Thoughts On Disability From A Guy Who Should Be On It
When I first read NPR’s “Unfit for Work: the startling rise of disability in America,” it told me something I did not know: we haven’t actually reduced welfare costs in America.
Yes, we’ve managed to give less money via welfare to people who aren’t working… but disability costs have skyrocketed in recent years. And if you add the two together, it looks like a lot of people who were once on welfare have shifted to disability. And, so NPR argues, there’s a lot of cahoots among the folks who grant disability payments to only give those payments to the poorest and most deserving.
This fact has, crazily enough, created a backlash among liberals, who are furious that NPR – NPR! – would join the “liberal attacks” on the disabled. To quote Tiger Beatdown, “…she contributed to familiar hateful rhetoric about disability in the United States, and what it means to be disabled. Scroungers. Sucking off the government teat. Fakers. Lazy. Slackers.”
But I read that same story a week or two ago, and I saw none of that. And perhaps that’s because at this point in time, I should be (temporarily) disabled.
For those who are new here, I am a forty-three-old programmer who had a heart attack, and a triple-bypass surgery, about ten weeks back. Having a triple bypass is tough on the body; they crack your chest open like crab, breaking every single rib in the process, and then shove your lungs up and around so it takes about six weeks to get your breathing back. Even now, I still have problems lifting heavy objects (lest I strain the still-fragile ribs, which may not fully heal for another three months) and experience chronic exhaustion from the beta blockers.
And when I was in the Cardiac ICU, one of the case workers came up to me and said, “You’re going to need to take three months off from work. File the paperwork now. Get it in before they can deny you.”
Three months? I thought, being a fairly healthy person before that. What the hell could possibly render me unable to work for three months? And I trusted my job, who had done right by me for the thirteen (!) years I’d been working for them, and failed to file.
I thought I’d be back working full-time in three weeks. And while I was working part-time at four weeks, it took me until six weeks out until I’d say I was really back on the clock.
So those foolish, greedy bastards at the hospital just wanted me to suck at the teat of my employer, right? They were encouraging lazy slackers everywhere! Forcing my job to subsidize lazy wretches like me!
Wrong.
My job consists of sitting at a keyboard and thinking. That’s because I was lucky enough to have some connections and some college, and I lucked into a white-collar desk job. But before that, for a good eight years, my job consisted of working retail – which, inevitably, consists of standing on my feet for eight hours a day and lifting heavy boxes.
I still could not do that. I’ve recovered astonishingly quickly by heart patient standards, but if my job depended on me heaving around thirty-pound boxes of the latest Tom Clancy hardback? I’d be fucked. I’d be lying in front of the television, sweating the countdown, because at this point I’d have two weeks to go and if I couldn’t manage it by then, what the fuck would happen to me?
Now, admittedly, that’s just my temporary sojourn into the Land of the Disabled, and I’m lucky enough to get to walk out after a while. But that was a constant worry, even when I was young and hale and twenty-five: what if I threw out my back? Working for Borders, there were a lot of older guys with braces, chewing Advil like it was their last chance, wincing. And management, who was kind back in those days of well-managed Borders stores, found ways to work the system – shifting these less-physically able folks to slower-paced jobs when they didn’t have to, moving them to the cash register while the rest of us hauled hundreds of pounds of books back and forth. We all silently agreed we’d pick up the slack, if we could.
If we’d had a dickier management, those guys might have lost their jobs. I might have. My family has a history of bad backs.
And so, when NPR pointed out that more people than ever were on disability, that made total sense to me. In my white-collar phase of employment, a bad back was trivial; my work was all in my head and hands. But as a blue-collar or lower worker, you’re pretty much judged by your body… and if that can’t function, you can’t get a job. That bad back may be a permanent lockout from any job available to you, ever.
That’s a problem, because the growing class divide in America means that more people can only get work based on their physical output. There was a time when Americans could get good, white-collar, office jobs without a college diploma; those days are no more. There was a time when America’s manufacturing was robust enough to support hierarchies of management, so you might move up from the factory floor; again, that’s mostly dead.
