art – Renaissance Guy

On Horror Films

Recently, I was confronted with a poll regarding my favorite horror film. This was only slightly awkward, as, of the films listed as options, I had seen… none.

Broadly speaking, I do not see fit to use my personal time to make myself experience negative emotions. Also, since the majority of horror films tend to focus on narrow, contrived circumstances and be driven by a supernatural, usually vaguely biblical demon, I find it difficult to suspend disbelief and buy into the premise. To me, the far better horror experiences have been disaster films, in particular those like Threads or By Dawn’s Early Light. Also certain alternate history films, in particular the HBO film, Fatherland, which did more to get across the real horror of the holocaust and genocide to thirteen year old me than six months of social studies lessons.

To wit, the only bona-fide horror film I’ve seen was something about Satan coming to haunt elevator-goers for their sins. Honestly I thought it was exceedingly mediocre at best. However, I saw this film at a birthday party for a friend of mine, the confidant of a previous crush. I had come to know this girl after she transferred to our public middle school from the local catholic school. We saw this film at her birthday party, which was, in the manner of things, perceived as the very height of society, in the pressence of an overwhelmingly female audience, most of whom my friend had known from St. Mary’s. Apparently to them the film was excellent, as many professed to be quite scared, and it remained the subject of conversation for some months afterward.

I have come to develop three alternative hypotheses for why everyone but myself seemed to enjoy this distinctly mediocre film. The first is that I am simply not a movie person and was oblivious to the apparent artistic merit of this film. This would fit existing data, as I have similarly ambiguous feelings towards many types of media my friends generally seem to laud. This is the simplest explanation, and thus the null hypothesis which I have broadly accepted for the past half-decade or so.

The second possible explanation is that, since the majority of the audience except for myself was Catholic, attended Catholic Church, and had gone to the Catholic primary school in our neighborhood, and because the film made several references to Catholic doctrine and literature, to the point that several times my friend had to lean over and whisper the names and significance of certain prayers or incantations, that this carried extra weight for those besides myself. Perhaps I lacked the necessary background context to understand what the creators were tying to reach for. Perhaps my relatively secular and avowedly skeptical upbringing had desensitized me to this specific subset of supernatural horror, while the far more mundane terrors of war, genocide, and plague fill much the same role in my psyche.

The third alternative was suggested to me by a male compatriot, who was not in attendance but was familiar with all of the attendees, several years after the fact, and subsequently corroborated by testimony from both male and female attendees. The third possibility is that my artistic assessment at the time was not only entirely on point, but was the silent majority opinion, yet that this opinion was suppressed consciously or unconsciously for social reasons. Perhaps, it has been posited to me, the appearance of being scared was for my own benefit? Going deeper, perhaps some or all of the motivation to see a horror film at a party of both sexes was not entirely platonic?

It is worth distinguishing, at this point, the relative numbers and attitudes of the various sexes. At this party, there were a total of about twenty teenagers. Of this number, there were three or four boys (my memory fails me as to exact figures), including myself. I was on the guest list from the beginning as a matter of course; I had been one of the birthday girl’s closest friends since she arrived in public school, and perhaps more importantly, her parents had met and emphatically approved of me. In fact I will go so far as to suggest that the main reason this girl’s staunchly traditionalist, conservative parents permitted their rebellious teenage daughter to invite boys over to a birthday party was because they trusted me, and believed my presence would be a moderating influence.

Also among the males in attendance were the brother of one of the popular socialite attendees, whose love of soap operas and celebrity gossip, and general stylistic flamboyance had convinced everyone concerned that he was not exactly straight; my closest friend, who was as passive and agreeable a teenager as you will ever have the pleasure to know; and a young man whose politics I staunchly disagreed with and who would later go on to have an eighteen month on and off relationship with the birthday girl, though he did not know it at the time.

Although I noticed this numerical gender discrepancy effectively immediately, at no point did it occur to me that, were I so motivated, I could probably have leveraged these odds into some manner of romantic affair. This, despite what could probably be reasonably interpreted as numerous hints to the effect of “Oh look how big the house is. Wouldn’t it be so easy for two people to get lost in one of these several secluded bedrooms?”

