Do As Thou Wilt

"Do As Thou Wilt."

This is probably the most significant line in all of Miura's work (and by the way, taken from Aleister Crowley). 

Let me set the stage. The world is inhabited by "apostles", who are monsters. These are seen as the cause of tragedy and destruction in the setting, perceived as the source of evil from society and our hero; perpetrating terrible acts of carnage, sometimes hiding in their human form, and sometimes incarnating what they represent in gore displays of dark horror. They were once humans, who sacrificed what they loved most to the Godhand, a pantheon of gods, in order to gain power. And that's not irrelevant background or a simple edgy explanation. In our story, there was a prior event, the Eclipse, that gathered them in a scenery of religious and apocalyptic undertones. There, they were given a command. You would expect that a great plan would be revealed to sunk the world into darkness; something that explains why on earth are those apostles behaving the way they do, why they even exist in the form of monsters. But in the scene, when you are expecting the dark gods to tell their servants to do something specific, or at least to do evil, they are simply told to do their own will.

Monsters don't monster because they are monsters. They do because they were humans. The animalistic nature of crude violence intertwined with higher obsessions of the supposedly more elevated soul. The manga doesn't shy away from terrorific displays of gore perpetrated to people by other people. If not by the dark horror imaginary, the distinction between the two would actually be hard to make.

Evil is then - at least in the world of Berserk - created as a necessary perspective for the society that can't understand that so dreadful world is the creation of individuals "simply" doing their will (as explained in Berserk deleted chapter) and need it as an explanation. Such interconnected murder can't possibility be the emergent result of the decisions of normal people. So something is created in the unconscious collective experience, and that idea once created, fulfills itself in those that believe in it. The philosophy of the author is here clear: the result of unbidden will, when given to people with power to act on it, results in existentialist monsters. The solution however, is not necessarily to strip power from each power wielding actor, which is what Guts (the protagonist) is trying to do in the first arcs. You can't "correct" them because they are doing nothing fundamentally different from what humans are designed to do. Even the faithful ones, who are only doing it in more twisted ways or sublimating it as justice. 

It doesn't end here. Griffith, the biggest on the apostles and member of the Godhand, doesn't have a simple will in self-gratification, simple power and pleasures (as do the majority of them) but instead has a dream. The change in rhetoric is significant, and changes everything. You don't perceive him as a villain (at first) but as a hero instead. Then as a fallen hero. Then all hell breaks lose. He finally becomes a monster - if he wasn't to begin with - and not any monster, one of the god ones. He descends to the world reincarnated to, once again, to fulfill his dream of his own kingdom of prosperity and peace (doesn't matter how tall the stairway of corpses has to be). We know what he did, we know what he has done, what he has sacrificed, what he actually is, but the world doesn't. He tricks the world into believing he is the savior of a hell of his own creation. But the thing is, he actually is. Only him can rally the apostles into a cause, his kingdom. They stop chasing their immediate gain and join society, Griffiths kingdom, living with humans somehow peacefully for a bigger cause. And they don't do because they abandon their will, because they repent or change their nature, but because they see in the longer term that concession, that abiding to the will of a bigger tyrant, is the best way to fulfill their own. I can't stress this enough. It doesn't eliminate their existentialist-hedonistic pursue, just slightly lures them in a desired direction that is beneficial to all. That draws an incredible parallel to Adam Smith capitalism, in which are the egotistic wants and needs of the individuals the ones that drive society to a better state, and not some underlying idea or promise of utopia, if only given the proper structure to do so. Such a kingdom, with those abominations product of the innate desires of humanity coexisting peacefully with humans themselves, only can exist for as long as it remains a secret to the population. The lie of the benevolent tyrant can only exist (and be manifested as utopia) as long as it is believed, and the true nature of the dream, and of the forces that keep it together as a self-sustaining status-quo, forgotten. The existence of apostles, the memories of their destruction, and the eventual and inevitable slips of those entities in the form of unabridged destruction in what seemed a functional society based on justice and harmony, then need to be explained by the existence of the concept of evil as an isolated and extraneous concept; because the alternative, to admit that civilization is built on the blood of the innocent and that we are still (at least potentially) the monsters that cause suffering and carnage, is too heavy to bear.

In essence, that's Miura thesis. That we live in this world.

The ultimate fate of the story is yet to be determined (well, the same that in Berserk, because the author died). The narrative points to a cathartic absolute breakdown of civilization, but I think that's just storytelling. The result might as well be just fine; the original dreamer and it's creation eventually fading into legend, his kingdom eventually degrading and the whole story starting again each two hundred years, with new heroes, villains and wills. With the people that have lived that era, having outlived brutal suffering with having them followed a path to fulfillment, sense of progress and purpose under the wings of the hawk. The protagonist of the story is in a revenge quest against Griffith for all the terrible things he has done, justified only because they stood between him and his dream. In certain point, he could have lived more or less peacefully, retire in a garden (well, in this case it was a cave) but chose not to do so, losing everything after an eternal struggle against existence itself. At least for the moment. In that struggle, he more or less also finds meaning. In our world, society itself acts as Griffith, utopia or a state of permanent contentment being the dream that engulfs all dreams. But it doesn't have shinning armor. His persuasive power is not awe, and the dream itself and the way to accomplish it are not clear to it's unwilling participants, and often more a downhill path of less resistance towards... nowhere in particular. It doesn't engulf, it extinguishes, it twists, it replaces. That's a significant difference between Falconia and the real world.

This is not a defense of dictatorship (I think) just a realization that something is missing when the will of man are not catered towards something bigger they can feel, see. That the progress of individual existentialism produces greatness when aligned, suffering when suppressed or bent on vengeance, servitude when surrendered and monsters when exclusively self-serving.

__________________

To those confused, this is part of a larger article named "Individual Existentialism 2" that I will almost certainly never finish. Nonetheless, this part also works as a standalone piece and also, I like it. So here it is. The picture may or may not be related to the essay.

Individual Existentialism

This one has been a long time coming. 

Existentialism is whatever wikipedia says existentialism is. Taking as an axiom the lack of inherent meaning in the universe (which in itself doesn't mean shit) existentialism affirms the individual can be the source of its own meaning. Which I will define here for shits and giggles as "the sensation of purpose". So, essentially, if you decide playing videogames all day is meaningful, meaningful it is. Here, we manufacture everything ourselves. Meaning, purpose, destiny, entelechy, dreams. All the big words, we have all of them. And those are the source of everything, justify everything. There are some branches of existentialism, but I'm not going to go much into it. Basically, you can be team Camus, team Kidegaard or team Nietzsche. The first is Bo-Bo-Bo, the second Jordan Peterson and the third Griffith. It's easy to see the allure of existentialism for minds still in love with heroism that feel alienated with the cultural constraints of it's own place in space and time. I myself was an existentialist for a long time. Maybe still am, deep down. Probably, but it requires a degree of strength I don't always dispose of. Most of the time, I consider myself in a leave of absence.

Imagine this: You are a knight, standing in top of a hill, leaving behind the lies and mediocrity, rising above the masses of falsehood and those who tried to convince you that you were just one of them. Triumphant, in eternal war against god, the elements, destiny, whatever you see fit. Defying and ready to take on the future with the strength of your own fist. Eyes in the distance, looking far away. Others don't understand. They don't need to. You are not one of them.

