The Drunk and The Ugly

Freedom has always come with asterisks, footnotes, and apologetic parentheticals. There is no total freedom; we are bound by causality, space, physics, time, ability, location, background, wealth, the limited freedoms of others. Yet, there are small freedoms every day in the choices we make, consciously or unconsciously, and in the infinite choices we choose not to make. Corporations, politicians, video bloggers, door-to-door salesmen will all try to manipulate that choice, but ultimately the power lies with you and the values you hold. You can impact this world, destroy infinite possibilities and create infinite more. So be vigilant. Understand yourself. Learn why you think in the ways you do and whether those thoughts line up with the kind of person you want to be. Because in a lonely world without inherent meaning, we have a responsibility to build our own meaning from the bottom up, through love, works, fighting for justice. Don’t let the wealthy and powerful define that meaning for you and maybe, just maybe, you can claim your freedom.

After All,

It’s Only Business

And Business is Closed.

“Lightless Dawn” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The docks had been closed for months now, its runners knee deep in one of the last and most powerful labor strikes in the city. No scab dared cross the picket line, the union bosses cold as ice and deeply respected by their allies. But as infrastructure in the city became ever more unwieldy, and liquid cash became easier than ever for the ever-larger shipping companies to dredge up, they simply didn’t need scab workers anymore. They had scab industries. Boatloads of shipping containers slowly moved from idle docks to scores of self-driving double-decker big rigs that clogged the arteries of highway travel. They moved to ever larger airshipping fleets, specializing in short-term contract deals that took up airport gates at random. They moved to new contracts demanding the receiving companies come pick it up themselves. And in special interest story after special interest story, the cable news shows mourned the losses of the average American at the hands of this noble yet thuggish strike. They didn’t need the dock workers anymore. But cutting ties wasn’t enough. They had to make it hurt.

After all,

It’s Only Business.

Side Chatter

“Lightless Dawn” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Addiction is a powerful thing. Or maybe more relevantly than addiction, the expectation of instant gratification and constant stimulation. The jury is out on just how addictive those cycles can be, and that jury may always be out, for its own concerning reasons. Children move from toy to phone to tablet and back, while adults move from phone to computer to television. These avenues have always been fine in moderation. But moderation limits profit. And always, the companies find a need, create one if necessary, and provide the solution that extracts as much value as the market can bear. And if you can claw your way to the top and buy out your competitors, it’s not the product they need anymore.

It’s you.

After all,

It’s Only Business.

“Lightless Dawn” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

It was the same as it had always been. “Open enough boxes of Cracker Jack” became “use your decoder goggles,” which became “get a full set of hidden stickers,” which became “scan the right QR code.” And always for a prize that could be, but was statistically unlikely to be, a higher cost than the variable number of items purchased to earn it. A model that manipulated dopamine, cultivated a sense of wonder, and perhaps most importantly, held statistically lower volatility and risk for larger-scale operations. Yet another model that slowly, insidiously, by law of averages, moved wealth up the chain to the toy megacorporations and conglomerates that set the market’s path. But it wasn’t a bad deal for the buyer. It let parents use the money they got from working at those corporations to provide moments of happiness for their children, while paying back into the system that put food on their table. And when it comes down to it, what market need could be more important than putting a smile on a child’s face?

After all,

It’s only business.

Side Chatter

“Lightless Dawn” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Look, gunshot wounds take a while to heal, okay?

After all,

It’s Only Business.

Side Chatter

“Lightless Dawn” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sometimes you get fucking shot.

After all,

It’s Only Business

“Lightless Dawn” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The casino business had changed. Not as much as anyone thought it was going to, but it had changed. With the advent of the chip that changed the world, sleep no longer existed in a meaningful way for most. The night stretched on and on, with anxiety and fatigue weighing you down. The sun takes away the light, and reminds you that you are cold and alone without it. A perfect opportunity for a company to bring in optimism, hope, kind faces, good food, and a gorgeous environment free from the petty differences of day and night. You could come in and play until you lost interest or your money ran dry, and coincidentally those were the top two reasons the House would prefer you not stick around.

But that was how the people changed, not the casino. The casino, on its own motivations, updated to meet the times. No more expensive upkeep of the room, or interior decorating to match what you could only hope the richest of your potential customers found appealing. Instead, an Alternate Reality display, letting all the decoration take place in your special casino glasses, guaranteed to make you look and feel and gamble like a cool person worth a lot of money. And those glasses made small changes here and there, to test you, to see what you liked, to see how your betting habits and spending increased through the connected casino interfaces. And those data could be sold to other casinos, to researchers, to advertisers, to build up the efficiency of the economic system that made society run. Everyone wins, in their own way. But mostly the House.

After all.

It’s Only Business.

“Lightless Dawn” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

There are few who would disagree that the meaning of life is more than the collection of good experiences to a degree that they maximally outweigh bad experiences. But how MUCH more? In their centuries of debating hedonism, utilitarianism, stoicism, and a hundred other worldviews, philosophers have considered the thought experiment of shaving down one’s brain to the minimum required to maintain consciousness and experience sensation, and placing it in a jar that continuously stimulates its pleasure centers until it dies a happy death. Under philosophies that maximize pleasure, they say, doing that to someone would not only be a good thing, but it might actually be a moral obligation. If pleasure is the only measure of a life well-lived, then such an absurd, destructive setup would perfect one’s life by definition. The very idea seems ridiculous.

On the other hand. Pleasure sells.

After all.

It’s Only Business.

“Lightless Dawn” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sometimes, when you work on your own for long enough, your plans become inseparable from you, attached irreparably to the way you think. This is all well and good until the plan leaves your grasp, and others start to grapple with it, only to find that what has been created wasn’t made for them, despite that being the original point of the project. Once past the rose-colored glasses, the plan becomes riddled with failure points, uninteresting, and frustrating, not because there’s anything wrong with the perspective of the recipient, but because that perspective wasn’t fully considered. When this occurs, there’s little to do but ask your friend to cut out a LARGE amount of frustrated side talk, question your self-worth as a GM, dread the premiere of the episode, and write a pretentious introduction paragraph in the style of your other pretentious introduction paragraphs to warn the listener.

After all.

It’s Only GMing.

My Bad.

Side Chatter

“Lightless Dawn” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The cogs continued to turn, squealing under the friction of the grit placed within them, but turning nonetheless. Tired, twitching fingers fretted at the keyboard, eyes bouncing between shorthand sections of past plans. The links were there, even if a good number of the boxes were marked with a small, passive aggressive “x”. At least when part of the plan failed, it didn’t require attention. It was like tossing a ball aside while juggling; the overall effect is diminished, but what remains is more reliable, more likely to work. With Project Lachesis standing at the forefront of his workflow, mental energy was always a resource to carefully ration for a rainy day.

Thunder was starting to echo on the horizon, but he continued to type, to work, to plan, to scheme.

After all,

It’s Only Business,

But maybe one day soon, that would finally change.

Side Chatter

“Lightless Dawn” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)