Emercobibliophilia

Quell your curiosity and uncock that eyebrow because yes, I admit that I made that word up; totally mixing it up with the neologisms community lately. Anyway, testament to my haughty and fittingly coy title, I’ve come into the possession of 6 new books in the past few days. All second hand and all totally kickass (despite the fact that I haven’t read all of them yet, I’m fairly certain my bibliodar was functioning correctly at the time of purchase), giving me an excuse to write about something in my otherwise dull and uneventful existence.

So let me give you the low down. Or down-low. I could never quite get the hang of that phrasal syntax, but anyway, let’s dust the irrelevance of my lexical ineptitude under the carpet of “shut the fuck up and get on with the point”.

First and foremost comes Mass Effect: Ascension, the first of two books that I ordered from Amazon with the other still hanging in limboland. I tore my way through this 342 page novel in less than two days, transfixed and enticed by the familiarity of the basic Mass Effect paraverse, but drawn to the new and slightly more than a tangential offshoot of a story the book boasts. The novel is well written, well paced, masterfully constructed and it’s clear to me that the author obviously did a fair amount of background research before penning the story.


All races are accurately depicted in conjunction with their video game counterparts and there are these teeny, sporadic snippets of information thrown at you throughout the course of the book relating to events in the video game (canonically occurring a few months before the events of the book), giving me a sense of ease that we’re still in the Mass Effect universe.

The protagonist of the story, I guess you could say, would be Gillian, a 12 year-old girl with high-functioning autism that affects her social skills to a very large degree. Her extremely introverted personality puts her at odds with her true “biotic” ability (think a slightly more sci-fi version of telekinesis) and as such puts her at the centre of Cerberus (a secret, but powerful organisation) interest.

She’s part of the “Ascension Project”, essentially a school for children with the rare biotic abilities, and is looked after by a joint civilian/military faculty, most of whom look out for the best interests of the children and truly want to help them reach their full potential.

Most of them. Little does Kahlee Sanders, a scientist with Alliance military experience working on the Ascension Project, know that she’s being played a fool by her toyboy love interest, covertly working undercover for Cerberus along with Gillian’s non-biological father, Grayson. Soon the pieces all fall into place with several groups trying to lay claim to the oblivious girl, the father-daughter relationship conflicting with Grayson’s loyalty to Cerberus and Kahlee’s own desire to protect Gillian embroils her in the mess.

I said that Gillian is the protagonist, but what with the shifting story arcs and different character perspectives, Kahlee takes probably takes a greater role than any of the other main characters. Her attitude towards certain things – and people – changes drastically throughout the book, and it’s interesting to see the clear-cut character development affect their decisions and disposition.

The books drifts from action to suspense continually, building up to a crescendo towards the end of the novel as various factions are forced to confront each other and decide just how far they’re willing to go to support their cause. A very good read by any standards, but particularly engrossing to those already familiar with Mass Effect das Spiel or with a general interest in suspenseful-cum-emotional stories; I would heartily recommend it to both parties.

Also in the pile in books lay Corelli’s Mandolin, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Secret Garden, Birdsong and A Gathering Light. A couple of well-known titles amongst some unknowns, but I feel that’s a healthy balance of reading material. I’m hoping to read The Handmaid’s Tale next, but that depends on when my other Mass Effect book arrives and indeed how long it’ll take me to finish the other book (Modern Masters of Horror, 1980s edition, obviously) I’ve been reading.

At the time of writing this, I’ve also just remember of another book I ->have<- to read in time for school in September. Gah, stupid books. I’m gonna play some Mass Effect.

Evidently I’m not the only one who finds blue-skinned alien femmes attractive.

Mass Effect and the universe

I haven’t written a post in a comparatively long while, and I guess I can attribute that to my recent purchase of an Xbox360 game called Mass Effect. I’ve been pretty much been spending all my time on it since then, exploring the virtual galaxy, sleeping with the good aliens and killing the bad ones. I spent about 15 hours over the course of two days working my way through the main storyline, and by the time I got the end I felt that familiar pang of emptiness in knowing that I’ve come the end of a great game.

So I did what I always do when I happen to find myself in that situation – I browse the internet for days on end, meticulously looking up every aspect of the selected mythos, scrutinising the events in the official canon and (in this case) reading up on all the different alien species.

And when I was done doing that, my insatiable appetite for knowledge eventually led my mind to the real world; and thus it humbly wondered about what lay beyond the skies above. Out there. Y’know, the “big black”.

