if you couldn’t tell, there will be spoilers.

I, like many people, tuned in weekly to watch the saga continue on the mysterious island in Lost.  My husband hadn’t seen the show up until just last year, when we watched seasons 1 through 5, episode after episode, in order to get caught up for when season 6 came on.  Now that the show has ended and the movie-length finale over, I thought I would express some of my final thoughts, as well as ask the questions that were never answered.

How it ended: The idea of purgatory.

The ending pretty much confirmed for me what I had thought to be the case since season 1: they were dead and this was purgatory.  But it isn’t as simple as that as the finale explains this alternate world, the world where Desmond was relinking everyone together, was where they were all waiting to be reunited so they could move on together.  Which, to me, indicated the alternate world was the purgatory in which everyone waited. But there is plenty of evidence to support the island was a part of purgatory as well:

-No one could leave the island. When Desmond tried in Season 2 to leave with the sailboat he ended up coming back again, describing the island as being “stuck in a snowglobe.”

-No one from the outside could find the island.

-The Others were choosing people to kidnap and, when confronted on the very few occasions, had explained that the people they were taking were pure, and the rest of the plane crashed lot were not. (which could indicate the “pure” were moving on to heaven and out of purgatory).

-Locke could walk again and Rose was no longer “dying” of cancer.

-Women could not conceive on the island, which makes sense given you cannot create life in purgatory.  Women who were pregnant when they arrived could still give birth, however. If the island was purgatory and they were dead, it would follow that their unborn children were dead as well, and the souls trapped on the island along with them (these children were also targets of abduction by the Others.  Aaron, Claire’s baby and Sun). This remains true with both the mother of Jacob and the Man in Black as well as Russou, who gave birth to Alex.

-Characters who had led bad lives, and made bad decisions were not present at the end when Christian Shepard led everyone out of the church and into the light.  This included Michael, Ecko, Anna Lucia, and Ben Linus.  Leading one to assume those that were present had proven themselves enough to move on to heaven.

-The Dharma Initiative is a metaphor.  In eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, Dharma is the trials and steps one must take in order to reach nirvana, or enlightenment.   In the show the entire Initiative, the tests that were undertaken by the original Initiative as well as the challenges the Dharma stations posed to those stranded on the island, serve as a metaphorical test, combining the philosophies of the eastern religions along with those of the Christian faith and the idea of purgatory, that the characters must undergo in order to move on.

-The Egyptian statue holding the ankh is a common symbol in Egyptian mythology. The ankh is the symbol for eternal life, and is commonly seen in the hands of deities associated with the afterlife.

But when did they die?

The major question that comes to mind when dealing with the theme of purgatory is “when did they die?”   The above points I made would indicate that the plane crash in the very first episode was the point in which they all died and entered purgatory (the island).  However, if this was the case then how is Ben Linus able to travel to and from the island?  How was the island able to be moved using the turning wheel and the light? When new people arrived to the island was it to be assumed they were already dead?

The second spot in which they could’ve died could have been when Juliette set the bomb off in the soon-to-be-built Dharma station.  She told Sawyer just before she died that “it worked.”  It was from this point in the story that the alternate world story started.  You could assume that, at the explosion, everyone on the island died and both the island and the alternate world were two different levels of purgatory.

The third theory I have on when they died is that ONLY the alternate world is purgatory, and they all died individually: either whilst on the island, or off the island, or simply due to natural causes long after the island.  What indicates this for me is the last ten minutes of the finale.  Hurley is about to enter the church and exchanges a few words with Ben Linus. Ben states he will not be joining them inside the church, that he wasn’t ready yet (perhaps he is due to spend a longer time in purgatory due to his life).  Hurley tells him he “was a great number 2″ and Ben replies that Hurley was “a great number 1″ (Star Trek reference, by the way.) This would indicate that they both  lived out their duties on the island together, Hurley protecting it and Ben acting as his second in command, further supporting that ONLY the alternate world is representative of purgatory.

The last ten minutes.

I once asked a pastor if people remain married when they die and go to heaven.  The response I got was that the souls of people in heaven do not remember such connections to others, and in a way “forget.”    This was the case of characters in Lost, as they needed Desmond to reconnect them in the alternate world.   They all met up in the church and Christian Shepard led them into the light and, presumably, into heaven.  I didn’t quite understand why Claire’s baby Aaron was present as a baby (supporting they died in the initial plane crash) and why Penny was there as well (supporting that the island was, in no way, purgatory).

