eyes.

-Ventus

This post is based on my own recollection, using no sources. As an exercise in, and example of, how video games exist in our memory after completion.

//////////////////////////////

Angry post-amble

EA Games: Cancel Everything

What the Brethren Moon really are is still a mystery. Visceral Games, the studio behind Dead Space, were shut down by their corporate overlords in 2017. I had not needed more reasons to dislike EA, but they sure do make it easy.

We get a small glimpse into what could have been at the end the DLC Dead Space 3: Awakened. In the Epilogue, Clarke and Carver finally head towards earth. As they approach our home, they try to hail the spaceports, or the mining corps, met initially only with static, they finally get through to something. They hear only screams and horror. A trio of Brethren Moons rise behind the pale blue dot. They followed our signals, they have gathered, and they feast.

We will never know what happens next.

Make us whole.

Hey you there, do me a favour.

Imagine You are designing a game for a large company with a tight deadline. You are crafting a military experience, and the player must take the role of a soldier in conflict. Where do you put your focus?

On articulate and precise physics, rotatable items, with small intricate details? On complex and engaging bomb-planting and defusing gameplay? Or on weapon feel, sound and animations, on making the one thing you do all the time feel as good to do as you possibly can. Its not stroke of genius to mention that, of course, FPS devs focus on making the first-person shooter part as good as it can be. And a game with multiple gameplay focuses usually miss the mark on some or all.

The wow-factor of one really good system of gameplay usually outweighs multiple mediocre ones. But choosing to focus exclusively on a clinical shooting experience. One where the player is divorced from the physical handling of the weapon, and other actions, is a choice. While it is the standard for shooting games to focus on the shooting, for obvious reasons, there is space left untrodden when the rest of the reality is ignored.

Know thy machine

Theres a thing people say, usually young guys driving their first car, when the fuel indicator is almost empty:

“I know my ride”.

Translated: I've driven this car enough to know precisely how much the fuel indicator is lying to me. I know how fast I can drive to make it the next few kilometers to the gas station, despite the engine groaning and grinding. And they do. It is rarely hyperbole.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2's campaign opens with the player learning to handle their weapons at a shooting range. As the instructor

The same can not be said about an M16. No matter how many hours your pour into CoD, a hundred, a thousand hours. You would never learn to handle a weapon as expertly as the player character does. There is distance between you the player, and you the character. You can and do do different things.

Nothing changes from shot to shot, the mechanics are static. Yes, you can get good at shooting with a specific gun, but it isn't because of a familiarity with the mechanicals of an object you know well. You don't get under the hood to scrape gunpowder out from the barrel, or deal with casings ejecting improperly. In short: you will never know the machine, because the machine isn't real. It doesn't matter if the barrel is fouled, because it will never be. Every casing will spring out like was it the first. Every magazine you find is already loaded and, somehow, they happen to be filled to the exact amount that is left in your counter in the corner.

The guns in the game are simply statistical changes to the function of shooting. Guns with larger magazines reload slower, some shoot faster some slower, with a relativity to damage done per shot. Some favour precision with singular big hits, while others don't count on you hitting more than 60% of shots fired, and having higher capacity as a result. At no point do you have to think about how many bullets are left in your magazine, you can just look at the counter. You don't have to rack the slide, or cycle the weapon, the reload animation does both as needed.

In real life weapons handling is much deeper than just the action parts. There is a whole lot of maintenance, cleaning, oiling, wiping gunpowder away. Its a process that isn't seen in games. Despite it being the prime action that gunowners actually do with their guns. A miniscule percentage of owning a gun is the actual shooting.

An IndieGem™©® called Receiver (2013, Wolfire Games) breaks with the traditional rootin' tootin' point-n-shootin' of FPS games. By asking the player to handle everything about their weapon. Racking slides, inserting magasines, clearing jammed bullets, managing the safety, and more.

Receiver seen without it's hud or instructions.

Receiver is by all accounts an experimental game. When it came out it presented a new and unique way to interact with the world of the gun. It crafted a reality where the weapon was more than shoot, reload, zoom, switch. It's follow up Receiver 2, was even more ambitious, and, as claimed by Wolfire, simulates every internal part, down to the last spring, of a given sidearm.