What we as Americans don’t want to face is that our concept that “Anyone can make it in America!” is mostly a lie at this point. We have all of the social mobility of France or Britain. And the truth is, if you’re stuck in the lower tier of jobs, your ability to provide for your family is dependent on health. That flags, and you can’t bus tables for eight hours, mise well pack it in.
So to me, what Tiger Beatdown proclaimed was an article where NPR gave into the welfare-beating hatred of America, I saw as acknowledging a critical reality: we can’t make people work when we, as a society, have quietly engineered it so that the only jobs they can get are physical labor. Tiger Beatdown makes the grievous error of thinking that stating the fact of “Disability payments on the rise” is the same as “…and that’s a sign that we’re pandering to lazy assholes!”
No. What I read was an article where judges were desperately trying to be merciful to people in dire circumstances, tacitly acknowledging that there were two levels of existence in America and trying like hell to find the money for these bastards somewhere. I saw a hellish process that took forever to get onto, the kind of thing you could only get onto if you were both desperate and persistent. I saw NPR outlining a fiend’s bargain where you agreed to give up the rest of your working potential for a poverty-level $13,000 a year, forever, never getting a raise unless the government unlikely gave you one, forever condemned to living in poverty… and having that be the only sane option because you had some part of your body give out prematurely.
The problem I have with this “liberal attack” is that Tiger Beatdown let it be a liberal attack. I didn’t see slackers, or scroungers, in that article, and I think you’d have to hunt to find them. What I saw were people getting fucked over by a country that’s slowly grown callous to these folks, and a hard reality that despite years of conservative poor-bashing, there’s a lot of folks who would like to work who utterly cannot, because the system has failed them, and no amount of so-called “fiscal responsibility” can avoid the truth that we have to help them or things are going to get a lot worse.
What I saw was the most stinging indictment of conservative thought I’d seen in a while… And if conservatives saw that evidence as “scroungers,” then I think it’s high time to raise that banner high and say, “No, these people aren’t suckling on your teat, they’re relegated to terror, poverty, and disease because you’ve robbed them of low-cost health care, jobs with benefits, and education. Now you’re paying the bill, and that payment, as it turns out, cannot be avoided. So how do we actually fix America and stop demonizing these folks?”
Which is why I’m disappointed. Some people read a pretty goddamned sympathetic article and called them “slackers,” presumably because they had their heads up their asses. And rather than refuting those points and saying, “No, actually, this is how bad it is for poor folks that these limited options look good to them,” some liberals chose to yell at…. NPR.
I’m in the top 20% of America. I’ve got a lawyer for my wife and a highly technical job. And after I post this, I’ll go back to my job, laying on my couch for the next eight hours and refactoring some programs that need reworking. And I’ll think about how it might be if my wife worked at Denny’s, and my job was the stock room at Target, and shit, how the hell are we going to pay the bills when I’m falling asleep after eight hours of just sitting down?
I wouldn’t be a slacker, then. I’d be an ailing man in a dire situation. And by God, I hope someone would devise some better way of helping me than what we have now.
Catching The Right Life Preserver: Some Sloppy Writing Advice For Pantsers
So I just wrote 20,000 words that I had to throw away. Those words were the start of the third act of the novel I’m working on – and I woke up as if from a dream to realize that the villain for the third act was wrong, the ending didn’t answer any of the questions I’d raised in the first third, and my most interesting characters had disappeared from view.
So I literally had to erase the final third of my book and start afresh, asking: All right, given all that’s happened up until now, how should it end?
This is the way of the pantser. You don’t have an end goal in mind, or at least not a clear one; you just write, sentence after sentence, and let the story surprise you. Except sometimes the surprise is “Oh, this isn’t working.” As a result, pantsers spend a lot of time throwing away dead ends. I have one infamous story that I’ve written 23,000 words for, and the finalized story was 4,000 words.
There’s a lot of advice on plotting, but not that much advice on pantsing, because pantsing is like trying to find your personal dowsing rod. There are signs that you’re going down the wrong path, but it’s like dating the wrong girl in that it’s all terribly obvious in retrospect that this would never work out, but you were in love at the time. And I think part of the successful pantser process involves three critical things:
1) Learning to spot the difference between when you’re just writing words because it’s a thing you can write, and when you’re honestly excited because it’s the thing you should be writing.
