Films such as The Cabin in the Woods are often described as “a love letter to horror.” Monolith’s 1997 first person shooter Blood is more like a rambling, 50 page Unabomber manifesto stuffed into horror’s mailbox at 2:00am, complete with the final line “ps: nice view thru yr bedroom window ;)”. Conceptually it’s one of most ridiculous and nebbish games ever made: the dialogue consists of groan-worthy riffs on famous horror movies, the levels are themed off places like the Overlook Hotel and Crystal Lake, the game shoves references to Lovecraft and George Romero under your face with such obsessive frequency that you almost want to pat it on the shoulder and say  “Relax, I get it. Stop trying so hard.”.

But it’s also one of the most fun shooters ever made. There’s just no cohesive direction to any of it, and strangely, that completely works.

You have 1) a brainless “shoot everything that moves” gameplay, 2) paired with a complicated set of RPG -style damage modifiers (as a simple example, stone gargoyles repel fire attacks). You have 1) a nonsensical throwaway plot about an old west gunfighter (with anachronisms galore), and 2) a very detailed mythos, right down to the fact that the enemy cultists speak a constructed language (there was a dictionary on the now-defunct Blood site, revealing said language to be the product of hurling Sanskrit and Latin at each other in a Participle Accelerator.) You have 1) shitty graphics (the Build engine was dated in 1996, and even more so in 1997), and 2) fairly groundbreaking use of 3D voxel imaging (for tombstones and such). Blood’s an anomaly.

The game’s a mess, in the best way possible. It’s like it was made by two different teams living on two different continents who could only communicate by carrier pidgeon.  “Throw a bunch of interesting ideas together” seldom works, but here’s the exception.

I’ve played through it several times, at various difficulty levels, and I still find it capricious, challenging, and occasionally brilliant. The Build Engine isn’t the prettiest whore on the waterfront, but it allows for destructible/deformable environments and the game takes those features and runs like they’re a pair of scissors. E1M3, “The Phantom Express”, takes place on board a moving train – it’s stunning as a visual effect, and the level design perfectly complements it: you have to fight tense gunbattles in narrow train corridors, etc. The only bad thing is that none of the later levels quite match it in creativity.

The weapons are savage and visceral (though I never figured out exactly how the voodoo doll work), and the level design fun, flowing, and filled with endearing human touches. Duke Nukem 3D was the anti-Quake. This is the antier-Quake. This is the final and complete triumph of content over technology, and nobody in gaming realised it, either then or now.

Not even Monolith did – Blood II was an inexplicable attempt at remaking this game with zero character or charm. And of course, the game still has a modding community.

Blood isn’t perfect. The final boss is the easiest one in the game. The weapons aren’t balanced all that well (generally, the cooler a weapon seems, the less useful it is in the game) and some of the enemies are truly ridiculous bullet sponges. It’s bimodal nature means it has daring creativity paired with cloddish FPS cliches – there’s the old “shoot a crack in the wall to reveal a secret area” wheeze…again…and again…

But it’s classic, and the rarest type of game: one that is impervious to time. To preserve a human body, you generally extract all eight litres of blood – and I guess this is where it all ends up. Duke Nukem 3D came out a year before and laid the ground for this type of game (gory violence + campy irreverent humor), but between the two of them, THIS is the one to play first, and perhaps last.

People who fight social change do so for two reasons. The first is that sometimes society changes in a bad direction. The second is that sometimes society changes in a good direction. Yeah, think about it. How terrible would it be to spend your life fighting eugenics or whatever, have society adopt eugenics anyway…and then society doesn’t collapse. Wouldn’t that just be the pits and the shits? Why were you even alive?

On a related jag: lots of famous men use prostitutes.

Charlie Sheen. Tiger Woods. A-Rod. These are wealthy, high-status men. They could have consensual sex with any number of women. Yet they choose prostitutes.

I think it’s because sex prostitutes is explicitly transactional. You fuck them, you pay them, and they leave. They don’t expect you to talk or be entertaining, they don’t gab about you to their friends or the tabloids, they don’t try to move into your house or poke holes in your condoms. THEY LEAVE.

Economists talk about revealed preferences, where peoples’ true desires can be triangulated through their buying habits. If men, given unlimited money and status, choose prostitutes, does this mean that this represents some kind of…ideal preference? I heard someone say that a communist sees a mansion and thinks “nobody should have this much” while a capitalist thinks “everyone should have this much.” Are prostitutes the mansion in this scenario? In the future, will there be social welfare so that every man can afford prostitutes?

