Demonic Angelicism

I’m down for maintenance. I mean me, literally. Not the blog. Basically, I haven’t been posting anything recently because I’m grounded. Sort of. They don’t really call it grounded. It’s more like

Use this crappy old computer. Don’t install anything on it. Only do your homework. Study more. Work on your classes. Don’t use the computer at all if you can avoid it. Get A’s, or at least B’s.

So I haven’t posted in a while, and I won’t be posting in a while.

This is a poem I wrote really, really late last night for the myriad. I hope you like it.

Wiki Sleep

Falling Asleep

Well, today was my birthday… and there were only four people who actually said “Happy Birthday” to me without me prompting them first…

And now they shall be “immortalized” on my blog (as if the server won’t die someday and people read this blog anyway)

Tina Lee
Regina Ngo
Dylan Tong
Kiki

And here’s the horde of people who went on facebook and went Oh crap! It’s Arthur’s Birthday! (AKA, the honorable mentions)

It seems that there’s a belief that teens have problems (or at least my parents think that - refering to me and me alone). I can’t deny it, it’s true. However, I don’t believe that they are correct in their reason why we have problems.

They claim some really complicated thing about some social system thing and rights. Basically, they say that teens have no rights. Why not? Because Adults have a fulfilled obligation to the social system (here known as the country of America) by paying taxes, and other stuff like that. Children do not do that. So, therefore, we have no rights, and we want rights. This is where the problem comes from, conflict between the two groups.

So that’s their theory. My theory is that we have a lack of good communication between the two parties. It’s not a teenager problem, its a “teenagers and parents refuse to communicate effectively” problem.

This is mostly caused by coercion. A parent can force a child to do something he or she does not like, no questions asked. This, obviously, kills communication. In cases like this, the parents harden against any complaints, suggestions, and ideas of the child completely. Coercion is usually performed through threats, which makes the child even less communicative: any sign of disobedience could result in “severe” consequences.

Coercion happens indirectly as well. For example, right now, I am being told to get off the computer. I can’t really say anything against it, because I know that whatever I say, he will think that I’m lying and that I’m fooling around. Aww I give up. I’ll finish this up later.

By now about half of you know that I’m writing a story. About a quarter of you know it’s called Ripple. About an eighth of you know what it’s about.

That is not what my post is about.

In the summer of 2008, I went to Italy and Greece. On my travels to Italy, I stopped by a city named Rome. Here, we stayed at the Hotel Pineta Palace. On one of these rather interesting days, I decided that I was angry at the rest of my delegation and went straight to my hotel room after a long day of sightseeing. I took a quick shower, and lay down on my bed.
And my mind started calculating.
I thought about the various games I’ve played thus far… and thought about what it would be like to make a FPS game mod. I had tried to make a map for Portal called Seriously Now earlier that year, and it did not turn out very well. I thought about Seriously Now, and suddenly the idea began to evolve.
Seriously Now begins with the player traveling in a stasis bed, somehow accidentally jolted awake by a little accident. This stasis bed was traveling by way of rail to a test chamber.
I decided, what if instead of the test chamber it traveled outside the facility instead? What if there was more than one? What if they carried weapons?
What if it was a game about a contracted assassin?
The ideas twirled around my head a little more, until I had reached the idea of an entire organization where an angry individual walks up to some virtual interface, pays a huge fee, then our player is sent out into a giant city map to hunt down and find a person and kill them.
That’s kinda boring. And repetitive. What would make someone want to play this?
I needed a storyline. What if… along the way you met someone… who helped you…
And then suddenly you had to kill them?
And then the game ended when you killed them, maybe you had a few more missions if you didn’t kill them.
Wait, why would the organization accept you again after you fail a mission?
No. You would have to start a revolt. Gather a few squad members… (Hey, the Half-Life 2 engine does support squads, not too hard to put them in a map…), and then suddenly you’re deep inside the organization, and you bring it down, and just like the end of Seriously Now, the entire facility explodes into a brilliant (laggy) display as you fly away in a little airplane.
Who’s going to do the models for me? And how would I find time to do this map?
Sean walked into the room.
This idea is stupid. I threw it into a mental recycling bin.
And never thought of it again.

August 2008. I had just been shipped off to Stanford to take a Leadership Summit program. Yippee.
I met a girl named Rhonda. She claimed to be good at writing. Aww… she’s so smart… I’ll never be friends with this person. I shouldn’t even bother.
I met a girl named Lauren. She was carrying a giant book around on a few days. (Yeah, yeah, I can hear you Twilight fans cheering.) I finally got tired of the cover and asked her to tell me what it was about. She shoved the back of the book at me. (Actually, I think it was an inside flap.)
I was like “oh cool” and made her tell me more. I remember the words Twilight and “Oh its a girl book don’t bother” mentioned.
Then as we walked back to our dorms I suddenly remembered something and pulled a crumpled thought from my mental recycling bin. My story.
Maybe it would work as a short story.
A few days later I managed to catch Rhonda. (Not physically, just managed to get her attention.) I’m usually really bad at making friends with people I don’t know that well, but for some strange miraculous reason Rhonda and I got along fairly well. Then I said that I wanted to write a story.
She had only encouragement.
The next day I brought my computer with me to the bus. We had a 3 hour long bus ride ahead of us. My facilitator, April, asked me what it was for, and I said I was writing a story.
Well, I guess I have to now
So I did. I wrote five pages during the remainder of the trip.

