Ben Paddon

Category: How my Head Works

  • An Apology

    Late last night, far later than I had any business doing on account of the insanely early start I had this morning, I was thinking about Justin and Griffin McElroy, and their final week at Polygon. Their final day. I was thinking on what they’ve accomplished, not just at Polygon but outside of it – with Travis, with their father, everything. I reflected on all of the joy they have brought into the world, and everything they’ve yet to do. I’m excited for it.

    Then I remembered, not for the first time, an act of kindness that Justin performed for me about seven years ago. And, being utterly incapable of having a thought without immediately sharing it on social media, I tweeted about it. I won’t repost the tweets here, they’re easy to find, but the tl;dr is that at a time when I was a much younger, angrier man than I am now, at a time in my life when I was regularly shitting on Justin and Griffin for doing their jobs, Justin helped me – unexpectedly and unprompted – during a time when I needed help.

    Those tweets gained some traction overnight – hundreds of likes, dozens of retweets, and a quote tweet from Justin that has been itself liked and retweeted hundreds upon hundreds of times. 

    A big part of that story, however, of that exchange, is who I was in 2011 at the time it takes place. And so what follows is a very long post about growth, anger, and shame. (more…)

  • On A Seven-Day Diary

    This is without a doubt my favourite poem of all time. It’s called “On A Seven-Day Diary” by Alan Dugan.

    Oh I got up and went to work
    and worked and came back home
    and ate and talked and went to sleep.
    Then I got up and went to work
    and worked and came back home
    from work and ate and slept.
    Then I got up and went to work
    and worked and came back home
    and ate and watched a show and slept.
    Then I got up and went to work
    and worked and came back home
    and ate steak and went to sleep.
    Then I got up and went to work
    and worked and came back home
    and ate and fucked and went to sleep.
    Then it was Saturday, Saturday, Saturday!
    Love must be the reason for the week!
    We went shopping! I saw clouds!
    The children explained everything!
    I could talk about the main thing!
    What did I drink on Saturday night
    that lost the first, best half of Sunday?
    The last half wasn’t worth this “word.”
    Then I got up and went to work
    and worked and came back home
    from work and ate and went to sleep,
    refreshed but tired by the weekend.

    This poem epitomizes exactly the sort of life I have sought to avoid. The grind, the chore of merely existing as opposed to the joy of living. It’s one of the reasons I left the UK and came looking for something better in the United States.

    It’s also probably one of the reasons I’m presently unemployed. Bugger.

    As an aside, I wish I could write poetry like this. I which I could make words flow like liquid half as well as Dugan could.

  • I’ll Give You My Telescope, Anything, Please Glod Don’t Tell Anyone

    This blog entry runs the risk of becoming somewhat of a self-indulgent Pity Party, so you don’t have to read it. I feel I need to vent, and this blog is a convenient place to do so and so I shall put it to use. There’s every chance I’ll wake up in the morning, remember I’ve written this blog post, go…

    ARGH

    …and then delete it, or make it private. That said, it’s here while it’s here. So enjoy it, or whatever.

    Every now and then my brain gets caught in a logic loop. The problem goes something like this: I worry that there is something seriously wrong with me on a psychological level – some wonderful, terrible mental illness which accounts for my erratic behaviour, my emotional nature, my desire to be the central focus of attention, and all manner of other personality problems. I worry about this for a while, and then I decide I’m probably just being paranoid and I dismiss it. At that point I begin to worry: maybe my dismissing of the thought is preventing me from getting actual, proper help for what may well be a proper, actual condition. My usual response there is to dismiss that as me overthinking the matter and being overly paranoid. Then I worry that dismissing the notion is me denying a problem I have with paranoia coupled with the potential mental problem I might have, and I start to get anxious. Then I dismiss all of it as rubbish, and I wonder if maybe dismissing any of it was in fact the smart thing to do.

    Usually I can stop my thought process from wandering too far down this path and I can catch myself before I get too caught up in it and find myself sitting on the bed, staring out into nothing, terrified that whichever decision I make about this whole “my brain is broken” nonsense is the wrong one. Occasionally I don’t, and I wind up doing just that. Even when I’m able to break free of it and go about living my life as if I were a normal, sensible, contributing member of society (ha!) it still floats around the surface of my brain for a few days afterwards, and generally that can leave me feeling rather low.