2) Realizing when you’ve gone astray, and being honest enough to do the necessary amputation.
3) Once you’ve done the painful cutting, figuring out which areas of the first half of the story you can mine to determine how the last half should end.
But that’s all really personal. For example, I’m slowly learning my personal Danger Signs of Poor Pantsing, which include:
1) All my ideas for what could happen next, which usually flow like champagne, dry up.
2) I’m spending my time devising ideas for why a character wouldn’t simply do X, when X is the thing that would make sense and derail my intended story.
3) I’m very concerned about sticking to the original idea that got me interested in this story – “This is like Boardwalk Empire, but with magicians!” – and waste time writing a pastiche of other people’s ideas when it’s time for my ideas to start flowing.
4) I don’t like my characters very much. This is usually because they’re doing things that I feel they should do, instead of the things they secretly are mad to do.
For me, the biggest danger of pantsing is that I do what I feel I should do, instead of what I want to do. Which sounds very silly, but it’s kind of like getting an invite to a very exclusive, fancy costume ball. And the day of it comes, and all you want to do is dance in your apartment in your socks. And maybe that dancing would be more joyous, but you’ve already bought the costume, and how many grand balls do you have a chance to go to, and so rather than doing the thing that would satisfy you, you instead do the thing that you believe you ought to do because, well it’s there.
So many of my 20,000-word castoffs were, well, just there. They were an idea I could write about, and so, like a person flailing for a life preserver, I grabbed at it and wrote. And it wasn’t until much later that I realized, drowning as I was, I needed to be snobby and wait for the right life preserver.
That’s the trick, though. It’s not that you’re not writing; you are. But you’re not paying attention to that little tickle in the back of your head that asks, “Is this really the most awesome thing that could happen?” because SHUT UP I’M GETTING CLOSER TO THE END, BRAIN. And then you get to the end and you read it all with a dispassionate eye and sadly mutter, “…oh.”
That’s when you have the hard work of going back to the last good point and asking all the questions you need to in order to re-pants. What questions did you ask in the first part of the story that are, as yet, unanswered? Each character has a lesson about life he or she needs to learn over the course of the tale – what is that lesson, and have you brought them closer to learning it? What random elements and/or themes in the first part of the story can be brought up again in the end, for closure?
All of that is very hard work; it is knitting, because you have all of these threads you’ve unwittingly knotted together in the first part of the tale, and now you have to tie them all together into something that looks like an attractive scarf. Sometimes you even go back to the beginning and add more threads, now that you’ve discovered what the story is actually about.
(It sounds terribly stupid, but in the book I’m writing? I didn’t know who my lead character was until I wrote a scene 50,000 words in where I went, Oh, that’s really who he’s about. And then I had to go back through every scene he was in – which is to say, all of them – to rewrite them with a subtly new person in the lead, reacting in subtly different ways.)
That’s pantsing. And I wish I had better advice to give, but really it’s about listening to your own inner voice. Some days you get desperate for ideas, and you’re so happy to have met anyone to dance with that you don’t notice the mustard stains on his lapel, his clumsy feet, his lack of rhythm. You’re just happy to be dancing again. And it takes some personal experience to realize that no, you can’t just dance with anyone, you must stay vigilant and decline graciously and watch the incoming dancers until you find that right person.
Or else you’ll be in the middle of a very elaborate and physically straining dance when you realize: this is crap. And it’s so awkward to walk away then. Yet it’s your only choice. 
Six Tips To Not To Cut Your Face Up, Or: A N00b's Advice On Straight Razor Shaving
It’s been three weeks since I last drew blood with Floyd the straight razor, and as such I feel compelled to speak upon what I have learned. The straight razor is good tool for shaving, but it’s also got some finicky bits I figured I’d go over.
Tip #1: Get a really good shaving cream.
Oh, you can use thin soap, or even *gasp* just hot water, but a good rich later is like training wheels; it lets the blade slide over your skin easier, and any time it’s sliding over your skin it’s not cutting into it.