I think that in the incomprehensibly large universe, with its quadrillions of stars and innumerable planets orbiting them is, on the whole, a vast and empty derelict playground. But those quadrillions of stars present quadrillions of opportunities, and all of a sudden thinking that there may be life elsewhere out there seems instead of silly to believe, silly to doubt.

Even sentient life doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch when you think about the endless stream of possibilities on all the planets in all the systems of all the galaxies. What really made me think is that, if there is sentient life out there, do they wonder about us? Do they theorise and postulate and debate in languages or other forms of communication? Do they have societies more technologically advanced than us; less? A better system, or a worse system of government? A freer form of society where people are much more accepted, or a unilateral government that punishes individuality?

Or do they have all of those things on a single planet, boasting variation to rival our own?

I get so caught up in this idea that there may be other sentient life out there and that they may think about us, that I completely forget the barriers that will prevent us from ever meeting them. Or even just knowing who, what and where they are.

I mean, on the off-chance that in that big, black emotionless void of space we call “the universe” some divine spark ignited the flame of life on another planet, we’d never ever know about it. It kinda makes me sad in a way, because it almost feels like a missed opportunity. Two hands aching to touch (they want to meet US, right?), but never quite close enough to reach.

It’s a lament comparable to when I think about the future because both have one thing in common: I won’t be there. Allow me to elaborate a little.

We think we live in a golden age. We live in a society that revolves around technology most of us don’t understand and consider ourselves VERY lucky we weren’t born, say, 150 years ago. I think we’re naive, because if you think about all the unprecedented things the folk in the 1950s couldn’t predict about time period (and if popular trends continue to stay popular), our society will be very different in 50 years time. 100 years time. 500 years time. Unprecedented. It will evolve and change (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse), empires will rise and fall, people be born, be great and inevitably die.

And eventually humanity will get to the stage where it’ll look back and see us as a “classical civilization”. We’ll be looked at (not necessarily negatively) as primitive and quaint. A broken society that set the foundations for the glorious, united utopia that will arise from the ashes of our soot and pollution fumes like a golden phoenix and dazzle the earth with its incredible ideas, thoughts, feelings, machines and technology. Taint the Earth with sparks of glory.

Don’t you see where I’m going with this? They’ll build a better society on our ruins. On our graves. And I can’t help but feel sad that I’m going to miss out on what the world 500 years from now will offer to those lucky enough to be born into it. Assuming war, famine, disease or general, ominimisanthropy doesn’t lead to our demise, we’ll become something great. We may like to think that we stand on the threshold of the apex of our prime and glory, but in reality our potential puts the house a trillion miles away on another planet.

A planet with life on it. I’ll keep both feet on the ground here and try and stay realistic: the chances of us coming across any form of life in the universe is highly unlikely. Sentient life? Astronomically unlikely (no pun intended). But I like thinking about these things, they really interest me.

And I guess if anyone happens to be reading this right now, you’re probably thinking I’m a crazy person based on my incoherent ramblings, and so I’ll conclude this spurt of randomness.

The universe is a lot like our minds: while most of it is wasted, some parts are truly incredible even as others are dark and scary. It’s endless, it’s infinite and it’s beyond our comprehension. Its mysterious facade only masks the underlying loneliness that echoes across it as it searches for someone else to share in its experiences.

I miss it.

What if Christianity never was? (short)

Now, I know I’m not nearly as qualified as one has to be to talk about this sort of thing, but I want to speculate about it anyway because the more I think about it the more interesting it seems. I also can’t really be bothered to flesh this post out into something that resembles a half-decent essay, so I’m just gonna ramble on about shit.

Consider for a moment that Jesus of Nazareth slipped and fell into a river as a child, drowning himself (heh, I’m going to hell for this) and Christianity never existed. There would be no Bible, no crusades, no warring between Catholics and Protestants in England and Ireland, no Roman persecution, no missionaries running off to all corners of the globe trying to convert people to Christianity.

I’m not trying to point out all the negative things, I’m really just trying to grasp how different the world would be today. The Romans would have still invaded Britain, the African slave trade would have almost certainly happened and the American War of Independence is something I would still have expected to see.

It is unclear how or when Christianity came to Britain (most guesses point towards Roman influence in c. 200-400 A.D.), but without Christian influence wouldn’t the native peoples remained pagan? Wouldn’t that be the same for most places in Europe too? I don’t really know a lot about pagan religions, other than that they tend to be a lot more gender-equal. Perhaps modern Western society would be greatly influenced by beliefs similar to Wicca or other neopaganist religions.