    I had someone suggest to me a few years ago that I might be Bipolar. I’m fairly confident that I’m not. I’ve something of an interest in neurological disorders and I don’t personally believe I fit the description of a classic Bipolarity. That said, I’e always felt a kinship with Stephen Fry. If you don’t know who Fry is then that probably means you’re American, but to summarize he’s a writer, actor, playwright and poet. You’ve probably seen him in Bones as Dr. Gordon Wyatt M.D., or in Jeeves and Wooster as the titular butler. Possibly you remember him as the Qur’an-owning television chat show host from the 2006 movie adaptation of V for Vendetta.  I’ve just spent far too much time explaining who he is. Long story short, he is the gem of the British Isles, and a rarity; a glowing, charismatic, intelligent man who is at the same time accessible to and admired by the general public. He is an inspiration of mine and something of an idol. He is the man I hope to be when I reach my 50s.

    He’s also Bipolar, and in 2006 filmed the documentary “The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive” talking about his own experiences with Bipolarity and interviewing other Bipolar celebrity figures such as Carrie Fisher (oh, you know who she is) and Robbie Williams (the British musician, not the hairy comedian – you’re thinking of Robin Williams). I’ve watched this documentary a couple of times on YouTube and just tonight downloaded the whole thing to sit and watch on a proper television tomorrow.

    Every time I watch this documentary it shreds my insides. It leaves me devastated, frightened. It scares me, it makes me worry, and it usually leaves me stuck in that paranoia/anxiety feedback loop I mentioned earlier. In fact I haven’t watched it in well over a year and a half for that very reason. But spurred on by a recent… looping, I feel I have to watch it again. I don’t know why.

    I’d love to know exactly why my head is wired up the way it is. I’d love to know what makes me tick. I doubt I’m Bipolar – I know I’m not, in fact – but for some reason I feel that if I learn more about Bipolarity, if I can understand it better, then perhaps I can understand what’s wrong with me. I’m sure there’s a logical hole in there somewhere.

    Sometimes I am so scared of the way my brain functions. But, and I feel this is important, I do my best to ensure it doesn’t get in the way of experiencing new things and achieving my ambitions. It’s rare for me  to feel as weak and pathetic as I do tonight.

  • We’re All Flawed, and We’re All Brilliant

    I read the UK government’s ePetitions website, and I do so as a hobby.

    But, Sir… started life as a hobby. Friend and fellow Jump Leads writer Andrew I both followed the RSS feed for the ePetition site in Google Reader and we’d often share the more ludicrous petitions with each other. The idea hit one one day that rather than just pointing them out to each other like children passing notes around class, why not collate them in a blog for everyone to see?

    Since then reading through the petitions has changed for me. It’s no longer a way to kill time. It’s almost a job. It’s something I enjoy doing a lot because, in all honesty, everybody likes to make fun of stupid people. Recently, however, it began to sit uncomfortably with me. “How on earth,” I’d ask myself, “Can there be this many stupid people living and working in the UK?”

    Indeed, idiocy is all around us. Here in the US we have to deal with morons like Orly Taitz and the Birthers, and the Healthcare Reform nuts who believe that Obama is going to send “death panels” to their grandparents’ houses to shoot them in the head. Or whatever. Indeed, there is a public perception amongst the rest of the world that America is full of mindless, gormless, overweight neanderthals who barely have enough power in their minuscule pea-brains to recall even the simplest of PIN numbers. Y’know what? I’ve lived here for over two years and I think that I’ve personally encountered more morons in the UK than I have in the US. The problem, really, is that the American morons get more news coverage – well when a country elects a complete and utter bollock-brain like Bush twice, they’re bound to get weird looks.

    British citizens like to look down on America, as though it were a less intelligent nation. But the simple truth is this: “Like German tourists, the stupid are everywhere.” The UK is not full of… actually, Americans, you should take note of this as well. The UK is not full of tea-drinking, wine-sniffing, witticism-spouting intellectuals who gather around a fine wooden table to discuss Matters of Great Importance. Not everybody there knows what a bidet is. Many of them have never even seen the inside of a Parlour, nor looked through the single lens of a monocle. The UK isn’t full of anything. What it has, just like any other country, is its fair share of smart people and its fair share of morons.

