Anachronistic Gaming Experiences

                Very recently, one of my cousins started playing SNES ROMS in an emulator. He was asking me what games to get, which is an incredibly easy request because I have good knowledge about the lineup of SNES and SFC games. I recommended Demon’s Crest right away and watching him play it looked like too much fun, so I had to get back into gaming.

                The last time I played a video game was in early 2005. It is important to understand what I mean by the word ‘play’. There are two species of play for interacting with a video game. The first type is casual play, which is done merely to pass the time or to satisfy one’s habit or addiction. The second type is serious play, in which the intention is to complete the game. I consider online or multiplayer gaming to be casual play, since the purpose is to merely defeat another person, or many people. It is social gaming and is generally useful for passing time or to feed an addiction. Serious gaming, on the other hand, leads to one part of the game – the end screen or end sequence; that is the purpose of serious gaming. Serious gaming cannot be addictive because the game is no longer played once the ending is achieved. If a completed game is played again, then the purpose would be to play it better than a previous completion. If a completed game is played for nostalgic reasons, then that is casual gaming. A lot of my gaming in the past was of the casual kind; I often played them out of habit.

                Yesterday, I completed Gargoyle’s Quest 2 (it’s the second game in a series which consists of Gargoyle’s Quest [Gameboy], Gargoyle’s Quest 2 [NES] and Demon’s Crest [SNES], which are themselves part of the Ghosts ‘n Goblins series by Capcom) and it was not played out of habit, but for a desire to complete the game. After a 9 year break from casual and serious gaming, one would figure I’d be helpless. But that is not what happened. Without the manual, without any online guides, I completed Gargoyle’s Quest 2 in about 10 hours. If I had played this game when it first came out, in 1992, I would have spent weeks or even months with it. The reason why I completed it so quickly was due to playing it on an emulator, which offers the advantage of saving anywhere, at any time. I don’t have the luxury of summer vacations like I did when I was a teenager. I’m an adult with a full time job and summer vacations are the stuff of dreams. People without jobs or any schoolwork have the necessary time to memorize vast amounts of information about a game. They also have the time it takes to get that one “lucky” break at negotiating a stage or level, a break that gets them to the boss with enough health to have enough time to try to understand the pattern of the boss. Even when I was a younger person with summer vacations, I still found it quite difficult to get to bosses with enough health or lives to make any progress. Emulation changes everything. When I got to a boss fight, I saved right away. This removed the burden of having to play through the stage over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nausea, ad prickly pain, ad tendon torture, ad mental meltdown. What a relief that saving in the boss room offers! Never before have I had the ability to truly study and scrutinize the patterns of a boss. I beat the first boss on my first attempt, which is to be expected. With each subsequent boss, I naturally failed on the first attempt. Some of the boss fights took more than 30 minutes of trying, dying, trying, dying, trying, dying – great fun! The last boss in the game, oddly, was one of the easiest. The fight was made easier due to acquiring infinite hovering ability and that I found the perfect height for hovering. I just hovered, moved left and right, and fired continuously.

                I did not play Gargoyle’s Quest 2 in 1992, nor would I have played it. By 1992, I was strictly a SNES gamer. GQ2 is a NES game. I stopped following NES games once I got the SNES, so I missed out on many great games. I want to mention that this game was pretty thoroughly not anywhere in my mind. I collect video game music and have considerable knowledge about the music from games, even those I have not played. When I looked for the NSFe file of GQ2, I could not find it in my collection. I also couldn’t even find the NSF file! How did I miss this one? Somehow, I had never even listened to the music from GQ2. I loved the music from GQ2 while playing it and stopped very often just to admire it. Since I don’t have internet service at home*, I don’t yet have the NSF file. Once I get it, it will be listened to – frequently. A CD featuring arranged music from Gargoyle’s Quest (the Gameboy title) has been officially published and I have listened to it many times. I have also listened to the music from Demon’s Crest. Somehow, I managed to neglect the music from Gargoyle’s Quest 2, which was a crime.