I deleted four the day I got home. Then I found Twilight and read it for the next four days. (But that’s not part of this story.)
And then I started writing my story. I recently named it Ripple.

Name subject to change, but I doubt it will. I already have a tag named after it.

This weekend, I was bored, so I lined up two unused whiteboards on my refrigerator and wrote one sentence on it. Before long, I discovered another sentence on it. My nine year old sister decided she wanted to start playing too.

So the act of story continuing began in my house.

Here is our first story:

Billy Pig and the Big Cave
Once upon a time, there was a pig. A little pig named Billy. He went up a hill. Billy saw a cave. He went in the cave and heard a spooky noise. Then he found out it wasn’t a cave, it was a dinosaur’s mouth! He tried to run. But he couldn’t. So he walked to a car. He was too late; the dinosaur ate the pig and the car. “Mmm, yummy pork,” the dinosaur said before he woke up.

Here’s the original: (or as original as it could get)

If you don’t like reading or writing, you’re probably better off not reading this post.

Ever tried reading a book… and you’re enjoying it a lot… and then, suddenly, it ends. Sure, it may have been a nice, bright, happy ending, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that you were drawn out of the world and left something behind with that last word on the page… I don’t know about you, but I just hate that feeling.

Since I have space here and not much to blog about, I think I’m going to share a bit about how I read. First of all, I seem to read faster than a large number of people who happen to be my friends. (It seems that everyone who’s not my friend reads much faster than I do.) One friend in particular seems to think that I’m skimming and missing everything. This is obviously not the case. Strangely, it sometimes seems like if I read too slowly, I start to read only the letters and words, never grasping the actual meaning of the ideas behind the words. If I read a little faster though, I start to understand not just the words, but the sentences, phrases, and ideas. (If I read any faster I tend to get distracted.) Skimming (and the opposite, scanning) is something that seems to be almost impossible to me.

Reading faster leads to me finishing the book quicker, which then makes me (and I’m sure you) hate the author for taking away the world that they let me glimpse into. More often than not, I’m attacked by the story for a few weeks afterward, wishing that I was a part of that world. (Please don’t tell me that you don’t do that, I’m sure that deep somewhere inside you know what I’m talking about.) As evil as it may seem, I’m lead to believe that the author suffers greater pain. After all, who else has the most comprehensive idea of what the world is like? Who else spent hours living in their dream world, trying to figure out what their characters are doing?

Ok, to make a long blog post short, I plan to write a story to see how far I can get with a world I develop. What’s it going to be about? Hmm… maybe a organization of assassins, a sinister plot, a revolt… something along those lines.

Keep your eyes peeled!

Here’s a short snippet to whet your appetite… It’s not that great though…

I entered the virtual briefing room, and was surprised to find that my client was The Administrator. “How are you, Jonathan?” he asked me in a emotionless voice.
“Fine, thank you.” I answered, slightly confused. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Oh, I actually have a job for you if that is what you wonder about.”
I sat down on the floor, wondering who in the world The Administrator would need taken care of. Why pick me, even if he really did need it?

This is a story I wrote some time ago, and I thought that I might share it because I had nothing interesting on this blog for a while… Besides, it was gathering dust in my Google Docs.

Apparently someone changed it without my permission, so this isn’t entirely my writing…

Prologue: Twenty Years in the Future

The small, cylindrical elevator stopped and played its usual “Level Reached” chime. As the doors slid open, Chell greeted the bright, bluish room with a wave, and a cheeky smile. The lead scientists didn’t think she’d be fit to operate her portal gun, but yet, she was there. She had gone through great difficulties to get it, and she was happy to have it. Unfortunately, it was only able to create blue portals, but she was sure that she would be able to create the orange type soon. She stepped out of the elevator and walked out into the small hallway in front of the elevator. A large sign on her right lit up with the large number x. She quickly peered at the testing icons below it, representing the challenges she would face in this particular chamber. She dashed on, because it was nothing new, she thought.

The usual quasi-human voice sounded in the background. “The Enrichment Center regrets to inform you that this next test… is impossible. Make no attempt to solve it.” Chell glanced around the new room. It seemed to be true. There was a cube in front of her, and a button to her right. But there was an emancipation field between the two, so the obvious route of taking the cube through the field would prove to be impossible. The voice continued, “The Enrichment center apologizes for this clearly broken test chamber.” Chell thought for a few seconds, and suddenly, the ground shook under her. She was tossed onto the floor. The lights flickered, and the emancipation field flickered, then turned off. She heard a creak as the elevator fell onto the level below. There was a crash and the sound of an explosion. Then, the lights turned back on as if nothing had happened, but the emancipation field was still off. Ooh, this makes things a lot easier! She thought to herself. As she got up, she noticed that the room was beginning to fill with a green gas, her vision was beginning to blur, and that she was experiencing slight pain throughout her body. “Uh oh, she thought as she grabbed the cube, violently jammed it on the button, and ran through the now open door at the end. GLaDOS recited her usual “Fantastic! You remained resolute and resourceful…” as she dashed into the elevator. The doors slid closed.

