# sn Says:
March 24th, 2009 at 1213

*Disclaimer in order to fulfill a duty of care: This will most likely result in huge-ass multi posts. I’ll be very surprised if not. End of disclaimer.

I should say this at some point and it might as well be this one. I considered saying it during the (new) Braid review though now that I’ve read this one it presents an even better opportunity. I love Tim’s articles (reviews, LPN posts, etc.); they are uplifting, mind-blowing and inspiring. And even though I’m not in the habit of having fun I am again and again surprised by Tim’s creativity and I do laugh an awful lot when I read — say for example this review — so I suppose it’s fair to say that they are great fun for me. And when I say that I love them I must clarify that I am not a man who thinks that we should all use the verb “love” less often and only in conjunction with gravely important, eternal relationships of divine making; we all know that romanticism is bullshit so let’s not confine that nice feeling word to describing something bullshitty. I love Tim’s reviews and when I say that I’m being more honest and genuine than I’ve ever been when I said “I love you” to a girl. In retrospect.

That seems to be what I came up with for an introduction right now. Off to a vaguely homo-erotic start. Rectifying this right now with mention of blatantly homophobic music genre.

Because the middle part is this: I listen to rap occasionally and Kanye West impressed me with the thought that “If you admire somebody you should go ahead and tell them, people never get the flowers while they can still smell them”. And indeed, pretty much all of my idols are long dead and gone and I have no way of showing them my appreciation. Even worse than that, I know that some of them haven’t been much appreciated by any of their contemporaries. Now I am not a man that suffers from insomnia by any stretch of the word yet that’s the sort of real-life cruelty that I find my thoughts revolving around, keeping me awake late at night, on some nights. As Tim might or might not know by a glance at his inbox, I don’t normally jump out of bed in these situations to glue my tired mole eyes to a monitor and write huge appreciation letters. I pretty much just hope that someone else does that anyways RIGHT THAT INSTANT and thus the balance is upkept, justice is done, all is good and all is good without me having to have moved a single digit of a single finger on a single hand, touching a single key on my (singular) keyboard to make it happen. Now, no one has ever called me a cynic in all the 24 years of my life even though I have always surrounded myself with people smart enough to know the meaning of that word well enough and while I take that as empirical evidence gathered from a large enough group to be representative that I’m not a cynic, I yet have doubts as to the accuracy of my pleasantly positive imagination. So yes, right now I’m going to openly accuse the world of not being a nice enough place for good things to always happen to good men in timely fashion. Let me be cynical enough to accuse the world of NOT being a German precision cuckoo clock that shoots out a mechanical cuckoo singing friendly major thirds every time a man looks desperately for his pocket watch and can’t seem to find it in ANY of his coat-, trouser- OR vest pockets, before I go to rectify this situation (with the timepiece of my own).

(An aside, while on the subject of time: Happy 30st birthday, Tim. (You may keep that sentence unread until the appropriate day has come.)

Even though I am not a man that pays much attention to coincidences it MAY be that the first time I ever read anything written by Tim was when he was approximately as old as I am now. I THINK that might have been the time when he was homeless in Japan, with oily hair and an itching scalp. In another strange turn of coincidental events I have just washed my hair because my scalp was killing me — rather, my scratching of my scalp was killing me because it started to hurt more than soothe. The itching came in a flash and not because of improper hygiene. As a scientific man I don’t speak much about mysteries yet this itch was something of a mystery. I connect it with the fact that I have consumed large amounts of Red Bull over the last few days while at the same time not sleeping for either one night or two, memory and perception of time being spotty at this point, and certainly my nerves and synapses and all the good things in my body would like to get some rest to balance themselves out during sleep; get a chance to — like a giant pendulum — finally overstep the peak of their momentum and go down after going up for a jolly long time; to swing deeply and grandly to the other side for a change and for refreshment. As a funny aside and to provide another vague coincidental connection I’ll mention that I was up and running for the last days in part because I worked on a transcript for a company that has something to do with Brandon Sheffield, who has something to do with Insert Credit, which has something to do with Tim Rogers, who might have something to do with my scalp itch and definitely has to do with my writing about it.

My scalp no longer itching has to do with cool water and olive shampoo.

I consider Tim Rogers to be a genius and with genius being a label that I’d like to see applied to myself one day I also consider him an abstract role model. I say abstract because I mean that I can do without some of the particulars. I can do without both, scalp itch and excessive hair care products. I can do without a Korean semi adult-model girlfriend because I prefer Hungarian and Brazilian adult models anyway and I can do without being homeless for years in the Society Of The Future — Japan, — because being homeless for a night in the Society Of The Antique — Greece, — was enough to get a million points across.

