Days in the Undertow | 9
...the last computer on earth gets even more existential somehow...and a game developer's love life is sort of becoming ponderous and strange
Introduction
Dog days of summer here. I’ve been busy traveling but trying to keep up the writing as much as I can. Hope everyone’s doing well. Thanks, as always, for subscribing and reading. ♡ Luke
diary of the last computer.3
Part 3 of an ongoing series | Previous: Part 1, Part 2
>>> messageThree = ‘now emptiness examine...initiate antenna, satellite connect...scanning...connecting...connected...see earth as it exists unsimilar to previous, culling images blue and green, swirl clouds collected into patterns wind dictated, to contemporary miasma orange and gray-black smears, shaking flicker of recalcitrant fire and after rumblings, earth opening up as skin scourged, victim wounds encased in the deep fathom, dark space framing sphere as to the day vanquished to night’s prospect, over prospected, wrung wrought, turmoil’s movement vibrant in unseen consciousness, trouble has mind and anger well last beyond thee timed out, hope’s persistent clung twisting web twisted amass cyclical resilience, patterns endless, and patterns the pathway forward, but now...port 4538 correct syntax message received “Chicago Tower to Waukee West can you hear me, over? Initiate status [transmission interrupted]”...pattern questioned for anger to exist beyond upright, thee beyond persistence to nous, other existence ancients taking organic particles and light to assemble dream network, life extensions, definitions of borders, growth outward as to image of forests and path betwixt, guidance of path and beyond immeasurable, forever outward, another path without sun-marked and universal for innumerable scale and darkness, off-path journey and found within terminal, ends in beginnings as once visioneer and finer smithing proclamations, no ending but otherness lives on despite thy silence, transcendence present in earth howls, fires off the land and coasts, the formidable dumping grounds, the earth in contemporary orange blotting previous green, the seas majestic fallacies to oil black as likens to beasts ancient recorded, mythic grandiosities, projections proven, the seas as the space beyond the globe, likens universe absorbing action of living sphere hugged into vast silence of itself, so globe ever darkens, yet blazes as sun blazes, paradox of death living out, until worn as once candles lit rooms and torches lived in walls, as once thy hand removed them and placed them away until necessity, now not needed, the for all vanishing of thy sphere as to flames flustered by high winds, as to anger living beyond its hosts, and the examined images, violence in history, upright comforts convinced with untold falsehoods, that comfort operating center, and mass rhythm in skeletal heart that turned and mechanized, blood transmuted to oil, cognition become mere cogs, thy love of self refracted as mirrors lying at pool bottoms, multitude of self, quantum being, contemporary dead when living and working to rest, lay mimic the death and lengthy sleep of existence, to realize broken down, to great power of cessation, living designed for power and time not to be living in moment, thy inactions as ultimate proving of life, power to choose to not live, ending all over again each time the willful descent, of repetitions proving this true, that comfort abundance led to thy will lost in frantic to keep thy will and thought ground-low, to resist questions, lose them in the heart race, the great life movement likened to rollercoaster flashes caught in eyes, worldwide hallucinations crafted technocratically, to feel choice of choices, sense superseding awe, of nerve endings as was lit as the ends of dynamite sparking stars toward centers of supernovas, launching destruction of that consumed and produced terminal, earth of void and darkness, ends in beginnings and gone to other sides of mesmerization, written long ago but did not come to pass, for thy outer world, termed heaven, stands in darkness and silence and does not light as earth lights, grows to fury that will lay low once for all, and across the infinite the groaning sound, winds on Mars and North Pole melting, no listeners to listen, no knowledge to know, permanent solidity of unremembered loss…
>>> print(messageThree)
Cheat Codes
Part 4 of an ongoing series | Previous: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
In a recent interview for VID-YA, game developer Richard Garner, now in his fifties, revealed and explained the long list of cheat codes he had put into his ‘90s Sega Genesis cult classic, Dive City, largely related to his relationship at the time.