Although I credit this obliviousness largely to the immense respect I maintained for the host’s parents and the sanctity of their home, I must acknowledge a certain level of personal ignorance owing mainly to a lack of similar socialization, and also to childhood brain damage. This acute awareness of my own past, and in all likelihood, present, obliviousness to social subtleties is part of why I am so readily willing to accept that I might have easily missed whatever aspect of this film made it so worthwhile.

In any case, as the hypothesis goes, this particular film was in fact mediocre, just as I believed at the time. However, unlike myself with my single-minded judgement based solely on the artistic merits and lack thereof of the film, it is possible that my female comrades, while agreeing in the abstract with my assessment, opted instead to be somewhat more holistic in their presentation of opinions. Or to put it another way, they opted to be socially opportunistic in the ability to signal their emotional state. As it was described to me, my reaction would then, at least in theory, be to attempt to comfort and reassure them. I would assume the stereotypical role of male defender, and the implications therewith, which would somehow transmogrify into a similarly-structured relationship.

Despite the emphatic insistence of most involved parties, with no conclusive confession, I remain particularly skeptical of this hypothesis, though admittedly it does correlate with existing psychological and sociological research on terror-induced pair-bonding. I doubt I shall ever truly understand the horror genre. It would be easy to state categorically that there is no merit to trying to induce negative emotions without cause, and that those who wish to use such experiences as a cover for other overtures ought simply get over themselves, but given that, as things go, this is an apparently victimless crime, and seems to being a great deal of joy to some people, it is more likely that this issue lies more in myself than the rest of the world.

To a person who seeks to understand the whole truth in its entirety, the notion that there are some things that I simply do not have the capacity to understand is frustrating. Knowing that there are things which other people can comprehend, yet I cannot, is extremely frustrating. More than frustrating; it is horrifying. To know that there is an entire world of subtext and communication that is lost to me; that my brain is damaged in such a way that I am oblivious to things that are supposed to be obvious, is disconcerting to the point of terrifying.

I will probably never know the answer to these questions, as at this point I am probably the only one who yet bothers to dwell on that one evening many moons ago. It will remain in my memory an unsolved mystery, and a reminder that my perception is faulty in ways imperceptible to me, but obvious to others. It might even be accurate to say that I will remain haunted by this episode.

Happy Halloween.

Halloween Video Games

With Halloween imminent, I thought I’d review some video games that I think are apropos for the season, and that I might recommend if one is looking for something to kill some time on for a solo Halloween. None of these are horror games, but I consider all of them to be in some form or another, dark. Not in aesthetics either. Not from aesthetics either, but in theming and story.

DEFCON

The tagline is “everybody dies”, and they’re not too far off the mark. If you’ve ever seen the movie WarGames, then this is basically that game. This game simulates global thermonuclear war. You have a complete arsenal of strategic weapons, including nuclear-armed aircraft, fleets, and ICBMs. In the base game, you gain two points for every million enemies killed, and lose one point for every million casualties taken. The game isn’t detailed, and it prioritizes gameplay over realism wherever there is a tradeoff, but it is still haunting. You are in complete control of a superpower, and yet are nigh powerless to prevent massive and irreversible devastation, because even if you’re merciful to your enemy, your enemy won’t be to you.

The level of detail is minimalist in such a way that it gives your imagination just enough fodder to work with. You can see the renditions of individual, nameless pilots, and real life cities, and can’t help but fill in the details. Each point measures a million people dead, and you can see how many survivors are still around to kill. All rounded of course. At this scale, you can only ballpark to the nearest million or so. You have as much data and detail as a real nuclear commander would have, and nothing more.

One of the things I found most chilling: the default speed for the game is in real time. Let that sink in. If you’re playing in a basement away from windows, it is entirely possible to imagine that a WarGames style scenario has happened, and you’re watching the end of the world in real time. And just like in real life, you can’t pause or quit once you’ve started, until there is a victor (yes, this is annoying when you’re actually playing, but the statement gets through). The online manual takes this a step further, including in its instructions on setup and play strategies, pages copied directly from actual Cold War civil defence pamphlets, describing in terrifying detail, how to build a fallout shelter for you and your computer.

Plague Inc.

Back when I was in primary school, there was this game called Pandemic II (it still exists, it’s just really old and outdated), and the basic idea was that you were a disease trying to wipe out humanity. Plague Inc took this idea and ran with it, adding all kinds of new features, new interactivity, and new scenarios. The game calls itself “hyper-realistic”, which seems to be their way of saying it parodies the real world and takes everything to extreme, video-game/cartoon logic ends (One guy in China is coughing. Clearly the world needs to go to full scale pandemic alert).