All in all, I was satisfied with the ending, I thought it confirmed alot of what I had expected throughout the series.  But they left alot of things unanswered.

W…..T…..F….???

Here are some burning questions I wanted resolved but were left unanswered:

-What was the deal with Walt?  Walt was painted in the first couple seasons as being “special.”  This was something that was shown both in his life before the island when he lived with his step father after the death of his mother, and in his time on the island when he was wanted by the Others for how “special” he is.   In what way was he special?  How was he able to appear to people in spectral form, both to Locke and to Shannon (which led to her death)?  And why was he completely written off the show after he was off the island (save for a few, rare, meaningless appearances)?

-What was the significance of the numbers? 4 8 15 16 23 42.   The only thing I can think of is that they corresponded to the plane seats of the characters who would become candidates to replace Jacob.  The only evidence I have of this is that we know Jack sat in 42F, as he revealed this when drinking with Anna Lucia in the Sydney airport bar, and that there are 6 numbers… the same numbers of candidates.   But why enter them into the computer?  Perhaps its a metaphor for faith?  Press them because you are told you must, with no other proof?

-What was the deal with the polar bears?  Seriously.

-How did a simple electromagnetic barrier prevent the Smoke Monster, assumed to be the devil, from entering various areas on the island?

-What was Richard’s role?

-How could Desmond move between points in time (as he was coached on by Faraday), predict deaths, and link everyone together in the alternate world?

-How could Charles Widmore find the island?

-Who were those people sent on the second plane crash to protect Jacob?

The sad thing is, we may never know.

Alternative title: Why am I the only person who realizes this?

May contain spoilers.

I wasn’t aware until we were walking out of the theater that Kick-Ass was the latest in a long and iffy line of comic book adapted movies.  Out of the four of us who went to see it, I was the only one bitching in the end.  And now, as the reviews are in and more of my peers have seen the movie, it continues to be labeled as “awesome” and “must see.”  Sorry, but I feel as though I was unjustly charged actual money to see this garbage, and I will tell you why.

Part of my problem with the movie is, admittingly, not knowing the source material.  I had no clue this was based on a comic book series by the same name, and therefore cannot judge the movie based on how well I feel they captured the essence of the characters.  But I did go into the movie with expectations, and those expectations were handed to me by the trailer for the film.  The trailer is cut in such a way that someone who is not familiar with the comics may think that the movie is a light-hearted comedy about a boy trying to become a real life superhero… and those are the expectations I took into the cinema with me.  Instead, Kick-Ass is a very violent movie. It contains a mass murdering father- 12 year old daughter duo who are also dressed as superheroes, and a cliche, tiring plot about one simple boy getting wrapped up in something much bigger than himself.

Let’s start with the violence.  I am perfectly okay with violence in films if it is done well, I am a huge fan of Tarantino’s work.   Kick-Ass does not have original style when it comes to the violence or action sequences.  Instead, it feels like a Tarantino rip off.  The scenes of graphic violence strike you as something you’ve seen before, perhaps in Kill Bill.  It tried too hard to go for the shock value but failed miserably. Instead of watching something that actually horrified me in it’s gruesomeness, it felt like  cheesy, B horror film violence and gore, fake red corn syrup and all.

Nick Cage and some unknown 12 year old girl play the parts of Big Daddy and Hit Girl, a father daughter team who have been in the game long before Kick-Ass (in case you didn’t know, that’s the young teen Dave’s super hero alter-ego) enters the scene.  If there was anything endearing about this special father-daughter relationship, it was completely overshadowed by the psychopathic need of Nick Cage’s character to train his 12 year old daughter to be a killer and Cage’s terrible, terrible acting. Each time Cage’s character said “child,” as in reference to his daughter, I got a creepy pedophilic vibe from him.

Nick Cage playing his favorite character: Nick Cage.

Speaking of Hit Girl, here is where the majority of the film’s comedic fodder comes in: a 12 year old saying “cunt.”  Sure, we can also count the masturbation scene and the awkwardness of McLovin’s Red Mist character as some of the comedy, but the vast majority of the humor in the movie relies on this one little girl spewing a myriad of cliche one-liners and cuss words that would make a sailor blush.  Again, I have no problem with cussing or the like in movies, but it really got old when the film was using it as a crutch to get a couple of laughs. We get it, it’s fucking ironic a 12 year old pretty little girl would call someone a “cunt” before running across the room to kill him, but we didn’t need to see it done over and over again.  It wasn’t funny after the first dozen times.