Come to think about it, maybe it wouldn’t be THAT different, irrespective of the “butterfly effect” that would no doubt make more than its fair share of significant changes throughout history.

If that were the case, perhaps we’d all be a promiscuous bunch of amoralites living in a society sculpted by our own decadence and lacking not only what I would like to call “civilized laws”, but any form of art or culture (thanks Huxley). But then again by saying that, I’m implying that Christianity is the basis for where a lot of our morals come from. And I don’t believe that.

You see, I’m a firm believer that religion does just as much, if not more, harm than good. For every well-established charity or young students’ group building schools in Africa there’s a war or act of religious prejudice to balance it out. You don’t need religion to mould you into a good person because you naturally develop into someone who knows the difference between right and wrong as long as you’re raised properly (I know, I know... “right/wrong” = subjectives, I’m not the divine person who establishes these cross-culture principles, but you see my point).

I kinda like the idea of a society based around atheism, if only because logic and science would remain largely unhindered by religious (not just Christian) objections and people would be little less ignorant...if only in one way. Deism is an interesting theology because it teaches that there is a supreme being that created the universe out there, but that he basically fucked off somewhere along the line and everything around us can be explained rationally and by observing our natural surroundings. No miracles. No revelations. Just a mysterious, incomprehensible creator and logic.

But what would that society be? More compassionate? Smarter? Would its lack of religion be detrimental to our mores and culture? I dunno, I doubt it. I think we’d be a lot more genuine in our love of things because it wouldn’t be ingrained into our beliefs that we HAVE to love everything. I think we’d have a lot more initiative to look, see, hear and explore because religion wouldn’t be trying to tie us down to something that doesn’t change.

Because everything changes; it’s how we get better. We see, we do, we fail and we learn. I don’t see why this can’t be applied to our beliefs either – we believe something, it gets disproven or something else makes more sense, and we believe that instead. Kinda like evolution I guess, or perhaps I’m just being retarded now.

Meh, no one man can understand it all anyway. We’re all just cogs turning in the great gestalt of society, constantly being replaced by newer and better parts. I’d love to see the day when society lets people act like people, but perhaps society will change what it means to be a “person” before that day becomes. I’ll keep my love in a box and bury it until the day the soil moves it under the feet of someone who cares in any case.

Quid me nutrit me destruit. "What nourishes me destroys me."

The Haughty Burglar - an experiment

So me and my frieeeend, becoming increasing bored with the lack of things to do, decided it would be a wholesomely fun endeavour to create a half-serious, half-nonsensical story together. The gimmick is this: each of us take it in turns to write 200 words (und precisely 200 vords) each, after which the next person has to continue the story with his/her respective ideas. Neither one of us knows what the other is going to write next, nor does the story have any sort of established plot or storyline, but what the hell.

It's old, it's clichéd, your grandmother's heard of it, but it's still fun! (Note that I've compressed all the entries into a single post to make it easier to read. Big, manly blue is me; pretty, sensitive pink is her).

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It was with a great sense of foreboding that I crept up the gated fence guarding the perimeter of the manor grounds. Anxiety, tinged with excitement, gave me a burst of adrenaline as I heaved both myself and my black, burlap sack over the obstacle, landing with a soft thud on the grass. Most of the manor house windows stood dark and unlit, although a few sporadic panes bore a soft, yellow illumination.

I crept up to the side of the house, weary of any unforeseen challenges that lay in wait for me; burglar alarms, motion sensors, even a wayward resident out on a midnight stroll (these country folk could be quite weird y’know). Pulling an old but faithful crowbar out of my sack, I proceeded to jimmy the window open, halting a few times to allow the uncharacteristic screeches to dissipate into the night.

Hoisting my body over the sill, I pulled my legs over and fell onto the cold, hard surface of the fittingly elegant rug which, from what I could see, covered the greater part of the mahogany floorboards. The room, initially pitch black, began to come into focus as my eyes slowly adjusted to the lighting.

It was precisely how I remembered it, many a passionate nights were held in this room, and others too. But this room was special, here was were the promises were made, where the commitment grew, and where all my darkest thoughts were listened eagerly by my lover. But I had been betrayed; by the very one I loved. I knew of the affair, but I spent too long in denial, I tried everything to win her back. There was not much I could do, she betrayed me, and a divorce was imminent. But there was just a little question about the valuables, So ignorantly I had signed the prenuptial agreement, so casually had I allowed her into my life, no more.
The room was dark, lit only by the silent moon outside. He knew my movements, scorning as I stole trinkets and vases, If only I had brought a bigger bag! As I reached out for the golden snow globe, a sign of my untainted adoration, a gift from a recent trip to Venezuela, from one lover to another, I heard a shuffle. The guards were out, and the sound came from upstairs, I breathed deeply and slithered towards the shadows. As I crouched underneath the stairs, the creaking steps above me paved the way for whoever was coming down them. He paused halfway, lingering on the step just above me and groaned. Then he continued down the stairway and shuffled off out of earshot.

