A really cold sounding quote that I'll find in my free time.Come now, you rich, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you.
James 5:1When the beats drops I'm going to fucking kill myself.
Dedicated to Ziggybeeps.
I'm hungover as shit I'll start writing later... My plan to begin writing this work is to start playing the game with a pile of index cards next to me so I can take notes and try to get a collection of about 16 that'll correspond each to a paragraph in the piece. I'm only aiming for about 3,000 words since I want a read time of slightly over 10 minutes. At the moment, I'm reading Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts which will hopefully serve as a companion to my writing. My set deadline to finish this piece, regardless of how shitty it ends up, is the end of the month. Writing is an intrinsically interative process so even if I end up dissatified with the result I at least reserve the right to modify it later. Again, aim for 3,000 words.
The sections of Marx's manuscripts are as follows: 1. Wages of Labour, 2. Profit of Capital, 3. Rent of Land, 4. Alienated Labour, 5. The Relationship of Private Property, 6. Private Property and Labour, 7. Private Property and Communism, 8. Needs, Production, and the Division of Labour, 9. Money, 10. Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy.
For the purposes of this writing I will refer to the protagonist as simply, The Empty Fuck, call it my version of the unhappy consciousness. There's something that Marx says in his Introduction to his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, that the speculative philosophy of right as systematized by Hegel mirrors his contemporary political reality so well that a critique of his Philosophy of Right transforms into a critique of that present political reality. I see something similar in Cruelty Squad, it mirrors the degradation and violence of our condition so well, that an analysis of Cruelty Squad can't help but transform into an analysis of What the hell was I thinking?the world all present degradation and violence. That, I think, is a strength of Another Wasted Life's analysis of Cruelty Squad, they always made it a point to relate something from our reality to something present in the game. Cruelty Squad is, in essence, an inverted world.
I am broken. My hope is eradicated. I am dead and I am death. I have ascended to wealth and status beyond those that would employ me. I am the lifeblood of society. I am flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters.
You emerge from a long and weary sleep. The world appears as a large flat plane of opportunity. The sky is boundless and blue. You are among friends. The air is fresh with the scent of the ocean. You have learned acceptance and forgiveness, but you lack knowledge and understanding. You will be trapped forever. The past is ever-present. The sun smiles at you with eternal malice.
I weep. You are a rotten husk, you overflow with boundless power, you have the soul of an emperor. Sacrificial hero, blessed by primordial luck. Your friends are in hell, yet you smile. Only good things will come to someone like you. Set goals, have a ten year plan. Invest, wake up early, CEO mindset. Good luck.
The first Triagon was born of malice, the second emerged from Life, the third was born of Death. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, beauty hates the understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.
The first of the Triagons was born of malice. It grasped the flow of the solar terror with both hands, and perched on top of this doomed world. The germ is born. It looked up into the sun. Beyond the veil of power. It extended it's bulging vascular arms through the boundary and took it's share. The disease spreads. It assumed total control of the biological shape of things. It became a primal engine of technological progress. And so everything started to twist and turn, pulsate and pump. The infection is final.
When the second Triagon descended from the newly emerging mass of Life, the world was mired in confusion and chaos. The overwhelming clutter of biology got on it's nerves, it demanded calm. The feeding begins. It saw visions of guts, of decay and metabolism. The opportunity had come to extend a cavern of intestines deep into the ground. To start processing the glut of excess organic mass. To introduce limits to writhing and shitting. Chlorhydric acid. Existence became a scarce product, and the nervebags came to detest the limits. Suffering was born. The second Triagon was content with it's power. It was happy. Metabolic Domination.
The third Triagon was born of Death. It saw that the world was radiating excess energy. It wanted to put great things into motion. But greatness wasn't possible without value. The first transaction. It took it's blade and cut a large hole into the boundary, creating a sudden flash of high volume transactional power. And just for a moment things seeped value into themselves, assuming souls. The second transaction. The hole was quickly mended, and the overpowering transmission of value was cut short. But in that moment the seed of primordial financial might was planted, and the world took on it's transactional form. Conflict and discord emerged, and the third Triagon was ecstatic. The third transaction.
None of this shit matters to what I actually want to say.
A point in the horizon, a melting scene from your childhood. Your mortality is showing. A frantic drift towards nothing, biology doomed to an infinite recursive loop. Teeth with teeth with teeth. Take a bite. Serene scent of a coastal town, warmth of the sun. Bitter tears. Lust for power. This is where you abandoned your dreams. You are a high net worth individual, an expanding vortex of pathetic trauma. Finally a beautiful fucking nerve ape. A pure soul is born, its neurotransactions stutter into being. 30583750937509353 operations per nanosecond. Beauty eludes your porous mind.
The value of Life is negative. The balance of being is rotated by 38 degrees. The surface is full of cracks, a turgid light shines through. Fleshy primordial bodies sluggishly roll down the slope. Only you slide upwards, with a celestial step. You become beautified, a saintly figure. Your pristine idiocy reveals a safe path through the impenetrable fog of Life. Your dull sword cuts through the weak tendons and membranes of the garden of corruption. Sit on the throne of contentment and ferment. Inspect the eternal blue skies of your kingdom. You come to a realization. You pick up an onion and begin peeling.