She said “cunt.”  I’m literally rolling on the floor laughing, it’s so hilarious.

Then there is the plot.  Is there any plot in the history of movies that is more worn out than ordinary-guy-gets-involved-in-something-way-over-his-head-and-viewers-need-a-flow-chart-just-to-follow-it?  Here is my problem: Take a  movie like Pineapple Express or The Big Lebowski (stoner movies are really guilty of this).  Now, your target audience just wants to watch a movie about other people getting high. You have a likable main character one can relate to and put him in a situation we can all relate to as well. Hilarity ensues and things are going good.  Then take all of that and throw it out the window and replace it instead with a plot involving various levels of an organized crime ring/ govt agency /any type of group so long as it has too many characters to keep track of, and make the plot so ornate that not only is it not believable, but you’d have a hard time following it even sober.

That’s what Kick-Ass is like.

The movie starts with the light-hearted idea of a boy who could try to become a real, crime fighting superhero and ends with him having become resistant to pain due to a Wolverine-like experience, involved with an organized crime operation disguised as a lumber wholesaler, two psychopathic masked vigilantes who have apparently been in the game for a long time but no one has ever heard of them, a plot to trick Kick-Ass into the arms of said crime organization so they could torture and then kill him live on webcam for the whole world to see based on the misguided fact that they believe Kick-Ass killed their drug dealers, said plot involves the crime King Pin’s own son to dress as a similarly lame superhero to gain Kick-Ass’s trust, and a hilarious scene with Nick Cage’s Big Daddy character burning to death all the while shouting in that ridiculous fake voice he put on for the character.

Too.  Much. Lame. Plot. Sometimes, less  really IS more.

All in all, if you are one of the people who claim this movie has become one of your top favorite films of all time, you need to watch more films.  Kick-Ass sucked ass and if I had the choice to do it again, I wouldn’t have even wasted the few seconds it would take to download a pirated version let alone pay money to see it.

I went to log into WoW for the last time today, having made the decision to go ahead and cancel my account, only to find that the account was already closed.  I hadn’t logged in in about a week, but I must’ve canceled the subscription right after renewing for three months, preventing it from automatically billing me. It’s funny, a part of me must’ve known then that any longer wasn’t needed.

This was the last of gaming in my life and I feel ready to move on from it.   MMO gaming has been the biggest hurdle for me over the last 10 years as I’ve slipped in and out of addiction with various titles.  Whilst a part of me will always want to renew that old Everquest account, or read about WoW’s next expansion, I know it’s for the better if I don’t.  I feel free from it, in a way I never have before. I’m not giving these things up because I feel some responsibility to do so now that Little Doodle is about to rock my world, merely I am letting these things go as I feel ready to do so, and ready to move on. I don’t think I’ll ever return to WoW, a part of me feels I “beat the game,” having been there, done that, and got the achievement to boot.

But I am very grateful for the time I spent in WoW, because without it I would’ve never met my husband.  Two people, so perfect for each other, on opposite sides of the globe should so happen to meet in an online game and fall in love.  I am very grateful to have met him, and now we are married and expecting a little one and our love continues to grow.  I also met some really awesome people through our guild as well.

It’s a shame it was already closed though, I guess the gold shall be buried with the characters and not given away lol.

Share on Facebook ]]> http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/index.php/archives/now-departing-azeroth/feed 0 http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/index.php/archives/the-known-universe http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/index.php/archives/the-known-universe#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 20:01:26 +0000 Nicky http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/?p=286 Really cool video. Puts things into perspective of just how small we are!

Don’t get me wrong, I like WoW as a game; my current burnout is sure to last a few months and, barring I don’t find something that captures my imagination, I’m sure to renew my account down the line.  But as far as MMOs are concerned, it really is the only popular MMO. Looking back over the dozen or so titles I’ve played over the last ten years, I find myself adorning the rose colored spectacles of nostalgia for games-gone-by and “how it used to be.”  And these are my thoughts.

No other game can thrive in the shadow of WoW.