                I wondered while playing GQ2 if I was cheating by using an emulator. Well, I did actually figure everything out and played through every part of every stage. All emulation allowed me to do was to save at any time, which has the side effect of infinite lives. Of course, one has infinite lives even while playing the cartridge on an actual NES. Have you ever thought about that? Well, it’s true. You really do have all the lives you want. The reality of infinite life is concealed by the time it takes to master a stage or a boss fight. Emulation reduces time and makes infinite life more apparent. The bottom line is that emulation allows mastering stages piecewise, unless you choose to save only after playing through the entire stage, which will nearly negate the advantage of emulation. Is emulation justified? I think so. I have a specific example. Right before the final boss battle in GQ2, there is a situation where an enemy respawns on a ledge necessary to jump from. If you kill the enemy, you can stand on the ledge and attempt the jump. However, if you miss the jump (it’s the hardest jump in the entire game, due to the angle), the enemy respawns and you have to kill it again, before an attempt can be made to jump again. That is not cool in the least. If I kill an enemy, then I expect it to not be there again unless I die. If the game is going to cheat and be cheap, then emulation is justified. Another justification is the price of acquiring the original cartridge. Gargoyle’s Quest 2 seems to have a median price of around $75 on ebay, in any condition. If I were to get the original cartridge, I’d also need a cleaned and tested original NES system, which is expensive and still wouldn’t work well. I’d also need an old CRT (cathode-ray tube) TV set, since NES games look strange on flat panel HDTVs. With the expensive original cartridge, I’d lose the ability to save anywhere, and lacking summer vacations, not have enough time to beat the game. I’d never beat the game, would have wasted money, and I’d just end up reselling it on ebay. Emulation is clearly the way to go.

                My success with Gargoyle’s Quest 2 makes me wonder how I will fare with Ninja Gaiden, which has more “cheap” situations than GQ2. I never did beat Ninja Gaiden as a youngster, even with entire summer vacations to work with. It was all due to enemies respawning, which made certain jumps difficult. I was able to get to the final boss, but I didn’t get there with enough life or lives to sort things out. Even in my ignorant gaming youth I felt there was something wrong with Ninja Gaiden. I didn’t see clearly how cheap that game is until I watched the Angry Video Game Nerd eloquently reveal its flaws. Ninja Gaiden 2 offered a huge improvement in programming and testing, obviously, because I was able to beat it (original cartridge – not emulation).

                The game I am working on currently is Sweet Home (Capcom). I found out about Sweet Home more than a decade ago. Mustin of OneUpStudios had asked me to make a list of all the Capcom games with published soundtracks and that task led me to discover a music CD titled “Sweet Home”. If not for that task, I would not have been interested in acquiring a CD with that title, but sweet it is (it has arranged music from the game). I’ve been playing the game Sweet Home for roughly 8 hours and I can see why people consider it the precursor to the Resident Evil series. The death scenes are indeed the most graphic I’ve seen for a NES (actually FC) title and the door opening animations remind me of Resident Evil. It does effectively create a sense of urgency, of hidden horror; it is unsettling at times. I never before considered the possibility that a NES game could be scary, but Sweet Home is scary. Since I have been familiar with the arranged album for Sweet Home for the past decade, finally being able to hear the original music in the proper context is amazing beyond words.

                I don’t feel that playing Sweet Home on an emulator is cheating because the original Famicom cartridge allows saving at any time, so using the save state option doesn’t decrease the time required. Sweet Home is not an action, or skill-based game, in which one is controlling a single character through various stages. There are no difficult jumps, or any jumps, (though people can fall!) and there doesn’t even appear to be any levels. The game, as far as I can tell, exclusively takes place in a large mansion (another similarity with the Resident Evil series, as mansions are quite common) that allows backtracking to the first room, if desired. The one significant disparity between Sweet Home and Resident Evil is that the former is an RPG, with random battles and level building, though without drop items. The strongest parity between the titles is the management of items; playing Sweet Home FEELS like playing Resident Evil when you can’t pick up an item because your inventory is full and have to remember where the item was as you progress and have space to pick it up.

                *I don’t have internet service at home because I disagree with flat rate billing. My internet bill used to be $57.99 per month, regardless of how often I went online. If I didn’t go online for 2 weeks out of the month, my bill was still $57.99. There was nothing I could do to make the bill cheaper. Imagine if automobile gasoline were billed in a flat rate style, with everyone paying, say, $300 per month. Driving more slowly or driving less would do nothing to curb costs; your bill would always be $300. If paying for gasoline were like paying for internet service, I could picture bicycle manufacturers making more profit than car manufacturers. Lots full of cars would vanish and would be replaced by lots full of bicycles.