The elevator began going up. Chell took a deep breath and pain ran through her body as her vision blurred again. She collapsed on the floor. The elevator stopped, the “Level Reached” chime played, and the doors slid open. Chell struggled to get up. She got up, but the elevator gave another violent jolt, there was a familiar creaking noise, as the elevator began to fall. Chell attempted to leap to the next testing chamber, but the elevator had fallen too far. She hit the concrete elevator shaft wall and fell back into the falling elevator. Chell doubled over and coughed up a stream of blood, splattering the floor. But she couldn’t worry about that now. The whistling wind and her hair flying up around her soon became blurred and muffled. Her last memory was a loud crash, and a large painful jolt, all images green-tinged.

Then there was nothing.

Scene 1: Unexpected Delivery

Chell awoke sputtering at the water’s surface. She appeared to be tied around the waist to a rather large chunk of concrete. Just as she realized that she was being dragged down, her head went under. She was sinking faster and deeper than she thought, being pulled by gravity’s invisible hand into an endless abyss. After a few moments of panic, she noticed a curious brown sea snake rising towards the surface. “No stop it, there’s got to be a way out.” She struggled to untie the braided ropes around her waist, but to no avail. Suddenly the “sea snake” brushed against her cheek. “It’s fuzzy. …. This is no sea snake, this is a rope!” She grabbed onto it and held on as if her life depended on it (which it did). She nearly passed out from lack of oxygen, but sheer will kept her conscious and alive. The rope was pulled to the surface. Nearby on the blindingly white beach, a small crowd of people cheered. Chell was untied from the hunk of metal and concrete she was attached to, and looked at the people on the beach. There were people of her own nationality darting around and others were lying dead on the beach. Suddenly, she felt a dull pain and a lot of pressure in the small of her back. White sand flew up and she was knocked to the sand. She was about to rise and retort angrily when shots sounded around her. She instinctively knew to stay low, so she attempted to army crawl over the tip of the sand dunes. However, she was spotted.

She was dragged by her hair, and roughly carried to a airplane. She was tied up and thrown inside a detention chamber. The doors quickly slid shut before she could register what was going on. She immediately started coughing, choking on the almost palpable air. Sleeping gas soon filled her lungs, and she lost consciousness.

…

Lots of stuff.

…

Epilogue: Twenty Years of Change

The small, cylindrical elevator stopped and played its usual “Level Reached” chime. As the doors slid open, Chell greeted the bright, bluish room with a wave, and a cheeky smile. The lead scientists didn’t think she’d be fit to operate her portal gun, but yet, she was there. She had gone through great difficulties to get it, and she was happy to have it. Unfortunately, it was only able to create blue portals, but she was sure that she would be able to create the orange type soon. She stepped out of the elevator and walked out into the small hallway in front of the elevator. A large sign on her right lit up with the large number x. She quickly peered at the testing icons below it, representing the challenges she would face in this particular chamber. She dashed on, because it was nothing new, she thought. The usual quasi-human voice sounded in the background. “The Enrichment Center regrets to inform you that this next test… is impossible. Make no attempt to solve it.” Chell glanced around the new room. It seemed to be true. There was a cube in front of her, and a button to her right. But there was an emancipation field between the two, so the obvious route of taking the cube through the field would prove to be impossible. The voice continued, “The Enrichment center apologizes for this clearly broken test chamber.” Chell thought for a few seconds, and suddenly, she noticed a tiny hole in the wall above the emancipation field. Perfect! she thought to herself as she picked up the cube and flung it through the hole. It landed right on the button. She cheered as she lept through the rest of the chamber, through the door and into the elevator. Back in the chamber, GLaDOS recited her usual “Fantastic! You remained resolute and resourceful…” as the elevator doors closed and she was whisked off into the next chamber.

Chell spent an extraordinarily long time in the elevator, but she dismissed it to a rare malfunction of GLaDOS. “After all, what robot doesn’t need repairs,” she thought. The doors finally slid open right after she fired the portal gun a coulpe hundred times at the door. “Finally.”

I found this in a pile of my poems.

Congrats to anyone who can understand it.

Supernova

In the darkness of the World,
in the shadows of the Souls,
in the mystic gloom of Time
there was a light
shining steadily,
willing, wishing,
forcing itself to grow
brighter, brighter
ever as bright
boldly surpassing even the
brilliance of the shining sun.

And yet, it wanted more.

the flame leaped up,
high as the heavens
burning holes in the sky

it was still not enough.

It surpassed the brightest of stars
shining brilliantly in the deep, dark sky.
But then, it failed
A shining star gone wrong.
It becane the brightest
in the universe for a second
Just a second.

And passed out of our world.

~ Arthur Lei, May 16, 2007.