Not taking any chances, I headed up the stairs and towards my old study. Aside from malevolence and petty theft, I was also after a book of mine that I had held a lot of sentimental value for. I spent a lot of lonely nights in that study; nights when my wife would be away...on business of course, always on business. Business at the best hotels with the finest food at the most exotic locales. It made me also sick to reminisce it.

I turned the handle to the study, but it wouldn’t budge an inch. It seemed my ex-wife had taken it upon herself to lock it at night now, something she had never done when we were together. With an exasperated sigh, I moved along down the hallway, past the rows of identical doors with their shiny brass knobs cedar frames. I halted outside my former bedroom, a place where so many memories occurred, both good and bad. I placed my hand on the doorknob and hesitantly considered my next move. I decided against the intrusion, and walked slyly towards the stairs, only to hear the faint sound of approaching footsteps. I panicked, I dashed into the nearest room and hid behind the door, holding it ajar.
The cold tiles told me it was the bathroom, I felt around for the sink, then wall, tracing my finger around blindly until finding the bathtub. I lifted my foot into the bathtub just as the door swung open. Darkness. I used the opportunity to hide behind the drawn veil that separated the bathtub from view, and prayed to the Goddess of Fortune for my safety. The shadow then swung the light switch, and all was lit. Thankful to my wife’s shyness towards manual labour, the single bulb that shone in the bathroom was dimly lit. The man then lifted up the toilet seat, and began to relieve himself. I stood waiting silently in the tub, with the painful echo of my acquaintances personal business ringing in my ears. It angered me to think not long ago this was my territory, and now my place had been usurped by this undeserving stranger. A few more agonising seconds ticked by, followed by a loud cough, a brief flush and footsteps promptly leading out of the door, blanketing the room in darkness once more. I allowed myself the luxury of waiting another 30 seconds before moving; partly to make sure that he had drifted off back to his bedchamber, but mainly because I needed to quell my heart which was beating away furiously in my chest.

Once I was sure he was gone, I clambered out of the bathtub, slowly pushed the door open and ventured back into the hallway. I’d almost forgotten that I was here to steal things, and what a better thing to steal than money? We’d kept a safe under a bed in one of the spare bedrooms (who would think to check there?), one two doors down from where I was standing now.

Smiling at the amount of money we’d stockpiled over the years, I inched along the skirting board towards the door. Approaching it was a tricky endeavour, what with my eyes constantly flickering from left to the right, ears constantly straining for any minute noise. Click. It was unlocked, just as I expected, it held a single black purse-string like cloth, underneath which should be the stockpile of cash and a gold bar. “Gold is worth a lot these days!” I thought to myself full of silent glee. I reached out for the cloth, the silky bag was heavy. No time to check what was inside I placed it delicately into my SWAG bag and tiptoed towards the window. A jump from here would be dangerous I thought, leading to imminent death, although that wouldn’t be the worst thing with the way my life is right now, but I can’t be caught with stolen goods for legal reasons, It would be better if I came out the same way I entered. So with that epiphany I slid downstairs, blending well into the shadows, and found the smashed window. Getting out was trickier than getting in, with the window so high I had to strain to get my body through. I really should have lain off the doughnuts; I cringed to myself as a sharp blade pierced my ankle. I vowed to not eat a super-sized meal at McDonalds the next I visited it, praying that decision would allow fate to help me out of this mess. Wincing with pain, I slung myself over the window and flinched as my wounded ankle struck the ground. Luckily, the cut didn’t seem to be too deep, but the glass had left a wide, 2-inch gash which stung greatly and would almost certainly leave a scar. After inspecting it, I drew a cloth from my pocket and wrapped it around my ankle as a makeshift bandage – I hoped it’d hold until I could get home.

It was as I struggled to keep the whimpering confined to the inside of my mouth that I noticed how eerily silent it was. The night had bathed me in an aura of tranquillity; pitch black and dead quiet. I felt the cool touch of calmness wash over me, and at once I felt confident and resolved. My wound would hinder me but it wouldn’t kill me, and what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger....right?
Slinging my burlap sack over my shoulder, I limped back around the side of the house. I was on the verge of making my hasty escape when I spotted something glinting on the grass near the edge of the lawn. Tentatively, I cast my

We'll be archived, you and I.