It’s true:  with WoW having the monopoly on MMO players’ hard earned subscription money, it’s near impossible for other games to sustain a large playerbase.  What’s more, with the pressure of Blizzard expansion releases and major game updates, many competing developers find themselves racing to push out a near finished or half finished products, just to contend with release dates.  When a player then leaves WoW to try out a newly released MMO, and finds that it’s buggy or doesn’t have much (if any) endgame content on release, they leave and go back to the familiar.  Which leads me to my next point:

The new-to-MMOs player that WoW attracted.

With twelve million subscribers, there are quite a few MMO newbies who have recently discovered the niche genre over the last five years thanks to WoW.  Many of these players did not start at launch either, and instead came into the game with Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King. They started their MMO careers in the middle of a well established and hugely popular title, one that had years of post release development to make it as rich as it is today.  Polished leveling, massive amounts of endgame content, well balanced classes, casual player content, achievements…. these are all things that come with time with an MMO.  Those of us who played WoW from day one know that this hasn’t always been the case.  WoW has undergone years of post release development to get to where it is today.

Now, when you have a player who has only ever known a polished, impeccable WoW for an MMO go and try another game JUST released in the genre, you’ve got trouble.  They expected a myriad of endgame content, polished gameplay, and a flawless experience.  What they got was horrid latency, bugs, crashes, falling through the world, and areas of the game lacking all content.  They pack up their toys and go home, because a game like this obviously sucks, right?  No matter that it’s just been released.  They tell their friends and guildmates upon their triumphant return about what a terrible experience they had with the new game and loe, the new game gets a bad rap on the web just weeks into it’s launch.

WoW has set the bar for easy and casual content.

Does anyone actually remember a time when MMOs had some challenge to them?  I do.  WoW has a second monopoly: the monopoly of the casual player.  Let’s face it: WoW is easy.  It’s so easy you can practically beat the entire game solo simply by rolling your face across the keyboard a couple of times.  Leveling takes no skill, and you can do virtually levels 1 through 80 entirely solo.  Once you reach 80, a day or two of easy heroic dungeon grinding and you’ve got a full set of one of the latest tiers of gear.  Raiding was taken down from 40 to 25 man dungeons, and all current endgame raid content can be PUGed (Ie. pick up groups aka not guild organized).   Where did the challenge go?

This has been a debate amongst the MMO community for some time: What constitutes “hard?”  For MMOs, it’s mostly time investment and group organization.  In Everquest,  raids took up to 72 people, and were done on world bosses (ie not instanced, most world bosses would not reappear again after being killed for days, some a week or more).  In WoW, everyone can have their piece of the pie in a minimal amount of time with virtually no challenge.

Let’s take another example: Dieing.  In WoW, dieing is a momentary inconvenience. You die, you spawn at the nearest graveyard, you run as a ghost back to your grave, and you resurrect.  A small amount of damage is done to your armor.  In Everquest, death carried actual penalty. You died, you spawned buck naked at your bind point (which, if you forgot to bind close to where you would be hunting… could be a few HOURS away), you had to make it back to your corpse to retrieve all of your armor and stuff, whilst things could attack you in your defenseless naked state, and if you made it back to your body alive without a cleric friend to rez you, you also just lost a couple hours worth of experience.  If you had just dinged to the next level before you died, you probably de-leveled as well.  If you died on the way back to your body, you lost more experience. In the early days of Star Wars Galaxy, if you spent months of your life building your character into a jedi all it took was one death.  Die one time as a jedi and your character was a ghost permenantly.  You were done, finished.  No more jedi for j00! (of course, subsequent SOE patches have changed this to make it easier/less harsh).

Some people argue that this is making a game unnecessarily hard, but I disagree.  People work harder at their roles in a group when dieing poses a real threat.  Death loses it’s meaning in games like WoW because their is no penalty.  So instead of grouping with another player to beat the pack of three mobs you need to kill, why not just rush in, kill one, die, respawn, kill another, die, respawn, and then kill the last one.  See what I am saying?

There is also no real reward for beating the top of the top dungeons, either.  So you’re in a full set of teir-du-jour armor?  So is everyone else.  Because the content is easy enough anyone can experience it.  In Everquest, if a player walked into a city with the top gear you knew about it, you could see a crowd of people gathered around him or her, drooling over how elite this person was.  Because it meant that person went to near inhuman lengths to get that armor, and people knew it.