Onion layer one. Onion layer two. Onion layer three. Onion layer n^n. Aeons have passed and the onion is fully peeled. Nothing remains. It's perfect. You get lost in the point that remains where the onion used to be. Synaptic cascade, neurological catastrophe. The point becomes infinitely dense, the universe condenses into a unicellular being. It screams sin. It craves happiness. It's done with this world. It tries to commit suicide but fails. Sad pathetic mess. You feel pity and disgust but in a way only a being of pure grace can. In your violent mercy you terminate the worldlife.
The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in it's growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.
I'm removing this from my study because it seems completely superficial for me to attempt to analyze the relation of a philosopher's fragment to a piece of art from one mere paragraph of a larger work, if I wanted to include this as relevant to the discussion I'd have to be more familiar with The Accursed Share, which I'm not. You haven't even begun your study you fucking idiot.
I'm extending the deadline for this writing another month because now that I have a full time job I have much less time to play video games and I'm juggling a lot of responsibilities, both work related and social. Hopefully next month I'll have time to sit down and take proper notes on this game and organize them into a rough draft. When the beat drops I'm going to fucking kill myself.
For now since I'm at work I'll just go ahead and spill some ink—the Empty Fuck as a shape of self-consciousness is in itself an abstraction that finds its compliment and fiercest enemy in a world incapable of furnishing this consciousness with meaningful content, the emptiness of the Empty Fuck is a totalizing emptiness—the Empty Fuck becomes animated by the sound of blood bubbling in a slit throat. You stand there, gazing at a car riddled with bullet holes, its driver complacently resting their head as chunks of brain spill out of their skull and cover the upholstery. You can't help but imagine the taste. After all, prion disease has been cured, no risk.
Structurally, I'm thinking of ending the writing with a description of the opening cutscene. I had a thought while driving the other day that this writing is in some sense limited by the fact that it's not a video essay and I can't bring in a visual dimension but that led me to remember about a book I'm interested in reading by Peter Sotos called Pure Filth which is comprised of transcripts of gonzo pornography and the simple act of transplanting the acts to pure writing makes them abstract enough to be even more disgusting when your brain attempts to process the mental imagery, and I hope transposing the experiences of Cruelty Squad to prose accomplishes something similar.
My copy of Visions of Excess by Georges Bataille has come in the mail, it's a collection of essays and experimental writings. In Bataille, the darkness of his thought is set into locomotive motion through the clarity of his utterance. In myself, this obscurity festers as the already-developed yet unexpressed, until it will burst forth into the miscarriage of prose as an expression of absolute hatred. It is necessary to lacerate myself. There's a certain freedom that I see in Bataille's writing that I hope to harness for myself, a freedom to sink into excretion and dismemberment.
I notice Ville Kallio tends to downplay what he's accomplished, as if his un-decisions somehow lower his game's value, but artists are rarely the best custodians of their own work. He's too modest rather than self-aggrandizing. I myself am stuck in a loop of revolving around this game but never quite setting my thoughts about it into motion. It's as if I'm afraid of writing, or perhaps afraid of falling short of what I'd like to accomplish by the act of writing. He mentions in an interview that Cruelty Squad is 'a sadistic game born entirely out of spite' and I think I have to do myself the displeasure of bringing my own hatreds and self-hatred to a bubbling surface. I must write paragraphs on the corpses of others. Thankfully, I buried this part of the writing under a pile of nothing-writing so I now consider myself free to express myself. I did end up making a list of the topics I'd like to cover, but fuck the list. Ville also mentioned something about reading a collection of Althusser essays that he pretended to understand and I feel the same way about the collection of Bataille essays I attempted to read, maybe that's how I feel about all the philosophy I read. One weird thing I noticed is that while Cruelty Squad explores the degradation of violence, you don't see much of the degredation of sexuality. It's there but not often.
Another thing I struggle with is not really knowing what style this writing should adopt, it began as a piece of fiction, I wanted to veer into philosophy, but now I don't really know. If only I read enough theory-fiction to write a theory-fiction. I think I'll wait to finish this after I finish reading some short stories from Thomas Ligotti. One thing I'd like to throw out about my approach is that it's not 'this is the hidden secret meaning this is the definitive interpretation!!1!' as much as it's more my way of presenting what specifically stuck out to me about this game and why it resonate with me, you don't necessarily have to agree but I hope I can help you see why I'm so fascinated by this little experience.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Keep fucking cutting. What, are you too good for a fucking outline? You pathetic piece of shit. Write you fuck. Who's the Empty Fuck? It's fucking you. Are you excited by this, every living creature seeing what a fucking idiot you are, what a cock you're making of yourself?
Cruelty Squad is the last thing I ever shared with my ex-girlfriend. There, I said it. I was always the empty fuck.
In the strikethrough I've found freedom. The freedom of eternal reorganization, of throwing everything I want to say about this game at the wall knowing most of it won't matter, carrying on anyway. Listen to me you slack-jawed idiot, you cannot take anything for granted when writing this. You have to write as if the person reading isn't even familiar with the concept of a video game. You have to render violence the way Peter Sotos renders sex. One thing I wanted to do was intermingle things in the game and actual slightly traumatic memories that aren't in the game. Cancer City Research Unit.
1.a.