In case you’ve banged your head and suffered a bout of amnesia lately, let me inform you that we are currently living in the year 2009. The Internet, if Wikipedia is to be believed, originated in the 1960s, as little more than a couple of computers joined together like two creepy, telepathic twins. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that it became a wide-spread phenomenon; a technological spurt in the direction of scientific advancement which led to hundreds of millions of computers all fundamentally interconnected by something which doesn’t even technically exist – The Internet.

I think it’s fair to say that it would be pretty hard for any of us in a modern society to imagine life without the internet. It’s like trying to imagine life without telephones, or the wheel. The era we find ourselves fettered to is a fickle one. An era where society is changing faster than most of us can keep up with (unless you’re a social elitist, in which case please go bathe your eyes in a pool of acid), where we rely more than ever on the electronic and the non-existent. The Internet; the economy; even our own imaginations as we obsessively strive to improve upon what we have.

I think the Internet is rather unique in its unprecedentedness. I mean, most inventions like the car, the aeroplane, even the telephone, are built upon over centuries of observation; slow and gradual improvements which make what we have faster, safer, more beautiful, etc. The Internet is something which has no precedent. No one but a handful of crazy, white-coated scientists in an underground lab somewhere would have guessed thirty years ago that we would have this. Not even twenty years ago would they have expected it to become such an integral part of our lives; something which our society thrives on. Leans on, even.

But here’s the really interesting part. You and I are both part of a generation that dominates the early stages of the Internet’s life. A hundred years from now, people will be studying the origins of the Internet; to them it will be a fascinating and truly pivotal point in our history, en par with the invention of the atomic bomb, or the formation of The U.S.A. as an independent country. And while they trawl through the archives of websites, forums and data caches alike, our words will be etched in the very annals of the Internet itself.

A hundred years from now, all of us will be dead. In five hundred years, we’ll be very dead. But people will still choose to study the Internet and the history of; and we’ll be there, right at the beginning of it all. You and I.

It’s rather fascinating when you think about it. To think that one day, people will be studying forums which we, in our time, primarily used as a means to call people rude names and insult their mothers. People will speak differently too. They’ll look at our (mostly incorrect) “Classical English” with their post-modern eyes and guffaw at the way our pronunciation hardly matches our spelling, or how the word “sleep” doesn’t have four ‘e’s or whatever. And then they’ll look back at Shakespeare and say: “Why is it written in Ancient German?”

But we won’t be offended, because like I said, we’ll be dead. Some of us will die peacefully in our sleep at the age of 87, with four generations of our family crowding around the bedside, expressing their love and gratitude for us. Some of us will die alone in an unheated, one-bedroom flat in an obscure, dilapidated apartment block, completely forsaken by society and forgotten by anyone who ever loved us. Some of us will die in the inevitable World War 3, in which the revived Allies (now including Germany) take on the whole of Asia, resulting in a nuclear holocaust which will devastate approximately 96% of the entire world, and cut the human populous down to numerous diasporae with a cumulative total of about 100,000.

And the vibrant, sparkling phoenix that will arise from the ashes as a broken and schizophrenic society will pick up the pieces and start all over again, blaming us for their troubles. Maybe they’ll even learn from it; finally recognising the importance of people over things.

Because, let’s face it, you can gab on about the divine gift of human life all you want, but at the end of the day most of us are so un-unique and token that the only reason we don’t attach a monetary value to ourselves is because we know it’d make us feel bad. The sooner you recognise that your own individuality is just an illusion and that your contribution to society is ultimately NIL (in most cases, probably even profoundly detrimental) is the day when you can stop trying to prove to yourself that you’re more important than you actually are. I mean, if humans theoretically were traded on some kind of modern day version of a Roman slave market, I daresay that most of us would be worth less than a reasonably new car.

“Everyone knows how to make another human, but the secrets of a Ford Mondeo are all but lost.”

But this is getting a bit off-topic now. My main and summarising point is that each and every one of us will have a place in history. What with the government national database archives, most of us will be a name, a face and a brief description. Nothing more, nothing less. What we leave on the forums, on the websites, and yes, I’ll admit, even in the books will be a catalogue of our long-lost personalities. Our ideas, our thoughts, our prophecies and our emotions. And in much the same way as we read a Shakespearean play, we’ll be misunderstood, misinterpreted and stereotyped as “the age that could never find self-satisfaction”.

Sometimes the only thing I feel is an innate loathing and fear of human beings.