I recently debated with a WoW player about hard content.  His argument was why would a company create a game where it’s top echelon of content was only experienced by 1-2% of the playerbase, as that’s not what someone pays for in buying an MMO.  I say that’s incorrect, as most people who buy MMOs are acknowledging in their purchase of the game that X amount of time is going to  need to be invested into the title to achieve Y goal.  It’s not the makers of the game who are at fault if that person’s expectations are unrealistic.  You need to have top content for top players or else there is nothing to aim/work for.  MMOs are a time sink.  Making them into something that can be done on a casual player’s two hours a week is making them easier.

Thus, all games post WoW launch have been suspiciously easier, perhaps to compete for the casual player subscription base.

Chuck Norris, also known as “there goes the neighborhood.”

Any player across the realms of WoW can tell you that trade channel chat is perhaps the most intellectually devoid verbal diarrhea one has ever had the pleasure of reading.  Simply step into any major city at any time of day and your once peaceful chat box is instantly filled with a cacophony of retarded children on the topic of the moment, anything from religion, to politics, to your mother, to Chuck Norris, to the latest internet memes and, as always, an update on who’s a ninja.  WoW brought MMOs mainstream and, as such, you have more people than ever in your personal playing space… and there goes the neighborhood.

MMOs used to be a niche appeal sort of thing.  With the advent of MUDs, to Ultima Online, on through to the first 3D MMO experiences like Everquest and Asheron’s Call, most of the playerbase were twenty and thirty somethings, and the type of people who grew up on pen and paper RPGs and Magic the Gathering.  This group of people held these game experiences with high regard, an online social experience coupled with a living, breathing world much like those in fantasy novels or in the tabletop RPGs. General chat channels were usually filled with people exchanging information about aspects of the game, helping each other out, etc.  Occasionally you’d experience other people roleplaying and, whilst I was never a roleplayer myself, I could appreciate what RPers added to the overall environment.  People were patient with each other, wanted real adventure, and took their time with things.

In WoW, when not expressing their horrid political views (which always end in a punctuated “lulz”) we have players who are impatiently tapping their foot over a new-to-dungeons players, calling them a noob and telling them (helpfully) to “learn to play, lulz.”  Ask a question in the channel about a quest or item, and you can be sure to be greeted with a “Check wowhead.com, fag.”  More under 18s than ever are playing MMOs, particularly WoW, and the mature, respectful, roleplayers seem to have all but disappeared.  Most stayed behind, loyally, on MMOs living past their prime like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.

The failure of other MMOs.

Over the last couple of years a few games have been released worthy of mention: Vanguard and Age of Conan.  These should’ve been top contenders to share in the MMO glory at the top of the food chain alongside WoW or, at the very least, not crash and burn.  This wasn’t the case sadly.  When I canceled my WoW subscription I thought I’d go see what Vanguard had become.  I downloaded the game, renewed my old account, and logged in.  There were FIVE people on the ENTIRE continent.  No more than TWENTY on the entire server. What happened?

The Vanguard forums were dead, and according to those still around SOE was concentrating it’s business on developing an MMO for 2014, rumored to be Everquest 3.  The game was no longer receiving regular updates, and it appeared as though SOE had simply put this glorious-in-concept MMO out to pasture to live out the rest of it’s time and die peacefully.

I had high hopes for this title before and after it’s release.  It was an AMAZING concept, a rich world, a Brad McQuaid creation.  And it’s not to say that WoW was Vanguard’s failure, because it wasn’t.  After all, you can’t blame WoW that Sigil developed a game that would run on a computer that was invented two to three years in the future (and even my current beast of a laptop could only run it on low settings).  And you also cannot blame WoW that Vanguard still lacks endgame content three years from release.  But this is the state of MMOs that are not WoW. They lose subscriptions, they lose funding, and eventually they fade into being just another dead title in the genre.

Warhammer, a game that tried to be so much like WoW they even went to great lengths to completely copy the design style, is also dead.

Age of Conan is fairing a bit better.  Servers had been merged but it at least created a sense of a living world, as you can see other players quite frequently going about their day.  There is still an active community and an active development team.  My Laptop had no problems running it flawlessly on the highest settings,  and I was surprised to even hear about an expansion due out this year.  AoC may still have a hope for not completely failing but again,much like Vanguard, it’s lack of content at release and the bad press it got for it has really put a dent into what it COULD achieve. You can see it’s still in the recovery phase from a poor launch and, whilst you do see oter players in the world enjoying the game unlike Vanguard, it’s not the bustling metropolis that is WoW.