I myself use Jack Black Supreme cream, which I highly recommend, but the shaving cream that came with my kit was crap and the Burt’s Bees stuff I got at Walgreen’s slightly less crap. Find something thick and gooey, and don’t skimp on the application. My cutting went way down when I got a good lubricant.
Tip #2: If the grip feels uncomfortable, it’s not gonna work.
The razor is a simple tool: one handle, one blade, one pivot. And when you start out, you’ll see all sorts of potential grips to hold this deadly thing, each designed for someone to hit a different area of their face. And you’ll emulate some of these, and they’ll feel wildly wrong to you. Not just “uncomfortable,” for every time you bring a blade against your skin you’ll feel a bit odd, but wrong, as in your fingers feel like they’re about to slip.
Every one of those wildly wrong grips wound up carving me up like a turkey.
Eventually, I settled for a grip that appears in no manual I’ve seen, but it feels comfortable for me. The point is that the grips are the suggested starting points; you’ll evolve your own, soon enough, and the sooner the better. Don’t try to emulate others, find your own method.
Tip #3: Only shave with the grain the first few weeks. Then shave against.
When you start out, shaving down your cheeks is easy; you’re not levering the blade under the hairs, thus potentially sawing down and cutting yourself. And then you go upwards, shaving at a more awkward angle, one where any looseness of the skin will kill you, and whoops – cuts.
My advice is to only shave with the grain, until you get a sense of how to cut easy hair. Then, once you’ve mastered that, move on to against the grain, which will involve more cutting, but you’ll at least have less cutting because you know the basics.
Tip #4: Know Thy Face.
Eventually, you’re going to realize that your face has its own hollows and bumps, treacherous areas and easy passes. That’s why you pay attention while you’re shaving – to try to figure out what areas you really need to pay attention to. For example, weirdly enough, I have never once cut myself on the underside of my throat above my Adam’s apple – you’d think I would, but the skin is taut and forgiving.
My pudgy cheeks, however? The doughy skin there attracts cuts like mosquitoes.
Your end goal will be to make two or three passes over your face, and to do that you’ll need to recognize that not all facial areas are equal. Some will hurt you if you’re not paying attention. So make a mental map of your visage, and start seeing where the issues are. It’s a weird thing, but oddly pleasant once you start; it’s getting in touch with your own body, finding strange surprises in something you thought you knew all too well.
Tip #5: If you’re unsure, either stop or keep going.
All of my cuts come from hesitation. The goal is to sweep smoothly across the skin. And if you hit a point where you’re not sure whether you should keep going, you need to do one of two things:
a) Stop.
b) Keep going like you were.
However, most novices seem to go with c), slow way down, which is your worst option. When you slow down, your hand starts to tremble a bit, you often unconsciously pull away a little, and then the skin slackens and the edge bites into flesh. It took me a while to realize that shaving is, in fact, about confidence – when you’re not sure, either pull the blade away completely, relather, and go at it again, or confidently move forward as if you know what you’re doing.
Strangely, as in life, that usually works out.
Tip #6: Lather up a balloon. Shave it. When you can scrape all of the lather off the balloon without popping it, you can shave a face.
…okay, I’ve never done that. But that’s how they taught my barber in barbers’ college. Isn’t that cool? I mean, Gini would have killed me, spattering lather all over the walls and filling the house with sporadic explosions, but I think it’s fucking awesome and at least one of you should do it. And YouTube it. YouTube it copiously.
It's Not That I Don't Care. It's That I Don't Care About YOU, Sir.
“You don’t seem to care what people think,” she said. “Which to me is very cool.”
Thing is, that’s not true. Yes, I reveal a hellish amount of personal data in my blog, sharing emotions, taking controversial opinions, basically putting myself out there so that strangers can come to loathe me. And I can see how you might think that I just don’t care.
But I do. That’s why I’ve become so careful with my essay writing – writing slower and more precisely so I can’t be misunderstood by your run-of-the-mill reader. It’s why I pay close attention to comments, retweets, and incoming blog links. I’m actually completely paranoid about what you good people think.
Yet there’s the rub: you good people.
I have zero problem ignoring the opinions of idiots.