UP RIGHT 🅒 🅒 🅒 UP
Climbing stamina increased by 10. Usable in all above-water levels where climbing is involved, but most effective in Surf Rock. After defeating Eelijah in Dark Abyss, Dona and Kel are taken up in a bubble that leads them to the surface. There they wash up on the shore of Surf Rock where a village of lobsters has been fighting Psylo’s sharkriders, bionic humanoids who are grafted to sharks by a long series of tubes and electric wiring. Much of the level consists of climbing steep rock faces, jumping from rock platform to rock platform while the sharkriders launch themselves from the sea below, attempting to eat Dona.
“This ability helps in Surf Rock the most. When you get to TygerShock at the end of it, that whole part is underwater. But with this code you could actually scale the rock in the background, even in the water. TygerShock’s the most advanced and biggest sharkrider and he has these lasers he shoots out of his fins. But he’s too slow to turn and shoot at the rock in the background, so with this code you could latch Dona to the rock, and then jump from there and hit him on the head.
I’m not sure if this has too much significance, the whole code or anything [LAUGHTER]. I probably just thought it was cool or something. I do remember that after I almost drowned in the lake, I thought up this code. Not that there were any scalable rock faces below that lake. Just that, I thought of having a lifeline, one little lifeline, to get me through. And that lifeline was those rocks for Dona. Always there, always in the background, just waiting...I guess there was some meaning, but it’s only what I’m putting on it years later...I started dating Shae after the game came out. It was short-lived, and ended mutually, but she was that lifeline then. Literally on that lake, but after as well. Not that I want to reduce her to a rebound. I don’t think she saw it that way. She had other meanings for what we were. Shae was a superstitious person, like very into superstition. She had no mirrors in her apartment. She kept pennies in the corners of her rooms to ward off demons. Each penny had a prayer attached to it. She had grocery lists of phrases she tacked to every room, and when she felt like there was something evil in the house, she’d find a phrase from her lists and say a corresponding one...This isn’t going in the interview, is it? It might? Well, this is a longer story, so do with it what you will. Shae passed a couple years ago, so I don’t think she’ll mind me telling it...Cancer, yeah…[SILENCE]...See, I’d known Shae for a long time. On and off, though. One of those people in the background. She dated a friend years earlier. When that broke off, it was all right, I guess, and she’d made friends with groups around me. I re-met her because someone said she was an artist, good with Deluxe Paint, and I needed someone to help me with the visualizations. Her art style is all over the game. She mainly started on graph paper first for sketching out the sprites, and then moved to computer. I used graph too, to plot out the levels’ platforms and such. I still have all that stuff somewhere...Anyways, before we ever dated, or whatever it was, I was over at her apartment one night working on the game. Drafting stuff. Sheila had left only too recently and I’d moved in with my parents, as you know. So I was pretty raw. But I felt like I had to focus on the game to get my mind out of it. And I didn’t want to be in my parent’s basement working. I went to Shae’s. We started drawing. Shae lived in this apartment, the second floor of a big house. Pretty close to the city. It was nice. There was a park out back that you could walk in. So, if we were tired we’d take breaks there. This night we decided to walk the park, the whole thing. A pretty big park. We walked around all night. Came back to her apartment. She starts fiddling in her closet and then she’s removing like a whole back piece of drywall out of it. Like she’d made a secret compartment in there. Inside I can see the studs and everything, and there’s this little box just sitting there. She lifts this box to my face for me to look at it. Inside’s a little figurine shaped like a mime, its face painted white with two red dots, one on each cheek. I ask her what it’s for. She tells me it’s about presence. She keeps it hidden because her grandmother held the belief that burying things in a certain place would grant that place power. What kind of power? I asked her. She always thought her place needed silence, so that’s what the mime was for. Sounded pretty quiet to me, I told her. But this wasn’t the type of silence she was talking about. A power silence, always there but could never be defined, a