Good morning, beloved, and happy April.
— The first and most important thing I need to do this Sunday morning is thank you for your thoughtful expressions of concern for Olive and for us. We appreciate it more than words can convey.
I am relieved to be able to share the news that a firm diagnosis has come back; that what Olive is suffering from is a chronic but treatable condition; that she’s healing from surgery beautifully; and that at this time she’s expected to recover fully. To an extent, her life will be different from now on, and so will ours, but I feel like the worst of the shadow has passed over us.
Having said that, we’re all still feeling a little frazzled. The wisest thing I ever learned from an otherwise rather silly writer was to understand that at any given time most of the people you encounter on the sidewalk, on the bus, or in line for coffee should be thought of “the walking wounded.” Some awful proportion of them are shouldering their own invisible burden of grief and loss — maybe not in the acute, exhausting, more or less self-evident thousand-yard-stare phase, but present, real and sharply-felt nonetheless. The only thing any of us can do to lighten this burden in any way is to act with patience, compassion and consideration, in whatever way we can, to whatever degree the various pressures of our own lives allow us to muster them. It’s an observation whose truth I’ve had a good deal of time to contemplate these past two weeks, shambling through the days on autopilot as I have been, just TCB.
This writer, mind you, spoke to the question of loss with unimpeachable authority. He’d arrived at his insight under the hardest possible circumstances, after his fifteen-year-old daughter was beaten to death in the course of a botched robbery; more than most of us ever will, he knew what he was talking about on the subject of grief. If he was capable of walking through that unimaginable horror and coming out the other side with a renewed commitment to kindness and compassion, how can any of us possibly do any less?
Loss comes to all of us, an unavoidable consequence of the fundamental constraints of human existence. We live in a universe where love must contend with time, entropy and decay, where the forces arrayed against its survival are immense and implacable, and these vessels that contain it so terribly fragile. And that fragility is so acute that to spend too much time dwelling upon it can itself be crippling. But from time to time it’s good to be reminded of it, as an inoculation against cynicism and a reminder how much and how badly we need each other.
I dunno. Ringo said all of this better. I’m just babbling in relief. Thanks again, from all of us.
— Unlike many of you, periods of stress and depression are the only times I ever find any particular interest in games. This week having been one such interval for sure, I’ve been head-down in something called Swarm Simulator for the past few days. It’s a text-based resource-management game so profoundly old-school that I can easily imagine playing it on a TRS-80 — specifically, the TRS-80 in my neighbor Pam Stein’s father’s den, the only computer I had any kind of regular access to prior to 1987.
Swarm Simulator manages to be ferociously addictive, without any recourse at all to graphics, sound effects or the other paraphernalia we’ve come to associate with games played on computers. You start with nothing more than a very few larvae, from which you hatch drones to harvest resources; once you’ve gathered enough resources, your emerging swarm can support queens and various types of specialized warriors, and begin to grow itself nest by nest and hive by hive.
So far, so straightforward. But in no sense is Swarm Simulator really what it says on the tin. After awhile I started to think of it as the resource-management module of a larger, more complete and as-yet unfinished game. For one thing, it lacks even the most basic sense that these activities take place in an environment of any kind. A swarm’s ability to gather resources apparently isn’t affected by the weather, not even weather as rudimentary as, say, Lemonade Stand’s. The game is essentially aspatial — your swarm conquers “territory,” but this is purely an abstract and exponentially increasing counter that, if taken at face value, implies that a successful swarm comes to occupy an area unavailable on any surface this side of a Dyson sphere. Above all it refuses any notion that there might be other swarms contending for the available pool of resources, or for that matter that the swarm and its nests are vulnerable to predation, whether that of conspecifics or any other organism. This will doubtless disappoint anyone who cherished the thought of frenzied hive-on-hive battles for supremacy — otherwise known as Chitin:I, for those that remember the $3 beer-and-pretzel Metagames of the 1970s, as I am now outing myself as doing.
Taken together, these factors allow for unlimited growth, and in that sense Swarm Simulator can be understood by those so inclined as a kind of interactive parody of the late-capitalist logic of accumulation. (Not that I think that’s at all intended by the designers, but, y’know — death of the author and that.) At any rate, it soon enough became clear that something much weirder and more interesting was going on here than a mere naturalistic representation.
The first hint comes after the possibility of harvesting a resource class called “energy” arises, relatively early in the game; you learn that with sufficient energy, a swarm can, uh, warp time around itself. This has the practical in-game effect of rushing production, but it’s a pretty clear sign that whatever universe this simulation takes place in…it’s not ours. Then there are the military units that successively become available — “swarmlings,” “arachnomorphs” and “devourers,” where you might expect “spiders” and “worms,” and “goons” that “cannot fly on their own, but use metal to construct powerful flying exoskeletons that rule the skies.” (And just what kind of colonial insects are these, anyway, that they’re able to assemble a slave military of worms and giant spiders to capture territory on their behalf?) By the time you note the field for “Last Ascended at:” in the running tally of in-game statistics — and I haven’t yet Ascended, whatever that means, so no spoilers please — it’s obvious that Swarm Simulator is a whole lot closer in spirit to Phase IV than it is to a mere digital ant farm.
As the orders of magnitude pile up, the times-to-next-upgrade mount exponentially as well. It’s frustrating enough that I’ll have to wait a little over a day to build my next and final energy-channeling Nexus, but that’s far from the worst of it — the progress bar helpfully indicates that at my present rate of resource accumulation, I can’t expect the next upgrade to my Stinger-class warriors for “24.3946 million years.” I assume that I’ll tire of the game somewhat before then, or perhaps Ascendance will render it a moot point, but in any event I wanted to share Swarm Simulator with you if it’s the kind of thing you’d enjoy. I’ve certainly found it a welcome distraction at a not-super-fun moment in my life.
— Finally, I wanted to share with you this article on William Bunge, the “Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute” he co-founded with Gwendolyn Warren in the crisis-wracked year of 1968, and the critical practice of cartography they undertook. With uncompromising titles like “Where Commuters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downtown Track,” the DGEI maps furnish a point of view that’s by and large sorely missing from the contemporary practice of geographic data visualization, restored only slightly by projects like Million Dollar Blocks. This work sets a hugely important precedent, I’d only barely heard of it before, and as far as I’m concerned it deserves to be much better known and more widely influential. I’m grateful to Dee Morris and Stephen Voyce for their account of it.
Be kind to yourself, and take care of those around you,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 19 of Sunday, 5 April 2015, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