    The balance has always seemed off-kilter, and this is usually because idiots are louder. America has its Town Hall meetings where ignorant, gun-toating Beckites shout idiocies and moronisms at elected officials because they’re terrified that their healthcare system might be improved, and the UK has the Government ePetitions site and the BBC’s Have Your Say pages where our own special breed of idiot can shout more or less the same stupid comments either directly at the government or the internet in general (incidentally if you want to see real lunacy in action I’d suggest you check out spEak You’re bRanes, which does for the Have Your Say comments what we do for the ePetitions). This sort of halfwit has existed since long before our time. We’ve had idiots for decades. Centuries. Millennia. The only difference now is that they’ve been handed a worldwide platform for their mad ravings. Used to be you just stood on a street corner and told people that we should bring back Crucifixion. Now you can get on television and tell an entire nation, or  jump online and tell the world.

    Reading the ePetitions site might be enough to drive a lesser man into a pit of cynicism, depression, and a sort of general bitterness for the human race as a whole. Despite my bitter ranting in the last couple of paragraphs I feel I have to make it clear, I don’t despair for the state of the human race. I don’t lay awake at night wondering what’s become of us. I may well have a deeply-routed antipathy for the willfully ignorant, but that is not a label that can be applied to humanity as a whole. Me? I love the human race. We’re fantastic! How can you not love a world were an overworked, underpaid supermarket soda monkey does this with his spare time? Or where a lover sends his other half bits of card to tell her how much he loves her?

    People – cynical, jaded people in particular – seem to forget that just as human beings are capable of great stupidity and horror, so are we capable of remarkable intellect and acts of incredible kindness. For every Charles Manson there is a Danny Wallace, for every Fred Phelps there is a John Lennon (which logically means there’s also a Yoko Ono, but let’s not think about that).

    You can’t ignore that there is so much bad that goes on in the world – the media makes sure of that – but you mustn’t forget that there’s a lot of good going on as well.

  • It Fills A Hole

    We’re all humans, right? I mean, unless an animal testing laboratory has been raided and dozens of cerebrally-enhanced genetic super-chimps have been freed from their cage, slipped out of the building masked by the confusion and tear-gas and then, having discussed amongst themselves what they should do with their new-found freedom, decided to hightail it to the nearest Internet Cafe and look up an obscure British writer’s blog, I think it’s a safe assumption to make.

    So with that in mind, I think it’s fairly safe to say that sometimes, when we are faced with feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction with the current state of our lives (Why haven’t I got any regular income? Why won’t the BBC return my calls? Is The Beatles Rock Band really $250?!) we turn to unusual places to plug up the gaping hole that has pushed itself into our lives. Some people fill that hole with television, or sex, or by writing abusive emails to publishing companies. Others, such as myself, tend to fill that void with food.

    It’s a dangerous thing. I’ve spent much of the last few months couped up on my own in my house. Often I haven’t left my bedroom because I’ve been on my computer either writing, talking to friends, or playing Tales of Monkey Island. Occasionally I will leave my room, slouching and scratching my back like some sort of well-dressed caveman, and wander into the kitchen where I will, for no real reason whatsoever, get something to eat.

    There’s no need for this. I’m not hungry. I’m not even peckish. And yet I have lost count of the number of times where I have been sitting at my computer, blinked, and then found myself standing in the kitchen looking into the fridge. Occasionally I have gone one step further and found myself sitting at my computer desk with a tub of Pringles and a jar of dip, an occurance which fills me with dread because we never buy Pringles.

    Then there was a recent incident where I found myself eating Nutella out of the jar with a spoon. Such antics are forgivable of a young boy who just likes chocolate, but I’m a 23 year-old man. I’m supposed to be a professional. So why the Hell am I shovelling chocolate and hazelnut spread out of the jar and directly into my mouth?

    It’s possible I am simply a Disgusting Human Being. Indeed, I don’t dismiss this option. There is at least one item in my DVD collection that would probably validate this theory (and, y’know, who amongst us hasn’t gone to Amazon UK and seen series one of Not Going Out for the limited-time-only price of £3 and subsequently purchased it in a moment of heady recklessness?).