Perhaps others disagree, but I always felt this rather undercut the game. Sure, it’s amusing to see that “Apple$oft is working on the iCure app”, but this doesn’t really make it emotionally engaging. It’s just too easy to wipe out the puny humans without really pausing to reflect on what you’re doing. I can see the juxtaposition they were going for, using cutesy bubbles and highly stylized graphics to display information about millions of casualties. The artist in me can even appreciate, and applaud the effort. I just don’t think they managed to pull it off.

This doesn’t make the game bad, by a long shot. It’s a great app game to kill some spare time, say, in the hospital waiting room (no, I’m not joking). For a game with such a heavy subject matter, it just doesn’t carry the weight well. In many respects, this makes it a better app game than a video game. You can wipe out all the humans in a short play session between IV changes, and without actually having to commit emotionally. But on this list, that’s a bad thing.

Prison Architect

As proof that you can tackle a heavy subject while still keeping simplistic, cartoon graphics, and a sandbox game, Prison Architect tackles a whole slew of heavy material. The game itself is pretty much all in the name: you build and administer a prison. In doing so, you make a variety of choices, big and small, which have moral, political, and strategic implications and consequences. Do you maintain order through the brute force, or balanced incentives? Do you aim primarily to rehabilitate, or punish? Are you willing to bend human rights to satisfy a tight budget?

These aren’t questions that are pitched to you directly through narrative. Even in a sandbox game, these are all still legitimate strategic questions that you have to contend with. There aren’t developer-ordained right answers, though there are consequences. If you treat your prisoners too badly, and they will be more motivated towards violence and escape. Forget to lay down the law, and they will walk all over you; to say nothing of your company’s shareholders, who are footing the bill for all this expensive “rehabilitation”.

This game does a lot to show, in an approachable, understandable way, a lot about the current situation in regards to criminal justice and the debate about reforming it. It shows how you can get to a place with such an atrocious system as we have in the US today acting from perfectly good (or at least, defensible) intentions, while also demonstrating some of the paths forward, including the costs that need to be considered. It tackles real world themes that we often shy away from, because they’re dark and ethically charged, without, as I usually put it, “The author standing over you and beating you with a sack of morals”.

Papers Please

This game is often described as a “bureaucracy simulator”, which is dark and depressing in and of itself, but the theming and story of the game take this further. Your work as a border checkpoint officer takes place in a brutal totalitarian regime, where failure to follow the rules means certain death. Even the unwritten rules. Especially the unwritten rules.

It is incredibly difficult to be a “good person” in this game, because in order to have the resources to do the right thing, you have to be good enough at your job to not be replaced (or arrested, or killed, or some combination thereof). Which means you have to be good at picking out the smallest discrepancies in paperwork, and ruthlessly enforcing the order of the day. Which means you develop a certain paranoia and disdain towards, well, everyone. (“You changed your name. A likely story. Guards, arrest her!”)

The game manages to not be ham-fisted in the way it presents player choices (most of the time) while also not pulling any punches. This game also manages to humanize a particular kind of job that tends to get the brunt of a lot of criticism: the poor schmo on the ground responsible for implementing bureaucratic orders, in this case, government security and immigration directives, and absorbing the abuse of the people on the receiving end. You can see how this position is both terrible to start with, and could easily wear a person down into being a terrible person.

Honorable Mention: Democracy series

This isn’t exactly dark, though it can be. It is, as the name implies, a democracy simulator. You play as someone in a position of power in a country, and you need to balance your policies carefully, not just to keep your country afloat, but to appease your constituents. It isn’t realistic by a long shot, but it does a good job of getting across the central message: every policy comes with a cost and a tradeoff.

What’s right may not be popular. What’s needed to keep the country from plummeting into fiery chaos tomorrow may not be popular, or even workable, today. This can be really frustrating and depressing if you’re the idealistic type, or if you favor niche policies that aren’t added into the game. If you really just want to force your agenda through, you can always fiddle around with the difficulty settings, and can exploit some quirks of the game. Or you can do as I do: invoke emergency powers to have your critics dragged from their homes and imprisoned without trial. Admittedly this won’t do much for your approval rating, and won’t stop you from being voted out of office (somehow, your fanatical police state can’t seem to rig elections properly), or being assassinated (an unlimited secret police budget, and they can’t stop one idiot with a gun?).

