Painfully hard platform puzzlers.

I started playing two different indie platformers today. Both of them are spectacular but I found the differences extremely unnerving. Warning: Spoilers, nothing major, but you have been warned.

Super Meat Boy:

The game is tongue-in-cheek parody of the hyper-violence and masochism in video games. The games protagonist, meat boy, goes on a super mario quest to save his female friend, bandage girl from the grasp of doctor fetus... an evil baby. It takes the plot of super mario, and desecrates it with meaty bloody juice splodges designed to represent meat boy whenever he hits anything sharp. Hacksaws and hyperdermic needles have their wicked way with our unfortunate protagonist, but he brushes it off and respawns within seconds. (Sometimes before you realise he'd even died.) The gameplay is spectacularly fun, with just the right combination of impossible challenges, and satisfying reward. The best reward comes at the end of each level when all attempts at completing it are shown simultaneously in a live-action replay. You watch with satisfaction as a lone SMB completes the level in one fell swoop, or else, watch 40 or 50 meat boys simultaneously take on the level. Each is picked off at all the different obstacles you had to grind past, with one lone lucky guy reaching bandage girl. Pure fun.

Limbo:

In comparison Limbo, is one of the most stark, goosebump inducing, intense gaming experiences. Black and white, total quiet, and barely anything moves.

The reds and browns of SPM still echoed in my eyes as I sat down to play this game. It was like I'd eaten too much chocolate (insert your drug of choice here), and now was time for the come-down. Limbo has no introduction, a boy wakes up in a black and white forest and he must go forwards, (going back gives you the "wrong way achievement.") Totally alone, he trudges through the forest, jumping haphazardly over obstacles, and then gets brutally killed in a bear trap. It's a sickening feeling. You mourn a just met character. Then he respawns... but painfully slowly. Unlike in SMB there is no promise of the cathartic watch all the painful deaths, in fact there was no beginning to the level at all, no comforting tutorial. The help section of the game is like an ikea manual, a to jump, b for action, left stick to move. The developers seem to know that once a seasoned player is looking for "help", it's because they want some kind of explanation. They offer none.

Drowning is the worst. No insta-respawn here, you watch as the bubbles slow and his eyes close. At least the bear trap was quick. The kid becomes instantly more vulnerable, instantly younger. You've watched him trudge through the forest barely able to jump, and now he's never even been taught to swim. It's unbearable.

Both games are beautifully crafted and ingeniously well-thought out. They were both worth every penny I paid for them, but playing them one after another was like going on a bouncy castle and then cutting myself for ever believing I deserved to have fun.

Is it worth it?

THE PRO-CON LIST

For doing a part-time MA.

Pros:

• I love to study, and I get a lot out of the learning experience.
• I am pursuing an academic career.
• I am doing well in both aspects of my life; at work and at University
• I enjoy the work, and feel as though I am developing myself.
  

Cons:

• I have no time, and very little social life.
  
• I haven't been to salsa in months.
• The house is a total mess and will always be like this.
• I don't have enough time to support James.
  
• I have very little money.
  
• My family are having to pay for me to get through this degree.
  
• Academic life grows more terrifying and impossible by the day. Whilst I found my undergraduate contemporaries to be fashionable at best, the people around me now are bright and wonderful. I continue to wonder whether my academic interests have any merit whatsoever.
  

The cons probably would outweigh the pros if it weren't for my selfishness. If I was to quit the studying I would have more time for James, more money to support us both and more time for a social life. But I wouldn't be as happy in myself and I don't think I would be as satisfied throughout life if I didn't continue to give this a go. I would regret it. This is short-term. Two years feels like forever right now, but it will pass.

I need to write more about what it is like working in a kitchen. To talk about filling and emptying the cold counter, to explain about the red hot stove which burns me if I simply look at it. I need to explain the thrill of service, of a million things to do at once, and only rigorous and continual quickness will get them done.

Alas there is no time.

1 pot cookery.

So incredibly unfair. In the last few months the yet living fat lady of "two fat ladies" fame, stole my idea and published a book of single pot recipes... Incidentally why have I not bought it yet? These are simple, ingenious little recipes which require less kit and thus; critically less washing up. I'm talking stews, soups, warming delicious recipes. Well today I made a single pot lentil soup, and flapjack which is so ridiculously simple it might as well be one pot.