    I used to go for a daily walk. I stopped doing that because It’s Fucking Hot, and I am tall and red-haired and British and therefore not built for the surface-of-the-sun levels of heat LA seems to endure for 347 days of the year.

    So my plan from tomorrow is this: Eat healthily. Yes, that’s ridiculous. Yes, my primary source of food for tomorrow will be a local AM-PM and the only food they serve there has been treated with more chemicals than a Marvel superhero. But dammit, I’m going to eat healthily or not at all. One way or another I’m going to get Results. I’m not huge, and I’d like to keep it that way.

    Meanwhile, I have to find something else to fill that hole with. What were the other things I mentioned earlier…?

  • Why Monkey Island is my Star Wars

    During my childhood I was sucked into a seemingly vast fictional world that was populated with rogues, scoundrels, a dark evil and a plucky young kid wanting to learn the ways a time long gone by. I speak, of course, of The Secret of Monkey Island, a game written by Ron Gilbert and published by LucasFilm Games (who later changed their name to LucasArts).

    monkey1

    I was four years old when Secret was released, and while I couldn’t really read at the time I would watch for hours as my cousin Andy played the game on our old Amiga 500. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I was captivated by what I saw on screen. Back then games didn’t have voice actors to deliver the lines – there simply wasn’t the space on the floppy disks – so all of the in-game dialogue appeared on screen above the characters. I couldn’t read at that age, but I pushed myself to learn so I could play the game myself. I was, I think, six when I finally completed the game for the first time, when I finally saw the hero Guybrush Threepwood and his love Elaine Marley standing at Stan’s Second Hand Shipyard watching the body of the Ghost Pirate LeChuck explode like fireworks against the night sky. I have never been so infatuated by an image in all my life. It is burned into my mind, a perfect glistening memory, the one thing I think of when I remember the youngest days of my childhood.

    A couple of years later I’d heard that a second game, LeChuck’s Revenge: Monkey Island 2, had been released. Although I would read about it in the Amiga magazines my Dad bought it would be several years before I finally got to play the game myself. I filled that time with other, similar adventure games. I found my Dad’s old King’s Quest games and worked my way through the first three in the series. They were charming but they didn’t elicit the same feeling of excitement and wonder that the first game did. The closest a game came to doing that was 1993’s Simon the Sorcerer, a British-developed game that felt spiritually very similar to Secret. This was also the first adventure game I played with voice actors instead of on-screen text, and it featured none other than Red Dwarf star Chris Barrie as the titular teenaged wizard.

    1997 saw the release of The Curse of Monkey Island, the third game in the series, but that year I was too busy wrapping my head around Revenge for the first time, having been given a cracked pirate copy for the Amiga by a friend of the family. That beast came on eleven floppy disks, by far the biggest game I’d ever played at the time. I can’t define the sheer amount of excitement that filled my young heart as I installed the game to my computer’s hard drive (at that time a beefed up Amiga 1200 that my Dad had left us when he moved to the States). Each time the installer asked for the next disk I felt the grip of anxiousness and glee tighten. One disk down, ten to go… one step closer to being able to see what happens next to our entrepid pirate wannabe.

    monkey2

    I was probably just as taken aback by the ending to Revenge as practically every other Monkey Island fan out there had been years before when the game had first come out. Without wanting to ruin it, the ending was a bizarre, unexpected, bittersweet cliffhanger that has been both hailed as one of the finest endings to a game of all time and the laziest, worst piece of trash ever to come from the Lucas stable. At the time I hated it. It felt like a kick in the groin, like LucasArt and Ron Gilbert had taken our money and ridden their solid gold speedboat down the cash river out to the open waters of the Financial Gain Ocean. Anyone who’s played any game by Hideo Kojima no doubt knows the feeling well.

    Over time, and after discovering an article that explores Guybrush’s world and what the secret of Monkey Island might be, the ending began to make more sense to me. It began to feel less lazy and more finely crafted. A second playthrough of LeChuck’s Revenge some years later (and, in fact, a playthrough of the very first game) revealed a ton of stuff to me that helped make the ending much less nonsensical to me. I now think it’s the greatest ending to a game ever produced.