It’s a survival mechanism I developed in high school, back when bullies used to use my shame as a weapon against me. I’d spend whole summers trying to be cool for their benefit – pretending I spent my weekends partying, hiding my books, dressing differently, in all ways showcasing my cringing fealty to them. Because even though they were mean and scornful, I was convinced that if I could just act the right way, I’d eventually gain their affection. You know, like in every movie, where the bully finally gains a grudging respect for his enemy.
But that’s not real life. If you’ve ever tried to suck up to a bully, you’ll know what happens: show up in the fine set of jeans they’ve been ragging you about for not wearing, and they’ll deride you for something else. Or they’ll mock you for thinking you’re good enough to wear those jeans. Doesn’t matter. Come up to the level they claimed you needed to be at, and bullies will raise the bar.
After eating a whole adolescence’s worth of humiliation, I burned out. One day I woke up and realized there were some opinions not worth listening to. Bang. Bullies shut down. My life’s been a lot better since.
Since then, I’ve tried hard to gain the favor of people I respect. Whenever someone I like links to a blog post I wrote, I’ll do a little happydance. And when they criticize me because I’ve been racist, or sexist, or unclear, or just perhaps plain bullheaded, I have listened. If you were to take the time to read my blog archives – and good luck with that – you’d see that I’ve changed my mind on any number of topics over the years. My whole approach to blogging has changed. I refuse to take the old entries down, because I believe that people should come to believe that there’s an arc between where someone was a decade ago and where they are now… But dammit, that doesn’t mean I’m not embarrassed.
I am an antenna, listening. I worry. I want to do the right thing. And on the rare occasions I blow it big time, I literally feel sick.
But! If you prove to me that you’re an idiot, off you go. You can comment, you can be mean, you can do whatever – I don’t care. Because you’ve proven that you’re not sufficiently in touch with reality that I can ignore you. Emotionally, that kind of guy means nothing to me – not quite a bully, for not every dissenting opinion is intended to bash, but certainly not someone who I’d be healthier or wiser if I listened to them.
So why should I bother? I’ll read the words; I just won’t be emotionally affected by them.
I can even micro-idiot, if need be. For there are many people I adore who are idiots on a certain topic. Craig is a wonderment when it comes to politics, but God forbid you look at his string of depressing relationships and try to take poly advice from that. Farrah is perhaps the smartest person I know when it comes to dissecting racial topics, but God forbid you get her going on health care. And so, when they comment on a certain topic, I just shrug and say, “That’s their opinion, and I don’t think it’s right.”
(I don’t say “They’re wrong” except in all of the most dire disagreements, as I find a “wrong” for me often leads to “Well, I never have to question that assumption again” – but rather, “I have done the requisite thinking on this topic and concluded that the evidence is in my favor, so I’m not going to put any more processing time into this until some other relevant factor arises.” Not as punchy as “You’re wrong,” but it leads to a better life.)
Furthermore, if you think I’m an idiot, well… I might be. Part of my whole survival mechanism consists of constant self-investigation, probing my weak and strong points alike to see if they could be bolstered… and a large part of that function involves being brutally honest with myself. I’m frequently wrong. I don’t always get it right. And I can either get wrapped around the axle of “ZOMG I WAS SO RIGHT THIS TIME” – or I can do the better thing of actually getting it right next time.
It’s a polling process, for me. One person I respect thinks I’m an idiot? That’s gonna happen from time to time. Store it in the file. Three people I respect think I’m an idiot? We’re treading closer to danger. Ten people, and I start looking for my donkey’s tail.
But there’s no shame in being wrong. There’s shame in not admitting wrongness. And that’s a vital point that most people miss.
Tl;dr – yeah, I care. I care a lot. But I care only about the opinions of people who’ve proven they’re smarter than I am, and I recognize that I’m gonna get it wrong a lot. So being wrong? Not a problem. Shrugging off jerks? Not a problem.
It lets me be happy. And bold. And, occasionally, even in a position to do some good. So I keep at it.
New Condoms! In The Twenty-Fourth-And-A-Half Century!!!!!
So Bill Gates has put up a $1 million reward if some clever cocksmith can create the next-generation condom.