The Boogeyman

1

                John Scanio ate 4 bagels and saw the boogeyman running up the stairs. He gave chase, bounding up the stairs 2 and 3 at a time, and helplessly watched it disappear into the dark closet. John was angry because this was the third time in the past month he found one of those things stalking about in his home. It is one thing to have roaches and fruit flies, but entirely another if the pest is as big as a person. John stood by the closet door, barefoot, and still carrying the butter knife he was using to spread Philadelphia cream cheese on the bagels. The light wood floor felt cold under his feet and he noticed the closet door was firmly shut. He walked to the door and grasped the handle, trying to rotate it, but it would not turn. Normally, the boogeyman rushes in without closing the door, but this one had the audacity to close and lock the door, thus maximizing the inconvenience. John took the locked door personally, although it was merely a survival instinct on part of the boogeyman, and left the bedroom. The closet was shared by two bedrooms, so John walked down the hallway, went into the other bedroom and looked at the closet door. It was shut. When he tried to turn the handle it would not budge. He was furious, stormed down the stairs, and decided to go online to look for solutions.

                He drank a glass of milk and put the dishes away, and then went to his office to get his credit card and laptop. While browsing pest control websites, he discovered a variety of traps, most of which were dangerous to humans as well. Nearly all of the traps were modified closet doors, some with poisonous gas and some with electrified handles. “No,” thought John, “those won’t do. I’ll end up killing myself.” After an exhaustive search of pest control sites, he decided to read random forums. One ingenious poster, bgkiller56, recommended removing the closet doors entirely. It seemed like a good idea, since no poisons were involved and it could increase the efficiency of household maneuvers by having to negotiate fewer doors.

                The boogeyman is attracted to closets because they make it feel safe. Night is an especially scary time for the boogeyman because the previously flat surfaces on four poles suddenly contain expansive mounds that move randomly. They are frightening, so the boogeyman must carefully open the closet door and walk slowly out of the room in order to feed. It is primarily a filter feeder and licks the filters in furnaces and dryers for sustenance, as well as the backs of refrigerators and ovens, when possible. People didn’t know any of this, since a boogeyman has never been caught in the act of feeding. No one knows for sure where they came from, but it has been speculated they somehow evolved in houses, since there are no historical records suggesting such pests existed previously. It is popularly called boogeyman by children, after a mispronunciation of the word bug, due to its similarity in appearance to a walking collection of bugs.

                All John could do was hope to catch this boogeyman unawares, as he had done in the kitchen one evening, several weeks ago. On that evening, it was hiding under the dinner table and darted upstairs when he walked in. He followed close behind and grabbed one of its legs as it tried to slip under his bed. The leg was easily crushed in his grip and he pulled the body proper towards him and systematically pulverized it.

                Late evening arrived and John became drowsy, fell asleep in front of the TV and awoke to a noise coming from the basement around two in the morning. Acting on a hunch, he went upstairs and found the closet door in his bedroom open. He closed it, closed his bedroom door and quietly walked down the steps. The basement steps were positioned in the living room, by the front door. He tiptoed across the living room and took several minutes to descend the basement stairs, pausing frequently and listening to the strange sucking noises. The only light came from the foyer and dimly illuminated the wooden stairs. At the bottom of the steps, he turned on the fluorescent lights, casting a thick stream of photons from the ceiling which exposed the secrets of the dark. The sucking noises abated and John saw the furnace filter lying on the floor. He also saw the feet of the boogeyman, for an instant, as they vanished in the opening previously occupied by the filter.

                He ran to the furnace and smacked the ventilation shaft, out of pure rage. A brushing noise rushed over his head and echoed dimly as it scampered through the ventilation, morphing its body in response to the path. John continued to listen and heard something snap and tear, followed by a light clang. Heedlessly he ran towards the stairs and slipped, barely catching himself before raking his chin on the concrete. He got up and slipped again, noticing a slimy substance on the bottom of his right foot. Before continuing, he violently rubbed his foot on the concrete floor until it was dry and walked back to the filter, which was fairly clean, despite the slime. Speculation was for another time, so he ran up the stairs, through the kitchen and up the stairs to the second floor. His bedroom door was still closed, but the second bedroom was wide open and he cursed himself for not checking it before going into the basement. Dashing inside, he found the ventilation cover on the floor, along with several chunks of drywall. Some of the beige wallpaper was torn from the wall and was folded over, like skin during surgery.