Oddly enough older games have an easier time holding on to  loyal subscribers than do newer, failed MMOs.  You still have loyal, active communities in Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, as well as a scattering in Star Wars Galaxy.   Vanguard is a ghost town, as is Warhammer, and Age of Conan looked to be going the same way at release but make actually make a comeback in the coming year.   I think it’s hoping to much to herald any game awaiting release as the “WoW killer.”  WoW isn’t going to die.  No game will ever be released that will simply overtake WoW and pry it’s 12 million subscribers from it’s cold, dead fingers.  It will be interesting to see if WoW can match the longevity of the previous most successful MMO, Everquest, still going in it’s 11th year.

I think all that will simply happen is a developer will create an MMO that serves to satisfy another niche MMO desire other than high fantasy, and this game will do well as it will provide different content.  Not because it’s better or more successful or destined to be a WoW killer, simply because it’s different.  Many MMO players are looking towards Star Wars: The Old Republic to achieve this niche position, due out in the next two years.  We will have to wait and see.

Until then, you’re either playing WoW or playing by yourself.

I has received cash for my birthday and insisted my mother take me up to Best Buy as quickly as possible in order to buy the same game I had seen my cousin play.  But when I got to the games selection for MMORPGs, I hesitated.  Next to Asheron’s Call was another game, one that I had never seen or heard of, titled Everquest.   I had unfolded the flap on the front of the box and gazed wonderously at the artwork of strange and fascinating fantasy characters battling it out.  The back of the box promised an expansive world, a large community of fellow players, and hours of enjoyment.   So I bought Everquest instead.

Ten years later I’ve played a total of eleven different MMORPGs, with the current one being the very game I also met my husband in: World of Warcraft.  I went from being the complete noob to veteran player over the years and I am still going, still leveling characters, still doing quests, gaining armor and raiding dungeons.  But why?

My love for MMORPGs exist for the constant world.  A living, breathing society of players, some nice and others rude, some well played and other noobish, some neurotic and some just your average people.   A true spread of all walks that make up our actual world.  The world in which we play does not simply shut down when you stop playing.  It continues on, grows, expands, and changes around you.  Players selling and buying goods form a real working economy based on supply and demand.

MMOs cannot be beaten, they cannot be fully conquered, and you never truly reach an end point.  Whilst with single player game experiences you play a game that may have 5 to 10 hours of gameplay or, if you’re lucky, on upwards to 40 hours or more.  But regardless of the amount of hours of gameplay promised on the box, it will end.  You will eventually leave the world and the characters behind, possibly to never return to them.  With MMORPGs, the “magic” of the game experience continues, the characters you get to know and love are other people from around the world sharing in the same interests you have, and the world will continue to be persistant, ever changing, always there.

For the last 3 to 4 years my gaming experience has run along side my guild: Fist of the Empire.  The very clan I met Mark in.  I’ve not only had the privledge of meeting a bunch of these characters in real life, but also forged friendships with them.  this is part of what makes the MMO gaming experience so rewarding.  A group of people, of friends, can come together in a game and work with each other to accomplish goals, to raid dungeons, or to build up the guild.  Many who don’t game this way may never fully understand the dynamics but, simply put, do you know how much it takes to get 40 people together and focused for a couple of hours, each doing their own individual role, to accomplish a task?  It’s no easy feat, not even in the real world.  But when it happens, it’s simply amazing.

I’ve bounced between titles over the years,  returning to Everquest a number of times but never for very long, and then onto the next title.  But one thing was always certain: I’ve always has a subscription set up to one game or another.  I’ve never lost that desire to be apart of that fantasy world, to log in and assume the role of the valiant knight or illustrious elf,  to meet new people and play with the ones I’ve grown to know over the past couple of years, and to make my own character the best it can be.  This is why I pay, this is why I log in, this is why sometimes, I may even go to bed at unreasonable hours.

This is why I love MMO gaming.

Call me an oddball, but one of my lifetime goals is to be able to go to Pripyat in the Ukraine and photograph it.  Prypiat was a city built to house the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant.  It was completely evacuated in 1986 following the Chernobyl disaster.  The city is situated in the Zone of Alienation in Northern Ukraine, a 30km exclusion zone around the reactor. Most of the area is concidered relatively safe, and many Ukraine companies offer guided tours.