This has attracted its share of sniggers, but the truth is that condoms flat-out suck. They do reduce sensation significantly, and in the distinctly unromantic time it takes to slip on one, erections can be lost. And that difficulty means more STDs transmitted, more unwanted pregnancies, more excuses for douche guys to be douches.
We can put a man on the moon, but that just gave us Tang; a real, high-sensation, easy-to-wear condom would mean a safer world in millions of tiny ways.
But one of the new condom contenders is Origami Condoms – which, wisely, has different models for different sex acts, male, female, and anal. And I am looking forward to all the many ways in which science can improve my nookie (and exactly what levels of reward will come with Origami’s impending Kickstarter campaign). But this statement really caught me off-guard:
1. Easy donning method slides the condom onto the penis in 2.8 seconds.
Isn’t that, uh, kind of specific? Two-point-eight seconds? That’s… pretty damn exacting timing. Like, how much better is that than three? Is this an average time? How many condoms did they time going in before they arrived at this? One pictures scientists, brows furrowed with concern, going, “Dammit, we’re at three-point-five.”
“But Phil, we’re guiding the glans to a ridiculous amount already,” a junior lab assistant observes. “We can’t possibly change the angle without risking…”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” the lead scientist yells, throwing his laptop to the floor. “I have studied penises all my life. When I was a young boy, all I did was catalogue the geometries of every holes my cock could fit into. The UN Council of Intercourse has issued me their highest awards for my penile cladding techniques. And if I say there’s a way to break the peen of light, then it will be done!”
Seriously, with this kind of specificity, there had to be contests.
I’m imagining a row of men, lined up like Olympic swimmers and sporting bobbing erections, with a referee and a whistle. At the sound of the gun, eight men whip this condom down to wrap their willies, as kneeling scientists triumphantly click the stopwatch. “Three-point-one seconds!” one claims.
“Oh, we can do better than that,” the head of Origami condoms mutters angrily. “Get the fluffers.”
Then there had to be the failures – the poor men who panicked and wound up with this art deco Rubbermaid thing wrapped around their ankle, the boys with broken penises who aimed wrong, the shameful premature ejaculation. These condoms come with electronics, are outfitted with memory cloth like Batman’s wings to change shape in mid-coitus, perform exacting calculations to caress the shape of your tallywhacker to six significant digits.
Eventually, you will desire them for masturbation. For platonic relationships. For illicit wedding ceremonies in Switzerland, where a man and his condom can finally lie together in the way that man and God intended. These are the condoms of the future, and nothing will stop them from their inevitable goal of replacing humans with a rubberized, glorious, endlessly moisturized environment of orgone and pyramidal bouncing.
Bioshock Infinite: The Review
If you had asked me two days ago what a perfect sequel was, I would have told you “The Empire Strikes Back.” Every time I see Empire, I’m utterly astounded at how sure-footed it is; how it literally reintroduces each of the main characters in a mini-sequence that’s just as exciting and interesting as the original Star Wars, then proceeds to turn each of those characters’ strengths into weaknesses. Is Luke a starry-eyed dreamer? Well, now that he’s a real Jedi, that’s a very bad thing. Is Han a smartmouthed rogue? Well, now his history is coming home to roost. In every way, including the ending, Empire Strikes Back really was the best sequel there ever was.
Now, however, I’ll add “Bioshock Infinite” to that list. Because it taught me how to do a different kind of sequel perfectly.
I still remember how stunning it was six years ago to say “Bioshock is a deconstruction of Ayn Rand’s philosophies”… but after descending into the capitalism-crazed, creator-worshipping undersea world of Rapture, you couldn’t deny it was the most popular bash of Objectivist thinking as you saw how Jack Ryan’s dream of creating his artistic refuge had fallen apart. The gameplay was unique thanks to the miniboss Big Daddies, but what really sold Bioshock was following this tarnished 1920s dream of a philosophy through its inevitable unwinding. I was far more thrilled at finding another audio log than I was at killing an enemy.
So when it came time to do the sequel, folks thought in Empire Strikes Back-style rehashes: how can we do more of the same, while making those elements seem new? And so we went back to Rapture with a twist, to battle the Big Daddies with a twist, and had another semi-twist at pretty much the same place in the plot, and… it felt warmed-over. Which is the failure mode of ESB sequels – you don’t manage to add enough new stuff, and it’s okay but it’s a faint echo.