    The series could, and perhaps should have ended there. It didn’t. Two further games were produced, without the aid of Ron Gilbert who left LucasArts to do his own thing. While The Curse of Monkey Island was an exceptional game, a thoroughly enjoyable and very humorous adventure, it was missing something integral… some key element that made it feel like a Monkey Island game. In many ways Curse is the end of Monkey Island because the fourth title, Escape From Monkey Island, is a trainwreck – the leap to 3D didn’t benefit the game at all, leaving fans with horrible controls, terrible fan service and failed attempts to revisit locations from the previous games. It still had that classic Monkey Island wit, but without the charm and with an ending even worse than Curse‘s it wasn’t worth the time it took me to go to the store and buy it.

    monkey3

    The entire Monkey Island franchise can be easily compared to the Star Wars saga. Secret is an utterly brilliant game that took gamers by surprise when it was released. Revenge is a marvellous experience building upon the groundwork laid down by Secret building to a crescendo cliffhanger (in this case, almost literally) that fans desperately wanted to see resolved. Curse is a good third entry, but the veneer is beginning to peel – it’s clear that this is the beginning of the end. And Escape… well, Escape is the entry everybody was looking forward to that couldn’t deliver and left fans feeling bitter and angry.

    The Star Wars parallels continue – yesterday saw the release of The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, a high-definition reworking of the game that started it all. The artwork had been completely redone from the ground up. The music has been rescored, this time using actual, real, actual instruments. The dialogue, that brilliant, gloriously witty dialogue, has been recorded by a team of voice actors many of them reprising their roles from later games in the series. The entire thing has been, dare I say, remastered. And has it worked? Well, it’s hit and miss, and I’ll address that in another blog post.

    I grew up with Monkey Island. I grew up wanting to be Guybrush Threepwood. The Secret of Monkey Island is the game that made pirates cool again. It’s the game that made adventure games not just another game on the shelf but made them events. Before Secret I hadn’t experienced a game with such a wonderfully crafted narrative before, and while titles like King’s Quest had stories they were so loose and freedom (what you’d probably call a “sandbox” game in today’s gaming vernacular) so as to be largely irrelevant. Secret was the first game I fell in love with. It’s the game that made me want to make games myself. It’s the game that made me want to be a writer.

    The Secret of Monkey Island, along with two of its three sequels, is the greatest computer game of all time. It will always have a special place in my heart.

  • The Dream Ends

    I’ll do my best to describe what I saw in my dream last night. It was an incredibly fleeting glance, but I got a tremendous amount of history and intent from it.

    Imagine one of the walls from your room gone, replaced instead by a dark portal to a region of unknown space. Through the portal you see only the immense head and shoulders of a large, bald demon. Its skin white, its eyes like galaxies, its mouth locked in a permanent open grin revealing thousands of tiny, pointed teeth. As you look down the throat of the beast, you see the very essence of infinity itself.

    Everything in your room is slowly being pulled towards this gaping maw. By “everything” I don’t just mean your bed, your clothes, your pictures on the wall, your clothes horse… I mean everything. The atomic structure of your possessions begins to melt away, a flowing stream of particles evaporating away from their original place and into the mouth of the creature. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the oxygen, everything pulled towards it. The string of atoms is almost beautiful in a horrific way.

    The space is left empty. Not in the sense that the room is vacant, but that this block of space is now devoid of existence. It is a void, bereft of substance, a room-shaped hole in reality. It is painful to look at, the eyes not wanting to transmit the view to the brain, the brain not wishing to process it.

    Content, the beast moves on to another room and begins the process anew. It is a slow process, but room by room, building by building, the creature intends to destroy everything. And once there is no more interior to wrap the exterior around, the reality of our world will simply collapse inwards, folding in on itself.

  • Technology Crisis

    BEN sits at his computer, ready to work.

    BEN

    Okay iTunes, give me something AWESOME to get me PUMPED for work.

    ITUNES

    Here, listen to Jonathan Coulton’s “When You Go”, followed immediately by “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You” by Colin Hay.

    BEN

    (Gently sobbing)

    You bastard.