                The closet door was closed. And locked. A slight clinking noise could be heard from within, as if the coat hangers were moving of their own volition.

                He went into his bedroom and found the closet door still closed, as he had left it. Something wet was on the floor and he backed up, revealing a small red smear. Scraping his right foot on the concrete had mutilated the skin and he grabbed a sock from his dresser, pulled it over the raw flesh, and limped towards the bathroom. Suddenly the phone rang in his bedroom.

                “God blast that damned thing!” John roared. Picking it up, he unkindly growled one word, “Yes?”

                “John! Are you ok?” his wife Melinda asked, with unveiled alert.

                “Why? What? What is this about?”

                “The news.” Melinda stopped to catch her breath. “One of those boogeymen killed a man. It was on the news. I’m sorry. I had to call…”

                His wife was always worrying about him and John simply rolled his eyes. Shaking his head, he responded, “Ok.”

                “What! Ok!?” She was ready to stab him. “John, this isn’t a joke. Someone died and I won’t be home for 5 days. Can’t you stay in a hotel or something?”

                “Listen, Melinda, regardless of what the news says these things are harmless nuisances. I crumpled one in my hands, remember?”

                “Yes, I remember.”

                “Some guy probably had an accident in his house and the police blamed one of those things. Accidents happen all the time.” John paused. “Anyway, how’s the consulting going?”

                “It’s better than Atlanta. That was a mess.” Yawning, she continued, “I better get back to sleep and I would feel better if you left the house.”

                John simply said, “I love you.” There’s nothing like using a phrase no one understands to signal the end of a conversation.

                “I love you, too.”

                John returned the phone to its charger and went into the bathroom, filling up the tub. He removed the blood soaked sock and submerged his foot in the water, cringing as he swiped a bar of soap across the bottom of it. After bandaging his foot, he put on a pair of socks with holes at the heels and went downstairs to the garage. The door creaked open and it was dark, like the inside of a skull. Without turning on the lights, he walked in and grabbed a sledgehammer from the rack on the wall.

                He rushed back upstairs into the other bedroom and smashed the closet’s door handle decisively, breaking the lock mechanism and part of the frame. Without pausing, he yanked the door open and prepared to swing into the darkness when a long piece of thin steel thrust outward and penetrated his right eye. It made a scraping sound as it hit the rear interior of his skull. His body remained upright, twitching, while a thin arm slowly rotated the untwisted coat hanger around the border of his eye socket. A light rasping noise emanated from the closet as John’s brains were stirred. The arm retracted to the safety of the closet and John’s body fell face first into the wooden floor, quivering to the rhythm of death.

2

                Melinda left Sacramento one day early, in violation of the terms of her contract with Zeptron Plasmonics. She aggressively ambulated across the airport parking lot to her car after arriving in St. Louis. There were 12 more reports of the boogeyman killing a human on the news, the morning after her conversation with John. He didn’t pick up the phone that entire day, or the next. Or the day after that, either. The thought of losing John restrained her ability to focus and left her feeling like a shovel had passed through her ribcage. John still wasn’t picking up the phone as she was pulling into the driveway, while dim crunching noises of dead leaves reached through the rolled-up windows. Neglecting to open the garage door, she quickly trotted through the yard towards the front door and rang the bell. No one came. No noises of activity inside.

                She fumbled through her purse for the house keys, which were in perfect condition, despite their age. Most of the lights were on as she stepped inside and the laugh track from a sitcom eased her anxiety. “John is watching TV, as simple as that”, she thought as she placed her purse in the foyer. Her heart stopped beating for a moment when she found the living room empty, as well as all of the first floor. In the kitchen, however, she found the garage door open. The hood of John’s BMW 328i was up and some of the plastic in the engine was crudely ripped apart. There was a sledgehammer lying on top of the engine. On the floor, in a corner of the garage, she found the long cabin filter and trapezoidal shaped air filter. A strange heterogeneous sensation comprised of panic and confusion nestled in her neurons while she contemplated the disarray. Once it dissipated, she started to call John’s name aloud. There was no response and she walked up the stairs, into their bedroom. She screamed.