Speaking of millions. Not only do I consider Tim a source of inspiration and my own personal entertainer whose funny pages I click for jokes and laughs several times a month, no, he is also my favorite horror movie monster whose dramatic life I follow with a sweaty fist clenched absent-mindedly in a bowl of cold microwave popcorn. That popcorn flew all over the place when I learned that Tim Rogers had become — after years of poverty — richer than a motherfucker; I pumped my fist so hard that I wondered and pondered if I’ll ever feel that strongly for myself on, or after, the day that I’ll finally manage to drag financial liberation into my life by the hair and keep it there. I don’t think I’ll feel as strongly. I suppose I will lie on my bed and listen to Jay-Z’s Black Album — maybe twice — with an untouched glass of pineapple juice balancing on my stomach and feel slightly guilty for everything and nothing in particular. It’s just great to see people that I consider better than myself succeed. And Tim’s among the best I know of; he’s a genius.

I’m looking forward to many more great successes of his in the future.

That sounds like I’m close to the end of this. Better make it mean something now.

I’m looking forward to the Tim Rogers videogames; even though I’m not a man that’s currently indulging in videogame pleasure (read: haven’t owned a game console for the last couple of years) I’d play those. And I’m also looking forward to the Tim Rogers Middle Ages (his middle ages), when he finally gets around to publishing novels — hopefully. (Yeah, well, and letting people know about them. Who knows what he has published in secret.) Then the days of printing out videogame reviews and gluing them into gutted paperback covers of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle will be over and I’ll have something to refer people to when they ask me about my favorite authors. Because lord knows the surefire way to never again be asked for book recommendations is to tell people to go to websites instead. Websites are not literature canon even when they display word combinations of equal brilliance as some of the best books out there. Books are literature and websites are somewhere between local rightist newspapers and World Cup edition toilet paper imprinted with quotes of things football players said in post-game interviews when their lactate levels were high enough to hinder intelligent thought.

So uhm. I don’t know if I’m the only one feeling this way or what. I don’t know if other people see the same things I’m seeing in Tim’s writing. I can say with certainty though that every article and review and essay of his I’ve read has transcended the importance of the thing it was written about. In my perception. For me, you know. When he writes about the evil doings of certain (at times) Japanese (videogame-)business men (some could be women in all actuality) then that creates a desire inside of me to do better than them — to right the wrongs of others; that’s, I mean, some huge something. Right there. And it’s not only that; there’s also the drive to — because of the excellence of his writing — top Tim himself. That’s definitely there. I certainly always reflect back on myself when I’m reading something, though most of the time I either go, “this is almost worthless to me” or “yeah, I can already do that and do it better too”. To me Tim’s excellence is as apparent and as clear to my mind as, say, size differences to my eyes. I read something Tim has written and it’s like looking at a skyscraper. It amazes me. I get an immediate sense of sophistication and history; the things that had to happen to make it happen — the causality of it.

What I really want to get across and make understood is that, when I’m reading something on here, at ABDN, it’s not a review of a game to me. It’s not about something that’s out there that I’m being informed about — a “product”, a videogame, the experience the reviewer has had with it, the thought processes, the ideas, the evils or the virtues and common sense that led to the creation of a game; it’s always about something being created inside of me. That’s because good writing shapes you as a person. It helps produce connections between synapses that have never been connected before. It re-wires your thoughts, makes you revise your behavior, gives you new perspectives, shows you and makes you realize the workings of systems that you’ve never even been aware of existed. Systems of human behavior, most importantly. Every sentence that you can derive meaning from is source code to the mind.

Somewhere in a comment around here Tim said that the more praise he(/they, ABDN) get the less likely he is to quit writing. I know that feeling.

I’m not a man that’s in the habit of giving praise though. I’m merely stating that I have a real world need for something that very few people can provide, and that’s the level of brilliance and genius that Tim possesses. My reason for not playing most of the videogames out there is similar to my reason for not eating junk food; my reason for reading everything that Tim writes about videogames is similar to my reason for eating a real world representation of the lower levels of the newest food pyramid every day. (Willett and Stampfer food pyramid, for those of you who want to look it up. I make it at least 500g of vegetables and 300g of fruits a day, more if I can; just saying because the amount’s often times not mentioned in the pyramid.)

And while I can pretty easily satisfy my stomach and thus all the systems feeding off of it with the food I’m getting, feeding the mind is harder. I think it could use some more to really thrive. I mean, I don’t wanna be unreasonable — I don’t go to one farmer and ask him to produce ALL the different kinds of food I need. I’ll just buy whatever he’s got to sell whenever he’s got it. (Tim Rogers: Organic Farming Of Ideas And Assorted Brilliance)

So yeah, Tim, I don’t really know what else to offer you to keep you productive and feeling good about what you do. I mean, I don’t see you asking for money anywhere (which is good) and I can’t code, so that’s out. So I’m praising you.

So yeah, Tim, I don’t really know what else to offer you to keep you productive and feeling good about what you do. I mean, I don’t see you asking for money anywhere (which is good) and I can’t code, so that’s out. So I’m praising you. And re-envisioning your concepts and way of writing, most certainly! So please, in everybody’s interest, keep from dying for as long as you can — just don’t — and keep on writing and sharing your thoughts, music, etc. with the rest of us, also, for as long as you can and as much as you can. There’s real demand out there and it’s not going to be satisfied any time soon.

Thanks,

Stefan