The problem being, I'm not Griffith.

You aren't either, by the way.

I'm not in the mood to be understood, so I will speak frankly. What we understand today as existentialism is in fact heroic, individual existentialism. When we try to isolate it from its inherent air of exceptionalism and try to say it's meant to be for everyone is even more absurd. It's premises are not wrong by any stretch of the imagination, but they simply apply to an humanity that doesn't exist. Never existed, never will. Our sense of purpose is not born from thin air or from a pure will to power but is a social instinct. Emerges for societal born structures of meaning. Even when against the group, is born from the constraints of it. Even when abstracted from it in forms of virtue, it's born from it's womb. It can be really delicate, and romantic, and pure. But it's not yours. The reality of the world is social existentialism. What is meaningful is decided almost in assembly inside the collective consciousness, and only tickles us if the walls decide to resonate. Existentialism ignores that architecture. Acts as if it doesn't exist. The last five years of my life have been invested into trying to figure out if the blueprints are even here and what materials are used. We don't feel (or choose) purpose at random. They are the crystallization of esoteric forms of narrative, heroism, acceptance, beauty, archetypes, role based identity, family, expectation, education, appearance, symbolism and the list goes on and on.

There was this documentary about a colony of orangutans. Yeah I know I have a lot of free time. The thing about them, it was an unusually large colony, don't remember why. That started a slow and continuous transformation of their behavior, as groups that size don't usually last under the idiosyncrasy and culture of normal orangutan society. Rates of in-group aggression went down, elder members were cared of, kids were raised in a more group-like manner, started to show some signs of a division of labor. In general stuff that reminisces of human tribal society. The one that struck me most (and the researchers too) was that there seemed to be a group of young, male, strong orangutans that eat more than most, worked the least getting food and overall received preferential treatment. At first they though they were the leaders, but soon it was proved otherwise. The territory was attack or "invaded" by another group of monkeys and those were the first to jump there to fight. Ah, these are soldiers. One of those soldiers, however, slacked off or something and didn't risk his life protecting his orangutan nation. The day after, it was beaten down by the rest of the colony. Holy shit. The thing is, eventually that tribe or whatever you want to call it, separated. And the colonies that emerged from the schism, didn't behave in that particular manner and return to normal orangutan social behavior. Without solid and strong mechanisms of cultural transmission, social "advances" or constructions tend to fade. It's not far fetched for me to think that in humans, soldiers develop heroism and see meaning in it as a result of cultural inheritance of social functions that had a tacit risk-reward mechanism in them. A cheap one that doesn't require such maintenance and is much more subtle. But a social mechanism nonetheless. We don't perceive it as the conclusion of the needs of the tribe, we perceive it as purpose, meaning, function, and wrongly define individual existentialism as the source of it just because it comes from within.

We have to stop deluding ourselves into thinking we (as individuals) are the creators of meaning in this universe and start to rebuild foundations that support social meaning in a way we like. Even if it's through trial and error. Maybe the idea itself of existentialism has function as it is, I don't deny it, but to pretend that's the solution to the death of god is ridiculous. We don't have heroic struggles, express through art and ride horses. We watch american sitcoms and buy yogurt to feed our kids. Even when we do those heroic things, it's telegraphed. It's glorified yogurt-buying. At it's best, is a constructor of purpose, but a terrible way to try to understand what people do and why. Even worst at trying to make them do things. Do thou will, at implying your will is your own, is a lie.

That said. I don't give non-cryptic advice often, but I will this time. You owe nothing to truth. Who cares where it comes from; if you feel the rush of purpose, don't start deconstructing it as it will led to its inevitable downfall. Ride it as long as you can. As hard as you can. Until your inevitable downfall.

What a Wonderful World

Estábamos el otro día, Ruben y yo (si, el mismo de la entrevista) varados en la orilla del mediterráneo bebiendo cerveza, fumando cigarros y viendo a la gente pasar. Se que suena florido, pero es la verdad. De pronto, por ninguna razón en particular, él dijo:

"Joder tío, es que ya podrían existir los pokemon."

"Bueno, los animales existen y no les hacemos ni puto caso."

"Yayayaya." 

Lo que empezó una larga conversación que no voy a intentar recrear, pero que siguió mas o menos la línea de lo que voy a explicar.

Recordé al instante que ya había tenido esa misma conversación, si bien en contexto y vocabulario ligeramente diferente, con Cristian una década atrás. Joder como me gusta presumir de décadas. Lo suyo es que no importaría demasiado que existieran los pokemons o no. Si existieran, nos acostumbraríamos a ellos y ya esta. Estaríamos igual aquí sentados en el mismo banco quejándonos de que no existe vete a saber que. ¿Tu sabes el trabajo que llevaría tener un Charizard? No solo la comida y las mierdas que dejaría por todos lados, sino que además lo quemaría todo. Nada, nada. Tenemos una capacidad impresionante de convertir todo aquello que existe en aburrido e irrelevante. El mundo esta lleno de cosas fascinantes que no tendrían porque existir. Es decir, existen porque existen, porque emergen de las leyes de la física de forma natural, pero si diseñaras un mundo o el mundo fuese una simulación, nadie miraría al cielo y diría "¿Porqué no existen los rayos? ¿Qué raro, no?" El fenómeno de un rayo divino de pura energía emergiendo de las nubes como por arte de magia no parece una condición necesaria para que un mundo sea creíble o parezca tener sentido. Pero existe. Esta ahí.

Cuando uno lo piensa fríamente, en sí, el mundo es fascinante. Maravilloso. Puedo dar mas ejemplos. Los sueños. En un mundo sin sueños, trata de explicarle a alguien que debería haber, rollo, viajes psicotrópicos turbios que son una reinterpretación o yo se que de la realidad mientras duermes. Te tomarían por loco. La electricidad, los animales, volcanes. Cualquier fenómeno o comportamiento humano que emerge de la enormidad y complejidad de nuestras interacciones y que tomamos como obvio simplemente porque es común pero que nunca en un millón de años podríamos predecir aunque conociéramos a cada persona del planeta. Los animales son el resultado de una especie de inteligencia de enjambre de billones de células individuales que han decidido, mediante una conversación de millones de años, que la mejor forma de sobrevivir es un elefante. Las estrellas y galaxias. En el cielo hay bolas de plasma en perpetua fusión nuclear a miles de millones de años luz de distancia y nos da lo puto mismo. De pequeño me quedaba pasmado, maravillado por su incomprensible enormidad. Ahora, da gracias si me da por darle un vistazo al cielo una noche de verano. No se nada de constelaciones. Nunca me han interesado. El verano pasado estaba tumbado en una playa junto a chica y empezamos a hablar de lo bonitas que eran y que era una lástima que la astrología era fuese una idiotez. Me enamoré al instante. Me dio una vergüenza enorme no poder nombrar mas que un par. Durante un momento estuve tentado de hablar de como de fascinante era que fuesen las mismas estrellas que veían nuestros antepasados miles o quizás millones de años atrás, de cómo sus nombres y formas encerraban de alguna forma aún la consciencia colectiva perdida de aquellos tan conectados a nosotros tanto tiempo atrás. Pero no me salió del alma. Lo pienso, si. No hubiese sido una mentira ni para hacerme el interesante ni nada. Pero era simplemente una observación intelectual. Una fascinación técnica. Un interés académico. No sentía nada mas. Joder cerebro, ya se que llevamos un par de cervezas y acabas de salir del agua, pero si hay algún momento para sentirte espiritualmente conectado con el universo o algo así, es este. Pero nah.

