I contemplate things like should I name this blog the catchy name “Perfect Morality”? Or should it name it the accurate name, “The Morality Oscillation”, which is a better title, but only after you read the blog. 

But if I were taking ANY of this seriously, I would avoid this blather at the start altogether and get to the point without driving everyone off with incessant rambling! 

But that’s not true either, because this all ties into the larger subject of what’s real? And why do we do anything at all? And what about our world is good, and how can we propagate that good to systems in which we create things like games or blog posts? 

How do we teach the audience to become discerning and thinking beings again able to reach their own decisions and find their own tastes without being influenced by those fickle 0’s and 1’s, upvotes and downvotes. To pursue the things they want without that nagging fear of FOMO that has blistered our world.

Hot damn I feel like the synapses are firing today. I always think after a long blather there couldn’t POSSIBLY be another friggin’ thing for us to run our mouths about, BUT NOPE! We have an endless list of things we want to complain about! We do enough  whining and doubt here, imma be confident as shit in this one, sue me!

So the concept I wanted to ramble about today is morality, and I think the way we perceive morality has really caused the social fabric of our world to crumble, to turn people against one another for the silliest of reasons.

If you’re a fast runner, you can tell who else is fast by how close they are to you in a race. The fastest all tend to clump up. This is true for most EVERYTHING! The skinniest people will be the lightest, the angriest people will get in more fights, and the most insufferable fucktards will make the most blog posts.

So this is how our brain operates. If someone is alike to other things, then they are comparable.

But morality throws this WAY off, and because of the general rules of relatively we exercise in all other realms, it makes navigating the modern culture war REALLY horrendous for good people on all sides of the divide.

Imagine there’s a poor little good boy that was hit by a car and it’s laying hurt by the side of the road. An absolute monster of a human would walk up to that poor animal and cause it more harm, or laugh at its pain. A child would see that animal run to it and cry and cry and wish it’s pain away. An adult would see the animal, shake their head in sorrow, but continue driving because they have a job to do. A hunter might see the dog, see they have no hope, and put it out of its misery. Someone with the resolve and care to have taught themselves medical practices would rush to the animal and maybe try to set broken bones, or stem bleeding. But a firefighter, rushing at 80 miles an hour to save a burning elementary school may have been the individual who hit the dog in the first place.

(Holy shit that analogy is good, I just came up with that firefighter thing at the end right now, but this is something I’ve thought about for a while now).

Point is, Morality is ambiguous, because as you have slightly more or less of empathy than someone else, you don’t just slowly gravitate towards other behavior you OSCILLATE between actions that may be polar opposites. And this notion that there is a perfect morality, a perfect code to live by and all others are heretics is hogwash. This more than anything has caused so much horrible, horrible strife between people who are generally speaking all people who want to do good, to do right by others, we all want to be better for those who depend on us and to make the world a better place.

Comfortability is at the root of this. WTF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT ILLTEMPEREDTUNA!? Well settle the fuck down and let me explain it to your dumb ass! We all live in the bubble of our own life, we are all subject to the experiences that we have lived. 

If you grew up in a circus, and your family were all clowns (I don’t mean like the Kardashians) you would grow up loving clowns! And if you had an asshole older sibling who talked up how funny “IT” the movie was and how great a character Pennywise is and tricked you into watching that flick, you’re going to HATE clowns.

If you grow up, the child of very rich individuals, and you’re comfortable, and you have everything handed to you, and you never “build character” by ever having to produce things, and never having to learn the value of a hard day’s work, you’re going to start going a little crazy. You might see starving children and think to yourself, “Well, let those dilapidated little shits eat some gah’ damn cake FFS!”

And your circles will be with those who never really had to work hard, and everyone will try to be in each other’s good graces, and we’ll all try in the best way we can to do right by the world, but also… we’re only human. And anyone who does things unlike us… is an other. And despite the fact that we are all inherently good, we are also all inherently at odds with one another, we are all wired to sniff out any outside element who is unlike us, and to deminze and believe falsehoods that give us the “Moral Mandate”

In our modern comfortable lives, the moral mandate is the most powerful weapon of all, because it weaponizes your brain, to cut down others. We no longer do that with a sword, nowadays it’s far more subversive, it’s death by a thousand cuts.

It’s, eh, I just like the graphics in this game a little better. I just don’t like the “Vibe” of this person. Eh, i don’t really feel this and that and next thing we know we’re living in echo chambers, filled with toxic dissonances, toxic positivities, and toxic character. Because we no longer build that character, we no longer have to face painful truths, we no longer have to produce art through adversity, we no longer have to suffer for anything. And in this world of comfort, we behind to slide down that moral ladder, and even as we slide JUST A LITTLE BIT, suddenly everyone who no longer believes the modern sensibilities that we do look like CRAZY ALIEN MONSTERS FROM ANOTHER PLANET.