Bioshock Infinite goes the more adventurous sequel route. “Let’s throw out literally everything,” it says. “No Big Daddies, no underwater city of Rapture, no Ayn Rand – what’s thematically like those, though?” And so Bioshock Infinite took another, bolder route – exploring the concept of American exceptionalism.
Which is, frankly, tough to do. The problem with a thematic sequel is that themes are nebulous, and often unsatisfying, and most “Let’s start again” sequels felt like different, less interesting films. And so I’d never had a real success in this department to compare to. But if Bioshock Infinite is a warm, sunny baseball park with happy white kids playing a pleasant afternoon game on a Sunday afternoon, then the game itself is one of Babe Ruth’s called shots.
For once again, you investigate a mysterious city – but this one is Columbia, floating above the clouds! And whereas Rapture was dark, Art Deco, and in decay, Columbia is at the height of its powers, large, grassy, idyllic, populated by barbershop quartets and well-behaved ladies in hoop skirts, eating cotton candy. The inhabitants literally worship the Founding Fathers, kneeling before large statues of Washington and his Sword, Franklin and his Key, and Jefferson and his Scrolls. And, of course, they worship the Founder, the religious zealot who created this bold vision of America.
You’re here to erase some debts and find a girl. And unlike the silent protagonist of Bioshock, you have a voice – you’re a hard-bitten ex-soldier who says things you may or may not agree with. And eventually, you find the girl and have adventures.
I won’t get into the plot overmuch, but I will say that it’s incredibly ambitious, the kind of weirdness explained that outdoes Inception and makes Lost look like a tangle of strings. By the time you’re done, you’ll be amazed at the audacity of the plot, which winds its way through time in a way that involves no less than four parallel plots coming together to mesh into something approaching an honest answer. Not every bit of oddness is explained, but so much of it does make sense once you know the key that Bioshock Infinite outdoes any sci-fi television show I can think of to date in terms of neatly tying things together… and I’m a Babylon 5 fan.
Yet it feels coherent. This is Bioshock. It’s not the Bioshock you knew, but all the elements are in place. It’s the same, but different.
As for the gameplay, it’s probably about 90% tuned. The controls are slightly twitchy for what they’re trying to do. The end goal is to ride the overhead rails of Columbia, attaching yourself to a rollercoaster that winds its way through the complex levels and having a firefight along the way… But the controls aren’t tuned enough. You speed along so fast that there’s literally not enough time to aim at the targets you want, and they’re annoyingly late in that you’re trying to dismount onto a villain for a power attack, and instead lamely land three feet in front of him, facing the wrong way.
Add that to the fact that this game loves its smoke effects – your gun actually fogs your vision, on top of fog – so it’s hard to tell where shots are coming from. And then your companion throws you power-ups in mid-battle, which is helpful but the camera stops to turn at her so you know just who gave you that bottle of salts, and so it means that combat is often a struggle to stay facing the right direction.
That said, fighting is still good when you’re on the ground. But the aerial sequences seemed closer to luck than to skill, and the tremendously frustrating last level (sadly) relies on so much aerial fighting I dropped the level to “Easy” and felt thoroughly justified.
But Bioshock Infinite doesn’t need the 100% tuned gameplay of, say, a Diablo III, where the enjoyment is all centered in the gameplay. There’s one long sequence in Bioshock Infinite where all you do is walk up a long hill, press a button and wait for a minute, then do that two more times. Then you go back down that exact same slope, except faster and without the button pressing. And yet that sequence is one of the most thrilling moments in Bioshock Infinite, for the tale you’re walking through is so engrossing that you don’t even care that there is literally zero gameplay challenge in it. It’s a testament to the power of story, which takes the mundane and makes it riveting.
So from now on, when asked what the best sequel ever is, I’ll ask, “Which kind of sequel are we talking here?” Because Empire Strikes Back did the “more of the same” perfectly. Bioshock Infinite does the “raze the old stuff to the ground and build anew” perfectly. And both, I think, will be landmarks of their media.