NSA's HATEFINGER has been deployed to quell the spread of "virulent domestic unrest" in Ferguson
NSA’s HATEFINGER has been deployed to quell the spread of “virulent domestic unrest” in Ferguson
INTERNET — The NSA, seeing that the flow of data into and out of Ferguson, Missouri was inevitably leading to a nationwide anti-police revolution, “pulled the plug,” as an Anonymous NSA leaker told Internet Chronicle. The active weapon, codenamed HATEFINGER, overwhelms domain name servers, which act as interpreters for internet protocol addresses and make up the most vulnerable part of internet infrastructure. Network Scientist Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador said, “Oh if the NSA wanted to drop the whole internet with domain name server attacks, I’m sure it’s well within their capabilities. Snowden’s shown their capabilities far exceed such a simple attack.”
Now that Ferguson protesters are to blame for nationwide internet outages, the public has lost sympathy for their cause. “It wasn’t enough that they had to loot and mess things up for everyone,” Gerald Darey, 56, of St. Louis said. “But now I can’t get on my facebook or my other, more important web sites that I pay good money to view. I’m about to lose my mind and just run out in the streets like an animal, myself, with my hands up in the air.”
Critic of the government and supporter of the Anonymous insurrection, Dr. Cecilia Darwin, refused to blame the protesters for triggering such dramatic clampdowns by the government and instead pointed her finger at the government clampdown itself, saying, “This is yet another case of militarized police, or more specifically, policified military. The NSA is supposed to be a code-breaking wing of the military, and by deploying HATEFINGER on the US populous this is a clear use of the military for domestic policing. The founding fathers intended, with the most-neglected amendment, the third, that military shouldn’t be brought into civilian populations to police or control, because they saw what happened at the Boston Massacre and they didn’t want that to happen again. But in Ferguson we see this happening every day, and because the founders obviously failed in phrasing the third amendment in a way that would withstand the test of time, now we have the military in our computers, in our streets, and maybe citizens aren’t forced to house them, but the effect is just the same. War on the streets of the homeland, war inside our domestic communications devices. This has to stop.”
Henry Rollins committed suicide after a torrent of hatemail for his criticism of Robin William’s Suicide.
INTERNET — Henry Rollins, also known as Henry Garfield, was found dead in his home Saturday after his stomach tragically burst. Rollins angrily denounced Robin Williams for his recent suicide, saying, “I no longer take this person seriously,” but doctors say his ruptured chest was full of viciously chewed hate mail from Robin Williams fans.
Henry Rollins will be missed for his interesting addition to the classic American Hardcore band Black flag, even though he felt the band never really made it, saying “Flag never assimilated will with the Hollywood Punk scene.” Rollins was known in the music scene for his daddy issues, famously phoning up Ian MacKaye, a grandmaster of angry white man hardcore second only to Jello Biafara, to ask for permission to join Black Flag. MacKaye approved.
Not only was Black Flag an outsider in its milieu, but Rollins was an outsider, a mere replacement within Black Flag. The band, and Rollins especially, were targeted for abuse everywhere they played. Rollins himself admitted, “I got bottles bounced off of the head — after a a while, you become very wary, ready for someone to fuck with you — you get into you-versus-me situations. To this day I take shit.”
No one ever really liked Henry Rollins, especially his spoken-word stuff, and he will most likely not be missed by anyone except maybe four people at the most. Robin Williams was definitely more popular, his suicide overshadowing Rollins’ by far.
Depression Quest: The game about depression for people who aren’t depressed
INTERNET — Recent controversy over several blogposts from the anonymous ex-boyfriend of author Zoë Quinn alleged that Quinn promoted her work, Depression Quest, by exchanging sexual favors with powerful “gaming journalists,” who then helped her promote her game. However, at least one of the allegations appear to have been dismissed as little more than veiled slut shaming in the virulent, twisted form given by a pathetic ex-boyfriend. A major complaint among the chauvinists piling on Quinn is that the game is barely even a game and no fun at all. In some yowling sex-deprived voice, they all say something like, “She must have been prostituting herself for that to be popular.” The veil for their attacks is their interest in protecting the sacred objectivity of gaming journalism, something which is not even at stake, as the reviews of her game fall in the realm of criticism or opinion.
Like many others fascinated by this absurd non-controversy, I fired up corporate-controlled Steam and downloaded a free copy of Depression Quest, hoping that by reviewing this video game I could restore my castrated manhood. Clocking in at 105 megabytes, I expected something more involved than the retro web 1.0 visuals that looked lazy juxtaposed with repeated appearances of the Netflix logo. An ominous epigraph from David Foster Wallace boded well, and the introduction played up the game’s potential descent into depression with trigger warnings and a link to a suicide hotline.
It might be wrong to classify Depression Quest as a game or even as an interactive fiction. In interactive fictions like MUDs or text-based dungeons, players respond to a textual world with text commands, participating, in a sense, as a writer of a story within the framework of an already-created world. Depression Quest, however, has a much more limited interface and is closer to a choose your own adventure paperback.
It takes about twenty minutes to read through Depression Quest, and the reader is given a few choices at the end of most frames. Each frame is a roughly page-length second person story about the painful banality of a depressive’s everyday life. While there are some evocative vignettes of the interiority of a depressive, most especially in family scenes, I found myself scanning over repetitive fragments of cliche or stereotypical thought patterns of any depressive. The protagonist is an empty container who cannot bring himself to work on a project that is never described, but constantly referred to.
The protagonist’s depression is charted by three textual scores at the bottom of each frame, one rating the depth of depression and the other two tracking cumulative visits to the therapist and use of medication (A combination of depression and medication, I assumed, was the only way to win). There seems to be no continuity at all between frames, which creates a disorienting effect that contributes to the unpleasantness and fragmentation of a depressive’s everyday life. However, at one point I found myself wondering if the cat the protagonist adopted had disappeared, only for it to appear a few frames later to console him. In the last syrupy-sweet frames, the protagonist whispers to his totally clueless girlfriend that he’s depressed and seeking help, and then he honestly tells his mother that he is feeling well.
I would have liked Depression Quest much better if it hadn’t come off as a doctor’s prescribed program for how to deal with depression, although there were a few times when calling in sick to work or vegging out on Netflix did relieve the depression score. At its best, Depression Quest does achieve the goal stated in its introduction by evoking the interiority of a depressive to foster understanding, but much of this is undone by the kind of stereotypical advice it takes to win. I found myself wondering if anyone could ever empathize with the game’s empty narrator and his unspeakable project when continually steering him away from depression with the kind of glib advice that is never advisable to foist onto a depressed person. I assume if I went back and truly inhabited the mindset of a depressed person, I would lose and the story would end with suicide, but then again perhaps I (or the writer?) approached the text wrongly by treating it as a ‘game’ that needs to be ‘won’.
It is little wonder that this minimally game-like text that purposefully inspires icky unpleasant feelings in its readers has received so much scorn from gamers, but I could not at all connect the story to the controversy over its author’s personal life, except that it has achieved some moderate popularity and chauvinists out there can only rationalize this with some kind of sexual conspiracy. As a first foray into writing forked path narrative, it’s not a bad effort and even interesting in concept, but I have no desire to go back and explore all its corners.