Pressing R in Call of Duty spends a set amount of time before the ammo counter in the corner goes back to full. Without needing you to acknowledge the mechanics of a gun, you can get right back to putting holes in faceless goons of non-european descent. In effect it feels more like waiting on, rather than doing, something.

Receiver contrasts the traditional by dedicating space on your keyboard, which also means in your muscle memory, to every bit of the reloading process. It becomes a very different challenge from shooting in traditional FPSs which favour reflexes over accuracy. A much larger weight is put on accurate execution of a process under pressure.

Let me break down how to reload a semi-automatic pistol in Receiver:

v: – Toggle safety e: – Eject the magazine ¨: – Holster weapon (to free up your other hand) z: – Insert bullets into the magazine ¨: – Draw weapon z: – Re-insert the magazine r: – Pull back slide

the full process

Seven discrete inputs, with separate timings, some require holding in order to execute, and if done improperly can mean the swift end of a run, since a single bullet will kill you. High-stress gameplay means that the more familiar a player is with the process, the more likely they will handle correctly, and in a timely manner, even when the red light of a Mindkiller drone is bearing down on you.

Receiver doesn't actually make you more familiar with your weapon than Call of Duty does, because the weapon still isn't real. Mastering weapons handling in game still is just a simulation, and the gun still simply a matter of logic. You can get equally as masterful at handling a M1911 from Call of Duty, or the same from Receiver, without having ANY skill handling a real-life version.

Now my question to you. Do you think it matters? Does it matter that we handle simulated weapons in simulated violence, and would there be a difference if the violence was marred by the actual mechanicals of the gun machine?

I don't have an answer. I am, after all, just a history person on the internet. I think, and I feel, when I play games with guns and violence in them. Sometimes at least. But I do think I'd feel more, and think more, if the game made me, even when doing the simplest things. And in FPSs, the simplest thing is killing.

Thanks for reading

-Ventus

Did you get this if you subscribed? Good.

Did you get this if you didn't subscribe? Not good.

Anyways. Have fun, drink water. -Ventus

Today I've been hard at work re-themeing the blog. This includes taking and modifying the Painkiller Bullet theme written by Jesse Watson. Thank you Jesse, it looks rad as hell.

Federation

I have managed to get federation with ActivityPub working, though it still seems a little unreliable. If you are an active user of Mastodon or the like, try searching for blog.cuinns.com, and see if it comes up. If you do, please let me know the results at bsky.app/profile/cuinns-compendium.bsky.social or by email at ventus@cuinns.com. Thank you.

RSS feed

is up and running. You can subscribe from any reader using https://blog.cuinns.com/feed Should include all images and the likes.

Subscription by email

Currently working on this. Writefreely is quite limited in email options, but once I get it working y'all will be able to subscribe by email, meaning whenever I post a new thing you'll get it yote at yo face.

Up next

Working on a few pitches to magazines. Hoping to get some kind of publishing going. In the meantime I am putting words on pages for the project Killing in a Haze Super excited for y'all to read that one.

Welp that's all

Stay safe, drink water, punch nazis. All the best -Ventus

Not all material is created equal

Video games are a difficult media when it comes to historical preservation. Part of this is due to their relative novelty in the temporal space. Video games haven't existed for more than 80~years, and even then, at their earliest we'd barely recognized them. The written word, the most common type of historical material, has existed for millennia. Of course with changing production methods and style and technique, but remaining pretty much the same in how we access it. Avant-garde art might ask us to touch, feel, listen, but for the most part our eyes are all the tools we need to read a book.

This immutability makes these sources accessible. The only thing you really need to read a book, is the book itself, as long as you can read that particular language. This way the primary barrier to preservation is spatial. We need places to put books when we're not actively looking at them, and a place for the activity of looking. For this we have museums and archives. Institutions we as a society understand to be important, wherefore we fund them, make procedures within them, with systems and staff to facilitate the work of the historian. We make copies of books, scans of them, digitally accessible sometimes even from our own home over the internet. I can sit right now and read a newspaper from 1756 in the Danish West Indies as easily as a book from my own shelf.