Estamos enfermos. No tiene nada que ver con "darse cuenta" de lo maravilloso que es el mundo ni la "forma en la que te lo tomes", ni siquiera en tu actitud. Estamos programados para que nos de lo mismo. Que asco.

Volar. Los aviones. Estamos cumpliendo el sueño de la humanidad, surcando los cielos sentados en una silla a miles de metros de altitud, viajando a toda hostia. Pero la peli que ponen es una mierda, y el café que dan sabe a caca. Este juego de consola, esta maravilla de la ingeniería que funciona a base de pasar la energía de un hamster dando vueltas a una ruedecilla a través de una cierta combinación de ceros y unos no me termina de convencer. La animación de esa invocación no me gusta.

Tengo, continuamente a mi disposición, al alcance de mi mano, de gratis, el resultado de cientos (miles) de años de creación cultural. Incontables clásicos y obras maestras en forma de libros, películas, series, música, poesía. En una de estas tardes, si me apetece, podría ponerme a aprender latín. Sin embargo, llego a mi casa y lo único que quiero hacer es mirar otra vez una reposición de dragon ball en latino o cualquier mierda que me aplaste el cerebro y así obligar a mi cerebro a no pensar en nada de más de un par de dedos de profundidad. 

Deberíamos estar pegados a la ventanilla con las dos manos y los ojos abiertos durante las cuatro míseras hora que dura lo que en su momento sería la Iliada.

¡La música en sí! ¡La música! ¿Cómo de arbitrario es que ciertos ritmos, frecuencias y timbres nos den cosquillas en las partes del cerebro destinadas a lo emocional? No solo eso, sino que esos efectos sean no arbitrarios y aleatorios sino moderadamente consistentes a través de individuos, grupos, culturas y eras. No solo eso, sino que además la entendamos intuitivamente y la podamos crear con el objetivo de hacer unas u otras cosquillas en particular. Es un escándalo.

Incluso yo, que no tengo un puto duro, puedo ir a un edificio raro grande, y llevarme cientos de tipos distintos de comida a cambio de unos papeles que ni me van ni me vienen que hace medio siglo ni siquiera existían en este continente. No le cambiaría mi sitio a ningún emperador romano. Me da igual que tuvieran sirvientes, tierras y poder. Prueba de ser un rey de hace quinientos años y pedirle a alguien que te haga sushi. Que te apetece jugar al Final Fantasy. Que quieres escuchar la novena de Beethoven. Nada, nada. Quita. Pero aún así, con todo eso, nos da puto igual. Ser consciente de ello no lo hace mejor, si acaso al contrario.

¿Solución? No hay solución. Lo siento. No tengo "uplifting conclusion" para todo. El mundo es maravilloso, si eso te sirve de algo, aunque sea para saber que ese no es el problema. Ninguna combinación de palabras, terapia o sustancias psicoactivas te va a hacer experimentar el mundo como si fueses niño otra vez. Ni siquiera creo que querer eso sea bueno. Ni siquiera se si es esto lo que estoy echando de menos en realidad. Creo que no. Tiene que haber algún tipo de fascinación que no sea regresiva. Pero a saber dónde está. No en el fondo de una sesión de motivación. Ni de meditación. La contemplación puede estar bien de vez en cuando, pero Siddhartha nunca tuvo de pequeño una Gameboy Advance. Todo esto ni siquiera es porqué yo tenga depresiones y esas cosas. La gente está mas o menos bien y tampoco se amorran a la ventana ni caen desmayados ante la belleza de nada en particular. A la mayoría les da completamente igual las exposiciones de arte, la poesía o el atardecer (excepto si pueden ganar puntos en instagram con ello). Tampoco creo que sea la presencia de problemas en el mundo o de guerras televisadas es lo que oscurece la realidad. Quizás lo hace por alguien. Los problemas, desgracias y conflictos que emergen de interpretamos como las partes oscuras de la humanidad solo consiguen, a mis ojos, hacerla aún mas interesante. Tampoco los problemas cotidianos de cada uno. No estamos distraídos, sino activamente evitando. Por supervivencia, por necesidad. Porque cada segundo de interés en una flor nos quita de cosas mas importantes, como hacer la cena, o comprar una camiseta. El motivo por el que nuestra fascinación existe en primer lugar es como indicativo de aquello que tiene, como juego, la profundidad necesaria para potencialmente enseñarnos algo. Pero no es una medida objetiva de nada. Está balanceada acorde a lo que tienes alrededor y las necesidades de tu momento. Es importante que la persigas cuando interesa, pero es algo instrumental. Mas allá de a qué te conduzca a hacer lo que tienes que hacer, a tu cerebro le importa un pepino que tu estado por defecto sea estar maravillado o aburrido como una ostra. Igual que con la felicidad. Es intentar cambiar el punto de equilibrio de una balanza para que siempre esté mal en la dirección equivocada. Tratar de encontrar un estado consistente de felicidad o fascinación es esencialmente intentar que el sistema de recompensas de nuestro cerebro haga algo para lo que no está diseñado, y además, se nos da fatal.

Casi un exploit de obscuras leyes físicas sobre el electromagnetismo en baja entropía provoca que el movimiento de una carga eléctrica en el núcleo de un átomo genere un campo magnético, que a su vez genera uno eléctrico perpendicular, que a su vez genera otro y esa reacción en cadena continua en una particular dirección; dando pie a lo que percibimos como un rayo de luz dónde, pensándolo fríamente, solo debería haber oscuridad.

Why I Don't Write Anymore

I never wanted to write in the first place. I don't enjoy it, I get nothing from it. I know some people do, but the majority of people aren't interested in what I say. From time to time, I like to contemplate my work and kinda like the sensation that words pile up and there is now something where nothing used to be. That's true. But I don't like it. I started when I was about twenty because I wanted to start communicating ideas and well, writing seemed quite a straightforward way. Also, it's easy. Also, it's cheap. Also, I don't need technical ability or expensive equipment to.

There's plenty of reasons to write anyway. It lets you explore, organize, develop, structure ideas. Get them out from the cloudy interconnected but disseminated stream of consciousness and put it against, not real life, but at least the consistency trials of dialectics. My best lines and thoughts have always been in random, casual conversations, but due to their nature, their get lost to memory and time. I didn't like the idea of that, that the ever-evolving internal consciousness would eventually consume my thoughts and erase them from existence. Deleting all proof that they existed some day. That I existed some day. During the last four thousand years, writing has had the highest correlation with immortality. That reason still exists, but I don't fear that so much today. The reasons for it, I can only guess. From a liberation from self-importance, to a more emotionally close relation with death.

But I don't think so. Maybe it's more about giving me the hope that something has come out of a lifetime of preemptive reflection. That it doesn't amount to nothing. That even if my ideas don't inevitably led me to unbiased success in some random endeavor, they are worth something by themselves in making me a special man.

They aren't.

Writing, like every creative endeavor, is related to the ego in some way. But I'm not a crusade here against my sense of self. After all, when trying to fight off what we consider (or they consider) our demons, we have to be careful to not erase the best part of ourselves.