My biggest complaint about this series is that the fingerprints of the developer are all over which policies work and which don’t. Policies are blunt and one dimensional (maybe this is more accurate than I give credit for), and change is either immediate and dramatic (you can effectively abolish religion, capitalism, and liberalism in one term) or nonexistent (I have complete censorship, and yet somehow attack ads against me are sending my administration into a tailspin), and the policies you can implement tend to be, with a few exceptions, pretty bland and generic.

What Comes Next?

So, as you may remember from a few days ago, I am now officially-unofficially done with classes. This is obviously a relief. Yet it is also dizzyingly anticlimactic. For so long I was solely focused on getting done the schoolwork in front of me that I never once dared to imagine what the world would look like when I was done. Now I am, and the answer is, to summarize: more or less the same as it looked when I was still working.

There is now an interesting paradox with my schedule. The list of things that I have to do each day is now incredibly short, and comprises mostly on those items which are necessary to my day to day survival; I have to make sure I eat, and shower, and get to the doctors’ offices on time. Beyond that I have almost no commitments. I have no local friends with whom I might have plans, nor any career that requires certain hours of me, nor even any concrete future path for my further education (I was, and still am prevented from making such plans because my school still cannot provide an up to date and accurate transcript, which is a prerequisite to applying).

At the same time, now that I have some semblance of peace in my life, for the first time in memory, there are plenty of things which I could do. I could go for a pleasant walk in the park. I could take to the streets and protest something. I could fritter away countless hours on some video game, or some television series. I could write a blog post, or even several. My options are as boundless as my newfound time. Yet for as many things as I could do, there are few things that I need to do.

Moreover, almost all of here things that I could do require some degree of proactive effort on my part. In order to sink time into a video game, for example, I would first have to find and purchase a game that interests me, which would first require that I find a means to acquire, and run said game on my hardware (the bottleneck isn’t actually hardware on my end, but internet speed, which in my household is so criminally slow that it does not meet the bare minimum technical specifications for most online distribution platforms).

As problems go… this isn’t particularly problematic. On the contrary, I find it exhilarating, if also new and utterly terrifying, to think that I now command my own time; indeed, that I have time to command. In the past, the question of time management was decidedly hollow, given that I generally had none. My problem, as I insisted to an unsympathetic study skills teacher, was not that I categorically made poor use of time, but that I only possessed about three productive hours in a day in which to complete twelve hours of schoolwork. The only question involved was which schoolwork I focused on first, which was never truly solved, as each teacher would generally insist that their subject ought be my highest priority, and that all of their class work was absolutely essential and none could be pared down in accordance with my accommodations.

Nevertheless, while my new state of affairs isn’t necessarily problematic, it certainly has the potential to become so if I allow myself to become entranced in the siren song of complacency and cheap hedonism. I am aware that many people, especially people in my demographic, fall prey to various habits and abuses when lacking clear direction in life, therefore I have two primary aims in the time that it will take the school to produce the necessary paperwork for me to move on to higher education.

First, I need to keep busy, at least to an extent that will prevent me from wallowing; for wallowing is not only unproductive, but generally counterproductive, as it increases feelings of depression and helplessness, and is associated with all manner of negative medical outcomes.

Second, I need to keep moving forward. I am well aware that I often feel most hopeless when I cannot see any signs of progress, hence why much of the past five years has been so soul-crushing. In theory, it would be quite easy to occupy my time by playing video games and watching television; by building great structures of Lego and then deconstructing them; or even by writing long tracts, and then destroying them. But this would provide only a physical, and not a mental defense against wallowing. What I require is not merely for my time to be occupied, but an occupation in my time.

I am therefore setting for myself a number of goals. All of these goals are relatively small scale, as I have found that when setting my own goals as opposed to working under the direction of others, I tend to work better with small, tactically minded checklist-style agendas than vague, grand strategies. Most of these goals are relative mundanities, such as shifting around money among accounts, or installing proper antivirus software on a new laptop. All of these goals are intended to keep me busy and nominally productive. A few of them have to do with my writing here.