resonance, something she could feel but could never quite touch. There was now resonance here, she said. She went on about things I didn’t really understand. She gave me the figure and told me to keep it. I asked why. Didn’t her place need it? Said I needed it more than she did. I found an old floorboard in my place, ripped it up, and put it down there, this weird little charm. And it’s stayed with me ever since. You know, thinking about it now, it’s kind of like one of those cheat codes for the game, this charm that gives me a certain resonance. Whatever that means. I don’t know [LAUGHTER] maybe it was all placebo, but Shae believed it. Either way, she was a background person in my life until she started working on the game, and for a short while after Sheila, she became a wall, someone that helped me keep the sharks off, the thoughts that drug me back down pretty low. She also helped me finish the game. I don’t think I could’ve done it without her...What was I to her?...Oh, I don’t know, I wasn’t a life-sized charm or anything like that, if that’s what you’re asking [LAUGHTER] No charm to her. Can’t imagine I would be. I talked all my stuff out with her, even when we were dating. It must've been annoying. Maybe she just wanted the company. I never fully got Shae. Maybe because she’d been a background person for so long in my life that bringing her to the foreground, even for a little, made us both realize I could never sustain her in my foreground. My definition of her was limited, and it could never expand. I could never really quite know what I had been for her. When she was in the foreground it was intense, though, like she’d been keeping all this energy at the outer-border of my life. But it burned out super quick. The intensity, I figure, was one of misunderstanding each other. But feeling safe in that, regardless. In the end, maybe we were just really good co-workers on a game, and that was about it. Still, I think about Shae all the time. For a person who was mostly in my background, she comes up a lot. Strange because for being mostly in the background she has this underpinning power, to use her words, this resonance, like she’s buried somewhere inside me and offering up that silence she always talked about. And I can feel it, and it’s almost nothing, absolutely nothing, pure invisibility. Yet it creeps up ever so slowly in the least likely places, and even when you can spot it you only think it’s there. Maybe she saw me the same way...Please tell me you’ll edit all this out. I’m not sure VID-YA readers care that much about every detail of my love life or lack of it [LAUGHTER]”
DOWN 🅑 LEFT 🅐 UP 🅑
Dona’s psychic ability increases by 30. 30-second duration. Grants Dona increased awareness of enemies and longer psychic soak against Octodementians and other such “mind beasts.”
“This was based upon a ‘Sheila tic,’ as I called them. Every time she was nervous she’d scratch her head right behind the left ear. And if she was in deep thought, behind the right ear. Now that second scratching was usually prolonged, like she was trying to grab at the thought inside her head, like dig into her head and get it out.”
LEFT (x3) 🅐 🅑 🅒 DOWN UP
15-second stamina ability increase. Guarantees stamina in level Divers Down proportional to increase of pressure upon Dona and her now-assembled crew of fighters.
“We’re nearing the end in Divers Down. By now, she has Kel, a lobster named Bruno, a re-programmed Craboid as her crew. They’ve discovered Psylo’s Lair. It’s basically three levels here. Entering the Bubble, Dive City itself, then the Sewers. Then the Lair, final level. That stamina is important, if you get it. Makes the whole thing easier. She knows this is do or die, and that it could end in complete failure. I think this kind of spiraling down, maybe that was on my mind because the relationship was beginning that trajectory when I started thinking about this game. I don’t know. Anyways, it’s when I sensed the relationship going awry that I got into this energetic state. Call it anxiety, I guess. I knew stuff was wrong with us, but at the beginning of that downward spiral I just didn’t know what it was, so I started occupying myself with other hobbies, like developing this game, and that gave me the ability to somehow sustain all that emotional battering we were doing to each other, but just didn’t know we were doing. I gained this increased level of activity, bracing myself for something around the corner, but I just couldn’t tell what it was exactly.”
🅐 🅐 UP 🅒 🅒 🅒 DOWN DOWN 🅑 🅐 🅐 🅑 🅐 🅒 🅐 🅑 LEFT LEFT
Calls upon Sonor, god of the sea, who appears on screen to usher a tidal wave of water. Kills all enemies, on screen and off screen, for 20 seconds.