I have never lacked ideas. It has nothing to do with being cleaver or being creative. I just have a constant, intense intellectual life and they kind of emerge from there. If I'm in an era of writing, watching a YouTube video gives me dozens of things to write about. An speed-run of Pokemon: "Life as an RPG, Game Theory, Learning, AI, The Concept of Time". An scene about a movie about Rome: "How can we perceive the ancient world through the lenses of state-nations, when they were born in the 18th century? Can we really know anything beyond the boundaries of the cultural ideas we explore the world through? How are those ideas communicated. What role language plays in it. Narrative. Music. Power." It's too much. Because writing isn't an activity to me. I don't just write when I'm writing, writing is a state of mind of intense openness to intellectual ideas. Of inner conflict, of inherent hypervigilance. I'm in the shower, I get ideas. I'm eating, I get ideas. I'm working in a manually absorbent and intense labor, I get ideas. I'm trying to sleep, three hours already past my usual time, I get ideas. I have to get up, search for that line and implement it. Because otherwise, they get lost to time. And a new idea the next morning is never as good as the one that no longer exists. It's exhausting, and I get tired, and I force myself, and then I start to fear keyboards.

I've tried to note it, only in name or brief descriptions. That kind of helps. I make lists of things I should write or whatever about, and this way I can be a little free from them. But they pile, and pile. I made one last week. I was trying to focus myself. It had only three elements. Now, it's about two pages and a half long. Eventually, it traps me. I feel guilt, anxiety, and just erase it forever, or put them where I can't see them no more. Lost to time. I have post-its with cryptic names of articles that I have no idea what they were meant to be about, that date from more than eight years ago. I have more half-written shit than published articles, even when over the years I have published about two hundred of them. And yet, I have the sensation I haven't even begun explaining myself. Ten years later, I see another million words ahead.

Luckily, I don't feel the need to justify my actions and decisions writing, but I see how that could become a problem to some people, or to myself if I try myself too hard to power through.

It used to be manageable. Not only because I maybe had more determination, but because reality wasn't that expandable to me. The lists of topics are not separate elements, it goes more like: I want to write about this important thing, but in order to do that, I have to explain first those other three things. That process goes on and on. There's no end to it. There's no conclusions, no easy answers. Sometimes they are cute ideas that seem to wrap the thing, but not much else. Now everything I want to talk about needs not three previous articles but a lifetime of conversations and shared experiences before I feel my listener kind of understands where I'm coming from. And that's before talking about the actual thing I was going to write about. Behind my feet, knowledge and reality expands in a fractal manner towards chaotic uncertainty and the abyss. The only moments I can write is when I can freeze it during a second and take a misleading and partial picture of one of it's many tentacles. But I know it's a lie. It was outdated in my mind the second I started typing.

And that's the "extensive" problem. Then there's the opposite one. 

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand 

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour."

When you try to say something, and compressing it, trying to reduce it to it's essence, you find out there's a threshold in which it just disappears. And just before that, it seems to contain the whole world. A complex cosmos of ideas and free associations regarding not only the meaning of the words but it's pace, form, beauty, order. They take central stage and you can just witness it, truly incapable to touch it. Then you remember you can't write. At all. You can play with the keyboard all you want, you won't able to understand a single word and it's infinite internal world doesn't matter how much you stare at it. To capture an idea would require an insane exercise of beauty I'm not capable of. Every phrase is a failure to capture that ideal.

Its like, you see a stain of a wall. You get close to it, and its actually a bump on the paint. I can fix that. You take your tools, like a spatula and that paste that covers wall stuff. You scratch it a little and a bit of water comes from it. Interesting, maybe it's a leak or humidity of some sort. When trying to take it off so you can cover it, you discover that the underlying problem goes on an on, and entire chunks of painting start to come off. You get mad at at, and are determined to solve the root problem. In your frenzy, you dismantle almost a square root of painting. Exhausted, panting, you realize what you have done. It was just a fucking small stain, I could have live with that. Now its too late. In a moment of clarity, you decide you can't go on, and will have to conform with your wall being fucked in the long term, something you can solve when you repaint or rebuild the whole room. For now, you have to cover what you did at the best of your ability, and fast, before someone comes up. You do so, and at the last patch, before the final touch, you hit the wall accidentally, and notice that a brick is slightly loose. Just because you can, our of curiosity, you slowly take it off the wall entirely, and look at the other side. What you though was a wall, and where you though there was another room at the other side of it, there's an intergalactic portal to another dimension. An entropy mess of alternating realities, with words, math formulas and ridiculous stuff flying around. The foundation of reality reveling itself to be an incomprehensible mess. Solemnly, you put the brick again where it was, sort of masquerade your initial fuckup in what now looks like a convincing wall and walk away in silence. Then, eventually, your partner or landlord or parents notice something is changed in the wall, and you spend the rest of the day talking about humidity, stains, building maintenance, brands of putty and shades of white paint, pretending how important they are and eventually believing it yourself.

That's writing to me.

I can kind of write if I do it in one sitting. More, I start thinking about the universe again. This kind of one-off articles often in exotic languages. I think about it, but not too much, and then regret it the next day in silence. Because that's not writing, its spilling over the keyboard. Not because I overshare or anything, or because I'm sincere, but because of the absolute opposite. I can't even stop myself from obsessing about them and editing during the next week. This is a fucking edit, for example. Writing makes me selfconscious beyond belief. It's a downwards spiral. Once I start, it becomes integrated into my thinking, its almost a department of it, an extension (or sometimes a form, imagined) of my own inner dialogue. Hell, most of my writing starts because I start imagining me writing something as a proxy to develop a line of though and turn into actual writings, therefore becoming what should just be speculative work. It gives permanence, which is sometimes useful, but horrible when it becomes an internal demand for everything I think about. I can see myself preaching, spitting small drops of saliva into the crowd, convincing myself because I like my own voice. This edit should be a total rewriting. Its structure disintegrating while I pile up more and more words into it, trying to explain everything but blurring it into nothing. It's original form shouldn't even exist, it makes me too proud and too attached to the initial spirit and form than I can never possibly now think or write about the subject the way because it has already a definite form in my mind. An insufficient one. A decadent one. 

When I write about something, it should have intent behind it, power. If there isn't, why the hell am I writing about it in the first place? It's because I fear writing, that I have to come up with these cheap and coward tricks; like writing. There's more history behind a single one of my ideas than what I can remember. They deserve better than this. Not because they are mine, but because I fail to deliver its complexity and wonder. I like the levity, but I hate it as well. How can I summarize an entire epoch of my life in a couple of remarks of snappy language? What the fuck am I going to say about questions better minds than me have spend rivers of ink into? Writing like I do makes it sound casual, it subverts the expectation that this things that shape our life are very serious, suggests that the highs and lows of human existence are just a game. I imagine it kind of puts me above them, like a self-depreciating joke that makes the presents fake laugh, interchange looks and drink sour grapes while I stand there, proudly. I go to write this things, and I can't even remember where to start. I feel it, the blood and powerful imagery that inspired it, but I can't access that world. Only try to access in reverse, when there's already nothing. This place is a wasteland. Somewhere I come to reap the spoils of war. What a crude exercise, so detached from what happened. The only way out of the spiral is either surviving it, or cheat. This is cheating. How smart, the witticisms and jokes. I hate it. I hate it so much.

I can write, but I can't edit. 