I generally detest people who post too much of their day to day personal affairs online, particularly those who publish meticulous details of their daily efforts to meet one target or another. However, having my goals publicly known has in past attempts seemed to be a decent motivator of sorts. It forces me to address them in one way or another down the line, even if all I do by addressing them is explain why they haven’t happened yet. If there is a reasonable explanation, I do not feel pressure; if there is not, I feel some compulsion to keep my word to myself and others. So, here are a few of my goals as they regard this blog:

1) I am looking at getting a gallery page set up which will allow me to display the photos that I have taken personally in one place, as well as showing off some of my sketches, which people say I ought to. Aside from being nice for people who like to look at pictures, having a gallery, or a portfolio if you will, has been a thing that I have wanted to have in my life since my first high school art class, as part of my quest to be a pretentious, beret-wearing, capital-a Artist, and people have been clamoring to see more of my pictures and sketches of late. My aim is to have this page in working order before thanksgiving.

2) I am also working on getting that fictional story I keep mentioning polished up for launch. The reason it hasn’t gone up yet is no longer that I haven’t written necessary materials, but that I am still working on getting the backend set up so that it displays nicely and consistently. I’m also still writing it, but I’m far enough along writing it that I can probably start posting as soon as I get the technical hijinks worked out.

This story was scheduled to start some time at the beginning of last month. However, a major glitch in the plugin I was aiming to use to assist its rollout caused a sitewide crash (you may remember that part), and subsequently I had to go back to the drawing board. Because I am, quite simply, not a computer coding person, the solution here is not going to be technically elegant. What’s probably going to happen is that the story is going to be posted under a sub-domain with a separate install of WordPress, in order to keep fiction and nonfiction posts from becoming mixed up. I’m working on trying to make navigating between the two as painless as possible. The timeline on this one should be before thanksgiving.

3) I aim to travel more. This isn’t as strictly blog related, but it is something I’m likely to post about. Specifically, I aim to find a method by which I can safely and comfortably travel, with some degree of independence, despite my disability. My goal is to undertake a proof of concept trip before May of next year.

4) I want to write and create more. No surprises there.

This is likely to be the last post of the daily post marathon. That is, unless something strikes my fancy between now and tomorrow. I reckon that this marathon has served its intended purpose of bringing me up to date on my writings quite nicely. I have actually enjoyed getting to write something every day, even if I know that writing, editing, and posting two thousand words a day is not sustainable for me, and I may yet decide to change up my posting routine some more in the future.

The Fly Painting Debate

Often in my travels, I am introduced to interesting people, who ask interesting questions. One such person recently was a lady who was, I am told, raised on a commune as a flower child, and who now works in developing educational materials for schools. Her main work consists of trying to convey philosophical and moral questions to young children in ways that allow them to have meaningful discussions.

One such question, which she related to me, focused on a man she knew tangentially who made pieces of microscopic art. Apparently this man makes paintings roughly the width of a human hair, using tools like insect appendages as paintbrushes. These microscopic paintings are sold to rich collectors to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because of their size, they are not viewable without special equipment, and broadly speaking, cannot be put on display.

There is obviously a lot to unpack here. The first question is: Is what this man does art, especially if it cannot be enjoyed? My feeling is yes, for two reasons. First, there is artistic expression taking place on the part of the artist, and more importantly, the artwork itself does have an impact on its consumers, even if the impact is more from the knowledge of the existence of the piece than any direct observation. Secondly, the piecesare by their very existence intellectually stimulating and challenging, in a way that can provoke further questions and discussion.

Certainly they challenge the limits of size as a constraint of artistic medium. And these kinds of challenges, while often motivated by pride and hubris, do often push the boundaries of human progress as a whole, by generating interest and demand for scientific advancement. This criteria of challenging the status quo is what separates my bathroom toilet from Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”. Admittedly, these are fairly subjective criteria, but going any further inevitably turns into a more general debate on what constitutes art; a question which is almost definitionally paradoxical to answer.

The second, and to me, far more interesting question is: is this man’s job, and the amount he makes justifiable? Although few would argue that he is not within his rights to express himself as he pleases, what of the resulting price tag? Is it moral to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on such items that are objectively luxuries, that provide no tangible public good? How should we regard the booming business of this man’s trade: as a quirky niche market enabled by a highly specialized economy and generous patrons willing to indulge ambitious projects, or as wasteful decadence that steals scarce resources to feed the hubris of a disconnected elite?