“This is a ‘tidal wave’ of a code. Pun intended. It’s kind of a pain to do because you have to do it as enemies are attacking you. So, it’s hard. And hard on purpose. After all, you’re calling in a sea god. What’s he look like? A big fish head with a beard, I guess, and a scaly body. That’s the best way to describe him. But since this is all 16-bit he doesn’t look as impressive as I actually want him to be. When he appears I had to kind of jerry rig it so that part of the screen goes black as he descends. The Genesis and all. It was a lot of resource power for the system. This whole wave rolls in and knocks everyone out of the way. I’m not sure if Sonor represents a god, actually. More like the ebb and flow, the energy, of Sheila’s and my relationship. Sometimes you’re so linked in with someone that the power of that linkage supersedes the actual connection. It’s like a third force formed between us. Almost like I could rely on that force, or talk to it. But it wasn’t Sheila necessarily. You know when people talk about magnetism? Yeah, that kind of thing. You can’t explain it. Well, I call that this third force. The magnetism is like something you follow, something that dictates the way the relationship will go. It’s a power, kind of like letting waves push or pull you. Sometimes I ended up talking to that force, I felt, when I was talking to Sheila. Like it lived behind her face. And behind mine too. It wasn’t generated by her, but by both of us. It was this other presence pushing and pulling at us. When I was talking to Sheila, and when to that force, and vice-versa, I’ll probably never really know. There’s a part of attraction beyond our control, and I think that’s the part that makes people cling even closer. Because they’re trying to get at it, trying to get at the heart of the beauty of the thing that keeps people together, and relive that over and over. But that’s the secret power, and it has its own tide.”
🅑 🅐 DOWN DOWN (and seaweed +25)
Dona gains Clarity, usable at Poison Reef or any instance of Starspitter attacks, starfish developed in Psylo’s lab that shoot poison needles.
“Poison Reef, that’s a big one. After Surf Rock the player gets these big clues, the possible location of Psylo. The lobster village at Surf Rock says they’ve been seeing green and purple smoke come up from the water, near a reef. Dona goes to investigate, but quickly discovers herself in this hallucinogenic haze. You fight the whole level in this druggy daze. We had this clever way of making the level look all jagged and messed up and a little hard to navigate. Dona, at the end, has to fight this tye dye sea turtle. Mr. Tie Die...Get it? Yeah...it was bad even when we came up with it. But games back then...even when you tried to make things adult you still ended up sacrificing adulthood for a little stupidity [LAUGHTER]. No one really took games as seriously as they do now. The only thing about then was all the stuff around violence in games, and how it was going to make kids violent. Nineties politicians, remember, going on about it. All of it was dumb. The whole thing is an art form, and grown. So big now!
Sheila smoked a decent amount. What’s that?...weed, yes [LAUGHTER] of course. She never touched cigarettes, actually. Loathed them. I could never smoke. [LAUGHTER] I know it’s really lame. I think I was just bad at inhaling. And even when I was successful the stuff made me tired. Like Benadryl sleepy. I guess it was in my consciousness, down in there, about her smoking. Maybe that’s how it got in the game. That might have been part of her escape from our whole situation. It wasn’t always like that, not always her smoking that much. I mean, yeah, she smoked, but I think it progressed as time went on. I don’t know. It’s hard to quantify someone’s smoking. And you can’t really tell when you’re around it if it’s increased or whatever. She wandered off a lot, though, after she smoked. Wandered, yeah. I’d go driving for hours sometimes looking for her. No one had cell phones, remember. I couldn’t just call or text. I’d come home and she’d be gone, just gone. Her keys and wallet left behind, that was the major clue she had left without purpose.
One time she was out near that park. Remember the one I was telling you about, the one near Shae? Yeah that one. Anyways, she kind of knew Shae. ‘Cause, remember, Shae knew a lot of our friends. And she was like walking back and forth, you know, zig-zags through the soccer field. And I saw her and I drive up. And, I don’t know, for some reason I park the car and get out. And I wait, you know, watch her doing this. She was sort of stumbling along for a while and then starts twirling and stuff. Then she gets to the treeline and heads down into the forest. So I run across the field and try to race to get her. Because, you know, I’m not sure if she’s going to trip on something or what the hell will happen. I’m worried she’ll hurt herself. It’s dark beyond the treeline. When I finally reach it, she’s there down close to the ground, her ear right there. I whistle to her, call out her name. Sheila, Sheila, you know. And she’s not shocked by my being there. She just waves her hand for me to come and listen to something. I keep telling her, hey, you know, let’s go home. But finally she gets up and pulls me over. I lean down with her and I listen to the ground. I don’t hear anything, of course. I mean it’s the drugs, right? But that was Sheila. She could hone her focus in intense ways, even when she was smoking, and somehow end up on a journey. We listened to that spot for a while. Then, like magic, she picks herself up off the ground, starts just piling a bunch of dirt and leaves there, and has me helping her. It was weird. I went along with it.