I am not saying reading historical material is light work. I know I've sat with lettering I could hardly understand, not to speak of the cultural understanding needed to fully appreciate a given context. No, the work is hard, time consuming, frustrating, but the access is easy. Books can be read even with pages missing. It is frustrating, yes, but a page with a sentence blotted out in due to a careless ink spill, still holds most of a page. The ink blot might even tell you something about the care taken when writing the source!

Now let us compare to a video game. Yes, you need the game itself. A piece of software, or a cartridge or other physical media. This needs to be fully intact. If you have a damaged disk, the entire thing might not ever run unless you get lucky. You need a computer or console on which the software can run.

These are often proprietary systems (looking at you Nintendo), which might not have been in production for a long time, making their acquisition difficult and sometimes costly. Already you need two different pieces before you can even begin assembling the whole.

The Library of Congress in the USA has determined that CD-ROMs, the primary physical media for a whole host of games, lasts about 100-200 years, and only 70% of discs tested held up to this estimate¹. Some losing their readability in an estimated 15~years. Similarly the Canadian Conservation Institute found that some writable disc formats last only 10-20 years². As you read this there are archives of games slowly becoming unreadable. While video games continue to gain legitimacy as an art form and objects of cultural value, time is running out for the preservation of certain games. Especially those unpopular or otherwise unnoteworthy.

Copying a video game is not always as easy as copying a book. Because of compilation, taking code and turning it into 011001 binary, a process which isn't easily reversible, it can be impossible to find the source code. ROM (read-only memory, also a common abbreviation for a game file) backup devices exist, but are viewed with hostility from game manufacturers. Since they allow the copying of the physical media, and, in theory, could be used by pirates to make illegal copies, there is debate as to their legality. To copy a book, you look at the book, and write the same words elsewhere. You don't even need to know the language.

Now once you have gathered an intact copy of the game you wish to analyse, and the hardware on which it can run, you still need more to understand. So let's talk about...

Gaming literacy

https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/349777-game-journalist-bad-cuphead-given-another-shot, accessed 17.01.2025.

It is commonly overlooked by gamers that playing video games takes a high level of skill. A literacy, if you will. Not just being good at games, but basic understanding. Having played many, many, games on the Playstation family, I intuitively understand that X = jump, the south in the compass of buttons on the right of the Dualshock controller. A convention that games with a jump button follow almost religiously. Choosing a different button would be akin to shifting the reading direction right-to-left. The same applies for pressing down on the left stick of the controller meaning sprint or run. Parsing these conventions is a skill that gamers develop over time. We learn how to 'read' games as a language. And the understanding doesn't just relate to the execution of actions. The colours red and blue respectively mean 'health' and 'magic', a long bar of red tells us that the subject has a lot of health points, while a short one implies the opposite. Waterfalls are often the place for hidden paths, and sleeping implies a save state. With these conventions we and the developers communicate implicitly, we speak the same language. Understanding this language lets us understand overt messaging in games.

Not everyone grew up with video games. Entering late means you lack certain skills that are taken for granted. Frustrating as it may be to explain obvious things like “of course eating restores your health” or “why didn't you shoot the red barrel, it blows up?”, it also serves to remind us that intuition is a learned skill. A piece of cake lying on the floor of a dungeon might appear as a well-timed boon to me, a blessing of best health, but take a moment to think how weird that is. If anything, eating dungeon cake should probably upset your stomach to the point of incapacitation but nothing frightens a dragon more than time slowing to a stop while the Dragonborn shoves 8 whole wheels of cheese down their gullet, ready to fight again with renewed fervor.

I have had the absolute pleasure to play with friends who got into gaming late in life. Mostly women, owing to the continuing societal stigmatisation against women in gaming, but that is an essay for another time since I don't feel like seething with anger at the moment. I digress. Showing others how to play, accompanying them on their own journey, helps teach the things we as veterans have forgotten. The why's of our intuition. Which in turn can help us as historians. Understanding that red barrels are explosive isn't the same as understanding why they explode.