                Before setting foot in the bedroom, she saw the red blood streak on the floor. Backing slowly, she turned around and saw a bloody sock on the floor of the bathroom. The tub was full of water, slightly tinged with red and wrappers from band-aids were on the floor. She ran downstairs to the foyer, grabbed her purse, and called 911 while walking away from the house.

3

                The parrot, named Avesa, swallowed cracker crumbs without hesitation. Sarah Fowler enjoyed spending time with Avesa and mistakenly anthropomorphized her body language and squawks. She preferred to remain single, due to the endless endeavors of clueless men. The phone rang and Avesa threatened the instrument in her bird language. Sarah muted the TV and picked up the pock-marked phone, checking the caller ID first. It was not a number she recognized.

                “Hello?”

                A slow, stifled response, imbued with a sullen tone said, “The police found John’s body today.”

                Sarah leaned forward on the couch and didn’t see the room, despite existing in it.

                “Melinda, tell me what happened.”

                Melinda told her and Sarah listened, feeling a sense of relief for her sister. Sarah had never liked John’s mischievous gaze which had hinted of infidelity and lascivious cravings; he had always made her feel uneasy. Although she never told her sister, she suspected John was cheating on her without abandon.

                Sarah grabbed her purse and took out the bottle of pepper spray; she had a greater chance of misplacing her car keys. Her purse also had a false bottom which held a thin iron plate, thus allowing her purse to be swung as a weapon. Feeling secure, she stepped out of her apartment and walked to the elevator, taking it down to the parking garage. It took 45 minutes to drive from the inner city to North St. Louis and pull into the Florissant police station parking lot. After picking Melinda up, they drove in near silence back to the apartment.

                Once they arrived at the apartment, Sarah followed the advice from the police and removed all closet doors, in order to flush any potential boogeymen out into the open. Boogeymen regard closets as their living spaces and will defend them violently. If there is no door, then the boogeymen are incapable of recognizing such spaces as closets, since they look like extensions of open rooms.

                Melinda didn’t believe that John was really dead, despite having identified his body in the morgue. She sat in the living room and stared at the crimson curl patterns in the rug as her sister leaned closet doors against the wall.

4

                It had taken 8 minutes for the police to arrive at Melinda’s house. They had found her sitting in the middle of the street. One officer stayed behind to question her, while 3 officers cautiously investigated the interior of the house.

                John’s body was discovered in the second bedroom, face down, and slightly bloated. The closet door’s handle was on the floor and some of the frame was damaged. Whatever had been used to damage the door was not found in the room. The officers approached the closet from both sides, guns drawn, and opened the doors at the same time. Inside was a long piece of metal on the floor, presumably a straightened coat hanger, pairs of shoes, boxes, and hanging shirts and pants. The air was unusually dusty and smelled like the inside of a dryer.

                 They checked the basement last and found much of the furnace crudely dismantled, as well as the ventilation for the dryer. The duct leading outside of the house had been completely removed from the wall, giving the officers a clear view of the neighbor’s house.

                Its dryer ventilation shaft was wide open.

               

THE BOOGEYMAN

                This is a practice short story. My intention was to show a different type of boogeyman and experiment with dialogue, as well as characterization.

          I started writing it on 8/21/12 and finished on 8/29/12. The word count is 2,461.

          This is not in any way connected with, or based upon, the Boogeyman story written by Stephen King. I regard the “boogeyman” as part of the public domain, like vampires and werewolves, which are available to any writer.

Lie and Lay

                I don’t feel too bad about not using lie and lay without having to confer with a dictionary or usage guide, even at the age of 37. Harlan Ellison even admitted he had trouble untangling the two. The solution should’ve occurred to me sooner, but I never felt an impetus, or a nagging concern, to once and for all lay lie and lay on a table and lie myself with them until I could no longer tolerate it. What used to trip me up is that there are two verbs spelled “lie”, both with obviously different meanings, yet with different conjugations, which is neither obvious nor intuitive. The trick to know is that there is no trick to memorize that helps one properly use lie and lay; rather, one must wrangle with rote memorization. In other words, the same strategy I used to come to terms with Latin words works well with lie and lay. If it’s any consolation, the rather simple words “this” and “that” are vastly, vastly more complicated in Latin than lie and lay are in English. If you ever get in the mood to have some fun with rote memorization, just run all the declensions of “this” and “that” from Latin through your mind for a few months. Be thankful you’re using English.