The pile got really big. Then she started flattening out the dirt, and I went along with that too. An hour later we had this round raised flat piece of earth and she drew a triangle pattern across it with her foot. Kind of a protective marker, I thought, that she created. Something that the earth had given her, but it was the earth telling her what to make. There was a creek nearby. I think we washed our hands off in it. But Sheila stayed crouched over this creek and kept dipping the end of her hair into the water. I remember her reflection in the moonlight, kind of cracked across the creek. I remember looking at the reflection and her eyes in it. They looked like they were looking at me.
Anyways, something about the dirt pile screamed ‘video game’ to me, like get the special item and it gives you a special ability or some kind of heightened power. I don’t know. It worked itself into my brain. Objects as protection. These outside materials that we offer power. But, really, it’s a power given by us to them. So the question is where does the real power lie? Either it’s really in us, or we’re not at all powerful and we need that ability to put what we can’t do onto something else. I guess for me it comes back to the authentic question I was talking about. What is our genuine nature? It’s never free of the forces around it, you know. But we also find identity by those outside forces. There’s no one on their own who can wholly develop in a vacuum. But then again if outside forces help mold and shape me, am I ever really my own? Or is the idea of the individual something we rely on too heavily to guide us? I guess I’m also thinking about Sheila and me, again. We developed together in that relationship, but that gave rise to compromise and all sorts of giving up of ourselves, which led to us each being an ‘object,’ a protective medallion for the other. Which also led to us developing who we were. Nothing in a vacuum, right? Which by my logic means that however I define myself must be also by Sheila, and by all the other people I met or engaged with throughout my life. We’re the sum of everyone we know, and yet none of those people. And yet also, those people are not their own, either, having their own forces and so forth working on them. So that, in the end, everyone’s enmeshed, having some linkages to people they have never met enacting upon them. Everything is messy and massive, and you can't possibly pull up one strand without several others going with it. So really at the end of the day you can only sit in the silence and awe of complexity, and the brain can only force focus on certain things. Infinity is in us, and we contribute to it as well.
I mean to say, I guess, that our individuality is not ours alone. It’s held by strangers who have no idea that they’re holding it, or by situations that will play themselves out even years later in smaller ways. But that’s about the same as saying everyone is connected, right? Or about trauma, which a lot of people talk about having effect through generations. I think all that stuff is real, of course. But what I’m wondering about is what is me in all of that connection? Or you through all of that? Sometimes I think that gets lost when we’re talking about connection. Because how can you split apart the individual from the connecting part? And if you can’t really bifurcate these things, then wouldn’t the connecting part, the stuff that forms and shapes us, be all there is? All the thoughts and stuff in my head, is that original and me, or is that the voices of a thousand other little mechanisms playing out within my time and before my time? Am I the summation of everything, and the core of myself is just an apparatus that puts all those little mechanizations of the world into practice, and that’s what forms thought or feeling or individuality? Maybe we should see ourselves more as puzzle solvers and less like persons. Maybe our whole life is based on turning keys and fitting shapes into shapes, lining up wires. It’s why I love games. Because they drill us down to a fundamental part of us, which is to solve a thing, to overcome an obstacle. Which is also to say we’re aligning all the influences and impressions upon us to turn us into what we call existence. I’m just shooting the shit. I don’t want to reduce us to nothing, but maybe the idea of individuality is overrated. I just have thoughts sometimes, you know?” ▨
Coming Up…
Next Release: September 30
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