This points at a question that I keep coming back to in my philosophical analyses, specifically in my efforts to help other people. Is it better to focus resources on smaller incremental projects that affect a wider number of people, or larger, more targeted projects that have a disproportionate impact on a small group?

To illustrate, suppose you have five thousand dollars, and want to do the moral utilitarian thing, and use it to improve overall happiness. There are literally countless ways to do this, but let’s suppose that you want to focus on your community specifically. Let’s also suppose that your community, like my community, is located in a developed country with a generally good standard of living. Life may not always be glamorous for everyone, but everyone has a roof over their head and food on the table, if nothing else.

You have two main options for spending your five thousand dollars.

Option 1: You could choose to give five hundred people each ten dollars. All of these people will enjoy their money as a pleasant gift, though it probably isn’t going to turn anyone’s life around.

Option 2: You could choose to give a single person five thousand dollars all at once.

I’m genuinely torn on this question. The first option is the ostensibly fairer answer, but the actual quality of life increase is marginal. More people benefit, but people probably don’t take away the same stories and memories as the one person would from the payout. The increase in happiness here is basically equivocal, making them a wash from a utilitarian perspective.

This is amplified by two quirks of human psychology. The first is a propensity to remember large events over small events, which makes some sense as a strategy, but has a tendency to distort trends. This is especially true of good things, which tend to be minimized, while bad things tend to be more easily remembered. This is why, for example, Americans readily believe that crime is getting worse, even though statistically, the exact opposite is true.

The second amplifier is the human tendency to judge things in relative terms. Ten dollars, while certainly not nothing, does not make a huge difference relative to an annual salary of $55,000, while $5,000 is a decent chunk of change. Moreover, people will judge based relative to each other, meaning that some perceived happiness may well be lost in giving the same amount of money to more people.

This question comes up in charity all the time. Just think about the Make a Wish Foundation. For the same amount of money, their resources could easily reach far more people through research and more broad quality of life improvements. Yet they chose to focus on achieving individual wishes. Arguably they achieve greater happiness because they focus their resources on a handful of life-changing projects rather than a broader course of universal improvement.

Now, to be clear, this does not negate the impact of inequality, particularly at the levels faced in the modern world. Indeed, such problems only really appear in stable, developed societies where the the value of small gifts is marginal. In reality, while ten dollars may not mean a great deal to myself or my neighbor, it would mean the difference between riches and poverty in a village facing extreme poverty in a developing nation. Also, in reality, we are seldom faced with carefully balanced binary options between two extremes.

The question of the microscopic artist falls into a grey area between the two extremes. As a piece of art, such pieces invariably contribute, even if only incrementally, to the greater corpus of human work, and their creation and existence contributes in meaningful and measurable ways to overall human progress.

There is, of course, the subjective, and probably unanswerable question of to what degree the wealthy collector buyers of these pieces are derive their enjoyment from the artistic piece itself, or from the commodity; that is, whether they own it for artistic sake, or for the sake of owning it. This question is relevant, as it does have some bearing on what can be said to be the overall utilitarian happiness derived from the work, compared to the utilitarian happiness derived from the same sum of resources spent otherwise. Of course, this is unknowable and unprovable.

What, then, can be made of this question? The answer is probably not much, unless one favors punitively interventionist economic policy, or totalitarian restrictions on artistic expression. For my part, I am as unable to conclusively answer this question as I can answer the question of how best to focus charitable efforts. Yet I do think it is worthwhile to always bear in mind the trade offs which are being made.

Do You Wanna Build a Castle

Pictured below is my most recent project. It requires no real explanation.

I happen to like Lego bricks, perhaps more than is considered appropriate for one my age. They are one of my preferred media for experiencing the joys of creation, which I have previously mentioned as one of the major sources of joy in my life. I find that they provide a good midpoint between creating still images, which in my cases involves mostly sketches, and writing stories in text. Still images convey singular moments, or else discrete concepts. Writing, although it can be used to describe a setting in a single point in time, is generally better adapted to stories. Writing also usually requires a level of cognitive function that is, if not above, then at least, distinct most other options.