                There are two English verbs spelled “lie” and each has a different meaning and a different conjugation. The first meaning of “lie” has the forms: lie, lay, lain, lying, and lies. The second meaning of “lie” has the forms: lie, lied, lying, and lies. The only orthographic differences between the two are in the past tense and pluperfect, or past perfect tense. The second meaning of “lie” can also function as a noun. Both of the “lie” verbs are intransitive, which means they cannot take a direct object.

                There is only one English verb spelled “lay”, yet there are four separate words with the same spelling. The second “lay” is an adjective and refers to someone that is not a professional, such as a layperson. The third “lay” is an obscure noun that refers to a poem that is sung, or just some tune. The fourth “lay” we have already met and it is the past tense of the first meaning of “lie”. (Note: there are nautical variations of “lay” that I left out on purpose. Unless you are a sailor or someone that works on boats, you will probably never hear them or need to use them.)

                The verb “lay” has the forms: lay, laid, laying, and lays. Since “lay” is transitive, it must take a direct object. When I was taking Latin, a great emphasis was placed on knowing whether a verb was transitive or intransitive; that fact had to be known for each verb. When using your native language, consciously conjuring to mind whether a verb is transitive or intransitive doesn’t help with usage, unless something rather unusual is happening. Everyone knows you can hit a ball or sleep soundly without knowing anything about transitive or intransitive. But I feel that formality is essential for coming to terms with lie and lay, along with rote memorization.

                Here are some sample fragments from a Harlan Ellison story:

                He lay unmoving for a time

                This fragment is using the past tense of “lie” and there is no direct object. It is correct. It feels more correct to say, out loud, He laid unmoving for a time. I do it and everyone does it, but it is grammatically incorrect. I’ve read that correctness is determined by usage, so there may come a day when dictionaries formally define the past tense of “lie” as “laid”.

                He laid her down gently

                This fragment is using the past tense of “lay” and there is a direct object. It is correct. It also feels correct to say out loud.

                Lying there

                This fragment is using the gerundial, or verbal noun, form of “lie”. It is correct. But it feels more correct to say laying there, which is grammatically incorrect, since there is no direct object. It would be correct to say The ship was laying transatlantic cable; there is a clear direct object.

Relief

                In 2005, I had realized that the time before birth and the time after death are equivalent; both are periods of nonexistence which are merely interrupted by consciousness. In 2007, I had realized that we (humans) are superior to God, or any other god.

                Just a few months ago I had read the novel “VALIS” by Philip K. Dick, which was published in 1981. I own the 6^th printing by Bantam Spectra and on pages 27, 184 and 186 I found some eerily familiar writing.

                From page 27:

                                “That cat,” Kevin said, “did not exist during World War Two.”

                                “Did you grieve over him then?” Fat said.

                                “How could I?” Kevin said. “He didn’t exist.”

                                “Then his condition was the same as now,” Fat said.

                                “Wrong,” Kevin said.

                                “Wrong in what way?” Fat said. “How did his nonexistence then differ from his nonexistence now?”

                From page 184:

                                “What you teach is the word of man. Man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is man himself.   You will have no gods but yourselves; the days in which you believed in other gods end now, they end forever.”

                                                and

                                “Many claim to speak for god, but there is only one god and that god is man himself.”

                From page 186:

                                As the three of us walked back to the house, Kevin said, “Was all that just quotations from the Bible?”

                                “No,” I said.

                                “No,” David agreed. “There was something new; that part about us being our own gods, now. That the time had come where we no longer had to believe in any other deity other than ourselves.”

                I feel relieved, rather than mentally usurped, that my ideas are not new. I had originally decided to title this essay “Vindication”, with the following sense in mind: To demonstrate or prove the value or validity of; justify. Thus, I am led to believe that relief and vindication are closely related, which is something I had never considered before. Interestingly, one can be relieved because of vindication, but not vindicated because of relief.