Analysing video games as historical objects requires both the skill to succeed, and the nuance to fully grasp the context of decisions made. Gaming literacy allows us to appreciate that a red barrel exploding when shot is par for the course, and that changing the barrel for a crate, or a thorny acorn, is an explicit choice. Games often have overt and covert themes, and just like reading a book and interpreting the blue curtains, games can hold meaning in every bit.

It is not a particularly hot take to say “In order to understand thing, you need to know thing”. I know. But, with video games being primarily made for the purpose of fun, they have a tendency to colour our reading of them.

Cultural evolution

They tell us things about ourselves in much the same way as a popular tv-drama would. Counter-strike has had a presence in the gaming culture since its first days as a Half-Life mod. In CS you buy guns through an interactive menu. As an example let's look at three generations of Counter-Strike: 1.6, CS:GO, and currently CS2. In 1.6 the menu for buying gave a plethora of statistics about the weapon, stats that did not matter for the in-game usage, like muzzle velocity, since bullets don't travel physically in the games. These details are all part of the game's theming.

Evolution of the buy menu from CS 1.6 –> CS:GO –> CS2

With CS:GO, they cut away most of them, choosing to keep the stats relevant for gameplay, and not much flavour except country of origin. Finally in CS2 the real-world stats are completely gone, replaced with functional game stats and the flavour being descriptive of the in-game gun rather than its real world counterpart. Counter-strike moved away from realism over 22 years. There are many other points of analysis available with a culturally important game like CS, but this example shows us an evolving want to detach from the original real-world inspiration for the game, and a move towards a more stylized unreality.

Valve's choices in the development of CS can be read in multiple ways. It could be that a large shift in consciousness has made the connection to real violence unpalatable. Maybe a business analyst determined a more arcade feel would lessen criticism, or make it easier to develop skins to sell. While we can't take something like CS's evolution as absolute proof for any of these, it does prepare the ground for us to plant theories.

Games offer up a way to track the prevalence of certain ideas and moods in society. The language used in games to describe the gender of the player character, the choices given for character customization, how many military shooters are published in a year versus chill farming simulators. Art is the mirror of culture, and culture the mirror of art. This self-reinforcing relationship echoes in video games, and for this very reason they are important, legitimate historical objects. And I am excited for the possibilities they carry within.

With love -Ventus

P.s these thoughts do not even come close to covering the totality of games' historical value.

If you like this please let me know at https://bsky.app/profile/cuinns-compendium.bsky.social, I would love to hear your thoughts <3

Sources

¹) Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd_longevity.html, accessed 18.01.2025 ²) Conservation Institute Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html, accessed 18.01.2025

I've always liked writing.

Its an act of freedom. Penning my mind down in words forms the shapeless blob of thoughts and mind-mud into coherent, even sometimes intelligent, ideas. Since the mid of 2024 C.E, I've tinkered with a funky lil' dusty computer moonlighting as a functional server. I use it to train my technical skills, and as a hobby. That server now serves another (among many) purpose. This blog.

I've always liked writing, but I never did it much.

As a kid I loved telling stories. Acting out adventures with my friends in school. We were pirates, jedi, scoundrels of every kind, and heroes too (sometimes). It was glorious. The skybridge between, the top floor where my classroom was and the hallway lined with computers (for some reason), had been defended from every manner of darkness creature by kids with guns made of thought and powers barely contained in overacted motions. At some point, I don't remember when, this sort of play became passé among my friends. It was hard. Something in me still wanted to play like that. Live the stories that were in my head. The pictures I saw sometimes clearer than the real world. Ah, I still long for it. But it wasn't to come again. And I remember that day. Under the flourescent light that once exploded, and how I perpetuated a myth about how it had left a cool splash on my shirt which was in fact, just the print of the shirt. Under that now-empty fixture, a girl I knew, Nikoline, looked me in the eye and said she felt too old to play. And we never did again. I had been writing stories my whole life at that point, just never on paper. Fantasy was a show in the theater of the mind only. And the theater had not closed, the actors simply stopped coming to work.

I've always liked writing, but I had to read first.