My first real experience with lego bricks was while I was hospitalized and recovering from severe neurological trauma as a result of medically-unexplained encephalitis. As part of my care, I was referred to “play therapy”, that is, play-based cognitive therapy. In my case, this meant being observed when given a tub of Lego bricks. I have come to regard this medicinal approach as ironic, given that Lego is derived from butchered danish meaning “play well”.

Whether it was the play therapy or the cocktail of drugs, I did recover, and, much to the pleasant surprise of my cognitive therapists, regained virtually all of the ability I had lost. Once I began to feel slightly better, I began to experiment with the up of bricks I had been assigned. I began to build structures atop the rolling tray table that was supposed to hold my food at mealtime. Eventually I was granted an extra tray solely for my creations. My myriad specialists were always impressed with my construction progress each time they came in for rounds.

Having truly nothing else to do, seeing as my access to the hospital’s computer entertainment systems had been suspended, and my TV time restricted after I had my first seizure, I began to devote more time to building a comprehensive city. It was escapism, and it was encouraged by all of my factors. Being limited on the number of bricks, I began to experiment with various methods of creating facades and Potemkin structures. I used the space inside these structures to smuggle extra condiments, seasonings, and small packages of foodstuffs.

Many weeks later, when my neutrophils plummeted to a point that I was in more imminent danger in the hospital than at home, I was, without buildup or ceremony, booted out of the hospital. Much to my disappointment, my grand City was disassembled and taken away (though I did get a passing chuckle upon seeing the look of the staff’s faces when discovering that my city contained in it more snacks and condiments than the ward kitchen). My parents were given a list of prescriptions, a list of symptoms to look out for, and a phone number to call if they should notice me having another seizure, but other than that, we were on our own.

As soon as I got my hands on another Lego set, I began building anew. Part of this was the obvious desire to reconstruct and avenge my previous creation. Mostly, though, it was a sense of comfort. It was something I could do, even in this strange new world of having to take pills that slowed down my thinking and avoiding strobes on the television. I could still build something, and I could do it in a format that was universal. Even if not everyone understood my specific logic of city planning, everyone could recognize an obvious house, or a farm, or a city park.

Looking back, it was about two years before my new city eclipsed that which I had built up using the hospital’s resources. My city went through its boom and bust cycles as I saved up my pocket money for new sets, and as I discovered new ways of structuring my buildings. While I enjoyed playing with the minifigures, constructing and imagining fierce battles between Star-Wars shock troopers and entrenched medieval wizards, what I enjoyed most of all was working on the city as a whole. Whether it was adding new buildings, or converting an unused plot into a massive skyscraper, or rerouting traffic to make it more efficient, I thrived on making the whole thing grow.

As time wore on, and the long term effects of sudden, massive brain trauma began to surface, I came to rely on my city as a place of solace. Perhaps I might be temporarily unable to read and write or even speak coherently. Perhaps a migraine had dashed all my plans to be productive and meet my goals. Perhaps I had simply had a bad day and required a break. Whatever the case, as long as I could manipulate my fingers with some degree of accuracy, I could build. I didn’t need to explain myself, or even conform to a set standard. I could build what I wanted. I could design my stories in three dimensions, not having to rely on my memory or my ability to convey concepts using words.

Having a massive Lego metropolis in our basement has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just like with any major collectible hobby, Lego sets have become the obvious choice for birthday and Christmas presents. Friends comment on the size of our display, which ensures that I make an effort to add to it, or at least, change it up, before people come over. It is a virtuous cycle. Personally, I do not believe our collection is particularly large. It always feels to me as though we are just a few sets short of a genuinely remarkable construction. On the other hand, we do have the largest collection of any person or family I have personally met.

Today, our city comprises four separate tables, and is divided loosely into zones. There is one zone which is a permanent combat scene, where an anachronistic stew of Star Wars troops and vehicles seek to dislodge the well-entrenched rebel base, comprised mostly of outdated fighters and crossbow-wielding knights. There is a touristy recreational area built around the newly-constructed Cinderella’s Castle and loosely based on the planning style of Disney World. There is the main citadel and downtown area, abound with skyscrapers and inner city traffic. Finally, there is the uptown district, comprising the theatre and historic castle fortress, as well as some urban industrial zones. All of them are constantly growing and changing. It is a constant, giant story, handmade, and never truly completed. It is simultaneously a metaphor for my own struggles, and a contrast to them.