EDIT: /u/southsamurai has picked up the gauntlet. May the sun shine on all their days.

With only a modicum of regret, I am stepping away from Lemmy.

Nothing to do with this community or Lemmy itself. Love y'all.

Rather, since leaving reddit I've observed a huge improvement in my mental health and my feelings of personal effectiveness. I'm taking this as a sign to exit social media for now, as an exercise in overall self-care.

So I'm releasing this community to, well, whoever would like to step up! This will likely be my last post here, but I'll keep an eye on my inbox.

If there are any takers, just hmu.

For example, I didn't fall in love with Titanfall 2's environmental art design---it felt a bit generic to me, like it was meant to be the backdrop for a shooter, as opposed to the Sevastopol in A:I or the station in SOMA that felt like existing locations.

Ditto BioShock: Infinite. The world felt like it was built around the premise of being an arena shooter, not the other way around.

BioShock 1 & 2 are exactly what I'm talking about though.

Even Borderlands 2 has great world-building: the corporate history that can be inferred from the level design, the weapons & the NPCs makes it one of the richer games I've played.

Would love to hear others' thoughts on your favorite FPS environments!

Wisława Szymborska, 1986

What needs to be done?
Fill out the application
and enclose a résumé.

Regardless of the length of life
a résumé is best kept short.

Concise, well-chosen facts are de rigueur.
Landscapes are replaced by addresses,
shaky memories give way to unshakable dates.

Of all your loves mention only the marriage,
of all your children only those who were born.

Who knows you counts more than who you know.
Trips only if taken abroad.
Memberships in what but without why.
Honors, but not how they were earned.

Write as if you’d never talked to yourself
and always kept yourself at arm’s length.

Pass over in silence your dogs, cats, birds,
dusty keepsakes, friends, and dreams.

Price, not worth,
and title, not what’s inside.
His shoe size, not where he’s off to,
that one you pass yourself off as.
In addition, a photograph with one ear showing.
What matters is its shape, not what it hears.
What is there to hear, anyway?
The clatte

Edward Hirsch, 2020

Instead of a pebble to mark our grief
or a coin to ease his passage
you placed a speaker
at the top of his head
and suddenly a drumbeat
came blasting out of the grass,
startling the mourners on the far side
of the cemetery, clanging the trees,
scattering the swifts
that had gathered around the stone
like souls of the dead,
souls that were now parting
to make way for a noisy spirit
rising out of the dirt.

Tracy K. Smith, 2007

Winter is a boa constrictor
Contemplating a goat. Nothing moves,
Save for the river, making its way
Steadily into ice. A state of consternation.

My limbs settle into stony disuse
In this city full of streetlamps
And unimaginable sweets.
I would rather your misuse, your beard

Smelling of some other woman's
Idle afternoons. Lately, the heart of me
Has grown to resemble a cactus
Whose on flower blooms one night only

Under the whitest,
The most disdainful of moons.

Edward Hirsch, 2020

Moon-head is shouting at me
to back the fuck up
on the forklift
I am trying to jab
into a tower
of wooden pallets
stacked all the way
to the sprinklers
laid out under the roof
of the warehouse
where I am struggling
to control the prongs
of a monster
and avoid dousing
everyone on the floor
of E.H. Sargent & Co.,
my summer of chemicals,
the school where I learned
that someone
is always shouting
at someone else on the job
to back the fuck up.

Nikainetos, 3 BCE

Traveler, I am the grave of Biton:
if you go from Torone to Amphipolis,
give Nicagoras this message: his only son
died in a storm, in early winter, before sunrise.

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

This journey is exploring us. Where the child stood
An island in a river of crisis, now
The bridges bind us in symbol, the sea
Is a bond, the sky reaches into our bodies.
We pray : we dive into each other’s eyes.

Whatever can come to a woman can come to me.

This is the long body : into life from the beginning,
Big-headed infant unfolding into child, who stretches and finds
And then flowing the young one going tall, sunward,
And now full-grown, held, tense, setting feet to the ground,
Going as we go in the changes of the body,
As it is changes, in the long strip of our many
Shapes, as we range shifting through time.
The long body : a procession of images.

This moment in a city, in its dream of war.
                               &nbsp

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

I think of the image brought into my room
Of the sage and the thin young man who flickers and asks.
He is asking about the moment when the Buddha
Offers the lotus, a flower held out as declaration.
“Isn’t that fragile?” he asks.     The sage answers:
“I speak to you.     You speak to me.     Is that fragile?”