Perfect Lentil Soup:

Makes 8-10 portions:

1 Onion chopped,

3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed.

2 chicken stock cubes,

2 litres of water.

500g of lentils,

1-2 cans of chopped tomatoes ( ideally two, but I was being stingy today.)

1 can of baked beans,

oil,

salt and pepper,

spices: chilli powder, ground chilli flakes, cumin. mixed ground spice.

1. Heat the oil gently and add the spices. Fry gently, add the chopped onion and leave on a low heat till the onion softens. Add the garlic, and continue to fry.

2. Add the chopped tomatoes and make up some stock with the cubes and water.

3. Add the lentils quickly followed by the water. Bring to the boil and then allow to simmer gently until the lentils begin to soften.

4. Add the baked beans. Cook until it is a nice soupy texture, the beans are warm and the lentils are completely soft.

This is the most durable food I know. I make a big batch and then eat it for a week without getting bored. I love to eat it with lightly poached eggs, so the yolk mixes in with the soup and makes it thick and rich. It's delicious with cheese and bread, tonight I have put brie on top and it's melted in perfectly. It would be amazing with white fish, chicken and pork. It's a winter warmer. If you make it thicker you can serve it on spaghetti with butter and cheese. You can bake it in the oven and eat it with salad.

Flapjacks:

I seem incapable of making food in small amounts. I tripled these quantities and put the mix in a rectangular baking tray (usually used for roast potatoes). This recipe is from the ladybird cookery book of my childhood.

3oz of butter,

3oz of sugar,

30z of golden syrup

6oz of oats.

1. Preheat oven to 160 C. Grease a tray and line with greaseproof paper. The tray needs to be big enough to hold the amount of flapjack you want to make. Inexact, but true!

2. Melt the butter on a low heat in a pan, add the sugar and golden syrup. Stir it altogether don't let it so much as bubble. If it boils the pan will never, ever, ever come clean. Pour the oats in. Mix it altogether gently.

3. Put it in the tray. Put the saucepan in the sink, and fill it with hot water. (You'll thank me later). Bake the mix for 20-25 minutes. It will still be soft when it comes out the oven. If it's hard when it leaves the oven it will be like trying to eat rocks.

4. Let it cool a bit then remove it from the tray.

5. I'm gonna drizzle some dark chocolate on these bad boys.

They smell amazing. I freaking love cooking!

It's official, I'm a pervert...

But then, so are you. And so is your best friend, your mum, your neighbour. In fact it's getting so fucking crowded in here that I'm wondering why I ever aspired to being a pervert in the first place.

I went to a seminar today run by Dr Adam Phillips, a psychologist so renowned he has a proper wikipedia page which might have been written by someone other than him. It was the use of the word "perversion" in clinical practice. For swathes of the 20th Century perversion has been a term designed to separate people in categories. Specifically "normal people" and "perverts" and these categories have been created based on the normative values of particular groups. Psychoanalysts and Christians being just two. Oh what company the scientists are keeping.

However more recent study of psychoanalysis has veered away from seeing people in these categories and has begun to look at the tendencies. Perverse activities vs. perverts. These activities are defined as actions which excite people because they are explicitly or implicitly forbidden by parents. Perversions are activities you believe you shouldn't be indulging in.

They are a way of dealing with and controlling your own sexuality. So if your particular fetish happens to be feet, in my opinion that is no different to being coprophiliac or having a perverse interest in heterosexual penetrative sex with a significant other. Pic related.

It was also fascinating to gain a grounding in psychoanalytic theory. Which perhaps will not help me particularly with my Renaissance Literature MA but continues to fascinate me in ways which probably aren't healthy. The most perfect and simple example of the issues presented by Freud were quoted to me today. "To the child the mother is everything, but to the mother the child is not everything." All those times our needs went unfulfilled, are what drives us to treat our partners the way we do. The way we with-hold sex. Because we can and because we couldn't always get food when we wanted it as a child. It's a fascinating topic, but needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

As Phillips today informed me, psychoanalysts are the ultimate sadists. They categorise people as perverts in order to have the false sensation that they control the "norms" of sexual behaviour. They do this because sexuality is unnerving. We wonder why people choose to have sex with people of the same sex, why on earth they enjoy pain, or fetishize feet because we are afraid of these different sexualities.