I think there’s more to famous men using prostitutes than it just being more convenient. It’s an upgraded form of love, love made efficient.

Love is traditionally haphazard, rambling, impenetrable, irrational, awkward, and (to an extent) based on deception. From the male end, it looks like this. Make yourself attractive. Approach women. Hope they don’t write blog posts about how creepy you are. Court a woman over months or years. At any stage in the proceedings, things can fall apart for any reason at all, or even no reason at all, and you’ve just wasted four whole years putting the toilet seat up and pretending to like Michael Bublé.

In its natural form, love is like crude oil, filled with grit and sand and byproducts. Sometimes it’s still usable. When the Japanese occupied Tarakan island they found that the crude was light enough to pump directly into their ships’ boilers. But why not refine it? Why not strip out all the stuff you don’t need?

Prostitution is refined love.

A working lady can fulfill any need you can possibly have, whether you want carnal knowledge, emotional intimacy, or even just someone to hug. Is it fake? Yes. For a whole lot of us, fakeness is all we need. I don’t need to actually IRL kill people in Battlefield 4. I don’t need rappers in music videos to actually own those expensive cars. All that matters is that the illusion is real enough, and thanks to technology, it either is or soon will be.

Soon, we might be looking at people who get married the way we look at people who churn their own butter. It will be a bucolic hipster lifestyle choice.

There’s nothing wrong with living in the past. Look at the NES gaming console, and how people fondly remember it. Some people build shrines to the NES. We have to do this, because the console can’t speak. It lacks a voice, so we commemorate it.

The human race is in a similar but different predicament. We’re coming obsolete…but unlike every other product in history, we can talk about our own obsolescence.

Society is full of noble ideals that nobody can defend because they attract assholes.

Consider artistic obscenity. Even the United States’ famously permissive free speech laws have vague, ominous carve-outs where speech can be disallowed for things such as affronting “contemporary community standards” You can look up guys like Mike Diana and Peter Sotos in your own time. Suffice to say, are people who have gone to prison for lines on paper.

This, in the words of John Locke, is “a bummer, man.” Why can’t we stop it? Nobody wants to live in a world where art is criminalized. You can almost hear the clocks striking thirteen. This should be the sort of thing that attracts huge public support.

There’s one problem: you’ll be waving picket signs alongside pedophiles.

Child pornographers consider their work to be art. Or even if they don’t, that’s their cover story. I don’t have any particular opinion on whether child pornography should be considered free expression (yes I do!), but this is a burr in the saddle of the radical free speechist: his position puts him in confederacy with some of the most reviled (and Savile’d) people on earth. Remember when someone launched voat as an “anything goes” competitor to reddit? And they were naive enough to think that reddit limited speech because they were mean old jerks? Then they lost their Paypal account due to all the pedophiles using the site. The gay rights movement had/has a similar problem – pedophiles hijacking “free love” for their own NAMBLAtastic ends.

I feel like a lot of groups end up with this problem.

Punk rock. “Fuck the system, burn it all down” = a pheremone for Nazis.

Men’s rights activism. “Stop screwing men in court” = a pheremone for rapists and domestic abusers.

Communism, of course, is a pheremone for communists.

It’s ubiquitous, and unavoidable. Any public stance other than “pie is good” will attract some element of socially undesirable people to your side, and this is the sort of thing that can permanently discredit your cause. Years ago, there was a “anti-speutering” movement, which opposed the spaying/neutering of dogs over health concerns. Were they a well-intentioned group at the start? We’ll never know, because, zoophiles require intact animals for their purposes, and soon this movement became a rallying cry for people who want to fuck their housepets. For example, James Greathouse. “I advocate close, even sexual, relationships between human and non-human animals, so long as they are honest, mutually enjoyed acts of love.” Now, nobody really remembers them for anything else.

This is kind of why I feel like there should be a pro rapist lobby, and a pro pedophile lobby, and a pro-Cthulhu lobby. Why? Because it might keep jerks safely isolated away from all the sane groups. Forget inclusion. Sometimes you just need quarantine.

There was a journalist called Malcolm Muggeridge, whose parents belonged to a commune of socialists. One day, in a fit of working class spirit, they tore apart the deeds to their property. No chains on me! Viva la revolution! Unfortunately, this noble gesture soon meant that squatters started settling on their land, and they now lacked the means to remove them. Excess freeloaders made the project unworkable, and eventually they ended up resorting to capitalistic oppression (throwing the squatters out by force).

Bat signals are great for attracting Batman. Unfortunately, in real life they usually just attract actual bats.