When I finished my book, I felt nothing but relief that I didn't have to write it anymore. During a couple of weeks, I felt a bit less pressure. Like if the book could talk for me so I didn't have to "force" myself to being a representation of me. Almost nobody will ever read it, but that's not my fault. The words are there. I am there. It was never my fault if even that you refuse to see.

That's assuming the book does a good job at explaining anything, which I'm not sure of.

I tried a lot of things to make writing manageable. I tried enjoying it, not enjoying it, putting a sense of purpose behind, scheduling it. Essays, songs, poetry, narrative, scripts, reviews, interviews. In all kind of styles. Three languages. Some got early success in making me write and not hating every second of it, maybe because of novelty, but got tired of them pretty fast. The enjoying one, I wrote a short novel in english about some guys living through the sixties in an abandoned house. When I finished, I thought I could never write another word ever again. My girlfriend liked it. Maybe it wasn't bad (don't know, never read it). But I felt fucking bad. It was light, and good spirited. I felt cheap, and filthy. And bad. There was no blood on the pages. Anyone could have written that. I find myself chasing that high, of having said everything I wanted to and feeling, satisfied. But it doesn't come. Never has. Never will.

Why do I write then, in the first place? I though I had an answer, but I don't remember it anymore. There's no reason. Never had. Never needed it. I don't know. Maybe it gives me the illusion of finality. That things have an end. Ideas go to die in writing, if not, they can never end.

There used to be a joke here. About me not writing anymore and then going like "well before I shut up forever let me say this one last thing" and then never shutting up forever and continue writing without a discernible reason for doing so until the end of my days. It was terrible. And that's probably what I'm going to do, for bad or for worse, in one way or another, burning every reason and logical explanation I find for myself. There's no romantic determination behind it. No idealistic pursuit. Just a silent resignation to continue living the way I have always lived until I find another.

Ravnica: Uprising [Part 2]

So, anyway, I started blasting.

Found a website called playgroundai.com that let me create up to one thousand images per day, all for free. I went head on to create the first card on my list. Quickly, I realized something that I have been repeating to friends and family for months "It's easy to create great things, but impossible to create what you want." Which kind of sumps up my whole history with creative endeavor. Coherence and style, which I thought at first were going to be the main obstacles, were quite easy to figure out. But to create intent, that was hard. To solve this, I doodled things with another AI, stable diffusion, and use the product of that to serve as baseline for the another AI the create pretty, awe-stroking images. Awe is something I encountered a lot. Sometimes AI creates something that leaves you almost paralyzed. You look close and the image it's shit, it has inconsistencies, defects, visual garbage. But you look at the whole and it just works. It gets it, even when you didn't even knew before starting with that particular image what "it" was. Then, you work from that.

All and all, I spend about twenty minutes with each image. Creating variations, changing ideas. More and more, I started to get new ideas and modifying cards. I got better at creating them. I switched baseline models, using an improved version of stable diffusion in the same webpage. I created collections of keyboards that gave each guild a feel and motif. I created an architecture for each one of them, defined in a few words. I scouted dozens of artists I had never heard about to expand the range of styles and ideas to use. Better and better stuff was coming out, and a lingering feeling that I had to step up the overall design of the cards started to emerge. Specially when creating for the Dimir, that guild blue and black that portrayed the more obscure part of the oppressive state, in which secrets and contradiction were foundational ideas. Contradiction was at the hearth of it all. When I started, I made some cards about ministries and slogans directly taken from the 1984 book, almost as a joke. I was looking back at those more and more, and started thinking. Bad sign. Because creating images was kind of interesting but grueling repetitive work, my attention started to drift. I was already months deep into this hole, and I needed a distraction, so I went out the house. It turns out it was a national holiday, and the main street of my town was flooded with roses and books. I approached the one that sells second hand ones for one euro (the only one I go to year after tear, honestly) and found a damaged copy of, guess what, 1984. Neat, I though. I mean, I like doing versions, working or talking about things I only remember loosely, but if there was a moment to reread the best book I have never reread, it was that one. So I started right away.

Holy shit.

Every chapter I read gave me ideas for a dozen cards. But that was the least of my troubles. The book evidenced the lack of depth of my work, the lack of subtlety and bluntness. Never compare yourself to classics, they are classics for a reason, after all. I had to redo the cards. I had to. I had to expand the edition and be more ambitious. In my impulse to get the job done and actually do something, I had fallen into doing exactly what I didn't want to do, bunch of cards that did nothing but convince you they are magic cards. Every one of those was a missed opportunity to explore vital aspects of the conflict, of the contradiction, of the world. And I didn't stop reading there. I read about the Spanish civil war (which I had never done, despite being born, raised and living in Spain) and spent lots of hours in wikipedia and arguing with ChatGPT. So, when I had already finished the images for half of the cards, I opened the first guild I started with and started, once again.

There's a certain order in my creative chaos that I think many people can resonate with. I have no trouble with ideas, never feared a white page. First a have a foundational one that interests me, I feel I have something to say about or I am familiar with. When, I expand on that idea for it to fill the shape of the container or art form I'm trying to make. Then, I have a finished product that's explicative of my worldview. Then I decide it's shallow, pedantic and only scratches the surface of everything I realized or started to suspect while doing it. So I rewrite it for the ground up. A couple of things start to click and I have an explosion of ideas that need to be introduced into the thing all at once. Now, instead of filling the shape, they get constrained by it. So, against the best of my efforts I surrender my initial vision and expand the project in order to fit all the awesome shit. Eventually, if ever, I have everything again. Then I realize it's overworked, has lost it's identity and shape, it's huge but not powerful. It's a mess. I think about it during sleepless nights, procrastinate in order to avoid working on it at any cost. A couple of existential crisis later, I surrender again. This time in the other direction. The project will never be what it should be. I drift from expansionist exposition to evocative background. Well, evocative it's more a desire than a fact. But one has to have faith. Then, still not wanting to work in what in my eyes is a dignified failure, I scrape the rests and put them together with duct tape, praying to God that a sensible, smart or unwilling costumer will indirectly perceive the depth of the ideas through the paper (cartboard, in this case) and be as awe struck as I am to the complexity of creation of how we can only scratch it's surface though art.

So, that's what happened. I expanded the project and decided to finish only half of it (but finish that half). I sit now at five completed guilds of about fifty cards each, all with "original" images attached to them (we can talk about authorship of AI created art another day). I showed them to former magic players and, they confirmed that indeed, they are magic cards. Well, that's a first step. I guess. But do they accomplish the task of communicating though the limitations and mechanics of a casual game the conflicts and complexities of the world? Dude, I don't know, leave me alone. Ok? Give me a break.

I will name this The Minotaur Problem. Think about a minotaur card. It's there. It's a magic card. For some reason, you are convinced you need to make a creature that belongs to a certain guild. Maybe you want to cover more creature types, maybe you accidentally created a cool image. It doesn't matter. In your mind, that creature has a clear position within the guild and a position within the conflict. It makes sense that our minotaur is against the government and part of the uprising. Maybe because he is a beast, and feral. It makes thematic sense that can hate civilization. He is angry. That's self-evident to you. But why? What problem does he actually have? Why is his reaction this and not another? What characteristics does he have or what part of society conveys, being an angry minotaur? How do you expand on that idea without making it a character in itself, without personalizing it too much? Without those things, the card already makes sense, but explains nothing, explores nothing. There's no conflict. It's just a magic card.