When I was around 14 years old I accidentally stole a book from a friend. It was a tome. Set with hundreds of pages, bound beautifully, on the cover was the striking image of a statuette with large sharp wings, and a head with red eyes and cephalopod features. Great Tales of Horror, it said, written in a blood-like red under the author's name. It was H.P Lovecraft, of course. Who else? My friend had shown it to me, since I talked often of Lovecraft, despite having read very little of his work. At this point I had played many years of WoW, and if you've ever been to Azeroth, you'll probably know a little about Lovecraft. The tentacled monsters coincidentally named 'The Forgotten Ones' had piqued my interest early on. This interest led me to wikis, and wikis led me to more wikis. From article to article, turn out there aren't many Kevin Bacons between the Forgotten Ones and the Old Gods. From C'thun to Cthulhu. Descending into weird fiction gave me power. I learned words I'd never seen, It gripped me so heavily I often had to read two books at the same time, one being an English-Danish dictionary. In my final years of “folkeskole”, the Danish primary school where you are from around 6~to around 16~, I had amassed a vocabulary of decent size. But I still didn't write.

I've always liked writing, but I was anxious

Teen years are rough. Especially for the socially anxious. I was awkward as a kid, but I had found my people along the way. At a LAN party held by the local extra-curricular school I had met people I would love forever. Then we went to different 'gymnasier' translated: high schools. It was daunting. So many new people. So many new things. Schedules, biology classes, homework I didn't understand. Gymnasiet didn't fit me, nor did I fit it. But I learned. not much in the way of maths or physics, but I learned how to be a social being again. In the 7th grade, I had my first anxiety attack. It sits clear as day in my mind. I had gone to the gas station for lunch. There was a queue, so I wasn't sure I'd make it back before class started. When I came back to the school the hallways were empty. Not a single other person. Limbo. Okay, I thought, I'm sweating a little cause I walked fast, no one will notice. I'm at the door, just open it up, apologize and sit at your seat. You like French class. When the door swung open all eyes were on me. Pin drop dead silence. Every head had turned. In my memory their eyes were all white out. No pupil. Just white lights staring at me. Fast breaths. Sweating more now. How should I act? I don't know. What if they hate me, what if I'm a joke, what if they'll laugh, what if-

I hadn't opened the door.

That was my first anxiety attack. I could not bring myself to open it. I left. Walked home, my parents' house being just 6 minutes away walking fast. In the living room I curled up on the couch. Tears soaked into the pillow. I had lied there many times before. It was my favourite spot, right where the light hit around 14:00. I fell asleep still crying. Once I woke up not even 15 minutes later I called my mom, told her I had left school, something was wrong and I didn't know what, but I needed help. My parents saved my life then. They took it seriously, and got me to as many psychologists as was needed for me to get better. I'm still not all the way better.

For a long time I wanted to write. And every time I did, those same thoughts came back. What if they hate it? I don't even know who 'they' are. But I know they kept me from ever showing my words to anyone.

I've always liked writing, and I still do.

“As long back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a [writer]” -Goodfellas, edit mine.

Looking back on my life is a funny thing. I was there for all of it but it still feels like a movie I've watched. Scenes I can recall key parts from, but not the whole thing. I've wanted to write, to publish, and I've met obstacles, of course, but I have also been in my own way. Excuses about why I haven't done what I like, or why I couldn't have. These pages represent a step. A step off the path. I can't stop life from throwing hurdles, but I can move out of the way. Because I want to write, I want to express myself like I did all those years ago. Unapologetically and for no one but myself. I want my mind to be filled with colour, and shapes, and faces of people who have never existed. I want to cry at their misfortune and smile at their good times. And I want to share it, too. This is part of why I've made this blog. This is a place for me to place my thoughts. To work on projects I like. To practise my prose and sharpen my wit. But also a place to place a part of myself. We don't have unlimited time in life. It moves fast. And if we aren't careful we might miss it. When down the line becomes end of the line I don't want to look back at all the stories I didn't put to paper. I want to look at the colourful patches of ink in my skin, that one from 'On Sails of Smoke and Oars of Oil', or the family sigil I dreamt up for 'Wallfall'. All the books I can write, all the articles with my name at the bottom. Ambitious, I know. But there's plenty of life left, and hey, why shouldn't I aim for the stars? After all,

I've always liked writing.

-Ventus