What intrigues me about the area is its not just a singular abandoned building (and I love abandoned buildings) but an entire abandoned city, complete with an enitre amusement park, all of it just slowly rotting and decaying.   It’s hard for me to put into words my desire for abandoned structures, but I find them interesting.  In this decaying ruin of a city, people used to walk and go about their lives and then suddenly they left, and the buildings themselves, the ferris wheel, the childrens’ playground… all of it was left to just slowly rot back to the earth.

Here are some photos of Pripyat:

The Ganzfeld Experiment is a technique in parapsychology to test people for ESP abilities, with one notable side occurrence of causing one’s volunteers to, for lack of a better term, “trip balls.”  Being a curious party with a love for science and an unusual amount of time on my hands, I decided to recreate this supposed hallucinogenic, drug free, experience with only a ping pong ball, a red light, and some white noise.

In the original intent of the Ganzfeld Experiment, volunteer subjects would lay back in a dark room with two white, translucent coverings on their open eyes, facing a red light.  With headphones playing only white noise (flat frequency noise), they were to relax whilst another volunteer consentrated on a singular thought and attempted to send that thought to the sensory deprived volunteer.  The experiment is said to have a 32% hit rate.  However, volunteers who underwent the mild sensory deprivation did report on having pseudo-hallucinatory experiences and some even think it may induce global functional state changes (altered consciousness ie out of body experiences and astral projection).   It is only the latter I was interested in, the idea of inducing an LSD-equivalent experience without the chemicals or twelve hour bad trips (in all honesty, I’ve never tried LSD or any hallucinogenic).  Thus, the quest of epic proportions began.

It took four shops and two hours to get both a red light bulb with a bayonette end and cheap, ugly-as-sin bayonette fitted lamp. Why the country has two types of lamps escapes me, but trying to find an appropriate light bulb on top of it was like searching for the holy grail.   Then after having aquired a set of ping pong balls, I went home to prepare and to wait for Alicja to come over to be a guinea pig alongside me.  Lastly, I needed white noise.  Apple’s slogan is 100% true: there IS an app for that.  I downloaded an iphone app to my iphone called “White Noise” which not only had white noise, but also brown, pink, etc etc.  Perfect.   After having cut two ping pong balls in half, we were ready to begin.

Turning the lights off in the room and the red light on, both myself and Alicja laid back with the two ping pong ball halves over our eyes and headphones on playing the endless loop of white noise.  The idea here is you must keep your eyes open and be staring at the red light filtering in through the translucent ball.  Then, we waited.

After what seemed like fifteen to twenty minutes, the red light suddenly blew out thanks to the faulty, ugly, cheap, dildo shaped lamp I bought to put it in.  Upon checking the time we realized that not only had fifteen minutes passed, but fifty-five.   So with the only red light bulb for a bayonette lamp in the whole of England burnt out, we called the experiment and discussed our results.

To cut to the chase, no hallucinations happened for either of us, but a few things are worth noting.  Firstly, after some time of staring into the hazy and soft red light, blinking stopped becoming an automatic function for both of us.  We had to manually blink to wet our eyes.  I would hazard a guess it may have something to do with confusing the brain into thinking the eyes were closed, as the sensation of the ping pong ball and red light combo was one like looking into the sun with your eyes closed.  Secondly, while we didn’t exactly ride our unicorns off into the rainbow sunset, we both did experience more vivd than usual thoughts, and I would go as far to describe them as “dream-like” visions.   This is not unusual, however.  With the constant, unchanging sensory input from both the red light and the white noise, the brain eventually stops “noticing” these input stimuli and, when left with nothing else, will start to create it’s own.  These weren’t hallucinations in a tripping sense, but more like dreaming while conscious.  Lastly, we both found it to be very relaxing, and were both shocked at how distorted our perception was of just how much time had past.

All in all, is it worth doing?  I would still say yes, because it will run you less than $10 and it is still a very relaxing, very meditative experience.  However, I wouldn’t be too hopeful in reading what you find on the internet because the experience isn’t going to resemble a trip (not that I’d know) and websites mentioning the Ganzfeld Experiment tend to be a little too free with the word “hallucination.”  Lastly, I’d like to try the experiment again and test for certain factors such as, does it increase with time? What if you use something other than white noise?  and more importantly, where will I find another red light bulb?