On the other side, imagine you have an idea. It can be anything. A nuance about the conflict of good versus evil. A reinterpretation of moral values as necessary lies. About social behavior being driven by convenience instead of ideology. It doesn't matter.

Now make that a card about a Minotaur.

Well, that's every design problem ever.

How to portray contradiction? What are the internal psychological mechanisms that keep an status quo stable and how are they subverted? Are these subversions maybe part of a deeper game? How do factions keep balance but still present inner conflict? I started to make much more literal references to the book, and watching documentaries about revolutions and alternative history channels. How do you explain in a handful of words a minotaur to an artificial inteligence that for some reason knows what "Luciano Pavarotti singing to a capybara" means but doesn't know about minotaurs? I got lost, inside my mind, in what I call the abyss. Not a single card remained in it's original form since I started changing one of them.

Better that keep talking about abstract stuff, I decided to better show you a piece of the though process that goes behind creating a card. Which is one of my favorites of the set, I confess, but the process itself is not so different from any other one. Let's start.

Orzhov. White and black guild.

In the official lore and past editions, they are supposed to be about corruption, religion and wealth; which translates well into what we are trying to do. They make sense as a part of the coalition that conforms the Azorian state. They are contiguous to them in the color wheel, share the color white and would have reasons to want to stay in power. No doubt there in their position. I decided that they benefited from the uprising at first, thinking it wasn't a big deal and just using it as an opportunity to enrich themselves, but then got cold feet, realized it was snowballing and when they tried to back down the damage was already done. In a sense, their inner conflict is about how much greed they would have, and about how much they should be accountable for the consequences of their own actions, even if they didn't rebel themselves. That's just a bit of exposition.

The leader of the guild is a council of ghosts, everything likes to religiosity and spirituality. Their Ministry is the one of Virtue, or Loyalty; which they transform into a thing about money. Somehow communicating the process of commodification of virtue in modern societies. They are powerful but scared, rich but corrupt, with lots of resources but without exactly the means or will to actually use them if society doesn't function in a certain specific way. The problem is: religious institutions are not that important in modern societies. The mixture of them and wealth and corruption is great, but not enough. What mechanisms, emotions, figures, represent this kind of behavior or takes that role of indirect spiritual control in our world? What part of religious societies have been taken in modern urban conflict by what? Spiritual and moral decadence couldn't be the manufactured product of an evil organization, but the byproduct of the infinite amount of interactions and ambitions of every single citizen in a system that has drifted it's original curse.

I did some thinking. Religion, specially religious institutions are not only about faith. They are about idolatry. In the novel, as well as in totalitarian regimes, that is redirected to figures of the state, but it didn't really fit for me that a guild started to worship the leader of another guild. I maybe could make a card about the cult of personality, but not much more. The solution was other. I had to create an object of worship that encapsulated the same idea of idolatry and idols and belonged to the Orzhov themselves. I was going to create a modern idol. A celebrity, with legions of fanatic followers, that represented modernity and... vanity. That was the word I was looking for.

First, I though about creating an Avatar. A card just named Vanity that loosely represented the concept or emotion in an ethereal way. The same way I created avatars for the Golgari (Hunger) or the Gruul (Pride) but the problem was that I already had an avatar for the Orzhov, named Avarice, that I really liked. So I had to search for another solution. But I really wanted to use the word Vanity, because it was perfect for it. One way could be for it to be a "title" for the creature, spelled in it's name. For example something like "Cavalier, Vanity Champion" and for it to be a knight surrounded by mirrors of something like that. That would be a good solution, but I kept thinking. About celebrities, influencers, rock stars. Eventually, it came to me. What if Vanity was a stage name? What name could I give it to make it obvious that's a stage name and not just a flowery name I came up with? It has to feel like he or she gave it himself. It has to contain elements of Orzhov identity but it has to be a name you could plaster on a screen, or a ticket, or a stage. After some iterations I came up with Vanity Nethervoid. I gave it a mana cost and color identity of two white mana and one black, came up with an ability, and rewrote the flavor text about a hundred times until I was satisfied. It was something about how the council of ghosts were old fools and how she was the new thing and how thing would be from there on now. Should it be an angel? A demonic angel? A vampiric angel? All those have implications in lore and meaning. But maybe over defining it could be bad. It has to have an air of simplicity. Black space has as much meaning (sometimes more) than text. Whatever, let's decide it later.

Now, I only needed the image.

I'm not gonna lie, I don't remember exactly how I created this image and don't have the exact prompt. I'm just using it to walk you though the process. It went something like that:

Close-Up Portrait of Vanity Nethervoid. Portrait of a beautiful female idol, abstract painting. Ravnica City, Orzhov. Magic Urban Fantasy Artwork. Revivalist Gothic Architecture. _____ style.

dynamic lighting, splash art, trending on Artstation, soft natural volumetric lighting.

orwellian, wealth, corruption, spiritual decadence, oppression, loneliness, monumental architecture, black and gold palette. shadows, duality.

Let me explain.

The first part is the more intuitive one. A description of what you want. But the way you use language there matters, a lot. I can't explain it. Just trust me. Then, I repeat always the part about "Ravnica City" followed by whatever guild we are talking about. Magic Urban Fantasy Artwork is mandatory, and found it though trial and error. I think I used it in every single card. Then, the architecture I designated for that guild. When I start a guild, that is the first thing I do. Sometimes you use real stuff you find on wikipedia and look at hundreds of images of fucking buildings on google, sometimes you make up something and the AI does cool stuff. Either way, let's continue. The part about the style is for when (if) you want to use the style of a particular artist for the card. Not all artists are recognized by the AI so you have to experiment first. You can also combine. The possibilities are pretty much endless. The stuff about lighting and all that is something that essentially tells it "make it cool". Not much no analyze here. Then, I use the keywords of the edition and mix them with the keywords of the guild. They are not direct descriptions of anything in particular but are meant to portray the overall "vibe", in an effort to maintain a certain thematic consistency across the art of the edition and inside every guild.

Then, there's a bunch of negative prompting, things you don't want in the image. Sometimes you don't want specific things, sometimes when generating a particular thing you notice that for some reason the AI is trying to create, I don't know, teddy bears. So you drop the hammer and say, dude, don't create teddy bears. Also useful for colors. Another world to explore. Colors have meaning inside the machine, with free associations to concepts and ideas, they aren't only a functional thing.

After all that, I probably generated about thirty or more images with or without slight variations in the prompt, select a few ones and start to make variations of them, with more or less faithfulness to the variation I am using as a base for the next one.

About twenty to thirty minutes after, I am moderately happy with one, and I ship it. Here's the result. 

That's it. So much talk, so much thinking. So much conceptual nonsense. It's this. Only this.

I could have learned how to bake a cake. Go to the beach with some friends. Exercise. Look for a job. Be a captain. Finish the physics career I left ten years ago. Marry my girlfriend of that time. But instead, I chose to do this. I don't know why. I don't know when.

And that's with EVERY SINGLE ONE.