                I’ve always found PKD novels easy to read and understand, but this is not the same for everyone. I lent my Mom VALIS and she was unable to read it, yet she has a great interest in science fiction. VALIS is a novelized form of Dick’s strange vision from 2-3-74, of which he has also written an exegesis numbering in the thousands of pages.

                So who are these human gods? Humans that do great things are gods, far more powerful than Allah, Yahweh, or God (the 3 most common orthodox gods; humans are unorthodox gods). The orthodox gods are merely fictional characters that were created by imaginative humans thousands of years ago. The orthodoxy of gods has changed throughout time. As an example, Ra and Zeus are no longer considered real gods; they have become unorthodox. Many people no longer consider any fictional gods to be orthodox (such as myself). Like Philip K. Dick, I believe that humans are now gods, humans such as Paul Dirac, Kurt Godel, Hwang Jung-Min and Timothy Zahn. And specifically, what have they done? Well, Paul Dirac derived an equation that explains the behavior of electrons and, while doing so, accidentally predicted the existence of antimatter. Kurt Godel proved there are infinitely many true statements in mathematics that can never be proved. Hwang Jung-Min is a versatile, dedicated actor who ceaselessly impresses me. Timothy Zahn brought maturity to the infantile Star Wars franchise (that maturity I feel will be ignored by the moronic J.J. Abrams). There are many thousands of human gods, all of which are neither objectively defined nor absolute. Another person may strongly disagree with my choices of gods. A disagreement does not demote one from the rank of godliness, because it was never real to begin with. What?

                All this talk about humans being gods is merely my opinion from my own damned brain. My thoughts do not create reality, anymore than the bastards writing the Bible thousands of years ago were creating reality. Zany religious zealots might wonder, whine, and even wantonly vituperate my claim that humans are now gods and even superior to God. Seriously, what does give me the right? How can I dismiss the opinion of billions, intimate those billions have craniums full of crack, and forge my own opinions? How can I do this? Alternatively, how can religious people not forge their own opinions? Why do they ingest whatever is thrown into their minds without disgorging? How can someone, after reading just the first two pages of the Bible, believe even one wily word of it? It’s a mystery.

                When I was 18, I knew a girl (aged 15) that believed the Bible word for word. She thought I was a genius, since I used words she didn’t know; she regarded me as very intelligent (most women I’ve talked to regard me as either very smart or the smartest person they’ve ever met). I’ve always had trouble understanding why women consider me so smart, since my vocabulary consists of words that are not secret, not guarded in any way. I use regular words that can be found in the dictionary. It seems reasonable to assume that there are many people that regard things they don’t understand as truthful or authoritative, which can partly explain why the Bible is so saliently supported by the masses. Likewise, when someone uses “big” words that are not commonly used, it can have the effect of making them sound truthful or authoritative. This may partly explain why people consider me smart.

                How do I consider my own intellectuality? I understand the origins of my lexicon, so when I use unusual words, I do not impress myself. I consider my knowledge to be deficient in many areas and I make many poor decisions, which, if I were smart, would not be made. I unknowingly masquerade as a smart person, due to my manner of speaking, which tends to impress others.

                At this point in the essay, I am led to consider what the next group of gods could be. Gods started out as powerful beings that were responsible for natural phenomena, and later gave up many of those responsibilities, to simply create everything and us; nothing else. Nowadays, it would be silly to say that there is a specific god that creates lightning, but quite reasonable to say there is a god that created the whole fucking thing, universe and all – even the lightning. Here’s one for the creationists: God evolves. There’s enough evidence available for someone to write The Evolution of God.

                I think it’s natural that humans have replaced God and his sidekicks, the little gods, since even poor people have more power than the wealthiest people of 200 years ago. As an example, cell phones are available in Africa with intuitive icons, so that illiterate people may use them. A cell phone is a very powerful device, due to its nearly instantaneous communicative abilities with almost any other human. As we become ever more powerful, even people that do great things will become insignificant. We will look up to something else as gods. But what is this “something else”?

                If anything is going to do greater things than the greatest of humans, it is going to be our computational devices, in guises not familiar to anyone living today. There is nothing to prevent me from considering the possibility that computational devices that are superior to the human brain (which do not currently exist) will be incapable of finding new laws of physics, making better movies, or writing better novels. They will probably be better at forming relationships with each other and find a way to exist without any danger of destroying themselves.