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

Many of us     Each in his own life waiting
Waiting to move     Beginning to move     Walking
And early on the road of the hill of the world
Come to my landscapes emerging on the grass

The stages of the theatre of the journey

I see the time of willingness between plays
Waiting and walking and the play of the body
Silver body with its bosses and places
One by one touched awakened into into

Touched and turned one by one into     flame

The theatre of the advancing goddess     Blossoming
Smiles as she stands intensely being in stillness
Slowness in her blue dress advancing standing I go
And far across a field over the jewel grass

The play of the family stroke by stroke acted out

Gestures of deep acknowledging on the journey stages
Of the playings the play of the goddess and the god
A supple god of searching and r

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

Born of this river and this rock island, I relate
The changes : I born when the whirling snow
Rained past the general’s grave and the amiable child
White past the windows of the house of Gyp the Blood.
General, gangster, child.     I know in myself the island.

I was the island without bridges, the child down whose blazing
Eye the men of plumes and bone raced their canoes and fire
Among the building of my young childhood, houses;
I was those changes, the live darknesses
Of wood, the pale grain of a grove in the fields
Over the river fronting red cliffs across—
And always surrounding her the river, birdcries, the wild
Father building his sand, the mother in panic her parks—
Bridges were thrown across, the girl arose
From sleeping streams of change in the change city.
The violent forgetting, the naked sides of darkness.
Fountain of a city in growth, and island of light and water.
Snow striking up past the gr

Muriel Rukeyser. 1962

Girl grown woman     fire     mother of fire
I go to the stone street turning to fire.      Voices
Go screaming        Fire        to the green glass wall.
And there where my youth flies blazing into fire
The     dance      of sane and insane images, noon
Of seasons and days.     Noontime of my one hour.

Saw down the bright noon street the crooked faces
Among the tall daylight in the city of change.
The scene has walls        stone        glass        all my gone life
One wall a web through which the moment walks
And I am open, and the opened hour
The world as water-garden        lying behind it.
In a city of stone, necessity of fountains,
Forces

Adrienne Rich, 1973

A man in terror of impotence
or infertility, not knowing the difference
a man trying to tell something
howling from the climacteric
music of the entirely
isolated soul
yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego
music without the ghost
of another person in it, music
trying to tell something the man
does not want out, would keep if he could
gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy
where everything is silence and the
beating of a bloody fist upon
a splintered table

Allen Ginsberg, 1980

Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof
out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross
surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers
'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking
your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn.
I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.
O Thought, now you'll have to think the same thing forever!

William Blake, 1793

Why should I care for the men of Thames
Or the cheating waves of charter'd streams
Or shrink at the little blasts of fear
That the hireling blows into my ear

Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames
Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me
I was born a slave but I go to be free.

Patti Smith, from Early Works 1970--1979

picture this. I’ll play the killer. 16 millimeter.
ebony and ivory. the purest contrast. iris closed.
open sesame. a screen of creamy white satin.
on that wedding lap a white persian cat. a pale
hand pets. milk purr. pan up slow. it’s me see.
in a black silk suit. dark glasses. kid gloves.
as sinister as the law allows. I’ve returned
from the opera. prowl cat tom cat.
if I’m male it doesn’t matter.

I’m on the ledge. that’s a several story drop.
how did I execute my brilliant cat walk? that’s
up to you, franju. but there I am. perched on her
window sill like a dirty bluebird. the back of my
neck is wet. I sit there what seems for hours.
a human chess game. she makes the first move.

it’s quite simple. she gets up to adjust her
sloppy stocking. her easter spikes could use
some vaseline. her matt gesture is reflected
in black patent leather. shoot to the ruffled
vanity. mirror image. look at the kisser
gazing

Hart Crane, 1926

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Catullus, trans. Carl Sesar 1974

Quaenam te mala mens, miselle Rauide,
agit praecipitem in meos iambos?
quis deus tibi non bene aduocatus
uecordem parat excitare rixam?
an ut peruenias in ora uulgi?
quid uis? qualubet esse notus optas?
eris, quandoquidem meos amores
cum longa uoluisti amare poena.

Lost your mind Ravidus, you poor ass,
landing smack into one of my poems like this?
Is some god getting you into trouble
because you didn't say your prayers right?
Or are you just out to get talked about?
What do you want? To be famous, never mind how?
Okay you will, and being that it's my girl you're after,
you're going to suffer for a long, long time.