I'm tired and done and don't want to do it anymore. But here they are. Half of the guilds completed. about two hundred images and cards. I have no idea of that to do with it. I should share it in magic communities, show it to friends, send it to rito, post it in social media. I don't know. I don't want to know. I create things, I overcreate things, and they stay in a folder, created. What I would like to do is find a project, with people, where all this work of abstraction is shared to create something big. Cards, films, games, books. I don't care. Things that have depth, things that need of interaction and esoteric discussions about the nature of idolatry in modern societies. Maybe I don't communicate them properly, maybe I overthink them and this is just supposed to be a card game and not that much though is meant to be put into it. What can I say. You can keep the cardboard, I prefer the Magic.

Ravnica: Uprising

Five years ago I started making Magic the Gathering cards. It all started as a sort of agreement between a friend of mine that wanted to delve into game design and me being bored as hell and wanting to do stuff, whatever stuff. We both had a background playing magic together as kids so the choice seemed quite obvious. The project kinda went nowhere, but tinkering with the cards made me realize there was more to it that what it seemed; in the format of the cards and mechanics I found a language, not only to make a game, but to be used to communicate ideas. I finished it on my own, scraping the internet for images and completing the world I created to sort of fill the gaps of gameplay with lore. I guess that's the usual procedure, or at least the one one expects.

Fast forward to a six months ago.

I had finished writing my book, which in a sense is also a language (narrative language) to also communicate ideas and conflicts. But a book is very different, at least how I wrote it. If you want to communicate or explain something, you just do. You hit a white page and go to town, in whatever extension or form you want. Yes, you still create characters and maybe give them the expository charge, but its still a very limitation-free format. But of course, that has it's drawbacks. I remembered the quote from Mark Rosewater (I think that's the name) from a speech he gave about creating Magic cards. "Limitations breed creativity." That quote was very surprising to me, a kid that refused to learn, analyse or compose metric poetry in high-school on the basis of "conscientious objection". In my mind, art and creativity should be, by principle, as free from constraints and rules as possible. And that's still not far-fetched to me, but it comes with nuance. Now, I wanted to do the opposite. Instead of riding free on a line of text without barriers or frontiers, I wanted to squeeze meaning into little boxes, and embrace the constraints of a language as my tools to communicate it.

That's great and all, but what is "Magic" language? It's just a game you play and the lore comes in second place, we certainty didn't pay attention to it when we were kids and were trying to just min-max the game to beat each other. We didn't read Magic lore, read the flavor text or even pay much attention to the images.

Well, first of all that's a lie. There was a time, indeed where all that meant jack shit to us. But the sole reason we became mystified with the game was because the images looked pretty. Not only pretty, evocative. I remember reading over and over and watching over and over my own cards, when we didn't event knew you could play with those. There was a perceived hidden deepness in them, an evocative force. A magic card was a fascinating object on itself. And second of all, even when we forgot about all that and just wanted to play, the narrative force of the cards is not located only in their "designated" flavorful parts. Flavor in magic is ingrained on the mechanics, cost, colors, rarity, function, everything in the card. It's a unitary entity, in which you can't separate one from the other and whose function is not only to "beautify" the card but to make holistic sense, to explain an entity, in which in the best of cases their game mechanics are self-explanatory and so obviously linked to it's identity they don't require to read entire books about past events to not only "figure out" or "understand" but to "feel".

Yes, I wanted to used magic cards as a narrative device. Which is not very far from creating cards just because and then enriching them with a backstory and lore in it's result if both are done very well, but requires a totally different approach and mentality. It's very easy for me (and I assume for anybody) to create magics cards whose sole purpose is to convince you that the card you created is, indeed, a Magic card. It's also relatively easy to make them good, pretty, or interesting; like the members of communities of magic cards creators often do, as the cards created this way serve only themselves. I could create hundreds of Spiders and Ogres and brave warriors if I wanted to, pack them together and go "yep, that's a magic card edition that could perfectly be a magic card edition". But as you can expect, that's not my jam. Amidst the storm of AI generative tools I was trapped in early winter, I almost jokingly started to prompt ChatGPT with ideas for a set, and it came up with kernel ideas for cards. Then, I opened Midjourney and told it to make some art that crossed my mind. I am ashamed to admit than I needed a couple of weeks to think the obvious "hey, I could use this to actually create original magic art".

So, I had the means. And the time. I just needed a reason. Something I wanted to communicate or explore it's complexity with. I though about making cards about the world of Berserk, but that seemed like another case of just doing it because I can. Then, binging videos on youtube I found that channel named Rysthic Studies, an incredible channel that focused on art and flavor and not much gameplay. I devoured it in a week, and finally came to the video about a new plane (planes are like worlds, or universes in Magic) I didn't knew about. Well, I didn't knew about most of them, because I've been out of the Magic world for almost a decade now. What was different about it was that it was based on American mythology. Not about native american mythology in form of spirits and the usual stuff. Modern, urban mythology. Modern societies and cultures have myths and legends, not necessarily meaning lies, but foundational ideas so entangled with it's media and cultural output one doesn't usually reefers to it as mythology. But it's there. The plane was based on a fictional city, with lots of stuff related to social issues like class, social mobility, legacy. The American Dream could be felt though a veil of fiction. It basically deconstructed a modern culture into it's bare bones and reinterpred it using a canvas of fantasy. That was my shit. I love classic fantasy. Conquests, kingdoms and beasts. But I don't have any motivation to create it. The conflicts that emanate and are fictionalized from what I name "pastoral societies" are done and ever-done. I wanted to translate to a world of fiction conflicts coming from the modern age, not related necessarily to technology, but born from the core of urban society.

So I typed in google "urban myths". That didn't help. I wasn't behind what I though were gimmicks, but after endemic conflicts that could be "mythologized". Then it struck me. My favorite work of modern fiction. I could adapt that (more than adapt, use the core conflict within it, at least at first). That would be perfect to create a light-hearten card game for children to play around. 

Ah yes, perfect.

So now, the easy part. How do I create a world in which to communicate the oppressive nature of power and the risks of idealism turning totalitarianism? The conflict resultant from it was obvious, an uprising threatening to appear. But what could be the scenario? Do I really have the force to introduce so many ideas and nuanced stuff while at the same time creating a new world for it? No, but my memory was there to rescue me. There was already an urban world in Magic. Used for alien invasions and superpowered beings. What a waste. I could just use that, create the minimum necessary to link it's past history to the state I wanted for it (that was quite fact) and use it's own characters, rules and mechanics.

Ravnica is a world that mirrors a multicultural European mega-city. While in the world of Magic for example minotaurs are beasts that spell wildlife and evil, here are part of a society, maintaining part of their identity but also transformed into a part of urban life. To create a minotaur in Ravnica you can either take the original and imagine how would it fare off in the modern city or you can do it in reverse, imagine a modern city and guess what would be the representations of different organizations, people or civil functions in fantasy. And maybe some of them can be a minotaur.

In order to understand what I mean when I reefer when I talk about the "language" of Magic or that world, I have to explain a couple of things. We come with preloaded expectations about the world when we come into a game. Some of them are from general culture, like the fact that maybe a minotaur should be wild and aggressive. Some of those come from the medium we are currently using. In magic, you would expect the minotaur to be red, and probably to be a creature with around two to three power and two to three resistance. These things mean nothing to the non player, but the game itself create expectations and a language you have to commit with in order to tell what you need to tell. Magic is full of micro expectations, and to navigate them is more art than science, but the main one, the one that's genius is the color wheel.