Plus the heavy reliance on Freud leads to some weird conclusions. Men we are told are more perverse than women because they fear castration, so they must find things which arouse them in case they lose their penises. This bullshit has never really flown with me. Women are just as perverse as men, but why on earth would they show it. I am inclined to believe (alongside the unnamed woman in stoller's article: "The Term Perversion") that once women's liberation is fully realised that women will be able to be as open about their own sexuality. They will stop pretending to be content to be the object, (if they still are? This is weird territory for me,) and be more able to talk about what interests them. Having spoken to women about masturbation and most of the time, hit a brick wall, I feel that openness about sexuality will continue to be limited to the bedroom. Or worse cosmo magazine. (Try Scarlet, it got a bit tiring after a while, but it is actually attempting to explore sex, as opposed to normalise.)

New shoes!!!!

You are all going to see these, so it's a non-story, but I'm quite in love with my new crazy shoes... they have two sets of laces for christ sake. I need some kooky shoes now that everyone has military brown boots. They are comfy but really tricky to put on, so I guess I just won't take them off.

They are perfect because they will go with all my clothes, and are slumpy, but still neat. My parents sent me some pyjamas today and a post card. I think there should be mandatory care packages from parents to students who have for university. In the care package today was a postcard. With a picture of Queen Victoria and her dog. The note read:

Our noble hound today ate through my belt so my trousers keep falling down. We are not amused. Dad.

This week I'm reading about print and manuscript culture. I think my first or at least my procedural might look at times when works were circulated as manuscript even after coming into print and arguing that this was not necessarily because of flexibility and engagement: Since these things were still very much possible with printed works... but because of economic reasons. I think it's an interesting and different enough argument to get me through this busy, busy start of term.

Poor Little Rich White Boys.

A potent cliché amongst historians is that the study of the past will prevent history repeating itself. It is with this ideal and hope with which Friedrich von Hayek writes The Road to Serfdom, his bestselling discussion of the economic and political climate of 1944. The root of his argument is that socialism is the root cause of both fascism and communism. That communal power leads to universally shared and expressed ideas. This in turn leads to a need to spread the simple but effective ideologies of the community and eventually to enforce these ideologies through violence. In it's place he argues that in order to protect the "individual" ( I will come back to this loaded term) it is necessary to have a free market, with lots of competition and private property controlling the wealth. Put simply, Hayek argues that if the state takes away the power from the private property owners it will lead them on a road to serfdom.

His argument at its heart is for freedom of the individual. He posits that socialism is set up to destroy individualism and that a free market aids individualism. In so doing he highlights his own utter ignorance for the core roots of socialism. To look at this we need to go back to Friedrich Engels seminal socialist text, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Writing in the 1840s Engels is discussing a period in which Hayek's ideals of private ownership and free markets are in full swing. England is the richest and most powerful nation in the world, individual freedom must therefore of course be at its most high, the "working man" at his most comfortable and secure:

"Often the inspectors found, in a single house, two families in two rooms. All slept in one, and used the other as a kitchen and dining-room in common. Often more than one family lived in a single damp cellar, in whose pestilent atmosphere twelve to sixteen persons were crowded together. To these and other sources of disease must be added that pigs were kept, and other disgusting things of the most revolting kind were found."

In such environments it becomes difficult to begin to imagine the individual freedoms of the men and women who were living in these environments, unable to afford basics liberties such as privacy. "We must add that many families, who had but one room for themselves, receive boarders and lodgers in it, that such lodgers of both sexes by no means rarely sleep in the same bed with the married couple." It becomes difficult to contemplate that they could pick and choose the work, or life they led.

Poverty is rarely touched upon by Hayek. His ideals require the working man to be free and he believes the freedom of all men in England to be somehow self-evident: "By the beginning of the 20th Century, the working man had reached the degree of comfort, security and personal independence which 100 years before had hardly seemed possible." Hayek carefully compares the working man with Engels' working man, but offers no evidence for this new found security and independence of the working classes. George Orwell in the 20s and 30s wrote extensively about the problems which continued to face the poor throughout Britain. His books the Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, are the accounts of his experiences of the working class experience. Socialism is not an attempt to create uniformity as Hayek suggests (by lumping together socialism, Marxism and communism into one very small rowing boat) but was originally founded upon the realisation that capitalism was destroying the independence and individuality of the poor.