We must learn to accept that there are people, GOOD people, who are close to our morality who may have radically different perceptions of what is good and what is evil, and if we’re not careful and if we retreat to our bubbles and we become too accustomed to having our ego’s stroked all the time, and having our biases inflated, and the affirmations just pump and pump into that echosphere, before we know it… we get what we have today. This horrible, horrible decline, where no one can see the good in anyone any more.

And I haven’t spoke to the story or message of SeaCrit in these parts, because who wan’ts to hear that crap? But a big part of the SeaCrit for me, is trying to connect with the player and their morality whatever that may be. Because I’m older now and I hope a little wiser, and I know what it means to think of the others as the goofballs, and to be so enlightened in my nihilism, and my circles of like minded people. 

I’ve come to learn late in life that conviction is not believing the common knowledge of what is right and true, that’s EASY. True convictions are to stand for things when they are not widely accepted, when people believe you to be a monster for your beliefs, and knowing things could be so much easier if you just bent the knee, but holding steady, even in the face of endless torment.

We fixate on the stupidest shit any more. We hate anyone for having any conviction or ethic at all any more unless it perfectly aligns.

And that’s just so fucking sad.

I had a horrible fright yesterday, ran into some tech issue and reverting to prior builds and deleting the library folder didn’t work, and THANK GOD I had made a backup of the project yesterday morning. But what I ended up doing was nuking the local install of SeaCRit, swapping in the new one and crossing my fingers than i’ve ever done ever in my life that my entire life’s work didn’t just up and delete itself from existence.

LUCKILY it fired right up and I only lost a couple hours of work. But even that was debilitating. When you’re this burned out and working on this massive a project, it can feel like finding neverending needles in a haystack trying to remember all the crap you did.

I’m not even going to think about it any more! We have enough to stress about.

Some good stuff: I found a really cool way of “bookmarking” what i’m working on currently without using the currently somewhat high overhead feature of bookmarks in visual studio. And so all I do is, is I type “///” and that’s my new bookmark system of what i’m working on recently. Then i can find “///” in the search dropdown or just quickly type ctrl + f and “///” and boom we’re cycling back and forth between all the /// comments. The reason this works is that “//”, prevents characters from interacting with code, but we use it all the time so that third / makes it unique, unless you have other /// which i did so I just went through and replaced them all with just two //.

Beyond this! I never knew there was an explorer in VS that allows you to quickly click code files and hope right to them! I’m so pumped all never have to hunt down damned scripts ever again using shift + F12 all the damn time! And this was what got me in so much trouble breaking things in unity. I was shuffling around files, and it’s kinda like chopping things with a really sharp knife. The longer it’s been since you nicked yourself, the more lazy you get until one day you REALLY get that blood pumping all over the counters.

So I accidentally deleted a file with a few very important scripts while cleaning up the project and that caused prefabs to break and that’s when the above happened.

But ON TOP of that, I realized the power of FOLDERS for bookmarks, and how I come to realize I can create some very powerful bookmarks for niche functions and such and organize them in folders like “Fish”, “Movement”, “Abilities”. And it even allows you to enable or disable quick navigation between them “next” or “previous” so once I get a few of these up and running it’s going to be SO MUCH FRIGGIN EASIER to find those damned bits of logic that have been such a pain in the arse!

Only now towards the end of getting everything set up for this demo am I learning all these things!

Part of the weaknesses of working in a bubble XD

Last random thought. All the great thinkers and writers and visionaries that were larger than life, that came before us, that we perceive as worthy and great… they all existed in a time apart from this lowest common denominator BS. They didn’t sit around and watch youtube videos, they wrote each other fucking letters, THEN THEY HAD TO WAIT WEEKS TO HEAR BACK! Can you imagine how much more time you would put into your words if it wasn’t just some gah damn text message showing some cat falling out of a window?

Nowadays we have social media, and we have anonymous forums to shitpost in, and we all are drowning in these engagements that highlight the absolute worst of one another. And it kinda just feels like the whole of our society is just designed to normalize stupidity and mediocrity in SO MANY intertwined ways, stemming from these untested social systems, from the comfort, from the lack of earned character, and on and on.

And as everything decays, we’re all shuffling hoping for AI to save us, to pick up the slack where we have grown so weak. And now we measure the ability of AI not against the greatness of our past, but the diminutive bullshit we quaff into the digital nethers.

Not sure what the solution is, but suppose we should gear up to making our idiot murder fish simulator. Whew, what a blather!