I could talk for hours about it, but here is what you need to know. There are five colors in magic, each card is from a combination of them and you can only play it if you pay mana of that color. The colors are not only a differentiating function, but each has an identity on itself. A cosmology of ideas is related with. In Ravnica, the city, there are ten guilds that control the city. Each one is of two colors (all the different possible combinations of two colors if we have five). The identity of each guild in this fictional world is not independent from the colors it belongs to, but a reinterpretation of that precise combinations and attributes of those colors in the setting. Colors are also related between them, some having identity relations to each other, common or antagonistic, and all that needs to be represented somehow in the cards, guilds, mechanics themselves. It's a giant, colossal, work of abstraction. Luckly, I have half the work done already, that world is already created. Each of those guilds have a position in the city, an identity, relations, protagonists, etc. What I need to do now is develop a function for each one in this totalitarian world that makes sense thematically, along with inner conflicts regarding the potential uprising and represent the whole spectrum of political and ideological opinions and factions that could exist in a real world in a language of soldiers, dragons and cards that say things like "destroy a land". All without creating a good and bad side, respecting the color wheel and making a functional game. Kill me.

One thing I have to point out is that, all these things are not stated anywhere. Are kind of assumed, or inadvertently learned, almost though osmosis, while playing the game. In order to create magic cards, you have to reverse engineer them. There's not a guide. That imagine is not official in any way shaper or form and has no actual direct implications in gameplay. But it has to contain it. Somehow.

The prime candidates to be the conduits of such totalitarian state were the Azorious. Blue and white, being white probably the color more like to "goodness" in the Magic universe. It would had been maybe obvious to create an evil totalitarian state of color black and have heroes of the good colors righteously fight against it. But we don't do easy here. The whole point was to don't do this kind of thing. It was far, far more interesting have that state be the result of an ideology or dream from the good guys turn inherently oppressive when applied to the real world that having a run-of-the-mill evil empire that needed purging. From that point, it was easier to fill the gaps and imagine what the consequences of that rule would be, and reactions and alliances from each of the other guilds, based on imagination, common sense but, mainly from their relative position in the color wheel (his roundness be praised). I decided that such state would be mainly them and four other guilds, with two other in open uprising and three undecided ones. That resulted to be a good balance. I created a timeline of events, a draft of the current state, motivations and representatives of each of the guilds. I created some mechanics, re-utilized old ones, and spend like a month making prototypes of the three hundred cards I needed to make. I just needed to create the images and I would be done, and maybe remake some of the cards so they would be more interesting. Maybe add some more deepness and detail in order to give it more nuance and I would be successful in mythologizing modern rebellion in the form of little pieces of cardboard. The concept and card creation took me about a month total, I give myself another one to finish this and I will move on to make something with my life.

Oh boy was I wrong. Oh boy was I not done.

It's infuriating how I get baited by myself into "little projects" again and again, when I know for certain they always become impossible monsters.

he venido a hablar de mi libro

Hace ya casi cosa de un año autopubliqué casi quinientas páginas de bajanades en forma de un libro y creo que es tiempo suficiente para explicar un par de cosas sobre él. Sobre de qué cojones va, por ejemplo. Así que me he puesto delante de una cámara y eso he hecho, sin mas.

Nos vemos pronto.

No soc ningú

No sóc ningú, i ja m'està bé.

En ocasions he pensat que m'havia d'esforçar molt per arribar a ser algú, i a força de treballar i de ser megaproductiva arribaria un moment que ho aconseguiria, i seria rica així que podria jeure i relaxar-me a l'ombra d'un arbre i menjar sushi.

Doncs aquest "algú" resulta que ja existeix, i resulta que soc jo. L'únic que vull fer és gaudir el que se m'ha donat. Treballar lo just i necessari, i al meu temps lliure dedicar-me a no fer res. Descansar, pensar una mica però tampoc gaire. Llegir una mica potser, o potser no. Amarar-me de temps. Perdre el temps, malgastar-lo, desprofitar-lo al màxim. No cardar res. Posats a no fer res tampoc no vull ni gaudir. Si m'ho passo bé, doncs millor, i si no, doncs què hi farem. Veig molta pressió per fer coses súper guais i aesthetics i viure el moment. Doncs que el moment em visqui a mi.

Me la suda el temps. El temps em pot menjar el sashimi.

El juliol passat vaig venir a Holanda i em vaig posar a treballar de la primera mandanga que vaig trobar a un centre de Logística. Fins el dia d'avui, la meva feina consisteix a classificar paquets, escanejar paquets, posar paquets sobre una cinta o arrossegar carros. I és la millor feina que he tingut mai. 

Quan arribo abraço la Carla, la meva amiga, amb tot l'amor que el meu cos em permet donar. Les dues som espanyoles, però ens hem conegut aquí. Sovint sortim de festa, gràcies a la Carla he descobert que m'agrada molt ballar. Si hagués de descriure la Carla amb una sola paraula, seria: celebració. Aquesta noia és la màxima definició de hippie sense saber-ho i sense aparentar-ho, en el millor sentit de tots, com una papallona que no sap que és una papallona. 

A la feina he conegut molta gent. Gent jove i gent vella, que em saluden i es passegen com jo pel magatzem. Gent que estudia, gent que té fills, gent que ha d'anar a la presó. Alguns venen, treballen durant una setmana i se'n van. Alguns s'hi queden un parell de mesos fins que troben una feina més ben pagada. Alguns els conec des del primer dia i m'esperen per tornar cap a casa en bici. Holandesos, polonesos, romanesos. Camioners, tècnics, Team Leaders que porten una samarreta vermella per diferenciar-se de la resta. I enmig d'aquest purgatori de nacionalitats, ens mirem als ulls i ens diem bon dia. 

És un espai enorme, he de caminar bastant així que estic en forma, no hi ha pressa i ningú m'estressa (normalment). Sé on va cada cosa i com funciona tot, i la feina és tan senzilla que la puc fer amb els ulls tancats. Som un grup gran, així que tot s'acaba enllestint, i jo sé que al cap de quatre horetes soc fora i tinc tot el dia per mi. Estic vivint el pitjor escenari del meu futur laboral i m'ha sorprès descobrir que s'hi està de tranquis. No sé si a catalunyeta això seria possible, però el que importa és que he carregat la meva pròpia ambició com una pedra enorme durant molt de temps i ara, per fi, l'he deixada anar. I darrere la pedra, trobo l'alegria. 

https://youtu.be/eXvBjCO19QY

P.D.: Esclar que seguiré estudiant però això és un altre tema vale? Així que keep scrolling, aquí no hi ha res a veure.

Spoiler: Fa un any i pico que vaig escriure això, ho vaig posar a borradors i no ho vaig arribar a penjar. Han canviat moltes coses. No vaig seguir estudiant, vaig fer una parada tècnica a Espanya i ara visc a Bangkok, treballo de professora i torno a tenir molta ambició i a voler fer coses molt guais, amb l'ansietat que tot això comporta. Trobo a faltar la Jordina que no volia ser ningú: era alliberador i fàcil. Recordo la meva habitació gairebé buida excepte per un matalàs a terra, i la sensació de fred quan sortia al carrer, que convidava a descansar i a rendir-se dolçament. Només necessitava anar fins on em portés la meva bicicleta. Potser llavors era hivern, i ara potser tinc la sang alterada per la calor d'aquest país tropical ple de gratacels. I totes aquestes coses han passat en un any. Em pregunto què vindrà després.