Hayek writes: "Our generation has forgotten that a system of private property is a most important guarantee of freedom. It is only becuase of the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves." The "we" of this statement refers to those like Hayek, the rich, the white, the male, and the powerful. The Road to Serfdom is adored by people like Hayek; Churchill used up precious stocks of rationed paper printing thousands of copies of it, Glenn Beck, stark raving mad republican broadcaster loves it, and George W. Bush sr. gave Hayek a medal of freedom for writing it. The individual freedoms which Hayek wishes to protect are their freedoms. But it says nothing for the freedom of the poor to have enough money to put a roof over their heads, to have enough food to eat, to have job satisfaction or even the simple choice of being able to leave their job and find better employment.

Interestingly, Hayek paints two pictures of the working man, the first is the comfortable, secure ideal I have already discussed. The second is those who will seize power if socialism is allowed to slide into communism or fascism. "The higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their tastes and views are differentiated. If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail." Once a political extreme prevails, it will be the less individualistic people who will take control. Thus on the one hand Hayek suggests that the poor have independence and individualism and on the other purports that their like of individualism will lead them to become powerful in a communal state. The hearty warm working man is transformed into a uniform, dangerous bureaucrat.

Hayek's Road to Serfdom closes with the following rhetoric: The guiding principle in any attempt to create a world of free men must be this: a policy of freedom for the individual is the only progressive policy." In reality what Hayek proposes is a regression away from giving the working class an opportunity to develop individuality and independence. Instead he is self-serving in his attempts to preserve the wealth and independence of the rich. Indeed his ideas were played out during the 80s by Thatcher's government. Once again Britain was engaged in the biggest boom of the 20th Century, and yet unemployment was at its highest since the war. Hayek gives the right a cosy little bedtime story that socialism is about crushing the individual which makes it easy for them to privatise, to destroy small businesses, to find loopholes in tax and ultimately to be as greedy as they like. But socialism is not about creating a community which controls everything, it's about closing the gap between rich and poor, about giving everyone the opportunity to be free. To misquote Marx; if Hayek's description of socialism is correct, then I am not a socialist.

A Gentleman's Game

It has been a long time since I last posted. I have found work. I work in a kitchen, a male-dominated environment in which the work is hard but I don't mind too much. It is interesting and busy enough that I don't count the minutes. This is particularly lucky as sometimes I work an 11 or 12 hour shift or 720 minutes. I wash the pots. In this respect I am the lowest of the low. The chefs tell me what to do, the waiters and waitresses tell me what to do. I am at the bottom of a very long ladder. But unlike working in an office I do have a certain amount of autonomy. In at least my space; the realm of the sink I am queen, and I can get a little grumpy and officious when people mess up my space or waste my time. I find it interesting that the component parts of the kitchen all need to be in place for it to run smoothly. The little bitty jobs that waste time and are unproductive but still need to be done fall to me frustratingly, but sometimes everything runs smoothly.

I do not like the pay. THE PAY IS BAD. It is disgusting, it has always been disgusting that the minimum wage is graded down based on age. Anyone who is old enough to be working full-time. Who is trying to support themselves beyond the aid of their parents deserves minimum wage. Whether they are 16 or 18 or 21. I am fortunate that I am 21. On October 1st the legislation will change I will earn the full minimum wage. 5.90 an hour. Hopefully by then my tax code problems will be resolved. As it is I am working for £4 an hour after tax. I am desperately poor. But it hasn't kicked in yet. Provided I can sustain myself for this month I should be able to support myself.

James seems to be unable to motivate himself to find work. Apart from getting press-ganged into an interview for telesales the progress is very very slow. He is afraid. He is so afraid that even if we designate a day to go into town and find work we will not arrive before around 2 and often it is much later, leaving little time to actually talk to anyone. He doesn't search online, he doesn't try and he is unafraid of abject poverty. I don't really know what to do.